Death of the Fourth Estate

CBS' Bob Schieffer hobnobs with actress Claire Danes at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Real journalists do not enjoy--nor do they seek--this sort of access to power and celebrity.

The vacuous shell that has become of American journalism was on full display last week during NBC's savagely hostile interview with Edward Snowden. Indeed, Brian Williams's attempted takedown of the former National Security Agency (N.S.A.) contractor-turned-whistleblower proved an embarrassing backfire given Snowden's calm, thoughtful, reasoned responses to his host's vacuous, uninspired questions.

At one point during the interview, Williams held up what he called a "burner" cell phone--or a temporary, disposable phone typically used by drug dealers (and, apparently, NBC reporters...) which is meant to be promptly discarded after use so as to avoid detection--and asked Snowden what specific information the N.S.A. could obtain from it.

Snowden did not miss a beat. "Well, that's got to be the most expensive 'burner' I've ever seen," he said of Williams's high-end smartphone.

This brief segment, incidentally, was the only part of the interview that focused on the actual details of the N.S.A. surveillance programs Snowden went to such heroic lengths to reveal to the American public. The majority of the piece centered exclusively on Edward Snowden himself--his early life, his politics, his exact title at the N.S.A., and other biographical details. In fact, NBC's much hyped, exclusive interview is titled, "Inside the Mind of Edward Snowden,"--not say, "Inside the U.S. Surveillance State."

This tactic of focusing almost entirely on the character of the whistleblower, the activist, or the reporter--be it Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, or Glenn Greenwald--has become the media's default approach to dealing with whistleblowers. The goal is always the same: Shoot the messenger, ignore the message. Ergo, Assange, we are told, is an "anti-social egomaniac,"; Manning, a sexually confused youth; and Greenwald an "activist journalist," (as if any other kind exists) whose reporting is driven by his political agenda rather than facts.

The point is to discredit the source of pertinent government crimes or abuses of power. Call them disloyal, unpatriotic, or accuse them of enabling "the enemy." And, even if this personal smear campaign fails, the corporate media have still succeeded in shifting the discussion away from the actual content of the crimes, themselves. From the media's perspective, it is a win-win strategy. And Williams's interview deviated little from the playbook.

Williams wastes no time with his accusatory questioning. In fact, he kicks the interview off not with a question, but a declarative statement: "A lot of people would say you have badly damaged your country."

He follows this up with a slight variation on the previous statement, quoting former N.S.A. Director Keith Alexander who claims Snowden has done "significant and irreversible damage to the nation...." Williams makes no mention of the fact that Alexander lied outright to a congressional committee concerning the N.S.A.'s illegal spying last fall.

Could it be that G.E.-owned NBC--one of the world's largest weapons manufacturers and, as such, a major proponent for the Iraq war--is just as "agenda-driven" as Greenwald?

"Journalism," wrote George Orwell, "is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."

Brian Williams is no journalist--not in the traditional sense of the word. Neither is Scott Pelley, Katie Couric, Bill O' Reilly, David Gregory, Charlie Rose or Rachel Maddow. They are, at best, celebrities. At worst, they are facilitators of corporate propaganda.

Williams, for instance, makes $13 million a year hosting NBC's Nightly News. His net worth is placed at $40 million. This sort of money is unheard of for actual reporters like Amy Goodman, Seymour Hersh or Jeremy Scahill.

Furthermore, Williams has repeatedly appeared on popular TV shows like 30 Rock playing himself or a parody thereof. While this sort of sitcom moonlighting shows Williams is not afraid to poke fun at himself, it nonetheless begs the question: is he a journalist or an entertainer? (Williams's daughter, Allison Williams, stars on HBO's Girls so it must run in the family.)

Williams was ranked the second "most trusted" TV news reporter in America in a 2009 Time magazine readers poll. The Comedy Central satirist, Jon Stewart was number one. While some media scholars objected to Stewart's inclusion in the poll among "serious" reporters, it makes perfect sense, really. The only difference between Stewart and the "Establishment" reporters he routinely sends up, is he openly acknowledges everything on his show is a joke.

Six corporations currently determine all of the news we read and watch: Disney (ABC), Newscorp (Fox News/Wall Street Journal), CBS Corporation (CBS), General Electric (NBC/Comcast), Time Warner (CNN/HBO/Time Magazine) and Viacom. Not only does this sort of mega-merger consolidation significantly decrease the number and diversity of voices in the mainstream news, it is the antithesis of a free and independent press.

"[J]ournalists are not in control of the instruments they play," writes Bill Moyers, in the introduction to his excellent essay collection Moyers on Democracy (Anchor Books, 2008). 

As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of corporate effort, news organizations... are folded into entertainment divisions. The "news hole" in the print media shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment rights (p. 5-6).

Real journalism--the kind television entertainers like Williams know nothing about--rarely makes reporters rich. Real investigative reporting is tedious, time consuming, and often expensive. It requires a fierce loyalty to the truth, no matter how unpleasant that truth may be. Truth is not to be confused with the corporate media's professed journalistic "objectivity." Truth is rarely nestled comfortably between the "right" and "left" or two similar opposing viewpoints. Truth, in the words of the late Molly Ivins, "has the oddest habit of being way the hell off on one side or the other."

Without a free and independent press--one that speaks truth to power, is fiercely critical of authority, and remains steadfastly committed to truth and journalistic integrity--democracy is not possible. We are reduced to captive, ignorant prisoners in Plato's metaphorical cave, entertained by the shadows on the walls.

Yet we are living in an era of unprecedented crackdown on journalists and an attempt to criminalize, through draconian laws like the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the very work they do. The Obama administration has overseen more prosecutions of government whistleblowers than any other administration in history. President Obama has invoked the 1917 Espionage Act twice as many times as all previous presidents combined.

This has created a chilling effect among government insiders and sources. As a result, according to the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, "Investigative reporting has come to a standstill."

Independent muckraking journalism has played an integral role in American history. From Ida Tarbell's expose on John D. Rockefeller in the early 20th century; to Upton Sinclair's inside look at the unsanitary, inhumane working conditions in the Chicago meat factories chronicled in The Jungle; to I.F. Stone and Edward R. Murrow's takedown of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s; and Seymour Hersh's horrific revelations of the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War and, years later, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse in Iraq.

"It is the responsibility of journalists to go where the silence is," writes Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman in her book, Breaking the Sound Barrier (Haymarket Books, 2009), "to seek out news and people who are ignored..."

She continues:

What is typically presented as news analysis is, for the most part, a small circle of pundits who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong. While they may appear to differ, they are quibbling over how quickly the bombs should be dropped, not asking whether they should be dropped at all (p. 1).

So do not labor long over NBC's recent corporate assault on democracy. It is, in the end, so much bread and circuses for a dying empire.

You can watch Brian Williams's entire interview with Edward Snowden below.

Like what you read here on Guerrilla Press? Consider making a donation via the "Donate" button on the right. Any amount is greatly appreciated and allows this blog to keep running. I realize Internet users get tired of constant appeals for donations. But, unfortunately, such is the nature of capitalism. We can change that--but the revolution needs to be televised (downloaded...?) before it can be implemented. So don't be afraid to give a few bucks. This is radical news analysis you won't find on NPR.

The Fog of War

Memorial Day musings on the culture of war and empire

Is there any American holiday more blatantly militaristic than Memorial Day?

Whether or not we are capable of admitting it, the entire long weekend is a celebration of war and empire. At the very least, one is unlikely to see any serious critique or challenge to either institution in one's various Memorial Day travels.

Of course, this is not how most Americans perceive the various parades and patriotic observances that mark the day's events. These parades are meant, we are told, to honor the soldiers who died "fighting for our freedom." While this refrain is no doubt comforting to the families of service members who have died, its legitimacy warrants some closer examination.

Have the long, bloody, unnecessary wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan really made us appreciably "freer" as citizens? Do our daily drone strikes of Syria, Yemen and Somalia truly enhance and strengthen our democracy? Indeed, if these wars are fought to maintain our freedom, then why have we lost so many of them--our right to privacy, to peaceful dissent, to habeas corpus to name just a few--since 9/11?

By that measure, these wars seem to be failing. Yet even allegedly "anti-war" liberals unblinkingly swallow this infantile rhetoric--the more eagerly so when the presiding Warmonger-in-Chief is a Democrat.

Our young men and women did certainly fight and die for something, but it was not freedom. They died for empire, Wall Street, global U.S. hegemony, and corporate profits. They gave their lives so Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), General Electric, and Raytheon could get richer while towns across America continue to close schools, slash budgets and reduce assistance to the poor. (Because, you know, "we're broke.")

"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country," Ernest Hemingway wrote in his 1935 Esquire article, "Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter." "But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason."

Politicians cynically use Memorial Day to pledge their unwavering support and commitment to The Troops. Those returning soldiers who continue to read from the nationalistic script of war-as-necessary-for-freedom may even be trotted out to speak on the Sunday news shows about their "heroic" experiences in fighting overseas.

But any other time of year we cannot turn out backs on these young men and women--kids, really--fast enough.

Those that survive the horrors of war return physically and psychologically maimed. The majority of U.S. soldiers come from poor or working-class families. For many of them, the military is the only career option. A disproportionate number of military enlistees come from Maine, particularly the northern, more economically-deprived part of the state. Suffice to say, you typically do not see the wealthy, the privileged or the college-educated shipping off to Afghanistan or Iraq.

Upon returning from war, soldiers often find it impossible to re-acclimate themselves to civilian life, and struggle to find those wonderful jobs the military disingenuously promises them. After dutifully fulfilling their "patriotic" role in defending empire, they are promptly discarded like so much human cattle.

"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder," observed Socialist leader and perennial presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs in denouncing World War I.

...And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose--especially their lives. 

Hence the importance of a national, highly subsidized military in any capitalist society. As the "CrimethInc." authors explain in their self-published book, Work: Capitalism, Economics & Resistance (2011), "The military is by far the most socialized sector of the US economy. Without the employment opportunities it offers the poor and restless, many of them might seek their fortune in another army" (p. 128, Italics theirs).

But this all goes well beyond the simplistic, nationalistic cant of the average Memorial Day parade. To the extent that Americans reflect on issues of war and peace at all (most of them spend the three-day weekend at the beach or grilling E. coli-tainted meat from Hannaford), the shallow rhetoric rarely transcends beyond, "thanking" the troops for their "service."

War has become our new religion. While membership in traditional religious faiths continues to decrease, Americans remain intimately connected through the language, rituals, and iconography of, in the words of Glenn Greenwald, "all things military."

And I am not merely referring to jingoistic conservatives, here. Allegedly anti-war liberals have, under Barack Obama's presidency, proven themselves just as hawkish.

Case in point, during the 2012 Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker praised the assassination of Osama bin Laden as one of Obama's chief first-term accomplishments. ("Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive!" vice president Joe Biden exclaimed triumphantly.) Liberal convention-goers greeted this exaltation with jubilant cheers and banal chants of "USA!, USA!"

(For the record, it is perfectly legitimate to fervently despise an individual's criminal actions, and still refuse to rejoice at that person's death. Life is frequently full of such ambiguous complexity, despite our media and politicians' desperate attempts to reduce everything to simplistic, "us-vs.-them" sloganeering. I, for one, would have preferred to see bin Laden arrested, tried, and imprisoned for his crime against humanity.)

This type of behavior is typical of those infected with the childish, barbaric mentality of war. The language of war--like the iconography of advertising--replaces rational, complex thought with simplistic symbolism and irrational emotional appeals. Or, in the moronic words of NRA spokesman, Wayne LaPierre in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, "The only thing that stops a bad-guy with a gun is a good-guy with a gun." Such an infantile worldview is far more pervasive than most of us care to realize. It is a direct product of a culture steeped in the language of war.

As with any religion, those who offer even the most mild criticism of its doctrines or prophets, those who speak outside the narrow parameters of what is deemed "acceptable discourse," are banished and treated as unpatriotic pariahs.

This is precisely what happened to historian Howard Zinn, author of the bestselling, A People's History of the United States, when he too dared to question the priorities of Memorial Day in an op-ed column in the Boston Globe on June 2, 1976. Zinn, who was a regular Globe columnist at the time, in a piece titled, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?" had the audacity to observe the holiday should be a day "for putting flowers on graves and planting trees."

"Also," he added, "for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren."

Dear lord. Planting trees is one thing, but "destroying weapons of death"...? And Zinn calls himself an American...?

This was, predictably, the last editorial Zinn wrote for the Globe. He was fired shortly thereafter. Remind me again what George Orwell said about truth-telling becoming a revolutionary act in a time of "universal deceit."

Here's the takeaway: Let's make Memorial Day obsolete by no longer sending our service men and women to war. This is not a call for "weakness," or "surrender." It is a call for a renewed sense of humanity. War does not make us safer or freer. It does nothing to enhance our democracy. Quite the reverse--it erodes it. It makes us less safe--more vulnerable to retaliatory "blowback." As anti-war author Gino Strada urges, we must go beyond helping the victims of war to abolishing war itself.

And if we are serious about abolishing the institution of war then it is essential we understand the intimate connection between the forces that send us to war--the so-called military-industrial-complex--and capitalism.

Again, the words of the late Howard Zinn are instructive. In a chapter entitled "War is the Enemy," in his essay-collection, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (City Lights, 2007) he writes:

My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a message that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can also understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race (p. 196).

Your Job is a Prison

My favorite scene in the 1999 film American Beauty occurs when Kevin Spacey's middle-aged, disillusioned office drone, Lester Burnham turns in his job description to his boss, who is in the middle of company job-cuts. His boss, Brad, reads aloud Lester's unhinged rant of his job description.

"My job," Lester writes, "consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge and, at least once a day, retiring to the men's room so I can jerk-off while I fantasize about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell."

It is a hilarious, triumphal scene, not merely because our Every Man hero finally tells the boss off. But I imagine audiences enjoy a vicarious thrill in it, perhaps imagining themselves in Lester's shoes. Later at the dinner table he nonchalantly tells his teenage daughter, played by Thora Birch:

"Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself and then I blackmailed him for almost sixty thousand dollars. Pass the asparagus."

In quitting his job, Lester regains something he thought he had long ago lost: His freedom.

And therein lies the greatest irony of America, a nation that exalts itself for its "freedom" and "democracy." (After all, didn't the 9/11 hijackers attack us because of "our freedoms?" I mean, what other motivations could they possibly have had...?)

Because the truth is we spend the vast majority of our waking lives in the most undemocratic institution in modern life: The workplace.

Unless you are part of a worker-owned cooperative (more on those later), there is nothing remotely democratic about your job. Democracy does not exist at work. The workplace is, at best, a benevolent dictatorship--and believe me, I have held more than a few jobs where the rulers were not at all benevolent.

(True story: I once worked at a "nonprofit" in South Portland where the executive director would routinely hurl her shoes and shout obscenities at the administrative assistant when she would make the most minuscule of mistakes. The only thing more astounding than her behavior was the fact the subservient secretary never actually got up and quit.)

As economics professor Richard D. Wolff observes,

The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth. Workers have no say over decisions affecting them. If workers sat on the board of directors of democratically operated self-managed enterprises, they wouldn't vote for the wildly unequal distribution of profits to benefit a few and for cutbacks for the many.

Here is the dirty little secret about American democracy--one your history and government teachers neglected to tell you. The Constitution, while it does, through the First Amendment, offer us the freedom of speech, religion, the press and the right to petition and assemble peaceably, it does not explicitly grant any of those things at work.

The exact wording of the First Amendment is, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." The key word here is "Congress." The First Amendment says nothing about what employers (essentially property owners) in a private business can or cannot do. In other words, there is no public law denying citizens free speech. Outside of your job, you can, legally speaking, do whatever you desire. Should you run into any attempts to abridge your freedoms, Congress (i.e. the federal government) will have your back. (Post-9/11 exceptions, noted.)

But the First Amendment says nothing about private business. While the federal government has some regulatory control over private business (though not nearly enough, despite what conservatives may claim), its primary function is the daily operations of public life.

Therefore, the First Amendment does not apply at work.

Consider: Workers have little to no say over the duration of their work, the conditions under which it takes place or how much they get paid. (It is even taboo to ask how much a job pays during an interview, even though it is a completely legitimate question--one that may well determine whether or not an applicant accepts the position.)

In certain "unskilled" jobs--like retail--workers have no say in when they can take their break. Sometimes they cannot even use the bathroom without permission from a manager. Certain jobs, likewise, mandate what employees wear, the length of their hair, and whether or not they can have piercings, tattoos, jewelry or facial hair.

Indeed, in today's anemic economy many do not even have a say in the job itself. They must settle for whatever they can find.

Even those who work at home or are self-employed, while they may seem to have escaped the "rat-race" of the traditional work environment, are still beholden to the same rules, guidelines, and strictures as the rest of us. The only difference is they have brought the dictatorship of the workplace into their own homes. Indeed, many small-business owners often complain about how all-consuming their work schedules can be. Store owners, for example, must remain open on weekends and major holidays, because that is when they do their most business. And because small-businesses typically do not employ as many people as big-box stores, the majority of the work inevitably falls on the owner.

And forming a union? Good luck with that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates only about 11.3 percent of American workers belong to a union today--the lowest level in 97 years (The New York Times, "Share of the Workforce in a Union Falls to a 97-Year Low..." 01/23/2013). Most retail employers--Walmart, Hannaford, Target, etc.--expressly forbid workers from unionizing, despite the fact it is completely legal to do so. Target, Walmart, and Home Depot force new hirees to watch blatantly anti-union propaganda videos as part of their indoctrination, err, I mean "training."

What freedoms we do enjoy at the job (weekends and holidays off, overtime pay, sick-time, maternity leave, child labor laws, worker's compensation, mandatory break times, etc.) are all thanks to the gains of labor unions. The United States had the bloodiest labor battles in history. Union members, labor leaders and activists were beaten, shot at and, in some cases, killed for their worker-advocacy actions.

Employers did not benevolently grant workers these rights on their own. They had to be pressured, prodded, pushed.

It is curious, certainly, how Americans often react with horror at draconian working conditions in developing nations like China or garment factories in Bangladesh. But are we really any freer at our own jobs? Ours is merely a more subtle, deceptively cheery form of workplace dictatorship--propaganda in place of the bludgeon, as Noam Chomsky puts it.

"They caught me singing and they told me to stop," Arcade Fire's Regine Chassagne sings on "The Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)." "Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock."

But increasingly workers are fighting back, demanding the same civil liberties that (ostensibly) protect us in the public sphere extend to the private one as well. Worker-owned cooperatives allow employees to do just that.

In a worker co-op, there is no boss. Rather, all employees have an equal say in running the business. All decisions are made democratically. And employees typically have the option to engage in profit-sharing. Essentially, a co-op brings the principles of democracy, into the workplace.

This decentralized operational model not only allows for greater worker participation, but higher worker productivity as well. This means less instances of workers calling out sick, or showing up late for their shift. Empowering employees tends to make them happier at work in general--something both the workers and the business benefits from.

And no--worker co-ops are not something strictly "European." (And even if they were, I do not see how that would necessarily be a bad thing...) They exist right here in the U.S. Local Sprouts Cafe, on Congress Street in Portland is one.

Guerrilla Press will continue to explore worker cooperatives in future installments and how they are altering the nature of work for the better. Stay tuned.

If you like what you read here on this blog consider making a donation via the "Donate" button on the right-hand side of the screen. Any amount is greatly appreciated and allows me to update more frequently. That's a win-win for both of us. Guerrilla Press offers radical, muckraking views and reporting you won't find on NPR.

Capitalism is Killing the Planet

The White House released its most comprehensive global warming report to date last week, warning of increased sea-level rise, flooding, drought, heat-waves and other ominous forms of climate disruption. The National Climate Assessment report urges lawmakers and policymakers to take meaningful action now to halt the most destructive effects of climate change.

The report, which comes on the heels of a similarly bleak summary by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) released earlier this year, is notable for being one of the first to dispel the widely believed myth that climate change is a "future threat," the effects of which will not be seen for decades to come. Global warming, the authors note candidly, is not a "looming threat." It is happening right now.

"Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future," they write, "has moved firmly into the present."

This, of course, is hardly news to those of us who are paying attention. One need only glance at the morning headlines to understand we are already experiencing the effects of climate change.

California is experiencing the worst drought in decades. Over half of the Arctic sea ice has melted. The previous decade was the warmest on record, while 2012--the year "Superstorm" Sandy wreaked havoc on New York and New Jersey coastlines--was the warmest in history. And last year, the overall concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reached a dangerous 400 parts per million (ppm)--an amount not seen since prehistoric periods. According to esteemed climatologist and former Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief, James Hansen, any CO2 level above 350 ppm is not compatible with a "planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted."

The planet is hurtling toward a two-four degree rise in temperature. While that may not seem like a lot, given the Earth's delicate natural balance any rise in temperature, no matter how modest, can have devastating repercussions for the climate. The Washington Post, meanwhile, puts the overall temperature rise at an unfathomable 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

Maine and the rest of the Northeast can expect to see more flooding from sea-level rise; greater damage to coastal homes and communities; increased threats to fisheries; and a greater prevalence of Lyme disease-carrying ticks.

Yet Congress is all but incapable of meaningfully responding to climate change. Our lawmakers have been bought-off by the very coal, oil, and gas companies responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The best "solution" Congress can offer is a woefully inadequate cap-and-trade bill, which basically allows corporations to pay to continue polluting the atmosphere. Not only does cap-and-trade do nothing to lower greenhouse gas emissions but, like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations, it puts the very corporations that created the climate crisis in charge of "fixing" it.

Perhaps the biggest failure of the corporate press (indeed, a failure of design) when it comes to global warming is its inability to clearly and frankly denounce the root cause: Capitalism.

"[U]nfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force," writes Chris Hedges in his book, Death of the Liberal Class (Nation Books, 2010), "that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself" (17).

It is not just the supposed "excesses" of the system that are to blame, as many liberals would have us believe. It is the system itself. Capitalism is predicated on the concept of unceasing, infinite growth on a planet of finite resources--one with tangible physical limits.

Not only is such a concept unrealistic, it borders on the psychotic. When energy companies view the newly opened land in the rapidly melting Arctic as another business opportunity rather than a frightening sign of environmental destruction, something is horribly wrong. Little wonder then that the directors of the 2003 documentary film, The Corporation, using the physicians' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), determine a corporation is essentially a psychopath.

Like a psychopath, a corporation--a legally defined "person"--displays a callous disregard for the feelings of others, an inability to make and sustain enduring relationships, and an incapacity to experience guilt among other characteristics. (In fact, new research confirms something I have long suspected: The majority of successful bosses, managers, and CEOs routinely display more than a few psychopathic tendencies.)

In essence, the business model of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and B.P.--whether or not their executives realize it--is to literally destroy the planet. The profit-motive of capitalism necessitates that they do no less.

And contrary to the claims of current "Go Green" campaigns, climate change cannot be solved by individuals alone. Even if every single American got rid of her car tomorrow and committed to walking or biking everywhere, the effect, in terms of reducing global CO2 emissions, would be negligible. Like the hippie counterculture and punk-rock before it, the current phase of "green" marketing merely represents the latest corporate co-option of what was originally a genuine grassroots artistic movement.

"We have to do away with the word 'environment' itself," writes Stefanie Krasnow in the latest issue of Adbusters magazine ("Blueprint for a New World, Part II: Eco," May/June 2014),

along with all the campaigny phrases--"reduce your footprint," "care for the planet," "live sustainably" and "go eco-friendly"--they're all just a cheap ticket to a clear conscience. This language has convinced a whole generation that you can 'buy into' saving the world, as if you can consume your way to sustainability.

As author and philosophy professor Clive Hamilton notes in his sobering book, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (Earthscan, 2010), responding to climate change will not only require collective, rather than individual, action. It will also necessitate forming a radically new relationship with the natural world.

Invoking the Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, Hamilton writes:

Climate change is intimately linked not just to the transformative powers of the scientific-industrial revolution, or even the political and cultural forces of growth fetishism and consumerism; it arises from the reshaping of human consciousness. Disconnection from Nature led inexorably to a stronger orientation towards the personal self. The shift is by no means complete and has met resistance along the way, but its extent renders an adequate response to climate disruption much more difficult. For if we are mired in an existential crisis because Prometheus was unbound, salvation requires the shackling of Prometheus once more (158). 

No, Congress and "enlightened" consumer-spending cannot solve the climate crisis.

And, while many of the Big Environmental organizations--Greenpeace, 350.org, The Sierra Club, etc.--are made-up of well-meaning, environmentally-conscious activists, their questionable sources of funding and refusal to operate outside the corporate two-party duopoly (routinely supporting Democratic candidates that share none of their environmental concerns), render them virtually impotent as well. When it is impossible to tell a 350.org Keystone XL Pipeline protest from an Obama campaign rally, it is worth asking if this is, indeed, the best use of environmentalists' resources.

Rebellion is our only hope. Only through mass acts of peaceful yet defiant civil disobedience can we hope to fend off the worst aspects of climate change. And it is going to take more than merely getting arrested outside the White House lawn. Ultimately, if we are to maintain a planet that is habitable for human life, capitalism must go. It really is as simple as that.

Fawzi Ibrahim, author of the eco-socialist book, Capitalism Versus Planet Earth: An Irreconcilable Conflict, sums it up best:

"Today, humanity faces a stark choice: Save the planet and ditch capitalism or save capitalism and ditch the planet."


If you like what you read here at Guerrilla Press please consider making a donation via the button on the right-hand side of the screen. Any amount is greatly appreciated. Adam Marletta can be contacted at adamd.marletta@gmail.com.







 

  

Antiwar Opportunists

Political bumper-stickers are funny things.

Drivers who adorn their vehicles with numerous stickers can sometimes inadvertently convey contradictory messages. For example, I often see cars with peace symbol stickers or phrases like, "Don't Attack Iran!" next to one for "Obama/Bidden, '12." I shake my head and wonder if the driver is aware the former sentiment is essentially cancelled out by the latter.

Point being, President Barack Obama is not a peace president. In fact, as I have detailed many times on this blog, he has been more of a military hawk than George W. Bush--who once bragged to the late Tim Russert that, "I'm a war president."

The U.S.'s overall military-spending as well as our troops' global presence have increased dramatically under Obama. We currently maintain military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq (yes, we are still in Iraq), along with daily drone bombings in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And Obama has all but codified the Bush administration's criminal policy of "preemptive" war under the interminable "War on Terror."

Yet try to point any of this out to a room full of liberal Obama supporters, and you will be greeted as though you are from Mars. The fact that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in the fall of 2009--while he was currently planning his escalation of the Afghanistan War, now the longest military conflict in U.S. history--has only further cemented liberals' conception of Obama-as-peacemaker.

But go back and listen to Obama's Nobel acceptance speech. The president used the occasion to invoke the nonviolent actions of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., only to then summarily dismiss their antiwar views as naively unsuitable for "the world as it is" today. ("Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms," he claims, despite the fact that the U.S., under both Bush and Obama, has rejected al-Qaeda's every offer for peaceful negotiations.)

What is that quote again about truth being the first casualty of war...?

The biggest misconception about liberals is that they are ideologically opposed to war whenever it can be avoided. They are not.

Liberals only express antiwar sentiment when it is a Republican president that is advocating the war. When the man in the White House is a Democrat liberals have no problem dutifully falling in line to "support the troops." This is why the antiwar movement has essentially shutdown under Obama.

Case in point, hundreds of thousands of liberal Americans protested Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003. Indeed, these were some of the largest antiwar demonstrations in history and they were not relegated to the United States. Yet there have been no comparable protests against Obama's continuation of the very same war or the conflict in Afghanistan (which Obama campaigned on expanding as a candidate in 2008). And there has been even less discussion--never mind critique--of Obama's covert "dirty wars" in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the antiwar women's group, Code Pink, describes her firsthand account of the antiwar movement's evaporation even before Obama was elected president in a recent interview on the online Real News Network ("Media Benjamin on 'Reality Asserts Itself'," 04/16/2014).

"What happened to that [antiwar] upsurge?" RNN host, Paul Jay asks Benjamin.

"Well, you said it," she replies. "It's a one word answer: Obama."

"We had a huge movement," Benjamin continues.

You just look at one group like Code Pink: We came out of nowhere, and suddenly we had over 300,000 people on our mailing list. And we had over 300 groups around the country and, really, around the world... When Obama started to gain steam as a candidate, those started fizzling out. And when he won the election we had half the numbers of people we had before on our mailing list. And most of the groups started to disintegrate.  

The antiwar movement, in other words, is the victim of simple partisanship.

This is precisely the conclusion reached by researchers at the University of Michigan and Indiana University in a Sept. 2013 study. The researchers surveyed 5,300 antiwar protesters from 2007-2009 and found that the majority of protesters who identify themselves as Democrats, "withdrew from anti-war protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success" in the 2008 presidential election ("What Happened to the Anti-War Movement?", Truthdig.com, 09/05/2013).

Summing up the researchers' findings, reporter David Sirota writes, "...during the Bush years, many Democrats were not necessarily motivated to participate in the anti-war movement because they oppose militarism and war--they were instead 'motivated to participate by anti-Republican sentiments'."

The fact is mainstream liberals have never been the knee-jerk pacifists Fox News makes them out to be. Historically, liberals have a long tradition of supporting military intervention--especially when it is the name of "humanitarianism." (See: Bosnia, Kosovo, the Gulf War, Iraq War I--hell, even World War II was fought for "humanitarian" reasons. And yes, it is perfectly legitimate to question the justifications for the United States' involvement in "The Good War.") Indeed, this liberal thirst for interventionism dates back to WWI, during which a Democrat--Woodrow Wilson--was president.

As if further evidence of liberals' penchant for war, a recent cover story in that bastion of elite liberal opinion, the New York Times, illustrates recent military recruits' frustration--even disappointment--over the lack of any current major (declared) military conflict in which to build their careers on ("In New Officers' Careers, Peace is No Dividend," 04/14/14). "[F]or the [West Point Academy] class of about 1,100 cadets," the article laments, "there may be few, if any, coveted combat patches on their uniforms to show that they have gone to war.

Reinforcing the mythic national narrative of war as a glorious, noble pursuit where boys become brave men of valor and courage and similar nonsense, the Times' story continues, "Many of them may not get the opportunity to one day recall stories of heroism in battle, or even the ordinary daily sacrifices--bad food, loneliness, fear--that bind soldiers together in shared combat experience."

Then again, what should one expect from one of the leading publications that successfully sold readers the lies and deceptions that launched the Iraq war?

(Ironically, all of the young soldiers interviewed for the story express a desire to transfer to the Special Operations forces, the elite mercenary unit primarily involved in the U.S.'s covert missions in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Ethiopia. The military careerists claim that is where "the real action is.")

It is the Left--the radicals, anarchists, socialists, and communists--not liberals, that have consistently been the staunchest opponents of war.

The outspoken Socialist leader and perennial presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1918 under the Espionage Act for passionately denouncing World War I. "Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder," Debs spoke to a massive crowd in Canton, Ohio. ".... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles..."

Yet contemporary liberals have little connection, both to the history of this nation's radical left-wing movement, and to the socialist ideals many of its members like Debs advocated. The truth is, liberals tend to support empire (they call it "neoliberalism"), which is inextricably linked to capitalism. Liberal acolytes like Katrina vanden Heuvel, Van Jones, Todd Gitlin, and Rachel Maddow may correctly decry capitalism's excesses or foibles from time to time. But by definition, liberals are only interested in reforming the system. Radicals want to overthrow it.

As a result, liberals are not necessarily opposed to war as a means of foreign policy. Like Obama, they are merely opposed to "dumb wars," as he famously referred to the war in Iraq. And this is why the antiwar movement has atrophied under Obama. Liberals do not want to challenge war and mass killing when it is "their guy" in the White House.

Glenn Greenwald is right: Obama is not the "lesser evil." He is the "more effective evil."

 

 

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Class Dismissed

Portland has, in recent weeks, become the latest case study in the ongoing corporatization of higher education.

Last month, The University of Southern Maine laid off 15 full-time faculty members--the majority of which belong to the humanities and liberal arts department--in order to make up for a $14 million budget shortfall. All of the laid off professors are tenured, but have been "retrenched," which, as the Portland Phoenix's Nicholas Schroeder explains in a recent cover story ("Crisis at USM," 03/28/2014), is a "jargony term for eliminating specific programs without appearing to violate faculty union contracts."

The departments cut include Music, Theater, English, Sociology and Women and Gender Studies, along with Geosciences, Recreation and Leisure Studies, and New England Studies. And this is only the first round of cuts to as many as 50 total positions across the University of Maine System. The USM administration, currently headed by President Theodora Kalikow and Chancellor James Page, cites declining enrollment and tuition freezes as the need for the cuts.

Kalikow says she wants to remake the sprawling, multi-campus college as a "Metropolitan university." With all due respect to both Portland and USM, the words "metropolitan," and "Maine" really do not belong in the same sentence.

But students and faculty are fighting back.

The anti-austerity activist group #USMFuture--which consists of current and former USM students, faculty, members of the Portland Green Independent Committee, the Southern Maine Workers' Center, and Occupy Maine--staged a rally and march against the layoffs in Portland's Monument Square on April 10.

Andy Moxley, one of the rally's participants from the organization Socialist Alternative, drew comparisons between the ongoing corporatization of education and the nationwide drive for a higher minimum wage (the "Fight for $15," as it is being called).

"These issues are absolutely related," said Moxley. "They are both issues that affect working-class young people. We keep belt-tightening until we have no room anymore. This sort of austerity is not working. I think people are realizing that. And the fight for $15 is definitely a part of this [larger] struggle."

Many protesters carried signs that read, "Students Are Not Customers," and "Education is Not a Business Transaction." Yet, that is increasingly how colleges are treating both.

More and more, college recruiters and administrators, parents, employers, and even a few professors, are pushing students away from the liberal arts courses, traditionally the backbone of higher education. They insist these disciplines are not "practical" and will not lead students to a career. Courses in the humanities (Music, Philosophy, Creative Writing, Literature) are considered "superfluous" because they will not make anyone (monetarily) rich. And this has perverted the entire purpose of education which is inherently self-critical, political, and even, at times, subversive.

Universities are becoming glorified vocational training mills, emphasizing job skills over actual learning.

"Education," W.B. Yeats famously wrote, "is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

John Branson, a Portland attorney who served as the pro-bono lawyer for Occupy Maine, echoes Yeats's sentiments. In a recent Op-Ed to the Portland Daily Sun ("In Defense of the Liberal Arts," 04/03/14) Branson recalls the benefits of his own liberal arts education at Yale.

"We [Branson and his classmates] were to become lifelong learners," Branson writes, "equipped with the intellectual ability and moral courage to contribute meaningfully not only to our future employers but society itself."

He continues:

Unfortunately, instilling our young people with the moral courage and intellectual ability to think for themselves is directly at odds with both the dominant paradigm of indoctrination and the corporate model for modern education reform. .... The goal of the modern corporatocracy... is to develop linear thinkers devoted to the absorption and acceptance of conventional knowledge, wisdom, and opinions; to mold pliant workers reluctant to rock the boat; and to create an army of malleable consumers easily influenced by modern advertising and marketing.

Let's be honest: The UMaine public schools have never been outstanding. They are average at best. (The truly excellent schools--Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin--are financially out of reach for most students and their families.) USM is a glorified commuter school, and the system's flagship college, The University of Maine in Orono, suffers from perpetual understaffing of faculty. Like most major colleges, UMaine overly relies on graduate students and part-time adjunct instructors to teach most of its courses.

But these budget cuts only threaten to make mediocre schools even worse.

And this dumbing down of education is not limited to our universities. The national trend toward austerity has led to a defunding of public schools, teacher layoffs, and a lack of adequate resources and learning spaces. Lawmakers complain they "do not have the money" to properly fund K-12 education, yet seem to have no problem with mega-retailers like Walmart and McDonald's basically living off of taxpayer expense.

And the emergence of charter schools in recent years--privately owned, for profit schools that are still publicly funded--threatens to usher in a future in which all education is privatized and commercialized.

The Kennebunk school district (RSU 21) where I teach as an Ed Tech recently finished implementing the new Common Core learning standards, which 46 states plus the District of Columbia have essentially been forced to adopt. (Adoption of the Common Core curriculum is tied to federal "Race to the Top" funding--some $4.35 billion. States not on board with Common Core are not eligible for the funding.)

These new standards mean more student learning will be "measured" by standardized tests and mandated educational outcomes. It also means more teacher salaries--and, in some cases, continued employment--will be based on their students' test scores. Indeed, this brave new world of corporatized education, in which the so-called "bad teachers" are those whose students do poorly on standardized tests, forgets that teaching is, as radical educator Paulo Freire observed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a reciprocal endeavor. Even the most talented and engaging educators can only lead students to the metaphorical fountain of knowledge. They cannot force students to drink from it.

Yet the corporate forces--including the "philanthropic" Gates Foundation--that are pushing curriculum like Common Core do not understand this. They only understand one thing: How to make a profit. They see money in public education and they want it. All of it. And if we do not stop them, these corporate forces will destroy not only our nation's education system, but the very concept of an informed, engaged citizenry along with it.


UPDATE, 04/11/2014:

President Kalikow announced Friday afternoon that all faculty layoffs have been rescinded. According to the Portland Press Herald, Kalikow made the decision just minutes before the USM Faculty Senate Meeting and claims the student-led protests "did not play a role" in her reversal. This, of course, seems highly unlikely. However, Kalikow made clear the university must still account for the budget shortfall and is "open to alternative plans."

So, is this a win for us? It is hard to say. As Maine Green Independent Party chairman and state senate candidate, Asher Platts points out, this is, at best, a temporary victory. There are still structural changes needed to the University of Maine System's administrative board in order to change the ever increasing Business-orientation of higher education. Platts writes on the Maine Green Party's website:

While it's great that the faculty layoffs have been rescinded, we must keep our eyes on the prize of reforming the UMaine system to allow for more democratic means of making decisions, review funding models, and [to improve] the state of Maine's relationship to the UMaine system or we will be fighting this same battle over and over.

Bedtime for Democracy

In the wake of 2010's disastrous Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) and now this week's equally game-changing, McCutcheon v. FEC, which lifts the cap on campaign contributions from rich donors, it might be time to start asking the obvious question we are all too afraid to pose:

Do we even still live in a representative democracy, anymore? Or has the United States become a sort of oligarchic plutocracy where only the very wealthy have any ability to influence government?

(Let's put the broader question of whether the U.S. has ever truly been a democracy, aside for the time being. For the sake of argument, let's assume America was founded as a democratic nation. I'll let readers fight this one out in the "Comments" section.)

Many progressive pundits have lamented in recent years the state of our "beleaguered," or "weakened" democracy. But just how "weak" must a country's democratic institutions become before they finally gasp their last metaphorical breath? At what point is the transition from an open, free society, to a closed, totalitarian one complete? Have we, in fact, now reached that point? Does our democracy exist in name only?

Chilling questions, to be certain. Yet the Supreme Court's campaign-spending decision last week demands we treat them as more than academic hypotheticals.

Those Americans whose civic participation starts and ends in the voting booth once every four years might want to start paying more attention. And you might want to start contemplating alternative forms of action while you are at it, given how increasingly pointless those elections are becoming--unless that is, you happen to be rich.

Last week's McCutcheon decision--which raises the so-called aggregate limit on the amount of money an individual can directly contribute to a candidate, PAC (Political Action Committee), or political party from $2,600 to $3.5 million--maintains the Roberts-led court's trend of equating the spending of money with free speech.

While many conservatives have lauded the Justices' decision as a win for "freedom," it is a freedom only a very small, wealthy percentage of Americans can exercise. As Andy Kroll makes clear in his recent coverage of the McCutcheon decision in Mother Jones ("The Supreme Court Just Gutted Another Campaign Finance Law...", 04/02/2014), this will no doubt further the vastly disproportionate influence the extremely rich already yield in our elections.

"The decision is a boon for wealthy donors," Kroll writes, "a potential lifeline for the weakened Democratic and Republican parties, and the latest in a series of setbacks dealt by the Roberts court to supporters of tougher campaign [spending] laws." 

It is time to start thinking outside of the voting booth. Occupy Wall Street had the right idea, initially. Not only did the movement leave an indelible impact on our vocabulary, with phrases like "One percent," and "99 percent," still widely in use today. But it also made clear, to anyone who still did not understand, where the real centers of power are in this country: Not the White House, but Wall Street.

Unfortunately, the widespread emergence of "sister occupations" throughout the country (including here in Portland) kind of lost the plot. It is hard to occupy Wall Street--based in Manhattan--when you live in, you know... Maine. Had the Portland Occupiers set up camp in front of a local TD Bank or Bank of America (or even the Portland offices of Preti Flaherty, law firm of Harold Pachios, a longtime Democratic donor and strategist), that would have made sense. Instead they quixotically settled for about five months in Lincoln Park, where most of their anti-corporatist message was mistaken by passerby for "camping."

When Occupy re-emerges--and I believe it or something like it will--I hope it can move beyond these fledgling failings and coalesce a truly populist mass movement. Still, the Occupiers were on the right track. And this is why the movement was ultimately crushed by the corporate state. They knew it was a threat.

In his remarks shortly after forcibly evicting the Occupy protesters from Zuccotti Park, New York's "independent" Mayor Michael Bloomberg dismissed the group's grievances as "totally unfounded."

It is increasingly clear any substantive effort at restoring our democracy and the rule of law is going to come from outside the two-party system. Real progressive change will come, as it always has, through activists, socialists, and third-parties like the Green Party. (Full disclosure: I am the Secretary for the Portland Green Independent Committee, of the Maine Green Independent Party.)

Contrary to popular opinion, Greens can win elections. We have had particular success on the local and state levels where voters are more willing to look past the bogus "spoiler" argument. And even if Greens fail to win office we can still influence the election by bringing up issues--like raising the minimum wage, or instant run-off voting--the Democrats and Republicans would not otherwise discuss.

Our democracy has been hijacked by an unfettered corporate state. It has been sold to the highest bidder. Extremely wealthy capitalists like the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and Warren Buffett now own America. And the only hope we have of taking our country--and our democracy--back is by stepping outside of the system.

Do not "Keep Calm and Carry On," as the ubiquitous motivational slogan urges. It is time to get mad and f*&@ sh#! up.