Rahm Emanuel: Chicago’s War Criminal/Anti-Labor Mayor
By Stephen Lendman
This filthy crook and professional Zionist (what else can we expect from the scum that governs this nation) is already making his mark as a force for ill in Chicago, reflecting yet another triumph for the forces of corruption and cynicism that dominate America. The Democratic label means nothing.—Eds
The Compleat Scumbag: Now polluting Chicago politics again. When will it end as American passivity seems to have no bottom?
Except for Harold Washington’s 1983 – 1987 tenure until his untimely death, Chicago never had populist mayors, notably under father Richard J. (April 20, 1955 – December 20, 1976) and son Richard M. Daley (April 24, 1989 – May 16, 2011). However, after two months in office, Emanuel looks likely to be Chicago’s worst, based on policy initiatives he supports.
As White House chief of staff, he was criminally part of Obama’s war cabinet. As Chicago’s mayor, he’s waging it against labor.
Candidate Emanuel, in fact, promised draconian anti-worker cuts “in attacking our budget deficit, (so) there must be no sacred cows….Chicago will have to make tough choices, (forcing) more than $500 million in efficiencies” on the backs of working Chicagoans already struggling to get by when they need help, not greater sacrifices they can’t afford.
No matter, slash and burn now is policy, including layoffs, wage freezes, and benefit cuts, notably targeting healthcare and pensions. Then in June, Emanuel rescinded a contractual 4% raise owed 30,000 teachers, indicating the same policy would follow for other Chicago Public Schools (CPS) employees as part of his war on public education and Chicago workers.
In late June, it continued with 1,000 teachers fired, besides 4,000 since 2009, school closures, larger class sizes, and other draconian measures. Reassigned teachers retain salaries and benefits for one year as “interim” substitute staff. If not kept after 10 months, they’re “honorabl(y) terminated.”
In other words, fired, no matter their qualifications, tenure, or student needs. In fact, many other teachers were sacked without temporary pay or benefits, according to union officials, who have little to boast about after endorsing Illinois Senate Bill 7 (SB 7).
Its provisions include using standardized tests to fire teachers, regardless of seniority, tenure, qualifications, or how students respond to effective classroom practices, what rote memory tests can’t measure. It also lets school districts increase hours per day, and add extra school weeks, with no additional compensation. In addition, teacher strikes are prohibited until after four months of negotiations plus a special arbitration panel’s ruling.
Even then, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) must give 10 days notice backed by 75% of its members to approve a walkout. In other words, SB 7 empowers state and city authorities over their right to demand equity or walk out.
At the same time, CPS executives got salary increases up to 30% over their predecessors. Emanuel’s new CPS head, Jean-Claude Brizard, earns $250,000 plus a 15% incentive package. Earlier as Rochester, New York public schools superintendent, 95% of teachers deplored his policies in office.
Moreover, he’s named in two federal lawsuits regarding improper handling of budget cuts and school closures. Earlier, he attended the notorious Superintendents’ Academy of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, founded by corporate predator Eli Broad to train administrators on restructuring and privatizing public education at the expense of educating kids.
Nonetheless, Emanuel wants him to replicate what he did in Rochester. Elizabeth Swanson is his deputy chief of staff, formerly (billionaire Penny) Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation executive director.
It advocates merit pay, school privatizations, and other regressive policies supported by Arne Duncan, former CPS head. He’s now Obama’s Education Secretary, appointed to wreck public education nationwide through his Race to the Top scheme, linking federal funding to compliance with retrograde federal standards. They mandate:
— open-ended conversion of public schools to charter or for-profit ones;
— running them by marketplace rules;
— requiring state laws conform with federal ones;
— linking teacher pay to student achievement as determined by standardized tests that measure rote memory, not real learning or preparation for higher education;
— destroying unions and teacher benefits;
— empowering bureaucrats over parents to decide what’s best for their children;
— creating a two-tiered, class and income-based system, favoring affluent communities over poor ones, denying poor kids real education and a chance for a better future; and
— destroying public education by creating another business profit profit center.
Emanuel plans more of it for Chicago, including weakening collective bargaining and teachers’ right to strike, the same core issues Wisconsin state workers tried and so far failed to save, perhaps heading for the chopping block in Chicago.
In fact, Emanuel explained:
“As we (prohibit strikes by) police and firefighters, I would have it for teachers because they provide an essential service.”
Of course, so do all public and private workers, entitled to rights like everyone, including to bargain collectively and strike if treated inequitably.
Since taking office, however, Emanuel waged war on Chicago workers, implementing austerity like Obama’s doing nationally at a time massive stimulus is needed.
Sworn in on May 16, his 25-minute address mimicked Obama, calling for “shar(ing) the necessary sacrifices fairly and justly.” In other words, make working Chicagoans sacrifice so corporate interests and city elites share, the same cancer metastasizing across America, destroying an earlier time long gone.
Saying “Chicago is ready for change,” he omitted hard truths he began implementing on the backs of struggling working households. They need help, not greater hardships with lots more coming to close a $700 million budget gap and resolve $14.6 billion in underfunded pension liabilities perhaps by expunging them and cheating retirees.
While campaigning, in fact, he told city unions he planned pension cuts for all city employees, privatizations of many city services, selling Chicago incrementally to corporate favorites, and restructuring of revenue, finance, fleet management, and general service systems.
Prioritized is:
— downsizing government;
— slashing the city’s $6.15 billion budget;
— cutting management payrolls by 10% by merging departments;
— laying off city workers;
— privatizing city services, including public education more intensively;
— ending past social reforms;
— deregulation;
— encouraging private investment through tax breaks;
— getting tougher on crime by reassigning 1,000 police to city streets, including hundreds to poor neighborhoods to harass Blacks and Latinos;
— improving Chicago’s business climate in collaboration with complicit unions, betraying their rank and file for a seat at the table plus high salaries, excellent benefits, and generous perks.
On July 15, Emanuel announced laying off 625 city workers. Affected are custodians, water department call center operators, and transportation department seasonal workers.
He also announced new privatizations. In addition, cost-cutting work rules are being discussed with union bosses, including unpaid days off, paid holidays reduced from 12 to nine, and new hoisting engineer wage differentials, based on machines they operate.
Other work rules he wants implemented include:
— paying workers time-and-a-half for overtime instead of double;
— paying regular, not extra wages for prep time;
— a standard 40-hour week for all city employees, replacing 35 hours for some;
— regardless of union affiliation, workers doing the same job will get no wage differential;
— salaried employees will get the same number of sick days and holidays as hourly ones;
— rate differences for driving different vehicles or operating various non-vehicular equipment will be eliminated;
— workers alone on a truck paid no more than as part of a crew; and
— union apprenticeship cost saving programs will be enhanced.
Moreover, city workers no longer will provide airport and library custodial services. Private companies will replace them at greater cost.
In addition, seasonal transportation department workforces will be cut 75%. As a result, 61 fewer blocks of curb and gutter improvements will be made, as well as 76 fewer sidewalk blocks repaired.
Henceforth, a professional benefits management company, not public staff, will handle city benefit services at greater cost to the city and taxpayers.
Chicago’s water bill call center will also be privatized, again at greater cost.
Overall, hundreds of city workers will be sacked to allegedly save millions of dollars. In fact, costs will be increased, not cut, making Chicagoans pay for privatized services public workers can do as well cheaper.
According to American Federation of State, County and Municipal (AFSCME) Council 31 executive director Henry Bayer:
“Mayor Emanuel’s announced intention to lay off 625 employees will diminish the availability and quality of city services on which Chicago residents depend. It will also” increase already high city unemployment.
“We are surprised and disappointed at (his) scattershot approach to the city’s budget shortfall. We are paricularly disappointed that most of his bullets are aimed at frontline employees who do the real work of city government.”
“Contrary to (his) claim, neither he nor his representatives have ever made any attempt to meet with our union to negotiate changes to work rules….If the mayor were serious about (instituting positive changes), he would have taken the appropriate measures to engage in such discussions.” Not doing so shows “blaming union work rules for (Chicago’s) massive deficit is mere public relations gimmickry.”
“In that spirit, we call on the Mayor to rescind his layoff threat and work collaboratively to reduce costs while protecting city services and jobs.”
In fact, AFSCME, CTU, and other city union bosses collaborate with city management, furthering their own interests over rank-and-file members they pretend to represent. As a result, Bayer’s statement rings hollow, common practice to make workers think he’s on their side when, in fact, he and other union heads fall short.
In Chicago, Illinois and across America, government and corrupted union bosses collaborate against workers, agreeing on wage freezes, benefit cuts, and layoffs, making already dire conditions worse.
As a result, harder than ever hard times deepen to assure corporate favorites and wealthy elites benefit at the expense of troubled working households being scammed.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also 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.
___________________________________________________________________________________________ PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED.Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!
Australia and the Dirty Digger: The Phony Populism of Rupert Murdoch
By JEFF SPARROW
Murdoch and accomplice, Brooks, until recently CEO of Newscorp.
It’s been fascinating to watch from Australia as the News of the World scandal engulfs Britain.
Rupert Murdoch himself was, of course, originally one of ours, and those antipodean origins are often cited to explain his self-perception as an outsider in international media, a crass colonial pitting himself against the stuffy clubmen who once controlled London’s newspapers.
The flagship titles of the Murdoch Empire have traditionally expressed this brash populism, boldly declaring Jack just as good as his PC masters, if not a damn sight better. The late Paul Foot described how Murdoch’s Sun built its remarkable circulation around the image of a ‘cheeky chappy’, a fellow who liked a pint and a punt and a well-endowed woman, and wouldn’t be told there was anything wrong with any of them.
That last point was crucial. The Sun didn’t simply know what its readers wanted but also upheld their values (even, or perhaps especially, their prejudices) against censorious feminists and snooty academics and stuffy bureaucrats and out-of-touch judges and other condescending know-it-alls, displacing class resentment into a cultural antagonism directed against the Left.
Now, there’s a long history of conservative idealisation of the Tory workman, a fellow hailed as patriotic, royalist to the bone and genetically immune to political radicalism (unless, of course, he goes on strike, whereupon he’s knocked to the curb as lazy and pampered).
Murdoch’s populism distinguished itself not so much by the way it encouraged its readers to kick down (against immigrants, homosexuals, black people and so on) but by how it encouraged them to kick up. It drew upon the New Class concept developed by conservative intellectuals (Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, etc) in response to the sixties: a theory that posited the emergence of a white collar elite, identifiable by cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, liberalism and all the other notions that patriotic sons of the soil were said to despise. This New Class was supposed to have ensconced itself throughout society’s top echelons, particularly within the media and universities, a position from which it thereafter busied itself belittling and mocking the traditional pursuits of ordinary folk.
By expressing his outrage against, say, housing specially allocated to immigrants or the light sentences received by muggers, the cheeky chappy of a Murdoch tabloid cocked a snoot against the smug moralisers on his TV or in the upmarket papers, even as he aligned himself with the traditional priorities of the Conservatives.
You can see an updated and Americanised version playing out every night on Fox News, where the Aryan anchors perennially incite Joe Sixpack against the forces who would patronise him, from Hollywood liberals flapping their gums about gay marriage to pusillanimous Frenchmen who treacherously refuse to go to war.
By uncoupling the tropes of class from economics (indeed, from reaility), the schema facilitates a populist demagoguery sufficiently elastic so as to embrace almost anything. John Kerry might have actually been wounded in a conflict that George Bush assiduously dodged but Fox could still paint him as a pacifist elitist who sneered at patriots like W, largely on the basis that, though Bush didn’t fight, he looked like someone who would have.
The ‘Dirty Digger’ himself might have lacked the right accent, but even when he was first challenging the newspaper establishment, he was scarcely proletarian. Murdoch inherited his first paper, the Adelaide News, from his father, Sir Keith; he did his schooling at Geelong Grammar, a quintessential finishing college for the rich and entitled that also educated a young Prince Charles.
The journalist David Marr tells of attending a lecture in which Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son, denounced the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for drawing attention to his shenanigans in the mobile phone business: the particular program in question was, he said, a ‘disgracful and biased attack’ by ‘our media elite’. So powerful has the peculiar vocabulary of New Class anti-elitism become that a man born into the most powerful media dynasty the world has ever seen can still present himself, without any trace of irony whatsoever, as an outsider being done down by society’s rulers.
All of this is worth mentioning because it shapes the response to the News of the World scandal by other elements of the Murdoch empire.
In Australia, the Murdoch papers have issued condemnations of the shenanigans taking place in Britain, with News Limited chairman John Hartigan has launching a review of editorial expenditure to ensure that nothing similar has happened here. Yet there’s also been more than a few suggestions that the outrage about the News of the World also represents an elitist attack upon democracy.
‘Is the News empire at risk of selling out the Murdoch spirit that has helped to democratise the press and challenge the smug group-think of the Left?’ asked Andrew Bolt, the most prominent columnist in Australia’s biggest selling tabloid, the Herald-Sun. ‘Is Fox News next?’
Bolt was citing Brendan O’Neil, the leader of the contrarian political cult that emerged from the ashes of the old Revolutionary Communist Party and its paper Living Marxism.
‘British journalism is having its cojones removed,’ O’Neil declared. ‘There will less risk-taking, muck-raking, daring.’
Well, no.
The Murdoch stable displayed both its cojones and its daring in 2003, when every single paper in the empire simultaneously decided that invading Iraq was a wonderful idea – shortly after, of course, Rupert declared that oil at $20 a barrel was well worth other people fighting for. The ‘cheeky chappy’ of the British tabloids had, in other words, proved himself a ‘dodgy geezer’, long before he was busted creeping and peeping on murder victims and terrorism survivors.
‘Brash? Vulgar? Populist?’ wrote Paul Foot about the Sun back in 1988. ‘Maybe [it] is all these things. But with all three qualities goes another which puts the lot of them to flight: servility.’
That is, after all, the key element of New Class populism, an anti-elitism that will challenge any authority – except that of those who actually wield influence. With the Murdoch press in mind, former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating once memorably denounced the outrageousness of conservatives ‘cloaking their well-nourished frames in the rags of the powerless’.
Ironically, the gathering economic storm in both Europe and America means that there’s never been more need for unfettered campaigning journalism.
Consider the United States, where, after decades of the neoliberalism that Murdoch has unceasingly championed, an extraordinary ten per cent of the total personal income goes to the top 0.1 per cent of the populace, a disparity only rivalled by impoverished nations like Cameroon and the Ivory Coast. Strangely, those who belong to America’s gilded fraction are not refugees or welfare queens or pampered prisoners, nor even pretentious professors or fussy multiculturalists or the other easy tabloid targets. Rather, they are very much a traditional ruling class, made up of people who look very much like Rupert Murdoch, his sons and the rest of his corporate lieutenants.
And that, in a nutshell, is why the populism that comes from News International will always be so phoney.
PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED.Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!
Two of the top charlatans destroying the future of the American people.
Short of finalizing details and assuring enough bipartisan support, it’s a done deal to slash Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social spending while leaving outsized military budgets and generous handouts to corporate favorites in place.
At the same time, the timeline to accomplish it is undetermined. Political posturing may extend the August 2 deadline until fall or beyond. It’s how corrupted Washington always works, notably since the 1980s under both parties. Obama was elected to assure continuity and accomplish by rhetorical duplicity what Republicans on their own can’t do.
Notably after capitulating last December on tax cuts for America’s super-rich, he proposed deep budget cuts, affecting disease prevention, children’s and community healthcare, education, supplemental grants to poor women and children, community block grants for housing, energy efficiency and renewable energy, and other benefits for people most in need.
He’s a charlatan, not a leader who cares. Earlier, he proposed hundreds of billions in Medicare cuts. It was step one ahead of incrementally ending entitlements and other social benefits altogether, including publicly funded pensions, returning America to dark age harshness.
Bipartisan duplicity supports it, including slashing healthcare, education, housing, virtually all social benefits incrementally, eliminating them all altogether. Obama and many Democrats tacitly agree. Timing is mostly at issue with an eye to 2012.
In principle, Obama and Speaker Boehner privately agreed to $4 trillion in Social Security, Medicare, and other social spending cuts, backtracking when word leaked prematurely to a more modest $2.4 trillion package, then resurrecting the $4 trillion one.
At a July 11 press conference, Obama again stressed “shared sacrifice,” leaving unexplained he means working households sacrifice to let America’s super-rich share.
Also unmentioned was his 2006 debt ceiling position, voting against raising it in the Senate saying:
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US government can’t pay its bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies.”
“Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
As President, Obama endorsed reckless fiscal policies, including:
— trillions of bailout dollars to bankers;
— generous handouts to other corporate favorites;
— record high military spending for multiple illegal wars and proxy ones;
— the same anti-labor tax workers, not the rich policies as Republicans;
— wrecking Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social spending policies; and
— rhetorically insisting the debt ceiling be raised before the August 2 deadline as part of a deal to please Wall Street at the expense of working households and seniors, dependent on vital entitlements they can’t afford to lose or see weakened.
In fact, economist Michael Hudson accused Obama of governing to the right of George Bush, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, the Republican far right-wing extremist presidential candidate endorsing holy war on democratic values.
At the same time, he’s triangulating more than Clinton to appear responsible. The budget debate is a charade. Republicans are playing bad cop. Obama plans selling out his constituency. Ahead is a nightmarish scenario comparable to Greece, impoverishing working households to pay bankers, starving states and cities of revenue, forcing them to sell public assets cheap, putting America on sale at fire sale prices, creating a dystopian Great Depression, wiping out generations of social progress.
Moreover, only a Democrat could do this, especially a smooth talking charlatan like Obama – more duplicitous and pernicious than hardline Republicans saying, “(M)eaningful changes to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid (plus other social spending policies must be made to) preserve the integrity of the programs and keep our sacred trust with our seniors (and other needy households), but make sure those programs were there not for just this generation, but for the next generation.”
He lied. He wants them incrementally ended, perhaps over the next decade when another president will have to answer for his social destruction. His Wall Street and other corporate cronies demand it. They also want and will get the debt ceiling raised. It’s why they funded his 2008 campaign, put him in the White House, and assure his reelection if he plays ball.
Chamber of Commerce president Thomas Donahue also weighed in, saying:
“An unprecedented default on the nation’s bills would have dire consequences for our economy, our markets, and Main Street Americans.”
The Washington Post gave PIMCO’s Bill Gross (the nation’s largest bond investor) July 13 op-ed space, saying:
“Don’t mess with the debt ceiling. Raise it unencumbered if necessary. (Default) would….be a huge negative for the US and global financial markets, introducing fear and unnecessary volatility into the economy and global trade.”
False! America won’t default, but doing so is the road to recovery, forcing bondholders to take stiff haircuts, letting too-big-to-fail banks take pain, collapsing their Ponzi scheme speculating, or shutting them down altogether. Removing that cancer would facilitate recovery and growth.
Moreover, if post-2008 crash Fed created trillions went into the real economy, creating jobs and stimulating growth, they’d be no social spending cuts/debt ceiling debate because America again would be healthy.
Ignoring basic truths, a July 11 Washington Post editorial called Obama’s entitlement slashing a “truly progressive position.”
A June 1 New York Times editorial called congressional posturing “Playing With Matches on the Debt,” endorsing corporate America’s advocacy for raising it, slashing social spending to finagle it, and keeping the nation on a fast track to third world status, including workers transformed to serfs.
On July 13, Fed Chairman Bernanke (Wall Street’s hired hand) said Washington’s failure to service debt would cause “shock waves through the entire global financial system,” omitting what he should have said: namely,
— that Washington has no debt creation limit;
— that quantitative easing buys all of it not absorbed by sovereign or private buyers;
— that the Fed can issue whatever amount is needed to service it; and
— most important that Congress can reassert money creation power, replacing Federal Reserve notes with Treasury ones interest and inflation free with no need to raise taxes if responsibly done.
Doing so would end the budget cutting/debt ceiling charade. Moreover, sustainable economic growth would follow because publicly controlled money would reignite it free from predatory bankers, wrecking the economy to buy assets cheap, complicit with corrupt politicians letting them.
A Final Comment
On July 12, economist Jack Rasmus tried “reading the debt ceiling tea leaves,” predicting what he sees ahead, saying:
— gutting Social Security and Medicare is planned;
— the debt ceiling will be raised;
— real negotiations will begin once it’s done;
— for starters, slashing $3 trillion in entitlements is a done deal;
— October 1 is the next deadline, the start of FY 2012; at issue is passing next year’s budget, including cuts;
— expect the retirement age to be raised to 70 as well as sharply reduced disability benefits;
— Medicare recipients will absorb all future cost increases, including Part B (raised to double the current level) and higher Part D deductibles; “(t)hat way Obama can say he never ‘cut’ Medicare,” yet, in fact, slash “$200 – $400 billion a year for the next decade;”
— Republicans will agree to token tax cuts, closing loopholes easily offset by agreeing to overhaul the tax code favoring corporations; specifically, the top corporate rate will be cut from 35% to 20%, though gaming the system lets many corporations pay minimal taxes or get rebates despite being profitable;
— “lowering rates for foreign profits (will) placate multinational” firms;
— what political Washington takes with one hand goes back twice over with the other, continuing “the decades long tax ‘shell game;’ ”
It’s why corporations’ share of federal revenue dropped from 20% years ago to 10% now, and falling because of bipartisan deceit.
Obama and Congress now plan completing their financial coup d’etat, ending America’s social contract, leaving retirees, working households, and impoverished millions on their own sink or swim.
Only revolutionary change, impeaching Obama, and routing bipartisan criminals can stop them. It’s high time public anger demanded it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also 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.
___________________________________________________________________________________________ PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED.Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!
While idiots in “professional journalism” circles and J-Schools (see below featurette on Poynter) speak admiringly of Steve Kroft’s shameful performance, the mainstream media notch yet another mark on their descent into total prostitution for the corporate system (which after all, owns them).—Eds
(Originally posted on 10 May 2011; reposted as a public service)
I N HIS FIRST and so far only interview since the assassination in Pakistan of Osama bin Laden, US President Barack Obama spent half an hour on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” reveling in the details of the extra-judicial killing, while insisting that anyone who questioned the action must be insane. (We also provide a video segment below. BUT CAUTION: Strictly for people with a strong stomach or confirmed masochists. Some of questions are such transparent “softballs” or “setups” for the interviewee to grandstand that it’s hard not to wince or puke upon watching these passages. While ALL mainstream media rarely shy from shilling for the corporate-dominated status quo, CBS has been moving —subtly—ever to the right and is now becoming a Fox News in disguise. In that sense, they’re subtle supporters of the status quo in the “velvet glove thief” tradition of The New York Times and other “revered” media institutions.)
The interview, conducted by CBS’s Steve Kroft, epitomized the role of the corporate media. In its sycophantic and wholly uncritical celebration of the Bin Laden killing, it is indistinguishable from a propaganda arm of the US government.
There were no probing questions, including on the many contradictions and absurdities in the official version of events. There were no attempts to examine the implications of targeted assassinations for relations between states. Nor was there any challenge to the US president on the connection between this killing and broader US policy in the region and internationally.
Among Kroft’s first questions:
“Mr. President, was this the most satisfying week of your presidency?”
“Was the decision to launch this attack the most difficult decision that you’ve made as commander-in-chief?”
“Was there a sense of excitement? Did this look promising from the very beginning?”
Another line of questioning centered on how Obama was able to keep the planned kill operation secret while going about his public appearances as president. This included:
“Was it hard keeping your focus?”
“Did you have to suppress the urge to tell someone? Did you want to tell somebody? Did you want to tell Michelle? Did you tell Michelle?”
The interview was organized as part of a well-orchestrated campaign to rebrand Obama, exploiting the killing of Bin Laden to cast him as a “war president” along the lines of George W. Bush. It is one more indication that domestic political concerns played a pivotal role in the decision to organize the assassination.
Faced with a deepening economic crisis and mounting social tensions at home, the killing is seen, on the one hand, as a means of diverting popular anger and, on the other, forging a more solid political base within the military, the intelligence apparatus and the most reactionary sections of the financial-corporate elite.
Obama was allowed to expound on the decision-making responsibilities of the commander-in-chief, “where you make a decision, you’re making your best call, your best shot” in “tough, complicated operations.”
While he claimed that his overriding concern in carrying out the operation was getting “our guys… in and get out safely,” he also asserted that the intelligence upon which it was based was anything but conclusive.
“As outstanding a job as our intelligence teams did… at the end of the day, this was still a 55/45 situation,” he said. “I mean, we could not say definitively that Bin Laden was there.”
If this is true, it underscores the extreme recklessness of the entire operation. Obama sketched out one scenario in the event the intelligence proved faulty: “And so if it turns out that it’s a wealthy, you know, prince from Dubai who’s in this compound, and, you know, we’ve sent Special Forces in we’ve got problems. So there were risks involved geo-politically in making the decision.”
He failed to spell out that such “problems” would stem from the Navy Seal unit murdering said prince and members of his family. This is hardly a hypothetical outcome, given that similar events take place with numbing regularity in Afghanistan, where special operations hit squads conduct night raids that routinely claim the lives of unarmed civilians.
Still greater problems were posed by the possibility that the Pakistani military would respond to the violation of their country’s sovereignty by an unknown invading force.
While hinted at, this possibility was glossed over in Kroft’s interview. He asked Obama, “There was a backup plan?” Obama responded, “There was a backup plan.” What it entailed was left entirely to the viewer’s imagination. It seems obvious, however, that it would have involved the use of military force against the Pakistani military, posing the threat of war.
Other sections of the interview dealt with the well-worn themes of glorifying the military and the intelligence agencies, while hailing a successful assassination as the confirmation of American strength and ingenuity. Obama declared that “the skill with which our intelligence and military folks operated in this was indescribable.”
He added, “So it was a moment of great pride for me to see our capacity as a nation to execute something this difficult so well.”
Needless to say, Kroft did not ask Obama whether he thought other nations would be entitled to take similar pride if they proved capable of executing similar operations against their enemies abroad.
At the end of the interview, Kroft asked what was perhaps his most interesting question: “Is this the first time that you’ve ever ordered someone killed?”
Obama responded, “Well, keep in mind that, you know, every time I make a decision about launching a missile, every time I make a decision about sending troops into battle, you know, I understand that this will result in people being killed. And that is a sobering fact. But it is one that comes with the job.”
Kroft made no attempt to follow this up and allowed Obama to evade the fact that this is indeed not the first time he has “ordered someone killed,” and not only in the general sense of authorizing military actions that result in deaths.
The “60 Minutes” interview was conducted on Wednesday and broadcast on Sunday. On the Friday in between the shooting and airing of the program, a US Predator drone carried out a missile strike in Yemen that killed at least two people but missed its intended target, Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen born in New Mexico. Al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric, has never been charged with any crime, much less found guilty in a court of law.
Early last year, Obama’s then-director of national intelligence testified to Congress that the administration reserved the right to carry out “targeted killings” of US citizens overseas as part of the “war on terror.” Administration officials subsequently confirmed that Al-Awlaki had been placed on a “hit list” along with other American citizens. While they alleged that the cleric had some unspecified involvement in terrorist plots, no evidence has been presented and his assassination has been authorized on the sole say-so of President Obama.
The killing of Bin Laden also came just one day after a missile strike that claimed the lives of the son and three grandchildren of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was the intended target of an assassination attempt. There is no question that such an attempted killing of a state leader could only have been carried out with Obama’s approval.
If Obama were to offer an honest answer to Kroft’s question, he would have had to acknowledge that there was nothing unprecedented in his order to kill Bin Laden. Rather, assassination has become a standard instrument of US policy, on a scale that outstrips the infamous period of the 1960s and 1970s when the CIA earned the name of “Murder Inc.”
In his final remarks in the interview, Obama concluded: “The one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking Bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.”
Here one has the essence of the Osama Bin Laden operation. “Taking him out,” a phrase generally associated with gangland killings, is equated with justice being done. Anyone questioning this equation is dismissed as sympathetic to Bin Laden and mentally ill.
This bullying by the US president, however, only underscores the administration’s desire to silence the very real questions posed by the Bin Laden killing. This was made clear by the evolving claims made by administration officials over why Bin Laden was killed. Initially, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, claimed that the Al Qaeda leader was killed in a “firefight,” while using a woman as a “human shield.”
This was later acknowledged by White House spokesman Jay Carney to have been false. According to his account, Bin Laden was, in fact, unarmed when shot to death. One woman, Bin Laden’s wife, had been shot and wounded when she allegedly “lunged” at the Seals, while another woman had been shot and killed for unexplained reasons. Neither woman, Carney admitted, had been used as a “human shield.”
Carney claimed that the Seals were operating under a “capture or kill” order, and that Bin Laden had resisted capture in some unspecified way. “Resistance does not require a firearm,” he said. As in the earlier “firefight” account, the aim was to provide a “self-defense” justification for the killing.
Georgia Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was briefed repeatedly on the operation before it was carried out. In an interview last week with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he reiterated what military officials said on condition of anonymity immediately after Bin Laden’s death the order from the White House was to kill, not capture, the Al Qaeda leader.
The Navy Seals, he said, “went in with the idea of killing him, not capturing him.” Chambliss added, “We needed to take this guy out, and I know that’s what the executive order said.”
That such an order is illegal under international law is unquestionable. The real issue is why the Obama administration was determined to kill Bin Laden and not capture him, interrogate him and try him for his alleged crimes. Here a number of elements come into play.
What would have come out at such a trial?
First, there is Bin Laden’s long record as a valued “asset” of the CIA, going back to the early 1980s when he funneled CIA aid to the mujahideen guerrillas fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan and continuing through the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Second, any trial would have necessarily opened up the circumstances of the 9/11 attacks to judicial review, raising questions as to what prior knowledge elements in the US government had about these attacks and why they were allowed to take place.
Finally, there was undoubtedly the conception, worked out long in advance, that a “clean kill” of Bin Laden could be marketed as a triumph for the Obama administration and the military, setting in motion the propaganda barrage that has been unleashed over the past week.
Obama’s attempt to intimidate notwithstanding, these questions will not go away.
Among those raising them is Benjamin Ferencz, a former chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals at the end of World War II. “This can’t be done, not in this way,” Ferencz said in an interview with the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. “People cannot be killed in cold blood.”
In a letter to the New York Times, Ferencz contrasted the treatment of Bin Laden with that meted out to the leaders of Hitler’s Third Reich, responsible for the deaths of millions.
“The Nuremberg trials earned worldwide respect by giving Hitler’s worst henchmen a fair trial so that truth would be revealed and justice under law would prevail,” he said. “Secret non-judicial decisions based on political or military considerations undermine democracy.”
Bill Van Auken is a senior political writer with the WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization.
BONUS FEATURE Making cogs for the system’s propaganda machine
CASE IN POINT: The Poynter Institute (other schools, even the illustrious Columbia Journalism School, do not rise much higher.)
Below, what the Wiki says officially about this entity:(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
In 1976 the Poynter Institute counted no more than 4 employees and 267 students. In 2002 the respective numbers were 59 employees and more than 1,200 students.
And here’s the product of such institutionalized imbecility. Read this absurd gusher closely, by one Al Tompkins, supposedly an authority in professional journalism:
Steve Kroft explains why he broke interviewing rules when questioning Obama about bin Laden death for ’60 Minutes’
by Al TompkinsPublished May 9, 2011 3:21 pm Updated May 12, 2011 7:53 pm
When Steve Kroft interviewed President Obama last week about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s headquarters in Pakistan, the “60 Minutes” veteran violated many of the guidelines that we teach about how to conduct an interview. And it worked.
Why? Kroft kept the questions short and constantly mixed up the types of questions he asked to alternately seek facts, emotion and insight.
Kroft told me that when he sat down with the President, he had, in his hands, a list of 62 questions that he might ask. “We wanted to do the interview in three sections; the raid and the planning, the Situation Room and Pakistan. I knew I was not going to get through all of the questions,” Kroft told me by phone on Monday.
I teach journalists that there are three kinds of questions:
The Objective (or Closed-Ended) Question: This type of question usually results in a “yes” or “no” answer. The objective question is used when you are searching for facts not opinions. Sometimes the objective question poses a choice, such as, “Do you mean X or do you mean Y?” The objective question seldom is the type that journalists use to elicit memorable quotes or soundbites.
The Subjective (or Open-Ended) Question: This type of question seeks a thought, opinion, feeling or emotion. The question often begins with word “how” or “why.” This question is the one that produces the most memorable soundbites.
The Non-Question Question: Kroft sometimes repeats words that the President just said as a way of asking for clarity or emphasis. This is more of a statement than a question. The non-question question is a signal to the subject to keep going, similar to saying, “That is really interesting, tell us more about that.”
Kroft told me “there were almost no outtakes from this interview. We aired almost everything we shot. We only cut out five minutes, not even that much, in editing.”
He said he consulted with others before drafting a list of questions. Then “I got up at 5 o’clock Wednesday morning and went through all of them again. I was very cognizant of eliminating questions that would lead to long answers.”
How the interview progressed
The story opened quickly, assuming any reasonable person watching would be familiar with the basic facts of bin Laden’s death. That was a great decision.
Kroft gets right to the interview with, interestingly, an objective (or closed-ended) question. Not what journalists might expect.
STEVE KROFT: Mr. President, was this the most satisfying week of your presidency?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, it was certainly one of the most satisfying weeks not only for my presidency but I think for the United States since I’ve been president. Obviously, bin Laden had been not only a symbol of terrorism but a mass murderer who had eluded justice for so long and so many families who have been affected I think had given up hope. And for us to be able to definitively say, “We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States” was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of.
I would have expected a subjective question to work best at the beginning of the interview. I might have asked the question, “How satisfying was this week?” But Kroft’s question was better than mine. His question would reveal any hint of gloating.
Kroft told me he carefully chose the word “satisfied” for the first question. “I played around with a couple of other words — ‘happy’ for example, but it brought up ‘celebration,’ which didn’t seem right to me, so I settled on ‘satisfying.’ ”
Kroft’s second question was also closed-ended:
KROFT: Was the decision to launch this attack the most difficult decision that you’ve made as Commander-In-Chief?
Kroft is aware he used a lot of closed-ended questions, and he did it on purpose because of time pressures and because of how this President answers questions.
“I have interviewed him before and you don’t want to ask him open-ended questions — you get long answers,” he said.
Kroft explained, “It is difficult to interrupt the President — it is not something I particularly like to do. The thing about this president is he will give you his thought process if you ask him about it. He will explain the complexities that weigh on his mind.”
A little later, Kroft asked a “double-barreled” question, two questions at once that can allow the interviewee to escape the first question and choose the second one.
KROFT: How much of it was gut instinct? Did you have personal feelings about whether… he was there?
Notice that the first part of that question, the subjective part, produced a quote, a soundbite when the President responded:
OBAMA: The thing about gut instinct is if it works, then you think, “Boy, I had good instincts.” If it doesn’t, then you’re gonna be running back in your mind all the things that told you maybe you shouldn’t have done it. Obviously I had enough of an instinct that we could be right, that it was worth doing.
Kroft used several other double-barreled questions, some a bit indirect that could have been more direct:
KROFT: When the CIA first brought this information to you…
OBAMA: Right.
KROFT: …what was your reaction? Was there a sense of excitement? Did this look promising from the very beginning?
The last part of the question is the useful part. I would have asked it as a closed-ended question, “When the CIA first approached you with information, how promising did that information seem to be?”
Then, I would have followed up with, “What was your reaction when you saw what the CIA had?”
Here is another example of how a double-barreled question allowed the President to escape without a direct answer. Kroft asked:
KROFT: Did you have to suppress the urge to tell someone? Did you wanna tell somebody? Did you wanna tell Michelle? Did you tell Michelle?
But the President never said whether he told his wife. The President chose to respond to the first question over the more interesting last one, a danger when asking multiple questions at once.
Kroft followed with single, direct questions, all in the perfect order to build our understanding of the sequence of events:
KROFT: When was that when you set that plan in motion?
KROFT: How actively where you involved in that process?
KROFT: Were you surprised when they came to you with this compound right in the middle of sort of the military center of Pakistan?
The objective questions were the right tool because Kroft was trying to get facts, not opinions, in this part of the interview. This information will not generate a quote or soundbite in anybody’s story but will be important copy or narrative text:
KROFT: Do you have any idea how long he was there?
OBAMA: We know he was there at least five years.
KROFT: Five years?
OBAMA: Yeah.
The value of short questions
Even when he asks double-barreled questions, Kroft’s questions are short, 15 words or less.
That brevity makes this interview so watchable.
“I probably wrote the questions longer, but the good thing about writing your own questions is you know the material,” Kroft told me. “I had to keep moving. I was so cognizant of the clock.”
Kroft also know the interview is not about him. Less confident interviewers have a habit of asking long-winded questions to make themselves look informed and commanding. Kroft is authoritative.
Look at this quick, open-ended question that produced an answer which made its way into newscasts around the world.
KROFT: This was your decision whether to proceed or not and how to proceed. What was the most difficult part of that decision?
OBAMA: The most difficult part is always the fact that you’re sending guys into harm’s way. And there are a lot of things that could go wrong. I mean there’re a lot of moving parts here. So my biggest concern was if I’m sending those guys in and Murphy’s Law applies and somethin’ happens, can we still get our guys out?
So that’s point number one. These guys are going in, you know, the darkness of night. And they don’t know what they’re gonna find there. They don’t know if the building is rigged. They don’t know if, you know, there are explosives that are triggered by a particular door opening. So huge risks that these guys are taking. And so my number one concern was, if I send them in, can I get them out?
Not every question is perfect. This one missed the mark:
KROFT: It’s been reported that there was some resistance from advisors and planners who disagreed with the commando raid approach. Was it difficult for you to overcome that?
Of course, the President is going to say “no.” Anything but a “no” would make him look like he has a divided circle of advisors.
A different closed-ended question might have elicited better information, like “What did you say to your closest advisors who told you they didn’t want you to approve this raid?” Or an open-ended question could have worked: “Your closest advisors were reported to be divided about this raid. How important was it to have unanimous agreement on something so important?”
Kroft asked a great question about how past failures shaped this mission but without providing long background in the question.
KROFT: How much did some of the past failures, like the Iran hostage rescue attempt, how did that weigh on you?
He had to assume that people watching this interview knew something about history. It could be a risky assumption, in some cases, so journalists have to know their audiences.
By using short, punchy questions, Kroft added an urgency to the part of the interview where the President talks about watching and listening to the actual raid. Look at the length of these questions:
KROFT: I want to go to the Situation Room. What was the mood?
KROFT: Were you nervous?
KROFT: What could you see?
KROFT: Right. And that went on for a long time? Could you hear gunfire?
KROFT: Flashes?
A nice mixture of objective and subjective questions, facts and feelings. About the release of those bin Laden death photos, Kroft didn’t re-state the debate. He just asked the question that people wanted answered:
KROFT: Why haven’t you released them?
Later, Kroft tried a non-question question.
KROFT: There are people in Pakistan, for example, who say, “Look, this is all a lie. This is another American trick. Osama’s not dead.”
Kroft needed to gather another fact about the burial. So he used a closed-ended question:
KROFT: Was it your decision to bury him at sea?
One of Kroft’s craftiest questions came late in the piece. It sounds innocent enough, but the answer could have generated headlines:
KROFT: Is this the first time that you’ve ever ordered someone killed?
The direct question gets at a key issue about the raid, was this a “kill mission” or could it have been a “capture mission”? It was the most sobering moment of the piece, set up by a simply worded question.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, keep in mind that, you know, every time I make a decision about launching a missile, every time I make a decision about sending troops into battle, you know, I understand that this will result in people being killed. And that is a sobering fact. But it is one that comes with the job.
While I spend a lot of time talking with journalists about how they open their stories, the “60 Minutes” interview is more remarkable for the way the piece ended.
Kroft moved toward the final soundbite with a statement, so the President was not backed into a corner and offered a remarkable ending:
KROFT: This was one man. This is somebody who has cast a shadow, has been cast a shadow in this place, in the White House for almost…a decade.
OBAMA: As nervous as I was about this whole process, the one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.
“We put that at the end because I thought it had a real sense of finality. I thought it was the strongest answer,” Kroft told me. “I was interested in whether he had moral thoughts about it.”
Again, the subjective answer proves to be the most memorable answer in the interview.
The “60 Minutes” interview was laser-focused. Kroft didn’t swerve off into politics and only lightly treaded into international affairs regarding Pakistan. Those issues will find their place in other shows at other times. This interview was about the decision-making process that led to an historic capture.
CBS and Kroft proved that skill can turn a straightforward interview with a politician into great TV if you ask the right questions and let the person answer.
Editor’s conclusion: This is pathetic. And we’re not making this up. Below the link to the actual page:
___________________________________________________________________________________________ PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED.Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!
Why Rupert Murdoch Love$ God: World’s Biggest Sleaze Mogul Also Getting Rich from Christian Moralizers
By Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet
Murdoch: The kind of scum that promotes death and sleaze everywhere he goes.—Eds
Here’s what you might not know about Rupert Murdoch: he’s one of the leading religion publishers in the world.
Maybe one day soon Murdoch will go to jail as might his son, as will several of their UK editors if many alleged and disgusting and illegal acts of pirate “journalism” are proved true, ranging from bribing the police to hacking the phones of bereaved family members of killed service men and women and child murder victims. Make no mistake: when it comes to the Murdoch media “empire” we’re talking about the lowest form of “journalism” as detailed by the Guardian newspaper.
So are religious moralizers and others writing about religious and/or “moral” themes prepared to enrich the Murdoch “ media juggernaut” forever while Rupert Murdoch further corrupts UK, American and Australian politics while his companies trade in human misery for profit by hacking murder victim’s phones, paying off the police, elevating smut to a national sport and even hacking the phones of killed soldiers’ families?
You bet!
Rupert Murdoch is one of America’s number one publishers of evangelical and other religious books, including the 33-million seller Purpose Driven Life by mega pastor and anti-gay activist Rick Warren. Murdoch is also publisher of “progressive” Rob Bell’s Love Wins.
Rick Warren, Rob Bell and company helped Murdoch fund his tabloid-topless-women-on-page-3 empire, phone hacking of murdered teens and Fox News’ spreading “birther” and “death panel” lies. They helped Murdoch by enriching him. And these weren’t unknown authors just lucky to get published anywhere, they could have picked anybody to sell their books.
Do the religious authors making their fortunes off Murdoch wear gloves when they cash their royalty checks? Do they ever dare look in the mirror?
The authors publishing with Murdoch serve a religious market so fine-tuned to grandstanding hypocrisy and moralizing, that, for instance, my novels about growing up religious (Portofino, Zermatt and Saving Grandma) will never be sold in the thousands of CBA member (Christian Bookseller’s Association) bookstores because – horrors! – my books have profanity and sex in them!
But those same CBA stores gladly sell tens of millions of books — annually — published by Murdoch, a man with the moral rectitude of the herpes virus, a man who runs the companies that gave Glenn Beck a megaphone, that hacked a dead girl’s phone, that lied about Iraq’s involvement in 9/11, and thus contributed to the war-of-choice needless killing of almost 5000 American soldiers [and over a million Iraqis and counting—Eds] by George W Bush.
You see, Murdoch has bought into and now owns a huge chunk of American religion and is suckling from the profitable God-teat along with the likes of Rick Warren and Rob Bell et al.
Murdoch bought the venerable evangelical Zondervan publishing house. I knew the founding Zondervan family, a clan of strict Bible-believing Calvinists who’d have bathed for a week in the Jordan River to purify themselves if they’d ever even brushed up against Murdoch and his minions! Later generations sold out.
Murdoch also bought the all purpose all-religion-is-great-if-it-sells-something “religion” site “Beliefnet” and “Inspirio” – religious “gift production,” specialists making tawdry religion-junk of the one-more-pair-of-praying-hands made of pressed muck kind.
And Murdoch publishes Rob Bell and other so-called progressives evangelical “stars” as well as run of the mill evangelical right winger’s books though Harper One, the “religious” division of Harper Collins, another Murdoch company.
Murdoch knows something I found out way back in the 1970s and 80s, when I was still my founder-of-the-religious-right Dad’s sidekick and a right wing evangelical leader/shill myself: There’s gold in them-thar God hills! James Dobson alone once gave away 150,000 copies of one of my evangelical screeds that sold more than a million copies. (I describe why I got out of the evangelical netherworld – fled — in my book Sex, mom and God.)
So here’s my question to Rob Bell of the God-loves-everybody school of touchy-feely theology and/or to the right wing “family values” crowd who worry about gay marriage between responsible loving adults while they perform financial fellatio on the mightiest and most depraved/pagan media baron to ever walk the earth:
What serious, let alone decent religiously conscious person – left or right, conservative or liberal — would knowingly work to enrich this dreadful man who will go down in history as the epitome of everything that all religion says its against: lies, greed, criminality, and sheer disgusting exploitation of the defenseless that would shame a sewer rat?
Secular “un-saved” and “godless” and “liberal” authors like Jeff Jarvis have pulled books from Harper Collins because it’s owned by Murdoch ashe writes: “[my] next book, Public Parts, was to be published, like my last one, by News Corp.’s HarperCollins. But I pulled the book because in it, I am very critical of the parent company for being so closed. It’s now being published by Simon and Schuster.”
Where are the big time religion writers like the “I-give-all-my-royalties-to-the-poor” Rick Warren to be found refusing to publish with Zondervan, Harper One or write another word for Beliefnet? What’s mildly lefty Rob Bell’s defense for enriching Murdoch and helping to finance Fox “News” via publishing with Harper One when he could publish with anyone?
For that matter where are the evangelical/Roman Catholic/Muslim—or just minimally decent — people, religious or irreligious guests and commentators now refusing to be interviewed by Fox News even if it will help sell their books?
Knowing what we know about the union-busting, slime-spreading Murdoch empire and it’s disgusting and criminal actions can a moral person work for or use the products of this all-encompassing web of profit, far right politics and corruption?
I don’t think so.
But of course the religion writers have plenty of company.
What about journalists working for Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal?
What about Deepak Chopra?
He publishes with Harper One. Thus Chopra is helping finance Fox News. And so is Desmond Tutu. He’s also a Harper One author.
And what about all the “progressive” stars, producers and writers doing deals with the Fox movie empire? Such Hollywood moralists used to boycott working in the old apartheid South Africa, but will work for/with Murdoch today as he empowers the far religious racist right through Fox News! Desmond Tutu used to call for boycotts of far right religious nuts in South Africa oppressing blacks in the name of God, and now he’s a Murdoch contributor!
Go figure!
Why should the people – religious leaders, writers, actors, agents, producers et al — who help Murdoch wreck America and the UK — remain respectable in our countries?
Okay, they deserve a second chance.
Mea Culpa!
I published two books with Harper Collins some years ago after Murdoch had taken over. I had a deal with the Smithsonian that was tied into Harper Collins for distribution, then the Smithsonian backed out but my books stayed at Harpers. After they were published I thought about – and regretted — helping Murdoch. I’ve never published with them again.
I only have one excuse, I didn’t know much about Murdoch then. But who would willingly publish anything with any Murdoch paper, magazine or book publisher now, knowing what we all know?
Post UK meltdown, will Tutu, Bell, Chopra et al – big time authors with a choice of publishers — still publish yet more books with Harper One, and/or with Zondervan?
Will liberals in Hollywood still underwrite Murdoch with their lives and continue to work for Fox TV and Fox Films?
It’s time to hold all Murdoch’s collaborator’s feet to the fire, especially the big and famous sell outs who can go anywhere with their books or scripts. And why would any decent paper or blog review any book, film or TV show that enriches Murdoch? He should be blacked out before he takes us all down with him.
No more excuses. We all know about Murdoch now.
From here on out it’s time to out those who choose to stay in bed with the sleazy man from down under who elbowed his way into America and the UK, damaged our political systems, perhaps fatally, all the while insulting our intelligence and aiding and abetting our war machine.
We can’t boycott every dubious corporation on earth. But with Murdoch’s sleaze-infested ambition to control the politics of so much of the world a reality a line’s been crossed. It is time to pull an “Arab Spring” on the whole Murdoch empire and overthrow it. And we of the outraged “street” can do it at last because so many political and media leaders, who have sucked up to Murdoch for decades, are running for cover.
I know it’s not considered polite to be judgmental but I’ll say it: to work for any part of News Corp, Murdoch, Fox and/or any or all of his companies, let alone to publish books with him makes you an accomplice to a very bad person.
___________________________________________________________________________________________ PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE A TOOL IS USELESS IF IT’S NOT USED.Don’t just sit there…introduce a friend or relative to The Greanville Post and help us expand the reach of remedial ideas and information. If each of you brings merely ONE additional reader to the table, we will be able to double our circulation!
If you liked this article, why not support The Greanville Post by buying our T-shirt, a mug, a mousepad, or any other item now in our store? That way you donate a few dollars and also get a nice gift. It’s a win-win formula!
