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Friday, June 27, 2003

The Specter of Vietnam

Howard Zinn's latest is well worth your time!

posted by Jenny at 6:17 AM |

Whole Lotta Nothin'

Looks like at least a few journalists share my suspicions about the mainstream media's jingoistic portrayal of the "Battle of Iraq"...

Michael Wolff, the media commentator and New York Magazine columnist, who was based at the million dollar press center in Doha, Qatar, went further, saying he and other journalists had been entirely cut off from events and might just as well have been in Florida. There was nothing. There was no one to talk to. It was embarrassing.

"There were hundreds of reporters. People had spent huge amounts of money getting there and we were getting nothing."

Delivering the keynote speech yesterday, he said journalists who were promised access to General Tommy Franks were forced to become Jayson Blairs - a reference to the New York Times reporter sacked for having made up stories - because of pressure on them to provide news when they were being starved of information by the US military.

He claimed the decision to allow embedding had been a "moment of sheer brilliance" on the part of the Bush administration and suggested the move had turned reporters in such positions into little more than public relations people.

Describing the principle as "intrinsically dangerous", he went on: "I do not think we should be attached to military forces. There is no way you will not become an adjunct to these forces."

Mr Wolff put forward the "semi-conspiracy theory" that major media companies in the US meekly followed the flag-waving agenda of the Bush administration in order to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to change its regulations.

"Ass-kissing has gone on to a profound degree. It's pervasive throughout all these news organizations."

posted by Jenny at 6:11 AM |

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Mining Giant Threatens to Scar Island Paradise

I've always wanted to visit Madagascar and see the lemurs. Now, thanks to these corporate idiots (and the Global North's penchant for industrially-produced paint and toothpaste), the ecosystem off Madagascar's south coast will be perhaps irreparably altered. Environmental activists, get your groove on...

Via Vegan Blog.

posted by Jenny at 3:50 AM |

Here's some speculation on blackbox voting from Seattle Weekly; Washington state is still in a comment period on the state's plan to implement the Help America Vote Act.

posted by Jenny at 3:16 AM |

"See more Hispanic photos"

Need a laugh? Then check out the Slate's screen grab and commentary on Bush's 2004 campaign website, which somebody accidentally left live for a few hours yesterday. Cackle cackle, but of course, they'll probably just spin themselves a more streamlined one in response to this...

posted by Jenny at 3:08 AM |

Here's a thought-provoking post from the MotherJones discussion boards:

What's significant about Orwell's critiques of the left of his time is that they were taken to heart, and much of what he saw as wrong, such as the apologism for Stalin, was excised. Even the phrase "politically correct," which the marching morons of the right use as an accusation against the left, originated within the left as an example of the sort of internal criticism that Orwell was practicing.

More neat stuff on Orwell, the various readings on the term "liberal", and other potpourri to be found here.

posted by Jenny at 2:59 AM |

Check out this Army sergeant's story (via Cursor): two US Army doctors refused to help three Iraqi children who were burned when they set fire to a bag containing explosive powder left over from the war. Doctors turned them away because "their injuries were not life-threatening and had not been inflicted by U.S. troops." The two girls and boy are now covered with scabs, says the AP, and the boy cannot use his right leg. "Our goal is for the Iraqis to use their own existing infrastructure and become self-sufficient, not dependent on U.S. forces for medical care," public affairs officer with the 3rd Corps Support Command David Accetta told the press service in an email.

Whatever. If you're on the side that provoked the war, and children are playing with explosives used in the war, you've got to be pretty heartless to say that it's their own damn responsibility. Maybe nobody in charge over there gets that stuff like this is what feeds anti-American sentiment...and with considerable justification, I might add. Holy cow.

posted by Jenny at 2:49 AM |

Now I'd like to direct our attentions to a brilliant article by George Monbiot on the WTO, published a couple of days ago at the Guardian. The reason I like it so much is that it proposes a solution different from the usual calls to dismantle such organizations, which often don't account for the aftermath of their disapperance...instead of simply scrapping the WTO, Monbiot proposes we transform it into a global fair trade organization.

posted by Jenny at 2:39 AM |

Whew! My blog has been in limbo for awhile as Blogger was in the process of transferring it to the "new system", which looks very modern and such on my display. So anyways, I'm back! And hopefully the new version works as efficiently as it looks...

posted by Jenny at 2:35 AM |

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Blech

Okay, this is just bizarre. I think Saddam Hussein may have one up on Hitler in the category of megalomaniacal self-veneration...

posted by Jenny at 12:33 PM |

Anybody catch Howard Dean's appearance on Meet the Press? I don't get it here in Germany, but there are a mixture of reactions for your rumination at Daily Kos and Atrios. I often hesitate to draw serious conclusions from accounts of happenings on TV (how many lenses is it filtered through?), but in this case, it seems some of the commentary on the web is well worth a glance. One of the most thought-provoking (and troubling, but that's not necessarily a bad thing) pieces I've found on this is at Slate:

Most of what Dean said on Meet the Press Sunday morning could have been written by the Democratic Leadership Council. He accused Bush of forcing tax hikes and spending too much. He indicated that he'd limit the rate of spending growth and might raise the retirement age. He deferred to states and churches on gun control and gay marriage. At one point, host Tim Russert rapped Dean for calling Dick Gephardt's expensive health care proposal "pie in the sky." Some big spender. Dean's defense of the death penalty in extreme cases was even more eyebrow-raising:

The problem with life without parole is that people get out for reasons that have nothing to do with justice. We had a case where a guy who was a rapist, a serial sex offender, was convicted, then was let out on what I would think and believe was a technicality, a new trial was ordered, and the victim wouldn't come back and go through the second trial. And so the guy basically got time served. … So life without parole doesn't work either.

Executing killers because they might get out on a "technicality"? That isn't just pro-death penalty. It's anti-due-process.

Even Dean's foreign policy views, which do set him apart from Gephardt, Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman, aren't that radical. At Sunday's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition forum, Dean said of left-wing candidate Dennis Kucinich, "I don't agree with Dennis about cutting the Pentagon budget when we're in the middle of difficulty with terror attacks." On Meet the Press, Dean gave a perfectly presentable defense of his stated uncertainty that ousting Saddam Hussein was a good thing: "If we can't get our act together in Iraq, and if we can't build Iraq into a democracy, then the alternative is chaos or a fundamentalist regime. That is certainly not a safer situation for the United States." Russert ended up wondering whether Dean had a sufficient "sense of the military." I wonder, too. But mostly, I wonder what the hell that means, and whether it's enough of a basis to label somebody the next George McGovern.

posted by Jenny at 12:31 PM |

Sunday, June 22, 2003

PETA and Pop Culture

Here's a fascinating article by Michael Specter on Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA...and a good reminder of the Hollywoodization of animal rights. While I disagree with many of PETA's tactics, including the usage of objectifying images of women to promote cruelty-free shopping, I think it's important that we explore the dynamics which produce such star-studded organizations, and the pros and the cons of their existence...

posted by Jenny at 8:41 AM |

Ever think of the chemistry at play behind your Kodak moments?

On Earth Day 2003, Kodak brazenly announced that the EPA had proclaimed the company “a remarkable example of how organizations can combine environmental concerns with smart business strategy.” This is a dubious distinction, given the fact that three years ago an EPA report named Kodak New York state’s number-one producer of dioxin—a carcinogen found in Agent Orange. Not surprisingly, people living near the company’s Rochester plant have experienced high rates of neuropathy, diabetes, and cancers of the thyroid and pancreas—all illnesses suffered by Vietnam veterans.

According to Michael I. Niman of Alternet, residents of the Kodak Park neighborhood have also reported ailments such as fibromyalgia, arthritis, asthma, cerebral palsy, nervous system disorders and Primary Biliary Cirrhosis—a rare autoimmune disease. A concerned mother conducting a door-to-door survey documented 33 cases of children living with brain cancer within a five-mile radius of the Kodak facility. Both the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute have placed Rochester “in the top ten percentile for death rates from 13 different types of cancers.”

More.

posted by Jenny at 8:31 AM |

Notes from the Blogosphere

Well, here are some gems from my weekend surfing...

First of all, LMB recommends "The First Casualty", an article which deconstructs "U.S. intelligence and the way it was manipulated, stretched, and distorted to support a war on Iraq. Good for those debates with neighborhood war hawks...

Hesiod directs us to an Economist article "in defence of elderly hippes"...take that, John Ashcroft!

Meanwhile, Atrios informs us that Rumsfeld's staff have been calling city officials around the country, "urging them to structure Fourth of July celebrations around the war in Iraq," and, frighteningly, Eschaton guest lambert says that fears are surfacing of a new Wal-Bank...doesn't seem utterly probable yet, but still a future possibility.

Vegan Blog excerpts an article on "intelligent" hunting by Howard Rosenberg. It's really well-written, and ties in some good criticism of the Crocodile Hunter...whose show I do watch from time to time, and sometimes enjoy, but feel quite ambivalent about...

And, last but certainly not least, South Knox Bubba has a tinfoil hat update regarding a new "watch blog," PNAC.INFO, which keeps an eye on that elusive think tank consortium of the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, and Dr. Strangelove. Check it out, folks.

posted by Jenny at 8:24 AM |

What would Orwell say? (Case #5,676)

This just in via Alternet's Rights & Liberties Log:

More than 13,000 Arab and Muslim men who voluntarily came forward to register with the US government now face deportation, despite the fact that they are not suspected of any terrorist activity. According to an AP report, the Justice Department also acknowledges that many of these immigrants were also chained, physically and verbally abused, held without bail, and denied access to lawyers. This is the thanks they get for coming forward? Instead of an apology, a one-way ticket back to a country that may be next on the U.S.'s bombing list.

And a few lines from the article itself...acknowledging that the deportees were "illegal", but there seems to be a disparity of treatment between immigrants of particular ethnicities:

Of the 82,000 who came forward, more than 13,000 were found to be in the United States illegally and now face deportation, the Times said.

But of those 82,000 men and "tens of thousands more screened at airports and border crossings" in the past six months, only 11 had links to "terrorism," it said.

Many came forward in false hopes their cooperation would result in leniency on the part of immigration officials.
"People did register out of their good conscience, because they wanted to follow the rules, respect the law," Fayiz Rahman of the American Muslim Council told AFP.

He charged that Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites)'s policy is "targeted only towards Muslims.

"This is a major concern," he stressed. "They are planning to reduce the number of Muslims on American soil, ... discourage Muslim immigration, make our lives difficult."

Other critics also say the policies are discriminatory.

"What the government is doing is very aggressively targeting particular nationalities for enforcement of immigration law," the paper quoted Lucas Guttentag of the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) as saying.

"The identical violation committed by, say, a Mexican immigrant is not enforced in the same way."

posted by Jenny at 8:00 AM |

Tom Tomorrow has the latest projected statistics on items stolen from Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities--was it 6,000 artifacts, or 10,000?

posted by Jenny at 1:02 AM |

The Economics of Embedded Journalism

These hidden costs of the program have gone curiously unreported, perhaps because the top news organizations accepted this bargain for their own embedded employees. Or maybe it's because the Pentagon didn't disclose any media expenses in its $60 billion war budget. Either way, taxpayers had no reason to suspect they would foot the bill when the Pentagon recruited 775 embedded journalists to tell the military's story. For critics who already feared embeds were too beholden to report objectively, this sweetheart deal will likely cast further doubt. The bottom line is that Pentagon officials, to attract as many journalists as possible, offered free training, transportation, food, shelter, medical care, protection, gas masks and chemical suits, Blair tells Milwaukee Magazine.

"The military is paying for these guys," says Blair. "We went into this program saying we weren't going to have reimbursement." In effect, the Pentagon offered free trips to Baghdad and hundreds of journalists jumped on board without packing their ethics codes.

Almost every major news organization has a strict policy against journalists accepting anything free from people they cover. Freebies undercut the public's perception of their independence and objectivity. "We pay our own way. If an event is newsworthy, we can afford it," states the Journal Sentinel's detailed policy, which directly addresses meals, lodging, services, transportation and other expenses. For instance: "The Journal Sentinel will pay for transportation necessary for a staff member's professional duties in all possible cases, including transportation provided by government or military agencies."
The military did require embeds to pay for their reporting equipment (satellite phones or laptops) and for optional things like immunizations, helmets or body armor. This is pocket change, however, compared to expenses for a non-embedded reporter - $16,000 to $35,000 for everything from tents to gas masks to hiring drivers, estimates a Columbia Journalism Review story.

While news editors and producers boast about how much they spent on Iraq coverage, the more important issue is how much embeds saved by taking military favors. In future military conflicts, will this many journalists embed if they have to pay?

During media boot camps, for example, the Journal Sentinel's Skiba spent six days at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Toosi five days at Quantico, Virginia. The Pentagon's Lt. Col. Gary Keck, who coordinated the camps, says the training is worth "thousands and thousands of dollars." By comparison, the private firm Centurion Risk Assessment Services offers a similar five-day course for $2,300 per person, according to The Weekly Standard.
If embeds traveled with their units to the Gulf region, the trip was free. Skiba hitched a ride with soldiers on a chartered Boeing B-747; a similar commercial flight from Chicago to Kuwait City has a $1,400 ticket price.
To provide a minimum daily ration of two meals-ready-to-eat (MREs) and two 16-ounce bottles of sterilized water for a month, the cost to the military is more than $500 per journalist, based on figures from the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia.

Free shelter saved embeds the cost of a tent ($130 retail), sleeping bag ($100 retail) or hotels in Kuwait City and Baghdad ($100 nightly minimum). They also took no-cost loans of gas masks ($179-$329 retail) and nuclear/biological/chemical suits ($45-$59 retail).
And, yes, protection courtesy of the U.S. armed forces. To hire a former British Royal Marine from Centurion to escort you to Baghdad, the charge is around $400 a day.

Embeds kicked out of their units for rules violations were then responsible for themselves, a powerful incentive to play along.

...

"Journalists seem to be failing to practice what they preach. They're outraged when government officials accept travel and gifts from private interests," says Jeffery A. Smith, author of War and Press Freedom and a UW-Milwaukee journalism professor. "Clearly, the news media have some explaining to do."

posted by Jenny at 12:59 AM |

Arianna Huffington ought to team up with Chris Hedges:

WMDs and The Psychology of Fanaticism

posted by Jenny at 12:54 AM |

FauxNews

Dale Steinreich offers up a chronicle of the media distortions emanating out of the Murdoch giant during the war...here's the hook:

Since the Iraq conflict began on March 20, Fox News has been on a mission to legitimize it. One problem for Fox's protracted apologia is that despite promises of evidence of current weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) by the Bush Administration, the evidence has been ambiguous at best. Unfortunately for the network, I’ve been keeping a scratch diary of their reports since the war began.

Keep in mind that in the first three weeks of March, before the bombs started officially dropping, Fox was spreading all sorts of Pentagon propaganda. Iraq had "drones" that it could quickly dispatch to major U.S. metropolitan areas to spread biological agents. Saddam was handing out chemical weapons to the Republican guard to use against coalition troops in a last-ditch red-zone ring around Baghdad. Given what we now know about Iraq, these reports seem to be laughable fantasies, but they were effective in securing public backing for the war. The following is a short chronicle of lies, propagation of lies, exaggerations, distortions, spin, and conjecture presented as fact.

posted by Jenny at 12:51 AM |