Miriam wrote: "Power elites have always manipulated us. ".
I would probably have said, "The Establishment always attempts to confuse us."
Back when I was just learning to print, I remember carefully printing
out a letter to Santa Clause. My mother took the letter and said she
would mail it for me. I know she did because I received a reply from
the North Pole. And Bunny Rabbits laid Easter Eggs made out of
chocolate. And Goblins and old Witches with warts on their chins came
out on Halloween in order to scare the pants right off us.
And I went to Sunday School and learned all about Heaven and that
other place, and I was told by my Sunday School Teacher that when we
died, if we'd accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts, and lived a good
and decent life, that we would go to Heaven and sit at God's feet, and
play our harps and sing praises to His name. And so of course I
believed that WW II was the Good War. I believed that our good guys
never killed enemy civilians, nor did we bomb their homes.
Still, in all of these stories my teachers also taught me about our
great victories. Among tales of heroes and kind GI's giving Hershey
Bars to little children, I began counting the numbers of Wars that our
Great Nation had fought in.
I had grown up believing that after the Revolutionary War we were
pretty much at peace until the Civil War, and then not until WWI,
followed by WW II.
Somehow I overlooked the War of 1812, our never ending Indian Wars,
our attempts to seize part or all of Canada, our Spanish American War,
our safari into Russia's Siberia, and our never ending activities in
Central and South America. And all of that only took me up to 1945.
And in all of that our Establishment's Media told us how powerful we
were, and how we were using that power to spread democracy and Freedom
around the planet.
Well, as far as I was concerned, the Establishment oversold it.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/19/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We have all been tricked by the mass media at one point or another. Didn't
we believe that World War 2 was, "the good war", and that it was the US that
destroyed Nazi Germany? But it wasn't fought for the reasons that we had
been given, and it was the Soviet Union that destroyed Nazi Germany, not our
brave American boys. Didn't we believe that the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor was a surprise to our government? It wasn't. The government knew the
Japanese would attack because it manipulated the Japanese government so it
would attack, but it didn't know just exactly where and the FDR
administration had planned for that to happen because Japan was becoming an
economic problem and our government needed an excuse to declare war. I had
to read many books and articles over God knows how many years to know that.
And did we know that the Bush family had financial investments in German
military companies, or that the Dulles brothers were communicating with the
Nazi government throughout the world because of their financial interests,
or that the National Student Association was a front for the CIA and US
propaganda? And I first learned about how the US protected Nazi scientists
from the Nurenberg trials and brought them to the US so they could help with
the development of the Atom bomb as a threat to Russia, in a novel I read.
Later, I read about it in a nonfiction book. Power elites have always
manipulated us.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2021 10:44 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: With Bezos at the Helm, Democracy Dies at the
Washington Post Editorial Board
I simply shake my head. How is it that an animal that is clever enough to
dominate the entire planet can be stupid enough to believe the smoke and
mirrors Mass Media "news", owned and controlled by the American Corporate
Media(ACE)?
Carl Jarvis
On 6/18/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
CONFIDENTLY WRONG
With Bezos at the Helm, Democracy Dies at the Washington Post
Editorial Board In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the
media was controlled by the state. But in a corporate state like the
U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained, although trust in
the media has been plummeting for years.
by Alan Macleod
June 18th, 2021
Mint Press News
By Alan Macleod
WASHINGTON — The Washington Post’s glaring conflicts of interest have
of late once again been the subject of scrutiny online, thanks to a
new article denouncing a supposed attempt to “soak” billionaires in
taxes. Written by star columnist Megan McArdle — who previously argued
that Walmart’s wages are too high, that there is nothing wrong with
Google’s monopoly, and that the Grenfell Fire was a price worth paying
for cheaper buildings — the article claimed that Americans have such
class envy that the government would “destroy [billionaires’] fortunes
so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them.” Notably, the Post
chose to illustrate it with a picture of its owner, Jeff Bezos, making
it seem as if it was directly defending his power and wealth,
something they have been accused of on more than one occasion.
There was considerable speculation online as to whether Bezos himself
wrote the piece, so blatantly in his interest it was. Unfortunately,
this sort of speculation has raged ever since the Amazon CEO bought
the newspaper in
2013
for $250 million.
Undue influence
Being owned by the world’s richest individual does not mean that The
Washington Post and its employees are rolling in dough themselves. Far
from
it: Bezos’ revolution at the newspaper, which has led to both
increased pageviews and company value, has been largely based on
simply squeezing workers harder than before. In an interview with the
Columbia Journalism Review, management acknowledged that Post
reporters are pushed to produce almost four times as many stories as their
peers at The New York Times.
Furthermore, the Post writes and rewrites the same story but from
slightly different angles and with different headlines in order to
generate more clicks, and thus more revenue. Thanks to new technology,
reporters’ every keystroke is monitored and they are under constant
pressure from management not to fall behind. The technique of constant
surveillance is not unlike what hyper-exploited Amazon warehouse
workers who wear GPS devices or Fitbit watches have to endure.
Bezos is currently worth a shade under $200 billion, with his wealth
nearly doubling since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in
2020. With such a fortune to protect, the obvious solution is to
acquire media outlets to control the narrative in the face of rising
public disenchantment with rampaging inequality. Omar Ocampo, a
researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the
Institute for Policy Studies, said that this is a common tactic among
the super wealthy. “Billionaire ownership of major news outlets is but
another tool the billionaire class deploys for the purpose of wealth
defense. It gives them the power to set the terms of the agenda and
influence public opinion in their favor,” Ocampo told MintPress.
But Bezos is far from the only senior figure with questionable
connections.
The company’s CEO, Frederick Ryan, was a senior member of the Reagan
White House, rising to become the 40th president’s assistant and later
the chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. He later
became CEO of Politico. In the Post’s announcement of the hiring move,
they themselves noted that among Ryan’s biggest achievements at their
rival outlet was “helping the news organization win a lucrative
advertising deal with Goldman Sachs and host presidential debates
before the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries.”
Another neoconservative in a key position is Editorial Page Editor
Fred Hiatt. Under Hiatt’s tenure, anti-establishment columnists like
Dan Froomkin were let go and warmongers like the late Charles
Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Ignatius moved in. “After being
so wrong on such a huge story as the invasion of Iraq, hawkish
ideologue Fred Hiatt should have been terminated as editorial page
editor,” Jeff Cohen, former Professor of Journalism at Ithaca College
and founder of media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting, told MintPress, adding:
In a decent media system, someone who has been so inaccurate on so
many issues as Hiatt would not be in a powerful media position two
decades later.
Powerful voices in U.S. media often argue that society should be a
‘meritocracy’ — with advancement based on ability or achievement.
Hiatt proves that the U.S. corporate media system is just the opposite
— a ‘kakistocracy’ — where the unqualified and unprincipled rise to the
top.”
Other highly questionable hires include Jerusalem correspondent Ruth
Eglash, who spent seven years putting out content that was often
indistinguishable from Israeli government propaganda. At the time of
her hire, activists highlighted the conflicts of interest she had,
given her husband’s job as a PR rep for the country. In November 2020,
Eglash quit the Post to become chief of communications for the Israeli
ambassador to the United States and United Nations. “My experiences as
a journalist have afforded me a great instinct of how to better tell
Israel’s unique story,” she said, adding “a strong U.S.-Israel
relationship and showcasing Israel’s successes to the world has [sic]
always been a passion of mine.”
At the center of the news cosmos
The Washington Post is among the most powerful, influential, and
widely-read media outlets in the United States. Its position as the
dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital reinforces its place as a
thought-leading, agenda-setting publication. Whatever appears in the
Post will likely be in the rest of the nation’s media, so
authoritative is its reputation.
There are no more important pages than its editorial section, where
its board comes together to lay out the collective wisdom of its most
senior journalists and editors. Through its editorial page, the senior
staff lay out the newspaper’s line to others and broadcast what they
see as the correct position on the most pressing issues of the day.
Hence, editorials are essentially instructions to their well-heeled
and influential readers in D.C. and around the country on what to
think about any given subject.
This is particularly troublesome as, despite the fact the newspaper
presents itself as a defender of liberty and a champion of the people
(its tagline is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”), the editorial board has
represented the interests of the powerful over ordinary Americans on
issue after issue. The following editorials are examples of this in
action.
Could we be any more pro-war?
The Post’s editorial board has generally been extremely supportive of
whatever conflicts the U.S. has started, and has consistently warned
against ending the violence. In a 2015 editorial entitled “Drone
strikes are bad; no drone strikes would be worse,” it balked at the
idea of stopping the highly controversial bombing campaigns throughout
the Middle East and North Africa.
By that time, President Barack Obama was bombing seven countries
simultaneously. Nevertheless, the Post argued that drones had
successfully defeated Al-Qaeda and that the use of drone strikes
“shouldn’t be up for review.”
In recent times, the rising newspaper of record has also been a driver
of increased hostilities with China, describing Beijing’s military’s
moves in the South China Sea as “provocations” against the U.S.,
spreading rumors about the COVID-19 virus’s origin, and demanding
American companies like Apple “resist China’s tyranny” and begin to
relocate their production facilities elsewhere to punish the Chinese
government.
On Latin America too, the editorial board has proven to be extremely
hawkish. It immediately endorsed a U.S.-backed far-right coup in
Bolivia in 2019, insisting that “there could be little doubt who was
ultimately responsible for the chaos: newly resigned President Evo
Morales.” The Post condemned him for refusing to “cooperate” with
“Bolivia’s more responsible leaders,” who were organizing his
overthrow, and chastised him for using the word “coup” for what was
going on. Morales, they concluded, was a victim of his own “insatiable
appetite for power” and his inability to “accept that a majority of
Bolivians wanted him to leave office.”
In 2002, the paper also supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, falsely
claiming the Venezuelan president had ordered the shooting of
thousands of demonstrators and absurdly asserting that “there’s been
no suggestion that the United States had anything to do with [it].
The WaPo editorial board's less than subtle take The WaPo editorial
board’s less than subtle take on drone warfare
In more recent times, it has demanded more action to unseat Chavez’s
successor, Nicolas Maduro, including supporting U.S. sanctions that
have now killed over 100,000 people, according to a United Nations
rapporteur. The Post’s justification in 2017 was that Maduro was on
the verge of carrying out his own “coup,” “abolish[ing] the
opposition-controlled legislature, cancel[ing] future elections and
establish[ing] a regime resembling that of Cuba’s” — none of which has
happened. In its efforts to oust the democratically-elected leader,
the Post even aligned itself with Donald Trump and endorsed far-right
coup leader Juan Guaidó as “Venezuela’s legitimate president,” a
position some polls have suggested as little as 3% of Venezuelans
hold.
The editorial board has expressed its desire to see regime change in
leftist-controlled Nicaragua, too. President Daniel Ortega, it claims,
is “taking a sledgehammer” to opposition against him, while it also
demands that the U.S., which has done nothing but offer “mild verbal
opposition” to his rule, do more. What happened to the U.S. of the
1980s, “which spent so much money and political capital to promote
democracy in Nicaragua?” they ask sadly.
In reality, of course, the U.S. is currently trying to strangle
Nicaragua’s economy through sanctions. And in the 1980s, Washington’s
“democracy promotion” agenda included the funding, training and arming
of fascist death squads who wrought havoc across Central America,
killing hundreds of thousands in genocides from which the area may
never recover. The architects of the violence were found guilty in
U.S. courts, while the Reagan administration was tried and convicted
by the International Court of Justice on 15 counts that amount to
international terrorism. That the Post’s editorial board remembers
that history as “promoting democracy” is particularly worrisome.
Fake news, fake newspapers
The Washington Post was the key supporter of fake news detection
system “PropOrNot,” which was almost immediately exposed as a fake
operation itself, forcing the newspaper to publicly distance itself
from its own reporting. Yet it was the Post itself that perpetuated
the most notorious and damaging fake news story of the 21st century:
the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction hoax and Saddam Hussein’s fictional
links to al-Qaeda.
In a highly influential editorial entitled “Irrefutable” the Post
wrote that, after watching Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech at
the United Nations, “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that
Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction… And [Powell] offered a
powerful new case that Saddam Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a
branch of the al-Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical
weapons and stage attacks in Europe.”
“No page was more crucial in propelling the disastrous U.S. invasion
of Iraq than the Post‘s editorial page — which beat the drums for war
in a couple dozen editorials in the six months leading up to the
invasion,” Cohen told MintPress, adding:
The Post’s op-ed page was almost as cartoonishly wrong on Iraq,
offering little dissent or corrective to the editorial page’s jingoism
— especially in that pivotal media moment following Colin Powell’s
error-filled U.N.
speech. While the editorial page offered up its ‘Irrefutable’ verdict,
the op-ed page’s liberal voice offered an embarrassing column,
headlined ‘I’m Persuaded’.”
The Post played a major role in manufacturing consent for the
deadliest war since Vietnam, publishing 27 editorials in support of an
invasion. As with PropOrNot, it backtracked long after the dust had
settled, apologizing for its role in amping the public up to accept
that war. Yet to this day it continues to push for others.
Surveillance state champion
Despite telling its readers that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The
Washington Post certainly has a negative opinion about those
individuals who work to shine a light on illegal government
activities. In 2016, its editorial board demanded “no pardon for
Edward Snowden,” condemning his backers like filmmaker Oliver Stone
and expressing outrage that Snowden had revealed that the U.S. was
spying on Russia and carrying out cyberattacks against China. In its
long denunciation, it insisted that the NSA’s massive surveillance
operation against the American public resulted in “no specific harm,
actual or attempted.” As such, the editorial board made history by
becoming the first newspaper ever to call for the imprisonment of its
own source, on whose back and information it won a Pulitzer Prize.
If Snowden was not worthy of defending, then it is no surprise that
the Post’s editorial team expressed their delight when Julian Assange
was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, declaring it a
“victory for the rule of law.” “Julian Assange is not a free-press
hero. And he is long overdue for personal accountability,” they wrote,
spreading baseless conspiracy theories that the Australian publisher
worked with Russia to hack American democracy.
WaPo Snowden
After relying on him as a source, the Post went after Snowden and any
who dared to back him
The Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa, which offered asylum to
the Western dissidents, also came under fire. In 2013, the Post
(falsely) labeled Correa an “autocrat” and “the hemisphere’s preeminent
anti-U.S.
demagogue.” They also directly threatened him, writing that, “If Mr.
Correa welcomes Mr. Snowden, there will be an easy way to demonstrate
that Yanqui-baiting has its price.”
Of course, the Post is now intimately linked with the national
security state after Amazon signed a number of deals to provide
intelligence and computing services to several three-letter agencies.
In 2020, the Bezos-owned Amazon Web Services signed a new deal with
the CIA worth tens of billions of dollars.
The editorial board has also gone up to bat for Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) multiple times, insisting that it is “the
wrong target for outrage,” presenting the agency as key in the battle
against art theft and nuclear proliferation. “Abolishing ICE is not a
serious policy proposal,”
the board wrote in 2018, despite the fact that the U.S. survived
without the agency perfectly well until its creation in 2003.
Attacking any pro-people policy
The Washington Post has aggressively attempted to beat back any new
political movements challenging the establishment. Chief among them
has been the one around Bernie Sanders, for whom the newspaper has
reserved a special ire. In 2016, it famously ran 16 negative stories
on Sanders in the space of
16 hours and has used its fact-checking page to relentlessly undermine
him, sometimes to bizarre effect.
“Bernie Sanders keeps saying his average donation is $27, but his own
numbers contradict that,” read the headline of one article, which
detailed how his average donation was actually $27.89, not $27. It
also gave his statement that six men (one of whom is Bezos) hold as
much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population “three
Pinocchios” — the designation just below the most egregious lie. This
was because, they argued, billionaires’ wealth is tied up in stocks,
not money itself, and most people own essentially nothing. Why this
disproved his assertion they did not explain. Going undisclosed is
that both Bezos and the Post’s chief fact-checker Glen Kessler, who is
the scion of a fossil fuel baron, would stand to lose a fortune if
Sanders were elected.
Likewise, the Post’s editorial board did all it could to ensure
Sanders was not elected in 2016, publishing editorials such as “Bernie
Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign,” which defended big banks from
Sanders’s attacks; “Mr. Sanders’s shocking ignorance on his core
issue,” which presented Hillary Clinton as a more credible Wall Street
reformer; and “Mr. Sanders peddles fiction on free trade,” which
championed the long-discredited North American Free Trade Agreement as
a jobs creator. Unsurprisingly, the editorial board was also a
vociferous supporter of the Trans Pacific Partnership.
In 2020, the Post was no less hostile to Sanders, publishing an
editorial headlined “We should pay more attention to the Democrats who
pay attention to reality,” which stated that “Mr. Sanders promises
unlimited free stuff to everyone; other candidates propose smarter,
more targeted approaches.”
The Post’s higher-ups have been careful to oppose virtually every
piece of progressive or pro-people policy proposals. Chief among them
has been healthcare. The United States is alone in the developed world
in not offering some kind of universal healthcare to its population.
Its privatized system is multiple times more expensive than that of
comparable countries and has the worst outcomes in the West. Yet the
board has consistently scare-mongered its readers, claiming
“Single-payer health care would have an astonishingly high price tag,”
and attacking Medicare-For-All proponents running for office. “Why go
to the trouble of running for president to promote ideas that can’t
work?” it asked rhetorically, before going on to insist that moving
towards a healthcare system like that of Canada, Japan or Western
Europe does not meet a “baseline degree of factual plausibility.”
On education, it has been just as regressive. “There are consequences
to making college free,” it warned readers. Chief among these would be
that private universities would make less money, which, apparently
should be a major concern. “Forgiving student loans the wrong way will
only worsen inequality,” ran the headline of another editorial, in
which the board pretended to be ultra-left elite-hating radicals,
arguing that we should not make college free because Ivy League
graduates would benefit the most (around one-third of the Post’s
editorial team attended an Ivy League school). It also feigned a
far-left position on charter schools, pretending that essentially
privatizing schools and handing them over to businesses to run would
solve racial inequality in America, and that anyone who opposed them
(like teachers’ unions) was no progressive.
Perhaps the most blatant conflict of interest the Post has displayed
is in their committed opposition to a wealth tax. “Elizabeth Warren
wants a ‘wealth tax.’ It might backfire,” they wrote, making a series
of bizarre and illogical arguments against the plan, such as
immigrants will stop wanting to come to the U.S. if such a tax is
imposed (the threshold for paying a wealth tax is $50 million). Five
months later, the board reaffirmed their
position: “A wealth tax isn’t the best way to tax the rich,” they
wrote, claiming that rich people “can afford the best accountants and
lawyers,”
and
so taxing them is presumably impossible.
Of course, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has every reason to go all
out to prevent a wealth tax gaining traction. A CNBC study calculated
that Bezos would be forced to pay $5.7 billion annually if Warren’s
tax plans came to fruition.
The Post has also taken a firm stand against serious regulation of
monopolies, decrying a supposed “antitrust onslaught” against Google,
spearheaded by simplistic “break-them-up” rhetoric from dishonest actors.
In
2016, it also lambasted Sanders for his “oversimplified,”
“crowd-pleasing”
demagoguery on Wall Street regulation, insisting that there has
actually been widespread reform of the financial sector since 2008,
making another crash unlikely.
Unsurprisingly for an outlet owned by a poverty-wage employer, the
Post has also consistently opposed a national $15 minimum wage. In
March, it categorically stated that “[a] $15 minimum wage won’t
happen” and Democrats should stop trying to make it happen. Instead,
they advised, they should “practice the art of the possible.” This,
the board explained, meant falling in line behind Arkansas
arch-Republican Senator Tom Cotton to support his proposals for a
creeping state-by-state rise to $10.
On the climate, too, the Post has pushed extremely regressive
positions, opposing a Green New Deal outright and suggesting the
atmosphere be turned into a giant free market where polluters can trade
credits and speculate.
“The left’s opposition to a carbon tax shows there’s something deeply
wrong with the left,” they wrote. They also endorsed the highly
controversial process of fracking. Seeing as the Post’s editorial
board is littered with former employees of the notorious
climate-change denying Wall Street Journal, its stance is perhaps not
surprising.
On COVID, the Post has consistently opposed teachers’ unions calls to
keep schools closed, as well as standing against $2,000 checks. A
universal payout is a “bad idea” they stated, but one “whose time has
come because of politics, not economics.” So committed was the
editorial team’s opposition to the idea of helping the poor that it
presented Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a voice of
sanity in Washington.
This does not mean that the Post was against direct payments to all
people.
In fact, all Post employees received a $2,021 bonus from management in
January as a gesture of appreciation for their work during the pandemic.
Two
grand for me, not for thee.
Junk-food news
The point of a fourth estate is that it is supposed to shine a light
on the powerful and hold them to account. But when corporate media are
largely owned and sponsored by the super wealthy themselves, the claim
that this is what they do is increasingly hard to maintain. In the
Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the
state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of
independence is still maintained, although trust in the media has been
plummeting for years.
While The Washington Post presents itself as an adversarial
publication standing up to power, the fact that its senior staff
constantly comes to such a hardline neoliberal elitist consensus on so
many issues shows how little ideological diversity there is among its
staff. Democracy dies at The Washington Post editorial board.