FAIR dispatch: NewsHour Responds on Inequality

Media Turd Paul Solman: Defending inequality.

After FAIR’s recent action alert (10/27/11) concerning the PBS NewsHour‘s reports minimizing–and even celebrating–economic inequality, NewsHour correspondent Paul Solman posted a long response on the PBS website (10/31/11) that attempted to answer the criticism.

Solman began by expressing his appreciation for the “avalanche” of feedback, “hostile though most of it has been.” He admits that guest Richard Epstein (10/26/11)–who made the case in favor of inequality–was incorrect to attribute this quote to Abraham Lincoln: “You do not make the poor rich by making the rich poor.”

But then Solman writes that the sentiment behind it is beyond dispute:

But when I reread the quote, who would disagree with it? Who thinks you help the poor by destroying the rich? (Boetcker and Reagan’s version.) Or make the poor rich by making the rich poor? (Epstein’s.) Maybe Stalin, or Steve the Talking Parrot, but I’m sure Lincoln didn’t believe this, even if he never said it. And neither do the most passionate champions of greater economic equality in America.
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Epstein, of course, wasn’t citing Lincoln because he thought people were literally proposing to put the homeless in mansions and billionaires on Skid Row; rather, he was using a revered president as a spurious authority for his argument that you can’t help the poor by taxing the wealthy. And, according to a recent New York Times poll (10/26/11), vast majorities of the public do support raising taxes on the wealthy and the redistribution of wealth. It’s not likely that they’re all Stalinists or parrots.

The NewsHour attached a note to the online transcript of Epstein’s interview noting that he incorrectly attributed the quote to Lincoln, but the show has not set the record straight for its viewers. It’s worth noting that Epstein’s Lincoln is quite at odds with the real thing, who told Congress–12/3/1861–“Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration,” and complained (c. 12/1/1847) that “in all ages of the world…some have labored, and others have without labor enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue.”

Solman goes on to recall other reports he has produced for the NewsHour over the years, including one from 1992 that tracked the decline of middle-class wages via the Bunker family from the TV show All in the Family. In trying to understand the “wrath” of the email responses, he writes:

People are reacting to what they’ve just seen and heard–Lerman or Epstein–not contextualizing those interviews in terms of dramatically dissimilar stories about Archie and Edith Bunker from a generation–or even a few weeks–before.

It’s true that most people cannot recall a segment from the PBS newscast from 1992. They do recall what they just saw, and might recall the segment before it (9/21/11)–where guest Bob Lerman attempted to argue that inequality isn’t as bad as it seems because seniors get Medicare benefits (FAIR Blog, 9/26/11).

Solman is on solider ground when he suggests that

what I take to be significant is the sense of outrage–that economic inequality can by this point be in any way minimized or justified by anyone. If there’s a driving theme to the “Occupy” movement, as we suggested in our coverage of the New York branch, it’s the inequality divide.

That seems more likely. And since Solman mentions Occupy Wall Street, it is worth mentioning–as the PBS ombudsman Michael Getler observed (10/4/11)–that the NewsHour was mostly uninterested in these protests when they started.

Given that two of the program’s most recent reports on inequality are devoted to minimizing inequality, it is not surprising that NewsHour viewers would be alarmed by this shift in focus. Asking viewers to give the show credit for a segment from 20 years back misses the point.

Thanks to all the activists who participated in the avalanche.

ADDENDUM

REPORT    AIR DATE: Oct. 26, 2011 (PBS’ NewsHour)

Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side?

SUMMARY

A new Congressional Budget Office analysis supports the idea that income inequality has grown considerably over the past few decades. As part of his Making Sen$e series on economic inequality, Paul Solman talks to libertarian law professor Richard Epstein, who argues that wealth inequality acts as a driving force for innovation.

Transcript

JEFFREY BROWN: Now to our own continuing series on inequality.

A new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office supports the idea that income inequality has grown considerably over the past few decades. The report found that household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007 for the wealthiest 1 percent of the population. For the rest of the top fifth of the country, it grew by 65 percent. By contrast, the bottom fifth of the population saw its income grow by just 18 percent.

IN-DEPTH COVERAGE

Making Sen$e

ARTICLE TOOLS

Richard Epstein. He teaches at New York University School of Law.

 

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The Guys in the 1% Brought This On

Barbara Ehrenreich 

At the risk of being pedantic, let me point out that “99% versus 1%” is not a class analysis, not in any respectable sociological sense. Shave off the top 1% and you’re still left with some awfully steep divides of wealth, income and opportunity. The 99% includes the ordinary rich, for example, who may lack private jets but do have swimming pools and second homes. It also includes the immigrant workers who mow their lawns and clean their houses for them. This is not a class. It’s just the default category left after you subtract the billionaires.

Some of the diversity of the 99% is clearly on display at the variations [we observe in the]  occupations around the country. I’ve seen occupiers who look like they picked up their camping skills on vacations in the national parks, as well as those who normally make their homes on the streets, even when they’re not protesting. Occupy Wall Street has attracted contingents of airplane pilots, electricians and construction workers -– the latter often from the new World Trade Center being built a block away. You’ll also find schoolteachers, professors, therapists, office workers and, of course, the usual crusty punks of indistinct provenance and profession. In Washington, I met one occupier wearing a crisp blue dress shirt and a tie emblazoned with tiny elephants. He said he was a Republican, a lawyer, and he’d had enough.

Then there are the poorest of the poor – the unemployed, the foreclosed upon, the chronically homeless. In Los Angeles, traditional residents of Skid Row have begun to join the occupation encampment. When about 150 people met to plan their local occupation in a union hall in Fort Wayne earlier this week, they solicited advice from already-homeless people in the crowd, who had first-hand experience of where the police are most heavy-handed and where you’re most likely to find a nutritious dumpster or a public toilet. For the homeless, joining an occupation brings instant upward mobility: free food — not entirely vegan, I have been relieved to discover — and, in some cases, Port-a-potties and the rudiments of medical care. 

The evident poverty of so many of the occupiers has left the right sputtering for apt denunciations. In the ’60s, neoconservative intellectuals looked at student protesters and saw the political avant-garde of a “new class” or “liberal elite,” bent on taking power and imposing their own twisted combination of sexual libertarianism and Soviet-style Communism. The neocons accused the protestors of being the privileged, “spoiled” children of a “permissive” upper middle class, and utterly alien to salt-of-the-earth working class Americans. There was just enough truth to this accusation to make a few of us young radicals flinch.

I saw one community organizing effort crash on the class divide between earnest Marxist professors, who thought meetings were a good site for “political education,” and blue collar recruits who thought meetings should be social occasions adequately lubricated with alcohol. In the ’70s, Minneapolis was the site of the “twinkie wars,” in which a food co-op was torn apart between the conflicting demands of working class omnivores and middle class organic purists. At the absolute nadir of New Left-working class relations, in 1970, 200 union construction workers attacked a student anti-war protest near Wall Street—not far from where construction workers now take lunch breaks with the protesters in Zuccotti Park.

For decades, as Tom Frank and others have documented, the right exulted in its clever diagnosis: Anyone who raises his or her voice on behalf the downtrodden is in fact an “elitist.” “Real” Americans loyally align themselves with the wealthy and their corporations. And, at least for a couple of years, the Tea Party seemed to make the fantasy come true. Although heavily funded by billionaires and thickly populated by prosperous suburban business owners, the Tea Party did manage to attract some representatives of the unemployed and uninsured, like the financially shaky California man I interviewed in 2009 who told me he would happily forgo health insurance if that’s what he had to do to “stop socialism.”

But today, even the college-educated among the occupiers no longer fit the sloppiest notion of an “elite.” This is the student debt generation, which graduated with five- to six-figure dollar debts and no jobs in sight –- people like thirty-three-year-old Cryn Johannsen, who has MA’s from both Brown and the University of Chicago and now works as an unpaid full-time “warrior for the indentured educated class.” Forty years ago, someone with Cryn’s credentials would be settling into a tenure track academic job, complete with health insurance and maybe even a housing subsidy. When I first met her about two years ago, she was working as a sales clerk in a department store. Now she lives with her in-laws and hustles for bits of money to keep her on the road, organizing occupations.

The class contours of American society (and no doubt Greek and Irish and many others as well) have been redrawn since the last great outbreak of mass protest in the ’60s. True, a college education still offers a lifetime earnings advantage; the unemployed lawyer faces a brighter future than the laid-off sanitation and call center workers she confers with at an occupation encampment’s general assembly. But the parts of the middle class once lumped together by the right as a “liberal elite” have been severely eroded, its core occupations go underfunded and exploited. Promising young academics end up as adjuncts earning near the minimum wage; social workers face starting pay in the neighborhood of $12 an hour; lawyers from non-Ivy League law schools may find themselves toiling in basement “legal sweatshops.”

So the “99% versus the 1%” theme is beginning to look like an acute class analysis after all, and it’s the guys in the 1% who made it so. Over the years, they have systematically hollowed out the space around them: destroying the industrial working class with the outsourcings and plant closures of the ’80s, turning on white collar managers in the downsizing wave of the ’90s, clearing large swathes of the middle class with the credit schemes of the ’00’s—the trick mortgages and till-death-do-we-part student loans.

In the ’60s we dreamed of uniting people of all races and collar colors into “one big working class.” But it took the billionaires to make it happen.

BARBARA EHRENREICH is a veteran social critic and political activist. Her books and articles constitute a treasure for the American left. 

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KULTURKAMPF: Debunking postmodernist mumbo jumbo (archives)

(From our archives—articles you should have read the first time around, but missed) 

By Alan D. Sokal 
Department of Physics 
New York University 
4 Washington Place 
New York, NY 10003 USA 
Internet: SOKAL@NYU.EDU 
Telephone: (212) 998-7729 
Fax: (212) 995-4016  

The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is — second only to American political campaigns — the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.  — Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (1990)

Editor’s Note:  

A. Sokal

Why did I do it? While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious. What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text  raises important questions that no scientist should ignore — questions, for example, about how corporate and government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to further the discussion of these matters.

In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do  matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths — the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language.

Social Text‘s acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory — meaning postmodernist literarytheory — carried to its logical extreme. No wonder they didn’t bother to consult a physicist. If all is discourse and “text,” then knowledge of the real world is superfluous; even physics becomes just another branch of Cultural Studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and “language games,” then internal logical consistency is superfluous too: a patina of theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors and puns substitute for evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely modest example of this well-established genre.

Politically, I’m angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. We’re witnessing here a profound historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful — not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent turn of many “progressive” or “leftist” academic humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social critique. Theorizing about “the social construction of reality” won’t help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity.

The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Textliked my article because they liked its conclusion: that “the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.” They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.

Of course, I’m not oblivious to the ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment. Professional communities operate largely on trust; deception undercuts that trust. But it is important to understand exactly what I did. My article is a theoretical essay based entirely on publicly available sources, all of which I have meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented. Now, it’s true that the author doesn’t believe his own argument. But why should that matter? The editors’ duty as scholars is to judge the validity and interest of ideas, without regard for their provenance. (That is why many scholarly journals practice blind refereeing.) If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don’t? Or are they more deferent to the so-called “cultural authority of technoscience” than they would care to admit?

In the end, I resorted to parody for a simple pragmatic reason. The targets of my critique have by now become a self-perpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside. In such a situation, a more direct demonstration of the subculture’s intellectual standards was required. But how can one show that the emperor has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon; and the blow that can’t be brushed off is the one that’s self-inflicted. I offered the Social Texteditors an opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual rigor. Did they meet the test? I don’t think so.

I say this not in glee but in sadness. After all, I’m a leftist too (under the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua). On nearly all practical political issues — including many concerning science and technology — I’m on the same side as the Social Text  editors. But I’m a leftist (and feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it. Why should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual high ground?

And why should self-indulgent nonsense — whatever its professed political orientation — be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?

 

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.)

SIDEBAR: EXCERPT FROM ARTICLE

Thus, general relativity forces upon us radically new and counterintuitive notions of space, time and causality; so it is not surprising that it has had a profound impact not only on the natural sciences but also on philosophy, literary criticism, and the human sciences. For example, in a celebrated symposium three decades ago on Les Langages Critiques et les Sciences de l’Homme, Jean Hyppolite raised an incisive question about Jacques Derrida’s theory of structure and sign in scientific discourse … Derrida’s perceptive reply went to the heart of classical general relativity:

The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability–it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something–of a center starting from which an observer could master the field–but the very concept of the game …

In mathematical terms, Derrida’s observation relates to the invariance of the Einstein field equation Gμν = 8πTμν tex2html_wrap_inline112 under nonlinear space-time diffeomorphisms (self-mappings of the space-time manifold which are infinitely differentiable but not necessarily analytic). The key point is that this invariance group “acts transitively”: this means that any space-time point, if it exists at all, can be transformed into any other. In this way the infinite-dimensional invariance group erodes the distinction between observer and observed; the tex2html_wrap_inline114 of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone.

Alan Sokal’s ‘Transgression‘”

AND THE PARODY ITSELF:

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

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The Breitbart Effect: Why Weiner’s Boring (Non-) Sex Scandal Is Getting More Play Than Republicans’ Sordid Sexcapades

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Weinergate, as it has been dubbed by pundits across the political spectrum, must be the lamest (non-)sex scandal to come down the pike in years, yet it seems to be getting as much play as Watergate.

That such trivia as an adult sending relatively benign photos and “racy messages” to other consenting adults should be of interest to anyone besides the Representative’s wife – much less the making of a week-long “news” story – is obviously a sad reflection of our shallow, sex-and-celebrity-obsessed culture.

But it’s also a testament to what you might call the “Breitbart effect” – the ability of conservative activists to push a news story to the forefront of the national discussion, and hold it there for an extended run. Breitbart, like the Drudge Report and a host of other dedicated right-wing provocateurs, has learned the value of gaming the refs – of hounding the mainstream media with angry and unsubstantiated accusations of “liberal bias” for so long the latter tend to overcompensate and give prominence to whatever story the activists are interested in amplifying.

Don’t take it from me. As Eric Alterman noted, former GOP chair Rich Bond acknowledged in a candid moment that, “There is some strategy” to the Right’s conspiracy theories about the media being hopelessly biased toward the left. ”If you watch any great coach,” he said, “what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”

In their 2006 book, The Way to Win, ABC News political director Mark Halperin andWashington Post national political editor John Harris famously wrote that “Drudge rules our world,” calling Breitbart’s former mentor “the Walter Cronkite of his era,” and noting that “there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts.” But now that Breitbart’s string of Big This and That sites have hit the scene, that’s no longer the case.

They brought down ACORN with a Big Lie (the media still credulously report that James O’Keefe visited ACORN’s offices dressed like a pimp) and put Planned Parenthood in the GOP’s crosshairs with a similar stunt. This kind of guerilla media works.

That’s not to suggest that the story doesn’t have inherent prurient appeal – it does. But Breitbart’s antics – as well as Weiner’s own bungled efforts to contain the damage – have made this lusterless, rather bovine “scandal” a huge sensation across the political spectrum for an entire week, and as of this writing it doesn’t appear to be losing momentum. The Huffington Post live-blogged the unfolding non-drama and Amanda Marcotte and Dana Goldstein have been debating the ramifications of Weinergate here at AlterNet and on the Nation’s blog for several days.

There’s a feedback loop in play: Conservatives get hold of a story and hector the media into giving it outsized coverage. That coverage makes the story appear to be a big deal, which in turn attracts lots of viewers and readers. Then, seeing all those eyeballs on the story tells the media it is of great import to their readers and viewers, so they focus yet more energy on it.

That has certainly been the case with this latest teapot tempest. Setting aside the fact that Anthony Weiner’s pseudo-scandal has bumped real news – several wars, an economy slumping back into recession and a variety of political games surrounding the debt ceiling, just to name a few — the coverage has been wildly disproportionate to some real and genuinelyunseemly scandals that garnered a fraction of the breathless coverage Weinergate has featured.

Remember that until a fuzzy cell-phone pic alleged to be the Congressman’s penis was released early this week, this whole brouhaha was about the kind of PG-rated photos that can be found in any men’s clothing catalogue being sent to people Weiner had never met, much less touched. Contrast that tepid example of stupidity with the tale of Senator David Vitter, R-Louisiana, donning an oversized diaper in order to play mommy-games with random prostitutes. The Vitter story made the rounds for a few days, died down and he was easily re-elected in 2010.

Former Senator John Ensign, R-Nevada, shtupped the wife of his chief of staff and then skirted federal law to hush him up with a cushy lobbying job. The sordid affair was a non-story for two years until an ethics probe was launched, leading to Ensign’s resignation.

Former Rep. Don Sherwood, R-Pennsylvania, allegedly beat the hell out of his mistress of five years just a couple of months before getting re-elected in 2004. The incident didn’t even make the news until the following year. While members of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are calling for Weiner’s resignation, the Republicans spent well over a million dollars defending Sherwood’s seat.

Even disgraced Rep. Chris Lee, R-New York, also busted for posting a tame shirtless photo to the Internet, may well have resigned to hide the fact that he was trolling Craigslist for transexuals.

And, unlike Anthony Weiner, all of those pols were “family values” types – self-appointed moral scolds telling others how they should or shouldn’t express their own sexuality. Weinergate lacks their hypocrisy entirely – this is a man who never blamed any substantial issue on the imagined loss of some kind of idealized past in which innocence and chastity were supposedly the norm.

Ultimately, Weiner’s just a horny dork with a Twitter account – a guy with some penchants that nobody outside his family should even begin to care about. But Breitbart appears to rule our world, so we’ll have to suffer through days of additional analysis of this perfect distraction of a “story.”

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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US football player targeted for criticizing celebration of Bin Laden killing

Reminiscent of Nazi Germany, jingoism and overwhelming sanctimony are stifling free speech in America. Behind the myth of rugged individualism, the US has always been a land of abject conformity, but the pressures manufactured by the political and media classes are today stamping out any possibility of really practicing the First Amendment. As for the behavior of the repulsive corporate class, twhere so many of our problems originate, it comes as no surprise they have failed to uphold the spirit of the Constitution.

By Jerry White  | 7 May 2011

Rashard Mendenhall. Well done, man. Don't give in to the conformity pack.

Following the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the news media and virtually every avenue of American popular culture was activated to manufacture an atmosphere of jingoism and celebration over the dirty killing of the Al Qaeda leader.

As has so often been the case, in particular since September 11, 2001, professional sports has been used to create a false aura of “national unity” and intimidate anyone critical of the criminal actions of the US government.

The backward chants of “USA! USA!” by a section of the crowd at the Philadelphia Phillies vs. the New York Mets baseball game Sunday night—following the announcement of the bin Laden killing—was followed by a week of sporting events where soldiers threw out the ceremonial first pitches and the routine singing of the national anthem at the National Basketball playoffs became the occasion for even more crude displays of flag-waving patriotism and militarism.

Sportscasters from the ESPN cable network were immediately dispatched to solicit pro-government comments from prominent athletes in an effort to demonstrate the supposed unanimity of public opinion. In an interview with Minnesota Vikings football coach Mike Priefer, a former Navy helicopter pilot, ESPN commentator Jay Crawford urged the coach that defensive players who tackle ball carriers on kickoff returns were a “well-trained team, working in precision,” just like the Navy Seal assassination squad.

Whether they shared the right-wing political conceptions or were naïve and taken in by the propaganda blitz, several prominent athletes issued statements praising the military and President Obama. There were, however, notable and, in the present circumstances, courageous exceptions. Since sports cable channels and news media would not broadcast such statements, the athletes making criticisms used their Twitter accounts.

The day after Obama’s announcement of the killing, Rashard Mendenhall, the 23-year-old star running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, tweeted: “What kind of man celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side.”

Mendenhall’s comments—which were bound up with his religious convictions and skepticism in the government’s version of the 9/11 events—were immediately seized upon for a rabid campaign accusing the football player of being disloyal and contemptuous of the 3,000 Americans killed by the terrorist attacks. The fraternity of cable television sportscasters—who, with few exceptions, generally appeal only to the base instincts of sports fans—demanded that the National Football League block athletes from having access to Twitter and social networking sites.

On Tuesday, Pittsburgh Steelers President Art Rooney II released a statement regarding Mendenhall, saying it “is hard to explain or even comprehend what he meant with his recent Twitter comments.” He added, “The entire Steelers organization is very proud of the job our military personnel have done.”

In the face of the torrent of criticism, Mendenhall issued a clarification on his blog, which, while expressing religious conceptions and some conciliation to pro-war propaganda, nevertheless upheld his initial comments and the right to the express them.

“This controversial statement was something I said in response to the amount of joy I saw in the event of a murder. I don’t believe that this is an issue of politics or American pride; but one of religion, morality, and human ethics. I wasn’t questioning Bin Laden’s evil acts. I believe that he will have to face God for what he has done. I was reflecting on our own hypocrisy. During 9/11 we watched in horror as parts of the world celebrated death on our soil. Earlier this week, parts of the world watched us in horror celebrating a man’s death.”

On Friday, sports apparel maker Champion fired Mendenhall, who recently signed a four-year contract and had been a sponsor with the company since his NFL career started in 2008. While hypocritically claiming to respect his right to express such views, the company said, “We no longer believe that Mr. Mendenhall can appropriately represent Champion and we have notified Mr. Mendenhall that we are ending our business relationship.”

The statement added, “Champion is a strong supporter of the government’s efforts to fight terrorism and is very appreciative of the dedication and commitment of the US Armed Forces” and said Mendenhall’s comments and opinions “were inconsistent with the values of the Champion brand.”

Despite the witch-hunt atmosphere, other athletes also spoke out. Milwaukee Bucks basketball player Chris Douglas-Roberts tweeted after hearing of Bin Laden’s death, “Is this a celebration??”

Responding to several hostile tweets he went on to express his anti-war position in the regards to the killing of bin Laden.

“It took 919,967 deaths to kill that one guy.

“It took 10 years & 2 Wars to kill that…guy.

“It cost us (USA) roughly $1,188,263,000,000 to kill that………..guy. But we’re winning though. Haaaa. (Sarcasm).”

With more negative reaction being tweeted at Douglas-Roberts, he went on to clarify his position.

“What I’m sayin’ has nothing to do with 9/11 or that guy (Bin Laden). I still feel bad for the 9/11 families but I feel EQUALLY bad for the war families. …

“People are telling me to get out of America now b/c I’m against MORE INNOCENT people dying every day? B/c I’m against a 10-year WAR?

“Whatever happened to our freedom of speech? That’s the problem. We don’t want to hear anything that isn’t our perspective.”

The effort to stampede public opinion, of course, has an effect. But the overwhelming sentiment of the population is one of suspicion towards the government and its official explanations and a concern over the erosion of deeply felt democratic rights in the name of the “war on terrorism.”

The American population—including athletes—have had ample experience with the lies of the US government and their exploitation of 9/11. Eight months after the terrorist attacks, Arizona Cardinal football player Patrick Tillman left a lucrative career to join the military. His death in Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border, was used by the Bush administration and Pentagon to promote support for the war, even as they concealed the fact from the American public and his family that he had been killed by friendly fire from US troops.

In 2007 testimony before a US congressional hearing, Tillman’s brother Kevin Tillman testified: “The deception surrounding this case was an insult to the family: but more importantly, its primary purpose was to deceive a whole nation. We say these things with disappointment and sadness for our country. Once again, we have been used as props in a Pentagon public relations exercise.”

While the military presented Tillman as a pro-war sports icon, his family and friends later made public that the young man developed anti-war and left-wing views while in the military and was preparing to write an anti-war book when he returned from Afghanistan.

JERRY WHITE writes on politics for the World Socialist Web Site.

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