October 13, 2012

By Jennifer Epps, The Political Film Blog

On the spectrum of recent U.S. films about intense life-and-death conflicts between Persians and “our guys’, the most propagandistic, militaristic, and reactionary position is occupied by the reprehensible live-action cartoon 300. You could call this the “Kill Them All” position. On the opposite end of that spectrum, the most humanistic, egalitarian, and psychologically insightful position is occupied by the exquisite drama The House of Sand and Fog — a chamber piece that shows how misunderstandings can spiral tragically out of control. You might call this the “Human Decency” position.

Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes lies the new movie Argo, directed by Ben Affleck for Smokehouse Pictures, the production company owned by George Clooney and Grant Heslov. Argo is about the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, and how the CIA came up with an unlikely rescue plan for six of the Americans hiding outside of the embassy: they would pretend to make a sci-fi movie. The premise has enormous potential, and it’s easy to see why it would be attractive to Hollywood. Unfortunately, the finished product is nowhere near the “Human Decency” end of the spectrum. I think its liberal makers would be surprised and actually ashamed if they realized how much more it leans towards 300.

There is no doubt that Argo is a very ambitious film. It wants to be life-and-death serious, funny, and exciting all at once, and to join historical accuracy with breathless pacing, jokey put-downs of Hollywood, and an absurdist scheme at the story’s core. As Affleck confided in an interview, it is also ambitious in its delicate tonal balance. It aims to be a taut suspense thriller that also provides some history of the strained relations between the U.S. and Iran, and it tries to re-create the 1970’s vibe without being too cheesy or campy. All the while, of course, it is designed to be commercial, with a budget of $44 million — the L.A. Times alleges that this makes it “one of the season’s more daring gambles, the kind of movie most studios stopped making in the last decade.”

At the same time, it seems to want to leave us with the takeaway that even in a nightmarish scenario, bitter differences can be resolved without bombing anyone. (At the premiere, the audience applauded President Carter’s voiceover explaining that in the end we got all the hostages out, and we did it peacefully). The movie does show that deciding against a bloodbath can take courage and foresight. And perhaps this is what Affleck, Clooney, and Heslov believe made the movie the right thing to do right now — even at the risk of stoking the fires of warmongers here at home in 2012, by raising the spectre of Americans imperiled by Iran.

Well, it achieves all those goals in spades, and I applaud its ambitions and its aplomb. But I wish it was considerably more ambitious.

Argo catapults between, as Affleck put it to the L.A. Times, “three different themes and three different worlds: the CIA, Hollywood, and the Iran tensions.” Affleck’s quote is informative: the third theme or world that he organized the film around was “Iran tensions’, not Iran itself. Not even the Iranian revolution. The subject is the threat to Americans. Argo is about the plight of 6 Americans hiding out in Tehran after the embassy is seized, and it cuts away only to strategic debates at CIA headquarters as agent Tony Mendez (Affleck) struggles against bureaucratic inertia, or to comic relief scenes in Hollywood between John Goodman and Alan Arkin. No matter where our wheels touch down, it’s Americans who matter. This is a movie that views Iran in the 1970s from the living-room where the 6 are hiding — and the blinds are closed.

The cover story being used to try to smuggle the 6 hideaways out of Tehran is that they are location-scouting for a movie, so the day before they are to escape, they go out in public to make their aliases more believable. Do we, on the pretend location scout, finally see some of Tehran’s cultural landmarks? Do we get a sense of an ancient civilization and a sophisticated culture? Do we have any panoramas of people going about their business in the complexity of a metropolitan city? No, because the Americans’ expedition is just as claustrophobic as the scenes in their lair — Affleck crowds them into a van, squeezes the van in a vice as they are swarmed by furious protesters, and then jostles them around in a packed bazaar that turns hostile. Of course, he’s doing this deliberately for the tension it creates in them and in us. But throughout the film, the Iran we see in the news clips and the Iran we see dramatized are all on the same superficial level: incomprehensible, out-of-control hordes with nary an individual or rational thought expressed.

After a brief (albeit important) animated storyboard introduction that contextualizes the events of 1979 with some history, it is the storming of the American embassy which begins both the film proper and our exposure to the Iranian revolution. You wouldn’t know from this film that, despite years of persecution during Iran’s westernized government, the communist Tudeh Party was also out organizing workers’ strikes during the turmoil of the Shah Pahlavi’s overthrow. The movie does stress that the U.S. helped overthrow the democratically-elected prime minister Mohammad Mossaddeq in 1953 because he dared to nationalize Iran’s oil, and then backed the Shah and his use of the notorious SAVAK secret police to kidnap and torture the Shah’s opponents. These are obviously excellent points to make. But Argo glosses over the diversity of opinion in Iran and the intellectual ferment before the theocratic lockdown, making the culture look exactly the way an insular American public has come to believe all Islamic countries look. The film offers only scant insight into how  the Islamists came to win over a country that had previously been quite secular and sophisticated.

Very, very few Iranian characters are individualized in Argo, and most of the time when we see Iranians on-screen, their words are not translated for us. Take Farshad Farahat’s character. He is an officer in the Revolutionary Guards, one of the final terrifying obstacles the escaping protagonists must face at the airport. Farahat tries not to play stupid or cartoonish like so many ethnic villains in Hollywood movies, but most of the little he has been given to say is un-translated, so Farahat has to do almost all of the work with his eyes. The movie apparently never intended much more for him: his character’s name is merely “Azzizi Checkpoint #3”.

Another Persian, Reza (Omid Abtahi), makes an appearance in the marketplace in Tehran. His defining characteristic is whether the Americans can trust him. When he is friendly, his words are translated. When an altercation breaks out, there are no subtitles.

And even the point of the jokey snippet of dialogue that is translated seems to be to mock his idea of a Hollywood movie even more than Argo sends up the fake sci-fi B-movie. This dialogue emphasizes his cultural Other-ness, making him sound as sexist and out-of-touch as a Sacha Baron Cohen creation.

Nowhere, in a caper that exists in part to celebrate movie magic, is it mentioned that Iran has its own cinematic tradition — though if the Argo creative team had ever seen the award-winning 1992 tribute film Once Upon a Time, Cinema they would have seen clips from old Iranian movies dating all the way back to the silent era. By the time Argo is set, a number of Iranian film festivals had been in existence several years, including the Tehran International Film Festival ‘to promote the art of Cinema that expresses humanitarian values and promotes understanding and exchange of ideas between nations’. And there were already several film and television schools in Iran, including a decade-old government-financed School of Television and Cinema which students attended for free. 480 feature films were made in Iran between 1966 and 1973; filmmakers, like other Iranian artists and intellectuals, had plenty to call attention to under the Shah’s oppressive regime. In fact, the Iranian New Wave, which launched in 1969, should have been known to Argo ‘s Foreign Service professionals who had spent their leisure time in Tehran; with filmmakers as respected as Dariush Mehrjui and Abbas Kiarostami already active. By the late seventies, movies were already the key form of mass entertainment in the country. Yet Affleck has the Revolutionary Guards gawking and giggling over the storyboards and poster for the fake Hollywood movie like awe-struck children.

The most important Iranian character in the film is the young and beautiful Sahar (Sheila Vand), the housekeeper to the Canadian ambassador and his wife who secretly harbor the 6 American refugees. But calling her the most important Iranian character is not saying much — and neither is Sahar. Over a handful of scenes she may have a grand total of 3 lines. In this case they are translated, because they are relevant to the plot. Her character, however, is defined by her attitude toward the Americans. She also may be the only kind of Iranian the movie is interested in individuating because she is separated from her society, ensconced in a Western household.

Sahar also reflects a class differential that accompanies the chasm between nations in Argo. Apart from a smooth-talking, sinister heavy Ali Khalkali (Ali Saam) who presides over a cultural portfolio in the new government, we see only guards, soldiers, merchants, a guide, a domestic worker, and unspecified mobs in the street. By contrast, the American characters are either professionals or have highly skilled jobs: CIA agents, State Dept. officials, members of the Foreign Service, and Hollywood above-the-line talent or artisans. Thus the overall picture of Argo ‘s Iranian characters as second-class is exemplified even through their occupations. Note that this is very much at odds with the value system Iranian-Americans often express, cherishing educational accomplishments and taking great pride in professional status.

In a somewhat similar vein, Argo does not make it clear that the storming of the embassy was carried out by militant students — and only a few years after a wave of occupations in the U.S., albeit usually considerably more non-violent, by students and militants. We absorb only an impression of an amorphous, frenzied mob. By contrast, U.S. news media corporations covering the 2011 Green Revolution in Iran made sure we knew about the youth component in that movement — because they wanted to help American viewers identify with the protesters, and to make them seem rational.

Yet one would think that discussions in Argo among the students suddenly in direct control over so many people’s lives would have held some dramatic potential. The Tehran students’ views on the internal conditions within the U.S. — the fact that they released some hostages early who were female or people of color because, they claimed, these people were oppressed by the American system — would certainly have suggested that Iran contained thinking beings. But we never go behind-the-scenes at this revolution. (Instead, Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio’s tempering historical introduction is soon outweighed by the visceral power of mobs storming walls, chador-clad women toting rifles, and banshees screaming into news cameras.) To allow a little insight wouldn’t mean Argo would be condoning the revolution or hostage-taking. After all, in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens empathized with the suffering that led to the French revolution, but he still made its horror manifest. And he did it all in the service of a breathtakingly exciting escape story, not unlike Argo.

But there’s also the fact that Argo suggests and circles around the idea that the whole crisis was blowback against CIA covert ops. It might have been appropriate for somebody on the American side to feel conflicted about what they had wrought. Affleck portrays a real CIA agent, lead character Tony Mendez, who gets people out of tough places; he is even said to have helped get some of “the Shah’s people” out. But he is an uncompromised hero — his struggle is less about ethical questions than about strategy, and (as the Republicans like to say) “resolve.’ Ironically, Affleck had more of an internal dilemma in the last movie he directed, the bank heist caper The Town. And in the one before that, Gone Baby Gone, Ben’s brother Casey faced very troubling moral choices. Yet those Boston thrillers were about garden-variety criminals and detectives, and their moral quandaries involved only a couple of people. Why do the decades of Cold War schemes of the CIA, carried out on a mass scale beyond democratic oversight and frequently subverting democracy abroad, occasion so much less gravitas?

Now, these liberal filmmakers might object that an introspective CIA tragedy has already been made (The Good Shepherd, starring Affleck’s friend Matt Damon), and so has a bumbling CIA farce (Burn After Reading, featuring Clooney). They could well ask “what do you want from us?”, and point out that Argo actually calls the CIA the biggest terrorist organization in the world. Yes, but that designation is made, and only in passing, by America’s official enemy, and as Noam Chomsky would explain, that’s how the media prevents accusations from hitting home.

Clooney, Heslov, and Affleck might point out that the movie does stipulate why Iranians were angry at the U.S. Yes but, again, as media critics would attest, if you bury a story deep inside the newspaper, readers will assume it is of little importance: the well-intentioned seeds that Argo plants to explain “why they hated us” in 1979 are stomped on by the boots of the maniacal hordes. (Affleck also shows archival footage of Americans throwing tantrums in the streets and calling for Iranian blood, but they’re not directly terrorizing anybody at the time; the Iranians are.)

The problem is that viewers who don’t already know their Chomsky or William Blum aren’t going to walk out of the film muttering “gee, it’s more complicated than I thought.” Instead, they’ll leave with their fears and prejudices reaffirmed: that Middle Easterners create terror, that Americans must be the world’s policemen, and that Iranians cannot be trusted because they hate America.

It could be argued that Argo is not meant to be a leftist political tract or a dour history lecture but a fun spy thriller, which is how it got financed in the first place. I realize that many of my concerns are about elements that actually work resoundingly well in purely cinematic terms — and maybe Affleck was so focused on pacing, tension, drama, and excitement, all of which are his job, after all, that the other psychological effects he was creating didn’t even occur to him. I admit I have no idea if the changes I’d like would have made it a better movie; perhaps my way would have been the boring way. It is certainly extremely entertaining as it is: crisply and intelligently directed, perfectly-cast as Affleck’s films always are, witty, moving, absorbing, and nail-bitingly intense. If politics and humanitarian concerns didn’t matter, it could be called a terrific movie.

Farshad Farahat, the Iranian-American actor who plays “Azzizi Checkpoint #3”, probably appreciates that the makers of Argo were not consciously on the war path like the author of 300, Frank Miller was. (Slate critic Dana Stevens wrote that if 300 “had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.” Some fans might not want to think 300 has this agenda, but Miller made the conclusion unavoidable when he told NPR: “It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants… For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent.”)

Long before his experience in Argo, Farahat wrote a guest essay for the L.A. Times about 300. It shows a glimpse of what it must be like to come from a culture that is so relentlessly demonized, and I suspect that part of what comes with that experience is appreciating differences in degree in how deeply a cultural artifact dips into the swamp of prejudice.

The triumvirate behind Argo have a track record that shows their concerns for social justice. As an activist, Clooney has worked for years against the genocide in Darfur. He also produced and starred in the searing ensemble drama about the politics of oil in the Middle East, Syriana, and helped get the anti-war actioner Three Kings made. Heslov co-wrote the script for the film Clooney directed about the media and Cold War paranoia, Good Night, and Good Luck, and he directed a Clooney-starrer that gleefully subverted the military-industrial-intelligence complex, The Men Who Stare at Goats. Meanwhile, Affleck and his buddy Damon tried for years to get their old pal Howard Zinn’s groundbreaking tome A People’s History of the United States made into a miniseries. (A concert performance special of Zinn’s work did air on History Channel before he passed away.)

We are certainly fortunate that the inviting premise of Argo did not end up in the hands of more jingoistic and warmongering directors or producers, like William Friedkin (Rules of Engagement) or Jerry Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down). As I said, on the continuum of messaging in Hollywood movies on this general subject, Argo falls in the middle.

But despite their credentials and beliefs, Affleck, Clooney and Heslov have certainly not brought Argo anywhere close to The House of Sand and Fog. Trita Parsi, reviewing the latter film for the National Iranian American Council, deemed it “one of Hollywood’s first refined and sophisticated portrayals of Iranians and Iranian Americans… a step in the right direction for Hollywood; away from its simplistic, Manichean perspective and towards a polished outlook with a focus on the essence of the individual”. Argo almost completely ignores individual Iranians; its portrait of an entire culture is neither refined nor sophisticated; and it does reinforce a simplistic, Manichean perspective.

That may not have been the filmmakers’ intentions at all — and as I’ve mentioned, they did have a lot on their plate, since Argo is a very ambitious film, with plenty of inherent difficulties just trying to get the normal filmmaking aspects right. But politics and humanitarian concerns do matter. Does the American public really need another movie that tells us to be afraid of Middle Easterners? Does a movie that makes the action sequences flashy and exciting but obscures the hard work of diplomacy (which ultimately got far more hostages out than this “caper’ did) benefit our national psyche? Is it healthy for us to hold up images of Cold War CIA agents as selfless do-gooders? And when Iran is constantly lied about by politicians and media pundits, and there’s a very real possibility that Israel or the U.S. could attack Iran militarily, is this movie going to help or is it going to harm?

I’m not sure of the world views of Chris Terrio, who is making his feature film writing debut here. But in his script, Affleck’s character points out to a roomful of CIA agents that in winter there is snow in Iran — thus shaming them for their ignorance of basic facts about the country. (Ignorance some of our media still have to this day.) Albert Einstein said that “Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.” I think this filmmaking team does know. Why should their smart and entertaining film have more of a conscience than others in Hollywood have? Because they are an extremely intelligent, perceptive, and talented bunch, and for those to whom much is given, of them much is required.

A Separation

Anyone who sees Argo should make sure they wash it down with an antidote: an Iranian film which came out on DVD this fall and which counteracts all the negative influences of Argo. To say that Asghar Farhadi’s film A Separation is highly acclaimed is an understatement. The movie won the the 2011 Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear International Jury prize; the Oscar, Golden Globe, Independent Spirit, Critics Choice, National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics (NSFC), Online Film Critics Society, Chicago Film Critics, London Critics Circle (ALFS), and France’s Cesar awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Its direction was lauded at the Fajr Film Festival in Iran, the International Film Festival of India, the Asian Film Awards, and the Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film; its screenplay garnered an Oscar nomination and took home trophies from the NSFC, ALFS, L.A. Film Critics, the Durban Film Festival and the Fajr; and its cast received prizes from Fajr, Berlin, and London. And so forth.

Like Affleck’s film, A Separation has conflicts between people spiraling out of control. But Argo wraps things up in a bow, since the Americans all got home to read bedtime stories to their kids — we’re not to consider that the next eight years turned into a devastating war between Iraq and Iran, covertly fueled by the U.S. (in violation of U.N. Security Resolution 522). There is no closure in A Separation, however; no right solution.

Farhadi’s screenplay shows how separations develop between people — and while Argo just accepts them, A Separation laments them. The title refers to the first, and central separation, the physical one between Nader and Simin, a husband and wife (beautifully played by Peyman Moadi and Leila Hatami). If the film had focused only on that it still would have had a Kramer vs. Kramer -like pathos, since it is clear that 11-year old Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter) loves both of her parents, even when she is mad at her mother. But it also deals with the separation between the genders, one that is exacerbated by religious doctrines and traditions: Razieh, a housekeeper/caregiver, is hired to watch over Nader’s elderly father, and she frets a great deal that it is improper for her to be alone with a man. The film also deals with the separation between the classes, and how lack of money means lack of options, fueling a family’s sense of desperation and mistreatment. And there is the rift of distrust that grows between the two couples, the employers and their employee — suspicions of elder abuse and theft on one side; accusations of physical assault leading to miscarriage on the other. Finally, there are gulfs between the couples based on religious and cultural differences: Simin and Nader follow the laws but they have no enthusiasm for it. Simin is a more liberated kind of Iranian woman, she is studying to be a teacher, she tries to get her daughter out of Iran, she instigates the separation from Nader, and though she has to wear the head-scarf by law, she is one of many Iranian women who dresses to express personal freedom as much as she can. By contrast, Razieh (in a deeply felt performance by Sareh Bayat) wears the plain, long, black chador, is careful to consult religious strictures at every turn, worries a lot, and is deferential to her husband. The lower-income couple even questions the more affluent couple’s belief in God, since they are clearly not as pious.

Though both have a suspense thriller feel, the biggest difference between Affleck’s film and Farhadi’s is that A Separation does not unfold the way we might expect. The plotting is so expertly carried out that it keeps us guessing all the way through — the mystery expands with emotional and philosophical revelations that continually surprise and move, and we are amazed at how differently we have come to see the characters. Ultimately, instead of uncovering murderers, A Separation uncovers human nature. Though we think we’ve discovered domestic abuse by one of the husbands, it turns out there are no villains.

Each family is chiefly concerned with the welfare of their daughter — it’s clearly a patriarchal society, but the film has a great deal of empathy towards women and girls. It elevates the tender or feminine side of men, too: Nader is close with Termeh, they race each other up the stairs and work on her homework together. He is also a sweet caregiver to his glassy-eyed father, who is stricken with Alzheimer’s. In fact, it is his loyalty to his father, who cannot be moved from their apartment, that makes him unwilling to leave Iran — and it is that refusal which causes his wife to file for separation. A Separation is a wise and subtle tragedy full of impossible choices.

One of the themes seems to be how easy it is for people to harm each other, even without malevolent intent. The housekeeper’s young daughter is left unsupervised with the old man, and she plays with the dial on his oxygen pump (she’s too young to realize what she’s doing). Like many Iranian films, A Separation stems from a simple story and ordinary situations, yet leads to intense strum und drang. The takeaway of the film, perhaps, is how unnecessary it all is. Even in the midst of the feud, pre-pubescent Termeh naturally starts playing with Razieh’s small child out in the yard. The children would be friends if only the two families weren’t pressing charges against each other.

It is election season, and a recent election event shows how important it really is for films to avoid the trends of political misinformation. Though Arkin and Goodman are a great comedic duo in Argo, they’ve got nothing on the vaudeville act of Berman and Sherman.

Because of redistricting and the new “top-two” primary rule in California’s elections, Berman and Sherman, currently both Democratic members of Congress, are now competing in the general election to represent the 30th district, a seat currently held by Rep. Brad Sherman — up until now, Rep. Howard Berman’s seat had been in the 28th district. During a debate at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley on Oct. 11th, the duo spent most of an increasingly heated hour calling each other liars and other epithets. It all came to an explosive climax when they stood almost nose-to-nose and seemed about to wrestle. Sherman aggressively gripped Berman’s shoulder and challenged him “You want to get into this?”, causing pandemonium to break out in the packed hall and an intervention from the Sheriff.

And yet, despite their bitter animosity and repeated attempts to show how different they were from each other, they were in total lockstep on one thing: Iran.

Both jumped up to swear how dangerous they consider the Iranian regime to be, to warn that it could give a nuclear bomb to terrorists, and to aver how important it is for the U.S. to stop Iran’s “nuclear program”. Their only dispute on the issue was over which one of them had a more aggressive record in pursuing sanctions against Iran.

It is very sad to see such Orwellian groupthink being ladled out at an institution of higher learning. Most of the crowd loved both Berman and Sherman talking tough about Iran, and seemed blissfully unaware that there’s no evidence that Iran is actually working on a nuclear weapon, according to both U.S. intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The students were apparently also unaware (though one would think Sherman or Berman would have been briefed) that Iran’s right to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is guaranteed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nuclear power, though it may be undesirable from an environmental safety standpoint, is supposed to be the reward for signatories to the NPT vowing to abstain from nuclear weapons. Instead, U.S. policy tends to make a mockery of the NPT, since we side with countries who don’t sign and actually obtain nuclear weapons — if they are Israel or India, say. We even help India with its nuclear energy needs, though it’s not supposed to enjoy that privilege.

None of this came up in the Sherman/Berman boxing match, even though Berman made a point of excusing his vote in favor of the Iraq War by asserting that, at the time, he believed Iraq had WMDs. Yes, and perhaps the reason you believed that was because politicians lied about Iraq’s WMDs. Are we really going to do it all over again? In the immortal words of George W. Bush: Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. Fool me — a fool can’t get fooled again. A nice sentiment, but he got even that wrong. The WMD accusations against Iran sound an awful lot like Iraq Redux; apparently plenty of people can get fooled again.

…………………………………………………………………..
Argo is not much help in this situation. However, if you want to help prevent military action against Iran, try spreading some wisdom by sharing a copy of A Separation with people you know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Epps is an environmentalist and a peace, social justice, and animal activist in L.A. She has also been a scriptwriter, stage director, film producer, actor, puppeteer, and film critic.

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By Glenn Greenwald
Cross-posted from The Guardian

Reflecting the Obama legacy and US culture, the Time columnist says: “the bottom line is: ‘whose 4-year-olds get killed?'”

(updated below)

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe program this morning (see video below), which focused on Monday night’s presidential debate, the former right-wing Congressman and current host Joe Scarborough voiced an eloquent and impassioned critique of President Obama’s ongoing killing of innocent people in the Muslim world using drones. In response, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, a stalwart Obama supporter, offered one of the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings. This exchange, which begins at roughly the 7:00 minute mark on the video embedded below, is quite revealing in several respects.

Here are the relevant portions of the exchange, which was triggered when regular guest Mike Barnicle announced how amazing he found it that so little public attention and debate is paid to the fact that Obama simply kills whomever he wants “without any kind of due process”:

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SCARBOROUGH: “What we’re doing with drones is remarkable: the fact that over the past eight years during the Bush years — when a lot of people brought up some legitimate questions about international law — my God, those lines have been completely eradicated by a drone policy that says: if you’re between 17 and 30, and within a half-mile of a suspect, we can blow you up, and that’s exactly what’s happening … They are focused on killing the bad guys, but it is indiscriminate as to other people who are around them at the same time … it is something that will cause us problems in the coming years.” …

There are several points worth noting about this exchange:

(1) Klein’s justification — we have to kill their children in order to protect our children — is the exact mentality of every person deemed in US discourse to be a “terrorist.” Almost every single person arrested and prosecuted over the last decade on terrorism charges, when asked why they were willing to kill innocent Americans including children, offered some version of Joe Klein’s mindset.

Here, for instance, is what the Pakistani-American Faisal Shazad said after he pled guilty to attempting to detonate a bomb in Times Square, in response to an angry question from the presiding US federal judge as to how he could possibly be willing to kill innocent children:

“Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims….

“I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.”

The mentality of Faisal Shazad and Joe Klein are completely identical and indistinguishable: it is justified for us indiscriminately to kill even your innocent children because doing so will help stop you from killing ours.

And here’s what Osama bin Laden had to say on the same topic:

“The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousands of its troops to the land of the two Holy Mosques over and above its meddling in its affairs and its politics, and its support of the oppressive, corrupt and tyrannical regime that is in control. These are the reasons behind the singling out of America as a target….

“Besides, terrorism can be commendable and it can be reprehensible. Terrifying an innocent person and terrorizing him is objectionable and unjust, also unjustly terrorizing people is not right. Whereas, terrorizing oppressors and criminals and thieves and robbers is necessary for the safety of people and for the protection of their property….

“The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah, the tyrants, the traitors who commit acts of treason against their own countries and their own faith and their own prophet and their own nation. Terrorizing those and punishing them are necessary measures to straighten things and to make them right….

“It is not enough for their people to show pain when they see our children being killed in Israeli raids launched by American planes, nor does this serve the purpose. What they ought to do is change their governments which attack our countries. The hostility that America continues to express against the Muslim people has given rise to feelings of animosity on the part of Muslims against America and against the West in general. Those feelings of animosity have produced a change in the behavior of some crushed and subdued groups who, instead of fighting the Americans inside the Muslim countries, went on to fight them inside the United States of America itself.”

The only difference between the Joe Kleins of the world and Osama bin Laden is that they’re on different sides. To the extent one wanted to distinguish them, one could say that the violence and aggression brought by the US to the Muslim world vastly exceeds — vastly — the violence and aggression brought by the Muslim world to the US. That’s just a fact.

(2) Leaving aside the sociopathic, morally grotesque defense of killing 4-year-olds with a “joystick from California,” Klein’s claims are completely false on pragmatic grounds. Slaughtering Muslim children does not protect American children from terrorism. The opposite is true. That is precisely what causes  the anti-American hatred that fuels and sustains terrorism aimed at Americans in the first place, as even a study commissioned by the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon recognized almost a decade ago.

The reason American 4-year-olds are in danger from terrorism — to the very limited extent they are — is precisely because those empowered in US government and media circles think like Joe Klein does. Soul-less cheerleaders for indiscriminate killing like Joe Klein — who once went on national television and advocated that the US should preserve the right to launch a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop its nuclear program, prompting host George Stephanopoulos to label that statement “insane” — are the reason there is a terrorism risk to Americans, not the solution for that risk.

If you want to understand why there is such a widespread desire to engage in violence against the US, look at Joe Klein’s face and listen to his words. Every Muslim who has ever engaged in violence against the US will make that as clear as can be.

(3) This exchange is a perfectly vivid expression of the Obama legacy. Here we have a standard Democratic/progressive pundit who is one of the media’s most stalwart Obama fanatics defending indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim children. Meanwhile, it’s left to a former right-wing, Gingrich-era congressman to raise objections, call for more public scrutiny, and cite the moral and strategic dangers, one of the very few commentators on MSNBC – the progressive network — who has ever voiced such passionate criticism of Obama’s ongoing killings.

Obama has led all sorts of progressives and other Democrats to be the most vocal supporters of unrestrained aggression, secret assassinations, and “crippling” the Iranian people with sanctions. It is completely unsurprising that the most sociopathic defense of drones comes from one of the most committed Obama supporters, and that it’s now left to a former GOP Congressman to raise objections. As much as anything, that is the Obama legacy.

(4) One of the primary reasons war — especially protracted war — is so destructive is not merely that it kills the populations at whom it is aimed, but it also radically degrades the character of the citizenry that wages it. That’s what enables one of America’s most celebrated pundits to go on the most mainstream of TV programs and coldly justify the killing of 4-year-olds, without so much as batting an eyelash or even paying lip service to the heinous tragedy of that, and have it be barely noticed. Joe Klein is the face not only of the Obama legacy, but also mainstream US political culture.

Afghanistan
Speaking of killing children, the Afghanistan government said this morning that a NATO operation on Saturday killed three more Afghan children, ones who were tending to livestock.

UPDATE
There’s one other vital point to be made here. Klein says that “there is a really major possibility of abuse [of drone power] if you have the wrong people running the government” — in other words, we can trust Obama with it, but not the big bad Republicans. This was precisely what Bush followers used to say about his claimed powers of due-process-free eavesdropping and detention: maybe this would be scary if Hillary Clinton could do this, but I trust Bush to use it only against the Bad Guys.

Leaving aside the authoritarian willingness to trust certain leaders with unchecked power, this is not how the US government works. Once a power is legitimized and institutionalized, then it is vested in all presidents, current and future, Democratic and Republican. That is why Thomas Jefferson warned: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Those who cheer for the unchecked power to assassinate in secret because it’s Obama who currently wields that power will be the ones fully responsible when some leader they don’t trust exercises it — abuses it — in the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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by Stephen Lendman

Sanitizing news and suppressing what’s most important is bad enough. Imagine compounding it by producing infomercials for despots. CNN stands accused. More on that below.  It’s well known that Western major media represent wealth and power interests. Fox News is a Republican party house organ. It also reflects Rupert Murdoch’s worldview.

It features demagoguery, managed news, scandal, sleaze, and warmongering. It’s prototypical presstitute media. Famed journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) denounced it in books like “Lords of the Press.”  He called them “the most powerful force against the general welfare of the majority of the people.” He exposed their tactics long before Project Censored and Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

(FAIR) once called Fox News “the most biased name in news….with its extraordinary right-wing tilt.” Viewing it is like watching “a Harlem Globetrotters game (knowing) which side is supposed to win.”

It’s hard-right, pro-business, pro-war, pro-occupation, anti-populist, sleazy and biased. It combines the worst of yellow journalism with juiced-up infotainment and junk food news. It’s a mouthpiece piece for Republican extremism. It long ago stopped pretending it’s legitimate. It mocks real journalism. It’s not tolerated on air.

Britain owns and operates BBC. It scrupulously follows government marching orders. It backs its imperial and neoliberal agenda.

Media Lens is an antidote to misinformation. Last July, co-editor David Edwards headlined “Blocked By The BBC,” saying:

Its reports are notoriously pro-Israeli. Accuracy on Occupied Palestine is sorely lacking. Edwards asked Jon Williams, its World News Editor, to comment on Greg Philo/Mike Berry’s book “More Bad News From Israel.”

An updated edition analyzed BBC and ITV Cast Lead coverage. It was unconscionably biased. “The most striking feature of the news texts,” said Philo and Berry, “is the dominance of the Israeli perspective, in relation to the causes of the conflict.”

Truth and full disclosure got short shrift. One-sided Israeli support excludes accuracy of what happened and what’s ongoing daily. In classic understatement, said Edwards, both writers said it’s “difficult in the face of this to see how the BBC can sustain a claim to be offering balanced reporting.”

Edwards called these serious, well-substantiated charges. Williams didn’t respond. He blocked Media Lens from his Twitter page. He’s not the only one. BBC’s Middle East bureau chief, Paul Danahar, did the same thing. Millions globally follow BBC reports regularly. Most perhaps don’t know they get propaganda, not real news, commentary and opinion. Notoriously one-sided, imbalanced, and biased accounts are featured. It’s standard fare.

Anyone paying attention can spot it. Western interests alone are represented. Viewers and listeners get one side only. BBC does what it’s told. It’s government funded, operated and controlled. It’s Britain’s official voice. It pretends to be independent and impartial.

It denies Palestine is occupied. It claims Israel’s capital is Jerusalem. In 1947, the UN designated it an international city. It remains so to this day. American and UK embassies are in Tel Aviv. So are most others.

In profiling Palestinian territories, the word occupation is omitted. Nothing explains daily reality or how mass slaughter, destruction, and ethnic cleansing created Israel. BBC says its content informs. It doesn’t mislead. Claiming it is laughable on its face. Instead of condemning criminality, it defends it. Its justification is none at all. It reports spurious propaganda globally. Millions aren’t told they’re lied to. Misinformation and illusion substitute for reality. Viewers and listeners are betrayed.

What’s more important than war or peace? When Britain and America wage wars or plan them, BBC marches in lockstep. It’s no different from America’s scoundrel media.

NPR and PBS are called public to conceal their real agenda. Critics ridicule NPR as National Pentagon or Petroleum Radio for good reason. It’s true as well for PBS. Calling it Propaganda Public Broadcasting more accurately describes it.

The Nation magazine and publications like it fall far short of their mandates. Some get funding from corporate and other disreputable sources they should condemn.

George Soros is a stealth media mogul. Broadcast outlets and print publications he funds reach hundreds of millions globally. So-called progressive media like Democracy Now take tainted Soros and other corporate foundation money. It’s given to buy influence and gets plenty. Dirty money comes with strings.

Do as they say or lose it. Obeying means producing managed, not real, news and information. Cheerleading imperial lawlessness is demanded and gotten. It shows up in scandalous reporting.

Progressive media sources doing it are especially insidious. Viewers, listeners and readers think they’re getting legitimate information. Instead they’re being lied to. They support these groups monetarily. They’re throwing good money away on organizations betraying them.

Video News Releases (VNRs) are fake news. They masquerade as real. They’re corporate-sponsored propaganda. PR firms produce them to look legitimate.

Scoundrel broadcasters air them. They fill time slots. Viewers aren’t told they’re watching prepackaged garbage. They influence public opinion. They promote commercial products and services. They publicize issues and individuals. They constitute deception writ large.

TV stations fill air time without cost. Corporations get free advertising. VNR producers profit from lying. Everyone wins but viewers. They’re deceived and scammed.

Audio News Releases (ANRs) are also produced. Radio stations air them. Public airwaves are used fraudulently.

Government officials produce fake news. They’re broadcast the same way on television and radio. Issues are promoted like imperial wars and homeland neoliberal policies.

Journalists shill for power. They’re paid government employees. They support programs they should condemn. Viewers, listeners, and readers are none the wiser.  On-the-take journalism pays well. Tax dollars buy public deception. FCC officials turn a blind eye. They do nothing. AJ Liebling (1904 – 1963) said, “People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.” It’s the same on television and radio.

Manipulating public opinion is policy. Truth is suppressed. Misinformation infests airwaves and fills broadsheet space like crabgrass besets lawns.  Censorship is policy at CNN. So is producing infomercials for despots. Bahrain dirty money bought it. The Al Khalifa monarchy is one of the world’s most ruthless regimes. It’s a case study in despotism. It’s one of the worst. State terrorism is policy.

Since winter 2011, it waged war on its own people. They’ve braved security force attacks with tear gas, beatings, rubber bullets, live fire, arrests, torture, disappearances, and imprisonments. Nonviolent men, women, children, doctors, journalists, human rights activists, and foreign observers are targeted. Western governments turn a blind eye. They offer support, not condemnation.

Media scoundrels are no better. Ongoing state terror is suppressed. Practically nothing about Bahrain is reported. CNN’s the exception. Former reporter Amber Lyon exposed how it buys favorable content.

On October 6, Fars News Agency headlined “Ex-CNN Reporter: CNN Bribed by Dictators to Censor Realities,” saying:

Amber Lyon said “CNN gets paid by despotic regimes to produce and broadcast what she referred to as ‘infomercials for dictators,’ saying that the sponsored content of such pieces aired on CNN International ‘is actually being paid for by regimes and governments.’ ”

Bahrain’s monarch paid CNN blood money to suppress information on its brutal crackdowns. Lyon went public and told all.

On October 3, Russia Today (rt.com) headlined “Bahrain buys favorable CNN content,” saying:

Amber Lyon explained. RT interviewed her. She said she “created a lot of documentaries for CNN that didn’t air internationally.”

They should have, but CNN suppressed or sanitized them. She spent time in Bahrain. She witnessed state terrorism firsthand. She videotaped it. It wasn’t aired internationally. She learned “Bahrain was actually a paying customer for CNN.”

Favorable content was created. “Even though CNN says its content is editorially independent Bahrain can affect that – what we’ve seen with that documentary not airing and also with the constant struggle I had at CNN to get Bahrain coverage, accurate coverage of the human rights abuses on-air while I was there.”

“What CNN is doing is they are essentially creating what some people have termed ‘infomercials for dictators.’ And that’s the sponsored content that they are airing on CNN International that is actually being paid for by regimes and governments.”

“And this violates every principle of journalistic ethics, because we’re supposed to be watchdogs on these governments.”

“We are not supposed to allow them to be a paying customer as journalists. And that’s the issue here – that CNN is feeding, then, this propaganda to the public and not fairly disclosing to the public that this is sponsored content.”

It’s not just Bahrain. CNN does the same thing for Saakashvili’s Georgia and Kazakhstan. Instead of getting correspondents to report accurately, viewers are systematically lied to.

The self-styled “most trusted name in news” reports managed news misinformation and willful lies. Disturbing truths are suppressed. Regime friendly accounts substitute. What viewers most need to know isn’t broadcast.

Lyon took great risks in Bahrain. She dodged her minders. She went to villages and witnessed atrocities firsthand. She videotaped it. She saw injured patients run out of hospitals. Birdshot targeted them.

Ambulance drivers who helped them were beaten. Coming back, she and her producer were accosted. About 20 masked men with machine guns stopped them. They tried to erase videos they found.

She and her producer concealed some discs in their bras. They managed to get them out of the country.

“You can imagine Bahrain’s surprise when we got back to the US and this content was airing on CNN, and right after that is when the phone calls started coming into the network complaining about me and trying to get my coverage off the air.”

CNN and other scoundrel media vilify Syria and Iran unjustifiably. At the same time, they suppress horrific atrocities committed by US allies. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are two of the worst.

Viewers are systematically lied to. They’re denied real information. RT said Bahrain issued a statement. It denied Lyon’s accusations. It lied saying so. That’s how despots operate.

CNN International also lied. It calls its editorial and commercial operations “completely separate.” Lyon, of course, knows otherwise. So do RT viewers who followed their reports. They explained what everyone needs to know.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”  http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour   

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By Paul Street

Sunday, October 14, 2012
Crossposted with Paul Street’s ZSpace Page

One month before the 2012 presidential election, the “Public” Broadcasting System’s investigative journalism show Frontline last week broadcast a show purporting to “present the definitive portraits of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.” The show, bearing the dramatic title “The Choice,” provided sensitive, highly personal biographies of the two official contenders, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Families of Origin, Marriages, School Days, and Drugs

“The Choice” was as remarkable for what it left out as it was for what it included. It was loaded with details about each candidate’s family histories and marriages and past careers and campaigns. It reported at length and quite intelligently about Obama’s conflicted, multi-racial and peripatetic childhood, his youthful drug use, his absent parents, his alcoholic grandparents,  his multicultural friendship group at Occidental College, his deepening seriousness at Columbia University, his centrist Harvard Law career, his early romance with Michelle Robinson, and his early victories and one crushing defeat in black Chicago politics. Frontline reported deeply and sensitively on Romney’s close childhood relationship with his rich powerful father (onetime moderate Republican Michigan governor and presidential candidate George Romney), Romney’s Mormon background, his near-death in an automobile accident in France, his elite private school upbringing, his college days and pro-Vietnam War politics at Stanford, his early marriage to Ann, Ann Romney’s struggle with multiple sclerosis, his years at Harvard Business School, his rise to prominence and success at the Wall Street firm Bain Capital, his unsuccessful bid to unseat Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate, and his brief tenure as the Governor of Massachusetts.

All of this was very impressively researched and presented. At the same time, “The Choice,” was deafeningly silent about the different yet all too similar policy agendas of the two business-backed candidates and about the massive amounts of elite money that have paid for both of the campaigns in what has become by far and away the most expensive U.S. election ever. By deleting policy, Frontline suggests  that only real choice on offer is whether one wants to the White House to be occupied by (A) a fantastically rich white male who was born into great wealth and power and the Mormon Church close to this father or (B) an often lonely half-black man born into a broken, middle-class family who smoked a lot of weed in high school and had almost no contact with his father, was raised for many years by his white grandparents in Honolulu, and wandered the streets of Harlem before finding a home and a political base in Chicago’s black South Side?

Missing Policy

Beyond the standard shrieking of Romper Room radicals who insist that the two parties and their candidates’ agendas are “indistinguishable” and “the same” – totally or almost completely without any relevant difference – there are policy divergences that ought to matter to any serious progressive who actually cares about his fellow human beings and livable ecology. The G.O.P. has become yet ever more “publicly committed to dismantling and destroying whatever progressive legislations and social welfare has been won by popular struggles over the past century” (Noam Chomsky).[1] Writing of the Republican Party four years ago (in an important left-liberal critique of the U.S. political order that did not spare the Democrats), [2] political scientist Sheldon Wolin observed in 2008 that “It is hard to imagine any power more radical [than the G.O.P.] in its determination to undo the gains of the past century.”[3]

That judgment is no less relevant four years later, to say the least. Nobody, probably not even Mitt Romney, knows if Romney actually means what he says on the campaign trail. But if the Republicans complete their takeover of Congress – a possibility – next November, a President Romney would face overriding pressure to act on what he says. And here’s some of what he’s claimed he would do as president:

• immediately okay the disastrous Keystone Pipeline
• end federal tax supports for wind power
• further escalate fracking and offshore drilling
• let the states re-criminalize abortion
• seek a constitutional amendment outlawing new same-sex marriages
• seek a constitutional amendment requiring two-third congressional majorities for tax increases
• replace unemployment benefits with unemployment “savings accounts.”
• “double Guantanamo”
• officially re-authorize torture
• deport undocumented aliens en masse
• start a new Cold War with “our main strategic enemy” – nuclear Russia
• significantly deepen inequality with further giant tax cuts for the wealthy few
• further gut financial regulations
• further cut Food Stamps, Medicaid and what’s left of public family cash assistance

Romney’s selection of “Tea Party” favorite Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate amounts to a de facto endorsement of Ryan’s plans to voucher-ize Medicare and to thoroughly bankrupt what’s left of the government’s capacity for social expenditure – this while acting to significantly increase the upward distribution of wealth and income.

Still, the nation’s two dominant political organizations are more alike than different in any meaningful world-historical sense. A recent Black Agenda Report column by the left activist and commentator Bruce Dixon uncovered no less than 15 critical political and policy matters on which Obama and Romney basically agree behind the official media story line of an epic contest between two “very different” and indeed “sharply polarized” parties and candidates. Dixon’s list includes the following:

• ‘The federal government should NOT enact any sort of WPA-style program to put millions of people back to work.’
• ‘Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are “entitlements” that need to be cut to relieve “the deficit.”’
• ‘Climate change treaties and negotiations that might lead to them should be avoided at all costs.’
• The corporatist investor-rights North American Free Trade Agreement is ‘such a great thing it really should be extended to Central and South America and the entire Pacific rim.’
• ‘Banksters and Wall Street speculators deserve their bailouts and protection from criminal liability, but underwater and foreclosed homeowners deserve nothing.’
• Racist imperialism should march on in the Middle East: ‘Palestinians should be occupied, dispossessed and ignored. Iran should be starved and threatened from all sides…. Cuba should be embargoed…. Black and brown babies and their parents, relatives and neighbors should be bombed with drones in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and similar places.’
• Racist imperialism must march on in Africa: ‘Africa should be militarized, destabilized, plundered and where necessary, invaded by proxy armies like those of Rwanda, Ethiopia, Burundi or Kenya, or directly by Western air and ground forces, as in Libya’
• ‘US Presidents can kidnap citizens of their own or any nation on earth from anyplace on the planet for torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial or murder them and neighboring family and bystanders at will’
• ‘Oil and energy companies, and other mega-polluters must be freed to drill offshore almost everywhere, and permitted to poison land and watersheds with fracking to achieve “energy independence”.’
• ‘The FCC should not and must not regulate telecoms to ensure that poor and rural communities have access to internet, or to guarantee network neutrality.’
• ‘There really ARE such things as “clean coal” and “safe nuclear energy.”’
• ‘Oil and energy companies, and other mega-polluters must be freed to drill offshore almost everywhere, and permitted to poison land and watersheds with fracking to achieve “energy independence.”’
• ‘Immigrants must be jailed and deported in record numbers.’
• ‘No Medicare for All. Forget about it eliminating the Medicare age requirement so that all Americans would qualify.’
• ‘No minimum wage increases for you, no right to form a union, no right to negotiate or strike if you already have a union, and no enforcement or reform of existing labor laws.’
• ‘The 40 year war on drugs must continue…mention of the prison state is unthinkable.’[4]

The Republicans and Democrats are not completely identical or interchangeable,[5] but Dixon easily provides a chilling short list of areas of common ground between the two dominant reigning parties’ standard bearers[6].

It’s been like this for very many election cycles, which is no small part of why many U.S. voters’ candidate “choices” end up having nothing or little to do with policy. With the contests all-too drained of substantive policy meaning, voters commonly select the candidate who seems most “likeable” to them, the one with whom they’d most like to have a beer or watch television. The managed infantilization of the electorate along these lines is encouraged by campaign advertisements that sell candidates like a new brand of deodorant[7] and media commentary that focuses on things like Joe Biden’s facial expressions, the shape of Obama’s cheekbones, and Romney’s alleged physical awkwardness.

With its failure to mention policy at all – either in terms of difference or elite consensus between the candidates – Frontline’s “The Choice” is little more than a more sophisticated, elite-targeted version of  a  more vulgar national electoral culture that elevates candidate character and biography over substantive matters of policy.

The Wealth Primary

“The Choice’s” deletion of political money is intimately related to its avoidance of policy and particularly to its avoidance of the ruling class policy consensus between the candidates. The leading theme in the dominant media’s relentless election coverage and commentary is as usual the horse race: which of the two candidates will prevail and why. Though Frontline ignored the topic, it is permissible in the context of that narrow discussion to talk about the role that the obscene quantity of corporate and financial cash “the 1%” invests in the election may play in shaping the outcome. What cannot be discussed to any significant degree is the role that big money and much more in the corporate arsenal plays in making sure that “we the people” and democracy will lose the election regardless of which candidate gives a victory speech next November. Progressive measures and demands like Medicare for All, real progressive taxation, full employment/public works, mortgage relief, the re-legalization of union organizing, a peace dividend, ecological retrofitting, de-incarceration – all of this and much more is simply pronounced “off the table” of serious election discussion. Never mind that the majority of American citizens have long supported such decent and democratic policies and demands.

But so what? Who cares? When the television network ABC’s evening national news show has turned to the presidential race – its main story (the same goes for the rest of the dominant media) for months now – its puts up a bright slogan or logo over the left shoulder of the news anchor. “Your Vote, Your Voice,” the logo reads. And when speaking to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) last July, Vice President Joe Biden felt it necessary to “remind” that predominantly black civil rights organization “of one thing. Remember,” Biden said, “what this at its core was all about – why this organization at its core was all about. It was about the franchise. It was about the right to vote. Because when you have the right to vote, you have the right to change things.”

NAACP history aside, how true is Biden’s final assertion given the existence of what the campaign finance researchers and activists John Bonifaz and Jamie Raskin called “the wealth primary” – the requirement that candidates either personally possess stupendous wealth or enjoy strong funding connections to those with such wealth to pay for ever more expensive campaigns?[8]  Those with the financial resources required for serious contention and victory in America’s prolonged “winner-take-all” elections system are hardly in the business of paying for genuinely public-oriented and democratic office-seekers who genuinely wish to reflect majority populist and progressive sentiments in governments. As progressive journalist noted in a fall 2006 Harper’s report on the pre-presidential Obama phenomenon, “It’s not always clear what Obama’s financial backers want but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in clean government and political reform.”[9]

“On condition of anonymity,” Silverstein reported, “one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’”[10]

The title of Silverstein’s article bears mention: “Barack Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine” – a topic that was completely and glaringly ignored in Frontline’s account of Obama’s remarkable rise from dormitory dope-smoking and the Illinois legislature to national prominence and power.

Consistent with that title and the lobbyist’s candid comment, Obama received record-setting corporate and Wall Street contributions in the 2008 election and then as president conducted something of a tutorial on who really rules and runs America beyond the charade of popular governance and quadrennial, candidate-centered and elite-funded electoral extravaganzas – the people who own America.. [11]

The wealth primary has long imposed deep plutocratic scars on America’s dollar-democracy, of course, but the problem is worse now than ever. Between the congressional contests and the Presidential campaign, the 2012 elections are on track to cost an all-time record of more than $6 billion. As across the last three decades, a tiny and disproportionately wealthy slice of the populace (significantly smaller than just “the 1%”) will account for a wildly disproportionate share of the dollars required to feed the nation’s burgeoning “money and -media election complex” that has “effectively become the foundation of electoral politics in the United States,”[12] and “is now more definitional than any candidate or party—and that poses every bit as much of a threat to democracy as the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned us a half-century ago..”[13]

The problem isn’t just money per se. As the liberal Sunlight Foundation noted in a major campaign finance study titled The Political One Percent of One Percent last year, “It’s the 1 percent of the 1 percent who account for almost a quarter of all individual campaign contributions…We know that money is not equally given by all Americans. There are very few Americans who can afford to write the kind of big checks that candidates depend on” (emphasis added).

Citizens Defeated
 
The problem has been getting worse over time. “Over the past 20 years,” Sunlight reported, “ the $10,000-plus donors have accounted for an ever bigger share of political contributions….Everybody — not just candidates — leans harder on the wealthy as campaign spending escalates. Parties want to be able to tap into donor networks of people who can give $10,000, $20,000 to the party.” Within “the 1 percent of the 1 percent,” Sunlight found, the most elite donors, those with corporate ties, give on average $29,000 per election cycle – “more than what half of Americans earn in a single year.”  Reflecting on Sunlight’s finding, University of Maryland political scientist Jim Gimpel told reporters, activists, and citizens to “Bear in mind that wealth is concentrated…this donation pattern… reflects the concentration of wealth in this country.”[14]

But the real problem went deeper than merely the disproportionate power of concentrated wealth. Part of the reason that 2012 is certain to be the most expensive election on record was the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal decision. Passed 5-4 by the high court’s conservative, Republican-appointed majority and opposed by the Obama administration, Citizens United abolished prior longstanding governmental prohibitions against corporations digging into their treasuries to invest unlimited sums in election campaigns. The ruling opened the door to spectacular new levels of big business election spending, giving rise to giant new “Super PACs” that funneled tens of millions of corporate shareholder dollars into “independent expenditures” on behalf of candidates with the undoubted and in fact legally mandated purpose of shaping policy in the interests of corporate contributors.

Prior to Citizens United, to be sure, corporations already invested massively in American politics and policy. They spent billions on lobbying, ‘issue ads,’ political action committees (PACs), and raising PAC money. CEOs, top executives and corporate board members contributed heavily as individuals to parties and candidates. Still, as the prolific progressive legal critic Jamie Raskin noted in a recent special Nation issue on “The 1% Court,” there “ was one crucial thing that CEOs could not do before Citizens United: reach into their corporate treasuries to bankroll campaigns promoting or opposing the election of candidates for Congress or president. This prohibition essentially established a wall of separation—not especially thick or tall, but a wall nonetheless—between corporate treasury wealth and campaigns for federal office” (emphasis added). Citizens United blew up the wall and undid two centuries of high court doctrine on the special need to restrict corporations’ political contributions by claiming that “identity of the speaker” is irrelevant and an unconstitutional basis on which to limit the “free speech” rights of campaign contributors. What matters alone, the Court claimed, is “speech itself,” never “the identity of the speaker.”[15] As Raskin observed, the decision was openly absurd, in part because the Supreme had refused to extend free speech protections to “public employees, public school students, whistleblowers, prisoners and minor-party candidates whose free-speech rights have been crushed by the conservative Court because of their identity as (disfavored) speakers.” Equally significant was the fact that Court clearly had no intention of seriously enforcing the literal language of the ruling by extending it to other institutions:

‘If it’s true that the “identity of the speaker” is irrelevant, the City of New York—a municipal corporation, after all—should have a right to spend money telling residents for whom to vote in mayoral races. Maryland could spend tax dollars urging citizens to vote for marriage equality in November, and President Obama could order the Government Printing Office to produce a book advocating his re-election…..churches—religious corporations—would have a First Amendment right not only to promote candidates from the pulpit but to spend freely on television ads advocating their election or trashing their opponents….. If the identity of the speaker is truly irrelevant, there should be nothing to stop the Church of Latter-Day Saints or Harvard University from bankrolling political campaigns.’
‘In the real world, the claim that the identity of the speaker is irrelevant cannot be taken seriously, and it is already being disregarded by the justices who signed on to it. The Court has so far declined to strike down the ban on foreign spending in American politics and the century-old ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates, laws that the new doctrine logically should invalidate. A total wipeout of campaign finance law appears to be just a step too far—at least right now—for a Court already facing plummeting public legitimacy.’

Another key judicial decision deserves mention, In late March of 2010, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit struck down limits on what individuals could give to “independent expenditure campaigns”[16] in SpeechNow.org v. FEC.[17] While Citizens United unleashed corporations like never before in the world of campaign finance,  SpeechNow.org freed billionaires like legendary “Tea Party” funders David and Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson, right wing plutocrats who invested heavily in right wing Republican politics and pledged to spend massive sums (Adelson promised $100 million) to unseat Obama. [18]

Thanks largely to Citizens United and SpeechNow.org, the American political terrain is now burdened by more than 840 Super PACs and countless other “independent expenditure” campaign vehicles. Campaign finance observers noted with absolute certainty that “billions of dollars, much of it untraceable, will flood the 2012 election. We will never know for sure whose money is paying for the show,” Raskin noted, “because the front groups easily conceal their donors, including foreign corporations.”[19]

Wall Street’s Choice

For what it’s worth, Wall Street appears to have made its choice in the presidential election – Romney. Last September 8th, the Center for Responsive Politics’ (CRP) “Open Secrets” Website reported that Romney had raised $29,587,891 from employees, partners and others associated with the Finance, Real Estate, and Insurance (FIRE) sector, including $11,458,384 from the Securities and Investment industry. Obama, by contrast, had raised $12,179, 522 from FIRE and $4,175, 867 from Securities and Investment. Romney’s top five contributors were Goldman Sachs ($676,080), JP Morgan Chase&Co. ($520,299), Morgan Stanley ($513,647), Bank of America ($510,728), and Credit Suisse Group ($427,580). Obama’s top five, by contrast, were the University of California ($491,868), Microsoft ($443,748), Google (357,382), DLA Piper (a multinational corporate law firm), and Harvard University. [20]  (The gigantic sums do not include contributions to PACs and other “independent expenditures.”)

Talk about ingratitude: the disparity comes despite Obama’s faithful service to the financial elite. As campaign finance experts told Reuters reporter Kevin Drawbaugh last February, “the bankers likely feel they can relate to Romney.”

“Romney is one of them,” American University professor Leonard Steinhorn noted, adding that “they…feel comfortable with him.’”

“The financial industry has preferred Romney from the beginning when he started his campaign,” CRP spokesperson Viveca Novak added. “He is of their world. They believe he understands them.”[21]

“We Must Make Our Choice”

It has become common in the last year for progressive to repeat the elegant anti-plutocratic formulation of onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in October of 1941: “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”[22] That is good to see but I like to add the five-word sentence with which Brandeis prefaced this justly famous statement: “We must make our choice.” [23]

Democracy versus the concentration of wealth – that is the choice that Occupy Wall Street struggled to focus Americans on last fall, before the great authoritarian sucking sound of the latest presidential electoral spectacle became the official ubiquitous leading news story. (It’s not for nothing that the Obama administration worked with Democratic mayors and militarized urban police to help coordinate the often brutal armed force dismantlement of Occupy encampments across the country last fall.[24]). We can and must keep our eyes on the deeper and related prizes – economic equality and environmental sustainability. The latest and current “election frenzy”[25] will recede like a bad hangover. It always does. As the dull crush of corporate, financial, military and professional class rule sinks back into popular consciousness the time will be ripe again for popular mobilization around the serious political action that matters most- popular movement-building. Voting or sitting it out however and for whoever  they wish (the “election 2012” decision is more complicated if one lives in a contested state), serious progressives must stay focused on the bigger struggle beyond staggered, theatrical, and candidate-centered, big money, big media, narrow-spectrum elections. The real issue is the conflict between democracy and the authoritarian rule of “the 1%’s” exterminist[26] profits system, dedicated to the ceaseless accumulation of more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org) is the author of numerous books, including most recently, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010) and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party (2011). Street can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com

Selected Endnotes

[1] Noam Chomsky, “The Disconnect in American Democracy” (October 27, 2004), in Noam Chomsky, Interventions (San Francisco: City Lights, 2007), 100. Chomsky refers here to the George W. Bush administration but the point applies equally well to the 21st century Republican Party.
 
[2] “The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working-class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf. And this despite the fact that these elements are recognized as the loyal base of the party. By ignoring dissent and assuming the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republican. Unlike the Democrats, however, the Republicans, with their combination of reactionary and innovative elements, are a cohesive, if not a coherent, opposition force.”  Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 206.
 
[3] Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 206. “Paradoxically,” Wolin added, “liberalism and its historical party, the Democrats, are conservative, not by choice but by virtue of the radical character of the Republicans.”
 
[4] Bruce Dixon, “Closer Than You Think: the Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On,” Black Agenda Report (August 29, 2012) at http://blackagendareport.com/content/closer-you-think-top-15-things-romney-and-obama-agree Dixon elaborates on the false assumptions behind these shared positions and on  how most of what passes for differences between the two parties on these issue amount to contrasts of style, not substance.
 
[5]  In a book that is highly critical of the Democrats and the corporate-capitalist party duopoly, the incisive Marxist commentator and author Lance Selfa notes “the two-party system would not work the way it is supposed to [for the propertied elite] if the two parties were identical. There must be at least some differences between the parties to give voters a stake in choosing which of the two will be in power after each election. So in early twenty-first century America, the Democrats are the ‘pro-choice’ party and the GOP mostly opposes reproductive rights. The Democrats tend to be friendlier to organized labor than the Republicans. Democrats tend to support provisions for immigrants to win a ‘path to citizenship,’ while the GOP harbors many more open nativists in its midst. Aside from providing these kinds of issue contrasts, a crucial role of the political parties is ‘binding citizens to the established system…’” Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), 34
 
[6] See also Bill Quigley, “15 Issues This Election is Not About,” Black Agenda Report (September 24, 2012) at http://blackagendareport.com/content/fifteen-issues-election-not-about
 
 
[8]  Jamie Raskin and John Bonifaz, “The Constitutional Imperative and Practical Imperative of Democratically Financed Elections,” Columbia Law Review, 94-4 (1994): 1160-1203.
 
[9] Ken Silverstein, “Barack Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine,” Harper’s (November 2006). Silverstein, “Obama Inc.,” .37.
 
[10] Silverstein, “Obama, Inc.” 40.
 
 
[12] Robert McChesney and John Nichols, “The Bull Market: Political Advertising,” Monthly Review, Vol. 63, No. 12 (April 2012).
 
[13] Robert McChesney and John Nichols, “The Money and Media Election Complex,” The Nation (November 29, 2010), online at http://www.thenation.com/article/156391/money-media-election-complex.
[14] Sunlight Foundation, The Political One Percent of One Percent (December 13, 2011) at http://www.npr.org/2011/12/14/143730288/top-donors-make-up-one-quarter-of-campaign-donations
[16] “Independent expenditures” are made in elections by PACs and other groups that claim to operate independently from specific candidate campaigns. In fact, their activities and spending are commonly and widely coordinated with such campaigns. Contributions to “independent” political groups commonly aren’t subject to any disclosure laws and are thus untraceable.
 
[17] Adam Liptak, “Courts Take on Campaign Finance Decision,” New York Times, March 26, 2010, read online at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/us/politics/27campaign.html?_r=0 (accessed October 9, 2012).
 
[18] Raskin, “’Citizens United.’” Raskin calls SpeechNow.org a “junior partner” to Citizens United.
 
[19] Raskin, “’Citizens United.’”
 
[20] Center for Responsive Politics, “2012 Presidential Race,” at http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/index.php and “Presidential 2012, Selected Industry Totals” at http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/select.php?ind=F07
 
[21] Kevin Drawbaugh, “Romney Draws More Wall Street Donations Than Obama,” Reuters, Christian Science Monitor, February 2, 2012., read online at http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/From-the-Wires/2012/0202/Mitt-Romney-draws-more-Wall-Street-donations-than-Obama
 
 
[22] This is the lead front-matter quote in Hedrick Smith’s new book, Who Stole the American Dream? (New York: Random House, 2012). It is also used as the concluding line in the multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele’s latest book The Betrayal of the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs, 2012). See page 264.  See also Noam Chomsky, “The U.S. and Israel, Not Iran, Threaten Peace,” Common Dreams, September 12, 2012, at https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/04-6
 
[23] Quoted on the Web site of Brandeis University at http://www.brandeis.edu/legacyfund/bio.html and in Harvard Magazine (March 2011) at http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/03/quotable-harvard. The original source in the latter is Labor, October 14, 1941.
 

 
[25] “The election frenzy seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us…… Would I support one [presidential] candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth…But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.” Howard Zinn, “Election Madness,” The Progressive (March 2008).
 
[26] Paul Street, “Less Than Zero: the 1 Percent and the Fate of the Earth,” ZNet. (December 9, 2011) at http://www.zcommunications.org/less-than-zero-the-1-percent-and-the-fate-of-the-earth-by-paul-street
 

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By Stephen Lendman

Mussolini called the 20th century a fascist one. It arrived in America. Huey Long once said it’ll show up “wrapped in an American flag.” In his book, “Friendly Fascism,” Bertram Gross called Ronald Reagan its prototype ruler.

Huey Long: Leftist populist, he was assassinated much too soon in his career but he left deep marks in the nation’s consciousness. He has been wrongly called a Fascist, to kill his legacy.

When is a debate not one? When it’s not intended to be. When theatrical blather substitutes. When demagoguery takes center stage. On October 11, it showed up prominently in Danville, KY. Centre College played host. ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz moderated 90 minutes of flim flam.

Unmentioned was her close Washington military/intelligence establishment ties. She supports America’s right to bomb, invade, ravage, occupy, colonize, and exploit one country after another. Her loyalty got her prominence Thursday night. Call it spoils sharing for services rendered.

Like all so-called political debates, Biden/Ryan was prescripted theater. Demagoguery best describes it. Democrat and Republican candidates represent wealth, power, privilege, and imperial lawlessness. They spurn public need, democratic values, and right over wrong. They represent the worst of a morally degenerate nation. They govern one not fit to live in.

The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan. It threatens humanity. Whoever wins or loses in November, it hardly matters. On issues mattering most, both parties are in lockstep. Ordinary people aren’t served either way. Money power runs America. Gore Vidal understood. He explained  well. His comments are worth repeating.

He called America “a nation of ongoing hustlers from the prisons and disaster areas of old Europe.”

“I do not think that the America System in its present state of decadence is worth preserving.”
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party….and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

He called democracy a system “where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates” no different from each other.

“By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.”

The same goes for vice presidential candidates. Some become presidents. It’s planned that way.

No matter who governs, he said, America is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon….”

He predicted the worst of all possible worlds. Bread and circuses can’t conceal it. Fascism best describes it.

Mussolini called the 20th century a fascist one. It arrived in America. Huey Long once said it’ll show up “wrapped in an American flag.” In his book, “Friendly Fascism,” Bertram Gross called Ronald Reagan its prototype ruler.

In his 1943 book, “Facts and Fascism,” George Seldes explained what he called “big money and big profits in fascism.”

In his 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” Sinclair Lewis saw it coming in hard times. It’ll be led by a charismatic, self-styled reformer/populist champion, a con man exploiting human misery.

He recounted Merzelium “Buzz” Windrip’s rise to power. His promise to restore prosperity equitably hid his ties to corporatist interests and religious ideologues. He capitalized on hard times. He established militarism and unconstitutional governance. He convened military tribunals for civilians and called dissenters traitors. He institutionalized tyranny. He put political enemies in concentration camps. He created Minute Men paramilitaries to terrorize anyone opposing him.

He destroyed democracy, declared martial law, usurped dictatorial powers, circumvented Congress, and made himself supreme ruler.

It can happen anywhere, anytime. Political demagogues take full advantage. Obama/Biden/Romney/Ryan represent the worst of what’s coming. It’s already happening.

Pre-election theater camouflages it. It runs cover for dirty politics. It works as planned. Most people are fooled. It repeats each electoral cycle. Broken promises follow all important ones made.

Rhetoric and policies are worlds apart. Wealth and power priorities trample on popular needs. The worst is yet to come. It’s baked in the cake. Austerity is agreed on. Bipartisan schemes plan more of the same.

Huge social benefit cuts are coming. Mandated entitlements workers paid for will erode faster than ever. America’s needy will end up on their own out of luck. Let-em-eat-cake governance doesn’t give a damn. Non-believers will discover gulag hell firsthand.

Obama/Biden/Romney/Ryan are two sides of the same coin. Voters get to choose between death by hanging or firing squad. You’d never know it from post-debate commentaries. A New York Times editorial headlined “A Debate With Clarity and Fervor.”

It was “one of the best,” said The Times. Perhaps its editors were watching Three Stooges reruns instead of demagogic blather.

“….real differences on public policy (were) discussed with fervor, anger, laughter and real substance.”

Each candidate recited his lines. They were prearranged, prescripted well in advance.

“Martha Raddatz….was both entertaining and enlightening.” Perhaps The Times meant someone else by the same name unrelated to politics, America’s imperium, and media propaganda.

“Both candidates….demonstrated real engagement on issues that matter. It was a real change for voters starved for substance.”

They won’t find it anywhere on corporate-run television or in broadsheets like The Times. Managed news, opinion, and analysis substitute for the real thing.

Peggy Noonan is one of many Wall Street Journal right-wing ideologues. Headlining “Confusing Strength With Aggression,” she called the theatrics a “draw on substance, but the vice president loses on style.”

“For the second time in two weeks, the Democrat came out and defeated himself. In both cases, the Republican was strong and the Democrat somewhat disturbing.”

“Another way to say it is the old man tried to patronize the kid and the kid stood his ground. The old man pushed, and the kid pushed back.”

“And so the Romney-Ryan ticket emerged ahead. Its momentum was neither stopped nor slowed and likely was pushed forward.”

What else could be expected from one of Murdoch’s staff. He calls the shots and demands obedience.

Los Angeles Times contributor Doyle McManus headlined “Vice presidential debate: Biden’s mission accomplished.”

He said vice presidential debates don’t matter and called Thursday night “a draw.”

Reuters quoted University of Miami communications professor/debate coach David Steinberg saying:

“If you had to call a winner right now, I’d say it’s a draw. But a tie goes to the incumbent.”

“Ryan….turned in a solid performance,” said Reuters. At the same time, “Biden was the story….But it will be up to Obama to close the deal in the two debates to come….”

Reuters tried having it both ways and failed.

Nation magazine contributors represent America’s pseudo-left. They’re unabashed Democrat party apologists. They support the worst of Obama/Biden. It shows in one deplorable mischaracterization after another.

John Nichols’ post-debate analysis was typical. Headlined “Richard Milhous Ryan: No Specifics, Just a ‘Secret Plan,’ ” he compared Nixon’s Vietnam strategy to Ryan on taxes and balanced budgets.

No details. Just trust him. He’ll do the right thing. Of course, he won’t but neither will Obama. Nichols ignored that reality. Instead he compared tricky Paul to tricky Dick. Tricky Barack wasn’t mentioned.

Biden had the “upper hand.” His “skills” bested Ryan. At the same time, it wasn’t “Biden who made Ryan the Nixon of the night. It was Ryan.” On what he says matters most, he “had no details, no specifics, just a ‘secret plan.’ “

Nichols didn’t explain the common thread in all campaigns and so-called debates. Rhetoric and promises substitute for policies, specifics, and follow-through. Each side replicates the worst of the other.

Money power wins. Ordinary people lose. It happens every time. Too bad journalists with other priorities don’t explain. Too bad voters don’t say pox on America’s duopoly and vote independent.

Throwing out old bums for new ones never works. Expect nothing different in November no matter who wins or loses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour   

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