One of the more disturbing aspects of American punditry is that failure and poor analysis are so often rewarded. Pundits who were wrong about the war in Iraq, for example, were routinely given promotions, space on the country’s most read op-ed pages, and face time on television. William Kristol took the term wrong to new levels in 2002 and 2003, yet was granted plum gigs withthe New York Times and the Washington Post. There is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to Times columnist Tom Friedman’s woeful miscalculations on Iraq. Peter Beinart, New Republic editor and a staunch supporter of the war, snagged himself a fellowship from the Council of Foreign Relations and a book deal. And on it goes. Everywhere you look in the world of media, those who got it wrong have stayed on as dominant voices in the public sphere.
So it only makes sense that, in the waning days of the global economic crisis, on goes the reign of Jim Cramer, CNBC’s wild-eyed investment advisor and one-man circus show. Not only has Cramer’s stock advice, often screamed loudly on his program Mad Money, been notably horrendous, his shady business dealings, lack of ethics, and failure to stand up to Wall Street greed have all been very publicly exposed (thanks, Jon Stewart).
And yet the degree of arrogance Cramer continues to maintain is downright staggering. Consider his latest book, Getting Back to Even: Your Personal Economic Recovery Plan. (One assumes the title is talking about leveling readers’ stock portfolios, but, given Cramer’s history, perhaps it should be referencing his credibility.) Claiming that, with the help of his tome, readers will not only survive the crisis, but "thrive" and make “what’s essentially free money,” Cramer has proven again that, while his wallet is brimming, his senses of history and reality are bankrupt.
11/3/09
Jim Cramer's Mad Memory
10/31/09
The Real Israel Lobby: American Intellectuals, Culpability and US Foreign Policy
To understand the Israeli/Palestinian conflict it is vital to understand the role that the United States plays in it. The relationship between the United States and Israel is very close and of intense interest throughout the world. The United States provides Israel with around $3 billion in annual direct aid, more than any other country1. The US also is one of very few countries who vote against – and, in some cases, veto – resolutions in the United Nations that are critical of Israel or demand Israel to comply with international law by withdrawing back to the pre-1967 borders outlined in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2422. This support makes possible the Israeli expansion into Palestinian territory and its numerous vicious assaults on the Palestinian people.
In return for this support the United States has a staunch and dependent ally in the Middle East, a region that has long been considered vital to US interests and was described by the State Department as “stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”3 The prospects for having an ally in the region is one reason why the United States supported the partition and creation if Israel in 1948 and why US presidents over the years have continuously supported Israel in many ways, especially since the Six-Day War in 1967.4
In recent years, especially during the George W. Bush presidency, the US has become increasingly supportive of Israel, even in the face of Israel’s wars against Gaza and Lebanon that were wildly condemned by international institutions and human rights organizations as illegal and brutal.5 Some now believe that the US commitment to protecting Israel’s interests has come at the expense of its own national interests and say this is due to an aggressive and very effective lobbying effort from domestic pro-Israel groups and their allies. The most well-known and controversial outline of this belief came in a working paper by realist academics, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who in 2006 released, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.”6 This paper, which was later expanded into a book,7 concludes that the “overall thrust of US policy in the region is almost entirely due to domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby.’”8The lobby, the authors state, “cannot be identified precisely” but “has a core consisting of organizations whose declared purpose is to encourage the U.S. government and the American public to provide material aid to Israel and to support its government’s policies, as well as influential individuals for whom these goals are also a top priority.”9 The authors go as far as claim the lobby was the major reason for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.10
Surely, to some degree the United States “special relationship” with Israel does have unwelcome consequences. Polls show the public in the Middle East disapproves greatly with US support for Israel11, and is one of the major reasons for anti-Americanism across the globe – the tragic consequences of which became evident on September 11, 2001, where the US saw firsthand an example of the backlash to its policies in the Middle East. But is US policy in the Middle East dictated by powerful lobbying groups? Or does the support serve to provide benefits to elite US interests, geopolitically and economically? This paper aims to analyze the nature of the Israeli/US relationship, and the role of the United States in the Middle East, by analyzing the conclusion of Walt and Mearsheimer in their paper, “The Israel Lobby.” It will also consider the role the lobby has in shaping debate domestically on foreign policy issues and examine the narrow parameters of debate within US scholarship and media more broadly.
While Walt and Mearsheimer are right that the lobby yields considerable influence in shaping national debate, electing members of congress and casting critics of Israel as villains, their thesis overlooks key elements of the nature of US foreign policy12. Evidence shows, including from US planning documents, that US policy in the Middle East is focused on preserving US elite interests (typically described, somewhat cynically, as the “national interest”), which is done in many ways, including: 1) maintaining a powerful presence and reliable allies in the oil-rich region; 2) crushing Arab and third-world nationalism; 3) spreading the US-dominated neoliberal economic order; and 4) masking policies that serve to benefit the US geopolitically as benevolent and based on freedom and “democracy promotion.” US policy towards Israel, I attempt to show, is consistent with these basic principles. In this way US support for Israel is consistent with its foreign policy elsewhere. This paper also aims to show that when US planners do find its interests conflict with the wishes of Israel (and by extension the lobby), they end up defying Israel. In fact, there are few – if any – examples of the lobby dictating actual policy in the Middle East.
The more valuable aspect of Walt and Mearsheimer’s article is their conclusion that the domestic debate on the issue is narrow and serves to ignore or distort Israeli human rights violations, breaches of widely accepted international norms, its rejectionism of international consensus and US complicity in all of the above. The lobby is certainly a factor in limiting and suppressing debate; the hysterical reaction of the lobby to their paper is indeed evidence of this.13 The authors, however, blame this tendency almost entirely on the lobby, especially groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Coalition (AIPAC). The lobby is certainly a factor in shaping the debate in this way. The authors, however, again overlook a crucial reality: that the narrowing of debate and the suppression of facts and events that would hurt the myth of US benevolence is a regular occurrence in relation to virtually all US foreign policies towards allies – Israel is the rule, not the exception.14 In sum, Walt and Mearsheimer seem to be analyzing the behavior of the US intellectual community as a whole to reinforce doctrinaire assumptions about the nature of US policy and not a unique phenomenon created by a lobby that causes a deviation from normally healthy debate about U.S. foreign policy and its impacts.
The US-Israeli ‘special relationship’
The United States makes Israeli foreign policies possible by providing it with massive direct aid, the protection of the most powerful military in the world, and by voting with Israel in the United Nations. Even when the United States has played the role of supposed mediator – such as the Oslo negotiations during the early years of the Clinton presidency – the country has essentially been a partner with Israel. 15
Thus, the United States is the chief enabler of the most controversial elements of Israeli policies: aggressive wars that include the illegal bombing of civilian populations, supporting economic strangulation, continuation of illegal settlements, the building of a separation wall, racist citizenship laws and so on. These policies are widely condemned by the international community, human rights organizations and sometimes international courts and institutions. The United States could, simply by threatening to cut aid and diplomatic support, apply major on pressure on Israel to stop such policies, but rarely does. Sometimes US presidents show unambiguous public support for Israeli aggression, while at other times they make toothless statements of condemnation – but almost never does the US apply serious pressure in an effort to protect the Palestinians from Israeli domination and oppression.
Many examples of US support for controversial policies are documented by Walt and Mearsheimer, who note that the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US and the “War on Terror” that followed, was used as justification in the US giving “Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press Israel to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead.”16While the Bush Doctrine made the case for spreading democratic values far and wide, the US has not pressed Israel, to give one example, to change its policy of not permitting “Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens to become citizens, and does not give these spouses the right to live in Israel.”17 B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, they note, calls this “a racist” law. 18
It is ironic that the US does not press on Israel on this given that the US often cites Israel’s democratic ways as a reason for its support. This hypocrisy manifests itself in other ways, including the fact that the US has given de-facto support to Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza based on the population’s decision to vote for Hamas, a militant Islamic political party that takes a hard-line stance on opposing the Israeli occupation, and whose charter does not recognize Israel. Hamas won a governing majority in the 2006 legislative elections, deemed free and fair by international watchdog groups.19 Israel promptly instituted a blockade against Hamas, leading to an economic isolation of Gaza that, according to Human Rights Watch, is “a measure that is depriving its population of food, fuel, and basic services, and constitutes a form of collective punishment,” that “has contributed to a humanitarian crisis, deepened poverty and ruined the economy.”20 While just recently, President Barack Obama urged a lessening of the blockade in a diplomatic letter, he did not pressure Israel by threatening aid.21
The United States also makes it possible for Israel to maintain its rejectionist stance on borders and land. For example, every year the United Nations General Assembly votes on something called the “Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question,” demanding that Israel withdraw to the pre-1967 borders. The vote is passed overwhelmingly each year, with just the United States, Israel, Australia, and some tiny dependency states voting in opposition. In 2008, it passed 164 to 7.22 Even Hamas has joined the world community and said it would accept these borders as part of a peace for land deal, but the US and Israel continue to defy international consensus on the matter.23 As Rashid Hhalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, said of the US stance on the conflict: “every other single place on the face of the earth is in support of the Palestinians, yet all of them together aren’t a hill of beans compared to the United States and Israel, because the United States and Israel can basically do anything they please. They are the world superpower, they are the regional superpower.” This rejectionism, according to Alain Gresh, former editor of Le Monde diplomatique, is “undermining the two state solution given the continued growth of settlements and the construction of the wall.”24
President Barack Obama is widely credited (or critiqued) for taking a tougher stance on some Israeli policies than his predecessor.25 Obama, for example, has made several public statements urging Prime Minister Netanyahu to freeze settlements in the West Bank, and has taken a softer stance on the use of military force on Iran than Israeli officials would like. But this rhetoric has done nothing to stop the settlements, which Israeli officials say are vital to Israel’s security. Despite Netanyahu’s defiance, Obama has not threatened to cut any aid to Israel. Further, Obama has said nothing to condemn Israel’s destruction of Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, an attack on the Gazan civilian population with massive bombings that included the use of white phosphorus – a clear violation of international law and a moral catastrophe.26 The operation, which led to 1,417 Palestinian and 13 Israeli deaths,27was widely understood to be an especially egregious criminal undertaking, not only from reputable human rights groups, but also from Richard Goldstone, a committed and respected Zionist, who issued a report for the United Nations that said Israel may have committed “crimes against humanity,” and urged an investigation.28 The United States and Obama, not deviating from the norm successfully pressured to have the Palestinian leaders shelf the adoption of the report.29
These are just a few examples of the United States role in supporting Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinians – policies that have led some to compare Israel to the apartheid regime in South Africa from the late 20th century.30What drives the US to give this support? And what role, if any, does the Israel Lobby contribute to US support of these policies? This is examined in detail below.
The lobby vs. US interests
Few would deny the existence of a powerful lobby advocating for Israel. Lobbying groups such as The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Congress are quite influential and successful lobbying and propaganda outlets that do have an impact in Washington D.C. Further, many news outlets of varying ideological persuasions, are enthusiastic supporters of hawkish Israeli policies and US support for them, including the Weekly Standard, the Washington Post editorial page, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the New Republic.
AIPAC, by many accounts one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country, often hosts presidential candidates for key speeches, where they invariably proclaim undying support for Israel. The lobby has been credited for helping oust congressman deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel, as documented by Walt and Mearsheimer. They were also said by some to have been a major factor in preventing US diplomat Charles Freeman, who has been mildly critical of US support for some Israeli policies, from chairing the US National Intelligence Council.31
But do these incidents and other outlined by Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper indicate that the lobby is the main driver of US policy? To test this thesis, it is useful to look at incidents where Israeli interests differ from those of the US. When these interests collide, the record shows, the US is quite willing to defy the wishes of its important ally. One case study that proves useful is on arms trades between Israel and China. As Noam Chomsky notes in Perilous Power, Israel’s economy, much like the US economy, is highly technological and militarized and is in need of markets to export its products, especially weapons and technology.32 A market for Israeli goods exists in China, itself a rapidly growing economy with a growing military budget. China also happens to be widely viewed as a threat to US economic hegemony. On several occasions, however, when the United States has felt threatened by the ramifications of potential arms deals, they have succeeded in killing them.
In 2000, the British Broadcasting Company reported that “Israel’s decision to abandon the sale of its advanced airborne radar system to China was probably inevitable, given the pressure from the United States and Israel’s vital ties with Washington.” 33The United States “had threatened to cut $2.8 (billion) in annual aid to Israel if the deal had gone through,” and Israeli spokesman, Gadi Baltiansky said, “Israel will not do anything to harm the United States.”34
A nearly identical scenario unfolded in 2005. When Israel, “under pressure from the Bush administration,” according to the Washington Post, “agreed to cancel an arms deal with China and allow U.S. officials to review its future weapons transactions in an effort to resolve tension between Jerusalem and Washington, usually in lockstep over security matters.” 35When Israeli interests conflicted with US strategic interests, Chomsky said, “there was not a peep from the lobby.”36
The Post article noted that because of arms deals with China,” the Pentagon ended cooperation with Israel on at least one joint weapons project and ceased contact with a senior official in the Israeli Defense Ministry.” Under the terms of the agreement the Israeli government cancelled the project and announced that the senior official, Maj. Gen. Amos Yaron, the ministry’s director general, “will retire in a few months, as he said he has planned.”37
Examples of this go back much further. For example, in 1993, Israel wanted to invest with North Korea to “prevent the North Koreans from supplying upgraded long-range missiles to Iran.” 38”The American position,” however, according to Eytan Bentsur, senior deputy director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, was “certainly one of dissatisfaction and reservations regarding the contacts with North Korea.”39
If the definition of power is the ability to make another do something they would not otherwise do, the power of the US over Israel is indeed indisputable in this case. Israel’s goal in this instance was to keep one of its most important enemies from gaining key military equipment – a matter of significance to Israel’s position as a regional power. At the time the United States was isolating North Korea, however, and after the United States expressed its displeasure to senior Israeli officials, the deal was killed. The United States, again, showing it will support Israel insomuch as it suits its own elite interests, but no further.
Israel’s Strategic Importance
So, if the United States foreign policy in not dictated by the lobby, why then does the United States give Israel so much support? One answer is that the United States considers it important to have a reliable ally in the region. Certainly, the United States support for Israel is stronger than it is for other other allies. This is because support for Israel helps expand and preserve the United States in four major ways, outlined in the introduction. 1) Israel is located in the oil-rich Middle-East, long viewed as a crucial region in the world of power politics between nations; 2) Israel’s opposition to Palestinian nationalism is consistent with the US overall opposition to Arab nationalism; 3) Israel is a wealthy, trade-friendly partner of the US, serving to further expand the US-dominated neoliberal world order and; 4) since Israel is seen to have a liberal democracy (albeit a flawed one), it helps the United States sell their realist aims behind the veil of “democracy promotion” and promote the myth of US benevolence.
In recent years, Israel’s importance has increased, as has US aid to the region. As noted above, US state planners have long viewed the Middle East as a “stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” When the Shah fell in 1979, the US lost a key ally. This made Israel, in the words of Norman Finkelstein, “the only stable and secure base for projecting U.S. power in this region.”40 Every other country the U.S. relies on, he added, might “fall out of U.S. control tomorrow: the U.S. discovered this to its horror in 1979 after investing so much in the Shah.”
This, Finkelstein concluded, is due to not only Israel’s strategic relationship with the US, but also its deeply entrenched cultural connection to “the West.”
“Israel was a creation of the West, it’s in every respect – culturally, politically, economically – in thrall to the West, notably the U.S. This is true not just at the level of a corrupt leadership as elsewhere in the Middle East but – what’s most important – at the popular level. Israel’s pro-American orientation exists not just among Israeli elites but among the whole population. Come what may in Israel, then, it’s inconceivable that this fundamental orientation will change. Combined with its overwhelming military power, this makes Israel a unique and irreplaceable American asset in the Middle East.”41
Further, US opposition to third-world nationalism – in the Arab world and elsewhere – has long been obvious from US policies: its opposition to Nasserism in Egypt; its staunch opposition to Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s; its battles against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; and its distaste for Evo Molares in Bolivia and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras today. 42
“The reason is much the same as why the United States gives such massive support to Israel in their efforts to destroy Palestine as a viable national entity,” notes Middle East scholar Stephen Maher. “Third world nationalism represents a threat to US elite domination of the world’s resources. If people dictate who should represent them and how their resources should be used, it could result in what Diana Melrose described in an Oxfam report about Nicaragua, ‘the threat of a good example,’ in how to defy the US and fight for their own well-beings.”43
Aid for Israel, when examined through the lens of US policy and aims around the world, makes a good deal of sense if the goal is to maximize US power. While the Walt-Mearsheimer piece argues that Israel is a liability, it seems evident that US planners do not agree. When Israel and US interests are similar – as it most often the case – the US is in line with the lobby; when they differ, the lobby does not get its way.
The Real Israel Lobby: the US intellectual class.
The most persuasive part of the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis is its argument that the lobby has served to stifle debate by smearing opponents in ways Joe McCarthy would be proud of, and in doing so, making sure to punish any scholar or politician who defies the lobby’s policy preferences. This has manifested itself in many ways, as the Walt-Mearsheimer paper explains: Campus Watch’s witch hunt for college professors who dare to speak critically of Israel policy; the accusations of anti-Semitism towards human rights groups and academics that chronicle Israeli abuses; and in papers outlining the “new anti-Semitism” that essentially argue any critique of Israel is anti-Semitic. Further, as the realist authors point out, debate on Israel in contemporary scholarship and in media outlets is indeed one-sided in favor of Israel, whose atrocities are regularly ignored or downplayed even in so-called “liberal” publications such as the New York Times.44
While the lobby is indeed one significant contributor to the narrow debate about US policy in the Middle East, an examination reveals that the debate is equally narrow regarding US foreign policy more broadly. Generally speaking, basic assumptions about the United States are adhered to with alarming uniformity: the US aims to spread peace and freedom across the globe, it has the right to invade countries whenever it sees fit, states that resist US domination are hostile and run by despots, and so on. This tendency indicates a widespread problem with US intellectual culture. “If you look at the actual influence, in my opinion, the most influential pro-Israel lobby is not AIPAC; it is American liberal intellectuals,” Chomsky said in an interview. “In my opinion, AIPAC is pretty slight in comparison with that. The liberal intelligentsia is the major Israel Lobby.”45
If, in the case of the scholarship about Israel, the lobby was principally the reason for the narrow debate, than logic would follow that on other issues where the lobby is not involved (say, US Latin American policy), the debate is healthy and there is not a stifling of debate. In fact, Walt expressed this very viewpoint in a talk about the lobby, when he said (emphasis added), “this has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue.”46
But, by in large, the United States intellectual class has long supported the major tenets of US foreign policy, even those that are illegal, brutal and unpopular. When the United States invaded Vietnam, the country’s major news outlets and academics were largely on board. This is true of the coup in Venezuela in 2002, the massacres in East Timor in the 1970s, and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq in 2003.47
Walt and Mearsheimer cite Eric Alterman, who noted the lopsided nature of debates on op-ed pages regarding Israel and Palestine as an example of the success of the lobby. But similar disparities exist on a host of issues. When the US-supported Honduran military kidnapped and overthrew Manuel Zelaya, the democratically-elected leader of Honduras, The New York Times’ coverage was equally lopsided. Not only did the paper not report the US role in the coup (the helicopter used to transfer the ousted leader, stopped at a US base), but its op-ed page ignored the voices of the nationalist Honduran protesters who were victims to the thwarting of democracy. 48When the US invaded Iraq, only 6 percent of US guests on nightly television news program in the weeks leading up to the invasion opposed the US invasion.49
In short, what Walt and Mearsheimer seem to be seeing is the overall trend of elite media and scholars to accept the basic assumptions that are needed for US imperial domination of the world to persist with minimal domestic resistance. And while the two authors do deserve credit for going where few academics dare to go – attacking the lobby’s influence – the paper itself does, in some ways, conform to the aforementioned tendency to perpetuate the myth of US benevolence in its foreign policy.
Conclusion: the lack of culpability and its consequences
This great tendency in contemporary western scholarship to find ways to explain away the US role in crimes and atrocities across the world is widespread. The destruction of Iraq, it is so often states, was due to “tactical errors” or misguided leadership; likewise the US Cold War policy of developing enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over, was, again, not the fault of US planners, but due to the “unstoppable” force that was the Soviet Union.50 Whatever the issue, if things go bad, there is always a viable explanation, expressed with near-monolithic consistency by scholars and media outlets, about how it was not the result of US policy aims, which are always created with the best of intentions.
Given this tendency, the thesis brought out by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer regarding US foreign policy is rather interesting. As noted, for years now the United States has enabled numerous crimes by Israel against the people of Palestine with ever-increasing support. This support for Israel in destroying Palestine could, one might argue, be the result of the United States, the most powerful nation in world history, pursuing the geopolitical and economic interests of its power brokers. This logical and indeed realist hypothesis could be tested. Or, one could engage in scholarship in a different way: find some other explanation for the US role in the atrocities in the Middle East.
Walt and John Mearsheimer, try the second option – absolving the US for their role in perpetuating the destruction of Palestine – by finding someone else to blame. In this case, pro-Israel lobbying groups.
Notes Stephen Zunes, writing in Foreign Policy in Focus: “What progressive supporters of Mearsheimer and Walt’s analysis seem to ignore is that both men have a vested interest in absolving from responsibility the foreign policy establishment that they have served so loyally all these years. Israel and its supporters are essentially being used as convenient scapegoats for America’s disastrous policies in the Middle East.”51
This is a major problem with the “Israel Lobby” paper and Western scholarship more broadly: they serve to ignore the US role in dreadful acts across the world. Accordingly, there exists a mediated reality where the US – and the taxpayers that pay to fund these crimes – bears no responsibility for the destruction of Palestine and its people.
Endnotes
[1] Forbes magazine reported (http://www.forbes.com/feeds/afx/2007/07/29/afx3963706.html ) on a new deal that would increase US direct aid to Israel , quoting then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who said "'In my last meeting with the president of the United States, we agreed that the aid would stand at 30 billion dollars over the next 10 years, meaning over three billion dollars a year, starting next year ... This is an increase of over 25 percent in the military and defence aid of the United States to Israel," and gives Israel "qualitative advantage over other Arab states." Other places for aid numbers include the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID)
“Greenbook,” (http://gbk.eads.usaidallnet.gov/query/do?_program=/eads/gbk/countryReport&unit=R).
[2] There exists many such measures where the
[3] The United States Department of State Foreign Relations of the
[4] For an overview of US presidential policies towards
[5] Examples are numerous. Human Rights Watch "Why they Died: Civilian Casualties in
[6] Mearsheimer, John and Walt, Stephen. The
[7] Mearsheimer, John and Walt, Stephen (2007). The
[8] ibid. pg 13
[9] ibid pg 113
[10] Mearsheimer, John and Walt. Stephen. The
[11] According to the
[12] For example, a document called Joint Vision 2020, which was prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the start of the Bush presidency, states that the US must achieve “full spectrum dominance” meaning they must have “access to and freedom to operate in all domains – space, sea, land, air, and information” so they can “maintain the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.” The 40-page document does not contain the word democracy. Available at: http://www.dtic.mil/futurejointwarfare/ . In 2006, the Department of Defense released the Quadrennial Defense Review Report, which supports the idea that
[13] A good example of these hysterics can be found by reading the following 45-page retort: Dershowitz, Alan. "Debunking the Newest -- and Oldest -- Jewish Conspiracy: a Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt 'Working Paper.'" April, 2006.
[14] See, Herman, Edward and Chomsky, Noam. (2002) ""Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media." Pantheon. This study compares the way the
[15] Malley, a US State Department representative at the negotiations, debunks the notion of the
[16] Mearsheimer, John and Walt, Stephen. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, pg 4 Kennedy School of Government Working Paper,
[17] ibid pg 5.
[18] ibid pg 5. The paper cites many sources including the Haaretz editorial "Racist Law," from 18, January 2005.
[19] See, for example: National Democratic Institute, Final Report On The Palestine Legislative Council Elections,
[20] Human Rights Watch. Letter to Olmert: Stop the Blockade of
[21] Ravid, Barak.
[22] UN General Assembly, Peaceful settlement of the question of
[23] Hass, Amira. Haniyeh: Hamas willing to accept Palestinean state with 1967 borders, Haaretz. 11 September. 2009.
[24] Gresh, Alain. The PLO and Naksa: the struggle for a Palestinean state," Palestine Journal, Spring 2008 pgs. 81-93; http://www.palestinejournal.net/gmh/MIT_journal.htm ; "The Crisis of our Times - Nationalism, Identity, and the Future of Israel-Palestine", Interview with Rashid Khalidi, North Coast Xpress, Spring 2001; retrieved on October 15, 2009.
[25]
http://www.jstreet.org/blog/?p=630 Retrieved on
[26] Human Rights
[27] Lappin, Yaakov. IDF releases Cast Lead casualty, The Jerusalem Post,
[28] Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict". United Nations Human Rights Council.
[29] Ravid, Barak. Source: Palestineans Drop Endorsement of Goldstone Report, Haaretz.
[30] Former President Jimmy Carter used this term in his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,
Simon and Schuster.; for a more nuanced comparison, see Farsakh,
[31] For examples of the lobby’s sway of Congress see, Mearsheimer, John and Walt. Stephen. The
[32] AIPAC hosted speeches, for example, By Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton , John McCain and others. See: http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/19627/candidates-at-aipac-affirm-jewish-political-might/ ; Charles Freeman, after resigning amid a firestorm of controversy, blamed the lobby for his failed appointment, saying the "libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired." (Freeman, Charles J. Message from Charles Freeman, The Wall Street Journal,
[33] Marcus, Jonathan.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/831668.stm retrieved on
[34] BBC News Report.
[35] Wilson Scott.
[36] Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar,
[37] Ibid, pg 62.
[38] New York Times, Israeli's Say US Opposed North Korean Deal. 15, August 1993. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/world/israelis-say-us-opposes-north-korean-deal.html; retrieved on
[39] ibid
[40] Finkelstein, Norman. The Lobby: it's not either, or. Monthly Review.
[41] ibid.
[42]A) For extensive look at
[43] B.)ZNet. Maher on Israel-Palestine. 16, May 2009. http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21468
[44] Achbar, Chomsky. Perilous Power. Pg. 62.
[45] See, Kreisler, Harry. Balancing American Power in the Post American World: Conversations with Stephen Walt.
[46] For study on
[47] For study on
[48] Maher, Stephen and Corcoran, Michael.
[49] Interestingly, Mearsheimer opposed a nuclear freeze during the Cold War. See, Zunes, Stephen. The
[50] Interestingly, Mearsheimer opposed a nuclear freeze during the Cold War. See, Zunes, Stephen. The
[51] Zunes, Stephen. The
10/18/09
The Cult of Michael Moore
The Michael Moore Phenomenon
Originally published by Campus Progress -- Oct. 3 2009
Few things in today’s political world generate as much enthusiasm, hysteria, and debate as the release of a Michael Moore documentary. And just days before the release of his latest polemic, Capitalism: A Love Story, a film which takes on the entire U.S. economic system, the fervor over one of today’s most controversial figures—his style, his politics, his personality—has reached critical mass.
Moore’s popularity and notoriety are far-reaching; he has been seen on virtually every prominent news show in the last couple of weeks to explain his movie and was recently described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most successful documentary filmmaker in history.” It’s not surprising then that across college campuses, where the exchange of political ideas is an everyday occurrence, Moore’s films are widely watched, distributed, and debated in classrooms and among student activists.
View the rest here.
9/24/09
Moving Critical Leverage
I have made arrangements with Blast Magazine to host Critical Leverage. Blast gets massive readership and uses a much better content system, so it should be a good way to broaden my audience. I will be posting more regular commentary (this has served in many ways, as clip file of late).
The site is not ready yet, but will be soon.
http://leverage.blastmagazine.com
9/17/09
How Obama fooled the left: rhetorical manipulation and its consequences
1) It threw a huge bone to private insurance companies by providing a mandate, forcing uninsured people to buy policies, thus guaranteeing tens of millions of new customers to buy thier products or face tax penalties. Insurance companies love this idea, and having donated large piles of money to both political parties, this position has the support of both sides of the isle in Washington. Small wonder Business Week recently declared that the "Health Insurers have Already Won."
2) His plan drew a line on the sand on the deficit, in an effort to appeal to budget hawks. Obama declared he will not sign a bill that adds even "one dime" to the deficit, showing no flexibility on the matter.
3) The President, for all practical purposes, killed prospects for a public option, by saying it was only a "means" to an end, and unessential. There will be no veto threats or legislative arm-twisting on this issue. Instead the left gets lectured for using the public option as a "handy excuse" to have the "usual Washington ideological battles" (as if standing up for something the public wants and voted for is some kind of egregious sin).
The third point is critical. Going into the speech, many liberals, most notably among House Democrats, were demanding a public option. Some of them, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were insisting that the legislation include a public healthcare plan that uninsured Americans could buy into (most constructs of the plan would not allow someone currently enrolled in an employer-based plan to buy in -- already a huge concession from the left), lest they vote against the bill.
Obama could have used his speech to fight for such a reform, if he so chose. A whopping 72 percent of the public support a public option of some sort, while 59 percent support a sweeping national healthcare plan (ie, Medicare for All, or single-payer healthcare.) Further, due to progressive domination of the last two elections, Obama is blessed with mammoth majorities in both chambers of Congress. While it is true the GOP will not support a public option, it is a moot point -- the GOP, save perhaps one lone Senator, won't support a bill without a public option either. And the Democrats have the ability to pass through a bill with only 51 votes, as Republicans did with the Bush tax cuts in 2001.
But while Obama drew a line in the sand on the deficit, refusing to budge with one dime, he wavered on the public option -- saying that while he likes the idea, he is not married to it. The end result: the insurance companies get what they want -- no public competition and a mandate; Republicans, though irrelevant in practice, manage to help kill such a plan with their militant opposition to government-funded healthcare; and progressives, despite having the public behind them, get nothing except brilliantly worded and passionate oratory. Obama may not be able to (or truly want to) deliver a public option, but no one can doubt his ability to deliver a damn good speech.
But special interests often win battles in Washington, that is no surprise. What is so startling about Obama's repudiation of the major progressive aspect of the bill (single-payer, the choice of progressives, was ceded at the start), was the progressive reaction to the speech. Rather than show disgust and dismay at being slighted, progressives declared the speech a victory. At the Huffington Post, a popular liberal political blog, at least six glowing responses to the speech were posted within hour of its conclusion.
Paul Begala explained "Why I Loved Obama's Health Care Speech," in one post. Jacob Heilbrun claimed Obama "came out swinging" and made the "single most persuasive case for government intervention in decades," in another. From Bill Cunningham: "Tonight, we saw a leader, unafraid to stand and deliver...not a political document, but a platform that all who care about real reform, can support and amend and work for."
This jubilant tone stretched further into the liberal stratosphere. Katrina vanden Huevel, an unabashed supporter of single-payer healthcare and editor of the Nation -- often described as the flagship of the American left -- said Obama showed his "progressive spine" with his speech.
On MSNBC, Steve Hilderberg, a former Obama campaign staffer who has been organizing with others former staffers to demand a public option, seemed unperturbed that Obama, for all practical purposes, caved to the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Caucus, who oppose the idea, and not the progressives who elected him.
When asked by Kieth Olberman if Obama's speech was strong enough, he said "For sure. I never had any doubt, his favor is on the side of the American people and not in bed with special interests ... he hit it out of the ballpark."
But progressives have got to get past the glowing rhetoric, and notice something very important: Obama is going to pass a weak bill. And worse, the slight improvements, in most instances, will not occur for four years.
Surely there is an understandable desire to defend Obama, given that he has been subject to absurd lies and distortions from a right-wing base that has become more delusional and vitriolic by the day. And no doubt, Obama was right to call out the "death panel" fanatics for their pathetic "games" and often racist tirades. Moreover, Obama did articulate a liberal vision of sorts with his soaring explanation of the need for the government to step in when times warrant; and his channeling of the recent passing of Sen. Ted Kennedy, who viewed healthcare reform as the great unfinished business of his life, was emotional and effective.
But the rhetoric was window dressing; the plan itself is a gift to the powerful, sold as a gift to the masses. Paul Street, writing in Znet, wisely quoted the left-wing version of Christopher Hitchens, who in 1999 said the "the essence of American politics" is the "the manipulation of populism by elitism." Obama has proven to more effective at this manipulation than even Bill Clinton, who Hitchens was referring to with that astute comment.
Sure enough, as the week went on, key congressional supporters of a public option, including Speaker Pelosi, began to, in the words of a New York Times reporter, "drop their insistence," on it. By Sunday, the New York Times -- which, more than any publication in the world sets the news agenda -- ran a front-page story, The Fading Public Option, highlighting this trend. Obama's staff surely must have marveled at how easily they were able to kill the plan, while at the exact same time touting its value. If lives were not at stake -- and if was not such a grotesque reminder of the flawed nature of the US political system -- one could almost take joy in the political spectacle that was Obama's speech and the week that followed.
It should be noted that not everybody on the left drank Obama's brew. Matt Rothschild, editor of the Progressive, rightly chastised the weak direction Obama had taken the bill ("ingenious and disingenuous, naïve and nobody's fool"), as did John Nichols at the Nation ("Obama Speaks Loudly But Carries a Small Stick"). Wendell Potter, a former CIGNA executive, called a spade a spade, saying if the legislation coming out of the Senate Finance Committee (which does not include a public option) becomes law, it should be renamed the Insurance Industry Profit Protection Act. Rep. Weiner called it a "gift to corporations." Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, also continued to make the case, with the help of President Clinton's former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in a persuasive short film that has been widely circulated online.
But as single-payer supporter, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, noted at Dailykos, the dreary path of healthcare reform seems pretty well laid out.
He writes:
"Let me share with you some insight about health care legislation which may not be good for your health:
- House will make a big deal about keeping/putting a public option in HR3200 because it competes with insurance companies and will keep insurance rates low.
- The White House will refer to the President's speech last week where he spoke favorably of the public option.
- The Senate will kill the competitive public option in favor of non-competitive "co-ops". Senate leaders like Kent Conrad have said the votes to pass a public option were never there in the Senate.
- The bill will come to a House-Senate Conference Committee without the public option.
- House Democrats will be told to support the conference report on the legislation to support the President.
- The bill will pass, not with a "public option" but with a private mandate requiring 30 million uninsured to buy private health insurance (if one doesn't already have it). If you are broke, you may get a subsidy. If you are not broke, you will get a fine if you do not purchase insurance.
This legislative sausage will be celebrated as a new breakthrough and will be packaged as health insurance reform."
Only time will tell if Kucinich's projections are accurate, but it is hard to envision a different script, is it not?
The consequences of Obama's attitude towards his progressive base go beyond on healthcare reform. If progressives continue to cave in the name of supporting their beloved new president, Emperor Hope, they will continued to be viewed as a non-entity in Washington D.C. on all matters of importance. The mindset of Democratic leaders, and their willingness to walk all over progressives in Congress was described well by blogger Jed Lewison, in a post titled, "Why the Public Option Matters."
"So you sacrifice the progressives, and you don't think twice about it. It's nothing personal. You might not even think it's the best policy," he wrote. "But it's just the way it works, and you've got to get something done. So do you it, knowing that it will work. And whether or not you like it, you know that as long as progressives let themselves get steamrolled, that's always the way it will work."
Liberal columnist Paul Krugman also put it succinctly. "And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it's bad."
Obama has already shunned his base many times: on cabinet appointments, on Afghanistan, on detention policy, on repealing Bush's tax cuts, on gay rights and so on. Now he is allowing private insurance companies to dictate healthcare policy. This needs to stop. Because at this rate, progressives insistence on supporting Obama at all costs has become a liability to our democracy and our health.
Michael Corcoran is a journalist who focuses on business, media, and public affairs. He has written for The Nation, The Boston Globe, Extra!, Alternet, Campus Progress, and other publications. His work can be read at: michaelcorcoran.blogspot.com
How Obama fooled the left: rhetorical manipulation and its consequences
Just a week removed from Barack Obama's much anticipated speech about healthcare reform, one can hardly deny the shrewdness of our new president's rhetorical skills. This is not a good thing.
Jacob Heilbrun claimed Obama "came out swinging" and made the "single most persuasive case for government intervention in decades," in another. From Bill Cunningham: "Tonight, we saw a leader, unafraid to stand and deliver...not a political document, but a platform that all who care about real reform, can support and amend and work for."
This jubilant tone streched further into the liberal stratosphere. Katrina vanden Huevel, an unabashed supporter of single-payer healthcare and editor of the Nation -- often described as the flagship of the American left -- said Obama showed his "progressive spine" with his speech.
On MSNBC, Steve Hilderberg, a former Obama campaign staffer who has been organizing with others former staffers to demand a public option, seemed unperturbed that Obama, for all practical purposes, caved to the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Caucus, who oppose the idea, and not the progressives who elected him.
When asked by Kieth Olberman if Obama's speech was strong enough, he said "For sure. I never had any doubt, this favor is on side of American people and not in bed with special interests ... he hit it out of the ballpark."
But progressives have got to get past the glowing rhetoric, and notice something very important: Obama is going to pass a weak bill.
Surely there is an understandable desire to defend Obama, given that he has been subject to absurd lies and distortions from a right-wing base that has become more delusional and vitriolic by the day. And no doubt, Obama was right to call out the "death panel" fanatics for their pathetic "games" and often racist tirades. Moreover, Obama did articulate a liberal vision of sorts with his soaring explanation of the need for the government to step in when times warrant; and his channelling of the recent passing of Sen. Ted Kennedy, who viewed healthcare reform as the great unfinished business of his life, was emotional and effective. But the rhetoric was window dressing; the plan itself is a gift to the powerful, sold as a gift to the masses. Paul Street, writing in Znet, wisely quoted the left-wing version of Christopher Hitchens, who in 1999 said the "the essence of American politics" is the "the manipulation of populism by elitism." Obama has proven to more effective at this manipulation than even Bill Clinton, who Hitchens was referring to with that astute comment.
Sure enough, as the week went on, key congressional supporters of a public option, including Speaker Pelosi, began to, in the words of a New York Times reporter, "drop their insistence," on the public option. By Sunday, the New York Times -- which, more than any publication in the world sets the news agenda -- ran a front-page story, The Fading Public Option, highlighting this trend. Obama's staff surely must have marveled at how easily they were able to kill the plan, while at the exact same time touting its value. If lives were not at stake -- and if was not such a grotesque reminder of the flawed nature of the US political system -- one could almost take joy in the political spectacle that was Obama's speech and the week that followed.
It should be noted that not everybody on the left drank Obama's brew. Matt Rothschild, editor of the Progressive, rightly chastised the weak direction Obama had taken the bill ("ingenious and disingenuous, naïve and nobody's fool"), as did John Nichols at the Nation ("Obama Speaks Loudly But Carries a Small Stick"). Rep. Wiener, (D-NY), whose principled stand on the healthcare debate has placed him with the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. John Conyers, as a true leader in the quest for a rational and humane healthcare system, called a spade a spade, saying if the legislation coming out of the Senate Finance Committee (which does not include a public option) becomes law, it should be renamed the 'Insurance Industry Profit Protection Act". Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, also continued to make the case, with the help of President Clinton's former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in apersuasive short film that has been widely circulated online.
"Let me share with you some insight about health care legislation which may not be good for your health:
1. House will make a big deal about keeping/putting a public option in HR3200 because it competes with insurance companies and will keep insurance rates low.
2. The White House will refer to the President's speech last week where he spoke favorably of the public option.
3. The Senate will kill the competitive public option in favor of non-competitive "co-ops". Senate leaders like Kent Conrad have said the votes to pass a public option were never there in the Senate.
4. The bill will come to a House-Senate Conference Committee without the public option.
5. House Democrats will be told to support the conference report on the legislation to support the President.
6. The bill will pass, not with a "public option" but with a private mandate requiring 30 million uninsured to buy private health insurance (if one doesn't already have it). If you are broke, you may get a subsidy. If you are not broke, you will get a fine if you do not purchase insurance.
This legislative sausage will be celebrated as a new breakthrough and will be packaged as health insurance reform."
Only time will tell if Kucinich's projections are accurate, but it is hard to envision a different script, is it not?
The consequences of Obama's attitude towards his progressive base go beyond on healthcare reform. If progressives continue to cave in the name of supporting their beloved new president, Emperor Hope they will continued to be viewed as a non-entity in Washington D.C. on all matters of importance. The mindset of Democratic leaders, and their willingness to walk all over progressives in Congress was described well by blogger Jed Lewison, in a post titled, "Why the Public Option Matters."
"So you sacrifice the progressives, and you don't think twice about it. It's nothing personal. You might not even think it's the best policy," he wrote. "But it's just the way it works, and you've got to get something done. So do you it, knowing that it will work. And whether or not you like it, you know that as long as progressives let themselves get steamrolled, that's always the way it will work."
Liberal columnist Paul Krugman also put it succinctly. "And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it's bad.
Obama has already shunned his base many times: on cabinet appointments, on Afghanistan, on detention policy, on repealing Bush's tax cuts, on gay rights and so on. Now he is allowing private insurance companies to dictate healthcare policy. This needs to stop. Because at this rate, progressives insistence on supporting Obama at all costs has become a liability to our democracy and our health.
9/10/09
Single-payer health care: dead in Washington, but alive in the states
Originally published in the Christian Science Monitor.
By Michael Corcoran
Boston - President Obama delivered a stirring address to Congress last night, but the federal government's inability to truly overhaul our broken healthcare system – which now leaves more than 46 million uninsured – is becoming all the more apparent.
Speaking before a joint session of Congress, Obama declared that a public option to compete with private insurers, considered vital by many liberals, was merely a "means to an end," and not essential to healthcare reform. Earlier this summer, a New York Times/CBS poll showed that 72 percent of Americans support a government-run healthcare plan. But Obama's speech last night indicates that while a bill will probably pass, prospects for comprehensive reform – the kind millions of Americans voted for – have dimmed rapidly. Insurance companies, which have given large donations to both political parties, are winning the fight in Washington.
The inability of a popular president with substantial majorities in Congress to pass a progressive health bill is immensely frustrating to healthcare activists, and to all who gave Obama a mandate for change.
But their cause is not lost – they just need a new strategy.
Read the rest here:
9/8/09
The Weekly Standard's War: Murdoch sells the paper that helped sell the Iraq War.
At a glance, the move may seem unremarkable, given the Standard's relative size. With a circulation of about 65,000 and annual losses estimated from $1 million (New Yorker, 10/16/06) to $5 million (Forbes, 6/29/09), the Standard represented only a tiny fraction of Murdoch's vast media empire. Murdoch's News Corporation, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, took in nearly $33 billion in revenue in 2008 from properties in virtually every sector of the media, including such giants as Fox News Channel, Dow Jones, HarperCollins and MySpace, as well as hundreds of newspapers and television stations across the world.
While it yielded no financial gain for Murdoch and News Corp shareholders, for a time the Standard was arguably the most effective magazine in the nation in terms of its influence on policy. Edited by GOP political operative and neoconservative extraordinaire William Kristol, it had the eyes and ears of prominent members of the new Bush administration, Department of Defense and Congress who drastically escalated the United States' imperial ambitions. Perhaps no publication was as active or as successful in shaping the propaganda campaign that would enable this remarkable foreign policy transformation to take place.
The journal's rise to prominence was one of opportunity through tragedy. When the magazine was founded in 1995, neoconservatives were somewhat out of step with mainstream debate in Washington. With the Cold War over, foreign policy was on the back burner, leaving neocons with little to work with. Kristol, along with other prominent bureaucrats like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, joined together in The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) to advocate for "regime change" in Iraq and other extreme interventionist policies, but these ideas were considered to be on the fringes of the foreign policy establishment.
Then came the September 11 attacks.
"One day a novel must be written that conveys the sense of purpose and energy that surged through the Standard's offices...in the the days after September 11, 2001," wrote Scott McConnell, editor of the isolationist magazine the American Conservative (11/21/05). "For these bookish men, it was a Churchillian moment, an occasion to use words to rally a nation and shape history."
And shape history is exactly what the staff did. For the next seven years, the Standard would become the birthplace of hawkish foreign policy proposals that would become official U.S. policy; as the magazine fought the war of words in the media, it helped its administration allies fight--and win--the battle of ideas in the White House.
Following the attacks, the Standard advanced what became virtually all the noteworthy tactics of the Bush administration's "war on terror": focusing the response to 9/11 on Iraq using flawed and flimsy evidence (11/24/03), widening U.S. foreign policy interventions far and wide (11/01/04), dismissing all calls for even partial withdrawals of U.S. troops (5/10/07), shunning the recommendations of the realist-dominated Iraq Study Group (12/11/06) and escalating troop levels in what became known as "the surge" (1/21/08).
The rhetoric in the Standard's editorials and articles were often indistinguishable from that of the administration, as it downplayed war crimes committed by U.S. troops (6/12/06) and labeled antiwar activists and legislators as anti-American (8/14/06).
Although U.S. intelligence had found little evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks (McClatchy, 9/22/01), the first Standard released after 9/11 (9/24/01) tellingly featured a cartoon of Saddam Hussein and immediately began making the case for targeting his government: "While it is probably not necessary to go to war with Afghanistan, a broad approach will be required," wrote Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly. Despite acknowledging that Hussein "might not" have been involved in the 9/11 attacks, "the larger campaign also must go after Saddam Hussein," said the authors. Weeks later, Max Boot (10/15/01) asked, "Who cares if Saddam was involved?" as he pushed for regime change.
These sentiments were largely shared by a cadre of high-level Bush administration officials, including Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams and Richard Armitage, all of whom--along with Kristol and Weekly Standard contributing editor Robert Kagan--had signed a letter for PNAC urging Clinton to overthrow Hussein in the late 1990s (PNAC, 1/26/98).
In case Congress or the American public did not share Boot's attitude, the Standard did all it could to find (or invent) evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. One high-profile article, "Case Closed" (11/24/03), earned public praise from the vice president, who called it the “best source of information" detailing this supposed relationship (Rocky Mountain News, 1/9/04). Cheney's endorsement is now touted in an editor's note atop the online version of the article. (Hayes later grew this sophistry into the 2004 book The Connection: How Al-Qaeda's Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.) In 2005, Hayes, along with Thomas Joscelyn, contributed another 10,000 words in an article titled "The Mother of All Connections" (7/18/05). Hayes would later be hand-picked to write Cheney's official biography (Guardian, 9/04/06).
Of course, it is now widely understood that these supposed connections were spurious, having been debunked by every government body that has looked into the matter, including the Pentagon (Institute for Defense Analyses, 11/07) and the Senate Intelligence Committee (6/08).
That the Standard's views so closely mirrored those of the powerful was not happenstance. Murdoch, by design, distributed the magazine with an eye not on building a wide base of readers, but on influencing elite decision makers. And he made no efforts to hide this process. The journal's website reads: "Lots of Washington publications say they have influence. The Weekly Standard delivers it.... Each issue is hand-delivered--by request--every Sunday morning to an exclusive list: the most powerful men and women in government, politics and the media."
Among those who made such a request was Cheney; according to Kristol (New York Times, 3/11/03), the vice president sent someone over "to pick up 30 copies of the magazine" every Monday. "I would hope that we have induced some of them to think about these things in a new way," Kristol said. "We have a lot of writers who have independently articulated a version of how we deal with this new world we live in that has been read by Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Hopefully it had some effect."
The strategy has paid off. The Standard's website documents 10 instances where the magazine was mentioned in the congressional record; it also brags that the average reader has an annual income of $193,000 and net worth exceeding $1.3 million.
"Reader for reader, it may be the most influential publication in America," said Eric Alterman (New York Times, 3/11/03). "The magazine speaks directly to and for power. Anybody who wants to know what [the Bush] administration is thinking and what they plan to do has to read this magazine."
Under Murdoch's leadership, this effect was magnified by media consolidation and the synergy between media outlets that fall under the same corporate parent. The magazine's staffers are regulars on Fox News. Kristol has a regular spot on Fox News Sunday, further stretching the reach of the publication's hawkish ideals. The Standard's website notes a "survey of top congressional staff" found that 70 percent said the magazine is "more or much more influential than other Washington publications," because they "appear regularly on network and cable television." The magazine's 10-year anthology, as well as Hayes' aforementioned book, were distributed by another News Corp subsidiary, HarperCollins.
When Bush gave his 2005 inauguration speech, the Standard's relationship with Murdoch and government officials reached new heights. Kristol was hired as a consultant for the speech, which read much like a Standard editorial; he was also on Fox News (1/20/05) to analyze it, calling it "one of the most impressive speeches I think I've seen an American president give." Kristol also praised the speech he helped write in the pages of the Weekly Standard (1/31/05), calling it "powerful," "subtle," "historic," "sophisticated" and "nuanced" (Media Matters, 1/24/05).
This incident illustrates the function of the Weekly Standard under Murdoch: The country's most prominent pro-war editor generates the intellectual justifications for endless war in his magazine, puts them in the mouth of the world's most powerful politician, and praises their brilliance on airwaves owned by his boss, the most powerful man in media. All of this made possible, of course, by Murdoch's media empire, generous subsidies and willingness to absorb massive losses for 14 years--advantages that other opinion journals (particularly those that challenge corporate media) could not even dream of.
It remains to be seen how much will change now that Murdoch has cut ties with the Standard. Clarity Media is run by Philip Anschutz, a billionaire with right-wing politics (Media Matters, 1/2/05) and the ability to sustain losses. The company's CEO has also said he admires the magazine's editorial content. And with his recent acquisition of the Wall Street Journal and its pro-war editorial page, Murdoch still has a powerful soapbox from which to push policy preferences.
But as the costly and bloody neoconservative misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to plague the world, Murdoch's past ownership of the Weekly Standard assures that he will own, in addition to his media empire, a piece of the nightmare he helped create. As Kristol noted in a statement following the sale (Washington Examiner, 6/17/09), Murdoch's "generous support and (if I may use the term) liberal disposition have made whatever we’ve accomplished possible."
Michael Corcoran (www.michaelcorcoran.blogspot.com) is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He has written for outlets including the Nation and the Boston Globe.
8/3/09
Trying to make "Sense" of Glenn Beck
The conservative icon’s latest book blends Beck’s typical hyperbole with a gross misrepresentation of Thomas Paine’s political views.
Glenn Beck is a particularly egregious example of the larger-than-life conservative punditry class that gained almost regal status during the administration of President George W. Bush. The host of popular shows on Fox News and radio, Beck’s daily musings are so heated and fiery that he often reaches the verge of tears, his voice squeaks in anger and his inaudible words cease to sound like they come from a human. (For those with the stomach for it, YouTube offers many treasures highlighting this tendency, including this clip where Beck actually threatens to "vaporize" a caller who disagrees with him.) It is precisely this attempt at populist rage that led to his latest book, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: the Case Against an out-of-control government, inspired by Thomas Paine. It just may be the perfect symbol of his hyper-ambition and the outlandish anger that is reflected by many of today’s conservatives.
In Common Sense, Beck’s nonsense goes way beyond misguided right-wing talking points and resorts to a grotesque distortion of American history. His goal, by his own admission was to “re-write” Thomas Paine’s Common Sense—one of the most influential pieces of political writing in American history—and start a new conservative revolution. "Make no mistake," he writes, "a (non-violent) revolution is needed to restore America." It is ambitious endeavor no doubt and has proved to be a major hit; it tops on the New York Times‘ best seller list. But intellectually the book is an abysmal failure. This is because Beck’s efforts to channel Thomas Paine—one of the great progressive thinkers in U.S. history—are patently absurd.
Beck’s 174-page book (the last quarter of which is a reprint of Paine’s pamphlet) is mostly a tirade against government spending. His main targets are social welfare spending, progressive taxation and the occasional rant against the destruction of America’s pious roots. These very themes contrast mightily with the views of Paine, turning the book into something of a bad joke before one page is actually turned. While Paine did view government as a necessary evil, and warned against excessive debt, he was by no means a modern-day libertarian—in fact, quite the opposite.
Paine in his own time was radically progressive—in some ways socialist—and on most issues would be way to the left of the typical parameters of debate in Washington D.C. In the 1775 writing Agrarian Justice, Paine became among the first in the colonies to advocate for a "guaranteed minimum income." Sounding a lot more like Eugene Debs than Beck, Paine’s proposal was to "create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person when arrived at the age of twenty-one years … for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."
Paine wrote:
Taking it then for granted that no person ought to be in a worse condition when born under what is called a state of civilization, than he would have been had he been born in a state of nature, and that civilization ought to have made, and ought still to make, provision for that purpose, it can only be done by subtracting from property a portion equal in value to the natural inheritance it has absorbed.
Paine made it clear that he thought freedom was infringed by unmerited inequity—what philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin refers to as "positive liberty," or having the power and resources to act to fulfill one’s own potential. Beck, like most conservatives, unambiguously defines freedom in the mold of "negative liberty," or freedom from government restraint.
"Wake up America!" he writes. "Capitalism isn’t about money, it’s about freedom—the freedom to try and fail that made the United States the richest industrial nation in the world." It is also interesting that, given that Beck’s book pays homage to Paine—who published the first essay in America advocating for abolition— Beck makes no mention of the role of slavery had the early development of the U.S. economy.
Indeed, Beck fumes over most any kind of progressive taxation or shared services: Chapter 5 is actually titled "The Cancer of Progressivism." He constantly rails against the evils of universal health care, minimum wage hikes, welfare, and small tax increases on the rich. In Common Sense, he writes that it’s unfair that those who "worked, hard, lived prudently, spent wisely,” must be bailed out at the expense of the poor.
"The rich are being vilified and targeted because they are rich," Beck writes of Obama-era "class warfare." He has a particular concern about the nation’s youth, who have become increasingly skeptical of modern-day capitalism in recent polls, decrying them as the types that "prefer to be led and fed by the state for free." They are, he insists, "sheep willing to be shorn and molded by their master—yet their ranks are likely to swell as the economic crisis worsens."
With such sharp language one might assume the United States under Obama has implemented a Soviet-style planned economy, but, alas, Beck’s major gripe is that the Democrats implemented a large, but desperately-needed stimulus package, which was gladly received by conservative governors across the country, save a few ideologues.
During the 2008 presidential election Beck threw regular tantrums about how Obama was a socialist for wanting to allow Bush tax cuts to expire on those making more than $250,000 a year. These are marginal tax increases, comparable to what the rich paid under Ronald Reagan’s tax plan. So surely, if Paine was a guest on Beck’s show in 2009 and advocated for a guaranteed minimum income—a direct transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor—an infuriated Beck’s eyes would pop out of his head as he smeared Paine as a French-loving, socialist “little pinhead."
Beck’s strong affinity for the need for an increased role of religion in society also further emphasizes his fundamental differences with Paine. Progressives, Beck writes, "recognize that religion is a unifying force and a counterbalance to state power, so they believe that it must either be harnesses by the state or destroyed." Putting aside his ridiculous assumption that all progressives wish to destroy unity through the use of state power, what is telling about his chapter on religion and morals is that Paine’s words are nowhere to be found. Clearly, this is because, including Paine’s actual thoughts on the matter would further reveal the book’s fatal flaw.
Paine was a staunch critic of religion and Christian doctrines, arguing that they thwarted free-thinking and logic to the detriment society. "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit," Paine wrote in The Age of Reason. It is no wonder that Paine’s utterances on the subject are entirely absent from Beck’s version of Common Sense.
Beck’s book is more evidence of a resurgence of conservative populism aimed at channeling public anger. Progressives would be wise to take notice. As crazed as Beck seems, it must also be acknowledged that his voice is heard—and often. For strategic reasons, his existence simply cannot be ignored: progressives must take great pains to counter his blather. For it is true that Glenn Beck has a large and enthusiastic audience; it is also true that America can learn a lot from Thomas Paine. But Common Sense dictates that the possibility of these two realities becoming in any way morphed together is beyond frightening.
Michael Corcoran is a correspondent for The Boston Globe’s metro desk and graduated from Emerson College in 2007.
7/31/09
Iran v Honduras: the Times' Selective Promotion of Democracy
By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher
When the results of the June 13 Iranian elections were decried as fraudulent (charges that were later backed up by a detailed study by Chatham House--6/21/09), U.S. media instantly became the champions of the oppressed Iranians who took to the streets in protest. Cries of righteous solidarity echoed from virtually all mainstream editorial outlets, and the large demonstrations were front-page news on every newspaper in the country each day.
The Islamic regime's harsh suppression of demonstrations was rightfully the focus of prolific news coverage and vigorous editorial discussion. As the pages of the New York Times informed Americans, a "genuine democratic movement...including women, young people, intellectuals and members of the moderate clerical establishment," had "united" in "resistance" against Iran's clerics (6/14/09), who used "overwhelming force to crush the demonstrations" (6/16/09), and against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (6/14/09), "an intensely divisive figure here and abroad."
"Death to the dictator," the protesters were quoted as crying, after Ahmadinejad's victory "provoked deep suspicion" given Iran's tendency towards "vote-rigging" which had "often been raised." Indeed, the Times (6/15/09)editorialized , "given the government's even more than usually thuggish reaction, it certainly looks like fraud."
By contrast, about two weeks later, demonstrators in Honduras who took to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the democratically elected president who had been violently abducted by soldiers that were armed, trained and advised by the United States received no such media support or attention. Hardly a mention that hundreds of protesters--two of whom were killed and 60 injured, according to the Chinese press agency Xinhua (6/30/09)--were confronting tanks and droves of armed forces in the Honduran capital could be found in mainstream news outlets or editorial pages.
The New York Times (6/29/09) framed its reporting on events in Honduras much differently: President Manuel Zelaya, "a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,"was ousted by the U.S.-backed Honduran military, which was "acting to defend the law" after "months of tensions over [Zelaya's] efforts to lift presidential term limits"--efforts that "critics said [were] part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the constitution's limit of a single four-year term for the president."
This portrait of events laid out by Times reporters and opinion writers has been wildly inaccurate and misleading. In reality, Zelaya had called for a non-binding referendum that would have asked whether Hondurans would support the formation of a convention to rewrite Honduras' constitution (possibly including a change in term-limit laws); that convention would not have been convened until after the general elections in November 2009, in which Zelaya was not a candidate because his term was expiring (Miami Herald, 7/3/09; Rebel Reports, 7/1/09).
The comparison of Zelaya to Chávez, whose name in the Times has always been a pejorative (Extra!, 11=12/06), is telling. To the Times, Chavez has been a "populist demagogue" and an "authoritarian man on horseback" (12/20/98) who "has militarized the government, emasculated the country's courts, intimidated the media, eroded confidence in the economy and hollowed out Venezuela's once-democratic institutions" (book review, 9/17/06). The Times celebrated the unsuccessful coup against him, rejoicing that "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator " (4/13/02; Extra! Update, 6/02).
The disparity in the amount of attention given to the protesters in each country is striking, as demonstrated by a Nexis search of the first 10 days following both the Iran elections and the Honduran coup. The Times' first article on the Iran elections (6/14/09) quoted "green revolution" protesters at length, including reformist clerics and students. Op-ed columnist Tom Friedman (6/14/09) that very same day wrote: "But for the first time in a long time, the forces for decency, democracy and pluralism have a little wind at their backs. Good for them." Two days later (6/16/09), in the online edition, columnist Ross Douthat praised the Iranian upheaval as a happy consequence of the global recession (failing to mention the role played by crippling U.S. sanctions). Likewise, a Times editorial (6/15/09) quickly condemned the shaky election results and Iran's tepid democracy.
In the days following the military takeover in Honduras, on the other hand, the Times did not condemn the coup in an editorial, nor publish a single op-ed praising the Honduran protesters. In its original report on the coup (6/29/09), the Times acknowledged that "several thousand protesters supporting the president faced off against soldiers outside the presidential palace, burning tires," but unlike in its Iran stories, the paper failed to quote a single demonstrator rallying to salvage the country's hijacked democracy. The Times did follow with an article reporting on world leaders' condemnations of the coup (6/28/09), but the voices of the brave Hondurans, who like the Iranians are fighting for their freedom despite enormous risk, have been conspicuously absent.
The first op-ed in the Times about the coup in Honduras (6/30/09) argued that Zelaya "set a trap for the military" by "pushing the limits of democracy," and claimed the coup, while not legitimate, "has popular support in Honduras"--citing no evidence and ignoring the thousands who have taken to the street, the election results that put Zelaya in power in 2005, and international law on the matter. Astonishingly, the op-ed--headlined "The Winner in Honduras: Chávez"--linked the whole affair to the Venezuelan president's "incessant exploitation."
In the only other op-ed written on the topic as of this writing ("Who Cares About Zelaya?," 7/7/09), Roger Marín Neda, a columnist for an anti-Zelaya newspaper in Honduras, argued that the ousted leader was "a typical Honduran politician" with a "lust for power," whose "goal seemed to be a change from our democratic system into a kind of 21st-century socialism...a Hugo Chávez-type of government." After dismissing those "abroad [who] are obsessing over the question of whether Mr. Zelaya's ouster was legal or a classic military coup," Neda casually discarded the right of Hondurans to choose their own leaders: "Mr. Zelaya may or may not return to serve the remaining months of his term. But for the future of Honduras, does it really even matter?"
Equally revealing as the Times' framing of the news was the volume of coverage of the events in Iran and Honduras respectively. In the 10 days following the Honduran coup, the Times devoted 13 news articles to the events unfolding there--only two of which appeared on Page 1--totaling less that 14,000 words. They ran two op-eds, one news analysis piece, no editorials and no letters to the editor. In the 10 days following the Iranian elections, by contrast, the Times ran 37 news articles on the issue--more than 38,000 words in total--including 15 front-page articles. The paper also published 12 op-eds, six news analysis pieces, two editorials and more than 2,600 words in letters to the editor.
The double standard here is clear. Those protesting a regime that is an official state enemy are brave freedom fighters who merit attention and praise, and the official suppression of these protests is amplified. Meanwhile, those protesting a military coup against a leader who had increasingly supported alternatives to the U.S.-dominated economic world order are either ignored, or their cause distorted practically beyond recognition.
Michael Corcoran (www.michaelcorcoran.blogspot.com) is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He has written for outlets including the Nation and the Boston Globe. Stephen Maher (http://rationalmanifesto.blogspot.com/) is an MA candidate at the School of International Service at American University.
