I'm becoming a big fan of Ed Schultz. As the latest addition to MSNBC's weeknight lineup, he's continuing the network's transition into a liberal mecca (within the confines of corporate cable news, anyway). He first impressed me with his adamant demands for single-payer health care, a topic I thought was strictly out-of-bounds in the world of mainstream American news. Ed apparently has the courage to go where no other TV news personality will. As if to confirm that, yesterday he tore into Dick Cheney with a vengeance. It was pure magic.
You can watch the clip here. Former Cheney aide Ron Christie was on to regurgitate the former VP's standard talking points, but Ed didn't let him get away with it. He constantly reminded him of Cheney's numerous crimes and misdemeanours - you even heard him use the phrase "war crimes" at one point, a stunning admission of the kind you barely ever hear on typically sycophantic American news. It was a startling demonstration of speaking truth to power, supposedly the whole point of the fourth estate, but a quality that very few mainstream journalists ever demonstrate (with many doing the exact opposite, as we've seen in the cases of those reporters urging that we not prosecute Bush administration officials for war crimes).
That said, it did occur to me that in some ways, Ed was copying a technique used by the worst, most obnoxious Fox News propagandists, which is dominating the conversation, talking loudly and not letting the other person finish. Usually, I watch that happen with Bill O'Reilly or whoever and it really upsets me, because I'm not there to listen to some blowhard spout his opinion; I want to hear what the guest has to say. When Ed Schultz does the same thing, am I justified in treating him differently, merely because I happen to agree with his opinion? I think I am, and here's why.
The average TV news viewer is probably not that politically savvy. He tends to agree with the newsman, who is apparently on his side. This country ignorance is what allows professional liars like Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck to cram right-wing propaganda down the throats of Fox News viewers. Ed Schultz is an avowed, proudly liberal voice on the airwaves. In my experience, liberals and progressives tend to be more interested in hearing other people's opinions, and as a result are more laidback in the interview format, allowing the guest to say whatever he has to say. HOWEVER, in this age of spin doctors and pundits, half the time your guest is some professional hack paid to voice the approved talking points of his masters. Enter Ron Christie.
In cases like these, it's doing a disservice to the viewer to have a guest on and allow him to spew blatant lies without follow-up questions. This tends to be the modus operandi of Fox and CNN, but Ed Schultz clearly has balls. In the kind of media environment we have today, sometimes you need to fight fire with fire, and if Schultz needs to adopt similar tactics to O'Reilly to quash the reactionaries that use the airwaves to pull the wool over the eyes of the public, than I say all power to him.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Blaming the Victim?
Reading Mark Steyn's latest column in the Republican propaganda organ National Review, a few thoughts crossed my mind. The first was fairly standard - that Steyn, a classic right-wing shill with a column in the increasingly unreadable MacLean's, is an idiot. His arguments are always low on facts and heavy on hypocrisy, but that's par for the course when it comes to your average conservative diatribe.
The second thought concerns his whole argument, against government-funded health care. Once you get past the usual fearmongering about a massive "U.S. health bureaucracy", you get one of the more nonsensical statements I've seen lately about the issue:
But this brings me to the last thought I had while reading the column, and it addresses a far larger issue. Often, when I talk about American politics with my family, they'll tell me something along the lines of "who cares? That's in America." And in a way, they have a point. I spend hours and hours each day reading about American news, politics, and media. Part of that is because it's just so much more fucked up in general than Canadian politics; it's hard to believe that an entity like the modern Republican party, dominated by wingnuts, Jesus freaks, venture capitalists, torture apologists and chickenhawks, can be one of the two major political parties in what is (for now) the world's lone superpower. It would seem like a perfectly plausible argument for someone to tell me that I shouldn't worry what the right-wing noise machine is saying on any given day. As a Canadian progressive, why the hell should I care what wingnuts like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity and the rest of the Faux News crew have to rant about?
The problem, of course, is that while I don't take these guys seriously - I watch it knowing perfectly well that it's propaganda - many, many people in the United States do. And it's not just rednecks and wealthy conservatives; the mainstream media sees these demogogues as worthy contributers to the national discussion. Arianna Huffington, in her book Right Is Wrong, identified one of the main faults of corporate cable news: they always assume that there are only two sides to every issue, a liberal (Democratic) and conservative (Republican) view, and that the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. CNN is the prime culprit here when it comes to television, but it equally applies to establishment rags like the New York Times or the Washington Post. And it's immensely destructive when it comes to an issue where the right/left paradigm does not apply. Take the issue of global warming. Typically, a news segment on the issue might have one person who says global warming is real, and another who says it's a hoax or the science isn't advanced enough for us to know for sure. Since global warming is real, providing such a false balance leaves the viewer disoriented and unsure what the truth really is.
I saw a particularly putrid example of this phenomenon last night on CNN during a discussion about Gitmo detainees. Campbell Brown assured us we would hear from "two very different perspectives", which was fairly spot-on: it featured a face-off between Liz Cheney repeating her father's standard talking points (the detainees were Evil Terrorists, "the worst of the worst", too dangerous to try in American courts for some reason, and repeating the debunked lie that 15% of them had "returned to the battlefield), and Joan Walsh, arguing that Guantanamo only served as a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda (sharing the opinions of U.S. military commanders). I have my disagreements with Walsh - she's one of those liberals that sometimes cheers on imperialist war when it's carried out by a Democratic president - but I have to give her props this week, not only for her performance on the side of "truth" on CNN against Liz Cheney, but also for her bravura verbal ass-kicking of Bill O'Reilly on the issue of Dr. Tiller's murder.
Anyway, the problem was that CNN was offering - as Huffington described it - "equal times for lies." You have Liz Cheney lying her ass off, defending torture and extraordinary rendition, Joan Walsh offering a reasonable rebuttal actually based on fact, and then you have Campbell Brown weighing in before the commercial break with a typically CNN sitting-on-the-fence moment: "well, you both have interesting arguments, let's see if afterwards we can come to some kind of agreement." Panels like this make a mockery of the journalistic ideal. Theoretically, a journalist is supposed to sort through facts to arrive at the truth. Brown lets two sides talk - one of which is consciously lying and distorting the truth - and then leaves it to the viewer to decide which side is right, a complete abdication of her supposed responsibility as a journalist.
And this brings us back to the larger issue - the power of the right-wing propaganda machine. As stupid as conservatives are when it comes to actual policy, I'll give them this: they are brilliant when it comes to getting their message out. As George Lakoff summarizes in his book The Political Mind, Republicans have always been masters of framing issues in ways that skew towards their own agenda; hence, Democrats are accused of being "soft on terror" or "weak on national security". And Democrats always buy right into that framing, adopting right-wing policies to prove how "tough" they are and by extension looking all the weaker, as opposed to if they stood up for principle and said they were "strong on liberty" or something like that. In any typical media event, the Right always sets the agenda and the "Left" responds, and in this way, they allow the Right to effectively control the news cycle.
By presenting the lunatic fringe as the Respectable Right (although there's really not much difference these days), the media keeps a seat at the table for the forces of reaction. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised by this. The conservative movement is insanely well-funded by wealthy patrons. The corporate news media - both its owners and its advertisers - have an interest in presenting the news in a way that does not interfere with their own privileges, and so will always give time to a political movement that stands up for the interests of the American oligarchy. An educated population would be able to see through these lies. But guess what? Most people don't know that much about the news. They form their opinions based on very superficial impressions of what goes on in the world, and in that arena, it's hard to beat the right-wing noise machine.
So the problem is that the disinformation and lies purveyed by Wingnut TV and Hate Radio reach an audience of largely uneducated Americans, which the Right preys upon by exploiting basic fears and prejudices (Immigrants! Gays! Blacks! Evil Muslim Terrorists!), as well as wedge issues like abortion, in order to get them to vote against their own interests. Once in power, the Right leads the forces of imperialism and rapacious capitalism, lowering the standard of living for workers, trashing the environment, and engaging in endless war with a never-ending supply of unfortunate civilians slaughtered by U.S. airstrikes at wedding parties. In short, they're ruining the world for my generation and each one after it.
It's tempting to point the finger at the Wingnut segment of the U.S. population: the dumbass, xenophobic, God-fearing, gay-hating, gun-loving hillbillies who watch Fox News and think that a millionaire blowhard like Bill O'Reilly, a Republican-talking-point robot like Sean Hannity, or a racist, sexist 300-pound Oxycontin addict, with a few failed marriages under his belt, who claims to be the paragon of "moral values", have their best interests at heart. These are the Americans who have barely any concept of the world outside their borders, who have no idea that every country in the developed world besides theirs have some form of universal health care, who think that wanting their country to bomb brown people on the other side of their world somehow makes them "tough"...at some level, you have to blame them for their own stupidity and gullibility. It takes all sorts to make up a society, and you will always have those undereducated buffoons who ascribe to what Matt Taibbi referred to as "the peasant mentality."
However, I still can't let myself adopt the attitude of my brother, who suggested the other day, "who cares about a bunch of hillbillies?" The thing is, those hillbillies are actually an ever-shrinking minority in the U.S., and they support Republican politicians mainly because they lack the education to see how they're being misled. The majority of the American electorate voted for Obama, and even if most of them can't see past his celebrity-facade to see that he is a tool of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex (like all recent presidents), we can at the very least accept that they wanted some form of "change". Call me an optimist, but I prefer to believe that most people want very reasonable things from their politicians. The mass media today, meanwhile, serves to spin the policies and distract the populace so that they think they really do live in the greatest country on earth. To ascribe the policies of the United States governments to the voters is true on some level - there is some truth to the old adage that you get the government you deserve - but to take a society in which the ruling class systematically lies and distorts its way through the media every day, and blame its failings on the people who are fooled, is to some extent blaming the victims.
It's no coincidence that the United States is both the most religious country in the developed world and the one with the weakest labour movement. The American ruling elite has worked its whole history to maintain its privileges, to demonize supporters of labour unions as dangerous "socialists", to divide the working class by appealing to racial prejudices, and to distract the people from the faults of this world by pointing them to a fantasy afterlife in another. There's only one way to change that: by educating the people to the point where they can develop a sense of class consciousness.
The second thought concerns his whole argument, against government-funded health care. Once you get past the usual fearmongering about a massive "U.S. health bureaucracy", you get one of the more nonsensical statements I've seen lately about the issue:
When President Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor, and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment.Leave aside for a moment the fact that the current, privatized United States health system costs far more than any of its equivalents in the industrialized world while delivering far less. American health care is completely dominated by insurance companies that make all their profits by denying people coverage. The profit motive is the reason why Americans with health insurance are constantly told they have "pre-existing conditions" not covered by the company. A public health care system would be infinitely superior to a private one for the simple reason that its aim is not to profit at the expense of other peoples' lives; it's aim is to provide health services for the population - taking care of people, helping them when they're sick. As Democratic politicians love to point out (without doing anything about it), health care should be a right, not a privilege. A health care system whose entire motive lies in denying people health care is a sick joke, or at least it should be.
But this brings me to the last thought I had while reading the column, and it addresses a far larger issue. Often, when I talk about American politics with my family, they'll tell me something along the lines of "who cares? That's in America." And in a way, they have a point. I spend hours and hours each day reading about American news, politics, and media. Part of that is because it's just so much more fucked up in general than Canadian politics; it's hard to believe that an entity like the modern Republican party, dominated by wingnuts, Jesus freaks, venture capitalists, torture apologists and chickenhawks, can be one of the two major political parties in what is (for now) the world's lone superpower. It would seem like a perfectly plausible argument for someone to tell me that I shouldn't worry what the right-wing noise machine is saying on any given day. As a Canadian progressive, why the hell should I care what wingnuts like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity and the rest of the Faux News crew have to rant about?
The problem, of course, is that while I don't take these guys seriously - I watch it knowing perfectly well that it's propaganda - many, many people in the United States do. And it's not just rednecks and wealthy conservatives; the mainstream media sees these demogogues as worthy contributers to the national discussion. Arianna Huffington, in her book Right Is Wrong, identified one of the main faults of corporate cable news: they always assume that there are only two sides to every issue, a liberal (Democratic) and conservative (Republican) view, and that the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. CNN is the prime culprit here when it comes to television, but it equally applies to establishment rags like the New York Times or the Washington Post. And it's immensely destructive when it comes to an issue where the right/left paradigm does not apply. Take the issue of global warming. Typically, a news segment on the issue might have one person who says global warming is real, and another who says it's a hoax or the science isn't advanced enough for us to know for sure. Since global warming is real, providing such a false balance leaves the viewer disoriented and unsure what the truth really is.
I saw a particularly putrid example of this phenomenon last night on CNN during a discussion about Gitmo detainees. Campbell Brown assured us we would hear from "two very different perspectives", which was fairly spot-on: it featured a face-off between Liz Cheney repeating her father's standard talking points (the detainees were Evil Terrorists, "the worst of the worst", too dangerous to try in American courts for some reason, and repeating the debunked lie that 15% of them had "returned to the battlefield), and Joan Walsh, arguing that Guantanamo only served as a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda (sharing the opinions of U.S. military commanders). I have my disagreements with Walsh - she's one of those liberals that sometimes cheers on imperialist war when it's carried out by a Democratic president - but I have to give her props this week, not only for her performance on the side of "truth" on CNN against Liz Cheney, but also for her bravura verbal ass-kicking of Bill O'Reilly on the issue of Dr. Tiller's murder.
Anyway, the problem was that CNN was offering - as Huffington described it - "equal times for lies." You have Liz Cheney lying her ass off, defending torture and extraordinary rendition, Joan Walsh offering a reasonable rebuttal actually based on fact, and then you have Campbell Brown weighing in before the commercial break with a typically CNN sitting-on-the-fence moment: "well, you both have interesting arguments, let's see if afterwards we can come to some kind of agreement." Panels like this make a mockery of the journalistic ideal. Theoretically, a journalist is supposed to sort through facts to arrive at the truth. Brown lets two sides talk - one of which is consciously lying and distorting the truth - and then leaves it to the viewer to decide which side is right, a complete abdication of her supposed responsibility as a journalist.
And this brings us back to the larger issue - the power of the right-wing propaganda machine. As stupid as conservatives are when it comes to actual policy, I'll give them this: they are brilliant when it comes to getting their message out. As George Lakoff summarizes in his book The Political Mind, Republicans have always been masters of framing issues in ways that skew towards their own agenda; hence, Democrats are accused of being "soft on terror" or "weak on national security". And Democrats always buy right into that framing, adopting right-wing policies to prove how "tough" they are and by extension looking all the weaker, as opposed to if they stood up for principle and said they were "strong on liberty" or something like that. In any typical media event, the Right always sets the agenda and the "Left" responds, and in this way, they allow the Right to effectively control the news cycle.
By presenting the lunatic fringe as the Respectable Right (although there's really not much difference these days), the media keeps a seat at the table for the forces of reaction. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised by this. The conservative movement is insanely well-funded by wealthy patrons. The corporate news media - both its owners and its advertisers - have an interest in presenting the news in a way that does not interfere with their own privileges, and so will always give time to a political movement that stands up for the interests of the American oligarchy. An educated population would be able to see through these lies. But guess what? Most people don't know that much about the news. They form their opinions based on very superficial impressions of what goes on in the world, and in that arena, it's hard to beat the right-wing noise machine.
So the problem is that the disinformation and lies purveyed by Wingnut TV and Hate Radio reach an audience of largely uneducated Americans, which the Right preys upon by exploiting basic fears and prejudices (Immigrants! Gays! Blacks! Evil Muslim Terrorists!), as well as wedge issues like abortion, in order to get them to vote against their own interests. Once in power, the Right leads the forces of imperialism and rapacious capitalism, lowering the standard of living for workers, trashing the environment, and engaging in endless war with a never-ending supply of unfortunate civilians slaughtered by U.S. airstrikes at wedding parties. In short, they're ruining the world for my generation and each one after it.
It's tempting to point the finger at the Wingnut segment of the U.S. population: the dumbass, xenophobic, God-fearing, gay-hating, gun-loving hillbillies who watch Fox News and think that a millionaire blowhard like Bill O'Reilly, a Republican-talking-point robot like Sean Hannity, or a racist, sexist 300-pound Oxycontin addict, with a few failed marriages under his belt, who claims to be the paragon of "moral values", have their best interests at heart. These are the Americans who have barely any concept of the world outside their borders, who have no idea that every country in the developed world besides theirs have some form of universal health care, who think that wanting their country to bomb brown people on the other side of their world somehow makes them "tough"...at some level, you have to blame them for their own stupidity and gullibility. It takes all sorts to make up a society, and you will always have those undereducated buffoons who ascribe to what Matt Taibbi referred to as "the peasant mentality."
However, I still can't let myself adopt the attitude of my brother, who suggested the other day, "who cares about a bunch of hillbillies?" The thing is, those hillbillies are actually an ever-shrinking minority in the U.S., and they support Republican politicians mainly because they lack the education to see how they're being misled. The majority of the American electorate voted for Obama, and even if most of them can't see past his celebrity-facade to see that he is a tool of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex (like all recent presidents), we can at the very least accept that they wanted some form of "change". Call me an optimist, but I prefer to believe that most people want very reasonable things from their politicians. The mass media today, meanwhile, serves to spin the policies and distract the populace so that they think they really do live in the greatest country on earth. To ascribe the policies of the United States governments to the voters is true on some level - there is some truth to the old adage that you get the government you deserve - but to take a society in which the ruling class systematically lies and distorts its way through the media every day, and blame its failings on the people who are fooled, is to some extent blaming the victims.
It's no coincidence that the United States is both the most religious country in the developed world and the one with the weakest labour movement. The American ruling elite has worked its whole history to maintain its privileges, to demonize supporters of labour unions as dangerous "socialists", to divide the working class by appealing to racial prejudices, and to distract the people from the faults of this world by pointing them to a fantasy afterlife in another. There's only one way to change that: by educating the people to the point where they can develop a sense of class consciousness.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Canada's Next Top Metal Band
Joining 3 Inches of Blood as metal's best new hope for the Great White North is Toronto's Cauldron, a band whose debut album I've been listening to nonstop for the past week. Cauldron take the best of NWOBHM and early thrash, with a sprinkling of Dokken-style pop metal, to create an amalgram of the kind of music that I just instinctually love. One reviewer said the vocals are sung with more enthusiasm than ability, but hey, you could say the same for early Metallica. After hearing about their music, I saw a photo of the band and knew they had the image too. Seeing a bunch of scruffy longhaired metal dudes drinking beer - well, that takes me right back to the sense of fun and awe towards the majesty of rock that personified many of the best bands of the classic rock era. Plus, just look at the t-shirts: Budweiser and Dio. If that isn't a great combination (despite the watery nature of American beer), what is? Add a talent for tuneful choruses and atmospheric intros and you've got the EXACT kind of band I like.Check out one of my favourite songs from the debut.
General Motors and the Crisis of Capitalism
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's take on the government-subsidized "restructuring" of General Motors was good for a laugh:
The governments of Canada and Ontario are co-operating to provide financing to General Motors of Canada Limited (GMCL) and General Motors (GM) Corporation to support the companies’ efforts to restructure while maintaining Canada’s production share in the Canada-U.S. market and making a significant investment in research and development.Since the onset of the global financial crisis, a constant thread has been the assault on the working class by a financial oligarchy intent on making them pay for the financial crisis. The old quote, "As goes General Motors, so goes the nation" has never been more relevant. Contrary to Harper's bullshit, the unions have borne the lion's share of "sacrifice". From SocialistWorker:
“The management, unions and financial institutions behind General Motors have each made major sacrifices to help ensure a sustainable, competitive company going forward,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was joined by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Federal Minister of Industry Tony Clement in making the announcement.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page sounded a similar theme. "The new agreement simplifies some work rules and job descriptions but makes no reductions in hourly pay, pensions or health care for active workers," the Journal complained. It was forgetting that the United Auto Workers (UAW) agreed to forgive a $20 billion debt that GM owes the union for a retiree health care fund. Instead, the UAW health care trust fund will get 17.5 percent of company stock--which is highly unlikely to ever be worth enough to pay for retirees' health care.
At Chrysler, the UAW health care trust fund will get 55 percent of company stock under the takeover by Fiat--but that's even more likely to force cuts in retiree health care. And at both Chrysler and GM, the UAW gave up the right to strike until 2015--and contract negations will apparently be replaced by arbitration.
So despite the complaints of right-wing blowhards, it's autoworkers, their families and communities who are getting screwed. With 14 GM plants set to close, the company's UAW workforce will be downsized from 64,000 today to just 40,000--compared to 450,000 in the late 1970s.
And as better-paid autoworkers retire, most will be replaced with new hires earning just about half the current top wage of about $28 per hour, thanks to a contract concession made several years ago.
The sacrifices of the UAW mirror the experiences of millions of working people in Canada and the United States, who are being squeezed mercilessly by governments in the pockets of our respective financial aristocracies. As Linda McQuaig notes, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has made no secret of his contempt for workers and the unemployed, whom he blames for the crisis. The stinginess of the Conservative government in its treatment of Employment Insurance is truly remarkable, given how many Canadians have paid premiums into the program without receiving any benefits. But then, this isn't strictly a Conservative thing. After all, it was the Liberals who used built-up money from EI premiums to balance the budget. It left us ill-prepared for an economic rainy day, let alone the tsunami of a global financial meltdown.
Conspicuously absent from political discussions in Canada and the United States has been any discussion of a progressive income tax - i.e., of raising taxes on the rich. In the recent provincial election in British Columbia, even NDP leader Carole James pledged not to touch Liberal premier Gordon Campbell's corporate tax cuts. Since government budgets everywhere are swimming in red ink - deficit spending being necessary to stimulate the economy - you'd think this obsession with balanced budgets might point pundits towards the most obvious solution - raising taxes on the rich. After all, in times of economic crisis, it's the working classes that make or break a recovery. By giving people more disposable income through EI or social programs, they can afford to purchase more and help the economy recover (especially since they are far more likely to spend money quickly than the wealthy).
Unfortunately, that's the not the way our elites think. For them, any kind of limitation on their own luxurious lifestyles - no matter how small - is inconceivable. No, better to make the working masses pay for it, despite the fact that it was this parasitical financial oligarchy, with their reckless gambling on Wall Street and incessant demand for tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cut, that left us in such a precarious position today. As the always-brilliant Bill Maher pointed out, America is never short of people willing to fuck each other over for a buck - although it can easily be argued that the trait of greed is universal. But episodes like the developing plan to turn California into a Third World state are always staggering to hear about. As a kid, I admired Arnold Schwarzenegger as a larger-than-life action hero, but it turns out that he is a very small man indeed. Granted, this is institutional inertia as much as anything else, and was likely forced on him by the usual combination of corrupt politicians in Sacramento and Washington, and the wealthy donors that legally bribe them. States are unable to run a budget deficit, and so in that sense he had no choice - Schwarzenegger had to find some way to fill that $21 billion hole in the budget. Yet with raising taxes on the rich politically impossible, he took an axe to social programs with a vengeance. Many Californians will die because of these policies. But hey, you can't deny the rich their fair supply of yachts.
Of course, it all could have been prevented if President Obama had any balls. The federal government could easily have supplied $21 billion to California, but refused to. Apparently, it's no problem to give $185 billion to AIG, $45 billion to Citigroup (with $300 billion more in guarantees for that company's toxic paper), but politically insurmountable to try and save the actual people of California, one of the world's largest economies. As if it wasn't clear before, just more proof that the American government was bought and paid for a long time ago.
Blame Reagan.
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