ICEBERG AHEAD: The Big Money That is Sinking Democracy

Danny Schechter

I keep thinking of that clear April night 100 years ago when the unsinkable RMS Titanic steamed towards New York. It was actually on its way to dock just a few blocks from where I live at what are now the Chelsea Piers. There was a sense of optimism abroad as a new record for a speedy transatlantic passage was about to be set.

There was music, dancing and fine wine. That is, until they saw that iceberg high in the water. The Captain and his mates were aware that 80 percent of it was underwater and out of sight. They didn’t react in time.

Everyone knows the story—most recently recreated in 3D—but the lesson is really not just about that great ship that went down, or even the company that bypassed safety regulations, or even the hubris of the owners whose greed sent so many passengers to that legendary “watery grave.”

It was also about not seeing the dangers in front of us.

That’s the real story of this moment in our political lives, as the 2012 elections begin in earnest, and we ignore, to our detriment, that vast iceberg of money, stacked in the billions, that threatens to sink what’s left of our democracy,

It is hard to wrap your head around the scale and immediacy of this danger.

And it’s not just about the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court. It’s about the way Democrats think and Republicans act. It’s about the growing way money has been allowed to dominate politics in a game both parties play.

It is an outgrowth of our vast economic inequality and the policies that promoted it. Its about State laws limiting the franchise in the name of fighting voter fraud with so-called Voter ID laws, and ordinary Americans becoming so tired of electoral lies and the arrogance of power that they don’t vote.


Media Hit Job Of The Year: Helen Thomas

Danny Schechter
disinformation


Helen Thomas meeting students from Maxwell
School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
in
Washington D.C. (Photo: rachaelvoorhees)

Our Media Experienced A Few Highs and Many Lows in 2010; None As Disgraceful As The Vitriol Against Helen Thomas

In 1960, I co-founded a student magazine at Cornell University called Dialogue. I was a wannabe journalist, fixated on emulating the courageous media personalities of the times, from Edward R. Murrow to a distinctive figure I came to admire at presidential press conferences, a wire service reporter named Helen Thomas.

In recent years, my faith in the power of dialogue in politics has been severely tested—as, no doubt has hers—in an age where diatribes and calculated demonization chills debate and exchanges of opposing views.

Once you are labeled and stereotyped, especially if you are denounced as an anti-Semite, you are relegated to the fringes, pronounced a hater beyond redemption, even beyond explanation.

You have been assigned a scarlet letter as visible as the Star of David the Nazis made Jews wear.

My career path took me from covering civil rights activism in the streets to later working in the suites of network power. I went from the underground press to rock and roll radio to TV reporting and producing at CNN and ABC.

As a member in good standing of an activist generation, I saw myself more as an outsider in contrast to Helen’s distinctive credentials as an insider, as a White House bureau chief and later as the dean of the White House Correspondents Association.

Yet, beneath her establishment credentials and status, she was always an outsider too—one of nine children born to a family of Lebanese immigrants in Winchester Kentucky, who despite their Middle East origins, were Christians in the Greek Orthodox Church.

She became a pioneering woman, a modern day Helen of Troy, who broke the glass ceiling, infiltrating the clubby, mostly male, inside the beltway world of big egos and self-important media prima donnas, most supplicants to power, not challengers of it.


God To Beck,”Do Not Use My Name In Vain”

Danny Schechter
News Dissector

"God To Beck, Do Not Use My Name In Vain To Bolster Your Career"

Jesus was unavailable when Mediachannel sought out his opinion on Glenn Becks’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial today. Mr Christ, often called JEEEEZ-US by Beck’s faithful, was apparently watching another channel.

We did briefly touch base with his dad, God himself, often referred to as our Lord and Savior, or THE MAN above, who we thought would be pleased by all the adoring rhetoric emanating from the Lincoln Memorial where 47 years earlier a real religious leader held a nation spellbound.

God seemed as if was in a foul mood, as if he felt he was being used by the Fox News host and best selling author, who kept repeating that God was in charge even as he asserted leadership of the Tea Party minions and offered advice that was not found in the Bible or scriptures but on his not yet consecrated website, the one with an ad for LIBERTY SAFES.

Reached on the Royal Telephone, we were told by HIMSELF, “Look, with people in the West turning away from religion in droves, we are always happy to have someone invoke religious principles and spiritual insights. In that sense, Glenn’s Sermon from the Steps was welcome except it was so clear that he is serving a political agenda first.

“How disappointing that the crowd was so uni-cultural wearing T shirts like “I can see November from my House,” and carrying “Don’t tread on me” flags. Why did he have to drag me into it?


The Economy Is Getting Worse and Worse - And No One's Doing a Thing About It

Danny Schechter
Alternet


People wait in line to enter a job fair in New York City. The demand for
jobless benefits in Ohio has nearly exhausted the state's unemployment
funds. (Associated Press)

We know we live in hard times that are on the verge of getting harder, with 500,000 new claims for unemployment last week, a recent record.

The stock market may be over for now as fear and panic drives small investors out. Big corporations hoard stashes of cash rather then hire workers. The D word (depression) is back in play.

Foreclosures are up, and the administration’s programs to stop them are down, well below their stated goals, only helping a sixth of those promised assistance.

And here’s a statistic for you: 300,000. That’s the number of foreclosure filings every month for the past 17 months. This year, 1.9 million homes will be lost, down from 2 million last year. Is that progress? In July alone, 92,858 homes were repossessed.

At the same time, the number of canceled mortgage modifications exceeded the number of successful ones. According to Ml-implode.com, last month, “the number of trial modification cancellations surged to 616,839, greatly outnumbering the 421,804 active permanent modifications."

And don’t think this problem only affects those homeowners about to go homeless. According to the New York Times, Michael Feder, the chief executive of the real estate data firm Radar Logic, says we are all at risk.


Selling Out America to Wall Street

Stephen Lendman


Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Project Censored's top 2010 story was "US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street," highlighting that since 2001, "eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates and the Republican and Democratic parties." It's no surprise that they own them, what Wall Street Watch.org showed in a March 2009 Essential Information and Consumer Education Foundation report titled,"Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America."

The accompanying press release said:

Over the past decade, "$5 billion in political contributions bought Wall Street freedom from regulation, (and) restraint." From 1998 - 2008, "Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates (the FIRE sector)" spent over $1.7 billion in political contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists, in return for which:

-- they were freed from regulation;

-- could speculate on financial derivatives and an alphabet soup of securitized garbage, including asset-backed securities (ABSs), mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), collateralized bond obligations (CBOs), credit default swaps (CDSs), and collateralized fund obligations (CFOs) - combined, sliced, diced, packaged, repackaged, and sold in tranches to sophisticated and ordinary investors, many unwittingly through mutual funds, 401(k)s, pensions, and the like;

-- could merge commercial and investment banking and insurance operations;

-- bilk investors and the public through fraudulent schemes; and

-- get trillions of bailout dollars when the economy crashed.


My Cancer: The Waiting Game

Sarah Meyer


Storm Clouds over Rodmell Photo © Sarah Meyer

Birth Is The Disease; Death Is The Cure.

The language applied to cancer sounds like Obama’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We hear about "battles" - “Fighting the Enemy” and the “War on Cancer.” Constructively discussing the actual process of life and death can often be a no-go zone. Even the word 'death' is replaced by the awful term, “passing away.”

I am almost 73 now, and I am ready for death. The suffering of peoples on our planet is a burden for me. I have tried for much of my life to be useful, but of course one cannot ‘cure’ this central crux of life itself.

Some people emailed that they were "shocked" at my cancer news. Why is this? Cancer is a big reality in our times. 1 in 3 people die of cancer (UK).

I hope that this essay will be helpful and informative for others. If you would wish to write to me with your own experiences of cancer, or obstruction of your wishes, or treatment, please email me (see About Me above), with subject: "cancer."


Invasion - A Comparison of Soviet and Western Media Performance

Nikolai Lanine & Media Lens

Introduction

The writer Simon Louvish once told the story of a group of Soviets touring the United States before the age of glasnost. After reading the newspapers and watching TV, they were amazed to find that, on the big issues, all the opinions were the same. "In our country," they said, "to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what's your secret? How do you do it?" (Quoted, John Pilger, Tell Me No Lies, Random House, 2004, p.9)

It's a good question, one being asked by Nikolai Lanine who served with the Soviet Army during its 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan, but who now lives and works as a peace activist in Canada. Lanine has spent several years trawling through Soviet-era newspaper archives comparing the propaganda of that time with modern Western media performance.


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