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  • ‘The Most Vulnerable People Lose When the US Imposes Sanctions’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Khury Petersen-Smith about economic sanctions for the March 11, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220311PetersenSmith.mp3

     

    Atlantic: The Russian Elite Can’t Stand the Sanctions

    Atlantic (3/5/22)

    Janine Jackson: “The Russian Elite Can’t Stand the Sanctions,” crowed a recent piece in the Atlantic. The “whine and protest” from the country’s oligarchs meant that the US and European sanctions were “working as intended, to punish Russia’s elites for supporting President Vladimir Putin.” They “won’t starve,” the story elaborated, but they “will be unable to maintain their jetsetting luxury lifestyle.”

    Meanwhile, CNBC viewers were told, “The West is trying to destroy Russia’s economy. And analysts think it could succeed.” That piece cited the French finance minister’s statement that the aim of the latest round of sanctions was “to cause the collapse of the Russian economy.”

    So which is it? Inconvenience a few Richie Riches, or bring a country of 145 million people to its knees? Or is there a secret way to immiserate a country without incurring grievous human harm?

    The current moment provides another chance to examine the role of economic sanctions in conflict. And here to help us think about that is Khury Petersen-Smith. He’s the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us now by phone from Boston. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Khury Petersen-Smith.

    Khury Petersen-Smith: I’m so grateful to be here, Janine.

    JJ: Well, thank you.

    Truthout (Sanctions May Sound “Nonviolent,” But They Quietly Hurt the Most Vulnerable

    Truthout (3/6/22)

    Just like we are told by politicians and by media that weapons like bombs and drones are surgical, and that they’re targeted, we’re also told that sanctions are carefully aimed to hurt only the powerful, in order to influence them. Your recent writing engages that storyline, because it just doesn’t play out that way, does it?

    KP: It doesn’t. And I think that, particularly with sanctions, they’re not designed to play out that way. You know, when the Biden administration first was talking about doing sanctions on Russia, they simultaneously talked about targeting Putin and a few oligarchs, and they would use phrases like, to use their language, “crippling sanctions.” And, as you said, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that this is targeted and specific, and also talk about attacking the entire Russian economy, which the kind of sanctions that they have pursued intend to take out an economy. When you cut the Russian economy out of the international banking system, for example, that’s not just going to affect the billionaires, that’s going to affect the whole population. And as we’ve seen, the ruble has been crashing. So that does affect the population. So this is the design. It’s how sanctions are intended.

    JJ: And that’s the heart of your piece, is the fact that sanctions are framed for the public, the people who are going to be asked to support a particular invasion or a particular policy—sanctions are framed as an alternative to war. And I hear you saying, that’s not just imprecise, that’s a wrong way to think about it.

    Khury Petersen-Smith

    Khury Petersen-Smith: “The first thing is that sanctions, their impact is devastating in ways that are at least similar and often worse than armed combat.”

    KP: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. The first thing is that sanctions, their impact is devastating in ways that are at least similar and often worse than armed combat. We think about the sanctions that the US imposed on Iraq in the 1990s. When we think about the decades long US embargo on Cuba, these have had drastic impacts on the populations. When we think about the way that the Iranian population has been impacted right now, and has been for years.

    The other thing, though, is that often and actually, in the three cases I just named—Iran, Iraq and Cuba—the US government deploying sanctions is not posing them as an alternative to military action. It actually combines them with military action. So we know that the US embargoing Cuba has coincided with various attempts to overthrow the Cuban government since the Cuban Revolution. The sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s were bookended by US invasions, in 1991 and 2003. And then with Iran, the sanctions that have been imposed for several years, coincide with all kinds of military pressure as well.

    And Trump was maybe the most honest about this. Folks will remember his “maximum pressure” regime, which was a combination of intense sanctions and parking aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, threatening airstrikes and so on. So the actual practice is to really combine sanctions and combat or armed force. They’re really just tools in the same toolbox.

    JJ: When folks are transparent about it, they will say that sanctions are aimed at regime change. And what I often talk about is, accepting the US legitimacy in changing the leadership of other countries is the price of admission to serious people conversation about geopolitics and news media. You don’t have to concede the right of global powers like the US to force regime change. But even beyond the illegitimacy of that goal, sanctions don’t appear to work toward that end.

    KP: Right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. The first thing, what you said is so important, because it’s a pretty incredible thing that policymakers, US officials and journalists in mainstream media talk openly and casually about how the intended impact of sanctions is to immiserate a country’s population such that they overthrow the government in a way that is favorable to the United States. And if that isn’t shocking, then I ask people to consider what it would be like, or how the US government would react, if that kind of conversation was happening casually in Moscow, or in other countries that the US deems as enemies. It’s really incredible that US officials demonize Putin for being undemocratic, which certainly, he is undemocratic.

    JJ: Absolutely.

    KP: But to support overthrowing the government, and not just support it rhetorically, but pursue a policy whose thinly veiled objective is that—it’s a profoundly anti-democratic act.

    But, as you say, as wrong as the intention is, it’s also been ineffective. I mean, the US has had sanctions on Cuba for how many decades? And that government remains in power.

    If anything, sanctions tend to strengthen the government that the US is targeting. When the US imposed sanctions on Iraq, for example, again, with the hope that that would lead to a coup within Iraq against Saddam Hussein’s regime, because of the way that the Iraqi economy was devastated, and the resulting limited access to things like food and medicine, it made Iraqis more dependent on the Iraqi government, actually, and so it strengthened that government, for what it’s worth. So the US has no right, anyway, to meddle in the affairs of another country’s society, to target not only the country’s population, but the most vulnerable people in the population, who are always the people who lose when the US imposes sanctions. But also, for what it’s worth, it’s an ineffective approach.

    Twitter: Russia Sanctions Must Hit Elites Around Putin the Hardest

    Detroit Free Press (2/28/22—subscription required)

    JJ: US media translate it into what they imagine as “news you can use” for their US audience. I saw an op-ed in the Detroit News by a former diplomat that said that the West needed to pull together to “change Putin’s path.” And that

    that unity may well depend on the willingness of citizens of the West to suffer some economic costs of the broad economic sanctions. If inflation or gas prices go up and your 401(k) goes down as a result, give some thought to what democracy is worth to you.

    There’s a lot going on there, obviously.

    KP: There is.

    JJ: I mean, that could take us all day. But let me just say, all right, let’s think about what democracy means to us. And also international solidarity and human rights and justice and sustainability and peace. Let’s think about those things. What could we be thinking about as other ways forward, in what is admittedly a frightening time?

    KP: Right. Well, the way you’re putting things in an international context, I think that’s extremely important, because while US officials and US media cast countries that they deem as enemies as so foreign that you couldn’t possibly relate to them, that there’s something about Russia, or something about Iran, or something about China, there’s something about the kind of internal nature of those societies. When we talk about Iran, it’s these Islamophobic tropes, or something about “those people,” that democracy is a problem. And the only solution is for democracy to be imposed by the United States and the West.

    And let’s remind ourselves that among the many things happening in this country, we had an armed attack on the Capitol last year, led by an outgoing president who refused to accept the election results. We have an open campaign by the Republican Party to pass laws to restrict democracy, democratic rights at the state level, targeting the people who are always targeted: Black people, other people of color, immigrants and so on.

    And so there are plenty of problems in terms of democratic rights here. And the notion that there’s something exceptional about Russia that requires the US to step in and do something, whereas this is a bastion of democracy, is false. Instead, I think that we the people, the ordinary people of this place and of the world, need to ask, what are we all doing within and across borders to make a more democratic world?

    I have to say, I’m quite inspired by the people in Russia dissenting against this war in their thousands in cities across the country. They are pointing the way in terms of democracy, not only in Russia, but actually they’re pointing the way for all of us. So what are we doing to build popular democracy, in other words?

    And the challenge of having more democratic societies is not a Russian challenge. It’s not an Iranian challenge or a Chinese challenge. It’s also a US challenge, and it’s a challenge that we are facing all across the world. I think that it means a very different orientation that we have to have.

    JJ: All right then, we’ll end there for now. We’ve been speaking with Khury Petersen-Smith. He’s the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. And his article, “Sanctions May Sound ‘Nonviolent,’ but They Quietly Hurt the Most Vulnerable,” can be found at Truthout.org. Khury Petersen-Smith, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    KP: Thank you. It’s an honor.

     

    The post ‘The Most Vulnerable People Lose When the US Imposes Sanctions’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • What Polls About a Ukraine ‘No-Fly Zone’ Really Tell Us

     

    Reuters: Americans broadly support Ukraine no-fly zone, Russia oil ban -poll

    Reuters (3/4/22): “It was not clear if respondents who supported a no-fly zone were fully aware of the risk of conflict.”

    Last week, Reuters/Ipsos (3/4/22) reported on a poll that found

    some 74% of Americans―including solid majorities of Republicans and Democrats―said the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine.

    This was a surprising result, because there was strong bipartisan opposition in Congress to such an action. Typically, public opinion―especially on foreign policy―tends to reflect the prevailing political consensus.

    That poll announcement was followed this week from a report from YouGov (3/9/22) about three polls it had recently conducted―two for the Economist (2/6/22–3/1/22 and 3/5–8/22), and one for US News (3/7–9/22). The earliest poll found 45% of Americans saying it was a “good idea” for the US to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, with 20% saying it was a “bad idea.” The second poll showed a smaller margin of support, 40% to 30%.

    In its third poll for US News, YouGov ran a split-sample experiment, with half the sample asking respondents if they would “support or oppose the US enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine,” and the other half asking the same question with the additional comment: “which would mean the US military would shoot down Russian military planes flying over Ukraine.” The purpose was to determine if an explanation of what a no-fly zone means would affect support.

    Both questions elicited plurality support for the no-fly zone―42% to 28% when no explanation was provided, 42% to 33% when an explanation was provided. The explanation seemed to have little effect.

    But when YouGov rephrased the no-fly question in terms of the action required, it got a markedly different response. The second Economist poll asked, “Should the US military shoot down Russian military planes flying over Ukraine?” A 46% plurality said no—16 percentage points more than said a no-fly zone was a bad idea.

    And as the report indicated, large segments of the respondents gave self-contradictory answers:

    Nearly three in 10 of those who say that enforcing a no-fly zone is a good idea also say that they oppose the US shooting down Russian military planes flying over Ukraine; 13% of those who call enforcing a no-fly zone a bad idea support the US shooting down Russian planes.

    Making sense of polls

    The Reuters poll can be dismissed as a representation of actual public opinion. Typically, Reuters/Ipsos does not measure, or ignores, “don’t know” or “unsure” responses. As I noted in a previous post (FAIR.org, 2/11/22), using that “forced-choice” format creates the illusion of public opinion, but does not give a plausible picture of reality.

    The YouGov polls, by contrast, all included measures of “no opinion.” The poll for US News also included a measure of intensity, which provides even more insight into what the public is thinking.

    US News/YouGov Poll on US Enforcing a ‘No-Fly Zone’ in Ukraine
    No Explanation % “No-Fly” Explained %
    Strongly support 22 18
    Somewhat support 20 24
    Not sure 30 25
    Somewhat oppose 13 15
    Strongly oppose 15 18

     

    Typically, news media combine the “strong” and “somewhat” categories when reporting the results—as I did above (42% to 28% in the first group; 42% to 33% in the second group). But that format suggests a more solidly opinionated public than is warranted.

    Note the highlighted numbers. For both groups, only just over a third of respondents felt “strongly” about their views (37% strongly support or oppose in the first group; 36% in the second group). The rest are either “unsure” or hold views that are loosely held (“somewhat” support or oppose).

    The weakly held or “top of mind” views explain how many people can provide self-contradictory responses. They simply haven’t given the issue much thought. New questions elicit new opinions, some of which contradict previous responses.

    Those weakly held views also explain why “public opinion” can seem to fluctuate so greatly, as new information comes to light.

    The key conclusion here is that most Americans have not firmly decided about the merits of a US-enforced no-fly zone. That conclusion no doubt holds true for most, if not all, of the other policy proposals included in the poll.

     

    The post What Polls About a Ukraine ‘No-Fly Zone’ Really Tell Us appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘These Attacks Are on Children and Their Families’

     

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed TLDEF’s Andy Marra about trans youth rights for the March 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220304Marra.mp3

     

    Spectrum 1: Trans advocates warn of SB8's impact on the LGBTQ+ population

    Spectrum News 1 (11/12/21)

    Janine Jackson: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion calling gender-affirming care for trans young people “child abuse.” The state’s governor, Greg Abbott, doubled down, directing the Texas Department of Family and Planning Services to investigate parents who support their trans children in accessing care as child abusers. Abbott also suggested that teachers, doctors, nurses—anyone, really—could face criminal penalties if they don’t report parents and providers who support trans kids.

    It’s frustrating to read media accounts that say “LGBTQ advocates” disagreed with or were concerned about this event, because, actually, pretty much every relevant medical and legal authority weighed in immediately to say not only do those statements not reflect the legal understanding of child abuse, but they fly in the face of the fact that support for gender-affirming medical procedures comes from, for instance, the American Medical Association, which states that not only is gender-affirming care appropriate, but that the absence of it leads to poor mental health outcomes.

    In the same week, Joe Biden told trans youth, “I will always have your back” in the State of the Union address. So here to help us contextualize this past week in trans news is Andy Marra, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Andy Marra.

    Andy Marra: Thank you for having me, Janine.

    JJ: Let’s start with Texas. It seems important to say that laws don’t have to change for people’s lives to change, for people to be harmed. What do you think, maybe what you’re hearing from folks in Texas, but what are your concerns about the effect of the statements on people, whether or not they changed the law?

    AM: Well, the first thing that needs to be made clear, nothing said by Governor Abbott, or the attorney general in Texas, has any legal basis whatsoever.

    JJ: Right.

    AM: There hasn’t been a court in Texas, or a court anywhere in the country, that has found gender-affirming care to be considered “child abuse.” It’s just pure politics. And in light of the fact that Texas just concluded a primary, it seems pretty obvious that Governor Abbott was more than likely drumming up support amongst his base, at the expense of transgender young children in our country and the parents who love them dearly.

    JJ: I think for a lot of people, it’s like a joke, that you would say that parents who support their child are abusers. And parents who abandon or deny or punish them? Well, they’re the healthy ones. But “this is so obviously absurd and hateful that surely nothing will come of it”—that’s not really proven such a successful approach.

    Trevor Project report statistics

    Trevor Project (7/20)

    AM: Well, it’s not legally binding, what Abbott and Paxton have both declared, but it is having a profound impact on our young people and their families. People in Texas, as a result of hearing the remarks and the actions taken, they might be afraid to bring their trans children to a doctor now, which is in no one’s best interest. Medically necessary care should be accessible, and should be determined by the patient and the healthcare provider. And, unfortunately, the governor and the attorney general are sending the completely opposite message.

    Let’s talk about the actual effects that this political rhetoric is having on our young people. The Trevor Project, a partner of TLDEF, conducted a report, and they found 86% of LGBTQ young people in this country have said that recent politics has negatively impacted their well-being.

    JJ: There’s like 195 state bills proposed in 2022 alone, and it’s just March. So we’re wrong to say “this is ridiculous.” We do have to engage at every level to push back against these bills, even if they’re just at a low level, even if they’re just maybe not going to bubble up to become actual law, they still are having an effect.

    AM: You make a great point about the volume of anti-trans bills that are cropping up in state legislatures across the country. 2021 was no exception. There was a similar number of anti-trans bills introduced in state legislatures, including in the state of Texas. And it’s not a mistake, it is not a coincidence. What is happening is the result of a highly coordinated effort by a number of opponents who would seek to harm our young people in this country.

    Organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation, Concerned Women for America, these organizations have consistently attacked LGBTQ progress in this country. And their latest and greatest strawperson happens to be young people. It’s not only, in fact, despicable, it’s quite frankly putting some of our most vulnerable people in this country at risk. We are putting trans young people in actual risk for their safety and for their well-being. And for parents, there is an incredible amount of fear and confusion about how they can best support their children during these times.

    So I just want to underscore, this is not a mistake, this is not a coincidence. This is a highly coordinated effort in an attempt to derail progress in this country. And sadly, for me, from a very infuriating position, the next generation is being attacked. And it’s downright despicable.

    JJ: Are there any particular things that you would like news media to do more of, or maybe less of, in terms of their reporting on trans issues and these predations on trans people’s human rights?

    Andy Marra

    Andy Marra: “When we talk about gender-affirming care, it’s not an ambiguous, abstract concept. It is medically necessary, life-saving care.”

    AM: First things first, we need to remember that these attacks are on children and their families. This isn’t a trans rights issue. This is an infringement on the rights of families.

    And we also need to remember that when we talk about gender-affirming care, it’s not an ambiguous, abstract concept. It is medically necessary, life-saving care that is backed up by every major medical association in this country.

    We know that when trans people of all ages have access to gender-affirming care, it enables trans people to thrive. It improves their health and well being. And I would encourage news outlets across the country to pay attention, and to look for stories that explore more deeply the positive and lasting impacts of healthcare.

    Politicians should not have the final say when it comes to who should receive medical care. That is completely up to a doctor. And for media outlets, as well as those of us who consume news, we have to remain skeptical of the political theater and the distraction from politicians like Governor Abbott and the attorney general in Texas.

    JJ: I hear that, and I also hear how crucial intersectionality is, and how often that is missing from reporting, which tends to isolate issues and harms. You can be trans on Monday, but if you’re also Black, well, we’re going to do that story on Thursday, right? If you have a disability, well that’s Sunday. And I really appreciated Gabriel Arkles, senior counsel at TLDEF, who was reminding folks that things like organizations being allowed to use religious exemptions to deny services to LGBTQ people, that that’s especially bad and differently bad for poor people and working-class people, because they’re more likely to rely on services that wealthier people can avoid.

    And he also noted that, if we’re talking about child removal—actually, genuinely taking kids out of families—well, that’s a much more real threat for some families than for others. And so I know you know that you can’t isolate issues, and if we’re talking about responses, we have to talk about intersecting those responses. And this is as true for trans youth as it is for many other folks.

    AM: Absolutely. And on the matter of religious exemptions, look, in this country, we not only have civil rights protection, we also have religious exemptions as well. And both of those things have existed in this country for decades. And, look, TLDEF is a proponent and supporter of the Equality Act, which is a piece of federal legislation that would explicitly codify gender identity and sexual orientation as protected classes.

    JJ: And Biden mentioned it, called it out last night.

    AM: Absolutely. And we know that with this bill, and also the reality of the Senate’s composition, this is an issue that is going to require bipartisan support. And, sadly, our opponents, who do not want to see this crucial piece of legislation passed, have twisted very long standing and common sense principles, like religious exemptions, and distorted them to derail progress, more specifically to derail the passage of this bill.

    So I would encourage listeners, and particularly media outlets, to delve even deeper on that particular subject, because, look, our opponents are fighting tooth and nail to ensure that either progress is completely derailed, or to slow it down to the fullest extent possible. And, quite frankly, the trans community, but more broadly the LGBTQ+ community, communities of color, communities of faith, would all benefit from this piece of legislation.

    Truthout: Supreme Court Backs Catholic Foster Care Agency in LGBTQ Discrimination Case

    Truthout (6/17/21)

    JJ: Let me just ask you, finally: One of the things I liked about another piece I read from Gabriel Arkles was the reminder that courts, not even the Supreme Court, don’t have the final say on an issue. The people do. And I think you’ve just touched on it, but if you could just say, where would you like to see people using their voice? It’s easy to get discouraged when we see things like Governor Abbott and those statements, and it’s easy to get confused about what actual impact that can have, and then, even if it’s not law, it still has an impact. What would you have listeners do to make their voices heard on this set of issues?

    AM: I have received numerous emails and phone calls over the past several days related to developments in Texas, and I have been on the phone for many hours with our colleagues on the ground. And a lot of folks are asking: “What can I do in this moment? How can I be of help when it feels like there is nothing that can be done?” And I would say, pick up your phone, or go on your computer, and call or contact your US senator and call on them to pass the Equality Act.

    There’s a crucial need for federal protections in this country that would not only strengthen existing civil rights laws in the United States, but would also expand them to include deeply marginalized community members. And for TLDEF, and for me as a trans woman, as a trans woman of color, it matters when the president gets up in front of the world and delivers the State of the Union that calls on his colleagues in Congress to pass the Equality Act. That matters. And for listeners that are looking for one thing to do in support of trans equality, I would encourage you all to contact your US senator right now and call on them to pass the Equality Act.

    JJ: Thank you. We’ve been speaking with Andy Marra, Executive Director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund. You can find and follow their work online at Transgenderlegal.org. Thank you so much, Andy Marra, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    AM: Thank you for having me.

     

    The post ‘These Attacks Are on Children and Their Families’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Khury Petersen-Smith on Economic Sanctions, Greg LeRoy on Amazon Subsidies

     

    IPS: Sanctions May Sound “Nonviolent,” But They Quietly Hurt the Most Vulnerable

    Institute for Policy Studies (3/6/22)

    This week on CounterSpin: Russia’s horrendous invasion of Ukraine is providing yet another reminder that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that’s trampled. We see that not just in the front-page casualties; teenage soldiers dying fighting; civilian men, women and children killed by dropping bombs—but also in the measures we are told are meant to avert those harms: economic sanctions. Khury Petersen-Smith is Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us to talk about the problem with seeing sanctions as an alternative to war.

          CounterSpin220311PetersenSmith.mp3

     

    Depiction of Amazon subsidies

    Good Jobs First (3/1/22)

    Also on the show: In March 2012, Amazon opened an office dedicated to ferreting out tax breaks and subsidies. In other words, the megacorporation making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit puts in time finding ways to avoid supporting the communities it operates in—and to push local governments to divest money from education, housing and healthcare—to give to a company that doesn’t need it. This March, the group Good Jobs First marked that anniversary with a call to #EndAmazonSubsidies. We talk with the group’s executive director, Greg LeRoy.

          CounterSpin220311LeRoy.mp3

     

    The post Khury Petersen-Smith on Economic Sanctions, Greg LeRoy on Amazon Subsidies appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Saudi PR Pays Off at the Atlantic

     

    Atlantic: Absolute Power

    “The crown prince still wants to convince the world that he is saving his country,” wrote the Atlantic‘s Graeme Wood (3/3/22), “which is why he met twice in recent months with me and the editor in chief of this magazine.”

    A glowing profile of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Atlantic (3/3/22), promoting him as a reformer in the notoriously repressive kingdom, has raised questions about the magazine’s ethical integrity.

    Technically the second in command after the 86-year-old king, bin Salman is widely recognized as the country’s most powerful figure. When a Saudi hit squad lured Washington Post columnist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi to the country’s consulate in Istanbul to kill and dismember him (New York Times, 11/12/18), signs pointed to the murder being committed with the prince’s approval. Khashoggi was a vocal critic of the regime—specifically undermining the prince’s image as a modernizer, saying that he has “no interest in political reform”  (NPR, 10/16/18)—and recordings of the grisly crime indicated the prince’s involvement (New York Times, 11/12/18).

    A US intelligence report said that “bin Salman approved the operation to capture or kill the Saudi journalist” (CNN, 2/26/21). Committee to Protect Journalists senior Middle East and North Africa researcher Justin Shilad (2/26/21) said that the US and its allies should “sanction the crown prince” and his inner circle “to show the world that there are tangible consequences for assassinating journalists, no matter who you are.” No sanctions ever came.

    ‘Charming, warm, informal’

    The murder, and the lack of accountability, have shocked press advocates. So imagine the horror journalists have had in response to a profile of bin Salman, written by Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood, that makes a mockery of the entire matter. It quotes the prince saying that if he wanted to assassinate people, “Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list.” Claiming to understand journalists’ anger at the murder, he insisted he was hurt by the affair as well: “We also have feelings here, pain here.”

    WaPo: The Atlantic’s elevation of MBS is an insult to journalism

    Karen Attiah (Washington Post, 3/6/22): “Washington media has a long history of cooking up overbaked puff pieces on murderous autocrats—especially when those autocrats are key US allies.”

    Karen Attiah at the Washington Post (3/6/22) noted the article’s “intellectual gymnastics” when Wood wrote that in his three years of visiting the kingdom, he’s been “trying to understand if the crown prince is a killer, a reformer, or both—and if both, whether he can be one without the other”: “Both,” he suggests, might be a balanced case of breaking some eggs to make an omelet. Most offensively, for Attiah, the piece went to great lengths to make the royal ruler relatable to the common American, pointing out that he eats breakfast with his kids. “The piece reinforces a superficial view of power,” Attiah wrote, “and treats the Saudi people as an afterthought.”

    In Attiah’s view, bin Salman was allowed to “denigrate Jamal” when he asserted, “I never read a Khashoggi article in my life.” The idea that he had not kept tabs on such an influential critic—someone who served as editor of Al Watan, one of the country’s leading dailies, and was “fired from his role at the newspaper, not once but twice, both times for upsetting the regime and causing controversy” (Al Jazeera, 10/16/18)—would be laughable if the situation weren’t so tragic.

    Yet this all worked on the Atlantic. The piece, written by Wood based on two meetings he and editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg had with bin Salman,  called him “charming, warm, informal and intelligent.” Saudi’s abysmal human rights record on things like torture and lack of free speech were mentioned only briefly, and gestures like women being allowed to sit with men in restaurants were painted as genuine and progressive reforms.

    Saudi Arabia scores a 7 out of 100 on the political rights and civil liberties index of Freedom House, a conservative democracy watchdog funded by the US government. It is ranked 170 on Reporters Without Borders’ list of 180 countries in terms of press freedom. “Virtually all known Saudi Arabian human rights defenders inside the country were detained or imprisoned at the end of the year,” Amnesty International noted in its most recent report on the country.

    Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the war in Yemen—which has directly and indirectly killed a quarter of a million people according to one United Nations estimate (UN News, 12/1/20), including 85,000 child deaths due to starvation (AP, 11/21/18)—is mentioned twice. First, the Atlantic reported that the White House has called for “accountability” for the “humanitarian disaster in Yemen, due to war between Saudi Arabia and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.” But later it said that bin Salman “is correct when he suggests that the Biden administration’s posture toward him” on Yemen and other human rights issues “is basically recriminatory,” noting that the US should say the Saudi leader will be “rewarded for his good behavior” and that “no persuasion will be possible at all without acknowledging that the game of thrones has concluded and he has won.”

    From interview to PR

    Atlantic: 'Saudi women attend a live music performance in Riyadh in January.'

    Photo by Lynsey Addario of Arabian women attending a concert (Atlantic, 3/3/22).

    Interviews with repressive leaders are fair game in journalism, but when they cross over into outright publicity it tends to be an embarrassment. For example, Vogue has been so ashamed of its positive cover story (3/11)  on the wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that it has gone to great lengths to scrub it from history (Washington Post, 4/25/12). But the Atlantic invested heavily in this piece; it’s not a fluke that got past the editors. The reporting involved several trips to Saudi Arabia by Wood, accompanied by Goldberg, the magazine’s editor—an unusual move, but one that showed that this story was of paramount importance. Images were supplied by the celebrated war photographer Lynsey Addario.

    It’s hard to envision a similar treatment of someplace like, say, China. Imagine a top writer, photographer and the magazine’s editor making multiple trips to Beijing, conducting friendly interviews with President Xi Jinping that scarcely mention human rights concerns or the lack of a free press, dismissing concerns about political freedom with allusions to how many Western celebrities come to visit, all with photos that make the place look hip.

    By contrast, late last year, the Atlantic (11/15/21) ran a lengthy piece about the rise of autocracy around the world, with a heavy emphasis on China and Venezuela. Saudi Arabia appears three times: first as a potential financier of pariah states, then for its complicity with China in targeting Uyghurs, and finally highlighting the Saudi royal family when it said that former President Donald Trump “cozied up to autocrats.” But the rest of the article focused its details on regimes less friendly with the United States.

    Inside vs. outside game

    PRWeek: Saudi Arabia Turns to Influencers to Give Nation's Image a Makeover

    PRWeek (10/15/19): “Saudi Arabia is turning to influencers to shed a positive light on the kingdom.”

    Saudi Arabia’s closeness to the United States—as a sort of counter-balance of power in the Middle East to Iran—is often a point of confusion. How could an Islamic theocracy substantially linked to the 9/11 attacks (NBC, 9/12/21) also be a major recipient of US military weaponry (Reuters, 11/4/21)? Part of it is petropolitics. Part of it is realpolitik. And part of it is Saudi Arabia’s intense public relations strategy.

    PRWeek (10/15/19) reported on the regime’s public relations blitz to push both the country’s modernization and tourist offerings: “Several PR firms are leading these efforts, including Influencer…and Consulum.” The trade outlet added that “influencers are being taken on all-expenses-paid trips to explore Saudi Arabia’s tourism hot spots,” including “the Red Sea—a famous diving spot—and the Al Ula desert.”

    The country has paid millions of dollars for good publicity in Britain (Guardian, 10/19/18). CNBC (1/7/22) reported that it hired Nicolla Hewitt, “who was once a producer for news anchor Katie Couric,” as a consultant, “joining the ranks of American influencers who work for the kingdom.” In 2018, CNBC (10/12/18) said that “records show the country has spent more than $23 million on its DC lobbying efforts since last year”; it paid “$100 million to consultants and public relations firms in the decade after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in order to bolster its public reputation.”

    Josh Stewart of the Sunlight Foundation told the Washington Post (4/20/16):

    Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington…. That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying.

    Willful participant

    JTA: Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg stirs storm after tweeting he might stop reading Haaretz

    Jeffrey Goldberg, quoted by JTA (8/2/16): “I like a lot of the people at Haaretz, and many of its positions, but the cartoonish anti-Israelism and antisemitism can be grating.”

    But good PR can only go so far. There needs to be a willful participant in the journalistic class to receive the PR and run with it.

    Goldberg’s investment in the piece is telling. Goldberg, who once served as an Israeli prison guard, is fiercely pro-Israel (Jewish Currents, 8/2/18). He even attacked the Israeli newspaper Haaretz for apparent disloyalty to Zionism (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 8/2/16).  Not only is Saudi Arabia part of the US realm in the Middle East, bin Salman has said that there is a potential for an alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel (Jerusalem Post, 3/3/22), continuing the latter country’s success in forging ties to Western-friendly Arab countries like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (BBC, 9/15/20). Goldberg (Atlantic, 9/16/20) praised these deals not only as a progress for Israel, but as a growing bulwark against the Palestinians and Iranian power .

    The crown prince has been buttering up Goldberg with Israel-friendly talk for a while. After meeting with the crown prince in 2018, Goldberg told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt (4/3/18) that the relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia was “evolving” because they “have a common enemy—Iran,” adding that “Saudi Arabia understands that Israel does not want to harm Saudi Arabia.” The prince told Goldberg that Israel had a “right” to a homeland (Middle East Eye, 4/5/18).

    At present, reports swirl (Middle East Monitor, 3/8/22) that Saudi Arabia has a chance to strengthen its link to the US, as the Biden administration has reportedly looked to the nation as an oil supplier in order to isolate Russia. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D.-Minn.) said in response that any attempt to “strengthen our relationship with the Saudis” would be a “wildly immoral act.”

    Saudi Arabia couldn’t have asked for a better advertisement at a better time. That such a thing would appear in a storied and established magazine like the Atlantic is an insult to its readership.

    You can send messages to the Atlantic here (or via Twitter: @TheAtlantic). 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.

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  • ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Debt Collective’s Braxton Brewington about student loan debt cancellation for the March 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220304Brewington.mp3

     

    NBC: White House confronts political pressure to extend pause in student loan payments ahead of midterms

    NBC News (2/21/22)

    Janine Jackson: An NBC News story headlined “White House Confronts Political Pressure to Extend Pause in Student Loan Payments Ahead of Midterms” represented much media focus on student loan debt: treating the fact that 45 million Americans owe some $1.7 trillion as an “issue,” an object of debate, a potential election factor.

    And that’s all true. Student loan forgiveness was one of Biden’s campaign promises. The federal pause on repayments is set to expire on May 1, and what happens with it will have an effect on the president and the party. But, of course, there’s also a much broader and deeper conversation to be had about student loans, and about debt, that hopefully will carry us beyond any particular election cycle.

    For an update on the current situation and our understanding of what’s at stake, we’re joined now by Braxton Brewington, press secretary and organizer at the group Debt Collective, a membership-based union for debtors and allies. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Braxton Brewington.

    Braxton Brewington: Thanks so much for having me.

    JJ: Debt Collective is not just about student debt, but are there reasons for canceling student debt, in particular, among the constellation of debt that your work addresses? And/or is this just a moment where there’s energy behind student debt and its impact?

    BB: Well, there’s a ton of energy behind student loan debt, which is now getting close to $2 trillion, the second-highest household debt type, behind mortgages—surpassing credit card and medical debt combined. And it doubled in just the past decade, as the cost of college has risen actually eight times faster than wages.

    So everyone from young people to even older borrowers are suffering grave consequences of crushing student loan debt. We’re not able to purchase a home, we’re having trouble starting a family or having kids, getting married. There’s difficulty in just living a dignified life. It’s crushing, and it’s dragging down our economy.

    And in this current moment, we now know that the president has actually the authority to broadly cancel federal student debt with an executive order. And so I think that knowledge is aiding in the call for Biden to solve this crisis with just the flick of a pen. And also because, like you said, he ran on fulfilling this promise, there’s reason to suspect that Biden would take on student debt cancellation as a major issue, because this is something that helped get him into office.

    BET: NAACP President Derrick Johnson And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Call For Biden To Finally Put An End To Student Loan Debt

    BET (2/28/22)

    JJ: There’s a reason that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer co wrote an op-ed with Derrick Johnson, who’s head of the NAACP, about this, because student debt plays a particular role in the lives—and, as you’re saying, not just the education, but the lives—of Black people, right?

    BB: Absolutely. Black Americans in particular, Black women in particular, are really bearing the brunt of this student debt crisis. Twenty years after college, the average white borrower has paid off about 95% of their student loan, while the average Black borrower actually still owes about 95% of that student loan.

    So 90% of Black students are forced to borrow federal dollars to even attend college. We’ve actually largely closed this gap between Black and white students as to who attends college, but on the back end, Black Americans are having a much more difficult time being able to pay off that loan. They’re having to take out more, because we’ve been stripped of generational wealth, and are more likely to go into default, and face other types of life barriers and consequences that make it difficult to pay off that student debt. Black Americans are particularly bearing the brunt of this crisis. And so that’s why this is exactly a matter of racial justice.

    JJ: And you’re getting at what I think is so huge about this moment, the very idea that we’re seriously considering canceling debt, in the face of what you might call folk economics—“you borrowed it, you owe it ”—that we’re able to shift the frame of this conversation I think is very meaningful. Debt Collective talks about radical imagination. We have a society that orchestrates these situations in which, to get a degree, you’re told you have to incur a debt that then is going to maybe yoke you for the rest of your life. It’s making it a societal issue, rather than an individual issue. And that just seems major to me.

    Braxton Brewington

    Braxton Brewington: “We like to say that we are demanding abolition or cancellation, not forgiveness, because we have nothing to be sorry for.”

    BB: Yeah, there is this belief that student debtors, and debtors in the 99% in particular, have signed this—it goes beyond the piece of paper, we signed a moral contract, right, that we have to, we are required morally, to pay back this debt. But what we know is that sort of belief and ideology is not held for the 1%, who walk away from their debts all the time. That ideology is not set for major corporations, who have been bailed out in recent decades time and time again.

    And so what starts to become controversial is when the 99%, when working class Americans, start to demand the same. And that is the ideology that we’re up against. So many individuals believe that you took out this loan, and this is something that you were supposed to pay back. The truth is, so many people have actually paid it back, and two times over. But because of skyrocketing interest, and interest capitalization, and all of the other evil mechanisms of finance capitalism, it’s literally impossible to pay back.

    And so we’re acting and demanding cancellation. And we like to say that we are demanding abolition or cancellation, not forgiveness, because we have nothing to be sorry for. Because we have the audacity to go to college, for folks to try to better themselves, or to simply learn something that they’re interested in, that is not justification for a lifetime of debt.

    JJ: I love that language, specificity. “Forgiveness” is something that someone more powerful is generously offering you, and that’s not the frame that we’re looking at.

    BB: Right.

    JJ: I wonder, though, how do you respond to the concern that cancellation without systemic reform is going to be insufficient? Or is it just like it’s a piece of bigger things you want to happen?

    BB: Yes, well, that’s why we’re calling for full student debt cancellation and free college. But the thing that makes it tough is, for us to have free college, that’s going to require legislation. And, unfortunately, this Congress is having a tough time getting anything done today. So until we can get to that point, whenever that is—hopefully it’s as soon as possible—what President Biden should do is cancel all student debt on his own.

    So this is not going to be the catch-all solution for higher education, but it’s something he can do in the now. And what Biden could do was commit to saying, “I’m going to cancel student debt at the end of every semester as long as I’m the president of the United States, until Congress can get their act together and pass free college.”

    So, absolutely, canceling student debt is going to right the wrong of this nearly $2 trillion crisis, but it’s not the long-term solution. The long-term solution is college for all, and that’s what we’re fighting for as well.

    JJ: Finally, I have been a little bit surprised at the respect that corporate news media have given to the cancellation movement. I’m kind of surprised by it. It’s a big paradigm shift. It doesn’t necessarily look like reimagining the role of debt overall, so I’m just wary. I’m just wary of corporate media. And I wonder, what would you like to see more of or less of, what would help in terms of journalism, in terms of public understanding of student loan debt and the crisis of it?

    BB: I love this question. I think, one, there’s too many things to name in a short amount of time. But one thing that we have been really trying to push, in terms of dealing with corporate media, is this understanding, we at the Debt Collective use MMT framing, Modern Monetary Theory, and this understanding that the federal government does not operate like a household budget, right? They have the means to do what is necessary if it’s improving people’s lives. And we see that with endless wars, where we always have money to fight wars.

    And so one thing in particular with the student debt crisis that we’ve been struggling to get media, and thereby their readers, to understand is that cancellation is not going to weigh deeply on taxpayers (which, student debtors are taxpayers). In fact, canceling student debt is actually going to boost the economy. It’s actually going to create millions of jobs over the next decade. And the reason that is is because student loans are money that has already gone out the door. And so there’s often this conflation that $1.8 trillion in student debt means $1.8 trillion that’s going to come out of the pockets of people, and that’s actually not how debt cancellation works. In fact, the Debt Collective has bought and erased debt on our own through the secondary market, and what we know is debt literally is worth pennies on the dollar.

    So one thing that we’ve tried to push through is this idea that canceling student debt is going to then hurt the economy. The truth is, student debt is what hurts the economy, and cancellation will improve the lives of everyone. Whether you have student debt or not, you’ll benefit from the housing market booming, people being able to afford rent, putting food on the table, taking care of their children, etc.

    JJ: I’d like to thank you very much for that. We’ve been speaking with Braxton Brewington; he’s organizer and press secretary at Debt Collective. You can follow their work online at DebtCollective.org. Braxton Brewington, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    BB: Thank you so much for having me.

     

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  • Western Media Took Gold in Evidence-Free Allegations of Chinese Olympic Spying

     

    WaPo: ‘China will be China’: Why journalists are taking burner phones to the Beijing Olympics

    The Washington Post‘s headline (1/20/22) seems to sum up why Western journalists saw no need to factcheck claims of Chinese cyberespionage at the Beijing Olympics.

    A persistent trope in Western media coverage of China is the claim that Chinese technology is inherently compromised and used as a nefarious tool by Beijing to spy on unwitting foreigners. However, when one actually looks for evidence behind these claims or innuendos, one often finds unsubstantiated speculation.

    Before the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics began, there was a spate of reports alleging that China could be spying on visiting athletes and journalists. The reports had a sinister tone, implying to Western audiences that China was trying to collect private information for malicious purposes:

    • Quartz (1/20/22): “Beijing Winter Olympics Athletes Have Every Reason to Worry About Their Cybersecurity”
    • BBC (1/18/22): “Winter Olympics: Athletes Advised to Use Burner Phones in Beijing”
    • New York Times (1/18/22): “Security Flaws Seen in China’s Mandatory Olympics App for Athletes”
    • CNN (2/1/22): “FBI Urges Olympic Athletes to Leave Personal Phones at Home Ahead of Beijing Games”
    • Daily Mail (1/31/22): “Over 1,000 Athletes and Coaches Are Using ‘Burner’ Phones at the Winter Olympics Because the Chinese State Has ‘Crazy, Scary’ Spying Tech that Monitors Calls, Reads Texts, Tracks Movements and Can Spot ‘Illegal’ Words in Private Conversations”
    • Washington Post (1/20/22): “‘China Will Be China’: Why Journalists Are Taking Burner Phones to the Beijing Olympics”

    Creating an anaconda

    Yahoo!: China is watching: Olympians go to great lengths to avoid stolen data at 2022 Games

    Yahoo! Sports (2/5/22) closed its article on cyberespionage at the Olympics with an analyst who compared China to an anaconda: “It doesn’t need to bite you. It doesn’t need to spit venom at you. But your behavior will change simply because you know that it exists.”

    Yahoo! Sports (2/5/22) reported on a tech advisory the US Olympic Committee distributed to sports federations that discouraged athletes from bringing their personal smartphones to Beijing. “There should be no expectation of data security or privacy while operating in China,” the advisory warned, a message echoed by other Western national Olympics committees. Yahoo! cited numerous Western officials and cybersecurity experts who claimed that broader fears of Chinese cyberespionage are “absolutely rational,” setting the stage for what Yahoo! called the “Paranoia Olympics.”

    Yahoo! cited a number of Western cybersecurity experts raising concerns for Olympic athletes:

    Their worries stem from a variety of sources, from an alleged technical flaw in an app that all Olympics participants must download to broader anti-China hysteria; from Twitter threads claiming to prove that “all Olympian audio is being collected, analyzed and saved on Chinese servers,” to genuine fears about the Chinese government’s ability and willingness to steal sensitive information and use it.

    Yahoo!’s report cited supposed China experts’ explanation for how the Chinese government doesn’t even need to conduct cyberespionage to deter athletes from causing disturbances:

    It’s a version of what Sinologist Perry Link once termed “The Anaconda in the Chandelier.” It’s a metaphor “used to describe how the Chinese government controls dissent and speech,” explained Neil Thomas, a China analyst at the Eurasia Group. “It basically sits there as a huge anaconda in the chandelier of a room…. It doesn’t need to do anything, this anaconda. It just needs to be there. It doesn’t need to bite you. It doesn’t need to spit venom at you. But your behavior will change simply because you know that it exists.”

    This raises the question: If China merely convincing athletes that it might conduct cyberespionage on them is sufficient to control their behavior, and prevent them from bringing up topics that “might trigger the Chinese government,” then wouldn’t unsubstantiated Western media allegations of a Chinese surveillance program on foreign delegations serve the same function as the supposed Chinese anaconda–regardless of whether such a program exists?

    Citizen Lab’s findings

    DW: DW exclusive: Cybersecurity flaws leave Olympians at risk with Beijing 2022 app

    Deutsche Welle (1/18/22) set the tone for coverage of Citizen Lab’s report on the Beijing Olympics app.

    Is there evidence of a Chinese surveillance program on foreign delegations? Many Western media reports (e.g., BBC, 1/18/22; CBC, 1/18/22; New York Times, 1/18/22) on China’s supposed cyberespionage efforts against foreign delegations to the Olympics can be sourced back to a report by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research center best known for identifying government-authorized spyware on phones belonging to human rights activists and journalists, which was first reported by German state media outlet Deutsche Welle (1/18/22).

    DW reported on some of Citizen Lab’s findings, noting that athletes, coaches, reporters and sports officials, as well as local staff, were required to put “personal information” like passport data and flight information, as well as sensitive medical information related to possible Covid-19 symptoms, onto either the My 2022 app used for the Beijing Olympics or the Olympics’ website:

    The app’s SSL certificates—which are supposed to ensure that data traffic is only exchanged between trustworthy devices and servers—are not validated, meaning that the app has a serious encryption vulnerability. As a result, the app could be deceived into connecting with a malicious host, allowing information to be intercepted, or even malicious data to be sent back to the app.

    Citizen Lab researcher Jeffrey Knockel says he found the vulnerability not only regarding health data, but also with other important services in the app. This includes the app service that processes all file attachments as well as transmitted voice audio…. The expert says he also discovered that for some services, data traffic in the app is not encrypted at all. This means that the metadata of the app’s own chat service can easily be read by hackers.

    It also found that the app had an inactivated “censorship keyword list,” a “reporting function that allows users to report other users if they consider a chat message to be dangerous or dubious.” One option that could have been chosen (had the function been turned on) was “‘politically sensitive content,’ a phrase that is typically used in China to describe censored topics.”

    DW reported that Citizen Lab confidentially reported these findings to the Beijing Organizing Committee on December 3, 2021.  Citizen Lab’s cybersecurity experts, the news article said, conducted an audit on January 17 that found that “no changes were made to address the concerns raised over security vulnerabilities and the list of ‘illegal words.’”

    ‘A simpler explanation’

    Citizen Lab screenshots of the My2022 app

    Citizen Lab (1/18/22) found that the My 2022 app’s “widespread lack of security is less likely to be the result of a vast government conspiracy but rather the result of a simpler explanation such as differing priorities for software developers in China.”

    However, when one actually reads the full Citizen Lab report (1/18/22) that DW and other Western media outlets selectively cited, one quickly discovers that this reporting contained significant omissions that made My 2022’s alleged vulnerabilities seem more malicious and deliberate than they were described in the original report.

    For example, Citizen Lab’s report claims that while it’s “reasonable to ask whether the encryption in this app was intentionally sabotaged for surveillance purposes or whether the defect was born of developer negligence,” it also argues that “the case for the Chinese government sabotaging My 2022’s encryption is problematic” for several reasons:

    For instance, the most sensitive information being handled by this app is submitted in health customs forms, but this information is already being directly submitted to the government, and thus there would be little instrumental rationality in the government intercepting their own data, as weaknesses in the encryption of the transmission of this information would only aid other parties. While it is possible that weakness in the encryption of health customs information was collateral damage from the intentional weakening of the encryption of other types of data that the Chinese government would have an interest in intercepting, our prior work suggests that insufficient protection of user data is endemic to the Chinese app ecosystem. While some work has ascribed intentionality to poor software security discovered in Chinese apps, we believe that such a widespread lack of security is less likely to be the result of a vast government conspiracy but rather the result of a simpler explanation, such as differing priorities for software developers in China.

    In other words, Citizen Lab offered plausible reasons for why My 2022’s developers left alleged security vulnerabilities to enhance functionality that have nothing to do with a malicious Chinese government conspiracy to spy on foreign delegations. Citizen Lab also pointed out that the most sensitive information about athletes would already be directly submitted to the Chinese government for Covid containment purposes, so there would be little point in using My 2022 for espionage purposes.

    Ultimately, Citizen Lab concluded:

    While we found glaring and easily discoverable security issues with the way that My 2022 performs encryption, we have also observed similar issues in Chinese-developed Zoom, as well as the most popular Chinese Web browsers. My 2022’s functionality to report other users for “politically sensitive” expression is common in other Chinese apps, and, while we found bundled a list of censorship keyword terms capable of stifling political expression, such lists are near ubiquitous in Chinese chat apps, live streaming apps, mobile games and even open source software. In light of previous work analyzing popular Chinese apps, our findings concerning MY2022 are, while concerning, not surprising.

    Citizen Lab’s arguments and conclusions undermine the conspiratorial tone in Western media coverage, which might be why they were omitted, with the opposite impression conveyed through cherry-picked quotes. Outlets like the CBC (1/18/22), Quartz (1/20/22) and the Washington Post (1/20/22) focused on Citizen Lab’s “worst case scenarios” of all internet traffic potentially being intercepted, warning people to “pack burner digital devices” to evade the “‘devastating flaw’ that could expose users’ medical and passport information.”

    Aside from a few exceptions like the Associated Press (1/18/22), which correctly noted there “was no evidence that the easily discoverable security flaws in the MY2022 app were placed intentionally by the Chinese government,” the Chinese state media outlet CGTN (1/28/22) offered more nuanced reporting, citing the major thrust of Citizen Lab’s conclusions that were omitted from most Western media accounts, where they would have contradicted the lurid narrative.

    ‘Two software patches ago’

    There is one apparent error in Citizen Lab’s report. The group calls My 2022 “an app required to be installed by all attendees to the 2022 Olympic Games,” a claim repeated in Western media reports on My 2022’s alleged vulnerabilities. The link provided leads to a report by Fortune (12/7/22) that states attendees are “mandated to download a health app called ‘My 2022’ to input personal information and health records,” with no source provided to substantiate this claim.

    But the International Olympics Committee (IOC) has directly refuted this claim, noting that it is not mandatory for attendees to download the app, and that the app’s settings can be configured to disable access to “‘files and media, calendar, camera, contacts,’ as well as a user’s location, their phone and their phone’s microphone.” The IOC has also noted that the app has been validated by Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store, in addition to passing two independent assessments by cybersecurity testing organizations that found “no critical vulnerabilities.”

    NBC: Experts warn Olympics participants: China doesn't need an app to spy

    NBC (2/8/22) debunked the My 2022 scare stories–but still warned Olympians to be afraid.

    Later, in early February, Citizen Lab (NBC, 2/8/22) noted its concerns about My 2022 were addressed “several weeks and two software patches ago,” after the developers reached out after the initial paper was published and sought advice on how to fix the identified problems. All of this indicates that there is no basis for the claim My 2022 was used by the Chinese government to spy on foreign delegations.

    However, NBC argued that “focusing on that single smartphone app is a red herring” in “the context of China’s larger appetite for the personal data of people around the world.” It provided no evidence of China’s alleged appetite for the personal data of people outside its borders, instead relying on resurgent Yellow Peril hysteria in Western countries to suggest that it must be true.

    Another claim about My 2022 that has gone viral on social media, spread by popular podcast host Joe Rogan and Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, is the allegation that the app constantly records audio on users’ phones. This was debunked by numerous experts, like Will Strafach, the creator of an iPhone app that blocks location trackers, who looked at My 2022’s code and found that there was nothing beyond an overt translation function that could activate the phone’s microphone.

    More evidence-free espionage claims

    Business Insider: Everything you need to know about Huawei, the Chinese tech giant accused of spying that the US just banned from doing business in America

    Business Insider (3/16/19): “The US has upped its fight in the last year against Huawei, which it suspects of spying for the Chinese government and posing a great risk to US national security.”

    The evidence-free allegations promoted by Western media about supposed Chinese cyberespionage at the Olympics fit into a larger pattern of claims that Chinese technology is inherently compromised and engineered to serve as spyware by the Chinese government.

    Numerous headlines alleged that Huawei, a Chinese multinational tech corporation that created the world’s first 5G smartphone, was conducting espionage on behalf of the Chinese government:

    • Forbes (2/26/19): “Huawei Security Scandal: Everything You Need to Know”
    • Fox (2/13/20): “US Accuses Huawei of Spying on Mobile Phone Users”
    • NBC (2/14/20): “US Officials: Using Huawei Tech Opens Door to Chinese Spying, Censorship”
    • Business Insider (3/16/19): “Everything You Need to Know About Huawei, the Chinese Tech Giant Accused of Spying That the US Just Banned From Doing Business in America”

    Huawei had been cleared of accusations of espionage as early as October 2012, after the White House ordered an 18-month review of security risks by suppliers to US telecommunications companies. The inquiry found no evidence that the company was an espionage asset, although predictable concerns about nebulous “security vulnerabilities” were raised (Reuters, 10/17/12).

    In more recent years, Australian officials led the way in getting Western governments like the US to ban Huawei’s technology on national security grounds, after conducting simulations on the offensive espionage potential of 5G technology (Sydney Morning Herald, 5/22/19). However, when one reads past sensationalist headlines and looks for evidence that Huawei is conducting espionage on behalf of the Chinese government, one comes up dry.

    For instance, the Wall Street Journal’s report headlined “US Officials Say Huawei Can Covertly Access Telecom Networks” (2/12/20) cited anonymous US officials claiming that Huawei “can covertly access mobile-phone networks around the world through ‘backdoors’ designed for use by law enforcement.” When one reads further down, however, the Journal admitted that the officials “didn’t provide details of where they believe Huawei is able to do so,” and that they “declined to say” whether the US has observed Huawei taking advantage of these supposed backdoors.

    This is consistent with the US government’s assumption that it doesn’t need to show proof of malicious activity by Huawei; it’s a Chinese company, and therefore could be ordered to install backdoors or share data with the Chinese government, despite denials by both Huawei and the Chinese government of those allegations (Wall Street Journal, 1/23/19). In the absence of evidence, the US government has relied on asking foreign governments to shun Huawei’s technology based on speculative “what if” scenarios (Axios, 1/30/20).

    Critics of baseless US government accusations have argued that it wouldn’t make sense for China to jeopardize their own business interests by spying through Huawei’s technology, because the US and other Western countries are China’s best customers, aside from its domestic market, and it would be catastrophic if espionage were ever discovered (ZDNet, 5/20/19). This might be why Huawei has stated they are willing to sign “no spy” agreements to reassure suspicious governments that there are no backdoors in their technology (BBC, 5/19/19).

    But one doesn’t need to take Huawei or the Chinese government’s word for it, as other Western governments have confirmed there is no evidence for the US government’s allegations. The British National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) reported that they haven’t seen any evidence of malicious activity by Huawei, contradicting evidence-free US government allegations (Reuters, 2/20/19).

    Although German spy chief Bruno Kahl claimed that Huawei “can’t be fully trusted,” he didn’t cite any evidence of malicious activity by Huawei, and the head of Germany’s IT watchdog (Federal Office for Information Security), Arne Schönbohm, stated they had “no evidence” of Huawei conducting espionage (The Local, 12/16/18). France’s cybersecurity chief, Guillaume Poupard, the head of the national cybersecurity agency ANSSI, stated that “there is no Huawei smoking gun as of today in Europe” (South China Morning Post, 1/31/20).

    ‘Is TikTok Spying on You?’

    CBS: How TikTok could be used for disinformation and espionage

    Because of TikTok, a Heritage Foundation analyst told CBS (11/15/20), if China “were to try and source a human-intelligence asset, well, they know the exact type of legend or profile that they need to have.”

    Other speculative headlines about Chinese cyberespionage revolved around the popular social media app TikTok:

    • Washington Post (7/13/20): “Is it Time to Delete TikTok? A Guide to the Rumors and the Real Privacy Risks.”
    • Forbes (7/25/20): “Is TikTok Spying on You For China?”
    • Bloomberg (5/13/21): “A Push-Up Contest on TikTok Exposed a Great Cyberespionage Threat”
    • CBS (11/15/20): “How TikTok Could Be Used for Disinformation and Espionage”

    Although these headlines suggest that the Chinese government is using the video sharing platform to spy on users, when one actually reads these reports, it becomes apparent that there is no evidence that TikTok takes more data from users than other social media apps like Facebook, or that it shares that data with the Chinese government.

    CBS (11/15/20) cited numerous claims from experts they contacted about how China could potentially  share data with the Chinese government or “push disinformation” through the “For You” page on the app that recommends videos–though it doesn’t mention a single instance where TikTok actually did such those things. Forbes (7/25/20) admitted that despite “all the talk, there is no solid proof that TikTok sends any data to China, there is no solid proof that any information is pulled from users’ devices over and above the prying data grabs typical of all social media platforms.” Although Bloomberg (5/13/21) stated that claims of cyberespionage are difficult to verify, it acknowledged there’s “no publicly available evidence that TikTok has passed American data to Chinese officials.” The Washington Post (7/13/20) concluded that “TikTok doesn’t appear to grab any more personal information than Facebook,” and there is “scant evidence that TikTok is sharing our data with China.”

    Critics of the insinuations used by US government officials to try to ban TikTok on national security grounds have argued that “TikTok is not fundamentally different from other social media platforms,” as DW editor Fabian Schmidt (8/8/20) put it. It is of “no importance in the end who runs the platforms where people choose to put themselves on stage,” Schmidt argued, since the users themselves are “primarily responsible for protecting their own data on social media.”

    However, people need not take TikTok’s word that it is not spying on behalf of the Chinese government, as groups from Citizen Lab to the CIA have concluded that there’s no evidence that Beijing has intercepted data or used the app to access users’ devices (South China Morning Post, 3/23/21; New York Times, 8/7/20).

    These accusations of Chinese hardware and software conducting espionage on foreigners on behalf of the Chinese government are ironic, since there is more evidence of the US government spying on Huawei, and using Huawei’s technology to spy on others, than there is of Huawei spying for the Chinese government. And Washington has been caught inserting secret backdoors on US hardware and embedding software on mobile apps to spy on and keep track of people’s movements, while the NSA spies on Americans and people abroad operating on a “collect it all” ethos (Der Spiegel, 12/29/13; Wall Street Journal, 8/7/20).

    Motives to sully Chinese tech

    Breakthrough News: Why They’re Telling You to Fear China All of a Sudden

    Breakthrough News (10/28/20): “China hysteria has become a weapon of mass distraction for the US political establishment.”

    Journalist Vijay Prashad (Breakthrough News, 10/28/20) has pointed out that the US information war on China has intensified in recent years, as China’s technology industry has either become a peer competitor to or surpassed the US in certain sectors. Huawei once surpassed Apple as the second-largest smartphone maker in 2018, and TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps in the US.

    Similar Yellow Peril propaganda campaigns were waged by the US against Japan in the 1980s, with familiar tropes of alleged unfair trading practices when Americans were anxious regarding Japan’s rising economy as a peer competitor, noting their dominance in exporting technology like cars, computers and semiconductors. Japan’s economy is widely believed to have been sabotaged by the 1985 Plaza Accord Tokyo was pressured to sign by the US.

    Despite racist insinuations that China isn’t capable of innovating and claims that its success stems primarily from stealing intellectual property from the US, China is now in the lead regarding 5G (and potentially 6G mobile technology) and artificial intelligence, and has had a lead over the US in global patent filings since 2019. China’s status as a competitor to the US and emerging leader in the tech industry has even led US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo to say that the US and Europe should work together to “slow down China’s rate of innovation” (CNBC, 9/28/21).

    But whereas other East Asian countries like South Korea and Japan are politically subordinate to the US, in addition to having much smaller economies, China is politically independent of the US, and has already surpassed the US’s GDP when measured in purchasing power parity terms. Western corporate media thus have less incentives to vilify those countries compared to China, since they will not be independent countries capable of rivaling the US anytime soon.

    It is admittedly possible that the Chinese government is lying about not trying to conduct cyberespionage on foreign delegations at the Olympics, or spying on people through Huawei’s technology and social media platforms like TikTok. But Western media insistence on potential cyberespionage hazards are accusations without evidence. The US’s hybrid war on China includes diplomatically isolating it in world events like the Olympics, and unsubstantiated allegations of nebulous security vulnerabilities can be used to smear and sabotage China’s increasingly competitive tech industry as well.

    The post Western Media Took Gold in Evidence-Free Allegations of Chinese Olympic Spying appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Murdoch-Owned Outlets Ignore Their Own Role in Hate Crime Surge

     

    Fox News: San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin sued for turning back on Asian attack victim as anti-AAPI hate crimes soar 567%

    A Fox News story (1/27/22) that used anti-Asian hate crimes to swipe at a favorite Fox target—a progressive DA—was accompanied by a video that put Fox‘s typical anti-China spin on a space story.

    In crafting a landscape rife with danger and lawlessness, Rupert Murdoch–owned outlets drew upon a spike in hate crimes—specifically anti-Asian and antisemitic hate crimes—without taking responsibility for the xenophobia they’ve consistently peddled when it benefited their political agendas.

    Fox News (1/27/22) in January reported that the Asian-American victim of a 2019 attack was suing San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin for mishandling his case, just one day before the San Francisco police department announced that hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) were up 567% in the city in 2021 compared to the previous year. The story also mentioned a 60% increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes from 2020.

    Early last month, Fox (2/2/22) reported on the arrest of a man suspected of spray painting swastikas on several Jewish schools and synagogues throughout Chicago. “The incidents came days after Holocaust Remembrance Day and as antisemitism is on the rise across the country,” the piece says. Another Fox headline (2/7/22) declared, “NYC Antisemitic Crimes Up Nearly 300% in January”; the story noted that “there were 15 hate crimes committed against Jewish people in January—a 275% increase compared to the four hate crimes recorded in January 2021.”

    Meanwhile, Murdoch’s New York Post (1/21/22) published “NYC Hate-Crime Complaints Skyrocket, With Anti-Asian Attacks Up 343%.” Citing NYPD data, the article also noted that the largest portion of hate-crime complaints in the city in 2021 was for anti-Jewish incidents.

    The Wall Street Journal (1/26/22), another Murdoch property, reported on an incident at a virtual meeting of National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum when a “Zoom bomber” hacked the group and projected anti-Asian images and audio onto the screen. “Major cities have reported an increase in hate crimes directed at Asian-Americans,” the article said, also citing the San Francisco and New York police department numbers.

    Murdoch’s own outlets, however, often spread anti-Asian and antisemitic tropes, while taking no responsibility for the xenophobia that fuels these hate crimes in the first place.

    Scapegoating China

    Watters' World: Chinatown

    The O’Reilly Factor‘s Jesse Watters (10/3/16) pretends to perform martial arts as part of a race-baiting report from New York’s Chinatown.

    The rise in anti-AAPI violence is connected to both the rise of a new cold war with Beijing and the scapegoating of China for the Covid-19 pandemic (FAIR.org, 4/8/21, 7/29/21, 8/25/21), playing upon xenophobic stereotypes of Asians as disease-carriers (Salon, 2/6/20) and as robots brainwashed by their government.

    Even in the years prior to the Covid outbreak, Fox News was spreading anti-Asian—particularly anti-Chinese—sentiment. In 2016, the Fox News segment Watters’ World (10/3/16) featured Fox personality Jesse Watters conducting on-the-street “interviews” with New York City Chinatown residents, ostensibly to mock them for their lack of knowledge regarding US/China relations as discussed in the 2016 presidential debates. From the “Kung Fu Fighting” background music, to Watters asking his sources if they knew karate (a Japanese martial art) and questioning whether their watches were stolen, the piece was five straight minutes of blatant racist stereotyping thinly veiled as cheap humor.

    Like bullies in the lunchroom deriding another child’s food, Murdoch’s outlets employed the stereotype of Asian cuisine being unclean as  a common—and juvenile—trope to scapegoat the Chinese for Covid. Watters’ anti-Chinese racism predictably ramped up at the start of the outbreak in 2020, when on Fox’s The Five (3/2/20), Watters asked for a “formal apology” from “the Chinese,” insisting Covid originated in China “because they have these markets where they are eating raw bats and snakes.” He linked the disgust such stories evoke to a red-baiting agenda:

    They are a very hungry people. The Chinese Communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked. It’s unsafe, and that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated.

    NY Post: Revolting video shows woman devouring bat amid coronavirus outbreak

    The New York Post (1/23/20) misidentifies a gross-out video as being taken “amid [the] coronavirus outbreak.”

    “Revolting Video Shows Woman Devouring Bat Amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” read a January 2020 New York Post headline (1/23/20), linking a viral image of a woman eating a bat to the Covid outbreak. The article describes the clip as “gag-inducing,” explaining that “the deadly disease reportedly originated at Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market, which sold civets, snakes and other illegal exotic animals that had been infected by bats.”  It didn’t matter that according to the woman in the video, it was filmed the summer prior to the outbreak, or that a second bat-soup video referenced in the Post article was apparently taken in Indonesia’s Palau, not China (France 24, 3/2/20).

    The Wall Street Journal that condemned the rise in anti-AAPI hate crimes is the same paper that on multiple occasions has itself conflated Covid with China. In 2020, the Journal called China “the real sick man of Asia” (2/3/20), used what it called “the Communist coronavirus” to criticize China’s government (1/29/20), referred to the virus as the “Wuhan Coronavirus” (1/29/20) and falsely accused the Chinese government of stalling investigations into the evidence-free Wuhan lab leak theory (2/12/21, 5/23/21).

    Normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric

    Murdoch’s outlets have also played a significant role in normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric, despite their eager conflation of any criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism. In 2012, Murdoch himself tweeted about purported irony of the “Jewish-owned press” being (in his mind) anti-Israel, evoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that an elite Jewish cabal controls media (Extra!, 9–10/96).

    Fox News blames the left and Palestinian solidarity for a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes. “US Seeing Wave of ‘Textbook Antisemitism’ Amid Israel/Gaza Tensions,” warned one Fox headline (5/21/21). “The incidents fly in the face of those trying to distinguish between anti-Israel and antisemitic bromides,” the piece said.

    Fox News: Dennis Prager: Israel-Palestine conflict is not what Left wants you to believe, it’s not over land

    Right-wing talkshow host Dennis Prager told Fox News (5/21/21) that the “Middle East dispute” is because “a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state.”

    Conservative radio host Dennis Prager joined Fox News Primetime  (5/21/21) to discuss the rise in attacks:

    This is not what the left wants you to believe. They want you to believe it’s over land. No, it’s not. There is a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state beginning with, of course, Iran. That is why if you look at the rhetoric, it’s always “F the Jews,” “F the Jews” in all of these attacks. It’s never “F the Israelis.” It’s always “F the Jews.”

    But attributing a rise in antisemitic hate crimes mainly to left-wing anti-Zionism is more politically useful than substantiated. Data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) suggests the majority of antisemitic attacks come from white supremacist groups.

    ADL’s most recent numbers are from 2019, during which there were 2,107 recorded attacks. There were 171 incidents in which attackers mentioned Israel or Zionism, and 68 of those were propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups (ADL, 2019). Out of 270 incidents carried out by known extremist groups, two-thirds of those groups were white supremacist.

    Certainly, antisemitism does appear on the left as well as the right, and there are activists who shout “Free Palestine” and “Death to Jews” in the same breath, and use the word “Zionism” not as the name of an ideology but as a codeword for Jewishness. But Murdoch outlets consistently blur the line between criticizing Israel, or supporting Palestinian rights, and antisemitism. When Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid wore a necklace with the word “Palestine” on it, Fox (1/16/22) reported the model was accused of “perpetuating antisemitic tropes”—referring to a tweet Hadid had posted condemning “Israeli colonization, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid over the Palestinian people.”

    ‘A complicated web’

    Fox News: George Soros, 'the puppet master'

    Fox News (12/14/21) took down a cartoon depicting George Soros as “the puppet master” behind progressive DAs and attorneys general after complaints that such imagery “contributes to the normalization of antisemitism.”

    Murdoch outlets stop short of condemning antisemitism when it benefits their anti–police reform agendas. Blaming Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros for the election of progressive “soft on crime” district attorneys throughout the country, they evoked images of a wealthy Jewish cabal pulling strings behind the scenes (FAIR.org, 1/14/22). “Soros Funnels Cash Through a Complicated Web,” explained a New York Post piece (12/16/21).

    In late 2021, Fox removed a Soros “puppet master” cartoon from its social media after being called out for evoking antisemitic imagery (Ha’aretz, 12/16/21; FAIR.org 1/14/22).

    Fox star Tucker Carlson has also accused Soros of “waging a kind of war—political, social and demographic war—on the West,” in his recent documentary, Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization (Fox News, 1/26/22).

    In an interview with Watters about the documentary, Carlson said Soros is seeking to create a society that is “more dangerous, dirtier, less democratic, more disorganized, more at war with themselves, less cohesive” (Fox News, 1/25/22).

    This anti-Soros rhetoric sounds eerily similar to that of Robert Bower, the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting suspect who allegedly killed 11 people during Shabbat services in 2018. Bower (Washington Post, 10/28/18) once tweeted:

    Jews are waging a propaganda war against Western civilization and it is so effective that we are headed towards certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.

    Also a target of the “puppet master” trope: Michael Bloomberg. In 2020, Fox News anchor Raymond Arroyo described the billionaire and former New York City mayor, who is Jewish, as a “Biden puppet master” (Fox News, 3/5/20).  The comments sparked backlash from the ADL, which contended that the use of the trope, even unintentionally, played a role in mainstreaming antisemitism.

    ‘Jews will not replace us’

    Fox: Border Mess

    Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/21/21)  said Democrats want “to change the racial mix of the country”: “This policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries” (Media Matters, 9/23/21).

    In October, Jewish groups condemned Carlson’s defense of  “Replacement Theory” (Daily Beast, 4/9/21)—the idea that immigrants and people of color are entering the US to reduce the political power of white Americans (Media Matters for America, 4/8/21; FAIR.org, 10/20/21). The theory is linked to antisemitism because it’s often claimed an elite Jewish cabal is leading the replacement. A popular conspiracy theory in 2018 claimed Soros himself was organizing the caravan of Central American migrants to the US border (Washington Post, 10/28/18).

    Among Carlson’s fan-base are a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where “Jews will not replace us” was a prominent chant. Facing a lawsuit for taking part in the deadly demonstration while serving time in prison for an unrelated crime, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell reportedly watched Carlson with other white supremacists to prepare for the trial, according to a former inmate (BuzzFeed News, 10/28/21). Cantwell also mentioned Carlson in court documents, saying his trial was intended to silence white supremacists and those who agree with them, “even on peripheral issues.” He went on:

    This is evidenced by the president of the United States, and the second most popular show in cable news (Tucker Carlson) being branded as “white nationalists” on account of sharing a small number of our views on the pressing issues of our time.

    Neither Carlson nor Fox  has commented on the neo-Nazi endorsement of the show.

    Carlson has also downplayed the January 6 insurrection, whose participants included Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, asserting that it was not an act of terrorism (Fox News, 1/7/22). On hand for what Carlson (7/7/21) described as a “fake” insurrection “where elderly people showed up with signs on the Capitol” were Tim Gionet, a livestreamer known as Baked Alaska who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories online; the Nationalist Social Club neo-Nazi group; a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt; and another wearing a shirt reading “6MWE,” which stands for “6 million wasn’t enough.”

    In 2021, Fox News commentator Lara Logan faced condemnation from Jewish advocacy groups for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who performed deadly pseudoscientific experiments on Auschwitz prisoners (Fox News, 11/30/21). “It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline,” tweeted the Auschwitz Museum in response. Neither Fox nor Logan apologized; in fact, Logan retweeted a defense of her comments.

    The answer? More police

    As FAIR (FAIR.org, 6/24/21; CounterSpin, 10/7/21) has reported in the past, using an uptick in certain crime categories to stoke fear  of street crime allows corporate outlets to push a pro-police agenda, while blaming social justice, anti-police violence movements for crime.

    In early February, Fox News (2/3/22) reported on President Joe Biden’s visit to New York City and rejection of calls to defund the police, citing the city’s rise in crimes, including hate crimes:

    Hate crimes also surged 72% in New York City last month, driven mostly by a 275% increase in crimes against Jewish people.

    It’s a trend that started last year, as hate crimes rose 96% in 2021 .

    Framing the primary problem as crime and not hate allows hiring more police to be presented as the solution. And hate-mongering outlets like Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal don’t have to address their own antisemitism and anti-Asian racism.

    The post Murdoch-Owned Outlets Ignore Their Own Role in Hate Crime Surge appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Calling Russia’s Attack ‘Unprovoked’ Lets US Off the Hook

     

    Roll Call: Lawmakers united in outrage over Putin’s ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can fairly be called many things, but “unprovoked” (Roll Call, 2/24/22) is not one of them.

    Many governments and media figures are rightly condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as an act of aggression and a violation of international law. But in his first speech about the invasion, on February 24, US President Joe Biden also called the invasion “unprovoked.”

    It’s a word that has been echoed repeatedly across the media ecosystem. “Putin’s forces entered Ukraine’s second-largest city on the fourth day of the unprovoked invasion,” Axios (2/27/22) reported; “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine entered its second week Friday,” said CNBC (3/4/22). Vox (3/1/22) wrote of “Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked and unnecessary war with the second-largest country in Europe.”

    The “unprovoked” descriptor obscures a long history of provocative behavior from the United States in regards to Ukraine. This history is important to understanding how we got here, and what degree of responsibility the US bears for the current attack on Ukraine.

    Ignoring expert advice

    The story starts at the end of the Cold War, when the US was the only global hegemon. As part of the deal that finalized the reunification of Germany, the US promised Russia that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”  Despite this, it wasn’t long before talk of expansion began to circulate among policy makers.

    In 1997, dozens of foreign policy veterans (including former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and former CIA Director Stansfield Turner) sent a joint letter to then-President Bill Clinton calling “the current US-led effort to expand NATO…a policy error of historic proportions.” They predicted:

    In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West [and] bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.

    NYT: And Now a Word From X

    Diplomat George Kennan (New York Times, 5/2/98) said  NATO expansion would be “a tragic mistake.”

    New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (5/2/98) in 1998 asked famed diplomat George Kennan—architect of the US Cold War strategy of containment—about NATO expansion. Kennan’s response:

    I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.

    Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.

    Despite these warnings, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were added to NATO in 1999, with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia following in 2004.

    US planners were warned again in 2008 by US Ambassador to Moscow William Burns (now director of the CIA under Joe Biden). WikiLeaks leaked a cable from Burns titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines” that included another prophetic warning worth quoting in full (emphasis added):

    Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.  Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.

    Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.  In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

    A de facto NATO ally

    NYT: NATO Signals Support for Ukraine in Face of Threat From Russia

    As Russia threatened to invade Ukraine over the threat of NATO expansion, NATO’s response was to emphasize that Ukraine would some day join the alliance (New York Times, 12/16/21).

    But the US has pushed Russia to make such a decision. Though European countries are divided about whether or not Ukraine should join, many in the NATO camp have been adamant about maintaining the alliance’s “open door policy.” Even as US planners were warning of a Russian invasion, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reiterated NATO’s 2008 plans to integrate Ukraine into the alliance (New York Times, 12/16/21). The Biden administration has taken a more roundabout approach, supporting in the abstract “Kyiv’s right to choose its own security arrangements and alliances.” But the implication is obvious.

    Even without officially being in NATO, Ukraine has become a de facto NATO ally—and Russia has paid close attention to these developments. In a December 2021 speech to his top military officials, Putin expressed his concerns:

    Over the past few years, military contingents of NATO countries have been almost constantly present on Ukrainian territory under the pretext of exercises. The Ukrainian troop control system has already been integrated into NATO. This means that NATO headquarters can issue direct commands to the Ukrainian armed forces, even to their separate units and squads….

    Kiev has long proclaimed a strategic course on joining NATO. Indeed, each country is entitled to pick its own security system and enter into military alliances. There would be no problem with that, if it were not for one “but.” International documents expressly stipulate the principle of equal and indivisible security, which includes obligations not to strengthen one’s own security at the expense of the security of other states….

    In other words, the choice of pathways towards ensuring security should not pose a threat to other states, whereas Ukraine joining NATO is a direct threat to Russia’s security.

    In an explainer piece, the New York Times (2/24/22) centered NATO expansion as a root cause of the war. Unfortunately, the Times omitted the critical context of NATO’s pledge not to expand, and the subsequent abandonment of that promise. This is an important context to understand the Russian view of US policies, especially so given the ample warnings from US diplomats and foreign policy experts.

    The Maidan Coup of 2014

    A major turning point in the US/Ukraine/Russia relationship was the 2014 violent and unconstitutional ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, elected in 2010 in a vote heavily split between eastern and western Ukraine. His ouster came after months of protests led in part by far-right extremists (FAIR.org, 3/7/14). Weeks before his ouster, an unknown party leaked a phone call between US officials discussing who should and shouldn’t be part of the new government, and finding ways to “seal the deal.” After the ouster, a politician the officials designated as “the guy” even became prime minister.

    The US involvement was part of a campaign aimed at exploiting the divisions in Ukrainian society to push the country into the US sphere of influence, pulling it out of the Russian sphere (FAIR.org, 1/28/22). In the aftermath of the overthrow, Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, in part to secure a major naval base from the new Ukrainian government.

    The New York Times (2/24/22) and Washington Post (2/28/22) both omitted the role the US played in these events. In US media, this critical moment in history is completely cleansed of US influence, erasing a critical step on the road to the current war.

    Keeping civil war alive

    In another response to the overthrow, an uprising in Ukraine’s Donbas region grew into a rebel movement that declared independence from Ukraine and announced the formation of their own republics. The resulting civil war claimed thousands of lives, but was largely paused  in 2015 with a ceasefire agreement known as the Minsk II accords.

    Nation: Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World

    Anatol Lieven (The Nation, 11/15/21): “US administrations, the political establishment, and the mainstream media have quietly buried…the refusal of Ukrainian governments to implement the solution and the refusal of the United States to put pressure on them to do so.”

    The deal, agreed to by Ukraine, Russia and other European countries, was designed to grant some form of autonomy to the breakaway regions in exchange for reintegrating them into the Ukrainian state. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian government refused to implement the autonomy provision of the accords. Anatol Lieven, a researcher with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in The Nation (11/15/21): 

    The main reason for this refusal, apart from a general commitment to retain centralized power in Kiev, has been the belief that permanent autonomy for the Donbas would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the European Union, as the region could use its constitutional position within Ukraine to block membership.

    Ukraine opted instead to prolong the Donbas conflict, and there was never significant pressure from the West to alter course. Though there were brief reports of the accords’ revival as recently as late January, Ukrainian security chief Oleksiy Danilov warned the West not to pressure Ukraine to implement the peace deal. “The fulfillment of the Minsk agreement means the country’s destruction,” he said (AP, 1/31/22). Danilov claimed that even when the agreement was signed eight years ago,  “it was already clear for all rational people that it’s impossible to implement.”

    Lieven notes that the depth of Russian commitment has yet to be fully tested, but Putin has supported the Minsk accords, refraining from officially recognizing the Donbas republics until last week.

    The New York Times (2/8/22) explainer on the Minsk accords blamed their failure on a disagreement between Ukraine and Russia over their implementation. This is inadequate to explain the failure of the agreements, however, given that Russia cannot affect Ukrainian parliamentary procedure. The Times quietly acknowledged that the law meant to define special status in the Donbas had been “shelved” by the Ukranians,  indicating that the country had stopped trying to solve the issue in favor of a stalemate.

    There was no mention of the comments from a top Ukrainian official openly denouncing the peace accords. Nor was it acknowledged that the US could have used its influence to push Ukraine to solve the issue, but refrained from doing so.

    Ukrainian missile crisis

    WaPo: Putin’s attack on Ukraine echoes Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia

    The Washington Post‘s Hitler analogy (2/24/22) is a bit much, considering that the Ukrainian government provides veterans benefits to militias that actually participated in the Holocaust (Kyiv Post, 12/24/18).

    One under-discussed aspect of this crisis is the role of US missiles stationed in NATO countries. Many media outlets have claimed that Putin is Hitler-like (Washington Post, 2/24/22; Boston Globe, 2/24/22), hellbent on reconquering old Soviet states to “recreat[e] the Russian empire with himself as the Tsar,” as Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbot told Politico (2/25/22).

    Pundits try to psychoanalyze Putin, asking “What is motivating him?” and answering by citing his televised speech on February 21 that recounted the history of Ukraine’s relationship with Russia.

    This speech has been widely characterized as a call to reestablish the Soviet empire and a challenge to Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign nation. Corporate media ignore other public statements Putin has made in recent months. For example, at an expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board, Putin elaborated on what he considered to be the main military threat from US/NATO expansion to Ukraine:

    It is extremely alarming that elements of the US global defense system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our security.

    The United States does not possess hypersonic weapons yet, but we know when they will have it…. They will supply hypersonic weapons to Ukraine and then use them as cover…to arm extremists from a neighbouring state and incite them against certain regions of the Russian Federation, such as Crimea, when they think circumstances are favorable.

    Do they really think we do not see these threats? Or do they think that we will just stand idly watching threats to Russia emerge? This is the problem: We simply have no room to retreat.

    Having these missiles so close to Russia—weapons that Russia (and China) see as part of a plan to give the United States the capacity to launch a nuclear first-strike without retaliation—seriously challenges the cold war deterrent of Mutually Assured Destruction, and more closely resembles a gun pointed at the Russian head for the remainder of the nuclear age. Would this be acceptable to any country?

    Media refuse to present this crucial question to their audiences, instead couching Putin’s motives in purely aggressive terms.

    Refusal to de-escalate

    Twitter: United with Ukraine

    As the threat of war loomed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Twitter, 1/27/22) framed the issue of NATO expansion as “Kyiv’s right to choose its own security arrangements and alliances”—as though NATO were a public accommodation open to anyone who wanted to join.

    By December 2021, US intelligence agencies were sounding the alarm that Russia was amassing troops at the Ukrainian border and planning to attack. Yet Putin was very clear about a path to deescalation: He called on the West to halt NATO expansion, negotiate Ukrainian neutrality in the East/West rivalry, remove US nuclear weapons from non proliferating countries, and remove missiles, troops and bases near Russia. These are demands the US would surely have made were it in Russia’s position.

    Unfortunately, the US refused to negotiate on Russia’s core concerns. The US offered some serious steps towards a larger arms control arrangement (Antiwar.com, 2/2/22)—something the Russians acknowledged and appreciated—but ignored issues of NATO’s military activity in Ukraine, and the deployment of nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe (Antiwar.com, 2/17/22).

    On NATO expansion, the State Department continued to insist that they would not compromise NATO’s open door policy—in other words, it asserted the right to expand NATO and to ignore Russia’s red line.

    While the US has signaled that it would approve of an informal agreement to keep Ukraine from joining the alliance for a period of time, this clearly was not going to be enough for Russia, which still remembers the last broken agreement.

    Instead of addressing Russian concerns about Ukraine’s NATO relationship, the US instead chose to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, exacerbating Putin’s expressed concerns. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t help matters by suggesting that Ukraine might begin a nuclear weapons program at the height of the tensions.

    After Putin announced his recognition of the breakaway republics, Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled talks with Putin, and began the process of implementing sanctions on Russia—all before Russian soldiers had set foot into Ukraine.

    Had the US been genuinely interested in avoiding war, it would have taken every opportunity to de-escalate the situation. Instead, it did the opposite nearly every step of the way.

    In its explainer piece, the Washington Post (2/28/22) downplayed the significance of the US’s rejection of Russia’s core concerns, writing: “Russia has said that it wants guarantees Ukraine will be barred from joining NATO—a non-starter for the Western alliance, which maintains an open-door policy.” NATO’s open door policy is simply accepted as an immutable policy that Putin just needs to deal with. This very assumption, so key to the Ukraine crisis, goes unchallenged in the US media ecosystem.

    ‘The strategic case for risking war’

    WSJ: The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine

    John Deni (Wall Street Journal, 12/22/21): “There are good strategic reasons for the West to stake out a hard-line approach, giving little ground to Moscow.”

    It’s impossible to say for sure why the Biden administration took an approach that increased the likelihood of war, but one Wall Street Journal piece from last month may offer some insight.

    The Journal (12/22/21) published an op-ed from John Deni, a researcher at the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by the US and allied governments that serves as NATO’s de facto brain trust. The piece was provocatively headlined “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine.” Deni’s argument was that the West should refuse to negotiate with Russia, because either potential outcome would be beneficial to US interests.

    If Putin backed down without a deal, it would be a major embarrassment. He would lose face and stature, domestically and on the world stage.

    But Putin going to war would also be good for the US, the Journal op-ed argued. Firstly,  it would give NATO more legitimacy by “forg[ing] an even stronger anti-Russian consensus across Europe.” Secondly, a major attack would trigger “another round of more debilitating economic sanctions,” weakening the Russian economy and its ability to compete with the US for global influence. Thirdly, an invasion is “likely to spawn a guerrilla war” that would “sap the strength and morale of Russia’s military while undercutting Mr. Putin’s domestic popularity and reducing Russia’s soft power globally.”

    In short, we have part of the NATO brain trust advocating risking Ukrainian civilians as pawns in the US’s quest to strengthen its position around the world.

    ‘Something even worse than war’

    NYT: Europe Thinks Putin Is Planning Something Even Worse Than War

    What would be worse than thousands of Ukrainians dying? According to this New York Times op-ed (2/3/22), “a new European security architecture that recognizes Russia’s sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space.”

    A New York Times op-ed (2/3/22) by Ivan Krastev of Vienna’s Institute of Human Sciences likewise suggested that a Russian invasion of Ukraine wouldn’t be the worst outcome:

    A Russian incursion into Ukraine could, in a perverse way, save the current European order. NATO would have no choice but to respond assertively, bringing in stiff sanctions and acting in decisive unity. By hardening the conflict, Mr. Putin could cohere his opponents.

    The op-ed was headlined “Europe Thinks Putin Is Planning Something Even Worse Than War”—that something being “a new European security architecture that recognizes Russia’s sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space.”

    It is impossible to know for sure whether the Biden administration shared this sense that there would be an upside to a Russian invasion, but the incentives are clear, and much of what these op-eds predicted is coming to pass.

    None of this is to say that Putin’s invasion is justified—FAIR resolutely condemns the invasion as illegal and ruinous—but calling it “unprovoked” distracts attention from the US’s own contribution to this disastrous outcome. The US ignored warnings from both Russian and US officials that a major conflagration could erupt if the US continued its path, and it shouldn’t be surprising that one eventually did.

    Now, as the world once again inches toward the brink of nuclear omnicide, it is more important than ever for Western audiences to understand and challenge their own government’s role in dragging us all to this point.

    Featured image: NPR map (9/3/14) from 2014 showing NATO/EU expansion.

     

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  • ACTION ALERT: NBC Off by 18 Years on US’s Last Use of Cluster Bombs

     

    NBC: Ukraine's Major Cities Under Siege

    NBC Nightly News (2/28/22) depicts cluster bombs dropped by Russia on Ukraine, which it falsely claimed have not been used by the United States since 1991.

    NBC Nightly News (2/28/22) falsely reported that the United States has not used cluster bombs since 1991—when it fact the US has employed the weapons as recently at 2009, and has even more recently sold them to allied countries that have dropped them.

    Cluster bombs are munitions that include numerous small explosive devices that land separately; the bomblets frequently explode long after they land, with devastating effects on civilians.

    In the report, NBC correspondent Matt Bradley described possible war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, and noted that Russia appears to be using cluster bombs there. After quoting Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch (“We think that cluster munitions should never be used at all”), Bradley added:

    They’re banned by 110 countries, though not by Russia or the US. Still, the US hasn’t used them since the first Gulf War, over 30 years ago. They’re used by the Russians in Ukraine, another sign of this war’s growing savagery.

    This claim is inaccurate. Since the 1990–91 Gulf War, the US has dropped cluster bombs on Bosnia (1995), Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001–02) and Iraq (2003), according to the Landmine & Cluster Munition Monitor. The last reported US use of cluster munitions was against Yemen in 2009. (Before the Gulf War, the US used cluster bombs in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Lebanon, Libya and Iran.)

    Moreover, the US has refused to join the 123 countries that have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions that bans the use, production, transfer or stockpiling of these weapons. In 2017, the Trump administration canceled a plan to end the US military’s use of most cluster munitions, saying they are a “vital military capability” (Washington Post, 11/30/17). In 2019, the US abstained from a UN vote endorsing the ban.

    The US military was buying cluster bombs until 2007, and US armsmakers were building them for foreign sale as late as 2016. According to a 2015 Human Rights Watch report (5/3/15), credible evidence indicated that the Saudi-led coalition used US-made and -supplied cluster munitions in airstrikes against Houthi forces in Yemen.

    FAIR Action Alert: NYT Gives a False Pass to US on Cluster Bomb Sales

    The New York Times (9/3/15) corrected the record on US cluster bomb sales in response to this 2015 FAIR Action Alert (9/3/15).

    In 2015, following a FAIR Action Alert (9/3/15), the New York Times corrected a report that inaccurately claimed that the US was following the provisions of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, despite manufacturing and selling them.

    Because these weapons release smaller bombs, they can’t be fired precisely and put civilians at a devastating risk. Additionally, when the smaller bomblets don’t detonate, they can pose postwar risk to civilians as de facto landmines. A 2003 Human Rights Watch report (3/03) estimated 14% of these bomblets are “duds” that put civilians at a grave risk.

    Leftover bombs the US dropped during the Vietnam War in Laos are still being removed by humanitarian groups. The HALO Trust reports that about 20,000 people—40% of them children—have been killed or injured by dormant cluster bombs or other unexploded items since the war ended.

    NBC described Russia’s use of these bombs as “savagery”—a word corporate media rarely if ever applied to the US’s use of these same weapons. In 2003, US TV news did no in-depth reporting on the US’s use of cluster bombs during the Iraq War (FAIR.org, 5/6/03). In 2011, FAIR (4/16/11) criticized the New York Times (4/15/11) for describing cluster bombs used by Libya’s Col. Moammar Gadhafi as “indiscriminate weapons” that “place civilians at grave risk,” while at the same time falsely claiming that the US only used them “in battlefield situations.”

    ACTION ALERT:

    Please tell NBC to correct its misstatement that the US hasn’t used cluster bombs since 1991.

    CONTACT:

    You can send messages to NBC Nightly News at nightly@nbcuni.com (or via Twitter: @NBCNightlyNews).

     

    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.

     

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  • Western Media Accuse China of Wanting to Do What US Does to Other Countries 

     

    WaPo: In their excesses, Putin and Xi might be unwittingly saving the West

    David Von Drehle (Washington Post, 2/15/22): “Xi…has reminded the world what a Chinese superpower really means—and why a strong alliance of democracies is necessary as an alternative.”

    A flurry of recent newspaper articles have denounced what they describe as Chinese imperialism. Such texts are part of a new Cold War media blitz against China that simultaneously serves US imperialism by blessing it or denying that it exists.

    Last month, the Washington Post (2/15/22) ran an opinion piece by David Von Drehle claiming that, “in a sense, the alliance of democracies” (by which he means the US and its partners) fell “into a fitful sleep” at the end of the Cold War. “What began as a happy dream of perpetual peace,” he contended, “changed in recent years to a nightmare,” featuring “Communist empire-building in China.”

    The notion that there was a “happy dream of perpetual peace at the end of the Cold War” that only recently became a nightmare because of international bad guys like China suggests that Von Drehle himself has been not merely snoozing but comatose. Just as the Cold War ended, the American empire killed thousands of civilians in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm (FAIR.org, 10/28/21). US-led imperialism spent much of the rest of the decade prosecuting a war against the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, ultimately helping to take the country apart (Monthly Review, 10/07).

    Before the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s demise, the US was attacking Afghanistan (Jacobin, 9/11/21), and less than two years after that it was carrying out an invasion of Iraq that would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians (Jacobin, 6/19/14). That period, which Von Drehle regards as a favorable one in global affairs, was quite the “nightmare” for the millions on the wrong end of American bombs and bullets.

    Perhaps the author is worried that China might start doing to other countries what the US routinely does, even though China has not, at any point in its modern history, committed an international crime comparable to any one of those that the US enacted in the years immediately after the Cold War—or in the years since, in countries like Libya (Jacobin, 9/2/13) and Syria (New York Times, 11/13/21; FAIR.org, 4/20/18; Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17).

    ‘A semi-peripheral country’

    Monthly Review: China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?

    Minqi Li (Monthly Review, 7–8/21): “China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor.”

    Many academics who study Chinese foreign policy are reluctant to reduce China’s position in the world economy to that of “empire-building.” For example, Minqi Li of the University of Utah (Monthly Review, 7–8/21) writes:

    The currently available evidence does not support the argument that China has become an imperialist country in the sense that China belongs to the privileged small minority that exploits the great majority of the world population. On the whole, China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor and transfers more surplus value to the core (historical imperialist countries) than it receives from the periphery. However, China’s per capita GDP has risen to levels substantially above the peripheral income levels and, in terms of international labor transfer flows, China has established exploitative relations with nearly half of the world population (including Africa, South Asia and parts of East Asia). Therefore, China is best considered a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system.

    Claudio Katz (Life on the Left, 9/6/21), the Argentine academic, argues that China is a “potential” empire: It “appropriates surpluses from the underdeveloped economies,” but its approach to the military dimension of geopolitics has been to act defensively.  He writes:

    In contrast to the United States, England or France, China’s capitalists are not accustomed to calling on the political-military intervention of their state when they confront difficulties in their international business. They have no tradition of invasions or coups when confronted by countries that nationalize companies or suspend debt payment. No one knows how quickly the Chinese state will or will not adopt those imperialist habits.

    Such level-headed analyses complicate Von Drehle’s simplistic assertions, which could be why he leaves them out of the conversation.

    ‘Imperialism on the march in the East’

    Wall Street Journal: Russia, China and the Bid for Empire

    Robert D. Kaplan (Wall Street Journal, 1/13/22): “Imperialism throughout history has often originated from a deep well of insecurity.”

    In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (1/13/22), Robert D. Kaplan described Western imperialism as a feature of the past, rather than a present reality, three times. “Intellectuals can’t stop denouncing the West for its legacy of imperialism,” the piece began. “But the imperialism on the march today is in the East.” He went on to claim that “unlike Western countries, which are busy apologizing for their former conquests, the Chinese…take pride in their imperial legacies.” The article ended with Kaplan’s assertion that “the American left should focus on where empire as an ideal truly endures, which isn’t in the West.”

    Meanwhile, the US empire “truly endures” in the approximately 750 military bases it has in at least 80 countries (Al Jazeera, 9/10/21). China, by contrast, has just one overseas military base (Foreign Policy, 7/7/21).

    A puerile cartoon accompanied Kaplan’s piece, and it too denied contemporary American imperialism: A pair of giant octopuses are standing on a chessboard shaking hands. One octopus is covered in the red and yellow stars of China’s flag, the other in Russian colors; they’re holding all of the chess pieces, while a much smaller Uncle Sam looks on without any. The United States, in other words, is a powerless bystander with no holdings in the imperial great game.

    The US spends more on its military than any other country, accounting for 39% of all global military expenditure in 2020, and dramatically outpaces China in this regard, especially in per capita terms: In 2020, the US spent an estimated $778 billion on its armed forces, and China allocated an estimated $252 billion to its military (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 4/26/21)—$2,365 for each US citizen vs. $180 for each citizen of China.

    Similarly, Washington and its Western allies’ grip on the global financial system demonstrates that Western imperialism is chugging along. The US dollar is the global reserve currency (Atlantic, 9/6/21), not the yuan. The US and its partners are in control of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Al Jazeera, 11/26/20)—rather consequential chess pieces—while China doesn’t dominate any institution of global economics or governance of similar magnitude. Amid these conditions, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea and the rich economies of Europe—most of which are “in the West”—have drained $152 trillion dollars from the Global South since 1960 (Al Jazeera, 5/6/21).

    ‘No longer the imperialism of the West’

    Guardian: In China’s new age of imperialism, Xi Jinping gives thumbs down to democracy

    Simon Tisdall (Guardian, 12/12/21): “It’s difficult to regard Xi…as anything other than a totalitarian control freak with imperial fantasies.”

    Simon Tisdall of the Guardian (12/12/21) sounded a similar note in his article on “China’s New Age of Imperialism.” Like Kaplan, he referred to US imperialism in the past tense:

    Imperialism, in all its awful forms, still poses a threat. But it is no longer the imperialism of the West, rightly execrated and self-condemned. Today’s threat emanates from the East. Just as objectionable, and potentially more dangerous, it’s the prospect of a totalitarian 21st-century Chinese global empire.

    That Western imperialism is apparently “no longer” a threat will undoubtedly come as a relief to Afghans. Their country is on the brink of famine, with US sanctions effectively ensuring that Afghanistan can’t be fed  (New York Times, 12/4/21):

    Such widespread hunger is the most devastating sign of the economic crash that has crippled Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power. Practically overnight, billions of dollars in foreign aid that propped up the previous Western-backed government vanished and US sanctions on the Taliban isolated the country from the global financial system, paralyzing Afghan banks and impeding relief work by humanitarian organizations.

    When Tisdall wasn’t erasing American attempts to starve millions of people, he was inflating alleged Chinese threats to America, writing:

    US media reported last week that the port city of Bata in Equatorial Guinea could become China’s first Atlantic seaboard naval base—potentially putting warships and submarines within striking distance of America’s East Coast. It is said to be considering an island airbase in Kiribati that could in theory threaten Hawaii. Meanwhile, it continues to militarize atolls in the South China Sea.

    Yet the US having bases that put it “within striking distance” of China isn’t just a theoretical possibility: The US military already has nearly 300 military bases spread across East Asia, with seven more in nearby Australia. In September, the US, Britain and Australia announced a new military alliance aimed at China, which will involve a further military buildup (Salon, 10/28/21).

    Tisdall reduced the militarization of the South China Sea to a simplistic tale of a belligerent Chinese empire, rather than discussing these and other contexts, such as RIMPAC, a biennial US-led naval maneuver. RIMPAC is the world’s largest maritime exercise and functions as a show of force to China, which was disinvited from the festivities in 2018 (Washington Post, 8/17/20). Similarly, the US routinely sends naval ships through the South China Sea (CNN, 5/20/21), a move that antagonizes China about as much as Chinese vessels sailing through the Gulf of Mexico would upset the US.

    Even though Tisdall repeatedly denied that American imperialism is ongoing, near the end of the article he acknowledged that the US has vastly more global power than China: “By key measures—the number of overseas bases, alliances, military strike-power—America still greatly outstrips China’s regime.” He then changed his earlier opposition to “imperialism, in all its awful forms,” asserting that the US “greatly outstrips” China “in terms of respect for human values and rights.”

    Yet weeks before Tisdall’s article, UNICEF reported that 10,000 Yemeni children have been killed in the war on the country, which the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and which the US fuels and has fueled from the start (In These Times, 11/22/21; Middle East Eye, 11/17/17). The US has likewise demonstrated its disrespect for “human values and rights” by using its control of the international financial system to levy sanctions against Venezuela that, according to an estimate from two US economists, killed approximately 40,000 Venezuelans between August 2017 and April 2019 (CEPR, 4/25/19). No contemporary Chinese foreign policy is responsible for nearly as much suffering.

    ‘Imperial geography’

    To try to prove that China is the world’s foremost imperial threat, the coverage also points to China’s relations with Taiwan, and to its treatment of peoples living in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau. This aspect of the argument is odd, in that imperialism, in its contemporary usage, tends to refer to international relations. For instance, Tisdall (Guardian, 12/12/21) says Chinese state repression of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, or of residents of Hong Kong, amount to Xi acting like “a latter-day Roman emperor,” a plank in the writer’s assertion that China has less “respect for human values and rights” than the US empire.

    While there is evidence of significant human rights violations in both places, Tisdall provides no basis for believing that China has less of a claim to them than the US—or its close settler-colonial allies, such as Canada, Australia or New Zealand—does to Indigenous lands seized by European invaders from thousands of miles of way, or that China has done so in an even more brutal fashion.

    Like Tisdall, Kaplan (Wall Street Journal, 1/13/22) calls Hong Kong and Macau part of China’s “imperial geography,” a peculiar way to describe two regions returned to China by Western imperial powers: Britain gave back Hong Kong in 1997, and Portugal did the same with Macau in 1999. The author also writes that Xinjiang and Tibet “represent colonial legacies of former Qing rule,” which is one way of saying that China has had authority over Xinjiang since the 18th century (BBC, 9/26/14). As for Tibet, Robert Barnett (NPR, 4/11/08), director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University, says that “Tibet has never been considered independent by major players on the world stage.”

    Kaplan also points to Chinese saber-rattling against Taiwan. The latter has many of the trappings of a state, but only 13 countries regard it as an independent nation (New York Times, 12/10/21).

    None of this is to suggest that China should resolve the Taiwan question militarily. Nor is to endorse Chinese policies in Macau, Hong Kong, Tibet or Xinjiang. The point is that authors like Tisdall and Kaplan are playing fast and loose with history and international law, and applying wildly unequal standards that cast China as an evil empire and the United States as alternately a benign empire or not an empire at all.

    Longer-term trend

    Atlantic: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth

    Atlantic (2/6/21): “The truth about the widely, perhaps willfully, misunderstood case of Hambantota Port is long overdue.”

    These recent articles are part of a longer-term trend across much of the corporate media. Last summer, a Slate article (7/14/21) maintained:

    Beijing is capable of perpetuating imperialism in its own right. One case in point is the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive program of investments and infrastructure projects abroad. Designed to overcome China’s own overproduction dilemma at a time of stagnating wages and inadequate domestic demand, it targets developing countries in the region with extraterritorial legal arrangements, debt-trap diplomacy and, unsurprisingly, environmental exploitation.

    The authors aren’t the only ones in corporate media to make this claim about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Washington Post, 8/27/18). While BRI can give China leverage over borrowers, there is academic research that calls into question whether BRI amounts to imperialism: For example, Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire (Atlantic, 2/6/21), of Johns Hopkins University and Harvard, respectively, studied BRI and disputed the charge that it is a form of “modern-day colonialism.” “Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” they noted.

    In 2020, a Wall Street Journal op-ed (10/1/20) characterized BRI as “imperial overreach,” citing Africa and Latin America as examples. Justin Podur (FAIR.org,  1/31/22) recently demonstrated  that there is no convincing analogy between China’s policies in Africa and those of European empires, and it’s equally rich for the leading US financial paper to accuse another country of imperialism in Latin America. Katz (Life on the Left, 9/6/21), noting the “overwhelming intrusion of the US embassies” in Latin America, points out that “China is miles away from any such encroachment”: “Profiting from the sale of manufactured goods and the purchase of raw materials is not the same as sending the Marines, training police and financing coups d’état.”

    Two months before the Journal essay, a Newsweek article (8/31/20) claimed that

    Xi is now openly promoting imperial-era views that the Chinese emperor had the right and obligation to rule tianxia, or “all under heaven,” thereby suggesting China should now be considered the world’s only sovereign state.

    It would be remarkable if Xi said that China should rule “all under heaven,” or be the “world’s only sovereign state,” but the author provides no source to that effect, and I can find no evidence that Xi has. While US leaders don’t say that they think the United States should “be considered the world’s only sovereign state,” the power the US has secured for itself comes closer than that of anyone else. While Washington’s leaders don’t say that they think the United States should “be considered the world’s only sovereign state,” the power it has secured for itself  brings the US government much closer to having that type of authority than any other state.

    Instead of carefully considering the implications of China’s rise for the rest of the world, these articles have opted to whip up xenophobia against the country while also glossing over—if not outright cheering—US imperialism.

     

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  • Calling Both Sides ‘Spoiled’ in Baseball Lockout Ignores How Owners Forced Labor War

     

    AP: Locked out MLB players reject offer of federal mediation

    AP (2/4/22): “Players blame owners for the lockout,” but MLB’s commissioner “said his side was being proactive.”

    As Major League Baseball’s scheduled March 31 opening day looms nearer without a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), the nation’s sports media are pointing fingers squarely at both sides: the players’ union as well as team owners, who have been locked in so-far fruitless talks since the owners imposed a lockout in early December.

    “After a half-year of bickering over the sport’s economics, baseball’s warring factions couldn’t even agree on whether to have a mediator,” wrote veteran Associated Press sports reporter Ronald Blum (2/4/22). Paul Hoynes of Cleveland.com (2/15/22) wrote that the start of spring training had been postponed because instead of seeking a quick resolution, “the two parties have circled each other like pampered and spoiled entities too self absorbed to reach a settlement.” The Tampa Bay Times’ John Romano (2/15/22) likewise decried both owners and players, saying the two sides had

    months to work on a solution, and instead have mostly ignored each other while suggesting the other side is being A) uncooperative B) unrealistic C) disingenuous D) all of the above.

    It’s the kind of both-sidesing that’s familiar in media coverage of partisan political debates, whether over the right-wing insurrection at the Capitol (FAIR.org, 8/2/21), congressional budget battles (FAIR.org, 12/22/20), or the benefits of injecting bleach to ward off Covid (FAIR.org, 4/28/20). As in those cases, the media’s coverage of the ongoing baseball lockout obscures both the origins of the dispute and who’s responsible for its consequences.

    Enshrining loophole gains

    SBNation: The Rise of Cheap

    “Fewer and fewer players are seeing benefits from baseball’s record-setting revenues,” SBNation (3/18) reported in 2018.

    While the lockout officially began when MLB’s CBA expired on December 2, everyone in the sports world has known for years that team owners were preparing to shut down baseball in hopes of enshrining the gains they’ve made in exploiting loopholes in the last agreement to siphon money away from players and into their own pockets. Soon after the previous CBA was agreed to in 2016, owners began aggressively cutting loose players in their prime who were eligible for higher salaries under the league’s system of arbitration (which kicks in once a player has three to four years in the majors) and free agency (which requires six to seven years of service time). In 2019, the last season for which full data is available, over half of the total service time was accrued by players who combined for less than 10% of the total pay (Twitter, 12/2/21)—indicating that team owners were still paying for stars, but otherwise filling out their rosters with the cheapest talent available.

    This not only cost players who were forced to sign cut-rate contracts at well below their market value to compete with youngsters with artificially depressed salaries (SBNation, 3/18; Deadspin, 1/14/19), it trickled down to younger players as well: Ronald Acuña Jr., one of the brightest young talents in the game, surprised everyone by signing a relatively modest eight-year, $100 million deal in 2019 (MarcNormandin.com, 4/12/19), taking a guaranteed lump sum rather than gambling that someone would eventually pay him what he’s worth.

    At the same time, owners have used a “luxury tax” on high-payroll teams as a de facto salary cap (Deadspin, 1/31/19), driving down spending by imposing huge fines on teams that exceed an arbitrary limit—one that the owners, in their latest contract proposals, have repeatedly proposed making even more regressive by significantly ramping up the penalties even for first-time, low-level offenders (CBS Sports, 2/21/22).

    The result has been an increasingly two-tier labor system where players can only fully share in baseball’s multi-billion-dollar yearly revenues (Forbes, 12/21/19) once they’ve played in the majors for four years or more—but owners are increasingly incentivized to ditch expensive older players for younger ones making near the league minimum (DRaysBay, 3/21/19).

    That minimum salary, meanwhile, has actually fallen relative to inflation (TheScore, 12/2/21), rising only 6.6% since 2017; one of the union’s main demands has been to increase it to $775,000 for the 2022 season. While the salaries of the top stars continue to soar, the average salary fell throughout the life of the previous CBA, from $4.45 million in 2017 to $4.17 million in 2021, and the median salary now sits at $1.15 million, down 30% from 2015 (ESPN, 4/16/21).

    There is a third tier, meanwhile, which is the minor leagues, where the vast majority of professional ballplayers are employed, hoping one day to have a shot at the majors. For minor-leaguers, even the major-league minimum salary is a distant dream, as they must work for years at wages as low as $500 a week, while paying for their own equipment and finding their own housing in minor-league cities—something that has left some ballplayers living in their cars (Athletic, 8/5/21). During spring training, it’s even worse, as minor-leaguers aren’t paid at all for their required work time (Defector, 9/8/21) beyond free lunches of single slices of deli meat and cheese on white bread (Marcnormandin.com, 2/12/20) (Though minor-league baseball players—unlike, say, minor-league hockey players—lack their own union, they are currently part of a class-action suit challenging baseball owners’ classification of them as “part-time seasonal apprentices” not subject to minimum-wage laws: Baseball Prospectus, 10/23/20.)

    Stop the bleeding

    Tampa Bay Tribune: The only thing more abundant in baseball than money is shame

    John Romano (Tampa Bay Tribune, 2/15/22): “Owners and players…[are] just trying to figure out who gets more time in the vault with the billions of dollars that fans, networks and sponsors are throwing at them.”

    If this is the necessary context that led to the baseball lockout, you would have been hard pressed to find much of it in most media coverage. Romano, in his Tampa Bay Times column, called it “entirely fair and appropriate to call [owners] greedy %$@#*&!s,” then one sentence later said, while it’s “chic” to point out how younger players are underpaid, “you can’t bemoan the $605,000 bargain that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was in 2021 without acknowledging the same system allowed Albert Pujols to pocket $140 million while being a below-average player for the past five years.” (Pujols, then just two years removed from winning back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards, was signed to a 10-year, $240 million contract in 2011 by Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno—right around the same time Moreno signed a new TV deal that would pay him $3 billion over the next decade: SBNation, 12/8/11.)

    Even more pointed was AP Sports’ tweet (2/23/22) promoting its story on February 23’s bargaining session between the owners and players:

    As at least one Twitter user noted, calling out union leader Max Scherzer—a future Hall of Famer who is one of a few dozen elite players to cash in on his pitching skills with multiple big-money free agent deals—for driving a Porsche is a bit disingenuous when there’s no mention of the many private jets owned by the league’s team owners. And it’s an especially cheap shot when Scherzer has been one of the union leaders most vocal about needing an agreement that shares the wealth with all players, not just the most talented few, telling the Athletic (11/28/21) last fall, “Unless this CBA completely addresses the competition [issues] and younger players getting paid, that’s the only way I’m going to put my name on it.”

    The union did not realize they were signing on for dropping average salaries and a preference for league-minimum players when they negotiated the 2016 CBA, as they believed they were negotiating with a partner acting in good faith. The present bargaining is an opportunity to reverse these trends, and as it will take more than one CBA to undo all of that damage, their goals this time out are modest: in short, to stop the bleeding.

    On the other side, it is just as vital to the owners that they are able to codify the loopholes that led the league to this point (Defector, 2/18/21). Therefore, they wasted away the summer making unserious economic proposals, then locked the players out once the CBA expired (Baseball Prospectus, 12/3/21). The owners claimed this was all done as a defensive measure to hasten the pace of bargaining and avoid any missed games—even though the players would have to strike in order for games to be missed, and a strike can only legally occur if there is an impasse in negotiations brought on by MLB’s refusal to negotiate.

    ‘Both sides are exploiting’

    The media have too often been willing to play along with that strategy. One typical tweet, by ESPN’s longtime baseball writer Buster Olney (11/29/21), bemoaned:

    But at the time Olney posted that tweet, everyone involved knew that a lockout was coming, especially since the owners had refused to even make a proposal unless the players preemptively agreed not to ask for any changes to the core economics of the system set up in 2016 (ESPN, 1/5/22).

    The players weren’t “exploiting” anything: The owners were preparing to lock the players out, while at the same time scrambling to sign them to new contracts so they wouldn’t have to rush around filling key roster spots post-lockout—including Scherzer, who was signed to a $43-million-a-year deal just before the lockout by New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, the billionaire hedge-fund trader who narrowly escaped a lifetime ban from the SEC in 2016 after charges of insider trading (New York Times, 1/8/16).

    Sports Illustrated: Don’t Be Silly. This Isn’t Rob Manfred’s Fault, Says Rob Manfred.

    After MLB commissioner Rob Manfeld said, “We hope that the lockout will jumpstart the negotiations,”  Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri (2/10/22) noted, “the league waited 43 days to return to the negotiating table with a response to the last proposal from the players.”

    There were occasional exceptions that took a deeper look at the causes of the lockout. Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri (2/10/22), for example, reported on how MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced in December that he hoped a lockout would “jumpstart the negotiations”—then went seven weeks before even going back to the negotiating table with a proposal, one that largely ignored any of the union’s complaints about owners manipulating the current system to drive down pay. She also noted that owners’ claims of financial struggles run counter to the soaring sale prices of MLB teams in recent years.

    One reason we may not be seeing more reporting like this can be seen in the cautionary tale of Ken Rosenthal, who worked as a commentator for MLB Network until last year, when the TV network—which is majority-owned by MLB—declined to renew his contract (New York Post, 1/3/22) after he wrote a piece for the Athletic (6/16/20) that was mildly critical of commissioner Manfred’s handling of the negotiations for 2020’s pandemic-shortened season. MLB’s ability to reward or punish reporters from other outlets by extending or withdrawing lucrative offers to work for its own state media has long been worrisome, and only becomes more so during a contract war—especially since, once the lockout began, the “This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs” addendum once included on every story became a thing of the past.

    ‘Stark diminishment of engagement’

    Instead, we get baseball writers like Randy Miller of NJ.com (2/9/22) writing, “Spring training will not start on time next week due to a labor war that has no end in sight,” while “the Players Association is not backing down in its fight to bring a much bigger piece of the money pie its way”—something that’s only true if returning to the revenue split of six years ago represents “a bigger piece of the pie.” Or ESPN’s Olney tweeting (Twitter, 2/16/22) that the enduring lockout is a sign of “the stark diminishment of engagement and conversation. It costs nothing to talk.”

    NJ.com: yankees' gerrit cole on eve of expected solemn mlb announcement: solidarity high'

    Randy Miller (NJ.com, 2/9/22): “The Players Association is not backing down in its fight to bring a much bigger piece of the money pie its way.”

    But calls for everyone just to sit down and talk ignore that the two sides have very different goals in mind. The union wants to stop the codifying of the various exploitative loopholes the league introduced into the CBA in the last decade, while trying to ensure that future young players won’t be exploited in the same ways as present-day young players, which in turn should help improve the level of competition in the league and make for a better product for fans, too. The owners, meanwhile, want to codify the various exploitative loopholes they introduced into the CBA in the last decade, and they were willing to lock the players out and risk missing out on 2022 regular season games to do that (Defector, 2/18/22). These are not the same, nor are they the kind of thing that “engagement and conversation” are apt to fix.

    “Labor peace” is a lie: It is a call for the perpetuation of the status quo. If there is peace, it simply means the unions do not realize that they are under assault — which is exactly what led to the 2016 CBA, and the discontent that arose from it when the owners went full mask-off with exploiting cheaper talent and ignoring more expensive players unless they were superstars. For trying to reverse this trend, the players end up lumped in as equally as bad as the owners.

    The players, if anything, could be asking for more. Though they would arguably be justified in looking to the past and demanding another tripling of the minimum salary (Marcnormandin.com, 3/8/21), they’ve largely limited their demands to a more modest jump in the minimum, as well as an end to teams purposely manipulating young players’ contracts to keep them from the open market, and discarding high-priced players while leaning ever more heavily on younger athletes who aren’t allowed to offer their services on that open market.

    Those players with the nine-digit contracts that are beloved of sportswriters trying to sell this as a mere squabble between overpaid rich folks, meanwhile, would gain nothing from the union’s demands, as it hasn’t made new proposals to help them. After all, Max Scherzer already has a Porsche.

    The post Calling Both Sides ‘Spoiled’ in Baseball Lockout Ignores How Owners Forced Labor War appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Foreign Agents Designation Causes Media Cold War

     

    Politico: U.S. to treat 5 Chinese media firms as 'foreign missions'

    The US government in 2020 declared five Chinese media entities to be “not independent news organizations” but rather “effectively controlled by the [Chinese] government” (Politico, 2/18/20).

    Most nations have some form of state media. These days, it’s pretty easy for Americans to access any number of foreign state media outlets, and many of them have journalists covering US affairs. Some of those journalists must register as “foreign agents” with the US government. But others don’t have to—a distinction that has more to do with geopolitics than with journalism.

    The Trump administration mandated “five Chinese state-run media organizations to register their personnel and property with the US government”: Xinhua News Agency, China Global Television Network, China Radio International and the parent companies of the China Daily and People’s Daily newspapers (Politico, 2/18/20). The administration also “limited to 100 the number of Chinese citizens who may work in the United States” for those organizations (New York Times, 3/2/20).

    The privately owned Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao was forced to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act because it “is viewed as a pro-Beijing outlet” (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21). US state media organ Radio Free Asia (8/27/21) trumpeted the “foreign agent” designation for Sing Tao, quoting one Hong Kong journalist saying that it is “a fairly open secret that it is an underground CCP [Chinese Communist Party] organization.”

    Russia’s RT registered in 2017, as US intelligence agencies claimed it “contributed to the Kremlin’s campaign to interfere with [the 2016] presidential election in favor” of Donald Trump (Reuters, 11/13/17). Qatari-owned Al Jazeera was forced to register (New York Times, 9/15/20) because content “designed to influence American perceptions of a domestic policy issue or a foreign nation’s activities or its leadership qualifies as ‘political activities,’” according to one US official. Relations between Qatar and the US are complex, as they had strained during the Trump administration (NBC, 6/9/17) and have improved under President Joe Biden (NBC, 9/13/21), although the oil-rich nation is accused of funding Palestinian terror operations, adding to tensions (Washington Post, 12/15/20; Jerusalem Post, 2/17/22).

    But other state-owned outlets, like the BBC, CBC and Deutsche Welle, do not register as foreign agents in the US. Clearly, the standard is that the “foreign agent” label applies when an outlet’s government owner has rocky relations with Washington. And for many press advocates, that’s causing problems.

    Not just symbolic

    American Prospect: Congress Proposes $500 Million for Negative News Coverage of China

    The US government is proposing to spend half a billion dollars on “independent” anti-China media (American Prospect,  2/9/22).

    The designation isn’t just symbolic: Through FARA enforcement, the government can keep a closer eye on these outlets’ activities. US state media network Voice of America (5/12/21) reported that CGTN “spent more than $50 million on its US operations last year, accounting for nearly 80% of total Chinese spending on influencing US public opinion and policy,” while China Daily “reported more than $3 million in spending last year, including expenses related to advertising in American newspapers.”

    VoA called this a “propaganda spending spree,” as China wanted to “burnish its global image,” but even if that’s true, there’s plenty of evidence suggesting the US does the same thing. The US has looked to invest half a billion dollars into media organizations that counter the Chinese narrative (American Prospect, 2/9/22), causing the South China Morning Post (4/28/21) to scoff: “When the Chinese do it, it’s propaganda. When Washington does it, it’s ‘investing in our values.’” Xinhua (2/23/22) went further, saying that America’s move to fund journalism in Asia for political purposes makes the world “wonder how the self-styled ‘beacon of press freedom’ dares to openly manipulate media in an attempt to squeeze China out of what it calls a ‘Great Power Competition.’”

    In a statement to the Department of Justice concerning the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Committee to Protect Journalists (2/11/22) noted that not all state-owned media outlets are the same, but “the glaring difference in the way these media outlets are treated under FARA raises questions about the fairness of its implementation.” CPJ called for “the end of compelling media outlets to register, which impacts their operations and their ability to engage in journalism freely.”

    It went on:

    The inconsistent application of FARA has created the appearance that the act is a foreign policy tool, and has provided justification for foreign governments to use similar labeling against news organizations that receive funding from within the United States. Countries including Hungary, Israel, Russia and Ukraine have all cited the US use of FARA when they passed legislation requiring civil society organizations to register with the government.

    Even the Council on Foreign Relations (8/24/20), which wields enormous pressure on US foreign policy and press coverage of foreign affairs, sees a problem, saying that “such tough measures against Chinese state media could backfire.” By using FARA against these outlets, the US government “potentially overstates the influence of China’s state media outlets, and rather than modeling an open society, it risks appearing as if it does not care about press freedom.”

    Politicized applications

    Guardian: Putin’s crackdown: how Russia’s journalists became ‘foreign agents’

    Forcing journalists with overseas ties to register is an “oppressive new law” (Guardian, 9/11/21)—when Moscow does it.

    Indeed, the choice by these countries to register each other’s journalists is a part of a brewing media cold war. Russia acted in kind when it decided to list journalists working there as foreign agents (NPR, 7/31/21; Guardian, 9/11/21), and Russia added to its foreign agents list Bellingcat, which is highly critical of Russia, and the US-run Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is specifically meant to counter Russian-government narratives in Eastern Europe (RFE/RL, 10/9/21).

    The Chinese government showed its might during these escalating tensions when it expelled New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post journalists and “demanded that those outlets, as well as the Voice of America and Time magazine, provide the Chinese government with detailed information about their operations” (New York Times, 3/17/20). Both countries eventually eased “restrictions on access for journalists from each other’s countries” (Reuters, 11/16/21), but foreign reporters continue to complain of stifling working conditions in China (Wall  Street Journal, 1/30/22; CNN, 1/31/22). China is ranked 177th on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, beating out North Korea, Eritrea and Turkmenistan.

    Not all state broadcasters are the same, but even the venerated BBC, whose journalists do not have to register under FARA in the US, isn’t free from the idea that it works in the service of the state.

    One study by Cardiff University researchers, looking at “BBC news coverage from 2007 and 2012, concluded that conservative opinions received more airtime than progressive ones” (The Week, 11/26/21). Journalist Peter Oborne (Guardian, 12/3/19) sees the BBC not as a partisan news agency, but as one that favors the state generally: “The BBC does not have a party political bias: It is biased towards the government of the day,” he said. And as one former BBC journalist put it, staffers at the broadcaster’s BBC Monitoring program, which collects and re-reports from global media, historically were “working for…the Ministry of Defense,” specifically for the purposes of foreign intelligence (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 10/26/13).

    This isn’t an argument for forcing the BBC to register under FARA. It is an argument that the application of FARA to foreign journalists is politicized and should be stopped, as it only makes it harder for all journalists to do their jobs.

     

    The post Foreign Agents Designation Causes Media Cold War appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Palin v. NYT Is Latest Salvo Against Free Press Protection

     

    Sarah Pac: It's Time to Take a Stand

    The ad from Sarah Palin’s PAC that prompted the New York Times (6/14/17) to write that in Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ 2011 shooting, “the link to political incitement was clear.”

    Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate who helped propel the right flank of the Republican Party into its current prominence, came to New York City with a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times. She lost in court, but her offensive against the paper is a symptom of a growing political campaign against a crucial legal centerpiece of US press freedom.

    A Times editorial (6/14/17) used an ad from Palin’s political action committee that placed crosshairs over congressional districts as an example of partisan speech run amok, suggesting it had a connection to a 2011 shooting that maimed Rep. Gabby Giffords and left six others dead.  The original text read:

    In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.

    The paper later issued a correction (6/16/17), saying that the editorial “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric” and the shooting of Giffords, when “no such link was established.” A revised text replaced “the link to political incitement was clear” with “At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right,” and added: “But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.”

    Following the standard

    Palin said in court that the mistake caused her lasting damage (NPR, 2/10/22): “It’s hard to lay your head on a pillow and have a restful night when you know that lies are told about you, a specific lie that was not going to be fixed.”

    The jury rejected her defamation claim, bringing the Times a legal victory against the former governor (CNN, 2/15/22). The jury’s role in the case, it turned out, was merely symbolic. Judge Jed Rakoff declared as the jury deliberated that he would dismiss the case regardless of what they decided, because Palin “failed to show the Times acted with ‘actual malice.’” And that, according to the precedent set in the 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan, is “the standard in lawsuits involving public figures” (Reuters, 2/14/22). (The “actual malice” standard requires public figures suing for libel to prove that falsehoods were made either intentionally or with “reckless disregard” for the truth.)

    James Bennet, the editorial page editor at the Times at the time, took full responsibility for associating Palin’s ad with the Giffords shooting (New York Post, 2/8/22). The paper admitted that it made an error and issued a correction promptly (NPR, 2/12/22). Even looking at the editorial’s original form, however, it’s hard to prove that a vague word like “link” is factually false; it never came out and said that Giffords’ shooting was caused by Palin’s ad—a point Bennet made at trial: “If I thought it caused the violence, I would have used the word ‘cause,’” he said (Reuters, 2/9/22). It’s unsurprising that the jury found for the Times, even without the “actual malice” standard that public figures have to meet when suing for libel.

    Cheering for weaker legal protections

    Sarah Palin, the New York Times and the Oops Defense

    The Wall Street Journal s James Freeman (2/9/22) would like to make it easier for politicians to sue journalists because the New York Times “continues to mention Ms. Palin in a negative light.”

    But that protection for the press, once seen as a necessary shield to protect independent speech from powerful figures who could otherwise use legal might to crush dissent, is being turned into the bad guy in this case, less a shield than a weapon that the establishment press can use against anyone in the public eye that it wants to tar publicly.

    Palin, a former governor and vice presidential candidate as well as a powerful icon in conservative movement, presented herself as a David to the Times’ Goliath (New York Times, 2/10/22). Her lawyer, Shane Vogt, asserted that Palin’s team was “keenly aware of the fact that we’re fighting an uphill battle” (Politico, 2/3/22). The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman (2/9/22) said that “Bennet is arguing that he didn’t mean to write what he clearly wrote,” and that if his “argument is credited, media outfits can publish almost anything and then run corrections while claiming they meant no harm.”

    For many observers, these were crocodile tears and part of a public campaign to discredit the media and paint conservatives as victims of an unaccountable newspaper. Politico (2/10/22) said that Palin “knows the whole episode has enhanced, not damaged, her reputation with the partisans on whom her political and financial fortunes depend.” Her target is “the news organization her confederates on the right have seethed over since the Nixon era,” and others are “cheering her case” because they “hope to weaken the legal protections benefiting all journalists.”

    ‘Constitutional Brezhnev doctrine’

    FAIR: The Judicial Right Is Coming After Freedom of the Press

    FAIR.org (3/26/21): Right-wing judicial activism “has breathed new legal life into the prospect of making it easier for political and corporate leaders to use defamation suits to stifle the press.”

    That last part is critical. Protections like those afforded under Sullivan have been considered sacrosanct by press and free speech advocates. When then-President Donald Trump vowed to make it easier for him to sue journalists, the press scoffed (CNBC, 1/10/18; LA Times, 9/8/18). But the Palin case is a reminder that this threat was not the random musing of a thin-skinned demagogue, but an idea gaining steam on the broader right.

    Almost a full year ago, FAIR (3/26/21) pointed to a dissent written by circuit court judge, long-time conservative legal operative Laurence Silberman, which called the Sullivan standard a “constitutional Brezhnev doctrine” to defend the liberal press against the right. And that was just the tip of the iceberg: At least two Supreme Court justices have wanted to revisit the Sullivan standard, and legal scholar Richard Epstein has railed against it since the 1980s.

    This has intensified. The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press (1/18/22) said that at the beginning of this year, the Supreme Court “called for a response to yet another petition asking it to overturn its decision” in Sullivan. Last year, Justice Neil Gorsuch cited “‘momentous changes in the nation’s media landscape since 1964’ as his reason to revisit Sullivan.”

    The committee also noted that “Justice Clarence Thomas pointed to the ease with which the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory spread online”—an odd argument for Thomas to make, given the fervent advocacy of his wife, right-wing activist Gini Thomas, on behalf of the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump (New York Times Magazine, 2/22/22).

    WaPo: Is the legal standard for libel outdated? Sarah Palin could help answer.

    Genevieve Lakier (Washington Post, 2/3/22) suggests making it difficult for public figures to sue “might have made sense” when it protected “large media organizations,” but it “makes no sense today, when anyone can spread misinformation so long as they have social media followers.”

    University of Chicago law professor Genevieve Lakier (Washington Post, 2/3/22) cited these critiques of the “actual malice” standards. She noted that while Sullivan is “an emblem of American free-speech exceptionalism and a source of pride,” it is also “an accident of history”—one that “removes any legal incentive for those who write about public officials or public figures to vigorously fact-check their stories.”

    The United States, Lakier said, should “not let Sullivan limit our imagination of how First Amendment law could better serve the public interest in a vastly different media environment” from 1964, when the decision was handed down. (Her “most obvious” suggestion as a replacement for Sullivan are “damage caps”—which would allow lawsuits by public figures to be a manageable expense for outlets with deep pockets, while making them potentially catastrophic to independent journalists.)

    ‘A perverse incentive’

    Three years ago, the American Bar Association (2/27/19) noted:

    With breaking news being delivered in a tweet, it is easier now more than ever for journalists to simply get it wrong. This raises two questions: (1) Should there be a more relaxed standard for public officials rather than actual malice, and (2) would doing so create a chilling effect? These questions may soon have answers if courts do what Justice Thomas urges, which is reconsideration of jurisprudence in this area.

    In the end, Justice Thomas seems to go a step further than just arguing for a more relaxed standard; relying on common law, he deems libel against public figures, “if anything, more serious and injurious than ordinary libels.” His concurrence provides momentum for critics of [Sullivan] and room for courts to reexamine the standard, as the press continues to face increased scrutiny.

    Noah Feldman said at Bloomberg (7/7/21) that, according to Gorsuch, “the Sullivan precedent creates a perverse incentive not to check facts—so that you can later say that you didn’t realize what you were saying was false,” and that therefore, “the Sullivan rule no longer serves its original objective of creating an informed public debate.” (Gorsuch is describing here what’s known legally as “reckless disregard”—precisely what is not protected by the Sullivan standard.)

    Press advocates believe that false statements against a public figure come with the cost of celebrity, Feldman argued, but “it has become harder for such stories to be shunted aside.” For “non-celebrities who might still be deemed public figures,” the actual malice standard “makes it very hard for them to vindicate their concerns about their own reputation.” Feldman warned press advocates to brace themselves for this precedent to be revisited.

    A partisan distrust

    Public trust in media has fallen, although that trend is highly partisan. Gallup (10/7/21) noted that “68% of Democrats, 11% of Republicans and 31% of independents…trust the media a great deal or fair amount,” while “confidence in the media among Republicans over the past five years is at unprecedented lows.” Palin’s unsuccessful legal challenge against the Times will only solidify that skepticism among her political base, boosting the narrative that conservatives can be vilified in the court of opinion with no recourse in a court of law.

    Gallup: Americans' Trust in Mass Media, by Political Party

    Gallup (10/7/21)

    The consequences of that skepticism go beyond drops in subscriptions and the rise of more partisan, start-up media outlets. It is about building a political and legal case that media outlets enjoy too much free speech, and that a conservative Supreme Court should undo a precedent by the Warren court, the most liberal era of the high court’s history. Such a change could have an enormous stifling effect on the press—establishment and otherwise.

     

    The post <i>Palin v. NYT</i> Is Latest Salvo Against Free Press Protection appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Joseph Torres on Tulsa Massacre

     

    Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre

    Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre (photo via bswise)

    This week on CounterSpin: Black History Month has always been something of a double-edged sword: It implies that Black history is somehow not “history,” that it has to be shoehorned in, “artificially,” to garner any value, with the corollary implication that if you choose to ignore it, you aren’t missing anything crucial.

    The idea that Black Americans are somehow something other than (meaning “less than”) “real” Americans is stupid, toxic…and fully in play, as reflected in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s response to a reporter’s question about efforts to suppress Black people’s voting rights with the statement that “the concern is misplaced because, if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” So: There’s a reason Black people feel a need to lift up our particular history–our efforts and accomplishments, in and despite the context of violent, systemic harm we live in–that distinguishes that from the bland and euphemistic vision that usually passes as “US history.”

    What matters is how the history of Black people is approached, discussed and integrated into what’s happening today. Journalists, of course, have an opportunity to do that work every month, not just the shortest.

    Last year, we saw some open media acknowledgement of an event  previously shrouded in silence and ignorance: the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921. The layers of that story, the roles played by various actors, make it especially relevant for news media, who, to fully tell it, need to reflect on their own role, then…and now.

    We talked about the Tulsa massacre around its anniversary last June, with Joseph Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan González of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He works, as does CounterSpin‘s Janine Jackson, with Media 2070, a consortium of media-makers and activists that are detailing the history of US media participation in anti-Black racism, as well as collectively dreaming reparative policies, interventions and futures.

    We hear from Joseph Torres about Tulsa this week on the show.

          CounterSpin220225Torres.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at media coverage of Ukraine.

          CounterSpin220225Banter.mp3

     

    Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

    The post Joseph Torres on Tulsa Massacre appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • In Ukraine, ‘No One Hears That There Is a Diplomatic Solution’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Bryce Greene about Ukraine for the February 18, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220218Greene.mp3

     

    WaPo: The less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want U.S. to intervene

    Washington Post (4/7/14)

    Janine Jackson: Many Americans are confused or just unknowledgeable about Ukraine. They couldn’t find it on a map. A 2014 Washington Post story noted that the less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want the US to intervene.

    Well, into that void have rushed corporate news media, telling us for weeks now that there is a threat—presumably to us—over there, and we need to get ready for war. The ease with which media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might need to be sent off to a violent death in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. US officials accusing journalists who ask basic evidentiary questions of consorting with the enemy—should be disturbing.

    The very fact that news media have a framework in which there are enemies whose actions don’t merit thoughtful consideration, and a US “us” whose actions are always good, all of this should disturb you—not just about foreign policy, but about the power of news media to amp people up to accept horrific, avoidable actions.

    The current crisis with the US and Russia about Ukraine is a test of many things, not least news media’s ability and willingness to disengage themselves from these frozen narratives, from uncritical parroting of official sources, and from the devastating idea that diplomacy is weakness, and massive violence, or threats of massive violence, are the best way to address conflict.

    Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” appeared recently on FAIR.org. He joins us now by phone from Indianapolis. Welcome to CounterSpin, Bryce Greene.

    Bryce Greene: Thanks for having me on. I’m happy to be here.

    FAIR: What You Should Really Know About Ukraine

    FAIR.org (1/28/22)

    JJ: Your straightforward piece, an explainer about explainers, got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org. People needed it. And I’m just going to ask you to talk us through the official line on Ukraine, and the questions that we should have about it. Because all of the elements—Russians as cartoons; the US, as ever, engaged in democracy promotion; oh, are there material interests there? How dare you suggest!— It’s all so dusty, this playbook, you know?

    And part of what feels so dated about it is that it’s about NATO. I know for a fact that listeners under, like, heck, 40 years old are like, well, I’ve heard the word NATO, but whaat? You know, why? Isn’t the Cold War over? And yet NATO, and what it represents in 2022, are at the core here. So just start us off wherever you would like to, in terms of helping people understand what’s actually going on right now.

    BG: Right, so most media outlets try to put the current escalation in context. And when they do, they usually start at one event, the 2014 annexation of Crimea. And they use this to demonstrate how Russia has imperial ambitions to reconquer the old Soviet territories and reestablish the old Soviet Union.

    But for that to have any real credibility, you need to ignore what happened right before 2014, what happened right before the Donbas uprising, what happened before Russia began backing the separatist rebels.

    And that takes you back to early 2014, when the US government helped violently oust the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in what was called the Maidan Coup. After he fled the country, the new government immediately established closer ties to Europe and the US, and turned away from Putin’s Russia.

    Now, understanding why and how we did that is key to understanding Putin’s actions today. Like, if the United States had a neighbor who recently had a government change, instigated in part by Russia, and then that country tried to join a hostile military alliance, I think the US would be rightly concerned. They’d lose their minds. But you don’t really see that same concern extended to what’s going on over there in Ukraine.

    So this whole story of NATO expansion and economic expansion, it begins right after the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The US and Russia made a deal that NATO, the Cold War alliance, would not expand east past a reunified Germany. No reason to escalate tensions unnecessarily.

    But unfortunately, Washington decided to expand anyway. And, you know, they were the only superpower left, there was no one to challenge them, so they decided they could do it. They ignored Russian objections and continued to enlarge the military alliance one country at a time.

    And even at the time, Cold Warriors like the famed diplomat George Kennan warned that this was a recipe for disaster. It would make Russia feel trapped and surrounded, and when major nuclear powers feel trapped and surrounded, it doesn’t really make for a peaceful world.

    But as we all know, Washington isn’t in the interest of peace, and they did it anyway. In 2004, the US poured millions of dollars into the anti-Russian opposition in Ukraine. They funded media and NGOs supporting opposition candidates. And they did this using organizations like the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. These organizations are broadly understood to serve regime change interests in the name of “democracy.”

    Now, in 2004, it didn’t work exactly, but Ukraine began to start making closer ties to the EU and US. And that process continued up to 2014.

    Shortly before the overthrow, the Ukrainian government was negotiating closer integration into the EU, and closer integration with the Western economic bloc. And they were being offered loans by the International Monetary Fund, the major world lending agency that represents private interests around the Western world. So to get those loans, they had to do all sorts of things to their economy, commonly known as “structural adjustment.” This included cutting public sector wages, shrinking the health and education sectors, privatizing the economy and cutting gas subsidies for the people.

    And at the time, Russia was offering a plan for economic integration to Ukraine that didn’t contain any of these strings. So when President Viktor Yanukovych chose Russia, well, that set off a wave of protests that were supported and partially funded by the United States. In fact, John McCain and Obama administration officials even flew to the Maidan Square to help support the protesters who wanted to oust the president and change the government.

    BBC: Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call

    BBC (2/7/14)

    So at this point, I want listeners to ask themselves, what if Russia were sending high-level government officials to anti-government protests in Canada or Mexico? What if one of Putin’s advisors right now went to go encourage the trucker protests in Canada, and said that they should get rid of their kind of government? We’d lose our minds. And rightfully so. That’s just ridiculous. And what’s worse is that right after the protests started, there was a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland, one of Obama’s State Department advisors—

    JJ: Right.

    BG: —and the US ambassador to Ukraine, in which they were describing how they wanted to set up a new government. They were picking and choosing who would be in the government, who would be out.

    Well, a few weeks after that, the Ukrainian government was overthrown. And the guy who they designated as our guy, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, became the prime minister.

    So clearly, clearly, there’s a lot of US involvement in how the Ukrainian government has shifted over the last decade. After 2014, the Ukrainians opted to accept the IMF loans, they opted to further integrate with the EU economically. And Russia is watching all of this happen. And so immediately after the overthrow, the eastern regions in Ukraine, who were ethnically closer to Russians, and they speak Russian and they favor closer ties to Russia—

    JJ: Right.

    Bryce Greene

    Bryce Greene: “This current escalation started because of the US involvement in the Ukrainian government’s politics.”

    BG: They revolted. They started an uprising to gain more autonomy, and possibly to separate from the Ukraine entirely. The Ukrainian government cracked down hard. And that only fueled the rebellion, and so Russian sent in volunteers and soldiers to help back these rebels. Now, of course, Russia denies it, but we all know they are.

    And so since 2014, that sort of civil war has been at a stalemate, and every so often there would be a military exercise on the border by one side or another. But really nothing much has changed. And so this current escalation started because of the US involvement in the Ukrainian government’s politics.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: And when Russia started building up troops on the border, the United States started saying, hey, they’re about to attack. Of course, they didn’t have any evidence for that. The Russians had built up troops on the border in similar numbers in the past without a similar panic.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: But this time there was a lot of panic. So at this point the US media starts saying that, yes, this is Russia; they’re building up to invade Ukraine. They’re similar to Hitler or some other dictator that’s violating national sovereignty. And so now you have the US sending millions and millions and millions of dollars in weapons. They’re claiming that an invasion is imminent. There was this strange thing from the State Department about the Russians planning a false flag attack to justify an invasion. Of course, the State Department didn’t provide any evidence of that.

    JJ: And in fact, a reporter,  Matt Lee of AP, pushed back on that, famously.

    BG: Yeah. Like a normal person should. Then Ned Price, the State Department spokesperson, accused him of being pro-Russia, or consorting with the enemy. It was really ridiculous.

    But those are the roots of this entire escalation, this situation, these heightened tensions. And all of that is completely omitted from the Western media. How can you talk about the current situation without talking about the past? How can you understand Russia’s actions without understanding how the United States might have provoked them? And yet you have pundits all over the place asking, what does Putin want? Who knows if Putin’s going to invade? Or on another end is, like, Putin won’t stop with Ukraine. He’ll keep going. His goal is to reestablish the Soviet Union, or the Russian empire. And this is all ridiculous.

    From the start, Putin has been clear that he does not want NATO to expand, that he does not want missiles stationed just across his border. He doesn’t want troops there. He doesn’t want those problems on his border. But that doesn’t seem to be something that the United States media can understand. In fact, when Putin sent a proposal to Biden, talking about NATO, talking about the weapons, talking about the missiles, the media described these as non-starters.

    JJ: Mmhm.

    BG: As if asking for missiles not to be pointed at you at, point blank range, is out of the question to ask. Putin should accept that there will be a bunch of missiles, there will be a bunch of soldiers and military bases, all pointed at him. And that doesn’t square. Imagine, again, if the US were being asked to tolerate missiles pointed at us in Mexico or Canada. Again, we would go crazy.

    JJ: Well, US exceptionalism is part of the price of admission to serious news media conversation. You’re supposed to accept that the US has the right to intervene anywhere, anytime. If we’re going to talk about who owes who what, or the US, James Baker, made a commitment about NATO and its reach, and somehow that’s also off the page.

    WaPo: Putin’s fight with Ukraine reflects his deep distrust of the West. There’s a long history behind that.

    Washington Post (12/1/21)

    BG: It’s sometimes discussed in media. Like, there was a Washington Post article, and they interviewed Mary Sarotte. And she wrote one of the major books talking about this promise not to expand to the east, and she said, straight up, Washington got greedy, and that destabilized the region. That was just one interview in a sea of the official line, in a sea of opinions and articles talking about how Vladimir Putin wants to expand the Soviet empire. Just having one article in the midst of all the noise, it doesn’t really do much to cut through.

    So it is admitted by the media, but it isn’t really addressed. They don’t take it into account when they do their analyses. And that reflects a major American exceptionalist bias.

    JJ: Let me just say, polls, despite the media onslaught, despite corporate media slipping so easily into saber-rattling mode—it’s just so unsettling to see the ease with which news media go back into yeah, them, they’re horrible. Yes, us, we’re great, and surely killing is the answer. Despite all of that, and despite disinformation, polls are still showing that people in the US don’t want a war with Russia. Apparently Russian polls show that Russian people don’t want a war. People understand the harms of these things that pundits are blithely tossing about.

    BG: Mmhm.

    JJ: And so I just want to ask you, there are other voices. There are other ideas about how to go forward. Can you just talk about other avenues, what diplomacy might look like, what media that take diplomacy seriously might look like, or might include or exclude?

    BG: Part of the stalemate between the eastern Donbas rebels and the Ukrainian government, part of that was started because they agreed to a ceasefire in something called the Minsk II agreement.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: The Minsk agreements were an arrangement where the Ukraine would provide a degree of autonomy to the Donbas region, and Russia would withdraw all of its volunteers and troops. The area would be sort of demilitarized, and then there would be elections in that region and some sort of special status for that region afterwards.

    Well, Ukraine has refused to implement it, and Washington and the rest of the European Union, they don’t really push Ukraine on this. There are a lot of reasons for that;  mainly one of them is because they don’t think that they would be able to join NATO if they had a region of their country that isn’t fully controlled by the country. And so there’s been sort of a stagnation there.

    But there’s been a lot of people, analysts, who are talking about restarting these Minsk II agreements, talking about how can we get to a point where we’re talking about it again, and implementing it and maybe reimagining it for a more recent time, a more modern time? But those voices are very rarely included in the mainstream media. People talk about negotiations, and then they talk about all the “non-starters” that Putin’s offering, but they don’t talk about the framework for diplomacy that already exists.

    Nation: Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World

    The Nation (11/15/21)

    One of the best commentators is Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He writes very clearly. He had a very good article in The Nation about the Minsk II agreements. And there are some in the media who do take his voice and amplify it. He was on Mehdi Hasan’s show on MSNBC, one of the only decent people on MSNBC.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: And then I think he was interviewed once on NPR. But beyond that, no one hears about that. No one hears that there is a diplomatic solution that can apply to the situation. And so the result is that people are scared that, OK, there’s going to be a war. And the only off-ramp seems to be non-starters.

    JJ: And it’s disheartening, in the sense that people who, I’m talking about US citizens, they really don’t have a beef with Ukraine. They don’t know what’s going on in Ukraine. They are only looking at news media for their cues —

    BG: Mmhm.

    JJ: —of what to understand and how to feel. And we didn’t even get started on if you learn more about Ukrainian movements and what they’re about, would those be the team that you would back, you know?

    BG: Right, right.

    JJ: That’s a whole other story, yeah?

    BG: Yeah. So part of the opposition that helped topple the government in 2014 were made up of the far right. And I know we in America throw around the term “Nazi.” Sometimes it applies, sometimes it doesn’t.

    JJ: Mmhm.

    BG: Here, in this case, it absolutely applies. These are open Nazis flying Nazi symbols, Nazi flags, doing Nazi salutes, and they have an ethnic purity idea about why they’re opposed to Russia.

    And so the United States utilized these people to help overthrow the government. There was a lot of violence around the time of the overthrow. Some of these Nazis, they actually gathered a bunch of protestors in a building, locked the doors, and set the building on fire, killing dozens. But none of this is talked about when we talk about the current situation.

    And part of those far-right groups, part of those far-right militias, they were integrated into the Ukrainian military, the Ukrainian National Guard. And this is the same national guard that the US has given about $2.5 billion. And we don’t talk about it.

    Congress did have a provision that restricted aid to this specific sector of the Ukrainian military. But there was a report from, I think, the Daily Beast that said that there really is no mechanism for enforcing that. Like, it’s on paper, but it’s not in practice. And so the United States is actively funding Nazi militias. That’s just a fact.

    Twitter: Ukrainian great grandmother, Valentina Constantinovska, on an Ak-47, training to defend against a possible Russian attack.

    Twitter (2/13/22)

    And, in fact, recently there was a picture of an old woman holding an AK-47 in a training session. And it was used in Western media to show that the Ukrainian people are ready to defend their homeland. Well, people did some digging on the ground, and it turns out that this was a public relations event staged by these Nazis, by the Azov Battalion. But no one reported that in Western media. In fact, I think it was Richard Engel of NBC, I believe, who tweeted a picture of it. People called him out, they said, hey, these are Nazi people. There was actually a Nazi patch visible in the footage that was used on TV. No accountability.

    JJ: No.

    BG: No accountability, no one is forced to say, oops, sorry, I didn’t mean to spread Nazi propaganda to Western audiences.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: No one is saying that.  But that’s US media for you. You see it in Czech press, in Irish press, and all over the world. They’re like, yeah, these were straight-up Nazis, this was a Nazi event. And the US media can’t seem to grasp this.

    JJ: I’ll just finish up where we started, because I know that listeners are uninformed, and almost ashamed of being uninformed, about what’s going on, as is often the case in foreign policy. And then they’re relying on US media to tell them which side they’re on, and to explain the interest. And just in a final minute or so, somebody’s picking up a paper, looking at Ukraine. What are some questions that you would just say, keep this in your mind as you read this coverage? ‘Cause it’s not done. It’s not done, you know; it’s going forward.

    BG: Mmhm.

    JJ: What should we keep in mind as we look at media coverage, going forward from today?

    BG: One of the biggest questions that I ask myself whenever I’m reading a piece like this, aside from taking history into account, which is important, but you should also ask yourself, who are the sources being utilized in this story? Very often you’ll see a story that says “according to US intelligence” or “according to this State Department official” or “according to someone in the government.” Like, official sources. Well, if you look at the history of US media and US government public relations, there’s a well-documented and very extensive history of the government lying to the public. The classic example, WMD.

    JJ: Yeah.

    BG: WMD, for many people, destroyed the credibility of the media, because they credibly took government statements at face value. They didn’t question them. They didn’t seek out alternative explanations. They didn’t challenge the government when they said what they said. And so that’s sort of what they’re doing here. Repeatedly, you’re seeing stories about intelligence officials who say that an invasion is imminent without providing any evidence.

    And so you have to take intelligence and official government sources with a grain of salt. When an intelligence agency says that Russia is going to invade, well, the only information you have is that an intelligence agency wants you to believe that Russians are going to invade, regardless of whether or not they are going to. And so that’s one filter that might help cut through the noise when reading the media.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Bryce Greene. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” appeared recently on FAIR.org. Bryce Greene, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    BG: I’m very happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

    The post In Ukraine, ‘No One Hears That There Is a Diplomatic Solution’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt in Ukraine

     

    When the corporate media push for war, one of their main weapons is propaganda by omission.

    In the case of the recent crisis in Ukraine, Western journalists have omitted key context about the expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War, as well as US support for the Maidan coup in 2014 (FAIR.org, 1/28/22).

    A third and crucial case of propaganda by omission relates to the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces (FAIR.org, 3/7/14, 1/28/22). If the corporate media reported more critically about Western support for the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainian security services, and how these forces function as a front-line proxy of US foreign policy, public support for war might be reduced and military budgets called into greater question.

    As recent coverage demonstrates, one way of resolving this issue is by not mentioning the inconvenient matter of Ukrainian neo-Nazis altogether.

    The Azov Battalion

    MSNBC: Growing Threat of Ukraine Invasion

    The Azov Battalion’s Nazi-inspired logo can be seen in an MSNBC segment (2/14/22).

    In 2014, the Azov Battalion was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) to assist with fighting against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

    At the time, the militia’s association with neo-Nazism was well documented: The unit used the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, while its soldiers sported Nazi insignia on their combat helmets. In 2010, the Azov Battalion’s founder declared that Ukraine should “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

    The Azov Battalion is now an official regiment of the NGU, and operates under the authority of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

    ‘A granny with a gun’

    London Times: Leaders in Final Push to Avert Ukraine Invasion

    Pointing out that people training the 79-year-old woman to use an assault weapon (London Times,  2/13/22) were members of a fascist force would have spoiled the heart-warming aspect of the image.

    In mid-February 2022, as tensions mounted between the US and Russia over Ukraine, the Azov Battalion organized a military training course for Ukrainian civilians in the port city of Mariupol.

    Images of Valentyna Konstantynovska, a 79-year-old Ukrainian learning to handle an AK-47, soon featured across the Western broadcast and print media.

    The figure of a pensioner lining up to protect her homeland made for an emotive image, collapsing the conflict into a simple good versus evil binary, while adding weight to US and British intelligence assessments forecasting an immediate full-scale Russian invasion.

    Such a narrative was not to be ruined by reference to the neo-Nazi group training her. Indeed, mention of the Azov Battalion was largely erased from mainstream coverage of the event.

    The BBC (2/13/22), for instance, showed a clip of “civilians lining up for a few hours’ military training with the National Guard,” with International Correspondent Orla Guerin describing Konstantynovska endearingly as “a granny with a gun.” Though Azov Battalion insignia was visible in the report, Guerin made no reference to it, and the report ends perversely with an NGU combatant helping a child to load an ammunition magazine.

    BBC depiction of a boy learning how to load ammo

    The BBC (2/13/22) depicts a young boy getting a lesson on how to load ammo—without mentioning that the training was sponsored by a far-right paramilitary.

    The BBC (12/13/14) has not always been so reluctant to discuss the Azov Battalion’s neo-Nazism. In 2014, the broadcaster noted that its leader “considers Jews and other minorities ‘sub-human’ and calls for a white, Christian crusade against them,” while it “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.”

    Both MSNBC (2/14/22) and ABC News (2/13/22) also reported from Mariupol, showing similar video footage of an Azov Battalion member teaching Konstantynovska to use a rifle. As with the BBC, no mention was made of the regiment’s far right association.

    Sky News updated its initial report (2/13/22) to include mention of the “far right” trainers (2/14/22), while Euronews (2/13/22) made a rare mention of the Azov Battalion in its initial coverage.

    ‘Glorification of Nazism’

    Telegraph: Ukraine Crisis: The Neo-Nazi Brigade Fighting Pro-Russian Separatists

    There was a time when Western news outlets (Daily Telegraph, 8/11/14) recognized the Azov Battalion as a neo-Nazi force rather than a source of photo ops.

    The printed press fared little better. On February 13, UK newspapers the London Times and the Daily Telegraph ran front-page spreads showing Konstantynovska preparing her weapon, without any reference to the Azov Battalion running the training course.

    Worse still, both the Times and the Daily Telegraph had already reported on the militia’s neo-Nazi associations. In September 2014, the Times described the Azov Battalion as “a group of heavily armed men” with “at least one sporting a Nazi logo…preparing for the defense of Mariupol,” adding that the group had been “formed by a white supremacist.” For its part, the Daily Telegraph described the battalion in 2014 as “the neo-Nazi brigade fighting pro-Russian separatists.”

    In light of NATO’s recent posturing in defense of Ukraine, the fact of the Azov Battalion’s neo-Nazism seems to have become an inconvenience.

    On December 16, 2021, only the US and Ukraine voted against a United Nations resolution condemning the “glorification of Nazism,” while the United Kingdom and Canada abstained. There can be little doubt that this decision was made with the conflict in Ukraine in mind.

    In the doctrine of Western militarism, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And if that friend happens to enlist neo-Nazis, Western corporate media can be relied on to look the other way.

    The post Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt in Ukraine appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Bryce Greene on Ukraine

     

    FAIR: What You Should Really Know About Ukraine

    FAIR.org (1/28/22)

    This week on CounterSpin: You might think you’re not smart enough to talk about Ukraine. And, especially on US foreign policy, corporate media seem to suggest that any questions you have that fall outside their framework are not just dumb but traitorous, not earnest but dangerously naive. Peace? Diplomacy? The idea that US might have broken promises, might have material and not moral interests? Oh, so you love Putin then!

    There is an interesting, relevant history to the state of tension between the US and Russia over Ukraine; but understanding it involves letting go of the storyline in which the US equals benevolent democracy and Russia equals craven imperialism.

    We got some of that history from Bryce Greene, who wrote about Ukraine recently for FAIR.org.  We’ll hear that conversation this week.

          CounterSpin220218Greene.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Afghanistan.

          CounterSpin220218Banter.mp3

    The post Bryce Greene on Ukraine appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Trump Donor John Malone Could Soon Be Calling Shots at CNN

     

    CNBC: Malone: Discovery-WarnerMedia May Close Sooner Than You Think

    John Malone told CNBC (11/18/21) he’d like to see CNN “actually have journalists”—citing Fox News as an example of a channel with “some actual journalism.”

    What will CNN become under John Malone?

    “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” the media billionaire Malone told CNBC (11/18/21) in November.

    “I do believe good journalism could have a role in the future portfolio that Discovery/TimeWarner’s going to represent,” he went on.

    In the interview with CNBC‘s David Faber, Malone also said:

    Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have news news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.

    Brian Flood of right-wing Fox News (11/19/21) said of Malone’s CNBC declaration:

    Liberty Media chairman John Malone, who sits on the Discovery, Inc. board of directors, wants to see left-wing CNN revert back to nonpartisan journalism following the completion of a merger that would put the liberal network under the Discovery channel.

    More than a board member

    Malone, in fact, is more than a Discovery board member; he’s its chair and largest shareholder. CNN, started by Ted Turner and now owned by AT&T, is part of an $85 billion acquisition by Discovery, expected to be finalized this year.

    Malone’s links to politics include being an active supporter—he’s currently a board member—of the Cato Institute, the Washington-based libertarian think tank that espouses the privatization of numerous US government agencies and programs, including Social Security and the Postal Service.

    His Liberty Media empire was among the big contributors to Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration festivities in Washington, DC, with personal and corporate contributions adding up to $1 million.

    However, in 2019, in another interview with Faber on CNBC (11/21/19), Malone said:

    Look, I think a lot of things Trump has tried to do—identifying problems and trying to solve them—has been great…. I just don’t think he’s the right guy to do it. Half the people that he’s hired and thrown under the bus are now trying to kill him. I mean, what kind of thing is that?

    Malone then said he would vote for former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for president in 2020.

    No ‘coward’s way out’

    Newsmax: Billionaire John Malone: CNN Needs 'Actual Journalists'

    Newsmax

    Brian Freeman of right-wing Newsmax (11/21/21) said:

    CNN will be the key news property in the merged company, one that will be dominated by entertainment programming. There had been rumors that CNN might be spun off or sold, but Malone indicated [in the CNBC interview] that’s not likely.

    Malone, Freeman said, described such a move as a “coward’s way out.”

    Freeman asserted that “Malone has cause to worry about the left-wing network,” because

    CNN’s ratings have collapsed over 50% in the past year and may be suffering from a credibility gap with viewers…. Last March, a Hill/HarrisX poll found that 47% of registered voters believe CNN holds a liberal bias in reporting.

    (In the same poll, 48% of respondents said they believed Fox had a conservative bias—but who’s counting?)

    Steve Straub of the right-wing website the Federalist Papers (11/22/21) said of Malone’s CNBC comments:

    CNN’s soon-to-be new owner just made a startling admission, one that has been obviously apparent to us and many others for some time, that the so-called news network has no actual journalists.

    ‘The most powerful man you’ve never heard of’

    Gentleman's Journal: John Malone: everything you need to know about America’s single largest land owner

    Gentleman’s Journal called Malone “one of the most powerful, yet unknown, individuals in America.”

    “John Malone… Meet the Most Powerful Man That You’ve Never Heard Of,” was a heading of a 2018 piece on the website of the British-based Gentleman’s Journal. Malone owns

    services and TV channels you’ve most likely used or watched…yet the name John Malone still draws a sea of blank faces…. One of the most powerful, yet unknown, individuals in America…as Liberty Media’s chairman and largest stakeholder, John Malone is one of the world’s most influential media magnates.

    In addition to being part-owner of the Atlanta Braves, the website noted,

    he currently owns more land in America than anyone else: 2.2 million acres to be precise…. Malone has a net worth of around $9.22 billion, and thanks to his buccaneering role in media deals and land ownership, he’s been nicknamed the “Cable Cowboy.”

    The article related how Malone, born in Connecticut, has a Ph.D. in operations research from Johns Hopkins University, and

    joined the worldwide management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in 1968. However, fatigued from the constant traveling his job required, he left after five years to join General Instrument; while at GI, he ran Jerrold—a subsidiary which produces minicomputers for the cable TV industry—and was eventually offered the role of CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc… [which] only had 400,000 subscribers and owed creditors $132 million…. Malone was only 29 at the time.

    Within 17 years of snapping up smaller operators and acquiring minority stakes in other channels, TCI, under the management of Malone, had accumulated 8.5 million subscribers and grew into the second largest cable company after Time Warner. Because of his business deals in the byzantine world of cable TV, Malone was compared to “Darth Vader” by former US Vice President Al Gore….

    At the helm of Liberty Media, the young American changed the organization from just providing cable services to actually owning the networks broadcast on its infrastructure, including the Discovery Channel, QVC and Virgin Media.

    ‘CNN could face a reset’

    CNN: CNN Could Face a Reset Once Under Discovery Control

    Variety (2/8/22) says former CNN president Jeff Zucker (left) “pushed CNN to be blunt and unstinting in its efforts to hold feet to the fire,” while Discovery‘s David Zaslav (right) is “behind the scenes a relentless operator.”

    The headline last week in Variety (2/8/22): “CNN Could Face a Reset Under Discovery Control.” The article by Brian Steinberg spoke of how under its recently resigned president, Jeff Zucker, “CNN became more swashbuckling, more colorful…”

    But Discovery is “a media company that tries to maintain a quieter corporate demeanor.” Zucker

    changed the culture of the news outlet, shoving it into more direct competition with Fox News Channel and MSNBC…. Will Discovery change the recipe? There are signs that executives at the company see Zucker’s departure as an opportunity for a reset at CNN.

    The piece spoke of those who “argue Zucker’s strategies have been good for CNN—and for people who have been helped by its aggressive accountability journalism in Washington.” The article concluded:

    Executives charged with leading CNN in the wake of Zucker’s exit have vowed to staffers in internal meetings that his vision for the network will remain intact, but chances are Discovery will dim Zucker’s flash.

    That would not be good news.

    The future of democracy in the United States is at stake amid the polarization and deadlock of the political process in Washington. Media are increasingly under the control of right-wing zealots like Rupert Murdoch and those behind Newsmax, etc., who are poisoning communications.

    Critically needed now is an independent, honest, credible press providing, yes, aggressive accountability journalism—a light to enable people to find their way out of this mess. Instead, the nation’s oldest cable news channel will soon be under the control of someone who appears to want it to follow the “interesting trajectory” of Fox News.

     

     

     

    The post Trump Donor John Malone Could Soon Be Calling Shots at CNN appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Lack of Media Urgency Over GOP Efforts to Steal 2024 Elections

     

    FAIR: Journalists Need to Be Clear About a Clear Threat to Democracy

    Joshua Cho (FAIR.org, 9/15/20): “Journalists and newsrooms have an obligation to report that the most powerful person in the country is trying to subvert the election and retain power illegitimately.”

    If liberal democracy were threatened by the undeniably bad faith efforts of one major political party in the US to steal the 2024 presidential election, as they have tried to do (successfully, even) in previous elections, could Americans count on establishment media to report on this open subversion of liberal democracy?

    Before and after the 2020 elections (FAIR.org, 9/15/20, 11/5/20), I wrote that the few corporate journalists sounding the alarm about Trump’s blatant efforts at election theft were all relegated to the opinion section, where they could be more easily dismissed as partisan ax-grinding.

    For a brief period after the 2020 election, particularly after January 6, corporate media stopped betraying their journalistic duties and straightforwardly reported Trump and the Republican Party’s subversion of elections as a matter of fact, rather than opinion (FAIR.org, 11/25/20, 1/7/21).

    More transparent coverage of election subversion efforts after they have occurred is not as useful, of course. But even this glimmer of journalistic responsibility was only temporary, as establishment media have largely reverted back to their dishonest habit of false equivalence, the “both-sidesing” of vital issues that was so characteristic of the Trump era (FAIR.org, 8/2/21).

    Worst-case scenarios

    Pro Publica: Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections

    Rep. Madison Cawthorn, quoted in Pro Publica (9/2/21): “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed.” 

    There is plenty of evidence of the GOP’s election subversion strategy for 2024, as the occasional clear-eyed report makes clear. ProPublica (9/2/21) reported on the efforts of former Trump adviser and white supremacist Steve Bannon to mobilize a mass of like-minded right-wing extremists to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up.

    Bannon is focused on flooding the precincts, the lowest rung of the party structure. Precinct workers are responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors, but collectively, they can also influence how elections are run, since they have a say in choosing poll workers, and pick members of boards that oversee elections in some states. Bannon had also been one of the biggest supporters of Trump’s election theft efforts, and even broadcasted support for the January 6 insurrection attempt by saying on January 5, “All hell will break loose tomorrow.”

    ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began, with no similar surge for Democratic Party posts. The news service reported that the new movement is based on Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen from him, and is intended to reshape the machinery of elections themselves rather than to merely win them.

    WaPo: As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a ‘worst-case scenario’ for the country

    Washington Post (9/28/21): “No clear or sustained effort exists to broadly protect democratic institutions as the nation hurtles toward the uncertainty of the 2024 presidential election.”

    The Washington Post (9/28/21) reported on Democrats, constitutional scholars and election experts contemplating a “worst-case scenario” in which “Trump and his supporters emerge in 2024 more sophisticated and successful in their efforts to steal an election.” It also outlined another scenario in which “Trump—or an acolyte with similarly anti-democratic sensibilities—runs and wins legitimately in 2024,” and uses this emboldened position to legally remake the electoral system to consolidate power and erode democratic institutions.

    The experts the Post contacted hold that the “most precipitous recent threat to American democracy” remains Trump’s lies about the 2020 election:

    “Democracy depends on the belief of losers in a given election to trust the process, and to marshal support so they can win another day,” said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford/MIT Healthy Elections Project. “If we have entered a phase where the process is simply not trusted, that is a dangerous situation to be in, where people do not trust elections as being the way that we replace authority.”

    CNN (1/6/22) and the New York Times did publish rare reports (12/11/21) on “a wave of mobilization” in which “Republican candidates coming out of the Stop the Steal movement are running competitive campaigns.” The Times noted that

    legislation that state lawmakers have passed or tried to pass this year in a number of states would assert more control over election systems and results by partisan offices that Republicans already decisively control.

    However, these reports are the exception to the rule, rather than the norm.

    ‘An apparatus of election theft’

    Atlantic: Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun

    Barton Gellman (Atlantic, 9/23/20): “Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief.”

    The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman (9/23/20) was one of the few people in corporate media who took the possibility of Trump refusing to concede the 2020 election seriously. In an article late last year (12/6/21), Gellman laid out a detailed and very plausible scenario in which Trump successfully steals the 2024 election:

    For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie….

    By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response….

    Amid all this ferment, Trump’s legal team is fine-tuning a constitutional argument that is pitched to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court. This, too, exploits the GOP advantage in statehouse control. Republicans are promoting an “independent state legislature” doctrine, which holds that statehouses have “plenary,” or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead.

    Gellman further explained in an NPR interview (12/9/21) that although for 150 years, every state has decided to choose electors for the Electoral College through a popular vote, that isn’t a constitutional requirement. The GOP legal strategy is to get state legislators to assert a constitutional authority to directly choose electors. The “independent state legislature” doctrine being pursued argues that because state legislators have the authority to decide how electors are chosen, any deviation from state law on electoral procedures (like a governor sending mail-in ballots during a pandemic, or a judge keeping polls open when snafus result in long lines) justifies the legislature taking the selection of electors away from voters (Salon, 9/27/21).

    ‘A sign of Republican weakness’

    NYT: Let's Not Invent a Civil War

    Ross Douthat (New York Times, 1/12/22): “It’s worth asking whether the people who see potential insurrection lurking everywhere are seeing a danger rising entirely on its own—or in their alarm are helping to invent it.”

    Like 2020, one can find opinion pieces (e.g., New York Times, 12/3/21, 12/13/21), pointing out that “increasingly untethered from any commitment to electoral democracy, large and influential parts of the Republican Party are working to put Trump back in power by any means necessary,” and that “American politics today is not really normal.”

    Other opinion pieces, like the Wall Street Journal editorial “Democracy Isn’t Dying” (1/5/22), argue the opposite, claiming that “America’s democratic institutions held up under pressure,” and that the question for “Pelosi Democrats” is whether they will “ever let January 6 go.”

    New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (12/8/21) has argued that the notion that the “officially nonpartisan news media will have been an accessory to Trumpism” is “very wrong.” A press that takes the GOP’s threat to American democracy seriously, in Douthat’s view, is the kind of news that “empowers demagogues” and “feeds polarization,” which “makes crises in our system much more likely.” Douthat (1/12/22) maintains that the GOP’s anti-democratic measures are “worth worrying about but not at all the likeliest scenario, let alone one that’s somehow structurally inevitable.”

    Other commentators, like Timothy Noah for the New Republic (1/24/22), have criticized Gellman’s arguments as hyperbolic and overly pessimistic. Trump failed miserably in 2020, Noah says, downplaying Trump and the GOP’s 2024 election theft efforts as merely “considerable mischief.” They are actually “a sign of Republican weakness, not Republican strength, and they’re mostly being waged in inhospitable venues: the courts and the ballot box.”

    Even though Noah cites Gellman pointing out the GOP is taking anti-democratic measures in multiple states, he still appears to miss the significance of the fact that the 2000 election was stolen by the Supreme Court for George W. Bush, based on blocking vote-counting in a single state, Florida.

    Downplaying GOP assault on democracy

    Politico: Trump 2024 is here, if he wants it

    Politico (1/14/22): “Ten months before the 2022 midterm elections, Washington’s head is firmly in 2024″—but not on the threat 2024 poses to democracy.

    Despite this very alarming and plausible scenario, many corporate media outlets are omitting the Republican Party’s efforts to subvert the 2024 election for Trump or another Republican candidate, or reporting on US politics as if whatever democratic institutions still exist in the US aren’t facing serious decay or delegitimization.

    Politico’s “Trump Builds ‘Turnkey’ Campaign Operation for 2024” (9/7/21) managed to discuss things like Trump’s “boots on the ground in Iowa” and “accelerated fundraising,” signaling his “heightened interest in reclaiming the White House—and laying the necessary groundwork to do it”—while omitting the GOP’s groundwork to facilitate election theft efforts. Politico’s “Trump 2024 Is Here, if He Wants It” (1/14/22) merely discussed how Trump hasn’t “suffered from his banishment from social media,” and that he still has “his gift for drawing attention,” with the nomination seeming “almost certainly his if he wants it.”

    In an earlier report, Politico (11/29/21) reported on Trump’s 2024 preparations, with people “familiar with his thinking” claiming that “his [running mate] selection will be determined by two factors that rate highest in Trump’s estimation: unquestioned loyalty and an embrace of the former president’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.” An article on Trump wanting a dependable accomplice for the GOP’s 2024 election theft efforts seems to be a particularly relevant place to mention the GOP’s plans to subvert the election, yet Politico prioritized reporting gossip over threats to US electoral democracy.

    In another example of a “politics as usual” horserace article, Business Insider’s “Trump Drops the Biggest Hint Yet That He’ll Be Running in 2024, Calling Himself the ’45th and 47th President’ in a Video” (1/26/22) reported that Trump “remains immensely popular with his base.”

    I

    NYT: When Will Trump Answer the Big 2024 Question?

    Is “When will Mr. Trump announce his plans for 2024?” (New York Times, 9/7/21) really “the Big 2024 Question”?

    Likewise, the New York Times’ “When Will Trump Answer the Big 2024 Question?” (9/7/21) talked about “the biggest question in Republican politics: When will Mr. Trump announce his plans for 2024?” Is that really a more important question about Republican politics than whether or not the party is preparing to undemocratically seize the 2024 election? While the Times notes Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and the “phony idea that any election that Democrats win is a fraud,” it says nothing about the GOP’s active undermining of US election institutions, even while reporting on “signs that Republicans are more energized across the country.”

    The Times’ “Trump May Run in 2024. So Might They. It’s Getting Awkward” (10/7/21) seemed to imply that “Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to cede the spotlight” is primarily a problem for the “political futures of an entire group of Republican politicians who have suggested that they might someday want to run for president.” The Times could instead have framed it as a problem for Americans, who will have to deal with potential election theft and the likely erosion of democracy under another Trump administration, rather than for the political futures of GOP presidential hopefuls. But that would require reporting on the GOP’s efforts to seize the 2024 election on behalf of their candidates.

    None of these horserace reports give any hint or indication that there is a serious crisis facing the integrity of US elections, and give the impression that US electoral politics is carrying on as usual.

    The Times (1/23/22) published a profile on Trump loyalists who participated in the January 6 mob, who view the “next chapter of January 6” not as “the ashes of a disgraced insurrection, but an amorphous new movement fueled by grievances against vaccines and President Biden, and a deepened devotion to his predecessor’s lies about a stolen election.” The Times reported on their “sense of community” and the “sentiment” that has “given them new purpose,” without devoting any serious challenge to the reality of their beliefs. Given the Times’ previous reporting on the GOP’s 2024 election subversion efforts, this kind of coverage is especially egregious.

    ‘Accessories to the murder of democracy’

    NYT: The Trump Conspiracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight

    Jamelle Bouie (New York Times, 12/3/21): “The former president and his allies have made no secret of their intent to run the same play a second time.”

    Whatever pundits in corporate media might think, both US and non-US political scholars are warning of 2024’s threat to US electoral democracy and the possibility of the US being under a right-wing dictatorship by 2030 (New York Times, 12/15/21; Guardian, 1/3/22). But despite arguments based on little more than optimism about the “resilience of our political institutions” (Bloomberg, 12/28/21), or faith that Republicans won’t succeed in their 2024 election theft attempt because “we aren’t going to let them” (New Republic, 1/24/22), robust democracies depend on media that take plausible disaster scenarios seriously, and act to prevent such disasters from occurring.

    The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie (12/3/21) pointed out:

    When people plot to do wrong, they often do so in plain sight. To the extent that they succeed, it is at least partly because no one took them as seriously as they should have…. None of this is happening behind closed doors. We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.

    There appears to be some self-awareness of establishment media’s contributions to the US’s current political predicament, as numerous opinion pieces have pointed out the penchant for “both-sidesism.” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank (12/3/21) acknowledged that his own “colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy,” and that his “peers across the media have fallen victim to our asymmetric politics,” with “too many journalists” being “caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction.”

    Politico: What the left doesn’t get about the media

    Politico (12/14/21) “One of the most consistent criticisms of the political press from the left these days is that it treats politics and policy as ‘normal’ when the United States is facing an unprecedented crisis of democracy.” But doing so is perfectly normal!

    Politico’s “What the Left Doesn’t Get About the Media” (12/14/21) appeared to acknowledge that one of the “most consistent criticisms of the political press from the left these days is that it treats politics and policy as ‘normal’ when the United States is facing an unprecedented crisis of democracy.” However, Politico went on to say that “campaign coverage emphasizes what candidates are doing and saying,” and implied that the corporate media have no intention of adjusting their practices:

    If Democratic candidates aren’t talking about America’s anti-democratic movement, and if President Joe Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer aren’t doing it every day in Washington, then the coverage will reflect that. That is not a defense of the political/media ecosystem but just a description of it.

    So what the “left doesn’t get” is that even in the face of “an unprecedented crisis of democracy,” corporate media are likely to allow an authoritarian coup to happen because they’re too unshakably committed to business as usual to sound the alarm. That isn’t what the left doesn’t get; that’s precisely what the left is afraid will happen.

     

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  • Biden’s Multi-Billion Afghan Theft Gets Scant Mention on TV News

     

    AP: Ex-Afghan president: Biden order on frozen funds an atrocity

    ABC‘s website had an AP report (2/13/22) on Biden’s misappropriation of Afghan funds—but nothing on its TV news programs.

    Two months ago (FAIR.org, 12/21/21), I noted the striking contrast between vocal media outrage—ostensibly grounded in concern for Afghan people—over President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and the relative silence over the growing humanitarian crisis in that country, which threatens millions with life-threatening levels of famine.

    While influenced by drought and Taliban policies, the current crisis is primarily driven by the US decisions to freeze the assets of the country’s central bank and maintain economic sanctions, which have destabilized the banking system and sent the economy into a tailspin.

    Last Friday, Biden announced his intention to take the $7 billion in frozen funds currently held in US banks and use them as he sees fit, giving half to a humanitarian aid trust fund for Afghans and half to families of 9/11 victims.

    Lest anyone imagine this to be generous in any way, note that the $7 billion—most of which originated as international aid, and representing the vast majority of the central bank’s assets—belongs to the Afghan people, not to Biden. And the Afghan people bear zero responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. On the contrary, they are also its victims, because of the subsequent US decision to invade and occupy their country.

    Beyond that, giving them back half of the money that is rightfully theirs in the form of “aid”—instead of returning it to the banking system—is not only a band-aid that doesn’t solve the country’s liquidity problem, it’s nearly impossible to do anyway, given the sanctions still in place (Relief Web, 2/12/21).

    Biden’s announcement offered a perfect hook for reporting on the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, and anyone who truly cares about the Afghan people and their rights should be tearing their hair out and screaming at the top of their lungs about this audacious injustice that will surely result in more deaths and hardship. But despite their wailing about the Taliban’s impact on Afghan women’s futures, few in US TV news seem concerned about those same women facing starvation as a result of US policy.

    Since Biden’s announcement on February 11, there have been a total of 10 mentions on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC: six the day of the announcement, four the next day, and none by the third day. The broadcast network news shows, which have more viewers than cable news, aired exactly zero reports on the issue. CNN made eight mentions, MSNBC two and Fox one. Six of the ten were brief mentions that noted no criticism of the move.

    MSNBC: Biden Proposes Splitting Afghanistan Funds

    Masuda Sultan to Chris Hayes (MSNBC, 2/11/22): “This was a devastating day for Afghans who were hoping to have a sign that their economy would have a chance of surviving.”

    Only two shows deemed the story big enough to bring on a guest to discuss it: Jake Tapper‘s CNN show (2/11/22) and Chris Hayes‘ MSNBC show (2/11/22). Hayes devoted the last several minutes of his show to an interview with guest Masuda Sultan of the group Unfreeze Afghanistan. Hayes noted that the US “could help [the Afghan] people by simply doing one thing, unfreezing of the billions of dollars of Afghan government assets that are sitting in New York banks,” and Sultan argued that Biden’s move would simply create “a bigger and bigger humanitarian disaster, by not allowing banking to function and not allowing the economy to be back on its feet”:

    What Afghans need more than anything, is food, indeed, they need aid, but they also need jobs, they need an economy, they need to be able to import food, they need to be able to pay their teachers, pay their healthcare workers. You know, all of these sort of normal functions that you expect to happen in a country are now crippled.

    Tapper, in contrast, invited a family member of a 9/11 victim for her perspective on the decision. (Tapper did ask his guest to respond to “the people who say this is just penalizing this move today, the Afghan people who are suffering greatly, and they shouldn’t be hurt because of what happened on 9/11.”)

    Intercept: Biden’s Decision on Frozen Afghanistan Money Is Tantamount to Mass Murder

    Austin Ahlman (Intercept, 2/11/22): “The decision puts Biden on track to cause more death and destruction in Afghanistan than was caused by the 20 years of war that he ended.”

    CNN‘s Newsroom (2/11/22) and New Day Saturday (2/12/22) were the only other two shows to even briefly mention any criticisms or questions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the decision.

    On Newsroom, reporter Jeremy Diamond noted that “there are questions, though, about whether taking these funds away from the central bank could make it more difficult for Afghanistan to stabilize its currency.”

    A serious report would have explained that these aren’t merely questions, they’re certainties, and Biden knows it. As a senior Democratic foreign policy aide told the Intercept‘s Austin Ahlman (2/11/22), Biden

    has had warnings from the UN secretary general, the International Rescue Committee and the Red Cross, with a unanimous consensus that the liquidity of the central bank is of paramount importance, and no amount of aid can compensate for the destruction of Afghanistan’s financial system and the whole macro economy.

    On CNN, Diamond’s colleague Jim Sciutto concluded: “Trying to strike some sort of middle line here between not helping the Taliban, but somehow getting help urgently to the Afghan people.”

    It’s the best possible framing a murderous multi-billion-dollar theft could get.

     

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  • Vox Omits US Military Role in African Instability 

     

    Vox: How to understand the recent coups in Africa

    One way you should not understand recent coups in Africa, Vox (2/5/22) suggests, is as a consequence of the US training coup-leading military figures.

    Vox (2/5/22) recently published a piece titled “How to Understand the Recent Coups in Africa,” interviewing Joseph Sany from the Africa Center at the US Institute of Peace, a US government research center. The article had much to say about the potential causes of African conflict and instability, but pointedly left out any reference to the role of US training programs in constantly generating coup leaders.

    Writing for the Intercept (1/26/22), Nick Turse showed that US military training operations in the region were associated with the growing instability and antidemocratic tendencies. “Since 2008,” Turse wrote,

    US-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries, including Burkina Faso (three times), Guinea, Mali (three times), Mauritania and the Gambia.

    The Vox piece specifically mentioned the coups in Mali and Burkina Faso, where US-trained officers accounted for a total of six coups. In its initial form,* the Vox article even cited a later Intercept piece (2/4/22) piece by Turse:

    In Mali and Burkina Faso, Sany notes, the governments were dealing with violent extremism from ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates in the Sahel, where between 2020 and 2021, the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports, citing statistics in a recent report by Siegle and his team, attacks by militant Islamist organizations increased 70 percent, from 1,180 to 2,005.

    So while he is evidently familiar with Turse’s work, Sany failed to include the role of the US military operations that Turse had reported on in his analysis.

    ‘A robust relationship’

    Intercept: Violence Has Spiked in Africa Since the Military Founded AFRICOM, Pentagon Study Finds

    Nick Turse (Intercept, 7/29/19): “Since Africom began, key indicators of security and stability in Africa have plummeted.”

    This is a major omission. US-trained officers overthrew the government of Mali in 2012, 2020 and 2021, and in Burkina Faso in 2014, 2015 (reversed after popular pressure) and 2022. This is part of a broader trend; a study published in the Journal of Peace Research (7/13/17) looked at 189 countries between 1970 and 2009 and found “a robust relationship” between US training programs and coups d’etat. The greater the number of US trained officers, the greater the probability of a military coup. Turse noted that this study likely understates the relationship.

    Turse (Intercept, 7/29/19) has also previously reported on a Pentagon study that found a massive spike in violence correlated with the US military presence in Africa. Since the establishment of the US military’s Africa Command (Africom) in 2008, the number of “violent events” has increased 960%, jumping from 288 in 2009 to 3,050 in 2018. In 2010, there were just five “active militant Islamist groups,” but by 2018, there were roughly 24.

    These numbers seriously challenge the legitimacy of Africom, whose stated mission is to “promote regional security, stability and prosperity.”

    A call for ‘outside intervention’

    In its piece, Vox warned against discounting “the influence of outside powers,” but fingered Russia, China, Turkey and Qatar as potential agitators. These nations, counseled Vox, may try to exploit the conflict to “exercise influence” or “extract resources from nations rich in diamond, bauxite and other valuable materials.” There was no mention of the United States’ influence in Africa. A later passing mention of Western debt traps was wholly unconnected to the warning against outsiders.

    Later in the piece, Vox quoted Sany’s warning of Russian involvement specifically in Mali and Burkina Faso, again singling out two countries where US-trained officers overthrew the government: “‘If you want to know where Russia will go next, look for instability,’ Sany said, pointing to situations in Mali and Burkina Faso.”

    Despite warning against “outside powers” Vox ended the piece with a vague call for “outside intervention” to affect either “the undoing of a government takeover or a transition to democracy.” Sany claimed that “Western powers need to work better with these countries to look honestly at the root causes of conflict, poverty and instability.”

    The piece briefly nods to the West’s “brutal, exploitative and extractive history of colonialism in Africa; and their own strangleholds on poor nations in the form of debt.” But alluding to neocolonial relationships in the abstract is far less relevant to the piece than acknowledging active US military training operations. The current expanding US military footprint was one root cause that Vox and their interview subjects declined to include in their analysis.

    * Days after the piece was published, Vox inexplicably removed any reference to Turse’s work. The new version of the piece doesn’t contain any note about why this section was edited, or even any indication that it was edited. (The old version is preserved through the WayBack Machine.)

    The copy now reads (emphasis added):

    In Mali and Burkina Faso, Sany notes, the governments were dealing with violent extremism from ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates in the Sahel. Between 2020 and 2021, according to a recent report from Siegle and his team, attacks in the region by militant Islamist organizations increased 70 percent, from 1,180 to 2,005.”

    ACTION ALERT: You can send messages to Vox here (or via Twitter: @voxdotcom). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread.

     

     

     

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  • ‘Mega-Retailers Are Using Inflation as a Cover to Raise Prices and Turn Record Profits’

     

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Groundwork Collaborative’s Rakeen Mabud about the supply chain breakdown for the February 11, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220211Mabud.mp3

     

    NYT: Supply Chain Mayhem Will Likely Muck Up 2022

    New York Times (2/7/22)

    Janine Jackson: “Supply Chain Mayhem Will Likely Muck Up 2022” was a recent New York Times headline reporting that as havoc at ports shows no signs of abating, and prices for a range of goods are still rising, “the world” is absorbing the realization that time alone won’t solve the great supply chain disruption.

    Any time a corporate media outlet tells you that the world is just now learning something that the world didn’t know heretofore, you should reach for, well, anything that isn’t a corporate media outlet. Because plenty of people around the world have been raising questions and concerns about whether the current system of producing and delivering goods to people really has the delivery of goods to people as its core organizing principle.

    The pandemic, while it hasn’t created those concerns, has thrown them into high relief, and offered an opportunity to address them in a serious and not a stopgap way. But who’s going to lead that public discussion on that, beyond reporters who seem to be marveling at their inability to find their favorite brand of pickle on the shelf?

    Our next guest has been thinking about these things. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. She recently testified at a hearing on pandemic profiteering and price-gouging of the Committee on Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Consumer Protection & Commerce. Her article with David Dayen, “How We Broke the Supply Chain,” appears in the American Prospect magazine’s special issue on that topic. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Rakeen Mabud.

    Rakeen Mabud: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

    American Prospect: How We Broke the Supply Chain

    American Prospect (1/31/22)

    JJ: Your essay explains how there have been key historical policy choices—not nature, not economic inevitability, but choices—that have created the conditions in which the pandemic happened, and which the pandemic has exacerbated. It’s a very illuminating history, I think, that might be shorthanded sometimes in media, but is rarely spelled out.

    And then it’s virtually never spelled out from the point of view of workers or consumers in a substantive way. Both of those perspectives are sort of inserted or assumed, and they’re often pitted against one another, workers versus consumers. But the story isn’t told from our perspective as people who have to work and people who have to buy stuff, you know? And I feel that that’s what this helpful article does. So get us started on what we should understand as the roots of the “supply shock” that’s now in the headlines. Talk us through it.

    RM: Sure. And this is actually a really timely conversation, because the CPI data came out today, which gave us a little bit more insight on what’s going on with prices and the economy. And so I think a lot of this conversation often starts with this idea of price increases, right? And we see that. We see it in the data, we see it at the grocery store. Certainly people are really feeling the pressure of higher prices on essential goods.

    And what David and I really tried to do in the piece is to get under the hood a little bit. It’s not like prices are rising for no reason. Actually, the root cause here is a system that’s really been in the works for the last half a century. Fifty years of a series of policy decisions that has built a supply chain that was unable to handle a shock like the pandemic. And so when the pandemic hit, what we ended up seeing was massive shifts in demand, but also this extremely brittle system break down under those changes in demand. And so I’m happy to go into that, but eager to hear from you what you found interesting about the piece.

    JJ: Let’s talk about that brittleness, because I think when reporters think about “news you can use,” they’re like, hey, prices are up. And so prices are up, that’s bad, we’re supposed to pick an enemy for that, or a cause or a reason. And I don’t know that that energy is directed in the right place. So if you could talk about what is it that made the supply chain fragile, what made it brittle in the first place?

    Rakeen Mobud

    Rakeen Mobud: “We’ve essentially spent 50 years handing our supply chain over to mega corporations. These companies have built a system that works for them.”

    RM: Sure. So we’ve essentially spent 50 years handing our supply chain over to mega corporations. These companies have built a system that works for them, right, it works for padding their own profits, jacking up their profits, all spurred on by Wall Street, who really demanded short-term profit increases over all else.

    And so when you think about what a supply chain is for, usually most people would think, oh, it’s here to deliver goods and services. Well, that’s actually not what our supply chain was built to do. Our supply chain was built to really maximize what companies could get out of this, and the dividends that they can pay off to shareholders.

    And what that means is that they’ve essentially built this system that has no redundancy. It has no flexibility for changes in an economy, such as a pandemic or even something like a climate shock, right, which we’re unfortunately likely to see more of over the coming years and decades. And so there is what we call a just-in-time supply system, right? This is a supply system that is expected to deliver exactly the number of goods that are needed at exactly the moment that they’re needed.

    But with something like a pandemic, all of those predictions about what goods will be needed, when, go out the window. And that’s when you end up with supply shortages, that’s when you end up with bottlenecks.

    The consolidation piece of this is also really important. We have three ocean shipping alliances that carry 80% of the world’s cargo.  So there, if one of them goes down, you can see how that massively destructs our global supply chain, but you can also see how that might jack up prices.

    JJ: So where do workers fit in there? What is the role of the employees that are obviously a piece of this? What does labor policy do?

    RM: Yeah, I’m really, really glad you asked that, because I think, when people think of the supply chain, they have the sort of vague images of trains and maybe a big ship, right?

    JJ: Yeah.

    RM: But those big ships and those cranes are operated by people. And I think the effect on workers is made most clear through the example of trucking. About 80% of port truckers are misclassified as independent contractors. That means that they don’t get good wages. They don’t have predictable hours. They don’t get benefits. Some of them can’t even use the bathroom at the ports, because they’re not technically considered employees.

    And that erosion of labor, we see that throughout, right, we see that on these giant ships that are waiting offshore to unload their goods, there are people on those ships who are not being paid very well. In fact, a lot of these ships fly with what’s called flags of convenience, which are the flags of countries that have really, really low labor standards, so they don’t have to adhere to higher standards on the ships.

    So across our supply chain, we basically have an incredible reliance on precarious labor. And what that means is that people are being harmed. And part of the reason we’ve ended up in this position of incredible reliance on precarious labor is that companies have tried to profit maximize, right? They don’t want to pay those benefits, they don’t want to pay good wages. They want to make sure that they can squeeze as much out of a worker as they can, with paying them as little as possible.

    So I’m really glad you asked that question, because bad labor practices and our reliance on precarious labor is a real liability in our supply chain as a whole.

    JJ: And this brings me to media coverage, which is where a lot of folks look to have this explained to them. And in the media, we often see workers pitted against consumers, as though they weren’t the same people, you know? So we see articles say, you might want to pay farmers more, or do fair trade, but do you really want to pay another two dollars for your coffee? And it sounds as though those of us who work are opposed to, or not the same people as, those of us who buy coffee or buy cars or buy ovens, and it just seems a bizarre dissection that media do. That doesn’t make sense, right?

    RM: It doesn’t make sense at all. As you say, quite rightly, workers and consumers are the same. We are all—I’m at a job right now, right? I’m also a consumer. I’ll probably buy some groceries later. I would add small businesses to that mix too. Small businesses are getting crushed in this moment.

    JJ: Yep.

    RM: And my team and I have combed through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of corporate earning calls. And you really don’t have to take my word for it. There’s obviously a big, deep story here. But on these corporate earnings calls, what we hear CEOs and CFOs saying, in sector after sector, in company after company, is we can use the cover of inflation to jack up prices on consumers, and rake in the profits for ourselves, and pay out some good dividends for our shareholders.

    Embedded within that is also, let’s cut back on pay for workers. You saw Kroger do this, right? Kroger cut back on hazard pay, jacked up its prices, and then issued a bunch of stock buybacks.

    And so the issues facing workers and consumers, as well as these small businesses who aren’t able to negotiate better prices for the inputs that they’re selling in their stores, and are being hit by pandemic profiteering higher up the supply chain. These are all part of the same system, and it’s all rooted in what is essentially, in short, corporate greed.

    JJ: Let me ask you just to expand a little bit about that. What is corporate greed? What’s the role that that’s playing here?

    RM: Essentially, the supply chain dynamics that I was talking about earlier, it’s set up a system where in a moment of crisis, companies, especially really big companies who hold a lot of the market, can jack up prices on consumers and get away with it.

    And I think Procter & Gamble is a really good example. They have a real chokehold on diaper production, which is an essential good, right? If you have a kid, that kid is going to need diapers, however much it costs.

    JJ: Yup.

    RM: And so what Procter & Gamble has been doing is really pushing up the prices on diapers and other goods that they sell, such as household cleaning products, knowing that their consumers have nowhere else to go, because they hold so many of those different brands; they hold so much of that market share. And at the same time, literally, really celebrating on these investor calls, saying, Look at how much profit we have. And, by the way, we can use this idea that everyone’s worried about right now, inflation, as cover for the fact that we’re jacking up prices on consumers.

    So it’s very simple when you look at it; and then when you dig into these earnings reports, which are publicly available, they’re really, actually saying the quiet part out loud. And I’m really glad that you’re tying these two ideas together, because this corporate greed that we’re seeing in this moment wouldn’t be possible without the decades of policy choices that we’ve made along the way.

    And so the good thing is, we can take on the greed aspect, right? We can enable the FCC to ensure that we have competitive markets. We can take on price-gouging. The Biden administration has started doing some of that. And we need to address the deeper problems, which fundamentally are rooted in long-term disinvestment in our supply chain and in the rest of our economy.

    And the good news is, there’s at least one big piece of legislation on the table that would be an important downpayment in making sure that we have a healthy economy, a healthy labor force, healthy supply chain. But that’s just a first step, because, as I said, these are issues that have been decades in the making, and unfortunately will take more than one piece of legislation to undo.

    JJ: I’m going to ask you about that. But I have to say the story that we get, and I’m not being facetious, the story that we get from the media about capitalism is that it takes advantage of certain situations, but not that it’s cruel, you know? Not that when people are sick, you jack up the prices of medicine. I feel like in most peoples’ brains, that’s what a horrible person does; that’s not what a system does. And yet, that is incentivized by certain systems in this country. I’m not sure that people really grok that. But it’s true.

    RM: Yes. Yeah. I have a good example for that, which is in their Q4 2021 earnings call, Johnson & Johnson, which is a pretty familiar brand, I think, to many people, announced that they had raised prices on their consumer health products and about 29 of the prescription drugs last year. And on that earnings call, the CEO told investors that there’s a “strong underlying demand for medical care,” and all there is to do to address “suffering and death” caused by differing diseases, is part of their company’s optimism and opportunity for future performance.

    This is out in the public, right? This is not said behind a closed door. They’re literally celebrating the fact that there’s a long way to go before a lot of people are healthy again, and how that helps them raise money. Long story short, these mega-retailers are just using inflation as a cover to raise prices and turn record profits, all in the midst of an unprecedented health crisis.

    And that’s not morally acceptable, but I think, importantly, it’s also really, really not good for our economy. Because when you have this much inequality, that is not what makes a healthy economy. A healthy economy is one where workers and consumers and small businesses and smaller players in the market can really have a fighting chance, and that’s just not the system we’re living in right now.

    JJ: I’m going to ask you a question about media in a minute. But let me first bring you back to, you had a statement about legislation being something, but not sufficient. What is the state of legislative response to the problems that you’re outlining?

    RM: I testified last week in front of the Consumer Protection Subcommittee about a piece of legislation that would directly empower both state attorney generals as well as the FTC to go after price gougers, so that’s a really good first step. That addresses the topline problem of price-gouging that we’re seeing right now.

    But like I said before, getting under the hood and undoing a lot of bad policy, and creating a system that actually works, will require concerted effort. And I think it’s really, really critical that we make the long overdue, large-scale investments in our supply chain and in our labor force that we’ve needed for so long, that are currently on the table, right, with the Build Back Better agenda. That’s the first step. I’m not saying it’s going to fix everything. It’s just a critical step.

    JJ: Right.

    RM: The administration has the power to use executive orders to help promote competition. We’ve seen them do that with meatpacking and other sectors, and I’d like to see more of that. Because this is not a problem that we can—there’s no one-shot solution. It’s really going to take all the tools in our toolbox to start to address the different factors that have gone into this knot. Because it is a knotty problem, right, and undoing a knot takes time. Undoing a knot also requires us to trace every piece of string back from its end, right? You can’t just pull on one and expect that it’s all going to come apart.

    JJ: Right. That’s funny that you mention that; that’s very much the image that was in my mind, in terms of what would be important strings to pull on. And we know that it’s a multilevel effort.

    Given that the people who craft policy, we understand, are not, as a rule, those at the sharp end of policy: In theory, that’s where journalism should play a role. That’s where reporters should step in to be a voice, specifically, for the powerless, for those outside of policy-making, and specifically as a conscience for the powerful.

    And so I would ask you, finally, what would you ask of reporters who are now tasked with explaining current conditions? First of all, inflation—that’s in every headline I read today, but I don’t necessarily understand what it means for me. But just in general, in terms of the questions that you’re focused on, is there something that you would like to see reporters do more of or less of to help bring it home for regular folks?

    RM: Yeah, I’ve been really actually excited to see how the story about corporate greed has started to take off.

    JJ: Mmhm.

    RM: And I think it’s taking off because it’s true, right? Again, you don’t have to take my word for it. It is in these earnings calls. The public, you can look at them yourself, you can google them yourself. And I think it’s really heartening to see journalists and others starting to take into account data sources that we didn’t used to think of as data sources, right? Like, most economists don’t look at profit data when they think about inflation. But it’s a really important piece of the puzzle, and I’m really glad to see that journalists and others are starting to take that on and work that into the analysis that they’re thinking about.

    JJ: And connect those two things together. I mean, part of the problem with journalists is not that they lie. It’s just that they don’t connect this story with that story, in a way that shows the meaning.

    RM: Right. And it’s a complicated story. I think that’s also important to note. The long arc of how we got here is a complicated story, and that’s part of why David Dayen and I worked on that piece in the American Prospect. And I’m eager to see more of that from all sorts of folks, and luckily I think we are starting to see more of that teasing out of the complication of the story, the nuance of the story, across the landscape.

    JJ: Not to draw you out on it, but, again, it’s not so much that the story is complicated, which it is, it’s whose perspective it’s being told from. And so when I hear inflation and the Fed is a problem for Biden, I’m like, yeah, you know what? I’m not worried about Biden. Biden’s going to be fine. I’m concerned about how this is affecting folks who get up every day and go to their minimum wage or their just-above-minimum wage work.

    And so what I’m asking you about media is, if journalists were trying to say, here’s what it means for you, here’s how we could translate it to what it means for a regular working person, is there anything that you think they would add or subtract from that coverage?

    RM: Yeah, I really love that framing, because I think a lot of the coverage on inflation is devoid of people, right? We talk about inflation like it’s this thing that we have to deal with, but we care about inflation because we care about how it affects people. I really like that frame, and I hope more take it on. I think we’re starting to see a shift, and I think shows like yours are certainly pushing everyone to put the focus back where it needs to be, which is real people’s lives. Because at the end of the third year of the pandemic, if we’re not focused on people and what they’re doing, we’re not focused on the economy, because we’re the economy, right? So I’m really excited to see more of that framing going forward.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rakeen Mabud. She’s chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. They’re online at GroundworkCollaborative.org. And her co-authored piece with David Dayen on the supply chain can be found at Prospect.org. Thank you so much, Rakeen Mabud, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    RM: Thank you for having me.

     

    The post ‘Mega-Retailers Are Using Inflation as a Cover to Raise Prices and Turn Record Profits’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Big Lies Are Built From Lots of Little Lies’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Steven Rosenfeld about the Arizona election “audit” for the February 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220204Rosenfeld.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: When there are people transparently, fervently invested in presenting election results they don’t like as endlessly arguable, ultimately bendable to the will of whoever yells loudest and longest, it’s important that there be some evidentiary anchor. But when that evidence is provided, it’s still largely up to news media whether or not it anchors public conversation.

    We are at a moment where corporate news media are unfortunately reflecting A.J. Liebling’s view of the press as the weak slat under democracy, narrating more than resisting the overt decision of Republicans to shore up power by suppressing the vote. Beyond all of what ought to be sufficient human rights reasons to talk up a fight for something like democracy in this country, there are also journalistic, interesting stories there to be told.

    Our guest is on that beat. Steven Rosenfeld is editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He joins us by phone from San Francisco. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Steven Rosenfeld.

    Steven Rosenfeld: Thank you, glad to be here.

    CounterSpin: ‘These Lawsuits Are Incredibly Rinky-Dink’

    CounterSpin (11/6/20)

    JJ: When we spoke in early November 2020, Donald Trump had already announced, “As soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.” The contestations, the lawsuits, the Big Lie propaganda were not unexpected, and yet they’re somehow still startling.

    And an epicenter of that was Arizona, where we read about Trump loyalists demanding something called a “forensic audit” that did not go the way that people—hoping to convince or confuse a wider audience into thinking Trump really won the state—hoped it would. A lot of listeners might know that upshot, but they might not know why it happened the way it happened. You watched that all up close and personal, and I’d just like to ask you to talk us through it.

    SR: Sure. The Arizona Senate Republicans basically hired people who were known election deniers. And some of them had worked in Michigan to create these reports that claimed that votes were stolen, reports that were basically later debunked. And they went in to try to manufacture a result or manufacture evidence where they could claim that Trump won.

    What ended up happening was you had some progressives who were trying to go on the inside and work with Republicans and basically convince them and sneak documents out, and that was one of my sources.

    But you also had some retired election technologists who figured out that they could basically box the Cyber Ninjas in, and show that they really didn’t know what they were doing. And the way that they did that was they turned to public records, which are different data sets that accompany different stages of the voting process, and they used them to try to basically rebut and confront the most common false claims or cliches.

    So if you think about how big lies are built from lots of little lies, a lot of those little lies are these kind of dumb cliches, like 40,000 voters were somehow manufactured out of thin air, and ballots were smuggled in while nobody noticed on election night, and of course they came from China. You know, stuff like that. There’s just lots of those types of lies, and they generally are: voters were illegal, or that local election officials are cheating somehow and they’re altering totals, or that the machinery is being secretly programmed to steal votes.

    So anyway, I ran into people who used public records to basically refute these. And it wasn’t the media, and it wasn’t the secretary of state, and it wasn’t the Democratic Party’s lawyers, and it wasn’t the election policy think tanks. And we could talk about literally what they did. But the point of all this is, they came up with explanations before anybody else.

    Now, it was after Biden got inaugurated. But they showed, for example, in March, but this could have been done in November, that there were tens of thousands of people who voted for majority Republican candidates, but they didn’t vote for Trump. And that was several times the statewide margin. And these were basically from the wealthy Phoenix suburbs.

    But nobody else did that. I could tell you how they did that. And they also found out that there weren’t tens of thousands of fraudulent or made-up voters. And they did this by using different public records. And that’s because elections have lots of little subsystems and lots of stages. And if you know what you’re doing, and you know how to work through this data—and these guys, because they were in this industry for years, knew that—they could produce these very focused and simple explanations. So that’s what I was reporting on.

    New Republic: Meet the Trio Who May Have Figured Out How to Save American Democracy

    New Republic (1/27/22)

    JJ: There’s so many questions out of that, but let me start with the human beings. Because listeners may have heard of the Cyber Ninjas, this company which apparently has just shut down, but they were brought in as, supposedly, election experts. They were people who had no expertise in this. But they were brought in as Trump dead-enders who were basically charged with saying that Arizona had voted for Trump.

    But against these Cyber Ninjas, we have the Audit Guys. And I just love the story of who these folks were and what they did, and if you could just take a minute and say, because if folks google “Cyber Ninjas,” you’re going to get a lot of hits. Look for “Audit Guys”? Not so much. Who were these folks, and then a little bit about, you know, they didn’t do something that no one else could do; what they did was something that no one else did.

    SR: Right. That’s really, really true. And the thing is, you had a longtime Republican election data analyst from Tucson. His name is Benny White. And he ran for recorder, which is the county-wide local election official, and he lost last November. And he was the kind of person who always looked at voter lists of, were the registered voters up to date, and then list people who actually voted. And he tried to compare that, to make sure that there wasn’t any fraud going on. There were three of them. He was one.

    The second was this fellow, a Democrat, Larry Moore. And he created this company called Clear Ballot. They’re the only federally certified auditing company that looks at the digital images that are made after a paper ballot is scanned, and uses them to match it with the paper and match it with the final results, to see if everything lines up. And what’s great about that is you can, using computers, you can zero in on every single vote on every single ballot, and you can see if it’s sloppy and messy, and then you can grab the piece of paper and look at it and fight over the real thing, instead of something hypothetical.

    And then Larry’s chief technologist, Jim Halverson, who’s an independent libertarian, he was retired also. So the three of those guys knew election records. And what they did was Larry and Benny were talking, and Benny said that he was looking at his race in November, and he was seeing a lot of people in Tucson, Pima County, which is smaller than Phoenix, he noticed that a lot of these precincts with majority Republicans had an inordinate amount of votes for Biden.

    Steven Rosenfeld

    Steven Rosenfeld: “They knew where to look in all these election records to figure out how to debunk these small lies that become the big lies.”

    They didn’t do anything about it. And all you could do was, you could look at the subtotals, because that’s how things are actually generated at that level in the election results. But in March, he got together with Larry Moore, and he said, let’s really dig into this stuff and go after these Ninjas. Because what happens is, these guys are coming in, and they’re claiming that they’re experts. They have no idea what they’re doing. And literally, we saw that in the spring. They were recounting the second-largest jurisdiction in the country, Maricopa County, which is Phoenix and the suburbs, they were just ripping open boxes and trying to, you know, count stuff. We’re talking about 2.1 million pieces of paper.

    Anyway, what these guys did was they really, methodically, they knew where to look in all these election records to figure out how to debunk these small lies that become the big lies. So the first thing they did was, they took a look at the final, giant database or spreadsheet of every single vote in every single race. So if you think of a chart that has 2.1 million rows: It’s 2.1 million rows deep and it’s 800 rows across, because you have everything from school boards to presidents in a giant county, second-largest county jurisdiction in America, what you see on that spreadsheet, which is so critical, is you can see where people did not vote. The only record that shows what people did not vote for.

    So if you know how to do database searches, and these guys knew how to do this, you could figure out where people were voting for a majority of candidates from one party, but not from one person in particular. So they found something like 60,000 people in Maricopa County, Phoenix, who voted for majority Republicans but not Trump, and about 15,000 people who voted for a majority of Democrats but not Biden. So those are the Bernie Bros. And then you can go deeper, you can even figure out, you can’t identify people, but you can identify precincts or neighborhoods. So you can figure out where these people live. You can go talk to them.

    JJ: Right.

    SR: So that was the first thing that they did, they came up with these simple explanations that tens of thousands of people who were loyal Republicans voted for most of the Republicans on the ballot, but not Trump. Now that’s a non-technical explanation.

    JJ: Right.

    SR: Where all you’re hearing from election officials is trust us, you know, these technical explanations and things like that, our systems are accurate. This was a different, kind of common-sense thing. Republicans have been yelling and screaming about voter fraud as a big excuse, made-up voters, to pass all these restrictive measures for years. And the parties have the actual data that can prove that it doesn’t exist on any scale that affects election results. And they’re not using it.

    JJ: Yeah.

    SR: But these guys did. They accounted for every single voter, with the exception of people whose names are kept hidden because they’re judges, cops or domestic violence victims. So to me, this was unbelievably exciting and interesting. And it’s a template that could be used because, again, the big lies are built on top of lots of little lies, and these little lies are lots of dumb cliches.

    What are the dumb cliches? Oh, voters are being made up and somehow casting ballots, tens of thousands at a time. Or election officials are somehow altering totals, tens of thousands at a time. Or the systems are being secretly programmed and no one’s watching, even though everything is on video camera, especially after all the Russian hacking in 2016, or the attempts. So this is really low-lying fruit, if you’re willing to believe or look for hard data.

    Now, a lot of people are not going to believe this. But I think enough people in the middle, who are not cultists on the right or cultists on the left, would actually believe enough of this and lower the temperature in the room. But that’s always my hope as a journalist, that facts matter.

    NYT: Surprise! There's No Voter Fraud. Again.

    New York Times (12/17/21)

    JJ: I want to just ask you, finally, about news media’s focus, not on those fundaments, but on the shadows on the cave wall. And you address, in this recent piece, this New York Times piece that says that, when it comes to these baseless claims of voter fraud, debunking them was always a fool’s game. And it seems to sort of suggest that giving oxygen to these baseless claims, that somehow that’s the same thing as shining a scrutinizing or a disinfectant light on them. And those things are not the same; there is a role for journalists here. But it has to do with facts over narrative.

    SR: What ends up happening is that there’s a lot of resistance from election officials for a whole bunch of different reasons to having people look over their shoulders.

    JJ: Yeah.

    SR: They’re constantly aware of how partisans will take the smallest things and try to blow them up to make it sound like the sky is falling. But there’s also this resistance to releasing the data that they have, or working with it or presenting it, because they’re busy doing other stuff, and they think that their systems are good enough, and all you have to do is look at all the lawsuits that Trump lost to show that, yeah, they weren’t able to prove anything.

    But as one person said to me, a retired election official who I really admire: He said, that’s fighting the last war. The entire election administration establishment is so concerned with cyber security, and they’ve been so focused on preventing hacking and all that sort of stuff, at the expense of generating trust. So that the last war is fighting, is trying to stop Russia in 2016, that kind of stuff, instead of the disinformation that’s out there in the age of Trump. Right there, that’s the problem.

    So a lot of these folks don’t feel like you can convince anybody whose minds are made up, because they’re cultists. But the thing is, I’m not suggesting we’ve got to convince those folks. I am suggesting that there are lots of people in the middle who are intelligent enough to make up their own minds, and would welcome quickly produced, easily understood, focused, common-sense explanations right after election day.

    Imagine if in mid-November, in states like Arizona, people are able to understand or be shown that, hey, there were tens of thousands of Republicans who voted for most Republicans on the ballot, but not Trump. What would that have done to slow down the Big Lie? We don’t know, because it didn’t happen.

    JJ: All right, then; we’re going to continue this conversation going forward. But for today, we’ve been speaking with Steven Rosenfeld. His piece, “Meet the Trio Who May Have Figured Out How to Save American Democracy,” first appeared on NewRepublic.com. You can find the Voting Booth project and their work at IndependentMediaInstitute.org. Steven Rosenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    SR: Oh, thank you so much. It’s always a treat.

    The post ‘Big Lies Are Built From Lots of Little Lies’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Defenses of Rogan Aren’t About Free Speech; They’re Right-Wing Solidarity

     

    Fox News: Free speech advocates, journalists defend Joe Rogan from calls for censorship

    These “free speech advocates” (Fox News, 2/2/22) were conspicuously silent when people actually lost their jobs for criticizing cops.

    For right-wing and libertarian media, Joe Rogan, host of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, has become a symbol of resistance to censorship (New York Post, 2/2/22; Fox News, 2/2/22; Reason, 2/2/22; The Hill, 2/1/22).

    Musician Neil Young had given the streaming service Spotify, which paid a reported $100 million for exclusive rights to Rogan’s show, an ultimatum: either cut Rogan and his constant misinformation about Covid-19, or lose Young’s music. Spotify—a corporate media service that has been accused of exploiting musicians financially (Guardian, 7/29/13)―chose Rogan.

    Contrary to his media defenders, Rogan has not been threatened with censorship. His free speech rights were never in any kind of jeopardy. Young has not crossed into some kind of pro-deep state censorship mode; rather, he left Spotify because he disagreed with its policies, taking his business elsewhere because he has the right to do that.

    Young’s departure has cost Spotify $2 billion in market value (Variety, 1/29/22), as other notable musicians, like Joni Mitchell, followed suit (Fortune, 2/3/22). Grammy Award–winning singer/songwriter India Arie made matters worse for Rogan “by sharing resurfaced footage to social media showing Rogan using the N-word” (Hollywood Reporter, 2/4/22).

    Both Rogan and Spotify have responded to the outrage, as “Rogan apologized…for his use of a racial slur in past episodes,” and the streaming service removed dozens of his show’s episodes (New York Times, 2/5/22). Such pressure against right-wing, corporate media shock jocks has yielded results in the past: CBS fired Don Imus due to a public backlash against racist and sexist comments he made about the Rutgers women’s basketball team (CBS, 4/12/07; Extra!, 5–6/07). Sometimes it doesn’t, as two dozen advertisers left Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show after he made anti-immigrant comments (Hollywood Reporter, 12/17/18), and he still enjoys top ratings (AdWeek, 1/3/22).

    Artists and media consumers free to engage in media activism like leaving a streaming service (a form of voting with one’s dollars and property, supposedly a democratic feature of the free market) or protesting a media company over its content. But these articles imply that the mere discussion of Rogan’s ability to spread misinformation about Covid is an affront to his constitutional right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Fox News (2/3/22) paraphrased former Mumford & Sons banjo player Winston Marshall saying  that “the state of music censorship in the Soviet Union in 1984” was comparable “to the conditions that Spotify is facing today as calls for it to pull Rogan’s work mount.”

    Speech limits for everyday workers

    NY Post: LI woman with same name as Jacqueline Guzman, actress fired for NYPD funeral rant, makes tearful plea

    The New York Post (2/1/22) expressed no sympathy for a woman fired for criticizing police–she was “widely condemned for her shameful online rant”–but does feel bad for someone with the same name who was mistakenly subjected to abuse.

    Meanwhile, regular, everyday workers live with limits to their “work mount” and their free speech rights because they are at-will employees. And unlike Rogan, who still has the support of Spotify’s boss (New York Post, 2/7/22), these workers are treated as disposable.

    A few recent examples: A Catholic high school teacher was fired for a private tweet that apparently questioned her school’s efforts to commemorate two murdered NYPD officers (Daily News, 2/4/22).

    Related to the public funeral of one of these slain NYPD cops, a New York City “actress was fired this weekend after backlash over her viral TikTok complaint that the city didn’t need to be shut down for ‘one f—— cop’” (Fox News, 1/30/22). And someone who shares her name with that actor says she has “been harassed and threatened by people confusing her with the woman who made the vile rant” (New York Post, 2/1/22).

    In Tennessee, Starbucks fired unionizing employees who had “allowed members of the media into the store as part of the public launch of their unionization effort” (CNN, 2/8/22). For unionists, these terminations aren’t just an immoral violation of labor rights, but an affront to the First Amendment freedom of assembly and, in this case, these workers’ right to publicize their organizing against an enormous and well-known company in the free press.

    These are examples of the real predations on free speech in this country, and yet instances like these don’t seem to elicit the same hand-wringing about censorship from right-wing media.

    Controversy as sellable brand

    Atlantic: Why Is Joe Rogan So Popular?

    Devin Gordon (Atlantic, 8/19/19): “If you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things ‘gay,’ vegan bullies, sexism.”

    Rogan has been immune to this kind of pressure, largely because his controversial statements are exactly what makes his media brand sellable; the Atlantic (8/19/19) said in 2019 that his show has “been the No. 2 most-downloaded podcast on iTunes for two years running,” and “his YouTube channel…has 6 million subscribers.” LGBTQ groups like GLAAD (Twitter, 7/22/20) have criticized the host for promoting anti-trans viewpoints, but Rogan is protected from his critics because by all metrics, he’s a benefit for the corporate services like YouTube: The Hill (2/1/22) argues that with 11 million listeners, “Rogan’s popularity is precisely due to the fact that he is uncensored in what he says.”

    That is a very different story for the 99 Percent, who can become victims of a very real cancel culture, because things like being critical of the police at the wrong time can be seen as beyond the bounds of free discourse. Corporate media haven’t focused on them as victims; in fact, the tabloids and Murdoch-owned media have painted them as extremists who got what was coming to them.

    And libertarians haven’t made them a cause, either. That’s because these pieces that treat Rogan as a free speech warrior aren’t honest. Their defense of Rogan, who said he would vote for Donald Trump in the last election (Guardian, 4/20/20), is not about the sacredness of free speech; while he is facing a lot of public criticism, he is not being regulated or stifled as a result. In fact, these articles celebrate the degree to which protests by musicians haven’t actually silenced him, an admission that his speech was never really under threat.

    These pieces, instead, are a political defense of Covid-19 misinformation and bro jock racism. Robust public health measures to control the pandemic are seen by the right as left-wing government overreach, and therefore someone who criticizes them, however inaccurately, is on their team.

    The Rogan affair is a spectacle by right-wing media to paint an advocate for a right-wing political cause as a victim. Meanwhile, right-wing tabloid vitriol has celebrated the punishment of speech by regular working people.

    The post Defenses of Rogan Aren’t About Free Speech; They’re Right-Wing Solidarity appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Rakeen Mabud on Supply Chain Breakdown

     

    American Prospect: How We Broke the Supply Chain

    American Prospect (1/31/22)

    This week on CounterSpin: You will have heard many things recently about the supply chain—as the reason you can’t find what you’re looking for on store shelves, or the reason it costs so much. But what’s behind it all? Why has the system broken down in this way? Here’s where thoughtful journalism could fill us in, could educate on a set of issues that affects us all, including discussing alternatives. But corporate news media aren’t good at covering economic issues from the ground up, or asking big questions about who is served by current structures. You could say media’s reluctance to critically break down systems is itself a system problem.

    Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. She’ll join us to talk about the ideas in the article she recently co-authored for American Prospect, “How We Broke the Supply Chain.”

          CounterSpin220211Mabud.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of polling and Israeli apartheid.

          CounterSpin220211Banter.mp3

    The post Rakeen Mabud on Supply Chain Breakdown appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Polling on Issues People Know Little About Creates Illusion of Public Opinion

     

    ABC: Majority of Americans want Biden to consider 'all possible nominees' for Supreme Court vacancy: POLL

    ABC (1/30/22): A “new ABC/Ipsos poll shows high disapproval of Biden’s handling of a range of issues.”

    Last week (FAIR.org, 2/2/22), I suggested that a new ABC News/Ipsos poll (1/30/22) was a poster child for what is wrong with many media-sponsored polls these days. Instead of a serious effort to measure what the public is thinking about any specific issue, the poll glided superficially across a whole range of subjects, never stopping long enough to provide understanding of any one of them—creating an illusion of public opinion that is either misleading, biased or simply inaccurate.

    That article focused on the poll’s biased wording on one question about President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman for the Supreme Court vacancy. In this article, I examine the nine presidential approval questions the poll included.

    Origin of presidential approval

    In October 1938, George Gallup asked a presidential approval question for the first time, some three years after he launched his newspaper column “America Speaks.” The intent was to measure a president’s political strength between elections.

    For the past seven-plus decades, Gallup has continued to ask the general approval question: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way [president’s first and last name] is handling his job as president?” Other polling organizations these days routinely include this question, or a minor variant of it, in their own polls.

    The question appears to capture the president’s and his party’s overall popularity with the public. According to Frank Newport and Lydia Saad, writing in Public Opinion Quarterly (Spring/21), the general approval question correlates moderately with how well a president does when running for re-election, and how well his party fares in midterm elections.

    That’s why numerous analysts (see here, here and here) have suggested that if Biden’s low approval rating persists into the fall, the midterms this year could be disastrous for the Democrats.

    While the general presidential approval rating provides some relevant insight into public opinion, the same cannot be said for presidential approval questions that focus on individual issues. The January ABC/Ipsos poll included nine such questions:

    Do you approve or disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling:
    [items ordered by approval rating]
    Approve (%) Disapprove (%) Skipped (%)
    Rebuilding the United States’ infrastructure 50 47 3
    Response to the Coronavirus (Covid-19) 50 49 1
    Climate change 47 51 2
    The economic recovery 42 56 2
    The situation with Russia and Ukraine 41 56 3
    Immigration 34 64 2
    Crime 34 64 3
    Gun violence 29 69 3
    Inflation 29 69 2

    If we take the questions and answers at face value, the results present an amazing picture of the American public. Here are nine very different, and quite complicated issues. And for each one, the respondents are asked to assess how well Biden is dealing with each issue.

    The numbers indicate that 97% or more of American adults know what Biden is doing for each issue. And, presumably, after careful thought, they have come to a meaningful opinion as to whether they approve or disapprove of his actions.

    This is the media-polling Myth of the American Electorate—fully informed and attentive to all issues, with well-considered views about the way they should be addressed.

    That myth, of course, bears little resemblance to reality. In fact, on most issues, the vast majority of the public is simply uninformed—about the issue, and especially about what any president is doing to address the issue.*

    The illusion of public opinion

    Media polls get virtually all respondents to answer a question, regardless of whether they actually have an opinion, by the way in which questions are phrased. They often use a “forced-choice” format, which provides explicit answers like “approve” or “disapprove,” but fails to provide an explicit “unsure” or “don’t know” option. Respondents can volunteer a “no opinion” response, but the vast majority feel pressured to come up with one of the explicit answers, and—as the ABC/Ipsos poll reveals—that pressure works.

    Since most people really don’t know much about how the president is addressing each of the issues, their forced-choice responses can be based on a variety of factors. For some respondents, the mention of Biden’s name will cause them automatically to “approve”; for others, it will cause them automatically to “disapprove.”

    Some respondents will be influenced by what vague news stories they’ve recently read or heard. In that case, they’re reacting not to what the president is actually doing, but to whether they perceive the topic itself (such as the economic recovery, or the situation with Russia and the Ukraine) as good or bad.

    Some issues are inherently “bad”—like crime, gun violence and inflation—and, except for the most devoted partisans, most people will “disapprove” of any president’s “handling” of those issues.

    The ABC/Ipsos results thus tell us almost nothing important about public opinion on any of those issues. The news organization could have focused on one or another topic, and asked a variety of questions to probe what Americans are thinking.

    Instead, we get a whole lot of soundbites, and only the illusion of public opinion.

    *Besides the article referenced in this paragraph, numerous studies over the years have demonstrated that large segments of the public are unengaged on any given issue. Among the many studies that explicitly address this issue are Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World (Syracuse University Press, 1991; George Bishop, The Illusion of Public Opinion: Fact and Artifact in American Public Opinion Polls (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); David W. Moore, The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (Beacon Press, 2009); Christopher H. Achen & Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton University Press, 2017).

    ACTION ALERT: You can send messages to ABC News here (or via Twitter: @ABC). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread.

    FEATURED IMAGE: Detail from ABC image (1/30/22) of a Biden press event.

    The post Polling on Issues People Know Little About Creates Illusion of Public Opinion appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘The Entire Cryptocurrency Market Is Basically a Ponzi Scheme’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Sohale Mortazavi about cryptocurrency for the February 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220204Mortazavi.mp3

     

    NYT: Eric Adams, a Bitcoin Booster, Is Taking First Paycheck in Crypto

    New York Times (1/20/22)

    Janine Jackson: New York City Mayor Eric Adams apparently lost money on his trumpeted decision to take his first paychecks in cryptocurrency. Adams had proudly announced an intention to make New York “the center of cryptocurrency and other financial innovations.” But media reporting remains respectful, calling Adams’ move an “overture…to the business community,” though it has “sparked skepticism.”

    The tone is not, in other words, as though a powerful elected official were losing money at the dog track or betting on fantasy football. This, evidently, is not silliness, but some kind of savvy, whether lowly readers understand it or not. If you’re trying to understand cryptocurrency, and the “crypto” in the name sort of discourages that, and its relation to real goods and services, you probably have deeper questions.

    Our next guest encourages such questions. Sohale Mortazavi is a Chicago-based writer whose recent piece, “Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme,” appeared at Jacobinmag.com. He joins us now by phone from Chicago. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sohale Mortazavi.

    Sohale Mortazavi: Hi, Janine.

    JJ: Well, I’m not ashamed, I will ask you straight up: The stock market is somewhat opaque, but we understand that it’s ultimately linked to things that get made and sold and used. What relationship does cryptocurrency bear to stuff–to cars, to ovens, to sweaters? What is it?

    SM: It’s a great question. I would probably start by saying despite the name, these are not really currencies. Bitcoin was kind of started that way, at least in intent. But they really are just financial assets, and they get traded on financial markets kind of in the way stocks would.

    But the big difference is that stocks are like legal ownership in a company, whereas cryptocurrencies are basically nothing. They’re basically just digital cells on a spreadsheet that people trade back and forth. They’re like digital Chuck E. Cheese tokens, almost, just in the sense that there’s nothing, there literally is nothing underneath any of them.

    And there are a lot of cryptocurrencies now besides Bitcoin, and many of them market themselves in different industries. Honestly, it’s entirely speculative. All of that’s just hype, and it doesn’t really mean anything. They’re basically just speculative assets.

    JJ: Well, I already understand more than I did before, no joke. But let me just ask you, what accounts for the imagery of cryptocurrency as being “pro–little guy” or even revolutionary?

    SM: I think that it’s rooted in libertarian ideology to a certain degree. The person who invented the Bitcoin network did so after the 2008 crash, and the white paper for Bitcoin actually says it’s in response to the 2008 crash. And a lot of libertarians, frankly, have glommed onto this. And they sell it, as you said, as being good for the little guy.

    But it misses the mark, because the issue with the 2008 crash was that the banking system was under-regulated. And this is kind of exactly the opposite. These are people who want to privatize financial markets entirely. Because cryptocurrencies, I mean, the one thing they do well is that they are decentralized. They are decentralized networks. There’s no central managing authority, at least the Bitcoin blockchain isn’t, right? And, yeah, it’s just like they’re privatized money, privatized financial markets. And to me, that’s the opposite of what we want, to avoid another major crash.

    JJ: Well, then, what is the role of banks here, or even more importantly, maybe, what’s the role of federal regulators? Are they just kind of bystanders here?

    SM: Yeah, they’ve been pretty asleep at the wheel on this whole thing. I mean, we have a pretty non-functioning political system in general. Getting any basic budgetary bill passed in Congress is nearly impossible. So getting actual regulations here has been really difficult. I know in New York state there have been some moves to regulate cryptocurrencies, and in particular stablecoins, which we should talk about in a moment.

    JJ: Yeah.

    SM: But yeah, I mean, the DOJ’s done investigations, the FTC. But everything is just always a little too little, too late. And we haven’t really gotten a good bill out of Congress at all so far.

    JJ: What is stablecoin, and what role does that play?

    Jacobin: Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme

    Jacobin (1/22/22)

    SM: Right, so this is what my piece in Jacobin was mostly about. I feel like most people get that crypto is this shady thing. It seems like gambling. It seems kind of like a con, and probably a bad investment. And it really is all those things. But my piece is actually homing in, as the DoJ and the FTC did, on stablecoin, and the Biden administration as well, I should say.

    Basically, there are two main kinds of cryptocurrencies that are actually in use. And I will get yelled at for saying this by certain people; “there’s all these different kinds.” But really, there are speculative assets, like Bitcoin, people are trading on these markets. And then there’s also something called a stablecoin, which instead of being an asset that’s traded at different prices, is pegged, usually, to the price of the dollar. And so the one that people know the most about is Tether, which is issued by a Hong Kong-based company that runs a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange, Bitfinex.

    JJ: Mm-hm.

    SM: So I know this is a lot of information I’m dumping on you.

    JJ: It’s OK. Yup.

    SM: But these coins are pegged to the dollar, and they’re basically treated as dollars on exchanges. Because a lot of these exchanges are overseas, real banks don’t want to do business with them, and they don’t have access to dollars, basically, to facilitate exchanges on their exchange. So these stablecoins provide liquidity on bank exchanges.

    But the thing about them is there’s nothing stopping them from printing as many as they want, which is basically what’s happening. You have these private companies issuing fake dollars on the blockchain, and then sending them out to their own exchanges, and doing basically God knows what with them. And there’s nothing stopping them from using these fake dollars to buy up Bitcoin assets.

    Sohale Mortazavi

    Sohale Mortazavi: “Investors are buying thinking that prices are being driven by speculation, when they’re actually really being driven by market manipulation.” (image: Scam Economy, 2/3/22)

    And, frankly, that’s basically what they’re doing. Researchers have looked into this. There is a class action lawsuit right now. Also, this is all on the blockchain. It’s all public. We can see what’s happening, more or less. And so what my piece posits is that the entire cryptocurrency market is basically a Ponzi scheme, in which these companies are printing fake money to buy up assets and drive up the prices.

    I’m getting a lot of pushback on this, because people will say, well, technically, a Ponzi scheme is a specific thing. They’re usually investment funds that lure in investors, and pay out new investors, with funds from older investors. And the thing about crypto is that everyone kind of understands that that’s the goal of the game. So that’s not really fraudulent. They know it’s a purely speculative asset. The fraud comes in because investors are buying thinking that prices are being driven by speculation, when they’re actually really being driven by market manipulation.

    JJ: I think that’s really interesting, because there’s kind of a double-level thing going on, at least with the narrative around it, where it’s like, yeah, this is kind of sketch, but if you get on the rollercoaster at the right time and get off it on the right time, the money you’ll make will be real money, even if we realize that it’s ironically untethered from real goods and services as people generally explain them. But what you’re saying is, this isn’t even tulips. This is something structurally worse.

    SM: Right. Yeah. The thing is, people make money on Ponzi schemes, too, a lot of people. People who invested with Madoff did it because they made a lot of money doing so, until it fell apart.

    JJ: Yeah. Well, what do you see as a way going forward? It’s clear, yes, some folks are making money, absolutely. A lot of folks are also being duped, and then even more folks are being confused, not to put too fine a point on it. But what do you see as a kind of harm-mitigating way going forward?

    SM: I think the only way going forward is just to ban them entirely. And that’s what other countries are starting to do. China’s banned crypto entirely. India’s about to. Russia’s about to. And they’ve all talked about issuing their own state cryptocurrencies. But these aren’t going to be the same all-a-marketing-gimmick, actually private crypto that are being banned in all these other countries.

    And I see it as really the only way, because these are private companies issuing these stablecoins. There is no way we can stop anyone from some other country, outside of our own jurisdiction, from opening an exchange, printing their own stablecoins and continuing their Ponzi. Because Tether is not the only company doing this, even though that’s the one that we’ve talked about. There are multiple ones.

    So, yeah, I think a full ban is the only way to deal with it. Because there are companies like Coinbase that are banked exchanges. There’s Gemini, Coinbase, a few other ones, mostly based in the US and South Korea. And these actually are regulated crypto exchanges, that do have banking relationships. And these are functional as a cash off-ramp for people that are actually exchanging Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever for actual cash. And if we close these down, the whole thing will just die overnight. That’s really the only way I see out of this.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sohale Mortazavi. He’s a Chicago-based writer, and you can find his recent piece, “Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme,” at Jacobinmag.com. Sohale Mortazavi, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    SM: Thank you so much.

     

    The post ‘The Entire Cryptocurrency Market Is Basically a Ponzi Scheme’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Steven Rosenfeld on Arizona ‘Audit,’ Sohale Mortazavi on Cryptocurrency

     

     

    CNN: An Arizona bill would empower state legislators to reject election results

    CNN (1/28/22)

    This week on CounterSpin: A New York Times opinion piece by editorial board member Jesse Wegman says that debunking Republicans’ baseless, self-serving claims of voter fraud “was always a fool’s game,” because “the professional vote-fraud crusaders are not in the fact business.” The suggestion seems to be that even addressing such claims is “giving them oxygen.” But there’s a difference between airing such claims and training a scrutinizing, disinfectant light on them—and it’s really journalists’ choice which of those they do. The  spate of new election-meddling laws proposed in Arizona suggests that looking away is not the answer. But Trumpers’ loss in Arizona could also map a way forward, if you’re interested. Our guest is interested. Steven Rosenfeld is editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

          CounterSpin220204Rosenfeld.mp3

     

    Jacobin depiction of cryptocurrencey

    (image: Jacobin, 1/21/22)

    Also on the show: If you think the “little guy” is left out of Wall Street deals, you’re not wrong. But is Bitcoin the answer? Is “cryptocurrency” a leveling force—or just a different flavor of grift that plays on that not-unfounded little guy frustration? Our guest gets at what’s new and what’s old in his description of cryptocurrency as “the people’s Ponzi.” Sohale Mortazavi is a writer based in Chicago; his recent piece on cryptocurrency appears in Jacobin.

          CounterSpin220204Mortazavi.mp3

    The post Steven Rosenfeld on Arizona ‘Audit,’ Sohale Mortazavi on Cryptocurrency appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • The News Is Not That Israel Has Apartheid, but That Amnesty Dares Say So

     

    Politico: Amnesty International report alleging ‘apartheid’ in Israel draws fierce criticism

    Politico (2/1/22) framed its article around attacks on Amnesty International, quoting charges that it was  “just another radical organization that echoes propaganda with no serious examination,” and “likely motivated by antisemitism.”

    Does the state of Israel now endorse cancel culture? AP (1/31/22) disclosed that its government called on Amnesty International not to release a report (2/1/22) that defines that nation’s legal structure as a form of apartheid. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said the report endorses “lies shared by terrorist organizations.”

    CNN (2/1/22) covered the Amnesty report, leading with accusations of antisemitism, the sort of cheap slap that offers little substance but a lot of vitriol. Politico (2/1/22) led also with the report’s condemnation by Israeli officials and pro-Israel groups, not the findings of the report itself. (This isn’t surprising, as FAIR—11/5/21—reported how Politico’s German owner mandates its outlets maintain a pro-Israel line.)

    Politico also uncritically quoted Lapid calling the human rights group biased because “Amnesty does not call Syria an ‘apartheid state’”—as if “apartheid” were a generic term for “bad government,” rather than a specific form of racialized oppression. Amnesty’s web section on Syria states that all belligerents in the Syrian conflict, including government forces, have “continued to commit with impunity serious violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, and gross human rights abuses.”

    Recycled defenses

    WSJ: The ‘Apartheid’ Libel of Israel

    The Wall Street Journal‘s charge (1/31/22) that Amnesty’s report threatens “the very existence of Israel” echoes its earlier defense (1/13/64) of apartheid in South Africa, where “a one-man one-vote would open up the prospect of a black majority expropriating the property and destroying the livelihood of the white minority.”

    The Wall Street Journal (1/31/22) condemned Amnesty’s report, saying it ought to receive “the world’s opprobrium and sanction” for its “denunciation of the very existence of Israel as a refuge for the Jewish people.” The Journal placed the blame for Israel’s discriminatory laws on Palestinians, because Jewish settlers “in historic Palestine had to fight to survive against Arab militias and national armies that wanted to push them into the sea.”

    The paper peppered its editorial with hoary reminders that “Israel is a democracy” because Arabs who live inside Israel’s Green Line can vote and run for office. Meanwhile, the disenfranchised Palestinians who live under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza—who are the majority of Arabs in Israel/Palestine—have only themselves to blame, because they “could have their own state with comparable rights if they had accepted the concessions that Israel offered.”

    Almost 60 years ago, the Journal editorial board (9/25/63) made a similar argument against calls to boycott apartheid South Africa; the conservative daily argued that targeting white-run South Africa was hypocritical, because activists were not also targeting Arab Algeria with “equal disdain.” Historian William Henry Chamberlin wrote in the Journal (1/13/64) that condemnation of South African apartheid at the United Nations was “highly selective” because of strife in other UN member states, and reminded readers that white Boers had been in the country for “more than three centuries.”

    Two decades ago, the Journal (11/21/01) promoted Israeli academic Arnon Sofer’s belief that due to “high Arab birthrates,” there must be complete “separation” between Jews and Arabs, because “without separation, Israel’s Jewish majority, one of Zionism’s pillars, will be undermined.” Now the paper is shocked to see a word that means “systematic separation” being applied to the country.

    The New York Post (1/31/22) employed the same type of deflection as the Journal, using the tragedy of the Holocaust to justify Israel’s founding. It complained that the report doesn’t mention “Jews getting the boot from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt,” adding that “Yasser Arafat does not appear.” (Arafat died 18 years ago, and Nasser in 1970.)

    Echoing other evaluations

    NYT: Rights Group Hits Israel With Explosive Charge: Apartheid

    The New York Times has so far not covered the Amnesty report, but when it wrote (4/27/21) about Human Rights Watch’s similar conclusion, it featured the charge that finding apartheid in Israel “bordered on antisemitism.”

    While a new stance for Amnesty, the report echoes the evaluation of other human rights experts. Human Rights Watch (NPR, 4/27/21) and the Israeli rights group B’Tselem (1/12/21) have both accused Israel of maintaining an apartheid system, and the late Bishop Desmond Tutu frequently compared Israel’s occupation to the apartheid system in South Africa he fought to eliminate (FAIR.org, 1/6/22).

    The New York Times, as of this writing, has not covered the Amnesty report, although it did cover the Human Rights Watch report last year (4/27/21), leading with how the apartheid charge was “explosive,” and how at least one HRW representative had said in 2001 that it was wrong to equate Zionism with racism.

    The Times, however, has also offered the same kind of deflections against the “apartheid” label we are seeing today; its review (1/7/07) of former President Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid called it “a strange little book” with “misrepresentations” of Arafat and late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. Falling short of calling Carter an antisemite, the Times dismissed Carter for his “awfully narrow perspective,” “Rip van Winkle feel” and “tone deafness about Israel and Jews.”

    Amnesty (2/1/22) states that “massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians” add up to what is called “apartheid under international law.” All of this comes down to a fundamental truth that while Israel enjoys more plurality and democratic institutions than some of its neighbors, a defining feature of the government is that an individual’s legal and political rights are tied to their national and religious identity, something that should be anathema in a liberal democracy.

    Reflexive hostility to critics

    The hostile media responses to Amnesty’s report barely bother to refute the findings. Criticism of Israel’s denial of Palestinians’ rights is deemed a threat to the country’s ability to be an explicitly Jewish state, the Journal said. This is an admission of Israel/Palestine’s existential crisis: A country can be an ethno-state or it can be a democracy, but it can’t be both.

    Newsweek: Rashida Tlaib Accused of 'Antisemitic Dog Whistling' in Detroit Remarks

    Newsweek (8/4/21) suggests that when Rashida Tlaib talks about “the structure we’ve been living under right now,” she means Jews rather than capitalism.

    The charges of antisemitism being applied to criticism of Israel have become routine. Sonya Meyerson-Knox, senior communications manager at Jewish Voice for Peace, told FAIR (11/5/21) that “defending Israel’s regime of supremacy and violence does nothing to advance Jewish safety,” and that such rhetoric “helps fuel antisemitism, by reducing people with varying beliefs into a monolithic stereotype.”

    The response that the report ignores Palestinian misdeeds overlooks that the group has, in fact, condemned Hamas’ human rights abuses (e.g., 3/27/15, 3/18/19). These pieces insist that when Israel is criticized, we change the subject to how bad Palestinian leaders are and how their predicament is ultimately their own doing. This is a continuation of a trend in media that offers not just pro-Israel coverage, but outright hostility toward other points of view.

    For example, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (9/23/21) not only condemned several congressmembers for decoupling US funding for an Israeli missile defense system from a “must-pass bill to keep the US government afloat,” but insisted that they should suffer “reputational cost for this supremely foul piece of political grandstanding.” Even treating support for the Israeli military as open to debate in a democratic forum is supposed to put you beyond the political pale.

    Newsweek (8/4/21) amplified the accusation that Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American congressmember from Michigan, spoke in coded antisemitism when she linked Black suffering in Detroit to Gazans living under occupation. The accusation that she was insinuating that Jewish ringleaders were causing the world’s suffering was a stretch, but that was the price she paid for having the gall to link injustice in her district to injustice to her fellow Palestinians.

    Growing rejection of apartheid

    JTA: Survey: A quarter of US Jews agree that Israel ‘is an apartheid state’

    Jewish Telegraphic Agency (7/13/21): “Many American Jews agree with statements by some of Israel’s harshest critics on the left.”

    With leading human rights groups using the “apartheid” label on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, that terminology will be a bigger part of the Middle East discussion. That might be why the response has been so harsh. “The past decade has seen American public opinion in support of Palestinian human rights grow at an exponential rate across ages and religions,” said Meyerson-Knox.

    Indeed, Gallup (3/19/21) reported that “the percentage wanting more pressure placed on the Palestinians has fallen to 44%, while the proportion wanting more pressure on Israel has increased from 27% to 34%.” Last summer, a poll (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7/13/21) of US “Jewish voters taken after the Israel/Gaza conflict” found that “a sizable minority believe some of the harshest criticisms of Israel”: “34% agreed that ‘Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,’” and “25% agreed that ‘Israel is an apartheid state.’”

    Jewish Voices for Peace’s Meyerson-Knox added that, “The significance of Amnesty’s report in continuing to shape public opinion cannot be overstated,” because “the chorus of internationally respected voices calling for an end to Israeli apartheid is simply too loud to be ignored.”

    Research assistance: Luca Goldmansour

     

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