Monday, November 28, 2016
Sunday, November 27, 2016
The West’s Media Delusions
November 23, 2016
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/11/23/the-wests-media-delusions/
Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream
news media often holds itself out as the world’s gold standard, home for
careful reporting and diverse opinions compared to Russia’s monolithic
propaganda, but the reality is quite different, says James W Carden.
By James W Carden
In a wide ranging and
necessary survey
of Russian political programming, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, himself a frequent
guest on those shows, observes that:
“The charges — that Russian
media are only an instrument of state propaganda directed at the domestic
population to keep Russian citizens in line and at foreign audiences to sow
dissent among Russia’s neighbors and within the European Union — are taken as a
matter of faith with almost no proofs adduced. Anyone who questions this ‘group
think’ is immediately labeled a ‘tool of Putin’ or worse.”
Dr. Doctorow has launched an
important conversation in light of the release of yet another alarmist
media report, this time by a British neoconservative group named
(oddly) after a long deceased Democratic Senator from Washington State (Henry
“Scoop” Jackson), which seeks to stifle debate on Russia policy in
the West by smearing dissenters from the Russia-bashing conventional wisdom as
“Putin’s useful idiots.”
Doctorow’s experience with the
Russian media therefore serves a double use: to combat willful Western
misconceptions of the Russian media landscape as well as to serve as
a useful point of comparison with U.S. media outlets and their coverage of
Russia.
If we take the example of the
purportedly liberal cable news outlet MSNBC, we find, paradoxically, that the
hard-right neoconservative stance toward Russia goes virtually unopposed.
Regarding Russia, in comparison with their principal center-left cable news
rival CNN, which, to its credit occasionally makes room for the minority
“detente” point of view, MSNBC leaves about as much room for dissent as the
Soviet-era Pravda – actually, perhaps less.
New McCarthyism
As it happens, there was a
similar disparity when it came to the way the two networks covered the U.S.
presidential election. While CNN went about bringing much needed balance to its
coverage, albeit in the most inept way possible – by hiring paid flacks from
each of the campaigns to appear alongside actual journalists, MSNBC (like
Republican rival FOX News) wholly dispensed with any pretense of objectivity
and served as little more than as a mouth piece for the disastrous Clinton
campaign.
As such, the “liberal” network
found itself in the vanguard of the new McCarthyism which swept the 2016
campaign, but which has, in fact, been a feature of the American debate over
Russia policy since at least the beginning of the Ukraine crisis in late 2013 –
if not earlier.
Examples abound, but perhaps
the most striking case of the neo-McCarthyite hysteria which MSNBC attempted to
dress up as its legitimate concern over U.S. national security was a rant that
Rachel Maddow unleashed on her audience in June when Maddow opened her show
with a monologue dedicated to the proposition that Donald Trump was in league
with Vladimir Putin.
Maddow, in her signature
smarter-than-thou tone, informed readers that the “admiration” between Putin
and Trump “really is mutual. I mean, look at this headline, ‘Putin praises
Trump. He`s brilliant and talented person.’ ‘Putin praises bright and talented
Trump.’ ‘Vladimir Putin praises outstanding and talented Trump.’ There was some
controversy over how to exactly translate Putin`s remarks, but Putin took care
to flatter Donald Trump publicly, exactly the way Donald Trump likes to be
flattered, and that`s apparently enough for Donald Trump, that`s all he needs
to hear, that`s all he needs to know, to tell him, how great Vladimir Putin is.
“Putin likes Trump, he must be
smart, must be great. So, that is the very, very unusual context here, that you
have a Republican presidential nominee who is very, very susceptible to
flattery. It`s the most powerful thing in the world to him. If you compliment
him, he will never forget it and that`s kind of all he needs to know about
you.”
Maddow went on in this vein
for quite a while longer (meaning: little actual content but lots of “very,
very’s” and eye-rolling). But her central insight, such as it was, was little
more than a regurgitation of Democratic National Committee talking points. To
no one’s surprise, Maddow’s accusations were repeated almost verbatim in the
press releases issued by the Clinton campaign which accused Trump of being
little more than a Russian fifth columnist.
Maddow’s evidence-free,
innuendo laden June rant took on an added importance because she was the
messenger. After the risible, self-important sports journalist Keith Olbermann
left the network in 2011, Maddow took over as the network’s house intellectual.
So her words carry weight with its viewers in a way, say, Mika Brzezinki’s do
not.
Nevertheless at no point at
which I am aware did Maddow ever host a guest who pushed back against the still
unproven charges that the Russian government had interfered in the U.S.
election or that Donald Trump was, in the words of former CIA functionary Mike
Morell, an “unwitting agent of the Kremlin” – never mind that as recently as
Nov. 15, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker admitted he had
“no proof” of Moscow’s interference in the U.S. election.
While it is unclear whether
MSNBC’s Joy Reid is seen as “serious” a voice as Maddow, it is unquestionable
that she has emerged as the network’s most enthusiastic practitioner of the new
McCarthyism.
Days before the election Reid
hosted Newsweek’s increasingly unhinged Kurt Eichenwald and former Naval
officer Malcolm Nance who has repeatedly and without evidence claimed the
Wikileaks-Podesta emails were fake.
Why, asked Reid, are the
Russians backing Trump? As if that assertion was beyond dispute. Well, said
Eichenwald, “They hate Hillary Clinton…” Oh. Reid then went on to wonder why
the FBI is down-playing the intelligence community’s allegedly deep concern
that Russia was interfering in the election.
Putin-Bashing
Days later, right after the
election, Reid re-assembled a panel featuring Nance, the reliable Putin critic
Nina Khrushcheva and Esquire’s Charles Pierce to reinforce the message that
MSNBC had been pushing since the summer: that the Russian government had its
hand on the scale of the U.S. election. Pierce, in particular, was apoplectic.
That Reid’s roundtable
featured Pierce made a good deal of sense. Throughout the campaign, Pierce has
been determined to draw a direct link between the Trump campaign and Putin. A
sample of his output helps tell the tale. On July 24, Pierce published “Donald
Trump’s and Vladimir Putin’s Shared Agenda Should Alarm Anyone Concerned About
Democracy” in which Pierce speculated that “Trump seems increasingly dependent
on money from Russia and from the former Soviet republics within its
increasingly active sphere of influence.”
In his offering of Sept. 9,
Pierce protested that “It’s not ‘red-baiting’ to be concerned about Russian
interference in our elections.” Pierce, perhaps moved to madness by The Nation editorial
“Against Neo-McCarthyism,” sounded as though he were channeling the ghost of
James Jesus Angleton, asking, “Are we supposed to believe that Donald Trump
really went
on RT television by
accident? That nobody on his staff knew that the Russian government’s
American network picks up Larry King’s podcast?”
About a month before the
election, on Oct. 11, Pierce informed readers of the once-great Esquire,
“Vladimir Putin Is Determined to See Trump in the Oval Office.” Still worse,
according to Pierce, “There is
little question now that Vladimir Putin is playing monkey-mischief with the
2016 presidential election, and that the Trump campaign is the primary
beneficiary of that.”
All of the aforementioned is
to demonstrate that the American media’s much touted pluralism is little more
than a fiction when it comes to reporting on Russia. The diversity of
Left-Right voices on the political spectrum that Doctorow has encountered in
Moscow indicates that the widespread perception that Moscow’s political culture
is monolithic compared to that of the Washington’s is, at the very least,
challengeable.
James W Carden is a
contributing writer for The Nation and editor of The American Committee for
East-West Accord’s eastwestaccord.com. He previously served as an advisor on
Russia to the Special Representative for Global Inter-governmental Affairs at
the US State Department.
ICI Berlin Exhibition: The Waiting Room
Dec 7, 19:30, 2016
https://www.ici-berlin.org/event/787/
A waiting room most commonly
is an area of an office, a practice, or a parlour where people are seated while
waiting for their appointment. Waiting rooms can project engagement and care,
commercial or administrative interest, neglect, hope, or misery. Designed to
provide distraction, comfort, or access to information, they often end up
frustrating, infuriating the visitor, becoming a materialized manifestation of
time stretched, whiled away, annihilated. The curious atmosphere of these
interiors seems to soak up the time waited, spent, lost within them.
This group exhibition focuses on empty waiting rooms and the notion of waiting
in the visual realm, displaying photographic works and video art.
Opening
Wednesday
7 December 2016, 19:30
Finissage
Wednesday
11 January 2017, 18:00
Opening Hours:
Wednesday and Thursday: 11:00 – 16:00
Tuesday: 11:00 – 18:00
Friday: by appointment
Curated by Cristina Baldacci, Francesco Giusti, Clio Nicastro, and Claudia
Peppel
Time: 7 December 2016 to 13 January 2017
Venue: ICI Berlin
Related Record(s):
Festivity: ICI Library Event, 7 Dec '16
David Harvey on post-neoliberalism, Trump, infrastructure, sharing economy, smart city
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb6rhHyJJ_4
Private Prisons Expect Surging Profits During the Trump Administration
People invested in the prison
industry are set to get
even richer off the mass incarceration of minority and low-income people
when Donald Trump and the tough-on-crime nominee for Attorney General Sen. Jeff
Sessions take control of the federal justice system.
Investments in the prison
company CoreCivic Co. became 43 percent more valuable the day after Trump’s
election—the biggest percentage gain on the New York Stock Exchange that day.
The value of the correctional services company Geo Group rose 21 percent.
The gains follow a decade of
declining valuations that plummeted even further when the Obama administration announced
in August that it would phase out the use of some
private facilities. That decision was based on a Justice Department audit
saying private facilities have more safety and security problems than state-run
facilities.
During his campaign, Trump signaled support
for private prisons. “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations and
private prisons. It seems to work a lot better,” he told MSNBC in March.
Trump’s support for the prison
industry could be devastating for undocumented immigrants and people convicted
of minor crimes. AP reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds up
to 34,000 immigrants awaiting deportation.
Forty-six of the roughly 180
facilities in which ICE holds those immigrants are privately run, with about 73
percent of detainees held in the private facilities, the agency says.
“Trump was saying during his
100-day plan that mandatory minimums for people re-entering the country would
be set at two years — that’s going to require a longer-term need for beds,”
said Michael Kodesch, a senior associate with financial services firm Canaccord
Genuity Inc.
Immigration detention centers
are particularly profitable for private prison companies because they command a
higher rate for each inmate bed, he said.
Yet what’s good for investors
isn’t good for the country, said Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots
Leadership, a national nonprofit group that works to reduce incarceration and
detention rates.
“They’re handing the keys to a
deportation machine over to the Trump administration,” Libal said. “And I think
there’s no reason to believe that the Trump administration won’t drive that
machine forward through human rights protections or due process protections
people in the detention system.”
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick
for attorney general, was among a handful of Republican senators blocking a
bipartisan bill that would reduce lengthy sentences for low-level drug
offenders.
For-profit prisons get their
financing from Wall Street banks, which in turn collect profits from the prison
industry. Nadia Prupis reports at Common Dreams:
Six banks have played a major
part in bankrolling the two largest private prison firms, CoreCivic (formerly
the Corrections Corporation of America) and the GEO Group: Wells Fargo, Bank of
America, JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas, SunTrust, and U.S. Bancorp, according to
the ITPI’s report, The Banks That Finance Private Prison Companies.
CoreCivic and GEO Group use
the banks’ financing—which comes in the forms of loans, bonds, and credit—to
buy up smaller companies that conduct residential reentry and sell ankle
monitors for border agents to place on detained asylum seekers. That has
allowed the two corporations to quietly monopolize the corrections and
immigration enforcement industries.
The banks, meanwhile, profit
by collecting fees and interest on those loans, or investing their clients’
money in the corporations’ shares. At the end of June 2016, CoreCivic and GEO
Group were $1.5 billion and $1.9 billion in debt, respectively.
Activists and lawmakers have
long criticized the privatization of the prison industry and its partnership
with Wall Street. As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told International Business Times
on Thursday, “It is wrong for private enterprises to bring a profit motive to
incarceration and rehabilitation in this country, and I’m particularly
concerned by how it’s fueled by tax law. In my view, most taxpayers would be
disturbed to learn that their dollars are subsidizing corporate profits from
the mass incarceration of minority and low-income Americans.”
Lawyers doubt their ability to
protect their clients from the powerful commercial-legislative complex they
face in the upcoming Trump administration.
Mercedes Castillo, an
immigration and criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles, told In These Times: “I am
disheartened, stressed, anxious, and at a loss. Right now, after several of my
clients have called, texted, emailed, Facebooked—sat in my office and cried—I
have nothing to say but, ‘I will fight for you and with you.’”
—Posted by Alexander
Reed Kelly
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