Category: Blog

  • Three years after Ontario’s government committed to building more homes faster, the number of homes built in Ontario is dramatically down and government sources show that without radical change fewer than half of the 1.5 million homes promised will be built by 2031.

    Ontario has had all the tools it needs to house a fast-growing population, even with high interest rates. But its laws prohibit labour-efficient multi-family housing on almost all existing low-rise “neighbourhood” streets, limiting apartment buildings to tiny high-rise pockets where family-sized homes aren’t viable. They require that most homes large enough for families be built in inefficient low-density types and put on farmland and natural areas where construction resources are wasted on building roads, sewers and other infrastructure from scratch. These are the very same laws and policies that cause car-dependency, threaten Ontario’s Greenbelt, destroy rare wetlands and sensitive wildlife habitat. They also make Canada vulnerable to U.S. threats of “economic force” by eating away at the farmland we need to produce food ourselves

    This election is Ontario voters’ chance to fix these problems by electing MPPs who – whatever their previous views – are now committed to turning the way we plan our housing on its head by scrapping plans for wasteful car-dependent subdivisions and McMansions and focussing construction on family-friendly apartments on existing residential streets. Ontario needs a legislature with the guts to overhaul outdated zoning, unfair fees, building codes, and tax rules quickly, and from the top-down.

    Why not just “get government out of the way” by cutting taxes, fees, and red-tape for all new housing?

    Ontario’s housing crisis emerged even though construction workers and equipment were running at full tilt. Unlike fast-growing states in the United States “sunbelt”, who ruthlessly exploit a bottomless supply of undocumented and underpaid migrant construction labour, Ontario can only deliver more homes, faster by getting builders to make better use of the labour, equipment and materials that we already have. That means ensuring that the mid-rise infill housing development that produces family housing most efficiently is also easier, more cost-effective, and less risky for builders than competing formats and locations.

    • Whether you’re angry and scared about the shortage of low-cost housing in the places you want to live, or determined to protect our farms, forests and wetlands, your provincial election litmus test should be the same. Let candidates know that if they want your vote, they need to:
    • Lower land costs for labour-efficient buildings in all of Ontario’s existing lowrise neighbourhoods, starting with blanket permission for six-storey apartment buildings on every existing residential major street and avenue and four-storey apartment buildings on every suburban, city and small town residential lot throughout Ontario
    • Cut construction costs for mid-rise housing by allowing use of simple wood frame construction, removing residential parking minimums, ending “step-back” requirements, and legalizing single staircase designs for buildings up to six storeys and permitting mass timber construction up to eight storeys.
    • Stop the wasting of construction capacity, by reversing all designations of rural land for sprawl development since 2022. Requiring that any development on land designated before that house at least 100 people per hectare and expand the Greenbelt to the rest of southern Ontario’s farmland and natural areas permanently.
    • Cancel planned subsidies for inefficient sprawl, starting with the destructive multibillion dollar Highway 413.
      Fund deeply affordable public and non-market housing, especially when market construction is stalled.
    • Unlock existing towns and suburbs for families without cars and new homes that don’t waste land and materials on parking by immediately funding more bus service and quickly approving, funding, and installing bus rapid transit lanes on existing arterials and collectors.

    We know how to end the housing crisis. A future Ontario government has the advice of experts, and even a government appointed task force. Unfortunately, over the last several years progress has been slowed and reversed by dismantling the modest measures taken by the previous government to promote density and efficient land use while promoting wasteful, expensive sprawl and low-density housing.

    Don’t be fooled by vague promises to cut red tape and taxes or claims that more sprawl is the solution to our housing crisis. Don’t let provincial candidates pass the buck to federal and municipal governments. There’s only one path to solving the housing shortage, saving farms, forests and wetlands, and fixing car-dependent suburbs. Between now and election day, candidates must commit to following it.

    The post Ontario’s Fixation on Highway Sprawl Caused our Housing Shortage appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  •  

    Media outlets continue to print headlines about antisemitism based on Anti-Defamation League statistics known to be faulty and politicized. In doing so, they grant undeserved credibility to the ADL as a source.

    Producing statistics helps the ADL to claim objectivity when they assert that antisemitism is increasing dramatically, prevalent in all fields of society, and emanating from the left as well as the right. Those “facts” are then used to justify policy recommendations that fail to respond to actual antisemitism, but succeed in undermining the free speech rights of Palestinians and their supporters, including those of us who are Jews.

    Smearing Israel critics as antisemites

    Nation: The Anti-Defamation League: Israel’s Attack Dog in the US

    James Bamford (The Nation, 1/31/24) : “The New York Times, PBS and other mainstream outlets that reach millions are constantly and uncritically promoting the ADL and amplifying the group’s questionable charges.”

    While it frames itself as a civil rights organization, the ADL has a long history of actively spying on critics of Israel and collaborating with the Israeli government (Nation, 1/31/24). (FAIR itself was targeted as a “Pinko” group in ADL’s sprawling spying operation in the ’90s.)

    Though it professes to document and challenge antisemitism, it openly admits to counting pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic: In 2023, the ADL changed its methodology for reporting antisemitic incidents to include rallies that feature “anti-Zionist chants and slogans,” even counting anti-war protests led by Jews—including Jewish organizations the ADL designated as “hate groups.”

    The ADL’s political motivations are clear in its advocacy for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which alleges that criticizing Israel based on its policies (e.g., “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis“) is antisemitic. The ADL and their allies also deem speech supporting Palestinian human rights to be coded antisemitism.

    Criticism of the ADL is increasing. In 2020, activists launched #DropTheADL to raise awareness among progressives that the ADL is not a civil rights or anti-bias group, but rather an Israel advocacy organization that attacks Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian rights in order to protect Israel from criticism. Last year, a campaign to Drop the ADL From Schools launched with an exposé in Rethinking Schools magazine, and an open letter to educators, titled “Educators Beware: The Anti-Defamation League Is Not the Social Justice Partner It Claims to Be,” that garnered more than 90 organizational signatories. These efforts build off research that exposes the ADL’s work to normalize Zionism and censor inclusion of Palestinian topics in the media, policy circles, schools and in society at large.

    In 2023, some of its own high-profile staff resigned, citing the group’s “dishonest” campaign against Israel’s critics. In June 2024, Wikipedia editors found the ADL regularly labels legitimate political criticism of Israel as antisemitic, leading the popular online encyclopedia to designate the group an unreliable source on Israel/Palestine.

    Critiquing the ADL’s statistics does not serve to argue that antisemitism is acceptable or less deserving of attention than other forms of discrimination. Rather, it demonstrates that we can’t rely on the ADL for information about the extent or nature of antisemitism—and neither should media.

    A dubious source

    NYT: Antisemitic Incidents Reach New High in the U.S., Report Finds

    This New York Times report (10/6/24) obscured the fact that many of the “antisemitic incidents” counted by the ADL were chants critical of Israel.

    And yet corporate media use the ADL uncritically as a source for reports on antisemitism. For instance, the New York Times (10/6/24) not only headlined the ADL’s assertion that “Antisemitic Incidents Reach New High in the US,” it chose to contextualize the ADL’s findings “in the wake of the Hamas attack,” and called the ADL a “civil rights organization.”

    Important media outlets like The Hill (4/16/24), with outsized influence on national policy discussions, ran similar headlines, failing to note the ADL’s highly controversial methodology.

    At least the Wall Street Journal (1/14/25) acknowledged that the ADL has been challenged for counting criticism of Israel as antisemitism. But it immediately dismissed the applicability of those challenges to the ADL’s Global 100 survey, which found that 46% of adults worldwide hold antisemitic views. (The ADL’s Global 100 survey was criticized for its flawed methodology as far back as 2014, when researchers found it “odd and potentially misleading.”)

    The media’s willingness to accept ADL claims without scrutiny is evident in CNN’s choice (12/16/24) not to investigate the ADL’s accusations of antisemitism against speakers at a recent conference of the National Association of Independent Schools, but rather to simply repeat and amplify the ADL’s dishonest and slanderous narrative.

    Methodological faults

    Jewish Currents: Examining the ADL’s Antisemitism Audit

    A Jewish Currents report (6/17/24) concluded that “the ADL’s data is much more poised to capture random swastika graffiti and stray anti-Zionist comments than dangerous Christian nationalist movements.”

    Even setting aside the ADL’s prioritization of Israel’s interests over Jewish well-being, the ADL’s statistics should be thrown out due to methodological faults and lack of transparency.

    Even FBI statistics, frequently cited by the ADL, don’t tell a clear story. Their claim that 60% of religious hate crimes (not mere bias incidents) target Jews is misleading, given the systemic undercounting of bias against other religious groups. Because of the history of anti-Muslim policing, Muslims are less likely to report than people of other religions.

    In fact, a national survey of Muslims found that over two-thirds of respondents had personally encountered Islamophobia, while only 12.5% had reported an incident. Almost two-thirds of respondents who encountered an Islamophobic incident did not know where or how to report it. When Muslims experience hate, it is less likely to be pursued as a hate crime.

    On the other hand, the ADL has an unparalleled infrastructure for collecting incident reports. It actively solicits these reports from its own network, and through close relations with police and a growing network of partners like Hillel International and Jewish Federations.

    Perpetrators’ motivations are also relevant and should not be inferred. In 2017, Jews were frightened by over 2,000 threats aimed at Jewish institutions in the United States. It turned out that nearly all came from one Jewish Israeli with mental health problems. Without this level of investigation, policymakers could enact misguided policy based on the ADL’s sensationalism, like CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s claim that “antisemitism is nothing short of a national emergency, a five-alarm fire that is still raging across the country and in our local communities and campuses.”

    Bad-faith accusations

    Zeteo: What Antisemitism? The ADL Prostrated to Musk and Trump

    David Klion (Zeteo, 2/4/25): “How did the ADL, which for generations has presented itself as America’s leading antisemitism watchdog, find itself prostrated before the most powerful enabler of white supremacy in recent American history?”

    Although critics have long argued that the ADL’s politicized definition of antisemitism and flawed statistics cannot be the basis of effective policy, policymakers continue to rely on media’s deceptive journalism.

    Massachusetts State Sen. John Velis cited ADL statistics to claim the state has “earned the ignominious reputation as a hub of antisemitic activity,” and therefore needs a special antisemitism commission. In Michigan, ADL reports of escalating antisemitism led to a resolution that will affect policy in schools across the state. In Connecticut, the ADL referenced its statistics in a government announcement about changes to the state’s hate crimes laws. The ADL’s statistics undergirded the logic of President Joe Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.

    But how can politically distorted research be the foundation for effective policy?

    Antisemitism is surely increasing. Hate crimes have increased in general—most targeting Black people—especially since the first Trump presidency, and hate incidents generally rise during violent outbreaks like the war on Gaza, and during election periods. But since most antisemitism originates in the white nationalist right wing, why focus primarily on people—including Jews—who are legitimately protesting their own government’s support for Israeli actions against Palestinians? Or on Palestinians themselves, who have every right to promote the humanity and rights of their people?

    The ADL’s bad-faith accusations weaponize antisemitism to protect Israel at the expense of democratic and anti-racist principles. Anyone who doubted the ADL’s politics should be convinced by its abhorrent defense of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute (FAIR.org, 1/23/25) and its support for Donald Trump.

    To pursue effective public policy, policymakers and the public should refuse to cite the ADL’s flawed statistics, and instead develop thoughtful and nuanced ways to understand and address antisemitism and other forms of bigotry and discrimination. Media can play a key role by exposing the politicization of antisemitism by the ADL, including its prioritization of protection for Israel from criticism over the free speech that is fundamental to democratic discourse.

     

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  •  

    Who's Running This Country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?

    The wrap WaPo rejected.

    The Washington Post won’t say why it cancelled a six-figure ad buy calling for Elon Musk to be fired, but it’s likely the same reason the Post insisted Musk wasn’t Nazi-saluting on Inauguration Day, and why the paper killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris: because that’s what Jeff Bezos wants.

    In addition to owning the Post, Bezos is the founder of Amazon and currently the world’s third-richest human. At best, the Post is a side-hustle for Bezos, while Amazon and his other business pursuits are what truly animate him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

    To sustain his sprawling empire, Bezos relies on government contracts worth billions of dollars, even as he stiff-arms regulators and irksome antitrust enforcers. This nifty maneuver is only possible if those in power play ball, but Trump didn’t during his first term (CNN, 12/9/19).

    To ensure Trump II will be more amenable, Bezos has gone to lengths to grease the wheels, lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family. He joined Musk and other tech billionaires in flanking Trump at his inauguration. (Bezos’s presence signaled “anything but independence for the Washington Post,” said Marty Baron, the paper’s former executive editor.)

    Meanwhile, with Musk’s hand now on the public money spigot—thanks to Trump ceding much of the US government to him—Bezos is also busy doing favors for Musk (FAIR.org, 2/14/25), the richest person alive.

    From a business perspective—the only perspective that really matters to Bezos—pissing the temperamental Musk off at a moment when he commands unprecedented power in the public and private spheres is a bad idea. So Bezos is being careful not to—as is his paper. Which brings us back to that rejected ad.

    ‘You can’t do the wrap’

    No One Elected Elon Musk to Any Office

    The flipside of the Common Cause/SPLCAF ad.

    The bright red ad was to wrap around the front and back pages of some print editions of the Post, including those going to subscribers on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the White House, ensuring top officials would lay eyes on it. Featuring a laughing Musk hovering over the White House, the ad asks, “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”

    The civic groups Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund were behind the ad wrap, which was to be accompanied by a full-page ad inside the paper.

    But even though the groups had signed a $115,000 contract with the Post, the paper canceled the wrap at the 11th hour, even as it said it could run the inside ad, which hit on the same themes.

    “They said, ‘You can have something inside the paper, but you can’t do the wrap,’” Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón told The Hill (2/16/25). “We said ‘Thanks, no thanks,’ because we had a lot of questions.”

    Among them: Was the ad killed

    because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk? Is it only OK to run things in the Post now that won’t anger the president, or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?

    Kase Solomón asked the Post to explain its willingness to run the inside ad, but not the wrap. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason,” she told the New York Times (2/17/25).

    Tellingly, in providing guidance to Common Cause on how to comply with the Post’s ad standards, Kase Solomón said the paper sent a sample ad paid for by a Big Oil group. “It was a ‘thank you Donald Trump’ piece of art,” Kase Solomón told The Hill.

    The pulled ad directed readers to FireMusk.org, which states:

    Musk, an unaccountable and unelected billionaire, is pushing to control public spending, dismantle the safety net and reshape our way of life to suit his interests. It’s clear what’s happening here: Musk and Trump aim to replace qualified civil servants with political allies whose loyalty lies solely with them.

    ‘Unacceptable business practices’

    A single individual now controls sensitive US data, risking our national security.

    An ad from Ekō rejected by Facebook for “unacceptable business practices.”

    The Post’s ad cancellation comes on the heels of Meta pulling an ad critical of Musk earlier this month. The yanked Facebook ad was purchased by the watchdog group Ekō, which had two other anti-Musk ads taken down by Meta—at least until the outlet Musk Watch made inquiries. The two other ads “were removed in error and have now been restored,” Meta told Musk Watch (2/18/25).

    Meanwhile, Musk Watch noted, “Ads that were supportive of Musk and Trump were not impacted by similar errors.”

    Still, one Ekō ad remains banished, with Meta citing “unacceptable business practices” as the reason.

    That explanation makes a certain kind of sense. After all, alongside Bezos and Musk at Trump’s inauguration, was the world’s second richest person, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And as Bezos’s Post has made clear, pissing off your fellow billionaires is indeed an unacceptable business practice.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Matt and Sam are joined by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to discuss his new book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.

    This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.

  • Dr Koldo Casla 19 February 2025 In the second session of the constructive dialogue with the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) this morning in Geneva, the UK Government acknowledged that the child protection services in England are not fit for purpose. CESCR member Julieta Rossi raise the concern that the child protection system is overtly focused […]

    This post was originally published on Human Rights Centre Blog.

  •  

    Snack bar featuring "freedom fries."

    Selling “freedom fries” at the Nebraska state fair in 2004 (Creative Commons photo: E Egan).

    If you are younger than 30, you probably don’t remember there was a time in the United States when we were practically ordered to hate France. After the country’s oldest European ally voiced its opposition to the US-led push to invade Iraq (Guardian, 1/22/03; Brookings, 2/24/03), right-wing pundits called the French “surrender monkeys,” urging Americans to boycott French products (New York Post, 3/15/03; Guardian, 3/31/03).

    At the same time, pro-war media urged a purge of the word “French” from our vocabulary, starting with renaming French fries to “freedom fries” (New York Times, 8/4/06; LA Times, 2/11/19; Washington Post, 2/11/19). We even got a new breakfast: freedom toast (CNN, 3/12/03). No federal language police were deployed to local communities, although the renaming did reach the House of Representatives cafeteria menu (Daily News, 2/12/19).

    Revisionist maps

    "Gulf of America" on Google Maps.

    Google Maps adopts the Newspeak terminology for the Gulf of Mexico.

    When President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America via executive order (USA Today, 2/10/25), the days of “freedom fries” flashed back for many of us. Once again, the country’s woes were placed on another country; everything from drugs to economic anxiety could be blamed on our neighbor to the south, now run by a woman, left-wing, Jewish climate scientist (FAIR.org, 6/4/24). Like the neocons in the post-9/11 moment flexed their imperialist muscle against “old Europe” (RFE/RL, 1/24/03), renaming the gulf is another way for this revanchist and expansionist Republican administration to assert that the Monroe Doctrine is back in a big way, and the rest of the hemisphere had better get used to it.

    Much like “freedom fries,” the whole “Gulf of America” show feels like the lunacy of a dictator who’s off his rocker, akin to the fictional Latin American president in the Woody Allen movie Bananas who declares that his country’s official language will now be Swedish. But sadly, it’s not funny.

    Google Maps renamed it the “Gulf of America” for those reading from the US, and Google “appears to have deleted some negative reviews left in the wake of its name change” (BBC, 2/13/25). Apple made the same change to its maps service, although the move failed to gain trust from the White House, which still views the company with suspicion (New York Post, 2/13/25). Incidentally, oil companies like Trump’s move (Wall Street Journal, 2/15/25).

    The capitulation of Apple and Google validates a widespread fear that it isn’t just Elon Musk who is doing Trump’s dirty work to undo democracy, but that the Big Tech community generally has lined up to stay in the good graces of executive power. Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google each donated $1 million to this year’s presidential inauguration (Axios, 1/3/25; CNBC, 1/9/25).

    ‘Smearing and penalizing’

    AP: AP reporter and photographer barred from Air Force One over ‘Gulf of Mexico’ terminology dispute

    AP (2/15/25): “The body of water in question has been called the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years.”

    Contrast that with the AP, whose reporters have been barred from official White House briefings because the agency continues to call the body of water the Gulf of Mexico (AP, 2/15/25). In a statement (2/11/25), AP executive editor Julie Pace said:

    It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.

    Said Aaron Terr of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (2/14/25), “When the government shuts out journalists explicitly because it dislikes their reporting or political views, that violates the First Amendment.” Committee to Protect Journalists  CEO Jodie Ginsberg (2/14/25) agreed: “These actions follow a pattern of smearing and penalizing the press from the current administration and are unacceptable.”

    That pattern includes the recent Federal Communications Commission investigations into NPR and PBS funding (All Things Considered, 1/30/25), and into San Francisco’s KCBS for having “shared the live locations and vehicle descriptions of immigration officials” (KQED, 2/6/25).

    Placenames have politics

    USA Today: 'We want to use our own names': Language experts explain importance of Ukrainian cities' spellings

    The Ukraine War highlighted the political choices involved in naming places (USA Today, 4/13/22).

    The critics of AP‘s banning couldn’t be more correct. As silly as the spat sounds, this is government authority using its muscle to dictate what media can and cannot stay, something people of all political stripes in the United States would normally find contrary to our constitutional ideals. If the president can compel media outlets not to call bodies of water what everyone else in the world calls them, then forcing them to assert that Greenland or the Panama Canal belong to the US isn’t so far fetched (All Things Considered, 2/17/25). Direct government force and official censorship, or the threat of it, are filters through which consent can be manufactured.

    Generally, in journalism, the names of places and institutions carry a particular political connotation, and making a style choice for a media outlet can be difficult. Is that city in Northern Ireland called Derry, according to Irish Republicans, or Londonderry, as pro-British Loyalists have it (Irish Post, 7/24/15)? The choice to spell Ukraine’s capital either Kyiv or Kiev can tell the world which side of the war you’re more sympathetic toward (USA Today, 4/13/22).

    During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, it was common for US outlets to dateline reports from East Timor’s capital as “Dili, Indonesia” (Extra!, 11–12/93). This reflected Washington’s acceptance of Indonesia’s conquest; you would not have found US reports during Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait datelined “Kuwait City, Iraq.”

    For some observers (China Media Project, 3/30/23), referring to China’s ruling party as the Chinese Communist Party indicates that you don’t like it (NBC News, 10/13/23). Those who prefer to call it the Communist Party of China suggest that the CCP choice indicates that you somehow view the party as global, inorganic and not distinctively Chinese.

    These can be hard choices for a media outlet that wants to be both accurate and impartial, but the choice to avoid indulging in Trump’s idiocy is simple. There has never been a “Gulf of America” movement, or a general belief in the US that the Gulf of Mexico was somehow misnamed, until this order came out of the blue. What the Trump administration has done has created a fake controversy in order to bully the media, and the public, to go along with what it says, no matter how strange, giving the executive branch the opportunity to censor those who do not comply.

    Sympathy for the White House

    New York Post: Trump called out the AP’s lefty bias — and its snooty response betrays the media’s delusions

    The New York Post (2/12/25) declares AP a “left-wing organization, staffed by left-wing employees, and intent on pushing left-wing narratives.”

    The only way a democratic society can keep from falling into authoritarianism is if people refuse to comply, even with the little things. Google and Apple have already failed that test. Others in the corporate media are also failing, by not standing up for AP. David Brooks, a conservative columnist at the New York Times, appeared on Fox News (2/16/25) to sympathize with the White House, dismissing the affair as the usual antagonistic attitude the White House has with the press.

    Isaac Schorr of the New York Post (2/12/25) called the AP’s response “snooty,” saying the wire service has its own language problem, citing its choice to abandon the phrase “late-term abortion.” Schorr is free to take issue with that, but there’s a difference: The AP made that decision on its own, not because the government specifically threatened it unless it made such a change.

    The Atlantic (2/15/25), while admitting that “denying access to a media outlet because of its choice of words violates the First Amendment,” said this is a “fight that the AP probably should never have picked in the first place,” indicating that the media should simply give up when it comes to an autocrat’s insane demands. In fact, the centrist Atlantic seemed to be in tune with the tribune of American conservatism, the National Review (2/14/25), which admitted that Trump was being “silly and Big Brother-ish,” but that “AP journalists suffer from an obnoxious entitlement mentality.”

    As the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple reported (2/14/25):

    How outraged is the White House press corps regarding this naked violation of the First Amendment? Not sufficiently: In her press briefing Wednesday, Leavitt faced questions from only one reporter—CNN’s Kaitlan Collins—about the matter. As Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern: “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America,’” Leavitt said, noting that major tech firms have acknowledged the change.

    AP continues to stand firm on this issue, and that’s a positive sign, but the rest of the media class should be standing united with the wire service. It’s easy for media outlets (some, anyway) to editorialize about the horrorshow of this administration. But they need to stand up to the administration, and refuse to comply with attempts to silence outlets or dictate how they should report.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Santoshi is the youngest of seven siblings in a family where none of her older sisters ever went to school and all were forced into marriage. As her sisters’ lives unfolded, Santoshi understood she couldn’t follow in their footsteps. She convinced her parents to allow her to go to school, but that was the extent …

    Source

    This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.

  •  

    AP: Elon Musk tightens grip on federal government as Democrats raise alarms

    AP (2/4/25) concludes with Elon Musk describing his government takeover as a card game: “If we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”

    Associated Press (2/4/25) evidently needed the work of ten reporters to produce “Elon Musk Tightens Grip on Federal Government as Democrats Raise Alarms.”

    At first blush, the story might seem to convey concern, but look closer: We see Musk matter-of-factly described as a “special government employee, which subjects him to less stringent rules on ethics and financial disclosures than other workers.”

    He’s also described as “in charge of retooling the federal government.” Is that a thing? AP suggests we believe that it is.

    The debate, AP tells us, is just between Republicans who “defend Musk as simply carrying out Trump’s slash-and-burn campaign promises,” and Democrats who, “for their part, accused Musk of leading a coup from within the government by amassing unaccountable and illegal power.”  Tomato, to-mah-to, you understand.

    Musk locking federal workers out of internal systems, denying them access to their own personnel files, with their pay history, length of service and qualifications: Why, that’s just “Musk’s penchant for dabbling.” He’s been “tinkering with things his entire life,” the wire service says. He learned to code as a child in South Africa, you see, and “now Musk is popping open the hood on the federal government like it’s one of his cars or rockets.”

    Popping open the hood of democratic processes to tinker with them? If you rely on reporting from nominally neutral outlets like Associated Press, you might imagine that’s only a concern of partisan Democrats, not regular folks like you and me.


    You can send a message to Associated Press here (or via Bluesky @APnews.com).

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  •  

    Column: US Media's Credulous Depiction of 'DOGE' as a Good Faith "Efficiency Panel" Has Aged Poorly

    Adam Johnson (Column, 2/3/25): “The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN ran with the framing that ‘DOGE’ was some good-faith, post-ideological effort to ‘cut costs,’ ‘find savings’ and ‘increase efficiencies.’”

    Having spent nearly $300 million to purchase the US presidency for Donald Trump, Elon Musk now feels entitled to do with it as he pleases. Just how radically Musk plans to remake the country was conveyed to the American people only after the election, when Musk stood behind the presidential seal on Inauguration Day and gave a Nazi salute. Then did it again. Maybe that sort of thing was OK to do in apartheid South Africa, where Musk grew up, but it’s jarring to see here in the United States.

    Reporters initially struggled to meet the moment (FAIR.org, 2/4/25), downplaying Musk’s salute (the Washington Post described a “high-energy speech“), as well as his broader agenda, which Musk now openly declares a “revolution,” and consists of an unelected billionaire wresting control of nearly the entire executive branch of government. Early media reports went along with Musk’s “efficiency” mantra (Column, 2/3/25), but more recently reporters have started to find their footing, and the dangers of Musk’s project are being conveyed. Sort of.

    “Reporters on the battlefield are doing what they can” to expose the radical nature of Trump’s second term, writes media columnist Oliver Darcy (Status, 2/5/25). “The news generals back in the command center, however, are largely abdicating their duties.”

    ‘Musk’s audacious goal’

    Nowhere is this discrepancy more apparent than at the Washington Post, a newspaper famed for opposing a prior Republican president with an expansive view of executive power. These days, however, even as Post reporters like Jeff Stein are busy breaking stories (e.g., 1/28/25, 2/8/25) about the Trump power grab, the paper’s higher-ups are careful not to offend the president or Musk. The Post is even, incredibly, calling on the Constitution-defying billionaire duo to push further.

    WaPo: Trump needs to erect guardrails for DOGE

    As Elon Musk seizes extraconstitutional control of the federal budget, Washington Post editors (2/7/25) urge him to use that power to go after Social Security and Medicare.

    “To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts,” the Post editorial board (2/7/25) wrote, “Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”

    While claiming it wants Trump to “erect guardrails” for Musk, the Post urges the president to abandon one of the only guardrails he established—the cutting of Social Security and Medicare, which Trump repeatedly said he wouldn’t do, but recently started waffling on.

    To be clear, the Post has long called for cutting so-called entitlements (FAIR.org, 11/1/11, 6/15/23). But to do so at this moment—by encouraging a coup attempt to push further—is quite extraordinary.

    The Post’s move comes as its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family, while coaching his paper to take a less critical approach in its coverage (FAIR.org, 1/22/25). Bezos’s ingratiation toward Trump started prior to the election, when Bezos personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).

    Good news for X from Amazon

    WaPo: Some Jewish leaders renew calls for X boycott as Musk’s power grows

    The Washington Post (2/4/25) reports on “divergent views among Jewish leaders in how to respond to Musk”: Some object to his ” Nazi-esque salute and Holocaust jokes,” others appreciate his censorship of criticism of Israel.

    Bezos has also been busy making nice with Musk, his longtime rival for most powerful man on Earth and in space. On both fronts, Musk now has a decided edge, aided by his control over much of the US government, which both men’s sprawling empires rely on for billions of dollars in contracts.

    With Musk’s hand on the public-money spigot, Bezos apparently did him a favor. After Musk openly heiled Hitler, Jewish leaders renewed calls to boycott Musk’s social media platform, X (Washington Post, 2/4/25). “To advertisers—including Google, Amazon and the ADL: Pull your ads now,” the Jewish leaders wrote. “The pressure is working. X’s financial difficulties prove it.”

    But the boycott’s pressure was countered by Bezos’s company. “[X] got good news last week, with Amazon reportedly planning to hike its advertising on the site,” the Post (2/4/25) reported, without mentioning Bezos.

    While X’s finances “were once so bad that Musk floated the idea of filing for bankruptcy,” things are suddenly looking up, the Financial Times (2/12/25) reported:

    Musk famously admitted to overpaying for Twitter after he bought the social media platform known now as X for $44 billion in 2022. But the billionaire’s foray into government has coincided with a turnaround in X’s fortunes, as advertisers, including Amazon, flock back to the platform.

    ‘Lemmings leaping in unison’

    WaPo: Americans asked for it, and they’re going to get it

    Kathleen Parker (Washington Post, 1/24/25) likened those who condemned Musk’s Nazi gesture to “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff”—because it’s suicidal to notice fascism in high places?

    It wasn’t just Bezos’s company that threw Musk a lifeline, but also his newspaper. An initial Post headline (1/20/25), which omitted mention of Musk’s Nazi salute, read “Elon Musk Gives Exuberant Speech at Inauguration.” The following day, Post columnist Megan McArdle, echoing the ADL, downgraded Musk’s salute to an “awkward gesture,” the same phrase Post columnist Kathleen Parker used to dismiss those who saw something more sinister as “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff” (Washington Post, 1/24/25).

    Interestingly, one of the most vociferous “lemmings” was Post columnist Catherine Rampell, who brilliantly called out Musk’s Nazi salute, but on CNN, and noticeably not in the Post, except once in passing (1/30/25).

    Musk responded to Rampell’s CNN appearance by threatening to sue her in a post (1/27/25) to his over 200 million X followers.

    I noted at the top that Musk spent nearly $300 million to elect Trump, but that’s only part of the story. Musk also provided inestimable support by transforming X into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Personally, when I logged onto X during the campaign, I routinely saw Musk’s pro-Trump tweets at the top of my feed, even though I didn’t follow Musk at the time.

    Since the election, Musk ’s gifts to Trump have continued. X recently agreed to pay Trump $10 million to settle Trump’s 2021 lawsuit against the company, even though the case was dismissed in 2022. Trump was still appealing the ruling two-and-a-half years later when a deal was cut. “The settlement talks with X began after the election and were more informal, with both Trump and Musk personally involved in hammering out the $10 million number,” the Wall Street Journal (2/13/25) reported.

    ‘Cheering for change’

    NYT: Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up

    New York Times (2/11/25): Many of the federal agencies targeted by Musk “were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.”

    It’s quite something for Elon Musk—the world’s richest human and one of the largest government contractors—to gleefully slash public spending benefiting others. Especially when, by one measure, “virtually all of his net worth can be pinned to government help,” CNN (11/20/24) reported.

    While Musk claims to wield a populist’s pitchfork as he attacks “the bureaucracy,” a closer look reveals the work of an oligarch’s scalpel. Musk’s coup team—called DOGE, and consisting mostly of twentysomething male engineers, several of whom appear to share Musk’s racist ideology (New York Times, 2/7/25)—is targeting the federal agencies investigating Musk’s companies, which in addition to X, include Tesla and SpaceX.

    “President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting—or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit,” read the opening lines of a New York Times story (2/11/25):

    At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by [Trump’s] moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.

    While Trump claims Musk is “not gaining anything” from the arrangement, and Musk says the same, Wall Street sees things differently. Even as Musk says he’s turning his “efficiency” revolution to the Pentagon—the only federal agency never to pass an audit, and where any honest attempt to rein in government spending would begin—stocks for armsmaking companies associated with Musk are surging, while those without ties to him languish. “Palantir, as well as Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI and robotics and AI specialist Anduril Industries, are cheering for change,” the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25) reported.

    In other words, having seized control of the levers of government, an oligarch will now be directing funding to himself and his cronies. That’s Wall Street’s view, anyhow.

    It seems to be Bezos’s as well. With Amazon and Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company, competing for billions in government contracts, it makes perfect business sense for Bezos to cozy up to Musk and Trump. From a journalistic perspective, however, it’s nothing short of a disaster, one that’s playing out daily in the pages of the Washington Post.


    You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com (or via Bluesky: @washingtonpost.com).

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread on FAIR.org.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  •  

    Three Israeli men held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip were freed on Saturday, February 8,  in exchange for 183 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. It was the latest round of captive releases stipulated by the January ceasefire deal that ostensibly paused Israel’s genocide in Gaza, launched in October 2023, the official Palestinian death toll of which has now reached nearly 62,000—although the true number of fatalities is likely quite a bit higher (FAIR.org, 2/5/25).

    In all, 25 Israeli captives and the bodies of eight others were slated to be released over a six-week period, in exchange for more than 1,900 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel—the disproportionate ratio a reflection both of the vastly greater number of captives held by Israel and the superior value consistently assigned to Israeli life.

    Hamas halted releases on Monday on account of Israel’s violations of the ceasefire agreement, with Reuters (2/10/25) oh-so-diplomatically noting that the “ceasefire…has largely held since it began on January 19, although there have been some incidents in which Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces.”

    But Saturday’s exchange offered a revealing view of the outsized role US corporate media play in the general dehumanization of the Palestinian people—an approach that conveniently coincides with the Middle East policy of the United States, which is predicated on the obsessive funneling of hundreds of billions of dollars in assistance and weaponry to Israel’s genocidal army. And now that President Donald Trump has decided that the US can take over Gaza by simply expelling its inhabitants, well, dehumanizing them may serve an even handier purpose.

    Granted, it’s a lot easier for a news report to tell the individual stories of three people than to tell the stories of 183. But the relentless empathetic media attention to the three Israeli men—who, mind you, are not the ones currently facing a genocide—deliberately leaves little to no room for Palestinian victims of an Israeli carceral system that has for decades been characterized by illegal arbitrary detention, torture and in-custody death.

    So it is that we learn the names and ages of the three Israelis, the names of their family members, and empathy-inducing details of their captivity and physical appearance, while the 183 Palestinians remain at best a side note, and at worst a largely faceless mass of newly freed terrorists.

    ‘Like Holocaust survivors’

    NYT: Hamas Makes Gaunt Israeli Hostages Thank Captors Before Release

    Deep into this story, the New York Times (2/8/25) admits that many released Palestinian prisoners were also “in visibly poor condition”—but it doesn’t explain that both the Israeli and Palestinian prisoners were emaciated for the same reason: because Israel had deliberately deprived them of food.

    Take, for example, the Saturday New York Times intervention (2/8/25) headlined “Hamas Makes Gaunt Israeli Hostages Thank Captors Before Release,” which recounts the plight of the “three frail, painfully thin hostages” who elicited the following comparison from Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar: “The Israeli hostages look like Holocaust survivors.”

    When we finally get around to the Palestinian prisoners, we are immediately informed that “at least some were convicted of involvement in deadly attacks against Israelis, who view them as terrorists.” Needless to say, such media outlets can rarely be bothered to profile Palestinian prisoners with less sensational biographies—like all the folks arbitrarily swept up in raids and never charged with a crime.

    The article does acknowledge, more than 20 paragraphs later, that “many of the released Palestinian prisoners were in visibly poor condition,” too—albeit not meriting a comparison to Holocaust survivors—and that “Palestinian prisoners have recounted serious allegations of abuse in Israeli jails.” It also mentions that “Israeli forces raided the West Bank family homes of at least four of [the] men before their release, warning their relatives not to celebrate their freedom”—evidence, according to the Times, that Israel has simply been “particularly assertive in suppressing celebrations for detainees.”

    And yet all of this “assertiveness” is implicitly justified when we are supplied with the biographical details of a handful of released detainees, who unlike the three Israelis are categorically ineligible for pure and unadulterated victimhood, consisting instead of the likes of 50-year-old Iyad Abu Shkhaydem, who “had been serving 18 life sentences, in part for planning the 2004 bombings of two buses in Beersheba, in central Israel, that killed 16 people.”

    Of course, the corporate media are more interested in obscuring rather than supplying context, which is why we never find the New York Times and its ilk dwelling too critically on the possibility that Palestinian violence might be driven by, you know, Israel’s usurpation of Palestinian land, coupled with systematic ethnic cleansing and regular bouts of mass slaughter.

    In the media’s view, the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks that killed some 1,200 Israelis and saw more than 250 taken captive was just about the most savage, brutal thing to have ever happened. Never mind Israel’s behavior for the past 77 years, which includes killing nearly 8,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from September 2000 through September 2023, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

    But that’s what happens when one side is appointed as human and the other is not—and when the US media takes its cues from a genocidal state whose officials refer to Palestinians as “human animals.”

    ‘Shocked Israelis’

    NYT: ‘Dad, I Came Back Alive!’ Israeli Hostages Start to Give Glimpses of Ordeal.

    This New York Times story (2/9/25) is not matched by one in which Palestinian captives “Give Glimpses of Ordeal”—but then, the Times doesn’t have a correspondent who’s married to a Palestinian PR agent, or who has a son who’s a fighter for Hamas.

    On Sunday, the New York Times ran another article (2/9/25) on the “torment” the Israeli hostages had endured. Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner managed to find space in it to discuss the “bright magenta track suit” worn by a female Israeli hostage released last month, but not much space to talk about Palestinians, aside from specifying that “some” of the prisoners slated for release were “convicted of killing Israelis.” (Kershner, it bears recalling, was called out by FAIR back in 2012 for utilizing her Times post to provide a platform for her husband’s Zionist propaganda outfit. In 2014, it was revealed that her son was in the Israeli military.)

    While Kershner described the three Israelis released on Saturday as being in “emaciated condition,” many other media outlets opted for “gaunt.” Reuters (2/8/25) announced that the “gaunt appearance” of the three hostages had “shocked Israelis”—and reminded its audience that “some” of the 183 released Palestinians were “convicted of involvement in attacks that killed dozens of people.”

    NBC News (2/9/25) also went with “gaunt,” as did CNN (2/9/25). But aside from common vocabulary, a recurring theme throughout media coverage of the prisoner exchanges is the sheer humanity infused into the Israeli characters: their suffering, their weepy reunions with their families, their heart-rending discoveries that certain loved ones have not survived. This same humanity is blatantly denied to Palestinians; after all, emotionally conditioning audiences to empathize with Israel’s enemies would run counter to US machinations abroad and the Orientalist media traditions that help sustain them.

    Again, many of the media reports do acknowledge that quite a few released Palestinians were looking worse for the wear, had difficulty walking, or had to be transferred to hospital. But such information is not presented as “shocking” to anyone—perhaps because maltreatment and abuse of Palestinian prisoners is business as usual in Israel.

    Conspicuously, the continuous invocation of the factoid that “some” released Palestinians had been convicted of killing Israelis is never accompanied by the corresponding note that “some” of the released Israelis happen to be active-duty soldiers in an army whose fundamental purpose is to kill and displace Palestinians. When individual hostages’ army service is mentioned, it is done so in a positive light—as in Kershner’s recounting the uplifting aftermath of the January 25 release of 20-year-old soldier Daniella Gilboa: “Days later, she was singing at a party marking the discharge of the army lookouts from Beilinson Hospital near Tel Aviv.”

    Weaponization of empathy

    CNN: Pale, gaunt Israeli hostages freed from Gaza captivity as scores of Palestinian prisoners released under ceasefire deal

    CNN‘s article (2/9/25) acknowledged that Israel “intentionally reduc[ed] food servings to Palestinian prisoners in what’s been described as the minimum required for survival”—but there’s no headline about “gaunt” Palestinian captives.

    To be sure, the media’s effective weaponization of empathy is crucial given that Palestinians are killed by Israelis at an astronomically higher rate than Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Any objective comparison of fatalities or consideration of history unequivocally establishes Palestinians as victims of Israeli aggression—hence the need for the US politico-media establishment’s re-education campaign.

    Meanwhile, speaking of “humanity,” a Telegraph article (2/8/25) published on the Yahoo! News website quoted Israeli President Isaac Herzog as detecting a “crime against humanity” in the appearance of the three men released on Saturday, who had returned from captivity “starved, emaciated and pained.” This from a leader of a country that has just bombed an entire territory and a whole lot of its people to bits, while also utilizing starvation as a weapon of war. Starvation is furthermore par for the course in Israeli prisons; as even CNN (2/9/25) observed in one its articles on Saturday’s “pale, gaunt Israeli hostages”:

    The Israeli prison system has come under fire for intentionally reducing food servings to Palestinian prisoners in what’s been described as the minimum required for survival, on the orders of then National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir last year.

    It brings back memories of that time in 2006 that Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli government, offered the following rationale for restricting food imports into Gaza: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

    In November 2023, the Associated Press reported that a 78-year-old female hostage released by Hamas had “said in an interview that she was initially fed well in captivity until conditions worsened and people became hungry.” In this case, the AP semi-connected the dots: “Israel has maintained a tight siege on Gaza since the war erupted, leading to shortages of food, fuel and other basic items.”

    In other words, there’s no one but the Israeli government to thank for those shockingly “gaunt” faces—the Israeli ones in headlines and the Palestinians relegated to the bottom of stories. And with Israel gearing up to renew its genocidal onslaught with fanatical US encouragement, there are no doubt plenty of crimes against humanity yet to come.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • On February 26, AJWS is participating in the first ever Jewish Justice Giving Day! It’ll be a moment where Jewish people across the country will join together to act on our tradition of tzedakah in support of the urgent pursuit of social justice. AJWS and lots of powerful Jewish organizations are mobilizing our communities to …

    Source

    This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.

  •  

    Election Focus 2024The murder of UnitedHealth Group executive Brian Thompson, and the subsequent arrest of Luigi Mangione, focused media and policymakers’ attention on the savage practices of private US health insurance. In the immediate aftermath, major media outlets scolded social media posters for mocking Thompson with sarcastic posts, such as “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers.”

    As public fury failed to subside, it began to dawn on at least some media organizations that the response to Thompson’s murder might possibly reflect deep, widespread anger at a healthcare system that collects twice as much money as those in other wealthy countries, makes it difficult for half the adult population to afford healthcare even when they’re supposedly “insured,” and maims, murders and bankrupts millions of people by denying payment when they actually try to use their alleged benefits. As Rep. Ro Khanna (D.–Calif.) said to ABC News  (12/8/24), “There is no justification for violence, but the outpouring afterwards has not surprised me.”

    Any reporter, editor or pundit who writes regularly about healthcare and professes to be mystified or outraged by the public reaction to Thompson’s murder should take a deep look at their own assumptions, sources and professional behavior.

    FAIR reviewed coverage of healthcare in the presidential election by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, as well as KFF Health News (KHN), the leading outlet specializing in the healthcare issue, whose reporting is often picked up by corporate media. The coverage by these outlets amounts to little more than sophisticated public relations for this corporate healthcare killing machine and, especially, the Republican and Democratic politicians who created and nurture it.

    The coverage was marred by many of the media failings FAIR has exposed since its inception. These outlets:

    • took false major-party “facts” at face value and published candidates’ platitudes without challenging their substance;
    • anointed former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris as the only legitimate horses in the race, blacking out the content of third-party candidate proposals like “Medicare for All”; and
    • added insult to injury by legitimizing their own failed coverage with analysis asking why there were no major healthcare reform proposals to cover.

    Tsunami of fake good news

    In March 2024, I reported (Healing and Stealing, 3/23/24) that Democrats were preparing to unleash a “tsunami of fake good news” about healthcare and the Affordable Care Act to try to influence media coverage of the campaign.

    Major media fell for it hook, line and sinker. No campaign tactic and media failure did more to lengthen the distance between a public brutalized by a failing healthcare system and an out-of-touch corporate media.

    President Joe Biden (until he dropped out) and Harris spun a narrative of “progress” under the Affordable Care Act to attract voters. The progress narrative relied on two new healthcare policy “records”: a record-low uninsurance rate and record-high Obamacare enrollment.

    In a story on why “big, prominent plans for health reform are nowhere to be seen,” the New York Times Margot Sanger-Katz (9/13/24) explained that the “overall state of the health system” is different than in 2019 for several reasons, including that the “uninsured rate is near a record low.”

    NYT: More Than 20 Million People Have Signed Up for Obamacare Plans, Blowing by Record

    The New York Times (1/10/24) reported that signups for the ACA set a “record”—but not that this was less than the number of people who had been kicked off Medicaid.

    KHN’s Phil Galewitz (9/10/24) similarly reported:

    Before Congress passed the ACA in 2010, the uninsured rate had been in double digits for decades. The rate fell steadily under Barack Obama but reversed under President Donald Trump, only to come down again under President Joe Biden.

    Meanwhile, insurance plans sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges reached a record enrollment of 21 million in early 2024, or, as the Times’ Noah Weiland (1/10/24) put it, “blowing by the previous record and elevating the health and political costs of a repeal.”

    The two “facts” are both distorted and largely irrelevant to people’s actual experience of the healthcare system. As Galewitz acknowledged, because of survey lags, the uninsurance data don’t reflect the 2023–24 disenrollment of some 25 million from Medicaid, the joint federal/state insurance program for low-income Americans, which had been temporarily expanded under Covid.

    But the Medicaid disenrollment is reflected in the record signups to Obamacare, where some of those who lost Medicaid coverage fled in 2024. Yet according to KHN, 6 million of the 25 million people who lost Medicaid coverage became uninsured. Most of them haven’t yet been captured in uninsured data, allowing the Democrats to have their cake and eat it too.

    The fact that the uninsured data likely understate uninsurance by as much as 6 million people escaped most political coverage—the Washington Post’s Dan Diamond (9/11/24), for example, added no caveats when reporting that the Biden administration

    had released data showing that nearly 50 million Americans have obtained health coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges since they were established more than a decade ago, helping lower the national uninsured rate to record lows in recent years.

    The Times‘ Sanger-Katz (9/13/24) likewise failed to mention it.

    Private insurance ≠ healthcare 

    WaPo: What Kamala Harris learned from embracing, abandoning Medicare-for-all

    The lesson Kamala Harris learned, according to the Washington Post (9/11/24), is that “incremental change, not a sweeping overhaul, is the best path to improving US healthcare.”

    Far more importantly, the rate of uninsurance no longer measures whether or not people have adequate healthcare, or are protected from financial ruin if they get sick or injured. Data show that people who supposedly have insurance can’t get healthcare, rendering the raw uninsurance rate a relatively meaningless measure of the burden of the crisis-stricken US healthcare system.

    National surveys by the Commonwealth Fund every two years include one of the few comprehensive attempts to measure underinsurance, and the impact of medical costs on people nominally “covered.” In 2022, Commonwealth found that 46% of adults aged 19–64 skipped needed medical treatment due to out-of-pocket costs. That number included 44% of adults buying insurance through ACA exchanges or the individual insurance market—even with the much-hyped expanded premium subsidies in place.

    Commonwealth didn’t release its 2024 surveys until November 21, well after Election Day. During the last two years of the Biden/Harris administration, the percentage of working age adults skipping medical care due to costs increased from 46% to 48%, no matter the source of coverage (Healing and Stealing, 11/21/24).

    When people with private insurance do attempt to get healthcare, their insurers often refuse to pay for care. The slain Brian Thompson was CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s insurance subsidiary. According to an analysis of federal data by ValuePenguin (5/15/24), a consumer website run by online lender LendingTree, UnitedHealthcare denied 32% of claims submitted to its ACA and individual market plans in 2022, the highest rate in the industry.

    Corporate media political reporters usually delivered the misleading progress narrative “facts” without reference to this critical context. The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond (9/11/24), explaining that Harris learned “the importance of incremental progress” as vice president after retreating from support for Medicare for All, noted the administration’s achievement of “record levels of health coverage through the Affordable Care Act,” with no reference to the Medicaid purge or underinsurance.

    Substance-free coverage of a substance-free campaign 

    The Campaign Issue That Isn’t: Health Care Reform

    New York Times (9/13/24): “After years of crises and emergencies, no part of the system is currently ablaze.”

    The New York Times’ Margot Sanger-Katz wrote in “The Campaign Issue That Isn’t: Healthcare Reform” (9/13/24):

    As you may have noticed, with less than two months until Election Day, big, prominent plans for health reform are nowhere to be seen. Even in an election that has been fairly light on policy proposals, healthcare’s absence is notable.

    It’s true that neither Harris nor Trump offered any concrete proposals for improving US healthcare. Harris campaigned on “strengthening” the ACA, but her only specific “improvement” was a promise to support keeping the expanded subsidies that help people pay their ACA health insurance premiums—passed in the first year of Biden’s term—from expiring as scheduled next year. In other words, “strengthen” the ACA by maintaining its dismal status quo.

    As for Trump, the Times’ Weiland (8/12/24) reported that the authors of Project 2025, the consensus right-wing NGO blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, “were not calling for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.” At the debate, Trump said he wouldn’t repeal unless he had a better plan, and drew mockery for saying he had “concepts of a plan.”

    Ultimately, mass deportation was his primary healthcare policy (Healing and Stealing, 10/16/24, 9/10/24); the RNC Platform maintained that undocumented immigrants were the cause of high healthcare costs. (It’s nonsense. Undocumented taxpayers actually paid more in taxes that were earmarked specifically for healthcare in 2022 than the estimated total cost of healthcare for all undocumented immigrants in the US.)

    What you see depends on where you look 

    One reason Sanger-Katz and colleagues had a hard time finding “big” plans for healthcare is that she and her colleagues chose to look for them only in the two major parties’ platforms.

    Whether Eugene Debs campaigning for Social Security from prison in 1920, Henry Wallace fighting for desegregation after walking out of the 1948 Democratic convention, or Cynthia McKinney proposing an end to the Afghan War in 2008, third-party candidates have a long track record of promoting policies dismissed as unrealistic ideological fantasies that later become consensus policy. Yet corporate media outlets repeat the same failure to pay attention every four years (FAIR.org, 10/23/08).

    Green Party candidate Jill Stein, the only medical doctor in the race, supported Medicare for All as a

    precursor to establishing a British-style National Healthcare Service which will replace private hospitals, private medical practice and private medical insurance with a publicly owned, democratically controlled healthcare service that will guarantee healthcare as a human right to everyone in the United States.

    Stein placed special emphasis on taking “the pharmaceutical industry into public ownership and democratic control.”

    Justice for All Party candidate Cornel West’s Health Justice agenda also envisioned a system “Beyond Medicare for All,” including “nationalization of healthcare industries.”

    Prior to suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Jacobin (6/9/23) he would keep private insurance for those who want it, but also have a public program “available to everybody.” Although he used the phrase “single-payer,” Kennedy described a program most similar to a voluntary “public option,” an untested idea whose ultimate impact on the breadth, depth and cost of coverage remains speculative.

    Outside the world inhabited by elite media, Medicare for All is a fiscally modest proposal that receives consistent support among large segments of the US population, reaching majorities depending on the wording of poll questions (KFF, 10/26/20). In 2022, the Congressional Budget Office (2/22) estimated that a single-payer system with no out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits or hospital care, minimal copays for prescription drugs, and doctor and hospital prices at the current average would cover everyone for all medical conditions—including services that are almost never fully covered, like vision, dental and hearing—and still lower expected total national health expenditures by about a half a percent.

    Even with candidates in the race proposing even broader expansion of the public role in healthcare, through nationalizing hospitals and drug manufacturing, Medicare for All remains beyond the boundary of acceptable corporate media debate. This has been true for 30 years, when FAIR (Extra!, 1–2/94) reported on media coverage of the failed Clinton administration healthcare reform effort.

    Just one election cycle back, during the Democratic primaries, multiple candidates—led by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, but also including Kamala Harris—supported Medicare for All, and media were forced to cover it, generally with considerable hostility (FAIR.org, 3/20/19, 4/29/19, 10/2/19). But with Harris backing away from it entirely, media found themselves returning to a place of comfortably ignoring the popular proposal.

    Missing Medicare for All

    WaPo: Democrats are taking third-party threats seriously this time

    Leading papers covered third parties as potential spoilers, but not as potential sources of new ideas (Washington Post, 3/14/24).

    FAIR searched the Nexis, ProQuest and Dow Jones databases, and the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and KFF Health News, for election or healthcare policy stories and podcasts mentioning different iterations of “Medicare for All,” “single-payer” and “universal healthcare,” between January 1 and Election Day 2024. We found 89 news and 107 opinion pieces.

    Ninety percent of the news articles came after Biden dropped out of the race. The coverage overwhelmingly focused on Harris’s reversal of her brief support for Medicare for All in 2019, with 96% of these stories mentioning her shift.

    The ubiquitous Republican claim that Harris sought to give undocumented people free Medicare was based on the obviously false premise that Harris had not abandoned support for Medicare for All. Asked in 2019 whether her support for universal health insurance would include eligibility for undocumented immigrants, she said yes (New York Times, 10/30/24). Since that time, Harris has repudiated Medicare for All, and no Democrat has advocated enrolling the 11 million undocumented immigrants in Medicare, let alone for “free.”

    KHN (8/1/24) and the New York Times (10/30/24) corrected this GOP distortion, but all four outlets left readers hard-pressed to learn any other details of Medicare for All, or other meaningful alternatives to the status quo, especially not any proposed by other candidates.

    All four outlets wrote frequently about whether third-party candidates might siphon votes from Trump or Harris (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 11/10/23; Washington Post, 3/14/24; New York Times, 10/14/24). However, they blacked out the content of those parties’ healthcare policy positions, leaving readers with no information to help them decide if voting for a candidate other than Trump or Harris might benefit them.

    Voters in the dark

    NYT: Where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Stands on the Issues

    In 2,000 words on “Where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Stands on the Issues,” the New York Times (6/14/24) avoided any discussion of where he stands on major healthcare reform issues.

    The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and KHN frequently mentioned one or more of the third-party candidates in other political coverage as a threat to the major-party candidates. But out of the 89 news articles bringing up Medicare for All, single-payer or universal healthcare, only three included third-party candidates at all, each one in passing as possible spoilers. Exactly zero offered any information at all about the candidates’ healthcare proposals.

    For example, the New York Times published 34 news articles and podcasts mentioning a version of Medicare for All or single-payer, without a single word on the healthcare proposals of the third-party candidates who remained after Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump. One article (10/24/24) included a passing Stein spoiler reference. Another (8/22/24), on Harris’s commitment to “the art of the possible,” quoted West’s vice presidential running mate, Melina Abdullah, criticizing Harris for shifting many of her policy positions, but again without reference to West and Abdullah’s proposals for healthcare.

    Times readers were more likely to get news about the healthcare reform positions of foreign political leaders than non–major-party candidates running for president of the United States. The paper ran six stories about Indonesia (2/12/24, 2/15/24, 10/19/24), Thailand (2/18/24) and South Africa (6/3/24, 6/7/24) that mentioned a politician’s position on “universal healthcare,” while blacking out discussion of third-party candidates’ healthcare proposals, except to some degree for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

    Before leaving the race, Kennedy’s half-baked notions about vaccines, activism on environmental health and food safety, and criticism of Covid lockdowns received frequent mention, but as with the other third-party candidates, his views on major healthcare reform issues went missing, including from a 2,000-word Times analysis of “Where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Stands on the Issues” (6/14/24).

    The third-party healthcare blackout was even tighter in the Washington Post. The 38 Post news articles mentioning Medicare for All or single-payer had only one reference to Stein or West—a quote from West unrelated to healthcare (8/21/24). The Post never reported either candidate’s healthcare proposals. A webpage on which reporters tracked third-party ballot access offered a short “Pitch to Voters” for each party that included no healthcare policy.

    Medicare for All spin and bad facts

    NYT: Despite Trump’s Accusations, Democrats Have Largely Avoided Medicare for All

    Like Democrats, the New York Times‘ Noah Weiland (8/22/24) largely avoided talking about what Medicare for All would do.

    The four outlets’ descriptions of Medicare for All, single payer and universal healthcare were nearly as sparse as coverage of third-party candidates’ healthcare positions, and as distorted as reporting on the ACA. Only 23 of the 89 news stories included any description at all of these policies, the overwhelming majority of them a brief phrase in the reporter’s own words.

    Only three New York Times stories included any Medicare for All substance, and these were barely intelligible. The most extensive was an article debunking Trump’s claims that Harris continued to support the policy, in which Noah Weiland (8/22/24) wrote nearly 1,300 words without explaining what the Medicare for All is or would do. Readers wouldn’t know that the current Medicare for All bills before Congress would cover everyone in the country with no out-of-pocket costs, and free choice of doctors and hospitals. They would, however, have learned that Harris “proposed a less sweeping plan” in 2019, which would include “a role for private plans.”

    Weiland treated readers to what may be the most emphatic recitation of the ACA progress narrative. Biden’s pursuit of a “more traditional set of healthcare priorities” has yielded “explosive growth” in the ACA exchanges, he wrote. According to unnamed experts, that growth, and changes to Medicare and Medicaid, have “complicated” pursuit of Medicare for All.

    Times readers would also have learned that expanding Medicaid is an incremental step toward Medicare for All, what bill supporter Rep. Ed Markey says is part of the policy’s “DNA.” In reality, Medicaid’s eligibility standards are literally the opposite of Medicare for All—means-tested coverage that requires you to prove you’re appropriately impoverished every year, and which disappears if you get a big enough raise at your job.

    The vast majority of Times coverage of Medicare for All included no content whatsoever, simply mentioning it as a policy that Harris once supported, with the occasional political characterization (7/24/24) that it was one of her since-abandoned “left-leaning positions that can now leave her vulnerable to attack from Republicans.”

    ‘A proposal that worried many Americans’

    WaPo: Fact-checking GOP Trump fliers flooding swing-state mailboxes

    Washington Post factchecker Glenn Kessler (9/9/24) said it was mostly true that Medicare for All would “raise taxes [and] increase national debt,” citing studies of Bernie Sanders’ plan that “estimated that national health expenditures would rise over 10 years.” He didn’t note that CBO found that under most single-payer plans, national health expenditures would rise—but much less than they would under the status quo.

    Eleven of the 36 Washington Post stories in our sample published after Biden’s withdrawal made some substantive policy comment about Medicare for All, all but three in a single passing phrase. Every article except one said that Medicare for All would “abolish” or replace private insurance, sometimes noting private insurance would be replaced by a “government” plan—using the industry-preferred framing instead of the more neutral descriptor “public.” In the majority of stories, this was the only substantive point made about Medicare for All.

    The Post‘s Glenn Kessler (9/9/24) “factchecked” Republican claims that Medicare for All would “raise taxes, increase national debt and functionally eliminate private health insurance.” Calling it “mostly true,” Kessler cited the figure of $32.6 trillion over 10 years, and claimed that “four of the five key studies on the effect of the Sanders plan estimated that national health expenditures would rise over 10 years.”

    Kessler skipped a big fact. When the CBO insisted that raising the minimum wage would cause 1.4 million lost jobs, his editors (4/18/21) indignantly defended the agency as “admirably apolitical.” But Kessler neglected to mention that the “nonpartisan scorekeepers” at the CBO (12/10/20) found that four of the five versions of single-payer healthcare that they analyzed would raise national health expenditures, but by significantly less  than preserving the status quo.

    Healthcare reporter Dan Diamond (9/11/24) wrote the Post’s most detailed take on Harris’s about-face on a plan “to eliminate private insurance, a proposal that worried many Americans who feared losing access to their doctors.” Diamond managed not to let readers know that, in contrast to private insurance plans that penalize patients for seeing “out-of-network” doctors, Medicare for All would free patients to see any doctor they want without financial penalty.

    Diamond added that Harris pulled back from Medicare for All because “polls across 2019 found that many Americans were worried that shifting to a national government-run health system could delay access to care,” without mentioning that half of all American working adults already skip treatments altogether every year (Commonwealth, 11/24).

    Voters’ 2019 “worries” were likely stimulated in part by a multi-million-dollar lobbying and advertising blitz by the hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical industries, reported on by the Post‘s Jeff Stein (4/12/19), and based on the same distortions and inaccuracies Diamond and Kessler repeated five years later (Public Citizen, 6/28/19).

    In a story (Washington Post, 4/3/20) on Sen. Bernie Sanders supporting the Biden/Harris administration’s drug cost control policies, Diamond reported that during the 2020 primaries, Sanders “argued that Medicare for All would help rein in high drug costs by forcing pharmaceutical companies to negotiate with the government.” It was the only positive framing of Medicare for All we could find in the Post’s coverage. Biden and Harris have done exactly what Sanders proposed, although to date they’ve only negotiated lower prices for 10 drugs, the prices won’t take effect for another year, and they only apply to our current “Medicare for Some.”

    Expert content suppression 

    KFF: Compare the Candidates on Health Care Policy

    KFF’s website limited its discussion of candidates’ healthcare proposals to the “viable contenders”—a choice that excluded virtually all ideas for improving the US healthcare system.

    No outlet ignored the third-party candidates’ healthcare proposals more firmly, or took the tiny increments proposed by the major parties more seriously, than the one best equipped to inform the public about the state of US healthcare: KFF Health News.

    KHN is a subsidiary of what used to be known as the Kaiser Family Foundations, but now goes by the acronym KFF. Founded with money from the family of steel magnate Henry Kaiser, tax-exempt KFF occupies a unique role as both news outlet and major source for healthcare information, calling itself “a one-of-a-kind information organization.”

    KFF’s research and polling arms publish a large volume of detailed data and analysis of healthcare policy, covered widely in the media. This work lends additional credibility to KHN’s respected and widely republished news reporting.

    With a staff of 71 reporters, editors, producers and administrators, as of November 1, KHN is devoted entirely to healthcare. Unlike taxpaying competitors like Modern Healthcare and Healthcare Dive—which regularly cover KFF’s research output—KHN publishes without a paywall, and permits reprints without charge. KHN forms partnerships with outlets of all sizes and focus, from an in-depth investigative series on medical debt with NPR and CBS News, to providing regular policy and political reporting to the physician-targeted website Medscape.

    Excluding opinion articles, letters to the editor and brief daily newsletter blurbs linking to other outlets’ content, FAIR’s searches yielded just five KHN news stories from January 1 to Election Day that referred to Medicare for All, single-payer or universal healthcare. Two were state-focused—a one-paragraph mention of a proposed California single-payer bill in a broader legislative round-up (4/24/24), and a profile (7/15/24) of Anthony Wright, newly appointed executive director of the DC nonprofit Families USA.

    The remaining three (7/21/24, 8/1/24, 9/11/24) were passing mentions without substance. KHN went the entire year without once mentioning Jill Stein or Cornel West.

    KHN’s news coverage appeared to follow the lead of its affiliated research entity. KFF published a web page to “Compare the Candidates on Healthcare Policy,” last updated October 8, that declared

    the general election campaign is underway, spotlighting former President Trump, the Republican nominee, and Vice President Harris, the Democratic nominee, as the viable contenders for the presidency.

    The comparisons highlighted the differences rather than the similarities, and included without context the standard claim that the Biden/Harris “administration achieved record-high enrollment in ACA Marketplace plans.”

    KFF had long since decided that discussion of Medicare for All is over. President Drew Altman told the New York Times (8/22/24) that KFF stopped polling on Medicare for All after the 2020 primaries because “there hasn’t been debate about it.” Yet pollsters regularly ask voters about healthcare issues that have no immediate chance of passage. The AP has asked people for a quarter century if they think it’s the federal government’s responsibility to “make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage,” and the Pew Research Center and other organizations have polled on abortion for decades, even when federal legislation was extremely unlikely.

    The lack of “debate” about Medicare for All or single-payer is a flimsy excuse for blinkered coverage. In fact, KHN and the other outlets all ignored major healthcare reform stories with looming deadlines for action by the incoming president—federal approval for state-level reform (Healthcare Dive, 4/24/24). California and Oregon passed laws in 2023 instructing their governors to seek federal permission to dramatically restructure their state healthcare systems, including formation of a single-payer system in Oregon. Negotiations were supposed to begin in the first half of this year. None of these four agenda-setting outlets asked 2024 presidential candidates whether they planned to flex White House power to help major state-level reforms.

    Complicit in mass death

    All four of these outlets have done detailed reporting on some aspects of the extraordinarily expensive mass-killing machine that passes for the US “healthcare system.” Claims denials, aggressive collections, medical debt and massively inflated prices have all graced their pages.

    But when it comes to political coverage, reporters and editors refuse to use their knowledge to challenge candidates effectively. The public’s experiences disappear, as journalists regurgitate bad facts and focus on self-evidently meaningless “proposals” framed by corporate power within their insular Beltway cultural bubble.

    UnitedHealth Group executive Brian Thompson’s murder exposed the degree to which that behavior makes them complicit in mass death.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Cropped image of a bag of vegatables on a bike

    We’ve gotten tons of questions about “reusable” shopping bags since the ban on single-use plastic checkout bags was implemented two years ago. The ban has been very effective in reducing single-use plastic pollution across Canada, protecting wildlife and the environment from these harmful, throwaway items.

    But if your closets are now filling up with this new kind of checkout bag sold at the grocery store, here are some things to remember the next time you go shopping:

    The bags you’re now taking home from the grocery store every week are still plastic.

    The federal plastic bag ban focuses on film plastic. Replacement bags can still be made of plastic “fabric” as long as they don’t break when machine washed and dried or used to carry 10 kilos of goods across a parking lot 100 times (seriously, those are the rules). So guess what? Major retailers picked out the cheapest plastic “fabric” bags they could find and that quickly became the default offer.

    Bags abandoned in our closets or trunks don’t qualify as reuse.

    To be reusable, a bag must actually be reused. But retailers have not lifted a finger to help make that happen. Instead, they just changed suppliers, upped the price they charge you – and are still happy to hand bags out like candy. Just ask anyone who gets home delivery from certain retailers. To do their part in reducing plastic waste and pollution, one of the things retailers should do is accept “reusable” bags back and clean them for use by another customer – or another delivery. But no dice. If you have a stash of clean and functional bags, you could try donating them to a local food bank or thrift store.

    Four reusable bags in a row

    The grocery chains that sell us cheap so-called reusable bags are creating problems for us, not solving them.

    Seriously, it’s not you (mostly). It’s them. Sure, you should remember to bring your own bags when you go to the store. Especially if you have a big stash and you don’t know what else to do with it. But it was the retailers who got us into the habit of plentiful throwaway bags and – as per above – they’re going to have to do better to get us out of it.

    Ignore the plastics industry’s misinformation about reusable grocery bags. 

    The plastics industry doesn’t like the Canadian ban on single-use plastic checkout bags, so they keep spreading false information. They particularly like to refer to a certain study that they think reveals that throwaway plastic bags are much better for the environment than reusable cotton bags. It sounds absurd – and it is. Throwaway anything is bad – but throwaway plastic is brutal for the environment, for wildlife, for the oceans. Reusable bags are fine. But, remember, they only count as reusable if you actually reuse them. So, rest assured: if you have a nice, sturdy cotton bag that you love to take shopping with you – please keep doing that. By reusing that cotton bag instead of getting a new bag when you go shopping, you’re doing a great thing for the environment. 

    The bag you already have is the one you should keep reusing over and over again.

    The previous point is so important we thought we’d just repeat it again. It could be that cotton bag with butterflies on it that your aunt gave you for Christmas last year or an Ontario liquor store bag from 2007 that remarkably still doesn’t have holes in it. Whatever bag(s) you already have are the ones you should keep using. Over and over again. 

    The post Five Things You Should Know About Reusable Grocery Bags appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  •  

    Donald Trump is back in the White House, and faux opposition is once again the order of the day for the Western media and the Democratic Party. Whether it comes to criminalizing migrants (FAIR.org, 1/25/25), maintaining US “soft power” via USAID, downplaying anti-democratic power grabs (FAIR.org, 2/4/25) or whitewashing Nazi salutes (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), the centrist establishment seems quite content to normalize Trump or even outflank him from the right.

    There is, of course, no area of greater consensus than US imperial grand strategy, from waging genocidal war in Palestine (FAIR.org, 1/30/25) to recolonizing Washington’s “backyard” south of the Rio Grande. Accumulation by laying waste to the societies of the global South via carpet bombing and/or economic siege warfare is, according to anti-imperialist political economist Ali Kadri, the name of the game.

    Venezuela is no exception to this multi-pronged onslaught. And the US empire’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, proudly leads the charge, most recently advocating the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “through coercive diplomacy if possible or force if necessary.”

    High on his own (imperial) supply

    New York Times: Depose Maduro

    Bret Stephens (New York Times, 1/14/25): “Ending Maduro’s long reign of terror is a good way to start [the Trump] administration—and send a signal to tyrants elsewhere that American patience with disorder and danger eventually runs out.”

    In a column belligerently titled “Depose Maduro,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/14/25) made an overt case for US military intervention to topple Venezuela’s government. He hailed this textbook crime of aggression as “overdue, morally right and in our national security interest.”

    For the Times’ self-described “warmongering neocon,” that last point is characteristically paramount. Specifically, he asserted that US “national security” requires “putting an end to a criminal regime that is a source of drugs, mass migration and Iranian influence in the Americas.”

    The irony that during the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency actually facilitated the trafficking of cocaine to working-class Black communities in the context of the Iran/Contra scandal (FAIR.org, 12/29/24) was evidently lost on the Times columnist.

    Then as today, the principal drug routes to the United States cut across the Pacific rather than the Gulf of Mexico (FAIR.org, 9/24/19). A 2017 DEA report found that less than 10% of US-bound cocaine flowed through Venezuela’s eastern Caribbean corridor, with WOLA reaching a similar conclusion in a 2020 study.

    Not only does the bulk of drug trafficking flow through US-allied countries, but the US government itself is broadly complicit in the perpetuation of the multi-billion dollar contraband, as evidenced in its support for narco puppet regimes in Afghanistan (New York Times, 7/27/08) and Honduras (FAIR.org, 3/20/24; Covert Action, 3/14/24).

    In marked contrast, the US has levied “narco-terrorism” charges against top Caracas officials, going as far as to place a bounty on Maduro’s head, without providing a shred of evidence, since Western outlets are happy to take US officials’ word, no questions asked (BBC, 1/10/25; New York Times, 1/10/25; Washington Post, 1/10/25; AP, 1/10/25).

    Stephens lamented that Washington’s murderous economic sanctions “didn’t work” and that its bounty “also won’t work.” The columnist conveniently ignored that the unilateral coercive measures, described aptly by US officials as “maximum pressure,” were quite effective in deliberately gutting Venezuela’s economy, in the process killing at least tens of thousands, and spurring the migrant exodus he pointed to as justification for his proposed military adventure.

    Such omission regarding US responsibility for Venezuelan migration is by now a staple of corporate media coverage (New York Times, 1/31/25; PBS, 1/31/25; CBS, 2/2/25). Indeed, support for Washington’s economic terrorism against Venezuela has been fairly uniform across the US political spectrum for years (FAIR.org, 6/4/20, 6/4/21, 5/2/22, 6/13/22).

    Common tactics include describing sanctions as merely affecting Maduro and allies (New York Times, 1/6/25; NPR, 1/10/25; Al Jazeera, 1/6/25; Financial Times, 1/31/25) or portraying their consequences as merely the demonized leader’s opinion (New York Times, 1/31/25; BBC, 1/10/25; Reuters, 1/27/25).

    The Iranian bogeyman

    Infobae: Irán refuerza su presencia militar en Venezuela con drones y cooperación estratégica

    Stephens cites a story (Infobae, 1/10/25) about an Iranian “drone development base” in Venezuela that offers as its only source for the claim that “there is information” about such a base.

    It is no surprise, either, that in Stephens’ casus belli, Iran appears alongside the familiar conservative tropes of Latin American migrant hordes and narcotics threatening the US (white settler) body politic.

    Stephens’ Orientalist fixation with the Iranian bogeyman is notable, if hardly novel. Western media have in recent years circulated baseless rumors of Iran covertly shipping military equipment to Venezuela (FAIR.org, 6/10/20), and the Times in particular has promoted equally evidence-free claims of drug trafficking by Iranian ally Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 5/24/19, 2/4/21).

    In the latest whopper, Stephens cited Iran having “reportedly established a ‘drone development base’” at a Venezuelan air base. However, this story comes from rabidly anti-Venezuelan government outlet Infobae (1/10/25), which did not even bother describing its anonymous source. The report only vaguely stated that “there is information” about this purported base.

    Regardless of whether there is any truth to the alleged defense cooperation between the two sovereign nations, the perceived threat is, following the late Edward Said, symptomatic of Western imperialism’s enduring obsession with the “loss of Iran” in the wake of the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. Like the Chinese Revolution before it, Iran’s Islamic Revolution is still decades later portrayed as a global civilizational menace.

    But the effort to update the “axis of evil” with a revised cast of rogue states from Venezuela to Iran also crucially serves to manufacture consent for military aggression against Tehran, which has long been the ultimate dream of significant segments of the US political class and intelligentsia, including Stephens (FAIR.org, 10/25/24).

    On elections and ‘tropical despotisms’ 

    In Stephens’ tropical gunboat diplomacy redux, there was something for everyone, even bleeding-heart “liberals” horrified that Venezuelan President Maduro supposedly “stole the election, terrorizes his opponents and brutalizes his people.”

    As always, US imperialist intervention ideologically hinges on denying the Bolivarian government’s democratic credentials, most recently regarding the outcome of the July 28, 2024, presidential vote (Venezuelanalysis, 8/22/24, 7/29/24). However, Washington’s blockade ensured that the elections would never be free and fair. As the main factor driving economic hardship and migration, US sanctions meant Venezuelans headed to the polls with a gun to their heads, not unlike Nicaraguans in 1990.

    It is the height of hypocrisy for US officials and their corporate media stenographers to claim the right to arbitrate other sovereign nations’ democratic legitimacy, even as they advance fascism at home and genocidal war across the globe. That sectors of the Western “compatible left” echo Stephens and his ilk, caricaturing the Maduro government as a “corrupt” and “repressive” regime, is unfortunate but not surprising (Ebb, 10/3/24).

    The core racial assumption, going back to the 19th century, is that Global South states that refuse to bow to Western imperialist diktat constitute “tropical despotisms” to be toppled in a never-ending “civilizing mission,” with its anti-Communist, “war on terror” and neo-Orientalist mutations.

    Demolishing the Death Star

    Extra!: How Television Sold the Panama Invasion

    Extra! (1–2/90): “In covering the invasion of Panama, many TV journalists abandoned even the pretense of operating in a neutral, independent mode.”

    It is noteworthy that the script for Stephens’ Rambo sequel is over 35 years old: Stephens argued for “US military intervention of the sort that in 1990 swiftly ended the regime of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.” Formerly US-backed narco dictator Noriega was, not incidentally, an ex-CIA agent involved in Iran/Contra (Extra!, 1–2/90; FAIR.org, 12/29/24).

    The New York Times warmonger-in-chief’s rendering of the intervention is fantastically selective, forgetting that the Central American nation was already “pre-invaded” by US military bases, and that the savage bombing of the Afro-Panamanian neighborhood of El Chorrillo transformed it into “Little Hiroshima.”

    But the sober reality is that Venezuela is not Panama. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Armed Forces, alongside other corps, like the Bolivarian Militia, have spent a quarter of a century preparing for a “prolonged people’s war of resistance” against the US empire at the level of doctrine, organization, equipment and training.

    If the US and its Zionist colonial outpost failed to defeat the heroic Palestinian resistance in Gaza after nearly 500 days of genocidal war, an asymmetric conflict with a significantly larger and stronger force, across a territory more than 2,000 times as large, is not likely a serious proposition.

    Nonetheless, it is the duty of all those residing in the imperialist core to grind Washington’s industrial-scale death machine to a definitive halt. This paramount strategic objective demands systematically deposing the New York Times’ Goebbelsian propaganda.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Sprawl

    As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Ontario is headed to the polls on February 27. This blog is part of our series outlining what we see as some of the key environmental issues voters should keep in mind as they talk to candidates and when they cast their ballots. 

    Sprawl is causing our housing shortage, we need a new plan.

    Housing is a key issue in Ontario, but our housing numbers are falling and, unless the province changes its approach to housing development, we won’t reach the 1.5 million homes needed by 2031.   

    What’s causing Ontario’s housing shortage?

    Ontario has all the tools it needs to house a fast-growing population, even with high interest rates. However, our focus on sprawl development  has made it hard for housing construction to meet demand. Prioritizing sprawl restricts multi-family housing in lowrise neighborhoods, limits apartments to small highrise areas, and requires most family-sized homes to be built inefficiently outside urban areas.

    Urban sprawl also increases car-dependency, threatens Ontario’s Greenbelt, destroys rare wetlands and sensitive wildlife habitat, and consumes what remains of the province’s good farmland.

    We need leaders who will turn the way we plan housing on its head—shifting from car-dependent sprawl to building family-friendly apartments on existing residential streets. Ontario needs a legislature with the guts to overhaul outdated zoning, unfair fees, building codes, and tax rules quickly, and from the top-down.

    Why not just cut taxes, fees, and “red-tape” for all new housing?  

    Ontario’s housing crisis emerged even though construction workers and equipment were running at full tilt. Unlike fast-growing states in the United States, who ruthlessly exploit undocumented and underpaid migrant construction labour, Ontario can only increase home building by getting builders to make better use of the labour, equipment and materials that we already have. That means ensuring that the mid-rise infill housing development that produces family housing most efficiently is also the easier, more cost-effective, and less risky option for builders than the less-efficient alternatives.

    In order to meet housing targets, we would like to see the next government:

    • Lower land costs for labour-efficient buildings in all of Ontario’s existing lowrise neighbourhoods—starting with blanket permission for six-storey apartment buildings on every existing residential major street and avenue and four-storey apartment buildings on every suburban, city, and small town residential lot throughout Ontario.
    • Cut construction costs for mid-rise housing by allowing use of simple wood frame construction, removing residential parking minimums, ending “step-back” requirements, and legalizing single staircase designs for buildings up to six storeys and permitting mass timber construction for buildings up to eight storeys.
    • Stop the wasting of construction capacity, by reversing all designations of rural land for sprawl development since 2022. Requiring that any development on land designated before that house at least 100 people per hectare and expand the Greenbelt to the rest of southern Ontario’s farmland and natural areas permanently. 
    • Cancel planned subsidies for inefficient sprawl, starting with the destructive $10B Highway 413.
    • Fund deeply affordable public and non-market housing, especially when market construction is stalled.
    • Unlock existing towns and suburbs for families without cars and new homes that don’t waste land and materials on parking by immediately funding more bus service and quickly approving, funding, and installing bus rapid transit lanes on existing arterials and collectors. 

    Our next provincial government must stand up for Ontarians and their housing needs. There’s only one path to solving the housing shortage, saving farms, forests and wetlands, and fixing car-dependent suburbs—and we need leaders who will pursue it.

    Red button that says "take action"

    The post We Need a New Plan to Build More Affordable Homes in Ontario appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Streetcar in Toronto

    Ontario’s provincial election is on February 27. As part of Environmental Defence’s mission to inform voters about crucial environmental issues, we’ve put together a list of seven things that we believe all political parties should put in their election platforms to strengthen clean transportation options in Ontario. 

    While provincial and federal funding has poured into battery and assembly plants to build electric vehicles in Ontario, little has been done to actually help Ontarians get their hands on affordable electric vehicles. Ontario has built several new public transit projects, but existing transit services are suffering. Since 2018, per-capita public transit service levels in municipalities across Ontario have been cut, on average, by 18%. 

    Additionally, Ontario has been promoting car-dependent urban sprawl that will only make traffic congestion worse.

    Our ideas for a credible clean transportation plan would cut emissions, actually reduce traffic, and reduce transportation costs for everyday families, whether they drive or take public transit. We encourage voters to use these policy ideas as a guide to assess whether a political party or your local candidate has a credible plan to reduce carbon emissions from transportation, the largest polluting sector in our province. 

    A credible clean transportation plan should include pledges to:

    1. Say no to destructive new highways like Highway 413, and instead invest in public transit projects that will actually reduce congestion and carbon emissions by moving far more people at a lower cost. 
    2. Fix the broken municipal public transit funding model by expanding provincial operating funding to ensure that Ontarians can rely on their buses, trains and streetcars to arrive more often and on time. 
    3. Put a “Mode Shift” target in Ontario’s climate plan, which means growing the amount of trips people make using public transportation and active transportation (like walking and cycling).
    4. Tackle the high costs of public transit construction in Ontario relative to other countries by moving away from public-private partnerships and instead growing public sector building expertise.
    5. Repeal Bill 212, the Bike Lane Ban, and support bike and bus lanes instead. 
    6. Catch up to BC and Quebec’s lead on zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) adoption with a Clean Car Standard, making EVs more available and affordable. Greater EV adoption must also be supported by abundant charging infrastructure, and targeted EV-buyer rebates.
    7. Require municipalities and school boards to shift to 100% zero-emission bus procurement by 2030 as part of a broader strategy to reduce emissions from Medium-Heavy Duty Vehicles (MHDVs).

    Small actions can have a big impact on how the Province moves forward, from signing a letter to your MPP; to volunteering within your community; to voting in local, provincial, and federal elections. Together, we can demand that all political parties show Ontario voters a real plan to tackle climate change, including from its largest source: transportation. 

    Join the movement and make a plan to vote!

    Red button that says "take action"

    The post A Clean Transportation Plan that Ontario Needs: 7 Key Elements appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Matt and Sam talk to historian Jennifer Burns about the fascinating life, and brutal philosophy, of Ayn Rand.

    This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.

  •  

    PIIE: Mass deportations would harm the US economy

    A non-hypothetical headline from the centrist Peterson Institute for International Economics (9/26/24).

    “GDP Could Take Massive Hit as a Result of Mass Deportations.” “Mass Deportations Could Leave Many Americans Without Jobs.” “Mass Deportations Could Spur Spike in Inflation.” “Mass Deportations Could Cost Nearly $1 Trillion.”

    These are hypothetical headlines of the sort you run if you want to drive home the point that mass deportations would not only be a humanitarian outrage, but an economic disaster. Which, according to economists, they very much would be.

    As of 2022, undocumented immigrants constituted approximately 5% of the US workforce. Deporting all or a large number of them would substantially reduce the supply of labor in the US economy and would concurrently reduce aggregate demand by eliminating the spending of anyone deported. GDP could, as a result, drop as much as 7.4% below a baseline forecast by the end of 2028, per the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

    Rather than opening up more job opportunities for American workers, past research tells us that the opposite will occur. As Michael Clemens from Peterson puts it:

    The disappearance of migrant workers…dries up local demand at grocery stories, leasing offices, and other nontraded services. The resulting blow to demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in supply of foreign workers.

    The supply shock induced by mass deportations of undocumented workers would have the additional effect of spiking inflation, perhaps several points above baseline. In short, beyond being a humanitarian nightmare, mass deportations would be an economic self-own of epic proportions.

    Rather than sound unfamiliar or strange, as it may to readers of corporate media, this sort of expert analysis of the economic effects of deportation could become conventional wisdom if outlets ran headlines like those above. After all, those are the type of headlines you run if you are dedicated to objectivity in reporting, to informing your audience of what the research says, no matter whether it might offend their sensibilities.

    ‘Warning of a fiscal crisis’

    WaPo: Trump’s immigration crackdown reaches New York City and shows its limits

    Writing about the prospect of mass deportation in New York City, the Washington Post (1/28/25) highlighted Mayor Eric Adams’ “warning of a fiscal crisis.”

    They are not, of course, the headlines you run if your paper is committed to bending over backwards to avoid offending Trump and his supporters. So at the Washington Post, such headlines are hard to come by. In fact, if you look through the “Immigration,” “Economy” and “Economic Policy” sections on the Post’s website, you will find a grand total of zero articles since the start of the year with headlines directly addressing the negative economic impact of Trump’s proposed mass deportation policy.

    Some articles published over this period have addressed the economic effects of mass deportations, but only in a marginal way. For instance, in an article (1/31/25) published at the end of January about an ICE raid at a workplace in Newark, New Jersey, the Post included the following quote from Newark mayor Ras Baraka:

    “How do you determine…who is undocumented and who is criminal?… In this community, you might pull everybody over, because this is a city full of immigrants,” Baraka, who is running for governor of New Jersey, said in an interview. “You got everybody on edge around here. And it’s going to hurt the economy.”

    What would the economic damage look like? The Post declined to elaborate.

    Similarly, a piece (1/28/25) from a few days earlier about an ICE raid in New York City had little to say about the impacts of mass deportations on the economy. It did, however, take some space to highlight negative economic effects of illegal immigration on the city, explaining that “the largest influx [of migrants] since the Ellis Island era…left New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) warning of a fiscal crisis.” The only economic figure cited in the piece was the figure for the cost of the migrant influx, apparently over $5 billion since 2023.

    Cautiously ‘wonky’

    NYT: What Mass Deportations Would Do to New York City’s Economy

    “So much recent political rhetoric has succeeded in portraying undocumented people as driven to crime rather than contribution,” the New York Times‘ Ginia Bellafante (1/31/25) noted.

    Contrast this coverage with that of the Post’s competitor, the New York Times. At the end of January, the Times published a piece (1/31/25) headlined “What Mass Deportations Would Do to New York City’s Economy.” A far cry from the hypothetical headlines provided at the top of this article, the headline nonetheless signaled an intention to seriously analyze the economic effects of mass deportations. The first economic figure cited in the piece, coming in the third paragraph, highlighted the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants:

    As a group, undocumented immigrants paid $3.1 billion in New York state and local taxes in 2022, for example, a sum equal to the city’s early education budget for the current fiscal year.

    Not wanting to come off as too activist for citing data on the positive contributions of undocumented immigrants to New York City’s tax base, the Times felt obliged to clarify that this figure did not come

    from a left-leaning human rights group intent on fostering sympathy for people who crossed the border illegally, but rather from the wonky Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

    An odd way of presenting data, but a way that evidently feels comfortable for a paper that has no intention of seriously rocking the boat, even if it is willing, on this occasion, to stand up from its seat rather than clinging to the captain’s feet for dear life.

    Despite some apparent hesitancy, the piece went on to examine the loss in local and state tax revenue that could result from deportations of even a fraction of the undocumented population, and to explain the centrality of undocumented workers to key industries in the city, from food services to childcare to construction. None—I repeat, none—of this information could be gleaned from the Post’s coverage of the immigration situation in New York City.

    ‘Recast the US economy’

    WaPo: Trump’s win puts militarized, mass deportations on the agenda

    A Washington Post subhead (11/6/25) said that Trump’s deportation plans might “recast the US economy”—which turns out to mean shrinking it by as much as 6%.

    In a major piece on Trump’s approach to the immigration system published just before Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Post (1/19/25) likewise failed at its basic task of informing its readers. The Post at least mentioned that mass deportations could hurt the economy—“By rounding up immigrants who fill otherwise vacant jobs, [Trump] could hurt the US economy he has pledged to supercharge”—but that’s where the analysis ended. No reference was made to research showing that mass deportations could lead to complete stagnation of GDP during Trump’s time in office, or that it could lead to a several percentage point spike in inflation.

    Prior to the start of the year, the Post had published more about the economic effects of mass deportations. For instance, an article (12/27/24) from the end of December headlined “The 2025 Economy: Five Things to Watch” included “Deportations” as the second thing to watch. It nonetheless featured only a small discussion of the topic—four short paragraphs—and no hard numbers were cited regarding the effects on employment, GDP and inflation, despite these numbers existing in reputable research from a nonpartisan think tank.

    A Post piece (11/6/25) from a day after the election, meanwhile, had discussed how mass deportations could “recast the US economy and labor force”—what a verb! Towards the end of the article, the reporters touched on the effects of mass deportations on inflation and GDP, citing concrete numbers for the second variable:

    Many economists also say that mass deportations on the scale proposed by Trump would trigger inflation in the short term—by forcing employers dealing with labor shortfalls to raise prices. A major deportation program would also shrink the economy by 2.6% to 6.2% a year, according to a recent review of projections published by the University of New Hampshire.

    This paragraph, however, was all that was given for a concrete discussion of the economic impact of mass deportations.

    Amazingly, before the election, the Post editorial board (10/24/24) did take the time to weave in commentary on Trump’s mass deportation policy in yet another editorial fearmongering about Social Security. The board wrote:

    Whatever you think about its merits as immigration policy, a crackdown on undocumented workers, including mass deportations, could also hurt Social Security’s finances because undocumented workers contribute payroll taxes without collecting benefits for decades—if ever.

    No other economic effects of mass deportations were mentioned by the editorial board. A substantial hit to GDP, though relevant to the discussion of public finances, was not discussed. Concerns about the effects of mass deportations were merely looped into apparently more pressing concerns about the sustainability of Social Security, which the Post wants to cut (FAIR.org, 6/15/23).

    ‘Not about wages’

    NPR: Immigrants drive Nebraska's economy. Trump's mass deportations pledge is a threat

    NPR (1/17/25) looked at the economic problems posed by mass deportation through the eyes of employers who depend on exploiting immigrant labor.

    The Post has been particularly egregious in ignoring the topic of the economic impact of mass deportations, but it certainly hasn’t been alone in covering it poorly. NPR, for example, decided to let employer propaganda slide unchecked in a recent piece (1/17/25) about the contributions of immigrants to Nebraska’s economy.

    The piece started by centering the experience, not of immigrants, but of the executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers Association, Al Juhnke, whose main concern appears to be maximizing the availability of cheap labor for the agricultural industry in Nebraska. An early paragraph read:

    Juhnke says attracting workers to Nebraska is not about wages. The average pay for a meat trimmer is close to $18 an hour—well above the state minimum of $13.50. “These are good paying jobs in the plants,” he says. “People say, ‘Well, just double or triple the pay [and] you’ll get United States citizens to work.’ No, you won’t.”

    There is no follow up on this point; it is simply accepted as fact by NPR. But there’s little reason to trust an executive of an organization advocating for pork producers on this.

    Responsible coverage might at the very least entail bringing in an independent researcher to comment on this claim. For instance, it could be noted that, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage in the county of Nebraska where much of the meat processing occurs is $18.64 per hour for a single adult with no children. For a family with one working adult and one child, it’s $32.27. Such information immediately undermines the executive’s claim that a wage of “close to $18 an hour” is a good wage, and in turn should raise eyebrows at the idea that raising the wage would have no effect on the attractiveness of employment to US citizens.

    Survey results from the Manufacturing Institute and Colonial Life, furthermore, indicate that manufacturing companies have seen success in recent years in attracting workers by increasing pay and benefits. Why should we assume meat processing plants face different dynamics from other manufacturing plants?

    More to the point, for an article focused on undocumented immigrants’ plight, it would be worth following up this claim, and the surrounding text discussing Nebraskan employers’ search for cheap immigrant labor, with an analysis of the exploitation of immigrant labor.

    A follow-up question to the executive might be: Can employers afford to pay workers, immigrant or not, substantially more? And if so, why are they not doing that?

    All that the piece gives, however, is a quote from a civil rights advocate lamenting the dehumanization of immigrants: “It’s dehumanizing—‘Let’s harness immigrant labor.’ Like an animal.” This is a powerful quote, but it’s not a substitute for basic factchecking of an empirical claim.

    ‘Real economic crisis’

    Politico: Americans hate high prices. Mass deportations could spark new surges.

    Even while pointing out the inflation threat posed by mass deportation, Politico (1/20/25) allowed the Trump team to promote dubious numbers from an anti-immigrant hate group.

    Though also better than the Post, in that it has actually prominently covered the negative economic effects of mass deportations in the “Economy” section of its website recently, Politico has similarly engaged in sloppy reporting, failing to provide skepticism where it is needed. In an article headlined “Americans Hate High Prices. Mass Deportations Could Spark New Surges,” Politico (1/20/25) did highlight how much of a disaster Trump’s deportation policy could be for the economy. But it quickly turned the issue into a both-sides debate and, crucially, left unchecked a particularly wild claim:

    Some Trump allies say the doomsaying over the incoming president’s pledges to deport as many as 20 million undocumented immigrants is overblown. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team, said in a statement that the “real economic crisis is the $182 billion American tax dollars spent each year to cover the costs of 20 million illegal immigrants that have flooded our communities and replaced American workers.”

    This claim—that undocumented immigrants impose a $182 billion cost on American taxpayers—was not discussed further. Politico just let it sit. It appears the figure comes from an organization called the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a far-right advocacy group, which was claiming 15 years ago that undocumented immigrants cost American taxpayers over $100 billion per year.

    A later estimate from 2013 by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that’s behind Project 2025, put the figure closer to $50 billion. But even that number is controversial—it includes, for example, the cost of government-provided educational services received by the children of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are US citizens. Educational services, in fact, constitute the majority of the costs associated with undocumented immigrant households in the Heritage analysis.

    The amount spent on direct transfer payments to such households is only a small fraction of the estimated overall cost. Other categories of cost include spending on police, fire and public safety, as well as transportation services and administrative support.

    The liberties that conservative researchers take in deciding what to count as a cost imposed by undocumented immigrants on US taxpayers make one question the utility of this accounting exercise in the first place. As one researcher has commented:

    Fundamentally I think it’s the wrong question…. You’re talking about people who work for very low wages and are excluded from nearly all social services. It takes a real act of will to say they’re exploiting us.

    Yet for Politico, none of this context is worth bringing into the piece. Even a basic attempt at factchecking the claim from a Trump ally is absent.

    Support declines with details

    ABC: Do Americans support Trump's mass deportations?

    When respondents were asked about worker shortages, support for mass deportation went from net 7 points positive to 5 points negative (ABC, 1/29/25).

    If this sort of coverage—ignoring the issue at the Post, shying away from hard-hitting coverage at the Times, and allowing the story to be warped at NPR and Politico—is going to be the norm for coverage of the economic impact of Trump’s extremist immigration policies, there is little hope for an informed US public on this issue.

    Currently, the public appears broadly supportive of mass deportations—that is, if you ask them directly and provide no further details. However, once more details are given, support for mass deportations declines.

    One poll from about a month ago gauged support for the following policy: “Detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants.” It found 52% of Americans in favor and 45% opposed. But with the addendum “even if it means businesses will face worker shortages,” the result changed to 46% in favor, 51% opposed. The effect of including other information about the negative economic effects of mass deportations was not tested, but it seems highly probable that other information—like the potential for a hit to GDP or a spike in inflation—would similarly turn Americans against mass deportation policy.

    The problem is, the details about the potentially disastrous economic effects of mass deportations are likely known by only a small minority of the population. If corporate media outlets took their job seriously, they would make those details very well known. That could have major political effects, and could help turn the tides against extremist immigration policies.

    Failing to inform the public likewise has major political effects. Passivity means greater leeway for Trump and his backers to shape public opinion, with their claims perhaps continuing to go unchallenged by outlets like Politico. Elon Musk, for one, is known as a prolific propagator of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, and has frequently used X to amplify his message in the past. If corporate media fail to confront such misinformation, they effectively acquiesce to its corruption of the popular consciousness.

    Ultimately, it’s up to corporate media to make a decision about what journalism means to them. They can’t escape making a decision with significant political consequences—political consequences are coming no matter what. But they can decide whether they care more about not appearing political to Trump supporters, or about protecting millions of people—and the health of the US economy.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • My youngest son, Silas, grew up fishing the blue-ribbon trout streams of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. 

    The first time he set a fly on the narrow, crystal clear waters of the Livingstone River – a couple of hours south-west of Calgary – he knew that he had found his place. We both did. 

    Alberta Stop Coal Mines
    Photo by Stephen Legault

    It was a fabulous feeling to fall in love with a landscape not because I was necessarily drawn to it – though I had been since the early 1990s – but because my fourteen-year-old son was enamoured by it. 

    Many Albertans enjoy a special relationship with the Eastern Slopes; a range of mountains and foothills that run from the Alberta/Montana border, along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains and Foothills, north to Jasper National Park, the Wilmore Wilderness and the Kakwa Wildland. 

    This is where our water comes from; it’s where many of Alberta’s most iconic species – from grizzly bears to bull trout – live, and it is where we retreat with our friends and families to hunt, fish, hike, camp and paddle. 

    The Eastern Slopes are part of our province’s narrative. They are part of the story we tell about who we are and what we stand for. 

    That relationship and that narrative, however, are at risk because of the Alberta government’s reckless, ill-conceived plans to allow new open pit and mountain top removal coal mines in these watersheds along Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. 

    Take Action: Tell the Alberta Government to Stop Coal Mines in the Eastern Slopes

    Red button that says "take action"

    It doesn’t matter to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and Minister of Energy and Mines Brian Jean that 90% of Albertans oppose new coal mines; what matters is the procession of coal company lobbyists, including many former provincial government employees, who keep knocking at their doors to demand access to coal used for making steel in India, China and South East Asia. 

    In a string of haphazard decisions starting in 2020, the Alberta government has alternatively opened the Eastern Slopes for further coal exploration, reinstated the 1976 coal policy, and then, in January of 2025, reopening the Eastern Slopes for exploration and mining. 

    As hard as it is to believe, there is still a strong market for coal in China, Asia and elsewhere in the world. While western countries appetite for steel making coal is expected to flatten in 2025 after a record high level of consumption between 2020 and 2025, India and China’s use is forecast to continue to grow. 

    Unfortunately, market forces alone are not going to keep coal companies out of the Eastern Slopes of Alberta. 

    Stop Coal MiningWhile alternatives to coal fired blast furnaces – including electric arc furnaces and hydrogen powered steel making – are beginning to gain traction, these technical solutions are still years from being adopted at the scale needed to sideline coal. 

    That means it is up to you and me to stop this. We’ll have to do it the old fashioned way: advocacy. 

    Take Action: Tell the Alberta Government to Stop Coal Mines in the Eastern Slopes

    As Environmental Defence’s lead for the Alberta Energy Transition, it’s impossible to ignore the impact that coal has on our climate, our communities and our economy. In this special series of blog reports on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes coal industry, including how it has become deeply and profoundly corrupt, and its impact on our ability to see clear-eyed to the future of the energy transition, we’ll explore these challenges and seek out opportunities to take action. 

    My motivation remains simple. My son is now a young adult, and like him there are many young people in Alberta who dream about casting a dry fly on the undulating back of the Livingstone, the Oldman, the Castle, and Highwood, and the Crowsnest Rivers. My son didn’t know this country before the threat of coal mining; now it’s my goal that he gets to know the Eastern Slopes after this threat has been banished. 

    That’s what gets me and hundreds, even thousands of other passionate defenders of the Eastern Slopes, up in the morning. It’s why I hope you will join Environmental Defence in taking a stand against coal mining, and for wildlife, wild water, and the wild places we love. 

    Stay tuned for future blogs that look at the connection between coal mining and climate change, and how when water and wilderness are lost, they’re gone forever. 

    The post Stop Alberta Coal Mines: A Personal Connection to a Threatened Place appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  •  

    MEM: Over 61,700 Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocidal war, local authorities say

    As Gazans return under a ceasefire, the official death toll has risen beyond 60,000, including almost 18,000 children (Middle East Monitor, 2/2/25).

    The official death count of Israel’s genocide is climbing as hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians resolutely march back to the north of Gaza. That’s in part because those returning to their demolished homes have been unearthing the remains of their missing loved ones whose deaths went unconfirmed for months.

    Discoveries like these were anticipated by a study published in the prestigious British health journal Lancet (1/9/25) earlier this year. It estimated that the Gaza Health Ministry may have undercounted the deaths caused directly by the Israeli assault by 40%, placing the real toll closer to 65,000. This is before taking into account the indirect causes of death resulting from the onslaught, like disease, malnutrition and lack of clean water or adequate healthcare.

    The study’s findings came as no surprise to experts, who for months have warned that Israel’s attacks on first responders, journalists and infrastructure, as well as its refusal to let in international human rights monitors and media organizations, were causing an undercount. But if all you read are major Western media outlets like the New York Times or CNN, their reports on the study (New York Times, 1/14/25; CNN, 1/9/25) may well have surprised you.

    That’s because, over the course of Israel’s genocide, Western media have actively avoided investigating—and even downplayed—the true human costs of the war by eagerly parroting Israeli officials who cast doubt on the claims of the Gaza Health Ministry. Despite those supposed doubts, Western media default to citing the health ministry tally in day-to-day coverage of the war, while making little mention of the long-held consensus among health experts that far more Palestinians were dying than were being recorded (New York Times, 12/27/24; CNN, 8/16/24).

    The downplaying can be seen in Western media’s repeated refrain that the health ministry is “Hamas-run” or “Hamas-controlled” (BBC, 12/3/23; New York Times, 10/19/23; CNN, 12/4/23) and therefore not to be trusted. More than adding doubt, labeling civilian infrastructure as “Hamas-controlled” puts Palestinians in harm’s way. Israel’s desire to paint anything Palestinian as Hamas is “an implicit association of Palestinians with evil, essentially making Palestinian lives dispensable,” writes Noora Said in Mondoweiss (12/29/23).

    No more pressing task

    CBS: Israeli strike on school in Gaza City kills at least 22, Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says

    The phrase “Hamas-run” (CBS, 9/21/24) was used to insinuate that death numbers might be exaggerated, when experts knew the official toll was certainly an undercount.

    It stretches the mind to imagine a more pressing task for journalism than accurately reporting on an unfolding genocide. For US audiences, whose tax dollars are bankrolling the slaughter, news outlets should be making every effort to help them appreciate the full consequences of their government’s foreign policy.

    That’s undoubtedly a difficult job. The sheer scale of destruction in Gaza, and its status as an open-air death camp walled off from the rest of the world, means outsiders don’t have the ability to get a complete picture of the devastation. That would require an exhaustive cross-referencing of Gaza Health Ministry documents and (Israeli-controlled) population registers, as well as a broad collection of witness testimonies that international observers just don’t have unfettered access to. But major Western media outlets need to ask themselves a question similar to what the International Court of Justice asked in January 2024: “What’s plausible?”

    In addition to the most recent direct death estimate, a letter in the Lancet (7/20/24) by public health researchers took a stab at answering the broader question of all attributable deaths last July. Taking into account historical wartime data, the researchers suggested that for each death directly caused by Israeli weaponry, there could be four or more indirect deaths. “It is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza,” they wrote.

    In October, 99 American medical practitioners who served in Gaza wrote a letter to then-President Joe Biden, estimating that at least 118,908 Palestinian had already been killed, directly or indirectly, by Israel. The physicians used a variety of methods, including a calculation of the minimum number of deaths likely to result from the number of civilians classified as facing catastrophic and emergency-level starvation.

    Ideally, the vast resources of an outlet like the Times could be used to begin to corroborate these estimates from public health and medical researchers. At the very least, the fact that researchers estimate the true scale of death in Gaza to be three or more times the official tally should bear constant repetition in paragraphs that add context to daily news stories on the topic.

    Sana Saeed, a leading critic of Western media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide, noted:

    If your article can include a line about how the IDF denies yet another war crime that it’s very clearly committed, then your article can include how leading health studies are estimating that the number of slaughtered Palestinians exceeds 100,000.

    ‘Debate over credibility’

    NYT: How Many of Gaza’s Dead Are Women and Children? For 10,000, the Data Is Incomplete.

    When the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs sought more identifying information about the list of Palestinians killed by Israel, the New York Times (5/15/24) leapt on this to insist that it “added fuel to a debate over the credibility of the Gazan authorities’ tallies of fatalities in the war.”

    Western outlets haven’t just failed to consistently convey the full extent of the carnage in Gaza to their readers, they’ve actively downplayed it.

    Take the Times story (5/15/24) headlined “How Many of Gaza’s Dead Are Women and Children? For 10,000, the Data Is Incomplete.” The article used the United Nation’s exclusion of some 10,000 confirmed casualties from the tally of women and children killed in Gaza, due to incomplete information, as an opportunity to launder Israeli claims discrediting the health ministry.

    The UN’s acknowledgement that some data is incomplete has “added fuel to a debate over the credibility of the Gazan authorities’ tallies of fatalities in the war,” the article says. But who’s on either side of this “debate,” according to the Times? Affirming the tally’s credibility, we have Biden, the civilian casualty monitoring group Airwars and researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, according to the Times. On the other side, only Israel and the infamous neoconservative Elliott Abrams are credited.

    The article acknowledged that the number of women and children dead can be used as an “indication of how many civilians have been killed, a question that lies at the heart of the criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war.” But nowhere in the piece was it mentioned that the UN secretary general has called Gaza a “graveyard for children,” or that just the month before, doctors in Gaza reported “a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest” (Guardian, 4/2/24), suggesting a practice of Israeli snipers targeting noncombatants.

    In another article (1/22/24), headlined “The Decline in Deaths in Gaza,” the Times noted that “the daily death toll in Gaza has fallen in half over the past month, reflecting a change in war strategy.” Set aside that the article neglected to actually mention how many Palestinians had been killed by then. Instead, consider all the other factors that went unmentioned in the report: Had Israel’s devastating rampage up until then created new challenges to reporting fatalities? Was Israel’s strategy shifting focus to imposing a devastating blockade on humanitarian aid, eventually causing more starvation-related deaths? The answers are yes and yes.

    ‘Arguing for caution’

    CNN: The New York Times walks back flawed Gaza hospital coverage, but other media outlets remain silent

    Credulously accepting Israeli and US claims that they were not responsible for the destruction of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (10/26/23) demanded of media outlets that quoted the Gaza Health Ministry: “Was there any regret repeating claims from the terrorist group?”

    CNN similarly exemplifies Western media’s inclination to discredit the Gaza Health Ministry and downplay the death toll in Gaza. In February 2024, the Guardian (2/4/24) published the testimony of six CNN employees confirming that the network’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza is shaped by its management’s biased edicts that include restrictions on “quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives,” while “Israeli government statements are taken at face value.”

    As FAIR (11/3/23) previously covered, after an Israeli strike on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City killed hundreds of Palestinians, CNN (10/26/23) published an op-ed from its media reporter Oliver Darcy chastising Western outlets, including his own, for relying on health ministry claims about the strike. Instead, he demanded they retract their reporting, because Israel and the US had investigated the strike—a crime in which they were both implicated—and found no wrongdoing.

    When CNN has published stories about the human consequences of Israel’s war, such as its coverage (8/16/24) of the health ministry’s toll surpassing 40,000, it has only made passing mention of the impact beyond the immediate death toll, referring to “the daily suffering, malnutrition and volatility in Gaza.” While in that report CNN apparently found no reason to bring up the Lancet letter published just one month earlier, it found plenty of space to uncritically state that “Israeli military officials have said they try to minimize harm to civilians in Gaza, and that Hamas bears the blame for using civilians as ‘human shields.’”

    When Western outlets do publish the rare reports that convey a broader impact than just the health ministry tally, they still leave much to be desired. Take the Times’ coverage (7/11/24) of the Lancet letter projecting some 186,000 Palestinians killed by Israel. It started off by introducing the concept of excess deaths—which, almost a year into the genocide, may be the first time Times readers have been exposed to the concept—and explained that it “can provide a truer indication of the toll and scale of conflicts and other social upheaval.”

    But right after mentioning the Lancet’s estimate, the Times said that it “immediately generated debate, with other researchers arguing for caution in any such projection.” What reason for caution did the Times provide? That any estimate would necessarily be tricky, because it would have to start with the health ministry’s data—which they acknowledged is imperfect, given the health system in Gaza’s almost total collapse. So instead of stressing a need for investigating the true cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, given the difficulty Palestinians are having reporting the toll, the Times found itself parroting urges against such inquiries, for the very same reason.

    Israel’s assault on Gaza has been the first genocide live-streamed for the world to see. Journalists have more tools at their disposal than ever before to glean what information they can. Western media’s failure to do so will be recorded in history.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • A collection of Dissent’s writing on the union movement is out now. Get your copy today.

    This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.

  •  

    CNN: How an arcane Treasury Department office became ground zero in the war over federal spending

    CNN (1/31/25) framed Elon Musk’s extra-constitutional power grab as part of “the war over federal spending.”

    When President Donald Trump announced an unprecedented freeze on federal grants and loans last week, some of the most prominent US news outlets proved themselves largely uninterested in whether it was legal. Meanwhile, a few braver journalists called out the move as the constitutional crisis that it was (FAIR.org, 1/29/25).

    When Democratic attorneys general rushed to challenge the move in court, with positive results, Trump rescinded the order. But the crisis is hardly over.

    On the contrary: Elon Musk, the unelected centibillionaire who threw Nazi salutes at the inauguration, has wrested control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, after forcing out its most senior career civil servant, David Lebryk. As CNN (1/31/25) reported, the Treasury takeover happened after Trump’s team had repeatedly asked about the department’s ability to stop payments, to which Lebryk had insisted, “We don’t do that.”

    These payments include everything from Social Security checks to tax refunds, federal employee salaries to contractor payments. It’s over $5 trillion a year, a fifth of the US economy. The database Musk and his tech bro allies in the non–congressionally approved “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have access to also contains enormous amounts of sensitive personal information for most Americans, including Social Security numbers. And Musk and a 25-year-old former X employee have access to the code that controls the payment systems, allowing them to make irreversible changes to it, according to Wired (2/4/25).

    At the same time, Musk has infiltrated the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management—two other rather obscure and nonpolitical but hugely consequential agencies that manage federal offices, technology and employees (Wired, 1/28/25, 1/31/25).

    ‘An idea that crosses party lines’

    NYT: Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines

    The New York Times (1/31/25) put its seal of approval on Trump’s illegal attempt to freeze federal spending, calling the idea behind it “bipartisan.”

    Instead of appropriately pushing the increasing lawlessness and opacity to the forefront of their reporting, the New York Times and Washington Post largely buried these stories, downplaying their earth-shattering break from democratic norms.

    As Musk took over the Treasury system, the Times (1/31/25) did point out:

    Control of the system could give Mr. Musk’s allies the ability to unilaterally cut off money intended for federal workers, bondholders and companies, and open a new front in the Trump administration’s efforts to halt federal payments.

    And yet somehow this story struck editors as page 13 material.

    Meanwhile, a piece (1/31/25) by the TimesMichael Shear published online the same day was deemed front-page material, causing even seasoned media critics to spit out their morning beverage at its breathtaking ability to bothsides the situation: “Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines.”

    Shear wrote that Trump is simply “continuing a mostly failed effort by a long series of presidents and Congress” to “somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.” He thus clearly communicated that he is not up for the task of reporting on this administration.

    The Times published Musk’s Treasury takeover on page 18, under the rather nonchalant headline: “Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payments System.” The subhead read:

    Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Mr. Musk’s representatives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

    And hey, don’t worry, the article suggests:

    Mr. Musk’s initiative is intended to be part of a broader review of the payments system to allow improper payments to be scrutinized, and is not an effort to arbitrarily block individual payments, the people familiar with the matter said.

    At the Post, readers got language like, “The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy” (1/31/25), and “it is extremely unusual for anyone connected to political appointees to access” the payment systems (2/1/25). (In fact, it appears to be unprecedented—Independent, 2/3/25.)

    ‘Reminiscent of Stalin’

    Wired: Elon Musk’s Friends Have Infiltrated Another Government Agency

    Wired (1/31/25): Musk’s team is “attempting to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech, deploying a suite of new AI software, and recreating the office in X’s image.”

    There is another way to do journalism. It’s called connecting dots, asking questions, not accepting anonymous claims of benevolent intent—and helping people understand the gravity of the situation when unprecedented end-runs around democracy are happening before our very eyes. And it’s heartening to see quite a few news outlets engaging in it.

    For instance, Wired has been doing a tenacious job following Musk’s assault on the government, connecting the dots between his actions and explaining the dangers to the country. It broke the news (1/28/25) that Musk workers from his various companies had taken over management positions at the Office of Personnel Management—well before Trump’s nominee to take over the OPM has even had a confirmation hearing. Its subhead noted: “One expert found the takeover reminiscent of Stalin.”

    Wired explained that the installation of AI experts at OPM suggests a forthcoming effort to use AI on the reams of data it has access to in order to target federal employees for removal.

    Regarding the GSA infiltration, Wired reported (1/31/25):

    The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, among many other things, a former Biden official told Wired on Friday.

    “Granting DOGE staff, many of whom aren’t government employees, unfettered access to internal government systems and sensitive data poses a huge security risk to the federal government and to the American public,” the Biden official said. “Not only will DOGE be able to review procurement-sensitive information about major government contracts, it’ll also be able to actively surveil government employees.”

    Wired again put that danger (“the potential [for Musk minions] to remote into laptops, read emails, and more”) into its subhead—unlike the Times‘ muted headlines.

    ‘Incredibly dangerous’

    Rolling Stone: Elon Musk’s Attempt to Control the Treasury Payment System Is Incredibly Dangerous

    Rolling Stone (2/3/25) pointed out that “the danger of operational access to the payments system is precisely that there are very little safeguards for its improper use or manipulation.”

    Others are also raising alarms in their headlines, as at Rolling Stone (2/3/25): “Elon Musk’s Attempt to Control the Treasury Payment System Is Incredibly Dangerous.” The subhead explained: “Trump and Musk could use sensitive Treasury information to punish their enemies. Worse yet, they could break America’s payment system entirely.”

    The piece, by Nathan Tankus, pointed out that there are glaring reasons to disbelieve administration claims about this being about “improper payments,” such as:

    At 3:14 a.m. Sunday, Musk pledged to shut down supposedly “illegal payments” to Global Refuge, a faith-based organization that exists to provide “safety and support to refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants from across the world.”

    Tankus also points out what the Post and Times won’t, which is that the seizure of the payment system means Trump and Musk

    can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign.

    Even in bigger media, some critical voices could be heard. CNN‘s Zachary Wolf (2/1/25) asked some appropriate journalistic questions: “Has [Musk] taken an oath, like the federal workers he apparently has plans to fire, to uphold the Constitution?…. What are Musk’s conflicts of interests?”

    Accessories to the coup

    WaPo: Trump preps order to dismantle Education Dept. as DOGE probes data

    The Washington Post (2/4/25) assures readers that “the Education Department was created by Congress, and only Congress can eliminate it.”

    The Washington Post put news about Musk’s takeovers on the front page today (2/4/25), as it reported on Trump preparing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, which Musk has apparently also infiltrated. But it still managed to sound rather sanguine about the threat: “The expected executive order would not shut down the agency, as there is widespread agreement in both parties that doing so would require congressional action.” Despite reporting daily on actions Trump and Musk have taken that have usurped congressional authority, the paper still seems to believe—and want readers to believe—against all evidence that our Constitution’s constraints on executive power continue to hold.

    And the New York Times finally published an article (2/3/25) taking a deeper look “Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government,” as the headline stated. Still, it seemed to find it difficult to use language in its early framing paragraphs any stronger than to say that Musk’s actions “have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections,” as it explains in the third paragraph. These moves are “creating major upheaval,” the fifth paragraph allowed, and the sixth said it “represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.”

    The piece was not published in the print newspaper the next day; FAIR has yet to see it rise to the top of the paper’s homepage.

    As Musk and Trump continue to behave like kings, it’s incumbent upon news media to not just report on their actions, but put them in the proper context for the public to understand the threat level they represent; otherwise, we can’t respond appropriately.

    That kind of reporting takes real bravery in the kind of moment we are in: Musk has already (falsely) called it a crime to reveal the names of those working for him at the agencies DOGE is targeting, which Wired and others have done. The Trump-installed DC attorney general has obsequiously promised Musk to go after those who identify his underlings—and to prosecute “anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people” (New Republic, 2/3/25).

    While that might sound laughable, media outlets have already paid Trump handsome settlements to settle lawsuits that should have been seen as similarly laughable (FAIR.org, 12/16/24; PBS, 1/29/25; New York Times, 1/30/25). When prominent news outlets won’t summon the courage to vigorously oppose this descent into autocracy, they are accessories to the coup. We must demand better from them, and support the outlets and journalists doing the critical work we as citizens require to defend our democracy.


    ACTION: Tell the New York Times and Washington Post to treat Musk’s actions like the existential threat to democracy that they are.

    CONTACT:

    New York Times
    Letters: letters@nytimes.com
    Bluesky: @NYTimes.com

    Washington Post
    Letters: letters@washpost.com,
    Bluesky: @washingtonpost.com

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • NPR: Can Trump's 2nd act work for the working class while giving back to his super donors?

    NPR (2/1/25) investigates how a politician who surrounds himself with fellow billionaires can “work for the working class.” NPR‘s suggestion: tax cuts for the very wealthy.

    “Can Trump’s Second Act Work for the Working Class While Giving Back to His Super Donors?” asks NPR.com (2/1/25). The answer, from NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving, is a resounding—maybe!

    Elving presents the politics of the second Trump administration as a perplexing paradox:

    Today we are confronted with an alliance between those whom political scientists might call plutocrats and those who are increasingly labeled populists. The contrast is stark, but the symbiosis is unmistakable. And we all await the outcome as the populist in Trump tries to co-exist with his newfound ally Musk, the world’s richest man with abundant clout in the new administration.

    After a meandering tour of US history from Andrew Jackson to William Jenning Bryan to Ross Perot, Elving concludes: “We may only be at the beginning of an era in which certain political figures can serve what are plausibly called populist causes by calling on the resources of the ultra-rich.” Huge, if true!

    Elving’s evidence that Trump is a “populist”—or at least has a populist lurking inside him—is remarkably thin, however:

    Trump has shown a certain affinity with, and owes a clear debt to, many of the little guys—what he called in 2017 “the forgotten men and women.”… With his small town, egalitarian rallies and appeals to “the forgotten man and woman,” he has revived the term populism in the political lexicon and gone further with it than anyone since Bryan’s heyday.

    Trump “made a show of working a shift at a McDonald’s last fall,” Elving notes. And he “used his fame and Twitter account to popularize a fringe theory about then-President Obama being foreign born and thus ineligible to be president,” which “connected him to a hardcore of voters such as those who told pollsters they believed Obama was a Muslim.” Elving suggests that this is the sort of thing populists do.

    But when it comes to offering examples of actual populist policies from the first Trump administration, Elving admits that there aren’t many to speak of:

    If Trump’s rapid rise as a Washington outsider recalled those of 19th century populists, Trump’s actual performance as president was quite different. In fact it had more in common with the record of President William McKinley, the Ohio Republican who defeated Bryan in 1896 and again in 1900 while defending the gold standard and representing the interests of business and industry.

    In fact, says Elving, “Trump in his first term pursued a relatively familiar list of Republican priorities,” with “his main legislative achievement” being “the passage of an enormous tax cut…that greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth.” For genuine journalists, for whom politicians’ actions are more significant than their words, that would be the most meaningful predictor of what Trump is likely to do going forward.

    But Trump’s second term, Elving suggests on the basis of nothing, could be quite different: “As Trump’s second term unfolds, the issues most likely to be vigorously pursued may be those where the interests of his populist base can be braided with those who sat in billionaire’s row on Inauguration Day.” Such as? “The renewal of the 2017 tax cuts is an area of commonality, as is the promise to shrink government.”

    So—a restoration of the same tax cuts that “greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth”? That how NPR thinks Trump in his second term “can serve what are plausibly called populist causes”?

    All hail the unmistakable symbiosis!


    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here. or via Bluesky: @kellymcb.bsky.social. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

    FEATURED IMAGE: NPR depiction of candidate Donald Trump as a tribune of the working class.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  •  

    Thomas Friedman

    Thomas Friedman has what Edward Said (Village Voice, 10/17/89) called “the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism.”

    It is not often that I check the New York Times Opinion page to see what the paper’s three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and mansion-dwelling foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman is up to. After all, I feel I’ve already exceeded my quota for masochism by wasting a full year of my life writing a book about the man, source of such ideas as that McDonald’s is the key to world peace, and that Iraqis needed to “Suck. On. This” as punishment for the 9/11 attacks—an event Friedman himself admitted Iraq had nothing to do with.

    Employed in various posts at the United States’ newspaper of record since 1981—including as bureau chief in both Beirut and Jerusalem—Friedman has just entered his 30th year as foreign affairs columnist. His imperial imperiousness and pompous dedication to Orientalism came under fire from the get-go from none other than Edward Said, who remarked in a 1989 Village Voice intervention (10/17/89), titled “The Orientalist Express”:

    It is not just the comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner…. It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility.

    Noting that Friedman had “internalized the norms, if not the powers, of the secretary of state not just of the United States, but of all humanity,” Said called our journalist out on his habit of offering “advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him.” Had everyone been paying attention, they would have learned Friedman’s “moronic and hopelessly false dictum”—Said’s words—according to which “the Arab political tradition has produced only two types: the merchant and the messiah.”

    Just for the hell of it, I checked up on Friedman on January 21, the day after Donald Trump’s reinauguration. Sure enough, there was his very first column of 2025, headlined: “President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” In other words, it was the latest version of how much better everyone could be doing if they paid attention to the self-appointed secretary of humanity.

    ‘Reborn as a strong region’

    NYT: President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare

    Friedman (New York Times, 1/21/25) counsels Trump: “The more credibly we threaten” Iran, the more likely you will get a Nobel Peace Prize.

    You couldn’t ask for a more Orientalist ambition than “remaking” the Middle East, and Friedman has various suggestions for Trump on that front. First, he instructs the president that “your interest is to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia into a US-led alliance with our other Arab partners”—which basically boils down to rewarding the party that has since October 2023 been conducting straight-up genocide in the Gaza Strip with a normalization of relations with Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia, whose bloodthirsty ruler Mohammed bin Salman has long occupied a special place in Friedman’s heart.

    Friedman continues with his roadmap:

    Gaza, like the West Bank under the Oslo agreement, should be divided into Areas A and B for a four-year transition period. Eighty percent would be Area A (under the international force/Palestinian control), and 20% (basically the perimeter) would remain under Israeli military control until Israel’s security is assured.

    Never mind how the old Oslo Accords panned out—the 1993 US-brokered agreement that was supposedly designed to pave the way for Israeli/Palestinian peace and Palestinian self-governance, i.e. a two-state solution. Friedman might do well to revisit his own assessment in 2000 that “the Israeli propaganda that the Palestinians mostly rule themselves in the West Bank is fatuous nonsense,” and that “Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land for more settlements is going on to this day—seven years into Oslo.”

    Friedman warns Trump that

    the Middle East is either going to be reborn as a strong region where normalized relations, trade and cooperation are defining objectives, or disintegrate into a few solid nation-states surrounded by vast zones of disorder, warlordism and terrorists who are chillingly expert at using drones.

    Lest anyone jump to the conclusion that Friedman has at last gotten something right, rest assured that the drone-happy terrorists to which he is referring are not in fact the Israelis—despite the Israeli military’s established chilling expertise in said field.

    ‘Birth pangs of a new Middle East’

    Jacobin: Tom Friedman as Midwife

    Friedman claimed that in Iraq, the US was “a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts” (Jacobin, 7/26/12).

    As for the alleged necessity that the Middle East “be reborn,” murderous obstetrics have long factored into the United States’ Orientalist approach to Arab and Muslim regions of the world; just recall then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s favorable assessment of Israel’s summer 2006 slaughter-fest in Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

    That particular assault, which killed approximately 1,200 people in 34 days, was subsequently invoked by Friedman in 2009 as a positive precedent when Israel was once again ravaging the Gaza Strip. Declaring that Israel’s decision in 2006 to “exact enough pain on the civilians” of Lebanon was “not pretty, but it was logical,” Friedman prescribed the same “logical” approach to Gaza—to hell with the pesky Geneva Conventions, as well as Friedman’s own ostensible opposition to, um, terrorism.

    Of a piece with the whole rebirth-by-mass-killing theme is the Orientalist exploitation of infantilizing terminology. And in that realm, too, Friedman has long excelled, including in his repeated references to Afghanistan—a nation decimated by the US with Friedman’s enthusiastic encouragement—as a “special needs baby.” Then there was the time he complained that the US was “babysitting a civil war” in Iraq—a baby-sitting job that, mind you, happened to have been unleashed by the very 2003 US invasion extensively cheer-led by Friedman, who in 2002 argued that such a war was the “most important task worth doing.”

    As I note in my book, Friedman’s reliance on childish condescension is

    merely one manifestation of a tradition of unabashed Orientalism that discredits Arabs and Muslims as agents capable of managing their own destinies and sets up a power scheme in which the United States and its military simultaneously occupy the positions of killer/torturer, liberator, educator and parent/babysitter.

    As is the case with the 2006 “birth pangs” and the current Middle East that Trump has now been tasked with rebirthing, the Arab/Muslim world is often portrayed as having not even yet made it into infant form, instead awaiting violent expulsion from the imperial womb—as in Friedman’s eloquently cogent 2012 proclamation that Syria was in need of a “well-armed external midwife.”

    ‘Animal Planet’

    FAIR: Friedman’s Vermin Analogies Echo Ugly Pro-Genocide Propaganda

    As FAIR (2/6/24) noted, “The comparison of official enemies to vermin is a hallmark of propaganda in defense of genocide.”

    Of course, Friedman’s Orientalist repertoire goes beyond infantilizing rhetoric and fetal fantasies. There was that time in 1988 that he decided that Palestinians could be collectively referred to as Ahmed—“I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands”—after which Noam Chomsky questioned whether journalists could also be promoted to chief diplomatic correspondent at the New York Times by suggesting that Hymie or Sambo be given a seat in the bus.

    And just last year in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Friedman undertook to outdo himself with a column headlined “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom,” which as I observed at the time would have already been sufficiently grotesquely bonkers had the Israeli military establishment not taken the liberty of classifying its Palestinian victims as “human animals.”

    The column hosted some nonsensical babble about parasitoid wasps and sifaka lemurs, along with the following information about our columnist’s investigative modus operandi: “Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet.”

    Anyway, Friedman is now clearly the best candidate to help Trump “Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” No matter that Friedman purports to be at odds with Trump’s nasty worldview; the two conveniently share a haughty and snotty antagonism vis-à-vis those “animal planet” parts of the world that need a “well-armed external midwife” as a mission civilisatrice.

    If only Friedman himself could be rebirthed into something more human.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  •  

    New York: Trump’s Blatantly Illegal Funding Freeze Causes Nationwide Chaos

    New York‘s headline (1/28/25) was accurate—but was it “riveting storytelling”?

    When President Donald Trump ordered an unprecedented freeze on all federal grants and loans, a few news outlets responded with at least some degree of appropriate alarm and scrutiny.

    “Trump’s Massive Power Grab,” read the headline for Politico‘s Playbook newsletter (1/28/25). “Trump’s Blatantly Illegal Funding Freeze Causes Nationwide Chaos,” announced the headline over a column by New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore (1/28/25).

    The order, both sweeping and confusingly worded, called for a halt to disbursement of federal funds that Congress has already authorized. The memo required all such funding to be reviewed to make sure it aligns with Trump’s “policies and requirements,” including his barrage of executive orders. (After a federal judge temporarily blocked the order, the White House rescinded it.)

    The memo specifically highlighted “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal.” But no funding was excluded from the freeze, aside from Social Security, Medicare and “assistance directly received by individuals.”

    As the New York Times (1/27/25) pointed out, this would appear to include “hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to state, local and tribal governments. Disaster relief aid. Education and transportation funding. Loans to small businesses.” Medicaid, which is distributed through the states, also seemed to be frozen.

    Politico described “the first big question” as being: “Is this legal?” The answer provided by most legal scholars appeared to be, “hell, no.”

    Unfortunately, that wasn’t the information offered by some in corporate media—with the multibillionaire-owned Washington Post among the worst offenders.

    ‘Democrats contend’

    NYT: White House Budget Office Orders Pause in All Federal Loans and Grants

    The New York Times (1/27/25) offered its readers agnosticism: “It is uncertain whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds allocated by Congress.

    As competent and useful reporting explained, Trump has long declared his interest in impoundment, or the executive’s ability to cancel funding that Congress has approved. It’s something presidents had done on occasion in the past, but Richard Nixon took it to an extreme, attempting to cancel billions in federal spending. Congress responded by passing the Impoundment Control Act in 1974, which requires congressional permission for presidents to impound funds (Forbes, 1/28/25).

    In other words, there’s been a clear law on the books for over 50 years that expressly prohibits what Trump was attempting here. It should have been an easy call for journalists, then, to answer Politico‘s basic and central question. Some failed this basic task.

    The New York Times report (1/27/25), while raising the question of the move’s legality in paragraph four, didn’t even attempt to answer it, only offering  a quote from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who argued, “Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law.“ The article gave readers no other information by which to judge “whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds allocated by Congress.”

    In its follow-up on the state-led lawsuit to challenge the funding freeze, the Times (1/28/25) briefly described the Impoundment Control Act, but then wrote that “Democrats contend” that Trump can’t unilaterally block funds that have already been approved, as if it were simply a partisan claim whether the law just described exists.

    At Axios, co-founder Mike Allen’s brief report (1/28/25) didn’t even address legality, taking the “Why it matters” of Trump’s memo to be that it

    will provide the administration with time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of funding for those programs consistent with the law and Trump’s priorities.

    ‘Generally allowed under the law’

    WaPo: White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion

    The Washington Post‘s first takeaway (1/28/25): “The feared disruption highlighted the extent of the new Trump administration’s determination to target long-standing functions of the federal government.”

    But the Washington Post took craven reporting to another level. In its report on the directive (1/28/25), by reporters Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage and Emily Davies, the Post‘s headline and lead focused on the “confusion” in Washington. After describing the order and what it appeared to target, the reporters’ first attempt to make meaning of the order came in the eighth paragraph: “The feared disruption highlighted the extent of the new Trump administration’s determination to target long-standing functions of the federal government.”

    The president tried to usurp Congress’s power of the purse by fiat, and the Beltway paper’s biggest takeaway was that it “highlights” the Trump administration’s “determination”—not to shred US democracy, but to “target long-standing functions of the federal government.”

    But it gets worse. It took another eight paragraphs (that’s the 16th paragraph, if you’re counting) to find the Post‘s first mention of Politico‘s No. 1 question—is this legal? That came in the same Schumer quote the Times used, about how these expenditures “are not optional; they are the law.”

    And the Post quickly cast doubt on that idea:

    The order’s legality may be contested, but the president is generally allowed under the law to defer spending for a period of time if certain conditions are met, according to budget experts.

    The article went on to note that the order “may not have given sufficient grounds under the law to pause the funding,” and that a “left-leaning” expert says that “pausing it over policy disagreements is not legal.” Meanwhile an expert from a “bipartisan” group was offered to argue that Trump “should be legally able to pause the money temporarily,” even if there might be some formal hoops to jump through to extend it.

    In other words, the Post‘s framing of the story gave the impression that the memo was “confusing,” but probably mostly legal.

    This comes shortly after the announcement of the Post‘s new mission statement, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America,” which owner Jeff Bezos hopes will expand the Post‘s conservative audience (FAIR.org, 1/22/25). As for holding the powerful to account? Well, you might want to look to a media outlet not owned by a toadying oligarch.


    ACTION: Please tell the Washington Post not to downplay illegal actions when they are committed by a president its owner is trying to curry favor with.

    CONTACT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Bluesky @washingtonpost.com

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.