Disinformation Campaign Proves Effective as Anti-SOPA Strike-Breaker

Two or three days ago, announcements were broadcast on various Media Outlets stating that two bills in the Congress and the Senate, SOPA and PROTECT-IP were effectively “Dead-in-the-Water,” resulting in the cancellation (or extreme reduction) of what would have been an extremely disruptive– and therefore highly dramatic– strike/protest by Major Internet Companies against the proposed legislation.

The fact that no sources were actually named, as well as the coordinated nature of this spurious disinformation campaign, indicates that this legislation, involving a precipitous curtailment of the Civil Liberties in the United States, indicates a scope of political interests far beyond those of the Entertainment Industry.

History shows us that a curtailment of Civil Liberties is never instituted without an eye to a further attack on those same liberties at a later date.

This debate is not over. Expect to hear opponents to these bills caricatured as disgruntled pirates of popular entertainment, 20-somethings living in their mothers’ basements, who want to continue downloading music and movies without having to pay for the privilege.

Expect to read further, and ever more disturbing, developments in the coming months.

View A Legal Analysis of S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act [PDF] from the Congressional Research Service

Wall Street Declares War on America (Yes, this constitutes Conspiracy!)

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan Admits Cities Coordinated Crackdown on Occupy Movement

Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”

Mayor Quan then rambles about how she “spoke with protestors in my city” who professed an interest in “separating from anarchists,” implying that her police action was helping this somehow.

Interestingly, Quan then essentially advocates that occupiers move to private spaces, and specifically cites Zuccotti Park as an example:

In New York City, it’s interesting that the Wall Street movement is actually on a private park, so they’re not, again, in the public domain, and they’re not infringing on the public’s right to use a public park.

Many witnesses to the wave of government crackdowns on numerous #occupy encampments have been wondering aloud if the rapid succession was more than a coincidence; Jean Quan’s casual remark seems to clearly imply that it was.

Might it also be more than a coincidence that this succession of police raids started after President Obama left the US for an extended tour of the Pacific Rim?

Occupy Oakland

Apparently, Wall Street doesn’t believe in the First Amendment right to Freedom of Association:

In a side note: apparently the police tried to claim that it was protesters throwing tear gas grenades. They’re not even good liars.

Also, my nephew went there to observe the event. Good thing he went at the wrong time.

When terrorists aren’t Jihadists: The Media Reaction

From Atlantic

Yesterday’s first reports on the massacre in Norway suggested that there was a link between the horrific attacks, which left 92 dead at latest reports, and Muslim extremists. Only later was the news released that the suspect taken by police, Anders Behring Breivik, was apparently a conservative, right-wing Christian with strong anti-Muslim and anti-immigration beliefs. Many in the media were left reeling over the fact that others were so quick to report and comment that Muslims were involved, before there was clear evidence. Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun had as a headline on the front page, “Al Qaeda Massacre: Norway’s 9/11.” The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial on the bombings that begins with references to Islam. It starts:

When cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad appeared in a Danish newspaper in the fall of 2005 and sparked a full-blown jihadist campaign against Denmark, then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen responded with a telling remark. “We Danes feel like we have been placed in a scene in the wrong movie,” he told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel.”

Joe Weisenthal, deputy editor of Business Insider, tweeted: “It is pretty bewildering that the first 3 paragraphs of this WSJ editorial on Norway are about Al-Qaeda/Islam.”

The most controversial piece, however, seems to be an editorial at The Washington Post by “Right Turn” columnist Jennifer Rubin, who quoted the Weekly Standard that:

We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra. Prominent jihadists have already claimed online that the attack is payback for Norway’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

The editorial remains up on the Post, “sixteen hours after its claims were shown to be false and hysterical, it’s still there, with no correction or apology,” according to James Fallows at The Atlantic. Fallows responded to Rubin’s piece, in a blog post titled, “The Washington Post Owes the World an Apology for this Item,” writing that:

No, this is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too tedious to reserve judgment about horrifying events rather than instantly turning them into talking points for pre-conceived views. On a per capita basis, Norway lost twice as many people today as the U.S. did on 9/11.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn’t, even when it’s allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist… we’ve seen repeatedly: that Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target. Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn’t Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn’t).

Ibrahim Hewitt writes an editoral at Al-Jazeera, where he observes that once media outlets noted that the suspect was not Muslim, they disassociated connections between the suspect’s beliefs and his alleged violent actions.

…the perpetrator was a “blond, blue-eyed Norwegian” with “political traits towards the right, and anti-Muslim views.” Not surprisingly, the man’s intentions were neither linked to these “traits,” nor to his postings on “websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies.” Any influence “remains to be seen”; echoes of Oklahoma 1995. Interestingly, this criminal is described by one unnamed Norwegian official as a “madman.”

…Anyone who claims therefore, that the perpetrator’s “right-wing traits” and “anti-Muslim views,” or even links with “Christian fundamentalist” websites are irrelevant is trying to draw a veil over the unacceptable truths of such “traits” and expecting us to believe that right-wing ideology is incapable of prompting someone towards such criminality.

The right-wing, anti-government mindset attributed to the Norwegian rampage suspect has observers recalling US extremist Timothy McVeigh – behind the devastating Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured more than 800.

McVeigh, then just 26, blew up a van he had packed with explosives and parked outside a large federal building in the Oklahoman state capital, on April 19, 1995.

The blast was the deadliest ever domestic attack in US history, and brought into sharp focus the threat of homegrown terrorism.

Arrested shortly afterwards, McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, was found to have been a figure in neo-Nazi groups and even claimed to have acted for the “common good” of Americans, as he railed against what he thought was the dictatorship of the federal government. (sound like tea party rhetoric?)

Pseudomenos [Greek: liar].

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” — George Orwell

The magnetic power which ideologies exert over human beings, while they have become entirely threadbare, is to be explained beyond psychology, in the objectively determined decay of logical evidence as such. It has come to the point that lies sound like truth, and truth like lies. Every statement, every news report, every thought is preformed by the centers of the culture-industry. What does not bear the trusted mark of such preformation lacks credibility in advance, all the more so that the institutions of public opinion garnish what they send out with a thousand factual proofs and all the power of conviction which the total [corporate] apparatus can bring to bear. The truth which would like to do something against this, bears not merely the character of something improbable, but is moreover too poor to break through in direct competition with the highly concentrated apparatus of dissemination. The German extreme sheds light on the entire mechanism. When the Nazis began to torture, they did not merely terrorize people both inside and outside the country, but were at the same time the more secure against exposure, the more savage the atrocities became. Its sheer unbelievability made it easy to disbelieve what, for the sake of peace, no-one wanted to believe, while simultaneously capitulating before it. Those who trembled in fear told themselves that things were much exaggerated: well into the war, the details of the concentration camps were unwelcome in the English press. Every horror in the enlightened world turns necessarily into a horror story [Greuelmärchen]. For the untruth of the truth has a kernel, to which the unconscious eagerly [begierig anspricht] turns. It does not only wish for horror. Rather Fascism is in fact less “ideological”, to the extent it immediately proclaimed the principle of domination, which was elsewhere hidden.

Whatever humane principles the democracies marshaled to oppose it, were effortlessly rebutted by pointing out that these do not concern all of humanity, but merely its false image, which Fascism is man enough to divest itself of. So desperate however have human beings become in their culture, that they are ready to cast off the frail signs of a better state of affairs, if only the world does their worse side the favor of confessing how evil it is. The political forces of opposition however are compelled to make use of the lie, if they do not wish to be completely extinguished as completely destructive. The deeper their difference from the existent, which nevertheless grants them shelter from a still worse future, the easier it is for the Fascists to nail them down as untruths. Only the absolute lie still has the freedom to say anything of the truth. The confusion of truth with lies, which makes it nearly impossible to maintain the difference between the two, and which makes holding on to the simplest cognition a labor of Sisyphus, announces the victory of the principle in logical organization, even though its military basis has been crushed. Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The reconfiguration of all
questions of truth into those of power, which truth itself cannot evade, if it does not wish to be annihilated by power, does not merely suppress the truth, as in earlier despotisms, but has reached into the innermost core of the disjunction of true and false, whose abolition the hired mercenaries of logic are anyway feverishly working towards. Thus Hitler, who no-one can say if he died or escaped, lives on.

—Minima Moralia, Theodore Adorno

Click to enlarge:

The Deficit Hawks Target Nurses and Firefighters

Center for Economic and Policy Research

Dean Baker – March 28, 2011

Many people might think that the country’s problems stem from the fact that too much money has been going to the very rich. Over the last three decades, the richest 1 percent of the population has increased its share of national income by almost 10 percentage points. This comes to $1.5 trillion a year, or as the deficit hawks are fond of saying, $90 trillion over the next 75 years.

To put this in context, the size of this upward redistribution to the richest 1 percent over the last three decades is roughly large enough to double the income of all the households in the bottom half of the income distribution. The upward redistribution amounts to an average of more than 1.2 million dollars a year for each of the families in the richest 1 percent of the population.

And this upward redistribution was brought about by deliberate policy. We pursued a trade and high dollar policy that was intended to put downward pressure on the wages of manufacturing workers. The Federal Reserve Board deliberately kept unemployment higher than necessary in order to weaken workers bargaining power… And, we gave the Wall Street banks the benefit of “too big to fail” status so they can borrow with a government subsidy.

These policies and others fueled this enormous upward redistribution. But the deficit hawks don’t want us talking about any of these things.

The deficit hawks insist that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits now! They are busy hyperventilating over the enormous deficits, the result of the economic collapse, which was in turn the result of their economic mismanagement.

And the deficit hawks have clear ideas on how they want to deal with the costs of Social Security and Medicare over coming decades. And, it does not involve taking money from the tiny group of wealthy people who have profited enormously at the expense of the middle class over the last three decades?

Nor are the deficit hawks interested in reining in the drug companies, the insurance companies or the doctors. The bloated prices and exorbitant pay of these actors is the main reason that U.S. health care costs are so wildly out of line with health care costs in other wealthy countries.

But deficit hawks don’t get paid to go after rich people or the health care industry. Deficit hawks get paid to go after the benefits of middle-income people. This is why we were treated to a Washington Post column by finance industry executive Robert Pozen telling liberals that they should support his plan for raising the retirement age and cutting Social Security benefits for higher-income earners.

The deficit hawk crew will even shed some crocodile tears for the poor who earn near the minimum wage and live near the poverty level. They would raise their benefits if not for those greedy plumbers and mechanics who insist on getting the Social Security benefits that they paid for.

In the next few weeks we will be treated to an endless parade of budget experts who will be yapping about “entitlements” and insisting that middle-income workers are living too lavishly.

The deficit hawks are very good when it comes to whining about the deficit and demanding sacrifices from middle-class workers. They just aren’t very good when it comes to understanding the economy.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, “Beat the Press,” where he discusses the media’s coverage of economic issues.

Gingrich: My Infidelities Helped Me Understand How To Impeach Clinton

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace questioned likely presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — who has placed social issues at the forefront of his emerging campaign — about his personal infidelities and multiple marriages. Gingrich has admitted to having an affair with a Congressional aide (his present wife Callista) while leading the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton and so Wallace asked the former Speaker of the House if he thought his actions were hypocritical. Gingrich said they weren’t, going so far as to suggest that his past divorce and experience with giving depositions helped him understand why Clinton should have been impeached:

WALLACE: There is something else that bothers people. You were leading the charge to push Bill Clinton from office for lying about an affair and yes, he lied in a court proceeding, in a deposition, where he was sworn to tell the truth, whole truth, nothing but the truth. At the same time, you were leading that charge, you were having an affair. Isn’t that hypocrisy?

GINGRICH: No. Look, obviously it’s complex and obviously I wasn’t doing things to be proud of. On the other hand, what I said clearly — and I knew this in part going through a divorce. I had been in depositions. I had been in situations where you had to swear to tell the truth. I understood that in a federal court, in a case in front of a federal judge, to commit a felony, which is what he did, perjury was a felony. The question I raised was simple: should a president of the united states be above the law? […]

WALLACE: I’ll ask you man-to-man. did you think to yourself I’m living in a really glass house? Maybe I shouldn’t be throwing stones?

GINGRICH: No. I thought to myself if I cannot do what I have to do as a public leader, I would have resigned.

Earlier this month, Gingrich tried to justify his divorces by telling the Christian Broadcasting Network that he engaged in his affairs because he was overworked and overcome with patriotism for America. “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” he said. “And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them.”

Clear as Mud!

Happy Birthday, Rupert Murdoch!

by Eric Alterman

Take a step back from contemporary American political debate and it’s not hard to conclude that our political class has gone insane. Tax giveaways to the wealthiest Americans as the deficit rages out of control. Attacks on underpaid and overworked teachers, caregivers and firefighters as alleged fat cats. Insults flung at scientists seeking to save us from the consequences of global warming as House committees vote to strip the EPA of its regulatory power. One could go on indefinitely, of course, but searching for a perfect symbol of how and why our priorities have grown so indefensibly askew, one need look no further than a recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, which featured eighteen tributes from assorted business and entertainment luminaries to media mogul Rupert Murdoch on his eightieth birthday.

None of the tributes come from people identified as conservatives. Quite a few, including Ted Turner, Peter Chernin and Gary Ginsberg, are well-known liberals…
Leave aside the purely corrupt aspects of his business practices: the nepotism; the bribery in the form of millions offered to Newt Gingrich and the daughters of Chinese dictators in the form of “advances” for books that nobody wants to buy; the unionbusting; the cancellation of a book contract by Christopher Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, because it displeased the same Chinese strongmen to whom he kowtowed by kicking the BBC off his satellite network. Judge him instead according to the testimony of film producer Arnon Milchan, who says Murdoch told him, “I am first and foremost a journalist. All the rest is a defense mechanism.”

How to pick the highlights of this esteemed journalistic career? What about the practice at Fox News of deliberately misleading its audience with phony footage—for instance, using films of violent altercations in Florida while pretending to report on peaceful demonstrations in Wisconsin; or, presumably for variety’s sake, using footage of a much larger demonstration somewhere else to give a boost to a poorly attended Michele Bachmann–led rally against healthcare reform? And what are we to make of the anti-Obama rally led by Glenn Beck at which a Fox producer could be seen leading the protesters in cheers as Fox readied to film them?

Of course, this is rather small potatoes compared with the hosts and guests who frequently promote the false and destructive notion that Barack Obama is a Kenya-born Muslim who hates all white people—including, presumably, his mother. (Murdoch, one must recall, said he agreed with Beck’s comments that Obama hates white people.)
As if that’s not dangerous enough, there is the recent campaign of anti-Semitic slander against Holocaust survivor George Soros on Beck’s show and the ginning up of anti-Arab racism on all Fox programming. It’s impossible to know what, exactly, motivates any act of violence by a disturbed person—say, in the case of the attack on Gabrielle Giffords and those around her by a crazed gunman. But what of Beck fan Byron Williams’s desire to take out the progressive Tides Foundation, a frequent Beck target—a crime foiled only when California Highway Patrol officers pulled Williams over on a DUI charge?

It’s no accident that such tactics are so prevalent at Fox; they are the rule rather than the exception at Murdoch properties. Was it really such a shock, for instance, when it was recently reported that Murdoch’s top honcho, Roger Ailes, allegedly instructed ex-HarperCollins employee Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators in order to protect Rudy Giuliani? As mayor, Giuliani had pressured Time Warner Cable after it initially declined to include Fox News on its menu of channels. And is it really so amazing that the British staff of Murdoch’s News of the World were widely engaged in criminal wiretapping to try to scoop their competition? When you consider all this, you almost want to give ex–New York Post gossip columnist Richard Johnson a Pulitzer Prize. All he did was regularly accept cash bribes in exchange for using his column to promote the properties of those handing over the cash. (Johnson was not publicly disciplined when this corruption was revealed.)

If Murdoch is judged as “first and foremost a journalist,” the inevitable conclusion is that he is an enabler and purveyor of lies, hatred and criminal activity in the service of his ideological, financial and personal interests. A man like this deserves to be shunned, à la Bernie Madoff or Mel Gibson. That he is celebrated as some sort of hero by people who need not worry about their reputations tells you almost all you need to know about the insanity that grips our benighted political culture.

More at The Nation

from quotevadis.com

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”

— From the book Propaganda (1928), by Edward Bernays

No Suprise: FOX Manufactures “News”

Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck Respond To News That Parent Company Hires Call-in Actors

On Sunday, the article, Limbaugh/Hannity Parent Company Admits Hiring Actors to Call Radio Shows, by Gustav Wynn, generated an explosive response on Twitter, in the blogosphere and subsequently, from Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck on their radio shows.

Hannity attacked the messenger, Limbaugh attacked his bosses, Beck attacked “currency manipulator” George Soros and the blogosphere went abuzz as the the public considered whether Limbaugh, Hannity or Beck might have used their parent company’s dial-a-fraud radio call-in service.

Limbaugh Pissed

On his radio show Monday, Rush Limbaugh responded to an online furor after his parent company acknowledged a secretive “custom caller” service. Rush questioned the judgment of the bosses at Premiere Radio Network [after] it was confirmed his distributor hires and plants actors on radio programs.

The article that set off the explosion of public criticism and media coverage, Limbaugh/Hannity Parent Company Admits Hiring Actors to Call Radio Shows, has led to speculation that the country’s highest rated talk hosts knew the Clear Channel owned company was peddling a pay-to-lie service.

Hannity Indignant

On Sunday, the article, Limbaugh/Hannity Parent Company Admits Hiring Actors to Call Radio Shows, by Gustav Wynn, generated an explosive response on Twitter, in the blogosphere and subsequently, from Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck on their radio shows.

Hannity attacked the messenger, Limbaugh attacked his bosses, Beck attacked “currency manipulator” George Soros and the blogosphere went abuzz as the the public considered whether Limbaugh, Hannity or Beck might have used their parent company’s dial-a-fraud radio call-in service.

Beck Bonkers

Unlike the two top-rated radio mega-icons, Glenn Beck defends the pay-to-lie services, explaining that real people are too dull and too inhibited. Through Beck’s blog The Blaze, author and Breitbart alum Mike Opelka then makes a blatant factual error writing, “Tablet Magazine…neglected to exercise the most basic journalistic common courtesy – asking the accused for a response. Instead of seeking real answers, they printed what they wanted to believe.”

In fact, Tablet’s original article included a statement from Premiere spokesperson Karen Nelson, who confirmed the existence of the service and shifted blame for any potential abuse onto her clients. “Premiere provides a wide variety of audio services for radio stations across the country, one of which is connecting local stations in major markets with great voice talent to supplement their programming needs,” Nelson wrote in an email. “Voice actors know this service as Premiere On Call. Premiere, like many other content providers, facilitates casting — while character and script development, and how the talent’s contribution is integrated into programs, are handled by the varied stations.” That’s no denial.

Though Premiere may have been hiring actors since 2009 or even 2008, their casting service flew under the radar until last month when Tablet writer Liel Liebovitz met an actor who had auditioned for the job. “Once I learned about that, I reached out to other actors until I found enough sources who could corroborate the veracity of the story. I definitely talked to a number of actors who were paid to call in to radio shows. The people I talked to showed me communications from Premiere proving they were hired as freelance actors,” Liebovitz said.

Read more at the Huffington Post