Tag Archives: Big Media/Big Tech
Financial Times article ignores monetary inflation
Dear Sirs:
In a recent OpEd Andrew Sentance resurrects the discredited theory of “cost push” as the cause of price inflation. According to this theory rising oil and commodity prices “push up” other prices and lead to widespread price inflation. Left unexamined is how it is possible for ALL prices to rise.
Media smears suggest Swedish complicity in a Washington-driven push to punish WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception is essential for starting an unpopular colonial war. Like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, attacks on Iran and Syria require a steady drip-effect on readers’ and viewers’ consciousness. This is the essence of a propaganda that rarely speaks its name.
To the chagrin of many in authority and the media, WikiLeaks has torn down the facade behind which rapacious western power and journalism collude. This was an enduring taboo; the BBC could claim impartiality and expect people to believe it. Today, war by media is increasingly understood by the public, as is the trial by media of WikiLeaks’ founder and editor Julian Assange.
. . . .
For this, as the American historian William Blum points out, “dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for [his] execution or assassination”. If he is passed from Sweden to the US, an orange jumpsuit, shackles and a fabricated indictment await him. And there go all who dare challenge rogue America.
In Britain, Assange’s trial by media has been a campaign of character assassination, often cowardly and inhuman, reeking of jealousy of the courageous outsider, while books of perfidious hearsay have been published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or resuscitated on the assumption that he is too poor to sue. In Sweden this trial by media has become, according to one observer there, “a full-on mobbing campaign with the victim denied a voice”. For more than 18 months, the salacious Expressen, Sweden’s equivalent of the Sun, has been fed the ingredients of a smear by Stockholm police. (Read more)
War: Big Government’s Best Friend
Great lecture by a great speaker, Tom Woods:
BBC defends decision to censor the word “Palestine”
In a ruling on 31 January, the BBC Trust defended its decision to censor the word “Palestine” from a freestyle by rapper Mic Righteous on 1xtra in February last year. In the performance (above), he rapped:
I still have the same beliefs
I can scream Free Palestine,
Die for my pride still pray for peace,
Still burn a fed for the brutality
They spread over the world.
BBC production staff covered up the word “Palestine” with the sound of broken glass. The censored version was also aired in April. Responding to the original complaints, the BBC said that “Mic Righteous was expressing a political viewpoint which, if it had been aired in isolation, would have compromised impartiality.”
Yet its own guidelines make allowances for “individual expression” for “artists, writers and entertainers”, as long as services “reflect a broad range of the available perspectives over time”. The BBC argues that a late night music show was not the appropriate place to get into political debate as it was not obvious when these other views would be aired.
Amena Saleem, of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign said: ‘”In its correspondence with us, the BBC said the word Palestine isn’t offensive, but ‘implying that it is not free is the contentious issue’, and this is why the edit was made.”
But the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is a fact, not a statement of opinion. The UN Security Council classifies Israel as the “occupying force” in the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, in upholding their decision, the BBC Trust has not addressed this key issue in the complaints. Consequently, nine complainants have said that their main point, that the BBC “demonstrated bias against Palestinians”, had been ignored.
At the time, the PSC made the point that the BBC did not ban the song “Free Nelson Mandela” in 1984, even though Mandela was considered to be a terrorist by many western governments. (Read more)
Ron Paul Wins First Caucus: MSM Changes Rules, Reports Romney Wins
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Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul secured his first caucus
victory over the weekend, by winning 29 percent of the popular vote
among the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands. However, the mainstream
media decided to report that despite coming in second with 26 percent,
Mitt Romney was the real winner.
The Republican Party of the U.S. Virgin Islands reported the results as “112 to Paul (29%), 101 to Romney (26%), 23 to Santorum (6%), 18 to Gingrich (5%),”
In response, The AP and other mainstream reports yesterday claimed that Mitt Romney won caucus, because he stands to come away with more delegates. (Read more)
NY Times offers Socialist Criticism of Constitution, 2nd Amendment
Sure, it is the nation’s founding document and sacred text. And it is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But its influence is waning.
. . . .
The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.
In an interview, Professor Law identified a central reason for the trend: the availability of newer, sexier and more powerful operating systems in the constitutional marketplace. “Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1,” he said.
. . . .
As Sanford Levinson wrote in 2006 in “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” “the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any constitution currently existing in the world today.”
. . . .
Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect, at least in so many words, a right to travel, the presumption of innocence and entitlement to food, education and health care.
It has its idiosyncrasies. Only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions protect, as the Second Amendment does, a right to bear arms. (Its brothers in arms are Guatemala and Mexico.) (Read more)
The Original Title of This Article Was “PayPal founder gives $1.7 million to Ron Paul super PAC”
(according to reddit)
Romney super PAC raised $6.6M in January Restore Our Future, a super PAC aiding Mitt Romney, raised $6.6 million in January to aid his presidential campaign, documents filed today show.
The super PAC spent nearly $14 million in January as it blistered Romney’s GOP rivals with stinging ads during last month’s caucuses and primaries. It ended the month with $16.3 million in the bank, some of which is being deployed in Romney’s native state of Michigan ahead of the Feb. 28 primary there. . . .
A report filed earlier today showed PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel donated $1.7 million last month to a super PAC supporting one of Romney’s GOP rivals, Ron Paul. (Read more)
If it’s true, they must have re-written the article too.
500 ‘Veterans for Ron Paul’ march on White House to media blackout
Nearly 500 veterans and active duty soldiers marched through the streets of Washington, DC on Monday to show their support for presidential candidate Ron Paul. Men and women traveled from across the country to be part of the historic march.
One soldier, 26, traveled alone, all the way from Alaska to participate. He asked that he remain anonymous, as he was breaking military directives by attending. The soldier from Alaska said that the march was “humbling and powerful” and definitely worth the risk. He told Examiner, “I shared some emotional moments with my brothers and sisters in arms. All in all, it was an amazing day.”
He continued,
I decided to support Ron Paul during the 2008 campaign while I was still deployed in Afghanistan. I started asking questions after witnessing so many injustices occur there.
Not only is Ron Paul the only veteran remaining in the race, he understands that our foreign policy is deeply flawed. Pretending that occupying other countries won’t have some repercussions is absolutely ignorant. The fact of the matter is we create more enemies than we can kill.
. . . .
Not unexpectedly, the mainstream media also largely neglected to report on the “Ron Paul is the Choice of the Troops” march in DC. One of the few videos about the event was made by RT, a Russian media outlet. One ABC article listed the march as having “dozens” of troops marching. After outrage in the comments, “dozens” was changed to “several hundred.” NBC was at the event recording, but never aired the footage.
(Read more)
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More Ron Paul Censorship
CNN:
Albany Herald:
There’s a whole sub-reddit dedicated to Ron Paul Censorship:
www.reddit.com/r/ronpaulcensored
Chris Matthews exludes Ron Paul from opinion poll commentary. (Ron Paul had won.)
Great discussion of this on reddit: www.reddit.com/r/RonPaulCensored/comments/psfu0/msnbc_chris_matthews_omits_ron_paul_from_a_poll/
The poll results are reported: politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/14/cnn-poll-romneys-likability-fading/
U.S. Market Shines Brighter ???
U.S. companies, facing slowing markets and rising costs around the world, are taking a new look at their home market.
With growth slowing in China and a slump gripping much of Europe, companies are adding capacity in the U.S., replacing aging equipment and even moving overseas production back from low-cost labor markets, a sign that corporate America could be poised to take a bigger role in the economic recovery. (Read more)
Analysis by Patrick Barron: Dear Sirs:
Perhaps that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. There is another interpretation to the report that some US companies are “bringing business home”. It is that the worldwide economy is shrinking and is shedding layers of specialization as a result. Austrian business cycle and capital theory explains that an expanding economy–which, of course, does not recognize political borders–requires the establishment of new, more specialized stages of production, which can only be financed with new, real capital. If you became poorer and could no longer afford to pay the neighbor kid to mow your lawn, would you consider it a good thing that you were repatriating this toil to yourself?
Glenn Greenwald: Repulsive progressive hypocrisy
Glenn Greenwald is one of the most honest reporters out there. He reminds me of Henry Hazlitt who worked for the NY Times and had always considered himself a progressive. When FDR’s fascist New Deal came about, he assumed all his colleagues would oppose it. He was wrong.
During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates:
The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. law and values, has little to fear politically for failing to live up to all of those promises.
The survey shows that 70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay. . . . The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.
Repulsive liberal hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.
Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it:
Fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year. Support for drone strikes against suspected terrorists stays high, dropping only somewhat when respondents are asked specifically about targeting American citizens living overseas, as was the case with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni American killed in September in a drone strike in northern Yemen.
The Post‘s Greg Sargent obtained the breakdown on these questions and wrote today:
The number of those who approve of the drone strikes drops nearly 20 percent when respondents are told that the targets are American citizens. But that 65 percent is still a very big number, given that these policies really should be controversial.
And get this: Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were provided to me by the Post polling team.
It’s hard to imagine that Dems and liberals would approve of such policies in quite these numbers if they had been authored by George W. Bush.
Indeed: is there even a single liberal pundit, blogger or commentator who would have defended George Bush and Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly targeting American citizens for execution without due process, or slaughtering children, rescuers and funeral attendees with drones, or continuing indefinite detention even a full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these people can even look in the mirror, behold the oozing, limitless intellectual dishonesty, and not want to smash what they see is truly mystifying to me.
Ed Crane’s Remarkable Hit Piece on Ron Paul
The Wall Street Journal published a remarkable hit piece on Ron Paul two weeks ago entitled “Why Ron Paul Matters.” It is remarkable because while purporting to be a defense of Ron Paul’s ideas, it subtly portrays Ron Paul the real candidate as unelectable while distorting or dismissing outright some of his most important positions.
The author of the article, Ed Crane, begins with a solemn expression of regret over the hoary and irrelevant newsletters of yore to “which Paul lent his name” and which contained allegedly “bigoted” and “intolerant” material. Crane concedes that the objectionable ideas expressed in the newsletters are not consistent with what he knows of Ron Paul’s current views and, moreover, that Paul “disavows supporting them.” And yet Crane makes sure that the reader knows that Paul “refuses to repudiate” his association with the “likely source” of this secular sin of intolerant speech. Crane has somehow divined that this cardinal sinner against the official State creed of political correctness is none other than Lew Rockwell—who just happens to be the leading critic of neoconservatism and of its offshoot Big Government libertarianism that Crane’s Cato Institute promotes so zealously. So by the end of the first paragraph we know exactly where all this is heading—and exactly why the neocon Wall Street Journal published it. (Read more)
The Atlantic does its part to make Iran war normal
The Plane That Would Bomb Iran
In June of last year, I went to Andersen Air Force Base, in Guam, to be embedded with the squadron flying the Air Force’s top-of-the-line strategic weapon: the B-2 Spirit, a massive, nuclear-capable stealth bomber that looks like a jagged boomerang and, with a price tag of nearly $1.2 billion, makes other planes seem cheap. It was my third visit in two years to Guam, an island of growing significance in America’s military-deployment strategy. The occasion for my visit was Valiant Shield, a military exercise—and the largest display of U. S. military power in the Pacific since the Vietnam War—in which several B-2s would be participating. Valiant Shield 2006 featured three aircraft-carrier strike groups, with all of their attendant destroyers, cruisers, frigates, submarines, and aircraft—290 aircraft in all, including B-2s, Marine F-18Cs, Navy F/A-18Es, and Air Force F-15Es. Never mind the official rhetoric—the point of this show of force was to impress adversaries like North Korea and competitors like China. (China had been invited to send a military delegation; the day before I arrived, Chinese officials were inspecting the bombers from the outside.)
Andersen Air Force Base has long had a squadron of heavy bombers, deployed there to be close to Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula. On one of my previous visits to the base, in the autumn of 2004, I’d spent time with B-52 pilots from Barksdale Air Force Base, near Shreveport, Louisiana. They were young, happy-go-lucky, uncomplicated. I was profoundly curious about the B-2 pilots. For a host of reasons, they had to be different. (Read more)