October 20, 2009

October 12, 2009

The Bubble from Abroad

By David Cogswell

That's what moving about, this traveling is; it's this inexorable glimpse of existence as it is during those few lucid hours, so exceptional in the span of human time, when you are leaving the customs of the last country behind and the customs of the next one have not yet got their hold on you.

Louis Ferdinand Celine
Journey to the End of the Night

Travel pushes you toward a pan-cultural reality, a view that is not entirely encapsulated in a single national culture. Because of travel I'm never completely immersed in the American bubble. But it's only by getting out of the bubble that one can really see it. We are like a fish, which has no concept of water because water is the total medium of its life. It has never encountered not-water, so it has no idea of it. The corporate state has gained such ubiquitous control over the media in America and has so effectively co-opted it for its own purposes as a propaganda machine, that many Americans have no idea how powerful the corporate state's influence it is over their own vision of reality.

When you are outside of the bubble, its influence over you begins to loosen its hold and you begin to see the world a little more the way non-Americans see it. After being in Italy for a week, I boarded a plane from Florence to Munich and I picked up the International Herald Tribune, ("The Global Edition of the New York Times") and was smacked in the face with the blatant bias of corporate America in the top left story on the front page. It was headlined "Europe Still Sputtering as Crisis Cools in U.S." by Nelson D. Schwartz and Matthew Saltmarsh. The subhead says "Fears of 'Eurosclerosis' return as hopes for fundamental change fade." The same story appears in the New York Times as "Crisis Leaves Europe in Slow Lane"

Though this is a front page story, it's not a news story. It's a polemic, a harsh slap in the face to Europe for hesitating in its rush to follow America into free market fundamentalism. The free market fundamentalists, by the way, are not really for free markets and competition. They are for corporate controlled markets, corporate controlled governments, corporate controlled everything. They want no government intervention in anything they do. They are the corporatists.

The story poses "fundamental change" as a desirable thing versus "Eurosclerosis" as a deadly disease. But what is this change the authors are referring to? Europe, it says, "finally seemed prepared to tackle longstanding economic challenges like rigid labor markets, runaway government spending and a rapidly aging population." But now, "Leaders who once spoke optimistically of fundamental changes aimed at enhancing productivity have turned to more prosaic tasks of protecting jobs and avoiding painful political choices."

These "fundamental changes" are changes toward free market fundamentalism for the advantages of corporations over people. The authors portray the U.S. as happily "shaking off" the recession while Europe "sputters." But what is this productivity they talk about. Let's look at this language. To the layman, "productivity" sounds good. We work hard, we're efficient, we produce a lot. "Americans are the most productive workers in the world," the senators say. But "productivity" here is a technical term. It's economist's jargon for the amount of income produced for the corporation versus the cost of labor. High productivity means cheap labor. If you work for the company, your salary is seen as a cost, a negative on the balance sheet. This conversation is from the standpoint of the owners, the shareholders.

When used in a lay context, such as in the news, it becomes a kind of code. You can talk about productivity in a way that sounds good, and for the corporation it is. But unless you're a shareholder, more productivity means less money for you. This is the kind of thing that causes people to vote against their own best interests.

The article refers to "job protection" as "prosaic," as in "commonplace or dull; matter-of-fact or unimaginative." To these writers, job protection is an old, outdated value, like human rights, or the Geneva Conventions, which Bush's attorney general Alberto Gonzales called "quaint." Meanwhile, America is portrayed as doing much better, shaking off the recession, and, of course still avoiding any encumbering regulations that might prevent Wall Street speculators from driving the system to the brink of collapse again, and then picking the pocket of the public to bail them out again. No worries in the U.S. about anything so "prosaic" as job protection. Thousands are losing their jobs, their homes, but no matter. We are shaking off the recession, Wall Street is humming and all is well, except for people who have to work for a living. A year after the crash when the American people were told they would have to bail out the big banks and then a new regulatory structure could be put in place to reel in the speculators, the new regulations remain only promises.

For those who have little, it will be taken away. This is free market fundamentalism. This is the change they seek. This is what "old Europe", as Donald Rumsfeld called it, is dragging its feet on. This is the New World Order. Government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. And just what does the IHT mean when it refers to "tough political choices" about an "aging population"? What does the corporate state plan to do about all those people?

It's not really that Old Europe is any more old-fashioned than the U.S., it's just that there is only so far down you can push the people before you meet resistance. In the U.S. power is more consolidated, and so is communications, which makes the propaganda system more effective because all the corporate news channels speak with a unified voice. They all speak the language of the corporate New World Order. In Europe there is more diversity based on the fact that there are many nations with their own languages, and their own traditions going back centuries. And governments that still exhibit some concern for their people.

The article says that Europe is being left behind by the US and China, which will in effect become the G2, according to C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, leaving Europe behind. Now get this: Bergsten is quoted as saying: "Ideally, it would be the G-3, but Europe doesn't speak with a single voice and they can't coordinate and function the same way the U.S. and China can," Mr. Bergsten said. It says explicitly that while Europe is diverse, the U.S. is like China in that it can speak with one voice.

The free market fundamentalists often speak with praise about China, which is called a communist country but is really an authoritarian capitalist state, the ideal model for the corporatists. As Mussolini said, fascism might be called corporatism because it is the merger of corporate and state power. The corporatists oppose actual free markets and they oppose democracy, because it tends to inhibit their profit making efforts.

Over and over again you will see that the neoconservatives prefer China, an authoritarian state, to Europe, a confederation of democratic states, because it is more in tune with the corporate world order. Corporations have no national allegiances. They are multinational. Their only allegiance is to profit and to the maintenance of a world system which promotes profit, and a democratic system is not the right fit for them. That's why they are tearing down democratic structures and replacing them with authoritarian ones, such as the Patriot Act, indefinite detention without trial and so on.

The article portrays the US and China as leaving Europe in the dust because its countries are concerned with matters such as job protection. From the free market ideological point of view, the function of government is to serve business, the corporations, and that means keeping unions down, labor costs low, and keeping people out of the way of profit. It's easy to recover economically if all you are concerned with is Wall Street and the profitability of corporations. And when they fail, you just take the money from the public to prop them up again. That's so-called free market ideology.

The Times' embrace of this ideology, its blatant trumpeting of these values in a front page article is why I shed no tears when I hear of the Times' declining fortunes. The Times should take responsibility for its own troubles and not just cry that it is the rise of the Internet that has crippled its ability to function. No one had any advantage over the Times in making use of the Internet. It had the brand, the tradition, the reputation, the momentum. It should have led the way in the Internet. It was not the technology that killed the Times it was because it did not do its job.

When the Bush administration was leading the charge toward war with false claims, the Times should have been the first to investigate and question those allegations. Instead they put their reporter Judith Miller on the front lines of leading the cheers for war, using bogus information from Ahmad Chalabi, the crook and conman that the administration was setting up to be their source of false information to justify their attack on Iraq. (See the Times own telling of what went wrong here.)

In comparison with the Judith Miller fiasco, the Jayson Blair scandal was minor, though he got away with inventing all kinds of stories out of nothing, because there were relatively few consequences.

But the lead-up to the war in Iraq was one of the most important moments in recent history, when the country lingered on the edge of war. The public was reluctant, as always to go to war, but had been effectively scared shitless by the Bushies. And instead of exposing the false information for what it was, the Times became a major contributor to the effort by transmitting false information and putting its stamp of approval on it without really verifying it. Now nearly seven years later we are still tangled up in that war, still being drained of blood and money over it, out national morale still undermined.

The only way the Internet hurt the Times is that it put alternative sources of information within the reach of everyman. And since the Times had abdicated its role of reporting, betrayed its readers and put its credibility on the line in favor of those false claims, people turned to other sources that were doing the real reporting. And the Times became an accessory to mass murder. It relegated itself to being a secondary news source.

September 26, 2009

September 23, 2009

September 17, 2009

It takes a lot of space to drop a few hints about the weight of this man's word, but it's worth it because he is challenging one of America's biggest, fattest sacred cows, the 9/11 conspiracy theory, the official explanation of the U.S. government. You know, the one in which no one is held accountable, except the mythic, ever-elusive Osama Bin Laden, former CIA asset.

In tackling the question why so many people don't want to even hear the facts about 9/11, Roberts explains that Hitler himself very lucidly explained the theory of the Big Lie in the book he wrote while in jail for his goofy Beer Hall Putsch (before the big industrialists realized he had talent worth investing in). Hitler knew exactly what he was doing and wrote the book on it for others to follow. In Mein Kampf he explained that the masses would much more easily fall for an outrageous lie than a small one. With cool, amoral analysis he explained how one could manipulate the masses merely by having the audacity to lie on a scale that few could ever imagine. Merely having no moral restraint gives you an advantage over more "simple" people who do. Hitler wrote, "In the simplicity of their minds, people more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation." All you really need to win, according to this theory, is to be a psychopath with no conscience. It's very simple.

In the midst of the 9/11 catastrophe, virtually everyone was gripped with fear by the spectacular destruction and mass murder. And very quickly at that moment, while still in a state of terror people were given an explanation, which suddenly materialized within hours of an event that was supposedly a complete surprise. Once this narrative emerged, it was deemed to be complete and beyond question. Questioning was considered unpatriotic, even traitorous. "You're either with us, or with the terrorists," Bush said. And, "Let's not tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories." Arie Fleischer said, "Watch what you say." In the raging of the moment the official explanation became welded to the feelings of horror and helplessness. The incident created a fear of such intensity that it dug deep into the psychological wellsprings of most Americans. And there it implanted a belief system.

Like a boxer who rises from the canvas before the count of 10 but is still dazed, Americans were rushed into war before they could gather their wits. By the time the emotions began to clear and a more grounded perspective could be recovered, there was already so much invested in the wars, it was difficult for people to change course psychologically. There is too much invested in it. It would be hard to go back at that point and say: we were wrong. It's certainly more comforting to say, "Let's move on," than to dig into that horror story and maybe find something even more terrigying than what we already know.

That could have something to do with why a baffling number of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, even though it has long been acknowledged even by Bush himself that Saddam had no connection to the attacks at all. Among those who know it was not Saddam Hussein who launched the attacks, most still fall back on rest of the original story, and it is still maintained by the government and the establishment media. Now at the eighth anniversary of 9/11, there are marked shifts in the terrain regarding the beliefs about what took place there. The wish to find more definitive answers, to be able to assign guilt and responsibility and see some accountability, to resolve conflicts between the explanation and the facts of the case seems to be reaching a critical mass. As with any murder, the victim's families long for a sense of closure. And beyond them, large numbers of people around the world are not satisfied with the official explanation and want to know more. In a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll more than a third of Americans said they believed that either elements of the government let it happen, or had a hand in making it happen.

Even though mainstream thought leaders have set up the meme that the "truthers" are the conspiracy theory freaks on the left equivalent to the the "birthers" on the right, (whose cause is to prove that Obama was not born in the U.S.) the group of people who want to see a more thorough and independent investigation of 9/11 is growing in size and it is not comprised only of lunatics. Many high-level people in our society now stand on the side of those who want a new investigation. Wanting a thorough, independent investigation is a serious issue all to itself. It does not require a belief that it was "an inside job" or anything other particular explanation. It just means wanting to find the truth, to separate false stories from real ones. This is the minimum due the families of those who died in the attacks as well as those who have died in the wars or are dying from lung disease from Ground Zero on 9/11.

It's very strange lately to see these questions increasingly surfacing in popular culture, so much so that the mainstream media has to deal with the issue, and try to find another stance toward it than just heaping hostility and ridicule on anyone who questions. This appears to be quite challenging. A writer of the quality of Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, who writes brilliantly about mainstream politics, is overcome with loathing when he has to address the subject of the 9/11 Truth movement. When it comes to someone questioning the 9/11 official story, no amount of venom that he can summon seems to be enough. The normally poised observer is suddenly almost beside himself with disdain and contempt. It was quite striking when he was recently involved in a written debate about 9/11 with David Ray Griffin, who has written a number of books about the inconsistencies of the official story. He seems furious that he even has to address the subject.

This furiousness is telling. There's been a subtle role reversal as confidence in the official explanation of events has eroded. Now that the desire for a thorough, independent investigation not controlled by the Bush administration is no longer a fringe position, is moving into the mainstream and perhaps on the verge of achieving some sort of critical mass, it is the defenders of the official conspiracy theory who are starting to seem like the hysterical ones in their desperate attempts to stem the tide of disbelief.

The debate between Taibbi and Griffin (see Alternet) is a fascinating example of role reversal between the opposing camps of conspiracy theorists. Taibbi has said that "9/11 conspiracy theorists" are "idiots" because "9/11 conspiracy is so shamefully stupid." Something, however, persuaded him to go up against David Ray Griffin, a theologian, a scholar who has turned his scholarship for the last several years to exposing what is wrong with the 9/11 Commission Report. Taibbi has never seriously looked into it because he considers it stupid and not worth looking at. Right or wrong, he was very poorly equipped to go up against Griffin in a debate. Griffin is verbose, but he comes off as calm, polite, encylcopedically knowledgeable about 9/11 and well-versed in debating its points. Taibbi's name calling was not much of a match for him.

Normally genteel and polite people drop their manners when it comes to 9/11. Ariana Huffington, writing in support of Van Jones, the Obama official who resigned under fire for signing a petition calling for an investigation, wrote that she "detest[s] 9/11 Truthers." She not only disagrees with their calls for an investigation, apparently, she detests them. Not Jones himself, however. He was just "wrong to allow himself to be associated with them."

I don't want to list newsclips here, but every day there are breaks on this story. A petition calling for a referendum on whether or not to have an independent investigation of 9/11 was finally accepted in New York after much resistance from local officials. They had been saying thousands of the signatures are not valid, but the argument was finally overwhelmed by the rising numbers of signatures. Voices from around the world are calling for an investigation. Yesterday a report of two Swiss scientists from the University of Zurich added their names to the list of questioners of what they call "the official Bush version" of the attacks. (MWC News). Professor Ganser said, "Three thousand humans were sacrificed for strategic interests. The more we explore, the more we doubt the Bush version. It is conceivable that the Bush government was responsible. Bush has lied so much already! And we already know that the US government planned an operation in 1962 that was approved by the Pentagon that would have sacrificed innocent US citizens for the government's own interests ... We only ask questions."

Of course 3,000 was only the beginning, there have been thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were justified by 9/11, and tens of thousands of casualties, and uncounted numbers of Iraqi and Afghan deaths. Questions indeed.

One does not have to be a "truther" or a "conspiracy theorist" or really to have any theory at all to object to the way the Bush administration tried to squelch an investigation from the beginning. It was only after literally years of very loud objections by family members of victims of 9/11 that the administration finally relented to allow an investigation at all, but only one with very little money, very little time, and a Bush administration ally in control of every item that went into the report. That alone is enough to call for a real investigation. There is no need for theories.

September 14, 2009

September 10, 2009

July 10, 2009

November 5, 2009

October 27, 2009

October 16, 2009

September 25, 2009

September 20, 2009

September 15, 2009

On the Mike Malloy radio show, which Brad of Bradblog was hosting, McGovern mentioned a new book by James W. Douglass called JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It delves into the history of the Kennedy assassination and the well-known connections between the crime and the agency. Kennedy got pissed at Dulles over his misrepresentation of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and fired him, saying he would tear up the CIA and throw the pieces to the wind. But not until after the next election, scheduled to take place a year after he was killed. When Kennedy was dead and Johnson was president, he appointed a commission to carry on an inquiry into the death (as opposed to a criminal investigation), and Allen Dulles turned up on the commission. Any president since that time has got to have the image of Kennedy getting his head blown off on a Dallas street clearly embedded in his mind. This is only reality. If you push against power, you get pushed back. Obama is no fool, he's read history. He knows about Lincoln, Martin Luther King and so many other political figures who have been killed. He's a brave man to even place himself in the position he is in. He is also a pragmatist. He does want to establish a legacy and I don't think he wants to be murdered just yet.

So when people complain that he is not upsetting the apple cart of the military and the CIA and not really standing up strong to corporate America, one must consider that aspect of the situation. He is a pretty middle-of-the-road guy anyway. He wants to play the game of being president within the rules as it is now being played. Maybe, maybe if he is very successful within those margins narrowly proscribed by the reigning power structure, he may be able to effect some meaningful change, maybe not. But it makes sense to keep in mind what he is up against.

That is not to say that I advocate just sitting and swallowing it all. Not at all. To me, the most remarkable thing about Obama, though he is an extraordinary individual, is still the movement of the people that put him where he is, in spite of all the election-neutralizing muscle of the Right Wing. The power of the people to overthrow the established clique and put in someone who was slightly outside of the old guard was the most impressive thing about 2008, more impressive than Obama himself. Because he responded to the urgent calls of the people for change, he rode a wave to power.

That grassroots movement is still the force I have most faith in in terms of effecting meaningful change in America. That is the force that can and must move and change corporate America, to dethrone the corporate power structure of the country and revive democracy.

Even though I think there is some basis to the arguments that Obama is a tool of the corporate elite -- who isn't to some degree? -- it does not make me despise him or think he lacks all integrity. If he really tried to carry out a much more radical agenda, he probably would not last very long. In a sense that is all beside the point. It is up to the majority of the people who want a government that serves people not corporations to push this country in a good direction. We can do this.

September 11, 2009

A Harvard Business School study in 2004 showed that file sharing did as much to promote music sales as it did to reduce them. (See also Harvard University Gazette, Washington Post or CNET News.) But the big recording corporations can't shake the feeling that someone is taking something from them and the fuss continues, big corporations flailing futilely against the evolution of technology and culture, but with no effect on the final outcome. (see current news stories on file sharing)

People downloading MP3 files to play a song for themselves is of course a different thing than a crime syndicate making copies of pirated music in order to sell them. The record industry lawsuits seemed to focus on ordinary people sharing files. In the case of downloading for personal use the principle of diminishing returns applies. It is virtually impossible to listen to thousands of files. It takes a few minutes to listen to each one once. So some guy downloads a large number of files and they sit on his hard drive. What is it?

Back in the '70s and '80s people could and did make cassette recordings of any recording on vinyl, cassette or CD they could get their hands on or anything that played over the airwaves. The copies were not as perfect as the copies made with digital recordings. But the standard of high fidelity reproduction at the time was much higher, so the quality of the reproduced sound was often much better than what people listen to with MP3s or CDs today. The fact is, as avant garde composer John Cage pointed out half a century ago, the emphasis has shifted from ownership to use. Who cares about owning anything? All I care about is what I can listen to right now. I have access to more music right now at this moment than I could listen to in years of sitting. I have hundreds of LPs and a turntable, hundreds of cassettes, hundreds of CDs, hundreds of MP3s. I can turn on the radio and in the New York metropolitan area choose from many stations. I can put on Internet radio and tune into an infinite range of music. My cable TV network has Music Choice with maybe another hundred channels of music w/o commercials in a great variety of genres.

When people download a file, they probably want to listen to it at that moment. They may not listen to it again for a long time, or maybe never. If their hard drive or their iPod crash, it is gone. Their "ownership" is moot. Listening to music is not about owning it. It's more like popping a nickel into a juke box and listening to something right now. The music on my iPod Nano would take a week to listen to straight through. I put it on shuffle and listen to a few minutes of it when I have time. It may take a very long time for a particular song to come up. And there are so many other sources of music available to me at any given time.

And yet, people will still buy a CD when it is presented to them in an appealing package, with interesting notes, photos. When you walk up to a Starbucks counter and spend $4 on a cup of coffee, why not pop for a few more bucks and buy the new Creedence CD. You can load it on your iPod, or pop it in a player, or lose it along with the disposable coffee cup and not care. It was an impulse purchase. It satisfied a momentary need and that's the end of it.

It's hard to say how well anyone fully comprehends the world of digital technology that we are now hurtling through. The potentials of the new technologies are far beyond what we now realize. It reminds me of the moment when Edison wired New York City for electricity in order to put up electric lights. He wasn't thinking of electric razors and can openers or phonographs or laptops, and yet those potentials were all there. Marshall McLuhan created conceptual tools for understanding how the media we create in turn transform us profoundly, but it only hints at where it is all going. Meanwhile, the corporate world continues to flail around in its attempts to hold everything together in a constellation that passed 30 years ago. They look so pathetic doing so.

For more on the battle over file sharing, see this article on Putumayo from 2006: "Breathing Life Back into the Record Industry"

In the 21st Century, being naive to the workings of corporate media can get you killed.

Chomsky For Beginners written by David Cogswell, illustrated by Paul Gordon, published by For Beginners LLC, is a documentary comicbook about Noam Chomsky the man, the linguist and the political voice, but more than anything, it is a guide to media propaganda, how the corporate-owned mass media are designed not to inform you but to manipulate you for the benefit of the owners.

Order Chomsky For Beginners from Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com

Interviews with Noam Chomsky

See also Existentialism For Beginners.

Post Script, Fortunate Son: The Making of an American President by J.H. Hatfield, second paperback edition, published by Soft Skull Press, 2001

For more on the late J.H. Hatfield, who wrote the controversial Bush biography Fortunate Son: The Making of an American President, see below

The following piece was written for the French and Spanish translations of J.H. Hatfield's Fortunate Son: The Making of an American President, published by Editions Timeli in Geneva, Switzerland. (See www.timeli.ch.)

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