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Kyle was given the nickname “Legend.” He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross on his arm. “I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,” he wrote. “I always will.” Following a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six people, he would go back to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigars and “playing video games, watching porn and working out.” On leave, something omitted in the movie, he was frequently arrested for drunken bar fights. He dismissed politicians, hated the press and disdained superior officers, exalting only the comradeship of warriors. His memoir glorifies white, “Christian” supremacy and war. It is an angry tirade directed against anyone who questions the military’s elite, professional killers.
“For some reason, a lot of people back home—not all people—didn’t accept that we were at war,” he wrote. “They didn’t accept that war means death, violent death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to impose ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior that no human being could maintain.”
The enemy sniper Mustafa, portrayed in the film as if he was a serial killer, fatally wounds Kyle’s comrade Ryan “Biggles” Job. In the movie Kyle returns to Iraq—his fourth tour—to extract revenge for Biggles’ death. This final tour, at least in the film, centered on the killing of The Butcher and the enemy sniper, also a fictional character. As it focuses on the dramatic duel between hero Kyle and villain Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously cartoonish.
Kyle gets Mustafa in his sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is shown leaving the rifle in slow motion. “Do it for Biggles,” someone says. The enemy sniper’s head turns into a puff of blood.
“Biggles would be proud of you,” a soldier says. “You did it, man.”
His final tour over, Kyle leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles with the demons of war and becomes, at least in the film, a model father and husband and works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He trades his combat boots for cowboy boots.
The real-life Kyle, as the film was in production, was shot dead at a shooting range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013, along with a friend, Chad Littlefield. A former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been suffering from PTSD and severe psychological episodes, allegedly killed the two men and then stole Kyle’s pickup truck. Routh will go on trial next month. The film ends with scenes of Kyle’s funeral procession—thousands lined the roads waving flags—and the memorial service at the Dallas Cowboys’ home stadium. It shows fellow SEALs pounding their tridents into the top of his coffin, a custom for fallen comrades. Kyle was shot in the back and the back of his head. Like so many people he dispatched, he never saw his killer when the fatal shots were fired.
The culture of war banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain, ritual humiliation and violence as part of an initiation into manhood. Brutal hazing, as Kyle noted in his book, was an integral part of becoming a Navy SEAL. New SEALs would be held down and choked by senior members of the platoon until they passed out. The culture of war idealizes only the warrior. It belittles those who do not exhibit the warrior’s “manly” virtues. It places a premium on obedience and loyalty. It punishes those who engage in independent thought and demands total conformity. It elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue. This culture, once it infects wider society, destroys all that makes the heights of human civilization and democracy possible. The capacity for empathy, the cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and respect for difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity that war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about the nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a terrifying numbness. It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths, when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society. It holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our lost glory by embracing an American fascism.
http://act.alternet.org/go/57027?t=9...1.38018.5wJLo7
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You're Not the Boss of Me! Why Libertarianism Is a Childish Sham.
Libertarians believe they're rebels, but they are really political children who scream through tears.
By David Masciotra / AlterNet February 26, 2015
Libertarians believe themselves controversial and cool. They're desperate to package themselves as dangerous rebels, but in reality they are champions of conformity. Their irreverence and their opposition to “political correctness” is little more than a fashion accessory, disguising their subservience to—for all their protests against the “political elite”—the real elite.
Ayn Rand is the rebel queen of their icy kingdom, villifying empathy and solidarity. Christopher Hitchens, in typical blunt force fashion, undressed Rand and her libertarian followers, exposing their obsequiousness toward the operational standards of a selfish society: “I have always found it quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.”
Libertarians believe they are real rebels, because they’ve politicized the protest of children who scream through tears, “You’re not the boss of me.” The rejection of all rules and regulations, and the belief that everyone should have the ability to do whatever they want, is not rebellion or dissent. It is infantile naïveté.
As much as libertarians boast of having a “political movement” gaining in popularity, “you’re not the boss of me” does not even rise to the most elementary level of politics. Aristotle translated “politics” into meaning “the things concerning the polis,” referring to the city, or in other words, the community. Confucius connected politics with ethics, and his ethics are attached to communal service with a moral system based on empathy. A political program, like that from the right, that eliminates empathy, and denies the collective, is anti-political.
Opposition to any conception of the public interest and common good, and the consistent rejection of any opportunity to organize communities in the interest of solidarity, is not only a vicious form of anti-politics, it is affirmation of America’s most dominant and harmful dogmas. In America, selfishness, like blue jeans or a black dress, never goes out of style. It is the style. The founding fathers, for all the hagiographic praise and worship they receive as ritual in America, had no significant interest in freedom beyond their own social station, regardless of the poetry they put on paper. Native Americans, women, black Americans, and anyone who did not own property could not vote, but “taxation without representation” was the rallying cry of the revolution. The founders reacted with righteous rage to an injustice to their class, but demonstrated no passion or prioritization of expanding their victory for liberty to anyone who did not look, think, or spend money like them.
Many years after the nation’s establishment as an independent republic, President Calvin Coolidge quipped, “The chief business of the American people is business.” It is easy to extrapolate from that unintentional indictment how, in a rejection of alternative conceptions of philosophy and morality, America continually reinforced Alexis De Tocqueville’s prescient 1831 observation, “As one digs deeper into the national character of Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: How much money will it bring in?”
The disasters of reducing life, the governance of affairs, and the distribution of resources to such a shallow standard leaves wreckage where among the debris one can find human bodies. Studies indicate that nearly 18,000 Americans die every year because they lack comprehensive health insurance. Designing a healthcare system with the question, “How much money will it bring in?” at the center, kills instead of cures.
The denial of the collective interest and communal bond, as much as libertarians like to pose as trailblazers, is not the road less traveled, but the highway in gridlock. Competitive individualism, and the perversion of personal responsibility to mean social irresponsibility, is what allows for America to limp behind the rest of the developed world in providing for the poor and creating social services for the general population.
It also leads to the elevation of crude utility as a measurement of anything’s purpose or value. Richard Hofstadter, observed in his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, that many Americans are highly intelligent, but their intelligence is functional, not intellectual. They excel at their occupational tasks, but do not invest the intellect or imagination in abstract, critical, or philosophical inquiries and ideas. If society is reducible to the individual, and the individual is reducible to consumer capacity, the duties of democracy and the pleasures of creativity stand little chance of competing with the call of the cash register.
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker recently stepped on a landmine when he suggested that the Wisconsin university system remove from its mission statement any language having to do with public service or meaning of life. Education should only train people to work. Walker might have faced mockery and scorn for his proposal, but any college instructor can verify my experience of struggling to convince even a handful of students to consider the importance of ideas not directly related to their career choices.
Meanwhile pop culture, still having not recovered from mistaking the Oliver Stone villain Gordon Gekko and his “greed is good” philosophy as heroic, bombards Americans with reality television programs about shallow and self-destructive rich people whose mansions, jewelry, vehicles, and fashion choices are treated with a religious reverence. Their lives are in despair and disarray, but they find redemption through consumption.
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Who then are the libertarians rebelling against? The most powerful sector of the society is corporate America, and it profits and benefits most from the deregulatory and anti-tax measures libertarians champion. That sector of society also happens to own the federal government. Through large campaign donations and aggressive lobbying – the very corruption that libertarians help enable by defending Citizens United and opposing campaign finance reform – they have institutionalized bribery, transforming the legislative process into an auction. Libertarians proclaim an anti-government position, but they are only opposing the last measures of protection that remain in place to prevent the government from full mutation into an aristocracy. By advocating for the removal of all social programs, libertarians are not rebelling, as much as they are reinforcing the prevailing ethos of “bootstrap” capitalism. The poor are responsible for their plight, and therefore deserve no sympathy or assistance.
When children yell “you’re not the boss of me” they believe they are launching a rebellion against the household establishment, but they are conforming to the codes of behavior visible among all children. Libertarians are attempting to practice the same political voodoo – transforming conformity into rebellion – without realizing that their cries for freedom coalesce with their childlike culture.
The philosopher Charles Taylor explains in his book, The Ethics of Authenticity, that the search for self-actualization is a noble and important enterprise in life. Authenticity is important, and people should not compromise their principles or passions to placate expectations of society. Taylor complicates the picture by adding the elemental truth of individuality and community that personal freedom is empty and meaningless without connections to “horizons of significance.” That beautiful phrase captures the essentiality of developing bonds of empathy and ties of solidarity with people outside of one’s own individual pursuits, and within a larger social context. Neighborhoods, religious institutions, political parties, advocacy organizations, charities, and social justice groups all qualify as “horizons of significance”, and the connections that arise out of those horizons inevitably producs politics of communal ethics and public responsibility, in addition to private liberty.
Encouraging and facilitating connections of love that revolutionize individual freedom into motivation for social justice, and reform politics to adhere to the truth of Cornel West’s insight that “justice is what love looks like in public” represents real rebellion in America. Defending and championing selfish indifference to collective interest and need conforms not only to the mainstream American practice of social neglect, but also to the most basic and brutish impulse of humanity’s mammalian origins. The rebel searches for higher ground. The conformist crawls through the shallow end of the swamp.
http://act.alternet.org/go/58327?t=2...3.38018.d5l0Rn
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Libertarianism is allegedly against so much that almost everyone can find something to agree with. But underneath those great-sounding positions lurks an extreme ignorance of reality that this essay examines. Any powerful entity can abuse and frequently does. How we control that and what will the consequences be from that effort is not as easily known as some think.
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Pentagon Report Predicted West's Support for Islamist Rebels Would Create ISIS
Tuesday, 26 May 2015 00:00
By Nafeez Ahmed, INSURGE intelligence | News Analysis
A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.
The document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, and that these "supporting powers" desired the emergence of a "Salafist Principality" in Syria to "isolate the Syrian regime."
According to the newly declassified US document, the Pentagon foresaw the likely rise of the 'Islamic State' as a direct consequence of this strategy, and warned that it could destabilize Iraq. Despite anticipating that Western, Gulf state and Turkish support for the "Syrian opposition" — which included al-Qaeda in Iraq — could lead to the emergence of an 'Islamic State' in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the document provides no indication of any decision to reverse the policy of support to the Syrian rebels. On the contrary, the emergence of an al-Qaeda affiliated "Salafist Principality" as a result is described as a strategic opportunity to isolate Assad.
Hypocrisy
The revelations contradict the official line of Western governments on their policies in Syria, and raise disturbing questions about secret Western support for violent extremists abroad, while using the burgeoning threat of terror to justify excessive mass surveillance and crackdowns on civil liberties at home.
Among the batch of documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal lawsuit, released earlier this week, is a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document then classified as "secret," dated 12th August 2012.
The DIA provides military intelligence in support of planners, policymakers and operations for the US Department of Defense and intelligence community.
So far, media reporting has focused on the evidence that the Obama administration knew of arms supplies from a Libyan terrorist stronghold to rebels in Syria.
Some outlets have reported the US intelligence community's internal prediction of the rise of ISIS. Yet none have accurately acknowledged the disturbing details exposing how the West knowingly fostered a sectarian, al-Qaeda-driven rebellion in Syria.
Charles Shoebridge, a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer, said:
"Given the political leanings of the organisation that obtained these documents, it's unsurprising that the main emphasis given to them thus far has been an attempt to embarrass Hilary Clinton regarding what was known about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012. However, the documents also contain far less publicized revelations that raise vitally important questions of the West's governments and media in their support of Syria's rebellion."
The West's Islamists
The newly declassified DIA document from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their regional allies.
Noting that "the Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria," the document states that "the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition," while Russia, China and Iran "support the [Assad] regime."
The 7-page DIA document states that al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to the 'Islamic State in Iraq,' (ISI) which became the 'Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,' "supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media."
The formerly secret Pentagon report notes that the "rise of the insurgency in Syria" has increasingly taken a "sectarian direction," attracting diverse support from Sunni "religious and tribal powers" across the region.
In a section titled 'The Future Assumptions of the Crisis,' the DIA report predicts that while Assad's regime will survive, retaining control over Syrian territory, the crisis will continue to escalate "into proxy war."
The document also recommends the creation of "safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre for the temporary government."
In Libya, anti-Gaddafi rebels, most of whom were al-Qaeda affiliated militias, were protected by NATO 'safe havens' (aka 'no fly zones').
'Supporting powers want' ISIS entity
In a strikingly prescient prediction, the Pentagon document explicitly forecasts the probable declaration of "an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria."
Nevertheless, "Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts" by Syrian "opposition forces" fighting to "control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar)":
"… there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)."
The secret Pentagon document thus provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led coalition currently fighting ISIS, had three years ago welcomed the emergence of an extremist "Salafist Principality" in the region as a way to undermine Assad, and block off the strategic expansion of Iran. Crucially, Iraq is labeled as an integral part of this "Shia expansion."
The establishment of such a "Salafist Principality" in eastern Syria, the DIA document asserts, is "exactly" what the "supporting powers to the [Syrian] opposition want." Earlier on, the document repeatedly describes those "supporting powers" as "the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey."
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Further on, the document reveals that Pentagon analysts were acutely aware of the dire risks of this strategy, yet ploughed ahead anyway.
The establishment of such a "Salafist Principality" in eastern Syria, it says, would create "the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi." Last summer, ISIS conquered Mosul in Iraq, and just this month has also taken control of Ramadi.
Such a quasi-state entity will provide:
"… a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of territory."
The 2012 DIA document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), not a "finally evaluated intelligence" assessment, but its contents are vetted before distribution. The report was circulated throughout the US intelligence community, including to the State Department, Central Command, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, FBI, among other agencies.
In response to my questions about the strategy, the British government simply denied the Pentagon report's startling revelations of deliberate Western sponsorship of violent extremists in Syria. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said:
"AQ and ISIL are proscribed terrorist organisations. The UK opposes all forms of terrorism. AQ, ISIL, and their affiliates pose a direct threat to the UK's national security. We are part of a military and political coalition to defeat ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and are working with international partners to counter the threat from AQ and other terrorist groups in that region. In Syria we have always supported those moderate opposition groups who oppose the tyranny of Assad and the brutality of the extremists."
The DIA did not respond to request for comment.
Strategic asset for regime-change
Security analyst Shoebridge, however, who has tracked Western support for Islamist terrorists in Syria since the beginning of the war, pointed out that the secret Pentagon intelligence report exposes fatal contradictions at the heart of official pronunciations:
"Throughout the early years of the Syria crisis, the US and UK governments, and almost universally the West's mainstream media, promoted Syria's rebels as moderate, liberal, secular, democratic, and therefore deserving of the West's support. Given that these documents wholly undermine this assessment, it's significant that the West's media has now, despite their immense significance, almost entirely ignored them."
According to Brad Hoff, a former US Marine who served during the early years of the Iraq War and as a 9/11 first responder at the Marine Corps Headquarters Battalion in Quantico from 2000 to 2004, the just released Pentagon report for the first time provides stunning affirmation that:
"US intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a US strategic asset."
Hoff, who is managing editor of Levant Report — an online publication run by Texas-based educators who have direct experience of the Middle East — points out that the DIA document "matter-of-factly" states that the rise of such an extremist Salafist political entity in the region offers a "tool for regime change in Syria."
The DIA intelligence report shows, he said, that the rise of ISIS only became possible in the context of the Syrian insurgency — "there is no mention of US troop withdrawal from Iraq as a catalyst for Islamic State's rise, which is the contention of innumerable politicians and pundits." The report demonstrates that:
"The establishment of a 'Salafist Principality' in Eastern Syria is 'exactly' what the external powers supporting the opposition want (identified as 'the West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey') in order to weaken the Assad government."
The rise of a Salafist quasi-state entity that might expand into Iraq, and fracture that country, was therefore clearly foreseen by US intelligence as likely — but nevertheless strategically useful — blowback from the West's commitment to "isolating Syria."
Complicity
Critics of the US-led strategy in the region have repeatedly raised questions about the role of coalition allies in intentionally providing extensive support to Islamist terrorist groups in the drive to destabilize the Assad regime in Syria.
The conventional wisdom is that the US government did not retain sufficient oversight on the funding to anti-Assad rebel groups, which was supposed to be monitored and vetted to ensure that only 'moderate' groups were supported.
However, the newly declassified Pentagon report proves unambiguously that years before ISIS launched its concerted offensive against Iraq, the US intelligence community was fully aware that Islamist militants constituted the core of Syria's sectarian insurgency.
Despite that, the Pentagon continued to support the Islamist insurgency, even while anticipating the probability that doing so would establish an extremist Salafi stronghold in Syria and Iraq.
As Shoebridge told me, "The documents show that not only did the US government at the latest by August 2012 know the true extremist nature and likely outcome of Syria's rebellion" — namely, the emergence of ISIS — "but that this was considered an advantage for US foreign policy. This also suggests a decision to spend years in an effort to deliberately mislead the West's public, via a compliant media, into believing that Syria's rebellion was overwhelmingly 'moderate.'"
Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer who blew the whistle in the 1990s on MI6 funding of al-Qaeda to assassinate Libya's former leader Colonel Gaddafi, similarly said of the revelations:
"This is no surprise to me. Within individual countries there are always multiple intelligence agencies with competing agendas."
She explained that MI6's Libya operation in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of innocent people, "happened at precisely the time when MI5 was setting up a new section to investigate al-Qaeda."
This strategy was repeated on a grand scale in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, said Machon, where the CIA and MI6 were:
"… supporting the very same Libyan groups, resulting in a failed state, mass murder, displacement and anarchy. So the idea that elements of the American military-security complex have enabled the development of ISIS after their failed attempt to get NATO to once again 'intervene' is part of an established pattern. And they remain indifferent to the sheer scale of human suffering that is unleashed as a result of such game-playing."
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Starts at post 264.
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Divide and rule
Several US government officials have conceded that their closest allies in the anti-ISIS coalition were funding violent extremist Islamist groups that became integral to ISIS.
US Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, admitted last year that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Turkey had funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Islamist rebels in Syria that metamorphosed into ISIS.
But he did not admit what this internal Pentagon document demonstrates — that the entire covert strategy was sanctioned and supervised by the US, Britain, France, Israel and other Western powers.
The strategy appears to fit a policy scenario identified by a recent US Army-commissioned RAND Corp report.
The report, published four years before the DIA document, called for the US "to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world."
The US would need to contain "Iranian power and influence" in the Gulf by "shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan." Simultaneously, the US must maintain "a strong strategic relationship with the Iraqi Shiite government" despite its Iran alliance.
The RAND report confirmed that the "divide and rule" strategy was already being deployed "to create divisions in the jihadist camp. Today in Iraq such a strategy is being used at the tactical level."
The report observed that the US was forming "temporary alliances" with al-Qaeda affiliated "nationalist insurgent groups" that have fought the US for four years in the form of "weapons and cash." Although these nationalists "have cooperated with al-Qaeda against US forces," they are now being supported to exploit "the common threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties."
The 2012 DIA document, however, further shows that while sponsoring purportedly former al-Qaeda insurgents in Iraq to counter al-Qaeda, Western governments were simultaneously arming al-Qaeda insurgents in Syria.
The revelation from an internal US intelligence document that the very US-led coalition supposedly fighting 'Islamic State' today, knowingly created ISIS in the first place, raises troubling questions about recent government efforts to justify the expansion of state anti-terror powers.
In the wake of the rise of ISIS, intrusive new measures to combat extremism including mass surveillance, the Orwellian 'prevent duty' and even plans to enable government censorship of broadcasters, are being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic, much of which disproportionately targets activists, journalists and ethnic minorities, especially Muslims.
Yet the new Pentagon report reveals that, contrary to Western government claims, the primary cause of the threat comes from their own deeply misguided policies of secretly sponsoring Islamist terrorism for dubious geopolitical purposes.
http://org2.salsalabs.com/dia/track....wvxvZMGBK5SSIg
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Our meddling always creates blowback but you will seldom hear about it from the MSM. You have to read alternate, credible sources.
Remember this essay the next time you hear someone like Lindsey Graham, or one of his colleagues say, we have to send troops there because they're going to come here and kill us.
Be afraid...of us!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU
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That sums it up quite well. It's depressing that so few care. Greed, dont'cha know.
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How Donald Trump Is Feeding Off the Death of the American Dream
The fascinating and dangerous trick of Trump is that he offers an escape from responsibility.
By David Masciotra/AlterNet July 29, 2015
“The American dream is dead” and “the US is going to hell” do not make for inspirational campaign slogans. It is difficult to imagine either one decorating a vehicular bumper next to adhesive flags and yellow ribbons. Somehow through his sheer lunacy, paranoid xenophobia, and buffoonish and boorish antics, the Vaudevillian billionaire Donald Trump, against almost all predictions, has managed to detonate the boring Republican primary, and place among the wreckage the typically taboo and unutterable idea that America is a country in decline.
Historically, Americans have preferred optimism, smiles, and forecasts of long days under clear skies in a perfect climate. Campaign strategists have often advised their candidates to avoid using the word “problems” in speeches and interviews. America does not have “problems,” they explain. It has “challenges.” When President Carter, who unlike Trump is not a maniac, but a man of great wisdom, suggested that American greed, isolation, and materialism ushered into the culture a “crisis of confidence,” the press, his Republican opponents, and many Democratic allies excoriated him. The public replaced him with a Hollywood B Actor who played his part with panache. America is better than the rest, he told the people. We have nothing to worry about. We aren’t really in our long, dark night of the soul. It is “morning in America.”
In 2015, as Trump makes perfectly clear, America has sufficient worry and anxiety to lose a lifetime of sleep. “The bridges are falling apart. The roads are falling apart. The airports look like hell. Look, I come back from places like Qatar, Dubai, where everything is unbelievable. Then, we land at LaGuardia or Kennedy or LAX, and it’s Third World,” Trump recently told a visibly irritated Megyn Kelly. One doesn’t need to own golf courses all over the world to appreciate the accuracy of Trump’s indictment. In 2013, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave US infrastructure the grade of D+. The “cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of doing something,” the report warned. Further deterioration could result in “everyday things simply stopping to work in the way people expect.” The horror show of Hurricane Katrina demonstrated with bodies floating in the streets, and children living in the stench and squalor of the Superdome, that damaged and declining infrastructure is not only an aesthetic assault, but an attack on human life.
“Don’t believe 5.6 percent,” Trump declared during his announcement as a candidate for the Presidency, “The real unemployment rate is 18 to 20 percent.” The steady dismantlement of the middle class, and the escalating war on the poor, makes the economic picture of America as bleak one of the closing art museums in Detroit. Many critics mocked Trump for “inflating” the “real unemployment rate,” acting as if he were a lying lunatic, inventing numbers on the spot. The Department of Labor, however, in a number rarely reported, places the unemployment and underemployment rate at 12.6 percent. The unemployment rate more than doubles, when evaluators take into account workers “marginally attached to the labor force,” meaning those whose lives are caught in the chaotic struggle of working a few hours a week at a miserly rate when they are in desperate need of full time jobs. As if the 12.6 figure was not already disturbing and alarming, many economists place the number higher by attempting to include the increasingly difficult to determine amount of Americans so discouraged by lack of employment options, they’ve stopped searching for work, and have vanished from the labor force. Peter Morici, an economics professor at the University of Maryland and award winning columnist for The Hill, estimates that the national unemployment rate is actually 18 percent. The Mercatus Center, an economic think tank at George Mason University, makes a slightly lower, but similar estimation.
Quarreling over the exact number of unemployed or “marginally attached workers” in America will do little to ease the troubles or improve the lives of the “nickel and dimed” workers Barbara Ehrenreich brilliantly and bracingly studied in her book on the working poor. 25 million workers, according to Oxfam America, toil for, at least, 30 hours a week, and can barely pay the rent, keep the water running, and fill the refrigerator. Their lives are a daily struggle against the misery of privation, and they are one unfortunate incident – an accident, a child getting sick, a car breaking down – from slipping out of sight into the back alleys and basements of America’s underclass and underside.
Even if Americans prefer the boosterism of having their leaders endlessly tell them they are perfect, at the levels most immediate and intuitive, many of them cannot deny that something is rotten in the state of America. As Howard Dean put it when he was in the middle of his campaign in 2004, “Not even Fox News can convince you that you have a job when you’re unemployed.” Young college graduates, buried in debt and unable to find placement in a career that enables them to pay down the debt, know there is something wrong, as do working parents who barely survive, counting the minutes in their Sisyphean climb from paycheck to paycheck. Senior citizens unable to even dream of retirement are equally incapable of living in denial. More and more Americans fear that Trump is correct when he proclaims, “the American dream is dead.”
Walking down the street of a major American city, one can often feel a sense of spiritual defeat. Crowding those streets are people who, according to the American Sociological Association, report having fewer “close friends” with every survey, people who are increasingly isolated and alienated from any sense of community, and who take more anti-depressants than any other people in the world, and self-medicate with high rates of alcoholism, drug dependency, compulsive gambling.
When Donald Trump, a billionaire in a culture that consistently and foolishly equates wealth with wisdom, describes the death of the American dream or compares the US to Third World nations, he alone on the Republican side speaks to the anxiety in the American spirit and the panic in the American heart. Many uninformed but intuitive Americans praise Trump for his forthrightness, and it is likely his refusal to act as if America is an Edenic paradise, that resonates with them. Americans have problems, and unlike Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, Trump is talking about those problems.
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The fascinating and dangerous trick of Trump is that he offers an escape from responsibility. Americans, especially those conservatives who preach personal responsibility, are terrified of accepting responsibility for any American problem, and resist it like healthy people resist pneumonia infections. With cynical mastery of demagoguery, Trump tells frightened and disillusioned Americans exactly what they want to hear: None of it is their fault.
Yes, the American middle class is barely existent. Yes, the American poor are barely alive. Yes, American culture is violent beyond comparison with massacres happening on almost a weekly basis. Yes, American institutions are dysfunctional and American cities are in decay. But none of it is America’s fault. It is all the fault of the Chinese, the Japanese, the OPEC nations, and most of all, the Mexicans who are “killing us in trade” and “killing us at the border.”
The reasons that America’s economy and culture are disintegrating right before the eyes of anyone willing to remove the red, white, and blue blindfold are American greed, selfishness, corruption, and arrogance. Rather than learning from other nations, America demonizes or ignores them. Rather than learning from its own tragedies and traumas – the 9/11 attack, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse of 2008 – America doubles down on the sources of those nightmares: war and military aggression, neglect of infrastructure and abuse of the poor, neoliberal deregulation and financialization of the economy. Given an opportunity for introspection, Americans will always look outward. The problem is never America. It is the Soviet Union. It is Islam. It is somebody or something else.
Donald Trump might correctly identify many American diseases, but he offers no real prescription for healing. In the words of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, “he has no ideas, only barstool eruptions.” Trump’s campaign amounts to nothing more than xenophobia. China, Japan, OPEC, and Mexico are responsible for all of America’s failures, and America is forever granted immunity for creating an economy that works only for people with bankrolls similar to Trump, and for creating a culture that produces massive amounts of loneliness and emptiness.
It is easy to ridicule and belittle Trump, and the hatred he expresses towards immigrants makes him worthy of it. It is harder to believe that Trump will quickly go away, as many pundits predicted when he declared his candidacy. Trump, and the ugly lines he recites with skill, is right out of American central casting. There is always an appetite in America for someone who scapegoats foreigners as the fault of everything in our society, and there is never a shortage of xenophobia. Whether or not Trump, the chief clown in the clown car of the GOP, wins the Republican nomination, his appeal to the nativist impulse in America will ensure a long stay, should he want it, in American political discourse.
When President Carter addressed the “fundamental threat to American democracy” and spoke honestly about his country’s problems, he demonstrated strong and courageous leadership by explaining that the “crisis of confidence” presents “two paths to choose.” One was a path of “truth seeking,” “common purpose,” and “true freedom” in the form of communal investment and involvement – a “spiritual restoration” rather than material fixation. The other path, “a certain route to failure,” was “fragmentation and self-interest” – “The mistaken idea of freedom as the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others.”
America chose the route to failure, and has paid for it ever since. Only from the vantage point of a ditch is someone like Donald Trump able to look like a leader.
http://act.alternet.org/go/63050?t=4...8.38018.PmoJ3-
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Where Are We Headed And How Far Along Are We?
The recent terrorism in France, Lebanon and Africa adds anger and fear to what many already feel. The Syrian civil war and the resultant refugee problems are another festering sore creating apprehension, not all of it mistaken.
The hate machine and politicians in this country are currently using these occurrences to stoke emotions to create more fear for political gain. It's what they always do.
There is much evidence from the past as to the possible direction this can push us. We can already see it with what many call the visible police state, corporate control of media, excessive nationalism, and the many scapegoats used to divide us.
The following listing is not provided frivolously. We are well on the way.
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The 14 characteristics of fascism are:
Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
Supremacy of the Military
Rampant Sexism
Controlled Mass Media
Obsession with National Security
Religion and Government are Intertwined
Corporate Power is Protected
Labor Power is Suppressed
Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
and finally,
Fraudulent Elections
Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt recently wrote an article about fascism ("Fascism Anyone?," Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, page 20).
Studying the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they all had 14 elements in common. He calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism.
Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottoes, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
Rampant Sexism
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.
Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed .
Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
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For some time I have been reading of massive police abuse, and other kinds of mistreatment leveled against citizens around the country.
I could have posted many examples but chose not to, however, since there is no decrease in the number of occurrences I've decided it's time to publicize what is going on.
This is one site that provides evidence of the severity of the problem that is really not getting the attention it deserves.
I suggest signing up for daily emails (I have for some time) for at least thirty days. The stories will make you sick.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/
12/29/15
An example...
Sadistic Cops Make K-9 Maul Unarmed Suicidal Teen – Caught Planning and Celebrating It in Texts
Florida police department has a pattern of commanding K-9 dogs to attack people without provocation.
By Justin Gardner / The Free Thought Project
North Port, FL — Months after the Herald-Tribune exposed the North Port Police Department for routinely commanding their K-9 dogs to attack people without provocation, the department has done nothing to address the problem. In fact, it defends its officers even in the most egregious cases, including the mutilation of unarmed juveniles.
There is clearly a culture within the North Port PD that encourages and applauds this cowardly form of brutality, as revealed by messages sent between K-9 handlers involving the case of 18-year-old Jared Lemay.
Lemay’s mother had called the North Port PD when she learned that her son was apparently about to commit suicide. Keith Bush, the leader of their K-9 unit, responded to the scene, but not before telling a fellow K-9 handler to come join in the fun:
“On this day, before he or any other officer reached Jared Lemay’s home, Bush sent a message to fellow K-9 handler Michael Dietz: “COME GET UR BITE.”
Minutes later, records show, Bush messaged Dietz again: “IM GONNA TAKE UR BITE IF U DONT HURRY UP.”
Lemay, who was found unarmed and hiding in a trash can in his garage, was bitten in the face and back by Dietz’s dog, a Belgian Malinois named Cammo.”
After he was taken to the emergency room, another cop, William Carter, messaged Dietz “CONGRATS,” commending him for his dog’s first bite.
Another dialogue between Officers Bush and Brandon McHale further reveals the culture of brutality.
“YOUR BITE OR (Dietz’s)?” McHale inquired.
“I LET (Dietz) HAVE IT,” Bush replied.
“NICE, HOW BAD?” McHale asked.
“BAD,” Bush wrote. “FACE AND BACK.”
“SKIN GRAFT BAD?” McHale asked.
“NO,” Bush wrote.
“COULDA BEEN WORSE THEN, HE SHOULD HAVE COMPLIED,” McHale said, ending the conversation.”
According to Lemay, who was hiding in a trash can after contemplating suicide, the cops entered the garage, peeked inside the trash can and closed the lid, and then pushed it over and sicced the dog on Lemay before he could do or say anything. The Belgian Malinois latched onto Lemay’s face and dragged him from the trash can, and then bit him on the back before an officer stopped the attack.
As a result of this barbaric attack, Lemay could not eat for a week and is permanently scarred.
This premeditated attack on an unarmed, suicidal juvenile was approved by North Port police supervisors, and no investigation was done on the attack or the messages sent through the police cruisers’ mobile messaging system.
The Herald-Tribune found that “North Port’s K-9 handlers commanded their police dogs to attack more people from 2010 through 2014 than did the police K-9 handlers of neighboring municipalities Sarasota, Bradenton, Palmetto, Venice and Punta Gorda during the same period – combined.
Close to 37 percent of apprehensions made by the K-9 unit ended with a dog attack, which was higher than a 30 percent threshold that many American law enforcement agencies use to monitor their K-9 units’ performance for potential misconduct.”
In response to the paper’s investigation, the North Port PD quickly whipped up a “memorandum of counseling” (the least severe form of discipline) and gave it to Officer Bush, two years after the attack. It said Bush’s messages via the mobile digital terminal were “unprofessional,” but said the attack on Lemay was “found to be within policy.”
The department is unabashed in defending its K-9 culture of commanding their dogs to attack unarmed, defenseless citizens, saying:
“We have reviewed all current legal authority and have found our K-9 handlers and the animals which we rely on to keep our community safe, to have acted in accordance within the law and in keeping with best practices.”
Officer Bush, the North Port PD’s senior K-9 handler, has racked up what would be considered by his colleagues an admirable count of 25 dog bites since the start of 2012. Three civil rights lawsuits have been filed in federal court against the department, two involving Bush and his K-9. Lemay intends to file his own suit.
Charles Mesloh, a former K-9 handler for the Venice Police Department, called Bush’s messages to Dietz “horrifying” and said a serious investigation is warranted.
“This is people deciding in advance deciding how they’re going to hurt someone,” said Mesloh. “In my opinion it should be investigated by the Department of Justice. I have defended agencies accused of civil rights violations in the past, and I have never seen anything that has approached what I have seen in this report.”
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Happy New Year, just like the old year and likely worse.
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7 kinds of government subsidies those angry ranchers get that you don’t
By Katie Herzog on 6 Jan 2016
One of the central complaints of the cracker terrorists currently holed up at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is about “government overreach.”
That phrase is commonly used on the right — applied to everything from income tax to background checks for gun sales — and it’s unavoidable if you follow the Republican presidential primary. Ben Carson, for example, wrote that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a government agency that helps protect people from banks, debt collectors, payday lenders, and other predatory financial institutions — is “the ultimate example of regulatory overreach, a nanny state mechanism asserting its control over everyday Americans that they did not want, did not ask for and do not need.” Ted Cruz also has a problem with government overreach, which, he says, includes dozens of programs like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. Oddly, neither Carson nor Cruz think that forcing a woman seeking an abortion to listen to her fetus’ heartbeat counts as overreach, but that’s because they like the idea. Basically, “overreach” just means anything the government does that these guys don’t like.
The rogue ranchers in Oregon misuse the term in the same way. The Bundy family, which is spearheading this little terrorist sit-in, is pissed off that the government won’t let them graze their cattle on public lands for free because of this perceived “overreach.” They’re also mad that Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond were sentenced to five years in prison for violating the law by setting fire to federal lands; that’s overreach too. When, however, government action benefits them, the armed cowboys don’t see any overreach at all.
In fact, the Bundys and Hammonds have been generously subsidized by the Big Government they claim to oppose. Here are just a few examples of welfare programs these families and other ranchers receive:
. The Hammonds, whose arson conviction inspired the action in Malheur, received almost $300,000 in federal disaster payments and subsidies from the mid-90s to 2012.
. Ammon Bundy, spokesperson for the Malheur action, got a $530,000 Small Business Administration loan in 2010, costing taxpayers more than $22,000. And we don’t know if he’s even paid the loan back.
. The Hammonds benefited from a government program that kills predators so they won’t attack ranchers’ and farmers’ livestock, Reveal reports. Specifically, the U.S. government shot five coyotes from the air for the Hammonds between 2009 and 2011, which, according to one expert’s estimate, would have cost taxpayers about $8,000. In fact, USDA Wildlife Services — an opaque and ironically named agency — spends $100 million annually to kill millions of animals, much of that in support of ranching and agricultural interests.
. The Bundys graze cattle on federal land, a privilege for which the government charges a dirt-cheap price. Federal grazing fees were just $1.35 for a cow and calf per month in 2012, while the going rate on private land was about $20 — that’s a 93 percent discount for ranchers using federal land, as FiveThirtyEight points out. (And even that wasn’t good enough for the Bundys; family patriarch Cliven Bundy has grazed his cattle on federal land without a permit since 1993, and refused to pay more than $1 million in fines and fees, which led to his infamous standoff last year.)
. Half of the grazing fees that ranchers pay the federal government come right back to benefit the ranchers. As U.S. News reported last year, “50 percent of grazing fees collected by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service (or $10 million, whichever is greater) go to a range betterment fund in the Treasury. According to the bureau, these so-called ‘Range Improvement Funds’ are used ‘solely for labor, materials, and final survey and design of projects,’ presumably benefiting ranchers.”
. Ranchers can cash in on a federal drought disaster relief program. In a particularly ironic case last year, some Nevada ranchers illegally grazed their cattle on public land that been closed to protect it during the ongoing Western drought, denying that the drought existed at all. But it turns out that two of the families leading that rebellion had received $2.2 million in federal drought relief funds the previous year.
. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management routinely removes wild horses from public lands to make way for cattle. In 2015, according to the BLM, this program cost the American public $75 million.
All of these subsidies to ranchers also cost the environment. The Center for Biological Diversity sums up the ecological costs of cattle grazing: “By destroying vegetation, damaging wildlife habitats and disrupting natural processes, livestock grazing wreaks ecological havoc on riparian areas, rivers, deserts, grasslands and forests alike — causing significant harm to species and the ecosystems on which they depend.”
Clearly, the vigilante ranchers — and Republican presidential hopefuls — are only concerned about “government overreach” when they see it as a threat to their own agendas. When it’s lining their pockets? Well, that’s just good government.
http://grist.org/article/7-kinds-of-...=daily-horizon
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If hypocrisy were illegal most of these cretins, politicians, religious and business "leaders" would be in prison.
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New Book Exposes Koch Brothers' Guide to Infiltrating the Media
Saturday, 27 February 2016 00:00
By Denise Robbins, Media Matters for America | Book Review
A new book by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer lays out how the oil billionaire Koch brothers rose to the powerful position they are in today, where they wield unquestionable political influence and have shaped public opinion in drastic ways. Titled Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, the book brings to light many tactics that the Koch brothers and others in their network of like-minded millionaires and billionaires have used over the years to push their agenda while hiding the true motivations behind it.
The book examines the influence of several of the country's wealthiest conservative donors, but it pays particular attention to the activities of Charles and David Koch, who have organized their network and spearheaded the group's political efforts. "Few had waged a more relentless or more effective assault on Americans' belief in government," Mayer wrote of the Kochs.
A key element of the Koch brothers' strategy is influencing the media. Through media, they have advanced their political and ideological goals and attacked those who stand in their way. The Koch brothers and their network have paid conservative media figures to promote their message, bankrolled front groups that run aggressive anti-environmental media campaigns, and even created their own right-wing "news" outlets. Meanwhile, they've garnered some favorable mainstream media coverage by tightly controlling reporter access to their summits and other events, while attacking and otherwise intimidating journalists who dare to shine a light on their activities.
Here is how the Koch brothers and their network have infiltrated the media:
Buying A Conservative Media Echo Chamber
Creating Their Own Media Outlets
Funding Front Groups That Run Deceptive Media Campaigns
Tightly Controlling Reporter Access to Their Events and Activities
Intimidating Journalists Who Seek to Uncover Their True Agenda
"Instead of earning the media, they were paying for it."
This is how former Republican Rep. Dick Armey of Texas described the activities of the Koch front group he once chaired. Indeed, Mayer lays out several ways that Koch-backed front groups have spent money to create a "national echo chamber" in the conservative media. Most notably, she highlights two Koch-backed organizations that directly paid conservative pundits to promote the Koch agenda on air.
The first group is FreedomWorks, which originated from the Koch-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy. Mayer reported that FreedomWorks "quietly cemented a deal" in 2011 with Glenn Beck, who was a Fox News host at the time. Beck read "embedded content" written by FreedomWorks staff in exchange for an annual payment "that eventually topped $1 million." Mayer further explained: "They told him what to say on the air, and he blended the promotional material seamlessly into his monologue, making it sound as if it were his own opinion." Because of this deal, Politico reported, FreedomWorks saw "50,000 new email sign-ups."
Americans for Prosperity (AFP) -- the other Koch front group that formed out of Citizens for a Sound Economy and has received significant funding from Koch foundations -- forged a contract with conservative radio host Mark Levin to promote AFP's attacks on climate scientist Michael Mann, thereby "copying the deal that FreedomWorks had struck with Glenn Beck." Levin attacked Mann and other climate scientists, Mayer wrote, accusing "enviro-statists" of "inventing global warming in order to justify a tyrannical government takeover."
In addition to the deals between Koch front groups and conservative pundits that are identified in Mayer's book, the Heritage Foundation, which has received millions from Koch foundations, has spent millions to sponsor the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, according to Politico.
Additionally, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the central group in the Kochs' financial network, paid Republican strategist Frank Luntz's firm $1.5 million for messaging work in 2014. Luntz then used his media platform as an analyst at CBS News to praise the Kochs and defend their spending without disclosing his own financial ties to them.
And in 2011, Koch Industries hired Republican political operative Michael Goldfarb to improve the company's image while Goldfarb was working as opinion editor for the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard. Shortly thereafter, The Weekly Standard published a long piece defending the Kochs, which was described by investigative reporter Lee Fang in a Think Progress piece as "8,000 words of hagiography." Goldfarb is still listed as one of The Weekly Standard's contributing editors, and the conservative magazine has published several articles in recent weeks criticizing Jane Mayer and her book.
The Koch brothers and their network have had a hand in creating several "news" outlets that echo the Kochs' conservative, anti-government message: The Daily Caller, The Washington Free Beacon, and the Franklin Center.
The Daily Caller was founded by financial investor Foster Friess, a major Koch donor who has attended many of the Kochs' annual summits and donated at least $1 million to conservative causes that the Kochs support. Friess provided $3 million in seed funding to The Daily Caller, a conservative website which, according to Mayer, has "functioned more as an outlet for opposition research paid for by the donor class." Charles Koch's foundation would later back the website, and the Daily Caller News Foundation is currently listed as a "partner organization" of the Charles Koch Institute. Tucker Carlson, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller, also has other ties to the Kochs: He joined the Cato Institute in 2009, which the Koch brothers co-founded, and he is currently listed as a senior fellow there. The Cato Institute has received millions of dollars from the Koch family, and David Koch currently sits on Cato's board of directors. Mayer notes that The Daily Caller was "the chosen receptacle" for the Kochs' retaliatory attacks on her after The New Yorker published an exposé she wrote on the Kochs in 2010.
After the Kochs started receiving some bad publicity, Koch Industries hired Michael Goldfarb to improve the company's image. Later, in 2012, Goldfarb founded The Washington Free Beacon, and he remains its chairman. The website has published articles defending the Kochs, attacking their opponents, advancing the Kochs' criticisms of President Obama and Sen. Harry Reid, and promoting their agenda. Plus whatever this is.
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The Franklin Center, which runs Watchdog.org, is the "investigative news" service for the State Policy Network, a network of conservative think tanks that are largely funded by Koch-backed dark money groups DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. The Franklin Center itself received 95 percent of its revenue from Donors Trust in 2011, and it was receiving millions from Donors Capital Fund as of 2013. Mayer writes that the Franklin Center frequently "attacked government programs, particularly those initiated by Obama," adding that it "claimed to be a neutral public watchdog, but much of its coverage reflected the conservative bent of those behind it." As Mayer pointed out, a couple of journalists have "t[aken] issue with the Franklin Center's labeling of its content as 'news.'" Yet the Franklin Center continues to reach far and wide, with 40 state news websites and writers in 34 states as of 2013, and its reporting appearing in state and local newspapers at times.
Key to the Kochs' success has been the "growing fleet of nonprofit groups" that "mobilized public opinion" behind their agenda, writes Mayer, particularly against action on climate change. The Koch brothers "had built and financed a private political machine," backing "[e]ducational institutions and think tanks all over the country" that "promoted [their] worldview." Mayer cited Harvard scholar Theda Skocpol, who noted: "Climate denial got disseminated deliberately and rapidly from think tank tomes to the daily media fare of about thirty to forty percent of the U.S. populace."
Mayer focused on two organizations in particular: Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and the Cato Institute. In addition to "spearhead[ing] a national drive to block action on climate change," AFP "took a lead role in organizing the Tea Party rebellion." But the Kochs insisted that they were not involved in the tea party movement, and as Mayer noted, "such denials helped shape the early narrative" in the media "of the Tea Party movement as an amateur uprising by ordinary citizens."
The Cato Institute, which was co-founded by the Koch brothers, took a lead role in attacking the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. Cato published "a steady stream" of misleading reports, which were frequently criticized by experts yet "echoed throughout the network of Koch-funded groups." Cato also "energetic[ally]" promoted the faux Climategate scandal -- falsely claiming that climate scientists deceitfully manipulated data -- in the mainstream media, where Cato officials were often "respectfully quoted as nonpartisan experts." One Cato scholar gave more than 20 interviews pushing the contrived scandal, spreading the story "from obviously slanted venues to the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, adding mainstream credence."
AFP and Cato have continued to promote their anti-environment agenda in the media without disclosing their oil industry ties. And those groups are just the tip of the iceberg; Media Matters has identified dozens of groups backed by fossil fuel interests that are working to attack the Environmental Protection Agency's climate change plan. One tactic commonly employed by these groups is to run op-ed campaigns promoting false and misleading attacks on environmental policies in state and local newspapers, as Media Matters and others have detailed.
The Kochs' political activities have largely been "shrouded in secrecy," writes Mayer, and such secrecy is a key to their success. When they do make media appearances, it is to "portray themselves as disinterested do-gooders and misunderstood social liberals."
The Kochs' biannual donor summits, where they have "succeeded in persuading hundreds of the other richest conservatives in the country to give them control over their millions of dollars in contributions," have historically been closed-door affairs. Only in recent years have the Kochs invited a handful of mainstream media reporters to attend the summits, but just in "snippets," and under tightly controlled conditions. Reporters had to agree to refrain from identifying conference attendees without their consent or approaching donors for interviews, and they were allowed in to only a select number of sessions, according to a copy of the conditions for the August 2015 summit obtained by ThinkProgress. That summit thereafter received positive coverage in publications including Politico, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
But these conditions also drew some criticism from media ethicists. Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, told ThinkProgress that the terms were "outrageous," and suggested that news organizations should "refuse to attend under these circumstances." Robert Drechsel, a professor and director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found it "remarkable" that news organizations "would agree to in effect become complicit in facilitating such secrecy and anonymity." Huffington Post media reporter Michael Calderone questioned whether the rules "still allow for reporting in the public's interest" or are "so rigid that the resulting coverage will primarily benefit the Kochs." Calderone noted in a separate article that the rules "could restrict journalists from reporting what's right in front of their eyes," and that "it's possible journalists end up reporting largely what the event sponsors want ... but less on the power brokers attending who play key behind-the-scenes roles in the 2016 election."
Mother Jones' Daniel Schulman told Calderone that the rules allow the Kochs to "closely control their images." And indeed, at the most recent conference, Undercurrent's Lauren Windsor overheard that a USA Today reporter was "prepped" by the Koch's communication staff hours before an article was published that Windsor said "dutifully relayed Koch talking points" about the new Koch group that is purportedly aiming to address poverty and education. Bloomberg News was recently prompted by a Koch spokesperson to remove a linefrom an article in which the reporter stated that Charles Koch "warned that climate change's worst effects would fall on people in poorer parts of the world." The article was changed to say that according to a Koch spokesman, Koch was "referring to the impact of bad climate policies or programs, not the negative effects of climate change itself."
Ever since her first long-form article on the Koch brothers in The New Yorker in 2010, Mayer has faced intimidation tactics and efforts to discredit her by the Koch network.
Koch operatives formed a "boiler room operation," seeking to discredit the New Yorker story by "undermining" Mayer. They hired a private investigation firm looking for "dirt" on Mayer, who was told by a well-informed source: "If they couldn't find it, they'd create it." After their search for dirt turned up nothing, Mayer learned that The Daily Caller intended to publish a "hit piece" accusing her of plagiarism. But Mayer reached out to the reporters she was supposedly plagiarizing, and they "offered to make public statements" supporting her, so The Daily Caller dropped the story.
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Mayer is not the only journalist to experience intimidation from the Kochs (though hers may be the most extreme example). At the American Legislative Exchange Council's annual meeting, Greenpeace researcher Connor Gibson was confronted by Koch Industries government affairs director Mike Morgan. Gibson captured a partial video of the interaction, but Morgan then took Gibson's phone away from him, until Morgan was forced to return it by police. Rolling Stone reporter Tim Dickinson called Koch Industries "the most hostile and paranoid organization I've ever engaged with." Mayer also wrote that Koch security threatened to arrest Politico reporter Kenneth Vogel after catching him in a cafe at one of their summits, "[u]nless he left the premises immediately."
Koch Industries also utilizes its website KochFacts.com to combat negative reports. Mayer notes that KochFacts.com "wage[s] ad hominem attacks, questioning the professionalism and integrity of reporters whose work the company found unflattering, ranging from The New York Times to Politico." The website has blasted David Sassoon of the Pulitzer Prize-winning InsideClimate News as a "professional eco-activist" and "agenda-driven activist." It also frequently posts personal email exchanges with journalists, "sometimes to the reporter's shock," according to The Washington Post. This includes email exchanges with reporters and editors at The New York Times, MSNBC, Politico, and more.
Hopefully, Jane Mayer herself is a testament to the fact that reporters will not back down from exposing the true extent of the Kochs' influence and how it is shaping our country for the worse. There is surely more to the story not yet uncovered.
http://org2.salsalabs.com/dia/track....yR58so/sRFtoP/
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If you've read this carefully the lying by media "stalwarts" and the infiltration of propaganda into what passes for independent media should frighten you.
Even if you're in the top 5-10 percent is this the type of country you want to live in? If you say yes, and you like the rich controlling a large part of the public discourse, you should realize that it is likely that your concerns one day will be ignored by those in power. And, if you are NOT rich, should you accept someone feeding BS about you, or the country you live in, to shape opinion against you and your life? If you are honest the answer has to be no!
Welcome to the world of the monied few. If it is not stopped YOU will be FKD eventually.
