Media - Corporate

Unemployment Up Dramatically! Stocks Rise! Huh?

dlindorff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:29:34 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their
heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that
unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a
record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists
had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a
percent!

What’s going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are
a “lagging” indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall
economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring
waiting until a recovery is well underway.

But that isn’t true with a deep recession like this one, because at
some point—and we’re well past that point—high and prolonged
unemployment leads to reduced demand for goods and services, and to a
psychology of fear and consumer withdrawal. Once people feel that they
aren’t going to find a new job soon, and once those who still have jobs
feel that their employment is not secure, they no longer buy things
except what they absolutely need. And in an economy where fully 72% of
economic activity is consumer spending, that is no longer a “lagging
indicator.” High, prolonged unemployment becomes a causal factor in the
economic downturn.

If people aren’t buying stuff, then companies won’t make it, which
means that they stop hiring, and even lay more people off, and so
unemployment becomes a downward spiral of cause and effect.

But what about the stock market rise? Why would investors think that a worse-than-expected jobs report is a good thing?

There are several explanations for this ugly phenomenon. First of
all, rising unemployment—particularly sharply rising unemployment—means
that the Federal Reserve will definitely not, for the foreseeable
future, raise interest rates. A rise in interest rates would hit
companies hard, and always batters the stock market, and the government
and the Fed don’t want to do either of those things. So investors
almost always jump into the market and push stocks up when they get
some signal that the Fed is going to lower, or at least hold the line
on interest rates. With rates effectively set at 0, the Fed can’t lower
them, but it is saying, no doubt with the bad news about unemployment
in mind, that it won’t be raising them anytime soon.

But there is another reason high unemployment may excite investors.
Current layoffs are likely, for many workers, to be permanent. A recent
report that productivity—work output per worker—was up at a 9.5 annual
rate in the Third Quarter, is an indication that those companies that
haven’t shut down operations are making or doing more with fewer
workers. That kind of thing happens in recessions, because as
joblessness gets worse, those workers who still have jobs become more
docile and are willing to be worked harder by management. Of course,
you get more on-the-job injuries, more stress-related illness, etc.
along with that kind of speed-up, but over the shorter term, it looks
good on the books if you’re cranking out more product with a lower
payroll.

Of course, longer term, this is all a disaster, not just for
laid-off and afraid-to-be-laid-off workers, but for the country as a
whole. You can’t rebuild an economy with more than one-in-ten workers
unemployed. And remember, that’s just the people who are our of a job
and still looking for one; it doesn’t count those who have been out of
work for so long, or who work in professions that are so gone (like
construction or maybe manufacturing Saturns) that they’ve just given up
looking, or those who have taken part-time jobs in ice-cream parlors or
selling apples to survive but who want to be fully employed again. If
you add those people into the mix (which is the way the US used to
count unemployment until the 1980s), you get an unemployment rate
closer to 20%, or one in five! And you sure can’t rebuild an economy
with one in five workers unemployed.

That’s what makes all the happy talk in the news and in Washington
about the recession being over because last quarter showed a 3.5%
annualized jump in the so-called Gross Domestic Product so ridiculous.

Most of that rise was the result of government subsidies to
car-buyers and first-time house buyers. It was a one-shot stimulus that
pushed forward spending, but it was no indication of a recovering
economy, just a spasm of spending using taxpayer money. Furthermore, an
excellent article in Businessweek by Michael Mandel noted that fully
one-percent of that GDP gain was the result of a failure by government
economists to account for a collapse in corporate spending on research
and development and on training and retaining intellectual assets (a
complicated way of saying that engineers, scientists and technology
workers were being laid off at a higher rate than other workers, and
much R&D work was being shipped overseas for good), So really the
“growth” of GDP in the third Quarter should have been at a 2.5% rate,
and even that was largely government pump priming, not recovered
economic activity.

The truth is, we’re falling deeper into recession, and apparently,
according to the October unemployment figures, at an accelerating rate.
And there is no indication that the Obama Administration or the
Democratic Congress are planning any significant jobs-creation program.
They seem to be happy with this.

So quick, run out and buy some stock! It’s the American thing to
do. Probably not a bad idea either, since those dollars you are using
will keep sinking in value as long as the Fed is constrained from
jacking up interest rates.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Our Out-of-Whack Economy and the Happy Talk Propagandists

dlindorff — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:42:23 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If you listen to the happy-talk folks at Treasury and the Fed, and
on the tube, you’d think things had finally turned a corner. The
economy grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in the third quarter ended
September 30. “The Economy is Back in Gear” shouted the headline on an
article by CNN senior writer Chris Isadore. “The recession ended
unofficially in September,” said a reporter on NPR.

There was some mention of the fact that earlier in the week there
were reports that consumer confidence had fallen, foretelling a
sluggish Christmas retail season, and that new home sales slipped an
unanticipatedly high 3.6% in September, when analysts had been
expecting a rise in sales. Meanwhile, new unemployment claims filed
during the third week of October jumped to 531,000, well above the
predicted 520,000, indicating that the official unemployment rate is
likely to top 10% in the next Department of Labor report due out in
early November. As well, fully one-third of the nation’s homeowners
were now said to be “underwater,” meaning that their outstanding
mortgage balances are greater than the current value of their homes.
Not surprisingly, foreclosures are continuing to surge.

How to explain this seeming oxymoronic situation? Well, that
positive economic growth figure, which comes on the heels of a 6.4%
decline in GDP in the first quarter and a .7% decline in the second
quarter, is, according to government analysts, actually largely the
result of two government stimulus programs—the “cash for clunkers”
program that induced people to rush out and buy a new car (usually a
much smaller, cheaper and, for the car makers, less profitable one than
they had been buying in prior years), and the $8,000 new home tax
credit, which led a lot of people to rush out and buy a first home.

The thing about those two stimulus programs is that they don’t so
much expand economic activity as they push it forward. That is to say,
a person who takes advantage of the cash-for-clunker program is
generally someone who owns a worn-out junker and needs to buy a new
vehicle anyhow, so what the government subsidy does really is just push
that purchase forward. Once the program ended, sales of cars plummeted
(not to mention that the bulk of the payments went to people who
purchased foreign cars, so the economic boost was just for dealers in
the US, not car makers). The same is true with houses. Very few people
would make the decision about whether to buy a home or not based on
just $8000, but the availability of an $8000 government subsidy for a
limited time would lead people to push forward their plan to purchase a
home.

What that means is, don’t count on this “recovery” to last into
next year. The cars that needed to be bought have been bought, and the
homes that people wanted to buy have been bought. The car subsidy is
gone now, and even extending the home buying subsidy, as the realty
industry lobby is pressing Congress to do, isn’t going to induce that
many more people to buy.

Meanwhile it’s worth noting an oddity about this “recovery” being
trumpeted in government and media. The relationship between the dollar
and the stock market has become very strange. If you look back at
stories on these two things to 2007, before the financial crisis hit,
and earlier, you’ll see myriad articles explaining that the dollar and
the US stock market tend to move in tandem. This was always explained
as being because as the dollar strengthens, foreign investors want to
put their money into dollar-denominated assets. Similarly, if the
dollar weakened, analysts would write confidently that the stock market
would be hurt as investors pulled their money out of US equities to
invest in markets denominated in appreciating currencies.

Now, the analysts say that as equities strengthen, the dollar will
fall, but if equities fall, the dollar will appreciate. The reason for
this new inverse relationship should be cause for considerable alarm.
Why? In fact, it turns out that the last eight months of a rising
equities market has been largely the direct result of a shrinking
dollar. This is because so much of the sales and earnings of companies
in the S&P 500 and the much narrower Dow Index are earned overseas,
denominated in foreign currencies, but accounted for on the books of
these US-incorporated firms in dollars, that as the dollar declines in
value, corporate sales and earnings appear to be growing. Reportedly,
as much as 80 percent of the appreciation in the S&P Index since
last March 9 when the market hit bottom can be attributed to the
dollar’s fall against major world currencies.

Financial writers and reporters on TV don’t mention this tectonic
shift. They just report the new relationship (Stocks up, dollar down,
stocks down, dollar up) as though that’s they way it’s always been. But
actually, this is a phenomenon has normally ben characteristic of Third
World, so-called “developing” economies. That since the end of 2008 it
has become characteristic of the US economy should be cause for concern.

So don’t be conned by the happy talk salesmen at the Fed and
Treasury and in the White House, or by their propagandists in the
newsmedia, who are trumpeting the latest GDP growth figure as a sign
that the recession is over, apparently in the hopes that people will
run out to the mall and start spending (in those remaining stores that
don’t have their windows taped or covered in plywood). What we’ve seen
was a blip on the chart, engineered by a couple of “going out of
business” sales by the car and housing industry.

Real unemployment—measured the honest way it used to be 30 years
ago, to include those who have given up looking for work or who are
working part time involuntarily—is hitting 20% (for those who are bad
at math, that’s one out of five working-age Americans). Foreclosures
are hitting a record. Half of laid-off workers are cashing out their
401(k)s in order to buy food. State and local governments, both major
employers, are hitting a wall as tax collections plummet and federal
stimulus funds run out. This is not the foundation for a renewal of
economic growth; it is the precondition for a renewed or prolonged
recession.

And if the dollar continues its slide, which is likely given the
US’s huge budget deficits and trade deficits, as well as the Federal
Reserve’s inability to raise interest rates (a move that could
strengthen the dollar but which would crush the economy), all those
things that Americans buy abroad which are no longer made at home, as
well as the oil that is imported, will cost that much more, driving
consumers further into the hole. And remember, 70% of US GDP is
consumer spending, a result of our decimation of our industrial base.

Recession ending? Don’t bet on it.

_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Fox Is News, Bad News

davidswanson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:04:16 -0400

By David Swanson

As someone who believes the producers of Fox News should be behind bars for promoting illegal wars and instigating domestic violence, and as someone who advocates never watching it, I feel compelled to speak up against the notion that Fox News is not a news outlet.

Now, Fox News does little investigative reporting. Mostly it chitters and chatters and re-processes. Nor does it stick with reliable information. It intentionally lies and distorts. It also screams and yells, demonizes and infantilizes. But these behaviors just make Fox News a small-time and untrustworthy news outlet that degrades the content and the form of our public discourse. These are not the reasons being widely offered for the declaration that Fox is not a news outlet at all.

To make that claim, we are being told that Fox News has an agenda and engages in activism. But every news outlet has an agenda, and I would like nothing more than to see the better ones engage in activism. Fox is owned by an international corporation, and generates xenophobic rallies against "socialistic fascism." This raises serious questions of foreign interference in our politics as well as pathetic ironies and sad hilarities. But, the central objection seems to be that Fox News has a right-wing agenda opposed by most Americans. That is true enough, and I almost always oppose Fox's agenda quite passionately. That more majoritarian agendas are not advanced by any major television networks is a severe defect in our system, not evidence of what constitutes real news.

The non-Fox television networks that we do have, with a few satellite, cable, and online exceptions, have agendas that are not terribly far removed from that of Fox. When Fox tells you to go out and rally against healthcare and explains what votes are coming up in Congress, it is doing something MORE democratic than what ABC News does when it reports on Congressional votes after the fact, explains them from the same corporate viewpoint as Fox, and makes clear that citizens are in no way involved in the process.

One of the best summaries of the "Fox is not news" argument is found in Adele Stan's "8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization" on Alternet. This is an intelligent argument from a talented writer on an excellent news site. But it is a news site with an agenda and a great deal of admirable and beneficial advocacy of activism. And I wouldn't want it any other way. Stan writes:

"Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda . . . ."

CNN and MSNBC don't have ideological agendas? Surely that's not seriously what's being claimed here. These news outlets oppose healthcare favored by most Americans, back wars opposed by most Americans, and generally advance a minority corporate agenda on a wide range of issues. MSNBC has begun including a few talking heads who sometimes stray from its overall agenda, but they are distinctly labeled as doing so, whereas most MSNBC reporting advances the same agenda as always, and under the obscuring banner of "objectivity" and the powerful pretense of no point of view at all. Thankfully, Alternet itself has quite a good agenda and provides a far better service to our nation than MSNBC or CNN. The accuracy of its reporting does not seem to be in any way put in doubt by its activism.

"Fox News Channel," Stan writes, "is anything but a news operation." Instead it's "a massive media campaign for the consolidation of wealth through unfettered markets." Of course Fox could be both of those things, but it isn't. It wants the markets very much fettered to the advantage of mega-corporate interests and against the rest of us. That does not, however, prevent its being a news organization, any more than the Nation Magazine's preference for socialistic solutions (a preference I share) prevents it from reporting news.

The "Fox is not news" campaign criticizes Fox for, in Stan's words, "declaring war" on President Obama. But I don't recall Alternet objecting to Keith Olbermann's rants against President Bush on MSNBC. What has happened is not that Fox has ceased to report news. What has happened is that Fox has begun criticizing a president in a way that most of the corporate media refuses to ever criticize any president, and a way that progressive media outlets are happy to criticize only Republican presidents. Now, Alternet has published criticism of Obama, including some written by me. And Fox New's fantastic racist falsehoods are not something I want to see emulated. But the general notion -- which, following the Bush-Cheney years, ought to be absurd on its face -- that a media outlet disqualifies itself by criticizing a president, is as much a function of the partisan loyalties of those diagnosing Fox's status as it is of Fox itself.

Here are excerpts from Stan's eight reasons that Fox News is not news:

"1. Glenn Beck, the community organizer -- No other news operation in memory has ever hired its own community organizer, at least not one tasked with the mission of organizing paranoid people to march through the streets of the nation's capital with signs depicting the president of the United States as a mass murderer."

Huh? Every protest I've ever helped organize in the streets of our nation's capital to depict Bush as a mass murderer has been promoted and energized by Pacifica Radio, Air America Radio, and all sorts of other online and radio news outlets, often including Alternet.

"2. Fox's alliance with the corporate-funded astroturf group Americans for Prosperity -- We've scratched our heads trying to come up with an analogous relationship between a cable news channel and a corporate-funded group that organizes fearful people to disrupt public meetings, but we came up empty."

Fox News has encouraged threats, intimidation, and violence. It may indeed be guilty of crimes, and that should be investigated. It certainly encourages rudeness and incivility on behalf of a murderous agenda. But when Ed Schultz reported on advocates of single-payer healthcare nonviolently and eloquently disrupting a Senate hearing on behalf of a majority of Americans and after having attempted all other approaches, he did so encouragingly -- and many were encouraged to use the same technique. Of course we didn't pay Schultz to do that. We couldn't have afforded to. (Although he was paid a handsome sum when he switched from rightwing to leftwing talk show host.) But the corrupting force that money has on our communications system is obscured rather than revealed when we oppose advocacy journalism too broadly.

"3. On-air fundraising for Republican PACs -- Fox News personalities encourage viewers to contribute money to, and visit the Web sites of, specific Republican-affiliated political action committees. We can't find a single instance of either CNN or MSNBC doing anything of the kind for Democratic causes."

But we CAN find that, and better than that, at good media outlets, and why wouldn't we want good media outlets to continue behaving that way if the current cartel were busted?

"4. Bill O'Reilly, stalker of those whose opinions he doesn't like -- We exhausted all avenues of research trying to find a news show host at another cable news channel who pays his producer to stalk people whose opinions he or she doesn't like."

Yet some of the best video reporting on the Fox- and CNN-promoted nonsense regarding Obama's place of birth, aired on all the channels, was generated by Mike Stark at FireDogLake.com. The best footage of Congress members' opinions on wars and healthcare are produced by roving "stalkers", because the corporate press corps does not ask useful questions. Fox News demonstrates that useful questions could be asked. It would just take an anti-Fox to do it.

"5. Sunday talk-show host who promotes Republican falsehoods."

Promoting falsehoods is, indeed, a serious argument that what is happening is not news. But Republican falsehoods doesn't seem essentially less newsy than the bipartisan falsehoods promoted on every channel (Iran's got nukes, Social Security is broke, Single-payer is unpopular, etc.).

"6. Fox News anchors, show hosts and pundits parrot GOP press releases."

Well, how the heck do you think the New York Times sold us the war on Iraq? This is bad news, not non-news.

"7. Fox News hosts urge viewers to join a particular political group."

Well, shouldn't they? In a nation where we had other media outlets with the same reach promoting other groups, wouldn't this be far preferable to, say, John Stewart promoting cynical scorn for everyone and everything?

"8. Glenn Beck, deranged inventor of paranoid conspiracies."

Yes, falsehoods is definitely to the point. Perhaps Fox News pushes too many falsehoods to count as news. But that's a distinct argument that should be made without all of these partisan, anti-activist encumbrances.

Why? Because it matters. It matters because there is a more destructive force in our communications system than a transparently rightwing buffoons gallery. That destructive force is the persistent myth of "objective" "viewpoint-free" reporting. When the "respectable" news outlets tell us that "objectively" we are going to have to escalate wars in order to be safe, and when they quote two "opposing" experts who both agree with that claim, thereby providing "balance," and they neither scream nor rant nor suggest that we citizens have any role to play, we are persuaded and disempowered.

When Fox News, in contrast, pushes its "fair and balanced" bullshit, we fight back. But the way to fight back is to build truly democratic media that promotes what we believe in without apology, and yet without the dishonesty that has damaged Fox in so many minds. The way to fight Fox is not to suggest that there is something respectable or praiseworthy about the bulk of the infofascistainment found on MSNBC and CNN.

Fox is owned by a nut job. MSNBC is owned by a weapons company. Where are our priorities? Do not support CNN or MSNBC. Support Alternet instead.

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

dlindorff — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:51:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined
“Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to
be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly
dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was
acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13
ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also
responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart
disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA
will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by
exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle
by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to
acknowledge the American government’s responsibility for poisoning them
and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and
grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to
man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune
illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the
general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its
battlefield use of toxins—most significantly the increasingly common
use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets—an
approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops
and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to
eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by military
affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the
obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry
saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent
Orange in Vietnam—the people on whose heads and lands the toxic
chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US
government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.

Thai Thi Nga, 16, 2nd-generation victim of US Agent Orange use in Vietnam

According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as
many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related
illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of
Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge
who ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” there are at least
three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are
suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans
and their children. It is estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese
in the country’s south currently suffer from chronic health problems
due to Agent Orange exposure, either to themselves, or to a parent or
grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom are retarded, and
others of whom cannot walk or have no use of their arms, need constant
care.

Veterans for Peace,
an organization whose membership includes a large number of Vietnam War
veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide funds for health
care, education, vocational education, chronic care, home care and
equipment to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam—a call which
Congress and the White House have consistently ignored. Tests have
found dioxin levels around the sites of the three main former US bases
in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 times recognized safe levels.
The US dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those bases
to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese fighters could use to approach
the bases, but it was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.

One organization that includes a number of American veterans of the
way, including former military doctors or soldiers who later became
physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.

It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given America’s use of two
nuclear weapons against civilian targets in Japan a few years later,
but back in World War II, in the midst of the most brutal
island-to-island fighting during the Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate
General in the Pentagon ruled that a military request for permission to
use herbicides against the Japanese on Pacific islands would be illegal
under the Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now called the
Geneva Conventions). He ruled that trying to destroy the crops of
civilians on those islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would be
a war crime. The US went ahead and used the herbicides anyway, arguing
that even though it was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since the
Japanese had already broken the laws of war by using strychnine to kill
military guard dogs in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side
breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.

But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used toxic materials
against US forces or against South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon
in the Vietnam War never even considered whether spraying a highly
toxic herbicide over 1.4 million hectares—12% of the total land area of
Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of the country—might be a
war crime.

Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its massive
defoliation campaign, about studies showing that Agent Orange was
heavily laced with deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some by
the chemical’s makers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and never even warned
the troops who handled the material daily, or who were sent out to
fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.

The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by America’s
criminal use of Agent Orange to defoliate a nation would be a good
place for President Obama to start earning his just-awarded Nobel Peace
Prize. He could kick off his peace campaign by finally honoring
President Richard Nixon’s immediately broken promise to provide several
billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Vietnam at the conclusion of
peace talks at the end of the war. Not a dollar of such aid was ever
given.

Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times could salvage a bit
of its journalistic reputation by having Dao or some other reporter
write a piece about the impact of America’s Agent Orange use on the
people of Vietnam.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Our Neighbors' Keeper: Local Cop Chiefs Want to Create a Nation of Snoops

dlindorff — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:54:04 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops
are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to
help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of
private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD
and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that
city.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty
journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I
co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard.
In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret “security
offices” run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) which
provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other
government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of
unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD’s “shoot to kill” gun use
policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords
themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA
Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the
LAPD’s “red squad,” known at the time as the Public Disorder
Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that
including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our
editorial collective. We only learned of Milazzo’s real identity years
later when she admitted disclosed it herself to a judge in a public
hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with
a group of activists she had “joined” undercover who had all been
arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their
identities to the court).

A subsequent lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU of Southern
California, eventually settled for a payment of $1.8 million by the
City of Los Angeles, disclosed that the PDID had for years been using
as many as 20 undercover cops to infiltrate and spy on over 200 legal
political and activist organizations in the Los Angeles area, gathering
rooms full of files on everyone from members of the National
Organization for Women to the staffs of certain members of the city
council. We also learned that the LAPD was providing those files to a
shadowy private outfit in San Francisco called Western Goals, which had
links to the ultra-right John Birch Society. Western Goals was
apparently seeking to serve as a private repository of dossiers on
leftists and political activists collected by local police all around
the country in a kind of end run around the restrictions on domestic
spying by the FBI that had been imposed after the post-Watergate
revelations about the abuses of the COINTELPRO era.

This is why Bratton’s idea stinks. Local police, because they are
local, are even more prone to rogue activities that will never be
exposed or monitored than are federal police.

As accommodating of police-state tactics as Congress has been,
especially since 9-11, at least some members of that body have raised
concerns and demanded investigations of some of those abuses by
organizations like the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But
city councils have been notoriously uninterested in monitoring the
unconstitutional activities of their local police around the country,
who have extremely powerful political connections and the support of
local media establishments.

Any attempt to organize a citizen’s watch program to look for
suspicious activity is bound to devolve into a police program of spying
on those who are outside of the “norm”: minorities, leftists,
activists, loners, people with alternative life-styles, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest. America faces no existential threat from
terrorism. It does face such threats from rampaging climate change,
political corruption, corporate power, economic collapse, and many
other things, but it is hardly threatened by terrorism, which has
killed far fewer people even in 2001 than have auto defects,
contaminated food, and insurance company denials of care.

Back in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration stoked an irrational
fear of terrorism in order to win passage of the Patriot Act and
acceptance of other actions, such as creation of a program by the
National Security Agency to use supercomputers to monitor millions of
Americans’ electronic communications. Many of those threats to freedom
remain in place today. Now Chief Bratton and his compatriots in police
departments around the country are trying to stoke that same irrational
fear of terrorism to move the country even further towards a
police-state mentality.

The last thing we need in this era of corporate-media-induced
conformity and citizen passivity is a bunch of self-appointed citizen
snoops calling in to the cops with reports on every neighbor who looks
or acts a little bit different.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The New York Times Trashes Single-Payer Health Reform

dlindorff — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:54:50 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, headlined
“Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,”reporter
Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government
insurance for all with faint praise.

To begin her article, Seelye quoted from a 2005 episode of the NBC
drama “West Wing,” in which two presidential candidates, a Democrat
played by Jimmy Smits and a Republican played by the always loveable
Alan Alda, are discussing health care reform. The Smits character says
his “ideal plan” would be Medicare for all. “That’s crazy” counters the
Alda Republican. Then Seelye sequed to an opinion piece recently penned
by real-life one-time Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern
(a noble figure who nonetheless has long-since been type-cast as an
out-of-touch extreme liberal loser), who favors expansion of Medicare
into a national single-payer system.

Turning to the real world, Seelye then trotted out several
economists, ostensibly to give a broad spectrum of arguments about the
idea of single-payer, but in fact carefully avoiding including anyone
who actually supports the idea of expanding Medicare.

As her representative liberal, she quoted Brandeis economist Stuart
Altman, an Obama adviser during the presidential campaign, who said
that while he is not “ideologically uncomfortable” with expanding
Medicare, such a move would be “disruptive.” Going then to what she
described as “the other end of the political spectrum,” Seeley quoted
Robert E Moffit, of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, who claimed
Medicare would mean too much government power over heatlh care.”
Finally, seeking what she could call middle ground, Seelye turned to
Dartmouth economist Jonathan Skinner, who claimed that expanding
Medicare would be good because it would cover everyone, but bad because
it would mean tripling the Medicare tax, currently 2.9% of paychecks.
If we were looking at a political yardstick here, Seelye started at the
16” mark (Altman), then went to the 36” mark (Moffit), and finally went
to the 24” mark (Skinner).

But where was an economist from the real left end of the political
spectrum, over in the single digits of that yardstick? Altaman,
representing the private insurance-based Obama approach, was hardly it!

Seelye might have gone to her colleague, columnist Paul Krugman, a
Nobel Prize-winning economist at Princeton, who has on a number of
occasions written and stated that a single-payer system such as
Medicare for all would be “far cheaper” than any private
insurance-based system. Krugman, at least, would be over by the 10” or
12” line on a political yardstick.

Never has the Times really analyzed the true costs and
benefits of the plan espoused in a bill, HR 676, authored by House
Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI), which would expand Medicare to
cover every American. Seelye mentions Rep. Conyers’ bill, but says
innocently that it is “going nowhere” in the House. In fact, his bill,
despite having been co-sponsored by 86 members of the House, has been
blocked from getting a public hearing in committee by Nancy Pelosi and
the House leadership, at the behest of the Obama White House, which is
dead-set against a single-payer reform of health care.

The reason the Times and the insurance industry-besotted
White House and Congressional leadership don’t want that analysis is
that it would show clearly that a single-payer system would mean vast
savings for all Americans.

Seelye quotes economist Skinner as claiming that Medicare expansion
to cover every American would mean a tripling of the Medicare payroll
tax—currently set at 2.9% of wages. But even if we accepted Skinner’s
math, it is meaningless without looking at the savings side.

Sure expanding Medicare would mean higher Medicare taxes, but what about the following:

Medicaid, the program that pays for medical care for the poor, and
is funded by federal and state taxes, would be eliminated, saving $400
billion a year.

Veterans’ care, currently running at $100 billion a year, would be eliminated.

Perhaps two-thirds of the $300 billion a year spent by federal,
state and local governments to reimburse hospitals for so-called
“charity care” for treatment of people who have no insurance but don’t
qualify for Medicaid, would be eliminated.

Individuals and employers would no longer have to pay for private insurance.

Several hundred billion dollars currently spent on paperwork by private insurers would be eliminated.

Car insurance would be cheaper as there would no longer have to be coverage for medical bills.

Federal, state and local governments would no longer have to pay to insure public employees.

In short, if every person were on Medicare, the overall savings
would overwhelm the small increase in the Medicare payroll tax of 5.8%.

The bottom line is that Canadians, who have Medicare for all,
devote 10% of GDP to health care. Americans, who have
private-insurance-based health care except for the elderly, devote 17%
of GDP to health care.

Seelye and the Times have never mentioned any of this. Neither does President Obama or the Democratic Congress.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Why are we signing the Boycott FOX news advertiser petition?

tempest — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:54:53 -0400

I signed my name to the Boycott FOX News advertisers, and then I got to thinking...

I was just complaining yesterday to a friend about how Big Corp owns us lock-stock-barrel. I was complaining about how the CORPORATIONS stopped dissenting voices at both FOX news and MSNBC.

I complained that I thought there was something inherently WRONG with that!!!!!!

The day that big companies decide what news people see? YIPES!

Why did I sign that petition again?

Somebody talk me down...

David Brooks' White Guy Nightmare: What If All Westerners Were Suddenly Sterile?

dlindorff — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:12:25 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t normally bother commenting on the writings of columnists like David Brooks, but today I can’t help myself.

Brooks earlier this week wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times elaborating on a blog on the site Marginal Revolution,
in which that site’s two economists speculated on what would happen if
a solar event instantly sterilized everyone, male and female, on the
side of the earth that was facing the sun at that moment, and if that
side happened to include both the US and Europe.

Brooks fretted that if the people of these regions (and off course
South America and Africa, which are on the same half of the globe, but
which Brooks conveniently ignores) were suddenly to realize they would
have no descendants, it would be the end of all “grand designs.” There
would, he said, be no more justice, no sacrificing for the future, no
more building of great buildings.

Brooks and the authors of this nightmare fantasy took the view that
if the citizens of what Brooks perceives as “Western Civilization” were
to have no hope of offspring, there would within weeks be an end to all
striving.

After I finished laughing, I started to think seriously about the idea...

For the rest of this column, please go to:
www.thiscantbehappening.net
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Agent Orange Causes Media Blindness

dlindorff — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:35:34 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by US military forces
in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited
forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long
been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating
diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now
it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American
journalists.

This is demonstrably the case at the New York Times, where a report in Saturday’s edition on new Agent Orange links
being found to Parkinson’s Disease and ischemic heart disease noted
that it could lead to many more Vietnam War Era veterans being eligible
for disability benefits and treatment, but completely failed to mention
the significance of the discovery for the millions of Vietnamese who
were also exposed to the chemical—and for their descendants.

The new link was announced in a report by a 14-member committee of
the Institute of Medicine, which had been asked to determine what
conditions might be traced to exposure to the chemical that had been
“used to clear stretches of the jungle” in Vietnam. As the article
noted, since 1994, the Institute of Medicine has to date found 17
medical conditions that can be traced to exposure to Agent Orange, “13
of which qualify veterans for service-connected disability benefits.”

There’s a lot wrong with this article, as written by Times
reporter Janie Lorber (though admittedly we can’t know what is her
responsibility and what is the handiwork of the newspaper’s editors)...

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

CounterSpin Radio: David Swanson on healthcare reform, Harold Meyerson on California’s budget crisis

davidswanson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:24:43 -0400

Source. Listen: [mp3] [RealAudio]

This week on CounterSpin: "Obama May Have To Wait for Health Reform" explained one July 22 headline. Leave it to corporate media to take a life-and-death issue for millions of Americans and reduce it to an item on a president's wish list. But if they're going to mainly cover healthcare policy as inside the Beltway politicking, how good a job are they doing even of that? We'll hear from activist and author David Swanson about the current state of play in healthcare reform efforts and what the media may have to do with it.

Also on the show: California’s budget crisis may be coming to a close and that may be good for governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and state politicians, but what about the potential crises to come, caused by a budget that severely cuts programs serving the elderly and the young, especially in the areas of health and education? And what are the prospects of any permanent solution for the wealthiest state in the union which seems perpetually broke? We’ll talk to Washington Post columnist and editor at large for the American Prospect Harold Meyerson.

Links:
— If Media Were Any Good, by David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 7/21/09)
— California: A Dream Decimated, by Harold Meyerson (Washington Post, 7/1/09)