Chris Hedges's Blog, page 557

CNN’s Welcome to Far-Right Pundit Is One More Example of ‘Trumpwashing’

As FAIR has noted before (7/3/16, 12/30/17), centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump—a phenomenon we call “Trumpwashing.” In the understandable service of shoring up forces against a destructive president, producers and editors check their memories at the door and help rebrand a laundry list of war criminals, anti-LGBTQ weirdos and Islamophobic media hustlers simply because they also happen to not like Trump.

Ralph Peters’ break with Trump and Fox News was covered in The New York Times (June 7)…

The latest version of this terrible trend is the recent veneration of retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters. A long-time Fox News presence, Peters quit the network in March to much fanfare, calling it a “propaganda machine” in service of Trump. But Peters is a strange arbiter of what is and isn’t propaganda, given his long history of bigoted, warmongering virtriol. From insisting Islam “is not a religion of peace,” to constantly suggesting Black Lives Matter and Obama were Islamists, to calling Yemenis “primitive,” to writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Civilian Casualties: No Apology Needed” (7/25/02), Peters has been one of the most bloodthirsty hawks and overtly anti-Muslim trolls in American media. He even lobbied for one of the very things he criticizes Putin for doing, the killing of journalists—calling for “military attacks on the partisan media” in the Journal of International Security Affairs (5/24/09).

But now that he dislikes Trump for being mean to his friends in the US intelligence community, he can find a home again on CNN as a Respectable, Reasonable Republican—that most cherished of endangered species, in urgent need of protection. His appearance last week on Anderson Cooper 360 (6/7/18) was given several glowing write-ups in the US press, eager for a defection narrative. In the interview, him calling Fox News a “destructive propaganda machine” is what made the headlines, but it’s his qualifier that gave the game away:

For years, I was glad to be associated with Fox. It was a legitimate conservative and libertarian outlet. And a necessary one. But with the rise of Donald Trump, Fox did become a destructive propaganda machine. And I don’t do propaganda for anyone.

…the Philadelphia Inquirer (June 7)…

So when Fox News was inciting against immigrants, trafficking in anti-Muslim bias, defaming the poor and smearing Black Lives Matter, he was fine with this, it was “necessary,” but now that it’s doing all these things plus boosting Trump, it’s somehow crossed a line? OK.

As FAIR’s Jeff Cohen noted in March (3/26/18), Trumpwashing is a problem that plagues ostensible liberal MSNBC as well. The network has become something of a dumping ground for the worst elements of the American right wing, from spooks to ex-military brass to Bush-era war propagandists. One would say the only criteria to get on MSNBC is to be anti-Trump, but this would mean the network would have to make room for leftists and Bernie Sanders partisans who also hate Trump. The producers at 30 Rock, mysteriously, can’t find time (FAIR.org, 7/30/17) for this increasingly large cohort.

“But liberals need all the help they can get,” one might argue. Perhaps, but certainly there are limits to this? If, say, white nationalist Richard Spencer for some reason decided Trump was bad on foreign policy and denounced him, we can all agree he shouldn’t be invited on CNN and get dozens of lofty write-ups praising his courage? Obviously, Peters isn’t a neo-Nazi, and these questions are always a matter of degree, but shouldn’t the line be drawn well before “anti-Muslim warmonger who once took time out to advocate why we should be open to killing journalists”? If the liberal embrace of documented racist Glenn Beck, who then went on to be pro-Trump anyway, is any guide, there’s a cost to legitimizing every far-right loudmouth solely because they say mean things about the president.

…and the Daily Beast (June 6), among other outlets.

The primary difference between a Trump conservative and a #NeverTrump conservative is that the latter happens to like the CIA slightly more than they hate poor people. Being good on exactly one thing—hating Trump—and in the most belated, surface-level manner possible, does not erase a hateful, racist ideology that animated one’s entire career.

Cable news producers should factor that in when turning the fringes of the right into #Resistance heroes simply because they check off one partisan box. Or, at the very least, if they’re going to have them on, they should spell out their guests’ long track record of hate, incitement and racism.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

Obamacare’s Pre-Existing Condition Protections at Risk

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration’s latest move against “Obamacare” could jeopardize legal protections on pre-existing medical conditions for millions of people with employer coverage, particularly workers in small businesses, say law and insurance experts.

At issue is Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recent decision that the Justice Department will no longer defend key parts of the Obama-era Affordable Care Act in court. That includes the law’s unpopular requirement to carry health insurance, but also widely supported provisions that protect people with pre-existing medical conditions and limit what insurers can charge older, sicker customers.

Two independent experts said Wednesday that the administration appears to be taking aim at provisions of the ACA that protect people in employer plans, not only the smaller pool of consumers who buy a policy directly from an insurer. The new Trump administration position was outlined last week in a legal brief filed by the Justice Department in a Texas case challenging the Obama health law.

Workers “could face the prospect of insurance that doesn’t cover their pre-existing conditions when they enroll in a plan with a new employer,” said Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley said the administration does not appear to have thought through all the consequences of moving against one provision of a health law that has many complicated interlocking parts.

“The lack of care on the brief is jaw-dropping,” said Bagley, who supports the Obama health law but considers himself a “free agent” critic of both sides. “There is no question that the Trump administration has to clarify what the scope of its injunction would be and grapple with the consequences of mowing down parts of the ACA.

“For someone with a pre-existing condition thinking about switching jobs, the answer to the question could make a life-changing difference,” added Bagley.

Both Bagley and Levitt said their questions about the administration’s intentions arose from language in the Justice Department brief that specifically singles out sections of the health law that apply to employer plans. The ACA strengthened previous protections already in federal law that limited the circumstances and length of time under which an employer could exclude coverage for a worker’s pre-existing health problems.

The Trump administration had no immediate rebuttal to the issues raised by the two experts.

Instead, the Health and Human Services Department pointed to comments earlier in the week by Secretary Alex Azar, who told senators that the Justice Department brief was a legal and constitutional argument, not a policy statement.

“We share the view of working to ensure that individuals with pre-existing conditions can have access to affordable health insurance,” Azar said. “The president has always shared that and we look forward to working with Congress under all circumstances towards achieving that.”

Nearly 160 million workers and family members have coverage through employers, although the number covered by small employers is much smaller.

A health policy expert with a business organization that represents large employers said he doubted there would be much of an impact on major companies, which are better able to pool risk and have long been accustomed to covering all employees regardless of health issues.

“There will not be a change with anyone who is with a very large employer,” said James Gelfand of the ERISA Industry Committee, as the group is known. ERISA is the name of a federal law that governs employee benefits for big companies.

However, Gelfand said the impact could “spill over” to small businesses.

Separately, senior Republicans in Congress are wasting no time in trying to distance themselves from any effort by the administration to undermine popular protections for their constituents. Democrats are accusing Republicans of yet another effort to “sabotage” coverage, and plan to take the issue into the fall midterm elections.

“No American should be denied health coverage based on their pre-existing medical conditions,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Wednesday. Hatch chairs the Finance Committee, which oversees health care and tax law. He supported repeal of the ACA’s insurance mandate, but draws a line on pre-existing conditions.

“Everybody I know in the Senate — everybody — is in favor of maintaining coverage for pre-existing conditions,” said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, earlier in the week. “There’s no difference of opinion about that whatsoever.”

Added Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., “There’s no way Congress is going to repeal protections for people with pre-existing conditions who want to buy health insurance. The Justice Department argument in the Texas case is as far-fetched as any I’ve ever heard.”

The lawsuit, filed in February by Texas and other GOP-led states, is in many ways a replay of the politically divided litigation that ended with the Supreme Court upholding the health care overhaul in 2012. In this case, California is leading a group of Democrat-led states in defending the law.

The Trump administration’s stance is a rare departure from the Justice Department’s practice of defending federal laws in court.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

Activists Plan Nationwide Protest Over Immigration Policies

In response to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, which include separating parents and children attempting to illegally cross the border, Families Belong Together is organizing a nationwide series of marches demanding reform. The marches are set for Thursday.

Organizers of the group wrote in a press release:

[I]t is unconscionable that the US government is actively tearing apart immigrant families. They are victims of violence, hunger, and poverty and our government’s actions re-violate them, causing untold damage. Children as young as 18 months are torn from their mothers’ arms by our own government. This is violent abuse and as concerned citizens and voters we state, unequivocally, that this is not in line with American values. We oppose the inhumane policies of the Trump Administration, Border Patrol, ICE, and other federal immigration agencies. We are disheartened by the lack of leadership in Congress whose job is to be a check on the federal government when it overreaches and abuses its power. We are calling for immediate reforms and an end to this barbarism.”

The marches, which are listed on the group’s Facebook page, were organized by more than 3,500 parents, grandparents and other citizens through the group’s website. The group opposes “the cruel, inhumane, and unjustified separation of children from their parents along the U.S. border with Mexico and at other ports of entry into the U.S.”

“The outrage and opposition will only keep growing if the Administration continues this cruelty of separating families,” says Jess Morales Rocketto, political director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and chair of Families Belong Together. “This shouldn’t be up for debate. No one should accept babies being torn from their mothers’ arms or children being locked away from their parents. Congress has the power to stop this inhumane practice.”

His group cites family welfare experts on the drastic effect that separating parents and children can have on families. In an open letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, a group of scientists writes:

The scientific evidence is clear that early life experiences and resulting development shape a person for their lifetime. This “critical period” in early life can set the stage for cascading effects on psychological and biological wellbeing.

We also know that, during this critical period, parents play a vital role in facilitating the growth and development of their children. Decades of psychological and brain research have demonstrated that forced parental separation and placement in incarceration-like facilities can have profound immediate, long-term, and irreparable harm on infant and child development.

Appeals to Nielsen from experts in child welfare, juvenile justice and child development echo the scientists’ concern:

We write again today, after the formal implementation of practices to separate immigrant families, to renew our shared concern that your agency is harming children by taking them from their parents to deter or punish parents and children who come to our border seeking protection. The separation of children from their parents to deter migration, or to punish migration, will have significant and long-lasting consequences for the safety, health, development, and well-being of children. We therefore urgently request that the Administration reverse course on its practice of separating families at the border.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

U.N. Assembly Blames Israel for Gaza Violence

UNITED NATIONS—The latest on the U.N. General Assembly’s vote on a proposed resolution that would blame Israel for recent deadly violence on its border with Gaza (all times local):

5:55 p.m.

The U.N. General Assembly has approved a Palestinian-backed resolution blaming Israel for violence in Gaza after narrowly rejecting a U.S. demand to add an amendment condemning attacks on Israel by Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

The votes reflected wide concern in the 193-member world body that the resolution sponsored by Arab and Islamic nations was one-sided and failed to even mention Hamas, which has fired over 100 rockets at Israel.

The U.S. amendment to condemn Hamas, which was voted on first, was approved by a vote of 62-58 with 42 abstentions. General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak declared that under U.N. rules a two-thirds vote was needed so the amendment failed.

The assembly then voted on the original Palestinian-backed resolution which was approved by a vote of 120-8 with 45 abstentions.

___

4 p.m.

The Palestinians’ U.N. ambassador is urging the General Assembly to adopt a resolution to address escalating violence in Gaza and “the crisis” of protecting civilians following the killing of more than 120 Palestinians by Israeli military fire.

Riyad Mansour urged an emergency meeting of the 193-member world body Wednesday to do everything to protect civilians and to avert further destabilization so as encourage the possibility of peace “for which we have not yet lost all hope.”

Mansour stressed: “We need action. We need protection for our civilian population. … Is that a crime to ask for?”

The draft resolution asks Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to make recommendations on ensuring protection of Palestinian civilians, within 60 days, including on “an international protection mechanism.”

___

1:20 p.m.

The Palestinians and their supporters are asking an emergency meeting of the U.N. General Assembly to adopt a resolution blaming Israel for recent violence in Gaza — and the U.S. is demanding that Gaza’s Hamas rulers be condemned as well.

The draft resolution being considered Wednesday was proposed by Arab and Islamic countries. The text deplores “any excessive use of force” by Israeli forces, particularly in Gaza, and demands that Israel “refrain from such actions.” It also seeks recommendations to protect Palestinian civilians.

The U.S. says Israel is unfairly singled out in the draft and has proposed an amendment condemning Hamas for firing rockets into Israel and inciting violence along the Gaza-Israel border fence, “thereby putting civilians at risk.”

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

Trump Administration Weighs Detention Camps for Migrant Children: Report

“Cages that looked a lot like dog kennels.” That was Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley’s description of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility he visited in McAllen, Texas, last week. He was denied access to a facility in Brownsville, Texas, whose windows appeared to be blacked out. Both facilities reportedly house migrant children who have been separated from their parents at the border. Now, according to McClatchy, the Trump administration is pursuing the construction of tent cities near military sites across the state to “shelter the increasing number of unaccompanied [minors] being held in detention.”

“The Department of Health and Human Services will visit Fort Bliss, a sprawling Army base near El Paso, in the coming weeks to look at a parcel of land where the administration is considering building a tent city to hold between 1,000 and 5,000 children,” reveals McClatchy reporter Franco Ordoñez, citing officials in the Department of Health and Human Services and others familiar with the project.

HHS, which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement, is responsible for 11,200 children without a parent or guardian at approximately 100 facilities, 95 percent of which are filled to capacity. Ordoñez notes that the number of such children has increased 20 percent since Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson introduced a “zero tolerance” policy that criminally prosecutes those who have entered the country illegally or re-entered while their asylum claims are being processed.

“Tens of thousands of unaccompanied children and families have been apprehended since 2014, when a surge of Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan mothers and children raced into the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, fleeing violence and poverty,” Ordoñez writes. “The unaccompanied children are generally turned over to family or held in an HHS shelter, like a detention center or tent city. Now those who arrive with their parents are being separated from them and also sent to HHS shelters or sponsor families.”

McClatchy’s findings are the latest in a series of disturbing reports about the Trump administration’s escalating cruelty. Last week, The Washington Post revealed that Marco Antonio Muñoz, a Honduran asylum seeker, committed suicide in U.S. custody after being separated from his son at a Texas processing center. On Monday, Sessions announced that fleeing domestic and gang violence would no longer be grounds for political asylum, a decision that could imperil hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

Like Merkley, Rep. Pramila Jaypal, a Washington Democrat, recently visited a detention center where migrant parents had been separated from their children, this one just outside Seattle. There, mothers said they were informed by border patrol agents that “their families would not exist anymore” and that they would “never see their children again.”

“Thirty to 40 percent of these women came with children who had been forcibly taken away from them,” Jaypal told The Nation’s Joan Walsh. “None got a chance to say goodbye to their children—they were forcibly taken away. … Some of them said they could hear their children screaming for them in the next room. The children ranged anywhere from [age 1] to teenagers.”

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

The Chomsky Challenge for Americans

It’s no wonder that most Americans are clueless about why “their” country is feared and hated the world over. It remains unthinkable to this day, for example, that any respectable “mainstream” U.S. media outlet would tell the truth about why the United States atom-bombed the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Gar Alperovitz and other historians have shown, Washington knew that Japan was defeated and ready to surrender at the end of World War II. The ghastly atomic attacks were meant to send a signal to Soviet Russia about the post-WWII world: “We run the world. What we say goes.”

However, as far as most Americans who even care to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki know, the Japanese cities were nuked to save American lives certain to be lost in a U.S. invasion required to force Japan’s surrender. This false rationalization was reproduced in the “The War,” the widely viewed 2007 PBS miniseries on World War II from celebrated liberal documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

An early challenge to Uncle Sam’s purported right to manage postwar world affairs from the banks of the Potomac came in 1950. Korean forces, joined by Chinese troops, pushed back against the United States’ invasion of North Korea. Washington responded with a merciless bombing campaign that flattened all of North Korea’s cities and towns. U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay boasted that “we burned down every town in North Korea” and proudly guessed that Uncle Sam’s gruesome air campaign, replete with napalm and chemical weapons, murdered 20 percent of North Korea’s population. This and more was recounted without a hint of shame—with pride, in fact—in the leading public U.S. military journals of the time. As Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading intellectual, explained five years ago, the U.S. was not content just to demolish the country’s urban zones:

Since everything in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was then sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the nation’s water supply—a war crime for which people had been hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals … talk[ed] excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys and the ‘Asians’ scurrying around trying to survive. The journals exulted in what this meant to those Asians—horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation. How magnificent!

The United States’ monstrous massive crimes against North Korea during the early 1950s went down George Orwell’s “memory hole” even as they took place. To the American public they never occurred—and therefore hold no relevance to current U.S.-North Korean tensions and negotiations as far as most good Americans know.

Things are different in North Korea, where every schoolchild learns about the epic, mass-murderous wrongdoings of the U.S. “imperialist aggressor” from the early 1950s.

“Just imagine ourselves in their position,” Chomsky writes. “Imagine what it meant … for your country to be totally levelled—everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.”

That ugly history rarely makes its way into the “mainstream” U.S. understanding of why North Korea behaves in “bizarre” and “paranoid” ways toward the U.S.

Outside the “radical” margins where people read left critics and chroniclers of “U.S. foreign policy” (a mild euphemism for American imperialism), Americans still can’t grapple with the monumental and arch-imperialist crime that was “the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Chomsky’s term at the time) between 1962 and 1975.

Contrary to the conventional U.S. wisdom, there was no “Vietnam War.” What really occurred was a U.S. War on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—a giant and prolonged, multi-pronged and imperial assault that murdered 5 million southeast Asians along with 58,000 U.S. soldiers. Just one U.S. torture program alone—the CIA’s Operation Phoenix—killed more than two-thirds as many Vietnamese as the total U.S. body count. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the widely publicized My Lai atrocity was just one of countless mass racist killings of Vietnamese villagers carried out by U.S. troops during the crucifixion. Vietnam struggles with an epidemic of birth defects created by U.S. chemical warfare to this day.

America’s savage saturation bombing of Cambodia (meant to cut off supply lines to Vietnamese independence fighters) created the devastation out of which arose the mass-exterminating Khmer Rouge regime, which Washington later backed against Vietnam.

As far as most Americans who care to think about the “Vietnam War” know from “mainstream” U.S. media, however, the war’s real tragedy is about what it did to Americans, not Southeast Asians. With no small help from Burns and Novick’s instantly celebrated documentary on, well, “The Vietnam War” last year, we are still stuck in the ethical oblivion of then U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s morally idiotic 1977 statement that no U.S. reparations or apologies were due to Vietnam since “the destruction was mutual” in the “Vietnam War.” As if fearsome fleets of Vietnamese bombers had wreaked havoc on major U.S. cities and pulverized and poisoned U.S. fields and farms during the 1960s and 1970s. As if legions of Vietnamese killers had descended from attack helicopters to murder U.S. citizens in their homes while Vietnamese gunships destroyed U.S. schools and hospitals. Did the Vietnamese mine U.S. harbors? Did naked American children run down streets in flight from Vietnamese napalm attacks?

The colossal crimes committed run contrary to Cold War claims that Washington was fighting the spread of Soviet-directed communism. The U.S. wanted to prevent Vietnam from becoming a good example of Third World social revolution and national independence. The truth is remembered in Vietnam, where national museums exhibit artifacts from Uncle Sam’s noble effort to “bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age” and tell stories of Vietnamese soldiers’ heroic resistance to the “imperialist aggressors.”

One American who made the moral decision to put himself in “our” supposed “enemy’s” position was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The people of Indochina, King mused in 1967, “must find Americans to be strange liberators” as we “destroy their families, villages, land” and send them “wander[ing] into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one ‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury. So far we have killed a million of them—mostly children.” Further:

They languish under our bombs and consider us—not their fellow Vietnamese—the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers and into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. … They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their land. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. … They wander into the towns and see thousands of children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our solders as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our solders, soliciting for their mothers.

Observing that the U.S. had become the world’s “leading purveyor of violence,” King asked Americans to develop the maturity to “learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the [Vietnamese] brothers who are called the opposition.”

All good Americans were naturally horrified by the 9/11/2001 jetliner attacks—the first serious foreign attack on the U.S. since the War of 1812. Where was their humanitarian revulsion as U.S.-led economic sanctions killed 500,000 innocent Iraqi children (what Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went on CBS to call “a price worth paying”) during the first half of the 1990s? “Mainstream” U.S. media had little to say about this terrible toll.

How many good Americans who understandably wept as they watched the World Trade Center towers collapse had ever heard about the grisly slaughter the U.S. armed forces arch-criminally inflicted on surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait in February 1991? Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:

U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. … On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. … U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre. …

Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring would have been impressed.

Imagine the imprint this senseless war crime must have left behind on Iraqis.

Thanks to its poor fit with American exceptionalist doctrine—according to which Uncle Sam always tries to do the morally right thing, even if it sometimes goes too far in overzealous pursuits of its consistently good intentions—this gruesome imperial crime was only a minor story in U.S. “mainstream” media. The same was true three years earlier when the American battleship USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 civilians on a clearly marked commercial jet in Iranian air space over the Persian Gulf. (Two years later, the Vincennes’ commander and his chief air-war artillery officer were given medals for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” during this heroic slaughter of harmless innocents.)

Imagine the U.S. response if, say, a Chinese navy ship had shot down an American Airlines flight in U.S. airspace over San Francisco Bay.

The U.S. shootdown of Flight 655 is well remembered in Iran. Not so in the United States of Imperial Amnesia, where official doctrine holds that, in Albright’s words, “The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”

” ‘Tis too much proved,” William Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet,” “that with devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.”

The tenacious hold of pious U.S.-exceptionalist dogma leads to soul-numbing two-facedness. In May 2009, a U.S. airstrike killed more than 10 dozen civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. As The New York Times somewhat surprisingly reported: “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to … the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi. … The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred. … Everyone was crying … watching that shocking scene. Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including … many women and children.”

The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this horrific incident—one among many mass U.S. aerial civilian killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning in the fall of 2001—was to blame the deaths on “Taliban grenades.” Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, expressed “regret,” but the administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge U.S. responsibility.

By telling contrast, Barack Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official for scaring New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people there of 9/11.

The disparity was remarkable: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians required no apology. No one had to be fired. And the Pentagon was permitted to advance preposterous claims about how the civilians perished—stories U.S. corporate media took seriously.

“Why, oh why, do they hate us?” So runs the plaintive American cry, as if Washington hasn’t directly and indirectly (through blood-soaked proxies like the Indonesia dictator Suharto and the death-squad regimes of Central America during the 1970s and 1980s) killed untold millions and overthrown dozens of governments the world over since 1945. As if the U.S. doesn’t account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s military spending to maintain at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 “sovereign” nations.

Maybe it has to do with a U.S. media that wrings its hands for months over the deaths of four U.S. soldiers trapped on an imperial mission in Niger but can’t muster so much as a tear for the thousands of innocents regularly killed (victims of what Chomsky has called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times”) by U.S. drone attacks across the Middle East, Southwest Asia and North Africa. Imagine what it is like to live in constant dread of annihilation launched from invisible and unmanned aerial killing machines. The tens of thousands of Yemenis killed and maimed by U.S-backed and U.S.-equipped Saudi Arabian airs raids get no sympathy from most American media. Nor do the more than 1 million Iraqis who died prematurely thanks to Washington’s arch-criminal 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was sold on thoroughly and openly false pretexts and provided essential context for the rise of the Islamic State.

Maybe it’s also about the “good friends” that “we” (our “foreign policy” imperial masters) keep around the world in the names of “freedom” and “democracy.”

These partners in global virtue include:

● Thirty-six nations receiving U.S. military assistance despite being identified as “dictatorships” in 2016 by the right-wing U.S. organization Freedom House.

● The Saudi regime, the leading source and funder of extremist Sunni jihadism and the most reactionary government on earth, currently using U.S. military hardware and ordnance to bomb Yemen into an epic humanitarian crisis.

● The openly racist occupation and apartheid state of Israel, which has sickened the morally sentient world this spring by systemically sniper-killing dozens of young, unarmed Palestinians who have had the audacity to protest their sadistic U.S.-backed siege in the miserable open-air prison that is Gaza.

● Honduras, home to a violently repressive right-wing government installed through a U.S.-backed military coup in June 2009.

● The Philippines, headed by a thuggish brute who boasts of killing thousands of drug users and dealers with death squads.

● Rwanda, a semi-totalitarian state enlisted in the U.S.-backed multinational rape of the Congo, where 5 million people have been killed by imperially sponsored starvation, disease and civil war since 2008.

● Ukraine, where a right-wing government that includes and relies on paramilitary neo-Nazis was installed in a U.S.-assisted coup four years ago.

You don’t have to be a leftist to have the elementary moral decency to do the Chomsky exercise of imagining yourself in other nations’ shoes—on the wrong side of the Pax Americana and its dutiful, consent-manufacturing “mainstream” media. Four years ago, the University of Chicago’s “realist” U.S. foreign policy expert John Mearsheimer had the all-too-uncommon decency (at least among U.S. “foreign affairs” specialists) to reflect on the Ukraine crisis and the New Cold War as seen from Russian eyes.

“The taproot of the crisis,” Mearsheimer wrote in the nation’s top establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, “is [U.S.-led] NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrated into the West,” something Vladimir Putin quite naturally saw as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.” And “who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asked, adding that grasping the reasons for Putin’s hostility ought to have been easy since the “United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.”

“We need not ask,” Chomsky reflects, “how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hints of the first tentative steps in that direction would have been ‘terminated with extreme prejudice,’ to adopt CIA lingo.”

You never heard about Mearsheimer’s take, much less Chomsky’s, even (or especially) in liberal media outposts like MSNBC and CNN, where progressives learn to love the CIA and the FBI.

The dominant U.S. media now is warning us about the great and resurgent danger of Iran developing a single nuclear weapon. U.S. talking heads and pundits also are leading the charge for the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula [of North Korea].”

It is unthinkable that anyone in the reigning American exceptionalist U.S. media-politics-and-culture complex would raise the question of the denuclearization of the United States. It’s no small matter. The world’s only superpower, the only nation to ever attack civilians with nuclear weapons, is embarking on a super-expensive top-to-bottom overhaul of a U.S. nuclear arsenal that already houses 5,500 weapons with enough menacing power between them to blow the world up five times over. This $1.7 trillion rebuild includes the creation of provocative new first-strike weapons systems likely to escalate the risks of nuclear exchanges with Russia and/or China. Everyday Americans could have opportunities to more than just imagine what the innocents of Nagasaki experienced in August 1945.

But don’t blame Donald Trump. Our current reality was initiated under Obama, leader of a party that is positioning itself as the real and anti-Russian and CIA-backed party of empire in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections.

This extraordinarily costly retooling heightens prospects for human self-extermination in a world in dire need of public investment to end poverty (half the world’s population “lives” on less than $2.50 a day), to replace fossil fuels with clean energy (we are marching to the fatal mark of 500 carbon parts per atmospheric million by 2050—if not sooner), and to clean up the titanic environmental mess we’ve made of our planet.

The perverted national priorities reflected in such appalling, Darth Vader-esque “public investment”—a giant windfall for the high-tech U.S. weapons-industrial complex—are symptoms of the moral collapse that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned the United States about in the famous anti-war speech he gave one year to the day before his assassination (or execution). “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” King said, “is approaching spiritual death.”

That spiritual death is well underway. Material and physical death for the species is not far off on America’s eco- and nuclear-exterminating path, led in no small part by a dominant U.S. media that obsesses over everything Trump and Russia while the underlying bipartisan institutions of imperial U.S. oligarchy lead humanity over the cliff. Americans might want to learn how to take Chomsky’s challenge—imagine ourselves in others’ situation—before it’s too late to imagine anything at all.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the  Poor People’s Campaign . Please help us by  making a donation .

Homeless Bangladeshis Brace for Floods

As another monsoon season begins, huge numbers of homeless Bangladeshis are once again bracing themselves against the onslaught of floods and the sight of large chunks of land being devoured by rising water levels.

Bangladesh, on the Bay of Bengal, is low-lying and crisscrossed by a web of rivers: two thirds of the country’s land area is less than five metres [16.4 feet] above sea level. With 166 million people, it’s one of the poorest and most densely populated countries on Earth – and one of the most threatened by climate change.

A recently released report by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) says rises in sea levels caused by climate change could result in Bangladesh losing more than 10% of its land area by mid-century, resulting in the displacement of 15 million people.

The country is already experiencing some of the fastest-recorded sea level rises in the world, says the EJF, a UK-based organisation that lobbies for environmental security to be viewed as a basic human right.

Unpredictable Rains

Increasingly erratic rainfall patterns – linked to changes in climate – are adding to the nation’s problems. Sudden, violent downpours have resulted in rivers breaking their banks and land being washed away.

Rising sea levels mean land and drinking water is contaminated by salt. Farmers are forced to abandon their land and move – many to Dhaka, the capital, one of the world’s so-called megacities, with a population of more than 15 million.

“Bangladesh has a long history of floods, but what used to be a one-in-20-year event is now happening one year in five”, says Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka. “It is what we would expect with climate change models.”

Farmers further inland are also forced to move to the capital in search of work due to surging rivers eating away their lands. The city’s slums are expanding, and Dhaka’s population is increasing by more than 4% each year.

Farming Abandoned

“We had a small farm – we used to produce peanuts and gourd, corn and sugar all year round”, says one farmer quoted in the EJF report. “Now I collect scraps of work as a labourer.”

EJF says climate change should not be seen only as an environmental issue; climate change is also contributing to a rapidly developing humanitarian crisis, not just in Bangladesh but in many other regions around the world.

“It is countries like Bangladesh, and people like those we met, whose contributions to climate change have been among the smallest, that are now facing the worst impacts”, says Steve Trent, EJF’s executive director.

“We must act now to prevent this becoming a full-scale humanitarian crisis.”

In recent months more than 600,000 people – Rohingya refugees from violence in neighbouring Myanmar – have set up shelters in southern Bangladesh. There are fears that this community could also be under threat during the monsoon period.

The EJF report highlights how women in Bangladesh are especially vulnerable to climate-related disasters. In 1991 a cyclone which swept across the Bay of Bengal caused the deaths of 140,000 people and forced 10 million to leave their homes.

EJF says 90% of the dead were women; their lower status means they are often not taught survival skills. Women also tend to stay with children and other family members when disaster strikes.

Those women who do migrate find it more difficult to adapt to life in a Dhaka slum or elsewhere. Some become victims of trafficking, ending up in brothels in India.

Foreign Migration Grows

EJF says that while most climate migration is internal, there are indications that growing numbers of Bangladeshis are seeking to move outside the country. It says that in early 2017 there was a particularly big surge in the number of Bangladeshi migrants arriving in Italy after completing the perilous journey by land and sea from their homeland.

EJF is calling for the creation of an international legally binding agreement for the protection of climate refugees. The EU should take the lead in this process, it says.

“There should be clarifications on the obligations of states to persons displaced by climate change, with new legal definitions”, says EJF.

“Definitions of climate-induced migration are urgently needed to ensure a rights-based approach and give clarity to the legal status of ‘climate refugees’; these must be developed without delay.”

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

2 Norwegian Lawmakers Nominate Trump for Nobel Peace Prize

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Two Norwegian lawmakers have nominated President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize after the Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Christian Tybring-Gjedde and Per-Willy Amundsen, lawmakers with the populist Progress Party, told Norwegian news agency NTB on Wednesday that Trump “had taken a huge and important step in the direction of the disarmament, peace and reconciliation between North and South Korea.”

A group of U.S. lawmakers also are backing Trump’s nomination for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.

The process of considering candidates and awarding the Nobel Peace Prize is done in Norway. Nominations must be sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee before Feb. 1. The committee doesn’t publicly comment on who was nominated, information which is required to be kept secret for 50 years.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the  Poor People’s Campaign . Please help us by  making a donation .

After AT&T-Time Warner Win, Is Comcast-Fox a Done Deal?

NEW YORK — Comcast will likely bid for Fox’s entertainment business as early as Wednesday now that a federal judge has cleared AT&T’s $85 billion takeover of Time Warner.

If Comcast succeeds in outbidding Disney for Fox, a major cable distributor would control even more channels on its lineup and those of its rivals. There are fears that it could lead to higher cable bills or hinder online alternatives.

But U.S. District Judge Richard Leon cleared the AT&T deal Tuesday despite similar concerns. The ruling signaled that federal regulators might have a hard time stopping companies from getting bigger by gobbling up rivals and the content they own.

Comcast isn’t likely the only mega-media bid in the works. There will probably be a rush to consolidate.

Cowen analyst Gregory Williams said the ruling could unleash “pent up” demand for mergers and acquisitions “across the Pay-TV landscape.”

Even if a company doesn’t need to get bigger right away, it might need to do so to prevent a competitor from doing so.

Here’s a look at some of the combinations that will transform the media landscape and change how people consume entertainment.

FOX WITH DISNEY OR COMCAST

Disney has made a $52.4 billion all-stock offer for the bulk of Twenty-First Century Fox, including the studios behind the “Avatar” movies, “The Simpsons” and “Modern Family,” along with National Geographic. Marvel would get back the characters previously licensed to Fox, reuniting X-Men with the Avengers.

But Comcast has said it is preparing an all-cash offer that is superior to Disney’s. It will likely to make an offer soon, now that the judge has ruled in AT&T’s favor, without setting any conditions.

David Turetsky, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany, warns that the AT&T ruling is based on “specific facts and evidence” that may or may not apply in other cases. Still, many of the circumstances in that case are similar with a potential Comcast bid.

For Disney, a successful Comcast bid could make Disney’s planned streaming service less attractive.

Wall Street braced for a bidding war. Shares in Fox increased nearly 8 percent to an all-time high of $43.90. Disney gained more than 2 percent, while Comcast lost more than 1 percent in morning trading Wednesday.

SPRINT AND T-MOBILE

In April, the two telecom companies announced a $26.5 billion combination. The deal would combine the nation’s third- and fourth-largest wireless companies and bulk them up to a similar size to Verizon and AT&T, the industry giants.

The worry is that with just three major carriers, there would be less incentive to keep innovating on prices and service. T-Mobile and Sprint might even raise prices now that they don’t have to try to poach customers off each other.

A 2014 attempt to combine fell apart amid resistance from the Obama administration. But the industry is different just four years later. Wireless carriers aren’t just competing with each other, but also with Comcast and others as the wireless, broadband and video industries converge. AT&T is about to get larger with CNN, HBO and other channels from Time Warner. Beyond combining with each other, T-Mobile and Sprint might need its own content acquisition to compete.

CBS AND VIACOM

CBS has resisted pressure from its controlling shareholder, National Amusements, to merge with Viacom, which also is controlled by National Amusements. The two companies used to be one but separated in 2005.

A combination would reunite CBS’s television business with Viacom’s production studios, similar to the arrangements now in place at NBC owner Comcast and ABC owner Disney. (On the flip side, the Fox television network and studios would separate under a deal with either Comcast or Disney.)

With Viacom, the $6-a-month CBS All Access streaming service might have a larger library, as Viacom owns MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and other cable networks.

VERIZON

Verizon, which bought AOL and Yahoo in recent years, could be on the prowl for other entertainment properties. Verizon wants to challenge Google and Facebook in the huge and lucrative field of digital advertising — and having more content could help. There’s speculation that CBS could be a potential target. With its main wireless rival AT&T becoming even more of a content powerhouse, Verizon might feel the need to grow.

Cowen’s Williams suggests, however, that rather than buy an entertainment or media company, Verizon might buy a company that bolsters its network or infrastructure. Cable company Charter or satellite TV company Dish are “ideal candidates,” he wrote in a research note.

SMALLER MOVIE STUDIOS

Rumors have long swirled that Lionsgate might be a potential takeover target by anyone from Amazon to Verizon or even a combined CBS-Viacom entity. Nothing has materialized yet for the owner of the “Twilight” and “Hunger Games” franchises. As a smaller studio, Lionsgate needs to get bigger to compete in the current landscape.

Similarly, Viacom-owned Paramount studio has been on the chopping block before. After years of troubles, it has recently rebounded with the horror film “A Quiet Place” and comedy “Book Club.” That could make it a lucrative takeover target by a company seeking content creators.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

N.Y. Times Swallows Israel’s Deception About Killing of Palestinian Medic

Journalism how-not-to: New York Times (6/7/18) puts the attack in the headline, reveals it’s a smear in paragraph 20.

A reporter at the most influential paper in English-language media appears to not know the difference between a government “tightly editing” and selectively editing video. New York Times reporter Herbert Buchsbaum (6/7/18) wrote up a propaganda video posted by the Israeli Defense Force, showing Rouzan al-Najjar–a 21-year-old medic the Israeli Defense Force shot and killed earlier this month—apparently throwing a tear-gas canister, along with a brief clip of her purportedly saying, “I am here on the front line and I act as a human shield.”

The video seems to suggest that throwing a device spewing caustic gas away from people into an empty field is a sort of violence. (“This medic was incited by Hamas,” the video reads as she grabs the canister.) But the primary problem with the IDF video is that it deceptively edits her comments to distort what she said—a fact not noted by the Buchsbaum until paragraph 20, when he threw in this crucial piece of information:

In the longer video, the comment that the military translated as “I act as a human shield” was part of a sentence in which Ms. Najjar said, “I’m acting as a human rescue shield to protect the injured inside the armistice line.”

“Acting as a human shield to protect the injured inside the armistice line” has a radically different meaning than the commonly understood canard about Palestinians using “human shields” to protect “terrorists.” This hugely consequential fact should have led the story; instead, it’s casually tossed out in the third-to-last paragraph. The story here is that the IDF—as it has been doing for decades—casually lies and distorts facts to suit its narrative. Like all militaries, the Israeli military is not presenting a “dueling narrative” in good faith, as a New York Times tweet suggested; it’s manipulating video, hoping credulous journalists help them muddy the waters, as Buchsbaum did.

Indeed, the bizarre IDF press release write-up serves no other purpose than to reframe the gunning down of the unarmed medic from a clear crime committed by Israel to a Fog of War “dueling narratives between Israel and Hamas” tale of “both sidesism.” Buchsbaum vaguely alludes to—but strangely omits—the deceptive editing in the opening with his risible turn of phrase in paragraph two:

The tightly edited video shows a woman identified as the medic, Rouzan al-Najjar, throwing what appears to be a tear-gas canister.

“Tightly edited”? What does this mean, exactly? “Tight” editing is generally considered a compliment in the film and TV world, and says nothing about deliberate omissions for the purposes of misleading the viewer. When videographer Tate B. James confronted Buchsbaum about this fact, Buchsbaum appeared to think he had covered his bases:

A 20-year-old Palestinian medic killed by Israeli forces last week has become the object of dueling narratives between Israel and Hamas. https://t.co/csnNvDkIQB

— Herbert Buchsbaum (@herbertnyt) June 7, 2018

The article says the video was edited in the second sentence, and raises questions about what it shows in the third sentence.

— Herbert Buchsbaum (@herbertnyt) June 8, 2018

Either Buchsbaum doesn’t know he’s being misleading, and is thus severely unqualified to be writing for a major paper, or he knows he’s spinning in Israel’s favor, but was hoping no one would really notice. Either way, the New York Times is once again (FAIR.org, 7/14/17, 5/17/18, 5/15/18) using its pages to confuse readers to the benefit of the Israeli military.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.