Monday, October 15, 2007

Racist Survey Questions on a Survey about Multi-Culturalism


OK. Click on this image. I dare you. I'll go into how offended I am by it below. If you find the questions fine, you can stop reading now and go here.

I'm starting to become far more than mildly concerned about Innovative Research Group. I've already written about the creative nature of interpreting reality that goes on at Robbins SCE Research. Now I can't help but wonder about the validity of IRG's polling.

Among whatever else they do, they conduct monthly polls in an online format. They ask about political support and current events.

Their online polling methodology is questionable. To sign up for their Canada 20/20 polls, you must provide an incredibly personal dossier on yourself, which they can use to pre-determine who gets to answer each month's poll. Maybe they request participation randomly. If so, why bother with all the up-front data-mining? I suppose we should just trust them on this. Here are your views and information they ask about [a poll in itself] before you can participate in their polls:
  1. federal party support
  2. our presence in Afghanistan
  3. Medicare and prescription drugs
  4. gender
  5. birthdate
  6. postal code
  7. citizenship
  8. residency
  9. whether you work in media or polling
  10. whether and who you voted for in the last federal election
  11. whether Quebec is a distinct society
  12. federal party affiliation
  13. your registered and non-registered investments
  14. your personal financial asset wealth
  15. your charitable giving habits
  16. the role of newspapers, tv and the internet in your news gathering, and which media outlets
  17. whether you rent or own your home
  18. employment status, sector, job category and authority position
  19. formal education
  20. union membership
  21. religion!
  22. language at home
  23. and of course the money shot, household income [which you can decline to answer, as with some but not all other questions]
  24. the country where you and your parents were born
  25. whether you wish to be in a focus group
Aside from the poll not being a random sample of British Columbians [the homeless and others on the wrong side of the digital divide don't always check their email promptly enough], their August poll asked "473 British Columbians" from around the province to comment on Vancouver's strike. Asking people far from Vancouver what they think of Vancouver's strike is questionable. This might explain how on page 10 of their August poll report, we find that 62% of those polled found the strike to not have affected them at all while 18% were affected "not much." Perhaps they don't live in Vancouver? Their heading on page 10 is "Most feel no impact from strike." Really.

They do break down the 17% of 473 people [or 80] who reported being affected and 96% of them [77 people] ]live in Vancouver or the lower mainland. I am not thrilled by that sample size. Good thing the Vancouver Sun reported on the poll that includes merely 77 of the over 2 million living in the lower mainland [that's .00386% of the population].

In all, they conclude that poll participants think the union had been more unreasonable than the city. Presumably this includes people from the rest of BC who may have virtually no knowledge of the machinations of the strike itself. In the end it doesn't matter because the percentages blaming each side were within the margin of error. So no one really loses. They interpret this to mean a pox on both your houses. Perhaps the conclusion is lack of information due to living in Fort St. John or Cranbrook.

So I've been wary of IRG's methodology for some time now. But this evening I participated in one of their polls. Why not? I have a chance to win $500.

After many reasonable questions in the monthly online survey, many having to do with general views of federal and provincial politics and multi-cultural acceptance [perhaps having to do with Bruce Allen and his idiocy], I encountered a series of questions asking how I felt about living in a society with so many cultures.

I was even asked to reflect on the idea that after all, our nation is a land of immigrants. [I agreed.]

Then I clicked on the next page button and saw this piece of garbage above.

I thought I had learned to stuff down the bile in my throat after Gordon Campbell's BC neoLiberal party has gone all in favour of treaty negotiations after their racist First Nations treaty referendum, but now we have a "major" polling group asking these ridiculous questions.

Below is the letter I sent to their support@canada2020.com. Feel free to share with them how you feel about asking these ridiculous questions. And pop back here to see any updates. I expect a response from them. If I don't get one, I'll comment on that as well.

Attached is a screenshot of a question in your current web survey [the same image as above].

It is irresponsible, inflammatory and impossible to answer by anyone but the ignorant or at best highly uninformed.

It can provide no meaningful information.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

While most of the other questions were highly or mostly answerable without having to over-simplify thought, this entire page is an affront. I await your apology and a public apology to all who have answered this survey.

I will be tracking how you disseminate the results of this survey. If you demonstrate that you have included information from this question, I will publicly be demanding a public apology.

Stephen Elliott-Buckley

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Friday, October 05, 2007

I'm Done with the Olympics

So Bruce Allen is a xenophobic bigot. Nothing new there.

And having been turned off the Olympics from decades of drug scandals and corporate co-optation, VANOC's de facto copyrighting of the number 2010, not to mention the International Olympic Committee [a global entity owned by who, regulated by who and accountable to who?], and during my preparations to boycott the China Olympics next summer because China is a murderous, totalitarian regime [but then Hitler hosted the Olympics too] I find myself stuck with how to boycott the 2010 Olympics in my home town.

Not that I could afford to go, so that's something off my 2009 Christmas List. But really it's only the hockey I'd miss, but when I think about it, the Olympics are much like an all-star game. Curious, but not as compelling as the Stanley Cup playoffs. So now I'm feeling easy about skipping the whole nonsense.

But now Bruce Allen, the bigot, is connected to the Olympics. So I whip off a quick note to our Olympic organizers [whose meetings and financial books are not open to scrutiny, though they are spending public money] saying how I feel, then they reply, then I reply [I can't wait for their next reply, I suspect it will be a "we agree to disagree, respectfully"]:

Here's how I started it off:

bruce allen is an embarrassment to canada. there is no place for him representing us with your organization in any capacity.

his perspective of multiculturalism is shameful and an offense to all canadians.

And I receive a polite FOAD email saying not to fret, he's only a minor player:

Vancouver 2010 Info wrote:

Hello,
Thank you for your interest in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. We wish to acknowledge your e-mail. At Vancouver 2010, we welcome everybody's comments, ideas and opinions.

We're committed to creating spectacular Ceremonies that celebrate
Canada's diversity and rich heritage - Ceremonies that make all Canadians proud. We will also showcase some of Canada's top musical talent every night of the Games at the Victory Ceremonies.

Bruce Allen's participation on the Ceremonies team is limited to helping
us secure some of the biggest music stars in the Canadian music industry. There are other members of the Ceremonies team who will be responsible for developing our Canadian messaging, themes and tone.

Bruce Allen's work for the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee
(VANOC) is and will remain entirely separate and distinct from other work he does including his public commentary and opinions on the radio.

He has communicated his regret over the controversy and he has strongly
reconfirmed and emphasized his support for our goal of showcasing Canada's cultures and celebrating our diversity through the 2010 Winter Games Ceremonies.

We appreciate you taking the time to share your views.


Thanks again,

Vancouver Info


And then I replied:

true, he regrets the controversy [only someone of questionable sanity wouldn't], but he stands by his views that oppose the diversity and rich heritage you wish to celebrate.

having a limited role for bruce allen is no solution. his presence in your organization stains your whole organization.


you need to remove him from organization completely.


I have no respect for, or faith in our Olympic organizers. I also think that if someone not famous or in the music biz who works for them phoned up all the great Canadian [and the relatively unknown ones] and asked if they'd like to be involved in the Olympics, they'd jump at the free marketing. You don't need Bruce Allen to secure them.

Yet another reason for boycotting these pathetic games. We have last year a $4.1 billion provincial surplus, social service cuts that make Bill Vander Zalm look like Dave Barrett, thousands of homeless, tens of thousands living below the poverty line, and privatization galore. We also have what someone once said, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

And I'm supposed to support the Olympics? Get a grip.

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Thursday, October 04, 2007

Global TV: Thoroughly Free of Irony

It's one thing to criticize Global for being the brunt of the corporate concentrated media nonsense that pretends to be a free press in this country.

It's another thing to watch them physically concentrate their media [see below] with the plan to create new monster broadcast facilities in four locations in the country allowing them to drop 250 jobs while adding 50.

Not to be too cynical, but why don't they just run with one office in Toronto and stop the pretense of actually providing local news. With the new internet machine, they can probably skip reporters all together.

=================

Global Television is cutting 200 jobs across Canada as it develops new "state of the art" broadcast centres in four cities, CanWest announced on Thursday.

The company said the centres, to be located in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto, will use the latest in broadcast technology. It will also mean local news programs can immediately begin the transition to high definition, CanWest MediaWorks Inc. said.

Although CanWest is adding 50 positions as part of the process, it will lose 250 jobs, meaning a net loss of 200.

Across the Maritimes, 30 positions in Halifax and 11 in New Brunswick are being cut.

Network employees in Halifax said they were shocked by the news.

"It came as a complete surprise. There was no warning," said Paul Saulnier, a union leader with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers and a technical director who's losing his job.

The layoffs take effect next spring around the time the first centre is planned to be opened in Vancouver. The other three are expected to be operational over the next 18 months.

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Unspinning the Bush Veto Spin

Not that Bush needs to veto much. He simply issues signing statements indicating the executive branch will not abide by this or that of the legislation he's signing. Soft Fascism 'R Us.

But now the folks at the radically right Media Research Center have spun coverage of this nasty veto thusly:

Again exploiting children and mothers to advance the goal of expanding federal spending and dependency, ABC's World News led Wednesday night by giving voice to the media-political establishment's astonishment that President Bush would veto a bill to provide health insurance "for children."

It's hard to reply to this other than to say that the very first clause has simply been spun backwards. Poor children cannot depend on private insurers, so they depend on the government to keep them from illness and death. Bastards, eh!

And black is white, war is peace...

So after 4 decades of socialized medicine in Canada, it turns out that all progressives do is look for excuses to increase government budgets, not the other way around.

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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

The Prime Minister is In

Maverick! Visionary Leader! Champion of Accountable Government!

The prime minister announces...[trumpets]...that he will enter the National Press Building and stand before...[pinch nose here]...journalists, to answer questions. Maybe.

And in the spirit of open government, he makes this announcement 20 months into his mandate, after using the PMO to stonewall the "free" press [such as it is] in its attempts to...I don't know...ask questions of our elected leaders.

Further, he gives you all an extravagant amount of notice! 67 minutes. See below for the notification, which took over 15 minutes to make it into my email box...but then again, I live in Vancouver.

I shit you not.

The throne speech is on October 16th, World Food Day. Expect a non-confidence motion and a winter election.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Notice
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 14:38:38 -0400
From: PMO
To: ALLNEWS_E@LSERV.PMO-CPM.GC.CA


>From the Prime Minister's Web Site (http://www.pm.gc.ca/)


Public events for October 3, 2007

October 3, 2007
Ottawa, Ontario

Public event for Prime Minister Stephen Harper for today, October 3rd are:

3:45 p.m. – Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be available to take questions from the media.

Press Theatre
National Press Building
150 Wellington Street
Ottawa, Ontario

*Open to media*
The Prime Minister’s Office - Communications
[Note: You are receiving this e-mail for information only, and because you have subscribed to our distribution list. To modify your subscription or to have your name removed from the list, go to: (http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/subscribe.asp?login)]

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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

More on the Myth of Media Objectivity

What the evening news shows need is less "objectivity" and more analysis. The problem with objective journalism is that it doesn't exist and never did. Molly Ivins disposed of the objectivity question for all time when she observed in 1993, "The fact is that I am a 49-year-old white female, a college-educated Texan. All of that affects the way I see the world. There's no way in hell that I'm going to see anything the same way that a 15-year-old black high school dropout does. We all see the world from where we stand. Anybody who's ever interviewed five eyewitnesses to an automobile accident knows there's no such thing as objectivity."

I've said it before and Molly Ivins has said it too [see above]. There is no objectivity in the media. Amira Hass has said it: being fair and objective aren't the same thing.

If you don't yet know who Keith Olbermann is yet, you owe it to yourself to YouTube him. Journalism with a soul. Don't bother settling for anything less.

If you don't believe what Ivins is talking about above, you probably don't understand the multiple subjectivity of post-modernism and your value to a 21st century world is limited. Time to get with the program.

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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Spreading Ignorance about Global Warming

Global warming deniers are really starting to annoy me. I've already compared them to Holocaust deniers because of their techniques and self-serving conflicts of interest.

Now I get to lump in the Media Research Center with them all. The MRC is a neutral, almost academic sounding institution that "tracks liberal media bias" ["liberal" used as a pejorative like commie] in their never-ending pursuit of "truth". They are a hyper-conservative spin organization whose regular emails inflame in me a clear sense of just how far the global corporate elites will go to maintain their stranglehold on power.

I enjoy the irony of rich, well-funded conservatives claiming there's a great media bias. With such intense corporate concentration of ownership in the media in the western world, there still exists a remnant of the liberal journalist. And I truly believe that many in the media are more liberal or left-wing than not, for why go into journalism if you don't believe in the responsibility of a free press for rooting out corruption, from the left or right.

And while self-censorship is clearly alive among journalists as they continually remember which corporate neofeudalist owns them and their work, there is occasionally some good work in the press.

But the MRC's approach to hunting down the liberal bias and balancing it out with another truth is astonishing sometimes. Today's missive from our MRC friends is called NBC's Today Show Champions Global Warming Alarmist. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

They introduce their criticism thusly:

On Monday's Today show, NBC's Bob Dotson profiled Will Steger, a polar explorer who is indoctrinating America's youth about "collapsing" ice shelves and global warming. Dotson never doubted the explorer's theories, instead he chose to portray Steger's crusade as nothing short of much needed charity work: "Pitching back in between and forth between the Poles, Will began to notice our warming world, wrote one of the first books about it. Now the old explorer has set himself a new challenge. Here in his home of the great northern Minnesota woods he's teaching the next generation how to rally support and solve the problem."

Dotson didn't ask any skeptical questions or air any soundbites from global warming critics, preferring to set up Steger to pontificate about climate change.

Misrepresenting controversy about global warming, opponents who gain from denying it do a disservice to the truth and humanity's responsibility to fix our mess by cleaning up how we are treating our planet like a sewer.

What the MRC doesn't get is what Amira Hass does get: "being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is really about--it's to monitor power and the centers of power." They don't get it because they reflect the centres of power.

Fairness in reporting does not mean treating both sides of an issue as equally merited with equal time to both. Demanding identical treatment mis-represents the merit of the argument for the global warming deniers who are wildly outnumbered and often funded by corporations that profit from global warming.

It's important to watch the MRC though, because watching the watchers helps us all. And to top it off today, I just joined Ann Coulter's email list. That should be exciting.

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Sunday, August 19, 2007

NASCAR Dads and "Canada's New Government"

Well, the NASCAR dads are definitely wearing the Prime Sinister's college ring this year [see below]. Not only are they into one of the best global warming sports around, they work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules.

The height of pandering to some red state United States Everyman is a shallow ticket used, however, to operatic degree by George w.Caesar twice now.

This from the party of Peter MacKay, king maker of the Reform/Alliance-Progressive Conservative shotgun wedding with the big lie to David Orchard: stealing his delegates at the leadership convention to become PC leader on the promise that he would not merge with the Reform/Alliance, would review Canada's participation in NAFTA, and a host of other internal party cleansing rituals. Of course, MacKay was not to live up to his agreement, leaving us in the mess we have now.

So, go car 29! The disastrously ignorant hopes of a party [and all its deluded supporters] unwilling to really deal with climate change are riding on your tailpipe, like Slim Pickens from Dr. Strangelove! But in the end, as our climate chokes our symbiotic relationship with our ecology, rest well that you play fair...even if your party doesn't.

Conservative Party Supports Grand Prix of Trois-Rivières

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 19, 2007

TROIS-RIVIÈRES – Today, Conservative Party Members of Parliament unveiled the Conservative Party NASCAR car at the Grand Prix of Trois Rivières.

The partnership between the Conservative Party of Canada and Whitlock Motor Sports includes the Conservative Party of Canada logo being placed on the hood and front side panels of car number 29 in the Canadian Tire NASCAR Series.

“This is a unique opportunity for the Conservative Party to reach out to Canadians,” said Conservative Party Member of Parliament Christian Paradis. “The Conservative Party supports Canadians that work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules and those are the same Canadians that watch sports like NASCAR.”

“I am proud to be part of this partnership,” said Whitlock Motor Sports owner, Dave Whitlock. “It is great to see the Conservative Party support an entry into a series that is growing in popularity in Canada.”

The partnership included three Canadian Tire NASCAR Series races in Bowmanville, Ontario, Edmonton, Alberta and Trois-Rivieres, Quebec.

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Thursday, August 09, 2007

Four Dogs, a Bone, Some Inner Truths and Rich Hilarity

Four Dogs and a Bone, playing at Havana Theatre on Commercial Drive
until Sunday, August 12, is an effortlessly funny play that has just
enough meandering through core identity neuroses for the audience to
appreciate the gravity of being, particularly the being of expressive,
artistic people. It quite simply succeeds.

As a movie producer, screenwriter and two hapless ingénues endure the
petty interpersonal dynamics and corporate demands of completing a film,
each ends up exposing their desperation as they try to find their
centre. Throughout, their base yet authentic struggles frequently leave
the audience in comedic bliss.

The play has the needling uncomfortability of enduring an evening in
Archie Bunker's living room, complete with the rich circumstantial,
sometimes narcissistic, sometimes brutal humour that attends needy
people working out their self-acceptance. The intimate environment of
the seating in Havana's theatre adds to the experience of being trapped
in someone else's melt-down.

The characters drift through priceless, occasional moments of gaudy
caricature to a place of honesty. Like all of us, they each seek moments
of safety to share their truths with those who are worthy of listening
and supporting them.

Artists struggle with self-acceptance while balancing the need to be
vulnerable as individuals and performers. When they are thrust together
to create such a collaborative project as a film, the situation invites
the kinds of clashes that force each person to rise above their persona
and their character to achieve true human honesty. Their ineptitude,
though, is often just hilarious.

As Bradley, the psychologically and physiologically decomposing
producer, Michael Q. Adams embodies the physical manifestation of
pressure with grit and acute comedic suffering. Brenda, played by Olesia
Shewchuk, projects a pristinely false vulnerability within a struggling
superficiality that masks her particular neediness.

Lori Watt's magnetic Collette, while at times almost glancing around for
Mr. DeMille's closeup, carries her truths so close to the surface that
the others, if they were not so engrossed in their own internal
psychological minefield, would undoubtedly grow to know. Finally,
Gabriel Carter's emotionally spent screenwriter, Victor, unknowingly and
ironically holds the central situational power despite the drifting
through the fog of his own emptiness.

While each character clashes with the others in their desire to be
heard, the audience ends up enjoying the comedy inherent in the human
soul as it clumsily seeks its surface. And the laughing flows—from
delightful physical humour to the guilty pleasure of chuckling at
caricatures that are trite masks for the struggle for truth that we all
face.

As the characters strive to make their art mean something—for itself and
for them—they show us how we all struggle to overcome our own masks to
find true liberation. And because so many of us are so bad at it, we
stumble and then get to learn the lesson of laughing at ourselves.

Four Dogs and a Bone reminds us of the necessity of exposing our truths
while keeping a healthy sense of humour about us.

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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Post-Post-Modernist, Non-Ironic Self-Reflexivity in Advertising: It Bores/Annoys Me Already

Click on that image above to view it in a nice, big size. You won't regret it.

So, every once in a while, the free daily Metro does away with...I don't know how to say this...any actual news on the front page. It just puts an ad there. The whole page. And the next page too.

Then they start the "paper" on page 3.

When they first did it, I was flabbergasted, though I shouldn't have been.

On Tuesday, July 21st, 2007 they did it again.

But this time it was a highly self-reflexive post-post-modern joke about there being no news and alas there was no news on the front page.

The joke several layers deep, or maybe just 2 layers deep [it's hard to count] is that there is no real news in Metro. There is just soft news masquerading as substance and substantial news with so little length that depth and thorough understanding is impossible. It all just seems to be news: a simulacra.

So as they and all the other free dailies unapologetically offer fluff over real news, they are even content to mock their own emptiness by profiting from their vacuousness with an ad skating so close to the truth.

But what happens to the population when they "read" this paper with this ad. Do they get it? Do they just skate over it mentally? Do they not care? I'm afraid to know the truth.

Metro is hip and connected to the vibe of its people:

"Our reporters get to the point quickly and cover Vancouver politics, up-and-coming local artists, events and much more. Our columnists keep readers informed about the latest celebrities visiting our city, shopping and restaurants – everything readers want, right at their fingertips."

By quickly does that mean without any slow stuff like background or analysis? And news columnists write about news. I have a hard time seeing fluff topics as being covered by columnists. But then, I suppose if you get a column in a paper on shopping, then that's news[?].

"Which is great, because since the beginning our readers have maintained a special relationship with Metro."

What the hell kind of relationship have we got with Metro? Is Metro our barber, therapist, confidante, bookie, work-spouse? Who started this relationship? Is it consensual? Was I informed that I'm in a relationship? Is it one-sided, completely constructed by a newspaper, its marketing arm, its focus groups and studies of target audiences, and its will to determine for us what news is so when we're asked we say news is that thing we're fed?

"They’re an established and loyal group who believe in, connect with and respond."

Established by Metro? Who decides how that amorphous group is loyal to anything, let alone a newspaper? Is it loyalty like to the Canucks or an extended family or belief system? And what does this loyal group believe in about Metro? This is just lunacy.

In the end, Metro's self-description sounds like a church. Metro isn't a product we consume as much as a lifestyle we choose and identify with. Psychology + Marketing = Mind Control. And if we actually believe Metro speaks to us, I've got some Kool-Aid I'd like you to drink.

I tell ya, Pravda never had it so good: at least there, everyone knew it was all the same, here we have the illusion of a free press because the papers and media outlets have different names.

In the end, the CanWestMedia whore owns the Vancouver Sun, The Province, The National Post, the Times-Colonist, 14 lower mainland weeklies, Global and CH TV and Showcase [with their purchase of Alliance Atlantis], all of the Dose free daily paper and until recently, 1/3 of Metro. The CRTC without any real concern for corporate concentration of media [unless it impedes free advertiser access] gives us all a snapshot of the media empire [see below or see here]. And in the end, regardless of which media robber baron is in charge of the "truth" we are allowed to see, the corporate media filter censors reality daily.



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Friday, July 20, 2007

What is Your Definition of "Easily" and "Overwhelmingly"?

On the homepage of Robbins Sce Research, it says:

"Harper popular as PM, Canadians easily support Afghan extension. Jun 29, 2007"

The poll it links to says Canadians support an Afghan extension based on this question:

"The United Nations is desirous of having Canada extend its participation in Afghanistan past the current term ending in early 2009. Are you agreeable to extending Canada's involvement?"
Yes 52 %
No 48 %

I have a hard time seeing how 52-48 "easily" supports anything. Plus, every other poll I've seen in the last several weeks has support for Afghanistan about split.

But then it gets worse. On the commentary of that poll it says:

"Canadians overwhelmingly support an extension to Canada's participation in Afghanistan."

OVERWHELMINGLY! 52-48?

Astonishing.

And then the commentary continues:

"The PM may want to change his Defense Minister. ROBBINS likes current Conservative House Leader Van Loan for the job. Although non-descript, he is excellent in the House of Commons and can articulate a reconfigured Canadian involvement in Afghanistan."

How is this unbiased polling? The first thing that popped into my head is that the third sponsor of this poll, requesting anonymity, is Van Loan.

So, what do you think they mean by "easily" and "overwhelmingly"?

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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

The Nexus Between Garbage Media and Climate Change



Rupert Murdoch, a ghoul of corporate concentrated media ownership, is appearing to be moved by criticisms that Fox Network is irrational and damaging to society, particularly on their flat earth approach to global warming opposition.

Brave New World Films has produced a 2.5 minute piece [above] in their ongoing campaign against the rationality-challenged, sensationalist Fox Network.

It is combined with a campaign to encourage green-positioned Home Depot to stop advertising with Fox. More information is at Brave New World Films' Fox Attacks site.

And if you have never seen the movie Network, or if it has been more than a few years, you truly owe it to yourself to see how this 1976 film predicted the irrational soup of media today that currently shackles the role of an intelligent, free press in a representative democracy.

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Sunday, July 01, 2007

Chevy, the Vanguard of Climate Change Activism!

I'm getting quite excited about Live Earth coming up on 7.7.07 next Saturday. I'm having a day-long open house house party. I'm pumping the pledge and I'm always encouraging people to go car free.

The Live Earth website is full of important information, but the MSN portal for Live Earth is a serious bother.

Chevy is the key sponsor of the online coverage. It's much like how Translink buses sell car advertising in and on its buses and trains. Irony? I think not.

Hyper consumerism...cars...greenhouse gas emission...I must be missing something here.

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

I've Decided to Become a Paris Hilton Fan, So Should You!

The Old, Debauched Paris:

The New, Squeaky Clean, Adorable Paris:

I'm sold!

It is clear to me that Paris Hilton has embraced a tone of contrition. She has embarked on life after incarceration with a brand new image of humility and a sparkling new girl next door haircut.

Perhaps she is concerned that it is time to grow up and leave her partying ways behind her. She was rebellious and disrespectful of her adoring public. She is "serious about leaving her famously party-loving past behind."

Perhaps jail was her equivalent of Drew Barrymore flashing her boobs at Letterman, but now Paris seeks the kind of respectability and success that Drew now knows.

In the end, you be the judge. Media has nurtured a month-long boner over her tribulations. It lives to create an international obsession to milk ad dollars with a compliant public.

Paris is doing her job. She is keeping the "news"[sic] industry/business rolling right along.

God bless Paris Hilton.

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Monday, June 25, 2007

Harper: Canada to Leave Afghanistan in 2009...You Missed it, Right?

Well, after a weekend to thoroughly digest Prime Sinister Harper's speech to mark the end of Canada's sad and waning 39th parliament, I feel moved to grumble about something he didn't bother to mention formally and officially.

I was going to talk about how he frames taxation as slavery from which we need emancipation, despite all the rich social, educational and health services we receive and largely take for granted: "Largely as a result of our tax reductions in budget 2006, tax freedom day arrived Wednesday, four days earlier than last year."

Instead I want to comment on what he said in a rare moment when he stooped to speak to the press. So many emails from the PMO describe Harper's upcoming schedule. "Photo op only" has become scripture.

So instead of in a formal political speech to end the session of parliament, Harper, on a Friday at the end of the week's new cycle, mutters that Canada will leave Afghanistan in 2009.

Huh? I kid you not:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who once insisted that Canadian troops will stay in Afghanistan until the job is done, now says the military mission will end in February, 2009, unless the opposition agrees it should be extended.

The acceptance that the mission's lifespan may be limited comes as the Prime Minister faces growing opposition to Canada's combat role in the Afghan south - a decline in support that has been particularly pronounced in Quebec.

"This mission will end in February, 2009," Mr. Harper said yesterday at a rare House of Commons news conference held to mark the end of the spring sitting.


Isn't this major news? The most significant Canadian military mission in decades, the most controversial episode of Canadian imperialism will end because Harper said quietly that we'll stay past 2009 only if all parties in parliament agree.

The NDP is opposed to our presence. Unless they see the light of imperialism in the next dozen or so months, our support for our troops will be supporting them home.

The Globe and Mail covered it on Saturday. Thanks.

But the volitional decision to end our occupation of Afghanistan and cease our imperial agenda there was not plastered all over the front pages of the Sunday and Monday morning papers.

This is a major victory for sanity in Canada. It is also a major reversal of Harper's militarism in the face of growing national opposition to the stupidity of what we have been trying to convince ourselves we could do there.

And Harper's embarrassment over his decision to radically change his entire war prime minister image made him squeak it out on a Friday afternoon in Ottawa in front of reporters, for whom he holds shocking and tremendous disdain.

Thank God for Harper that they haven't skewered him for it. Lucky man.

Maybe Harper's American Idol speech ending "God Bless Canada" has returned to save him from having to blush over changing his over-inflated sense of his military legacy.

The poor fool.

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Sunday, June 24, 2007

Who Wants To Be An Amerikan?

There is a fantastic short film by the Vancouver Film School called “Who Wants to Be an Amerikan?



Someone commented thusly:

“Ive been following this video since it first went on YouTube, and every time i see someone say something along the lines of "this video attack/ makes fun of/ is against the united states" someone asks "why do you think that?". funny thing is, nobody ever responds. im very curious how anyone thinks this attacks america could someone give me a real answer?”

I think it attacks America because it tells the truth that America[tm] is a marketing concept. Disneyland, the Cosby Show, American Idol. The idea of mom, apple pie and lemonade. It's surreal, not real. It also minimizes what a lot of Americans think America is: An awesome place. But it is really a myth covering a reality of 2 centuries of military and economic imperialism, domestic racism, xenophobia, soft fascism, poverty and shattered dreams.

The whole totalitarian game show thing is a separate commentary, I think, on totalitarianism that is somehow reaffirmed by the comment on the postcard about people being more important than places. And America is a place where his father left his family and the son was willing to leave his mother.

And I guess this does relate to America in that lots of Americans love America though they cannot explain why in the face of 40 million without health care, institutionalized racism and segregation still in practice, rampant poverty in the face of obscene wealth and millions who don't know the names of their neighbours in their cookie cutter suburbs.

It's a movie that tells truths that are uncomfortable for many Americans to think, let alone understand.

So many cannot say why it attacks America because they aren't stepping back to look at how their country looks to others outside and inside the nation.

And as a Canadian, I think even without carrying a myth like America, we carry our own myths of superiority to America, but we suffer from similar isolation as well as similar neglect of others' true material, social, emotional and psychological needs.

This is a wonderful film. Challenging, and beautiful.

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Friday, April 06, 2007

More "Support the Troops" Brainwashing on CanWest Global

I'm glad I "support our troops" because if I didn't, maybe I'd be a threat to the free world or something. And since I'm not as talented as the 22 Minutes folks who quite effectively ridicule [see "I support our troops"] all the rhetorical sheep claiming to support the troops, let me just say that disagreeing with government policy in Afghanistan/Haiti/wherever does not mean I hope our soldiers there get slaughtered. Unless you're intellectually stunted, I mean.

So here is a domestic news story with a military angle. A farmer has a legitimate disagreement with the government regarding his neighbour, a military base.

It has nothing to do with Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan or the creep of Soft Fascism up from w.Caesar land. It has to do with ditches.

And in the end, the reporter, thank god, lets us know that the farmer still supports the troops. I suppose the alternative would be that because of a ditch problem, he hopes the Taliban slaughter all Canadians in Afghanistan, kill all literate female Afghans, blow up more North American corporate and military imperial landmarks, outlaw anything other than radical Islam and invade and occupy Canada because they hate our freedom. Or something.

The effect of the "support our troops" lunacy is to separate us from them: those who support the soldiers from those who wish them all to die. No. Not at all. The job of that phrase being used in the corporate media and government is to make sure that anyone who questions the government policy of the current and previous political party taking part in the Afghan debacle is seen as someone who wishes the troops to all die. The troops are employees of our government, following orders to go here or there and do this or that, not forcing now 3 prime ministers at gun point or anything to send the Canadian Forces somewhere.

The illogic is astounding. But the continued use of this phrase is part of the Soft Fascism creep of the truly evil people in our country.

And the fact that it goes largely unchecked in our country means they are winning. Its smooth inclusion in this issue that is totally unrelated to Canada's presence in Afghanistan, is part of the brainwashing of corporate media.

It's time to read 1984 and Brave New World again, eh.

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Farmer takes government to court; [GLOBAL NATIONAL Edition]
KEVIN NEWMAN. Global News Transcripts. Toronto, Ont.: Apr 5, 2007. pg. 1

KEVIN NEWMAN: They're known as Canada's elite fighting force - highly trained, deployed in a moment's notice with stealth and deadly force. Tonight, an update on a story that we first brought you two years ago. A farmer from the Ottawa valley who dared do battle with Canada's commandos, and won, kind of. Here's Peter Harris.

RON MAYHEW (Farmer): Starting all over again.

PETER HARRIS (Reporter): Ron Mayhew found out the hard way, how difficult it could be to take on Canada's elite fighting force, JTF2.

MAYHEW: Everybody around here thought it was the RCMP musical ride moving in here beside us. Thats what we were told.

HARRIS: He'd owned this land since 1984. In the early 1990s, Canada's secret military unit, Joint Task Force 2 moved in next door.

MAYHEW: I have no idea how it escalated the way it did. I just don't understand it. It makes no sense to me. You're being watched there now, too.

HARRIS: Ten years ago, the government came on to his property and dug these two trenches. Hundreds of metres long, because they had water problems on their land. It's like a creek.

MAYHEW: Well, it's about four feet deep. Five feet deep along here they dug.

HARRIS: And this digging led to piles of clay on his land where he hoped to grow vegetables.

MAYHEW: This is just grey subsoil, grey clay. And when they dug it out, they took it and spread it over, or at least, oh was it twenty, twenty-five feet.

HARRIS: After years of promises and threats to take his land, and nobody cleaning up these ditches, Ron Mayhew took the government to court.

MAYHEW: Well, they jerk you around, I guess. They keep jerking you around and jerking you around. Finally I said, well, partly because of my age, I said I can't continue this on much longer. I want to leave something for my kids.

HARRIS: They finally settled, enough to cover his costs, to repair the land and fill in the ditches that have been left for so long.

MAYHEW: There's the finality about it. That chapter is done and now we can go on and do repairs, do what we have to do, and enough to do what I wanted to do ten years ago.

HARRIS: Despite his fight against the government, he still supports the troops, but is glad this fight is finally over. In Ottawa, this is Global National's Peter Harris reporting.

NEWMAN: And that's Global National for Thursday. I'm Kevin Newman. Local news is next on most Global stations.

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Thursday, February 08, 2007

The Myth of Media Objectivity

Kevin Potvin's piece yesterday in The Vancouver Courier [see below] is a welcome summary of the annoyance and offensiveness of The Province newspaper in particular and corporate media in general as they perpetuate the myth of their objectivity.

It is offensive to our democracy that is supposed to be enhanced by a "free" press for such a paper to actively promote the stadium development, collect mountains of ad revenue from its proponents, hold an online poll to guage public opinion, then remove the poll when the untampered results do not support their political/marketing position.

I, however, enjoy the irony that the CanWest monster that owns The Province also owns the The Vancouver Courier where Potvin and others often take valid shots at the legitimacy of CanWest's major propaganda dailies.

A friend once mentioned to me that this proves that CanWest actually supports fairness and balance in the media because they own one paper that frequently criticizes the validity of its other papers. But with just over 250,000 copies distributed for free each week throughout the city, The Vancouver Courier does not quite have the readership or budget to authentically counter the mind-numbing propaganda of The Province, The Vancouver Sun, or The National Post, the first two with a circulation of 2,500,000 each week.

And in the end, even if allowing this criticism in a small community paper [that is incidentally outweighed each delivery day by the fliers contained within, making the paper ultimately possibly just a convenient delivery mechanism for advertising] proves CanWest actually listens to or respects its own internal criticism, they certainly do not change their illegitimate operations at their propaganda dailies. So it actually looks worse for them: CanWest owns a paper that legitimately criticizes its major dailies, yet it ignores the criticism and continues subverting the role the free press ought to play in a democracy.

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Whitecaps owe public a thank you

By Kevin Potvin

In the week before public speakers were scheduled to appear before council last fall to express their views on the waterfront stadium proposal, the Province newspaper staged an online poll asking what readers thought about it.

The Whitecaps sent an alert to everyone on its email lists urging them to go to the Province website and vote in favour. A link was conveniently provided. The results, which one could monitor as they were coming in, showed early support reaching up to 70 per cent.

But as the day wore on and other people besides those on the Whitecaps' lists were alerted, the tide began to shift. By 5 p.m., the vote was nearing 70 per cent opposed. That's when the poll disappeared from the Province website, replaced by a note apologizing for technical difficulties. Final results were never revealed.

I made phone calls and confirmed that Whitecaps president John LaRocca was in touch with a Province sports editor when the decision was made to pull the poll. When I talked to the Province the next day, the paper confirmed it had pulled it because the results did not look right to them, though their technicians could provide no evidence hacking had occurred. The Province is an official "sponsor" of the Whitecaps, and the Whitecaps buy substantial advertising in that paper. Editorials in the Province heavily endorsed the Whitecaps' waterfront stadium proposal.

It was the public that drew council's attention to the myriad problems the stadium proposal contained, and not just problems for the public but also for soccer fans and the proposed stadium's owners as well. Chief among public concerns was the obvious safety hazard involved in packing in 30,000 people above an inaccessible storage area for train cars carrying such things as propane, bauxite and chlorine-the three ingredients in a train derailment in Mississauga that caused the biggest evacuation in Canadian history.

There was also the matter of there being only two exits from the proposed building, with no marshalling area outside the doors, meaning 30,000 fans would plug the streets of the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood with few people who could afford to go to events at the proposed stadium. And then there was the sheer ugliness of a massive stadium wall blocking the neighbourhood from any hint of the waterfront.

I spoke with the head designer of the project who reacted with indignation at my suggestion that it would be a blot on the landscape. He dismissed my safety concerns as those of someone who knows nothing about architecture.

Council voted unanimously to back the proposal.

Well, looks like the public was right. Last week, the Whitecaps, citing the same safety and public access issues the public speakers brought to their attention, abandoned the original waterfront stadium proposal-the same one the leading papers in the city, the leading councillors, the biggest of billionaires, the huffiest of architects and the most defensive of company presidents all assured me was not only the brightest idea in a decade, but the last possible chance we had to be blessed by the largesse of so wonderful a philanthropist as Whitecaps owner Greg Kerfoot.

The new proposal, to be built over the Seabus terminal, looks a lot better, better for the Whitecaps, for their customers, and for the neighbourhood. I'll be checking the Whitecaps website daily for the "thank yous" to the public.

published on 02/07/2007

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Thursday, February 01, 2007

Canadians: Far More Than Global Warming Victims

"A much anticipated and some say definitive report on global warming is due to come out of Paris tomorrow. What could this mean for our country, our province, our future?"

This is what I heard tonight, February 1, 2007, on CTV promoting the 600pm news on February 2nd. They are refering to the UN's release of nearly conclusive evidence that humans are a significant source of global warming.

"Some say" suggests a large number of people, but "some" is less than "many". And "some" suggests less than half. "Most" would be more than half.

Since the science is supported by a virtual consensus of scientists not funded by the fossil fuel industries, I'd say that is more than "some".

What could this mean for our country, province and future? I think the whole problem with how most of "us" deal with "some" who think the report is definitive is that it's all about us. Bangladesh will likely largely go under water like much of many Oceania countries. Or would that be "some" of Bangladesh...

The focus on us is the problem: Canadians, OECD-world folks, us inhabitants of the industrialized rich world, and the comprador rich of the majority world. We can afford to move somewhere if our bioregion changes too much. Most people [not some] will be victims of global warming without the means to easily find a healthier climate.

And since "we" are by far more responsible for global warming than the majority world, I get a little tired of "us" talking about how this all may affect "us." it's time to wake up to the rest of the world and see how we're abusing it all. Then we need to admit [to ourselves and the rest of the world] our complicity and guilt and scrub the whole Gateway Program...just as a start. If we think we really need to twin the Port Mann Bridge for more auto traffic, our worship of personal liberties is becoming homocidal. Getting rid of your car will help too. It's going to take far more than just putting on a sweater, Mr. Gore.

And in watching the news since the Paris release, watching the person-on-the-street interviews, we have a long way to go. My favorite idea to help the environment was that someone said they recycle. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycle is the residual LAST thing to do after we reduce our consumption [especially resource hogs in the industrialized world like us] and reuse far more than we do. And when I was writing about it being in our own best interest to not embrace a drastic reduction in standard of living to make up for our [the industriazlied world] great responsibility for global warming, to avoid a significant critique of our own system, we say that we recycle.

How completely inadequate.

The truth is not inconvenient for us. It is utterly damning and when CTV news continues to say "some" think this is a definitive report, we have still a long way to go.

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Saturday, January 20, 2007

The Thing about Deniers: Holocaust and Global Warming

My daughter, who is a toddler and loves to dance, is addicted to the Weather Channel, particularly the local forecast because the music they play is fantastic to dance to. So while we do not quite have the TV on as wallpaper, often it's on for her to dance.

This morning I saw on that channel yet another chat with David Suzuki talking about global warming. This time he was talking about how the media does a poor job of covering global warming. He says that as a member of the media we always try to be balanced and provide both sides of a story. That can be a problem.

His view, the correct view [and I know the risk in saying that, but keep reading], is that humans are contributing to global warming. He talked about thousands of academic studies that support that the planet is on a warming trend and we are part of it. Never before in human history have we had the power to influence the planet's operation. And he talked about 980 recent studies that ALL agree that we are part of global warming. Further, many scientists who do not agree with the vast majority of those who recognize the truth of global warming are not climatologists and many of them are funded by fossil fuel industries, so they are possibly [or almost certainly] biased. I would add that many of the global warming deniers also have a stake in the status quo and don't want to give up our lifestyle that direly exploits and abuses the planet [and the 4 billion or so of the poorest serf humans we keep impoverished with our global political economic system].

George Monbiot's book Heat is considered to do a much better job than Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth in addressing far more than the ridiculously cosmetic solutions Gore argues for, in part I think because Gore falls into the category of being concerned, but not enough to recognize that Americans and the OECD world are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the sources of global warming so it is our responsibility to absorb a disproportionate amount of the lifestyle change to stop the problem. But Gore can't argue that because doing so means telling Americans and the rest of the OECD world that our birthright is based on economically enslaving billions of humans and critically wounding our planet.

But back to the deniers. In its attempts to be balanced the media [which also has a stake in the status quo and is funded/owned by global corporations that even though they aren't always in the fossil fuel sector depend on their products for the operation of the global feudal economy and their profit] spends far too much time presenting the skeptics' side. Just by sheer numbers, the vast majority of scientists are recognizing the truth, which is far more than inconvenient, so you would think the media would reflect this. Not so much. The deniers and the politicians and celebrities who base their arguments on them get a ridiculously large share of air time.

And then I remembered Dan's post about the Holocaust conference in Iran. If the media gave as much air time to the biased, often anti-Semitic, self-serving Holocaust deniers as they do global warming skeptics, the FCC and CRTC would not be able to answer all the phones or ever open their email ever again. The uproar would destroy media empires.

And when I said before that Suzuki's view is the correct one, I mean that with all the sincerity of someone who says that the Holocaust did exist while there are some who for self-serving motives argue that it is something else entirely.

I now have a new level of disdain for global warming deniers. I just lump them in with Holocaust deniers and act accordingly.

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Friday, September 15, 2006

A Few Truths

A delightfully eerie piece about American military propaganda is engaging minds at Alternet.org right now. It is called "Rumsfeld's Fake News Flop in Iraq" and is reprinted below. I have a mere few reactions:

Osama bin Laden is America's Emmanuel Goldstein from Orwell's 1984. Not wanted, dead or alive. The longer he is at large, the longer the fear-mongering continues.

w.Caesar can remain so optimistic about the prospects for success in Iraq because his reality is a construct of his beliefs. "Greeted as liberators" has merely been delayed. He believes they will prevail, so the rest of our realities have relatively less sway over him. He is the resolute decision maker. He decides reality in a Philip K. Dick kind of way.

I'm not sure why we're so shocked at PSYOPs being pointed domestically--and I pick it up in Canada too through the dominating American media and Canadian sycophantic replicants. The enemy is one who confronts the agenda. Many enemies are domestic or living among allied countries. In this light, there is nothing wrong with treating the subversives [or cut-and-runners] as they treat their beloved Islamofascists.

Neil Postman's writing about edutainment tracks the increasing difficulty North American teachers are having developing functional critical thinking skills among students. When the government itself is assaulting the minds of its citizenry with PSYOPs, it is that much harder to facilitate a process whereby the public can evaluate the messages we are bombarded with, particularly from government, the corporate feudalists and corporate media.

Burson-Marsteller is the devil's publicist.

Again, we should not be so shocked that exporting a perverted sense of democracy to Iraq includes planted truth-truncated and one-sided news reports: "'The planted stories were "basically factual,' U.S. officials told the Los Angeles Times, although they admitted that they presented only one side of events and omitted information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments." North American media continues to imply their objectivity, yet the censorship and bias from such corporate concentration is intolerable.

Soft fascists are threatened by a free press. Hard fascists simply quash it. 1984 was about a totalitarian state controlling information. And to follow Neil Postman's lead here, Brave New World is all about convincing people they don't want to read anyway.

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The following is an excerpt from The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Tarcher, 2006).

The danger of negative news, according to President Bush, is that it may undermine morale and support for the war, as Americans "look at the violence they see each night on their television screens and they wonder how I can remain so optimistic about the prospects of success in Iraq." But propaganda itself is a danger to the nation, as the United States has long recognized, both in theory and in law. In 1948, Congress, concerned by what it had seen propaganda do to Hitler's Germany, passed the Smith-Mundt Act, a law that forbids domestic dissemination of U.S. government materials intended for foreign audiences.

The law is so strict that programming from Voice of America, the government's overseas news service, may not be broadcast to domestic audiences. Legislators were concerned that giving any U.S. administration access to the government's tools for influencing opinion overseas would undermine the democratic process at home. Since 1951, this concern has also been expressed in the appropriations acts passed each year by Congress, which include language that stipulates, "No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress."

Economic and media globalization, however, have shrunk the planet in ways that blur the distinction between foreign and domestic propaganda. This has been acknowledged in the U.S. Defense Department's Information Operations Roadmap, a 74-page document approved in 2003 by Donald Rumsfeld. It noted that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP [psychological operations], increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa. PSYOP messages disseminated to any audience... will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public."

This ought to be of particular concern to Americans because the Pentagon's doctrine for psychological operations specifically contemplates "actions to convey and (or) deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning. ... In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover, and deception, and psyops."

An example of a psyops operation that used "deception" in Iraq occurred during the 2004 preparations for the U.S. military assault on Fallujah, which had become a stronghold for insurgents. On October 14, a spokesman for the marines appeared on CNN and announced that the long-awaited military campaign to retake Fallujah had begun. In fact, the announcement was a deliberate falsehood. The announcement on CNN was intended to trick the insurgents so that U.S. commanders could see how they would react to the real offensive, which would not begin until three weeks later. In giving this bit of false information to CNN, however, the marines were not merely reaching a "foreign audience" but also Americans who watch CNN.

Much of the U.S. propaganda effort, however, is aimed not at tactical deception of enemy combatants but at influencing morale and support for the war in the United States. The Office of Media Outreach, a taxpayer-funded arm of the Department of Defense, has offered government-subsidized trips to Iraq for radio talk-show hosts. "Virtually all expenses are being picked up by the U.S. government, with the exception of broadcasters providing their own means of broadcasting or delivering their content," reported Billboard magazine's Radio Monitor website.

Office of Media Outreach activities included hosting "Operation Truth," a one-week tour of Iraq by right-wing talk-show hosts, organized by Russo Marsh & Rogers, a Republican PR firm based in California that sponsors a conservative advocacy group called Move America Forward. The purpose of the "Truth Tour," they reported on the Move America Forward website, was "to report the good news on Operation Iraqi Freedom you're not hearing from the old line news media... to get the news straight from our troops serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, including the positive developments and successes they are achieving." Even before the trip began, however, the radio talkers' take on Iraq was already decided. "The war is being won, if not already won, I think," said tour participant Buzz Patterson in a predeparture interview with Fox News. "[Iraq] is stabilized and we want the soldiers themselves to tell the story."

In September 2004, the U.S. military circulated a request for proposals, inviting private public relations firms to apply for a contract to perform an "aggressive" PR and advertising push inside Iraq to include weekly reports on Iraqi public opinion, production of news releases, video news, the training of Iraqis to serve as spokesmen, and creation of a "rebuttal cell" that would monitor all media throughout Iraq, "immediately and effectively responding to reports that unfairly target the Coalition or Coalition interests."

According to the request for proposals, "Recent polls suggest support for the Coalition is falling and more and more Iraqis are questioning Coalition resolve, intentions, and effectiveness. It is essential to the success of the Coalition and the future of Iraq that the Coalition gain widespread Iraqi acceptance of its core themes and messages."

The contract, valued initially at $5.4 million, went to Iraqex, a newly formed company based in Washington, D.C., that was set up specifically to provide services in Iraq. Not long thereafter, Iraqex changed its name to the Lincoln Group. Its success in winning the contract "is something of a mystery," the New York Times would report a year later, since the "two men who ran the small business had no background in public relations or the media."

They were: Christian Bailey, a 30-year-old businessman from England, and Paige Craig, a 31-year-old former marine intelligence officer. Before taking the PR job in Iraq, they had racked up a string of short-lived businesses such as Express Action, an Internet-based shipping company that raised $14 million in startup financing during the dot-com boom but disappeared within two years; or Motion Power, an attempt to invent a shoe that would generate electrical power.45 Bailey had also been active with Lead21, a fund-raising and networking operation for young Republicans.

Shortly before the commencement of war in Iraq, he set up shop in Iraq, offering "tailored intelligence services" for "government clients faced with critical intelligence challenges." In its various incarnations, Iraqex/Lincoln dabbled in real estate, published a short-lived online business publication called the Iraq Business Journal, and tried its hand at exporting scrap metal, manufacturing construction materials, and providing logistics for U.S. forces before finally striking gold with the Pentagon PR contract.

Lincoln partnered initially with the Rendon Group, a public relations firm that had already played a major role in leading the U.S. into war through its work for Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. A few weeks later, Rendon dropped out of the project and left Lincoln in charge. Lincoln hired another Washington-based public relations firm as a subcontractor -- BKSH & Associates, headed by Republican political strategist Charles R. Black, Jr. BKSH is a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, a PR firm whose previous experience in Iraq also included work for Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. Other Pentagon contracts for public relations work were awarded to SYColeman Inc. of Arlington, Virginia, and Science Applications International Corporation. All totaled, the PR contracts added up to $300 million over a five-year period.

On November 30, 2005 -- the same day that Bush gave his "Plan for Victory" speech to naval cadets -- taxpayers got their first glimpse at what was being done with their money. The Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. military was "secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military 'information operations' troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers."

In an effort to mask any connection with the military, the Pentagon had employed the Lincoln Group to translate and place the stories. When delivering the stories to media outlets in Baghdad, Lincoln's staff and subcontractors had sometimes posed as freelance reporters or advertising executives. The amounts paid ranged from $50 to $2,000 per story placed. All told, the Lincoln Group had planted more than one thousand stories in the Iraqi and Arab press. The U.S. Army also went directly into the journalism business itself, launching a publication called Baghdad Now, with articles written by some of its Iraqi translators, who received training in journalism from a sergeant in the First Armored Division's Public Affairs Office. The U.S. also founded and financed the Baghdad Press Club, ostensibly a gathering place for Iraqi journalists. In December 2005, however, it was revealed that the military had also been using the press club to pay journalists for writing stories favorable to the U.S. and the occupation. For each story they wrote and placed in an Iraqi newspaper, they received $25, or $45 if the story ran with photos.

The planted stories were "basically factual," U.S. officials told the Los Angeles Times, although they admitted that they presented only one side of events and omitted information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments. Actually, though, concealing the fact that the stories were written and paid for by the United States was itself a form of deception. Concealment of sponsorship, in fact, is the very standard by which the U.S. Government Accountability Office defines propaganda. In a 1988 report that has served as a standard ever since, the GAO stated, "Our decisions have defined covert propaganda as materials such as editorials or other articles prepared by an agency or its contractors at the behest of the agency and circulated as the ostensible position of parties outside the agency. ... A critical element of covert propaganda is the concealment of the agency's role in sponsoring such material."

"In the very process of preventing misinformation from another side, they are creating misinformation through a process that disguises the source for information that is going out," said John J. Schulz, the dean of Boston University's College of Communications. "You can't be creating a model for democracy while subverting one of its core principles, a free independent press." When the program was exposed, government officials responded with contradictory statements. The White House denied any knowledge of the program, and Donald Rumsfeld said at first that it was "troubling." General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was "concerned." In Iraq, however, a military spokesman said the program was "an important part of countering misinformation in the news by insurgents." A couple of months later, Rumsfeld claimed that the pay-for-praise operation had been shut down. "When we heard about it, we said, 'Gee, that's not what we ought to be doing' and told the people down there. ... They stopped doing that," Rumsfeld told interviewer Charlie Rose during an appearance on public television. However, he said, "It wasn't anything terrible that happened," and he argued that U.S. media exposure of the program was unfortunate because it would have a "chilling effect" on "anyone involved in public affairs in the military," preventing them from doing "anything that the media thinks is not exactly the way we do it in America."

The problem, in other words, was not that the United States was running a covert propaganda operation. The problem was that there were still independent journalists in the United States capable of straying from the script. Even more unfortunately for Rumsfeld, those same journalists happened to notice that he was not telling the truth when he said the program had been shut down. Four days after his interview with Charlie Rose, Rumsfeld was forced to admit that he had been "mistaken" and that the program was merely "under review." A couple of weeks later General George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said the military's review had found that it was acting "within our authorities and responsibilities" in paying to place stories in the press, and that it had no plans to stop.

It is difficult to imagine that Rumsfeld and other White House officials were as naive as they pretended to be when they denied knowledge of the Lincoln Group's activities, since Lincoln's work was closely coordinated with the Pentagon's psychological operations unit, a 1,200-person organization based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, whose media center was so large that the New York Times called it "the envy of any global communications company." The Pentagon had spent $57.6 million on contracts to the Rendon Group and Lincoln Group -- an amount that "is more than the annual newsroom budget allotted to most American newsrooms to cover all the news from everywhere for an entire year," observed Paul McLeary, a politics and media reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review. Spending on that scale, he added, "sure sounds like well-financed policy to us -- and a well-coordinated one as well -- and not one hatched by low-level officials who never let their bosses at the White House in on what they were doing."

Interviews with Lincoln Group employees also undercut the claim that their work was some kind of rogue operation. "In clandestine parlance, Lincoln Group was a 'cutout' -- a third party -- that would provide the military with plausible deniability," said a former Lincoln Group employee in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. "To attribute products to [the military] would defeat the entire purpose," he said. "Hence, no product by Lincoln Group ever said 'Made in the U.S.A.'"

Another former Lincoln employee openly scoffed at the program on grounds that it was having no effect on Iraqi public opinion: "In my own estimation, this stuff has absolutely no effect, and it's a total waste of money. Every Iraqi can read right through it."

The question, then, is who was believing it? Just who was the United States really fooling? The answer is that it was mostly fooling itself.

Reprinted with the permission of Tarcher/Penguin. Copyright © 2006.

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are the authors of, most recently, The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Tarcher, 2006). Stauber is the founder and director of the Center for Media & Democracy. Rampton is the founder of the website SourceWatch.org.

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Monday, September 04, 2006

Class War: A Labour Day Greeting Card!

Last year at Labour Day I wrote about how I began reading Mark Steyn's pearls of shit.

He was waxing on about how the world is so great and technology will save us and humans can trump an instant karma planet that may not endure us much longer. We should all stop whining and have faith in the Fortune 500 R&D divisions to conjure up the next fuel for global pillaging.

But class war is on my mind this year. And since it's Labour Day, it's important to point out that your labour is worth more shit and less value than ever before in recent generations. AND IT'S OUR FAULT because we are letting "them" do it to "us."

And I know that it sounds like the "typical" bleeding heart anti-establishment tone to blame some "them" but there is a "them", and Greg Palast has defined "them" quite neatly [see his whole piece below]. And as much as all this data relates to the USA, Canada is a syncophantic replica of this economic beast.

Just a few timbits of a sense of "them":

50.4% = amount of US income earned by the richest quintile

5.9% = the amount the US median income dropped since Bush's election-rigging machine stole the White House

83% = the amount of stock market shares owned by the richest US quintile

53% = the amount of stock market shares owned by the richest 1% of the US

3% = the amount of all US private assets owned by the poorest 50% of Americans

As a country's economy grows and wealth increases, the Gini Index measures the income disparity within that nation. One of the things that demonstrates who gets the benefit from economic increases is to examine the relationship between wages and productivity. When a nation's productivity increases, you would think that the wages of the workers who are producing more effectively would reflect that improvement.

Since 2003, the reverse has happened in the US. Productivity increased while median wages declined 2% after adjusting for inflation. In the first half of the decade, worker compensation [wage plus benefits] has been half of US productivity increases. However, the share of wage income earned by the richest 1% of Americans nearly doubled to 11.2% in the last 30 years.


"As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the [US's] gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s." Wages 6 months ago reflected just 45% of the US GDP, while 36 years ago wages represented 53.6% of their GDP. In fact, a Goldman Sachs report concluded, "the most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor’s share of national income."

Corporate profits are predominantly earned by the richest quintile of Americans these days. They are "them".

"Since last summer, however, the value of workers’ benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data."

Dividends per share rise when large and small corporations cut benefits to workers. Dividends are largely distributed to the top income quintile of Americans.

But maybe "them" have been hurting by this as well. "At the very top of the income spectrum, many workers have continued to receive raises that outpace inflation, and the gains have been large enough to keep average income and consumer spending rising." OK, maybe not.

But why is it so easy to blame "us" for "them" screwing us out of living or just wages?

If you think people deserve a share in the value or wealth they create, you understand the Labour Theory of Value, and you are in good company with two of the fathers of capitalism: Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Sadly, though, neoliberal free trade economics of global corporate neofeudal rape and pillage reject such quaint notions and liken you--in your support of the Labour Theory of Value--to Karl Marx: not so much a fan of classical or neoliberal economics.

And when I say that it's our fault that we continue to allow ourselves to be abused by the richest quintile or 1% of Americans [or Canadians or OECD world], it is because of how Marx connected the Labour Theory of Value to social order. More egalitarianism comes when more people are able to share in the fruit of their labour. This is not happening so much anymore. During the communism scares of the early 20th century, labour was able to make great gains in wages, benefits and social welfare as capital feared Red Revolutions across the industrial world. With the Evil Empire gone, and only a few marginalized "Red" nations remaining, there is less incentive to buy off labour.

"Polls show that Americans are less dissatisfied with the economy than they were in the early 1980’s or early 90’s. Rising house and stock values have lifted the net worth of many families over the last few years, and interest rates remain fairly low." Plus, "global trade, immigration, layoffs and technology — as well as the insecurity caused by them — appear to have eroded workers’ bargaining power. Trade unions are much weaker than they once were."

And then there's Wheel of Fortune, reality television and the other elements of what make up today's religion as the opiate of the masses. Class warfare belongs to another time and place. We see Hummers driving down our street and we think we're in the blessed world of economic birthrights. "We" are "them" so warfare is against ourselves. Except the economic statistics show we're being bled like the frog in the pot on a slow heat.

But then again, in a global sense, the OECD world is the world's top economic quintile. If the workers of the industrialized world unite against our oppressors, that's just us in the top 2-19% income group going after the top 1%. Is that really a class war?

Horatio Alger, Jr, 19th century American pulp novelist, championed the great American rags to riches dream. As long as the poorest four quintiles of North American population continue to think that we're just one raise away from getting our Hummer, we will refuse to recognize that class politics that allow the irony-free American "president" to chuckle while claiming to be the president of the "haves" and the "have-mores".

And if the Irish saved western civilization after the fall of Rome and through the Dark Ages, perhaps the ascendent political movements of Latin and South America with their focus on human over corporate centred economic development will save the myopic greed of the class rulers of North America.

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TODAY'S PIG IS TOMORROW'S BACON (a Labor Day recipe)

By Greg Palast
September, 3 2006

Some years from now, in an economic refugee relocation "Enterprise Zone," your kids will ask you, "What did you do in the Class War, Daddy?"

The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they're under attack. That's how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little we have.

This week, Dupont, the chemical giant, slashed employee pension benefits by two-thirds. Furthermore, new Dupont workers won't get a guaranteed pension at all -- and no health care after retirement. It's part of Dupont's new "Die Young" program, I hear. Dupont is not in financial straits. Rather, the slash attack on its workers' pensions was aimed at adding a crucial three cents a share to company earnings, from $3.11 per share to $3.14.

So Happy Labor Day.

And this week, the government made it official: For the first time since the Labor Department began measuring how the American pie is sliced, those in the top fifth of the wealth scale are now gobbling up over half (50.4%) of our nation's annual income.

So Happy Labor Day.

We don't even get to lick the plates. While 15.9% of us don't have health insurance (a record, Mr. President!), even those of us who have it, don't have it: we're spending 36% more per family out of pocket on medical costs since the new regime took power in Washington. If you've actually tried to collect from your insurance company, you know what I mean.

So Happy Labor Day.

But if you think I have nothing nice to say about George W. Bush, let me report that the USA now has more millionaires than ever -- 7.4 million! And over the past decade, the number of billionaires has more than tripled, 341 of them!

If that doesn't make you feel like you're missing out, this should: You, Mr. Median, are earning, after inflation, a little less than you earned when Richard Nixon reigned. Median household income -- and most of us are "median" -- is down. Way down.

Since the Bush Putsch in 2000, median income has fallen 5.9%.

Mr. Bush and friends are offering us an "ownership" society. But he didn't mention who already owns it. The richest fifth of America owns 83% of all shares in the stock market. But that's a bit misleading because most of that, 53% of all the stock, is owned by just one percent of American households.

And what does the Wealthy One Percent want? Answer: more wealth. Where will they get it? As with a tube of toothpaste, they're squeezing it from the bottom. Median paychecks have gone down by 5.9% during the current regime, but Americans in the bottom fifth have seen their incomes sliced by 20%.

At the other end, CEO pay at the Fortune 500 has bloated by 51% during the first four years of the Bush regime to an average of $8.1 million per annum.

So who's winning? It's a crude indicator, but let's take a peek at the Class War body count.

When Reagan took power in 1980, the One Percent possessed 33% of America's wealth as measured by capital income. By 2006, the One Percent has swallowed over half of all America's assets, from sea to shining sea. One hundred fifty million Americans altogether own less than 3% of all private assets.

Yes, American middle-class house values are up, but we're blowing that gain to stay alive. Edward Wolff, the New York University expert on income, explained to me that, "The middle class is mortgaging itself to death." As a result of mortgaging our new equity, 60% of all households have seen a decline in net worth.

Is America getting poorer? No, just its people, We the Median. In fact, we are producing an astonishing amount of new wealth in the USA. We are a lean, mean production machine. Output per worker in BushAmerica zoomed by 15% over four years through 2004. Problem is, although worker productivity keeps rising, the producers are getting less and less of it.

The gap between what we produce and what we get is widening like an alligator's jaw. The more you work, the less you get. It used to be that as the economic pie got bigger, everyone's slice got bigger too. No more.

The One Percent have swallowed your share before you can get your fork in.

The loot Dupont sucked from its employees' retirement funds will be put to good use. It will more than cover the cost of the company directors' decision to hike the pension set aside for CEO Charles Holliday to $2.1 million a year. And that's fair, I suppose: Holliday's a winning general in the class war. And shouldn't the winners of war get the spoils?

Of course, there are killjoys who cling to that Calvinist-Marxist belief that a system forever fattening the richest cannot continue without end. Professor Michael Zweig, Director of the State University of New York's Center for Study of Working Class Life, put it in culinary terms: "Today's pig is tomorrow's bacon."

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