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July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
July 30, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Branding September 11
PS Burton
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
Tom Stephens
Hypocrites in the House:
Fast Track After Midnight
Dave Marsh
Censorship
Goes Global
July 29, 2002
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
July 26, 2002
Jerre Skog
American
Dictatorship:
It Couldn't Happen...Could It?
Philip Farruggio
Lie,
Rob and Steal
Rep. Ron Paul
Monitor
Thy Neighbor
Ron Jacobs
Thinking
About the
Weather (Underground)
Walt Brasch
Ashcroft's War on Bookstores
July 25, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Paul
Krugman's Howl:
Populism, War and
the Melting Economy
Gavin Keeney
Van Morrison: In September
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
War
on Terrorism or
Police State?
July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
Resources:
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About 9/11
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The Memphis Blues Again:
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Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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July
31, 2002
Drivel &
Squawk
A Weekly Review of the Fourth Estate
by Alexander Cockburn
"At this very moment there are 100,000
fools of our species who wear hats, slaying 100,000 fellow creatures
who wear turbans, or being massacred by them."
Voltaire, Micromagus,
1752.
Angelina
Jolie and the New York Times
My plan is to take a few kicks at the New York
Times starting with a front-page headline in last Sunday's national
edition which imparted the starting news that "IRS Loophole
Allows Wealthy To Avoid Taxes", over a report by David Cay
Johnston. You don't say! Some NYT editor must have concluded
that this headline was too vulgarly subversive. By the final
edition the head had been cautiously modified to "Death
Still Certain, But Taxes May Be Subject to a Loophole."
But first a word or two about Angelina Jolie. I told her right
from the start that Billy Bob Thornton, her spouse of two years,
was a dirtbag who would play her false, and a dirtbag is what
he turns out to be.
Some months ago we
discussed here on this site Angelina and Billy Bob's amour fou
and the couple's passionate hacking at each with knives. We cited
Billy Bob as saying, "I was looking at her sleep, and I
had to restrain myself from literally squeezing her to death."
Apparently he detained himself from this terminal expression
of love by hastening downstairs in their fine mansion and seducing
the maid.
According to the British tabloid, The
Star, a pal (and don't you just love those gabby "pals")
of Jolie's claims Jolie confronted Thornton--with whom she recently
adopted Cambodian baby orphan Maddox--and told him, "You
aren't a fit husband for me or father for our child." According
to the newspaper, Angelina first discovered her husband's infidelity
when one of their maids claimed the Monster's Ball star had made
her pregnant. The pal adds helpfully, "She was devastated.
Billy Bob's a horn dog. He would screw anything that moves--and
does. Angie knew how he was from the start, but had no idea of
the extent of his problem. She agreed to kinky bedroom games,
but it was never enough. Angie warned him their marriage was
over unless he sought help and he swore on everything holy that
he'd get treatment. But then we hear he's screwed the therapist.
She sends him off to therapy in a last ditch effort to save their
union, and he seduces the therapist."
So into the trashcan go the vials of
blood along with the implement with which they mutilated themselves,
the better to express their passion. Angelina, I say this. You're
well shot of him.
Back to the Times. I finally got around
to reading Ken Auletta's New Yorker profile of the NYT's executive
editor, Howell Raines. All 17,000 tedious words of it, printed
in a June New Yorker, not one phrase of which escaped the amiable
blandness which is Auletta's trademark. How sad to think that
the New Yorker, which once featured Liebling and Woollcott, is
now content with Auletta's humdrum flatteries of the Fourth Estate.
Outside the Sulzberger empire, who really
cares about Raines? Not me, though I do remember him for all
those silly editorial sermons about Bill Clinton's sex life.
The pertinent question is whether the Times is a good newspaper,
and the answer there is, all too often it isn't. Part of the
reason the prose of Paul Krugman and Frank Rich seems so lively
is that they shine amid darkness.
The news pages are clogged with prose
that is either pedestrian or arch, the latter being the besetting
vice of journalists trying to turn in quality writing. And even
the editorial pages are dimmer than they were when Gail Collins
was writing during Election 2000. Collins was a delight and then
they moved her back onto the editorial board and now she's writing
much less. My own suspicion is that someone figured out that
Collins was showing up Maureen Dowd as the commentator equivalent
of Bud Lite, and shielded Dowd from further embarrassment by
shutting down Collins, via editorial promotion, a familiar stratagem.
The Times spent so many years through
the Nineties printing stupid stories about the triumph of neo-liberalism
and of the free market that even if its foreign and economic
correspondents had suspicions that all might be well, they prudently
suppressed their doubts. So the Times missed what was actually
happening in the former Soviet Union, or in Argentina, Brazil
and the other kleptocracies of Latin America.
The only reason more isn't made of the
imbecility of the New York Times's editorial pages is that the
Wall Street Journal's opinion pages are so violently demented
that almost any other editorial voice sounds sane by comparison.
But by and large our opinion writing classes are even more willfully
ignorant than they were twenty years ago. Take the New York Times'
initial reaction to the attempted coup against President Hugo
Chavez in Venezuela.
The
NYT on Venezuela
If there was ever a coup urgently and
publicly demanded by Washington, this was surely it. Chavez was
up there on the Wanted List, just under Saddam. When the attempt
on Chavez finally came in mid-April, the New York Times swiftly
editorialized that that Chavez's "resignation" meant
that "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a
would-be dictator." Eschewing the word "coup",
the Times explained
that Chavez "stepped down after the military intervened
and
handed power to a respected business leader."
The editorial called Chavez "a ruinous
demagogue", and proclaimed that "Venezuela urgently
needs a leader with a
strong democratic mandate", subsequently undercutting the
majesty of this statement by immediately having to concede that
Chavez himself actually had a democratic mandate, having been
"elected president in 1998".
Three days later, Chavez was back in
power and the Times
ran a second editorial trying to drag its editorial foot out
of its mouth.
"In his three years in office, Mr.
Chavez has been such a
divisive and demagogic leader that his forced departure last
week drew applause at home and in Washington. That reaction,
which we shared, overlooked the undemocratic manner in which
he was removed. Forcibly unseating a democratically elected leader,
no matter how badly he has performed, is never something to cheer."
Which of course is exactly what the Times had initially done,
without raising any unpleasant questions as to what role the
CIA had in the attempted coup.
The
NYT on Israel
The Middle East? The tilt to Israel is
noticeable to a powerful extent with straight news coverage,
even more obvious with analysis, and blatant with editorial and
op-ed coverage.
As Kathleen Christison, a former CIA
analyst and CounterPunch contributor, who's written a couple
of fine books on the Palestinian questions, puts it to me, "One
gets the impression that few if any Times correspondents
understand what drives the intifada or accept that there is any
legitimacy to Palestinian resistance to the occupation."
Soon we'll run here Kathleen's considered assessment of the NYT's
performance in this area.
The Times demonstrated its partisan approach most noticeably
in July 2001 in its commentary on a major one-year-later retrospective
on the Camp David summit published by Jerusalem bureau chief
Deborah Sontag. Christison points out that "In a striking-and,
one must assume, deliberate-effort to maintain its own blame-Arafat
position on Camp David, a Times editorial on the Sontag
story undermined Sontag by contradicting her principal conclusion."
Having done extensive interviews with Israeli, Palestinian, and
American participants in the summit and in-depth analysis of
what went wrong, Sontag concluded that Arafat was by no means
solely to blame for the summit's collapse and that all three
parties were responsible, more or less equally, for mistakes
made over the entire seven years of the peace process.
A "potent, simplistic narrative
has taken hold" in Israel and the United States, Sontag
wrote. "It says: Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat the moon at
Camp David last summer. Mr. Arafat turned it down, and then 'pushed
the button' and chose the path of violence." But officials
to whom she spoke had concluded that the dynamic was actually
far more complex than this, that Arafat did not bear sole or
even a disproportionate share of the responsibility. In fact,
Sontag concluded, Barak did not offer Arafat the moon at Camp
David but rather proposed a solution that might have been generous
and even politically courageous in Israeli terms, but that would
not have given the Palestinians what they regarded as a viable
state.
Rather than accept Sontag's considered
assessment of where responsibility lay, a Times editorial
two days later took care to praise Barak and blaming Arafat.
Barak had come to Camp David, the editorial proclaimed, "with
a daring offer, a peace plan that essentially vaulted over the
interim steps outlined under the Oslo accords.Mr. Barak gambled
that Mr. Arafat would accept his approach." But, the editorial
went on, Arafat was not up to the task and stirred up "the
violent uprising" that erupted two months later.
Of course the worst offender has been
Thomas Friedman, who in repeated columns over two years heaped
blame on Arafat and the Palestinians and, as Christison has pointed
out, seriously distorted what Israel offered at Camp David repeating
the fiction that Barak offered "95% of the West Bank and
half of Jerusalem, with all the settlements gone," never
mentioning that the resulting so-called "state" would
have been broken up into several non-contiguous parts).
The
NYT and the Pulitzer Industry
This year Friedman, the Bullfrog of the
Bubble, was given his third Pulitzer, possibly the most ludicrous
decision in the long and infamous lifespan of the Pulitzer industry.
Why did the Pulitzer board, over-ruling
the various juries on at least two instances, decide to heap
seven prizes on the Times last April? I thought Les Payne, (himself
victim of the Pulitzer board when it overruled a jury's decision
to honor him for foreign reporting) put it well in Newsday: "The
tilt toward the Times, I suspect, issues, at bottom, from the
all-too-American notion of rallying around the flagpole. the
Pulitzer board might give the nod to a "second-tier"
paper during peacetime Once the balloon goes up, however, it's
back to the the flagpole, and the closest thing the newspaper
industry has to a flagpole is The New York Times. The move to
The Times is so much easier, given its visibility and clout and
number of sheep-dipped Timesmen the paper has spread over the
industry and in academia."
So the function of those seven awards
was to tell the world, See, we really do have a good newspaper
. It must be good if it wins seven Pulitzer prizes. Trouble is,
just like I said at the start, the Times is no good at all, if
you want to find out what's going on.
First
Earl Hilliard, Now Cynthia McKinney
Remember Cynthia Tucker? She's the black
editorial in-house pundit at the Atlantic Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
I've seen her on panel shows on CNN, churning out the verbal
equivalent of over-boiled spinach. But lately Tucker has been
stirred to unexpected vehemence. Against whom? Why, against Rep
Cynthia McKinney of course, who has courageously dared to prod
Congress into considering the inconvenient aspects of 9/11, as
they pertain to culpable oversight by the Administration, implication
of the Royal Family (Bush division) with Arab billionaires and
so forth.
McKinney now faces a Democratic primary
challenge from former judge Denise Majette, just as another member
of the Black Congressional Caucus did. I refer to Earl Hilliard,
the first black elected to Congress in Alabama since Reconstruction.
For daring to call for some sense of balance in US policy in
the Middle East, some attention to what Palestinians are saying,
Hilliard was overwhelmed by a Arthur Davis, a middle-of-the-road
lawyer to whom American-Jewish organizations shoveled a ton of
money.
McKinney, who wins her elections by huge
majorities, now faces the same treatment. This time some black
leaders are better prepared to stand up and denounce the efforts
of well-financed pro-Israel pressure groups to terrorize all
critics of Israel's appalling conduct. Tucker shows that when
it comes to the crunch, she is snugged down in the Man's pocket.
Her paper has been unrelenting in its attempts to discredit McKinney.
"[She] has shown herself to be a fringe lunatic, well outside
the congressional mainstream," Cynthia Tucker wrote in one
typical commentary, cited by Frances Beal, in an column in the
San Francisco Bayview.
Outrageously, Tucker asserts McKinney
is "incapable of aiding any cause" and has the final
pious effrontery to declare that "The plight of the Palestinians
and their desire for an independent homeland is a serious cause
deserving of thoughtful, mainstream advocates. Hilliard wasn't
one and neither is McKinney."
We await Ms Tucker's thoughtful proposals
for a Palestinian homeland, or perhaps even a "serious"
consideration of their plight.
Hilliard
on Class Warfare and "New Blacks"
Pondering what we might call "Tuckerism"
(our phrase not his) Hilliard recently remarked in an interview
in The Black Commentator, "There is class warfare in the
Black community. In Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, in the areas of
Birmingham where what we call the New Blacks live, those that
work for corporate Alabama, those that live in subdivisions that
are predominantly Black, Davis won just like he did in the white
areas. These are things we have to look at. We need scholars
to come in and interpret these things.
"We don't even understand what is
happening to us because we let other people, other scholars,
interpret our presence. We have people who work in corporate
environments who are afraid to associate with their natural brothers
and sisters, because of what church they attend, what school
they attend, and the neighborhood they live in. We have kids
who won't introduce their mothers or their brothers and sisters
to their coworkers, because they know their mothers, their brothers
or their sisters may crack a verb, or don't have the educational
level that they enjoy."
The Black Commentator asks Hilliard,
"You refer to a 'natural progression' in Black politics
that has been interrupted?"
Hilliard replies: "That's because
it was natural--Blacks building on what the previous generation
had added to the foundation. And everything that the succeeding
generation did reflected back to the dreams and aspirations of
the elders. There was an intervention, which has created an unnatural
progression. In our society it has been, basically, other groups--and,
mainly, Jews. So when you look at the natural progression from
Martin Luther King, you would think that you would get to [Kweisi]
Mfume, but we've been sidestepped. We've had a Clarence Thomas.
We have a Colin Powell. We have Cynthia Tucker [Editorial Board,
Atlanta Journal-Constitution]. We have all these other people
whose ideals and views don't sit on the foundation. It's not
building for the masses, or building for the race. It's building
for self.
"So, when you have these people
who have gone to predominantly white elementary and high schools,
and have graduated from predominantly eastern universities, they
have not had the experience with the Black community that the
elders had. They are black in skin tone but, philosophically,
they are not. So, whites understand them better than we do. They
don't go to Howard, or Morehouse, or Alabama State to get people
to run against the Mayor of Newark, or Andy Young, or Craig Washington.
They go and get those from the eastern schools who have a white-oriented
philosophy. Or, who have been educated to compete on an individual
level. So that, when the tally is in, they think: I did it. I
made it through Harvard and Yale and Princeton on my own. I'll
make it in life on my own. I don't need the tribe, I don't need
the group, I don't the race. So you have a Condoleezza Rice:
I made it because I'm smart, and because of myself. I didn't
need affirmative action, I don't believe in it. If I can make
it, everybody else can make it."
"Somehow, we've got to clear the
field, and get back to the natural progression. The field is
very muddy now. Many African Americans are saying, Well, the
civil rights era is over. You can make it on your own even if
you're Black, if you do what you're supposed to do."
Today's Features
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
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