Liberal Media Propaganda Tells the World: America Is First

By Jeff Cohen, Reader Supported News

22 June 21

 

f you get your foreign policy news today from CNN or MSNBC or NPR or similar outlets, then you’re bombarded hour after hour with the idea that the United States has the absolute right to impose sanctions on country after country overseas if they violate human rights or are not democratic.

To give just one example: On Sunday, CNN anchor Dana Bash grilled Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on why the White House is not imposing yet more sanctions on Russia (and China) and why Team Biden was “giving in to Russia” on the gas pipeline to Western Europe. Sullivan was emphatic in insisting that sanctions had been imposed and more were on the way – boasting that Biden had grabbed even more presidential power to sanction Russia through an executive order.

I’m old enough to remember the superiority complex behind the liberal media propaganda during the Cold War with the Soviet Union – while U.S. foreign policy, in the name of democracy, massacred millions of people of color, mostly civilians, across the globe … from Asia to Southern Africa to Latin America.

In the middle of the Cold War, when Martin Luther King Jr. denounced the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and criticized U.S. hubris fueling the Cold War, liberal outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post furiously condemned King – in essence, telling him to leave foreign policy to “us white guys.”

When it came to relations between nations, King criticized the “arrogance” of our country and the West in “feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them.”

Jump to the present, and you see the same arrogance in liberal U.S. media: We have everything to teach others – whether Russia or China or Iran or Venezuela or any of the dozens of countries the U.S. is imposing sanctions on, sometimes deadly sanctions.

Let’s do today what MLK urged us to do back then: look at ourselves in the mirror.

There is no more precious human right than the right to be free from jail or prison. So it’s a human rights violation of epic proportions that the United States has more than 2 million people incarcerated, way more than any other country, including China with its much huger population. Our people behind bars are disproportionately Black or Brown people. Liberal media have recently learned how to throw around the term “systemic racism,” but – when lecturing other countries – they deftly forget that mass incarceration is an affront to notions of “democracy” and “human rights.”

It’s a human right to be able to live without the fear of violence. Yet no other major country has so much gun violence, with hundreds shot every day – one of many problems that U.S. “democracy” can’t even address, let alone solve.

One might have hoped that recent U.S. history would have humbled liberal media pundits about their cherished belief in the USA as a “beacon of democracy” to the world – and therefore, our sacred right to punish other countries that don’t measure up.

After four years of Trump and a Trump movement that has captured almost half the electorate … after our corporatized media system lavished massive amounts of free airtime on candidate Trump in 2015 (CNN, CBS, ABC, etc.) because it was good for network profits … after years of a dysfunctional political system in Washington that serves the rich and giant corporations when not in total gridlock … after the Supreme Court got packed with right-wing judges through legislative double-dealing … after ever-increasing voter suppression targeting people of color and young voters … one would hope for some humility about “U.S. democracy.”

Yet liberal media pundits keep propagandizing the public about the USA’s right to lecture foreign countries over their political systems, and to severely punish them (leaving aside allies like Colombia, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, of course). Never mind the horrific consequences to civilians overseas when deprived of life-sustaining imports.

These liberal news outlets may despise Trump, but they sure put “America first” when it comes to policing the rest of the world. And they seem intent on instigating new Cold Wars with Russia and China.

It’s indefensible that Putin has imprisoned and nearly killed opposition figure Alexei Navalny, and it’s important for the U.S. government to publicly and privately speak out against such behavior. The same goes for China’s terrible mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims. But while speaking out with self-awareness and humility about human rights, the U.S. also needs to work collaboratively with Russia on cyber-peace and disarmament (the two nations have 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons) and with China on climate change. Without collaboration, the world is doomed.

The liberal view on the original Cold War with Russia is that “WE WON.” The progressive view is that everybody lost, especially Global South countries like Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, and El Salvador that were victimized by U.S. invasions, coups, and proxy wars supported by both Democrats and Republicans.

I have a bold idea you won’t hear on CNN or MSNBC: Instead of lecturing and sanctioning the rest of the world, let’s get our own house in order. Let’s lead by example. On democracy, instead of sanctioning other countries, Team Biden should rally Democrats to sanction the U.S. Senate by establishing majority rule through an end to that Jim Crow-legacy, the filibuster. And Biden should address the right-wing-packed Supreme Court.

On human rights, let’s cut the U.S. military budget in half, and provide things that other advanced countries already have: universal healthcare and free or near-free higher education. Let’s invest billions of dollars in poor and working-class communities, and end the horrors of mass incarceration. Let’s cancel student debt that burdens 45 million people – and, at long last, seriously tax U.S. oligarchs and corporations to pay for these investments (and perhaps worry less about sanctioning Russian oligarchs).

Joe Biden likes to think of himself as a foreign policy specialist. If he listens to the laptop warriors in the media who want him to “pivot” belligerently toward China and Russia, an adventurist foreign policy will undermine the Democratic domestic agenda and doom his administration quicker than you can say “LBJ.” And Republicans will retake Congress.

Biden can succeed only if he ignores the media hawks and focuses laser-like on domestic policy – galvanizing his party toward a serious FDR-like effort to address human rights and climate change with major federal programs uplifting working class people of all colors.

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Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Kyrsten Sinema's Filibuster Defense Is Factually Untrue

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

22 June 21

Kyrsten Sinema’s Filibuster Defense Is Factually Untrue Moderate Democrat loves the supermajority rule, doesn’t understand how it works.

arlier this month, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, speaking to reporters, laid out a thoroughly ahistorical defense of the filibuster. To be fair to Sinema, her initial error, crediting the filibuster to the Founders (who in fact rejected it, only for it to emerge by mistake decades later) is a common one, and she was speaking extemporaneously.

Today, Sinema has a second shot to explain her thinking in a Washington Post op-ed. But her revised filibuster rationale, despite having the benefit of premeditated thought and editing, still relies on utterly false grounds.

Sinema’s central argument is captured in the headline “We have more to lose than gain by ending the filibuster.” She warns that a majority-rule Senate would allow Republicans to easily roll back any Democratic policy gains:

And, sometimes, the filibuster, as it’s been used in previous Congresses, is needed to protect against attacks on women’s health, clean air and water, or aid to children and families in need …

To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to expand health-care access or retirement benefits: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to later see that legislation replaced by legislation dividing Medicaid into block grants, slashing earned Social Security and Medicare benefits, or defunding women’s reproductive health services?

To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to empower federal agencies to better protect the environment or strengthen education: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see federal agencies and programs shrunk, starved of resources, or abolished a few years from now?

Almost every specific example she cites here as a possible or actual grounds of defense by the filibuster cannot be protected by the filibuster.

The reason is that the Senate has work-arounds for the filibuster. One is for confirmation of judges or executive-branch appointments. The other is for bills that change taxes and spending. The latter, called budget reconciliation, can be passed with 51 votes.

Almost every program Sinema cites above is a spending program that can be defunded through budget reconciliation: women’s health, aid to children and families in need, health care, Medicaid, Medicare, women’s reproductive services, funding for federal agencies to protect the environment and education. Several of them have been targeted in budget reconciliation bills.

Budget reconciliation rules do exempt Social Security (an exemption that is itself yet another of the Senate’s arcane, idiosyncratic distinctions that serve no logical purpose — why should Social Security alone have a protection that, say, Medicare and Medicaid don’t?). Likewise, regulations (such as clean air and water) can’t be repealed through budget reconciliation, though their enforcement can be defunded, or simply curtailed through administrative neglect, neither of which is subject to filibustering.

Given that Republicans could roll back any of the vast array of federal programs cherished by Democrats with a majority in both chambers and the presidency, why didn’t they do it either of the last two times they enjoyed full control of government?

The answer points to the essential fallacy of Sinema’s reasoning. Nearly all those programs are popular — so popular that even Republican voters would blanch at attacks on them. Republicans suffered grievous political damage when they attempted to defund Obamacare. (That episode points to yet another asymmetry of the filibuster — a law that required 60 votes to enact could have been destroyed with a mere 51.)

The federal government is filled with functions that the modern version of the Republican Party would never agree to create. The 1970 Clean Air Act, creating the Environmental Protection Agency, passed both chambers by a cumulative vote of 447-1, an unimaginable outcome today. And yet those programs and agencies generally earn broad public support and prove impossible to uproot.

A system in which both parties can advance their popular beliefs when they have control of government therefore benefits Democrats disproportionately. Republicans may have some measures they could pass in the absence of a filibuster but not otherwise, yet over the long run, Democrats have far more. That is why, when they controlled government, Republicans frankly confessed that filibuster was “what’s prevented our country for decades from sliding toward liberalism.”

If Republicans have policies they can pass with majorities in both chambers, then they should pass them. If those policies attract broad public legitimacy, they will stay in place. If they are as repellant as Sinema fears, they will be repealed when Democrats have their turn in power. There’s simply no reason why preventing Republicans from trying out their preferred policies is so vital that it justifies handicapping Democrats in the same fashion.

The Republican argument for a filibuster is perfectly coherent. Republicans understand full well that they stand to lose over both the short and long run by a system that enables parties in power to make change. The Democratic case for the filibuster is a sloppy mess, which is why advocates like Sinema rely on stating “facts” that simply aren’t true.