Classic Essays: The Crisis of US Capitalism

Archives: Articles you should have read the first time around but missed.

Crisis of US Capitalism or the Crisis of the US Wage
and Salaried Worker?
by James Petras
[Originally posted: July 18, 2006]

¶ —Introduction

Progressive, leftist, radical and even a few “Bearish” Wall Street pundits have been arguing for years about the coming collapse, decline or demise of US capitalism. No amount of continued growth of billionaires, millionaires and multimillionaires, record earnings by investment houses and double digit profit growth of major corporations can convince our doomsayers to re-think their prophecies. Nothing has discredited the US left more than its apocalyptic visions of the Big Fall, in the face of robust growth. Given the “long term” or imprecise time frame and a ritualistic litany of profound structural weaknesses, their predictions are swallowed and regurgitated in the progressive media, websites and blogs where they are spread to a dubious public.

________________________________________________

While the Left preaches “the crisis and end” of US capitalism, most workers are complaining about the bigger take of their bosses, their intensified exploitation leading to rising productivity, their extended work day and work year because of cuts in vacation, sick time and holidays.For too many years, the Left has premised an “awakening” and presumable shift to the left by the working and middle classes on the “Collapse of Capitalism” (COC). In fact this argument has ignored several crucial issues, which I will discuss.
The COC has not taken place because business, banking and the government have shifted the entire burden of adapting US capitalism to the demands of the market onto the back of the wage and salaried workers. What is called the “Crisis of Capitalism” is in reality the “Crisis of Labor”, by which I mean several things: 1) the relative and absolute decline in living standards — evident in the elimination of a) corporate-funded pension plans and the increase in worker payments to pension plans; b) the elimination or reduction in payments to health plans and the increased deductions from workers wages to pay for health, or the loss of any health coverage; c) the double-digit growth in the costs for energy, health, education and medicines which are not calculated in the consumer price index, used as a marker to estimate wage, social security and pension payments and d) the rising tide of “give backs” by sclerotic, over-paid (six-digit) trade union executives, which decrease living standards and increase profits for the corporations.

The deregulation of environmental, workplace and consumer protection agencies has led to health problems and loss of income for wageworkers but greater profits for the corporate beneficiaries.

The central thesis of this paper is that the correct focus for a radical revival is in the intensification and extension of exploitation of labor, the environment and consumers by corporate capital, which enables the US corporate economy to continue growing and overcoming any momentary down-turn. Predictions of US capital collapse are built on a specious set of arguments, which are easily turned on their head and which misdirect our attention from the real tasks of joining the struggle at the workplace, the environment and in the sites of consumption.

The Facts Against the COC Theory

“Currently (July 2006) US companies remain on track to achieve the longest ever stretch of double digit profit growth” reads the Financial Times. (July 5, 2006) For 12 consecutive quarters profits at US companies have grown by at least 10%. The projection is for this profit rate to continue through 2007. Profits are what sustain, not collapse, capital. Double-digit profits over several years are not indicators of declining capitalism. What it does strongly suggest is that the corporate “slash and burn” policies toward worker pay and benefits turns up record profit runs. It means that impotent and ineffectual trade union bureaucrats by facilitating “give backs” have established a pattern of exploitation, which consolidates high returns for capital.

Far from a world of collapsing capitalism, recent history has witnessed a virulent growth of capitalist billionaires and millionaires particularly in the regions of commodity booms and high growth rates. Between 2004 and 2005, the number of millionaires (including billionaires) in Africa increased by nearly 12%, in the Middle East and Latin America by nearly 10% and Asia-Pacific by 7%. (FT, June 21, 2006) There are now 8.7 million millionaires in the capitalist system, an increase of 6.5% since 2004. The super rich are becoming richer with their total assets rising 8.5% in 2005 to an estimated $33 Trillion USD. (FT, June 21, 2006) Over 80% of these million-billionaires are from North America, Europe and Asia. Their rising wealth is the result of capitalist growth — based on rising rates of exploitation of labor, raw materials and the environment.

The inequalities in pay between the US capitalist ruling class and workers increased 4 fold between 1990 and 2004. In 1990 the average CEO pay at 367 big corporations was 100 times that of a worker; by 2004 the ratio was approximately 430 times. It is abundantly clear that key problem of capitalism is its increasing inequality resulting from heightened exploitation — not its “imminent collapse” or “decline”.

If speculation is leading to the eventual collapse of the US economy, it is difficult to understand the enormous and sustained number of record-setting transactions mainly consummated and funded by US investment banks (IB). Between May 2005 to May 2006, all five of the top five financial advisers engaged in mergers and acquisitions were US-based (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigoup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch), the same IB that predominated in 2004-2005. A similar pattern of increasing US financial dominance is evident from examining the top ten investment banks in relations to global debt capital markets and global equity markets. While some refer to this type of economic activity as “casino capitalism” they forget that the House never or rarely loses, it”s the players, not the banks that lose. What this means is that as the world”s banker, US finance capital is in a position to skim off lucrative fees throughout the world, highly parasitical in one sense, but hardly indicative of a coming collapse.

The point that needs emphasizing is that the dynamic expansion of the US financial sector is not a sign of decline but of a highly effective form of direct and indirect exploitation. For example, multi-national corporations frequently consult the banks on strategies for acquisitions, mergers and sell-offs. The banks advise cuts in labor costs to make the firm more profitable and raise stock valuations; then the banks arrange loans for finance the transaction, leading to indebtedness and subsequent cuts in wages and benefits. The banks up front collect hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for their advice and “deal making” — putting pressure on the corporations to squeeze labor to pay the dealmakers. The key issue is not whether financial capital is “viable” or “sustainable” but what are the capital labor relations or more precisely the increased rates of exploitation, which allow the transaction to take place.

Luxury goods industries are booming as profits of the ruling classes of the five continents are expanding. In the US alone, sales of luxury goods enjoy a compound annual growth of 12%. (FT June 5, 2006 p.3) In contrast, the numbers of workers covered by company-financed health plans and pensions declined by the same percentage or greater every year. Inequality is the great motor force of capitalist accumulation — a clear consequence of rising profits based on greater exploitation.

Rising profits are clearly a sign that capitalism is expanding, not declining and that consolidation and not collapse is the defining reality. The conservative financial press has it right — not the Leftist doomsday pundits. “The rise and rise of US corporate profits” reads the FT editorial (June 10, 2006 p.6). US capitalism is experiencing a “historically unprecedented share of profits as a proportion of US gross domestic product . . .from 7% of GDP . . . in mid 2001 to 12.2% at the start of this year (Jan 2006).” (FT June 10, 2006) In direct contrast and a direct cause of rising profits, “the median US household income is 3 percent lower in 2006 than in 2000, according to the US census bureau.” (ibid)

Profits have climbed by 123% over the past 5 years, jumping from $714.5 billion to $1.6 trillion” Moreover official data show that manufacturing profits have outstripped the rest of the economy — calling into question the notion that US industry is being “hollowed out” or disappearing. Despite rising costs of raw materials — petroleum, copper, zinc, nickel and iron — profits rose because labor costs which represent 70% of corporate expenses is declining due to greater exploitation of male and female workers, legal and illegal immigrants and declining total wage and benefit packets.

Wall Street reports that Goldman, Sachs doubled its earnings in the second quarter of 2006 and forecasts for 2006 predict that new revenue for Wall Street banks will rise to $25 billion — double that of 2002. (FT, June 5, 2006 p. 17) It is time to get off our hands waiting for the “coming collapse (or decline) of capitalism.” The real issue is the declining living standards of US wage and salaried workers, the collapse of the welfare state, the extended work life and working hours, the job speed ups, the frequent firing and hiring of workers, the tension and insecurity of working families which accompany the unprecedented rates of revenue growth.

Conclusion

While ninety one percent of US private sector workers are unorganized and total subjects to the commands of their employers, while the nine percent of US private sector workers organized into trade unions are led by six-digit salaried bureaucrats who specialize in “giving back” to employers workers rights and remain as captives of the pro-business Democratic Party, there is no reason to expect any serious challenge to the status quo. As is likely to happen with a turn in the business cycle, the economy slows or even goes into recession and profit margins decrease, capitalism will simply turn the screw even tighter on working class and salaried workers” wages, impose more of the costs of recovery on their backs, pressure the Democrats and Republicans for greater Federal handouts, tax rebates and cuts in pursuit of recovery. Only if new social and political movements, leaders and activists stop pandering to the soothsayers of a coming “Collapse of Capitalism” and a future “systemic decline” and start engaging in a deeper and more profound analysis of the “Dirty Secret” (Marx) and the source of “Wealth of All Nations” (Adam Smith), in the exploitation of labor and the class struggle can a beginning be made toward denotating the foundations of capitalism and bringing about its collapse and replacement.

James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed). His book with Henry Veltmeyer, Social Movements and State Power: Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina, was published in October 2005. He can be reached at:jpetras@binghamton.edu.

Witness tied to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI

By Barry Grey and Nick Barrickman, wsws.org

Ibragim Todashev: Accidentally shot or an inconvenient witness?

Twenty-seven-year-old Ibragim Todashev was shot and killed early Wednesday morning while being interrogated by police and intelligence officials in an Orlando, Florida, apartment. Todashev, a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and, like Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen, was reportedly being questioned by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent from the FBI’s Boston field office, along with Massachusetts state troopers and counterterrorism officials.

The FBI claims that Todashev had implicated both himself and Tsarnaev in the grisly murder of three men in Waltham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, on September 11, 2011. They said he then suddenly pulled a knife and tried to attack the FBI agent questioning him. The attack, according to the FBI, prompted the lethal shooting.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police four days after two bombs detonated near the finish line of the April 15 marathon in downtown Boston killed three people and wounded 264 others. His younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, alleged to have participated with Tamerlan in the bombings, is being held in a Massachusetts prison hospital, charged with the capital crime of using a weapon of mass destruction.

One of the three men killed in Waltham in 2011 was a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a boxer and martial arts fighter. Brendan Mess, who, like the other two victims of the attack, had his throat slit, was also a boxer and trained at the same gym as Tsarnaev.

Todashev had lived in the Boston area before moving to Florida. A martial arts fighter, like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he had become friendly with his fellow Chechen. He reportedly last spoke to Tamerlan in April.

There is no reason to accept, as the media has uncritically done, the FBI’s version of Todashev’s death. The elimination of a witness renders even less credible the official line on the Boston bombings and the role of the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security and other police and intelligence agencies. It adds to the miasma of cover-up surrounding the Boston attack.

Khusen Taramov, 22, a friend of Todashev who was also questioned by the FBI, told several Orlando television outlets Wednesday morning that Todashev feared for his life. “He felt inside he was going to get shot,” Taramov said of his friend. “I told him, ‘Everything is going to be fine, don’t worry about it.’ He said, ‘I have a really bad feeling.’”

The events in Orlando also undermine the official story that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were “lone wolf” and “self-radicalized” individuals, with no connections to other groups. As the Orlando Sentinel reported Wednesday, “FBI sources also told [Orlando television channel] WESH that Todashev has extremist friends overseas.”

From the outset, the government has been eager to portray the Tsarnaevs as lone actors in an apparent effort to limit public information about the multiple contacts between federal police and intelligences agencies and the Tsarnaev family in the months leading up to the bombings, and advance warnings of Tamerlan’s Chechen separatist and Islamic fundamentalist sympathies and connections.

Once again, as in the September 11, 2001 attacks, the alleged perpetrators were well known to US police and intelligence and were being tracked, and the authorities ignored multiple warnings of an impending terror attack. Now, as then, in lieu of any explanation or accountability for, at the very least, a staggering intelligence failure, and, more plausibly, something more sinister, the resort is to the threadbare and all-purpose mantra of a “failure to connect the dots.”

Meanwhile, the Marathon bombings were used as a pretext to carry out a day-long lockdown of Boston and its suburbs, in which civil liberties were effectively suspended and state security forces tested out techniques for imposing a military dictatorship. The supposed security “lapses” are being cited as justification for giving the police and intelligence agencies even greater powers to spy on and repress the American people.

It has been acknowledged that in 2011 the FBI and CIA received multiple alerts from Russian authorities about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and that the elder Tsarnaev brother was placed on a number of terror watch lists. There are also reports of warnings from Saudi Arabian officials.

The FBI claims it conducted an investigation into Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 in which it questioned both Tamerlan and his parents but found nothing suspicious and closed the case. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security allowed Tamerlan to travel to the volatile North Caucasus region that includes Chechnya in January of 2012 and remain for six months, then return home without being stopped for questioning by customs or security officials on either leg of the trip.

There are multiple reports that while in Russia, Tamerlan sought out and made contact with known Islamist separatists who are waging a terror campaign against Russian authorities.

And yet, according to both Boston police and FBI Director Robert Mueller, Boston authorities were never informed of any of this information regarding the Tsarnaevs in advance of the Marathon, a mass event that attracts tens of thousands of people from all over the world. Instead, the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force was reportedly tracking Occupy Wall Street activists.

The FBI’s current charge that Tamerlan, and possibly Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were involved in the triple slaying in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 2011 underscores the unbelievable character of its claim that it could find nothing suspicious about Tamerlan when it carried out its probe that year, and had no reason to reopen its investigation thereafter.

The FBI could not have failed to discover the close connection between Tamerlan and one of the victims of the triple homicide, making absurd its supposed finding of “no derogatory” information regarding him.

Far more plausible than the official story is the likelihood that US intelligence agencies, including the FBI, were using, or planned to use, Tamerlan Tsarnaev to further their operations with Islamist separatist forces in the North Caucasus, with whom they have been working for many years. These operations include Washington’s machinations in Russia and the former Soviet republics, as well as its use of Chechen Islamist terrorists in its neo-colonial wars in the Middle East, including the current US proxy war in Syria.

Obama’s War on Free Expression

by Stephen Lendman

It’s the most fundamental right. Without it all others are endangered. Obama’s waging war to destroy it. He’s done so throughout his tenure. He targeted AP. He did so unjustifiably. A previous article discussed it.

It was lawless intrusion. It intimidates journalists, potential whistleblowers, valued sources, and others. It warns them against challenging or disclosing information Washington wants kept secret.

Obama’s done it numerous times before. He’s waging war on truth. He’s targeted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are best known. Others faced similar abuse. Fox News reporter James Rosen is another target. Headlines just revealed it. Since around 2010, his phone records were monitored. They were obtained for a defined period. His emails were read. His personal movements were tracked.

At issue are fundamental constitutional rights. They’ve been eroding for years. Obama’s waging war to destroy them altogether.

Candidate Obama called whistleblowing “acts of courage and patriotism.” His official document for change headlined “The Change We Need in Washington.”

It discussed promises to do so. He systematically spurned them. He did so across the board. He pledged whistleblower protection, saying:

“Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out.”

“Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often taxpayers dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration.”

“We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance.”

“Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government.”

“Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.”

He implied protection and encouragement for America’s fourth estate. He’s targeted them and government whistleblowers ruthlessly. He exploits secrecy and other repressive laws doing so. He claims a national security priority. America’s kept safe, he stresses. It’s never been closer to full-blown tyranny. He’s advancing it for our own good, he implies.

He’s manipulating public sentiment to concur. Sacrificing freedom for security assures losing both.

So-called free flow of information or shield laws protect journalists. If properly drafted, they’re freed from disclosing confidential sources and documents. Doing so assures they and informants won’t be silenced. It protects them from threat of prosecution. It forces Washington to prove a compelling need. It requires evidence outweighing journalists’ nondisclosure/confidentiality rights.

Numerous US states provide these protections. No federal law exists. In 2007, Free Flow of Information Act legislation passed the House. In 2008, it failed in the Senate. Its version fell short of full immunity. It permitted federal judges to declare some confidentially obtained information subject to disclosure. Bush administration officials felt not enough. They opposed the measure.

In 2009, proposed Shield Act legislation failed to pass. Obama opposed protecting reporters from imprisonment and/or fines for refusing to disclose confidential sources leaking alleged national security information. Initial legislation weighed “the public interest in gathering news and maintaining the free flow of information” against national security considerations.

Obama proposed sweeping revisions. He wants press freedom compromised. In 2011, House and Senate Shield Law versions were introduced. They targeted free expression and whistleblowers. Both died in committee.

Attorney General Eric Holder supported harsh Shield Law provisions, saying:

“To the extent there are gaps in the laws, we will move to close those gaps. The Shield Act will help close these holes in the law.”

At the time, Congressional Research Service (CRS) legislative attorney Jennifer Elsea said:

Espionage Act provisions apply “to the receipt and unauthorized dissemination of national defense information, which has been interpreted broadly to cover closely held government materials related to US military operations, facilities and personnel.”

“It has been interpreted to cover the activities of foreign nationals overseas….”

“The Supreme Court has stated….that the question remains open whether the publication of unlawfully obtained information by the media can be punished consistent with the First Amendment.”

“Thus, although unlawful acquisition of information might be subject to criminal prosecution with few First Amendment implications, the publication of that information remains protected.”

“Whether the publication of national security information can be punished likely turns on the value of the information to the public weighed against the likelihood of identifiable harm to the national security, arguably a more difficult case for prosecutors to make.”

CRS called prosecuting WikiLeaks unprecedented and challenging. It’s so legally and politically.

“We are aware of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it,” she added.

At issue are First Amendment rights and “concerns about government censor(ing)” information the public has a right to know. In 2011, House and Senate Shield Act versions targeted whistleblowers. They amended the 1917 Espionage Act. They criminalized free speech. They compromised the public’s right to know how their elected officials govern. Suppressing truth is the first step toward tyranny. America’s on a fast track toward it.

In December 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said:

“The debate about the wisdom of releasing secret government documents has turned into a massive attack on the right of intermediaries to publish truthful information. Suddenly, WikiLeaks has become the Internet’s scapegoat….”

“Like it or not, WikiLeaks has become the emblem for one of the most important battles for our rights that is likely to come along in our lifetimes. We cannot sit this one out.”

Earlier Shield Act legislation criminalized good journalism. It did so for knowingly and willfully publishing material on human intelligence activities conducted by America or other governments.

Doing so responsibly is what investigative journalists do. It’s their job. First Amendment rights protect them. In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court ruled government can’t punish inflammatory speech unless directed to incite lawless action. In Texas v. Johnson, Justice William Brennan wrote the majority opinion, saying:

“(I)f there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.”

Former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said:

“Above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression (regardless of its) ideas, subject matter (or) content.”

“Our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship.”

Thomas Jefferson warned:

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance.” Free expression “cannot be limited without being lost.”

Governments often overstate secrecy needs. Except under clear and present danger circumstances, doing so’s unjustifiable. Candidate Obama pledged openness and transparency. He repeatedly denounced Bush administration secrecy. He called it “one of the most secretive administrations in our nation’s history.”

“It’s no coincidence (that it) favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to the sunlight.”

“As president,” he vowed, “I’m going to change that. “The American people want to trust in our government again – we just need a government that will trust in us.”

“And making government accountable to the people isn’t just a cause of this campaign – it’s been a cause of my life for two decades.”

Straightaway as president, a White House statement headlined “Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov,” saying:

“President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history.”

In 2010, he said:

“I will not stop fighting to open up government. (W)e have put in place the toughest transparency rules in history.”

Throughout his tenure, his policies belied his rhetoric. He exceeded the worst of George Bush. He’s obsessed with secrecy. According to ACLU staff attorney Alexander Abdo:

“We’ve seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government’s interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority.”

“In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration.”

He’s gone out of his way to find new ways to do it. He’s waging war on free expression and other constitutional rights. He seeks legislative cover to disguise it.

On May 15, The New York Times headlined “Criticized on Seizure of Records, White House Pushes News Media Shield Law,” saying:

“Under fire over” AP spying, he sought “to revive legislation that would provide greater protections to reporters in keeping their sources and communications confidential.”

His way of doing it falls woefully short of what’s needs. He wants full immunity avoided. He wants federal judges able to declare some confidentially obtained information subject to disclosure.

He opposes protecting reporters from imprisonment and/or fines for refusing to disclose confidential sources providing alleged national security information. He’s waging war on press freedom. He’s done so throughout his tenure. He wants Shield Law cover for easier enforcement.

Perhaps he’ll get it this time around. Enactment will further erode free expression. It’s on the chopping block for elimination. Alleged national security concerns don’t wash. They’re cover to destroy what’s too precious to lose.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Red State Hypocrites: Inhofe and Coburn

Salon [1] / By Joan Walsh [2]

Oklahoma's James Inhofe: climate change denier and a poster boy for political corruption,and rightwing meanness, this man should be in jail, not presiding over the destiny of a great nation.

Oklahoma’s James Inhofe: climate change denier and poster boy for political corruption and rightwing meanness, this abject bastard should be in jail, not presiding over the destiny of a great nation.

Just a week ago, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe suggested that President Obama might be impeached over the Benghazi non-scandal. Now, Inhofe must watch as Obama declares Inhofe’s state a disaster area and promises Oklahomans “all the resources they need at their disposal.”

Inhofe, of course, believes his state deserves those resources, even though he voted down aid to Hurricane Sandy victims. On MSNBC, Chris Jansing confronted Inhofe about his calling the Sandy aid bill a “slush fund,” and the brazen right-winger insisted the two issues shouldn’t be linked.

“Let’s look at that, that was totally different,” Inhofe told Jansing. “They were getting things — for instance that was supposed to be in New Jersey, they had things in the Virgin Islands, they were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.; everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy taking place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

Inhofe’s answer is too dishonest to fully parse. First of all, there was Sandy damage way beyond New Jersey, including in the Caribbean and in Washington, D.C., too. And Inhofe had different objections to the Sandy bill at the time. In a rambling, hard-to-follow Senate floor speech blocking Sandy aid last December, the Oklahoma conservative objected to the bill’s timing — “There’s always a lot of theater right before Christmas time … We shouldn’t be talking about it right before Christmas” — even though it was already going on two months since the storm ravaged the East Coast.

Inhofe was also exercised by the fact that the Sandy bill included what he said was $28 billion for future disasters. But the climate-change denier was particularly outraged that the bill included $3.5 billion to deal with what he called “global warming,” which led to a long rant against cap-and-trade legislation, and then his floor speech unraveled. (Interestingly, Inhofe’s own press operation put the incoherent speech up on YouTube [3], as though it was a proud moment for the senator.)

Oklahoma’s other GOP senator, Tom Coburn, brags that he’s going to seek tornado relief — but insist that the funding is “offset” by other cuts to the federal budget. Coburn is proud that he’s being consistent by placing the same conditions on disaster aid to his own state as he’s demanded elsewhere. Consistent, maybe — but also fundamentally cruel.

Especially in the wake of the sequester cuts, the notion that the federal budget is larded with easily eliminated spending is ludicrous. Would Coburn like to see more kids thrown out of Head Start? More seniors losing Meals on Wheels? The federal deficit is shrinking faster than at any time since just after World War II, but Coburn is going to insist that someone, somewhere, must lose their federal help so Oklahoma can get it instead.

There’s something so typical about today’s GOP in the way Inhofe can dismiss comparisons between tornado aid and Sandy aid while Coburn grandstands for his long-term demand that new spending, even on disaster relief, must be “offset” by cuts elsewhere. Meanwhile, the notion that a new disaster relief bill should include funding to cope with future disasters isn’t lauded as common sense, it’s derided as pork. Like Inhofe, Coburn objected to the Sandy bill’s including funding for future disaster relief. (It should be noted that Moore, Okla., Rep. Tom Cole, also a Republican, voted for the Sandy aid bill.)

Just as modern conservatism helped create categories of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, we now apparently have deserving and undeserving disasters. When tragedy strikes, most Americans tend to want to pull together, but many Republicans look to pull us apart, placing their own constituents’ needs above everyone else’s.

________________________

AlterNet [1] / By Alex Kane [2]

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn Demands Tornado Relief Be Offset by Cuts Elsewhere

May 21, 2013 |

Sen. Coburn: A disgrace as a doctor and a politician, but to be expected from states with extremely benighted constituencies.

Sen. Tom Coburn: A disgrace as a doctor and a politician. His type is to be expected from states with extremely gullible constituencies.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has consistently balked at emergency funding in the aftermath of disasters–and a powerful tornado that ripped through his home state isn’t changing that. Coburn is making headlines by insisting that any aid to his state be offset by federal spending cuts elsewhere.

CQ Roll Call’s Jennifer Scholtes reports [3] that Coburn said he would “absolutely” demand the offsets. Coburn has also voted for cutting the amount of aid allocated to victims of Hurricane Sandy. A Coburn spokesman told the Huffington Post [4] that the Senator “makes no apologies for voting against disaster aid bills that are often poorly conceived and used to finance priorities that have little to do with disasters.”

Coburn’s callous position was announced as the death toll and devastation in Oklahoma was coming into full view. Yesterday, a tornado tore through parts of Oklahoma City and its suburbs and flattened a hospital and two schools. The death toll currently stands at 24, with at least 240 people injured. An estimated 60 of the injured were children.

One school “was reduced to a pile of twisted metal and toppled walls,” the New York Times reports. [5]Yahoo News! spoke to Stuart Earnest Jr. [6], who witnessed the destruction of the Plaza Towers Elementary school. “All you could hear were screams,” he said. “The people screaming for help. And the people trying to help were also screaming.”

“Numerous neighborhoods were completely leveled,” Sgt. Gary Knight of the Oklahoma City Police Department told the Times. “Neighborhoods just wiped clean.” Emergency crews continued to search for survivors.

President Obama has declared some Oklahoma counties to be disaster areas, which allows federal funding to be start to flow to the state.

CNN reports [7] that more storms part of the same weather patterns could hit more states, putting 53 million at risk. “Tornadoes could strike the Plains, but likely not in devastated Moore, Oklahoma, where the threat of severe weather has diminished. In the bull’s-eye Tuesday are parts of north-central Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, and northern Arkansas and Louisiana, according to the National Weather Service,” the news outlet reported.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/red-state-hypocrites-inhofe-and-coburn

Links:
[1] http://www.salon.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joan-walsh-0
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/21/inhofe-tornado-totally-different-from-hurricane-sandy/
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/inhofe
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/coburn-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/oklahoma
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

The Shame of the Fourth Estate

From our archives: articles you should have read when they first appeared but missed.

The mainstream media’s long-time kid-glove treatment of Andrew Breitbart led directly to the unjustified ouster of Shirley Sherrod.

By Charles Kaiser

[Originally: July 26, 2010 ]

This piece was first published by the Hillman Foundation.

Let me make this utterly clear: What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites, is the utter and complete perversion of journalism, and it can have no place in a civilized society. It is words crashed together, never to inform, only to inflame. It is a political guillotine. It is the manipulation of reality to make the racist seem benevolent, and to convict the benevolent as racist—even if her words must be edited, filleted, stripped of all context, rearranged, fabricated, and falsified, to do so.

What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites… is a manipulation. Not just of a story, not just on behalf of a political philosophy. Manipulation of a society, its intentional redirection from reality and progress, to a paranoid delusion and the fomenting of hatred of Americans by Americans…The assassins of the Right have been enabled on the Left.

— Keith Olbermann’s special comment on the Sherrod debacle

It has become fashionable to dismiss Keith Olbermann as an over-the-top ranter—or as the MSNBC host put it himself, “a mirror image of that which I assail.” But there was nothing over-the-top about his special comment about Shirley Sherrod. Every word he spoke was true. And the only thing that made his stance so remarkable is the abject failure of the mainstream media—especially this week—to accurately describe the source of the allegation against Sherrod, or to chronicle the long-term impact of the “complete perversion of journalism” practiced 365 days a year by Fox News (and the right-wing bloggers and radio hosts that make up the rest of this wackosphere).

The “enabling” Olbermann so accurately describes consists of a nonchalant attitude among most media swells toward Rupert Murdoch’s main propaganda machine—”oh, that’s just Fox”—melded with an inculcation by these same writers of the main “value” informing almost every judgment made in America today: if it makes a lot of money, it must be a wonderful thing.

The perversion of journalism produced by the fusion of these two attitudes has led us directly to the perversion of society we witnessed this week, when a Democratic White House and the nation’s oldest civil rights organization both behaved in a precipitous, craven, and disgusting fashion, purely out of fear of how they would be treated by a band of vicious charlatans—men and women who are inexplicably treated by everyone from the New York Times to the Today show as if they were actual journalists.

Here are some of the media choices, each of them chronicled by Full Court Press over the last two years, that have pushed us to this terrible place.

* A gushing page-one profile of Glenn Beck in the New York Times by Brian Stelter and Bill Carter, which celebrated his impressive ratings soon after his arrival at Fox: “Mr. Beck presents himself as a revivalist in a troubled land.… Mr. Beck’s emotions are never far from the surface. ‘That’s good dramatic television,’ said Phil Griffin, the president of a Fox rival, MSNBC. ‘That’s who Glenn Beck is.'”

* Time magazine‘s decision to ask Glenn Beck to assess Rush Limbaugh’s importance in America for the 2009 Time 100: “His consistency, insight and honesty have earned him a level of trust with his listeners that politicians can only dream of.”

* A decision by the editors of washingtonpost.com to allow Beck to host a chat there to promote one of his books.

* This hard-hitting assessment of Beck by Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik, who gurgled on, “Sure, he may be selling a sensationalistic message of paranoia and social breakdown. But politics, or basic responsibility, aside, he has an entertainer’s sense of play with the medium of TV that O’Reilly, or perpetual sourpuss Neil Cavuto, don’t.” And why would anybody care about a basic sense of responsibility, anyway?

* A worshipful 1,943-word profile of Fox News founder and president Roger Ailes by David Carr and Tim Arango on the front page of the New York Times—which included this perfectly amoral quote from David Gergen, a perfectly amoral man:

“Regardless of whether you like what he is doing, Roger Ailes is one of the most creative talents of his generation. He has built a media empire that is capable of driving the conversation, and, at times, the political process.” And what a wonderful conversation it is.

* And finally, the most sickening piece of all in this splendid cohort: David von Drehele‘s obscenely sycophantic cover story of Beck for Time magazine, which told us that Beck is a “man with his ear uniquely tuned to the precise frequency at which anger, suspicion and the fear that no one’s listening all converge;” that he is “tireless, funny, [and]self-deprecating…a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies—if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn’t, necessarily; he’s just asking.”

In a rare and honorable exception to this parade of journalistic disasters, earlier this month Dana Milbank did mention the role of Beck in the creation of the current climate of paranoia:

These sentiments have long existed on the fringe and always will. The problem is that conservative leaders and Republican politicians, in their blind rage against Obama these last 18 months, invited the epithets of the fringe into the mainstream.… Consider these tallies from Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News since Obama’s inauguration: 202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism, according to transcripts, 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels. Most of these were directed in some form at Obama—as were the majority of the 802 mentions of socialist or socialism on Beck’s nightly “report.”

But far worse than the kid-gloves treatment of Fox and its friends was the inexplicably benign approach the MSM took toward Andrew Brietbart, the original source of the doctored video of Sherrod’s speech before the NAACP that started this whole sorry saga.

In the Washington Post, he was a “conservative activist and blogger”; in Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s story in the Times, he was “a blogger” who “similarly…used edited videos to go after ACORN, the community organizing group;” in the Wall Street Journal he was “a conservative Internet activist” who “argued that the Obama administration is insufficiently sensitive to bias against white people”; in the Los Angeles Times, “a conservative media entrepreneur” and to Associated Press television writer David Bauder a “conservative activist” whose website “attracted attention last year for airing video of workers at the community group ACORN counseling actors posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend.”

But to find out who Breitbart really is, you would have had to read (h/t Joe Stouter) Joe Conason in Salon, who, “recalling Breitbart from his days as eager lackey to Matt Drudge...warned from the beginning that nothing he produced would resemble journalism.”

Although there was not a hint of this in any of the stories I’ve quoted from above, O’Keefe’s ACORN story was actually a “‘scandal’ that became a national story only after wildly biased coverage on Fox News Channel, followed by sloppy, scared reporting in mainstream outlets, notably the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the national TV networks (some of whom flagellated themselves for failing to publicize this canard sooner!)” as Conason put it. He continued:

Investigations by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes, California Attorney General Jerry Brown, and the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, among others, have served to exonerate ACORN of the most outrageous charges of criminality (while still criticizing ACORN employees and leadership). More important, from the perspective of journalistic ethics, those investigations revealed that the videotapes released and promoted by Breitbart’s website were selectively and deceptively edited to serve as propaganda, not news.”

The Harshbarger report, commissioned by ACORN’s own board of directors, pointed to signs of chicanery when it was released last December. Although O’Keefe, his associate and fake “prostitute” Hannah Giles and Breitbart all refused to speak with Harshbarger, his researchers at the Proskauer Rose law firm were able to make preliminary comparisons between audio and video files on the Big Government website…

Amazingly, the New York Times never covered the Harshbarger report and gave little or no coverage to the other deconstructions of the Big Government “scoop” by law enforcement. Last March, when Hoyt finally offered an excuse for the failure of the Times to adequately correct and explain the complex truth behind Breitbart’s ACORN scam, it sounded weak.

The report by Harshbarger…was not covered by The Times. It should have been, but the Acorn/O’Keefe story became something of an orphan at the paper. At least 14 reporters, reporting to different sets of editors, have touched it since last fall. Nobody owns it. Bill Keller, the executive editor, said that, “sensing the story would not go away and would be part of a larger narrative,” the paper should have assigned one reporter to be responsible for it.”

So, having repeatedly blown the aftermath of the ACORN story, the Times compounded its error by giving its readers no hint whatsoever this week of Breitbart’s nefarious background.

The single most ridiculous story of the week was written by “media reporter” Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post. Howie — as only Howie could, being a man of limitless energy and no judgment — decided the most interesting angle of the Sherrod affair was Fox’s lack of responsibility in promoting it. “Ousted official Shirley Sherrod blamed Fox, but other outlets ran with story,” was the headline over Kurtz’s report.

Kurtz said this was true because Fox did not mention the story until after Sherrod had been forced to resign — and he reported that Fox Senior Vice President Michael Clemente had seen an e-mail to his staff which said: “Let’s take our time and get the facts straight on this story. Can we get confirmation and comments from Sherrod before going on-air? Let’s make sure we do this right.”

However, Clemente’s memorandum did not prevent Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity from convicting Sherrod of her alleged crime on both of their programs on Monday night, even though neither of them had reached Sherrod as Clemente had directed. And it didn’t prevent the wall-to-wall character assassination which the network engaged in all day Tuesday, until the full, exonerating version of the tape of Sherrod’s speech was finally made public by the NAACP Tuesday night. (As one wise FCP friend observed, “It’s great to know they do have standards–even if they never bother to observe them.”)

Kurtz’s piece prompted FCP to ask him, “Did you ask anyone at Fox why every program there ignored this e-mail from Clemente and ran the story into the ground all day Tuesday–before getting confirmation or comments from Sherrod?”

This was Kurtz’s reply:

My focus was on what if anything was reported before Shirley Sherrod resigned. Lots of media outlets, including CNN and MSNBC and a zillion Web sites, ran with the story on Tuesday once the Agriculture Department fired Sherrod. Fox may have done it with more frequency and more enthusiasm, but it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t a story at all once the firing was confirmed.

Of course there was one small difference between Fox and CNN. While the conservative network spent thirty-six hours constantly repeating the false charge of racism against Sherrod, CNN actually tried to locate the truth about the allegation against her.

That allegation, by the way, was even more disgusting because of these facts: Shirley Sherrod’s father was murdered by white men who were never prosecuted for that crime. And as the indispensable Doug Ireland has pointed out, Sherrod’s husband, Charles Sherrod “was a real hero to many of us in the ’60s for his key role as a leader in SNCC in building an INTER-RACIAL civil rights movement. Charlie left SNCC when Stokely Carmichael took it over, expelled white folks, and adopted ‘black power’ as its ideology, in order to continue building a black-and-white movement in Georgia. The notion that Charlie’s wife could have been guilty of what’s being called ‘reverse racism’ against whites is therefore douibly ludicrous. Some of us who knew Charlie back when, however, haven’t forgotten his shining example.”

Thanks to Rick Sanchez’s intrepid producers, CNN tracked down the farmer Sherrod had supposedly discriminated against, because he was white, and learned that farmer revered Sherrod, because her efforts were the only thing which had prevented him from losing his farm twenty-five years ago. (Brietbart responded by attacking the “purported story of the farmer”–which is one more reason that Olbermann’s description of Breitbart is so accurate: “a pornographer of propaganda.”)

Since Kurtz has written laudatory profiles of Ari Fleischer, Rich Lowry, Bill Kristol and yes, even Sean Hannity, it was not a big surprise that the Washington Post reporter pointedly ignored Fox’s true role in the Sherrod affair.

For that you had to watch Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night, when she pointed out that Fox’s hyping of the Sherrod story was just part of the same old pattern of exaggerating the sins of ACORN, hounding Van Jones out of office, and making the alleged harrassment of voters by two members of the New Black Panther Party into a story just slightly less significant than World War II.

All the network was doing, Rachel explained, was to continue the 40 year-old Southern Strategy of the Republican Party, which can be summarized this way: “Be afraid, white people. There’s a threat to take you over. The black people are coming for you…and you better band together to not surrender, to fight back.”

And it was because Fox has stoked these fears so effectively that the Obama White House and the NAACP behaved so badly in response to the latest ludicrous accusation against one of its appointees.

As David Ehrenstein pointed out in a comment on FCP’s previous post about Sherrod, “As you well know, Charlie, being that Rachel Maddow is liberal — and therefore “biased” in the eyes of the “Mainstream Media” — her words are to be ignored. By contrast conservatives (or more to the point in Breibart’s case fascists) are never to be ignored. Their every word and deed must be regarded with utmost seriousness. The situation is so bad that the offhand snark of a conservative writer, Dave Weigel, comically dissing other conservatives, cost him his job at” the Washington Post.

We leave the last word to Keith Olbermann, because he had the very best advice for the president:

…You must, at long last, Sir, come to terms with the fact that while you have spent these first 18 months and one day of your presidency bending over backwards for those others, they have spent this time insisting you are not actually president, or you are a communist, or you are bent on destroying whatever is starring this week in the paranoid fantasies churned out by Fox News and the farcical Breitbart.

If only for the arrogance of the irony – that this Crusade to prove you a foreign influence is led by an Australian named Murdoch and his sons who pretend to be British, and his second largest shareholder Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia—you, Sir, must stand up to this attack on you, and on this nation. Their game-plan is transparent:

They can strand together all the forces of anti-black racism in this country, direct them at you and all for which you and this nation stand, and convince the great unwashed and unthinking out there that not only are they not racists, but you, you Barack Obama, and Van Jones, and Shirley Sherrod, you are the real racists, and so in opposing you they are not expressing the worst vestige of our past, but are actually standing up against it.

As you stay silent and neutral and everybody’s President, they are gradually convincing racists that they are civil rights leaders and you are Police Chief Bull Connor. And then some idiot at Fox news barks, and your people throw an honorable public servant under the nearest bus, just for the sake of ‘decisive action’ and the correct way to respond in this atmosphere.

Mr. President, please stop trying to act, every minute, like some noble, neutral figure, chairing a government of equal and dispassionate minds, and contemplative scholars.

It is a freaking war out here, and the imagined consensus you seek is years in the future, if ever it is to be re-discovered.

This false consensus has gotten us only the crucifixion of Van Jones, and a racist gold-shilling buffoon speaking from the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th Anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, and now it has gotten us Shirley Sherrod. And your answer is to note a “disservice” and an “injustice.”

Sir, get a copy of the Michael Douglas movie “The American President.” When you get to the line where he says “I was so busy keeping my job, I forgot to do my job”—hit the rewind button.

Twenty times.

About the Author

Charles Kaiser writes Full Court Press for the Sidney Hillman foundation. He is the author of The Gay Metropolis and…

here.

a reported piece on Tuesday morning by James Rosen, which included Sherrod’s version of the story, as well as the exculpatory part of Sherrod’s piece which had already run on another network. Rosen said that part of the speech “appeared to corroborate her claim that she was trying to unite her audience in racial tolerance.”

FCP regrets the omission.