Author Archive | Danny Schechter

The Slaughter of the Innocents

By on December 19, 2012 in News 11

ChristbaumkugelThe late December holidays in America used to be known as “the season to be jolly,” with our streets festooned with bright lights, groups caroling, shopping galore, gift giving and cheer.

This year, there’s a pall over all the light heartedness because of the horrific violence that claimed the lives of 20 young school children and their teachers in a still unexplained shooting incident in Connecticut, the latest of a string of similar events involving widely available deadly weapons often in the hands of mentally ill people.

At the same time, there’s fear and trepidation among those who believe there may be truth in ancient Mayan prophecies that predict the world will end this month. Perhaps that’s why music critics are reminding us of a country classic by singer Merle Haggard, “If We Make It Through December.”

This fear has spread worldwide with 100 arrests in China for people promoting apocalyptic scenarios. “Chinese authorities have arrested at least 101 people for spreading rumors about an impending apocalypse, the state-run news agency Xinhua reports.… Read the rest

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Ignoring Warnings Can Be Fatal

By on December 15, 2012 in News 22

Stöwer Titanic2012 has been the l00th anniversary of the famous Titanic disaster. The Captain of that “unsinkable” ship was warned that there were icebergs ahead but he was too busy, out to set a speed record on the way to New York.

The warnings were ignored and we know what happened. What we don’t know is why other urgent warnings go unheeded.

Take the repeated warnings that the easy availability of hand guns and assault rifles would lead to more massacres of innocents. The National Rifle Association operates with impunity (even as it bans weapons in its offices.)

When action is not taken, you increase the likelihood of more deadly incidents like the ones in malls and even elementary schools.

Take the predictions of a storm surge tied to climate change threatening the New York/New Jersey coastline. They were acknowledged but downplayed because right-wingers and their think tanks spent a decade in bogus quibbling about “junk” science.… Read the rest

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Economic Crisis Fuels Military Intervention As The Chemical Weapons ‘Threat’ Becomes The New Pretext

By on December 9, 2012 in News 8

USS Eisenhower 2Durban, South Africa: The US economy is sluggish with fears of a new recession. The Democrats and Republicans once more cannot agree on what to do about the alleged “fiscal cliff” that threatens to further unravel the economy, even as analysts say that the whole notion of going over the “cliff “ has been fabricated by the right to force more cuts in social benefits.

Consumer confidence is dipping in this festive season of global shopping–not a good sign, since consumption and spending at the malls is an economic driver with 70% of economic activity based on getting consumers to buy even when it means they must go deeper and deeper in debt using credit cards and loans.

What can the Obama government do? The political stalemate has blocked new jobs and stimulus programs so reliance on Federal Reserve Bank interventions has grown, but they are not printing enough money to turn things around.… Read the rest

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Obama Wins, But the People Can Still Lose

By on November 7, 2012 in News 19

Source: Twitter / Barack Obama

A year into his presidency, Barack Obama began to plan his reelection bid. Having assessed the lessons of 2008, it was clear that grass roots mobilizations would be essential to assuring a turnout the next time around.

I made a film, on that political campaign, , exploring how local organizers built networks based in part on their candidates’ community organizing experience. While most of the media framed the issue as Obama versus McCain, I was more interested in how he planned to win, than regurgitating the campaign’s rituals and rhetoric.

From the beginning, the Obamanauts backed the idea of the “ground game” as essential to victory but it was soon enhanced with the latest new media applications—including blogs, facebooking, texting and tweeting.

The field director of that 2008 campaign David Plouffe became the campaign’s organizer in chief in 2012. He ran that ground game, the Democrat’s antidote to the TV commercial-driven  “air war” blitz engineered by Karl Rove and his large list of wealthy right-wing benefactors.… Read the rest

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What Is There To Vote For?

By on October 21, 2012 in News 11

As Americans prepare to go to the polls, the airwaves are littered with paid advertising of the crassest and most manipulative kind. Political issues packaged by ad agencies are flooding the arena of politics with nasty negative ads.

So far, the two parties and their backers have spent a half billion dollars on political advertising with much of the placements still to come in the next few weeks. CBS reports the “spend” will top a billion dollars — just on ads.

2012 Obama Romney caricature

AP warns: “Get ready, presidential swing states. Now the campaign ad crush — and TV spending spree — really begins.”

This is occurring even as the economy and unemployment remain major issues. Millions of Americans are broke and hurting as poverty grows, but there seems to be no shortage of money to grease politics.

It’s being called a “deluge,” leading many Americans, according to USA Today, to wish the election was already over.… Read the rest

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Tell Me Lies: European Satellites Ordered To Drop Iranian Channels In Disregard of Free Speech

By on October 17, 2012 in News 4

Back in the 1960’s, A British poet, Adrian Mitchell, one of the great bards of that era, wrote a poem that went on to become a stage show in the West End of London. It was called Tell Me Lies about Vietnam and represented one voice among millions in the world then opposing that War

It was addressed, “To Whom It May Concern” and began with words that became its refrain:

“I was run over by the truth one day

Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way

So stick my legs in plaster

Tell me lies about Vietnam”

Years later, before his death, (and I was at the memorial service in London) he kept rewriting the last paragraph into what he called a remix. The poem took on a more global statement

That verse was a play on a children’s song:

“You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out

You take the human being, and you twist it all about”

And then this line:

“Tell me lies about –

Iraq

Burma

Afghanistan

BAE Systems

Israel

Iran”

He understood well that Iran was one of the countries his country and others in the West (and their sycophantic media) are telling lies about.… Read the rest

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Putting Palestine On The Agenda

By on October 9, 2012 in News 10

Source: Russell Tribunal on Palestine

The needs and concerns of the Palestinian people are not in the news much in the United States, even though the issues have been around for decades here in the city that hosts the United Nations and where there have been, over the years, persistent resolutions based on allegations of international law violations and apartheid-like abuses in the territories occupied by Israel.

In this same period, there have also been many detailed studies, as well, of media coverage that prove that our media rarely covers Palestinian concerns, or features Palestinian perspectives in talk shows or even news programs unless and until violence erupts.

Criticisms of Israeli behavior raised by foreign leaders are also largely ignored unless they are cast as controversies about noisy and invented allegations of anti-Semitism rather than any exploration of the underlying issues that are always treated as matters of contention, not of facts.… Read the rest

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Is Iran Trying To Tell Us Something We Won’t Hear?

By on October 1, 2012 in News 14

Sometimes, major media is the last to recognize, shifts in policy positions. Iran is a case in point.

In the lead up to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s annual speech to the General Assembly, the American TV stations were preparing their audiences for another provocative Israel-hating rant.

Brace yourself, we were told; it is his last appearance in office so he would go off and all out in denouncing Israel and world’s Jews.

Secretary General Moon cautioned him publicly to restrain his rhetoric even as right wing media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, that has never seen a far right wing Zionist cause it hasn’t embraced, went into full deionization mode with a front cover featuring his picture and the words,  “Peace of Sh*t.”  (It was reminiscent of the Saddam baiting in US media in the run-up to the Iraq War.)

The rhetoric of the well orchestrated anti-Iranian crowds outside was even bloodier than the Iranians had ever been with former Republican speaker of the House and GOP presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich calling for immediate U.S.… Read the rest

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When Is A Terrorist No Longer A Terrorist?

By on September 24, 2012 in News 17

Question: When is a terrorist a terrorist?

Answer: When the US government says so.

When the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan were assassinating members of their government and the Russian troops dispatched to support it, they were, in Washington’s view, freedom fighters,  even as their enemies branded them terrorists.

When they turned against an Afghan government imposed by the United States or revolted against a US invasion, they were once again branded terrorists.

When armed groups battling Khadafy’s government were supported by NATO, they were called freedom fighters. When some recently and allegedly turned violently against the United States, which is now dominating Libyan politics, they are once again castigated as terrorists.

And now, the United States Government through a decision by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has decided that the Iranian group Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen, that had been on the US State Department’s terrorist list for years, has now been taken off the list.… Read the rest

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Is It Time For An “October Surprise?

By on September 20, 2012 in News 11

Location of Strait of Hormuz in relation to Arabian Peninsula. Kleptosquirrel (CC)

The term “October Surprise” is one that always triggers speculation in political circles.

It refers to some covert initiative that a candidates take in the month before the election to try to win an election.

Even as President Obama seems to lead in the polls, and the lead is slipping, the political race faces a number of unknowns including whether and how Israel may intervene more actively to force its political agenda on our political agenda.

According to Consortium News, this has happened before in an earlier US election:

“A pressing foreign policy question of the U.S. presidential race is whether Israel might exploit this politically delicate time to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites and force President Obama to join the attack or face defeat at the polls, a predicament with similarities to one President Carter faced in 1980,” writes Robert Parry.

… Read the rest

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