The Wars That Will Not End And May Yet Expand
March 30th, 2007 - by: danny
WILLIAM BOWLES’ INI NEWSLETTER
We invariably have to be pursuaded to ‘support’ our government’s actions through the only outlet we have, one that exists in the ‘Looking-glass’ world of the media itself, whereby ‘opinion polls’ of various sorts, are used to reinforce an interpretation of the world that has already been created by the ‘news’ in the first place.
But it’s not only ‘opinion’ polls, it’s the very nature of ‘news’ coverage itself. The way it works is so obvious it verges on the ludicrous, yet it works as the reams of analysis of state/corporate news coverage reveals.
SENTATE SUPPORTS IRAQ WITHDRAWAL DATE
UN CALLS ON IRAN TO RELEASE BRITISH SAILORS
INCOME INEQUALITY GROWS
NYT: D. Kyle Sampson told a Senate panel Thursday c that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales was involved in discussions about firing United States attorney
CNN: The U.S. Senate passed a war spending bill that would require U.S. combat troops to leave Iraq by the end of March 2008, ignoring a veto threat from President Bush.
BUSH DERIDES DEMS – AGAIN AND AGAIN
CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS ANALYSIS:
Three months into the President Bush’s Iraq escalation strategy, the American people have continued to lose “faith in [his] conduct of the war.” Just last week, the House passed legislation calling for a major withdrawal of troops, and the Senate passed similar legislation today. But Bush continues his defiant support of the escalation plan, ignoring the calls for change from both the American and international communities. In a speech on the Iraq war yesterday, Bush extolled his own policies. “American forces are now deployed 24 hours in these neighborhoods, and guess what’s happening. The Iraqi people are beginning to gain confidence,” he said. But a BBC/ABC News poll this month revealed that only 18 percent of Iraqis have confidence in the U.S.-led coalition troops and almost 90 percent “say they live in fear that the violence ravaging their country will strike themselves and the people with whom they live.” On the domestic front, support for the escalation has dropped to new lows. A new Gallup poll shows that only 29 percent of Americans believe the escalation is working. “In addition, fully 80 percent of Americans ‘endorse a requirement that U.S. troops meet strict readiness criteria before being deployed to Iraq,’ while 60 percent ‘favor a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. troops from’ Iraq by fall 2008.’”
MARK FIORE”S ANIMATED COMMENT ON “THE DECIDER”
RET GENERAL WES CLARK: POLICY HURTS ISRAEL
I believe it shows that the Bush Administration’s current policy with Iran is not working. For the sake of stability in the Middle East, it’s time for direct diplomacy with Iran — now more than ever.
Today, we’re launching our third video blog for StopIranWar.com. I’m joined by Iraq war veteran Jon Soltz of VoteVets.org and Clark Community blogger Reg to discuss how President Bush’s get tough policy with Iran is undermining the security of our most reliable ally in the region, Israel.
http://www.stopiranwar.com/?page_id=16
RET: GENERAL BARRY MCCAFFREY VISITS IRAQ AND REPORTS
Iraq is ripped by a low grade civil war which has worsened to catastrophic levels with as many as 3000 citizens murdered per month. The population is in despair. Life in many of the urban areas is now desperate. A handful of foreign fighters (500+) – and a couple of thousand Al Qaeda operatives incite open factional struggle through suicide bombings which target Shia holy places and innocent civilians. Thousands of attacks target US Military Forces (2900 IED’s) a month – primarily stand off attacks with IED’s, rockets, mortars, snipers, and mines from both Shia (EFP attacks are a primary casualty producer) – and Sunni (85% of all attacks – 80% of US deaths – 16% of Iraqi population.)
Three million Iraqis are internally displaced or have fled the country to Syria and Jordan. The technical and educated elites are going into self-imposed exile – a huge brain drain that imperils the ability to govern. The Maliki government has little credibility among the Shia populations from which it emerged. It is despised by the Sunni as a Persian surrogate. It is believed untrustworthy and incompetent by the Kurds. There is no function of government that operates effectively across the nation – not health care, not justice, not education, not transportation, not labor and commerce, not electricity, not oil production.
There is no province in the country in which the government has dominance. The government cannot spend its own money effectively. ($7.1 billion sits in New York banks.) No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi – without heavily armed protection. The police force is feared as a Shia militia in uniform which is responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings. There is no effective nation-wide court system. There are in general almost no acceptable Iraqi penal institutions. The population is terrorized by rampant criminal gangs involved in kidnapping, extortion, robbery, rape, massive stealing of public property – such as electrical lines, oil production material, government transportation, etc. (Saddam released 80,000 criminal prisoners.)
BBC: The UN Security Council agrees a statement voicing “grave concern” at Iran’s capture of 15 British sailors.
THE LATEST NEWS ON IRAN STANDOFF
UNWISE BRINKSMANSHIP OVER IRAN
Former US Intelligence Professionals Are Alarmed
From Tomdispatch today, Tony Karon’s “Condi’s Free Ride, The Fantasy of American Diplomacy in the Middle East”
Charles Koch built the largest private corporation in the world, and then wrote a book about it. His publicist mailed it to me this week. It’s a great read. It just so happens that at the same moment I was reading about how Koch and J. Howard Marshall banded together to take control of Great Northern Oil Company, a newsflash appeared in my in-box announcing that Marshall’s widow is now known to have died of a drug overdose. The book in my lap contained the story of how J. Howard Marshall’s great fortune was created in life. The PDA in my hand told the story of how that great fortune destroyed a life. Then I realized something: Anna-Nicolle Smith died of a sudden and massive injection of unearned wealth.
THE NEW TB THREAT—SERIOUS!
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – A new deadly form of tuberculosis spreading through South Africa has now been found in rich nations in Europe as well as Canada and the United States, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.
Africa’s large population [of people living with HIV/AIDS] is at special risk from the particularly virulent strain, known as XDR-TB (extremely drug resistant), which had been documented in 35 countries worldwide, 16 of them this year alone.
“This is an the most urgent thing I have seen in my 15 years of working on tuberculosis,” Mario Raviglione, director of the STOP TB program at the World Health
Organization. He introduced WHO’s TB report, which coincides with the 125thanniversary of the discovery of the microbe that causes TB.“If it keeps spreading, as it has in South Africa, then we are really in trouble, Raviglione said.
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Media: When Karl Rove Danced With The Press
March 30th, 2007 - by: danny
BIRDS OF A FEATHER PARTY TOGETHER
John Eggerton reports in Broadcasting & Cable
HA HA: Bush, Rove, Crack Up Press Corpse
White House adviser Karl Rove boogied, backed by NBC’s David Gregory, Brian Wiliams burped the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the President cracked wise, all to the general delight, and occasional gales of laughter, of journalists gathered for the Radio & Television Correspondents Association dinner in Washington.
Rove was a better sport than a dancer, tapped by the surprise entertainment–Whose Line is It Anyway’s Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood–for an improv rap number featuring “MC Rove,” with Gregory as one of his backup dancers, and based on information supplied by Rove that, among other things, he collected stamps and liked to “tear the tops” off of small animals.
Rove got into the spirit of the bit, though when President Bush was asked to supply a rap nickname for Rove, his response was “Your Fired!” Sherwood then suggested Rove had offered his resume to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of a host of legislators in attendance at the annual dinner at the Washington Hilton.
Half the TV ads kids under 12 see are food ads, says a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation that could further fuel Washington pressure on media companies and marketers in the face of rising childhood obesity.
BILL BERKOWITZ: NEIL IN THE KINGDOM
In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country’s Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch “said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights.” In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper,
Bush described the country as “a kind of tribal democracy.”
Neil Mallon Bush, the son of President George H. W. Bush and the brother of President George W. Bush, attended the forum to renew old family friendships and to drum up a little business for his educational software company. “The Jeddah Economic Forum has been very productive,” Bush told Arab News. “I have been to this conference four times since 2002. I have seen it develop from the very beginning. There was less participation in the past, now there is more international participation.”
These days, Neil Bush is the chairman and CEO of Ignite Learning, a company devoted to developing technology-assisted curriculum. Ignite calls it COW: “Curriculum on Wheels.” In an interview with Arab News’ Siraj Wahab, Bush talked enthusiastically about his company’s mission: “We are building a model in the United States for developing curriculum that is engaging to grade-school kids, and our model is to deploy this engaging content through a device. So it is easy for any teacher to use our device through projectors and speakers. The curriculum is loaded on the device. We use animation and video and those kinds of things to light up learning in classrooms for kids. It helps teachers connect with their kids. We are planning to develop an Arabic version of that model.”
According to Wikipedia, Ignite was founded in 1999 and has “raised $23 million from U.S. investors, including his parents… as well as businessmen from Taiwan , Japan , Kuwait , the British Virgin Islands and the United Arab Emirates.
MEASURING MEDIA DIVERSITY
New Report from Center for American Progress
ARIANNA ON THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS
STUDY: ONLINE READERS READ MORE
In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often than those who read in print, according to the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack study released Wednesday at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference here.
When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77 per cent of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57 per cent in tabloids. The survey, in which 600 newspaper readers from six different newspapers were studied, utilized electronic eyetracking equipment that readers wore while they read broadsheet, tabloid and online editions of newspapers. The research, conducted last year, focused on 100 readers from each newspaper.
Among the findings: that more text was read online than in print. In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. Findings also revealed that news event photos received more attention than staged or studio images, while colour got more interest than black and white.
THIS SUNDAY – 3 HOURS OF ALEXANDER COCKBURN ON CSPAN
FROM PORTSIDE – A CESAR CHAVEZ DAY?
March 31 will be a special day in nine states and dozens of cities — Cesar Chavez Day, honoring the late founder of the United Farm Workers union on the 80th anniversary of his birth. That’s important, but it’s way past time that a national holiday was declared in
his honor.
Like Martin Luther King Jr., who’s rightly honored with a national holiday, Chavez inspired millions of people to seek — and to win — basic human rights that had long been denied them and inspired millions of others to join the struggle.
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Dissector Daily Forum: Letters and Two Films
March 30th, 2007 - by: danny
Your Letters for March 30
Geo Geller writes to comment on reports that the public doesn’t care about the US Attorney scandal:
who is the public and who is doing this survey and whose point of view – does the poll survey people have – and where are they – i think the gang of government knows they are in trouble and are basically careless and fearless since they know about the length of the public memory is so short they are all about distractions anyway as far as i can see – when ever there is a large media event i look elsewhere to see what they don’t want us to see and the main one is IRAN and anything that gets people distracted from war and the next war with iran that they are building up and IRAQ is already a lost cause but a new war will bring new energy – soon you will hear that the IRAQ war was really about the big domino effect of getting IRAN to tople and bring peace and freedumb to IRAN and the middle east too – anyway soap opera government style – to me its all about do something that it is not – why do you think they make their less then positive announcements on friday or saturday and their look at how wonderful we are on monday or Tuesday/
Ted Alexander loves Rosie:
I love Rosie. It’s refreshing to see someone on mainstream TV talk about the things she does which no one else will talk about. But, she
needs to stop spouting out the nuttier ideas like how the Twin Towers collapsed. She was talking about this today on her show. She says fire can’t melt steel (it can, how do you think they make it) and explosives made World Trade Center 7 collapse (nobody knows exactly why but its fairly simple to rule out explosives).I afraid all that good talk is going for nothing because of all the nonsense talk. Maybe you can talk to her or maybe you know somebody who can. She needs better sources. Common Dreams posted a great article by Gwynne Dyer on Iran’s capture of 15 British soldiers. Much more sense than what Rosie et al was saying about it on the View today.
Anyway, I felt like saying something. I enjoy your blog. I used to print it out and read it while on the elliptical machine. Something more interesting to read than the usual magazines at the workout clubs.
John Gilpin writes:
Danny Schechter — Heard your interview with Bob McChesney last Sunday. Three cheers for your advocacy of the teaching of “financial literacy”!
Here is a thought to go with that, and hopefully become part of it.
The word “exponentially” entered common usage not too long ago, to mean something like “very quickly”. It’s original meaning, of course, is “[changing] at a rate proportional to current size”, which is a decidedly more intense version of “quickly”, and one completely outside the intuition of any but a few technically-trained people.
I suggest that high schools should devote an entire semester to the study of exponential growth and decay, because it takes at least a semester to provide kids with the needed degree of appreciation.
Applications would include compound interest in both its benign and malignant forms, as well as things like population growth, economic growth, and cancerous growth. Hopefully, students would come to understand at a gut level that an exponentially-growing consumption economy is going to come to grief in a finite world.
When I was a kid in the late ’40s, we learned that the US had enough coal for 4000 years. Nowadays the figure is 300 years. What happened? Exponential growth. Global warming aside, that 300-year figure is no good either. People simply have no idea of how fast things are changing, because they have no understanding of exponential change.
What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom
Adam Curtis (BBC Video)
Curtis is best known for his 2004 series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise Of The Politics of Fear. This detailed how neocons in the US talked up the threat of radical Islamism to justify their “war on terror”.
SACCO AND VANZETTI ARE BACK – AND IN THE MOVIES
Peter Miller has resurrected two American heroes whose story and suffering is all too relevant today. A new documentary opening at the Quad Cinema (34 W 13th) tonight in NYC and thenat Laemmle in LA April 6 revives a chapter of our history that cannot be forgotten. It’s the story of two Italian immigrants and anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti who were accused of murder and executed, American style, in Boston back in l927. They were a cause celebre and still symbolize a kind of bigotry against foreigners that is still alive in the century we live in.
It is a dramatic story and this film does it justice with recitations of Vanzett’s powerful writings and profiles of the two which include Sacco’s observation that he was living “under America” which is where the poor and immigrant laborers often end up marginalized and scraping for existence.
We are living through a time with more than a few parallels to the world of Sacco and Vanzetti in country that often suffers from amnesia. This is a story that can’t be forgotten. Go see it. I watched it once and I a will again. Howard Zinn is in it but this is more than an illustrated lecture. It is a film that you won’t forget.
TRAVEL TIME
I am off tomorrow to AlJazeera land, in the state of Qatar in the Gulf for a conference that promises to discuss all the most contentious issues in the Middle East. I was pleased to be invited and happy to go to blog and report for Mediachannel.org
Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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