The Junkies Dilemma: Kicking Last-Stage Carbon Addiction

Carbon Delirium: The Last Stage of Fossil-Fuel Addiction and Its Hazardous Impact on American Foreign Policy

by Michael Klare - TomDispatch

Of all the preposterous, irresponsible headlines that have appeared on the front page of the New York Times in recent years, few have exceeded the inanity of this one from early March: “U.S. Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin.” The article by normally reliable reporters Coral Davenport and Steven Erlanger suggested that, by sending our surplus natural gas to Europe and Ukraine in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the United States could help reduce the region’s heavy reliance on Russian gas and thereby stiffen its resistance to Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior.

Forget that the United States currently lacks a capacity to export LNG to Europe, and will not be able to do so on a significant scale until the 2020s. Forget that Ukraine lacks any LNG receiving facilities and is unlikely to acquire any, as its only coastline is on the Black Sea, in areas dominated by Russian speakers with loyalties to Moscow. Forget as well that any future U.S. exports will be funneled into the international marketplace, and so will favor sales to Asia where gas prices are 50% higher than in Europe. Just focus on the article’s central reportorial flaw: it fails to identify a single reason why future American LNG exports (which could wind up anywhere) would have any influence whatsoever on the Russian president’s behavior.

The only way to understand the strangeness of this is to assume that the editors of the Times, like senior politicians in both parties, have become so intoxicated by the idea of an American surge in oil and gas production that they have lost their senses.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Shooting Up on Big Energy

Pssst, buddy, you want a report?

Hey, I’ve got three for you, all in the news last week! There was a rare intervention by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which issued a report warning that “the rate of climate change now may be as fast as any extended warming period over the past 65 million years, and it is projected to accelerate in the coming decades.” There was a risk, it added, “of abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes in the earth’s climate system with massively disruptive impacts,” including the possible “large scale collapse of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, collapse of part of the Gulf Stream, loss of the Amazon rain forest, die-off of coral reefs, and mass extinctions.” Then there was the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest grim assessment, whose key message is: “It's not just about melting ice, threatened animals, and plants. It's about the human problems of hunger, disease, drought, flooding, refugees, and war becoming worse,” or as one of the scientists writing the report put it, “The polar bear is us.” And, of course, the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization released its annual report last week, pointing out that, though we are only 14 years into a new century, 13 of them fall into the category of warmest ever recorded.

Not enough bad news for you? Rest assured that there will be prodigious new reports on climate change in the coming years, all from teams of sober, respectable scientists assuring us (yet again) that the next set of findings indicate the planet is going to get hotter (much hotter!), that extreme weather conditions are going to worsen, that drought is going to be endemic, that food production is going to suffer disastrously, that sea levels are going to rise, that chaos is going to ensue, etc., etc.

By now, this is painfully predictable stuff rather than breakthrough science. It’s middle of the road, ho-hum, world’s-going-down-the-drain material, and not even the worst version of what might happen either. By now, this has essentially passed out of the realm of pioneering science and, for those across the planet who are experiencing heat records in Australia, drought in the Western U.S., or horrific superstorms from New York City to the Philippines, onrushing daily life on planet Earth.

The message couldn’t be clearer. Individual scientists and groups of them continue to weigh in repeatedly. Climate scientist Michael Mann, for instance, recently suggested that “if the world keeps burning fossil fuels at the current rate, it will cross a threshold into environmental ruin by 2036.” Sadly, if we had 100 new reports this month, offering versions of the usual findings, it largely wouldn’t matter because we seem intent on doing the one thing that all the scientists say will make this so much worse. We’re burning fossil fuels as if -- excuse the phrase -- there were no tomorrow, while the Big Energy companies are finding new ways to release ever more of the ever-tougher variety of fossil fuels from their underground reserves. They’re building pipelines in profusion to ensure, for instance, that particularly carbon-dirty Canadian tar sands will sooner or later flood the market. They’re drilling with increased intensity in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Arctic, in ever-deeper ocean waters. Sarah Palin may be in retirement, but it’s her world and welcome to it. We’re now on a drill, baby, drill and frack, baby, frack planet, where the prevailing state of mind is what TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author most recently of The Race for What’s Left, calls “carbon delirium.” It’s a far better term for the mentality that simply refuses to absorb all those reports than the more rational-sounding “climate denialism.” Tom

Carbon Delirium: The Last Stage of Fossil-Fuel Addiction and Its Hazardous Impact on American Foreign Policy

by Michael Klare

As domestic output of oil and gas has increased in recent years -- largely through the use of fracking to exploit hitherto impenetrable shale deposits -- many policymakers have concluded that the United States is better positioned to throw its weight around in the world. “Increasing U.S. energy supplies,” said then-presidential security adviser Tom Donilon in April 2013, “affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing our international security goals.” Leaders in Congress on both sides of the aisle have voiced similar views.

The impression one gets from all this balderdash is that increased oil and gas output -- like an extra dose of testosterone -- will somehow bolster the will and confidence of American officials when confronting their foreign counterparts. One former White House official cited by Davenport and Erlanger caught the mood of the moment perfectly: “We’re engaging from a different position [with respect to Russia] because we’re a much larger energy producer.”

It should be obvious to anyone who has followed recent events in the Crimea and Ukraine that increased U.S. oil and gas output have provided White House officials with no particular advantage in their efforts to counter Putin’s aggressive moves -- and that the prospect of future U.S. gas exports to Europe is unlikely to alter his strategic calculations. It seems, however, that senior U.S. officials beguiled by the mesmerizing image of a future “Saudi America” have simply lost touch with reality.

For anyone familiar with addictive behavior, this sort of delusional thinking would be a sign of an advanced stage of fossil fuel addiction. As the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality evaporates, the addict persists in the belief that relief for all problems lies just ahead -- when, in fact, the very opposite is true.

The analogy is hardly new, of course, especially when it comes to America’s reliance on imported petroleum. “America is addicted to oil,” President George W. Bush typically declared in his 2006 State of the Union address (and he was hardly the first president to do so). Such statements have often been accompanied in the media by cartoons of Uncle Sam as a junkie, desperately injecting his next petroleum “fix.” But few analysts have carried the analogy further, exploring the ways our growing dependence on oil has generated increasingly erratic and self-destructive behavior. Yet it is becoming evident that the world’s addiction to fossil fuels has reached a point at which we should expect the judgment of senior leaders to become impaired, as seems to be happening.

The most persuasive evidence that fossil fuel addiction has reached a critical stage may be found in official U.S. data on carbon dioxide emissions. The world is now emitting one and a half times as much CO2 as it did in 1988, when James Hansen, then director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned Congress that the planet was getting warmer as a result of the “greenhouse effect,” and that human activity -- largely in the form of carbon emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels -- was almost certainly the cause.

If a reasonable concern over the fate of the planet were stronger than our reliance on fossil fuels, we would expect to see, if not a reduction in carbon emissions, then a decline at least in the rate of increase of emissions over time. Instead, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that global emissions will continue to rise at a torrid pace over the next quarter century, reaching 45.5 billion metric tons in 2040 -- more than double the amount recorded in 1998 and enough, in the view of most scientists, to turn our planet into a living hell. Though seldom recognized as such, this is the definition of addiction-induced self-destruction, writ large.

For many of us, the addiction to petroleum is embedded in our everyday lives in ways over which we exercise limited control. Because of the systematic dismantling and defunding of public transportation (along with the colossal subsidization of highways), for instance, we have become highly reliant on oil-powered vehicles, and it is very hard for most of us living outside big cities to envision a practical alternative to driving. More and more people are admittedly trying to kick this habit at an individual level by acquiring hybrid or all-electric cars, by using public transit where available, or by bicycling, but that remains a drop in the bucket. It will take a colossal future effort to reconstruct our transportation system along climate-friendly lines.

For what might be thought of as the Big Energy equivalent of the 1%, the addiction to fossils fuels is derived from the thrill of riches and power -- something that is far more difficult to resist or deconstruct. Oil is the world’s most lucrative commodity on the planet, and a source of great wealth and influence for ruling groups in the countries that produce it, notably Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. The leaders of these “petro-states” may not always benefit personally from the accumulation of oil revenues, but they certainly recognize that their capacity to govern, or even remain in power, rests on their responsiveness to entrenched energy interests and their skill in deploying the nation’s energy resources for political and strategic advantage. This is just as true for Barack Obama, who has championed the energy industry’s drive to increase domestic oil and gas output, as it is for Vladimir Putin, who has sought to boost Russia’s international clout through increased fossil fuel exports.

Top officials in these countries know better than most of us that severe climate change is coming our way, and that only a sharp reduction in carbon emissions can prevent its most destructive effects. But government and corporate officials are so wedded to fossil fuel profits -- or to the political advantages that derive from controlling oil’s flow -- that they are quite incapable of overcoming their craving for ever greater levels of production. As a result, while President Obama speaks often enough of his desire to increase the nation’s reliance on renewable energy, he has embraced an “all of the above” energy plan that is underwriting a boom in oil and gas output. The same is true for virtually every other major government figure. Obeisance is routinely paid to the need for increased green technology, but a priority continues to be placed on increases in oil, gas, and coal production. Even in 2040, according to EIA predictions, these fuels may still be supplying four-fifths of the world’s total energy supply.

This bias in favor of fossil fuels over other forms of energy -- despite all we know about climate change -- can only be viewed as a kind of carbon delirium. You can find evidence of this pathology worldwide and in myriad ways, but here are three unmistakable examples of our advanced stage of addiction.

1. The Obama administration’s decision to allow BP to resume oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

After energy giant BP (formerly British Petroleum) pleaded guilty to criminal negligence in the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which resulted in the death of 11 people and a colossal oil spill, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suspended the company’s right to acquire new drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico. The ban was widely viewed as a major setback for the company, which had long sought to dominate production in the Gulf’s deep waters. To regain access to the Gulf, BP sued the EPA and brought other pressures to bear on the Obama administration. Finally, on March 13th, after months of lobbying and negotiations, the agency announced that BP would be allowed to resume bidding for new leases, as long as it adhered to a list of supposedly tight restrictions

BP officials viewed the announcement as an enormous victory, allowing the company to resume a frenetic search for new oil deposits in the Gulf’s deep waters. “Today’s agreement will allow America’s largest investor to compete again for federal contracts and leases,” said BP America Chairman and President John Mingé. Observers in the oil industry predict that the company will now acquire many additional leases in the Gulf, adding to its already substantial presence there. “With this agreement, it’s realistic to expect that the Gulf of Mexico can be a key asset for BP’s operations not only for this decade but potentially for decades to come,” commented Stephen Simko, an oil specialist at Morningstar investment analysts. (Six days after the EPA announced its decision, BP bid $42 million to acquire 24 new leases in the Gulf.)

So BP’s interest is clear enough, but what is the national interest in all this? Yes, President Obama can claim that increased drilling might add a few hundred thousand barrels per day to domestic oil output, plus a few thousand new jobs. But can he really assure our children or grandchildren that, in allowing increased drilling in the Gulf, he is doing all he can to reduce the threat of climate change as he promised to do in his most recent State of the Union address? If he truly sought a simple and straightforward way to renew that pledge, this would have been a good place to start: plenty of people remember the damage inflicted by the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the indifference BP’s top officials displayed toward many of its victims, so choosing to maintain the ban on its access to new drilling leases on environmental and climate grounds would certainly have attracted public support. The fact that Obama chose not to do so suggests instead a further surrender to the power of oil and gas interests -- and to the effects of carbon delirium.

2. The Republican drive to promote construction of the Keystone XL pipeline as a response to the Ukrainian crisis

If Obama administration dreams about pressuring Putin by exporting LNG to Europe fail to pass the credibility test, a related drive by key Republicans to secure approval for the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline defies any notion of sanity. Keystone, as you may recall, is intended to carry carbon-dense, highly corrosive diluted bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Its construction has been held up by concerns that it will pose a threat to water supplies along its route and help increase global carbon dioxide emissions.

Because Keystone crosses an international boundary, its construction must receive approval not just from the State Department, but from the president himself. The Republicans and their conservative backers have long favored the pipeline as a repudiation of what they view as excessive governmental deference to environmental concerns. Now, in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, they are suddenly depicting pipeline approval as a signal of U.S. determination to resist Putin’s aggressive moves in the Crimea and Ukraine.

“Putin is playing for the long haul, cleverly exploiting every opening he sees. So must we,” wrote former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a recent Washington Post op-ed. “Authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline and championing natural gas exports would signal that we intend to do precisely that.”

Does anyone truly believe that Vladimir Putin will be influenced by a White House announcement that it will allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline? Putin’s government is already facing significant economic sanctions and other punitive moves, yet none of this has swayed him from pursuing what he appears to believe are Russia’s core interests. Why, then, would the possibility that the U.S. might acquire more of its oil from Canada and less from Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela, and other foreign suppliers even register on his consciousness?

In addition, to suggest that approving Keystone XL would somehow stiffen Obama’s resolve, inspiring him to adopt tougher measures against Moscow, is to engage in what psychologists call “magical thinking.” Were Keystone to transport any other substance than oil, the claim that its construction would somehow affect presidential decision-making or events on Russia’s borders would be laughable. So great is our reverence for petroleum, however, that we allow ourselves to believe in such miracles. This, too, is carbon delirium.

3. The Case of the Missing $20 Billion

Finally, consider the missing $20 billion in oil revenues from the Nigerian treasury. In Nigeria, where the average income is less than $2.00 per day and many millions live in extreme poverty, the disappearance of that much money is a cause for extreme concern. If used for the public good, that $20 billion might have provided basic education and health care for millions, helped alleviate the AIDS epidemic, and jump-started development in poor rural areas. But in all likelihood, much of that money has already found its way into the overseas bank accounts of well-connected Nigerian officials.

Its disappearance was first revealed in February when the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi, told a parliamentary investigating committee that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) had failed to transfer the proceeds from oil sales to the national treasury as required by law. Nigeria is Africa’s leading oil producer and the proceeds from its petroleum output not claimed by the NNPC’s foreign partners are supposed to wind up in the state’s coffers. With oil prices hovering at around $100 per barrel, Nigeria should theoretically be accumulating tens of billions of dollars per year from export sales. Sanusi was immediately fired by President Goodluck Jonathan for conveying the news that the NNPC has been reporting suspiciously low oil revenues to the central bank, depriving the state of vital income and threatening the stability of the nation’s currency. The only plausible explanation, he suggested, is that the company’s officials are skimming off the difference. “A substantial amount of money has gone,” he told the New York Times. “I wasn’t just talking about numbers. I showed it was a scam.”

While the magnitude of the scam may be eye-catching, its existence is hardly surprising. Ever since Nigeria began producing oil some 60 years ago, a small coterie of business and government oligarchs has controlled the allocation of petroleum revenues, using them to buy political patronage and secure their own private fortunes. The NNPC has been an especially fertile site for corruption, as its operations are largely immune from public inspection and the opportunities for swindles are mammoth. Sanusi is only one of a series of well-intentioned civil servants who have attempted to plumb the depths of the thievery. A 2012 report by former anti-corruption chief Nuhu Ribadu reported the disappearance of a hardly less staggering $29 billion from the NNPC between 2001 and 2011.

Here, then, is another, equally egregious form of carbon delirium: addiction to illicit oil wealth so profound as to place the solvency and well-being of 175 million people at risk. President Jonathan has now promised to investigate Sanusi’s charges, but it is unlikely that any significant portion of the missing $20 billion will ever make it into Nigeria’s treasury.

Curing Addiction

These examples of carbon delirium indicate just how deeply entrenched it is in global culture. In the U.S., addiction to carbon is present at all levels of society, but the higher one rises in corporate and government circles, the more advanced the process.

Slowing the pace of climate change will only be possible once this affliction is identified, addressed, and neutralized. Overcoming individual addiction to narcotic substances is never an easy task; resisting our addiction to carbon will prove no easier. However, the sooner we recast the climate issue as a public health problem, akin to drug addiction, the sooner we will be able to fashion effective strategies for averting its worst effects. This means, for example, providing programs and incentives for those of us who seek to reduce our reliance on petroleum, and imposing penalties on those who resist such a transition or actively promote addiction to fossil fuels.

Divesting from fossil fuel stocks is certainly one way to go cold turkey. It involves sacrificing expectations of future rewards from the possession of such stocks, while depriving the fossil fuel companies of our investment funds and, by extension, our consent for their activities.

But a more far-ranging kind of carbon detoxification must come in time. As with all addictions, the first and most crucial step is to acknowledge that our addiction to fossil fuels has reached such an advanced stage as to pose a direct danger to all humanity. If we are to have any hope of averting the worst effects of climate change, we must fashion a 12-step program for universal carbon renunciation and impose penalties on those who aid and abet our continuing addiction.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook and Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars -- The Untold Story.

Copyright 2014 Michael T. Klare

Riding the Bull to the Next China Shop: Waiting the Next New World Order

The new New World Order

by Jim Miles

“Look for the AIPAC hand whenever the US gets embroiled in a foreign policy debacle. Zionist agents will engender conflict and continue riding the American wagon – as it rode the German and the British before – until the US becomes useless. Then they will jump on the next world power wagon.”  - Kosher Theft, Jamal Kanj, Palestine Chronicle, March 26, 2014.

[Obama’s] ideas were stirring. Time and again the president invoked democracy, self-determination, human equality, territorial integrity and dignity -- principles the U.S. has nullified in its policy in Israel and Palestine. Obama's European message -- self-determination, equality, dignity -- is null and void in Palestine.  - Philip Weiss, www.opednews.com, March 29, 2014.

It was a different world two decades ago. The Soviet Union under Yeltsin’s hand capitulated to the west and the slow march away from a democratizing state began. The west had ‘won’ the Cold War and had it within its range to make a global ‘peace dividend’ with promises to not extend NATO into eastern Europe. The U.S. economy, although already on the path to serious economic debt problems, had worked side by side with China for a new era of global prosperity, at the same time that the economic tide in Russia was all about asset stripping and the rise of the oligarchs.

In Israel, the First Intifada was over, and the Oslo Peace Accord was in the making, giving recognition to the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinian people, and establishing the Palestinian Authority, and various areas of Israeli/Palestinian control in the West Bank.

Global peace was set to break out

One group had it mind to determine what kind of peace it was to be, the participants in the Project for a New American Century, headed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Among their many stated ideas was the concept of “full spectrum dominance” within which Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz were advocating for “first strike winnable nuclear war.” There were to be no new rivals to U.S. dominance on land, sea, air, or space and U.S. economic and political dominance of the world was assured. This process, "even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor." This group already had its sights on Iraq and provided much support for their Israeli partners in the Middle East.

A new Pearl Harbor did arrive

Plans that were ready, and processes that were moving slowly, immediately went into fast forward after the 2001, 9/11 events. Regardless of its initiation, 9/11 created the impetus and propaganda necessary for a new generation of militaristic actions around the world operating under the general rubric of the “War on Terror.” It launched an era of surveillance and authoritarian laws that have greatly diminished the democracy status of the U.S. and its allies. Financially, it marked the beginning of an era in which global finances became dangerously debt ridden as the costs of the wars added to the consumptive debt of a highly leveraged global economic system.

Israel rode on these ideas, strengthening its image as ‘victim’ surrounded by a sea of terrorists intent on destroying it, regardless of its own military predominance, its hundred or so deliverable nuclear warheads, and its continuing unqualified financial and military/surveillance/security support from the U.S. and its allies. The ‘peace process’ amounted to nothing more than a lot of delaying talks while more and more settlements were built on more and more Palestinian land. This outpost of western democracy held against the aggressive hordes of Muslim fanatics.

Global peace was not at hand, and the ‘long war’ settled into the normalcy of daily propaganda, biased mainstream newscasts, and the supposed ever increasing wealth of the western nations. Democracy and freedom were exported from the barrels of many guns and rocket launchers.

Unexpected outcomes

For the PNAC supporters, something different happened along the way. In spite of its military hardware, the U.S./NATO alliance stalled in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its ‘victories’ as with Yugoslavia and Libya came at the end of long and severely damaging aerial bombings, leaving behind broken promises, broken people, and broken cultures.

The poor financial status of the western countries became increasingly more evident, reaching its apogee with the 2008 economic collapse that threatened all major U.S. and EU financial corporations. The save was made from the power of the petro-dollar, the world’s reserve currency, which was printed up in the many trillions of dollars by the US Federal Reserve system in order to bail out the essentially bankrupt banks and financial institutions upon which the U.S./EU economy depended (at least for the powers that be).

A new order emerges

Still powerful, still belligerent, the U.S.’ plans/ideals as controller and comptroller of the world have not been realized. There are many factors that have stopped their dominance, too many to recount and enumerate here, but they can be summarized into two general categories.

First, is the political-military resistance of a reinvigorated Russian state, reacting strongly to increasing pressures towards its containment and eventual disintegration. Within that resistance is a strong political will, a no-nonsense recognition of its own vital interest, and increasing resource and financial power within its relationships with EU countries and with the world’s largest state, China.

Secondly, and fully related to the above, are the changing circumstances of the value of the U.S. petro dollar, the rise of China as an important economic player, and the large financial problems - essentially enormous unpayable debts - domestically and externally for the U.S. Add to this the increasing awareness of the power of the BRIC nations and their search for an alternative to the petro dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and the U.S. position becomes very untenable.

All this comes to a head with the U.S.’ instigation of the coup in the Ukraine, from which Russia recovered the Crimea. Those actions follow on Russia’s actions in relation to Syria and Iran, demonstrating that the ‘new’ world order is not exactly what it was supposed to be.

What happens next is still highly speculative, but short of initiating a nuclear war, the U.S. will have to adjust to the now multi-polar world that is emerging. Their global military dominance is fine against smaller, much weaker countries, but has met its mutually assured destruction match with Russia.

Through all this, where is Israel?

The opening quotes highlight the possible shape of things to come for Israel/Palestine. While the world is pre-occupied with the Ukraine/Syria/Iran, Israel continues its decades long program of ethnic cleansing and settlement building. Obama’s words about international law and democracy are the ultimate in double standards and hypocrisy, in relation to all its military actions around the world and in relation to Israel, where Secretary of State John Kerry ineptly tries to salvage something positive from the current dead end process.

What intrigued me more were the words by Jamal Kanj, “until the US becomes useless. Then they will jump on the next world power wagon.” In other words, does Israel really ‘need’ the U.S. in the newer world order, or will it dispense with U.S. interests and set up accommodations with other powers? And where will that leave the Palestinians?

The future is all speculation, but Israel could well surprise itself and the world in reaching out for new paramours to support itself. It is a mini-super power in its own right, has large military-security-surveillance structures that are tradable for other goods and necessities. The U.S. and its allies have strong religious ties to Israel, partly through Christian right fundamentalist beliefs and through their own Jewish populations and the power they hold domestically (or are perceived to hold). But with declining military influence and potential huge financial losses as the U.S. dollar declines, Israel will be looking elsewhere.

Business as usual?

Other countries while superficially hostile, may be much more accommodating. China has no argument with colonization and settlements. India cannot argue the point very well either. Russia may take advantage of opportunities to strengthen ties with Israel, and this triumvirate may well encourage Israel to settle its dispute with Iran and get on with business. Syria may be a larger sticking point by proximity, but it is interesting that for all that is happening in the region, I have yet to read about Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights as a factor in any of this.

The Arab countries, while overtly hostile, are quite docile in the face of Israeli power and their own internal control issues. Saudi Arabia has become a trading partner with China and would not create unnecessary aggravations to their own survival with ongoing hostility to Israel.

This presents a rather negative prospectus for Palestinians in that it may well be business as usual, just with different partners. The positive side may well be the BDS movement which may find surprising support from the BRICS if South Africa maintains its current viewpoint. Further, if the EU were ‘emancipated’ from U.S. overlordship with changes to the financial and military structures, more attention may be paid to the BDS movement.

As far as Israel is concerned, business as usual with a new paramour or group thereof will suit it just fine. How it actually turns out is entirely unknown. For the Palestinians, BDS remains the single most powerful instrument to achieve their democratic freedoms.

Turkish False Flag Suspected Delight for NATO Syria Interventionists

Standby NATO: Turkey Plots Justification to Strike

by RT

The Turkish government is red-faced after a leak on YouTube revealed a daring plot to justify invading neighboring Syria. An anonymous source posted audio of a secret meeting between top Turkish officials - discussing a false flag operation that would appear as a Syrian attack. It's not the first time Ankara has tried to rally NATO against Syria. RT's Marina Portnaya has a collection of Turkish attempts to spark a full-blown war with its neighbor, with the backing of the Alliance.

RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air

Widening Lens: Jonathan Schell and the Fate of the Earth

The Widening Lens: Jonathan Schell and the Fate of the Earth

by Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch

“Up to a few months ago, Ben Suc was a prosperous village of some thirty-five hundred people.” 

 

That is the initial line of The Village of Ben Suc, his first book, a copy of which I recently reread on a plane trip, knowing that he was soon to die. That book, that specific copy, had a history of its own. It was a Knopf first edition, published in 1967 in the midst of the Vietnam War, after the then-shocking text had appeared in the New Yorker magazine. 

 

An on-the-spot account of an American operation, the largest of the Vietnam War to that moment, it followed American troops as they helicoptered into a village controlled by the enemy about 30 miles from the capital, Saigon. All its inhabitants, other than those killed in the process, were removed from their homes and sent to a makeshift refugee camp elsewhere. The U.S. military then set Ben Suc afire, brought in bulldozers to reduce it to rubble, and finally called in the U.S. Air Force to bomb that rubble to smithereens -- as though, as the final line of his book put it, “having once decided to destroy it, we were now bent on annihilating every possible indication that the village of Ben Suc had ever existed.”

I had read the piece in the New Yorker when that magazine devoted a single issue to it, something it had not done since it published John Hersey’s Hiroshima in a similar fashion in 1946. I never forgot it. I was then 23 years old and just launched on a life as an anti-Vietnam War activist. I would not meet the author, 24-year-old neophyte reporter Jonathan Schell, for years.

To look at that first edition some 47 years later is to be reminded of just how young he was then, so young that Knopf thought it appropriate in his nearly nonexistent bio to mention where he went to high school (“the Putney School in Vermont”). The book was tiny. Only 132 pages with an all-print orange cover that, in addition to the author and title, said: “The story of the American destruction of a Vietnamese village -- this is the complete text of the brilliant report to which the New Yorker devoted almost an entire issue.” That was bold advertising in those publishing days. I know. As an editor at a publishing house as the 1980s began, I can still remember having a fierce argument about whether or not it was “tasteless” to put a blurb from a prominent person on a book’s cover.

The year after Ben Suc was published, he wrote The Military Half, his second great book on that horrific American war, in which he widened his lens from a single devastated village to two provinces where almost every hamlet had been destroyed, largely by American air power. To report it, he rode in tiny forward observation planes that were calling down destruction on the Vietnamese countryside. He then went to work as a staff writer for the New Yorker and in 1975 widened his lens further in his book The Time of Illusion, taking in the history and fate of a single administration in Washington as it waged “limited war” abroad in a nuclear age and created constitutional mayhem at home, bringing yet more violence to Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, as well as to the American political system.

In 1982, with his globally bestselling book The Fate of the Earth, whose first chapter, looking directly into a future of annihilation, was memorably entitled “A Republic of Insects and Grass,” he trained his lens on the threat of violence against all humanity. He memorably explored what was then known as “the nuclear predicament,” the way we had fully taken over a role previously occupied by God and, in the midst of the Cold War, were threatening the extinction not of a village, a couple of provinces in a distant land, or a political system, but the planet itself.

I was by then working at Pantheon Books, where in 1988 I re-read his two Vietnam reports and republished them in a single volume as The Real War. It’s cover copy read: “The classic reporting on the Vietnam War,” which couldn’t have been more accurate. And then, some years later, I evidently stumbled across that first edition in New York’s great used bookstore, the Strand. My copy is dated 8/93 on a little yellow tag inside the front cover and cost me $4. I doubt I read it a third time when I bought it. I can only imagine that I wanted to have that memorable first book by someone I already considered one of the greats of our age.

As it happened, at another publishing house in 2003, in an even grimmer century, I put out his book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. His lens by then couldn’t have been wider. In it, he appropriated a hollowed-out term from the war in Vietnam, the hopeless American effort to “win hearts and minds,” celebrating instead the untamed “rebellious hearts and minds” across the planet that might find new sources of people power and alter a world headed for destruction. It was a book so far ahead of its time that, in the invasion-of-Iraq moment, almost no one noticed.

He was then perhaps the only person who imagined that, in our future, lay an Arab Spring, an Occupy Movement, and whatever-is-still-to-come. He may have been the first to see that this planet, careening toward disaster, might no longer be controllable in any of the usual ways. (“Fifty-eight years after Hiroshima, the world has to decide whether to continue on the path of cataclysmic violence charted in the twentieth century and now resumed in the twenty-first or whether to embark on a new, cooperative political path... In our age of sustained democratic revolution, the power that governments inspire through fear remains under constant challenge by the power that flows from people’s freedom to act in behalf of their interests and beliefs.”)

His final great work on climate change, on which he spent years of research, provisionally titled The Human Shadow, will sadly never be written. In the end, the lens simply grew too wide for a single lifetime -- and we will all be the poorer for it.

He died on the night of March 25th of a cancer spurred on by an underlying blood condition that just might have been caused by Agent Orange, the poisonous defoliant chemical so widely used by U.S. forces in Vietnam. There is, of course, no way of knowing, but the Veteran’s Administration website does list his condition as one that might have been Agent Orange-induced. In life as in death, Vietnam may have defined, but never confined, him. He was a figure in my life and at TomDispatch -- as a friend, a writer, an interviewee, and for me a source of constant inspiration. I mourn him.

Given the role Vietnam played in his life, in mine, and in this country’s, I thought it might be appropriate to look not to his last words, but -- in a sense -- to his first words. So, today, I’m returning us to the young Jonathan Schell, the boy who, knowing so little but so terribly open, landed in Vietnam in 1966 and during that nightmarish war that seemed never to end, later at the New Yorker, and finally at the Nation magazine, as well as in his many books, helped shape our thinking and our world. Here, then, is an interview that historian Chris Appy did with him for his remarkable 2003 oral history of the Vietnam War from all sides, Patriots. It catches the sensibility both of the youthful Jonathan Schell and of the man I later came to know. I thank Appy and his publisher, Viking Penguin, for letting me remember and honor him in this way.

“The More We ‘Won,’ The More We Lost” - An Interview with Jonathan Schell on America’s Vietnam Debacle

by Chris Appy

[The following interview from Chris Appy’s 2003 book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides is used with the kind permission of his publisher, Viking Penguin, and is posted at TomDispatch.com as a memorial to Jonathan Schell, who died on March 25th, and to his work, which will long outlast him.]

Rushing into the magazine’s office, his cheeks flushed, he flops down on a couch looking impossibly burdened by the distractions of a journalist’s life. The odds seem slim that much of value will be gained by dredging up a 30-year-old topic. As soon as the subject is mentioned, however, the present evaporates. It’s as if the middle-aged man has entered a time machine dated 1966.That was the year he went to Vietnam on a whim, at age 23, hoping to write “something” about the war. On the basis of that trip, and another in 1967, he wrote two book-length articles for The New Yorker that were later published as The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half.

I wasn’t very political in college but I do remember noticing that this Vietnam War seemed to be a sort of unsolvable problem. At the time, I didn’t see how we could pull out and I suppose I bought into the domino theory. But I didn’t see how we could win. It just looked bad. When I graduated from college in 1965, I went to Japan to study and spend a year abroad. On the way back from Japan I had a round-the-world ticket that permitted me to stop anywhere I wanted. I had a certain ambition to be a writer of factual pieces so I decided I would go to Vietnam. I remember reading Bernard Fall’s latest book on the plane, which was my little crash education. When I landed in Vietnam I was the very definition of a pest -- a graduate student who had no knowledge and who vaguely thought he might like to write something.

Somehow or other it occurred to me that François Sully might be in Vietnam working for Newsweek. He was a French reporter I’d met at Harvard when he was a Nieman Fellow so I called up the Newsweek office and, lo and behold, he was there and invited me over.

It was a loft-like office with a back room full of the pseudo-military gear that journalists wore. When I greeted Sully I had Bernard Fall’s book under my arm and mentioned that I had been reading it. There was another fellow at a desk who said, “Could I see the book?” So I went over and gave him the book.

He opened it up and signed it. It was Bernard Fall!

So here were these two ebullient, life-loving Frenchmen, brave and brilliant journalists, both. And just out of sheer high spirits, they took me up -- this nuisance, this pest, this ignorant graduate student. They used their connections to perform a kind of miracle. They persuaded the military to give me a press pass on the somewhat deceptive basis that I was there for the Harvard Crimson. I had actually written for the Crimson, and very possibly they would have wanted me reporting for them, but we made up that little tale.

Well, if you had a press pass in Vietnam, it was a free travel ticket all over the country. You could hitchhike rides on helicopters and transport planes, wherever you wanted. It was a meal ticket. It was a hotel reservation anywhere. It gave a fantastic freedom to see what you wanted to see. I think the reason was the cooperation between the press and the military during the Second World War, and the Korean War had carried over for a while to Vietnam. So just a day or two later Fall and Sully called me up at my ratty hotel and said, “Something is going to happen. It’s all secret, but you can go and see it if you want. Come over to such-and-such a place at four-thirty A.M. and there’ll be a bus.” These two wonderful journalists, both of whom later lost their lives in the war, gave me this one-hundred-and-eighty-degree life-changing gift, which set me on the journalistic path I’ve been on ever since.

We got on a bus and were taken out to an airstrip where we were flown off in a C-5 to a big dusty field in the jungle. A spiffy major with an easel told us we were there for Operation Cedar Falls -- the largest military operation of the war to that date. The idea was to clear out the infamous Iron Triangle [a 40-square-mile patch of jungle with its southernmost tip just a dozen miles north of Saigon], which had been the source of so much woe for the South Vietnamese army and a revolutionary stronghold since the war against the French. The American military wanted to clear it out once and for all. On the major’s easel there was a great menu of things they were going to do. One of the items on the list was a helicopter attack on the village of Ben Suc. When we got to that item on the list, I asked, “What’s going to happen to the village after it’s attacked?” The major said, “Well, we’re going to destroy it and move the people out.”

“Then what?” I said.

“Well, we’re going to bulldoze it and bomb it.”

So I thought, okay, I’ll just follow that particular story from start to finish. It didn’t feel like a singularly adventurous or bold thing to do. And I do recall one little act of cowardice. When they asked which of the 60 helicopters we wanted to go on, many of the journalists were clamoring to be on the first or second helicopter. I was delighted to be on helicopter number 47. You could say that the operation came off beautifully. It worked exactly as planned. The helicopters flew in, moved the people out, destroyed the village. Mission accomplished. But to what end? Most of the reporting about Operation Cedar Falls told you how many Viet Cong were captured or killed, and those may have been true facts. But they left out what I believed was fundamental -- that we were destroying villages and throwing people off their land.

The unmistakable fact was that the general population despised the United States and if they hadn’t despised it before we arrived, they soon did after we destroyed their villages. Our whole goal was to build up a political system that would stand after we left, with a functioning government supported enough by its people so it could fight on its own. But our policies were destroying whatever support that government might ever have had, which was probably about zero to begin with. The more we’d win on the battlefield -- and we did just about every day in just about every battle -- the more we lost the political war.

The more we “won,” the more we lost. That was the paradox of Vietnam. American soldiers went over thinking they were freeing an enslaved people from their oppressors. I do think the Communists were pretty oppressive. However, it just so happened that they were the representatives of national dignity and that seemed to trump whatever oppression they dealt out. Whatever the reason, the people by and large supported them and they were the de facto government of a very considerable part of South Vietnam. So the idea that the Viet Cong were a sort of mysterious band of people that could be rooted out and separated from the population at large just didn’t have a basis in political reality.

One thing that struck me very powerfully was the capacity of both the officer corps and the press corps to see things in terms of a story they had brought with them to Vietnam and not to see what was actually going on under their noses. For example, when I came back to Vietnam in the summer of 1967 I went up to Quang Ngai Province and saw that the place was being leveled by American bombing. But when I got home, I remember reading a story in the New York Times about how the marines had built a hospital in this area. Apparently the Hiroshima-like devastation that was around that hospital was not visible to the reporters of the New York Times because they weren’t telling about that.

And it wasn’t a subtle thing. The fire and smoke was pouring up to the heavens. You didn’t have to be a detective or do any investigative journalism. The flames were roaring around you. I mapped it all out and seventy, eighty percent of the villages were just dust -- ashes and dust. But that was not the story. The story was still how we were going to help the South Vietnamese resist the attack from the North. In Vietnam I learned about the capacity of the human mind to build a model of experience that screens out even very dramatic and obvious realities.

When I first went back to Vietnam that summer I joined the journalistic pack, the “boys on the bus.” What they were covering at the time was this fraudulent election, a completely farcical election. One day we were all taken to a village for a campaign rally, but the candidates somehow didn’t make it. Apart from the journalists, the only person who showed up was an ancient guy going around with a bullhorn shouting that there was going to be an election rally. This was supposed to be democracy in action and we were the only people there.

To report on that as if it was something real would have been absolutely absurd so I just took the next helicopter out and somehow decided to begin covering the air war in the South -- the air slaughter, really. People had been writing about the bombing of North Vietnam, but the air war in the South was far more devastating and not getting much attention.

So in Quang Ngai I started going up in forward air control (FAC) planes -- little Cessna two-seater spotter planes that would direct the pilots to their targets. These little planes were constantly turning and twisting, in part to avoid enemy ground fire. That and the overwhelming heat made me constantly nauseous. But I had my notebook right there in the plane and the setup was unbelievably perfect for reporting. It was as if it had been designed for reporting. It gave you this fantastic perch. You could sit over the scene of the action, witness it, and you were conveniently supplied with earphones in which you heard conversations among the pilots, the forward air controller, and the ground. The quotes were coming right into the earphones and I wrote them down as if it were a lecture at Harvard. It was an amazing stroke of journalistic luck.

The idea that the U.S. military was operating under constraints in South Vietnam is ridiculous. We pulverized villages from the air if we merely imagined that we received hostile fire. I witnessed it with my own eyes and I saw the leaflets we dropped which said, “If you fire on us, we will destroy your village,” and then a follow-up leaflet that said, “You did fire on us, and we did destroy your village.” And U.S. planes were actually bombing churches. They would see the church, target it, and blow it up. I saw that happen.

And sometimes they cracked jokes about it. They were trying to imagine that the war was something like World War II. When you were in the air you could try to forget about all the paradoxes of policy that made your very successes counterproductive. But I sensed a deep uneasiness and regret among the pilots. They sometimes sang rather brutal ditties that seemed to me like confessions in a way:

“Strafe the town and kill the people,
Drop napalm in the square,
Get out early every Sunday
And catch them at their morning prayer.”

I wasn’t inclined to blame the people doing it so much as the people ordering it. I got along well with the soldiers and their officers. I liked them very much. Maybe that was a defensive thing. It would have been very uncomfortable for me to be in a position of feeling fury at the people doing it. Those are deep questions. You know, just following orders is no excuse. These were atrocities -- bombing villages from the air, just pulverizing houses, attacking people on the basis of little or no information. And there was this absurd supposition that if someone ran away from your attack, they automatically belonged to the Viet Cong.

It was a massacre from the air that was going on every day and I was a part of it in a way. I was kind of doing it. That was the feeling. The FACs were equipped with phosphorous rockets. They were used as markers for the bombers, but phosphorous rockets are particularly horrifying weapons -- worse than napalm. It’s something that burns that you can’t put out. The rocket would blow up the house and then people would run out. I was witnessing from a distance, but I had a real feeling of complicity. I mean I didn’t push the button, but I was there.

When I got back from Vietnam I met Jerry Wiesner, provost of MIT and a friend of my parents. He had been Kennedy’s science adviser and knew Secretary of Defense McNamara. We had lunch and when I told him about what I’d seen in Vietnam he said, “Would you be willing to go and talk to McNamara about this?” I said, “Yeah, sure,” and the meeting was arranged. So I went down to the Pentagon, where I’d never set foot, and was ushered into the secretary of defense’s office. It’s the size of a football field -- a proper imperial size. And there was McNamara, all business as usual, with that slicked-back hair of steel. I began to tell my story and he said, “Come over to the map here and show me what you’re talking about.”

Well, I truly had my ducks in a row. I had overflown the entire province of Quang Ngai and half of Quang Tin. And so I really had chapter and verse. After a while he interrupted and asked, “Do you have anything in writing?” I said, “Yes, but it’s all in longhand.” So he said, “Well, I’ll put you in General so-and-so’s office -- he’s off in South America -- and you can dictate it.” And so for three days I sat in the general’s office dictating my longhand, book-length New Yorker article on the air war in South Vietnam. Up from the bowels of the Pentagon would come typed copy. It was a dream for me, probably saving me a month’s work because this was long before word processors.

Three days later, stinking to high heaven because I had no change of clothes, I reappeared in McNamara’s office. I handed it to him, he took it, and that was the last I heard about it from him. But I learned later that a foreign service officer in Saigon was sent around Vietnam to retrace my steps and re-interview the pilots and the soldiers I had quoted. He even read back to the pilots the gruesome ditties they had sung for me at the bar. The foreign service officer had to admit that my book was accurate but he added, “What Schell doesn’t realize is what terrible circumstances our troops are in. He doesn’t realize that old ladies and children are throwing hand grenades because the people are against us.” Hence, the Vietnam War makes sense because the South Vietnamese are against us!

So why couldn’t we get out? When it became clear that the costs were so much greater than anything at stake on the ground in Vietnam itself, then why couldn’t we just withdraw? None of the official war aims made much sense. It was hard to maintain that we were fighting for freedom or democracy in South Vietnam since the government we were defending was so obviously corrupt and dictatorial. Nor could we honestly claim to be preventing aggression when the only foreign combatants in Vietnam were Americans or soldiers paid for by the United States like the South Koreans. Even the domino theory seemed to fall apart in the face of intense nationalism, support for reunification throughout Vietnam, and the historical conflicts between Vietnam and China.

But the one justification that proved most durable was this idea of credibility. Fighting for American credibility was not a tangible goal; it was the defense of an image -- an image of vast national strength and the will to use it. According to the doctrine of credibility, the United States was engaged in a global public-relations struggle in which a reverse in any part of the world, no matter how small, could undermine the whole structure of American power.

Part of the concern with maintaining credibility stemmed from a kind of psychological domino theory. In other words, policy makers worried that if the United States did not prevail in Vietnam, it would cast doubt on our determination to prevail anywhere. If the United States lost in Vietnam, then countries and revolutionaries all over the world would see that we were a paper tiger who couldn’t win wars and they would be emboldened to resist our will. So what was at stake in Vietnam was the ability of the United States to maintain control all over the world on a psychological basis.

But there was another component of the doctrine of credibility that is in a way the most subtle and the least noticed, but I think the most important. It was nuclear policy. In nuclear strategy one of the crucial facts is that you can’t actually fight a nuclear war. The moment that you fight the war you’ve lost it because everybody loses in a nuclear war. The purpose of deterrence is to prevent a nuclear war from happening. It depends entirely on producing a psychological impression in the mind of the enemy that you are a very tough guy -- so tough you’re ready to commit suicide and drag the enemy down with you.

Well that is a kind of crazy proposition. It doesn’t have a lot of inherent credibility. Why would you commit suicide to defend yourself? So it’s a real strain to keep producing an impression of toughness. All you could do in the arena of nuclear confrontation was build up your arms and talk tough. You couldn’t prove your toughness by actually using the weapons. 'Round about the end of the 1950s there were a number of thinkers, including Henry Kissinger, who began to say, well, okay, we’re paralyzed in the nuclear arena, but we can go out and win a few on the periphery. Here’s a place where we can actually fight wars and show how tough we are. At the same time [Soviet Premier] Khrushchev began to talk about the necessity of fighting wars of national liberation in the Third World so the Soviets were making their own contribution to the rhetorical battle. Thus, the model for Vietnam was actually created before we ever went directly into that war. Because the so-called peripheral wars were supposedly winnable, and since they occurred in a context of a very shaky credibility based on nuclear weapons that you couldn’t use, these limited wars came to bear an additional burden.

It was as if World War III were being fought in Vietnam. In the nuclear age, the whole structure of credibility and deterrence seemed to depend on winning these wars out there on the periphery. This was the sort of theoretical trap that the policy makers found themselves in. They thought they were not only preventing the toppling of dominoes but total war itself. And if you believed the assumptions, then almost no cost was too high to pay in Vietnam.

The above interview is from Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides by Christian Appy, copyright (c) 2003 by Christian G. Appy. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

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Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt and Christian Appy

Of Small Minds and Small Numbers: Engineering World War III

Pushing Toward The Final War

by Paul Craig Roberts

Does Obama realize that he is leading the US and its puppet states to war with Russia and China, or is Obama being manipulated into this disaster by his neoconservative speech writers and government officials? World War 1 (and World War 2) was the result of the ambitions and mistakes of a very small number of people. Only one head of state was actually involved–the President of France.

In The genesis Of The World War, Harry Elmer Barnes shows that World War 1 was the product of 4 or 5 people. Three stand out: Raymond Poincare`, President of France, Sergei Sazonov, Russian Foreign Minister, and Alexander Izvolski, Russian Ambassador to France. Poincare` wanted Alsace-Lorraine from Germany, and the Russians wanted Istanbul and the Bosphorus Strait, which connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. They realized that their ambitions required a general European war and worked to produce the desired war.

A Franco-Russian Alliance was formed. This alliance became the vehicle for orchestrating the war. The British government, thanks to the incompetence, stupidity, or whatever of its Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, was pulled into the Franco-Russian Alliance. The war was started by Russia’s mobilization. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, was blamed for the war despite the fact that he did everything possible to avoid it.

Barnes’ book was published in 1926. His reward for confronting the corrupt court historians with the truth was to be accused of being paid by Germany to write his history. Eighty-six years later historian Christopher Clark in his book, The Sleepwalkers, comes to essentially the same conclusion as Barnes.

In the history I was taught the war was blamed on Germany for challenging British naval supremacy by building too many battleships. The court historians who gave us this tale helped to set up World War 2.

We are again on the road to World War. One hundred years ago the creation of a world war by a few had to be done under the cover of deception. Germany had to be caught off guard. The British had to be manipulated and, of course, people in all the countries involved had to be propagandized and brainwashed.

Today the drive to war is blatantly obvious. The lies are obvious, and the entire West is participating, both media and governments.

The American puppet, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, openly lied on Canadian TV that Russian President Putin had invaded Crimea, threatened Ukraine, and was restarting the Cold War. The host of the TV program sat and nodded his head in agreement with these bald-faced lies.

The script that Washington handed to its Canadian puppet has been handed to all of Washington’s puppets, and everywhere in the West the message is the same. “Putin invaded and annexed Crimea, Putin is determined to rebuild the Soviet Empire, Putin must be stopped.”

I hear from many Canadians who are outraged that their elected government represents Washington and not Canadians, but as bad as Harper is, Obama and Fox “News” are worse.

On March 26 I managed to catch a bit of Fox “news.” Murdoch’s propaganda organ was reporting that Putin was restoring the Soviet era practice of exercise. Fox “news” made this report into a threatening and dangerous gesture toward the West. Fox produced an “expert,” whose name I caught as Eric Steckelbeck or something like that. The “expert” declared that Putin was creating “the Hitler youth,” with a view toward rebuilding the Soviet empire.

The extraordinary transparent lie that Russia sent an army into Ukraine and annexed Crimea is now accepted as fact everywhere in the West, even among critics of US policy toward Russia.

Obama, whose government overthrew the democratically elected government in Ukraine and appointed a stooge government that has threatened the Russian provinces of Ukraine, falsely accuses Putin of “invading and annexing” Crimea.

Obama, or his handlers and programers, are relying on the total historical ignorance of Western peoples. The ignorance and gullibility of Western peoples allows the American neoconservatives to fashion “news” that controls their minds.

Obama recently declared that Washington’s destruction of Iraq–up to one million killed, four million displaced, infrastructure in ruins, sectarian violence exploding, a country in total ruins–is nowhere near as bad as Russia’s acceptance of Crimean self-determination. US Secretary of State John Kerry actually ordered Putin to prevent the referendum and stop Crimeans from exercising self-determination.

Obama’s speech on March 26 at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels is surreal. It is beyond hypocrisy. Obama says that Western ideals are challenged by self-determination in Crimea. Russia, Obama says, must be punished by the West for permitting Crimeans to exercise self-determination. The return of a Russian province on its own volition to its mother country where it existed for 200 years is presented by Obama as a dictatorial, anti-democratic act of tyranny.

Here was Obama, whose government has just overthrown the elected, democratic government of Ukraine and substituted stooges chosen by Washington in the place of the elected government, speaking of the hallowed ideal that “people in nations can make their own decisions about their future.” That is exactly what Crimea did, and that is exactly what the US coup in Kiev contravened. In the twisted mind of Obama, self-determination consists of governments imposed by Washington.

Here was Obama, who has shredded the US Constitution, speaking of “individual rights and rule of law.” Where is this rule of law? It is certainly not in Kiev where an elected government was overthrown with force. It is certainly not in the United States where the executive branch has spent the entirety of the new 21st century establishing government above the law. Habeas corpus, due process, the right to open trials and determination of guilt by independent jurors prior to imprisonment and execution, the right to privacy have all been overturned by the Bush/Obama regimes. Torture is against US and international law; yet Washington set up torture prisons all over the globe.

How is it possible that the representative of the war criminal US government can stand before an European audience and speak of “rule of law,” “individual rights,” “human dignity,” “self-determination,” “freedom,” without the audience breaking out in laughter?

Washington is the government that invaded and destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of lies. Washington is the government that financed and organized the overthrow of the Libyan and Honduran governments and that is currently attempting to do the same thing to Syria and Venezuela. Washington is the government that attacks with drones and bombs populations in the sovereign countries of Pakistan and Yemen. Washington is the government that has troops all over Africa. Washington is the government that has surrounded Russia, China, and Iran with military bases. It is this warmongering collection of Washington war criminals that now asserts that it is standing up for international ideals against Russia.

No one applauded Obama’s nonsensical speech. But for Europe to accept such blatant lies from a liar without protest empowers the momentum toward war that Washington is pushing.

Obama demands more NATO troops to be stationed in Eastern Europe to “contain Russia.” Obama said that a buildup of military forces on Russia’s borders would reassure Poland and the Baltic states that, as NATO members, they will be protected from Russian aggression. This nonsense is voiced by Obama despite the fact that no one expects Russia to invade Poland or the Baltic countries.

Obama doesn’t say what effect the US/NATO military buildup and numerous war games on Russia’s border will have on Russia. Will the Russian government conclude that Russia is about to be attacked and strike first? The reckless carelessness of Obama is the way wars start.

Declaring that “freedom isn’t free,” Obama is putting pressure on Western Europe to pony up more money for a military buildup to confront Russia.

The position of the government in Washington and its puppet states (Eastern and Western Europe, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Georgia, Japan) and other allies purchased with bagfuls of money is that Washington’s violation of international law by torturing people, by invading sovereign countries on totally false pretenses, by routinely overthrowing democratically elected governments that do not toe the Washington line is nothing but the “indispensable and exceptional country” bringing “freedom and democracy to the world.” But Russia’s acceptance of the self-determination of Crimean people to return to their home country is “a violation of international law.”

Just what international law has Washington and its puppets not violated?

Obama, whose government in the past few years has bullied Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Lebanon, Iran, Honduras, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela and is now trying to bully Russia, actually declared that “bigger nations can not simply bully smaller ones.” What does Obama and his speech writers think Washington has been doing for the entirety of the 21st century?

Who can possibly believe that Obama, whose government is responsible for the deaths of people every day in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, cares a whit about democracy in Ukraine. Obama overthrew the Ukrainian government in order to be able to stuff the country into NATO, throw Russia out of its Black Sea naval base, and put US missile bases in Ukraine on Russia’s border. Obama is angry that his plan didn’t pan out as intended, and he is taking his anger and frustration out on Russia.

As the delusion takes hold in Washington that the US represents idealism standing firmly against Russian aggression, delusion enabled by the presstitute media, the UN General Assembly vote, and Washington’s string of puppet states, self-righteousness rises in Washington’s breast.

With rising self-righteousness will come more demands for punishing Russia, more demonization of Russia and Putin, more lies echoed by the presstitutes and puppets. Ukrainian violence against Russian residents is likely to intensify with the anti-Russian propaganda. Putin could be forced to send in Russian troops to defend Russians.

Why are people so blind that they do not see Obama driving the world to its final war?

Just as Obama dresses up his aggression toward Russia as idealism resisting selfish territorial ambitions, the English, French, and Americans presented their World War 1 “victory” as the triumph of idealism over German and Austrian imperialism and territorial ambitions. But at the Versailles Conference the Bolsheviks (the Tsar’s government failed to gain the Straits and instead lost the country to Lenin) “revealed the existence of the notorious Secret Treaties embodying as sordid a program of territorial pilfering as can be found in the history of diplomacy. It appears that the chief actual motives of the Entente in the World War were the seizure of Constantinople and the Straits for Russia; not only the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, but the securing of the west bank of the Rhine, which would have involved the seizure of territory historically far longer connected with Germany than Alsace-Lorraine had ever been with France; the rewarding of Italian entry into the War by extensive territory grabbed away from Austria and the Jugo-Slavs; and the sequestering of the German imperial possessions, the acquisition of the German merchant marine and the destruction of the German navy in the interest of increasing the strength of the British Empire” (Barnes, pp. 691-692).

The American share of the loot was seized German and Austrian investments in the US.

The secret British, Russian, and French aims of the war were hidden from the public, which was whipped up with fabricated propaganda to support a war whose outcomes were far different from the intentions of those who caused the war. People seem unable to learn from history. We are now witnessing the world again being led down the garden path by lies and propaganda, this time in behalf of American world hegemony.

Political Spoilers and TV Leaks

TV Secrets vs. Washington Leaks

by Walter Brasch

For almost a year, the people of the critically-acclaimed and popular CBS drama, “The Good Wife,” kept a secret, one so powerful that viewers were shocked by the abruptness of what happened on screen, March 23.

Will Gardner (portrayed by Josh Charles), one of the major characters, was killed by his client during murder trial. Within seconds, even before the show’s conclusion, viewers were texting and tweeting, shocked and confused and angry and upset and sad, all at the same time. There was no hint in the entertainment media that Will would be killed off.

Charles wanted to be dropped from the show after his four year contract expired at the end of the 2012- 2013 season, but didn’t want to do anything to harm the show. So he, the producers, and writers decided to extend the contract for a 15-show arc in the 2013-2014 season that would take his character and those around him, including Alecia Florrick (portrayed by Julianna Margulies) spinning in another direction, one that would change the characters’ dynamics and interactions.

What’s amazing is not that Will Gardner was killed—several major TV characters have been killed off abruptly—but that dozens of people working on “The Good Wife,” as well as some of their immediate families, knew about it and revealed nothing. In addition to the major characters, producers, and writers, anyone involved with the filming of the episode, which concluded about a month before its air date, knew. That would be dozens of crew members, including camera operators, sound and lighting technicians, and digital editors. They knew how important it was to keep the secret. Although some might have liked to alert their favorite reporters, perhaps to get favorable personal publicity later, they did not. That’s because they are professionals.

Now, let’s contrast the cast and crew of “The Good Wife” with the cast and crew of “Washington Follies.”

There are no secrets in Washington, D.C.,—and it has nothing to do with what the National Security Agency knows or doesn’t know about Americans.

The reason there are no secrets is because the nation’s capital has more leaks than all the antiquated gas pipelines in the country. It’s good there are no secrets—but, many of the “secrets” have as much integrity as a junk bond trader.

There are “whistleblower leaks.” These come from individuals who believe that a politician, staffer, lobbyist, or a corporation has committed and then hid an illegal act, and violated the public trust.

The second kind of leak comes from individuals who have a self-interest in alerting the media to what may be scandals. These leaks could come from political candidates, elected and appointed officials, and those in corporate business who want to eliminate a competitor, but don’t want to have their hands dirtied by the revelation. Most of these leaks fall into the sub-category, Gossip. Far too often, the media take the allegations, do minimal investigation, publish their findings, but never ask the critical question—“Why are you telling me this?”

A third kind of leak is the “trial balloon.” A government official or corporate executive wants to find out what the public thinks of an idea or plan, but doesn’t want anyone to know who is behind it. Often, the media will report something to the effect, “Rumors abound in Washington that . . .” If opinion leaders and the public like the idea—and politicians spent millions of dollars to have polls tell them what to think—then the proposal is implemented. If there’s a negative reaction to the trial balloon, the plan is locked into obscurity, and the source is exonerated from all negative feedback.

A fourth leak, a variant of the trial balloon, is the veiled news source. Reporters and politicians love this kind of leak, which takes the form of, “Sources close to President Obama say . . .” or “A highly-placed source close to the House Speaker says . . .” Readers’ first questions should be, “Who are these people? And is the reporter just making up this quote out of whole cloth?” It’s for that reason that veiled news sources should be rarely used. But, reporters still think they should be channeling the thoughts of presidents, corporate executives, and bartenders.

Unlike Washington, D.C., where the left hand doesn’t even know there is a right hand, all involved on “The Good Wife,” from the newly-hired production assistants to the show runners, work as a team, dealing with their conflicts and solving the problems. In the nation’s capital, solving problems doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s bucket list.

For “The Good Wife,” secrecy was important to maintain artistic integrity. For the daily “Washington Follies,” secrets are just rumors and a few facts that are leaked for political reasons.

[Rosemary Brasch assisted on this column. Walter Brasch is an award-winning journalist and author. His latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania, an in-depth investigation into the process and health and environmental effects of horizontal hydraulic fracturing to mine gas.]

 Walter M. Brasch, Ph.D.
Latest Books: Before the First Snow: Stories from the Revolution
Fracking Pennsylvania: Flirting With Disaster
(www.greeleyandstone.com)
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Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Shawnigan Lake Toxic Dump Rally, Barbara Biley, Janine Bandcroft Monday March 31, 2014

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

Before his 2006 ascent to power in Canada, the current prime minister reportedly told an audience at a right-wing think tank confab: "You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it."

Whether that is true or apocryphal, taking a quick, cross-country check up proves the point. From warfare to health care, environmental protection to ecological rejection, 'Stephen Harper's New Government of Canada,' has certainly broken the national mold, and none in either the Canadian parliament, or the nation's corporate dominated media seem inclined to pick up the shattered remnants of what once was this country.

Listen. Hear.

But, eight years of unprecedented deregulation, and systematic undoing of national institutions later, Mr. Harper and his considerably more hoary "New Government' cohorts are hardly finished their transformative mission.

Ingmar Lee is a long-time environmental defender, activist, writer, and woodsman. He currently lives with his family in the heart of the 'Great Bear Rainforest,' near Bella Bella, where the forests, wildlife, and marine environment are all threatened by various expansive human activities geared for short-term, and largely offshore profit.

Ingmar Lee in the first half.

And; today marks National Day of Action for a New Health Accord, a cross-country effort, spearheaded by the Council of Canadians, in hopes to draw Canadian's attention to the deleterious state of our nation's health care system - another of the many social "entitlements" targeted for "reform" by the current government in Ottawa. Barb Biley is the Hospital Employees' Union Regional Vice President for Vancouver Island North and she was on the front lines of Campbell River's contribution to today's actions.

Barb Biley and rallying for a New Health Accord in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what's good to do in and around our city in the coming week.

But first, Ingmar Lee and the Canadian government assault on Canada's people and environment.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

 G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Marching Out Not Like Lambs: National Day of Action for a New Health Accord

National Day of Action for a New Health Accord

by Council of Canadians

On March 31, sound the alarm for public health care!

We are facing an important moment in the history of public health care. The Health Accord – an agreement between the federal, provincial and territorial governments that sets federal funding for health care, and ensures all Canadians can access good quality services regardless of where they live – will expire on March 31.

To date, the Harper government has refused to meet with premiers to negotiate a new accord. Instead, the federal government plans to cut $36 billion over 10 years from public health care and walk away from its responsibilities to ensure equal access to all Canadians.  

Join us on March 31 for a National Day of Action!

We are sounding the alarm about the federal government’s funding cuts to wake Canadians up to what this means for our health care services. Removing $36 billion from our health care system will put an end to national standards. It will lead to the fragmentation of services across the country and that increasingly, access to care will depend on where you live.

We are asking people to organize actions in their community on March 31 to speak out against these cuts and to demand that the Harper government negotiate a new health accord. Any action, big or small, is important! You could hold a rally, distribute pamphlets or organize a public forum. See if your community is on the list or organize your own event.

Be sure to let us know about your National Day of Action activities so we can highlight them on our website. Fill out this form or e-mail your event details to webmaster@canadians.org. Don’t forget to check out our resources and publications that you can use to help inform people and raise awareness. Send an e-mail to inquiries@canadians.org if you would like to order materials for your event.

We’re looking forward to raising our voices with people across the country to sound the alarm on the Harper government’s attack on public health care. Together, we can strengthen public health care for generations to come.

NEW RESOURCE: Health Care Media Outreach Kit, Tips and materials for Council of Canadians chapter activists and other health care advocates

Dogs Not Watching: The Real Ends of Journalism Mean More than Barking

Barking Dogs And Sinking Ships: Journalism's Search For Metaphor And Meaning

by Robert Jensen  - Texas Observer Online

Reviewing The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism

The fundamental failure of Dean Starkman's The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism —and of mainstream journalism more generally—is hidden in plain sight in the title's metaphor. Starkman explains why journalists often aren't alert watchdogs, but he can't see why limiting the profession to the role of a barking dog is, quite literally, a dead-end.

To explain that rather harsh judgment, allow me to mix metaphors: The best the journalistic watchdog can do these days is bark at people rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and meanwhile the train has left the station.

That's not clear? Let me throw in a few clichés: Because Starkman is committed to “dance with the one that brung ya,” he can't see the forest for the trees, and as a result he takes his eye off the prize(s).

Still not clear? Here's some help decoding: The prizes we should be after are social justice and ecological sustainability in a meaningfully democratic society. The trees are the crimes and misdemeanors of various evil and/or incompetent executives and politicians. The forest is our vaunted corporate-capitalist system, the predatory essence of which makes those crimes—and worse—inevitable. The dance is the implicit bargain with powerful people and institutions struck by journalists, who agree not to point out that the whole system is morally indefensible, politically incoherent, and ecologically destructive.

Representative democracy yoked to a capitalist system driven by hyperconsumption is no longer sustainable (that's the train that has left the station), and if we refuse to grapple with these realities the system is going to go down (that's the Titanic).

In such a world, do we want journalists who only know how to bark at, or even nip the backsides of, the crooked and corrupt? Or should journalists take a more proactive role in critiquing not just the abuses of officials but the deeper crises of our social, political, economic systems?

The Watchdog That Didn't Bark analyzes the banking crisis and the broader economic meltdown of the 2000s without ever delving far below the surface, and on the few occasions that it does acknowledge a deeper critique, evading the implications. The book is an excellent account of mainstream journalistic failures, as those failures are understood by mainstream journalists, but such an account leaves us splashing in the shallow end of the pool.

OK, enough with the metaphors. Stated plainly, Starkman's approach is the best mainstream journalism has to offer, and it's not enough. A former Wall Street Journal reporter and current editor at the Columbia Journalism Review , Starkman has written a book that is engaging and informative when describing the few successes and many failures of mainstream journalism in covering the financial crisis, but that fails to offer prescriptions or a theory to guide journalism into the future.

THE “GREAT STORY”

If Starkman's reliance on the conventional watchdog metaphor sends him down the wrong track, the book derails on his “Great Story” theory of journalism. Promising to rebut “facile criticisms” from the right, left, and digital-news advocates, he sets for himself the task of writing “the story of the Great Story.” The model for this kind of journalism is the early 20th century muckrakers:

Their strength was a certain journalistic purity: They had no political axes to grind; they were after the Great Story and were, in fact, master storytellers. They had a journalistic ambition that was sweeping by today's standards. They combined the Victorian era's faith in science—a scrupulous fidelity to true facts—with its unabashed moralism. As moralists, the muckrakers recognized the importance of human agency and didn't shrink from holding power to account—by name. And they crafted what can be called American journalism's only true ideology.

This valorizing of a journalism that pretends to transcend political judgments is at the heart of the book's problem, and we'll come back to that. But for now, let's stay focused on greatness.

Starkman explains that while not every story journalists write needs to be “Great,” the core mission of journalism is built around the Great Story “that holds power to account and explains complex problems to a mass audience, connects one segment of society to another.” This kind of journalism, he writes, “is also the one reliable, indispensable barometer for the health of the news, the great bullshit detector.”

Holding power to account and detecting bullshit are certainly admirable goals, and Starkman correctly points out that journalists who practice what he calls “access journalism” are unlikely to achieve them. Access journalists, as the label suggests, play the insider game and cultivate access to powerful sources. At best, access journalism can give ordinary people a glimpse of what happens behind closed doors, but on terms set by those who close the doors.

Starkman makes the case for the necessity of “accountability journalism” in the muckraking mode that is confrontational and accusatory, and that “provokes the enmity of the rich and powerful as a matter of course.” The access and accountability schools, he writes, “represent radically [emphasis added] different understandings of what journalism is [emphasis in the text] and whom it should serve.”

The book's thesis, simply put, is that the news media's poor performance during the financial crisis can be explained by the prominence of access journalism and the lack of hard-hitting accountability journalism. Here's Starkman's summary of these two styles:

Access reporting tends to talk to elites; accountability, to dissidents. Access writes about specialized topics for a niche audience. Accountability writes about general topics for a mass audience. Access tends to transmit orthodox views; accountability tends to transmit heterodox views. Access reporting is functional; accountability reporting is moralistic. In business news, access reporting focuses on investor interests; accountability, on the public interest.

Starkman is correct to point out the limitations of access journalism and the greater value of accountability journalism. But are those our only choices? Let's hope not, because both approaches fall short of the demands of our historical moment, in which we struggle to understand not only the specific malfunctions of our social, political, and economic systems, but the cascading collapse of those systems.

Journalists should report on abuses by the powerful, of course, but within what underlying analysis of the larger system? Are illustrations of these failures used to deepen our understanding of the unjust and unsustainable nature of a capitalist system? Starkman doesn't take up the question, but his answer seems to be “no,” since he expresses faith in “effective journalism and uncompromised regulation,” which “operate independently but together create a dynamic that generates information, public awareness, and, ultimately, reform.” That seems to be where the process stops for Starkman: fine-tuning reforms.

If we look closely at accountability reporting, we see that such journalists do talk to dissidents, but dissidents who almost always accept the basic structure of the existing social, political, and economic systems. Journalists transmit heterodox views, so long as those views accept the assumptions of the existing systems. Journalists can be moralistic without ever questioning whether the existing systems are moral or can produce truly moral outcomes. That leaves an obvious questions: Just how “radically different” are these two approaches? And if accountability reporting cannot or will not challenge existing systems, then how exactly does it serve the long-term public interest?

Like virtually all mainstream journalists, Starkman doesn't step back from the crisis of the moment to examine the deeper crises of consumer society, representative democracy, and capitalism. He exhorts journalists to look at “systemic problems” within the financial system, but takes the existing social, political, and economic systems as a given. Journalists' task, by this measure, is to police abuses of the existing rules without ever asking if the system itself is sane, just, or sustainable.

Starkman points out that journalism cannot change the world by itself, that “without effective regulation, journalism can have all the resonance of one hand clapping.” But if journalism never challenges the assumptions of the system, and accepts the efficacy of regulatory agencies that are creatures of the system, we might as well ask about the resonance of dogs barking on a sinking ship.

THE INEVITABILITY OF POLITICS

Readers who have turned on their bullshit detectors have no doubt discerned that there is a left/anti-capitalist politics behind my argument. That assessment is correct, but anyone tempted to reject my argument out of hand on the basis that it's politicized and therefore somehow inappropriate should think about what kind of bullshit needs detecting. If my critique of Starkman can be dismissed as political, then so can Starkman's own argument—along with every other possible position on this question.

There is no escape from political judgment, and mainstream journalism's claim to be non-ideological and apolitical simply means the profession has absorbed the political assumptions of the dominant culture. That's not rising above politics; it's sinking more deeply into an unreflective politics. The appropriate question isn't, “Is there a politics to your approach to journalism?” but “Can you defend the politics of your approach to journalism?”

I do not believe there is a decent human future possible within capitalism, which is inhuman, anti-democratic and unsustainable ( more on this here , http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/04/30/anti-capitalism-in-five-minutes/ ). Most of mainstream journalism assumes such a future is possible. Whichever position proves to be most prescient, both points of view—an overt challenge to capitalism or the belief that capitalism is stable and/or just—are political to the same degree. The main difference is that an anti-capitalist position challenges the position held by powerful people/institutions and appears politicized, while a pro-capitalist position lines up with power and hides behind the illusory claim to not be political but simply working within the way things are.

This is not a contest between journalism based on facts and journalism based on values; all journalism should struggle to describe the world accurately and all journalism comes with value judgments. Nor is it about neutrality versus advocacy. Starkman supports a journalism that assumes regulation can solve problems in the financial system, and I support a journalism that questions the assumptions inherent to the financial system. The real questions are: Which kind of journalism does a better job of fitting the facts about the world into a coherent picture of how the world works, allowing us to imagine a better world? Readers can disagree with any particular position, but no position can be eliminated from the discussion simply on the claim that it is “politicized.”

JOURNALISM'S STUNTED POLITICAL IMAGINATION

To be clear about a couple of things: First, Starkman is an excellent journalist within the rules of the profession. My concern is not with the quality of his reporting and writing but with the stunted political imagination of the profession.

Second, I'm not arguing that every news story should be an anti-capitalist polemic. But all stories are based on claims about how the world works, reflecting a moral/political viewpoint, and those claims should be discussed openly rather than buried under the conventional wisdom. Like all humans, journalists tell stories within a certain framework, and even when recounting simple facts, the frameworks come with assumptions about how the world works and visions of how to change it.

Starkman is not unaware of this kind of critique, but he evades its implications. Citing Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent , he notes, “Many of the media's severest critics reject the notion that conventional newspapers could be an effective check on established power.” He offers a concise summary of their model but then dismisses its relevance:

Whatever the validity of the critique (and there's a lot to it), more reporters, I think, would argue that what happens on the margins isn't trivial since that is where accountability reporting usually operates. And what Herman and Chomsky don't take into account is that the margins, over time, move; they expand and contract. Indeed, the short history of the U.S. business press shows that the boundaries can move a considerable distance and that their expansion has provided considerable benefits for the chicken workers, day laborers, and slum dwellers who appear in the stories or, at least, for the curious middle-class readers who, for a few moments, were connected to them. Indeed, the expansion of the boundaries made a democratization of business news possible. Where to draw the lines becomes a source of fierce newsroom debate, with some journalists, depending on their own values, defending the boundaries and even seeking to narrow them; others push against them. Looking over recent investigative journalism, it is surprising to see how far the boundaries of what could be covered were stretched in American journalism, business news very much included.

Herman and Chomsky don't discount the importance of stories that uncover abuses and improve people's lives, and they recognize that the space for critique opens and closes, typically depending on the success of social-justice movements' challenge to power. But the boundaries in mainstream journalism have never stretched far enough for conventional newsrooms to embrace—or even take seriously—a fundamental critique of capitalism.

So, Starkman “refutes” the Herman/Chomsky propaganda model without explaining how it fails and ascribing to it a hard determinism that the model rejects. Apparently in the quest to offer some scholarly heft to his argument, Starkman says he prefers the “field theory” of the French sociologist Pierre Bordieu, conceptualizing journalism as one of the semi-autonomous fields operating in larger political field. Starkman explains:

Society, then, is an ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of play that can't be collapsed under any overall societal logic, like capitalism, postmodernism, or some larger theoretical model. Altering the distribution and relative weight of different forms of capital within a field is tantamount to modifying the structure of the field. Therefore, fields have a historical dynamism about them; they have a malleability that avoids the determinism of the classical structures, such as class-based models. Fields change over time.

I am not sure whether I agree with Starkman here, because I am not sure I understand what that means, or if it means much of anything. But in a quarter-century in academic life, I have observed that when people want to ignore difficult questions about basic power systems—such as capitalism, white supremacy, or patriarchy—they often create or invoke such arcane theories. But academic word-salad doesn't eliminate the question: Is capitalism consistent with our moral principles, commitment to democracy, and the ecological sustainability required for a large-scale human presence on the planet?

I am not arguing that unless Starkman accepts my political views, his account of journalism has no value. But when that account is so limited as to either ignore obvious questions or dance around the views of those trying to raise them, we should be skeptical.

I'm also not arguing that within a free press, every journalist and every story would raise these critiques. But when such critiques are effectively off limits, we have to question what “free” means, which leads to a troubling question: How great can the Great Story be when the Great Storytellers operate in a semi-autonomous zone that is only semi-free?

GREAT STORIES, GREAT MEN, AND THE DISTORTION OF HISTORY

In the Great Story theory of journalism it's difficult not to hear echoes of the Great Man theory of history attributed to the 19th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who argued that “universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.”

Starkman isn't naively imposing Carlyle onto journalism; although he spends considerable time recounting the accomplishments of Great Journalists, Starkman is arguing for accountability reporting to be deployed by more than just a few heroic reporters. Starkman wants that ethos to saturate reporting at all levels, extending the Great Man idea to Great Institutions such as journalism and regulatory agencies.

But both these theories, Great Man and Great Story alike, downplay the political agency of ordinary people working through popular social movements. This distortion of history is at the core of Starkman's myopia, evident even when he chastises journalists. Reflecting on journalism's failure to cover mounting problems in the financial system adequately, he writes:

…when the public is caught this off-guard about something this big, journalism needs to wonder if there was something, somewhere that it did wrong, something it didn't do. In this case, what wasn't done was accountability reporting. What journalism had done for more than a century, it could not muster when it was needed most.

What exactly did journalism do for more than a century? Many good things, of course, but accountability reporting didn't put journalism at the forefront of any progressive change or any serious challenge to concentrated power. At best, journalism has given publicity to some popular movements—typically once those movements have won enough political battles that ignoring or maligning them has become impossible—but just as often journalism has played it safe by subordinating itself to power.

Consider the 20th century that Starkman references. Were mainstream journalists championing the rights of the early labor organizers who faced intense and often violent resistance from corporations? Were mainstream journalists leading the challenge to white supremacy posed not only by radical black-nationalist movements but even by the more moderate civil rights movement? Were mainstream journalists out in front supporting the dissidents who questioned U.S. wars of aggression? Were mainstream journalists honestly self-reflecting on the pathology of patriarchy that feminists highlighted?

In all these cases we can find an occasional journalist from the mainstream who stands out, but the profession as a whole—including practitioners of accountability journalism—were unwilling to take, or incapable of taking, the risk of challenging concentrated power or reactionary public opinion.

But wait, the defenders of journalism will say: It's not the job of journalism to participate in political movements. I agree—journalists should not be active participants. The question is, what are the moral and political assumptions on which journalists base their work? If journalists can't step back to identify, let alone critically examine, the ideological claims of capitalism, their reporting will be pro-capitalist, not neutral. If journalists can't question the United States' claim to be a benevolent force for freedom and democracy in the world, coverage of foreign policy inevitably will bolster U.S. imperialism. If journalists can report on the activities of anti-racist and feminist organizers but not reflect on how white supremacy and patriarchy shape the larger society and the institution of journalism, coverage of these issues will be inadequate.

Many people will disagree with these political judgments and reject the implications for journalism. But everyone has to defend their political judgments, and no one can claim to transcend politics and work from a neutral position. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can ask what we really need from journalism at this moment in history.

WHAT IS THE RIGHT METAPHOR?

The search for a metaphor beyond the barking dog should start with an uncompromising understanding of the state of the larger society, which brings us back to the Titanic. Although often dismissed as alarmist or hysterical, serious concern about the viability of contemporary systems is supported by evidence that is piling up faster than we can avert our eyes. Let's start with the question of ecological sustainability.

All crucial measures of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity—suggest that our high-energy/high-technology society is unsustainable. Because we live in an oil-based society and are rapidly depleting the cheapest and most easily accessible oil reserves, we face a huge reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds our lives. Desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of “extreme energy” in which even more dangerous and destructive technologies are employed (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop removal, tar sands extraction). Additionally, of course, there is the undeniable trajectory of climate disruption.

Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about human activity pushing the planet beyond its limits. In a recent study, 22 leading scientists warned that humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale transition ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7401/full/nature11018.html ) “with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.” That means that “the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations.”

That means we're in trouble. And that trouble plays out in a world structured by the inequalities that flow from deeply entrenched hierarchies, both within individual countries and between the so-called developed and developing worlds. Because ecological crises exacerbate existing problems rooted in the unjust distribution of wealth and power, our troubles are likely to grow more troubling.

Is it realistic to pursue business as usual? If not, then journalism as usual is, again, a dead-end.

What is the role of journalists today? In a society that is in deep denial about the impediments to achieving social justice and ecological sustainability—denial that is especially deep in the relatively privileged sectors where affluence insulates from the immediate consequences—perhaps journalists should not be barking at people who break the rules of existing systems, but sounding an unpleasantly loud alarm that we have to change our existing systems in profound ways.

To alert society to such threats, journalists have to face—and tell—the truth about how our social, political, and economic systems operate.

To do that, journalism first has to face—and tell—the truth about itself.



The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism
by Dean Starkman  - Columbia Journalism Review Books  -  $24.95; 368 pages

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His latest books are Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialogue , http://www.amazon.com/Arguing-Our-Lives-Constructive-Dialog/dp/0872865738/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361912779&sr=1-10 , and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out , http://www.amazon.com/Are-All-Apocalyptic-Now-Responsibilities/dp/148195847X/ref=pd_sim_b_1 .

Jensen is also the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice , (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing” (Media Education Foundation, 2009), which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist.

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://robertwjensen.org/ . To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html . Twitter: @jensenrobertw.