Yellow Journalism, yellowcake, and yellow-bellied cowards.

The coverage of the Japanese Nuclear crisis was a journalistic disgrace for the most part. The most sensationalistic elements ruled the headlines as day after day passed and heroic progress in averting a meltdown was being made. When the Press behaves like this it shoots itself in the foot along with the public it supposedly serves! The Right is unforgiving once the story is settled and then they don’t have to make things up about a liberal bias!

One of the pivotal events in bringing about the Spanish American War was the behavior of William Randolph Hearst and the New York Journal. A routine inspection of a cabin that was carrying an actual spy, Senorita Clemencia Arango, (who was carrying secret papers) turned into an officially sanctioned sexual assault on an American woman that needed to be avenged by military intervention in Cuba when it was reported on by Hearst’s New York Journal! When the Maine was destroyed on top of this, Hearst needed no actual evidence to accuse the Spanish of firing on one of our battleships. The result of this Yellow Journalism was War.

Of course, decades later, in 1976 US Admiral Hyman Rickover concluded publicly that the fire on the Maine was caused by spontaneous combustion of a coal bunker, a common occurrence in the Ironclads of that time. Thus a long tradition of Yellow Journalism in the lead up to any military action by the US was ushered into by William Randolph Hearst and the New York Journal.

All of this was decades before the same formula was applied with Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction and the exploitation of 9-11 for huge military contractor profits! There was actually a long history of this manufactured consent in the twentieth century. It is only recently it has reached monstrous perfection in both the spheres of the mainstream news media and the Right Wing opinion echo chambers.

During that time a CIA agent named Valerie Plame was outed as such in retaliation for her husband's acts in exposing a supposed sale of yellowcake uranium to Saddam Hussein in Niger as a forgery! The press at the time never made a priority of discovering just who forged these documents and why. Instead, it vilified Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame. It was a member of the Right Wing opinion factory, Robert Novack, who ultimately was shown to be responsible along with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for this cowardly petty act.

Also in the run up to the war where New York Times journalist Judith Miller was reporting that Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, vouched for the existence of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. She used circular logic in verifying facts that came from the same source, Ahmed Chalabi, with the Pentagon. Mr. Chalabi was paid over $2 million dollars of our tax money for intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein during the 90’s and not one piece of information he gave was ever shown to be true.

The poor journalistic standards would be funny to watch at a distance if innocent servicemen and civilians did not pay for these grotesque bungles in the both the Spanish American War and the Iraq War!

Which brings us to the poor news coverage in today’s headlines! Specifically I wish to address the sensationalistic coverage of the Japanese Nuclear Crisis! When we have been in urgent need of information on what has been going on at the reactors themselves, we’ve been given worst-case scenario headlines. And rest assured the subject of potential meltdowns is very serious. When we are given headlines designed to manipulate us with fear it does a disservice to this extremely serious subject!

The pattern that has emerged is an apocalyptic headline or series of headlines, but information in the story itself and from the various international atomic agencies monitoring the situation indicating that the situation is in fact under control although the risk of having a nuclear wasteland on the northeast coast of Japan for the next dozen decades or so is actually very real and needs to be treated as such.

Japanese workers on the ground doing their very best to restore power despite the dangers to themselves personally deserve to have the world know their names and stories. For all the press I’ve seen regarding this incident, I still don’t know one name.

But contrast the headline of this story-“High Radiation in Food,” (http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=178438 Tap Water) with the information actually inside the article- “government spokesman Yukio Edano noted that even if a consumer were to drink the contaminated milk for a year, the radiation level would be the equivalent of one hospital CT scan.”

And contrast the headline- Japan Nuclear Accident Poses Crisis for Worker Safety (http://www.latimes.com/health/la-sci-quake-radiation-workers-20110318,0,5659183.story) with the words “That level of exposure raises the chances that workers will eventually die of cancer by 1 percentage point, according to John Boice, a cancer epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University and radiation safety expert.” Although the text of the article rightly gives credit to the men who are spent their time drilling and training for such an emergency, you wouldn’t know it from the headlines. Even in the article itself they admit –“Experts are focusing their concern on nuclear workers because the general population's exposure to radiation around the Fukushima Daiichi plant has so far been minimal.”

They don’t specify who the “experts” in question are. It smacks of the sleazy “some say” technique at Fox News. That technique is a shortcut for the editor to insert his own opinion into the story when they use words like that and don’t come clean about just who the experts are and who the Some is in “some say”!

And this is the Mainstream News media! The hacks who infest marginal information outlets have been much worse. For example, this website, economiccollapse.com (http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/27-signs-that-the-nuclear-crisis-in-japan-is-much-worse-than-either-the-mainstream-media-or-the-japanese-government-have-been-telling-us) citing no direct sources says that “We are not just talking about a repeat of Chernobyl.We are possibly talking about "many Chernobyls". The author then proceeds to link to every panicking news story he can find.

It is the exact opposite of the approach taken by Voice of America’s non sensational but nonetheless accurate story-
(http://www.voanews.com/english/news/Japan-Continues-Efforts-to-Cool-Quake-Damaged-Reactors-at-Nuclear-Plant-118226759.html)
Those people in the hack story’s links that where evacuating by air where actually exposing themselves to more radiation than if they were staying put! Last paragraph of the article says..."observers call the radiation fears by those in Tokyo an overreaction, noting those returning home overseas would be exposed to higher levels during the high-altitude flights than if they stayed put."

Oh and if you are actually concerned about nuclear plants and radiation here stateside to the point where you are using this crisis to reevaluate our existing nuclear plants pleas keep in mind that coal ash produces more radioactivity than nuclear plants! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste . Not to worry, If Massey Energy’s Don Blankenship can get away with safety violations and a mine collapse he’s going to continue to fill our skies with more radiation than this Japanese crisis produced for years to come!

Although as of this writing the crisis seems to be under control, it does seem worth noting that these were 40 year old reactors due for decommission and they endured a 8.9 earthquake, a tsunami, hydrogen explosions without a meltdown. And that was in no small part due to the courage and sacrifice of the well-trained workers who risked an early death in order to avoid that meltdown!

When news editors follow the motto “If it bleeds, it leads” or even worse have an axe to grind, they shame their profession and scare the public needlessly. In the case of the Spanish American and Iraqi Wars, it cost servicemen their lives. In this case we are right on the verge of another military action (we don’t follow the Constitution and have Congress declare war anymore!) Whether or not you agree with our participation in this UN action against Ghaddafi, you must admit that it serves the purpose of diverting our attention from the sensationalist panicking coverage of a serious event in Japan.

Personally I find it to be a cowardly maneuver to scare us while misinforming us and then change the subject!

Hitler once said, “The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.” It is similar with that tool of the state and industry, propaganda. In an age where Yellow Journalism is the norm, too many otherwise good journalists and editors give in to the temptation to-“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” (Another Hitler quote which we see the modern proof of nightly in Beltway Talking Points on Fox News and AM Talk radio)

The mainstream media’s recent coverage of the Japanese Nuke Crisis has proved itself to be no better. But it need not stay this way!

William R. Hearst’s main rival, Joseph Pulitzer, indulged in Yellow Journalism as well. But he eventually renounced it and turned his New York World into a model standard for journalistic excellence.

Come back to us Joseph Pulitzer, we need you! At the very least, the standards you inspired need to return!

Scott Adams’ “Noprivacyville”, Anarcho Capitalism’s Utopian Dream or Blueprint for Hell on Earth?

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert recently put forth a thought experiment regarding a society where no one enjoys privacy. He puts forward a number of anti-individual ideas and it can be argued that we are trending towards them already. But it is an utopist notion doomed to failure because it fails to take into account human nature.

I heartily urge everyone to read “noprivacyville” http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/noprivacyville/ by Scott Adams. He puts forward the idea of a city with everything tracked and zero privacy. He starts with an idea an insurance company has to install GPS tracking devices on cars in exchange for lower insurance rates. He extrapolates the concept to envision an entire society run in this manner, which unfortunately, looks as if some unlucky city, country or society will experience sometime in the not too distant future.

Among the utopist notions that he can see are lower crime since no criminal would dare defy the omniscient masters, less police needed to catch speeders since the car reports its own violations, a more efficient health care system because guesswork has been removed, cheap public transportation since the inefficient routes could be eliminated fast, and an end to “confusopolies” (pricing plans which rely on confusing the customer would not be tolerated).

And in all fairness to Mr. Adams, he does admit that this is a thought experiment. He is not advocating it. He is using his thought experiment to contemplate the price we pay for our privacy and concluding that it is expensive.

But when I look at another utopist concept, “Anarcho Capitalist” concept put forward by many Libertarians, it seems that this “noprivacyville” might put that in the grasp of a collection of oligarchy minded societal engineers who wish to create a perfect city. A society with no government but which everything is owned by private entities, is possible only if we get rid of personal privacy.

Allow me to explain further with a modern example. Take a casino floor, everything is owned by a private entity. There is no expectation of personal privacy. The expectation is the opposite. People know they are being watched. And if you don’t like being watched, you are welcome to leave. And it functions in many ways as a government. It has its own currency (chips), it’s own police force (Security), it’s own economy, housing, shops and it’s own factories (Slots, Games, Hotel, Restaurants and kitchens). And it is privately owned and subject to the whims of the marketplace. Every one of these functions would still need to be performed in a society. But if these are done by corporations en masse, these functions are going to be run in a manner that is in the corporations best interests. That means your personal privacy goes bye-bye!

And it is exactly because it is privately owned; there is no expectation of privacy! In a casino, if you are causing trouble, you get taken to a Holding Room and asked to leave (if you are really being a problem, then you wait for the police). And is exactly here that the Anarcho Capitalist Utopian Dream of an entirely privatized society starts falling apart!

It gets down to what are know as externalities! An externality is a fee or penalty that exists outside of the economic equation. A good example is when Bechtel privatized the water rights for Bolivia, the thirst and misery of the Bolivian people who couldn’t even save rainwater for their own use was an externality as was the revolution that ensued because of this policy.

Taking the casino Holding Room example. As it stands now, whatever happens to the person who is detained by Casino Security and then arrested by the police is external to the equation. The fellow is off property and that’s all that matters. Scott Adams admits to a similar dynamic in his piece. He says “Bad workers would end up voluntarily moving out of the city to find work. Imagine a world where your coworkers are competent.”

And where is he to go if there is nothing but similar private entities that do not want him on their property because they believe he is an incompetent troublemaker? If he lives in Noprivacyville other entities know his past and can want nothing to do with him once the information is shared. What’s more, since it is their property and there are no courts to appeal the matter, he can be arbitrarily evicted, have his job terminated, have liens put against him all before he gets home! All of this is external to the precious equation of a perfect Anarcho Capitalist society.

But the fellow in question still needs food, water, housing, sex, and warmth during winter wherever he winds up. Getting rid of privacy did him no good whatsoever!

Time and time again, whether it is Bechtel’s causing a revolution in Bolivia, Enron’s causing rolling blackouts while joking about senior citizen’s eating cat food, or Banks selling CDOs to themselves and causing the Great Recession, we find that externalities upset the precious equations which free market advocates passionately swear by.

Engineers make mistakes. Things often work very different in reality compared to the drawing board and the lab. When confronted with the mistakes and catastrophes, the response is invariably some version of “Er, it’s not supposed to work like that!” And utopias are very difficult to engineer!

I work in casino surveillance, so I have a unique personal perspective on all of this. I can say from personal experience, on the casino floor people know that they are being watched and commit crimes anyway. “Who would try it?” Scott Adams asks, given that the “few criminals who make that mistake would be easy to round up”. The answer is anyone who thinks that they had a reasonable chance of getting away with it. That’s one of the reasons that the Death Penalty is a bad joke as a deterrent. Prisons are not filled with people who thought they would get caught. They are filled with people who thought they had the system aced and could get away with whatever they’re in there for.

And there is the other dynamic regarding security and surveillance departments, they never turn a profit! Any benefit they have to a corporation is measured negatively in what was prevented or deterred. And when budget time comes around, it’s those departments that never turn a direct profit like Engineering, Security, and Surveillance that are first on the chopping block.

Gathering all of this data does no one any good if the staff isn’t there which can interpret it and act on it. I’ve already witnessed expensive slot monitoring systems installed and people who should be acting on the data just pretending to look at it. Or maybe they where never trained to interpret it. The creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams is well aware of the lack of competence issues in the workplace. That’s why he stopped with the concept as a mere thought experiment. As of this date, March 20 2011 http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-03-20/ , he had the insight to say in today’s strip the “a deep understanding of reality is the same thing as laziness” and backed it up with “You ever see a statue of Buddah jogging?” And he had one of the characters falsify data on reliability statistics by randomly typing numbers on a spreadsheet!

There once was a little girl in Russia named Alissa Rosenbaum whose family owned a pharmacy. A bunch of utopist nasty people took her family pharmacy away and made it state property because they had a vision of a utopia. Well, to make a long story short she never forgot that, moved to Paris, started writing, then moved to Hollywood, then hit it big with her work. So big that she eventually started a philosophy circle in NYC whose protégés included the future Federal Reserve Chair whose dedication to deregulation helped bring on the current financial crisis! Just as the utopian collectivist dunderheads who stole the Rosenbaum family pharmacy wound up creating Ayn Rand, so too would their Libertarian counterparts wind up creating monsters we can not forsee if Noprivacyville ever becomes a reality!

Based on my personal experience invading people’s perceived yet nonexistent privacy, I don’t think that an Anarcho Capitalist Noprivacyville would keep its promises. I don’t think that Scott Adams does either. The sacrificing of privacy would neither deliver on nor be worth the supposed benefits of lower crime, health care efficiency, increased workplace competence, and an end to confusopolies.

Promises to make the “trains run on time” should be viewed with extreme skepticism no matter who stated them!

What if they threw an Election Year smear campaign and nobody watched?

The campaigns for the 2012 contest to see which part of the Republican/Democrat Uniparty will pocket the most bribes as they sell out their fellow citizens had begun. The thing that will be different this time is the effect of the horrid Citizen’s United decision on a General Election. But how does the public fight back against that much Manufactured Consent?

In January 2010, Chief Justice John Roberts directly violated his promise to the Senate and the people not to engage in judicial activism and excreted the Citizen’s United Decision on the American Electorate. This resulted in the funds being spent to influence elections by outside groups, meaning not directly by campaigns, being increased to a ridiculous extreme. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the top 10 Special Interest Groups in the 2010 Election Cycle, 8 of which are Conservative (Chamber of Commerce, Club for Growth, NRA and American Future Fund among them), spent 160 Million on this Mid Term Election. The total amount for all groups was over $481 million spent on running ads, making phone calls, distributing literature and other activities.

I’m writing this from Nevada, one of the worst hit states during the recession. Outside groups spent $1,659,583 to support Democrats (mainly Harry Reid) and $6,573,603 to defeat Democrats in the 2010 mid terms.

And the ads coming directly from the campaigns were horrendous enough to begin with. You know the ones, they start with “ I’m a bought and paid for stooge of corporate interests and I approved this message”. Indeed, Sharon Angle looked a camera in the eye and claimed that she never said there was a need to “phase Medicare and Social Security out” when we could look at a clip of her saying exactly that 2 commercials later. The irony of living in a society which claims to have to cut state’s budgets for misguided notions of austerity but can still spend over 8 million dollars to influence an election in a single state while real unemployment is at Depression era levels and direct lies are being flung around is not lost on me.

And there was another relevant issue regarding these horrible outside campaigns. In no small sense they are really outside campaigns! Foreign corporations are being allowed influence in our elections because of the Citizen’s United decisions. Although there is a section of the law 2 US Code 441e that prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to election efforts, there is also a loophole in the law. There is nothing stopping a foreign national from coming here and starting a corporation (which because it was organized in the US is a domestic corporation) and using his financial power against the interests of the American people in our own elections.

And if you think that this ownership and influence from outside the US is a trivial matter please consider that not only is the BP oil spill still a recent memory we are not over, but…

The embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin we all know as Scott Walker recently had a cozy relationship with a foreign security firm, Wackenhut. Wackenhut, by the way is the same company that was caught red handed with homosexual hazing while guarding our embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. While in charge of the Milwaukee County Court House, Scott Walker decided to fire the public employees represented by a union and replace them with UK owned Wakenhut non-union employees (one supervisor was an ex-felon) because of a “budget emergency”. The whole thing was a mess which cost the taxpayers more money after the decision was reversed and the guards replaced and it didn’t save the taxpayer anywhere near what was being claimed. It actually cost them $430,000!

And if we allow this trend to continue, things will only get worse. The 2012 estimates for continuing this trend are enough to make any US Citizen/Voter/Taxpayer nauseous. The lowball estimates are close to $500 million. What can do in the face of this evil? What course of action do We, the People have against $500 million dollars spent to usurp our elections and extract the wealth of this country legally and legitimately by domestic and foreign corporations?

The answer I would like to propose is easier than we might think. It is along the lines of something we are doing naturally. It involves avoiding advertising. Think of how natural it is to switch channels during an election when you hear the words “I’m a pawn of private tyrants and I approved this message.” Specifically, I’m talking about BOYCOTTING not only as many lying political advertisements but all advertisements (as much as humanly possible).

What advertisers do whether it is a good product, bad product, or sleazy politician is try to expose them to as many eyeballs as possible. If we were to just simply not look at these ads, they don’t get our eyeballs. But if we punish the regular advertisers who are right beside the sleazy campaign liars, we could possibly bring market pressure to ending the monstrous political status quo which has been evolving since Jan 24,2010. It’s like the holy wraiths at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. If we refuse to look at them, they can’t hurt us!

Now to be sure, the candidate or side that spends the most does not always win. Although these outside groups spent $2.8 million to defeat Blanche Lincoln and she lost, they spent $6.7 million to defeat Harry Reid and he won. Although it can be demonstrated that the spending does not cause the win (This has been demonstrated by Freakanomics Stephen Levitt http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2007/05/freakonomics_th.html) candidates that spend the most often do win. One of the bigger reasons that accusations of Obama being a Socialist are laughable is the large amount of corporate donors whom contributed to Obama for America http://www.nndb.com/org/684/000167183/. Scroll down that list and see how many CEOs and CFOs you find. The main reason that he needs to solicit their help is the cost of running a Presidential campaign! And rest assured, they expect payback for their investment!

And campaigns are indeed expensive. Here in Nevada, Sue Lowden, the woman whom Sharon Angle defeated to win the Republican nomination, is still trying to pay for her failed campaign. She has debts in excess of $1,000,000. http://www.lvrj.com/news/campaign-debts-dogging-lowden-117390293.html?ref=293 She is worth somewhere between $50 and $200 million, but is hoping the people she owes money to will accept one of her chickens in barter. Had she won and was a sworn in as a Senator right now, do you think she would have any trouble finding some organization in Washington that would take care of those campaign debts for her? If some corporation, foreign owned or not, would donate towards American Action Networks $26 million dollar financing of sleazy attack ads, then they would cough up some money to help out a new Senator.

I think that it would be a great thing if all of it was wasted money and an educated informed citizenry capable of critical thinking decided elections!

The beauty of a boycott of advertisement until the General Election is over is that it can turn all of that into wasted money. And the purveyors of this harmful intellectual sludge are often the same people responsible for stuff like “Where’s the Beef?”, the Old Spice Guy, and Geico Caveman. If we can bring down the percentage of eyeballs that turn into customers, then those advertisers are naturally going to put pressure on their sleazier peers to stay out of our elections.

The fact that so many candidates require a hard sell to convince the electorate that they are not bought and paid for cronies of behind-the-scenes well-financed power players is very telling in and of itself. Whether it is a cruddy used car, a heart clogging fast food meal, or a politician who is a prostitute to tyrannical private power, the crappier the product the harder the sell is required to get people to buy it. All we need to do to thwart this is turn the TV off, switch the channel, leave the room or in the case of internet video, shrink the window and turn the sound off until the commercial is over!

But we also have let advertisers know that these merchants attempting to sell us a foul and putrid product are costing them and the good products our eyeballs!

Couch Potatoes of the World Unite, we have nothing to lose but the Old Spice Guy!