Guest guest Posted September 18, 2005 Report Share Posted September 18, 2005 A Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:44:35 -0500 Methods of Media Manipulation http://www.michaelparenti.org/ Methods of Media Manipulation by Michael Parenti from the book 20 years of Censored News by Carl Jensen and Project Censored We are told by people in the media industry that news bias is unavoidable. Whatever distortions and inaccuracies that are found in the news are caused by deadline pressures, human misjudgment, limited print space, scarce air time, budgetary restraints, and the difficulty of reducing a complex story into a concise report. Furthermore, the argument goes, no communication system can hope to report everything. Selectivity is needed, and some members of the public are bound to be dissatisfied. I agree that those kinds of difficulties exist. Still, I would argue that the media's misrepresentations are not merely the result of innocent error and everyday production problems. True, the press has to be selective- but what principle of selectivity is involved? Media bias does not occur in random fashion; rather it moves in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporations over corporate critics, affluent whites over inner-city poor, officialdom over protesters, the two-party monopoly over leftist third parties, privatization and free market " reforms " over public sector development, U.S. dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist social change, nation-security policy over critics of that policy, and conservative commentators and columnists like Rush Limbaugh and George Will over progressive or populist ones like Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader (not to mention more radical ones). The built-in biases of the corporate mainstream media faithfully reflect the dominant ideology, seldom straying into territory that might cause discomfort to those who hold political and economic power, including those who own the media or advertise in it. What follows is an incomplete sketch of the methods by which those biases are packaged and presented. Omission and suppression Manipulation often lurks in the things left unmentioned. The most common form of media misrepresentation is omission. Sometimes the omission includes not just vital details of a story but the entire story itself, even ones of major import. As just noted, stories that might reflect poorly upon the powers that be are the least likely to see the light of day. Thus the Tylenol poisoning of several people by a deranged individual was treated as big news but the far more sensational story of the industrial brown-lung poisoning of thousands of factory workers by large manufacturing interests (who themselves own or advertise in the major media) has remained suppressed for decades, despite the best efforts of worker safety groups to bring the issue before the public. We hear plenty about the political repression perpetrated by left-wing governments such as Cuba (though a recent State Department report actually cited only six political prisoners in Cuba), but almost nothing about the far more brutal oppression and mass killings perpetrated by U.S.-supported right-wing client states such as Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, El Salvador, Guatemala, and others too numerous to mention. Often the media mute or downplay truly sensational (as opposed to sensationalistic) stories. Thus, in 1965 the Indonesian military-advised, equipped, trained, and financed by the U.S. military and the CIA-overthrew President Achmed Sukarno and eradicated the Indonesian Communist Party and its allies, killing half a million people (some estimates are as high as a million) in what was the greatest act of political mass murder since the Nazi Holocaust. The generals also destroyed hundreds of clinics, libraries, schools, and community centers that had been opened by the communists. Here was a sensational story if ever there was one, but it took three months before it received passing mention in Time magazine and yet another month before it was reported in The New York Times (4/5/66), accompanied by an editorial that actually praised the Indonesian military for " rightly playing its part with utmost caution. " Lies, bald and repetitive When omission proves to be an insufficient form of suppression, the media resort to outright lies. At one time or another over the course of forty years, the CIA involved itself with drug traffickers in Italy, France, Corsica, Indochina, Afghanistan, and Central and South America. Much of this activity was the object of extended congressional investigations and is a matter of public record. But the media seem not to have heard about it. In August 1996, when the San Jose Mercury News published an in-depth series about the CIA-contra-crack shipments that were flooding East Los Angeles, the major media held true to form and suppressed the story. But after the series was circulated around the world on the Web, the story became too difficult to ignore, and the media began its assault. Articles in the Washington Post and The New York Times and reports on network television and PBS announced that there was " no evidence " of CIA involvement, that the Mercury News series was " bad journalism, " and that the public's interest in this subject was the real problem, a matter of gullibility, hysteria, and conspiracy mania. In fact, the Mercury News series, drawing from a year long investigation, cited specific agents and dealers. When placed on the Web, the series was copiously supplemented with pertinent documents and depositions that supported the charge. The mainstream media simply ignored that evidence and repeatedly lied by saying that it did not exist. Labeling Like all propagandists, media people seek to prefigure our perception of a subject with a positive or negative label. Some positive ones are: " stability, " " the president's firm leadership, " " a strong defense, " and " a healthy economy. " Indeed, who would want instability, weak presidential leader ship, a vulnerable defense, and a sick economy? The label defines the subject, and does it without having to deal with actual particulars that might lead us to a different conclusion. Some common negative labels are: " leftist guerrillas, " " Islamic terrorists " , " conspiracy theories, " " inner-city gangs, " and " civil disturbances. " These, too, are seldom treated within a larger context of social relations and issues. The press itself is facilely and falsely labeled " the liberal media " by the hundreds of conservative columnists, commentators, and talk-show hosts who crowd the communication universe while claiming to be shut out from it. Face value transmission One way to lie is to accept at face value what are known to be official lies, uncritically passing them on to the public without adequate confirmation. For the better part of four years, in the early 1950s, the press performed this function for Senator Joseph McCarthy, who went largely unchallenged as he brought charge after charge of treason and communist subversion against people whom he could not have victimized without the complicity of the national media. Face-value transmission has characterized the press's performance in almost every area of domestic and foreign policy, so much so that journalists have been referred to as " stenographers of power. " (Perhaps some labels are well deserved.) When challenged on this, reporters respond that they cannot inject their own personal ideology into their reports. Actually, no one is asking them to. My criticism is that they already do. Their conventional ideological perceptions usually coincide with those of their bosses and with officialdom in general, making them faithful purveyors of the prevailing orthodoxy. This confluence of bias is perceived as " objectivity. " False balancing In accordance with the canons of good journalism, the press is supposed to tap competing sources to get both sides of an issue. In fact, both sides are seldom accorded equal prominence. One study found that on NPR, supposedly the most liberal of the mainstream media, right-wing spokespeople are often interviewed alone, while liberals-on the less frequent occasions they appear-are almost always offset by conservatives. Furthermore, both sides of a story are not necessarily all sides. Left-progressive and radical views are almost completely shut out. During the 1980s, television panel discussions on defense policy pitted " experts " who wanted to maintain the existing high levels of military spending against other " experts " who wanted to increase the military budget even more. Seldom if ever heard were those who advocated drastic reductions in the defense budget. Framing The most effective propaganda is that which relies on framing rather than on falsehood. By bending the truth rather than breaking it, using emphasis and other auxiliary embellishments, communicators can create a desired impression without resorting to explicit advocacy and without departing too far from the appearance of objectivity. Framing is achieved in the way the news is packaged, the amount of exposure, the placement (front page or buried within, lead story or last), the tone of presentation (sympathetic or slighting), the headlines and photographs, and, in the case of broadcast media, the accompanying visual and auditory effects. Newscasters use themselves as auxiliary embellishments. They cultivate a smooth delivery and try to convey an impression of detachment that places them above the rough and tumble of their subject matter. Television commentators and newspaper editorialists and columnists affect a knowing style and tone designed to foster credibility and an aura of certitude or what might be called authoritative ignorance, as expressed in remarks like " How will the situation end? Only time will tell. " Or, " No one can say for sure. " (Better translated as, " I don't know and if I don't know then nobody does. " ) Sometimes the aura of authoritative credibility is preserved by palming off trite truisms as penetrating truths. So newscasters learn to fashion sentences like " Unless the strike is settled soon, the two sides will be in for a long and bitter struggle. " And " The space launching will take place as scheduled if no unexpected problems arise. " And " Because of heightened voter interest, election-day turnout is expected to be heavy. " And " Unless Congress acts soon, this bill is not likely to go anywhere. " We are not likely to go anywhere as a people and a democracy unless we alert ourselves to the methods of media manipulation that are ingrained in the daily production of news and commentary. The news media regularly fail to provide a range of information and commentary that might help citizens in a democracy develop their own critical perceptions. The job of the corporate media is to make the universe of discourse safe for corporate America, telling us what to think about the world before we have a chance to think about it for ourselves. When we understand that news selectivity is likely to favor those who have power, position, and wealth, we move from a liberal complaint about the press's sloppy performance to a radical analysis of how the media serve the ruling circles all too well with much skill and craft. excerpts from the book The Terrorism Trap by Michael Parenti City Lights books, 2002 p2 Swept along in the jingoist tide, that gaggle of political wimps known as the US Congress passed a War Powers Resolution Authorization, granting Bush the power to initiate military action against any nation, organization, or individual of his choosing, without ever having to proffer evidence to justify the attack. Such an unlimited grant of arbitrary power-in violation of international law, the UN charter, and the US Constitution-transforms the almost-elected president into an absolute monarch who can exercise life-and-death power over any quarter of the world. p4 Under pressure to present a united front against terrorism, Democratic legislators rolled over on the issue of military spending. Opposition to the so-called outerspace missile defense shield ( " National Missile Defense " ) began to evaporate, as did willingness to preserve the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). The lawmakers seemed ready to come up with most of the $8.3 billion that the White House said it needed to develop the missile defense shield and further militarize outer space. In December, Bush declared that the United States was unilaterally breaking the ABM treaty with Russia, saying that it " hinders us from developing an anti-missile shield that will deter an attack from a rogue state. " Congress marched in lockstep behind Bush's proposal to jack up the military budget to $360 billion for 2002. Additional funds were promised to the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other skullduggery units of what has come to be known as the US national security state. p5 .... the United States spends more on arms than all the other major industrial nations combined. The US military budget is about seven times greater than the $51 billion spent by Russia, the next highest competitor. p7 US leaders have been the greatest purveyors of terrorism throughout the world. p8 Editor of New Republic magazine " This nation is now at war. And in such an environment, domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity, a choosing of sides. " p8 The press is not just a stenographer for power, faithfully echoing what authorities feed it. It plays a far more proactive role as propagandist for the ruling ideology, exercising its own initiative to soften up public opinion, telling people what to think about events even before the events have played out, clearing the way for policymakers to make their moves. p11 The war against terrorism quickly became a cover for the war against democratic dissent. p13 Alternative sources [of energy] are readily available, infinitely renewable, ecologically sound, but ... vastly cheaper and less profitable than oil. Indeed, if developed to any great extent, alternative sustainable energy sources could destroy the multi-billion dollar oil industry, which is why they remain relatively underdeveloped p13 It is a myth that conservatives are practitioners of fiscal responsibility. Rightwing politicians who sing hymns to a balanced budget have been among the wildest deficit spenders. In twelve years (1981-1992) the Reagan-Bush administrations increased the national debt from $850 billion to $4.5 trillion. By early 2000, the debt had climbed to over $5.7 trillion. The deficit is pumped up by two things: first, successive tax cuts to rich individuals and corporations-so that the government increasingly borrows from the wealthy creditors it should be taxing; and second, titanic military budgets. In twelve years, the Reagan-Bush expenditures on the military came to $3.7 trillion. In eight years, Bill Clinton, a conservative Democrat who pretended to talk like a liberal on some subjects, spent over $2 trillion on the military. p18 Never do official circles or corporate media acknowledge how, for more than a half century, US military forces (or their US-supported surrogates) have repeatedly delivered mass destruction upon unarmed civilian populations in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and-with the 1999 bombings of Yugoslavia- even Europe, pernicious acts of terrorism that go unexamined. No critical discussion is offered regarding who really benefits from such ventures and who is harmed. Nothing is said about how the dominant interests within a small number of industrial countries, led by the US national security state continue to monopolize more and more of the world's resources and markets. US leaders preside over a military force of planetary magnitude unmatched in human history. Every year US taxpayers give up hundreds of billions of their hard-earned dollars to fund this global military empire, whose necessity has never really been critically debated on a national platform. A global military presence, we are told, supposedly safeguards our democracy and something called " the West, " discouraging " rogue states " from launching attacks against us, and allowing us to protect weaker nations from aggression. We are told that " US interests " need to be defended, and humanitarian rescue missions must be pursued. Policymakers and media pundits toss these various assertions around like so many advertising slogans, while ignoring the alternative explanations and analyses offered by progressive critics. With only 5 percent of the earth's population, the United States expends more military funds than all the other major powers combined. The US military establishment consists of about a half-million troops stationed at over 395 major bases and hundreds of minor installations in thirty-five foreign countries; more than 8,000 strategic nuclear weapons and 22,000 tactical ones; a naval strike force greater in total tonnage and firepower than all the other navies of the world combined, consisting of missile cruisers, nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, and destroyers that sail every ocean and make port at every continent. US bomber squadrons and long-range missiles can reach any target, delivering with impunity enough explosive force to destroy the infrastructures of entire countries-as demonstrated against Iraq in 1990-91 and Yugoslavia in 1999. US rapid deployment forces have a firepower in conventional weaponry vastly superior to any other nation's. US satellites and spy planes scope the entire planet. And today Washington is developing a capacity to conduct war from outer space. Worldwide US arms sales to cooperative capitalist nations rose to $36.9 billion in 2000, up from $34 billion in 1999. In addition to sales, since World War 11, the US government has given some $240 billion in military aid to train, equip, and subsidized some 2.3 million troops and internal security forces in more than eighty countries, many of them military autocracies. This extraordinary situation, this global military colossus goes on its grim and fatal way largely unexamined and unquestioned in public life. p24 September 11 had a terrible shock effect on the millions of Americans who get all their news from the corporate media and who were secure in the belief that everyone in the world secretly wants to be an American. They believed that America was universally loved and admired because the United States was more prosperous, nobler, and more generous than other countries. Very few Americans know about victims of US terrorism abroad. Relatively few are aware that whole societies have been shattered by US bombings or US monetary and trade policies. .... What changed on September 11 was people's perception of themselves and of America's place in the world. Many felt shocked, smaller, not respected, less secure, less powerful, and ) confused. Some even wondered if there were things that they had not been told. .... almost all of America know next to nothing about how US supported terrorists have taken millions of lives in scores of other countries. The media have little to say about those acts of terrorism, and so the general public knows relatively little about them. p27 Business profiteering in the name of patriotism has occurred in every war this nation has fought. p38 New York Times recently reported " For 30 years the gap between the richest Americans and everyone else has been growing so much that the level of inequality is higher than in any other industrialized nation. " p42 Why Do They Hate Us? Asking why there are people around the world who hate us, the writer Madison Shockley offered a list of grievances: " Arrogance, dominance, exploitation, oppression, racism, militarism, imperialism ... As Iong as we continue to thwart the aspirations for freedom and dignity for much of the Third World, there will be those who resent us, and some who hate us. " Similarly, a retired lieutenant-colonel of the US Air Force, Robert Bowman, argues that the United States was targeted not because it stands for freedom and human rights but because it stands " for dictatorship, bondage, and human exploitation in the world. We are the target of terrorists because we are hated. And we are hated because our government has done hateful things. " Some 1.5 billion people in the world live in absolute economic desperation, lacking even basic food, shelter, and clean water. One-fifth of all young men in the Middle East are unemployed, and the region's per capita income is about $2100 yearly, according to the World Bank, which is prone to understate the levels of economic deprivation. Leading the other rich industrial nations. The United States " has for decades imposed poverty-generating policies that force states to privatize resources and slash public spending. " This increases unemployment and leads to greater poverty, disease, forced migration, and environmental devastation. In Egypt-home of Mohammed Atta, who piloted the first jet into the World Trade Center-8.5 percent of the children die before age five, while Egypt's government spends a mere 4 percent of its budget on health care. US power supports retrograde rightwing governments that are dedicated not to the well-being of their peoples but to servicing the transnational corporations and the US national security state. Many Third World leaders eagerly incur huge debts with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western banks, then often pocket substantial chunks of the incoming loans. Scores of maldeveloped capitalist countries in the Third World are trapped in a deepening cycle of borrowing and repayment at usurious rates, a process that further enriches global financial interests at the expense of Third World populations. Over the past seventeen years, poor capitalist nations have transferred a net total of $1.5 trillion to rich foreign creditors. The deepening impoverishment that besets these debtor countries fuels popular resentment and rebellion. Leftist groups emerge and begin to mobilize large sectors of the population in the struggle for social betterment and against the economic servitude imposed by Western interests. These democratic movements are crushed by domestic military forces funded and advised by the US national security state. p44 Turkey today remains a police state with parliamentary window-dressing. p48 Various critics of US policy end up blaming America for the wars pursued in its name, noting that " all of us " have failed to stop what is being done in our name. But does this mean we are collaborative authors of US militaristic policies? More often, we are kept in the dark about what is done in our name. I do not blame the American people for what fundamentalist Muslim zealots did on September 11, nor for what secretive and deceptive fundamentalist empire-building zealots in Washington have been doing to help create the kind of world that brought forth the religious zealots. Part of the problem may lie in the bad habit that many people have in using " we " when they mean US political and financial elites. To say that " we " are thwarting democracy abroad, impoverishing other populations, or bombing innocent people, when really referring to the actions of the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the IMF and the WTO, is to assume a community of interest between the general public and those who regularly prey upon it, which is just what the predators want. p51 CNN chairperson Walter Isaacson [in 1999] issued orders to his correspondents that when they broadcasted reports with footage of civilian deaths, hunger, and devastation they were to remind viewers that the Taliban harbored terrorists who killed thousands of Americans in September, as if viewers weren't being reminded almost every hour of every day by the media. Isaacson called it " perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan. " To save us from such perversity, the Pentagon bought the rights to all pictures of Afghanistan and nearby countries taken by the world's best commercial imaging satellite, Space Imaging Inc., at a cost of $1.9 million a month, plus additional fees of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the images it actually purchased. The Pentagon contract meant that news media and other organizations outside government would not be able to obtain their own high-resolution satellite images of the Afghan conflict or of the entire region. Pictures of killed or suffering Afghani civilians soon disappeared from the US news. We now could see nothing about the war except what the Pentagon wanted us to see, specifically, repetitive accounts about the search for bin Laden .. p53 The media-hyped jingoistic craze that gripped the United States after September 11 was mostly just that, a craze. In time, the patriotic hype recedes and reality returns. p73 Why US leaders intervene everywhere Washington policymakers claim that US intervention is motivated by a desire to fight terrorism, bring democracy to other peoples, maintain peace and stability in various regions, defend our national security, protect weaker nations from aggressors, oppose tyranny, prevent genocide, and the like. But if US leaders have only the best intentions when they intervene in other lands, why has the United States become the most hated nation in the terrorist's pantheon of demons? And not only Muslim zealots but people from all walks of life around the world denounce the US government as the prime purveyor of violence and imperialist exploitation. Do they see something that most Americans have not been allowed to see? Supporting the Right Since World War II, the US government has given some $240 billion in military aid to build up the military and internal security forces of more than eighty other nations. The purpose of this enormous effort has been not to defend these nations from invasion by foreign aggressors but to protect their various ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anticapitalist insurgency. That is what some of us have been arguing. But how can we determine that? By observing that (a) with few exceptions there is no evidence suggesting that these various regimes have ever been threatened by attack from neighboring countries; (b) just about all these " friendly " regimes have supported economic systems that are integrated into a global system of corporate domination, open to foreign penetration on terms that are singularly favorable to transnational investors; © there is a great deal of evidence that US-supported military and security forces and death squads in these various countries have been repeatedly used to destroy reformist movements, labor unions, peasant organizations, and popular insurgencies that advocate some kind of egalitarian redistributive politics for themselves. For decades we were told that a huge US military establishment was necessary to contain an expansionist world Communist movement with its headquarters in Moscow (or sometimes Beijing). But after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist nations in 1989-1991, Washington made no move to dismantle its costly and dangerous global military apparatus. All Cold War weapons programs continued in full force, with new ones being added all the time, including the outer-space National Missile Defense and other projects to militarize outer space. Immediately the White House and Pentagon began issuing jeremiads about a whole host of new enemies-for some unexplained reason previously overlooked-who menace the United States, including " dangerous rogue states " like Libya with its ragtag army of 50,000 and North Korea with its economy on the brink of collapse. The real intentions of US national security state leaders can be revealed in part by noting whom they assist and whom they attack. US leaders have consistently supported rightist regimes and organizations and opposed leftist ones. The terms " Right " and " Left " are seldom specifically defined by policymakers or media commentators-and with good reason. To explicate the politico-economic content of leftist governments and movements is to reveal their egalitarian and usually democratic goals, making it much harder to demonize them. The " Left, " as I would define it, encompasses those individuals, organizations, and governments that oppose the privileged interests of wealthy propertied classes, while advocating egalitarian redistributive policies and a common development beneficial to the general populace. The Right too is involved in redistributive politics, but the distribution goes the other way, in an upward direction. Rightist governments and groups, including fascist ones, are dedicated to using the land, labor, markets, and natural resources of countries as so much fodder for the enrichment of the owning and investing classes. In almost every country including our own, rightist groups, parties, or governments pursue tax and spending programs, wage and investment practices, methods of police and military control, and deregulation and privatization policies that primarily benefit those who receive the bulk of their income from investments and property, at the expense of those who live off wages, salaries, fees, and pensions. That is what defines and distinguishes the Right from the Left. In just about every instance, rightist forces are deemed by US opinion makers to be " friendly to the West, " a coded term for " pro-capitalist. " Conversely, leftist ones are labeled as " anti-democratic, " " anti-American " and " anti-West, " when actually what they are against is global capitalism. While claiming to be motivated by a dedication to human rights and democracy, US leaders have supported some of the most notorious rightwing autocracies in history, governments that have tortured, killed or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens because of their dissenting political views, as in Turkey, Zaire, Chad, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, the Philippines, Cuba (under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), and Portugal (under Salazar). Washington also assists counterrevolutionary groups that have perpetrated some of the most brutal bloodletting against civilian populations in leftist countries: Unita in Angola, Renamo in Mozambique, the contras in Nicaragua, the Khmer Rouge (during the 1980s) in Cambodia, the mujahideen and then the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the rightwing drug-dealing KLA terrorists in Kosovo. All this is a matter of public record although seldom if ever treated in the US media. Washington's support has extended to the extreme rightist reaches of the political spectrum. Thus, after World War 11 US leaders and their Western capitalist allies did nothing to eradicate fascism from Europe, except for prosecuting some top Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. In short time, former Nazis and their collaborators were back in the saddle in Germany. Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States and Latin America, either living in comfortable anonymity or employed by US intelligence agencies during the Cold War. In France, very few Vichy collaborators were purged. " No one of any rank was seriously punished for his or her role in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi camps. " US military authorities also restored fascist collaborators to power in various Far East nations. In South Korea, police trained by the fascist Japanese occupation force were used after the war to suppress left democratic forces. The South Korean Army was commanded by officers who had served in the Imperial Japanese Army, some of whom had been guilty of horrid war crimes in the Philippines and China. ln Italy, within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while hundreds of communists and other leftist partisans who had been valiantly fighting the Nazi occupation were jailed. Allied authorities initiated most of these measures. In the three decades after the war, US government agencies gave an estimated $75 million to right-wing organizations in Italy. From 1969 to 1974, high-ranking elements in Italian military and civilian intelligence agencies, along with various secret and highly placed neofascist groups embarked upon a campaign of terror and sabotage known as the " strategy of tension, " involving a series of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombing massacres directed against the growing popularity of the democratic parliamentary Left. In 1995, a deeply implicated CIA, refused to cooperate with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating this terrorist campaign. In the 1980s, scores of people were murdered in Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe by rightwing terrorists in the service of state security agencies. As with the earlier " strategy of tension " in Italy, the attacks attempted to create enough popular fear and uncertainty to undermine the existing social democracies. The US corporate-owned media largely ignored these events. Attacking the Left We can grasp the real intentions of US leaders by looking at who they target for attack, specifically just about all leftist governments, movements, and popular insurgencies. The methods used include (a) financing, infiltrating, and co-opting their military, and their internal security units and intelligence agencies, providing them with police-state technology including instruments of torture; (b) imposing crippling economic sanctions and IMF austerity programs; © bribing political leaders, military leaders, and other key players; (d) inciting retrograde ethnic separatists and supremacists within the country; (e) subverting their democratic and popular organizations; (f) rigging their elections; and (g) financing collaborationist political parties, labor unions, academic researchers, journalists, religious groups, nongovernmental organizations, and various media. US leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected reformist governments- " guilty " of introducing egalitarian redistributive economic programs in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, the Congo, and numerous other nations-were overthrown by their respective military forces funded and advised by the US national security state. The intent behind Washington's policy is seen in what the US-sponsored military rulers do when they come to power. They roll back any reforms and open their countries all the wider to foreign corporate investors on terms completely favorable to the investors. The US national security state has participated in covert actions or proxy mercenary wars against reformist or revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Western Sahara, Egypt, Cambodia, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Jamaica, South Yemen, the Fiji Islands, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In many cases the attacks were terroristic in kind, directed at " soft targets " such as schools, farm cooperatives, health clinics, and whole villages. These wars of attrition extracted a grisly toll on human life and frequently forced the reformist or revolutionary government to discard its programs and submit to IMF dictates, after which the US-propelled terrorist attacks ceased. Since World War 11, US forces have invaded or launched aerial assaults against Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and most recently Afghanistan-a record of direct military aggression unmatched by any communist government in history. US/NATO forces delivered round-the-clock terror bombings on Yugoslavia for two and a half months in 1999, targeting housing projects, private homes, hospitals, schools, state-owned factories, radio and television stations, government owned hotels, municipal power stations, water supply systems, and bridges, along with hundreds of other nonmilitary targets at great loss to civilian life. In some instances, neoimperialism has been replaced with an old-fashioned direct colonialist occupation, as in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia where US troops are stationed, and more recently in Afghanistan. In 2000-2001, US leaders were involved in a counterinsurgency war against leftist guerrilla movements in Colombia. They also were preparing the public for moves against Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, is engaged in developing a popular movement and reforms that favor the poor. Stories appearing in the US press tell us that Chavez is emotionally unstable, autocratic, and bringing his country to ruin, the same kind of media hit pieces that demonized the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, Allende in Chile, Noriega in Panama, Qaddafi in Libya, Milosevic in Yugoslavia, and Aristide in Haiti, to name some of the countries that were subsequently attacked by US forces or surrogate mercenary units. Governments that strive for any kind of economic independence, or apply some significant portion of their budgets to not-for-profit public services, are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of US intervention. The designated " enemy " can be (a) a populist military government as in Panama under Omar Torrijos (and even under Manuel Noriega), Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser, Peru under Juan Velasco, Portugal under the leftist military officers in the MFA, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez; (b) a Christian socialist government as in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas; © a social democracy as in Chile under Salvador Allende, Jamaica under Michael Manley, Greece under Andreas Papandreou, Cyprus under Mihail Makarios, and the Dominican Republic under Juan Bosch; (d) an anticolonialist reform government as in the Congo under Patrice Lumumba; (e) a Marxist-Leninist government as in Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea; (f) an Islamic revolutionary order as in Libya under Omar Qaddafi; or even (g) a conservative militarist regime as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein if it should attempt an independent course on oil quotas and national development. The goal of US global policy is the Third Worldization of the entire world including Europe and North America, a world in which capital rules supreme with no labor unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, well-organized working class with rising expectations; no pension funds or medical plans or environmental, consumer, and occupational protections, or any of the other insufferable things that cut into profits. While described as " anti-West " and " anti-American, " just about all leftist governments-from Cuba to Vietnam to the late Soviet Union-have made friendly overtures and shown a willingness to establish normal diplomatic and economic relations with the United States. It was not their hostility toward the United States that caused conflict but Washington's intolerance of the alternative class systems they represented. In the post-World War 11 era, US policymakers sent assistance to Third World nations, and put forth a Marshall plan, grudgingly accepting reforms that produced marginal benefits for the working classes of Western Europe and elsewhere. They did this because of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the strong showing of Communist parties in Western European countries. But today there is no competing lure; hence, Third World peoples (and working populations everywhere) are given little consideration in the ongoing campaigns to rollback the politico-economic democratic gains won by working people in various countries. p87 The goal was, and continues to be, totally privatized economies that favor rich investor interests at the expense of the people in these countries. p87 When Words Speak Louder than Actions It should not go unnoticed that US leaders occasionally do verbalize their dedication to making the world safe for the transnational corporate system. At such times words seem to speak louder than actions, for the words are an admission of the real intention behind the action. For example, as President Woodrow Wilson contemplated sending US troops as part of the expeditionary force of Western nations to overthrow the newly installed revolutionary socialist government in Russia in 1917, his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, recorded in a confidential memorandum the administration's class concerns. Lansing ignored all the blather that US leaders were publicly mouthing about Lenin and the Bolsheviks being German agents. Instead he perceived them to be revolutionary socialists who sought " to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominate the earth. " The Bolsheviks wanted " to overthrow all existing governments and establish on the ruins a despotism of the proletariat in every country. " Their appeal was to " a class which does not have property but hopes to obtain a share by process of government rather than by individual enterprise. This is of course a direct threat at existing social order [i.e., capitalism] in all countries. " The danger was that it " may well appeal to the average man, who will not perceive the fundamental errors. " Almost four decades later, in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower uttered a forbidden truth in his State of the Union message: " A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy [is] the encouragement of a hospitable climate for [private] investment in foreign nations. " In 1982, the elder George Bush, then vice-president in the Reagan administration, announced, " We want to maintain a favorable climate for foreign investment in the Caribbean region, not merely to protect the existing US investment there, but to encourage new investment opportunities in stable, democratic, free-market oriented countries close to our shores. " Not only close to our shores but everywhere else, as, General Gray, commandant of the US Marines, observed in 1990, saying that the United States must have " unimpeded access " to " established and developing economic markets throughout the world. " President Clinton announced before the United Nations on September 27, 1993: " Our overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world's community of market-based democracies. " And over the past decade US policymakers have repeatedly and explicitly demanded " free-market reforms " in one country after another in the former communist nations of Eastern Europe. Far from being wedded to each other, as US leaders and opinion makers would have us believe, capitalism and democracy are often on a fatal collision course. US leaders find electoral democracy useful when it helps to destabilize one-party socialism and serves as a legitimating cloak for capitalist restoration. But when it becomes a barrier to an untrammeled capitalism, democracy runs into trouble. p96 .... policymakers will not move against the system-sustaining material interests of the dominant corporate class. p96 .... US politico-corporate elites have resorted to every conceivable subterfuge, coercion, and act of terrorist violence in their struggle to make the world safe for transnational corporate capital accumulation; to attain control of the markets, lands, natural resources, and cheap labor of all countries; and to prevent the emergence of revolutionary socialist, populist, or even nationalist regimes that challenge this arrangement by seeking to build alternative productive systems. The goal is to create a world populated by client states and compliant populations open to transnational corporate penetration on terms that are completely favorable to the penetrators. It is not too much to conclude that such a consistent and ruthless policy of global hegemony is produced not by dumb coincidence but by conscious design. p98 .... US leaders seem more interested in taking advantage of terrorist attacks than in preventing the conditions that breed them. They have neither the interest nor the will to make the kind of major changes in policy needed to dilute the hatred that so many people around the world feel toward US power. For one thing, they have no interest in breaking the " cycle of violence " by refraining from massive aerial assaults that wreak death and destruction upon innocent civilian populations. p98 .... violence is a serviceable instrument of ruling class control. That is why it is used so frequently and furiously. Violence is an effective resource of political power, one of the coercive instrumentalities used to convince others to submit to policies that are harmful to themselves but beneficial to the interests of global investors. US leaders often use violence or other forms of repressive coercion to destroy dissenting individuals, organizations, governments, and the living standards of whole societies ... p99 .... US global policy is devoted to benefiting the few not the many. This global policy must be opposed not because it is a failure but because it has been so terribly successful in the service of the rich and powerful, at great cost to the American people and still greater cost to the peoples of many other lands. p99 .... the Third World is capitalism at its best, at its freest, the place where it is least troubled by labor unions, high wages, work benefits, occupational safety regulations, consumer protections, environmental controls, costly social benefits, public sector services, business taxes, and other progressive taxes. For half a century, commentators have been talking about bringing the prosperity of the Western world to the Third World. What is overlooked is that the real goal has been the other way around: to bring the Third World to the Western world, rolling back the century of democratic gains won by working people in North America and Europe. p101 The struggle is between those who believe that the land, labor, capital, technology, markets, and natural resources of society should be used as expendable resources for transnational profit accumulation, and those who believe that such things should be used for the mutual benefit of the populace. What we need is to move away from liberal complaints about how bad things are and toward a radical analysis that explains why they are so ... p102 Those who believe in democracy must not be taken in by the reactionism that cloaks itself in patriotic hype. They must continue in their determination to educate, organize, and act. Siege Mentality How the White House is exploiting terrorism to promote a reactionary domestic agenda by Michael Parenti Toward Freedom magazine, December 2001 / January 2002 When almost-elected President George W. Bush announced his " war on terrorism " in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, he also launched a campaign to advance the agenda of the reactionary Right at home and abroad. This includes rolling back an already mangled federal human services sector, reverting to deficit spending for the benefit of a wealthy creditor class, increasing the repression of dissent, and further expanding the budgets and global reach of the US military and other components of the national security state. Indeed, a week after the terrorist attacks, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial calling on Bush to quickly take advantage of the " unique political climate " to " assert his leadership not just on security and foreign policy but across the board. " The editorial summoned the president to push quickly for more tax-rate cuts, expanded oil drilling in Alaska, fast-track authority for trade negotiations, and raids on the Social Security surplus. Bush himself noted that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon offered " an opportunity " to " strengthen America. " As numerous conservatives spoke eagerly of putting the country on a permanent war footing, the president proudly declared " the first war of the 21st century " against an unspecified enemy to extend over an indefinite time frame. Swept along in the jingoist tide, that gaggle of political wimps known as the US Congress granted Bush the power to initiate military action against any nation, organization, or individual of his choosing, without having to proffer evidence to justify the attack. Such an unlimited grant of arbitrary power-in violation of international law, the UN charter, and the US Constitution-transformed the almost-elected president into an absolute monarch who can exercise life-and-death power over any quarter of the world. Needless to say, numerous other nations greeted the president's elevation to King of the Planet with something less than enthusiasm. And King of the Planet is how he is acting, bombing already badly battered and impoverished Afghanistan-supposedly to " get " Osama bin Laden. Unmentioned is that US leaders actively fostered and financed the rise of the Taliban, and previously refused to go after bin Laden. Meanwhile, the White House announced that other countries may be bombed at will and the war will continue for many years. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz urged that US armed forces be allowed to engage in domestic law enforcement, a responsibility denied the military since 1878. Under pressure to present a united front against terrorism, Democratic legislators roll over on the issue of military spending. Opposition to the so-called missile defense shield is evaporating, as is willingness to preserve the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The lawmakers may come up with most of the $8.3 billion that the White House wants to develop the missile defense shield and move forward with militarizing outer space. Congress is marching in lockstep behind Bush's proposal to jack up the military budget. Additional funds have been promised to the National Security Agency (NSA), CIA, FBI, and other skullduggery units of the national security state. Having been shown that the already gargantuan defense budget wasn't enough to stop a group of suicidal hijackers armed with box cutters, Bush and Congress thought it best to pour still more money into the pockets of the military-industrial cartel. Many of the measures to " fight terrorism " have little to do with actual security. They are public relations ploys designed to: (a) heighten the nation's siege psychology, and (b) demonstrate that the government has things under control. So, aircraft carriers are deployed off the coast of New York to " guard the city, " national guardsmen armed with automatic weapons " patrol the airports, " and sidewalk baggage check-ins and electronic tickets are prohibited, supposedly to create " greater security. " Since increased security leads to greater inconvenience, it has been decided that greater inconvenience will somehow increase security-or at least give that appearance. The biggest public relations ploy of all is the bombing of Afghanistan, leaving us with the reassuring image of Uncle Sam striking back at the terrorists. To stop the bombing, the Taliban offered to hand over bin Laden to a third country to stand trial, without even seeing evidence against him. But the White House rejected that offer. It seems that displaying US retaliatory power and establishing a military presence in that battered country are the primary US goals, not apprehending bin Laden. Lost in all this is the fact that US leaders have been the greatest purveyors of terrorism throughout the world. In past decades, they or their surrogate mercenary forces have unleashed terror bombing campaigns against unarmed civilian populations-destroying houses, schools, hospitals, churches, hotels, factories, farms, bridges, and other nonmilitary targets-in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, the Congo, Panama, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and numerous other countries, causing death and destruction to millions of innocents. Using death squad terrorism, US leaders have also been successful in destroying reformist and democratic movements in scores of countries. Of course, hardly a word of this is uttered in the corporate media, leaving Bush and company free to parade themselves as the champions of peace and freedom. In time, people in the US may catch on that the reactionaries in the White House have not the slightest clue about how to save us from future assaults. They seem more interested in -and are certainly more capable of-taking advantage of terrorist attacks than preventing them. They have neither the interest nor the will to make the kind of major changes in policy that would dilute the hatred so many people around the world feel toward US power. They're too busy handing the world over to the transnational corporate giants at the expense of people everywhere. And, they show no intention of making a 180-degree shift away from unilateral global domination and toward collective betterment and mutual development. HOME FRONT OFFENSIVE Several proposed laws are designed to expand the definition of terrorism to include all but the most innocuous forms of protest. S. 1510, for example, treats terrorism as any action that might potentially put another person at risk. That would give the feds power to seize the assets of any organization or individual deemed to be aiding or abetting " terrorist activity. " And it can be applied retroactively without a statute of limitations. A telephone interview I did with Radio Tehran in mid-October, trying to explain why US foreign policy is so justifiably hated around the world, might qualify me for detention as someone who is abetting terrorism. Other initiatives expand the authority of law enforcement officials to use wiretaps, detain immigrants, subpoena email and Internet records, and infiltrate protest organizations. More than 1000 people were rounded up and put into " preventive detention, " with no charges brought against them and no legal redress. In keeping with the reactionary Right's agenda, the war against terrorism has become a cover for the war against democratic dissent and public sector services. The message is clear: The US must emulate not Athens but Sparta. One of the White House's earliest steps to protect the country from terrorist violence was to cut from the proposed federal budget the $1 billion slated to assist children who are victims of domestic abuse or abandonment. Certainly a nation at war has no resources to squander on battered kids or other such frills. Instead, Congress passed a $40 billion supplemental budget, including $20 billion for " recovery efforts, " much of it to help clean up and repair New York's financial district. Next was an " emergency package " for the airlines-$5 billion in direct cash and $10 billion in loan guarantees, with the promise of billions more. The airlines were beset by fiscal problems well before the September attacks. This bailout has little to do with fighting terrorism. Taken together, the loss of four planes, lawsuits by victims' families, and higher insurance rates didn't create industry-wide insolvency, and don't justify a multi-billion-dollar bailout. The real story is that once the industry was deregulated, the airlines began overcapitalizing without sufficient regard for earnings, the assumption being that profits would follow after a company squeezed its competitors to the wall by grabbing a larger chunk of the market. So, the profligate diseconomies of " free market " corporate competition are once more picked up by the US taxpayer-this time in the name of fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, some 80,000 airline employees were laid off in the weeks after the terrorist attacks, including ticket agents, flight attendants, pilots, mechanics, and ramp workers. They won't see a penny of the windfall reaped by the airline plutocrats and shareholders, whose patriotism doesn't extend to giving their employees a helping hand. At one point in the House debate, a frustrated Washington Democrat, Rep. Jay Inslee, shouted, " Why in this chamber do the big dogs always eat first?'' Inslee was expressing concerns about the 20,000 to 30,000 Boeing workers who were being let go without any emergency allocation for their families. Sen. Peter G. Fitzgerald, an Illinois Republican, expressed a similar sentiment when casting the lone dissenting Senate vote against the bailout: " Congress should be wary of indiscriminately dishing out taxpayer dollars to prop up a failing industry without demanding something in return for taxpayers. " It remained for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to explain on behalf of the Bush war mongers why the handout was necessary: 'We need to look at transportation again as part of our national defense. " The anti-terrorism hype is also serving as an excuse to silence opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The US needs oil to maintain its strength and security, we hear. Against this manipulative message, the environment doesn't stand much of a chance. Likewise, US trade representative Robert Zoellick enlisted the terrorism hype in the campaign to surrender sovereignty to corporate dominated international trade councils. In a September Washington Post op-ed, Zoellick charged that opposition to fast track and globalization was akin to supporting the terrorists. House Republican leaders joined in, claiming that trade legislation was needed to solidify the global coalition fighting terrorism. Here was yet another overreaching, opportunistic attempt to wrap the flag around a reactionary special interest. Actually, it is the free trade agreements that threaten our democratic sovereignty. All public programs and services that regulate or infringe in any way upon corporate-capitalism can be rolled back by industry-dominated, oligarchic trade councils. Corporations can now tell governments- federal, state, and local-what public programs and regulations are acceptable or unacceptable. The reactionaries don't explain how giving private, non-elected, corporate-dominated groups supranational, supreme power to override laws and the Constitution will help in the war against terrorism. LOOTING THE SURPLUS The airline bailout was only part of the spending spree. Bush endorsed a " stimulus " of $60 to $75 billion to lift the country out of recession by " recharging business investment. " He also called for an additional $60 billion tax cut which, like previous tax reductions, would give meager sums to ordinary folks and lavish amounts to fat cats and plutocrats. Where is all this money for defense, war, internal security, airlines, rebuilding lower Manhattan, tax cuts, and recharging the economy coming from? Much of it is from the Social Security surplus fund-which is why Bush is so eager to spend. It is a myth that conservatives practice fiscal responsibility. Right-wing politicians who sing hymns to a balanced budget have been among the wildest deficit spenders. Between 1981 and 1992, the Reagan-Bush administrations increased the national debt from $850 billion to $4.5 trillion. By early 2000, the debt had climbed to over $5.7 trillion. Two things pump up the deficit: first, successive tax cuts to rich individuals and corporations-so that the government increasingly borrows from the wealthy creditors it should be taxing; and second, titanic military budgets. In 12 years, Reagan-Bush expenditures on the military came to $3.7 trillion. In eight years, Bill Clinton added another $2 trillion. The payments on the national debt amount to about $350 billion a year, representing a colossal upward redistribution of income from working taxpayers to rich creditors. The last two Clinton budgets were the first to trim away the yearly deficit and produce a surplus. The first Bush budget also promised to produce a surplus, almost all of it from Social Security taxes. As a loyal representative of financial interests, George W., like his daddy, prefers the upward redistribution of income that comes with a large deficit. The creditor class, composed mostly of superrich individuals and financial institutions, wants the US- and every other nation-to be in debt to it. Furthermore, the enemies of Social Security have long argued that the fund will eventually become insolvent and must therefore be privatized. (We must destroy the fund in order to save it. ) But with Social Security continuing to produce record surpluses, this argument becomes increasingly implausible. By defunding Social Security, either through privatization or deficit spending or both, Bush achieves a key goal of the reactionary agenda. HOW FAR THE FLAG? As of October, almost-elected President Bush sported a 90 percent approval rating, as millions rallied around the flag. A majority supported his military assault upon the people of Afghanistan, in the mistaken notion that this will stop terrorism and protect US security. But before losing heart, keep a few things in mind. There are millions of people who, though deeply disturbed by the terrible deeds of Sept. 11, and apprehensive about future attacks, aren't completely swept up in the reactionary agenda. Taking an approach that would utilize international law and diplomacy has gone unmentioned in the corporate media, yet 30 percent in the US support that option, compared to 54 percent who support military actions (with 16 percent undecided), according to a recent Gallup poll. Quite likely, a majority would support an international law approach if they ever heard it discussed and explained seriously. In any case, millions of people in the US want neither protracted wars nor a surrender of individual rights and liberties, nor drastic cuts in public services and retirement funds. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets not to hail the chief but to oppose his war and reactionary agenda. Even among the flag-wavers, support for Bush seems to be a mile wide and an inch deep. The media-pumped jingoistic craze that grips the US today is mostly just that, a craze. In time, it grows stale and reality returns. One cannot pay the grocery bills with flags or the rent with vengeful slogans. My thoughts go back to another President Bush, George the First, who early in 1991 had an approval rating of 93 percent, and a fawning resolution from Congress hailing his " unerring leadership. " Yet, within the year, he was defeated for reelection. Those who believe in democracy must be undeterred in their determination to educate, organize, and agitate. In any case, swimming against the tide is always preferable to being swept over the waterfall. Michael Parenti's recent books include History as Mystery, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, and the 7th edition of Democracy for the Few. Michael Parenti received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1962, and has taught at a number of colleges and universities. He is the author of thirteen books, including Democracy for a Few (6th edition); Power and the Powerless; Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media (2nd edition); The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race; Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment; Land of Idols, Political Mythology in America; Against Empire: Dirty Truths; and Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. Dr. Parenti's articles have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals and political periodicals. He lives in Berkeley, California, and devotes him self full-time to writing and lecturing around the country. http://www.michaelparenti.org/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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