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To Serve Society |
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Wednesday, 03 July 2013 12:55 |
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Reich writes: "Economics, and much of public policy and political strategy, assume that people are motivated by self-interest, that the definition of acting rationally is to maximize what you want for yourself."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
To Serve Society
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
03 July 13
 t's worth pondering that the 19 firefighters who died Sunday battling a huge wildfire near Prescott, Arizona, presumably were motivated by something other than rational self-interest. Like the first-responders to 9/11 and other emergencies, and members of the armed forces, they put themselves in harm's way (or chose a job that did so) because they wanted to serve.
Economics, and much of public policy and political strategy, assume that people are motivated by self-interest, that the definition of acting rationally is to maximize what you want for yourself, and that other values - service, duty, allegiance to others, morality, and shared ideals - are either irrelevant or negligible.
Ayn Rand, the philosophical guru of the modern Republican Party, popularized this view of human nature. In her world, selfishness is the only honest and justifiable motive. By looking out for Number One, we accomplish everything that's necessary. Economist Milton Friedman extended the logic: The magic of the marketplace can be relied on to allocate resources to their highest and best uses. Anything "public" is suspect.
The titans of Wall Street and the CEOs of our major corporations have put this narrow principle into everyday practice. In their view, the aggregation of great wealth and maximization of profit is the only justifiable motive. Greed is good. Eight-figure compensation packages are their due. People are paid according to their economic worth.
This crimped perspective misses what's most important. Shared values are the essence of a society. They fuel not only acts of valor, such as those of these 19 young firefighters, but they also motivate people to become teachers and social workers, police officers and soldiers, librarians and city councilors.
And they generate social movements - abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights, environmental protection.
Most human beings want to be part of something larger than themselves. They crave moral purpose and social solidarity. If we overlook this, we fail to understand the means and meaning of social progress.
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The Dictionary of the Global War on You (GWOY) |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396"><span class="small">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Wednesday, 03 July 2013 12:54 |
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Engelhardt writes: "Perhaps nothing changed more than the American national security state, which, spurred on by 9/11 and the open congressional purse strings that followed, grew in ways that would have been alien even at the height of the Cold War."
Surveillance cameras are only one part of the growing collection of surveillance technology being implemented in the US. (photo: Kodda/Shutterstock.com)
The Dictionary of the Global War on You
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
03 July 13
n the months after September 11, 2001, it was regularly said that "everything" had changed. It's a claim long forgotten, buried in everyday American life. Still, if you think about it, in the decade-plus that followed - the years of the PATRIOT Act, "enhanced interrogation techniques," "black sites," robot assassination campaigns, extraordinary renditions, the Abu Ghraib photos, the Global War on Terror, and the first cyberwar in history - much did change in ways that should still stun us. Perhaps nothing changed more than the American national security state, which, spurred on by 9/11 and the open congressional purse strings that followed, grew in ways that would have been alien even at the height of the Cold War, when there was another giant, nuclear-armed imperial power on planet Earth.
Unfortunately, the language we use to describe the world of the national security state is still largely stuck in the pre-9/11 era. No wonder, for example, it's hard to begin to grasp the staggering size and changing nature of the world of secret surveillance that Edward Snowden's recent revelations have allowed us a peek at. If there are no words available to capture the world that is watching us, all of us, we've got a problem.
In ancient China, when a new dynasty came to power, it would perform a ceremony called "the rectification of names." The idea was that the previous dynasty had, in part, fallen because a gap, a chasm, an abyss, had opened between reality and the names available to describe it. Consider this dispatch, then, a first attempt to "rectify" American names in the era of the ascendant national - morphing into global - security state.
Creating a new dictionary of terms is, of course, an awesome undertaking. From the moment work began, it famously took 71 years for the full 10-volume Oxford English Dictionary to first appear! So we at TomDispatch expect to be at work on our new project for years to come. Here, however, is an initial glimpse at a modest selection of our newly rectified definitions.
The Dictionary of the Global War on You
Secret: Anything of yours the government takes possession of and classifies.
Classification: The process of declaring just about any document produced by any branch of the U.S. government - 92 million of them in 2011 - unfit for unclassified eyes. (This term may, in the near future, be retired once no documents produced within, or captured by, the government and its intelligence agencies can be seen or read by anyone not given special clearance.)
Surveillance: Here's looking at you, kid.
Whistleblower: A homegrown terrorist.
Leak: Information homegrown terrorists slip to journalists to undermine the American way of life and aid and abet the enemy. A recent example would be the National Security Agency (NSA) documents Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden leaked to the media. According to two unnamed U.S. intelligence officials speaking to the Associated Press, "[M]embers of virtually every terrorist group, including core al-Qaida, are attempting to change how they communicate, based on what they are reading in the media [of Snowden's revelations], to hide from U.S. surveillance." A clarification: two anonymous intelligence officials communicating obviously secret material to AP reporter Kimberly Dozier does not qualify as a "leak," but as necessary information for Americans to absorb. In addition, those officials undoubtedly had further secret intelligence indicating that their information, unlike Snowden's, would be read only by Americans and ignored by al-Qaeda-style terrorists who will not change their actions based on it. As a result, this cannot qualify as aiding or abetting the enemy.
Journalist: Someone who aids and abets terrorists, traitors, defectors, and betrayers hidden within our government as they work to accomplish their grand plan to undermine the security of the country.
Source: Someone who tells a journalist what no one, other than the NSA, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and similar outfits, should know (see "secret"). Such a source will be hunted down and prosecuted to the full extent of the law - or beyond (see "Espionage Act"). Fortunately, as Associated Press president Gary Pruitt recently pointed out, thanks to diligent government action, sources are drying up. ("Some of our longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking to us, even on stories that aren't about national security. And in some cases, government employees that we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone, and some are reluctant to meet in person.") Someday, they may no longer exist. When an unnamed administration official offers information privately to a journalist, however, he or she is not a source - just too humble to take credit for feeding us crucial information needed to understand the complex world we live in.
Blood: This is what leakers have on their hands. A leak, embarrassing the national security state, endangers careers (bloody enough) and, by definition, American lives. Thus, Bradley Manning, in releasing classified State Department and U.S. military documents to WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden, in releasing NSA secrets to the Guardian, the Washington Post, the South China Morning Post, and Der Spiegel have blood on their hands. We know this because top U.S. officials have told us so. Note that it does not matter if no deaths or physical injuries can directly be traced to or attributed to their actions. This is, however, a phrase with very specific and limited application. American political and military officials who launch aggressive wars, allow torture, kidnapping, and abuse, run drone assassination programs, and the like do not have blood on their hands. It is well known that they are bloodless.
Insider Threat Program: The name of an Obama administration initiative to promote patriotism inside the government. Its goal is to encourage federal employees to become more patriotic by picking up on clues that potentially traitorous co-workers might consider leaking classified information to the enemy (see "journalist"). Government managers, again to promote love of country, are encouraged to crack down on any employees who are found not to have been patriotic enough to report their suspicions about said co-workers. (Words never to be associated with this program: informer, rat, or fink.)
Patriot: Americans are by nature "patriots." If they love their country too well like (to take but one example) former Vice President Dick Cheney, they are "super-patriots." Both of these are good things. Foreigners cannot be patriots. If they exhibit an unseemly love of country, they are "nationalists." If that love goes beyond all bounds, they are "ultra-nationalists." These are both bad things.
Espionage Act: A draconian World War I law focused on aiding and abetting the enemy in wartime that has been used more than twice as often by the Obama administration as by all previous administrations combined. Since 9/11, the United States has, of course, been eternally "at war," which makes the Act handy indeed. Whistleblowers automatically violate the Act when they bring to public's attention information Americans really shouldn't bother their pretty little heads about. It may be what an investigative reporter (call him "Glenn Greenwald") violates when he writes stories based on classified information from the national security state not leaked by the White House.
Trust: What you should have in the national security state and the president to do the right thing, no matter how much power they accrue, how many secrets of yours or anybody else's they gather, or what other temptations might exist. Americans can make mistakes, but by their nature (see "patriots"), with the exception of whistleblowers, they can never mean to do wrong (unlike the Chinese, the Russians, etc.). As the president has pointed out, "Every member of Congress has been briefed on [NSA's] telephone program and the intelligence committees have been briefed on the Internet program, with both approved and reauthorized by bipartisan committees since 2006... If people don't trust Congress and the judiciary then I think we are going to have some problems here."
Truth: The most important thing on Earth, hence generally classified. It is something that cannot be spoken by national security officials in open session before Congress without putting the American people in danger. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has made clear, however, any official offering such public testimony can at least endeavor to speak in "the least untruthful manner" possible; that is, in the nearest approximation of truth that remains unclassified in the post-9/11 era.
U.S. Constitution: A revered piece of paper that no one pays much actual attention to any more, especially if it interferes with American safety from terrorism.
Amendments: Retrospectively unnecessary additions to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing a series of things, some of which may now put us in peril (examples: First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment "due process" clause). Fortunately, amendments turn out to be easy enough to amend within the national security state itself.
Checks and balances: No longer applicable, except to your bank statement.
The fourth branch of government: Classically, the U.S. had three branches of government (the executive, legislative, and judicial), which were to check and balance one another so that power would never become centralized in a single place unopposed. The Founding Fathers, however, were less farsighted than many give them credit for. They hadn't a clue that a fourth branch of government would arise, dedicated to the centralization of power in an atmosphere of total secrecy: the national (or today global) security state. In the post-9/11 years, it has significantly absorbed the other three branches.
FISA court: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, much strengthened since September 11, 2001, created a FISA "court" to oversee the government's covert surveillance activities. A secret "court" for the secret world of surveillance, it can, at just about any time, be convened and conducted via cell phone by the NSA or FBI. There is never a defense lawyer present, only the equivalent of a prosecution request. The search warrants that result read more like legislation by an unelected body. All national security requests for such warrants are granted. Its decisions are not made public. In its arcane rules and prosecutorial stance, it bears a greater relationship to the Inquisition courts of Medieval Europe than any other American court. Its motto might be, "guilty - there are no innocents." We have no word for what it actually is. The activity it performs is still called "judicial oversight," but "undersight" would be a more accurate description.
FISA judge: There is, in essence, nothing for a FISA judge to judge. FISA judges never rule against the wishes of the national security state. Hence, a more accurate term for this position might be "FISA rubberstamp."
Congressional oversight: When a congressional representative forgets to do something. (Historical note: this phrase once had another meaning, but since 9/11, years in which Congress never heard a wish of the national security state that it didn't grant, no one can quite remember what it was.)
National Security Agency (NSA): A top-secret spy outfit once nicknamed "No Such Agency" because its very existence was not acknowledged by the U.S. government. It is now known as "No Such Agency" because its work has been outsourced to high-priced high-school dropouts, or "No Snowden Anywhere" because it couldn't locate the world's most famous leaker.
American security (or safety): The national security state works hard to offer its citizens a guarantee of safety from the nightmare of terror attacks, which since 9/11 have harmed far more Americans than shark attacks, but not much else that is truly dangerous to the public. For this guarantee, there is, of course, a necessary price to be paid. You, the citizen and taxpayer, must fund your own safety from terrorism (to the tune of trillions of dollars heading into the national security budget) and cede rights that were previously yours. You must, for instance, allow yourself to be "seen" in myriad ways by the national security state, must allow for the possibility that you could be assassinated without "due process" to keep this country safe, and so on. This is called "striking a balance" between American liberty and security. Or as the president put it, "You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience... We're going to have to make some choices as a society... There are trade-offs involved." By the way, in return for your pliancy, this guarantee does not extend to keeping you safe from cars, guns, cigarettes, food-borne diseases, natural disasters of any sort, and so on.
The Global War on You (GWOY): This term, not yet in the language, is designed to replace a post-9/11 Bush administration name, the Global War on Terror (GWOT), sometimes also called World War IV by neocons. GWOT was famously retired by President Obama and his top officials, turning the ongoing global war being fought on distant battlefields and in the shadows into a nameless war. That may, however, change. You are, after all, being called to the colors in a war on... you. Congratulations, son or daughter, Uncle Sam wants you (even if not in the way he used to in your grandparents' day). You, after all, are the central figure in and the key to GWOY and the basis upon which the new global security state will continue to be built.
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We Must Hate Our Children |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23847"><span class="small">Joan Walsh, Salon</span></a>
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Wednesday, 03 July 2013 12:53 |
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Walsh writes: "Next time you're watching a college graduation, as you look out over the sea of caps and gowns, make sure you notice the ball and chain most graduates are wearing as they march onstage to receive their diplomas."
Today's college graduates are facing increasing debt and stress. (photo: ThinkStock)
We Must Hate Our Children
By Joan Walsh, Salon
03 June 13
We crush them with debt to go to college - and today, rates are actually set to double. Are we out of our minds?
 ext time you're watching a college graduation, as you look out over the sea of caps and gowns, make sure you notice the ball and chain most graduates are wearing as they march onstage to receive their diplomas. That's student loan debt, which at over $1 trillion tops credit card debt in the U.S. today. The average burden is $28,000, but add in their credit cards and they're graduating with an average of $35,000 in debt. It's no wonder that people who've paid off their student loan debt are 36 percent more likely to own homes than those who haven't, according to new research by the One Wisconsin Now Institute and Progress Now.
What kind of society sends its young people from higher education into adulthood this way? I'm aware I'm only talking about those lucky enough to go to college, when roughly one-third of high school graduates don't - but if this is the way we treat our relatively lucky kids, the rest of them don't have a prayer. For many, the school to prison pipeline functions much more efficiently than the school to college one; California is one of at least 10 states that now spends more on prison than higher education. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, two-thirds of college graduates leave with some debt, and 37 million Americans are repaying a student loan right now. Unbelievably, interest rates on federally subsidized loans are doubling today, from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. As Congress bickers over alternatives, even Democrats are backing "market-based" plans that aren't as bad as GOP ideas, but aren't good either. I hope they can find a way to lower interest rates, but the real scandal isn't the rate hike. The real scandal is that we take for granted that young people must go into debt - at whatever interest rate - to pay for college. Of course, the truly lucky kids - those blessed wealthy members of the Lucky Sperm Club - sail through higher education without debt. But today, even upper-middle-class kids are having to take out loans, as the average annual cost of a four-year public university soars above $22,000, while private schools are over $50,000. Who the hell thinks this is a good idea? I used to find it endearing when President Obama talked about how he and Michelle finally paid off their student loans after he was elected to the Senate. But in a way, the president's folksy anecdote helped normalize what should be outrageous: that we expect young people to go deep in debt, well into middle age, to get a good education. Of course, the Obamas' story should come with an asterisk, since much of their debt was built up paying for Harvard Law School, and clearly, that paid off for them. The assumption that students should borrow money to pay for an undergraduate degree, and that the only debate is over how high their interest rate should be, is seriously crazy. As David Dayen explained in this great Salon piece, we shouldn't even call them student "loans," because you can't refinance them, and you can't get out from under them by declaring bankruptcy. It's more like indenture. There's no statute of limitation on collecting student loans, and lenders can garnish wages, tax refunds and even Social Security checks. Back in 2007, now-Sen. Elizabeth Warren asked: "Why should students who are trying to finance an education be treated more harshly than someone … who racked up tens of thousands of dollars gambling?" Nothing's changed, although Warren is part of a limited number of people in Congress who are trying. In the survey of 61,700 student loan holders recently completed by One Wisconsin Now and Progress Now, students with bachelor's degrees took an average of 19 years to pay off their loans, at an average cost of $117,000. Their average monthly payment was $499. And this isn't a brand-new problem: Of the $1 trillion in student debt, 60 percent is owed by people over 30. It wasn't always this way. The postwar American economic boom had at its heart an intentional, comprehensive program of making higher education much more accessible. In 1946, 2 million Americans attended college or university, representing only one in eight college-age students; by 1970, there were 8 million undergraduates, one in three in that age group. And the balance of enrollment shifted to public institutions: In the '40s, more college students attended private colleges; by 1970 three-quarters were enrolled in public ones. Graduate enrollment spiked, thanks to expanded research funding, from 120,000 in 1946 to 900,000 in 1970. States competed to expand their public university systems - and many were free, or close to it. The stellar University of California system was tuition free (though there were fees) until Ronald Reagan became governor in 1967; so was the City University of New York system for a long time. CUNY was from the start an "experiment," in the words of co-founder Horace Webster, in "whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated." It was a contentious experiment, with its admission and tuition policies shifting back and forth over many years, but the egalitarianism at its heart, and through much of its history, can't be denied. And that was true of most public university systems. Late in the game, when I graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1980, I was still paying less than $400 a semester. Now it's amost 15 times that, at $5,500 a semester; the annual cost to an in-state student (including room, board, books and other fees) is $24,000. Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal ran down the California history in a piece about "the slow death of public higher education" last year. With the U.C. system's bipartisan 1960 master plan: The doors of the University of California were thrown open, tuition-free, for the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates. The top 33.3 percent could find a place in one of the California State Universities, which were also tuition-free. Everyone else, if they so chose, could go to one of the many California Community Colleges, which were open not only to high school graduates but also to qualifying non-traditional students. Perhaps most important, community college graduates had the opportunity to transfer to one of the UCs or CSUs to finish their bachelor's degree, if their grades were above a certain point. In theory and to a significant extent in practice, anyone from anywhere in California could, if they worked hard enough, get a bachelor's degree from one of the best universities in the country (and, therefore, in the world), almost free of charge. The pronounced social and economic mobility of the postwar period would have been unthinkable without institutions of mass higher education, like this one, provided at public expense. I got angry about this all over again having dinner with a friend who's a little older than me. He finished at the very bottom of his high school class - and wound up at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which as late as the '60s had "open enrollment," and cost $80 a semester. College unlocked something high school didn't; he thrived and transferred to Columbia University and eventually got a Ph.D. That isn't happening for anyone today, unless their wealthy parents can buy them into a private university. Meanwhile, public universities are spending on new buildings, but they're sharply hiking tuition as well as either cutting or just maintaining enrollment. (University of Wisconsin in-state tuition has doubled in just the last decade.) The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found that the share of young people enrolled in U.C. or California State University campuses dropped 20 percent in the five years between 2007 and 2012. "You can go into any community and talk to somebody whose son or daughter either can't get in or can't finish [college] because they can't get this or that course," David Wolf, co-founder of the Campaign for College Opportunity, told California Watch. "Meanwhile, they go on campus and there's all that fresh cement. That's embarrassing, and it's wrong." In the 1980s, at the flagship U.C.-Berkeley, more than half of all applicants were accepted; this year it was closer to 20 percent, as 67,000 applicants vied for 14,000 acceptances to the incoming freshman class (of 4,200 students, unchanged in the last 10 years). Meanwhile, both public and private aid has shifted from "need-based aid," which tends to go to lower-income kids, to "merit-based aid," which is tied to income but less directly. Not surprisingly, at Ivy League schools and the "public Ivies" (which includes the U.C. and U.W. flagship schools), 80 percent of students admitted come from the top income quartile of American families; only 2 percent come from the bottom quartile. Astonishingly, in 2008, older people born in California were a third more likely to have college degrees than younger native Californians, according to PPIC; elsewhere around the country, the difference was only 1/16th (30.9 percent versus 29.0 percent) - but still: young American adults are less likely than older Americans to have attended college. This has to be the first generation for whom that's true. We're putting the history of American progress in reverse.
With student debt so pervasive and crushing, of course it matters that Congress do something to keep interest rates from rising. The House GOP is gloating that (in a bizarre role switch) they've passed a plan, and the Senate hasn't. The House GOP plan would send students out into a maze of "market-based" adjustable rate loans. Why should someone at age 18 have to navigate a thicket of variable rate loans, where their interest rate could double over time? But even the compromise Obama plan, which would let students lock in a rate once they decided on a loan, has no cap on interest rates. A growing number of voices, including the Fed, are pointing to the way this debt burden is a drag not just on the borrowers but the wider economy. That One Wisconsin Now survey found that student debt reduces average aggregate car purchasing by $6.4 billion a year. Young people are leaving school with the kind of debt that was once only incurred by the purchase of a first home; not surprisingly, it's depressing home buying too. That practical economic argument is important, but almost no one is making the larger economic argument, that expanded access to higher education is good for everyone, period. There are proposals to reform the student loan system to make it more like a standard loan agreement and less like indenture. The Obama administration has expanded opportunities to have debt reduced for those in education or other public interest careers, which is great. But when we talk about doing big things again, when we dream about infrastructure, why are none of our major leaders advocating for new campuses for our state universities and colleges? A Washington Post piece on the interest-rate impasse noted that Obama and Mitt Romney both called for Congress to stop the rate hike last summer, and it happened. "But student-loan policy has drawn less attention this year now that the presidential election is over." Indeed. We should stop mouthing platitudes about how "children are our future." From preschool to post-graduate education, we are proving the opposite is true.
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Sanitizing Nelson Mandela |
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Wednesday, 03 July 2013 12:51 |
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Schechter writes: "Only after Mandela pulled back from demands about redistributing wealth was he embraced as a mass media icon."
Nelson Mandela, former South African president. (photo: AP)
Sanitizing Nelson Mandela
By Danny Schechter, Consortium News
03 July 13
When Nelson Mandela was a dedicated freedom-fighter against white-ruled South Africa, he was almost as much a "non-person" in the U.S. media as he was in South Africa's press. Only after Mandela pulled back from demands about redistributing wealth was he embraced as a mass media icon, Danny Schechter reports.
 here's anger amidst the apprehension in South Africa as the numbers of "journalists" on the Mandela deathwatch grows. Members of his family have about had it, comparing what even the New York Times called a "media swarm" to African vultures that wait to pounce on the carcasses of dead animals.
President Barack Obama was soon in South Africa, carrying a message that he hyped as one of "profound gratitude" to Nelson Mandela. The Times reported, "Mr. Obama said the main message he intended to deliver to Mr. Mandela, 'if not directly to him but to his family, is simply our profound gratitude for his leadership all these years and that the thoughts and prayers of the American people are with him, and his family, and his country.'"
It doesn't seem as if the South Africa's grieving for their former president's imminent demise are too impressed with Obama seeking the spotlight. Some groups including top unions protested his receiving an honorary degree from a university in Johannesburg.
Interestingly, NBC with its team buttressed by former South African correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault did not bother to cover the protest but relied on Reuters reporting "nearly 1,000 trade unionists, Muslim activists, South African Communist Party members and others marched to the U.S. Embassy where they burned a U.S. flag, calling Obama's foreign policy 'arrogant and oppressive.'"
"We had expectations of America's first black president. Knowing Africa's history, we expected more," Khomotso Makola, a 19-year-old law student, told Reuters. He said Obama was a "disappointment, I think Mandela too would be disappointed and feel let down."
Reuters reported, "South African critics of Obama have focused in particular on his support for U.S. drone strikes overseas, which they say have killed hundreds of innocent civilians, and his failure to deliver on a pledge to close the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba housing terrorism suspects."
(Oddly, The South African police detained a local cameraman who used his own drone to photograph the hospital from above. He was stopped for "security" reasons.)
For symbolic reasons, as well as because of his global popularity, Nelson Mandela seems to be of special interest to the American media with the networks, nominally in an austerity mode, busting their budgets to have a dominant presence.
South African skeptic Rian Malan writes in the Spectator, "Every time Mandela goes into hospital, large numbers of Americans (up to 50) are flown here to take up their positions, and the South African network is similarly activated. Colin, (a cameraman who works for a U.S. network) for instance, travels to Johannesburg, hires a car and checks into a hotel, all on the network's ticket. Since last December, he's probably spent close to 30 days (at $2000 a day, expenses included) cooling his heels at various poolsides. And he has yet to shoot a single frame.
"As Colin says, this could be the worst disaster in American media history, inter alia because all these delays are destroying the story. When the old man finally dies, a lot of punters are going to yawn and say, Mandela died? Didn't that already happen a year ago?"
Hostility to the media is satirized in an open letter by Richard Poplak from the foreign media to South Africa that appears in The Daily Maverick:
"As you may have noted, we're back! It's been four long months since the Oscar Pistorius bail hearing thing, and just as we were forgetting just how crappy the Internet connections are in Johannestoria, the Mandela story breaks.
"We feel that it is vital locals understand just how big a deal this is for us. In the real world - far away from your sleepy backwater - news works on a 24-hour cycle. That single shot of a hospital with people occasionally going into and out of the front door, while a reporter describes exactly what is happening-at length and in detail? That's our bread and butter. It's what we do. And you need to get out of the way while we do it."
Why all the fanatical interest? The U.S. media loves larger-than-life personalities, often creating them when they don't exist. Mandela has assumed the heroic mantle for them of Martin Luther King Jr. whose memory enjoys iconic status even as his achievements like Voting Rights Act was just picked apart by right-wing judicial buzzards in black robes. (King's image was also sanitized with his international outlook often muzzled).
The current homage to Mandela wasn't always like this. For many years, the U.S. media treated Mandela as a communist and terrorist, respecting South African censorship laws that kept his image secret. Reports about the CIA's role in capturing him were few and far between. Ditto for evidence of U.S. spying documented in cables released by Wikileaks.
In the Reagan years, Mandela's law partner Oliver Tambo, then the leader of the ANC while Mandela was in prison, was barred from coming to the U.S. and then, when he did, meeting with top officials. Later, Rep. Dick Cheney, R-Wyoming, refused to support a congressional call for Mandela's release from jail.
In 1988, I, among other TV producers, launched the TV series "South Africa Now" to cover the unrest the networks were largely ignoring as stories shot by U.S. crews ended up on "the shelf," not on the air.
A 1988 concert to free Mandela was shown by the Fox Network as a "freedom fest" with artists told not to mention Mandela's name less they "politicize" all the fun. When he was released in 2000, a jammed all-star celebration at London's Wembley Stadium was shown everywhere in the world, except by the American networks.
Once Mandela adopted reconciliation as his principal political tenet and dropped demands for nationalization anchored in the ANC's "Freedom Charter," his image in the U.S. was quickly rehabilitated. He was elevated into a symbolic hero for all praised by the people and the global elite alike. Little mention was made of his role as the creator of an Armed Struggle, and its Commander in Chief,
U.S. networks also did not cover the role played by the U.S.-dominated IMF and World Bank in steering the economy in a market-oriented neo-liberal direction, assuring the new government could not erase deep inequality and massive poverty and that the whites would retain privileges.
The American press shaped how Mandela was portrayed in the U.S. The lawyer and anti-nuclear campaigner, Alice Slater, tells a story of her efforts to win Mandela's support for nuclear disarmament.
When "Nelson Mandela announced that he would be retiring from the presidency of South Africa, we organized a world-wide letter writing campaign, urging him to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons at his farewell address to the United Nations. The gambit worked.
"At the UN, Nelson Mandela called for the elimination of nuclear weapons, saying, 'these terrible and terrifying weapons of mass destruction - why do they need them anyway?' The London Guardian had a picture of Mandela on its front page, with the headline, 'Nelson Mandela Calls for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.'
"The New York Times had a story buried on page 46, announcing Mandela's retirement from the Presidency of South Africa and speculating on who might succeed him, reporting that he gave his last speech as President to the UN, while omitting to mention the content of his speech."
And so it goes, with his death seeming to be imminent, he has been reduced to a symbolic mythic figure, a moral voice, not the politician he always was. He became an adorable grandfather praised for his charities with his political ideas and values often lost in the ether of his celebrity. He has insisted that he not be treated as a saint or a savior. Tell that to the media.
As ANC veteran Pallo Jordan told me, "To call him a celebrity is to treat him like Madonna. And that's not what he is. At the same time, he deserves to be celebrated as the freedom fighter he was."
Watch the coverage and see if that message is coming through, with all of its implications for the struggle in South Africa that still lies ahead.
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