Where Is Jack Welch Now? Congressional Republicans Suppress CRS Report

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, currently a pompous right-wing wind bag, made headlines by calling into question the October jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Welch implied that the unexpectedly favorable numbers were a political plot in which BLS officials had connived to make the Obama administration look good. Even conservative commentators like David Brooks thought his accusations were ludicrous. Well the question today is this - "where is Jack now?"

The New York Times reports today that Congressional Republicans connived to suppress a report from the Congressional Research Service that deflates the central tenet of their economic views, namely that there is some well-established, robust relationship between tax rates on those at the very top of the income distribution and economic growth.  You can find a copy of the report and some commentary here at The Washington Post.

The Republicans might have avoided stepping in this particular pile of their own bullshit. As Susan pointed out to me and as this cogent analysis of the CRS report and its putative shortcomings at The New Republic points out: "CRS reports are never released to the public anyway." Oooooppps! Now not only are the Republicans wrong about economics, but they are compounding their mistake by censoring the findings. This surely should outrage so hardheaded a businessman as Welch. Right? Don't hold your breath waiting for him to tweet his criticism of the Republicans. It is more likely that he will join the editorial ideologues at Pravda the Wall Street Journal in impugning the author of the report.
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P.S.: (2 November 2012) To punctuate this post I add a link to this news report from The New York Times this morning.  The story is about how job growth - as reported by those dastardly partisans at BLS! - has basically stagnated this month. Unemployment is reported up on the Friday before the election. Hey Jack! We'd love to hear from you.

Solnit on Greed, Language, and Politics

 Regular readers will know that I consider Rebecca Solnit an incisive, articulate analyst of politics and the arts. So, when I came across this essay of hers at TomDispatch.com I suspected it would be worth reading. It turns out that, as I sit in the cold, wet, grey backwash of Hurricane Sandy, anticipating days of bad weather, her focus on climate change and why it has made less than a cameo appearance in the ongoing election campaign is especially well taken. Her focus on the pervasive greed - and its converse, poverty and hardship - are especially relevant given that the University where I work is in the midst of more than one labor dispute. And her broader theme - the ways our political language is increasingly infested with euphemism, bullshit and deception - is one that I myself have taken up repeatedly here over the years. In any case, here, reprinted without permission, is her essay in its entirely.

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 Our Words Are Our Weapons ~
Against the Destruction of the World by Greed
By Rebecca Solnit

In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had taken place under the previous dynasty were cleared up and language and its subjects correlated again. It was like a debt jubilee, only for meaning rather than money.

This was part of what made Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign so electrifying: he seemed like a man who spoke our language and called many if not all things by their true names. Whatever caused that season of clarity, once elected, Obama promptly sank into the stale, muffled, parallel-universe language wielded by most politicians, and has remained there ever since. Meanwhile, the far right has gotten as far as it has by mislabeling just about everything in our world -- a phenomenon which went supernova in this year of “legitimate rape,” “the apology tour,” and “job creators.”  Meanwhile, their fantasy version of economics keeps getting more fantastic. (Maybe there should be a rectification of numbers, too.) 

Let’s rectify some names ourselves. We often speak as though the source of so many of our problems is complex and even mysterious. I'm not sure it is. You can blame it all on greed: the refusal to do anything about climate change, the attempts by the .01% to destroy our democracy, the constant robbing of the poor, the resultant starving children, the war against most of what is beautiful on this Earth.

Calling lies "lies" and theft "theft" and violence "violence," loudly, clearly, and consistently, until truth becomes more than a bump in the road, is a powerful aspect of political activism. Much of the work around human rights begins with accurately and aggressively reframing the status quo as an outrage, whether it’s misogyny or racism or poisoning the environment. What protects an outrage are disguises, circumlocutions, and euphemisms -- “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture, “collateral damage” for killing civilians, “the war on terror” for the war against you and me and our Bill of Rights.

Change the language and you’ve begun to change the reality or at least to open the status quo to question. Here is Confucius on the rectification of names:

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

So let’s start calling manifestations of greed by their true name. By greed, I mean the attempt of those who have plenty to get more, not the attempts of the rest of us to survive or lead a decent life. Look at the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame: the four main heirs are among the dozen richest people on the planet, each holding about $24 billion. Their wealth is equivalent to that of the bottom 40% of Americans. The corporation Sam Walton founded now employs 2.2 million workers, two-thirds of them in the U.S., and the great majority are poorly paid, intimidated, often underemployed people who routinely depend on government benefits to survive. You could call that Walton Family welfare -- a taxpayers' subsidy to their system. Strikes launched against Wal-Mart this summer and fall protested working conditions of astonishing barbarity -- warehouses that reach 120 degrees, a woman eight months pregnant forced to work at a brutal pace, commonplace exposure to pollutants, and the intimidation of those who attempted to organize or unionize.

You would think that $24,000,000,000 apiece would be enough, but the Walton family sits atop a machine intent upon brutalizing tens of millions of people -- the suppliers of Wal-Mart notorious for their abysmal working conditions, as well as the employees of the stores -- only to add to piles of wealth already obscenely vast. Of course, what we call corporations are, in fact, perpetual motion machines, set up to endlessly extract wealth (and leave slagheaps of poverty behind) no matter what.

They are generally organized in such a way that the brutality that leads to wealth extraction is committed by subcontractors at a distance or described in euphemisms, so that the stockholders, board members, and senior executives never really have to know what’s being done in their names. And yet it is their job to know -- just as it is each of our jobs to know what systems feed us and exploit or defend us, and the job of writers, historians, and journalists to rectify the names for all these things.   

Groton to Moloch 

The most terrifying passage in whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s gripping book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is not about his time in Vietnam, or his life as a fugitive after he released the Pentagon Papers. It’s about a 1969 dinnertime conversation with a co-worker in a swanky house in Pacific Palisades, California.  It took place right after Ellsberg and five of his colleagues had written a letter to the New York Times arguing for immediate withdrawal from the unwinnable, brutal war in Vietnam, and Ellsberg’s host said, “If I were willing to give up all this... if I were willing to renege on... my commitment to send my son to Groton... I would have signed the letter.”

In other words, his unnamed co-worker had weighed trying to prevent the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of people against the upper-middle-class perk of having his kid in a fancy prep school, and chosen the latter. The man who opted for Groton was, at least, someone who worked for what he had and who could imagine having painfully less. This is not true of the ultra-rich shaping the future of our planet.

They could send tens of thousands to Groton, buy more Renoirs and ranches, and still not exploit the poor or destroy the environment, but they’re as insatiable as they are ruthless. They are often celebrated in their aesthetic side effects: imposing mansions, cultural patronage, jewels, yachts.  But in many, maybe most, cases they got rich through something a lot uglier, and that ugliness is still ongoing. Rectifying the names would mean revealing the ugliness of the sources of their fortunes and the grotesque scale on which they contrive to amass them, rather than the gaudiness of the trinkets they buy with them. It would mean seeing and naming the destruction that is the corollary of most of this wealth creation.

A Storm Surge of Selfishness 

Where this matters most is climate change. Why have we done almost nothing over the past 25 years about what was then a terrifying threat and is now a present catastrophe? Because it was bad for quarterly returns and fossil-fuel portfolios. When posterity indicts our era, this will be the feeble answer for why we did so little -- that the rich and powerful with ties to the carbon-emitting industries have done everything in their power to prevent action on, or even recognition of, the problem. In this country in particular, they spent a fortune sowing doubt about the science of climate change and punishing politicians who brought the subject up. In this way have we gone through four “debates” and nearly a full election cycle with climate change unmentioned and unmentionable.

These three decades of refusing to respond have wasted crucial time. It’s as though you were prevented from putting out a fire until it was raging: now the tundra is thawing and Greenland’s ice shield is melting and nearly every natural system is disrupted, from the acidifying oceans to the erratic seasons to droughts, floods, heat waves, and wildfires, and the failure of crops. We can still respond, but the climate is changed; the damage we all spoke of, only a few years ago, as being in the future is here, now.

You can look at the chief executive officers of the oil corporations -- Chevron’s John Watson, for example, who received almost $25 million ($1.57 million in salary and the rest in “compensation”) in 2011 -- or their major shareholders. They can want for nothing. They’re so rich they could quit the game at any moment. When it comes to climate change, some of the wealthiest people in the world have weighed the fate of the Earth and every living thing on it for untold generations to come, the seasons and the harvests, this whole exquisite planet we evolved on, and they have come down on the side of more profit for themselves, the least needy people the world has ever seen.

Take those billionaire energy tycoons Charles and David Koch, who are all over American politics these days. They are spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat Obama, partly because he offends their conservative sensibilities, but also because he is less likely to be a completely devoted servant of their profit margins. He might, if we shout loud enough, rectify a few names.  Under pressure, he might even listen to the public or environmental groups, while Romney poses no such problem (and under a Romney administration they will probably make more back in tax cuts than they are gambling on his election).

Two years ago, the Koch brothers spent $1 million on California’s Proposition 23, an initiative written and put on the ballot by out-of-state oil companies to overturn our 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act. It lost by a landslide, but the Koch brothers have also invested a small fortune in spreading climate-change denial and sponsoring the Tea Party (which they can count on to oppose climate change regulation as big government or interference with free enterprise). This year they’re backing a California initiative to silence unions. They want nothing to stand in the way of corporate power and the exploitation of fossil fuels. Think of it as another kind of war, and consider the early casualties.  

As the Irish Times put it in an editorial this summer:

“Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of millions are struggling to adapt to their changing climate. In the last three years, we have seen 10 million people displaced by floods in Pakistan, 13 million face hunger in east Africa, and over 10 million in the Sahel region of Africa face starvation. Even those figures only scrape the surface. According to the Global Humanitarian Forum, headed up by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, climate change is responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and affects 300 million people annually. By 2030, the annual death toll related to climate change is expected to rise to 500,000 and the economic cost to rocket to $600 billion.”

This coming year may see a dramatic increase in hunger due to rising food prices from crop failures, including this summer’s in the U.S. Midwest after a scorching drought in which the Mississippi River nearly ran dry and crops withered.

We need to talk about climate change as a war against nature, against the poor (especially the poor of Africa), and against the rest of us. There are casualties, there are deaths, and there is destruction, and it’s all mounting. Rectify the name, call it war. While we’re at it, take back the term “pro-life” to talk about those who are trying to save the lives of all the creatures suffering from the collapse of the complex systems on which plant and animal as well as human lives depend. The other side: “pro-death.”

The complex array of effects from climate change and their global distribution, as well as their scale and the science behind them makes it harder to talk about than almost anything else on Earth, but we should talk about it all the more because of that. And yes, the rest of us should do more, but what is the great obstacle those who have already tried to do so much invariably come up against? The oil corporations, the coal companies, the energy industry, its staggering financial clout, its swarms of lobbyists, and the politicians in its clutches. Those who benefit most from the status quo, I learned in studying disasters, are always the least willing to change.

The Doublespeak on Taxes 

I’m a Californian so I faced the current version of American greed early. Proposition 13, the initiative that froze property taxes and made it nearly impossible to raise taxes in our state, went into effect in 1978, two years before California’s former governor Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in part by catering to greed. Prop 13, as it came to be known, went into effect when California was still an affluent state with the best educational system in the world, including some of the top universities around, nearly free to in-staters all the way through graduate school. Tax cuts have trashed the state and that education system, and they are now doing the same to our country. The public sphere is to society what the biosphere is to life on earth: the space we live in together, and the attacks on them have parallels.

What are taxes? They are that portion of your income that you contribute to the common good. Most of us are unhappy with how they’re allocated -- though few outside the left talk about the fact that more than half of federal discretionary expenditures go to our gargantuan military, more money than is spent on the next 14 militaries combined. Ever since Reagan, the right has complained unceasingly about fantasy expenditures -- from that president’s “welfare queens” to Mitt Romney’s attack on Big Bird and PBS (which consumes .001% of federal expenditures).

As part of its religion of greed, the right invented a series of myths about where those taxes went, how paying them was the ultimate form of oppression, and what boons tax cuts were to bring us.  They then delivered the biggest tax cuts of all to those who already had a superfluity of money and weren’t going to pump the extra they got back into the economy. What they really were saying was that they wanted to hang onto every nickel, no matter how the public sphere was devastated, and that they really served the ultra-rich, over and over again, not the suckers who voted them into office.

Despite decades of cutting to the bone, they continue to promote tax cuts as if they had yet to happen. Their constant refrain is that we are too poor to feed the poor or educate the young or heal the sick, but the poverty isn’t monetary: it’s moral and emotional. Let’s rectify some more language: even at this moment, the United States remains the richest nation the world has ever seen, and California -- with the richest agricultural regions on the planet and a colossal high-tech boom still ongoing in Silicon Valley -- is loaded, too. Whatever its problems, the U.S. is still swimming in abundance, even if that abundance is divided up ever more unequally.

Really, there’s more than enough to feed every child well, to treat every sick person, to educate everyone well without saddling them with hideous debt, to support the arts, to protect the environment -- to produce, in short, a glorious society. The obstacle is greed. We could still make the sorts of changes climate change requires of us and become a very different nation without overwhelming pain. We would then lead somewhat different lives -- richer, not poorer, for most of us (in meaning, community, power, and hope). Because this culture of greed impoverishes all of us, it is, to call it by its true name, destruction.

Occupy the Names  

One of the great accomplishments of Occupy Wall Street was this rectification of names. Those who came together under that rubric named the greed, inequality, and injustice in our system; they made the brutality of debt and the subjugation of the debtors visible; they called out Wall Street’s crimes; they labeled the wealthiest among us the “1%,” those who have made a profession out of pumping great sums of our wealth upwards (quite a different kind of tax).  It was a label that made instant sense across much of the political spectrum. It was a good beginning. But there’s so much more to do.

Naming is only part of the work, but it’s a crucial first step. A doctor initially diagnoses, then treats; an activist or citizen must begin by describing what is wrong before acting. To do that well is to call things by their true names. Merely calling out these names is a beam of light powerful enough to send the destroyers it shines upon scurrying for cover like roaches. After that, you still need to name your vision, your plan, your hope, your dream of something better.

Names matter; language matters; truth matters. In this era when the mainstream media serve obfuscation and evasion more than anything else (except distraction), alternative media, social media, demonstrations in the streets, and conversations between friends are the refuges of truth, the places where we can begin to rectify the names. So start talking.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books, a TomDispatch regular, and from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the California public education system in its heyday. She would like the Republican Party to be called the Pro-Rape Party until further notice.

Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit

The Debate Fiasco

I am about to head upstairs to watch a couple of politicians pay roles in an event paid for and closely orchestrated by other elites and mis-described as a "debate." If is like going to a faux juke joint like House of Blues and pretending that you are in an actual bar. For a typically smart assessment of the spectacle have a look at Glenn Greenwald's column at The Guradian. This is not democracy. Why watch, then? Because regardless of the charade, the event will have an enormous effect on the election.

Hey Jack! Zip It!

So, the thing about being a corporate tycoon is that you get used to being always right. Ask Jack Welch. As he explained in a diatribe today on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (which has the credibility of Soviet-era Pravda) he was correct last week in tweeting about the manipulation of employment data that appears, however tepidly, to support the general policies of the Obama administration. I commented on that earlier outburst here.

Forget about the fact that Welch's tweets last week basically accused the BLS bureaucrats of manipulating data - the inference being that they did so at the behest of the administration. No mention of that today. How convenient. Instead we get Welch applying himself to the BLS statistics and their (now apparently inadvertent) bias. Of course, that would raise the issue of whether any of all of the BLS reports over the past months are similarly biased. And it overlooks the fact that the latest number simply continues a trend (albeit a noisy one) of improved jobs numbers.

And for all of this bullshit (in the technical sense) we get treated to old Jack whining about being subjected to mockery as though we live in a totalitarian state. With corporate leaders this removed from reality it is little wonder that the depression lingers on.

Mitt who? On the "jobs report"

I am not so much pro-Obama - I actually am not registered as a Democrat - as I am anti-Republican. So here is how I interpret this graphic, lifted from The New York Times today.

First, and most importantly, it suggests that fewer people are jobless this month than last. Indeed, the unemployment rate is south of 8% for the first time since 2009. We can worry about whether the jobs are "good" ones or otherwise, but the trajectory is surely encouraging. That is the good news and it is important independently of the campaign.

Second, this news should distract attention from the horse-race preoccupation with who "won" the debate Wednesday evening. The common wisdom is that Romney did.  The employment figures today should pretty much render that discussion moot. Look where Republican policies left us. Then look at the record under Obama. Even if we think he could've done a better job, experience suggests there is zero reason to think that Romeny/Ryan will do so. Even if he seems less stiff and weaselly than you thought, voting for Romney on grounds of economic policy is indefensible.

Finally, the downside of this shift in attention is that it will provide less reason for the press to explore the plethora of lies and bullshit Romney offered up Wednesday night - [1] [2] [3] [4], etcetera . . . In other words Romney only appeared less weaselly the other evening. It is important not to let that message get lost in the jobs uptick.

Ryan - Lies and Bullshit

I am a bit late with this post. But, since Republicans seem to be ecstatic about Paul Ryan's speech last night, and since the press is largely preoccupied with his 'political' performance in attacking Obama and evoking small-town nostalgia, it seems appropriate to link to this nice column at The Nation. The punchline:

"Ryan had to know he was deceiving the American people when he and the Romney team prepared his speech.

But the “deficit hawk” congressman who voted for two unfunded wars, a budget-busting prescription drug plan that steered billions into the accounts of Big Pharma, and the bank bailout of 2008 made his choice long ago. He’s not going to level with the American people. He’s going to try to make them believe things that are not true."

How bad is it when we rely on Condi Rice* as a benchmark for honesty and straight talk?
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* Even The New York Times which was supine in the face of BushCo propaganda wrote in this editorial today: "Ms. Rice is a reminder of the colossal errors and deceptions of the Bush administration. She was a central player in the decision to invade Iraq and the peddling of fantasies about weapons of mass destruction."

Niall Ferguson: Peddling Lies and Bullshit

Well, in his role as drum-major for failed economic policies (namely austerity as a cure for all that ails us) Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has produced this piece in Newsweek that has generated a storm of critical responses: James Fallows, Paul Krugman, and Ezra Klein and Brad DeLong have deflated Ferguson's attack on the Obama administration. Ferguson remains undeterred.

Among the claims at issue is one where Ferguson insists - putatively on the basis of analysis by the Congressional Budget Office - that the Affordable Care Act will violate Obama's 2008 pledge not to raise taxes on middle-income Americans and that it will contribute to the nation's deficit woes.

It is scant surprise that Ferguson, who was an adviser to the unsuccessful and unlamented 2008 McCain campaign, has little patience for Obama or his policies. (I myself don't have much either!) But it is some surprise to learn - as reported here and here at Politico - that not only do the folks at Newsweek not fact check submissions, but they don't seem to mind that Ferguson seems to have been simply "makin' shit up" for this piece. One would think that a self-respecting journalistic outlet would want essays it publishes to be sound. And one would think that an historian would find it important to get basic facts right. One would think. And instead we get silence from Newsweek and what we can only call the Bullshit defense from Ferguson. Here is an appropriate reply from Brad Delong:

"And his only excuse--now, it's not an excuse for the lie, it's a "I can lie cleverly" boast--is: "I very deliberately said 'the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA', not 'the ACA'".

Fire his ass.

Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast.

Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university.

There is a limit, somewhere. And Ferguson has gone beyond it."

And here, at The Atlantic, is a more temperate riposte, in which their business and economics editor slices and dices Ferguson's claims. Niall? Newsweek?

The Wonders of Ideological Delusion

Let's see now, the government funds lots of basic research that leads to massive technological advance; let's call it the Internet. And a bunch of guys make oodles of dollars exploiting the technology for commercial gain. And then those same guys turn around and spend oodles of dollars on groups that spout libertarian nonsense about how "government regulation stifles innovation and, without innovation, there is no economic growth." Bullshit. It really is enough to make me wonder why so many Americans assume that one needs to be particularly intelligent or on the ball to succeed at business. So let me spell it out in simple terms: absent government funding, the world would be forced to get along without the wonders of PayPal. Think we might manage?

And before all my libertarian friends and students start rushing about asking why I think businessmen like Warren Buffett (say) are worth listening to on matters of tax policy, let's just say it is because Buffett, unlike this bozo, apparently believes in the virtue of consistency. Pretty simple.

A Weekend Digest

This graphic popped up unaccompanied on my FB news feed this morning. For lot's of information look here and here and stay tuned.

You can find an amusing "obituary" for facts here. It doesn't hurt that the essay works by mocking Florida Congressman Allen West. And even if it is a sad day, it is difficult to feel badly for those left behind: "Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion."

There is an appreciative essay on Allan Sekula's new work here at The Guardian.

Really smart and relentlessly decent are, in my experience, a rare combination in a single person. At Crooked Timber, this post contains a link to a series of very touching and insightful comments offered at an Oxford memorial service for the late G.A. Cohen who seems to have been among the rare.

There is a new book out with the self explanatory title Photographs Not Taken: A Collection of Photographers' Essays. You can find a review here at The Guardian. Many of the contributions are by photographers whose work I very much admire. And, speaking of smart and decent, you can find an excerpt from Nina Berman's contribution here at The New Yorker.

What Genre is This?

Today, the NPR program "This American Life" issued this press release retracting and apologizing for a segment they had run a while back on the way Apple does business in China. I linked to the TAL segment in this post but don't think the fabrications being discussed in the retraction make any substantive difference to what I wrote.

The retraction will likely bring out two constituencies. First, there will be the Apple devotees who simply cannot imagine that Saint Steve or his legacy can be criticized. That resurgence should be squelched promptly by the fact that there have been a plethora of other reports of Apple's troubling policies. Second, there will be the right-wing press who no doubt will take this as an indicator of how the ultra-liberal media juggernaut that is NPR needs to be brought down a notch or two more.

In any case, this episode highlights another recent essay, this one in The New York Times Sunday Book Review a couple weeks back. The issue is how to sort out journalism from fiction from creative non-fiction in reasonably clear ways.* Responding to "The Lifespan of a Fact", Rebecca Solnit sent this letter to The Times in which she suggests why it is important to get that task right:

To the Editor:

I was so pleased to see Jennifer B. McDonald take on and take a stand on one of the big issues in contemporary writing, the mixed-up, messed-up mash-up between truth and fiction. The potential for serious damage grows as this approach creeps out from memoir (where maybe you’re sort of entitled to lie about yourself, if not anyone else) and into works about strangers, including people who — as the stalwart fact-checker Jim Fingal points out — are not going to be publicly represented any other way, and about politically and culturally complex figures and events. When I teach, I tell my students that it’s a slippery slope from the nasty thing their stepfather never really did to the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq never really had.

A good artist is not hindered by her responsibility to both subject and readers, but stimulated to go deeper, look harder, write better. Maybe that’s because the stories don’t belong to you. You belong to them.

REBECCA SOLNIT
San Francisco

And that is why the retraction the folks at "This American Life" have issued is important.
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* I took up this matter a while ago in this series of posts on Ryszard Kapuściński.

P.S.: You can find the report that led "This American Life" to retract their segment on Apple in China here. I will note that part of what provides the background to this episode is the ridiculous notion that moralism is the proper response to political-economic exploitation or hardship. As one of the people interviewed for the follow-up suggests: “Foxconn bad. iPhone bad. Sign a petition. Now you’re good. . . . That’s a great simple message and it’s going to resonate with a public radio listener. It’s going to resonate with the New York Times reader. And I think that’s one of the reasons he’s had so much traction.” (The 'he' is Mike Daisey, who produced the initial TAL segment.) Of course, the point of my initial post on Apple and working conditions in its supply chain were directed specifically at that error.

Andrew Breitbart, “duplicitous bastard”* and the Problem With Liberals

Andrew Breitbart, the reactionary wingnut, dropped dead today, apparently of natural causes. He was relatively young and he leaves a family, including four children. For those children this is very sad.

I never met Breitbart. Thankfully. I know of him only through his serial, very public disregard for the truth and his enraged ranting. While I would not wish him dead, I can honestly say I feel literally no sadness whatsoever at his death. What does sadden me is that some liberals feel the need to talk about how a nice a person Breitbart could be over drinks or coffee. You can find a 'for instance' here at The American Prospect. The author of the piece, Sally Kohn, is described in the sidebar as "a political commentator, grassroots strategist and Fox News Contributor." I do not know her or her work at all. What her self-description brings to mind is self-proclaimed bigot Juan Williams, another person who thought he could play both sides of the fence only to discover that hanging out at FOX distorts your view of reality.

Perhaps Breitbart didn't lie about ACORN or about Shirley Sherrod. In each instance he just knowingly - indeed, gleefully - peddled bullshit in the technical sense of the term. In doing so, he repeatedly established his wholesale indifference to the truth. Arguably, that makes him worse than a liar - because he was 'not even' one. And, of course, snotty prep school kid that he was, Breitbart was especially adept at peddling his bullshit at the expense of those considerably less advantaged than he. I have a difficult time imagining how charming he'd have to be over drinks to compensate for that. The problem with liberals is that they can never quite seem to keep their eye on the politics.
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P.S.: The fact that Breitbart repeatedly and knowingly flaunted the truth makes it disingenuous to compare him - as does the author of this piece in The L.A. Times - to Christopher Hitchens (who could be as much a bully) let alone Jon Stewart. Neither Hitchens nor Stewart can be described as a propagandist. Breitbart was one. Period. Efforts to establish a sort of "Tastes Great! - Less Filling!" moral equivalence on this represents the cult of putative journalistic objectivity at its most mindless.

* This, of course, is how Breitbart characterized Ted Kennedy when he died. It seems fitting to quote him here.

Mind the Ideology

Discover here at Mother Jones why pervasive Republican talking points on the economy are bullshit.

What Is So Christian About That?

There is a remarkably sad story here in The New York Times about what your Grandma knows, but fundamentalist Christians seem not to have learned. The bottom line? If men and women, especially fertile young men and women, have unprotected sex the quite predictable result is babies!

What the Fundamentalists like to call "natural family planning" clearly is not birth control. Neither is it family planning. The couple profiled in this report used "natural family planning" to have multiple unplanned babies in a half dozen years. Neither, after all that, is it natural since it requires men and women to count and calculate and to abstain at the point where fertility and desire are strongest. And refraining or abstaining at that point amounts to intervening in "natural" processes that have evolved to maximize the chance to reproduce.

Now Sam and Bethany are recanting the propaganda they spewed early on about the wonders of "natural family planning." But that is not going to do anything to protect all the earnest young Christians who follow their unsound, irresponsible advice. That is the sad part of the story - these kids were so damned sure of themselves, they embraced their fanaticism so thoroughly, that they freely peddled advice to other kids. That advice turns out to be just so much bullshit. And now Bethany and Sam go on about their lives with a shrug - "oh well!" - and 15 minutes of fame in The Times.

Mistaken Identity

Op-Ed Columnist

Who Is James Johnson?

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: June 16, 2011

I noticed this headline on this column on the Op-Ed page at The New York Times today and I wondered "Who's asking?" Then I realized that it was another person Brooks is interested in. And then I realized is that what Brooks is really interested in is obfuscation. He wants to shift primary blame for the ongoing financial catastrophe onto the government. No way the private sector could bear any responsibility. He notes in passing toward the end of his indictment of Fannie Mae, that: "The Wall Street-Industry-Regulator-Lobbyist tangle is even more deeply enmeshed." Just so. But where, then, is the outrage at the speculators on Wall Street and the ways they bought influence and regulatory 'reform?' Brooks doesn't evince any whatsoever. Yet he is simply repeating a recurrent theme in the right-wing narrative of the political-economic collapse. The primary problem, unfortunately, is not that the government aimed to help get people into sound housing. The problem is that politicians - at the behest of the financial industry and its cronies - eliminated restraint on the speculation in securities. Brooks knows better. He only need to read another of his colleagues at The Times (or other commentators) to see that the case for blaming the government or the working class is perhaps less persuasive than he lets on.

The Consequences of Speaking the Truth in American Politics - Part 2

"No one has ever doubted that truth and politics
are on rather bad terms with each other . . ."
~ Hannah Arendt

James O'Keefe - pimper of truth - outside
the U.S. Federal Building in New Orleans,
Louisiana on May 26, 2010.

Well, a high level official at the U.S. Department of State has been fired because he managed to admit in public that the Obama administration's ongoing treatment of Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of giving classified files to WikiLeaks, is “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” According to news reports, P.J. Crowley "resigned" his position, but we all know better than that. He was forced out for telling the truth. Does the administration think this sort of behavior makes their position less stupid?

And speaking of stupid . . . the higher ups at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and at NPR must be a least a tiny bit chagrined for falling over themselves to fire folks in the wake of conservative outrage after one of their employees told the truth about the Tea Party and the GOP. Heads rolled and, on inspection, the putatively incriminating video of said truth telling, produced by serial liar James O'Keefe, turns out to be just the sort of crap everyone ought to have expected in the first place.

BP & the Photoshop Business

An attentive blogger, John Aravosis, has called out BP for using photo-shopped photos of its 'crisis response center' in an effort to make themselves look . . . what? minimally responsive to the crisis? I've lifted the detail above from the initial post, but it comes from BP's we page. The observation was picked up by The Washington Post here. Wouldn't a more effective PR policy on BP's part be to actually repair the leaking (oh, sorry, the splurging, gushing) well and then get on with the task of trying to remedy the disaster they've created? This makes one wonder how such a half-assed outfit avoided some similar disaster for so long. (According to news reports, of course, they haven't - they've just ignored problems or covered them up.) Whenever I see this sort of bumbling I think . . . 'You couldn't make this stuff up!'

Orwell's Shadow (2) ~ How "Torture" Disappeared From (or, Was Banished By) American Journalism

"Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute (sic) experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language." ~ Robert Fisk

In my last post (here) I recommended the essay by Robert Fisk on journalism and the language of power from which I've lifted this passage. The "we" and "our" he refers to are journalists. His complaint is that the press (print and broadcast) have embraced the language of the powerful. Sometimes this is because of the putative need to retain "access"; sometimes it reflects the convention of being "fair" or "neutral" or "objective." Either way, capitulating to the powerful and their claims leads, as Fisk indicates, to decidedly partial and political reporting.

As if on cue, yesterday Glenn Greenwald posted on a newly released report on the U.S. media entitled "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media." The study finds that the four largest circulation national print news outlets - The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today - capitulated more or less completely to the campaign by the Bush Administration to redefine interrogation techniques commonly recognized to be torture as something other than torture. They did so in a sharp break from their own historical practice, reaching back nearly a century, and from their own descriptions of practices in other countries. ("They" torture, "we" don't; we simply rely on "enhanced interrogation techniques.") These outlets, thereby, did not maintain "neutrality" or "objectivity" or "fairness" but actively connived in legitimating the torture policy that the Bush administration implemented.

This is a damning report. We are not talking about the clowns at FOX "News" here. We are talking about the purportedly "liberal" media. Fortunately, as Fisk notes, people are not stupid. They know torture when they see it and can call it by its name.
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P.S.: While I don't want top ring my own bell on this one (too loudly), this is a pattern that I have posted about repeatedly - see here and here and here, for instance.

P.S.(2): You might want to see Andrew Sullivan's post on this, and the reply issued by the lackeys at The New York Times. Why read Pravda, when you can read the American mainstream media.

P.S.(3): Update 7/6/2010 ~ See this follow-up by Glenn Greenwald on the vapid response of editorial higher-ups at The Times.

Orwell's Shadow: Fighting talk: The new propaganda ~ Robert Fisk

Fighting Talk: The New Propaganda
Robert Fisk

The Independent
21 June 2010

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House – most of the time – and our reporters' lexicon, is the same. Yes, let's be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Most of all, it's about the terror of power and the power of terror. Power and terror have become interchangeable. We journalists have let this happen. Our language has become not just a debased ally, but a full verbal partner in the language of governments and armies and generals and weapons. ... more ...

A reader, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, emailed the other day, calling my attention to this essay - both acute and astute - by Robert Fisk in The Independent. I thought I'd pass along his recommendation. Fisk argues, I think persuasively, that the news media - journalists, editors, publishers and producers, networks - are hostage to language and concepts that are peddled for political purposes and that they, the media, are relatively oblivious to the history and purposes of that language and those concepts. If we need always ask 'who is using this photograph and for what purpose,' the same is true too of words. Thanks Stanley!

The Charlatan

OK, here is the key passage from this essay/interview in The Guardian yesterday about/with Slavoj Žižek:

"He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. 'I will tell you the truth now,' he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. 'Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah.'"

He, of course, is the master himself. I could not have said it better myself. Although, no doubt, I simply am failing to grasp his deep irony and intelligence. Maybe so.

I like to flatter myself that I am reasonably bright. And, over the years, I have worked through a lot of difficult philosophy and social science. I even understood quite a bit of it. In all honesty, though, having tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to read Žižek, I never understood a word the man said. It simply was not worth the effort. On his own say so I guess there is no reason to even waste time worrying about this latest missive.
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P.S.: For those inclined to succumb and enlist in the Žižek fan club I recommend A review essay by Alan Johnson (no relation) in Dissent (Fall 2009) entitled "The Reckless Mind of Slavoj Žižek." It seems that, setting all the irony and self-parody aside, performance art can have dangerous - meaning authoritarian - political implications.

Maybe Chuck Schumer Should Read the Israeli Press?

"The Palestinian people still don’t believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution. More do than before, but a majority still do not. Their fundamental view is, the Europeans treated the Jews badly and gave them our land — this is Palestinian thinking [...] They don’t believe in the Torah, in David [...] You have to force them to say Israel is here to stay. The boycott of Gaza to me has another purpose — obviously the first purpose is to prevent Hamas from getting weapons by which they will use to hurt Israel — but the second is actually to show the Palestinians that when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have an economic advancement. When there’s total war against Israel, which Hamas wages, they’re going to get nowhere. And to me, since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid and people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go, makes sense." ~ New York Senator Charles Schumer (June 2010).

"The vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians are willing to live alongside each other peacefully in separate states, according to an independent poll released on Wednesday. Results of the poll, commissioned by the grass-roots OneVoice Movement, indicate that 74 percent of Palestinians and 78 percent of Israelis are willing to accept a two-state solution." ~ Ha'artez (19 May 2010).