Michael Corcoran

Uygur out at MSNBC (Extra!)

2012-02-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

Extra! November 2011

Uygur Out at MSNBC
Another progressive show canceled for political reasons

By Michael Corcoran

When talkshow host Cenk Uygur announced that his short tenure at MSNBC had come to an end due to his criticism of “those in power” (Young Turks, 7/20/11), it highlighted an unsettling pattern at the channel.

Uygur’s ouster represented the third time in recent years that a show hosted by someone with progressive ideals and a willingness to challenge the status quo was canceled, despite good ratings. In January of this year Keith Olbermann, well known for his public disputes with right-wing figures, was terminated by MSNBC, just after control of the channel was sold by General Electric to Comcast (Extra!, 3/11). In 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq War, Phil Donahue (one of the few elite media members to openly oppose the invasion) was taken off the air due, a leaked memo would reveal, to his antiwar views (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03).

Uygur, who began hosting MSNBC Live in the 6 p.m. weeknight slot in January, said he was warned before his show was cancelled by MSNBC president Phil Griffin that his aggressive style did not reflect MSNBC’s role as a reputable establishment outlet, and that he needed to “tone it down.”

“Outsiders are cool—but we’re insiders, we’re the establishment,” Uygur says Griffin told him (Salon, 7/21/11). “There are two audiences. There is the audience you are trying to appeal to, the viewers. And there is management. And management is basically the club. And they want to make sure that you are cool—can play ball with the club.”

His bosses also told him that “people in Washington were concerned about [his] tone,” Uygur said, and even sent him notes asking him to “act more like a senator.”

Ignoring this advice, Uygur saw his ratings consistently increase; his show, he said, consistently beat its 6 p.m. competition on CNN. But ratings clearly aren’t everything at MSNBC: In June his show was axed.

MSNBC took a drastic ratings hit following the removal of Olbermann, whose replacement, Lawrence O’Donnell, lost about 35 percent of the viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-to-54 age group. The weak lead-in ratings have also hurt Rachel Maddow’s ratings at 9 p.m., which are down 15 percent, and have put the channel “on the verge of falling back into third place among the cable news networks,” the New York Times (9/27/11) reported.

Uygur was offered a reduced role as a weekend and fill-in host that would have paid him twice as much money, but he declined the offer (Democracy Now!, 7/22/11).

Griffin took issue with Uygur’s account, telling the New York Times that (7/20/11) “we never told Cenk what to say or what not to say.” (Uygur acknowledges that he was never directly censored, just pressured to conform.) But in the same article, Griffin acknowledged he did, as Uygur alleged, reference “people in Washington” having negative views of the show.

“The ‘people in Washington,’ [Griffin] said, were MSNBC producers who were responsible for booking guests for the 6 p.m. hour, and some of them had said that Mr. Uygur’s aggressive body language and overall demeanor were making it harder to book guests.”

But given MSNBC’s past record in similar instances, Uygur’s accusations seem quite plausible. After Donahue’s show was canceled in 2003, a network memo leaked out (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03) saying the host’s antiwar views presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The show, the memo said, could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Olbermann’s firing came just after NBC was purchased by Comcast (Extra, 3/11). The host had come to represent the channel’s reputation as the most liberal option on cable news. He had long drawn the ire of the corporate executives he answers to at NBC, and a few months before his firing, he was briefly suspended for making political donations to guests (Guardian, 11/5/10). Olbermann had also raised hackles at the network for his constant spars with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, which prompted Fox News and NBC officials to attempt to muzzle their stars from further back-and-forth attacks (FAIR Action Alert, 8/7/09).

Fears that Comcast—whose executives have prominently donated large amounts to conservative campaigns and causes—would make the network even more inhospitable to progressive voices have hardly been allayed by Uygur’s cancellation. As Lee Fang of Think Progress (11/5/10) reports, Comcast also has a motive for avoiding antagonizing the incumbent administration:

Why would Comcast be interested in silencing progressive voices? Histori-cally, Comcast has boosted its profits by buying up various telecommunication and media content companies—instead of providing faster Internet or better services.... Many of these mergers, as Public Citizen and Free Press have reported, have been allowed by regulators because of Comcast’s considerable political muscle. Com-cast’s latest regulatory battle has been to oppose net neutrality—a rule allowing a free and open Internet—because the company would prefer to have customers pay for preferred online content.

Unlike Donahue, Uygur could not be accused of promoting a “liberal antiwar agenda”; he supported the Afghan War until very recently (Huffington Post, 12/1/09) and supported Obama’s decision to bomb Libya as part of a NATO campaign (Truthout, 6/3/11).

Uygur was, however, frequently quite critical of Obama, especially in his dealings with Republicans on economic and environmental issues. Before being given his own show, he suggested that Obama was either “the world’s worst negotiator” or might actually “not be a progressive” (Dylan Ratigan Show,12/8/10). When the White House lashed out at progressives who were critical of the administration in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, saying they were “irresponsible,” Uygur responded angrily, saying Obama lives “in a bubble in D.C. where you try to please all your Washington buddies, the right-wingers and the media” (Early Morning Swim, 9/29/10), and accused him of trying to “scapegoat his own base” for a poor showing in 2010.

As a full-time host, he continued his attacks on Obama. Uygur said Obama passed a weak financial regulation bill in June because he didn’t want “to offend the Wall Street guys,” in part because he “takes their money” (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11). He also criticized the president for legitimizing Bush administration surveillance tactics, such as the warrantless wiretapping program (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11): “As a former constitutional law professor, he should be embarrassed of that decision. That program basically destroys the Fourth Amendment.”

Could Comcast have been unsettled by such critiques from the left? Former presidential candidate Al Sharpton, who replaced Uygur, recently vowed “not to criticize the president about anything” in an interview with 60 Minutes (5/19/11). The segment also noted that Sharpton was now “a trusted White House adviser” and that “given his loyalty and his change from confrontational to accommodating, the administration is rewarding him with access and assignments.”

Interestingly, Current TV, which hired Olbermann earlier this year to host a nightly news program, has recently hired Uygur to bring his popular Internet show, the Young Turks, to cable TV (Current TV, 9/20/11). While the young channel has only a tiny fraction of the audience that MSNBC gets, its willingness to collect talentMSNBC deems too anti-establishment could steal away some of the very viewers the psuedo-left channel is trying to target.

Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blog spot.com), a freelance journalist based in Boston, writes frequently for Extra!, as well as for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.

Michael Corcoran on Ring of Fire Radio discussing 'Democrats and the Death of Keynesian Economics'

2011-11-20T14:54:00.000-08:00

This radio interview I did with Ring of Fire is about my article in Truthout, "Democrats and the Death of Keynesian Economics."

Note: I am having some trouble with the embed feature on YouTube. To watch it please click on the above link, or you watch it on the Ring of Fire website, here.

Smear Campaigns Fuel Shutdowns of Occupations Across Country

2011-11-15T15:38:00.000-08:00

Originally posted at Truthout

Tuesday 15 November 2011

by: Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis

An Occupy Wall Street protester is detained following an attempt to re-enter Zuccotti Park, in New York on November 15, 2011. Hundreds of police officers arrested about 200 demonstrators early Tuesday in an operation to clear the nearly two-month-old camp. (Photo: Todd Heisler / The New York Times)

City officials in Burlington, Vermont, recently used the suicide of a 35-year-old man as an excuse to deceptively close down the occupation. In New York City, just this morning, police threatened arrest to anyone who did not clear Zuccotti Park - the birthplace of the Occupy movement. Across the nation the media, right-wing critics and city officials are wrongly blaming Occupy for seemingly any crime or incident that occurs anywhere in their respective cities in an especially sinister smear campaign that aims to discredit and ultimately try to destroy the movement. Other occupations are in jeopardy of being shut down by the police. Organizers and supporters must act bravely and quickly to save - and expand - this movement as we head into the dead of winter.

A new and vicious smear campaign against the Occupy movement is in full swing. The narrative of this campaign is to portray the movement as a hotbed for violent crime and danger. This false narrative, if it sticks, could prompt more city and town officials across the country to shut down occupations, as the City of New York has attempted to do just this morning, and weaken the movement. This cannot be tolerated.

The full picture of the smear campaign became evident to me when I received a message on a social networking site from a right-wing relative of mine. His message linked to a right-wing smear site [3] that, citing the suicide of a 35-year-old homeless man in Vermont among other things, painted the occupations as one of "sexual assault, violence, vandalism, anti-Semitism, extortion, perversion and lawlessness."

My relative and many of his right-wing comrades, it seems, really believe that the Occupy movement is in favor of murder, violence, rape and drug dealing. This is rather astounding, but it is also the reality of how far beneath contempt the opponents of Occupy are willing to go to kill this movement. The mention of "sexual assaults" is especially slimy, given that it was a protester from Occupy Wall Street [4] who was the victim, not the perpetrator, of an alleged rape and her fellow protesters assisted her with medical and legal help and reported the alleged rapist to authorities.

It is fascinating - as well as scary - to see the way attacks on Occupy have evolved since it first started in late September. Originally, the media coverage and the right-wing attacksattempted to portray the protesters [5] as aimless, lazy, hippie freeloaders, who were fornicating and defecating on the streets, while banging on drums and rambling about nonsense. This caricature did not work, as the support and diversity that make up the movement and its supporters were just too obviously different from the cartoonish portrayal the movement's critics tried to paint. As Bill Maher rightly said on his HBO show "Real Time," "Occupy is not the counterculture. It is the culture [6]."

Take back the media by making a tax-deductible donation to Truthout this week. Click here to support news free of corporate influence. [7]

But, now, this new and far more sinister smear campaign is well underway. The corporate media, right-wing critics and city and town officials are trying to blame the protests for virtually any and all crime that has occurred on or near the encampments. The headlines in the media outlets - which are owned by corporations [8] that make up the 1 percent in most instances - continue to amplify these narratives and push for the closing of the occupations. The vast majority of these crimes and incidents have nothing to do with the Occupy movement; in fact, many of them speak more about the major social and economic injustices the protesters are trying to end. But that has not stopped city officials from trying to use these instances to stop the occupations. The occupation in Burlington, Vermont, has already been shut down. Occupy Oakland has been shut down twice. Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of the movement, is being cleared out by police as I write this [9]. And if the false narratives continue, other occupations - and the strength of the movement - could be in jeopardy.

This is now a crucial moment for the Occupy movement. How organizers and supporters proceed in the next few days may well shape the health and survival of the movement heading through the winter and into the spring. It is absolutely essential that Occupy organizers and supporters (including independent media) work aggressively to: 1) counter the false narrative that tries to, absurdly, link the movement to street violence, rapes and drugs deals, in order to discredit the movement; 2) better explain the relationship between the homeless and the Occupy movement, as the media has portrayed the relationship between organizers and the homeless as vitriolic and divisive, while understating the spirit of acceptance and cooperation between activists and the homeless - themselves products of our unjust economic system; and 3) most importantly, the movement must continue tomaintain the occupations, even in the face of crackdowns from city officials and police. This movement is the single most exciting development in decades for the prospects for creating a more just society. It must continue.

Read the rest here.

Michael Corcoran Discusses the Death of Keynesian Economics With Rick Smith

2011-10-30T15:09:00.000-07:00

From Truthout

Michael Corcoran Discusses the Death of Keynesian Economics with Rick Smith

Monday 31 October 2011

by: Rick Smith, The Rick Smith Show | Radio Interview

Press play to listen to Michael Corcoran's interview with Rick Smith about his latest story, "Democrats and the Death of Keynesian Economics":

Click here, to listen to more interview with Truthout authors on The Rick Smith Show.

Democrats and the Death of Keynesian Economics

2011-10-18T12:33:00.000-07:00

Originally published at Truthout. '

It is quite remarkable, given the nature of the recent debate overeconomic policy in Washington, that a Wikipedia articles exists today called, "2008-2009 Keynesian resurgence." Today, both political parties have had an obsession with "austerity measures" for at least last year or so - which includes putting Medicare andSocial Security on the chopping block. Barack Obama's weak job bill, which was dead on arrival, only further demonstrates how twisted priorities are in Washington. So, it is actually hard to believe that, in the aftermath of the near-collapse of the economy in 2008, Maynard Keynes, who advocated government intervention in the economy to increase demand during downturns, was making a comeback.

But for a brief moment in time, this was indeed the case. After the 2008 bailout of Bear Stearns, Martin Wolf, an economics writer for the Financial Times and normally a staunch supporter of free-market globalization, wrote: "Remember March 14 2008: it was the day the dream of global free market capitalism died." In the same article, he quoted Joseph Ackerman, the chief executive of Deutsche Bank, saying: "I no longer believe in the market's self-healing power." In an October 10 article, The Washington Post - in all seriousness - suggested that the current economic crises meant the "The End Of American Capitalism" as we know it. The cover of Time magazine in February 2009, said, "We are all Socialists Now," referencing the need for government intervention to save us from the ills of capitalism. "Whether we want to admit it or not," the article observed, "the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state."

As frightening and tragic as the economic crisis of 2008 was, having these widely held doctrinal assumptions about the power of the so-called "free market" spun on their head did provide some hope. Maybe there could be some sort of shift toward a more humane mixed economy that reined in the horrific excesses of contemporary capitalism. The country was optimistic; a new president had just been elected and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, famously said that he "never wanted a serious crisis to go to waste." The Nation magazine even called for a "New New Deal."

What followed, unfortunately, was a very underwhelming flirtation with Keynesian policies (such as the too-small stimulus bill in 2009), which was then swiftly overwhelmed with bipartisan discussions about how to gut government spending and create on austerity movement. This occurred despite the fact that the need for Keynesian economic policies are just as great now, in the face of crippling unemployment, as they were in 2008-09.

Read the rest here.

The End of the Bill Keller Era

2011-09-03T02:01:00.000-07:00

Available in the newest issue (Aug 2011) of Extra.

When Bill Keller announced that he would soon be stepping down as the New York Times’ top editor, he was hailed as the man “who rebuilt the confidence of the New York Times newsroom after the Jayson Blair scandal” (Forbes, 6/2/11). Rem Rieder of American Journalism Review (3–4/11) wrote that Keller “righted the ship” and “deserves major credit for steering our most important news organization in an immensely challenging time, for the most part avoiding the icebergs.” Hendrik Hertzberg (New Yorker, 6/3/11) commended his tenure: “The quality and quantity of Times journalism remain unsurpassed on Planet Earth.”

Despite all the praise, Keller’s record of major editorial decisions during his eight-year reign—especially on matters of national security, foreign policy and domestic surveillance—is littered with journalistic disappointments that warrant criticism rather than praise.

Underlying many of these critical decisions is a remarkable deference to state power, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration: his suppression of information about the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping program, his refusal to use the word “torture” when the U.S. engaged in it, and his closeness to the government regarding the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy project.

In a speech given at FAIR’s 25th anniversary ceremony (4/28/11), Glenn Greenwald highlighted Keller’s relationship with the government when he described the editor’s handling of the release of documents fromWikiLeaks:

What [Keller] is most proud of is that…the New York Times, before it publishes any of these [controversial or classified] documents, goes to the government and says, “These are the things that we wish to publish,” and then listens to the government say, “Don’t publish this and don’t publish that,” and in general the New York Times complies.... He’s so proud of the fact that he’s gotten government approval for what it is that he’s doing; it’s the proof that he’s doing the right thing.

Read the rest here.

MSNBC's Flawed Coverage of Libya, Economy

2011-06-05T15:50:00.000-07:00

Published at Truthout.

by: Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher, Truthout

(Photo: Jason Garber / Flickr)

The channel, viewed by far as the most progressive on cable television, keeps its critiques well within the narrow framework of "acceptable" discourse in the corporate media.

When US bombs began to drop on Libya last month, representing the start of the third simultaneous US war (not including covert wars being waged by US Special Forces and the CIA in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere), it was not surprising to see the media jump into a pro-war frenzy, as it so often does. One might hope, however, that perhaps MSNBC - on the liberal side of acceptable discourse in US cable media - would at least offer significant skepticism toward another expensive and bloody US war. This is especially true given that 74 percent of the US population opposed US intervention.

A close look, however, reveals the opposite is true. MSNBC, whose hosts align themselves closely with Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, has been perhaps the most hawkish station on cable news. Literally every single one of the channel's nighttime hosts (Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Lawrence O'Donnell and Cenk Uygur) has failed to oppose the war (the morning hours are hosted by Joe Scarborough, a reliable conservative). In many instances, they have vigorously supported the war, or at the least, have deflected criticism away from Obama and the Democrats. In fact, MSNBC has arguably defended President Obama's war policies with nearly the same vigor as their Fox News competitors did with President George W. Bush, when he pushed the US into Iraq in 2003. MSNBC's coverage of the intervention in Libya shows one of the great flaws of even the most critical corporate media in the United States. Such limitations do a great disservice to the prospects of a much-needed class-based movement. And given that a recent poll done by Alternet showed how influential MSNBC is - Maddow was overwhelmingly voted as the most influential progressive, and a number of other current or former MSNBC hosts were in the top 20 - it is important that the limits of MSNBC's independence and criticism be well understood.

Read the rest of the essay, here.

The myth of U.S. humanitarian intervention in Libya

2011-06-05T15:31:00.000-07:00

This article was the May/June cover article for the International Socialist Review.

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

THE MYTH of humanitarian intervention has once again surfaced as the key justification for Western imperial adventurism. This time, Libya has been targeted by the United States and France for a bombing campaign that is alleged to be primarily about “protecting” the people of Libya, who joined others in the “Arab Spring” in demanding freedom from a ruthless dictator.

As this so-called humanitarian intervention takes place, the United States continues its support for the brutal suppression of peaceful demonstrations in states allied with the United States, such as Bahrain and Yemen. This clearly demonstrates the brazen level of hypocrisy of the U.S. position and illustrates just how concerned U.S. state managers are with human rights. Clear geopolitical motives for the intervention in Libya, as well as the suppression in Yemen and Bahrain, show the true purpose of the U.S. policy: to maximize its control of a vital, resource-rich region while hiding its true intentions, as always, behind the veil of benevolent intentions. This has been made possible, in part, because the media has worked to spread the party line of U.S. humanitarian intervention and benevolent intentions, serving as what the neo-Marxist writer Louis Althusser referred to as an “Ideological State Apparatus” (ISA).1

This article seeks to dismantle the arguments made by apologists for U.S. imperialism in Libya by examining the true nature of U.S. foreign policy and its concern (or lack thereof) for human rights, the illegality of the Libyan invasion through the lens of both domestic and international law, and by demonstrating how corporate media complicity has helped to sell this narrative, serving, as always, as an arm of official ideology.

Read the rest here.

Michael Corcoran: Corporate Media Takes a Side in Debate over 'Entitlements'

2011-04-10T19:49:00.000-07:00

Originally published at Truthout

Michael Corcoran

March 30, 2011.

Corporate Media Takes a Side in Debate over 'Entitlements'

Pundits and politicians have often said that the thought of cutting Social Security and Medicare are, as Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post described them, the "third rails of American politics. Nobody wants to touch them." This, Cillizza argues, is an unfortunate trend, since chopping these staples to the United States ever-thinning safety net, is the "obvious fix" to our nation's budget problems. "The simple solution is to make cuts to two large government entitlement programs: Social Security and Medicare," he notes.

Despite this often repeated claim that cutting Social Security and Medicare is never discussed in American politics, in reality, the media is relentless in its perpetuation of the myth that cuts to these programs are needed - and right away. In recent months, the media has served to amplify the ideological claims of elites that use the recession - caused by large financial institutions' reckless behavior - as an excuse to further burden the nation's poor and elderly, even as the rich continue to benefit from massive tax breaks and bailouts. The question the media pose is not whether Social Security and Medicare should be cut, but when and how. But there is no debate as to who should sacrifice to balance the budget: the poor and the elderly.

In recent months, especially since President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released their initial report on deficit reduction and the GOP took over the House, the corporate media has excluded views of labor or working class-people, ignored alternative proposals to cutting these programs - such as various forms of revenue increases, all more popular with the populace - and perpetuated the falsehood that Social Security is in the throes of a deep crisis and is responsible for our budget woes. The idea that those on Wall Street who caused the financial crises - and the extreme revenue shortfalls that followed - should be asked to help pay a little more of their massive profits in an age of historically-low taxation on the rich is, indeed, the true "third rail" in the media.

Corporate Media, Corporate Agenda

To close followers of the economics of the mass media, it comes as no great surprise that the media is effectively serving as a communications arm of corporate America - the media is corporate America. And the corporatization of the media has only grown this year. In a few weeks, media activists will meet in Boston for Free Press's National Conference on Media Reform. Among the major topics to be discussed are the increasing corporate domination of the media; increased consolidation with the merger of NBC and Comcast; the passing of Citizens United, which served to createan effective "stimulus package" for media companies due to increased political ads; the battle over net neutrality, which will determine if corporations will dominate the web at the expense of independent web sites and the attempted desecration of public media, further enabling corporations to control information in the United States.

So, it comes as little surprise that the same media that supported the urgentpassing of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the most massive example of upward redistribution of wealth in US history, and are currently singing itspraises as an unmitigated success, would then ask for the nation's fiscal woes to be "fixed" on the backs of working-class people.

This sentiment does not merely come from the opinion makers, but the news pages of the major national papers, which continue to perpetuate the myth that Social Security is in crises. Consider the appraisal of New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes, who said Congress was tasked with the "unsustainable combination of fast-growing entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare and inadequate tax revenues." The Washington Post's news pages, likewise, push the same flawed narrative. Reporter Lori Montgomery concluded that "budget experts say it would be difficult to significantly reduce future deficits without addressing the rising cost of Social Security."

It appears the Post ignored "budget experts" who offered a differing view. For example, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and its co-founder Dean Baker - one of the only economists to predict the housing bubble that the media missed out on - have shown that the program is solvent at least until 2037, giving us decades to tweak policies to make sure those who receive benefits in 2038 get 100 percent benefits.

But, the likes of Baker are rarely given a platform in the US mainstream media, where the expert pundits represent an incredibly narrow range of opinions. On shows such as "Meet the Press," conservative Democrats, such as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council Harold Ford, often, absurdly, appear on the show as representatives of the left.

Consider the panel discussion on the show after the release of the deficit reduction report. The panel included Newt Gingrich, Alan Greenspan on the right and on "the left," Ford and Vanity Fair's Bethany Maclean (not exactly a modern-day Eugene Debs). Ford used the platform to give right-wing talking points and bash the left. "As long as you don't allow the far left and the far right, again, to crowd out the predominant middle, we can get a lot of this done," he said. "If that means making tough choices on Social Security - I'm 40, I'm willing to give mine up and I think a lot of people my age who may reach a certain income level are willing to do the same."

Host David Gregory was convinced by the wisdom of cuts to entitlements. "I don't see why, for instance, some of these suggestions, Harold, on Social Security are going to be demagogued to death," Gregory said. "Why, in 50 years, people can't look at raising the retirement age and have that be a serious discussion point?"

The Real Social Security Crisis

While the likes of Ford and Gregory may be able to endure cuts to Social Security, statistics show current and future retirees cannot. In fact, the real Social Security crisis is not that the program is insolvent - as noted above, it is in decent fiscal shape - but that the benefits are no longer sufficient to enable many people to live decent lives.

As CEPR reports, "the vast majority of near-retirees will rely on Social Security for the vast majority of their income in retirement," and therefore "cuts in Social Security imply large cuts in income for a population that is already not especially wealthy." The real debate in the media ought to be over how to increase benefits, so we can provide retirees with a dignified life.

Raising benefits should not be viewed as a radical idea. Contrary to media hysteria, Social Security is not reckless overindulgence in social welfare, but rather a modest (relative to other countries) pension program, that could be improved in the richest nation in the world. According to a report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), our federal pension system offers quite meager benefits, compared to other developed nations in the OECD. Social Security accounts for about 16 percent of our total public expenditure, which is lower than about 80 percent of all developed nations.

In fact, there are many changes we can make to increase Social Security benefits - the most obvious of which is to implement more progressive taxation. Currently, Social Security taxes are capped at $106,000. This means that someone making $1 million a year is only paying Social Security taxes on about 10 percent of their income. If we removed the cap, the program would remain solvent for 75 more years, according to theCongressional Budget Office. Another option would be a tax on financial speculation, a modest tax on Wall Street trading that could raise $1 trillion in revenue over the course of a decade.

In fact, Baker estimates that raising Social Security by 25 percent would cost about 1.5 percent of GDP, about 66 percent of which would be covered by a financial speculation tax. To put this into perspective, the increase in defense spending just from 2000 - 2010, accounted for 1.8 percent of GDP. "This seems affordable to me," Baker said in an email.

Indeed, wealthy people can afford the tax. According to a study done by an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, between 1979 and 2005, mean after-tax income for the top 1 percent increased by 176 percent, while the bottom 20 percent saw an increase of 6 percent only. With the extension of the Bush tax cuts, this trend seems likely to continue. But the idea of raising taxes, even slightly, on the rich is out of the realm of acceptable discourse in the media.

The Real Health Care Crises

Media attacks on Medicare are also fallacious. The general argument portrayed in the media is that the inefficiency of Medicare is causing costs to rise at a fast rate, adding to the deficit and thus, it must be cut. But Medicare is actually more efficient than private health care plans - its cost is rising 8.3 percent annually per beneficiary for Medicare, compared to 9.3 percent for private plans. The increase has a lot to do with the increase of people over the age of 65, not flaws with the program.

But rather than cutting Medicare, as pundits proclaim we must, the media should target on the real villain of the deficit: the exploding health care costs associated with the US's broken private health care system. Public plans such as Medicare are actually more efficient than private plans, since they have considerably less administrative waste. In fact, as this graph shows, if you replaced the US wasteful system - which costs about 17 percent of GDP, almost double of the average developed nation - with any public system from any OECD country, the deficit would be eliminated.

But, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has documented, the narrow ideology of the mass media does not even allow for a discussion of public health care. In a study of news coverage during the debate over federal health care reform, the organization concluded that out of "hundreds of stories" that mentioned health care reform "all but 18 of these stories made no mention of 'single-payer' ... and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer - none of which appeared on television."

The Media Agenda

As noted above, it is neither surprising, nor conspiratorial, to suggest that media companies - owned by large corporations - would produce information that would benefit their own institutions. This is precisely why the increasing corporate stranglehold of the media is such a topic of concern for media activists and why alternative media sources are so crucial to our democracy. The coverage of Social Security and Medicare in recent months is a perfect example of the narrow, ideologically driven agenda of the corporate media that is serving to help the rich dismantle important social programs.

Al-Jazeera, as endorsed by Hillary Clinton (The Guardian)

2011-03-10T19:05:00.000-08:00

With its Arab Spring coverage, al-Jazeera won new fans. Isn't it time to end the channel's virtual blackout on US cable networks?

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

Al-Jazeera's esteem in the United States has reached unprecedented heights in the aftermath of its coverage of the revolutionary uprising in Egypt, which clearly displayed how embarrassingly inadequate US cable news outlets are by comparison. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was compelled recently to concede that al-Jazeera English (AJE) provides "real news" coverage and actual on-the-ground journalism, unlike its American counterparts, which, she said, rely too heavily on cheap punditry.

Despite the US's unique position of power and influence, cable providers in America do not offer a single world news channel. Not even CNN International, the grownup sister channel of CNN, is available in the US; American audiences are forced to endure the entertainment-centric, domestic version of the channel – as Clinton described it, "a million commercials … and arguments between talking heads."

Al-Jazeera's impressive coverage of the uprising in Egypt has reopened a debate over whether cable providers should offer AJE as an option for US viewers. The channel is pressing the issue as never before, devoting a page on its site to encourage Americans to "Demand al-Jazeera", and using Twitter and Facebook to build a national movement for cable companies to offer the channel. With recent reports that Comcast is in negotiations with the Qatar-based network, now is the time for the effective blackout of al-Jazeera English in the US to end.

Read the rest, here.

Media Don't Bite the Ruling That Feeds Them

2011-01-05T18:12:00.000-08:00

Originally published by Extra!, the monthly magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Citizens United fills airwaves—and corporate coffers

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

The 2010 midterm elections were the first since the Supreme Court's 5-4 Citizens United decision allowed unlimited corporate funding of political broadcasts in elections. As was widely predicted at the time, spending hit unprecedented highs this election cycle, including record sums on television ads. In the words of the Associated Press (10/29/10), Citizens essentially constituted a “stimulus package” for broadcast and cable media corporations, which saw major increases in revenue, thus benefiting from the ever-deepening relationship between money and politics.

In fact, media corporations raked in a record $3 billion this mid-term election cycle, not only breaking the previous mid-term spending record of $2.4 billion in 2006, but also surpassing the $2.7 billion spent in the 2008 presidential election cycle (AP, 10/29/10). Much of this windfall can be attributed directly to the Citizens decision, according to a report from the media tracking group SNL Kagan, which described the 2010 election climate as “a political ad revenue treasure trove for broadcasters" (Hill, 9/22/10).

CBS, according to AP (11/4/10), “pounced on an advertising revival in the broadcast media to produce a 53 percent increase in its third-quarter net income"; other media companies likewise “reported robust ad gains.” Media giant Time Warner--owner of cable channels like CNN, TNT and TBS--saw profits rise by more than one-third in the quarter, in part due to a 23 percent increase in ad revenue (CNET, 11/4/10).

Local stations likewise have their snouts in the trough. Political ads are expected to account for 11 percent of the total revenue for local broadcasters this year, up from 7 percent in 2006 (AP, 10/29/10). In Boston, where a 30-second election spot costs about $25,000, demand for ads was so high that local channels were actually turning them down. “There are not enough commercial breaks and too many advertisers. It’s been absolutely crazy,” said Andy Hoffman, a sales manager for Channel 5 in Boston (Boston Globe, 10/30/10).

Media companies not only benefit from ads, but also now have the ability to donate as much money as they want to politicians' campaigns. This new leverage will enable media corporations to fight for issues that impact their bottom line, such as relaxing telecommunications regulations and fighting against net neutrality to ensure them a competitive advantage over smaller, independent news sites.

Read the rest, here.

Media Distortions Legitimize Honduras Regime

2010-12-06T19:20:00.000-08:00

Originally published at Truthout. Also published at Z Magazine.

Honduras held elections on November 29, 2009, that were deemed illegitimate by most of the international community and resulted in the presidency of Porfirio Lobo, a conservative politician and agricultural landowner. [I] The election occurred just months after the illegal coup overthrowing President Manuel Zelaya and, as a result of a significant boycott, only included candidates who supported the coup. [II]

At the time of the elections, the US mainstream media had an atrocious record of reporting on the coup itself, as well as on the elections that followed, helping to legitimize a startling attack on Honduran democracy. [III]Despite the illegal nature of the coup and numerous accounts of human rights abuses against supporters of Manuel Zelaya - including violence against protesters, mass arrests and crackdowns on press freedom - the US media portrayed the events in a way that painted Zelaya as a villainous follower of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and legitimized those who ousted him, in part by ignoring their many crimes and abuses. [IV]

Unfortunately, in the year that has followed these two troubling events, little has changed: the Lobo regime has continued the human rights abuses that have plagued the country for more than a year, while the media has downplayed, distorted or ignored the crimes of his regime.

Read the rest, here.

NACLA: The U.S. Media and the Crisis in Ecuador

2010-11-05T12:04:00.000-07:00

Originally published at NACLA.org

(Note: a slightly modified version was published in the Nov/Dec print edition of Nacla Report on the Americas, in the Media Accuracy in Latin America (MALA) section. That version is available in print, and here (PDF).)

When Rudolfo Muñoz, a reporter working in Ecuador for CNN, resigned from the cable news channel in the immediate aftermath of the September 30 political crisis, not a single noteworthy U.S. news outlet—including CNN—bothered to report on his departure. Fittingly, Muñoz cited the media’s failure to report important information as his primary reason for quitting his job, telling the Latin American media outlet TeleSur that he quit the job because CNN had a “distinct slant” on the deadly police uprising in Ecuador and “acted as if nothing happened” despite “proof that [police forces] tried to kill the president.”

"That same night on Sept. 30 I determined that it was no longer in my interest to continue doing that sort of work,” he said.

While it is still unclear whether the violent events of September 30 constituted an attempted coup, as President Rafael Correa claimed, Muñoz’s critique raises questions about how the crisis was covered in the U.S. mainstream media.

The crisis in Ecuador came less than 18 months after the Honduran military successfully overthrew its democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya. If Ecuador’s police uprising was indeed a failed attempt at overthrowing the government, it would mark the fourth coup attempt on left-leaning Latin America leaders in less than a decade — since 2002. The three earlier coup attempts took place in Venzuela, Haiti, and Honduras. The uprising in Ecuador, if it constituted a coup, was the fourth.

Given the long history of U.S. intervention in the region, the crisis in Ecuador should warrant serious examination from the U.S. media. However, not only were relevant historic angles ignored, but, as Muñoz observed, several important events of that day were not seriously covered. The most prominent mainstream media outlets either ignored the incident, or treated it as if it occurred in a vacuum—offering no context about the long history of U.S. involvement in coup attempts in the Americas.

Read the rest, here.

Media Continue Bank Bailout Advocacy

2010-10-07T04:21:00.000-07:00

Originally published at Extra!, the magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

For corporate media, the verdict is already in: The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), the unpopular program that redistributed some $700 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds upwards, to the very financial institutions that contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is an unabashed success.

It is hardly stunning that corporate media would react favorably to one of the biggest boons for big corporations in U.S. history. When the bailout initially failed to make it through Congress in 2008 due to House opposition, journalists quickly accepted and reinforced the narrative that the unpopular legislation--which gave unprecedented power to the Treasury Department with virtually no mechanism for oversight or review--needed to be passed so urgently that a serious national debate was not even possible (Extra!, 1/09).

"In the Congress of the United States, the insane are now running the asylum," wrote Dana Milbank in the Washington Post (9/30/08). The Post editorial page produced three editorials in three days (9/30/08=10/2/08) in support of the policy. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (10/1/08) claimed, "We have House members, many of whom I suspect can't balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don't understand, swamped them with phone calls."

As Dean Baker and Kris Warner of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted (Extra!, 1/09), despite claims echoed throughout the media that the bill was too urgent to even be subject to reasonable scrutiny, the Treasury Department "took no action for 10 days after the bill had been passed."

Now that the program is coming to an end, media--with a few notable exceptions like Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times (4/18/10)--are claiming the corporate bailout they so fervently supported has been a monumental success. Two primary claims have been pervasive: that TARP was a good idea that’s “working,” and that it was a “great deal for taxpayers” (Washington Post, 4/1/10). Progressive critiques challenging the official narrative have been almost entirely ignored by the corporate press, despite the fact that such challenges have appeared throughout alternative media (Pew Research Center, 4/28/10; FireDogLake, 7/15/10).

In the words of the Post editorial board (7/5/10), even though "pretty much everyone hated" the "$700 billion bailout fund," it has "arguably saved the U.S. economy.... Any member of Congress who supported TARP, Republican or Democrat, took a sensible risk that has been vindicated by the program's result."

Similarly, Reuters (8/19/10) reported that TARP's success would "dilute the previously potent political attack that lawmakers who voted for the bailout were rewarding Wall Street greed while putting taxpayers at risk." Former George W. Bush administration official James K. Glassman declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (8/26/10), "It has to be said that the TARP and the other financial rescues were necessary and efficient."

Prominent progressive critics contend TARP is a program that is doomed to failure. Even if it succeeds in temporarily rescuing the financial sector, the failure to enact broad systemic changes only increases the risk of future, more expensive bailouts. Dean Baker, for instance, suggested (CEPR, 7/5/10) that the "financial Armageddon" averted by TARP

>>>would have meant the demise of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and most of the other Wall Street titans, but probably would not have led to a qualitatively worse economic situation for the rest of us than what we actually saw. In fact, there would have been a great benefit from this financial Armageddon in that it would let the market wipe out the fast-dealing, high-flying Wall Street gang in a single blow.

This would eliminate the culture of synthetic CDOs and naked credit default swaps that provide ever more sophisticated and expensive ways to gamble. It would also eliminate many of the huge multi-million dollar paychecks that the Wall Street boys take home every year (or week). In other words, this is not obviously a bad story.<<<

Financial blogger Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, 6/23/10) likewise criticized the Obama administration’s choice to “patch the system up with duct tape and baling wire, and if it looks even remotely operational, tout it as tremendous success,” rather than enacting serious reform. The choice, she continued, reflects the administration’s "decision to reconstitute, as much as possible, the banking industry that had just driven itself and the global economy off the cliff” and “to cast its lot with an unreformed banking industry."

Yet these important ideas were rarely presented to the American people by the corporate-owned press, thus limiting their impact and damaging citizens’ ability to come to informed conclusions. "I have almost never had my criticisms of the TARP in the media," said Baker in an e-mail to Extra!.

Indeed, media adhered to their time-honored practice of framing the debate between centrist Democrats and far-right conservatives (Extra!, 9=10/04)--in this case, restricting the “debate” to pro-TARP voices on one side and militant free-market absolutists on the other, who oppose the program as a violation of laissez-faire principles. That was the form the debate took on Fox Business Channel (12/22/09), TARP supporter Lawrence Ausubel, economics professor at University of Maryland, faced off against Cody Willard, a right-wing libertarian critic.

A New York Times article (7/1/10) looking back on TARP included critiques of the plan from conservatives like Sen. Richard Shelby (“blatant accounting fraud”) and Rep. Spencer Bachus (“a ridiculous scheme”), but ignored progressive critics in Congress, such as Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The claim that the taxpayers are being fully reimbursed by beneficiaries of TARP is likewise being vigorously advanced by the corporate press. The New York Times has been ebullient regarding the program's outcome for some time now (8/30/09): "Nearly a year after the federal rescue of the nation’s biggest banks, taxpayers have begun seeing profits from the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid.... So far, that experiment [TARP] is more than paying off."

More recently, the Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin asked (4/12/10), "What if, after all that panting over Washington’s bailout of the financial system, we learned that it actually worked?" He continued:

>>>Some officials [are] suggesting that if the economic recovery continues apace, the bailout program could eventually turn from red to black. That may seem far-fetched to anyone who remembers the dire predictions about banks like Citigroup, but the numbers tell a different story. The government’s $45 billion investment in Citigroup alone is on track to make a profit of nearly $11 billion, plus $8 billion or so in interest and other fees. People inside the administration no longer refer to Citigroup as the "Death Star"; now it is a "profit center.”<<<

Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/5/10) wondered whether the assertion that TARP did not cost the taxpayers anything is “based on ungodly stupidity or is just plain dishonest”:

>>>The TARP money was a form of insurance. The vast majority of insurance policies are never paid off, but that does not mean they have no value. The point here is that the banks were on the edge of going bankrupt. The government, through the TARP and the Fed, gave the banks the loans and the guarantees that assured the markets that the banks would survive.... This is all a gift from the taxpayers to some of the richest people in the country.<<<

In a rare instance where a progressive critic was quoted by the mainstream press on the issue--albeit buried in an otherwise upbeat TARP story by Sorkin (New York Times, 4/13/10)--Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz said widespread efforts to glorify TARP's success are "disingenuous and a real attempt to distract people," as they don't factor in lost interest on the money spent. "Did we get back anything commensurate with the risk?... Clearly the answer is no," he said. Sorkin dismissively reminded readers that Stiglitz "has made a career of seeing every glass as half-empty."

Even Elizabeth Warren, who has been featured in the news as a potential leader for the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, has been largely ignored by the press when she reported on TARP’s flaws. As the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the use of TARP funds, she issued a strong critique of TARP's impact on small banks in the panel's July report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 7/14/10), saying TARP "served Wall Street much better than anyone else." Neither the Post nor the Times published a single article citing Warren's findings. The panel’s May report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 5/12/10), also quite critical of aspects of TARP, was mostly ignored as well, getting only two small mentions in the Post (5/19/10, 8/4/10).

When TARP was pushed through with no sizable programs attached to help the average American (Economic Policy Institute, 9/29/08), the priority for policy makers became clear. As Baker observed in CounterPunch (6/2/10), the same people who praise TARP are now saying we must “act aggressively now to reduce the budget deficit” and “accept large cuts in Social Security and other important programs.”

"Why on earth," Baker asks, "should anyone trust what the bankers' economist accomplices are telling us?"

Media Manipulates the "End" of the War in Iraq

2010-08-31T11:57:00.000-07:00

Originally published at Truthout.

Just as the media lied to help us get into a war, they are now lying us out of one.

In the introduction to season five of HBO's critically acclaimed series, "The Wire," Det. Bunk Moreland and fellow murder investigators laughed as they duped a hapless, young street gangster into confessing to a murder by pretending a copy machine was a polygraph test. "The bigger the lie, the more they believe," he said.

The statement reflects the political dialogue in this country perfectly over the last month, ever since Barack Obama touted the troop drawdown in Iraq in an August 2 speech in Atlanta and leading up to tonight's Oval Address celebrating the "end of combat operations in Iraq." The president, the DC establishment and the media have been perpetuating a lie on a massive scale: the war in Iraq is now over, they claim.

But this is patently misleading, as Andrew Bacevich, of Boston University noted in a recent essay. "For the rest of us to pretend that this unnecessary and ill-advised war has ended would only add one more lie to a pile that is already too large," Bacevich said, noting that internal strife between sects, an increasingly defiant Kurdistan and recent attacks in Baghdad, prove that the war in Iraq is by no means over.

Sadly, it is not merely the president and others who have a political motive for perpetuating the myth that the United States has ended out national nightmare in Iraq. More troubling has been the performance of the mainstream media, which, in print and on television, have been witting pawns in this massive deception, reporting on the war as if it were truly over, celebrating this historical moment and ignoring crucial details, as they mislead the American public about the nature of the US role in Iraq. The woeful media performance is just the latest of what has been an especially regrettable eight years of media coverage of Iraq

Read the rest here.

New Figures Show Student Loan Debt Exceeds Credit Card Debt

2010-08-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

Originally published at Campus Progress.

More evidence of the depths of the student loan crisis surfaced this week when the Federal Reserve’s latest numbers revealed that student loans now account for more consumer debt than credit cards.

Outstanding student loans now total $829.785 billion -- about one third of the $2.4 trillion consumer debt in the United States, according to FinAid.org. For the first time ever, this number surpasses total credit card debt, which, according to the Fed, is now $826.5 billion, down considerably from its high point in late 2008.

The drastic numbers are causing some to wonder if the student loan crisis will be the next bubble to burst for the U.S. economy, especially given that default rates are at least 20 percent, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education (and potentially much higher, according to some sources).

“The growth in education debt outstanding is like cooking a lobster,” says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “The increase in total student debt occurs slowly but steadily, so by the time you notice that the water is boiling, you’re already cooked.”

The reasons for this increase in student debt are numerous. Tuition is rapidly rising past the rate of inflation and the unemployment figures, especially for recent college graduates are staggeringly high.

Further, as Campus Progress recently reported, since 2005 student loans have not been granted bankruptcy protection. This has saddled borrowers with life-long debt and has given the banks enormous leverage when negotiating repayments. For example, lenders will often settle at credit card debts at discounted rates, knowing that borrowers could otherwise declare bankruptcy. With private student loans, however, the banks demand the full balance plus interest in fees. Legislation exists in the House and the Senate that would add bankruptcy protections, but it remains to be seen if a bill will pass, and if so, what the specific language will look like.

The silver lining of this latest news is that it could bring desperately needed attention to this brewing economic disaster. Student Loan Justice, an organization that advocates on behalf of student borrowers, issued a statement in response to the new numbers that says “media coverage of credit cards exceeds coverage of student loans by a factor of approximately 15-to-1 based on unscientific news surveys conducted since 2007.”

Clearly, more media attention to student loan issues is warranted given the scope of the problem. “It is our hope that this issue will be exposed to the same level of media scrutiny as is given to credit card debt, and even subprime home loan debt, “ the statement continues. “It is only under the light of serious investigative journalism that this problem will be identified correctly, and solved appropriately.”

Indeed, with outstanding student loans now surpassing credit card debt and a huge chunk of these borrowers falling into default it is clear this crisis has become impossible to ignore.

The Flotilla Story U.S. Media Won’t Report: Ignoring evidence that counters Israeli claims

2010-08-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

Originally published in Extra!, the monthly magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

At a June 10 press conference (Cultures of Resistance, 6/10/10), passengers from the Mavi Marmara released new footage of the Israel Defense Forces’ deadly May 31 raid on the ship, which killed nine activists attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza in defiance of the Israeli blockade. Days earlier, another video was released allegedly showing the IDF beating and then executing a U.S. citizen, although the identity of the passenger in the video has not been confirmed (Informed Comment, 6/10/10; Tikun, 6/10/10).

Obviously, two videos alone could not possibly tell the whole story of what happened that night, but they did offer some of the only images of the tragic event that had not been hand-picked for release by Israel, which confiscated virtually all of the photo and video footage taken on the ship and released only heavily edited snippets (Lede, 6/2/10). This new footage offered revealing glimpses into the bloody raid on the ship that countered the narrative Israel had been successfully spinning in the U.S. (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/1/10).

In addition to possibly showing the execution of a U.S. citizen by the IDF, the footage included images of the IDF shooting either rubber-coated steel bullets or live ammunition from a helicopter, seemingly before commandos boarded (Democracy Now, 6/10/10), and firing indiscriminately at crowds (Ali Abunimah, 6/13/10). Separate photos from Turkish papers and survivors’ testimony also revealed that flotilla passengers were treating injured IDF soldiers (Democracy Now!, 6/10/10; Ali Abunimah, 6/6/10), contradicting Israeli claims that soldiers had been taken hostage, as well as its insistence that the passengers of this "hate boat," as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it (Reuters, 6/2/10), were not humanitarian activists but violent extremists.

While independent media (Democracy Now, 6/10/10) and the foreign press (Guardian, 6/11/2010) covered the new evidence, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today all failed to even mention it in their newspapers--although Times blogger Robert Mackey did post the footage (Lede, 6/11/10), arguing that it gave "a better sense of the timeline of the raid," and making the video's absence in the Paper of the Record's print edition all the more troublesome.

The U.S. corporate press similarly ignored other important evidence that contradicted Israeli claims. This included detailed testimonies of the activists and journalists onboard the vessel, as well as GPS coordinates showing the flotilla accelerating and turning away from Gaza and deeper into international waters at the time of the attack (Ali Abunimah, 6/7/10). This blackout of evidence continues the long-held practice in the U.S. media of ignoring stories that reflect poorly on Israel and other U.S. allies (Extra!, 1/10).

After the attack, U.S. media wasted no time enabling Israel's aggressive public relations campaign (Extra!, 7/10). TV outlets uncritically replayed dubious video clips that were heavily edited, out of context and lacking timestamps (e.g., Hardball, 6/1/10). These clips showed passengers fighting off commandos with kitchen knives and whatever else they could find, but did not show the moments preceding the raid, leaving crucial questions unanswered. Despite there being no way to know the whole story, publications such as the Washington Post (6/6/10) offered no caution in reporting that "Israeli commandos were violently beaten by passengers as they boarded the Mavi Marmara," and then "opened fire in self-defense, killing nine activists."

Many Israeli claims reported unflinchingly by the U.S. media quickly turned out to be egregious lies or distortions. For instance, as journalist Max Blumenthal noted (Max Blumenthal, 6/22/10), a press release Israel issued claiming that associates of Al-Qaeda were on the boat would later be "corrected" by the IDF when it was unable to provide any evidence. The Washington Post editorial page, (6/1/10) which suggested that the activists--"a motley collection that included European sympathizers with the Palestinian cause, Israeli Arab leaders and Turkish Islamic activists"--had "ties to Hamas and Al-Qaeda," failed to issue its own correction.

Israel also released an audio tape it claimed to be of passengers on the Mavi Marmara making antisemitic slurs ("go back to Auschwitz") and warning the IDF to "remember 9/11." The tapes contradicted others the IDF itself released earlier depicting the same exchange between the Israeli navy and the activists on the flotilla that did not contain the bizarre comments (Max Blumenthal, 6/4/10).

Israel soon admitted that these tapes were doctored, though it said they were merely condensed for length, and released a longer version that still contained the slurs (Max Blumenthal, 6/22/10). However, this subsequent release was also problematic. On the new version, the IDF is again heard calling a different boat in the flotilla, the Defne Y, not the Mavi Marmara. Similarly, Huwaida Arraf, the activist who is heard responding to the IDF, saying, "we have permission from the Gaza Port Authority to enter," was not on the Mavi Marmara, but the Challenger One, another flotilla boat (Ma'an, 6/5/10). But the U.S. media again failed to report on this manipulation, and some outlets (e.g., Washington Post, 6/5/10) reported on the audio clips without hinting that there were doubts about their authenticity.

The op-ed pages were also predictably one-sided. The New York Times, for example, published an op-ed by Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren (6/03/10), who alleged the activists were "religious extremists" committing an "assault, cloaked in peace," and claimed, without a shred of evidence, that the activists had made propaganda videos before the assault showing "passengers 'injured' by Israeli forces" (Max Blumenthal, 6/26/10). The Times, it seems, did not bother to ask for copy of this alleged video before publishing such an extraordinary claim.

Given the large amount of time and space devoted to excusing and justifying Israeli actions, the lack of attention provided to the activists’ stories and evidence has given the public an incomplete and one-sided portrayal of events.

"Sadly, the U.S. press just decided to pretend we really don't exist,” said Iara Lee, the activist that smuggled out the hour-long video of the scene, in an interview with Extra!. “The media there is very controlled and almost all of the coverage [about the videos] came from the foreign press and the independent media."

Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blogspot.com) is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He has written for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.

Single Payer Isn't Dead: How States Are Keeping the Movement Alive

2010-08-02T17:20:00.000-07:00

Originally published at Truthout.

The grassroots single-payer movement in Vermont reflects the growing belief that the fight to make healthcare a human right must come from the states. But will the passage of federal reform get in the way?

Burlington, VT – When Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March, many thought the long and tedious stretch of legislative wrangling and endless debates about healthcare reform had come to an end and the prospects for further meaningful reform would be shelved for years or decades.

But while the country was consumed with the incredibly narrow debate in D.C., dictated largely by drug and insurance lobbyists, anti-abortion politicians, and a collection of conservative Democratic senators with close ties to the insurance and drug industries, another significant healthcare battle was taking place hundreds of miles to the north, in the tiny little state of Vermont, population, 600,000. By the time Obama signed a federal healthcare bill into law, the Vermont Workers' Center was almost two years into its “Healthcare is a Human Rights campaign,” which had the unambiguous goal of abolishing for-profit healthcare in the state and passing a state-wide, single-payer healthcare system that guarantees healthcare as a right to all Vermonters. In May, the Vermont Legislature, under constant pressure from this growing people's movement, passed a bill that could possibly lead to Vermont being the first state to pass a single-payer healthcare system, setting up what could be a crucial phase of the fight for healthcare justice.

If Vermont is able to break this ground, the implications could reverberate well past the borders of the Green Mountain State. The fight for state-wide single-payer here reflects a growing belief among healthcare activists that the path to a universal public system, will not take place in Washington D.C, where moneyed interests have a death grip on the legislative process, but through state houses across the country. Further, the effort in Vermont may prove to be the first test case of the “state innovation” language in the federal reform bill, and could indicate if Obamacare will ultimately serve to enable state-wide single-payer systems or if it will kill them. Finally, the movement in Vermont also highlights a fascinating debate over the rhetoric of healthcare reform. Should advocates point to the significant savings associated with single-payer healthcare and the unsustainability of the current system? Or, should the primary emphasis view the fight for public healthcare as a matter of basic human rights?

Read the rest here.

New Bankruptcy Legislation Could Provide Relief For Those Buried in Student Debt

2010-07-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Originally published in Campus Progress

New Bankruptcy Legislation Could Provide Relief For Those Buried in Student Debt

Legislation that would allow private student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, could provide distressed borrowers with a fresh start and bring a major victory to those dedicated to student loan justice.

By Michael Corcoran
July 30, 2010

Valisha Cooks graduated from the University of Phoenix with loan payments that amounted to $1,150 a month, much of it in private loans. Her debt burden amounted to more than half of her take-home pay. “When I took out private student loans, I had no idea that I was condemning myself to a lifetime of ruined credit, harassment by collection agencies, and the hopelessness of endless debt,” she says at a recent hearing before Congress [PDF].

Cooks is one of an approximate 17 million who have private student loan, many of whom are trapped in mounds of student debt with little hope of repayment. The default rate for private student loans is officially 7.3 percent, although the reality is actually grimmer, since these numbers do not account for people who are in deferment or forbearance and are likely to default in the future. Normally, people who suffer under such massive debt can declare bankruptcy and discharge much of their debt burden, but in 2005 Congress passed bankruptcy legislation eliminating a student loan borrower’s option of last resort, discharging student loan debt in bankruptcy.

“Now, even though I have a good job, I can’t afford to pay all my bills in any one month, I go to food banks to feed my son, and I will never be able to afford a house,” she says. “I live in constant fear that the hammer will one day drop and ruin my life and the hope for my son’s future. It is a scary, hopeless feeling.”

It is to President Barack Obama’s credit that he has made student loan justice a priority so far in his presidency. The reforms he made as part of the reconciliation bill that passed healthcare reform in March—an expanded direct lending program, more relaxed methods of repayment, and increased Pell Grants—are some of most significant changes to help students fund higher education in decades.

But the new reforms, some of which do not go into effect until 2014, do not impact any of the millions of people who have already borrowed private loans to go to college. This leaves generations of former students struggling to keep their head above water as they deal with massive student loan debt in an era where college tuition has dramatically outpaced the rate of inflation for nearly 20 years and unemployment, especially for recent college grads, is at frightening levels. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that 20 percent of student loans taken out since 1995 are in default (and some argue the number is higher). Private loans in particular, which are much less flexible than federal loans with repayment schedules and deferments, are often a major reason for the high default numbers. This is why both houses of Congress have introduced legislation that would once again allow private student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy (S. 3219 and H.R. 5043).

Read the rest here.

Human Rights Watch flotilla stance mirrors that of US, Israel

2010-07-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

Michael Corcoran, Stephen Maher, The Electronic Intifada, 23 July 2010

Supporters of Israel often accuse Human Rights Watch (HRW), one of the most prominent human rights organizations in the world, of having an anti-Israel bias or even being anti-Semitic. For instance, a recent lengthy article inThe New Republic accused the group of paying "disproportionate attention to Israeli misdeeds." Similarly, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz has said that HRW exhibits a "willful blindness when it comes to Israel, and its enemies have completely undermined the credibility of a once important human rights organization." Indeed, there is no shortage of other similar critiques of the organization by supporters of Israel.

Given such strong condemnations, one might have anticipated that HRW would have been especially vocal in its criticism of Israel's 31 May attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was attempting to deliver aid to Palestinians in Gaza and break Israel's three-year old siege of the territory.

Yet despite the alarms sounded by its most staunch critics, HRW has been mostly silent on the horrific attack. When they have spoken out, they have been notably timid, essentially sharing the same positions as the US government, Israel's closest ally. According to a search of the group's website, the flotilla attack has only been addressed four times. By contrast, Amnesty International (the organization's closest peer) has tackled the issue 17 times, issuing much stronger statements of condemnation than those released by HRW. The jarring difference in how these two human rights organizations have responded to the flotilla attack raises important questions about the functioning of the largest and most reputed human rights organization in the United States.

Read the rest here.

Michael Corcoran: Israel's Ongoing War Against the Press

2010-06-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

Originally published at Truthout.

The recent arrest of an Israeli journalist who allegedly leaked materials to a reporter, and the gag order that followed, is just the latest in a long string of Israel's systematic attacks on press freedom.

Today in Israel, a nation so often hailed by Western commentators as the lone shining beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East, sits Anat Kamm. Kamm is a 23-year-old muzzled female journalist, under house arrest for her role in exposing a secret Israeli assassination plot by leaking government documents to Ha’aretz, one of Israel's most prominent dailies. She faces the possibility of life in prison. Uri Blau, a reporter for Ha'aretz who covered the covert plot, has fled to London, fearing for his safety and freedom.

Kamm's story has been difficult to piece together, since there was a gag order that kept anyone from covering her arrest and surrounding events until April 8. Violating the gag order can carry harsh punishments, including shutting down a publication. We do know from recent reports that Kamm’s house was vandalized by Israeli settlers, and that Blau will be returning leaked documents to the government. But the details are foggy. Israel essentially made a journalist - and her story - disappear.

Dov Alfon, the editor-in-chief of Ha'aretz, acknowledged his paper is challenging the gag order and standing by their reporter, telling the UK Guardian that, “Israel is still a democracy and therefore we intend to continue to publish whatever public interest demands and our reporters can reveal."

Alfon is absolutely right to make the connection between freedom of the press and democracy. One cannot truly exist without the other, and this point is often made by staunch defenders of Israel when they attack nations such as Iran for lacking press freedom. This is precisely why this incident should be so troubling to Americans. In the US, it is often taken for granted that Israel, which receives more than $3 billion annually from the US in aid, is a true democracy, despite its harsh treatment of Arab citizens in Israel and in the Occupied Territories. President Obama has claimed that the US-Israel relationship is "mutually beneficial" as both countries "share common values, histories, and a dedication to democracy." But clearly the values are not identical. Unlike Israel, in the US freedom of press is seen as essential to a functioning democracy.

Read the rest at at Truthout.

Book Argues 'Obama Zombies' Will Destroy America

2010-05-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

Originally published at Campus Progress

It appears I must have missed the portions of President Barack Obama's inaugural speech where he announced he would emancipate the workers from their ruthless capitalist overlords.

Lucky for us, many conservative commentators have been able to warn us against Obama's plan to make a rapid transformation to a Stalinist-style planned economy. Jason Mattera, the recently hired editor of Human Events, adds another book, Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed my Generation, which warns of Obama sinister plans to destroy America.

Mattera's offering differs from other books from conservatives since Obama's election, as it takes a specific look at young voters and activists—dubbed the "Obama Zombies"—who, he argues, have become unknowing minions in Obama's socialist army, having been lobotomized by the media and Obama's aggressive youth outreach efforts during the 2008 campaign.

For those who are not familiar with Mattera, he is a rising star among young conservatives who worked as communications director for the Young America's Foundation, a conservative youth organization, for several years before landing his latest gig as the editor of Human Events, a long-running far-right magazine. He is often seen on cable news or YouTube aggressively confronting progressives and Democratic politicians on film. He is a sharp-tongued commentator and satirist who loves to use exclamation points. And in case there was ever any doubt, he doesn't like progressives or liberalism orCampus Progress very much.

Read the rest at Campus Progress.

The Flawed Media Narrative of the Healthcare Debate When ignoring constituents is 'pragmatic'

2010-04-24T17:11:00.000-07:00

Through all the twists and turns of the healthcare reform debate, one thing has remained constant: Progressive ideas with majority popular support are falsely portrayed as radical, ideological fantasies, while those who oppose them are praised as pragmatic and reasonable.

This trend began when Washington insiders excluded the idea of a single-payer public health insurance program at the beginning of the reform process (Extra!, 6/09). It culminated when the Senate finally passed a bill that, as a result of a few obstructionist senators and the acquiescence of Democratic leaders, was stripped of its most progressive remaining reforms—including the “public option,” a government-run plan that would be offered as an alternative to private insurance (Extra!, 10/09).

The public option had the support of 72 percent of the public (CBS News, 6/19/09) and would save the country billions, according to the Congressional Budget Office (Washington Post, 9/25/09). But when Obama stood by as the provision was dropped from the Senate bill, in an unambiguous victory for health insurance companies (Politico, 12/7/09), the New York Times (12/17/09) had a strange take on the rift it caused between outraged progressive Democrats and Obama: “Now ideology—an uprising on the Democratic left—is smacking the pragmatic president in the face.”

“Pragmatic” is a curious way to describe letting the public option die; how practical is it to make a bill more expensive and less popular? But this framing has been commonplace throughout the debate (FAIR blog,11/11/09).

Read the rest at Extra!

A Tale of Two Elections: Iran and Honduras

2010-03-08T18:56:00.000-08:00

Originally published for the Nacla Report on the Americas.

On November 29, the de facto authorities in Honduras held a blatantly fraudulent election—complete with state violence against dissidents in the run-up to the voting, ballot irregularities, and manufactured turnout numbers.¹ Sadly, some countries are recognizing these elections, giving unwarranted legitimacy to former de facto president Roberto Micheletti and the other coup leaders who took power in June.²

The mainstream news coverage has been a significant factor in portraying the Honduran election as a peaceful, legitimate exercise in democracy. By ignoring the abuses and corruption of the coup leaders before and during the election, the U.S. media in particular became complicit in thwarting Honduran democracy.

The coverage of the Honduran elections is especially interesting since it came on the heels of the uprising in Iran, which was triggered in June by an election widely denounced as fraudulent. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was accused of rigging the election to secure his victory over an opposition candidate who was less hostile toward the United States.³ In this case, The New York Times’ coverage was exhaustive; its editorials loudly condemned the Iranian leadership for abuses and fraud.⁴

But in the Honduran election—where those accused of fraud are advocates of the dominant neoliberal ideology of the United States—the Times’ editorial standards were dramatically different.

Read the rest here.

Rebuilding Media

2010-03-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

This article was originally published by Campus Progress, an online magazine for the Center for American Progress.

In the face of a rapidly changing industry, two books offer bold visions of what the future of media could look like.

The final edition of The Ann Arbor News, which ceased operation last year after almost 200 years in print. (Flickr/banlon1964)

There can be no denying that the state of the news media today is a full-blown crisis. Newspapers, now working with a broken economic model, are clearing out newsrooms with layoffs at a rapid rate, closing foreign andWashington bureaus, and spending less on investigative reporting. Cable news is dominated by Fox News Channel whose viewers are shown to be grossly misinformed while most TV channels focus on horserace political coverage (often with the help of corporate lobbyists serving as analysts) andtrivial entertainment issues. Freelancers are paid less than ever—if at all—and prospective young journalists attending college and graduate school, while not abandoning the craft, are facing a frightening landscape to carve out careers in the field.
Often books about the state of media focus on how to tweak the economic model to save media we have. Two recently published books, however, look at ways to create media that is focused not on making journalism profitable again, but rather, on making journalism the valuable civic tool that is required for a functioning democracy.
Robert McChesney and John Nichols in The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again make the case for significant public intervention in the industry, which they argue can sustain wide-ranging, editorially independent outlets focused on producing quality journalism, not on making a profit. Meanwhile, Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke, in Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics through Networked Progressive Media, focus on sustaining and improving upon what has been a rare media bright spot in recent years: The rise of a community of progressive media outlets that have shown a remarkable ability at bringing like-minded activists and writers together to make change. While each book has a different focus, both offer bold ideas as to how media can thrive.

Read the rest here.

'To the Next Generation of Rebel Voices'

2010-02-03T15:43:00.001-08:00

Published at Campus Progress of the Center for American Progress

A small excerpt below:

Too often, the world seems impossible to change. The obstacles too grave,
solutions too hard to come by, apathy and ignorance too prevalent. These moments
of dejection have plagued progressives for generations.

“I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy,” said the
iconic historian Howard Zinn in a 1970
speech. “[T]hat things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and
the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the
wrong people are out of power.” Surely, similar sentiments could be expressed by
any progressive-minded individual at any time in recent history. Such is life in
a world filled with injustice: prospects for
healthcare reform dimming, the Supreme Court handing
democracy over to corporations, young people going bankrupt because
they choose to go to college.

But what made Howard Zinn—the famous historian and activist who died
last week of a heart attack at age 87—so unique was his unceasing faith that
regular people can and should strive to make the world a better place.

"I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we
should not give up the game before all the cards have been played," Zinn wrote
in a 2004 essay, “The
Optimism of Uncertainty.” "The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not
to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at
least a possibility of changing the world."

Massachusetts Election Could Save Democrats From Themselves

2010-01-20T18:11:00.000-08:00

Published at the Christian Science Monitor.

By Michael Corcoran / January 20, 2010
Boston

As a Massachusetts voter, I was not happy to see Scott Brown win the Senate seat that Ted Kennedy held for 47 years. The loss is no doubt a huge boon for conservatives, a monumental embarrassment for Democrats across the nation, and a massive political problem for progressives.

The election, however, does offer a silver lining. The Democrats can no longer pretend they are on the right track. Indeed, the end of the “supermajority” held by the Democrats held in the Senate may force them to fight – boldly – for serious change. If they do not, they will be unable to fend off this effective populist, right-wing movement, which now has all the momentum going into the midterm elections this November.

The Democrats should use this moment to make a sea change in their strategy and move in a far more populist, progressive direction on healthcare, jobs, and financial regulation.

The Monitor has the rest here. Yahoo News also has the rest, here.

UPDATE: Also, thanks to the Taiwan News and the Nepal Riser for republishing my story.

NYT's Double Standard on Nuclear Proliferation

2010-01-05T14:02:00.000-08:00

Originally published at Extra! the magazine at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Hyping Iranian threat while ignoring Israeli defiance

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher
The New York Times' treatment of Iranian and Israeli nuclear programs in recent months is a clear example of the systematic double standard the "paper of record" displays in international coverage (Extra!, 8/09).

The Times has devoted tremendous space and resources to covering Iran's nuclear program. Even though, as the Times itself explained (9/26/09), there is "no evidence" that Iran is building a bomb, and despite Iran's cooperation with international inspectors, the paper has continued to wave the specter of the "Iranian threat"--calling to mind the paper's warmongering coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Extra!, 12/09). Meanwhile, Israel's longstanding refusal to cooperate in any way with international institutions seeking to monitor its actually existing nuclear weapons is absent from the pages of the New York Times. The contrast once again demonstrates how the Times systematically applies different standards to official allies and enemies of the U.S.--a long-standing and well-documented pattern at the paper (Extra!, 2/09; NACLA, 12/19/08).

Read the rest here.

Behind the Doctrine of Good Intentions: Why the US Invaded Iraq in 2003

2009-12-28T04:00:00.000-08:00

Note: A much-longer footnoted version of this appears here.

Behind the Doctrine of Good Intentions: Why the US Invaded Iraq in 2003

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” Noam Chomksy, 1969¹

“The noble lie will inform them that they are better than those they serve and it is, therefore, their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves.” Plato’s Republic²

Introduction

The War in Iraq, which has killed more than a million civilians and will cost more than $3 trillion, is a strong example of the great disconnect between actual US foreign policy and the stated goals of US politicians used in selling war to the public.³ While sold as a vital act of benevolence that would secure the US from large-scale terrorism, liberate Iraqis from tyranny, and spark a new liberal democratic world order in the Middle East, the War in Iraq was in fact a war crime that served to expand the United States control of coveted untapped energy resources, open up new areas for investment, provide it leverage over economic rivals such as China, India and Russia and illustrate the brute force of unilateral American power in the post-Cold War/post 9-11 era. While the US in waging this act of unprovoked aggression did not succeed in the stated goals of preventing the spread of terrorism, improving the lives of Iraqis or creating a truly democratic Iraq – and in fact has decimated the country – it has succeeded in creating a US military client state in a region that is considered vital for the future of power politics, taking control of a large portion of the global energy market and in privatizing the Iraqi economy in an effort to continue US-domination of the global economy.

This startling power-grab would not have been possible if not for the near-monolithic tendency of Western media outlets and scholars to ignore the obvious geopolitical and material reasons for the invasion – as well as its illegality – and instead propagate the distortions of the state's carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign.⁴ As a result, the war becomes noteworthy not only for what it says about US foreign policy, but also about the dissemination of ignorance by America's key providers of information and analysis. In fact, the criminal Iraq War of 2003 was enabled, in no small part, by the moral bankruptcy and shallow analysis of Western intellectuals, who thus own partial responsibility for the shameless slaughter of millions of Iraqis and the destruction of an entire country.

The inherent flaw of mainstream scholarship on the 2003 US invasion of Iraq is that it almost always starts with the assumption that the goals of the war were to “create a new middle east” that would “bring democracy to Iraq,” and take weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of a brutal tyrant and improve US interests in the region. The success of the war, thus, is measured by how successful the US was in creating a new (i.e. democratic) Middle East in its interest, or some other similar construct. But, as this paper aims to show, questions like this are assume the stated goals of the war made by leaders were in fact an honest reflection of the state’s goals. This is an egregious misstep by a scholarly community that has the responsibility to challenge the statements made by policymakers. Virtually every war ever waged has been sold by its leaders as benevolent and aimed at improving the world.⁵ To accept these claims unquestioningly is highly problematic as it ignores the very nature of power politics and the complex geopolitical motives for war.

Below, I aim to assess the true aims of the US invasion in Iraq, and assess the success and failures of these aims, by deconstructing the myth that the goal of the US invasion was democracy promotion. This can be accomplished by examining evidence in the documentary record of the United States and examining the actions of the US in Iraq, rather than the statements of US leaders. In doing this I will: a) examine the stated goals about the war; b)examine the documentary record, which outlines US interests in the region and geopolitical importance of the area; c) assess the policies implemented by the US in forming the Iraqi democracy, such as military policy, elections, the economy and the Constitution to see if assess if it truly respects the will of the Iraqi people – a basic tenet of a legitimate democracy and d); ponder the future of Iraq and US foreign policy. Throughout all of this, I will visit the contemporary scholarship and punditry on the war, as the role of which these groups played is crucial to understanding the nature of US foreign policy in Iraq. Only in looking past the rhetoric of leaders and by not accepting assumptions that too often form the basis of contemporary scholarship, can we fully assess the best way forward in Iraq.

II: The Democracy Promotion and National Security Lies

“We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda, and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.” Walter Lippman ⁶

Before we dissect the aims of the war, it is useful to examine the way contemporary writings on the war adhere to a set of assumptions that serve to narrow debate in a way that enables the state to commit such aggressive acts of state terrorism with as little domestic resistance as possible. There were two major falsehoods used to sell the War in Iraq. The first was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to America and needed to be stopped. ⁷ Various constructs of the argument allege he supported terrorist groups like al Qaeda, another blatant falsehood. ⁸

As these justifications crumbled, state planners redoubled the emphasis on “democracy promotion.” The goal, in the words of President Bush, was to create a "global democratic revolution,” in the Middle East by bringing democracy and freedom to its people.⁹ Alarmingly, despite being blessed with the strongest free speech protections in world history, mainstream Western intellectuals often parroted these claims without a second thought. “We all share President Bush's hope that ousting Saddam will transform Iraq into a flourishing democracy and revive the Middle East,” wrote Nicolas Kristof¹⁰, a liberal columnists for the New York Times’ editorial page, just one day after the United States started its “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign that, in one day, dropped 300 tomahawk missiles all over the heavily populated Iraqi capital of Baghdad and destroying much of the infrastructure of one world’s great cities.¹¹ This unflinching acceptance of “the Myth of Democracy Promotion” toward Iraq is reflective of the sentiment of nearly the whole of the mainstream intellectual establishment. Rather than question the stated goals of the invasion, Kristof merely accepts “the Doctrine of Good Intentions,”¹² which assumes that US wars are waged with selfless and noble goals, primarily aimed at making the world a better place. This acceptance was the rule not the exception. There was simply no questioning that President Bush’s “impassioned desire to transform Iraq into a model democracy,” was indeed a true policy objective of the invasion, as the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran stated in “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” ¹³

Chandrasekaran’s book is especially telling of the level of indoctrination of Western commentators as he brazenly accepts the democracy promotion justification claim while at the same time acknowledging it was actually a secondary justification for the war. The Bush Administration, as noted above, originally focused on preventing Hussein from using an alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction against the US. The President and his team warned of a “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud,”¹⁴ and falsely accused Iraq of seeking uranium in the 2003 State of the Union address – a statement that would later be retracted.¹⁵The vast majority of elite media outlets propagated these false claims¹⁶,, to the point where The New York Times actually issued an apology for its coverage, conceding it was not sufficiently rigorous in its examinations of evidence and allowed many assertions and flawed arguments to “stand unchallenged.” ¹⁷¹After fruitless searches and intelligence reports dismantled the WMD logic, the Bush Administration called an audible and aggressively shifted the primary goal to “spreading democracy.” Chandrasekaran, totally aware of this shift, did not see it fit to then question the honesty of the “wartime president” from Crawford Texas. He wrote (emphasis in original): “With search teams unable to turn up any weapons of mass destruction, the primary American justification, the viceroy (Paul Bremer) deemed the development of democracy to be no longer just an important goal. It was the goal.”¹⁸

The intellectual community could have viewed the WMD debacle as a red flag, leading them to question the word of US policy makers. This red flag could have been magnified when a British intelligence memo, “The Downing Street Memo,” would reveal that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” under the orders of the President.¹⁹ But the intellectual establishment did not miss a beat. The US, incapable of deception, depravity or sinister motives, the narrative goes, was bringing peace and freedom to Iraqis. It is crucial to understand the nature in which these false claims were accepted, because it is directly related to the ability of the US to carry out is aggression in Iraq. The US worked incredibly hard to forge a public relations campaign to sell this war.²⁰ The acceptance of US propaganda by the intellectual community painted a distorted portrayal of the nature of the intervention. Had the media and scholars been more vigorous of examining the true geopolitical aims of the war, the public may have been more equipped to understand the war, which has been extremely costly in both money and blood.

III: The Forgotten Documentary Record and US interests in Iraq

Even without the WMD blunder, the true aims of US foreign policy in the Middle East should not have been hard to decipher. There are many important and declassified government documents that highlight long-standing US ambitions in the region, as well as a long history of US policy in the region.. An examination of the actual record clearly shows that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons or spreading a legitimate democracy, but was designed to further US interests in several ways: 1) establishing a client state in the middle of a resource-rich region considered vital for power politics; 2) voiding Iraqi oil contracts with economic rivals such as Russia and China and replacing them with contracts to Western companies; 3) advancing US unilateral power in a “New American Century” that would make US hegemony a permanent feature; and 4) transforming and privatizing the Iraqi economy in a manner consistent with the neoliberal US-dominated economic world order.

Before outlining the evidence to support the above, it is important to note that these proposed reasons for the US invasion, despite being backed up by voluminous public documents, were never seriously broached my mainstream scholars or analysts; when they were mentioned it was to dismiss them as the wild ruminations of crazed conspiracy theorists. Chandrasekaran refers in his book to Iraqi’s “conspiratorial, xenophobic fears” that their economy would be taken over by foreigners, writing that he “wondered whether some soldiers didn't half wish that the conspiracy theorists had been right and that their country was at least getting free oil out of the invasion.”²¹

Larry Diamond in Foreign Affairs, was similarly dismissive of the idea that Iraq was about oil and US power. The war, he argued, while a “strategic mistake” was not a war of “imperialist aggression,” but waged because the “Bush Administration was convinced that Saddam (Hussein) has weapons of mass destruction” and would soon “threaten the region.” To allege that the US wanted to “control the Middle East” and “dominate the international oil market” are “wild charges.” Those “intellectuals and commentators who dismiss Iraq as a hopeless prospect for democracy,” he maintains, “have failed to consult the Iraq people.” ²²

Had Diamond followed his own advice to consult the Iraqis, he may have learned that they had no illusions about US aims in the region. In late 2003, when a Gallup poll of Iraqis asked “Why do you think the US invaded Iraq?” only 5 percent said the primary reason was to help Iraqis. Of those polled, 4 percent said it was to secure weapons while 43 percent said it was to “rob oil.” ²³ While western scholars were willing to accept, and even propagate the carefully crafted deceptions used by US state planners, Iraqis had reason to think otherwise. This papers will assess some of the factors that prompted the US to go to war, of which were rarely stated by US leaders or analyzed in public by the intellectual establishment.

IV: Oil, Geopolitics and the Invasion

“The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest costs, is still where the ultimate prize lies.” Dick Cheney, former Vice President and then-CEO of Halliburton, 2000. ²⁴

The diplomatic record of the US shows that it had taken an active and aggressive role in Mid East oil for more than half a century. In 1945, the State Department concluded that Middle East oil reserves were “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in history.”²⁵ The sentiment was shared by executive branch officials who deemed the “Middle East presented an important key to postwar economic problems, and to basic international political arrangements.” This very understanding has been central to US interventions in the region, ranging from its push for control of Iran through a coup in 1953²⁶, to its “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia.²⁷ The control of these energy resources gave the United States “veto power” as coined by George Kennan, over economic rivals, and has long been considered vital to maintaining and expanding US dominance.²⁸ The invasion of Iraq in 2003 fits perfectly into this plan. By controlling this vital supply of oil, the US would serve to expand what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls “critical leverage” over other states, while at the same time putting energy profits into the coffers of Western, rather than Eastern, multinationals.²⁹ “When viewed through the lens of history,” wrote Clark University professor Douglas Little, “the war in Iraq actually marked the culmination of more than a half a century of US Foreign Policy in the Middle East.” ³⁰

Vice President Dick Cheney understood the importance of Middle East oil quite well from his days as CEO of Halliburton. Nine months before leaving the private sector to run for Vice President, he issued a report declaring “the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil … is still where the ultimate prize lies” and said the best way to reduce US vulnerability was to convince eastern oil producers to “open up areas of their energy sectors arguing that the best way to produce to foreign investment.” ³¹ While the US had long understood this reality, its desire to control Iraqi oil was becoming jeopardized in the late 1990s and early 2000s by, what British historian Charles Tripp called, “Iraq's reemergence as a major oil producer and regional economic power.”³² By the early part of the 21^st century, Iraq was producing an estimated 2.8 mill barrels of oil per day and exporting 1.7 barrels per day under, bringing in roughly $12 billion in annual revenues, making it a "hub of regional trade,” and putting Iraq “on the verge of international rehabilitation.” The problem for US policy makers was that rivals like “Russia and China could not resist a piece of the Iraq market”³³ and prior to the US invasion, these rivals were increasing their cooperation with Iraq on oil deals, in effect assuming greater control of one some of the most strategically important resources on the planet. With the most powerful military in the world, however, the US was able to change this. When it toppled the Iraqi regime in 2003 oil contracts between Iraq and US economic rivals “were considered null and void.” ³⁴

Unsurprisingly, in a move that went virtually ignored by US scholars and journalists, in 2003 the US issued a memorandum of understanding, which declared that all reconstruction contracts would go to members of the “coalition of the willing” or countries that supported the US invasion.³⁵ Russia, China, Germany and France, accordingly, were blocked out of a massive oil market, which some estimate accounts for 12 percent of the world’s oil. With the US already having tremendous influence over Saudi oil – 25 percent of the world’s reserves – a client state in Iraq beholden to the US for support, gives the US significant control over 37 percent of the world’s oil³⁶, helping the US to obtain much-desired “critical leverage” over its rivals.³⁷Further revealing, was that in 2008, President Bush issued signing statements which declare the right of US state and corporate power to secure “United States control of the oil resources of Iraq,” as well as protecting efforts to “provide for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq.”³⁸

V: Democracy Suppression and Industrial Theft in Post-Invasion Iraq

While there is no doubt energy resources served as a major reason for the invasion, this does not necessarily refute the idea that the US wanted a truly democratic Iraq; US policy in the country, however, does. Far from setting the stage for a truly democratic Iraq, the US undermined the will of the Iraqi people throughout the ongoing occupation, which itself was opposed by more than 80 percent of the population.³⁹ The US thwarted democracy in the region in numerous ways, including: maintaining the US presence; opposing, then delaying and than overseeing elections; intervening in the drafting of the Constitution and imposing unwanted “shock therapy” economic reforms that crippled the domestic economy. All of this done without any appreciable concern for the “will of the Iraqi people,” who were so unified in their opposition to the US occupation that 51 percent of Iraqi’s said they supported violence against US troops.⁴⁰

The very idea that a democratic Iraq would truly benefit US interests is indeed laughable. The US government is distrusted greatly by the Iraqi population, and while the majority Shia political factions were no fans of Saddam Hussein and his Bathist regime, the sentiment among Iraqis was not to fill that vacuum with a pro-US government. In fact, much of population wanted to instill a nationalist Islamic government that would nationalize the oil and protected it from foreign investment, have friendly relations with its neighbor Iran, and pushed out US troops rapidly. “[W]ithin weeks of the fall of Saddam’s regime there were demands for an Islamic government. Sometimes the word democracy was used positively, but the larger message was not about tolerance and liberalism,” wrote journalist Nir Rosen.⁴¹. The public in a democratic Iraq, Rosen notes, was far more likely to support the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who ““argued for the supremacy of Islamic law” and “imposed new restrictions on woman.” ⁴² Of course Iraqi leaders were never truly optimistic that the US would tolerate a truly democratic Iraq – sure to advance policies in the interests of themselves and not the US. “The whole world stood against America and the US ignored it,” al-Sadr said. “Likewise, the US will ignore the opinion of the Iraqi people and it will compose the government according to its own desires.”⁴³

Predictably, Iraqi leaders grew frustrated by the US, refusing to meet with them as they formed an interim government. The US occupiers gave legitimization to these complaints when they delayed elections as long as possible, until the Iraqi people forced their hand due to massive nationalist sentiments. ⁴⁴But even these elections, organized by the US and Iraqi “collaborators,” were viewed with great skepticism by the Iraqis, many of whom boycotted the process. Iraqis called the US-led elections “fake”⁴⁵ and the elections commissions “in disarray.”⁴⁶ The whole operation was “corrupt” and “a trick to let (the US) stay here and use our oil and natural resources.”⁴⁷

“Nothing really changed for the Iraqi's," Rosen said. “Bush tried to sell the elections as an example of US liberation of the nation, but by then the entire American project had long since lost its credibility."⁴⁸

Of course, prior to the elections US credibility was already on thin ice. The creation of the Constitutional Provisional Authority (CPA), tasked with drafting the Iraqi constitution was hardly a reputable democratic exercise. In fact, it essentially was a document embedding US interests into Iraqi law. According to leaked US documents, the CPA, led by the US chosen de-facto leader of Iraq, Paul Bremer, almost immediately awarded important reconstruction contracts to Western multinationals.⁴⁹ Of the $1.5 billion in private contracts awarded by the CPA, 74 percent went to US firms and only 2 percent to Iraqi contractors, with “little competitive bidding.”⁵⁰ Soon thereafter, it worked on its main task, crafting a new Iraqi Constitution. The document was drafted in 2003-04 by Iraqis with US oversight and mostly served to reflect Western interests. According to the Iraqi newspaper, Al Mada, for example, early drafts of the document included language that would have nationalized Iraq's oil wealth, and used it to used to provide education, healthcare housing and other services to every Iraqi. The state, under these drafts, would have guaranteed employment to every Iraqi. ⁵¹

The United States, however, known domestically for its lack of government-run social services, such as healthcare, quickly worked to eliminate these very un-American policies into the Iraqi Constitution and the final draft actually incorporated a provision that made the state “guarantee the reform of the Iraqi economy in accordance with modern economic principles to insure the full investment of its resources, diversification of its sources and the encouragement and development of the private sector.”⁵² The US ideological adherence to the market took precedence over the desire of Iraqis, who relied heavily on state-owned businesses for employment. The Constitution writing process, according to Iraqis involved in the process, were “cooked up in an American kitchen, not an Iraqi one” ⁵³and Iraqis “haven't played much of a role in drafting the constitution.”⁵⁴

True to its undemocratic infatuation with the “free market,” the US went on to implement an aggressive “shock therapy” to the Iraqi economy. While 67 percent of Iraqi’s suffered unemployment, the US worked to “develop the private sector, starting with the elimination of subsidies”⁵⁵ and remake the Iraqi economy in the mold of the Chicago School of Economics, which advocated for the privatization of virtually everything. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” said Bremer “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.”⁵⁶ Within months of the invasion the US opened Iraq up to unlimited exports, implemented a flat tax, and dropped the corporate tax rate from 45 percent to 15 percent (with no requirement to reinvest in the Iraqi economy). Iraqis, notes Naomi Klein, viewed this privatization as “yet another U.S. act of war,”⁵⁷ especially since the US “so consistently excluded Iraqi contractors in favor of American ones.”⁵⁸ American leaders, according to Tripp, felt "reconstruction of Iraq could best, and most profitably, be handled by massive American private enterprises with which senior members of the US administration had been linked” which “seemed to be opening up Iraq to a "free for all of economic opportunity, in which Iraqis themselves could play only a minor role." ⁵⁹

While the US ridded Iraq of most of its state-owned businesses they did keep one relic of the Hussein era intact. The US "kept on the books legislation that restricted the powers of trade unions" this "irritated nationalist sensibilities even among those who welcomed the initial US intervention,” and confirmed "their worst suspicions about what the United States was really after in Iraq."⁶⁰ Those suspicions, of course, were that the US invaded Iraq to serve its own interests and not to “liberate” the people. Had US scholars bothered, as Diamond suggested, “to consult the Iraqi people,” perhaps they may, too, have seen what was so obvious to the victims of US imperialism in the region.

The US also worked to hard to squash Iraqi nationalism, choosing to divide Iraqis into sects – Sunni and Shia. While Iraq has long been home to a variety of religious and cultural philosophies, it was not until the US arrived that its nationalistic ways were divided, artificially by US planners. Notes Rosen:

This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves -- at least, not until very recently. Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become politicized until the Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys and Shiites as the good guys.

There were no blocs of ‘Sunni Iraqis’ or ‘Shiite Iraqis’ before the war, just like there was no ‘Sunni Triangle’ or ‘Shiite South’ until the Americans imposed ethnic and sectarian identities onto Iraq's regions.⁶¹

In sum, the notion that US was hoping to spread a truly viable democracy for the benefit of Iraqis conflicts dramatically with the actual evidence. Diamond and other scholars may be wise to consult US documents that outline its foreign policy. These documents illustrate clearly the goals of the US military, and the concept of promoting democracy is never broached. 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 military policy must aim to achieve “full spectrum dominance” meaning the US 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. 1 In 2006, the Department of Defense released the Quadrennial Defense Review Report, which supports the idea that US foreign policy is based on becoming an unrivaled, permanent superpower.1 Despite being available for free online, these documents are virtually ignored by the media and by scholars, in its coverage of US wars.

VI: The ‘New American Century’ and the end of International Law

In addition to the tangible benefits of securing energy resources and opening up the Iraqi economy for investment, the war also served as the attempted coming out party of a new era of American foreign policy. Since the early 1990s, a group of neoconservatives had been crafting an idealistic – at the time, many thought fantastical – plan for a “New American Century.”⁶⁴ Originally outlined in a memo written by Paul Wolfowitz (who would serve as deputy secretary of defense under George W Bush) the “primary objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower” and creating a “world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.”⁶⁵ This could be accomplished by ramping up military spending aggressively, disengaging from international institutions and using unilateral action. Originally these plans, scoffed at by realists, were envisioned as decades or more away, barring what “the Wolfowitz Doctrine,” called, “a new Pearl Harbor,” or a catastrophe that could dramatically change the scope of US foreign policy overnight.⁶⁶The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington D.C. proved to fill this role. Using a Global War on Terror as the justification, Bush outlined his so-called “freedom agenda” at West point in 2002 and essentially turned the Wolfowitz Doctrine into official US foreign policy.⁶⁷

The War in Iraq was seen as the first major test of the freedom agenda. Among the basic tenets of neoconservatism was the general lack of respect for international law and institutions. In this way the War in Iraq serves as a valuable test case for this. True to form, when the United Nations rejected the US appeal to use force in Iraq, the US invaded the country anyway, in an unambiguous violation of international law. The very act of hubris helped to transform US foreign policy in the direction neoconservatives advocates had wanted all along. This decision to ignore international law was instrumental for America’s “Grand Imperial Strategy” which called or “unilateral and preemptive, even preventive, use of force … ultimately unconstrained by the rules and norms of the international community.” ⁶⁸

The illegality of the invasion is another aspect of the war in Iraq that, according to international law expert Phillipe Sands, “became almost a non-issue in establishment political debate."⁶⁹ When rarely discussed, international law was mostly deemed irrelevant. Anne-Marie Slaughter, writing in the Times, ceded the war against the law but called it "illegal but legitimate.”⁷⁰An editorial in the Sunday Telegraph further slammed home this point: "The 'legality' or otherwise of the war is a non subject …The invasion may or may not be illegal. The point, however, is that the whole issue of 'international legality' is a gigantic irrelevance."⁷¹ The Telegraph’s views were echoed by the deputy foreign editor of the New York Times, who told an Arabic newspaper that, “we stay away from assertions of legality on most international issues, because law is less clear about international affairs than about national affairs.”⁷²

Despite these ruminations, the laws do seem to be quite clear. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called the war “illegal”– a rare step for a UN leader – admitting that it was in clear violation of various laws against the use of force, including charters 2, 4 and 51 of the United Nations.⁷³ At the Nuremberg trials, it was ruled that preventive war – of which no rational person could deny the Iraq war qualifies – is the “supreme international crime” a nation can commit.⁷⁴The US also renounced war as an instrument of foreign policy when it signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which “solemnly declare[d] in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it.”⁷⁵ When the war is criticized in the media or scholarship, however, these laws are rarely mentioned, and the emphasis is on “tactical” errors, such as troop levels or the decision to dismantle Hussein’s army.⁷⁶

VII: the Way forward for Iraq and US Foreign Policy

Since the real reasons for the War in Iraq contrast mightily with conventional wisdom, it is unsurprising the assessment of its success or failure does so as well. Generally, the war is viewed as a “strategic” mistake. The security situation has hampered the legitimacy of the client government, and greatly hampered the ability of the nation to be opened up for reconstruction and investment. The war has also empowered neighboring Iran, a scenario not welcomed in Washington. Further, the neoconservative fantasies of a “New America Century” have not panned out. Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 in part, as a rejection of these unilateral policies of the Bush Administration. But the major prize of the war is the control of Iraqi oil, and if the US can resist nationalist Iraqi sentiment at wrestling control of the resources from occupiers, the war is indeed a “success” in many ways. The US did, in fact, prevent economic rivals from controlling Iraqi oil and showed the international community it was willing to use its considerable force without international approval. While the US did not create a “new” Middle East in the way scholars often portray it – a Middle East with blossoming democratic values –it did create a “new” Middle East in that it has increased its access to energy and implanted a new strategic ally in a region that will help shape power politics for the foreseeable future.⁷⁷

But no matter what the war meant for the “national interest,” the war remains a terrible tragedy. The horror of the massive slaughter of the Iraqi people is self-evident as is the destruction of Iraqi libraries and museums, which has ruined the history of one of the great civilizations of the world. “There is only ignominy left for Americans and slaughter for the Iraqis. Iraq has been killed, never to rise again,” Rosen writes. ⁷⁸

Apologists for US war crimes and so-called realist scholars may argue that the death of a country and more than a million of its people was worth it to expand American hegemony and to secure control of the oil. They are, at least, more honest than the journalists and scholars who advance the fictitious narrative that the US cares about the Iraqi people. But in either case it is a tragedy. One view justifies unthinkable human suffering in the name of pure power politics; the other enables these crimes by keeping the nation’s citizens collective head in the sand.

The best way forward is two-fold. One, the United States must, in line with the will of both the Iraqi people, and the American people, promptly withdraw all forces from the United States, and cease operations of military bases.⁷⁹ As a matter of duty, the United States should then pay reparations for is role in destroying the nation. Such policies would save the US massive amounts of money and hopefully lessen violence in Iraq, given that US intelligence estimates say the presence of US troops fuels violence.⁸⁰ Further, the United States needs to reconsider the nature of US militarism and ponder the needless suffering we inflict on innocent human beings when we wage aggressive wars. For this to be possible the US intellectual community must stop serving as enablers of US imperialism and simply tell the truth about reasons for America’s state of near perpetual warfare. Such a scenario requires nothing more than a sea change in the United States political and educational system, the prospects for which seem dim. But if the academic community does not work toward this end, it will continue to own a piece of the horrific violence and death it enables with its complicity. In this way, the War in Iraq is not merely a crime made by state planners – but a collective crime of which we are all an accomplice.

Jim Cramer's Mad Memory

2009-11-03T00:35:00.000-08:00

Jim Cramer's Mad Memory (A book review published by Campus Progress)

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.

See the rest here.

The Real Israel Lobby: American Intellectuals, Culpability and US Foreign Policy

2009-10-31T15:34:00.000-07:00

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.”³The 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.²³As 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 20^th 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.⁵⁰Whatever 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 US, Israel and few others defy the international community in critiquing Israel. See the UN News Service for more examples, including the passing of resolution by a vote of 150 to 6," where the Assembly called on all UN Member States to comply with its obligations as contained in the finding by International Court of Justice (ICJ), which include a duty "not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall in the occupied Palestinean territory, including in and around East Jerusalem" and "not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction." (UN News Center, "UN Assembly votes overwhelmingly to demand Israel comply with ICJ ruling," 20 July, 2004. Available at: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=11418&Cr=middle&Cr1=east ; retrieved 8 Oct. 2009.

[3] The United States Department of State Foreign Relations of the United States: diplomatic papers, 1945. The Near East and Africa: Volume VIII. pg 45. Retrieved at the University of Wisconsin digital collection: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS1945v08; on 10 October 2009.

[4] For an overview of US presidential policies towards Israel see; Little, Douglas American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. For more on the increased support since 1967, see: Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar, Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008, pg 61.

[5] Examples are numerous. Human Rights Watch "Why they Died: Civilian Casualties in Lebanon during 2006 War." September 6 2006. http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2007/09/05/why-they-died ; retrieved on 10 October 2009. This report concluded "the conflict resulted in at least 1,109 Lebanese deaths, the vast majority of whom were civilians, 4,399 injured, and an estimated 1 million displaced ” and placed blame for the high civilian casualty count “squarely with Israeli policies.” Also see: Amnesty International. "Israel Troops Reveal Gaza Abuses." 1 April 2009. http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/israeli-troops-reveal-gaza-abuses-20090401; retrieved on 10 October 2009.

[6] Mearsheimer, John and Walt, Stephen. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Kennedy School of Government Working Paper, 13 March 2006.

[7] Mearsheimer, John and Walt, Stephen (2007). The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[8] ibid. pg 13

[9] ibid pg 113

[10] Mearsheimer, John and Walt. Stephen. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Kennedy School of Government Working Paper, 13 March 2006. Pgs 30-35

[11] According to the Pew Research Center's Arab and Muslims Perceptions Project, "perceptions of U.S. policy in the Israeli-Palestinean conflict feed anti-Americanism. A 2003 Pew Global Attitudes poll found that enormous majorities in Arab and Muslim countries (at least 90 percent in Jordan, the Palestinean Authority, Morocco, and Lebanon) believed the U.S. favors Israel too much." (http://pewresearch.org/pubs/6/arab-and-muslim-perceptions-of-the-united-states; 10 November 2005.)

[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 US foreign policy is based on becoming an unrivaled, permanent superpower. The report, which outlines the objectives of the Department of Defense, is released every four years and is considered the main documenting articulating US military doctrine. Yet, this document, like Joint Vision 2020, is virtually ignored by the major media. Available at: http://www.hsdl.org/hslog/?q=node/4663.

[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. Harvard Law School

[14] See, Herman, Edward and Chomsky, Noam. (2002) ""Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media." Pantheon. This study compares the way the US media covers US allies and enemies in different lights using many case studies and a qualitative analysis of the news output. This book developed the "propaganda model" which argues there is systemic elite bias in the media, and explains them based on the economic structure of media outlets. One example studied more than 50 New York Times' articles by Stephen Kinzer's about Nicaragua. Kinzer, the authors note, did not quote a single person who favored the Sandinistas, even though they had massive popular support according to polls. The example is appropriate here as the Sandinistas were in some ways similar to the Palestineans -- a nationalist group resisting as US ally.

[15] Malley, a US State Department representative at the negotiations, debunks the notion of the US as an even-handed mediator, and explains the negotiations were essentially the US and Israel on the one side, Palestinean leaders on the other. See, Agha, Hussein and Robert Malley. 2001. "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors." New York Review of Books: August 9, 2001.

[16] Mearsheimer, John and Walt, Stephen. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, pg 4 Kennedy School of Government Working Paper, 13 March 2006

[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, 25 January 2006. http://www.accessdemocracy.org/files/2068_ps_elect_012506.pdf ; retrieved on 10 Oct. 2009.

[20] Human Rights Watch. Letter to Olmert: Stop the Blockade of Gaza. 18, Nov. 2008. http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/11/20/letter-olmert-stop-blockade-gaza; retrieved on 10 October 2009

[21] Ravid, Barak. U.S. ups pressure on Israel to end Gaza blockade. Haaretz. 18 June 2006.

[22] UN General Assembly, Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine: resolution / adopted by the General Assembly, 22 January 2009, A/RES/63/29, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/49894f8a2.html; retrieved on 8 October 2009.

[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] J Street, a new lobbying group designed to counter AIPAC, has praised Obama for "bold international leadership has had a profound impact on global dynamics, reestablishing hope for a secure peace both in the Middle East and around the globe." (J Street. Statement on President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. 9 October 2009.
http://www.jstreet.org/blog/?p=630 Retrieved on 10 October 2009.) Regarding attacks, for one example see Alan Dershowitz op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, "Has Obama turned on Israel?" on July 3, 2009, where he claims "There may be coming changes in the Obama administration's policies that do weaken the security of the Jewish state."

[26] Human Rights Watch, Israel: White Phosphorous Use Evidence of War Crimes. 25, March 2009.

[27] Lappin, Yaakov. IDF releases Cast Lead casualty, The Jerusalem Post, March 26, 2009.

[28] Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict". United Nations Human Rights Council. 15 Sept. 2009.

[29] Ravid, Barak. Source: Palestineans Drop Endorsement of Goldstone Report, Haaretz. 2 October, 2009. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1118235.html; retrieved on 10 October, 2009. The article says "the decision appears to be based on pressure from the Obama administration."

[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, Leila, Israel: An Apartheid State? November 2003, Le Monde diplomatique.http://mondediplo.com/2003/11/04apartheid; retrieved on 10, October 2009. Farsakh says comparisons between Israel/Palestine and South Africa are "problematic" in some ways, but says they have become increasingly apt since the Oslo negotiations in 1993.

[31] For examples of the lobby’s sway of Congress see, Mearsheimer, John and Walt. Stephen. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Kennedy School of Government Working Paper, 13 March 2006.

[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, 10 March 2009.) The incident marked the first time the New York Times gave prominent coverage to the concept of the powerful Israel Lobby, giving the incident front page coverage. (Mazzetti, Mark. Nominee End Bid for Key Job in Intelligence, The New York Times. 10 March 2009).

[33] Marcus, Jonathan. China's Weapons Chase. BBC News. 13, July 2000.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/831668.stm retrieved on 8 Oct. 2009

[34] BBC News Report. Israel scrapes China radar deal. 12, July 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/830609.stm retrieved on 8 Oct. 2009.

[35] Wilson Scott. Israel Set to End China Arms Deal Under US Pressure. 27 June, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/26/AR2005062600544.html; retrieved on 13 October 2009.

[36] Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar, Perilous Power :The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy : Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice , Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008, pg 62.

[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 12 October 2009.

[39] ibid

[40] Finkelstein, Norman. The Lobby: it's not either, or. Monthly Review. 5 Jan, 2006. Available at: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/finkelstein010506.html; retrieved 14, October 2009.

[41] ibid.

[42]A) For extensive look at US opposition to Evo Molares, see Eva Gollinger’s reporting, which uncovered US support for opposition groups through public records requests: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1865/31/.

[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. Berkeley University. 15 November 2005. pg 7 of 8, available at: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Walt/walt-con7.html; retrieved on 14 October.

[46] For study on Iraq, see: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones for Official Views. 18 March, 2003. Available at: http://www.fair.org/reports/iraq-sources.html; On coup in Venezuela see former State Department official, William Blum’s essay, US Coup of Hugo Chavez of 2002 (available at: http://killinghope.org/essays6/venez.htm.)He notes that the New York Times (April 13, 2002, p.16), the State Department (press statement, April 12, 2002) the President (Washington Post, April 15, 2002, p.) and the US ambassador to the Organization of American States (Agence France Presse, April 13, 2002), all expressed joy for the coup. For examples of media support of Chavez coup, see, Extra! US Newspaper Hail Venezuelan Coup as pro-Democracy, Extra!, June 2002, available at: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1111; For biased coverage of East Timor, see: Herman, Edward and Chomsky, Noam. (2002) ""Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media." Pantheon. Pgs vii – viii. Excepts available at: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html

[47] For study on Iraq, see: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones for Official Views. 18 March, 2003. Available at: http://www.fair.org/reports/iraq-sources.html; On coup in Venezuela see former State Department official, William Blum’s essay, US Coup of Hugo Chavez of 2002 (available at: http://killinghope.org/essays6/venez.htm.)He notes that the New York Times (April 13, 2002, p.16), the State Department (press statement, April 12, 2002) the President (Washington Post, April 15, 2002, p.) and the US ambassador to the Organization of American States (Agence France Presse, April 13, 2002), all expressed joy for the coup. For examples of media support of Chavez coup, see, Extra! US Newspaper Hail Venezuelan Coup as pro-Democracy, Extra!, June 2002, available at: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1111; For biased coverage of East Timor, see: Herman, Edward and Chomsky, Noam. (2002) ""Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media." Pantheon. Pgs vii – viii. Excepts available at: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html

[48] Maher, Stephen and Corcoran, Michael. Iran. v Honduras: The Times' selective promotion of democracy. Extra! August 2009. This outlines the Times’ anti-Zelaya coverage in the op-ed pages and news sections. For more on US involvement, see essay by Frida Berrigan of The New America Foundation, available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frida-berrigan/coup-us-military-support_b_222655.html. Also see Eva Gollinger in the Monthly Review, here: http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/golinger140709.html^.

[49] Interestingly, Mearsheimer opposed a nuclear freeze during the Cold War. See, Zunes, Stephen. The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really? Foreign Policy in Focus, Institute for Policy Studies. 16, May 2006. Available at: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3270

[50] Interestingly, Mearsheimer opposed a nuclear freeze during the Cold War. See, Zunes, Stephen. The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really? Foreign Policy in Focus, Institute for Policy Studies. 16, May 2006. Available at: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3270

[51] Zunes, Stephen. The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really? Foreign Policy in Focus, Institute for Policy Studies. 16, May 2006. Available at: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3270

The Cult of Michael Moore

2009-10-18T09:41:00.000-07:00

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.

How Obama fooled the left: rhetorical manipulation and its consequences

2009-09-17T01:20:00.000-07:00

Obama's speech laid out a plan that primarily did three things.

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