Tag Archives: NPR

Political Rants

“The Improvement association” needs improvement

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I probably spend way too much time thinking about elections. I suspect you think so too, particularly since I’ve devoted so many blog posts to the subject. I even talked about it a lot on my short-lived political podcast, Strange Sound, though not so anyone would hear. The fact is, I kind of hate elections. They’re nerve-wracking as hell, they often turn out badly, and I’m not a big fan of suspense, especially when it runs all night long. But that’s just experience talking – long, bitter experience.

There are many things we can do that are more important than voting. Mutual aid, organizing, public service … all of these things make an immediate difference for people. But more than one thing can be important at the same time, and my contention has always been that voting is important enough to do, even if it isn’t as important as all that other stuff. For people like me – CIS-gender white males – the time commitment involved is negligible.

So, though I’m not a huge NPR fan, I was excited when I heard that a recent Serial Podcast had centered on elections in North Carolina and purported voter fraud. But after listening to it, I can only say that they kind of hid the ball. Or dropped it. Not sure which.

Organizing is the enemy

Without getting too deep in the weeds of the podcast, The Improvement Association – a co-production of NPR’s This American Life / Serial and the New York Times – talks about a political action committee in Bladen County, North Carolina that does get-out-the-vote efforts for black residents. They basically hand out a sample ballot with their recommendations and encourage people to support their list. In short, this is organizing 101, completely legal and above board, and a really effective way to drive turnout and support for Democratic candidates.

Naturally, the Association is under constant attack by white politicians, who accuse the organizers of voter fraud. They basically gaslight the organization, so that when an actual Republican voter fraud scheme is busted, somehow this black organization’s name is dragged into the conversation both on a local and a statewide level. The white people in this story – mostly Republicans – understand the power of this black voting block, and they’re using the tools available to them (i.e. baseless accusations of cheating) to undermine it. What is more of a threat to white power than organized black people?

Strange focus

What kind of astonishes me about this podcast is the degree to which the reporter, Zoe Chase, gets sidetracked by this internal power struggle within the PAC. Now, it should come as a surprise to no one that organizers and political agitators tend to have egos. It seems likely that the two lead organizers, Horace and Cogdell, push to get their own way in the context of the organization. But if the ultimate goal is more power and resources for black people in the sea of white people known as North Carolina, is this all that bad?

Chase follows Cogdell’s efforts to elect three black councilmembers in a little town named Elizabethtown – a majority black community run by rich, white people, where there is virtually no public investment in the black neighborhoods. Chase spends a lot of time on the critics’ accusation that Cogdell is doing this so that he will be able to control these three black women on the town council. In the end, Cogdell’s candidates lose, and his colleague Horace suggests that this was essentially because black people were voting against their own interests for one reason or another. This is Chase’s take on Horace:

“It’s always zero sum with Horace when it comes to politics. I’ve learned that. If you’re not with him, you’re against him. And if you’re against him, you’re wrong.“

The thing that must not be named

On the other hand, what I hear from Cogdell is a pretty reasonable economic, almost Marxist analysis of how power works in that little town. A minority of white people with money get all the benefits, while underrepresented black people get the shaft. NPR / NYT say little if anything about this dynamic. It’s really more about personal squabbles. That’s what makes a podcast go viral, right?

Am I surprised to learn that NPR / NYT reporters are constitutionally incapable of giving credence to this kind of analysis? Not at all. There was a similar issue with the podcast Nice White Parents which I talked about on my podcast, Strange Sound. They will twist themselves into knots trying to avoid it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Thine is the power and the story

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As of this writing, the Saudis and Yemen have pulled together a tentative truce for Ramadan. As Ryan Grim reports in Deconstructed, the podcast by The Intercept, it’s essentially the first one in seven years of brutal war that has left almost 400,000 Yemenis dead. It’s quite possible that, by the time you read this, the Saudis will have resumed their merciless campaign of destruction, but I, for one, hope not.

There is truly nothing so invisible as a war promoted by your own government. In Russia, they need to make it a crime to refer to the war in Ukraine as a “war”. Over here, that’s not necessary. There are other ways to manipulate public opinion in a formal republic; as Orwell wrote, educated, thoughtful people understand that there are some things it simply would not do to say. No need for brute force – just a compliant professional/managerial class eager to get ahead.

Hidden in plain sight

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being covered like practically no other conflict in my lifetime. That is a good thing. I just wish they would cover all wars, including the ones we start, with the same dedication to detail. I think the principle at work here is largely that of proximity to power. Ukrainians are culturally close to white Americans. Their attacker is an official enemy, a rival power. Those two factors, broadly speaking, drive the coverage.

Yemen is the opposite. The victims are not like “us” (i.e. white, christian, western people). They are being attacked by official allies – Saudi Arabia, UAE – with our help. They are friends with an official enemy (Iran). Those factors keep them off of the front pages. There are many horrific stories that can be told about the Yemen war, and we Americans have heard almost none of them. On the other hand, I have heard wrenching stories of suffering from Ukraine on a daily basis, many of them multiple times. This is not an accident – it is a reflection of power.

The limits of compassion

We are encouraged to empathize with our enemies’ victims. In the case of Afghanistan, the official argument for twenty years of war was partly built on concern for the fate of women and girls. That was during the war. Now that the war is over, however, we apparently couldn’t care less. The country is on the brink of starvation. They have been frozen out of the banking system and have no access to their own reserves. Even international aid organizations cannot operate effectively in Afghanistan under the current sanction regimes.

You will notice, also, that Afghanistan is not in the news all that much. That was the case during most of the 20-year American war. It only hit the headlines when Biden pulled out last year, and now it’s gone again. The news splash was mostly an expression of the war party in America (Republicans and Democrats) who were against withdrawing American troops from the country. Indeed, it was hard to find voices in favor of the withdrawal at the time.

Like a compass needle

I’ve said this about NPR in the past, but it’s basically true of all major media: they know where power resides in this country, and that is their true north star. Their compass needle will always point that way, regardless of the consequences.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Smash and Grab.

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This is another one of those “while you were looking over there …” moments. It’s not surprising – Trump is denying the results of the 2020 election, refusing to concede, refusing to cooperate with the transition to a Biden Administration, filing bogus law suits, and so on. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic is going through the roof, infecting many, many thousands of people each day and getting worse. These are enormous stories that demand coverage, but because our media tends towards myopia, we really only hear about these stories, while other important stuff falls through the cracks. This is in fact what is happening right now, as the Trump administration enters its final days, reaching for its final opportunities to remake our federal government in its own contorted image. Here’s some of what they’re doing.

First, Trump is placing some of his political hacks into posts deep within the bureaucracy of key federal agencies, as reported by the Washington Post. By placing Trumpists in these posts, the president is extending his influence far beyond his tenure. These appointees will benefit from Civil Service protections, which means it will be difficult for the Biden Administration to root them out from posts where they can actively sabotage any attempts at progressive policies. The Post cites the example of Michael Ellis, a former aide to Devon Nunes, as General Counsel at the National Security Agency, a non-political post. Ellis is the guy who came up with the secret server where transcripts of Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have been secreted away. This and other similar postings are deeply problematic.

In addition to that, the Trump administration is commencing a kind of fire sale of public lands, rushing to put the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on the auction block, inviting oil and gas companies to pick out their favorite patches of the now-endangered wilderness area. They’re hoping to take bids on the refuge lands before inauguration day so that claims may be locked in. And according to the Texas Tribune, leases on half a million acres of public land in the Gulf of Mexico have been handed out to oil and gas companies in recent days. The pace of these transactions has been increasing and is likely to get even more frenetic as this grisly administration rolls to a stop.

The combined effect of these efforts and Trump’s stonewalling of the transition is to defy the will of the people as expressed in the November election. Trump is a lame duck, like it or not, and as such his ability to implement massive changes should at least be mediated by the process of preparing for a new administration that does not agree with his policies. We need to demand that they stop this last minute smash and grab, and we need to do it now.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

One hit.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Well, I wouldn’t call it a hit, exactly. Kind of more like a near hit. You know – the term George Carlin wanted to substitute for “near miss”. Let’s just say, hit-adjacent. That’s a bit more like it.

Oh, hi. Just having a little discussion with my chief discography advisor and personal robot assistant, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Yes, he’s wearing two hats on his tiny brass head today, largely because we currently have no incumbent in the position of chief discography advisor. I’m told most bands have trouble filling that post. The trade schools just can’t churn them out fast enough, I guess. Oh, well …. couldn’t pay them anyway.

Right, well … we were just going over our canon. You know – our body of work. It’s kind of a decrepit body, frankly, hunched over and showing its age in a dozen different ways, but nevertheless, we’re sifting through our output, looking for hidden gems … or at least a fieldstone or two. (Lodestone, perhaps?) Why have we taken on this weighty project when there’s still so much good sleeping to be done? Glad you asked. It seems Marvin has been listening to the radio again. No just any radio …. national PUBLIC radio, as it happens (no, wait … that’s the CBC), and he heard a segment called … I don’t know …. “one hit wonders”, or something like that. Marvin doesn’t have speech, so I have to interpret his various flashing lights and rotating gears into pidgin English …. then into French, then back into English with a stopover in semaphore. So damn time-consuming!

It was on that little one down there. But it was STILL a big hit.

Anyway, Marvin thinks we might qualify as one-hitters because we had a hit record on Aldebaran. Personally, I think that’s kind of a stretch. Though I suppose, because Aldebaran is a binary star, it might actually count as two hits. Perhaps the song played backwards on its companion star, where everything is a perfect mirror image of what’s on the surface of the red giant itself. Or perhaps not. In any case, we never got a dime out of that particular success story, just a bucketful of radioactive goop that Mitch Macaphee got really excited about. Funny thing, that … just a week or so after he took possession of the goop, that bank he owed money to disappeared into thin air. So in a way, you could say that goop was good for something. It’s a foul goop indeed that doesn’t glow somebody some good.

Okay, well … this is getting us nowhere. Marvin, I really don’t thing NPR is going to be interested in our Aldebaran “hit”. I somehow can’t picture them playing “The Dino Song” to a national audience. (However, if you Big Green fans out there ask nicely, we will definitely play it for you. Just tweet at me @BigGreenJoe and we’ll get it done … somehow.)

Political Rants

Do no harm?

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Former secretary of defense under Donald Trump James Mattis has a book out, so he’s making the rounds of all the talk shows, talking about leadership, acting as though his reluctance to criticize the president is somehow rooted in personal integrity. What he won’t talk about on the book tour is how his “leadership” responded to policies that any person of average integrity would take issue with. Mattis sat still when Trump started banning Muslims from entering the country. He said nothing when Trump began separating children from their parents at our southern border and putting them in cages. He was silent as Trump praised white supremacists as “good people” in the wake of Charlottesville. When did he finally throw in the towel? When Trump decided to remove troops from Syria. That tells you much of what you need to know about Mattis.

Steve Inskeep’s fawning interview on NPR had few high points. Somehow Mattis saw fit to claim:

“From a Roman general, I used no better friend, no worse enemy. We were going in to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam. We were not going in to dominate them. I didn’t want triumphalism. I wanted to go in with a sense of first do no harm.”

First do no harm? Seriously? He has a funny way of showing it. One of Mattis’s bragging points was always his pivotal role in the various battles of Fallujah, a bloody massacre in which the U.S. military’s first act was to commandeer the city hospital. It’s kind of ridiculous to refer to such operations as “battles”, when the enemy they are fighting are so outgunned. In any case, the Iraqi casualties in Fallujah were so high that the city was left out of the Johns Hopkins study of Iraqi deaths caused by the 2003 invasion because they felt it would skew the numbers. That study, first published in 2005 I believe, numbered Iraqi deaths at more than 500,000 as a result of the war. It was revised later to something like 650,000. Do no harm?

Mr. Kindness himself.

The example he gives of a young officer choosing not to shoot up a building in Baghdad in order to spare civilians sounds apocryphal in light of the stories that have come out of that war. Robert Fisk described the U.S. tank shell that destroyed the building that housed Reuters journalists, among others. That was more along the lines of common practice, frankly. The U.S. military doesn’t exactly walk around on tip-toe. How any senior commanding officer attached to this atrocity can have the gall to speak proudly about his humanity in the context of imperial war is beyond me.

Save your leadership lessons, mad dog. You lost all credibility the moment you signed on to the criminal enterprise that was the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Fading to black.

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We all knew he would get an early start, and true to form, sixteen months before the general election, Donald Trump has completely poured himself into being Drunk Uncle Twitter Troll, spewing overtly racist attacks on duly elected members of the House of Representatives while his Republican colleagues lamely play rhetorical defense, desperate to hold onto their party’s precious rubber-stamp chief executive who is giving them all they ever wanted and more. Pretty amazing to hear the likes of GOP congressman Tom Cole on NPR gaslighting us all on the issue of whether or not Trump is race-baiting (clue: Cole says “no”), then engaging in some truly ridiculous what-about-ism (speaking to NPR correspondent Noel King):

KING: You just don’t think it was racist.
COLE: No, I don’t.
KING: OK.
COLE: And frankly, I also think that if you – you have to remember here, too, there’s – we’ve had colleagues that are routinely called down by presiding officers for using inappropriate language toward the president. We’ve had people that have said federal workers are running concentration camps. We’ve had people that have said if you support Israel, you do it for the money. We’ve had people that have referred to the president with vulgar epithets and said they’re going to impeach him. None of those people were subject to resolution. So the double standard here, in terms of accepting comments on your own side of the aisle and criticizing essentially – what, you know, others might think are a similar thing to another is just – you know, it’s breathtakingly inappropriate.

(NPR Morning Edition, July 17, 2019)

See what he did there? He literally attacked the same four representatives Trump baited on Twitter. Cole predicated this on his earlier statement that the president’s tweets about the four congresswomen of color were “inappropriate” and “offensive”, but not racist. That little twist makes the president’s comments equivalent to, for example, Rashida Talib’s using the word “ass” when talking about impeaching Trump, or Ilhan Omar making virtually the same observation about the effect of AIPAC political contributions that Thomas Friedman made without any negative reaction. This is a standard package of what-about-ism that Republican strategists whipped up quickly over the last day or two, and they’re all reading from the same hymnal.

Drunk uncle twitter troll strikes again.

Of course, the corporate media spends a lot of time pondering whether or not Trump is racist. That’s immaterial. We should have zero interest in what that fool thinks or how he feels. It’s what he projects and works to engender in other people that should concern us. It’s no accident or mere caprice that he chooses the targets he chooses, as I’ve said here before. It all follows the same theme, from the birther conspiracy, to bashing immigrants from Mexico at his campaign launch, to announcing his Muslim ban, to telling the toxic lie about Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey, to calling out Colin Kapernik or any one of a dozen women of color in Congress. It’s about othering people. It’s about framing black, brown, and non-Christian people as not true Americans, somehow disloyal, a fifth column, from somewhere else. Even his claim that 3 million undocumented immigrants voted in 2016 rolls into this – he’s basically saying that the margin of popular vote victory for Clinton was delivered by people with no right to vote … people of color.

This is not just Trump being Trump. This is his 2020 campaign, and it will get worse, just wait and see.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Empire news.

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Brazil’s fraudulently elected president Jair Balsonaro visited with the marginally less detestable Donald Trump this past week – a reported love fest in which Trump not only announced Brazil’s new status as a “non-NATO ally” (which means lots more weapons for Balsonaro to use against his own people) but breezily suggested elevating Brazil to full NATO membership …. which is a little strange, and may have taken Trump’s advisors somewhat by surprise. The two pretenders also discussed the ongoing U.S. attack on Venezuela, which Balsonaro is happy to join in on. Of course, that would only make him like most of our political class here at home, which has openly supported the coup attempt by right-wing Venezuelan politician Juan Guaido … as have much of our corporate media.

Just to single out a particularly egregious recent example, NPR’s insipid Morning Edition ran a piece by one-time journalist Phillip Reeves about the crisis in Venezuela. The framing of the piece was typical of Reeves and NPR – through the lens of U.S. historic role in the hemisphere; that of a hegemonic power. “How is the president of Venezuela still in power?” asks host Steve Inskeep in the intro, adding that the U.S. is “moving to choke off the oil revenue that supports the socialist government.” First of all, that revenue has already been “choked off.” Second, NPR always characterizes these siege-like sanctions as only punishing the government, not the people of Venezuela. Finally … “socialist”? What the hell kind of socialist country has as many wealthy people as Venezuela does? Yes, the government controls the oil industry, but that pre-dates Chavez. The neo-colonial economy of the country is one based principally on export of petroleum – that’s largely why the economy is in turmoil.

NPR: Giving Venezuela the Iraq treatment

Reeves’s story suggests an opposition under pressure, but what he’s describing is a self-proclaimed president, Guaido, who is still functioning inside the country, openly calling for intervention by the hemispheric superpower … and yet, still not incarcerated by this supposedly very oppressive government. Every mention of Maduro or the government emphasizes the label “socialist” and paints the regime as dictatorial. Chavez, Reeves writes, was Maduro’s “socialist mentor” who “took power in 1999” (i.e. won the first of several elections). Reeves talks to several Guaido supporters, most English-speaking, but only one Maduro supporter, whom he describes as “a lifelong communist” who lives in a “ramshackle home.” This sixty-five year old man, Reeves reports with seeming disbelief, is “convinced the U.S. is at war with Maduro to seize Venezuela’s oil.” Where would he get THAT idea? (Well … from Trump himself, from John Bolton … from recent and not-so-recent history.)

Pretty amazing stuff to run on the 16th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq – an anniversary that Morning Edition didn’t see fit to mark in any serious way. You’d think that any outlet that was as flat-footed as NPR was in the run-up to the Iraq War might have learned enough from the experience not to mindlessly serve the interests of a bellicose administration set on regime change. And you would be disappointed.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

No peace.

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The much-anticipated summit in Vietnam between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un ended without a deal. It’s pretty obvious that Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip approach to diplomacy is less than optimal. On top of that, there’s plenty of space in the empty skull of his for unsavory characters like John Bolton to take up residence. I suspect he was the cause of the breakdown. It sounds as though the discussion about nuclear technology was broadened by the U.S. delegation to include chemical and biological weapon systems as well. The president’s post-summit statement didn’t go there, of course, but that’s no surprise. I’m not convinced that he knows entirely what took place in Vietnam, he’s such a ding dong.

There's a lot of love there.

Nevertheless, his impulse towards talking this out is positive, and I support the effort, even though he’s probably coming at it from entirely the wrong direction. Any effort towards peace on the Korean peninsula is worth pursuing, in my view, though U.S. policymakers of both major parties would likely disagree. I’ve written elsewhere in these pages about my thoughts on our government’s motivations for prolonging this conflict. I don’t think Trump is part of that consensus, and that is probably a frustration to the foreign policy establishment. It’s hard to be sure about what’s happening here, but we are faced with the unusual circumstance of the president being very nearly right about something.

Of course, the upshot of this is that the mainstream, center-left media, like MSNBC, are pummeling Trump over his failure to reach a deal. Worse, they criticize his decision not to hold those enormous joint military exercises with South Korea, characterizing it as a gift to Kim Jong Un. They have also been harping on American student Otto Warmbier, who died after being released from North Korean custody. And just this week, the focus has been on North Korea’s mothballed missile site showing signs of being brought back into operation. It’s kind of a full-court press on the evils of Kim and the incompetence of Trump.

This is just stupid. I understand the impulse to oppose Trump at every opportunity (except, of course, on Venezuela), but this hammering over Korea turns the heat up on a volatile situation that threatens hundreds of thousands of lives. We were a whisker away from all-out war a little over a year ago, and that was not a good place to be. I’m not saying to avoid reporting on this diplomatic dance; I’m saying that the editorializing is over- the-top and not helpful to the cause of peace.

So, liberals … dial back the Korea rhetoric a bit. Let’s encourage this administration to do something useful, like end this pointless conflict that began with our hubris and stupidity more than 70 years ago. There are plenty of things you can attack Trump over – this shouldn’t be one of them.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Old time religion.

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When I listen to mainstream reporting on the standoff in Venezuela, I come away with the strong impression that the press has not learned anything whatsoever from their failures in the run-up to the Iraq war back in 2002-03. I know – I shouldn’t be surprised. Ironically, Trump’s targeting of the mainstream press rings a vague bell with many who recall their catastrophic support for Bush’s big middle eastern adventure. As is often the case, the Orange Disaster  approaches being right on this issue from entirely the wrong direction. (The same might be said of his current policy on North Korea, though that might actually result in something positive, unlike his targeting of journalists.)

Do not adjust your television

From an institutional perspective, it makes total sense that MSNBC, CNN, and the major networks would be almost totally on board the Trump train as it steams towards Caracas. These outlets are owned by corporations that are deeply vested in the imperial enterprise. Their news organizations are run by people who can’t see this crisis in any kind of equitable, non-interventionist fashion. And it’s not like they haven’t had a lot of helpful hints thrown at them, like the hiring of notorious war criminal Elliott Abrams to run the Venezuela desk, or execrable John Bolton’s crowing about how American oil companies can do good business with a Guaido-run government. Even when the quiet parts are said out loud, the media hews to the official line.

I think it’s fair to say that our two-party political culture effectively sets the parameters of debate within which our mainstream press operates. So when the leadership of the Democratic party in essence agree with the Republican president that this extreme right-wing opposition legislator who declared himself president of Venezuela should be seen as just that, no major newspaper or broadcast outlet is going to step outside of that political boundary. That is why, for example, there is no better method of determining where the center of power is in America than listening to an hour of news programming on NPR. It is why corporate-fueled media so worship bipartisanship, calls for civility, and “reaching across the aisle.” It is why television news show hosts are the primary constituencies for Howard Schultz’s toy presidential campaign.

They still got religion, my friends. They have learned nothing in the last 18 years.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Bombs and debt.

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As I begin to write this, I am hearing a TV commentator quoting David Brooks in writing that Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner is someone worthy “of some sympathy.” You read that correctly – the impossibly wealthy protege of our phony-ass billionaire president, a man with zero qualifications or apparent ability to perform even one of the many portfolios handed to him over the past few months … that man is worthy of sympathy. THAT’S the kind of week this has been.

Nevertheless, I am not going to grab the low-hanging fruit of writing about the Trumpster fire, even though the fucker pulled out of the Paris Accords this week. I’ll deal with his ass next time around.

Yeah, they owe us, right?Talk about ungrateful. I heard a story this week on NPR about a loan the government of Cambodia owes to the United States, in the amount of about $500 million. There were a couple of remarkable points about this story. For one, the piece actually acknowledges that some scholars think the massive bombing of Cambodia may have contributed to the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge. That’s a pretty big step forward for mainstream media, which usually follows the line that Cambodia was a peaceful, happy country before the arrival of Pol Pot. They also mention the bombing itself – another practical miracle. What they leave out is that the loan in question was made to a coup regime installed with the full support of the United States. Slight omission there, right?

My favorite part is the quote from U.S. Embassy spokesperson Jay Raman saying that (1) we’ve given Cambodia close to a billion dollars in aid since the 1990s and (2) we “lack the legal authority to write off debts for countries that are able but unwilling to pay.” Really? The loan was supposedly to pay for food to replace crops destroyed by years of carpet bombing – bombing that began well before the 1970 U.S. invasion, by the way. What legal authority did we have to terror bomb them in the first place? What legal authority did we have to push a coup regime on them, or to invade them in 1970?

Don’t tell me this is beyond our ability. We owe the Cambodian people a hell of a lot more than the amount of this odious debt.

luv u,

jp