E L E C T O T A I N M E N T 2007

EXCELLENT CRITIQUE OF THE BLITZERIZATION OF THE “DEMOCRATIC DEBATE”

David Swanson looks at the dumbing down and the depoliticalization of our politics by CNN’s Wolferino.

DISSECTING FROM THE TWIN CITIES: ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS

Good morning from Minneapolis.

It was my first time flying Sun Country Airlines. They actually feed you a hot pastrami sandwich. That’s also a first, although its not the far better pastrami I grew up on. Lunch later was at the Holyland Deli—Middle East food. A great buffet and good deals on hookahs. I am sure the FBI must be watching the falafels very closely.

I am screening my film thursday and Friday at a very cool art gallery (Gallery 13 302 13th Avenue NE) organized by a very cool magazine, CREDITLAND. Their philosophy:

The environment is more important than economics, but empowering the American people with financial stability instead of endless debt is the fastest way to give them a voice. We are voiceless because we think we sold ourselves out. Creditland says, “It’s not you. It’s how the system is set up: To over finance you into silence. To be more than the bread of the starving French.”

If lack of bread causes revolts, give too much Bread - that’s the American model of class peace. But now all this Bread we’re getting has left us all with NEGATIVE dough in our pocket. It’s a new thing happening…

Creditland magazine is a printed magazine out of the Twin Cities. We have credit related art events, like Credit Crunch. We are closely affiliated with Gallery 13, have an Advisory Board and are currently looking for funding for the magazine that has one issue out, and is looking to target College and Voc-Tech students this fall with a new format rollout and identity.

Have only a little time so I am sharing the stories that caught my eye, and maybe will enlighten your head. Here goes>

NYT: Bush Sets Plan to Ease Holiday Air Delays

Airlines will make fuller use of military airspace during Thanksgiving, under a plan to be announced today by President Bush.

NYT:Ahmadinejad Says U.N. Report Vindicates Iran

The I.A.E.A. report said Iran had made important strides toward transparency but had yet to resolve key outstanding questions about its nuclear plans.

LA TIMES: BHUTTO: SHEER PANTOMINE

By Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani poet and writer. She is the daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who was killed in 1996 in Karachi when his sister, Benazir, was prime minister.

KARACHI — We Pakistanis live in uncertain times. Emergency rule has been imposed for the 13th time in our short 60-year history. Thousands of lawyers have been arrested, some charged with sedition and treason; the chief justice has been deposed; and a draconian media law — shutting down all private news channels — has been drafted.

Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share power with Gen. Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted that without her, democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause. Now that the situation has changed, she’s saying that she wants Musharraf to step down and that she’d like to make a deal with his opponents — but still, she says, she’s the savior of democracy.

The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law. Yes, she now appears to be facing seven days of house arrest, but what does that really mean? While she was supposedly under house arrest at her Islamabad residence last week, 50 or so of her party members were comfortably allowed to join her. She addressed the media twice from her garden, protected by police given to her by the state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news conference. (By contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news conference has placed hundreds of other political activists under real arrest, in real jails.)

Ms. Bhutto’s political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take part in Musharraf’s regime have signaled once and for all to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise for dictatorship.

VOTING FUROR IN NEW YORK: ANOTHER FLORIDUH?

“Federal lawyers are seeking a court order that would force New York to replace every one of its mechanical voting machines with electronic equipment by September 2008, a mere 10 months from now.

……Even to think about using untested machines that voters have never used before, poll workers have never seen before and technicians have never fixed before is insane.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/index.html”>

Tom Engelhardt—on Drought

I’m hardly an expert on drought, but a question’s been nagging at me ever since, in early October, I first discovered that sometime in the next year, if the extreme southeastern drought doesn’t abate, Atlanta, a metropolis of five million (and still growing), might lose its water.

An immediate question came to mind: What in the world would that mean? And then what? I waited curiously until recently for someone in the mainstream media to take those questions under serious consideration. What does it even mean for a major city on the planet to lose its water. Are we talking about a Katrina without a storm? A new trail of tears?

When just about every mainstream piece I saw or read essentially ended on the fact that Atlanta might lose its water — just where my questions began — as if hitting a brick wall, I began to wonder. It was, as I write, “as if, in each piece, the reporter had reached the edge of some precipice down which no one cares to look, lest we all go over.”

I continued: “Based on the record of the last seven years, we can take it for granted that the Bush administration hasn’t the slightest desire to glance down; that no one in FEMA who matters has given the situation the thought it deserves; and that, on this subject, as on so many others, top administration officials are just hoping to make it to January 2009 without too many more scar marks. But, if not the federal government, shouldn’t somebody be asking? Shouldn’t somebody check out what’s actually down there?”

Venezuela To Cut Oil To US If Washington Attacks Iran

President of Venezuela: The Venezuelan President says they will cut off oil exports to the US if it decides to attack Iran

Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s President, has warned that oil prices could reach $200 a barrel if the US invaded Iran, APA reports.

Mr. Chávez said in a press conference in the US that reports on oil prices’ hitting $100 if US starts military operations against Iran are not real.

(CNS) MEDIA: FAKERY IN CHINA?

(CNSNews.com) - When a local television station in Beijing reported last summer that dumpling makers in the city were using pork-flavored chopped cardboard as a filling, the story made international headlines.

A month later, the reporter was jailed for a year, having been found guilty of “commodity defamation.” Zi Beijia had fabricated the story, China’s official media stressed.

The body responsible for censorship, the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP), then launched a campaign to clamp down against what it
described as “bogus journalists.”

That same agency caused a stir this week when its head, Liu Binjie, told the state-controlled China Daily that the authorities were building a database of profiles on the tens of thousands of foreign reporters who will visit the country to cover next summer’s Olympic Games.

Liu attributed the need for a database to the activities of “fake reporters,” the report said.’

JUST WHAT WE NEED

I WANT MEDIA.COM: Murdoch ‘Thought About’ Buying New York Times

Rupert Murdoch, the Wall Street Journal’s owner-in-waiting, says that he has”thought about” acquiring the New York Times. “We wouldn’t be allowed to buy that” now, he adds, referring to U.S. media-ownership limits. Murdoch’s disavowal of interest is said to be “not entirely convincing.”

Buffett More Than Doubles Stake in Dow Jones

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is more than doubling its stake in Dow Jones,from 2.8 million shares to 6.3 million. Analysts say that Buffett is seeking to take advantage of the price margin between where Dow Jones was trading and the $60 thatNews Corp. plans to pay for it.

NYT: BIG SET BACK TO LENDERS

A federal judge in Ohio has ruled against a longstanding foreclosure practice, potentially creating an obstacle for lenders trying to reclaim properties from troubled borrowers and raising questions aboutthe legal standing of investors in mortgage securities pools.

Judge Christopher A. Boyko of Federal District Court in Cleveland dismissed 14 foreclosure cases brought on behalf of mortgage investors, ruling that they had failed to prove that they owned the properties
they were trying to seize.

The pooling of home loans into securities has been practiced for decades and helped propel real estate prices in recent years as investors sought the higher yields that such mortgage trusts could provide. Some $6.5 trillion of securitized mortgage debt was
outstanding at the end of 2006.

CONGRESS IS HEARING CALLS FOR DEBT CANCELLATION IN AFRICA

Yes, that’s good and needed but what about debt relief in America too?

SECURITY SECURITY SECURITY

When I flew out of JFK today, the security check took forever. It may be cause inspectors found that they could smuggle contraband through the TSA lines and the story was all over the news on Wednesday. Oh how embarrassing. So they took it out on us today. But that’s nothing compared to this story which was featured on NBC News. This version is from The Independent in London:

Lebanese fraudster became an agent for both the FBI and CIA

By Leonard Doyle in Washington

A Lebanese woman who managed to obtain sensitive jobs at both the FBI and CIA without proper background checks, then looked up her relatives on an FBI database, faces 16 years in jail.

As a tale of incompetence by the intelligence services, the tale of Nada Nadim Prouty is hard to beat. She arrived on a student visa in 1990 and, like tens of thousands of other foreign migrants, stayed on. Officials say her case is a cautionary tale of America’s vulnerability to infiltration by foreign enemies.

Prouty, 37, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to using her security clearance to illegally access files on government computers about the Islamic terrorist group Hizbollah. She also confessed to fraudulently obtaining US citizenship through a sham marriage. After her wedding in 1990, Prouty worked as a waitress at Middle Eastern restaurants in Detroit, where she was recruited by the FBI in 1999. It is believed she was “talent spotted” to spy on the city’s large Arab-American population. The FBI gave her full security clearance and then posted her to its Washington field office, which investigates crimes against US citizens overseas.

While there, she used her pass to gain access to restricted FBI computer files. According to court documents, she wanted to know if her sister and brother-in-law were being linked by the US to Hizbollah. In June 2003, she left the FBI to join the CIA as an undercover agent.

The FBI is wondering how Prouty was able to sail through its background checks, which included interviews with her current and former husband and with her relatives in Lebanon. She also passed a lie detector test with “no deception noted”.

Stephen Kodak, a spokesman for the bureau, said it was trying to recruit so many agents, especially those with foreign-language backgrounds or from overseas, that it faced “special challenges” which it was now facing up to.

“Nada Prouty’s guilty plea should serve as a solemn warning to those who pledged their allegiance to the US and then make the conscious decision to place America’s interests at risk,” added Brian Moskowitz, an FBI special agent in charge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit in Detroit.

NEW Q&A IN THE UK

Terror crackdown: Passengers forced to answer 53 questions BEFORE they travel

LETTER: HUGO AND THE KING

David Friedlander writes:

The row over Chavez and the king of Spain is a good example of the shallow reporting we’re getting.

When the story broke about the Spanish king telling Chavez to “shut up,” I was interested and dissatisfied with the soundbite reporting of the moment.

This being the time of the Internet, I went off and googled the event. The farthest I could get was that Chavez had called the previous Spanishleader Aznar a fascist: video showed him interrupting Spanish Prime
Minister Zapatero about something. His microphone was turned off and the king, who was sitting next to Zapatero leaned over and said very rudely,”Porque no te callas.”

But I was still dissatisfied. Why this discussion, when Aznar is no longer in office? There had to be a white elephant hiding somewhere in this living room.

There was nothing in English about it so I geared up my deficient Spanish and watched a clip on YouTube. Here I hit paydirt. Chavez had been talking about the 2002 coup in which his elected government was briefly deposed by a group of plotters. Chavez himself was kidnapped and held.

Only two governments immediately sent their ambassadors to meet with the coup leaders, Chavez said. These were the Bush administration and that of Spain, under Aznar. Chavez, then, was talking about a Spanish prime minister who collaborated in a coup attempt against him.

He had more to say about Aznar’s dealings with the Venezuelan government but my Spanish failed me there.

With this discovery, it was clear why no American media wanted to report more than a soundbite. The elephant in the room was a familiar one. Nobody wanted to talk about the disgrace of this failed coup attempt, which punctured the omnipotent image of the empire.

On the substance of the matter, Zapatero may have a point that one should speak with respect about elected governments in other countries.

He was, in fact, quite eloquent on this point. But it would also seem common courtesy would extend the other direction as well. Wouldn’t we expect Aznar — or Bush, for that matter — should extend other elected governments the respect of not trying to overthrow them?

Well that’s all I had time for today, but I am duty bound or obsessed and try to blog everyday. With your help, we can keep going.

Have a great weekend. Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org