Marc Cooper's Blog, page 6

Comrade Cooper

I have to say it's been a barrel of fun watching Anderson Cooper froth and seethe the last two nights on CNN.  He's gotten so worked up about the Egyptian Revolution that I half expect him to pour a can of gas over his head and set himself alight in protest of the Fascist Mubarak Dictatorship.

God only knows why CNN has decided to actually so fully cover this uprising — with AC at the center.  I have  to cynically guess that it's a gamble for ratings rather than a commitment to internationalist civic duty. But, cool, I'll take what I can get.  I love watching Al Jazeera English (which is much much better) but it's hard to squint at an iPad for more than an our or two.

Enter Anderson with his last two evenings of full-on venting against the Mubarak regime which I can watch on the 60 inch LCD.

His first volley was peppered with the charge that Mubarak was "lying.. lying..lying.."  Which is true.

Tonight, AC kicked it up a notch boldly announcing he was going to devote the entire hour to "exposing the lies" of the Egyptian regime.

Holy batman! A nice, well-groomed MSM media anchor taking a real, live point of view! And nobody turned into a pillar of salt.

This ratings-grabbing boldness, which I applaud, does nevertheless beg one major question: Why can't AC, CNN, or any other MSM outlet  employ the same type of pointed honesty (and reporting) that Cooper is willing to do about Egypt?

Why was there never an hour on CNN about the "lying" that got us into Iraq?

Why isn't there an hour on CNN about the "lies" being employed to besmirch health care, medicare, social security and so many other subjects?  We all know the answer.  But I'm just sayin'….

My Take on HuffPost/AOL

Sorry.  I've been really bad about blogging here as I have been underwater with other work — mostly at our USC-based Neontommy.com website (which is now ranked as the 6th most trafficked college-based publication in America!).

I promise to do better.

In the meantime, take a listen to this Feb 8 podcast from Which Way L.A. on KCRW.  It features Arianna on the deal with AOL, followed by my thoughts on the deal. Hint: I refer to AOL as "the Wal-Mart of the web."

Whither Egypt?

After two days of ominous and bloody protests, Egyptian social media is now back online.

Meanwhile, the dictatorial regime of the ossified Hosni Mubarak is bracing for yet another day of street confrontations.  The U.S. State Department has issued a relatively enlightened statement about the incipient revolt — enlightened, at least, to how bad the statement might have been.  The BBC reports:

Mrs Clinton said it was facing "an important opportunity to implement political, economic and social reforms that respond to legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people".

"We support the universal right of the Egyptian people, including the right to freedom of expression, association and assembly," she told reporters at the state department, calling on all parties to show restraint.

OK, hardly an endorsement of revolution. The real test for the U.S., however, will come if the regime actually begins to falter.  The chief opposition leader in Egypt has called for regime change and the movement in the streets appears to be a mix of pro-democracy and Islamist forces.

The revolt in Tunisia will be small potatoes if the Egyptian dictatorship falls. It could have thunderous consequences. Not only would the U.S. lose a slavish ally and regional power broker but it might be faced by a new Islamic state.  Or, God Willing, a democratic one.

Campaign Obama 2012 Begins

The generality, vagueness and basic vanilla blandness of President Obama's SOTU speech was, in its way, rather politically brilliant.  It also unofficially marks the onset of his re-election campaign.

Conservatives were primed to pounce on what might have been an address laden with liberal legislative promises.  Progressives were sort of hoping the Prez would give a "centrist" speech, thereby proving his capitulation to all things evil and corporate. Turns out that Obama's speech was neither right, nor left, nor centrist nor particularly bi-partisan.

It was, essentially, small-p patriotic.  Call Obama what you like and fault him where you may, but the guy is very very smart. Very astute. And he reads the current political moment situation rather perfectly.  He's smart enough to know that with the GOP in control of the House and with a slim and unreliable majority in the Senate, it would be more or less pointless to have proclaimed a bunch of legislative goals.  Anything at all he can get through Congress in the next two years will be a result of quiet and intense negotiation and compromise and there was simply no good reason to proffer anything very polarizing tonight.

Right now what Obama is naturally most-focused on is mid and long term. Can he get re-elected in 2012 and can the national mood improve enough to give the Dems some shot at gaining ground in Congress?  He also knows, I think, that the Giffords shooting was and continues to be a game-changer.  Few Americans might believe that there is any direct link between the Tucson massacre and the birther/nutbag/Palineseque/Obama-is-a-socialist Tea Party rhetoric of the last two years. But make no mistake, an overwhelming majority of Americans sensed, as a result of the shooting, that things were getting out of hand, that lines had been crossed and they internalized — even if subtly- the wake-up call.

On the national scale, Obama emerged as The Only Adult in the wake of the shooting and people paid attention.  This is where we could measure, more than political or ideological shadings, the caliber of integrity and character of our leaders. And in the shadow of Obama, folks like Boehner, Palin, McConnell and even Gifford's fellow Arizonan, John "The Grump" McCain, shriveled in size and stature.

Yes, Obama spoke of jobs and the economy tonight and will continue to do so. But he knows, like anyone who cares to inform him or herself, that high unemployment is going to linger for some years no matter what is done and no matter who is in the White House.  Meanwhile, there is a definite if contained upswing in the economic feel of the country.  The credit crunch has eased. Interest rates are at an all time low.  The stock market is up nearly double since its lowest point under Obama, the recovery funding is no longer a punch-line but seems to have actually saved some thousands of jobs. The breathtaking spikes in unemployment figures have flattened out and Obama can rightfully claim to have saved an entire national American industry — just ask Detroit.

None of this means the economy is great. Nor even good. It still sucks. Problem is, and Obama knows it, is that it ain't gonna change much between now and the election.

And that election, like all elections, is a matter of choices.  It's going to be between Obama and somebody else — unlike the mid-terms which was a vote of anger and frustration.  Which brings us down to the nitty gritty of why Obama didn't have to say very much tonight. He didn't have to because, as of now, there is no choice. He has no credible opponent and it is very difficult to figure or imagine just who will emerge in that role.

Palin is a joke. McCain is a has been. Huckabee is a religious nut with no general appeal. Pawlenty is an official nobody. And then there's the Mormon from Maine who is best known in Republican circles for instituting Obamacare before Obamacare even existed.

In the interim, the rudder of the GOP will be in the tobacco-stained hands of Mssrs. Boehner and McConnell, more or less guaranteeing that Congressional Republicans will only lose, and not gain, support at the clock ticks.

If I were President Obama, and I felt that wind, albeit a gentle wind, behind my back and knew that my address was to be followed by one-two punch of Reps. Ryan and Bachmann, I don't know if I would have even bothered to rehearse the speech. I might have just canned the TeLePrompTer and got up and told a few jokes.

P.S. You don't think I'm right? Consider this: What was it? Four-five days ago that the Republican House "repealed" Obamacare.  Does anybody even remember that?  I see a lot of weeping in the days to come for Mr. Boehner.

He might start by reading the reviews of Rep. Bachmann's airbrushing of slavery out of American history. Be nice and pass the Kleenex.

Hard Core: The Daughter Lays It Bare In The Atlantic

I was laying around today thinking about how many different ways we are getting screwed by so many in power and one thought led to another. I concluded at the end of this exercise that, indeed, all roads (especially those stemming from screwing) lead to sex.

And, therefore, what better time to link to the piece on Sex & Porn In The Age Of The Internet, written by my daughter Natasha Vargas-Cooper, that appears in this month's issue of The Atlantic. In the great family tradition of going around picking fights, Natasha has really stirred the pot with this one, sparking reactions and detractions and refudiations from all sorts of places (precisely as she intended). Some folks read the piece as an ultra-feminist rant against men. Others see it as a reactionary manifesto for submission of women. Natch, all these folks are wrong (as only her hairdresser and her father know for sure).

What is fascinating for me is to see how feminism of forty years ago evolves in the hands of a younger generation. And thankfully, with just enough nuance to drive everyone batty trying to figure out this author's politics.

I will let you read the piece and reach your own conclusions.

Here's a couple of the money graphs that verbalize some of the resentment and frustration that at least some twentysomething women feel about the sexual memes we elders have handed down to them:

Armed with a "Take Back the Night" pamphlet, we were led to believe that, as long as we avoided the hordes of date rapists, sex was an egalitarian endeavor. The key to sexual harmony, so the thinking went, was social conditioning. Men who sexually took advantage of women were considered the storm troopers of patriarchy, but women could teach men to adopt a different ideology, through explicit communication of boundaries —"you can touch there" or "please don't do that." Thus was the dark drama of sex replaced with a verbal contract. Once the drunken frat boys and brutes were weeded out, if we gravitated toward a kind of enlightened guy, an emotionally rewarding sex life was ours for the taking. Sex wasn't a bestial pursuit, but something elevating.

This is an intellectual swindle that leads women to misjudge male sexuality, which they do at their own emotional and physical peril. Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression. The Internet has created a perfect market of buyers and sellers (with the sellers increasingly proffering their goods gratis) that provides what people—overwhelmingly males (who make up two-thirds of all porn viewers)—want to see or do.

Read the whole piece here.

GOP Moving To Take Out Palin?

If she's not careful, Sarah Palin might wind up being the victim she portrayed herself as in her grotesque "blood libel" speech. I don't think I'm revealing a state secret when I say it is common knowledge that there are a whole lot of  potential Republican presidential candidates, strategists and party-poo-bahs who would love to see her just go away.  Our GOP friends might be crazy but they're not stupid.

They know she's a gigantic liability that has ZERO chance of winning a general election and, yet, they have been afraid to take her on (lest her eyes-rolling-back-in-their-heads base come after them).

At least up till now.

No pun intended but they can smell the blood in the water. Palin has screwed up big time with her asinine statement on the Giffords shooting and her rivals –and their frontmen– might just think this is the perfect moment to take her off the board. Remember, folks, the Iowa GOP Straw Poll is a mere six months from the now and the caucuses six months after that.

It's sort of now or never if they want to ditch Sarah (whose favorability rating was Yeltsin-like 22 percent before her blood libel debacle).

Republican pundit David Frum, author of the "axis of evil" meme, fired the first barrage saying: "When you apply for a job, you should dress for the job you want," Frum noted, "She dressed for the job she has…She's like a big melting iceberg in warm water, and I think a big chunk of ice just slipped off the side."

Kerplunk.

Former Minnesota Governor and presidential aspirant Tim Pawlenty had already taken a shot at Palin, criticizing her for her now infamous map of targeted congressional districts.

Another possible GOP candidate, NJ Governor Chris Christie chimed in with his own backhanded slap at Sarah while appearing on ABC.

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And several other Republican bigwigs, including former Reagan advisor, John Weaver, also joined in the fun.

Ahh, it's all reminiscent of that great line from the Era of Nixon about "twisting, twisting slowly in the wind."

Sarah Palin: "America's Enduring Strength" from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

Blood Libel

Sorry, I've been VERY busy and now will attempt to start blogging again.

Let's get a quick jump-start with Sarah Palin. I will allow Bill Saletan to deconstruct her vastly ignorant and offensive remark about "blood libel."

But having listened, in great pain, to her jumbled and quite defensive statement issued earlier on Wednesday I retrieve two takeaways:

1) When Palin says what she wants to say and engages in the most inflammatory of rhetoric (at least for those with an IQ within ten degrees of room temp) it's a noble exercise of free speech. When others criticize her for what she says, well, then that's blood libel. Perfectly logical.

2) A Jewish congresswoman is in a hospital bed with a bullet hole through her brain but Christian Sarah Palin is the real victim. (Though, I have to hand it to Sarah for having figured out a way to non-violently create a hole in her own head).

Tomorrow: My cold-blooded political analysis, free of all sentimentality, which evaluates the real-life political impact of this week's events.

Just How Dumb Can Journalists Be?

Really effin' dumb apparently!

Have some fun watching Glenn Greenwald batting around CNN's clueless Jessica Yellin. The wonderful part is how the OVERTLY biased Yellin is the only one on the show who claims to be neutral. Happy New Year.

Only 364 Days Left for Xmas Shopping. Hurry!

Why Is Arianna Playing Footsie With Pinochetistas?

Disclaimer:  This is not a happy post for me to write.  Arianna Huffington has done a lot of work I admire and she has been a good friend of mine.

Indeed, the great irony of this piece is that ten years ago, it was Arianna who hosted a generously lavish party celebrating publication of my book Pinochet And Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir, and packed 350 people into her home — and fed them.  The book was a memoir of my time spent as translator to President Salvador Allende who was overthrown by the Chilean fascist, Augusto Pinochet.

So, let this column be seen not as one "trashing" Arianna, but rather one which offers her friendly advice — from a friend.

Here's the topic sentence: Arianna, please don't write about things you don't know much about. Like, in this case, the new President of Chile, Sebastian Pinera.

As part of her South American book tour, she apparently spent a few hours with this Chilean billionaire and immediately swallowed the whole plate of self-serving propaganda offered to her.

In her latest column, Arianna as much as swoons over Pinera, applauding his stated goal of ending poverty and of narrowing partisan differences. She favorably contrasts what she sees as Pinera's earnestness and seriousness with the frivolity and fecklessness of the American political class:

My South American trip is in full swing and, again and again, I've been struck by the way that Chile and Brazil, the two countries I'm visiting, have, on key issues, transcended the tired division between left and right the United States seems hopelessly mired in. Chile is led by a president from the right, Brazil by a president from the left. But both have gone beyond stereotypes and shibboleths in order to tackle hard problems. My first stop was Santiago, Chile, where I interviewed President Sebastián Piñera. Piñera is the third richest man in Chile; a former professor with a Ph.D. from Harvard; and the first right-wing president Chileans have elected in the two decades since Pinochet. So it's surprising to learn that his signature goal is the elimination of poverty. "By the end of the decade," he tells me, "we want to have closed the gap in income between rich and poor."

…

We are only a few minutes into our interview in the blue room outside his office, dominated by a huge painting by the Chilean surrealist Matta, when he tells me: "By the end of this decade, we want Chile to be the first country in South America to have eliminated poverty, to have closed the gap in income between rich and poor, and to be recognized as a developed — not a developing — economy."

To achieve this, he is putting more resources into overhauling his country's education system. "Nothing is more important," he told me.

Piñera's urgency is accentuated by the knowledge that, in keeping with Chile's constitution, he can only serve one term at a time. When, in a conversation with his wife Cecilia Morel at lunch the following day, I remark on his intensity, the First Lady laughs: "Yes, I know. I've lived with it every day for 37 years! He recharges by working. I, on the other hand, need silence and time by myself."

Let's get back to reality.  While over the last 20 years, Chile has made great progress in eliminating extreme poverty (under center-left not right-wing rule) it is still a relatively poor country and EVERY Chilean president, in ritual form, MUST promise to eliminate poverty — the same way every American president must end every speech with the words "God Bless America."  BFD.

But here are the facts omitted from Arianna's puffer on Pinera.  Chile remains not only one of the most economically unequal countries in the hemisphere, but also one of the most politically polarized. Right and Left are NOWHERE near coming together as Arianna suggests. Indeed, Pinera squeaked by with barely 51% as the former ruling center-left coalition ran a very poor candidate and had exhausted itself politically.

In fact, Chilean politics are much more similar rather than unlike American politics as Arianna argues.  The primary reason that Pinera won, and the center-left lost after being in office since 1991, was precisely because the latter refused to implement economic policies very different than those of the Pinochet dictatorship.  It had almost completed ceded to savage neo-liberal capitalism and the population was ready for a change, any change. In this case, it was a transparently (except to Arianna) faux populist campaign run by the political representative of the country's wealthiest elite.

Of course, Pinera offered economic prosperity and justice for the poor. The same way Newt Gingrich or Mike Huckabee does. Except, Pinera is infinitely richer.

He is, in short, a right-wing free market oligarch, everything that Arianna says she despises in American political culture. He flies over the slums of Santiago in his private helicopter and sits on top a net worth of around a billion dollars. Also omitted from Arianna's sketch is HOW he made his money, apart from inheriting it.  He did it by introducing expensive credit cards to a Chilean population eft threadbare by the Pinochet dictatorship.

You need go no further than his Wikipedia page to learn that Pinera has a long record of economic shenanigans:

In 1982, an arrest warrant was issued against Piñera. He was accused of violating the Banking Law during his time as general manager of the Bank of Talca. Piñera spent 24 days in hiding, while his lawyers appealed the order. A writ of habeas corpus was first rejected by the Appeals Court, but then approved by the Supreme Court, acquitting Piñera.[18]

In July 2007, Piñera was fined approximately 680,000 USD by Chile's securities regulator (SVS) for not withdrawing a purchase order after allegedly received privileged information (an infraction similar to insider trading) of LAN Airlines stock in mid-2006. [19] Piñera denied any wrongdoing and asserted that the whole process was part of a political attack to damage his image. He did not appeal, stating that the court process could take years and interfere with his intention to run again for president in late 2009.

Isn't he exactly the type of economic lowlife that the HuffPost rails against daily?

Let's get to the real point. Pinera's politics. Arianna, Pinera is the man who mobilized the pro-Pinochet coalition to become Chile's first elected conservative president since 1958.  He claims he voted against Pinochet continuing in power in the 1988 plebiscite that eventually led to the dictator having to leave office. But Pinera's entire family was intimately entwined in the dictatorship. His brother served as the fascist government's Minister of Labor — the office that banned and persecuted all labor unions and eliminated virtually all workplace protection.

Can Arianna produce one public statement by Pinera condemning any of this? Is there any record of Pinera speaking out for human rights and urging prosecution of any of the murderers and torturers who populated the dictatorship? (No).  In spite of his absurd claims that he took distance from the dictator, Pinera was the campaign manager in the (unsuccessful) 1990 presidential run for Hernan Buchi, Pinochet's hand-picked successor and….more central to Arianna's flawed argument– the leading right-wing economist at the time. To be precise, Buchi served as both Finance and Treasury Minister for Pinochet. This is the man who Pinera decided to try and slip into the presidency.

Now, spending a fortune, by Chilean standards, Pinera has himself become president.  To be fair, it is absolutely true that Pinera is attempting to move the Neanderthal Chilean right a few degrees toward the center. If he doesn't, in a place like Chile, he knows very well that his Pinochet-tinged coalition will have no chance of re-election.  He has packed his cabinet with free-market technocrats and, naturally, a few right-wing ideologues like Joaquin Lavin.

This is quite an important detail because, as stated above, Arianna praises Pinera for focusing on education. Well,  Lavin, the former mayor of Santiago and previously of the richest suburb in the country, is an Opus Dei fanatical free-marketeer and guess what post Pinera has named him to? Minister of Education!  Chile's educational system is already a class-based travesty, and five years ago there was a nationwide rebellion in the schools against then-Socialist President Michele Bachelet — a rebellion that came from her left, not her right. Nobody who has a minimal knowledge of Chilean politics expects Lavin to do anything except exacerbate the inequities of Chilean education. If Arianna had met with this Catholic fanatic now in charge of Chilean schools, I doubt she would have been so easily seduced as she was by the more manicured Pinera.

Here's another little factoid. Former President Michelle Bachelet left office, days after this year's earthquake, with something like an astounding 80% favorability rating. If she had been allowed to run a second time, she would have crushed Pinera. She owed her popularity to her basic decency and compassion, two adjectives rarely attached to the name Pinera. Unlike her Christian Democratic and Socialist predecessors since the fall of Pincochet, Bachelet actually undertook some serious social welfare programs. She extended child care and health care for the first time in 30 years.

Those programs are now at the top of the list to be chopped by Arianna's new found hero, Sebastian Pinera.

What does this all mean? That Arianna is secretly soft on right-wing douche bags like Pinera? I don't think so. And I am NOT implying anything of the sort. I think her mistaken view stems from a more widespread malady that infects the liberal-left.  It's an obsessive and sometimes even parochial focus on American, domestic politics that totally obscures any deeper understanding or sympathy with folks living outside our borders. Every political issue, quite literally in the world, is focused exclusively through the prism of American politics.

In defense of Arianna, she has generally refrained from this noxious game played by so many others on the left which equates my enemy's enemy as my friend. Arianna has never defended the likes of dictators like Castro or bullies like Chavez merely because they were enemies of George W. Bush.  She has never fallen for that kind of crap and she has mitigated the presence of such arguments to an admirable degree on HuffPost.

But that's exactly what she is doing here. Her disillusionment with Barack Obama and with Democratic politics has led her to blindly celebrate a right-wing demagogue who just happened to whisper into her ear all the right words about expunging poverty. She took the bait, and bit hard. So hard, that I don't know exactly know how to react to this astounding sentence she wrote:

Piñera's outlook is more long-range — and unfailingly optimistic. During our talk, he repeatedly used the phrase "the sky's the limit" when talking about Chile's prospects. It's a far cry from the Obama administration's fervent embrace of "politics as the art of the possible."

This is flabbergasting.  Look, I have my own problems, many many problems, with Obama and his administration,  But this sort of direct suggestion of Pinera's moral superiority to our president is deeply insulting to Obama and, frankly, to our collective intellect. You can say a lot of things about Barack Obama. But to my knowledge, he was never complicit with a bloody dictatorship, he didn't come to office by demagoging a coalition of fascists, free-marketeers, racists and extreme Catholics, he does not appoint members of Opus Dei to run the country's schools and he didn't make a personal fortune through credit card usury and securities fraud.

P.S.  My Chilean wife is currently visiting family in Santiago for Xmas. A lot of them are still living in shantytowns and eeking out a skimp existence on anemic wages and pensions. My wife and I are privileged to be able to help many of them out with monthly support for their meds, their housing and their schooling.  We would be delighted if Mr. Pinera began his war against poverty sooner rather than later. I can give him their addresses if he would like to start with my wife's family.

P.P.S.  Apropos of this posting, news comes tonight that a Chilean human rights agency has asked for the arrest of four former military officers thought to be implicated in the 1973 murder of folk singer Victor Jara.  The reports also say that the lead human rights lawyer and his assistant have been "laid off" by President Pinera who cited budgetary cuts.  No further comment required.