31
Dec
Looking Back In Horror: Isn’t It Time To Ring In The New?
The New Year is Upon Us
Football Gladiators: The Metaphor Of Our Age
The News We Need To Know
On the morning before the big night, as the year we have just lived through makes its timely and expected (and in my case anyway, desired demise) our world gets ready to oust the old and “ring in the new.” In Times Square, there ‘s a new multi-cultured ball with LED lights ready to do the honors. The crowds are beginning to form to play the part we have all watched year after year on TV. They are there to scream in anticipation of the countdown. No Writers Guild members are needed to script this extravaganza….all the parts have long ago been memorized and repeated by rote.
I am not in New York, but in Boston, a town with a permanent sports high these daze. First the Red Sox did it again, and then the Patriots finished a record win of every game this past season, and the Celtics are on fire. So what more do you want right.?
Saturday’s hard fought game turning back the giants (Great names, no? Patriots V Giants, all a testament to how these matches have become for our empire what the Lions versus the Christians were for the Romans. They had coliseums We have TV, do we ever. and this game was on no fewer than a lucky seven channels. That’s a record.
Everyone knows that pretty soon, these games will all be in HD, and on pay per view with the NFL posed to become even richer than it is. (In my little world NFL still stands for National Front For Liberation and the Patriots conjure up memories of the men in Blue who fought against British occupation in these New England states.)
The weekly combat of our gladiators in padded uniforms only mimics the knights of old. In sports as in politics, winning is everything. How many newscasts have we heard expressing fears that the mighty Academy Awards may have to be cancelled because the writers are on strike.
LEANING LIFE’S LESSONS
I am here with my dad. He’s lived through nearly 89 New Year’s Eves and is not approach this one with any great sense of hope, excerpt perhaps, given his condition that he will live to see 90. We are all pulling from him and learning from him as his stories take me back through the years of a world long gone—the world of immigrant families, trade union struggles, Jewish communal organizations and a culture not as materialistic and indifferent as our own.
My dad knows that his generation failed to make the changes they had hoped to bring about, and frankly, I know that mine has as well. We are all stuck in a world moving in the wrong direction on so many fronts.
Carolyn Baker, whose blog speaks truth to power summed the despair up this way:
It’s almost 2008, and in the final hours of 2007, I’m reflecting on the past twelve months and what may lie ahead of us in the coming year. It’s been a dreary year for planet earth-scientists telling us that climate change has passed the point of no return; the almost-daily blasting away of civil liberties in the U.S. with nary a peep from its citizens; endless war that produces little but nauseating carnage in the Middle East and a steady stream of suiciding or physically and emotionally devastated veterans, and of course, a housing bubble burst that has left thousands of families suffocating in debt, bankruptcy, and foreclosure.
Some readers would like me to stop talking about collapse and re-frame the notion into “spiritually correct” terminology that isn’t as scary, daunting, and dismal. Many more of you are telling me that you do want to talk about collapse because even with all the opportunities for rebirth and transformation that it holds, the world we have known, demanded, and relied on to be there for us is crumbling.
Contrast these two stories from just one newspaper, The Washington Post>
WORLD
Pakistan at Standstill as Discord and Unrest Grow
KARACHI, Pakistan, Dec. 29 — Nationwide rioting brought life in Pakistan to a standstill Saturday and forced government officials to consider delaying next month’s elections, as discord spread over the killing of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. (Actually the US wants the elections to go forward–and they will be. However there will be no international probe of the assassination even as Ch 4 in the UK and NBC herem using their footage, put the lie to the Pakistani Government’s the Sun Roof Got her no bullet theory.
IMAGES
WP: If you want to go shallow for an Image of the Year, you can’t do better than Paris Hilton, seen through the window of a Los Angeles sheriff’s car, weeping as she’s being hauled back to prison to complete a probation-violation sentence. What better image to sum up a year of celebrities in distress…
And Meanwhile in Africa.
Kenyans on edge for result of tight election
Kenyans waited for the result of their closest-ever presidential election on Sunday, fearing more unrest after a chaotic vote count marred by widespread ethnic violence over accusations of rigging. Several people were killed in tribal disturbances on Saturday across the East African nation, usually seen as an island of relative stability in a volatile region.
And in the background but soon to be in the foreground is the unraveling of our economy. Sometimes you have to seek out analysts in other countries who less constrained to be upbeat” Here’a Richard Stovin-Bradford in South Africa:
THE CREDIT CRISIS
How weird is it when a major global bank warns it will make write-downs of scary proportions, reports € 2-billion of write-downs a few weeks later — and investors’ first reaction is one of relief that things are not as bad as they had feared?
Welcome to the global credit crisis, first triggered by defaulting sub-prime mortgage borrowers in the US. No matter what they do or say, bankers — and central bankers — around the world are struggling to restore confidence to international credit markets.
Except at Deutsche Bank, that is. Global markets chief Anshu Jain predicted the sub-prime mortgage market in the US would weaken and planned accordingly. Although not unscathed, Deutsche was completely up-front about the extent of its exposure and took the fall- out on the chin.
Before reporting its third- quarter results in October, it warned investors to expect a pre- tax profit of 1.2-billion. When it only fell to 1.4-billion, its shares rallied as shareholders rewarded its candour and concluded it was through the worst……
CHINESE CHEQUEBOOKS
If it was not the credit crisis or private equity that was grabbing the headlines in the financial sector this year, it was China’s financial expansion.
A new Great Wall of China — built not of stone but of highly mobile investment cash — was deployed around the world in a string of global banks.
The Chinese government and the nation’s leading financial institutions are on a quest to obtain higher returns than they have been earning on their more than 1200-billion of foreign reserves.
They have been shopping on a grand scale for stakes in the Who’s Who of the global banking sector.
The year ended much as it began. Just before Christmas China Investment Corporation (CIC), the country’s sovereign wealth fund, acquired a 5-billion stake in US investment bank Morgan Stanley — as the bank reported a fourth-quarter loss triggered by a total of 9.4- billion of write-downs in its mortgage-related credit books.
Neatly illustrating the extent — that’s if “extent” is not now treated by investors as a moveable limit — of the problems in its structured credit books, Morgan Stanley’s fourth-quarter write-off added 5.7-billion to the 3-billion of write-offs it had already disclosed when it first drew a line under its write-offs.
Earlier this year China splashed out 3-billion on the listing of US private equity giant Blackstone.
In July, Barclays attracted € 2.2-billion from China Development Bank (CDB) for a 3.1% stake, and € 1.4-billion from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek for a 2.1% stake. CDB sees Barclays as a partner in mineral-rich Africa.
More recently CIC injected 1- billion into troubled Wall Street firm Bear Stearns.
By November, the wall of Chinese cash had stretched to South Africa. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is paying 5.5-billion for a 20% stake in Standard Bank — a reminder of the SA bank’s growing scale in Africa and its reputation on the world’s emerging markets stage.
And meanwhile as our politial pundits build up the suspense on who will win this week’s Iowa Caucuses,–with MSNBC putting John Edwards ahead for the Dems and Romney for the Repubgs—deeper questions have yet to addressed by any of the candidates about plans afoot to manipulate all the voting.
The BlueTide Rising Blog warns of a Republican tactic called “caging.” You better find out more about it if you don’t already know:
To date, the Kansas GOP has identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years!
We’re going to move past the fact that any amount of voter identification would be more than the amount the GOP has done in the last two years, or four for that matter. The practice of caging is what caught our eye.
Caging is a particularly devious and underhanded method of purging likely Democratic voters from the pollbooks. It’s also illegal.
How does it work?
The use of direct mail caging techniques to target voters resulted in the application of the name to the political tactic. With one type of caging, a political party sends registered mail to addresses of registered voters. If the mail is returned as undeliverable - because, for example, the voter refuses to sign for it, the voter isn’t present for delivery, or the voter is homeless - the party uses that fact to challenge the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be reached at the address, the registration is fraudulent. A political party challenges the validity of a voter’s registration; for the voter’s ballot to be counted, the voter must prove that their registration is valid.
Voters targeted by caging are often the most vulnerable: soldiers deployed overseas, those who are unfamiliar with their rights under the law, and those who cannot spare the time, effort, and expense of proving that their registration is valid. On the day of the election, when the voter arrives at the poll and requests a ballot, an operative of the party challenges the validity of their registration. Ultimately, caging works by dissuading a voter from casting a ballot, or by ensuring that they cast a provisional ballot, which is less likely to be counted.
Slate.com has the best comprehensive write-up on how the Republican Party employs caging techniques to suppress the votes of the poor, the deployed, and college students. (You know, likely Democratic voters.)
Did we mention it’s illegal? And that Kris Kobach is proud to be doing it?
Meanwhile out in the world, here is what is NOT making news in the US of A:
Is This The Beginning Of The End In Iraq?
By Patrick Cockburn
Some of the so-called “Concerned Citizens” militiamen now on the US payroll are former al-Qa’ida fighters, though the US is still holding hundreds of men in Guantanamo, accusing them of being associates of al-Qa’ida.
Bin Laden Issues Warning on Iraq, Israel
By Salah Nasrawi
Osama bin Laden warned Iraq’s Sunni Arabs against fighting al-Qaida and promised to expand the terror group’s holy war to Israel in a new audiotape Saturday, threatening “blood for blood, destruction for destruction.”
They Don’t Blame al-Qa’ida. They Blame Musharraf
By Robert Fisk
Weird, isn’t it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi - attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives - and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were “extremists” and “terrorists”. Well, you can’t dispute that.
Anglo-American Ambitions Behind the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the Destabilization of Pakistan
By Larry Chin
The Pakistani election, if it takes place at all, is a simpler two-way choice: pro-US Musharraf or pro-US Sharif.
Oh, yes, before we go: Bill Maher’s Dickheads of the Year
OUR FUTURE–IN YOUR HANDS, PART
And so it goes, the news not in the news and hence the need for Mediachannel to be around in the year ahead to dissect the distortions and help us search for the truth. Media Tenor will be running the show but I hope to stick around –if you want me to—to eep doing what I am doing for another year, the 8th if you can believe it?
So Old Lang Syne and all that. The Happiest of News Years. And stay with us as we try to offer the counter-narrative which remains so important in the year ahead.
Just make sure, that when the ball drops, it doesn’t drop on you.
Onward.
Comments to: Dissector@mediachannel.org
