2012 is Here: Looking Back and Looking Forward, Will The World End?
December 31st, 2011 - by: danny
New Year’s Eve/Day. Times Square Packed as Usual For Ball Drop
Mayor Mike Bloomberg dances on camera–(he can’t dance)–with his girl fiend and some celebs….TV shows all the Smiles and Kisses as the public cheers in a New Year that promises to be worse than the last one.
Downtown, Occupy Wall Street tries to reoccupy Zuccotti Park…43 arrested as of Midnight. Livestream at http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution..
CLG: Protesters Surge Back Into Zuccotti Park –At least one police officer fired an arch of pepper spray into the crowd behind the barricades.
More than 500 people associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement gathered in Zuccotti Park on Saturday and, in a return to scenes from earlier in the year, the evening began with the sound of drumming and calls of the familiar slogan, “We are the 99 percent” – and it ended with torn-down barricades and a scuffle with police officers. Just after 10:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, officers carried a person out of the park, prompting protesters to follow behind them, shouting “Shame!” About 20 minutes later, a group of protesters grabbed some of the metal barricades that surround the park and began piling them inside. As they gripped the barricades, police officers took hold as well, and a shoving match began, the silver bars trapped in between.
NYT: City Blog, Police Clear Out Protesters
This event reinforces an anti-police narrative, raises or reinforces no new issues. A New Year’s Party leads to a pushing match and arrests. It is unlikely to inspire more public support or respect for a movement that speaks in the name of The 99% who were focused on Times Square! What was achieved?
So far, there have been 5683 arrests at Occupy Events.
CLG: Magnitude 7.0 quake hits eastern Japan, felt at Fukushima
An earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale on Sunday rocked eastern part of Japan and its vicinity in Honshu Island of Japan, said the Japan Meteorological Agency. The epicenter of the quake, which occurred at 14:28 local time (0528 GMT), was off Torishima Island, south of Tokyo, at a depth of 370 kilometers. Strong tremors were felt in Tokyo where Xinhua’s office building swayed for a while. The jolt was also felt in northeastern prefectures including Miyagi and Fukushima.
I Read The News Today, Oh Boy….
My Final Dissection of the past year on reading the New York Times via Skype for the NYTexaminer.com
I did not see this headline in the NYT Business Section did you? Number of Major Bank CEOS sent to prison: 0
Watch for Al Jazeera’s new TV Special Report Series on the US election. I was on the inaugural program, taped Saturday. I was on remote from Syracuse, New York, my old stomping ground decades ago.
Welcome to 2012
Yes, the new year is already here, celebrated in Sidney Australia and Asia and now sweeping the world,
Is it “another year, same shit” or or can we expect something really new? If we want it, we will have to fight for it. Hats off to all the occupiers who responded to the call in 2011 and are still at it. Remember: “It’s So Not Over!”
Here it is your money chart thanks to the xkcd blog
NoBama News from The National Journal: The Latest from Our President, The Law Professor and Constitutional Scholar–Obama Signs Homeland Battlefield Bill Into Law
Sayeth Mr. Courage: “I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”
BBC: New Law Includes tough new sanctions against Iran.
The law cuts off from the US financial system foreign firms that do business with Iran’s central bank.
Iowa Agonistes
The Latest Poll from The Hill: Romney holds slim lead over Paul in final Iowa poll, Santorum surging
“Mitt Romney holds a slim lead over Ron Paul in the final Des Moines Register poll before the Iowa caucuses, but Rick Santorum has continued his surge in the last days of the race.
Santorum took third place with Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann rounding out the field.”
This election hype for the 2012 election has been underway for months, perhaps because elections—not voting or issues—are a subject that TV News knows how to cover with the same well honed routines it brings to the horse race.
It’s mostly blablabla about who is ahead, and who is behind. and the media heads seem to love it because it resembles sports coverage. Gail Collins of the NY Times nailed the insipid quality of this spectacle as it pretends to significance. The Iowa caucus is not a significant bellweather of a national election that only gets serious in its last weeks, but it, nevertheless receives far more attention that it merits.
She writes:
“Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that the Iowa caucuses are really ridiculous…
Iowa caucusgoers are supposed to be particularly committed citizens who can make informed choices because they’ve had an opportunity to personally meet and interact with the candidates. Some of that does happen. In 2008, at the Democratic caucus I attended in Des Moines, there was unusually high support for Bill Richardson, mostly from people who said he had been to their house….
To summarize: On Tuesday, there will be a contest to select the preferred candidate of a small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican. The whole world will be watching. The cookies will be excellent.”
Mark Engler reports in the new Daily Progressive Populist:
As caucus craziness reaches its peak here in Iowa, the Occupy movement has not been left out. As the Des Moines Register reported Wednesday in a notably favorable top-of-the-front-page story:
About 250 protesters from at least 11 states turned out Tuesday night for the first event of Occupy Iowa¹s most aggressive attempt to influence the presidential campaign.
The protesters ramped up for demonstrations at the candidates’ local headquarters and the offices of the Republican and Democratic parties. They were prepared to be arrested en masse, and they were fired up.
Des Moines happens to be my hometown, and so I’ve watched OccupyDSM for months. The impressive strength and resilience of local activists there is one of the things that first convinced me that this could be a movement with truly national reach.
Marching Down Memory Lane
Instead of looking forward, lets look back to other developments in the 12th year of some past centuries.
1712 was the year of the first slave revolt in New York, and took place not far from Zuccotti Park, the one-time base of the Occupy Wall Street Movement:
According to the websitefor the the Africans in America TV series.
“The stage was set for an uprising. First, the city had a large population of black slaves — the result of many years of trade with the West Indies. Secondly, communication and meeting among enslaved persons was relatively easy, since the New York City’s inhabitants lived in a small area on the southern tip of Manhattan. Thirdly, living in such a densely populated area also meant that slaves worked in close proximity to free men, a far cry from the situation on the plantations to the south.
Perhaps after meeting in a tavern, twenty-three blacks gathered on the night of April 6, 1712. It was midnight. Armed with guns, hatchets, and swords, the men set fire to a building in the middle of town. The fire spread. While white colonists gathered to extinguish the blaze, the slaves attacked, then ran off. At least nine whites had been shot, stabbed, or beaten to death; another six were wounded.
Militia units from New York and Westchester were mustered, as were soldiers from a nearby fort. Twenty-seven slaves were soon captured. Of these, six committed suicide. The rest were executed, some by being burned alive.”
How quaint: “Burned Alive”—a new practice in the new world.
1712 was also the birth year of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss philosopher
Now let’s fast forward another l00 years to 1812
It was a great year for wars, Naooleonic Wars, British and French Wars, Indian Wars. Russo-Turk wars, including a US invasion of Canada:
It was a year of music, as Wikipedia records, “the Year 1812, Festival Overture in E flat major, Op. 49, popularly known as the 1812 Overture or the Overture of 1812 is an overture written by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1880 to commemorate Russia’s defense of Moscow against Napoleon’s advancing Grande Armée at the Battle of Borodino in 1812.”
1812 was a year of war in the USA. The White House Was Burned. The Star Spangled Banner was later written in poetic form even as “the flag that was still there” was not there for long since the British won that battle.
Let us remember that it was in that year that political manipulation got underway when
Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry invented gerrymandering, the political art of engineering electoral outcomes.
It was the year that New York State chartered City Bank of New York, which later became Citibank.
And last but not least: James Madison defeated DeWitt Clinton in the U.S. presidential election. The High School I attended would later be named after DeWitt Clinton, a Governor of New York. Eat your heart out James.
A Century later, suddenly, it’s 1912.
The African National Congress of South Africa is born. It will take them most of the century to liberate their country under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. (I have been invited to their l00th birthday party on January 8th but really can’t afford to go. Viva ANC, Viva!)
On January 12th of that year, Thirty thousand workers walk out of textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, beginning the so-called Bread and Roses strike, the most dramatic and successful strike in American labor history.
In April, the unsinkable RMS Titantic sets sail for New York from Britain, hits an iceberg and sank. The White Star Line and the ship’s captains were later blamed for the accident. To mark the event. and cash in again, James Cameron is reissuing his movie in 3D.
Imperialism is off and running. The US. Marines landed in Cuba. No 3D movies planned for that event.
1912 was an era of trustbusting with which President Obama recently referenced in his “I am like TR” speech comparing himself, falsely, to a Republican president. But TR did not win reelection that year. It was a four way context between Dems, Republicans, The Bull Moose or Progressive Party and the Socialist Party led by Eugene Victor Debs.
Notes Wikipedia: Attention Occupiers
In the early part of his political career, Debs was a member of the Democratic Party. He was elected as a Democrat to the Indiana General Assembly in 1884. After working with several smaller unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs was instrumental in the founding of the American Railway Union (ARU), the nation’s first industrial union. When the ARU struck the Pullman Palace Car Company over pay cuts, President Grover Cleveland used the United States Army to break the strike. As a leader of the ARU, Debs was later imprisoned for failing to obey an injunction against the strike.
Debs educated himself about socialism in prison and emerged to launch his career as the nation’s most prominent socialist in the first decades of the 20th century. He ran as the Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, the last time from his prison cell. (He won a million viotes)
Noted for his oratory, it was a speech denouncing American participation in World War I that led to his second arrest in 1918. He was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 and sentenced to a term of 10 years. President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921. Debs died in 1926 not long after being admitted to a sanatorium.
in his memory, Happy New Year to my daughter: Sarah Debs Schechter (SDS)
Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Wins Presidency. A year later, he signs off on the Federal Reserve Bank, later calls it his biggest mistake. Forms League of Nations that fails, Sends Us Troops into Wall War 1 because “it won’t be over until its over, over there.”‘
Armistice and Peace Deal of First Wold War leads inexorably to the second.
Will the World End As Mayans Supposedly Predicted?
And now its 2012, another election year, with many fearing a Mayan prophecy that in fact did not predict the end of the world, according to National Geographic:
“It’s remotely possible the world will end in December 2012. But don’t credit the ancient Maya calendar for predicting it, say experts on the Mesoameri
It’s true that the so-called long-count calendar—which spans roughly 5,125 years starting in 3114 B.C.—reaches the end of a cycle on December 21, 2012.
That day brings to a close the 13th Bak’tun, an almost 400-year period in the Maya long-count calendar.
But rather than moving to the next Bak’tun, the calendar will reset at the end of the 13th cycle, akin to the way a 1960s automobile would click over at mile 99,999.9 and reset to zero.
“We, of course, know that really means a hundred thousand [miles] and not zero,” said William Saturno, an expert on Maya archaeology at Boston University.
“So, is [the end of Bak'tun 13] a large period ending? Yes. Did the Maya like period endings? Yes,” Saturno said.
“Would this have been a period ending they thought was wicked cool? You bet. The biggest period endings they experience are Bak’tun endings.”
But “was it predicted to be the end the world? No. That’s just us.”
Instead, for the Maya, the end of the long count represents the end of an old cycle and the beginning of a new one, according to Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta, the Chiapas state division director of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.
“It is like for the Chinese, this is the Year of the [Rabbit], and the next year is going to the Year of the Dragon, and the next is going to be another animal in the calendar,” Gallaga said.”
Far Above Cayuga’s Waters
I am writing from Ithaca New York where Occupy Ithaca faces eviuction from a local park even as a segment of the occupiers have already moved from DeWitt Park to the property of the First Baptist Church, according to a report by the appropriately named Liz Lawyer in the Ithaca Journal which also caries a lead “guest viewpoint by one C.J. Kilgore 111 who attacks the Occupiers for lack of focus and message. He suggests that the occupation is not allowing him to enjoy his park,
The Nation: Frances Fox Piven on What The Occupy Movement Should Do For The Poor
And speaking of occupations, Michael Moore reminded us last Friday:
“??On this day, December 30th, in 1936 — 75 years ago today — hundreds of workers at the General Motors factories in Flint, Michigan, took over the facilities and occupied them for 44 days. My uncle was one of them.
The workers couldn’t take the abuse from the corporation any longer. Their working conditions, the slave wages, no vacation, no health care, no overtime — it was do as you’re told or get tossed onto the curb.
So on the day before New Year’s Eve, emboldened by the recent re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, they sat down on the job and refused to leave.
They began their Occupation in the dead of winter. GM cut off the heat and water to the buildings. The police tried to raid the factories several times, to no avail. Even the National Guard was called in.
But the workers held their ground, and after 44 days, the corporation gave in and recognized the UAW as the representative of the workers.
The Nation: Katha Polilit on Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, my colleague for twenty years, was clever, hilarious, generous to his friends, combative, prodigiously energetic and fantastically productive. He could write with equal ease about Philip Larkin, capital punishment, Henry Kissinger and having his balls waxed.
I used to wonder, enviously, how he could write so much, especially given his drinking, his travels, his public appearances and his demanding social life. He told me once that a writer should be able to write with no difficulty, anytime, anywhere—but actually, not many writers can do that. I think part of the reason why he was so prolific—and the reason he had such an outsize career and such an outsize effect on his readers—is that he was possibly the least troubled with self-doubt of all the writers on earth. For a man who started out as an International Socialist and ended up banging the drum for the war in Iraq and accusing Michelle Obama of fealty to African dictators on the basis of a stray remark in her undergraduate thesis, he seems to have spent little time wondering how he got from one place to another, much less if he’d lost anything on the way.
After he left The Nation he said he had a “libertarian gene.” It’s a rum sort of libertarianism, and a rum sort of gene, that expresses itself first as membership in a Trotskyist sect, and then as support for the signal deed of an administration that stood for everything he had spent his life fighting, from economic inequality to government promotion of religion.
So many people have praised Christopher so effusively, I want to complicate the picture even at the risk of seeming churlish. His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled.
But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking. And so, I’m betting, were the cruder manifestations of his famously pugilistic nature: as F Scott Fitzgerald said of his own alcoholism: “When drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.” It makes me sad to see young writers cherishing their drinking bouts with him, and even his alcohol-fuelled displays of contempt for them (see Dave Zirin’s fond reminiscence of having Christopher spit at him) as if drink is what makes a great writer, and what makes a great writer a real man.
Roasting Tom Friedman who Deserves it
Robert Birnbaum (Our Man in Boston blog) writes
Journalist Belen Fernandez’s new opus Imperial Messenger (Verso) effectively eviscerating the NYT’s Thomas Friedman (whom Alexander Cockburn, not one to pull punches, has called “the silliest man on the planet”) strikes me as an example of the kind of book that a supine establishment,mainstream media herd must exert some effort to avoid paying even minimal attention.
Friedman, a three time Pulitzer Prize winner (meaning he has been well-celebrated by his supposed peers) perfectly represents the kind of gobbledegook that has allowed political discussion (such as it is) become a morass of bemuddlement And befuddlement.
World Journal: Putin’s Pathetic Reaction To Russian Movement
OK, that’s News Dissector.com for the year. I was pleased to welcome into your life. We have some plans to do a better job in 2012 with a new version of the Mediachannel as Mediachannel1.org.
I will have details for you soon on downloading my new new book OCCUPY on the Occupy movement, and other work in a long pipeline.
If what I do interests you, please get in touch and tell me if you can help. Write: Dissector@mediachannel.org
You can support our work with a tax deductible check to Mediachannel at the Global Center
PO Box 677, New York, New York 10035. We need all the help we can get, and are not that good at getting it. Please help if you can.
Congrats to all who protested and killed Verizon’s new fee. Consumer pressure can work!
Happy News Year
Danny Schechter
News Dissector
See the whole Post / →
GET READY TO OCCUPY THE NEW YEAR, There Will Be BLOOD
December 29th, 2011 - by: danny
Quote Of the Day: Michael Thomas writes In Newsweek
“I think, the game is at long last over.
As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government’s fault. This time, however, I don’t think the argument that “Washington ate my homework” is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street’s head – and about time, too.
…. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over…..
Related: Read my Latest on AlJazeera.com:
The year’s top story is not getting coverage
The financial industry may end up doing what the media isn’t – exposing its abuses and bringing itself down.
New York, NY – As every media critic learns, the worst sin of our press is not its blatant biases, or crimes of commission, but rather the pervasive patterns of omission; what’s left out!
Already, with two weeks to go, the Associated Press has crossed the finish line with the top choice of the newspapers it serves. Perhaps in the outdated spirit of Mark Twain’s famous dictum that: “There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe – only two – the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press on earth”, their pick for story of the year is the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The AP can’t bring itself to label it for what it was – a state-sponsored assassination.
As ever, the mainstream/lamestream – call it what you will – media tails after people in power and promotes/validates their great achievements, even when it was an extra-judicial murder in the dead of night.
Institutional power is their main beat and they beat it to death with every deadline and every headline.
There is no utterance by any political hack – like most of the GOP presidential menagerie – that goes unreported.
On the progressive side of the street, 2011 was ‘All Occupy All The Time’, with the growing movement against economic inequality getting the most glowing attention.
For the rest, visit AlJazeera.com
Dissector Essay: Get Ready To Occupy The New Year
Out with the old. I would say good riddance to 2011 even as I fear 2012 may be worse, given the financial trends, social chaos and political idiocy that we confront every day.
Every time, I believe it can’t get worse, it does.
It seems so clear that the political system is moribund and paralyzed and the economic system may be in worse shape.
A tiny sliver of the 1% may be in charge although not in control. Their own short-term greed makes it unlikely that they can stabilize the system or do any longer term planning. Their Titanic has hit its iceberg. Some new technologies may be keeping it afloat for now but for how long?
We lurch from crisis to crisis in an atmosphere of deep denial.
Obama clearly has no new ideas and the Republican candidates for the most part don’t know what an idea is, as they pander to a no-nothing base to prove that they can be as crass as they are.
Television dutifully reports all this as if we should take it seriously. No wonder only 7% of the people approve of their own money dominated Congress.
The Republicans can’t get any nastier with each other and now the Democrats are moving in the same direction with the announcement that Dennis Kucinich, whose been gerrymandered out of his district, is now—oh, no– going after Progressive Marcy Kaptur’s seat.
As I think about the year ahead, I am reminded of what I said at this time of year last year about what I called the year of the “Crumble.”
Sound familiar? It’s not a long distance from “crumble” to collapse as Democracy gives way to plutocracy.
I wrote then about 2010: “The economy continued to crumble for ordinary people with little hope for a quick turnaround, even as some markets surged. The hopes of the jobless for employment crumbled. The faith of the so many homeowners that they will find a way to stay in their homes facing foreclosure is crumbling.
And so have the hopes of so many of us that our new ‘change Is coming’ president would fight for us, would end the wars, would close Gitmo, would abandon torture, would make healthcare more affordable, would give us a government we could believe in; that, too, has crumbled.
Look back at the devastation of the year gone by: its ugly election, bought and paid for by U.S. Supreme Court-sanctioned special interests; oil spilled by the Gulf-full; wars escalated; climate change unabated; and Wall Street unchecked, and we have to scratch our heads and wonder who is crazier, them or us.
A year after the earthquake, rubble is still piled up in the streets of Haiti, which has received only two percent of the money raised to reconstruct it. We now have six active military operations underway, rating less and less coverage—only four percent of the network news fare, by one count.
In contrast, the partisan wars are all TV news covered over and over again, with Fox charging, MSNBC responding, and Jon Stewart joking.
There seems to be nowhere to go, but down.
The pragmatic compromisers of the democratic center may convince themselves they are “getting it done” in D.C., but they are also alienating the Democratic Party base and disgusting all those who believed it would be or could be different.
Already, there are new escalations in Afghanistan, a rising military budget that goes uncommented upon, and more repressive laws on the way.
There will be a price to be paid for their legacy of spinelessness and corporate complicity.
The media still remains at the center of our conundrum, as we argued ten years ago when we founded the media issues network, Mediachannel.org (now Mediachannel1.org) to advocate for fundamental media change.
So we are left where we started, as David Swanson argues, with the need to support independent media, arguing:
“[W]e need an alternative not only to Fox News but also to the rest of the corporate media. This is the easiest and most important project anyone can work on. The dream of persuading the labor movement (which can’t even strongly oppose corporate trade agreements when the president is a Democrat) to invest in a new television network should be abandoned. If the George Soros’s of the world haven’t figured out that there’s a communications problem, they never will. But we already have what we need; we just need to make it bigger, and we can do so. We should invest in TheRealNews.com, Thom Hartmann, Free Speech TV, Link TV, GRIT TV, Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio, community radio stations, blogs and web sites.
We should make use of foreign outlets that, for their own reasons, are willing to provide decent coverage of U.S. politics: Al Jazeera, ATN, RT-America, etc. Unsubscribe from the New York Times, stop contributing to any purchasing of ads in it, stop reading it, and read the Guardian online instead. Get connected online, and people will send you the occasional good article or video that all lousy outlets produce. Share that one further, but promote a good website that’s hosting it, not the corporate source.”
And let’s also get behind WikiLeaks as they fight for transparency and accountability by governments and media. We need to support not only Mediachannel1, but Pacifica Radio, Progressive Radio, Bill Moyers and Laura Flanders’ new shows and sites like OpEdNews.com, CrooksandLiars.com, Disinformation, Firedoglake.com, Global Research, Consortium News, Real News, ZNet, Reader Supported News etc., etc.
At the same time, we have to go back to an old idea for which online interaction and an email barrage is no substitute: organizing real people.
There are more of us than there are of them, but they are organized and focused and we are mostly reactive and emotional.
As James Kwak wrote on The Baseline Scenario, there is a reason for this. Progressives are captured by symbolic politics while the right is committed to substantive goals. He cites the view of Murray Edelman who divides the political sphere into insiders and outsiders.
“Insiders are basically special interests: small in number but well organized and with specific goals. Outsiders, or the ‘unorganized masses,’ are the rest of us: we have some interests, but we are poorly organized to pursue them and therefore are generally unsuccessful. In particular, Outsiders suffer from poor and limited information, and therefore are especially susceptible to political symbols.”
He cites Arnold Kling’s summary of Edelman’s insights:
“Given these differences, the Insiders use overt political dramas as symbols that placate the masses while using covert political activity to plunder them. What we would now call rent-seeking succeeds because Outsiders are dazzled by the symbols while Insiders grab the substance.”
Happily, this year which seems to be ushering in a year not of a crumble but a collapse, is also the year when Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots emerged so powerfully to capture the national imagination and create a force based in the 99% willing to fight the Wall Street crimesters and stand for social justice and equality.
I have been having a happier news year ever since OWS emerged.
I have been following its bold initiatives in print and in the streets. I have just finished a new book called OCCUPY collecting my reporting for AlJazeera and other websites as well as my News Dissector.com blog.
Despite all the depressing things that are happening—and the economic depression that so many of the Wisemen of the punditry admit is arriving—I am more hopeful than I have been in years
It feels good to be fighting back—and, not just online.
The fact that this movement received the media attention it has is a sign that the people of this country are open to something new and will, if well communicated too and organized, join in to make the changes we need so desperately.
In 2012, we have to continue to occupy the high ground and occupy the mainstream.
When people lead others follow.
Adelante! Forward! Or. As, Martin Luther King put it, “Tomorrow is Today”
Story Link If You Want To Send To Others.
News Dissector Danny Schechter writes daily at NewsDissector.com. Information on his latest film is at Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com. Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org
Some News of Note
•While Washington Publicly Downplays Iranian Threats, War Ships Are Sent
CLG: Iran Reports US Aircraft Carrier Near the Strait of Hormuz
A US aircraft carrier has entered the ‘hot’ zone close to the Strait of Hormuz between Oman and Iran. The Iranian fleet has been conducting naval exercises in the transit zone for over a third of the world’s oil supplies since 24 December. Iranian sources reported the ship’s arrival at a time of rising tension due to Tehran’s threat to close the strait.
•As I was Saying, NY Times reports US is arming the new Saddam: Weapons Sales to Iraq Move Ahead Despite U.S. Worries
Some fear that American weapons will strengthen Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s apparent efforts to consolidate his power and establish Shiite dominance.
•As I was saying via Fluent News: ‘Former Iran Hostage Fears History Will Repeat If Yemen’s President Enters U.S.’
•WSJ: EU Banks Get Big Loans, Have No Collateral
•Chris Spannos, NYTeXaminer: NY Times Fumbles Into New Year
•From Russia, and Not for the First Time:
(AP) — Russia’s Foreign Ministry has attacked America’s human rights record in its first report on injustice elsewhere in the world, offering examples such as the Guantanamo Bay prison and wrongful death row convictions to paint the U.S. as hypocritical for lecturing other nations on the subject of rights.
“The situation in the United States is a far cry from the ideals that Washington proclaims,” says the report released Wednesday.
Moscow has previously reacted angrily to the accusations of human rights breaches that the U.S. State Department has leveled at Russia in its annual reports. The State Department has expressed concern about the violent attacks on rights activists and journalists in Russia, most of which go unpunished. It also has criticized abuses in Russia’s Caucasus, including extrajudicial killings, kidnappings and torture
Personal note:
I will be away for a few days and may or may not blog. I hope to have the energy and resources to keep my blogothon going in the year ahead. I have been dissecting since l971, and on line since 2000.
You can help with donations to
The Global Center
PO Box 677
New York, New York l0035
Mark Checks for Mediachannel.org
Happy News Year from Globalvision and the Global Center.
Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
Some letters
Kate Webb writes:
just have some quick feedback/a question to offer regarding your editorial. I’m a Canadian journalist but I’ve written a lot about Occupy Vancouver (where it all began with Adbusters) and am interested in the international Occupy movement. My degree is in political science, not economics. I read all the news about the financial crimes that were committed on Wall Street but I can’t say I understand much of it. I have a vague sense that crimes and frauds were committed but not much understanding of what US laws can actually be used to prosecute the guilty – or why Canada’s financial regulations protected us from suffering the same fate.
How are the media, who have 35 seconds or maybe a couple of minutes, or in the case of print or online journalism maybe 500 words max, supposed to explain complex crimes to the average person when I, a university educated journalist, can’t understand them fully myself?
Maybe someone like yourself, who does understand, should start by breaking it down into more digestible pieces so that education and new ideas about white-collar justice can start to percolate among media consumers and journalists…
Just a suggestion from someone who is definitely interested but not completely able to understand how to do their job better.
Kate: See info on my film Plunder at plunderthecrimeofourtime.com and book: The Crime of Our Time for more information and analysis on this issue.
Dear Danny Schechter,
I read your articles of importance, to our and global community of good and caring people like you.
To me, you are wonderful and noble person of great character, vision and determination, to keep the public informed in vital matters, concerning the present and future events, domestic and abroad. I would like to see the movie: “Plunder”, but I do not know where to buy it Maybe the wind of change is approaching. The dark and black clouds are gathering above our heads, for the evil forces are awaken and ready to crash anybody staying in their way, but they
are mistaken, blinded by the greed, for the power of united, desperate people is stronger than anything else.
The global revolution stretches slowly and powerfully its fighting wings. The rolling thunders cannot be broken or stopped. Thank you for your courage, to be who you are! Your wisdom and sincerity is widely appreciated throughout the world by simple people like me, and by others, clean handed women and men.
I’m simple, mostly spiritual poet, but I create something for occupied movement. In this month on December 7, I was 64 year old. I have seven manuscripts of uplifting poetry to publish through Amazon.com and five more in Polish language. They are in the correcting process, which take some months. I learned English language all by myself. I am U.S. Citizen and I live i this Country, for quite a long time.
God bless you and your people, your family and your friends. I’m sending you some simple poetry.
Sincerely,
with love,
Zeno de la Mare Stachowicz
John Randolph writes:
Thank you Danny Schechter for you work. http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Year-s-Top-Story-is-No-by-Danny-Schechter-111228-628.html and others.
I am a retired US Border Patrol Agent who finally has figured out that failed immigration is very similar to other “corporate-run-government-for-profit” failures that is destroying the middle class.
Ted Rosa writes:
I predict that Greece will default or withdraw from the EU. All banks will take a shot, but the big banks (Citigroup,B o A) will still be standing because they can borrow from the treasury. But I predict financial losses for all, that will through everyone into a depression by 2013
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OCCUPY THE CAUCUS? Media in 2011: The More You Watched, The Less You Knew
December 28th, 2011 - by: danny
Bill Bowles, Quote Of The Day:
Could it be because, trapped in a system of information control so complete, most of us suffer a kind of reverse sensory deprivation, overloaded with data but starved of contact with the real world?
How else to explain the almost total disconnect between our governments’ actions and the public’s response (or lack of one) to the barbarism of ‘civilized’ world? This is spite of the fact that we donate millions to ‘charities’ for the starving ‘them’.
How else to explain the hypocrisy of a government that slaughters in our name with total impunity and the public’s apparent indifference?
Watch: Dissecting Tuesday’s New York Times for NYTeXaminer.
Listen to the Podcast: Last Week’s Radio Show: Dissecting OWS On News Dissector Radio on Progressive Radio Network
On the Outside Looking in, On the Inside Looking Out
Rainy Day in Gotham. Had lunch at the vast Eat Italy complex with an old friend who was once reporting on real business for BBC years ago and is now reporting on Red Carpets in Hollywood for Disney. He seems to be finding the LA scene wanting.
In all of my critiquing of media coverage, I sometimes forget the people who do it even when they don’t want to pay the bills. They are often most aware of how the media business disappoints not only viewers but the people on the other side of the camera who have mad their deals with the devil. I am hardly one to judge. I worked in commercial media for decades.
Here are two other media critiques’
FAIR: Occupy The P.U.Litzers
This year has given us simply too many worthy contenders for FAIR’s annual P.U.-litzers–recognizing the stinkiest journalism of the year. A big part of the problem was that so many outlets were striving to distinguish themselves with especially awful coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. So to note those lowlights, we bring you a special installment of P.U.-litzers: The OWS edition.
–Early Warning System Award: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer
On September 19: “Protests here in New York on Wall Street entering a third day. Should New Yorkers be worried at all about what’s going on?”
–We Could Do It Better Award: New York Times’ Ginia Bellafante
Under the headline “Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim” (9/23/11), Bellafante turned in the quintessential corporate media dismissal of progressive protests. The reporter discovered “a default ambassador in a half-naked woman…with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968.”
The movement’s cause “was virtually impossible to decipher,” Bellafante complained, slamming [it] for “lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgeably.” And who has more knowledge about grassroots progressive activism than the New York Times.
–What’s News Award: NPR’s Dick Meyer; Washington Post
Asked to explain NPR’s non-coverage of OWS, executive editor Meyer said (NPR.org, 9/26/11): “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.”
And the massive demonstrations around the world October 15th made it onto the front page of the next day’s Washington Post–in the form of a lower right-hand corner blurb approximately one column inch long, directing people to page A20 to find news about protests in “more than 900 cities in Europe, Africa and Asia.”
–Channeling Glenn Beck Award: Reuters
Under the headline (10/13/11) “Who’s Behind the Wall Street Protests,” the news agency provided an answer straight from one of Glenn Beck’s conspiratorial chalk boards:
One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.
Who exactly is bringing up Soros’ name? Reuters names one slightly less than credible source: right-wing talker Rush Limbaugh. But Reuters did its own digging, going on to suggest “indirect financial links” between Soros and the group Adbusters, which issued the original call for the Occupy protest. The links were mostly figments of the right-wing imagination, as even some Reuters reporters pointed out. Reuters eventually changed the headline to “Soros: Not a Funder of Wall Street Protests.”
–The Suites to the Streets Award: New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin
The Times star business writer (10/4/11) did little to dispel criticism that he’s too close to his Wall Street sources by admitting that he checked out the protests–after a banker told him to:
I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the CEO asked me. I didn’t have an answer. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this,” he continued, clearly concerned. “Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”
As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group–at least not yet.
–Those Facts Are Biased Award: WNYC’s Takeaway
Web producer Caitlin Curran was photographed at an OWS protest holding a sign that said this:
It’s wrong to create a mortgage-backed security filled with loans you know are going to fail so that you can sell it to a client who isn’t aware that you sabotaged it by intentionally picking the misleadingly rated loans most likely to be defaulted upon.
Curran was promptly fired by the New York public radio station for her flagrant violation of journalistic objectivity. Who could trust a journalist who took a far-out radical position like that?
–Timeless Cliches Award: Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer
“Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters denounce corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs,” wrote Post columnist Krauthammer (10/14/11), maligning the protesters as “indigant indolents saddled with their $50,000 student loans and English degrees” whose policy proposal boils down to “eat the rich.”
–We Smell a Rat Award: Washington Post
November 16: “Is this an occupation or an infestation?”
Media Trainer Jess Todfelt offers up an end of the year list of media stories. Here is #4 on his list:
#4 Occupy Wall Street-ers, while not all of their coverage was complimentary, received and continue to receive daily, worldwide coverage. In fact, their movement spread to cities all across the world. The idea of the 99% was very inclusive. Of course, people showing up wearing face paint, stilts or dressing like Vikings muddled the message at times
Times Co. Agrees to Sale of Local Papers
New York Times Co. said it has agreed to sell the 16 local papers that make up its regional media group to Halifax Media Holdings LLC, of Daytona Beach, Fla, for $143 million in cash.
The transaction, expected to close within weeks, continues a longer-term effort by Times Co. to streamline holdings and pay down debt as revenue at its flagship New York Times newspaper has declined.
Times Co. said it intends to use the estimated $150 million in after-tax gains from the sale for “general corporate purposes.”
In a statement, Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said that the “sale of our Regional Media Group will enable The New York Times Company to continue our transformation to a digitally-focused, multiplatform media company.””
Hundreds of NY TIme Employees Write Publisher, Express “Extreme Dismay”
First reported on by the Huffington Post, the open letter was posted to saveourtimes.com last week, and has been signed by more than 270 staffers so far.
The aggrieved include film critic Manohla Dargis, basketball writer Howard Beck, Washington correspondent Eric Schmitt and art critic Roberta Smith, among many others.
Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone spoke with Bill O’Meara, president of the New York Newspaper Guild, who said that some staffers considered storming Sulzberger’s office, but opted for the letter instead.
So what are the grievances?
Last week, the Times notified foreign citizens working at the paper’s overseas bureaus that their pensions would be frozen.
In their letter, Times employees express dismay for foreign staffers who have “risked their lives so that we can do our jobs.”
Economy:
•Gonzalo Lira: A Run On The Global Banking System-How Close Are We?
The general public still hasn’t quite realized the implications of the MF Global scandal.
UK Telegraph: UK Treasury Plans For Euro Failure
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone-RSN: “Towns and cities and states lose billions of dollars every year allowing financial services companies to overcharge them for underwriting. It gets even worse in the derivatives markets, where banks routinely overcharge state and local governments for things like interest rate swaps, for one very obvious reason – swaps are not traded on open exchanges, so only the banks know how to price them.”
HP: Profile Of Federal Judge Rakoff Who Challenges Wall Street
Overseas
•Protests Against Hatred in Israel
Haaretz: Israelis Rally Against Discrimination by Hardline Jewish Extremists
Rally was originally slated to take place in the courtyard of a girl’s school, but the location was changed after Haredi extremists threatened organizers with violence
Thousands of Israelis amassed near the Orot girl’s school in Beit Shemesh on Tuesday to protest gender segregation in a city that has become a symbol for the struggle against religious extremism.
•RAIN: Background: Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews spit on “immodest” 8-year-old girl in Beit Shemesh
Since this news report last Friday, about a little girl from Beit Shemesh, secular-religious relations seem to be the only thing Israelis are talking about
Naama Margolis, an 8-year-old from Bet Shemesh, is the most famous girl in Israel today. In fact, nobody can stop talking about her.
And why is that? Well, on Friday evening, Naama told her story on the most watched news show in the country. Interviewed by Channel 2’s Shai Gal, Naama told how she was afraid to go to school, just a few hundred meters from her house in Bet Shemesh, because Haredim cursed and spit on her for being dressed “immodestly.”
The report, translated in full below, has sent Israeli public discourse on relations between secular and religious into a frenzy.
Since the report, the Israeli Prime Minister has spoken about it, the Haredi Beit Shemesh Mayor has condemned it, Haredim in Beit Shemesh attacked a Channel 2 news team who came to town again on Sunday, and rioted when municipal workers took down signs calling for segregation between men and women. They later put the signs back up. Today, the city announced plans to put up 400 security cameras.
But guess who hasn’t said anything? That’s right: the rabbis. Apparently, they don’t care. And why should they? It’s not like they recognize the state or anything. And guess what else: They don’t have to. Because the invalid who spoke from inside his car at the end of the item is actually right. Out of all the ignorance he spewed, he managed to say one correct thing at the end:
“All of Israel will be Haredi, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
He’s right. The numbers speak for themselves.
Actually, it makes the whole two-state, one-state discussion seem like a waste of time. What does it matter when in a few decades between the river and the sea, secular people of any nationality will be a small minority.
You’ll just have to chose your theocracy.
•Undernews: Secret EU document outlines discrimination against Israeli Arabs
Independent, UK – A growing gulf between Israel’s Jewish and Arab communities is highlighted in a critical EU paper which breaks new ground by suggesting that the international community has a role in ensuring “genuinely equal treatment” for the country’s Arab minority.
The confidential 27-page draft prepared by European diplomats and seen by The Independent charts a wide range of indicators showing that Israeli Arabs suffer “economic disparities … unequal access to land and housing … discriminatory draft legislation and a political climate in which discriminatory rhetoric and practice go unsanctioned.”
The paper also levels criticisms at some Israeli Arab leaders, charging that the most extreme feed accusations of disloyalty within the majority Jewish community. And it is careful to praise positive state measures affecting the Arab community, including on policing. But it charges that Israel has addressed “few” of the recommendations on the “socio-conomic causes of Israeli Arab frustration” made by the Or Commission, appointed after 12 Israeli Arabs were killed by police during demonstrations 11 years ago.
•ADC Condemns Cantor Statement that Palestinian Culture is “Infused with Resentment and Hatred”
Washington, DC | www.adc.org | December 27, 2011 — ADC strongly condemns House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R) offensive and ridiculous statement that Palestinian culture is “infused with resentment and hatred.” The sheer ignorance of such remarks, particularly from someone in his prominent position, is both distressing and depressing to millions of Americans.
“Palestinian culture” is, of course, not “infused with resentment and hatred,” but it is true that Palestinians resent intolerance and hate injustice. Palestinians resent being discriminated against by dozens of Israeli laws that render them second-class citizens in their own country. Palestinians hate having to use segregated roads rather than being free to travel on the same roads as Israeli Jews. Palestinians in Gaza resent that they are subject to an inhumane Israeli blockade that has deprived them of essential foods, medicines and building supplies. Palestinians hate the fact that they have lived under oppressive Israeli military rule for more than 44 years. And they resent that so-called “leaders” who are embarrassingly ignorant of Palestinian lives, circumstances, ideals and, yes, culture, deem themselves fit to speak about such subjects with even a modicum of authority.
When the occupied are portrayed as violent and the occupier as victim, then democracy and justice have to be redefined.
EI: (Press TV) Qatar to overthrow Saudi regime
DS: Can’t vouch for the truthfulness of this. Sounds preposterous!
The Saudi Arabian monarchy will be overthrown by Qatar very soon, a leaked confidential conversation by Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem Al Thani has revealed.
According to an audio file which has gone viral on the Internet, the premier said Qatari troops would occupy Qatif in Eastern Province and the Al Saud regime will disintegrate.
“The regime of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud is exhausted and powerless to control the country and the army cannot confront the future changes,” he asserted.
The remarks were made as people in Qatif have been staging protest rallies to demand freedom and equality over the past months.
The Qatari premier also revealed that the United States and Britain wanted him to report back to them on the situation in Saudi Arabia.
“They want to get rid of the Saudi regime while they are afraid of any new Islamic regime in the region,” Sheikh Hamad said.
“Therefore, Qatar has taken advantage to transfer US military bases to its country,” he added.
Sheikh Hamad said Qatar also has been able to gradually reduce the dominance of Saudi Arabia in the region and impose itself on Arab countries.
Qatari state-run news channel Aljazeera has refused to comment on the audio clip.
Qatari officials did not confirm the report when Press TV contacted the Qatari Embassy in Tehran.
Politricks: Occuoy The Caucus
•Prensa Latina: Occupy Movement Targets Iowa Caucus
•NY TImes Version of Caucus Story
Haaretz: Demonizing Ron Paul? Ron Paul is not anti-Semitic but is anti-Israel
Republican presidential hopeful ‘wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all,’ says former senior aide; Paul’s spokesman says former aide has zero credibility, should not be taken seriously.
Dave Lindorff: Why the Establishment is Terrified of Ron Paul
Ron Paul says he’d end the wars, end the drug “war” and “war” on terror, and respect the Bill of Rights. Who else would do that?
Fluent News: ‘Iran Reportedly Threatens to Cut Off Oil Flow Through Key Route Over Nuclear Sanctions’
Russ Banker, WhoWhatWhy: Jutifying War With Iran
.. the evidence points to a concerted campaign to prepare Americans and the world for war against Iran. This is not idle speculation. It fits a pattern that repeatedly preceded previous hostilities.
Here are the recent examples on Iran:
-The claim that Iran is a WMD threat. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the long-term, continuing efforts to paint Iran as some kind of nuclear threat. This ignores the possibility that Iran is telling the truth in contending it is embarked on solely non-military nuclear research (debatable), and serious doubts among many experts that Iran is preparing nuclear weapons. Perhaps most important, it discounts the fact that many countries (including Iran’s arch-enemy Israel) have nuclear weapons, and disregards the undoubted truth that if a country like Iran ever did launch nuclear weapons, it would be wiped out in a nanosecond, creating a very strong disincentive for offensive use. At the same time, by encouraging other countries and internal foes to believe that it has nuclear weapons, Iran creates an inexpensive protective shield for its regime. A dangerous game, to be sure, but without further evidence of Iranian nukes, hardly a reason to launch a war that would surely cause even more death and destruction than the misguided Iraq invasion.
-The claim that Iran tried to hire Mexican drug cartel hit squads to kill a Saudi ambassador on US soil (fizzled). Remember this one? So ludicrous that even ultra-cautious corporate news organizations laughed it out of the spotlight. Still, it may have been a test of what will fly—and likely did impact a percentage of the population, particularly those getting their info from jingoistic outlets like Fox.
-The claim that Iran was complicit in the 9/11 attacks (current). A federal judge, reviewing evidence presented in a lawsuit on behalf of 9/11 victims, concluded this month that it proved Iran “provided direct support to Al Qaeda specifically for the attacks…on September 11, 2001.” This one may gain traction due to powerful lingering emotions on the topic. (For complaints about the general operating style of the judge who ruled in the case, click here.) Because this ruling and the underlying lawsuit are based largely on the claims of defectors (and past experience shows that defectors frequently trade politically valuable assertions for personal benefits), more research is needed on this. (Remember discredited CIA Iraq source “Curveball”?) The cited “NSA intercepts” also bring to mind the intercepts put forward as proof that Saddam had WMDs.
Marvin Kitman:Many Vets need Help
Arthur Lee Pipes Jr., 25, of Chiefland, an Army veteran who completed two combat tours in Iraq, is accused of dousing his mother-in-law’s house with a 5-gallon gas can, intent on setting it ablaze, and fatally shooting the family dog after his wife told him she wanted a divorce and emptied the bank account, according to a media release by the Levy County Sheriff’s Office
CLG: U.S. finds new human infection with swine H3N2 flu –
H3N2 case is 12th in five states reported in U.S. since this new virus first spotted in July 23 Dec 2011 U.S. public health officials have found another case of human infection with a swine-origin H3N2 virus, this time in a child from West Virginia. And they also reported finding a human infection with a new swine influenza virus never before seen in humans, in a person in Wisconsin who had contact with pigs. The investigation into West Virginia case suggests the child was infected by another person and that some amount of human-to-human spread of the [US-created] virus took place in the unnamed community where the child lives, according to details released Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
•LA Times: Studies of deadly H5N1 bird flu mutations test scientific ethics
In a top-security lab in the Netherlands, scientists guard specimens of a super-killer influenza that slays half of those it infects and spreads easily from victim to victim.
M&G: Apple slapped with fine for misleading consumers in Italy
Italy’s anti-trust authority has decided to impose a €900 000 fine on Apple for misleading consumers on assistance services and product guarantees.
Your Letters
Adrian De Villiers writes from South Africa:
just wanted to say praise God for been someone who cares for the people, and is been a beacon of light in a very dark world at the moment
these banking exec’s have lost control of themselves, like what was recently revealed in an interview with Madoff who pulled off the biggest ponzi scheme known to mankind, Madoff said since his been incarcerated, he feels so much more at peace, and calm, knowing now he’s not in control of his life anymore, i/e the greed he got caught up in ran away with him to the point he lost control of himself and his will power to break free was broken.
Danny, that’s what’s happened with these banking exec’s, they’ve lost it, and are out of control with some very dangerous people making sure they don’t turn around.
the sooner these exec’s get locked up the better for all of us and for themselves.
Someone even went so far as to pay themselves bonuses after the bailouts, it’s crazy, that’s like a women gettting raped, then a policeman sees her naked, and then locks her up for indecent exposure, and then wants a pat on the back and his pocket lined for locking her up.
Madoff, I believe also knows a lot more!!!!
just wanted to say, as long as you keep raising awareness about the economic injustices in the world and get a revelation of the truth about the one world elitists driving the recessions and wars with greed, lies, deceptions and trickery,
please be careful, try and get as many people on board about these wcked senseless wars and how the banking exec’s got away with the biggest bank robbery unknown to mankind,
the reason is. to avoid been signaled out, if many people around the world who are in the movie/music/radio/tv/news industry all raise awareness at the same time, these elitists can’t target any single person, this is the strategy
these guys are ruthless, so if u feel threatened, try and shuffle the deck to keep the truth getting out there, but at the same time, it will take the heat off u
i hope u are ok, I’m picking up high stress levels from u.
will keep u in my prayers”
Francis Ward is a professor-emeritus of journalism at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University on Christopher Hitchens:
I don’t doubt Hitchens’ skill as a writer and thinker. But as we remember and pay tribute to him, let’s not forget how deeply mistaken he was about the Iraq war and how blind hatred of a dictator can blind your sense of reality.
I welcome your comments on this daily blog. Write: 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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