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RSN: Uncritical Media, Reporting Lies, Feed Election Fear-Mongering |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 29 October 2018 14:11 |
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Boardman writes: "The actual news, as of October 28, was that the migrant caravan of mostly Honduran asylum-seekers posed NO imminent threat to the US. Even Mexico doesn't treat the caravan as a threat."
Ms. Nielsen at a White House press briefing. (photo: Tom Brenne/NYT)
Uncritical Media, Reporting Lies, Feed Election Fear-Mongering
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
29 October 18
Migrant caravan 1,000 miles from US border poses NO threat
 he actual news, as of October 28, was that the migrant caravan of mostly Honduran asylum-seekers posed NO imminent threat to the US. Even Mexico doesn’t treat the caravan as a threat. The caravan is traveling through southern Mexico. The caravan is more than 1,000 miles from the US border’s nearest point. Nobody knows how many people are in the caravan, estimated at 7,000 at its peak. Currently the caravan is shrinking, with estimates running around 3,500. Some Hondurans have decided to go home. An estimated 1,700 have applied for asylum in Mexico. By all reliable reports, the caravan has been peaceful and has been peaceably received by Mexicans along its route. The only unusual thing about this caravan was its initial size, and now that, too, is unremarkable.
The American reaction to the caravan, by contrast, has been off the wall hysterical lying crazy, unrelated to reality on the ground, and unrelenting even as that reality diminishes. Among the right-wing rage-mongers, Judicial Watch claims, “Guatemala caught 100 ISOS terrorists in the migrant caravan,” which unsurprisingly turns out to be another lie (like Judicial Watch’s 2015 claim of an ISIS base “a few miles from Texas.” The US president has threat-inflated the caravan since mid-October, rallying reliable cadres of surreality seekers to raise the alarm on social media, complete with false memes and flat lies. Chest-puffing armed militia are promising to defend the US 2,000 mile-long border with hundreds of armed volunteers who claim they are not out to shoot anyone, but promise to defend themselves.
They seem to be unaware that the caravan is still more than 1,000 miles away from wherever the militia decides to stake out its Alamo stand against unarmed men, women, and children seeking asylum from a country under the control of forces like this militia. This is vigilante reaction, which is by definition lawless. Militia have no lawful authority, but they have the extra-legal encouragement of our current lawless presidency.
OK, to be fair, the president is still somewhat constrained by the US Constitution and other laws, but he’s working on that, with limited, effective opposition. Most political and media sheep content themselves with ignoring the fantasy of the threat and the lawlessness of real and proposed official actions. The sheep are content with thinking the “high ground” is calling for unity – with no specification of unity around what. How does one unify with lawlessness or fantasy? Few take that on.
The government continues to pretend lawlessness is a good thing, a way of showing “toughness” and “putting America first,” by destroying its legal and moral framework. That’s just what Secretary of Homeland Security (!) Kirstjen Nielsen did on Fox News Sunday, October 28, addressing the imaginary threat posed by the Honduran caravan:
This caravan is not getting in. There is a legal way to enter this country. Those who choose to enter illegally will be stopped ... My general message to this caravan is: ‘Do not come. You will not be allowed in.’
Let’s deconstruct that arrogant bit of totalitarian practice.
“This caravan is not getting in.” Drawing a line in the sand 1,000 miles away from the caravan may be seen as tough. It’s certainly a veiled threat to use lethal force. And it’s certainly a veiled threat to use lethal force to pre-empt any legal immigration process (which this administration has been attacking since day one).
“There is a legal way to enter this country.” Actually there are several. One of them is asylum. Asylum is a US obligation under international law. Yes, the US honors that obligation more often in the breach than the observance, but it remains an obligation by any humane standard of international relations. The US Homeland Security capo speaks as if she were the ultimate authority of what is legal and what is not. That becomes true only if she is unchallenged. She’s an attorney; she knows where the lines are and that she’s gone way over them for the sake of political expediency. Maybe she should be disbarred.
“Those who choose to enter illegally will be stopped….” Again we have a veiled threat to use lethal force with dubious if any legal authority. Worse, this construction is a flaming hypocrisy bordering on an outright lie. For the sake of “homeland security,” the secretary falsely implies that the caravan is filled with people seeking to enter the US illegally. She has no way of knowing that or anything else with any certainty about their intentions. In general, caravan members have declared their intention to seek asylum. Many have already done so in Mexico. These migrants are seeking to exercise established universal human rights. Kirstjen Nielsen, with zero judicial authority, would act as judge, jury, and if necessary, executioner to deprive these migrants of their rights.
“My general message to this caravan is: ‘Do not come. You will not be allowed in.’” Nielsen might as well have said: You will not be allowed in because the US is prepared to kill you in cold blood, officially or otherwise. You have been warned: there is no law here for you. We have done all we can to turn your country into a tropical paradise for a military dictatorship, infested with drug traffic and gang violence – the least you can do is show a little gratitude, or at least stay in Mexico, where our destabilization efforts are not as far as advanced.
On its face, official determination to prevent illegal immigration is longstanding bipartisan policy with longstanding bipartisan lack of enforcement (for the sake of those in need of cheap labor, among other reasons). Actually, Nielsen’s formulation here is a less-than-subtle fig leaf for another administration Big Lie: that the migrant caravan is somehow, in the president’s words, a “grave threat to national security” (a term he applied to US media in August 2018 and that his own staff has applied to him).
When a president starts tossing around national security as his justification for something, that’s a warning sign that your own security is threatened, directly or indirectly. Right now it’s both. The president has already threatened to cut off aid to countries that don’t stop the caravan – something he can’t do legally. He has ordered 800 troops to the 2,000-mile border, a faux show of force apparently designed to gull the gullible. He’s considering using an executive order to cancel any migrant’s right to asylum – something else he can’t do legally, but illegal executive orders don’t bother this president. The plotters are hard at work in the White House these days.
[Note: Late October 29, the official White House reaction to the absence of any real threat from the migrant caravan went off the charts. The Pentagon, arguably breaking law to influence an election, now says it will send 5,200 troops to the southwest US border with Mexico. That’s in response to a caravan still hundreds of miles away. The US is sending a contingent of heavily-armed troops to face a much-smaller, shrinking caravan – now estimated at 3,500 unarmed civilians. The migrants are peacefully seeking their legal rights. The US is using force to violate international law. This is a preposterous gambit with no credible military justification. It is based on distortions of reality and lies. It has no other apparent purpose now but to overwhelm the gullible with numbers in a crass effort to steal the election. Someone explain why this is not a blatantly impeachable offense, an abuse of power steeped in deceit, paid for by the taxpayer-victims of the hoax.]
And the beauty part with this ploy is that it really doesn’t matter what happens to the migrants legally or on the ground. American media have done little to cover the reality in Mexico, 1,000 miles from the US, leaving it to be manipulated by whoever wants to manipulate it. Republicans want to manipulate it. The White House knows the caravan is a made-up threat, a fraudulent threat, a threat that exists only in the minds of too many ignorant voters and too many cynical manipulators. The White House knows that it needs to sustain the fear generated by this “threat” for just a week, just long enough to shape the midterm elections, just long enough to drive us further down the rabbit hole of unreality and repression.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience
in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20
years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers
Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life
magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences.
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.
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Voter Suppression Is a Crucial Story in America, but Broadcast News Mostly Shrugs |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43579"><span class="small">Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Monday, 29 October 2018 14:09 |
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Sullivan writes: "With the midterm elections a week away, and tensions building daily, a bipartisan rallying cry grows louder: People must get out and vote. But how possible is that, exactly, for some Americans?"
Voters wait in line for up to two hours to early vote at the Cobb County West Park Government Center in Marietta, Ga. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
Voter Suppression Is a Crucial Story in America, but Broadcast News Mostly Shrugs
By Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post
29 October 18
 ith the midterm elections a week away, and tensions building daily, a bipartisan rallying cry grows louder: People must get out and vote.
But how possible is that, exactly, for some Americans?
In North Dakota, thousands of Native American voters may be prevented from voting next week in a key Senate race because of an ugly technicality that amounts to targeted voter suppression.
In Georgia, hundreds of thousands of citizens were “purged” from the voting rolls in what election-law experts have called the worst disenfranchisement of voters in modern American history.
And in Kansas — where restrictive voting laws have been championed by Secretary of State Kris Kobach — the majority-Hispanic residents of Dodge City can no longer vote in their community after its single polling place was closed.
Yes, voter suppression is alive and well in the United States.
But Americans who rely on the broadcast news networks for their information, and they still number in the millions every night, probably don’t know about it.
Obsessed with all things Trump — caravan invasion, anyone? — and occupied with breaking news about hurricanes and mass shootings, the networks have almost ignored voter suppression.
With the consequential midterm elections only a week away, the near silence is deafening.
“What is happening to voting rights is fundamental to how we function as a country,” says Robert Greenwald, an independent filmmaker who is trying to fill the gap with a video that explores the problem.
“There has been nowhere near enough media attention,” he told me.
Andrew Tyndall, who closely tracks network news for his well-respected Tyndall Report newsletter and website, has a plausible theory about why.
“The network news divisions have not worked out how to cover politics without following the agenda set by President Trump,” he told me by email. “That’s not to say their coverage is pro-Trump, since they will use his agenda to present him in both a positive and negative light. But it does mean that they find it difficult to present politics as being about anything except him.”
Since Labor Day, Tyndall told me last week, the three broadcast networks (CBS, NBC and ABC) together had done only a handful of stories — fewer than 10, all told — on threats to voting rights.
NBC News did a couple of pieces in early September on anxiety about the possible hacking of state election systems. CBS offered a mid-October story on the Georgia governor’s race, clouded by accusations of voter suppression involving Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the man in charge of overseeing elections, who is the Republican candidate for governor. And ABC News last week gave a nod to the voter purge in its piece on high early turnout in Georgia.
But among many hours over two months, those are mere minutes — and precious few.
Constant attention to Trump works for the broadcast networks, Tyndall said.
“They do not conceive that following his agenda is a problem: his larger-than-life persona, his incendiary sound bites, and the strength of viewers’ reactions to him (both pro and con) make him a perfect fit for television journalism as it is currently practiced,” he said.
By contrast, national newspapers have given voter suppression quite a bit of ink. The New Yorker magazine just published a substantial, big-look piece by Jelani Cobb. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did an enlightening examination of the North Dakota situation earlier this month. And ProPublica’s Electionland project does a stellar job of focusing on voting rights, in collaboration with others.
So it’s not that the information isn’t available, if you’re the kind of heavy news consumer who reads and views widely.
The problem is that the average American citizen may not read the New Yorker — but he or she is much more likely to watch the evening news.
As Pew Research put it recently, those tightly edited half hours are still “appointment viewing” for many millions of Americans.
And they still are regarded by many as relatively unbiased. In other words, they have important credibility.
Tyndall thinks there may be only one way they could begin to pay attention.
“If President Trump happened to revive the canard about voting fraud in his stump speeches .?.?. the networks would respond with coverage both of his claims and of the entire voting rights debate about ID laws, ballot access, racial targeting, suppression efforts and so on.”
That doesn’t strike me as something American patriots should be pining for. (To state what should be obvious: There’s very little evidence of significant voter fraud in the United States, despite all claims to the contrary.)
The broadcasts, even within their short time frames, manage to do plenty of soft feature stories with the Stars and Stripes waving — there’s the “Inspiring America” series on NBC News and the “Made in America” series on ABC.
Their feel-good appeal to national pride is intended as an antidote to all the depressing stuff at the top of the half-hour. And that’s fine: no harm done.
But the unfettered right to vote is much closer to the heart of the American ideal.
And, especially now, the growing threats to that right should be considered news of the most urgent order.
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The Growing US Deficit: It's a Revenue, Not a Spending Problem |
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Monday, 29 October 2018 13:54 |
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Beinhart writes: "The national debt is growing, but despite what Trump and his party say, spending less will not solve the problem."
The US federal budget deficit rose in fiscal 2018 to $779bn, $113bn or 17 percent higher than the previous fiscal period, according to a statement from the Trump Administration. (photo: Reuters)
The Growing US Deficit: It's a Revenue, Not a Spending Problem
By Larry Beinhart, Al Jazeera
29 October 18
The national debt is growing, but despite what Trump and his party say, spending less will not solve the problem.
he deficit just hit $779bn for the last fiscal year.
The national debt is $21 trillion and growing.
Do you care about deficits and debts? It's a subject that brings up a multitude of significant issues. The financial health of the nation. Politics. Lying. How peculiarly distant from reality so much of economic theory is.
Here's the most significant thing to know about the current version of government debt and deficits: it's not a spending problem, it's a revenue problem.
Isn't it caused by government waste? Boondoggles? Welfare? Especially from entitlements! Social Security! Medicare! Medicaid!
No. It's a revenue problem.
It's not terribly instructive to look at debt and deficits in straight-up nominative terms. It's much better to measure debt in relation to earnings because earnings are the way it gets paid back. If someone who makes $10,000 a year, has a personal debt of $100,000, it is probably quite problematic. If someone who makes $10,000,000 a year has the same debt, $10,000, it will probably disappear as soon as they pay their most recent Amex bill.
US debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product (the nation's earnings), shot up during World War II, then peaked in the immediate post-war years, at 120 percent. From then on, it headed down in a steep and mostly steady trajectory. In the '50s, in spite of the Korean War, it got down to about 65 percent of GDP. In the 1960s, during the Lyndon Johnson years, when Medicare and Medicaid got started, Social Security was increased, the war on poverty was launched, and the real war in Vietnam was escalating, it continued on down to about 40 percent of GDP. It began levelling out under Nixon, had a slight uptick under Ford, and down again under Carter to near just 30 percent of GDP.
Then came Ronald Reagan. It was Morning in America again. For debt. Tax cuts, tax cuts, merry tax cuts! The debt, as a percentage of GDP more than doubled under Reagan and Bush.
Clinton came next. He raised taxes. The result was exactly, logically, and mathematically what you would expect. Revenues rose! The deficit declined. So significantly, that the conventional wisdom was that deficits were done with and America's debt crisis was over. Ahh! An almost universal sigh of relief.
Then along came Bush. Bush the younger, the lesser, the second. New tax cuts! The deficits shot up. Surpassing even the great morning in America for debt that had been accomplished by Ronald Reagan! Wow!
Didn't the debt keep going up under Obama!? Hugely! More than under any other president?
Yes, it did. But Obama couldn't end the Bush tax cuts. So he was using the same reduced rates to get revenue from an economy that had shrunk after the crash of 2008 and the onset of the Great Recession. He also had economists with advanced degrees who told him to never raise taxes in a recession and that tax cuts would stimulate the economy. Obama added more tax cuts, though targeted more at the middle and less towards the top.
As a matter of actual history, after the bubble-crash-Great Depression sequence of the 1920s and 1930s, and after the bubble-crash-recession sequence of the late 1980s, recovery came about after tax increases. The bubble-crash-recession sequence of the early 2000s, had been met with a tax cut. The recession continued. There was a second tax cut, the recession continued for most of the economy with a new set of bubbles at the top for Wall Street, real estate, and banking.
Tax cuts for the rich primarily create greater income inequality - a wealth transfer upwards - along with increased deficits and debt. Not genuine economic growth. Even tax cuts aimed at the middle are far less useful than economists thought they would be. The combination of Bush's continued cuts with Obama's new ones, had the twin results of all the gains of the recovery went to the top 10 percent or higher and the debt rising ever higher.
In 2014, Obama finally got to raise taxes, however slightly, on the rich. Revenue rose! Deficits and the debt reversed direction at last and began to decline. The recovery finally made its way into the real economy as signalled by a rise in the median wage.
These facts are easily found. Unless you're an economist, then, like a mule wearing ideological blinders, you can't look past the twin ideas that tax-cuts-grow-the-economy and tax-hikes-take-money-from-the-economy and see what's growing off your well-trod road over in the fields of reality.
So here we are with Donald Trump. He jammed through new Republican tax cuts. With the fervent support of all but 12 Republican congressmen.
Trump claimed that his tax cuts were for everyone, not just the rich and that they would grow the economy so hugely that they would pay for themselves. Those were the same claims made long ago by presidents Coolidge and Hoover and more recently by Reagan and by Bush the Lesser. (Bush the Elder, quite correctly called it Voodoo economics. Though he stopped saying so as Reagan's running mate and successor, he obviously never stopped believing in reality, as evidenced by his tax cuts to fix the deficits he inherited.)
One of the great things about Trump is that he lies so often and so blatantly, that he has changed the predisposition to believe, to a predisposition to disbelieve. There has been a quick recognition that his tax cuts will not create the promised growth, will not pay for themselves, and are of benefit to a very narrow segment at the top of society.
This has not stopped Mitch McConnell from claiming it's a spending problem. From relishing the deficits he's done so much to create by decreasing revenue, because he's now claiming that the problem is spending and next we must go after Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.
You may have noted, at the start of the article, that America's debt/GDP ratio peaked in WWII. If we look at it as spending on survival and then in becoming the only modern industrial nation left standing, it was a great investment. Businesses are constantly borrowing in order to grow. Even our poor friend, making but $10,000 a year with a $100,000 debt, might have made a sound choice if it's a home mortgage with payments he can afford on a property increasing in value. It is important to consider what the debt buys us. With Trump tax cuts we found out almost instantly: stock buybacks and other utterly non-productive transfers of wealth to the already rich.
The first and most important thing to remember is that for nearly a half a century, the problem of debt and deficits has been, and remains, a revenue problem.
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RSN: A Few Vital Words ... |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 29 October 2018 12:18 |
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Rosenblum writes: "First Kavanaugh, then Khashoggi. Two examples, among many, shed blazing light on a greed-obsessed, truth-averse, soulless leader who is recasting America in his own image. If voters do not step up on November 6, this will be entrenched as our new reality."
Jamal Khashoggi (photo: Virginia Mayo/AP)
A Few Vital Words ...
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
29 October 18
 irst Kavanaugh, then Khashoggi. Two examples, among many, shed blazing light on a greed-obsessed, truth-averse, soulless leader who is recasting America in his own image. If voters do not step up on November 6, this will be entrenched as our new reality.
The math is frightening. A third of the electorate is likely to cast ballots for Donald Trump's enablers, and fewer than half of eligible Americans normally vote in mid-terms. We have only days left to motivate everyone we can reach who is open to reason.
Talk with friends to help synthesize arguments. Much of our media underplays the main one. During 17 debates among Senate and gubernatorial candidates, only one included a question on climate change. And yet nothing else will matter when Earth is uninhabitable.
Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation showed how much party now overrides principle. Senators ignored 2,500 law professors who saw intemperate, partisan behavior. Jamal Khashoggi's gruesome murder showed Trump has a lump of coal for a heart.
Journalists who demand answers are fundamental to any free society. It is bad enough when a president cheers on a governor who body slams a reporter. When he covers for a Saudi prince whose goons behead a Washington Post columnist, he is despicable beyond words.
Max Boot, a wise observer of global geopolitics, put it simply: “Trump has given every despot on the planet a license to kill without worrying about the U.S. reaction. Because, in all likelihood, there will be none.”
Republicans tout a pumped-up economy and full employment. But look closer. That tax cut for the rich increased our annual deficit by $779 billion, equal to the Defense budget. Mitch McConnell baldly offered a solution: cut Social Security and health benefits.
Trump says that if he were impeached, the market would crash. It is already collapsing. Stock sell-offs parallel 1987. Nasdaq is having its worst month since 2008. Inflation cancels out wage increases. Paul Volcker, no alarmist, warns, “We're in a hell of a mess.”
China, once open to diplomacy, is preparing for potential armed conflict. Russia is a growing factor in U.S. elections. The world didn't laugh at us before, as Trump asserts. Now it does. Worse, those who hate us are increasing by geometric proportions.
The list is endless. We have irrefutable proof of outrageous malfeasance and misfeasance at the highest levels. We are losing personal freedoms, destroying our land and natural resources, making bitter enemies of former allies.
Every vote matters in swing states. In Arizona, for instance, Martha McSally, a hardcore Republican, won Gabrielle Giffords' House seat in 2014 by 167 votes. Now she is running dead even with Kyrsten Sinema for the Senate. Only a few fence-sitters will make the difference. Texans have a chance to rid us of Ted Cruz.
But we also need a thundering landslide everywhere to deliver a message to both parties. Citizens, finally, have had enough.
Barack Obama just issued an alarm to Democrats: “The consequences of your staying home would be profoundly dangerous for our country, for this democracy.” And, he might have added, for this world.
Marshal your arguments, make your call lists, and get started. Help young people see the incalculable cost of apathy. Reason with Republicans; Trump is poisoning the Grand Old Party. On November 7, we may be condemned to an entirely different United States of America.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents
as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International
Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from
global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
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.
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idterm elections often get “nationalized,” becoming a comment on the party in power rather than a vote for representation. But in 2018, more is at stake than a vote against President Trump.
