We Are Always the Good Guys

Unlike The Other Guys

Linh Dinh

All governments lie, kill and misuse public funds, but these calculated habits are amplified manifold during wars. We’re in two now, aiming for a third.

Japan, whose land we’re still occupying 65 years after Hiroshima, has just announced sanctions against Iran beyond what the U.N. mandated. South Korea swiftly followed suit.

It’s surprising to see these two countries so in sync, until one remembers that they have become American cheerleaders for decades. Rah, rah, bomb Tehran!

A murderous chorus is rising, yet again. Countries that aren’t our client states can be counted with two hands, even those missing fingers from an exploding grenade.

Universal outrage has been drummed up over the case of an Iranian woman about to be stoned to death for adultery. She’s also implicated in the murder of her husband, for which she may be hanged.

This second, more serious crime has been left out of many news stories. America also executes, but it doesn’t stone, especially for a bit of ticklish fun on the side.

We inject, electrocute, gas, hang and shoot our condemned. We’re more humane that way. Forever bureaucratic, we pay attention to procedural niceties.

Our objection, then, is not to capital punishment, but to certain methods. Stoning is barbaric. We don’t stone, period, except during one of our serial wars, where we will stone entire communities back to the Stone Age. But that’s war, buddy.

We also use phosphorous and cluster bombs, plant landmines that will last generations. To rectify and avenge the stoning of one woman, someone we don’t really care about, whose name we can’t even pronounce, we’ll flatten Iran, maybe by Thanksgiving.

The United States is concerned about women worldwide. It is touched and outraged by one Afghan woman, Aisha, whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband. To defend her honor, it has killed hundreds of thousands of her brothers and sisters. To protect her, it has destroyed her country.

It’s the principle that matters. We care about the individual, at least those who are useful to our agendas. It’s the masses we don’t give a fuck about.

How can we not raise our voices, for example, when an imprisoned prostitute — hardly a criminal, really, even less so than adulterer — is left in a cage, to be baked to death for at least four hours in 107-degree heat? Her captors ignored her pleas for water.

They wouldn’t even allow her to use the bathroom, so she soiled herself before passing out. She was still alive, however, when finally taken to the hospital, where doctors allowed her to die.

Incredibly, no charges have been filed. Such barbarity and judicial callousness deserve our fullest condemnations, except that hardly anyone has heard of Marcia Powell, 48, who died in an Arizona prison in May, 2009.

The mainstream media ignore her, because her abject death cannot be exploited for political purposes. We’re not trying to bomb Arizona.

Despite being lied to repeatedly, almost daily, Americans are strangely gullible to incoherent, even ridiculous narratives dished up by their government.

Brainwashed by the bromide that their nation is always a force for good, anywhere, worldwide, Americans can’t imagine that Washington could be a genocidal power abroad and complicit in the slaughter of its own citizens.

Once Down, Stay Down, Capitalism Rules

Upward mobility; a capitalist myth

By Micheal Lind

One of the fallacies exposed by the Great Recession was the idea of the mass upper middle class. During the bubble economy, both progressives and conservatives praised the graduation of most people from the working class to a new elite that included the majority of us.

The center-left and center-right defined this alleged new class somewhat differently.

America’s progressive elite, based it on the educational profession, civil service and nonprofit sector. America’s conservative elite based it in business and banking.

Elite progressives and elite conservatives share the assumption that the ideal society is one in which most Americans would be more like them, in owning educational credentials (progressives) or capital (conservatives).

The elderly in America can remember a long-distant era when progressive thinkers included leaders of organized labor and small-town populist politicians. But nowadays progressive politicians and strategists tend to be affluent meritocrats who got where they are by making good grades at highly selective schools.

Their narrow personal experience leads many elite progressives to equate social mobility and increases in income with obtaining academic credentials like their own.

While New Deal labor liberals and populists wanted to promote unions and a living wage, many members of the new breed of Ivy League-educated liberal technocrats prefer an alternate plan: send everybody to college.

Progressives love to claim that education is the key to upward mobility. But this is based on an obvious fallacy.

The "college premium" that results in higher incomes for college graduates is the result of the relative scarcity of college degrees.

If everyone had a B.A., then the value of a B.A. in generating high wages would drop. We know this to be the case, because access to college has expanded more rapidly in Europe, where the gap in wages between the college-educated and the rest as a result is smaller than in the U.S.

Nor is there any basis to the claim, repeated by politicians and pundits of both parties, that most of the jobs of the future require a college education.

Some have claimed that the millennium of the credentialed class has already arrived.

In a 2008 paper titled "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class," the leading political analyst Ruy Teixeira and the scholar Alan Abramowitz argue that the key factor in contemporary American politics is the expansion of the highly educated, white-collar professional sector.

But they reach this conclusion only by truly heroic feats of definition. They are able to claim that 54 percent of the American people are college-educated only by combining the 29 percent who had B.A.’s in 2007 with the 25 percent who had "some college."

Taking a different approach and combining the "some college" crowd with high school graduates produces a more recognizable picture of an America with a majority of workers who have less than a four-year college degree.

The definition of "white-collar jobs" used by Teixeira and Abramowitz is even more generous, including "clerical" and "sales" along with professional. Do receptionists and shoe-store sales clerks in the mall really think of themselves as being in the same social class as doctors, lawyers and corporate executives?

Conservatives of the bubble economy era had their own mass upper-middle-class fantasy. In their version, membership in the mass upper middle class depended not upon educational credentials but upon ownership of capital invested in the stock market.

By the beginning of the 21st century, according to some calculations, a majority of Americans had private retirement accounts or employer pensions that were invested in stocks and bonds.

In the pages of the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, conservative intellectuals declared that this made the United States a "nation of capitalists," an "investor society" based on "universal capitalism."

Defining janitors with 401K’s as "capitalists" is a kind of social promotion comparable to the elevation by progressives like Teixeira and Abramowitz of shoe-store clerks who dropped out of college into the "mass upper middle class."

Genuine capitalists derive most of their income from the return on their investments or savings, not from labor. By this definition, there are hardly any capitalists in the U.S.

Most of the rich are the "working rich," who derive most of their income from wages or professional fees, not from investments. We are a nation of wage earners, some paid well and others poorly.

A majority of Americans may have some money invested in the stock market, usually through employer pension plans or 401Ks, but it is very little indeed. Forty-three percent of Americans have less than $10,000 in retirement savings and 36 percent contribute nothing to retirement savings at all.

Thanks to two stock market collapses in less than a decade, most Americans will be more dependent on Social Security in retirement than ever. So much for the "nation of capitalists" and "the investor society."

At least the credentials touted by the center-left and the stocks and bonds touted by the center-right could be described with some plausibility as income-generating assets. During the bubble years, houses also began to be seen as income-producing assets, as well as symbols of membership in the suburban upper middle class.

For a generation, most Americans have been told by left, right and center that they would be failures if they ended their educations with high school, worked hard, saved cash for emergencies and bought modest homes they could afford.

They have been told that to succeed in life they need to ape the lifestyles of the upper middle class that provides most of America’s politicians, pundits and scholars.

The result has been an experiment in social engineering that has gone horribly wrong: the creation of a faux mass upper middle class.

Millions of Americans who by objective standards belong to the working class or lower middle class have persuaded themselves that they are part of the professional-investor elite, because they have worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford.

For the college graduates at Starbucks working to pay off student loans for degrees that they will never use, as for the millions of Americans who are now "underwater," owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth, the American dream has turned into a nightmare.

But many have profited from the peddling of the dream of the mass upper middle class.

The claim that everyone should go to college served the interests of the educational-industrial complex, from K-12 to the universities.

That now serves as an important constituency of the Democratic Party. (Along with Wall Street investment banks, universities provided Barack Obama with his largest campaign donations.)

And the claim that everyone needs to pour money into the stock market, to be managed by banks and brokers who fleece their clients, served the interests of the financial-industrial complex that has replaced real-economy businesses as the dominant force in the Republican Party.

Both the educators and the brokers have successfully lobbied Congress to subsidize their bloated industries, swelling them even further, by means of tax breaks for student loans and personal retirement savings.

The big losers have been the millions of working Americans whom many Democrats and Republicans alike have persuaded, against their interests, to indulge champagne tastes on beer budgets.

The alternative to the mass upper-middle-class fantasy peddled by Republicans and New Democrats is a return to the older New Deal liberal approach, based on high wages and adequate social insurance.

Working Americans should not need to go into debt to obtain college diplomas, in order to share more of the gains of national economic growth in the form of higher wages.

And there would be less pressure on working Americans to gamble with their money in the stock market, if Social Security, like public pensions in the rest of the world, replaced a higher percentage of pre-retirement income than the 30-40 percent it replaces today.

An America with a college-educated professional class majority was always a fantasy. So was an America with a majority of affluent day traders.

The America we need is one in which all Americans are paid a living wage and guaranteed a comfortable retirement -- even if they didn’t go to a university and don’t own stocks and bonds.

World is Our Garbage Can

Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent

Media's capitalist bias

Socialist Worker UK

TV and newspaper reporting reflect the existing power set-up in society. The mass media reproduces the ruling class’s view of what matters in the world. And quite often it deliberately sets out to paint a picture favorable to government and big business.

Almost every demonstrator has found that the press is against them, but what lies behind this in-built bias?

The media spreads the same old lies every time workers go on strike.

During strikes, like the recent ones at BA, the media constantly tell us that workers are powerless—yet at the same time that they are holding the country to ransom.

They act like unions are undemocratic, even though workers have voted to act collectively. The causes of a dispute are rarely explained.

Yet when bosses say we need cuts, they are rarely questioned. And when the police attack demonstrations, the media always reports their version of events.

This is because TV and newspaper reporting reflect the existing power set-up in society.

The mass media reproduces the ruling class’s view of what matters in the world. And quite often it deliberately sets out to paint a picture favorable to government and big business.

The revolutionaries Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the 19th century that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”.

Under capitalism a handful of rich and powerful people own the mass media. They form part of a ruling class—the tiny number of people at the top of society who own the factories, offices and other workplaces (see page 10).

Rupert Murdoch, for instance, owns over 175 print publications across the world, including the Sun, the Times and the News of the World in Britain. It is therefore not surprising they constantly reinforce the interests of the bosses.

The vast majority of the media is run for profit, so it’s not surprising it backs up a system based on profit.

They reflect the bias of normal capitalist life. So, they report it as “good news” if profits are up.

And, the media focus on what seems to matter in “official” politics in parliament, on the actions of celebrities, on crime and scandal.

Economics is reported separately from politics. Everything is put in different compartments. A picture of society as something that can be understood—and changed—as a whole is never presented.

Ordinary people’s lives—except as victims of crime or as things to be ridiculed—rarely appear. During a war much of the media often becomes a simple extension of the government propaganda machine.

According to Philip Knightley, the author of a book on war and the media, The First Casualty, “Every government wants to control the media in wartime to ensure public support for its war aims.

"If necessary it will lie in order to achieve this control. The media will usually go along with these lies because it considers it is in its best commercial interests in wartime to support the government of the day.”

This is at its most extreme during wars, but the coincidence of interests applies during peace time too.

People are rightly angry when a big demonstration gets little or no news coverage. But more than that, the recent anti-fascist demonstration in Bolton was repeatedly reported throughout the media as violent anti-fascist protesters attacking the police.

This was the exact opposite of what happened. The truth was readily available in video, photographs and accounts of police violence.

Does it matter? TV and newspapers are among the most important sources people have for gaining information about what’s going on in the world.

The media shapes our views of the world. But it does not control them.

As we are surrounded by messages that favour the bosses, we are still making judgments. For two decades the Sun newspaper told its readers to vote Tory.

Most carried on voting Labour. It now tells people to vote Tory again—but it won’t be the Sun that wins it. And the media is not a monolith.

The ruling class is not a homogeneous group. There are divisions within it—and the media reflects these. This is partly because of their competing commercial interests. In order to sell advertising they need viewers and readers.

That forces the media to at least be relevant to what people think. That can produce critical coverage which goes against the establishment.

For example, the Mirror opposed the Iraq war in the run up to it.

It reflected the fact that the ruling class was divided—but it also knew that there was an audience for an anti-war newspaper. The majority of people that the mass media is sold and marketed to are working class.

There is a huge gulf between the reality of their lives and the dominant ideology of capitalism. That gap can open up a space for that ideology to be questioned or even rejected.

If left wing ideas become stronger, then the media will have to respond to them. After all, if the number of people backing a transport strike with solidarity is large enough then there is no point interviewing the grumbling business class passenger.

Right-Wing Media Domination

Right-wing media dominates America

By David Walsh

The right-wing media set the agenda for the Obama Regime. Their programs don't coincide, but they may as well. The initiative remains with these aggressive reactionaries and is caused by the decline of US capitalism and the collapse of liberalism.

The Shirley Sherrod affair, the case of the black US Department of Agriculture official fired July 20 because of an allegedly racist remark, is profoundly discrediting to every wing of the American establishment.

What happened last week is indisputable: the extreme right media organized a provocation and a spineless White House fell for it hook, line and sinker.

The attempt by sections of the liberal media to turn this now into a new chapter of “the national discourse on race” or an additional “teachable moment”—phrases that should be put out of commission forthwith—is simply a hypocritical diversion.

On July 19, Andrew Breitbart, an ultra-right commentator, posted a deliberately misleading excerpt from a speech Sherrod delivered this past March.

She appeared to be explaining how, 24 years earlier, while working at a non-profit organization, she had not exerted herself on behalf of a white farmer because of her own racial preconceptions.

Sherrod’s father was murdered by a white man in 1965 and his killer was never punished, despite the testimony of witnesses, because of endemic racism in rural Georgia.

Breitbart’s posting, and the threat that other right-wing media outlets, especially Fox News, would take up Sherrod’s remarks, threw the Obama administration into a panic.

An official from the USDA harassed Sherrod as she was driving back to her office with several phone calls, finally insisting that she pull over to the side of the road and send in her resignation on the spot, “because you’re going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.”

Beck hosts a right-wing program on Fox, where he regales his audience nightly with his unhinged, anti-communist conspiracy theories.

What do these facts demonstrate?

The Obama administration and its hangers-on rushed to judgment on the basis of a two-minute video clip posted by a thoroughly disreputable source.

Breitbart functions in the foul world of ultra-right blogs and web sites. This is a disoriented and deranged petty-bourgeois layer, which identifies any criticism of American free-market capitalism with Bolshevism. They will say and do anything, no matter how unprincipled or violent, to achieve their ends.

Fox News, owned and operated by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, is a source of never-ending political provocation. Lying and distortion is a way of life for its stable of slick reactionaries, engaged primarily in whipping up the basest and most backward sentiments. Racism and anti-Semitism simmer just beneath the surface.

Breitbart, his attempted set-up of Shirley Sherrod exposed as a fraud, was entirely unapologetic. These bullying, neo-fascistic elements are not held back by any of the internal constraints that once operated within the American political system and the mainstream media.

They have been set in motion by the immense social and economic crisis, and nurtured within an official environment in the US over the past several decades pervaded by ideological reaction.

This extreme-right element represents the views of a small portion of the American population, yet it dominates at Fox News, major newspapers and has important representatives at virtually every media outlet.

The Obama administration closely monitors the right-wing web sites and cable television programs and reacts more sensitively to their thrusts than to any other single source of political criticism.

The watchword of this administration is that it will not be outflanked on the right. Meanwhile, it is impervious to mounting popular economic distress and opposition to the Wall Street pay bonanza, government inaction over the Gulf oil disaster, and the war in Afghanistan.

In effect, the right-wing media, bankrolled by Murdoch and others, largely sets the agenda for the Obama White House.

Their programs may not formally coincide, but they may as well. The initiative remains, for reasons bound up with the decline of American capitalism and the collapse of liberalism, with these aggressive reactionary types.

In this incident, as in every other one, the pundits reveal their own bewilderment.

Maureen Dowd in the New York Times makes the point that “Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience,” and proceeds to cite the comments of a series of black Democratic Party politicians as privileged and as distant from American social reality as she is.

The Times’ Frank Rich argues, “This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week.

"What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the NAACP and the news media were all soiled by this episode.”

Well, what does it say?

Speaking of Vilsack, Rich comments, “an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck.

That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence.”

Relatively strong words, but Rich draws no conclusions except that “While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.”

Implicitly at least, Rich identifies the fake populist demagogues on the right with popular opinion. What evidence can he muster to make such an assertion?

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. insists that “The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that ‘fairness’ requires treating extremist rants as ‘one side of the story.’”

But why do they cower?

None of the liberal columnists can answer that question, because it goes to the heart of America’s social reality.

In the end, the human trash on Fox and the right-wing blogs are merely the most naked and brutal face of a crisis-ridden, predatory and essentially criminal American capitalism. The Obama administration and the Democrats serve the same social interests, but in an unconvincingly and half-heartedly liberal guise.

There is a division of labor. Fox News and company proceed to stir up whatever filth they can, while the White House and the pundits assert piously that the country must rise above its alleged preoccupation with race.

But the real story here says something very different. It speaks to the fact that there are two Americas, divided sharply along class lines.

The political and media establishment could so seriously misread the Sherrod case in part because it is insulated by a hundred layers of wealth and privilege from the reality of the working class, the poor, and the sentiments of millions of working people about American life, even if they are not yet fully articulated.

Disney's 21 Century Propaganda Playbook

 

 The mind controlling, child knapping, psychotic dream world of the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

By David Scoville

 

Jean Baudrillard suggests that hyper-reality is where the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Hyperreality exists in a state where chosen symbols of reality mask our surroundings, thus producing unreality.

Jean Baudrillard noted that with Disneyland, “everyday life has been captured by the signs and sign systems generated to represent it. We relate to the models as if they were reality.

In his argument, California's Disneyland functions as ‘an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter.’”

Disneyland attendance is much like that of modern-day social media use. Virtual reality provides the same type of hyper-realistic world that was detailed above. In effect, it replaces a reality—social interaction, with another seeming reality—virtual interaction, which creates an element of unreality.

American idealism is forever branded in the American dream: The belief that with some hard work and clever thought, one can achieve his or her utopian world—a world where happiness abounds among equal opportunity, capitalism, consumerism, and industrialism.

Conversely, postmodernism has no such grandiose ambitions. Postmodernism might be considered the satirical twist of the American dream. It objects to objectivity; rather than searching for answers, postmodernism makes a parody of presupposed truths and juxtaposes seemingly unrelated pieces of culture together.

Many meanings can be derived in Disneyland—especially with the larger, capitalist, American culture as the context.

Disneyland exhibits signifiers of each aspect of early American capitalism. “Frontierland can be interpreted as a reference to the stage of predatory capitalism; Adventureland, as a representation of colonialism/imperialism.

Tomorrowland, as state-financed capitalism, or the military-industrial complex; New Orleans Square as a signifier for venture capital; and lastly, Main Street as the period of family and mercantile capitalism.

Hyper-Reality

A discussion on hyperreality is important as it is one key component of the Disney parks. Hyperreality exists in a state where chosen symbols of reality mask our surroundings, thus producing unreality.

Jean Baudrillard, one of the leaders of postmodernism and proponent of hyperreality noted that with Disneyland, “everyday life has been captured by the signs and sign systems generated to represent it.

"We relate to the models as if they were reality. In his argument, California's Disneyland functions as ‘an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter.’”

Just as Disney sought to control his company environment, Disneyland, like American colonialism, controls its natural environment.

Rather than allowing nature to be “natural,” Disneyland restrains every aspect its guests’ environment, from the sights and sounds to the available directions guests may go.

Furthermore, “there is no sign of decay, crime, confusion, discontent, pain, poverty, or struggle.” According to one scholar, this cultural interpretation of nature can have negative effects:

“There is a strong presumption that Disney closely records the real thing out there in mountain meadow, prairie and pound. If our first introduction to the natural world is via ‘Disneyvision’ -- and for virtually all of us, it is -- then we cannot help being disappointed by the real thing. Documentary is a dramatic form. Nature is hard put to compete with art.”

Disneyland embodies the presence of an idealized world in which Americans, bred from a culture of idealizing, find comfort in the safe and happy confines of a park where nothing goes wrong.

Many of these aspects of Walt Disney and his park relate his idealistic approach to business, and this idealism coupled with modernism is engrained in the parks.

Disney utilized modernism’s emphasis on the empirical approach to management and creative thinking. He engineered what Boje called the “story machine,” where all aspects of animation and film making, including much of the creative work was systemized and compartmentalized.

Similarly, the creative work and development of Disneyland was also brought about in a similar fashion.

Modernism also deals with commodification. Disneyland makes an increasingly good use of placing price tags on elements and ideas in nature and society. One scholar said that “indirect commodification is a process by which non-salable objectives, activities, and images are purposely placed in the commodified world.”

Disney discovered a great source of revenue when he began commodifying the characters from his films. From that time, commercialism has only increased in the parks. At every attraction there is a retail store, and the walkways are flooded with Disney street vendors.

As Disney embedded commodification in modernism, he also did so with advertising. Globalized corporations sponsor many of the attractions at Disneyland. One scholar said Disney is the “integration of recreation and leisure with hyper-consumption advertising and public relations.”

Like a mall, one cannot escape the thousands of commercialized messages found in every corner of Disney. When the park opened in 1955, Tomorrowland’s featured attraction was CirCarama, sponsored by American Motors. Even the front entrance to the circular theater looked like an American Motors show room.

Disneyland clearly stemmed from modern thinking in the early 1900s. Disney visited the early World Fairs that presented new technology in themed environments.

In fact, much of the early technology at Disneyland, such as the Monorail, were first made known at World Fairs. These technologies were developed during the modern era, where functionality determined design.

Las Vegas, a land of themed casinos, draws much upon the themed approaches which were established by Disneyland. However, modernism is no longer a driving force in contemporary America.

One scholar compared modernist architecture with that of the Luxor Casino, built in the shape of an Egyptian pyramid while using mirror-like glass for the exterior:

“Modernist architects once promised us cities of glass in which we would live in a continual state of revelation: all would be made clear and available to us. Here, glass hides all, inviting our desires and threatening us with the danger lurking at the heart of the cities we have built for ourselves.”

Perhaps Disneyland, although an ideal world, was never quite so modern as it was postmodern. Its hyperrealistic environment is at odds with modern thinking. Ultimately, visitors who trek to the park aren’t necessarily seeking the ideal world but rather an escape from objectivity.

Disneyland attendance is much like that of modern-day social media use. Virtual reality provides the same type of hyperrealistic world that was detailed above. In effect, it replaces a reality—social interaction, with another seeming reality—virtual interaction, which creates an element of unreality.

Disneyland has few clocks for guests to tell time and many of the attractions take place in dark environments. The buildings and attractions are also disproportionate, creating spatial illusions.

These elements suspend time and space for park guests, further enhancing their notions of hyperreality. As so many have noted, the park allows for guests to relive childhood dreams in a packaged, sterilized world without consequences or adult concerns.

Hyper-reality allows the guests to embrace postmodernism. For postmodernism seeks not to define truths by connections, but rather, it simply makes connections—never coming to conclusions about reality.

I don’t assume to say that Americans have completely forgone attempts to find meaning, but contemporary society, as a whole, is moved by this trend, further pushed by pop culture and mass media.

While Disneyland may still be considered the mind controlling dream land of the 21st century, in the end, it’s this postmodern tendency in our culture that continues to compel us to the gates of the happiest place on earth.

Propaganda in The West

The system explained

By Noam Chomsky and Daniel Mermet

Remember, children. Propaganda works becausewe don't know we're being propagandized
How could anyone suggest that in this
beacon of 'freedom and democracy',
the magnificent United States of Amnesia,
that we are programmed to to follow an ideology?

In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective than a propaganda system imposed in a totalitarian regime.

Its greatest triumph is that we generally don't notice the influence of propaganda — or laugh at the notion it even exists.

We watch the democratic process taking place - heated debates in which we feel we could have a voice — and think that, because we have “free” media, it would be hard for the Government to get away with anything very devious without someone calling them on it.

The American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name.

It isn't just propaganda any more, it's “prop-agenda.” It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about.

And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false “intelligence” and selected “leaks”.

With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then “use the democratic process” to agree or disagree — for, after all, their intention is to mobilise enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent.

The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

Keeping the People Passive & Obedient

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views.

That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Since the voice of the people is allowed to speak out in democratic societies, those in power better control what that voice says — in other words, control what people think.

One of the ways to do this is to create political debate that appears to embrace many opinions, but actually stays within very narrow margins.

You have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions — and that those assumptions are the basis of the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, the debate is permissible.

One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda.

Another is that they have jobs in management, media, and academia and therefore work in some capacity as agents of the propaganda system — and they believe what the system expects them to believe.

By and large, they're part of the privileged elite, and share the interests and perceptions of those in power.

It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent.

This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and government malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest.

What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality of the command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.

Propaganda & the Ruling Ideology

When a leading journalist or TV news presenter is asked whether they are subject to pressure or censorship, they say they are completely free to express their own opinions.

So how does thought control work in a democratic society? We know how it works in dictatorships.

Journalists are an integral part of the ruling ideology. They are so well 'integrated' that they can't see outside the ideological box they inhabit.

Their journalism is balanced, fair and tolerant of other points of view. But that is part of the 'value system' they are promulgating. 'Truth' is their version of the world.

To return to the original question. If one suggests there is censorship in the Western media, journalists immediately reply: “No one has been exerting any pressure on me. I write what I want.” And it’s true.

But if they defended positions contrary to the dominant norm, someone else would soon be writing editorials in their place.

Obviously it is not a hard-and-fast rule: the US press sometimes publishes even my work, and the US is not a totalitarian country. But anyone who fails to fulfil certain minimum requirements does not stand a chance of becoming an established commentator.

It is one of the big differences between the propaganda system of a totalitarian state and the way democratic societies go about things. Exaggerating slightly, in totalitarian countries the state decides the official line and everyone must then comply.

Democratic societies operate differently. The line is never presented as such, merely implied. This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty.

Even the passionate debates in the main media stay within the bounds of commonly accepted, implicit rules, which sideline a large number of contrary views.

The system of control in democratic societies is extremely effective. We do not notice the line any more than we notice the air we breathe.

We sometimes even imagine we are seeing a lively debate. The system of control is much more powerful than in totalitarian systems.

Look at Germany in the early 1930s. We tend to forget that it was the most advanced country in Europe, taking the lead in art, science, technology, literature and philosophy.

Then, in no time at all, it suffered a complete reversal of fortune and became the most barbaric, murderous state in human history. All that was achieved by using fear:

Fear of the Bolsheviks, the Jews, the Americans, the Gypsies – everyone who, according to the Nazis, was threatening the core values of European culture and the direct descendants of Greek civilisation (as the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote in 1935).

However, most of the German media who inundated the population with these messages were using marketing techniques developed by US advertising agents.

The same method is always used to impose an ideology. Violence is not enough to dominate people: some other justification is required.

When one person wields power over another – whether they are a dictator, a colonist, a bureaucrat, a spouse or a boss – they need an ideology justifying their action.

And it is always the same: their domination is exerted for the good of the underdog. Those in power always present themselves as being altruistic, disinterested and generous.

In the 1930s the rules for Nazi propaganda involved using simple words and repeating them in association with emotions and phobia.

When Hitler invaded the Sudetenland in 1938 he cited the noblest, most charitable motives: the need for a humanitarian intervention to prevent the ethnic cleansing of German speakers.

Henceforward everyone would be living under Germany’s protective wing, with the support of the world’s most artistically and culturally advanced country.

When it comes to propaganda (though in a sense nothing has changed since the days of Athens) there have been some minor improvements.

The instruments available now are much more refined, in particular – surprising as it may seem – in the countries with the greatest civil liberties, Britain and the US.

The contemporary public relations industry was born there in the 1920s, an activity we may also refer to as opinion forming or propaganda.

Both countries had made such progress in democratic rights (women’s suffrage, freedom of speech) that state violence was no longer sufficient to contain the desire for liberty. So those in power sought other ways of manufacturing consent.

The PR industry produces, in the true sense of the term, concept, acceptance and submission.

It controls people’s minds and ideas. It is a major advance on totalitarian rule, as it is much more agreeable to be subjected to advertising than to torture.

NY-Times is Conservative Propaganda

Liberal Media is a "Myth"

By Ed-Strong

It's important to demolish one of the central tenets of our political culture, the idea of the “liberal media.” The news media are so subordinated to corporate and conservative interests that their function is that of “elite propaganda.”

It's misinformation or agitprop disinformation masquerading as fact to boost circulation and readership or serve a larger purpose like lying for state and corporate interests.

The dominant US media excel in it, producing a daily diet of fiction portrayed as real news and information in their role as our national thought-control police gatekeepers.

In the lead among the print and electronic corporate-controlled media is the New York Times publishing "All The News That's Fit To Print" by its standards.

Others wanting real journalism won't find it on their pages allowing only the fake kind.

It's because this paper's primary mission is to be the lead instrument of state propaganda making it the closest thing we have in the country to an official ministry of information and propaganda.

Single handedly, the Times destroys "The Myth of the Liberal Media" that's also the title of Edward Herman's 1999 book on "the illiberal media," the market system, and what passes for democracy in America - what Michael Parenti calls "Democracy For the Few," in his book with that title out earlier this year in its 8th edition.

In his book, Herman writes about the "propaganda model" he and Noam Chomsky introduced and developed 11 years earlier in their landmark book titled "Manufacturing Consent."

They explained how the dominant media use this technique to program the public mind to go along with whatever agenda best serves wealth and power interests.

So imperial wars of aggression are portrayed as liberating ones, humanitarian intervention, and spreading democracy to nations without any.

Never mind they're really for new markets, resources like oil, and cheap exploitable labor paid for with public tax dollars diverted from essential social needs.

In "The Myth of the Liberal Media," Herman explains the "propaganda model" focuses on "the inequality of wealth and power" and how those with most of it can "filter out the news to print, marginalize dissent (and assure) government and dominant private interests" control the message and get it to the public.

It's done through a set of "filters" removing what's to be suppressed and "leaving only the cleansed (acceptable) residue fit to print" or broadcast electronically.

Parenti's "Democracy For the Few" is democracy-US style the rest of us are stuck with.

Books have been written on how, going back decades, the New York Times betrayed the public trust serving elitist interests alone.

It plays the lead and most influential media role disseminating state and corporate propaganda to the nation and world.

In terms of media clout, the Times is unmatched with its prominent front page being what media critic Norman Solomon calls "the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA" - more accurately, anywhere.

Examples of Times duplicity are endless showing up every day on its pages. The shameless Judith Miller saga is just the latest episode of how bad they can get, but she had her predecessors, and the beat goes on since she left in disgrace.

Through the years, the Times never met a US war of aggression it didn't love and support.

It was never bothered by CIA's functioning as a global Mafia-style hit squad/training headquarters ousting democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign heads of state and key officials.

Propping up friendly dictators, funding and training secret paramilitary armies and death squads, and now snatching individuals for "extraordinary rendition" to torture-prison hellholes, some run by the agency and all taking orders from it.

CIA, as Chalmers Johnson notes, is a state within a state functioning as the president's unaccountable private army with unchecked powers and a near-limitless off-the-books secret budget we now know tops $44 billion annually.

It menaces democratic rule, threatens the Republic's survival and makes any notion of a free society impossible as long as this agency exists. Not a problem at New York Times.

It worked closely with CIA since the 1950s allowing some of its foreign correspondents to be Agency assets or agents. It no doubt still does.

The Times is also unbothered by social decay at home, an unprecedented wealth disparity, an administration mocking the rule of law, a de facto one party state with two wings and a president usurping "unitary executive" powers claiming the law is what he says it is making him a dictator.

It practically reveres the cesspool of corrupted incestuous ties between government and business, mocking any notion of democracy of, for, or by the people.

That's the state of the nation's "liberal media" headquartered in the Times building in New York

Western Media is "Evasive"

Media propaganda though silence and evasion.

By Michael Parenti

 

In a capitalist “democracy” like the United States, the corporate news media faithfully reflect the dominant class ideology both in their reportage and commentary.

At the same time, these media leave the impression that they are free and independent, capable of balanced coverage and objective commentary. How they achieve these seemingly contradictory but legitimating goals is a matter worthy of study.

Notables in the media industry claim that occasional inaccuracies do occur in news coverage because of innocent error and everyday production problems such as deadline pressures, budgetary restraints, and the difficulty of reducing a complex story into a concise report. Furthermore, no communication system can hope to report everything, hence selectivity is needed.

Such pressures and problems do exist and honest mistakes are made, but do they really explain the media’s overall performance? True the press must be selective, but what principle of selectivity is involved?

I would argue that media bias usually does not occur in random fashion; rather it moves in more or less consistent directions, favoring management over labor, corporations over corporate critics, affluent whites over low income minorities.

Favoring officialdom over protesters, the two-party monopoly over leftist third parties, privatization and free market “reforms” over public sector development, U.S. dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist social change, and conservative commentators and columnists over progressive or radical ones.

Suppression by Omission

Some critics complain that the press is sensationalistic and invasive. In fact, it is more often muted and evasive. More insidious than the sensationalistic hype is the artful avoidance.

Truly sensational stories (as opposed to sensationalistic) are downplayed or avoided outright. Sometimes the suppression includes not just vital details but the entire story itself, even ones of major import.

Reports that might reflect poorly upon the national security state are least likely to see the light of day. Thus we hear about political repression perpetrated by officially designated “rogue” governments.

But information about the brutal murder and torture practiced by U.S.-sponsored surrogate forces in the Developing World, and other crimes committed by the U.S. national security state are denied public airing, being suppressed with a consistency that would be called “totalitarian” were it to occur in some other countries.

Labeling

Like all propagandists, mainstream media people seek to prefigure our perception of a subject with a positive or negative label. Some positive ones are: “stability,” “the president’s firm leadership,” “a strong defense,” and “a healthy economy.”

Indeed, not many Americans would want instability, wobbly presidential leadership, a weak defense, and a sick economy. The label defines the subject without having to deal with actual particulars that might lead us to a different conclusion.

Some common negative labels are: “leftist guerrillas,” “Islamic terrorists,” “conspiracy theories,” “inner-city gangs,” and “civil disturbances.” These, too, are seldom treated within a larger context of social relations and issues.

Facile and false labels are used, like “the liberal media” by the hundreds of conservative columnists, commentators, and talk-shows hosts who crowd the communication universe while claiming to be shut out from it. Some labels we will never be exposed to are “class power,” “class struggle,” and “U.S. imperialism.”

“Free market” has long been a pet label, evoking images of economic plenitude and democracy. In reality, free-market policies undermine the markets of local producers, provide state subsidies to multinational corporations, destroy public sector services, and create greater gaps between the wealthy few and the underprivileged many.

Another favorite media label is “hardline.” Anyone who resists free-market “reforms” is labeled a “hardliner.”

It is no accident that labels like "hardline" are never subjected to precise definition. The efficacy of a label is that it not have a specific content which can be held up to a test of evidence. Better that it be self-referential, propagating an undefined but evocative image.

Many labels are fabricated not by news media but by officialdom. U.S. governmental and corporate leaders talk about “our global leadership,” “national security,” “free markets,” and “globalization” when what they mean is “All Power to the Transnationals.”

The media uncritically and dutifully accept these official views, transmitting them to the wider public without any noticeable critical comment regarding the actual content of the policy.

Face-value transmission has characterized the media’s performance in almost every area of domestic and foreign policy.

When challenged on this, reporters respond that they cannot inject their own personal views into their reports. Actually, no one is asking them to. My criticism is that they already do, and seldom realize it.

Their conventional ideological perceptions usually coincide with those of their bosses and with officialdom in general, making them face-value purveyors of the prevailing orthodoxy. This uniformity of bias is perceived as “objectivity.”

Framing

The most effective propaganda relies on framing rather than on falsehood. By bending the truth rather than breaking it, using emphasis and other auxiliary embellishments, communicators can create a desired impression without resorting to explicit advocacy and without departing too far from the appearance of objectivity.

Framing is achieved in the way the news is packaged, the amount of exposure, the placement (front page or buried within, lead story or last), the tone of presentation (sympathetic or slighting), the headlines and photographs, and, in the case of broadcast media, the accompanying visual and auditory effects.

Newscasters use themselves as auxiliary embellishments. They cultivate a smooth delivery and try to convey an impression of detachment that places them above the rough and tumble of their subject matter.

Television commentators and newspaper editorialists and columnists affect a knowing tone designed to foster credibility and an aura of certitude, or what might be called “authoritative ignorance,” as expressed in remarks like “How will this situation end? Only time will tell.”

Or, “No one can say for sure.” Trite truisms are palmed off as penetrating truths. Newscasters learn to fashion sentences like “Unless the strike is settled soon, the two sides will be in for a long and bitter struggle.”

Many things are reported in the news but few are explained. Little is said about how the social order is organized and for what purposes.

Instead we are left to see the world as do mainstream pundits, as a scatter of events and personalities propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, bungled operations, and individual ambition — rarely by powerful class interests.

Passive voice and impersonal subject are essential rhetorical constructs for this mode of evasion. So we read or hear that “fighting broke out in the region,” or “many people were killed in the disturbances,” or "famine is on the increase.”

Recessions apparently just happen like some natural phenomenon ("our economy is in a slump"), having little to do with the constant war of capital against labor and the contradictions between productive power and earning power.

In keeping with the liberal paradigm, the media never asks why things happen the way they do. Social problems are rarely associated with the politico-economic forces that create them.

So we are taught to truncate our own critical thinking. Imagine if we attempted something different. Suppose we report, as is seldom reported, that the harshly exploitative labor conditions existing in so many countries generally has the backing of their respective military forces.

Suppose further that we cross another line and note that these right-wing military forces are fully supported by the U.S. national security state.

Then suppose we cross that most serious line of all and instead of just deploring this fact we also ask why successive U.S. administrations have involved themselves in such unsavory pursuits throughout the world.

Suppose we conclude that the whole phenomenon is consistent with a dedication to making the world safe for free-market corporate capitalism, as measured by the kinds of countries that are helped and the kinds that are attacked.

Such an analysis almost certainly would not be printed anywhere except in a few select radical publications. We crossed too many lines. Because we tried to explain the particular situation (bad labor conditions) in terms of a larger set of social relations (corporate class power), our presentation would be rejected out of hand as “Marxist” — which indeed it is, as is much of reality itself.

In sum, the capitalist media’s daily performance under what is called “democratic capitalism” is not a failure but a skillfully evasive success.

We often hear that the media “got it wrong” or “dropped the ball” on this or that story. In fact, the media do their job remarkably well.

Media people have a trained incapacity for the whole truth. Their job is not to inform but disinform, not to advance democratic discourse but to dilute and mute it.

Their task is to give every appearance of being conscientiously concerned about events of the day, saying so much while meaning so little, offering so many calories with so few nutrients.

When we understand this, we move from a liberal complaint about the press's sloppy performance to a radical analysis of how the media maintain the dominant paradigm with much craft and craftiness.

 

Avatar, is Same Old Shit

More garbage in for garbage out 

By John Pilger

Why are most films so bad? This year's Oscar nominations are full of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America's divine right to consume other cultures, replacing them with dumbed-down crap.

When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?

I grew up on the movie myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native American.

The formula is unchanged. Self-regarding distortions present the nobility of the American colonial aggressor as a cover for massacre, from the Philippines to Iraq.

I only fully understood the power of the con when I was sent to Vietnam as a war reporter. The Vietnamese were "gooks" and "Indians" whose industrial murder was preordained in John Wayne movies and sent back to Hollywood to glamourise or redeem.

I use the word murder advisedly, because what Hollywood does brilliantly is suppress the truth about America's assaults. These are not wars, but the export of a gun-addicted, homicidal "culture".

And when the notion of psychopaths as heroes wears thin, the bloodbath becomes an "American tragedy" with a soundtrack of pure angst.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is "better than any documentary I've seen on the Iraq war.

It's so real it's scary" (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has "unpretentious clarity" and is "about the long and painful endgame in Iraq" that "says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies".

What nonsense. Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else's country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion.

The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.

The accolades echo those for The Deer Hunter (1978) which critics acclaimed as "the film that could purge a nation's guilt!"

The Deer Hunter lauded those who had caused the deaths of more than three million Vietnamese while reducing those who resisted to barbaric commie stick figures.

In 2001, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down provided a similar, if less subtle catharsis for another American "noble failure" in Somalia while airbrushing the heroes' massacre of up to 10,000 Somalis.

By contrast, the fate of an admirable American war film, Redacted, is instructive. Made in 2007 by Brian De Palma, the film is based on the true story of the gang rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family by American soldiers.

There is no heroism, no purgative. The murderers are murderers, and the complicity of Hollywood and the media in the epic crime in Iraq is described ingeniously by De Palma.

The film ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians who were killed. When it was order that their faces be ordered blacked out "for legal reasons", De Palma said.

"I think that's terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people. The great irony about Redacted is that it was redacted."

After a limited release in the US, this fine film all but vanished.

Non-American (or non-western) humanity is not deemed to have box office appeal, dead or alive. They are the "other" who are allowed, at best, to be saved by "us".

In Avatar, James Cameron's vast and violent money-printer, 3-D noble savages known as the Na'vi need a good guy American soldier, Sergeant Jake Sully, to save them. This confirms they are "good". Natch.

My Oscar for the worst of the current nominees goes to Invictus, Clint Eastwood's unctuous insult to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Taken from a hagiography of Nelson Mandela by a British journalist, John Carlin, the film might have been a product of apartheid propaganda.

In promoting the racist, thuggish rugby culture as a panacea of the "rainbow nation", Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela's embrace of the hated Springbok symbol of their suffering.

He airbrushes white violence - but not black violence, which is ever present as a threat. As for the Boer racists, they have hearts of gold, because "we didn't really know". The subliminal theme is all too familiar: colonialism deserves forgiveness and accommodation, never justice.

At first I thought Invictus, could not be taken seriously, then I looked around the cinema at young people and others for whom the horrors of apartheid have no reference, and I understood the damage such a slick travesty does to our memory and its moral lessons. Imagine Eastwood making a happy-Sambo equivalent in the American Deep South. He would not dare.

The film most nominated for an Oscar and promoted by the critics is Up in the Air, which has George Clooney as a man who travels America sacking people and collecting frequent flyer points.

Before the triteness dissolves into sentimentality, every stereotype is summoned, especially of women. There is a bitch, a saint and a cheat. However, this is "a movie for our times", says the director Jason Reitman, who boasts having cast real sacked people.

"We interviewed them about what it was like to lose their job in this economy," said he, "then we'd fire them on camera and ask them to respond the way they did when they lost their job. It was an incredible experience to watch these non-actors with 100 per cent realism."

Wow, what a winner.

 

New Terrorist Attack Raises Disturbing Questions

 The hero

The Huffington Post

Jasper Schuringa was interviewed on CNN. He describes how he "freaked" when he saw Mutallab lighting something and then dove across four seats to tackle and subdue the suspect.

Jasper Schuringa has been identified as the principal man who tackled the would-be terrorist on Northwest flight 253. The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, attempted to ignite some kind of explosive device between his legs when Schuringa leaped over the seat and tackled Mutallab, extinguishing the fire and burning himself in the process.
Schuringa, a video producer and director from Amsterdam according to the Daily News, is being hailed as a hero. CNN interviewed Schuringa:

Media use latest attack for more propaganda

By Barry Grey 

 

The attempted plane bombing is being used for domestic propaganda purposes. Under conditions of popular opposition to the expanding war in Afghanistan, government officials and the media are already using it to cow and frighten the population.

This is the well-tried method to justify both foreign wars and increased attacks on democratic rights at home. Once again, Al Qaeda is being summoned up to make the American people more willing to accept restrictions on their personal freedoms.

That a Nigerian national was involved in last week’s attempted plane bombing underscores the global consequences of Washington’s militarist policies.

While nothing can justify terrorist attacks against civilians, Washington’s neo-colonial wars are responsible for creating the conditions for new recruits for terrorist operations.

What has been reported about Adbulmutallab’s biography is evidence of this fact. The young student, from a privileged and wealthy family, seems to have been radicalized in tandem with the escalation of US military violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He left his family home in London’s West End, broke off relations and disappeared during the period when it had become clear that the Obama administration was continuing and intensifying the warmongering policies of Bush.

The nearly catastrophic attempt to blow up a US passenger jet during its final approach to Detroit Metro Airport on Christmas Day raises a number of serious questions.

While many details of the attempted terror attack and the biography of the would-be suicide bomber remain sketchy, widely-reported facts that have been corroborated by US officials make clear that the near-destruction of the airliner was the result of a colossal and as yet unexplained security failure.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, was overpowered by other passengers and crew members when he attempted to set off an explosive device he had taped to his person and smuggled onto Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam.

In November, or six months ago (press accounts differ), Abdulmutallab’s father, a retired banker and former Nigerian government minister, told US Embassy officials in the Nigerian capital that he was concerned about his son’s extreme religious views and activities.

The Washington Post on Sunday quoted a “senior administration official” as saying the father had warned of his son’s “radicalization and associations.” Some press reports say the father also spoke with US intelligence officials and Nigerian security agencies.

The family had evidently lost contact with Abdulmutallab, who six months ago said he was breaking off relations. Family members reportedly said they believed he had gone to Yemen, the birthplace of his mother.

US officials say that as a result of the father’s warning, Abdulmutallab was placed on a counter terrorism database in November, but they nevertheless had no actionable grounds for barring him from flying or subjecting him to any special pre-boarding search or questioning.

The media is dutifully and uncritically parroting these explanations, but they strain credulity. Since 9/11, there have been innumerable reports of people being barred from flying by government security officials for no apparent reason.

One of these was the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who in 2004 was placed on the Homeland Security Department’s “no-fly” list and prevented from boarding a shuttle from Washington DC to Boston.

Yet despite being identified as a potential terrorist threat by his own father, a highly placed former Nigerian official, Abdulmutallab was allowed to retain his multi-entry US visa, board a plane to the US, and smuggle explosives on board.

The incident is all the more disturbing and suspicious, coming just weeks after President Obama announced a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and singled out Yemen and Somalia as alleged Al Qaeda bases where US military attack could be justified.

This episode has the appearance of another in a series of ostensible security lapses which have more the character of deliberately turning a blind eye than mere incompetence.

The case of Abdulmutallab seems to follow a well-established pattern dating back to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

A number of the hijack-bombers were known to US intelligence and security officials as Al Qaeda operatives, and were nevertheless allowed to enter the country, train as pilots, and eventually board the doomed airliners on 9/11.

Warnings of impending terror attacks involving the hijacking of airplanes went unheeded.

None of this has ever been explained. No one has been held accountable. Instead, numerous government investigations were carried out, culminating in the 9/11 Commission report, which whitewashed government agencies and officials.

Notwithstanding Obama’s pledge to investigate last week’s attempted terror attack, the 9/11 pattern will likely be repeated.

The latest episode occurs within days of US air attacks against insurgents in Yemen, which US officials and the media are increasingly portraying as a center of Al Qaeda activity nearly on a par with the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

The linking of Abdulmutallab to Yemen is an ominous sign that these attacks will increase, and the country may well become a new front in the expanding drive by the US to dominate oil-rich, strategic regions in the Middle East and Central Asia.

This danger was underscored by statements from politicians and the media over the weekend.

Jane Harman, the Democratic congresswoman from California who heads the House Homeland Security subcommittee, issued a statement declaring:

“The facts are still emerging, but there are strong suggestions of a Yemen-Al Qaeda connection and an intent to blow up the plane over US airspace.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote in its news account Sunday, “If corroborated, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s travel to Yemen for terrorist instruction and explosives underscores the emergence of that country as a major hub for Al Qaeda, perhaps beginning to rival the terror network’s base in Pakistan.”

The attempted plane bombing is also being used for domestic propaganda purposes. Under conditions of popular opposition to the expanding war in Afghanistan, government officials and the media are already seeking to use it to cow and frighten the population so as to justify both foreign wars and increased attacks on democratic rights at home.

Once again, Al Qaeda is being summoned up to make the American people more willing to accept restrictions on their personal freedoms.

That a Nigerian national was involved in last week’s attempted plane bombing underscores the global consequences of Washington’s militarist policies.

While nothing can justify terrorist attacks against civilians, Washington’s neo-colonial wars are responsible for creating the conditions for new recruits for terrorist operations.

What has been reported about Adbulmutallab’s biography is evidence of this fact. The young student, from a privileged and wealthy family, seems to have been radicalized in tandem with the escalation of US military violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He left his family home in London’s West End, broke off relations and disappeared during the period when it had become clear that the Obama administration was continuing and intensifying the warmongering policies of Bush.

Let Them Watch Garbage - 21st Century Media.

Next Up, Who's Gay?

By Chris Hedges

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity.

Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.)

And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview?

Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars”?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity.

We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains.

We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency.

There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

Celebrity worship has banished the real from public discourse. And the adulation of celebrity is pervasive.

The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of viewers to Oprah, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them.

We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and “The Purpose Driven Life” won’t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated. Nothing else in life counts.

We yearn to stand before the camera, to be noticed and admired. We build pages on social networking sites devoted to presenting our image to the world. We seek to control how others think of us. We define our worth solely by our visibility.

We live in a world where not to be seen, in some sense, is to not exist. We pay lifestyle advisers to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life.

Martha Stewart constructed her financial empire, when she wasn’t engaged in insider trading, telling women how to create a set design for the perfect home.

The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole.

Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities.

And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look, with the acquisition of wealth and power, or at least the appearance of it.

Glossy magazines like Town & Country cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set pieces that are their homes.

The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we present ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness.

Hedonism and wealth are openly worshiped on Wall Street as well as on shows such as “The Hills,” “Gossip Girl,” “Sex and the City,” “My Super Sweet 16” and “The Real Housewives of (whatever bourgeois burg happens to be in vogue).”

The American oligarchy—1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined—are the characters we most envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar mansions.

They marry models or professional athletes. They are chauffeured in stretch limos. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres to fabulous resorts.

They have surgically enhanced, perfect bodies and are draped in designer clothes that cost more than some people make in a year. This glittering life is held before us like a beacon.

This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying. And this is the life we want. Greed is good, we believe, because one day through our acquisitions we will become the elite. So let the rest of the bastards suffer.

The working class, comprising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are locked out of television’s gated community.

They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power.

Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything.

We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded.

We consume these countless lies daily. We believe the false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved and protected.

The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts.

Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity.

The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities and evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists and business tycoons, peddle this fantasy.

Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems... as defeatist, as negativity or as inhibiting our inner essence and power.

Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality, along with those who grasp the hollowness and danger of celebrity culture, are condemned for their pessimism or intellectualism.

The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us.

Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled and unique.

All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame and success.

This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything

. And because of this self-absorption, and deep self-delusion, we have become a country of child-like adults who speak and think in the inane gibberish of popular culture.

Celebrities who come from humble backgrounds are held up as proof that anyone can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are examples that the impossible is always possible.

Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success and of fulfillment are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real.

The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our “insignificant” individual achievements, however, is leading to an explosive frustration, anger, insecurity and invalidation.

It is fostering a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear.

The worse things get, the more we beg for fantasy. We ingest these lies until our faith and our money run out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is.

Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions.

Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age.

Oprah Make us, 'Dumb and Dumber'

Duuuuuuuh

Oprah allows the shopaholics and consumer whores to feel like they're solving real world issues, simply by buying things (which they most likely couldn't stop doing even if they wanted to). I'll admit, personally I don't always get how a lot of charities function, or how buying stuff somehow fixes stuff. And...as an afterthought, I still remember all the jokes about the Play Station 3 being able to cure cancer (and smoke a salmon, which someone actually did btw).

By Gloria Goodale

Secular saint or nefarious consumerist? No matter your opinion of Oprah Winfrey, it's impossible to ignore the global uproar over her announcement that she will be winding down her daytime talk show on broadcast television.

She is moving over to her very own cable channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), in partnership with Discovery Communications. OWN will debut in January 2011 to approximately 80 million viewers on what is currently the Discovery Health Channel.

Popular culture professor at Syracuse University, Robert Thompson, who grew up in Chicago where Ms. Winfrey began her career, says he has received requests for comments from around the world.

Media watchers, sociologists, and branding experts say the frenzied outpouring reveals much about the impact, legacy, and future of the media empire Winfrey has built over the past quarter century.

"I'm shocked," says Mr. Thompson, who explains that the syrupy accolades and montages playing in cities from London to Sydney are more akin to a memorial.

"This reminds me of the sort of tributes that poured out after Michael Jackson's passing. More about someone whose time is past," he notes. "Frankly, they don't bode well for the future of her projects in other areas."

But the passion of her fans also says something about her long-term commitment to them, Thompson adds. "This is an affection that was earned day by day, show by show, year by year," he says, a reign unprecedented in the daytime arena.

Over the two-and-a-half decades of her tenure in daytime TV, Winfrey came to fill a void for many of what is currently an audience of some 7 million viewers, says sociologist BJ Gallagher in an e-mail.

Calling Winfrey, "Our Lady of Perpetual Self-Empowerment," Ms. Gallagher says that for tens of millions of woman (and more than a few men, too) Oprah offers what they often can't find in mainstream churches:

"Inspiring advice on how to live the good life, compassion, encouragement, and support, spirituality that is broadly inclusive, love and forgiveness, laughter, hugs, and acceptance."

The decision to move from broadcast to cable is strictly a business move, says Elayne Rapping, professor of American Studies at SUNY, Buffalo.

She noted that during Winfrey's time on ABC affiliates nationwide, the influence of broadcast television has been severely eroded by the rise of cable and the Internet.

Her new venture with Discovery communications includes an Internet site, and she notes, "Oprah is just following audiences where they have demonstrably migrated, away from broadcast television."

When Winfrey entered the talk show game in the mid-1980s, shows such as Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer were already beginning to define the genre as a backwater of tabloid headlines.

In the early 1990s, Winfrey made the decision to take the show in more positive directions, points out Susan Mackey-Kallis, associate professor of communication at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

It is the rise of Winfrey as a business brand that has truly driven her influence, she adds. "She often assured her viewers and later her readers that their greatest power for changing themselves and their world lay in their purchasing power.

Supporting a cause meant buying a bracelet made by indigenous people; curing cancer meant attending a charity event, etc.

This coupling of consumerism with social and political change made her the darling of advertisers whose clients were willing to pay top dollar to advertising on her show."

It is also this emphasis on consumerism that has drawn the most fire from such critics as international branding expert, Rob Frankel, who sees the talk show diva as a negative influence in the larger culture.

"Nobody has contributed more to the dumbing down of America and its increase in mediocrity than Oprah Winfrey," he says. "If she has any leadership ability, it lies in her self-gratifying sustenance via mindless consumerism."