BY PAUL KRUGMAN | Dateline: July 09, 2007

Paul Krugman discusses how the “medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics” to prevent Americans from making health care available to all:

EDITORS’ NOTE: Cyrano was founded to expose and correct the misinformation and topical omissions pouring out of the corporate media, and, back in 1982, when Cyrano appeared, it was The New York Times, the dean of the American press, that provided some of the classical and most skillful examples. This continues to be the case, although the most sensational examples naturally come from the Rupert Murdoch-dominated media, and lately from CNN itself. We reproduce here Krugman’s column to underscore the fact that the establishment is breaking ranks over the health issue, as powerful sectors of capital—especially manufacturing (i.e., autos) and most of their small business popular base are unhappy with an status quo that has long benefited financial institutions (insurance) at the expense of the other sectors. It is that crack in the establishment’s unity that explains the appearance of progressive arguments such as Krugman’s.

Another possibility for Krugman’s relatively outspoken article is the radicalizing effect of any quality radical action. When you see how warmly a piece of cinema such as SiCKO is received, it prompts the timid to come out from behind the usual mealy-mouthed flim-flam. [Webster’s definition: Mealy-mouthed—Using soft words; not straightforward; plausible; affectedly or timidly delicate of speech; speaking deviously; unwilling to tell the truth in plain language. Opposite of frank or blunt.]

The lesson is important: both courage and fear are contagious. American social activists need to start shedding the crippling fears they have carried for far too many years.

These days terrorism is the first refuge of scoundrels. So when British authorities announced that a ring of Muslim doctors working for the National Health Service was behind the recent failed bomb plot, we should have known what was coming. Read the rest of this entry »

BY PAUL KRUGMAN | Dateline: July 06, 2007

Paul Krugman looks at who has sacrificed for the Iraq war:

On this Fourth of July, President Bush … called for “more patience, more courage and more sacrifice.” Unfortunately, … nobody asked the obvious question: “What sacrifices have you and your friends made, Mr. President?”…

You see, the Iraq war, although Mr. Bush insists that it’s part of a Global War on Terror™, a fight to the death between good and evil, isn’t like America’s other great wars — wars in which the wealthy shared the financial burden through higher taxes and many members of the elite fought for their country. Read the rest of this entry »

Besides the obvious facts that they can be the product of amateur terrorists, men alienated from the so-called values of the West by the constant murder and thievery practiced by the Anglo-British alliance with some European support throughout the Arab world, there’s also plenty of reason to suspect agents provocateurs or foul play in all these recent “terror incidents.” The plutocratic corporatocracy has a lot to gain by stampeding the populace into accepting a rapid erosion of their constitutional rights in return for “security.” It’s the oldest racket in town: the protection racket. These days, it’s apparently run in all continents by the world’s premier governments.—Eds.

FIRST VIEW:
BY JOEL SKOUSEN
Editor - World Affairs Brief
© 2007 All Rights Reserved | 7-7-7

A huge case of media hysteria was the only serious consequence of the London/Scottish would-be car bombs. Upon close analysis none of these “car bombs” would have done anything except burn up a car. That’s it–no explosions, no deaths, and no big plot. One difference though: As compared to other recent plots, riddled with government informers and agent provocateurs, these wanna-be terrorists seem to be of the amateur variety. Read the rest of this entry »

BY PHIL ROCKSTROH

A sprawling Mcmansion under construction. The styles increasingly resemble “bourgeois castles,” the compulsion to “ape one’s betters” so typical of those who need to flaunt their wealth to reassure their own sense of self-worth. Cost to the environment is also much larger than in normal construction.

In microcosmic mimicry of the plight of the besieged middle and laboring classes, my parent’s Atlanta neighborhood, as is the case with many others in the vicinity, is being destroyed, in reality — disappeared — by a blight of upper-class arrogance. The modest, post-war homes of the area are being “scraped” from the landscape as an infestation of bloated mcmansions rises from the tortured soil. These particleboard and Tyvek-choked monstrosities loom over the remaining smaller houses of the area, as oversized and ugly as mindless bullies, as banal as the dreams of petty tyrants.

In the surrounding suburbs, in a similar manner as mcmansions eclipse sunlight, throwing the adjacent houses into half-light, mega-churches eclipse the light of reason, leaving their congregations in an ignorant half-light of dogma and superstition. Of course, these true believer lunatics are wrong about everything, except, perhaps, for their elliptical apprehension regarding the arrival of proliferate cataclysms in the years to come. Oddly: Although they promulgate dire warnings on the subject, they seem gleeful at the prospect of widespread suffering. Read the rest of this entry »

NOTICE TO OUR READERS: THE EDITORS WILL BE GRATEFUL FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO A SPECIAL MESSAGE AT THE END OF THIS FEATURE. THANK YOU. WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY SiCKO by clicking here. Broadband required.

We know what the diagnosis is and what needs to be done. Now the question is whether the American public has what it takes to drive the con men and other crooks from the corridors of power.

Three reviews of this important film published in The Nation magazine.

SiCKO Is Boffo
by David Corn
Dateline: 6.21.07

In 1971, Edgar Kaiser, the son of the founder of Kaiser Permanente, one of the first big HMOs, went to see John Ehrlichman, a top aide to President Nixon, to lobby the Nixon White House to pass legislation that would expand the market for health maintenance organizations (HMOs). Ehrlichman reported this conversation to Nixon on February 17, 1971. The discussion, which was taped, went like this:

Ehrlichman: I had Edgar Kaiser come in…talk to me about this and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make.

President Nixon: Fine.

The next day, Nixon publicly announced he would be pushing legislation that would provide Americans “the finest health care in the world.” Read the rest of this entry »

Eli Lilly CEO Sydney Taurel received a 5-year $37-million compensation package for heading a company whose ethical standards are indistinguishable from those of a common criminal.

BY WILL HALL | Originally at ADBUSTERS MAGAZINE

For pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, death and injury are just a cost of doing business. When Zyprexa, Lilly’s drug to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, hit the marketplace in 1996, it was hailed as an “atypical” – a “safe, gentle psychotropic,” more effective than older drugs like Thorazine and Trilafon, without the dangerous side effects. Sales skyrocketed. The hype soon gave way to reality, as Lilly faced waves of lawsuits by patients suffering from diabetes, massive weight gain, pancreatitis and cardiac problems. Lilly responded with the cozy arrangement that worked with Prozac, another blockbuster plagued with problems: quietly settle suits out of court, with proceedings sealed and secret under a gag order. Anything embarrassing – or illegal – that Lilly is doing behind closed doors would remain hidden from public view. Read the rest of this entry »

The remains of an Iraq War victim (make that of an unnecessary Iraq War).

By KURT NIMMO | Dateline: January 21, 2005
REPOSTED AS AN ENTRY IN CLASSIC ESSAYS

On January 15th, at Kane Hall, on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, former L.A. cop and self-described 9/11 investigator Mike Ruppert told a standing-room only crowd the obvious:

“[Ruppert] believes that no sanctions, indictments or criminal prosecution [against the Bush warmongers] will ever be handed down. Rubicon [Ruppert’s book], he says, remains a base map of the decades before and the years since 9/11. But now he says we must look at the herd of elephants charging at us, instead of the one elephant that just ran us over,” Ken Levine summarizes on Ruppert’s From the Wilderness website. Read the rest of this entry »

BY PATRICE GREANVILLE

While the object of fascism is always the same, to disarm, intimidate, repress, and roll back the sectors of society pushing for further equality and democratization, thereby making possible a higher degree of exploitation, its various manifestations take up the coloring dictated by specific cultures and epochs. That’s why military fascism in Chile is different than Argentina’s, or Spain’s, and why German fascism was far more brutal and systematic than the Italian variety. When and if it comes, American fascism will have its own defining characteristics, most likely a presidential façade.

When the news filtered out in 2003 about the creation by the Pentagon of a formal, overt, disinformation agency to “influence US public opinion,” many political activists who track the system’s shenanigans reacted with a big collective yawn. Media watchers have long known about the CIA’s pervasive infiltration of mainstream journalism, with hundreds if not thousands of well-camouflaged “assets” around the world, and the de facto nullification of the injunction against conducting propaganda in the US.

This nefarious program, now at least half a century old, and whose actual dimensions we can only guess at, has included the sponsoring of journalists, authors, publishing imprints, newspapers, radio and tv stations, and many other tricks, all amounting to immense power to inject a false consciousness spin on contemporary realities. What’s more, this doesn’t include the huge pile of falsifications pouring from legions of non-CIA-connected journalists and commentators, operating under their own pro-capitalist or reactionary biases, nor the adulterated output from those already working under clear corporate fiats, as in the case of Rupert Murdoch’s media, by far the word’s pre-eminent avatar of Orwellian communications.

Against this backdrop, the announcement that the US public was to be subject to open propaganda by one of the government’s most powerful agencies was not alarming because it indicated a drastic departure from a wonderful information regime in which all voices were heard, and truth reigned supreme, the ghosts of Cronkite and Murrow rattling in the backgroundfor we never did have such a system, but, because in its own sinister way it marked a subtle shift in the way the plutocratic elites choose to mask or reveal their manipulation of the state apparatus for their own ends.

So the interesting question that comes up is this: Why do the “mind managers” feel they should now drop some of the pretense? The simplest assumption might apply: because they may feel the need to tighten further the linkages between “official truth” and the mass communications apparatus (while accustoming the public to such questionable fusion…and remember that the right never has enough), and besides they may feel the time is right. While the Iraq War debacle has contributed mightily to unravelling the credibility of this regime, the “globalization elites” fronted by Bush at the moment feel protected from retaliation by a quasi-impregnable wall of national paranoia and jingoism of their own creation, an obscurantist climate designed to harden the ignorance and provincialism with which far too many Americans perceive the world and their own interests.

But if the world’s elites (led by the American plutocratic establishment) are readying themselves for battle with the masses, what makes them think the battle is imminent or inevitable? After all, class war—one-sided, self-conscious class war— as we see in the US goes on all the time, so what makes this juncture more perilous?

Stoking up fear, an exercise in upper-class self-preservation

The midwife for all this, of course, is the much accursed Bin Laden and his gang of misguided reactionary fanatics, whose very existence is a direct corollary of American foreign policy, but if Bin Laden hadn’t obliged by stepping up to the plate, he would have been created. He’s simply too useful to the governing elites. In this context, what is even more troublesome is that, should the American public start to put aside the 9/11 memories, and therefore its effects, refocusing on their real problems such as increasing unemployment, inadequate health access, and the innumerable bizarre social and economic priorities implemented by the elites, they might be subjected to a new round of jingoist fever, again, thanks to the same cast of perps, and with further distractions and dislocations from such pressing issues. The advantages to the plutocracy of a Bin Laden specter roaming the world, of another Reichstag fire writ large, are so attractive that the chance of his re-entry into the American scene, with perfectly woeful consequences for the remainder of American democracy, are almost guaranteed. It is that sinister eventuality we must constantly watch out for and work to prevent.

I have often rebuked my fellow sufferers on the US left for crying wolf too soon and calling anything even slightly authoritarian “fascism,” but moves like these fall squarely out of the textbook of creeping fascism. Bertram Gross, not to mention Gramsci, or R. Palme Dutt (the British Marxist who wrote that classic, FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION) spelled it out eloquently. Their diagnosis was that fascism, as known in Europe, would be an unlikely occurrence in America. The American brand of fascism, they concurred, would be one with a strong, self-righteous presidential mask, behind which the ruling orders, in pursuit of a fierce global class agenda, would implement policies designed to eviscerate democracy in its totality while keeping the appearance of sweet democracy in place.

I have long argued that, since the beginning of “government by professional manipulation” in America (which reached what we might call “self-conscious maturity” under Ronald Reagan), that the country has been ruled and continues to be ruled by a plutocratic oligarchy smugly dressed in the garments of democracy. The problem for the ruling orders is not new: Alexander Hamilton was already aware, along with many of the Founders, that a real, popular democracy would represent a huge class menace to dominant privileges. That people, once awakened to their true interests would simply vote their exploiters, or “betters,” out of power–at least for a while. The bicameral system was set up (in the age of puny, local media) as one way to stem or derail this ominous tide. (In France, the revolutionaries installed a unicameral system, which is intrinsically more democratic.)

At the moment 9/11 took place, the world’s ruling plutocracies (among which I now must include China’s authoritarian capitalists, and Russia’s state capitalist Mafias) were already facing an intractable problem: a hugely unstable system of massive natural and human exploitation, with a rapidly mounting tide of completely intractable social and political problems.

Under the conditions of modern industrialism, world production can easily outstrip world consumption due to the tremendous productivity of new technologies. All capital machines, such as conveyors, presses, welders and related equipment used in a car assembly, for example, are designed and sold to replace human labor with machine labor
This phenomeon is certainly not restricted to manufacturing, where of course it is more visible; the service sector, banking, for example, has also seen its human ranks thinned considerably thanks to the introduction of sophisticated automation routines in many of its front— and back-end tasks. And in management journals there’s been talk for decades of the “totally automated auto plant,” the “totally automated bank,” and many other visions, all spelling out the end of mass human employment in production.

The apparently inexorable trend, therefore, is for industry to require fewer and fewer workers—in all sectors—to turn out ever larger outputs…so what does this actually mean for us? Under conditions of authentic democracy and egalitarianism, this should mean humanity’s gradual liberation from toil, as, ideally fewer and fewer hours of labor would have to be surrendered to produce a very high standard of living.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Why? because social property, read capital to produce everything–land, machines, etc.—is owned by a tiny minority and it is precisely this tiny minority that also appropriates the lion’s share of society’s production, translated, of course, into money, which is nothing but a certificate of entitlement to this enormous mountain of goods and services…a “claim” redeemable anywhere such certificates are accepted. (By law the legal tender, or currency, must be accepted everywhere in the nation.)

The inevitable upshot of such grotesque disequilibrium is overconsumption on one side and underconsumption on the other.
In other words, as long as the social relations that bind society to this unfair “contract” remain in place so will this untenable equation, since, if technology is constantly eliminating human labor, and therefore paychecks, who is going to have the necessary income to go back to the market and buy back that ever expanding pile of production?

So, the simple, biggest reason for the problem of faltering demand, recession, or even depression on a world scale, is severe income and wealth inequality, which becomes ever more acute as the system—unchecked by progressive forces such as labor and other pro-democracy groups—follows through with its inherently myopic dynamic of heaping ever larger accumulations of wealth onto the hands of a privileged few while slowly and inexorably immiserating the majority. Such conditions must eventually lead to a major, structural crisis, and they do. History is replete with such examples. But since the system can choose any solution to the crisis, except the obvious—social justice—as the latter goes against its central, non-negotiable dynamic, this is then the anteroom to fascism.

FINANCIAL FRAGILITY ON THE INCREASE

The US today shows alarming inequality. This is evident to all of us who can look at the situation fairly and impartially. We now have hundreds of billionaires, and a similarly growing mass of millionaires. Meanwhile, the income and wealth gap is not big, it’s obscene. The legendary American middle class, the envy of the world, the staple of television sitcoms of the 1950s, not to mention the working classes, have lost a substantive share of national income over the last 35 years and the financial stress observed in this sector is evident in most national indicators.

Consider: There were 1,661,996 bankruptcies filed in Fiscal Year 2003, up 7.4 percent from the 1,547,669 filings in Fiscal Year 2002. This is the highest-ever total of filings for any reporting period. Since 1994, when filings totaled 837,797, bankruptcies in federal courts have increased 98 percent.

The financial profile of the typical American family reflects this troubling reality. As reported by the Washington Post in March of 2006,

[The typical family] has about $3,800 in the bank. No one has a retirement account, and the neighbors who do only have about $35,000 in theirs. Mutual funds? Stocks? Bonds? Nope. The house is worth $160,000, but the family owes $95,000 on it to the bank. The breadwinners make more than $43,000 a year but can’t manage to pay off a $2,200 credit card balance.

That is the portrait of the median American household as painted by the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
Such findings might represent a rude awakening to those still starry-eyed about the vaunted “new affluence” everyone was until recently talking about.

But how does capital deal with this problem? In the way you have seen all over the place: cutting back on wages and benefits, laying off workers, or simply moving to a remote location where labor can be paid a pittance and where neither humans nor animals nor nature do or will enjoy any protection. (The output is then cheerfully sent back to the more affluent—but shrinking— developed world, where extravagant profits are made, except that here, too, the crunch is inevitable because average income, in real terms, is dropping relative to production.)

In the more developed world, especially Europe, where citizens have a more sophisticated understanding of politics, and larger self-defense organizations than in the USA, governments have been obliged to apply some bigger band-aids to the crisis—read a measure of tangible social welfare. But the issue remains: the social vessel is listing badly, making water from many holes and infinite patches and now requires a serious overhaul, if not rebuilding altogether.

An outside observer, say an interplanetary traveller who never set foot in America, might deem such conditions deranged. And why not? Is it sane to live under a system whose ruling elites openly decry a rise in employment and living standard for the masses? And, conversely, isn’t it bizarre that, on Wall Street, supposedly the barometer of society’s economic health, when multinationals lay off workers by the tens of thousands, or shut down facilities, or abandon communities for an overseas location in pursuit of bigger profits for the few, the stocks go up amid wild celebration, and the executives in charge get fat bonuses and other rewards?

In a sane, truly democratic, not to say moral, society such behavior would be hidden from view, like the plotting of common criminals. But in this society, long inured to the reigning disease, Wall Street reactions are not hidden from view at all, they’re bragged about, as they remain safe behind an elaborate national brainwash that teaches Americans to accept such conditions with the tolerance we assign to the whims of nature.

The crisis of overproduction represented by humanity’s new technological capabilities is here to stay and can only be resolved by a far, far more equitable distribution of the product of human labor, on a world scale. This means serious, dramatic revisions of the current social contract—”the terms of agreement”—between two utterly conflicting social interests. Or the abandonment of such an injurious contract entirely.

I hate to quote one of the bogeymen of the American psyche, Karl Marx’s longtime collaborator and friend, Engels, but he put it admirably in 1886:

[If] there are three countries (say, England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for the possession of the world market, there is no chance
but chronic overproduction, one of the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity required.

That was written in the 19th century. Multiply that by a thousand to begin to approach the contours of the current crisis.

DARKER BEFORE DAWN—IS IT TRUE?

The sense of despair that many activists feel these days, battered on all sides by this truly monstrous regime–monstrous in its immorality, cynicism, hypocrisy, self-righteousness and sheer evil–and its all-enveloping prostituted cheer-leading media, is shared amply in this quarter. In a sense, and without going too far afield, the present situation is the inevitable outcome of several realities which have defined this sick society for quite some time:

(1) The absence of a workers’ party, and by that I mean nothing so “alien” to the American mind as a bolshevist vanguardist party, but simply the absence of a real movement and party expressing and articulating the needs and visions of the average person, whose needs are clearly anchored in a “working class reality.”

Parties in a class-divided society, which the US surely is (business propaganda aside), are supposed to represent the interests of the various classes constituting the social pyramid. But since both Democrats and Republicans stand first and foremost for “free enterprise,” i.e., the polite coinage for the national and international bourgeoisie, what we have here is a single party cynically masquerading as two. I’m sure this is scarcely a revelation to most moderately sophisticated American audiences. (The obvious question then is, why is such a fraudulent state of affairs tolerated?)

(2) The successful enthronement in the American mind of liberals as real leftists.

Ferociously centrist, some might call them “extremists of the center,” liberals, frequently the embodiment of the petit bourgeois element in a nation, have never been and never will be real leftists because their entire class orientation and economic interests, which, as is true for all classes, largely determine their mindset, is anchored in the upper, propertied sector, which they tend to ape. This limits their vision and political actions. They are for endless tinkering within the system, while never daring to go beyond its egregiously restrictive limits. Their systemic solutions are therefore stillborn, quilts of pitiful patches with the problem itself often dictating remedial policy. (Witness, for example, Hillary Clinton’s health plan reform initiative, whereby no Naderites, or the Harvard Independent Health Reform Study Group, or similar authentic healthcare system critics were invited to the discussions, but the AMA, the Hospital chains, and Big Pharma’s lobbyists were. When was the last time that the disease set out to stamp itself out?)

(3) The rise and (momentary) triumph of corporate propaganda

The system requires the illusion of options, the illusion of some sort of political balance. And as democracy, against great odds, instinctively struggles to survive and deepen its roots, corporate power, especially through its media and political assets, works tireslessly to confuse and derail the effort. Thus the propaganda apparatus necessitated to negate obvious realities, to inject and maintain a pre-emptive consumerist consciousness among the masses, and to sow escapist notions as a complementary venting valve for gathering tensions, is an enormous and sophisticated machine, precisely what we witness today in modern America. In fact, the rise of such a disinformation machine, a marketing conduit for ideological and economic wares, was foreseen more than 80 years ago, as the growth of corporate propaganda was anticipated to match, blow by blow, the extension of democracy.

Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise that only liberals are heard in this country as “legitimate critics” when it comes to shaping national debates. Reflecting the so-called two-party system, which provides us with a rump political spectrum, the media, too, take care not to admit people to the left of what is regarded as “mainstream opinion” or what some quaintly define as the “loyal opposition” (loyal to what? to whom? That’s never spelled out with any precision).

True radicals (those that go to the root of a problem) are ruled out as “extreme” from the start. (When the national debate commission not only prevents Ralph Nader from attending the debates, but threatens to throw him in jail for exercising his right to do so, we know we are living in a country where the word democracy is something of a joke.)

In this regard, for those who will surely protest with alacrity that America is still the land of the free, I will say only this: The freedom guarantees of any bourgeois democracy can only be tested when that society’s power-holders feel they are under attack.True chalenges—by international standards have never been seen in the US, but the record so far is not pretty, and I refer you here to any number of episodes and incidents in American history showing that the American upper class is extremely manipulative and paranoid in the defense of its privileges. The trip wire is indeed very close to the ground in this nation.

But, folks, who needs widespread repression when the masses can be so successfully controlled by a pervasive 24/7 brainwash? Why show the jackboot and the truncheon, when we can launch massive invasions with relative impunity, under transparently hypocritical motives, and appear every day on the boob-tube with the photo-op of the day, claiming to be the last defenders of human sanity and decency on earth? Why indeed use the mailed fist and give away the system’s true fascistic nature when ubiquitous sound-bites and torrents of idiocy on the tube will suffice? I repeat: The true test of whether this or any nation is a reliably “free” and authentic democracy can only be approached with the rise of a mass movement seriously bent on replacing the current rotting structures with something deserving of the word “representative democracy.”

My money is that long before the emergence of such a welcome phenomenon you will see the system’s crises depositing us at the doorstep of operational fascism, albeit of the American sort, “friendly fascism.”

THE PREFIGUREMENT OF FASCISM, AMERICAN STYLE

Coups and military takeovers may happen in the middle of the night, but fascism (especially the strain incubated behind a presidential façade) arrives on the scene with plenty of advance notice. Its ready-made arsenal of anti-democratic weapons gives it away: increasing thuggery, judicial intimidation, widespread lies at all levels of governance, cultivation of public paranoias, political persecutions, dismantlement of constitutional rights in exchange for “security,” and, when all this fails, widespread repression using the immense reservoir of technical and military assets the system has amassed, from military repression to “retail suppression,” using covert assets, or even “indirect assets,” that is, killing dissidents and making it seem a common crime. (The latter is an old and characteristically sordid tactic used throughout the Third World.)

One may be justified to wonder if, against this backdrop, a populace so effectively depoliticized, and so exasperatingly naive about the true material mainsprings of American policy—abroad and at home—can ever manage to stand up to claim its rightful position as the genuine sovereign and fount for US policies on this endangered planet? How will this gross democratic imposture be retired in the face of the most successful and sophisticated plutocratic propaganda system ever devised?

That is the central question facing all dedicated activists in America and around the world. For America’s ever deepening immersion in fascistoid waters is the cross that the world continues to bear in this age of wholesale reaction sponsored by the “Free World colossus.” And the longer we take in finding genuine solutions to this crisis, the harder it will be to implement them. We have only this rapidly eroding chance to win the battle of communications, and win it we must.

—Patrice Greanville

RELATED PIECE: Naomi Wolf—FASCIST AMERICA IN 10 EASY STEPS

—FINIS—

BY BENJAMIN ROSS | Originally in Dissent Spring 2007

Newly elected Senator Jon Tester, reports the New York Times, is “your grandfather’s Democrat—a pro-gun, anti-big-business prairie pragmatist whose life is defined by the treeless patch of hard Montana dirt that has been in the family since 1916.”

Virginia’s new senator, Jim Webb, is an ex-marine who served as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy and writes novels celebrating the fighting heritage of the Scots-Irish. He writes that “The most important—and unfortunately the least debated—issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century.”

Pennsylvanians elected Senator Bob Casey, who is as much anti-abortion as he is pro-union. Former National Football League quarterback Heath Shuler of North Carolina won election to the House on a similar program, and joined the next day in a press conference with the new Ohio senator, Sherrod Brown, to denounce unfair trade agreements.

It is not an undifferentiated Democratic tide that swept these candidates into office, but a distinctly populist one. The strategy urged on the party by establishment opinion—an appeal to upscale suburbs that couples firmness on national security with economic and social moderation—repeatedly fell short. Both Webb and Tester won primaries against business-oriented opponents backed by party leaders before going on to defeat Republican senators. And the only Democratic Senate candidate in a close race who ran as an economic centrist, Tennessee’s Harold Ford, was the only one to lose.

The trend toward populism was visible among voters as well as candidates. Rural and blue-collar voters swung toward Democrats, most notably in the economically distressed belt stretching from upstate New York to Indiana. The party also picked up House seats in Kansas, Iowa, and western North Carolina.

The populist temper of the electorate has an obverse side; signs appear that the half-century-long swing toward Democrats among the wealthy and well educated may be coming to an end. From 2000 to 2004, George W. Bush gained more votes in the affluent coastal belt from southwestern Connecticut to northern Delaware than almost anywhere else. Similar phenomena appear in the 2006 returns, with Republicans holding contested House seats in upscale suburbs that had been leaning Democratic. Districts that bucked the Democratic tide contain the hedge fund havens of Greenwich and Stamford in Connecticut, the home of Microsoft outside Seattle, and some of Chicago’s wealthiest suburbs. In the strongly Democratic state of Maryland, Republican governor Bob Ehrlich improved on his 2002 performance in many affluent suburban precincts of Anne Arundel and Montgomery counties while running 10 percent behind his previous score in heavily blue-collar Baltimore County.

WHAT ACCOUNTS for the populist resurgence? Unquestionably, Democratic voters in 2006 responded to the mounting economic costs of globalization and the human costs of the Iraq War, and those who bear a disproportionate share of those costs responded most strongly. Conversely, the relatively strong Republican performance among affluent cosmopolitans is hard to explain in any other way than as a reflection of the country’s growing economic and social stratification.

But these shifts in the electorate are too slight to be the full explanation. The range of views to be found among the Democratic Party’s newly elected representatives and senators has moved much further than that of the party’s voters. Public support for a higher minimum wage and opposition to trade agreements are only marginally greater than they were a few years ago, and it is doubtful that there has been any shift regarding gun control or abortion rights. Opinion has, to be sure, turned vehemently against the war in Iraq, but although support for the war has fallen further in rural blue-collar communities than elsewhere, that is in part because it had further to fall. The drift toward populism in public opinion is one of degree, and a modest degree at that, while the wave of populist, socially conservative senators is a change of kind.

The economically liberal and socially conservative have always been a large segment of the electorate. A 1999 Pew Research Center survey categorized one-third of all Democrats in a “socially conservative” group. Together with the “partisan poor” who had similarly traditional attitudes on religious and social issues, they made up the majority of all Democratic voters. Nearly a third of Republicans fell into a “populist” group that had decidedly anti-business views. Yet in the Congress of that year there were few Democrats, and certainly no Republicans, with such combinations of opinions. What caused the severe underrepresentation of populist voters in Congress, and what changed to enable populists to arrive with such sudden force?

The answer to this question lies in the enduring inequalities of class. Numbers do not translate automatically into political power. For one thing, the media are dominated by elite opinion, in its divisions over social issues and in its agreements about economics. On issues such as trade and the minimum wage, where elite and mass diverge most sharply, the views of the great majority of the American people are presented as the fringe of the debate. The fundamental human right of workers to organize earns hardly a mention.

An even more important factor is the financing of political campaigns. The cost of campaigns has skyrocketed since the 1970s; a serious challenge for a House seat costs upward of a million dollars, and Senate races often exceed ten million. Economic progressives have found it hard to keep pace with the rising price of politics. Unions, with their membership stagnant, were unable to compete in the financial arms race; the Catholic and Jewish ethnic networks that helped pay for New Deal-era campaigns moved to the right on economics as memories of immigrant generations faded; and the generation of progressive political donors formed by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War had less inclination to Democratic partisanship than the generation formed by the New Deal and the Second World War.

By the 1990s, Democratic campaigns relied heavily on single-issue contributors motivated by noneconomic issues—feminism, the environment, gay rights, gun control, and others. The party also drew its funds from relatively friendly business interests in such sectors as entertainment, finance, and computer software. Between these two groups there was considerable overlap in views, and frequently in membership, with the business people inclined toward social liberalism and the social liberals often sharing the globalist views of the businesses. An across-the-board progressive like Paul Wellstone could still mobilize social liberals to finance his campaigns. But candidates of the stripe of Jim Webb and Heath Shuler were largely shut out of the process.

IN THE WANING years of the George W. Bush era, the politics of campaign finance has changed entirely. Money floods into Democratic coffers driven by outrage at the Iraq War, the erosion of civil liberties, and the influence of a religious right that has become part of the Republican Party machine. Although most of the individual contributors probably hold more or less the same opinions about questions of public policy as the single-issue donors of the 1990s, they are motivated by a profoundly different political outlook. Democrats have become thoroughly partisan. Their overriding objective is to end Republican control of the government. To that end, any Democrat with a chance of winning will be supported—and in most of the places where seats can be gained, that means populists.

The last few years have been a time for putting party before issues. Iowa Caucus-goers of 2004 rejected Howard Dean in the hope of defeating Bush, and the bloggers of 2006 promoted the insurgent primary candidacies of social conservatives Webb and Tester. Among donors, similarly, partisanship trumps economics. The paychecks of thousand-dollar campaign contributors will surely not be enlarged by a higher minimum wage, yet they cheer Nancy Pelosi’s determination to put this vote-winning issue at the top of her agenda. Democratic candidates, assured of the funds needed to run a campaign, are set free to represent voters rather than money.

It is this rapid change in the temper of the political class, and of its campaign-contributing subclass specifically, that fueled the sudden populist surge of 2006. When this partisan temper cools, as it will if Democrats recapture the presidency in 2008, the populist tide will inevitably recede with it. That is not because populist voters will be less numerous, but because the conditions will be less favorable for translating their numbers into political power.

The tide will recede, but it will not likely fall back to its previous ebb. Political motion develops its own momentum, and especially so when it carries a previously excluded group into the halls of power. Once included in the political debate, populist views will be hard to shut out. Democratic contributors educated by the 2006 election returns will remain open to supporting populist candidates. The loss of economic security in an era of globalization will continue to draw voters’ attention to social inequalities. And, we may hope, Democrats will seize this populist moment to enact structural reforms in campaign finance and union rights, so that the votes of the many carry a little more weight against the campaign contributions of the few.

Benjamin Ross is a community activist in Maryland. He writes frequently for Dissent.

BY DANNY SCHECHTER

[D]espite the many scholars who have validated it, even with some nitpicks, their “model” is ignored in most journalism schools and newsrooms because its real focus is on the powers behind the media…

Twenty years ago, a professor of finance at the Wharton School in Philadelphia and a far better known professor of linguistics at MIT set out to come with a way to explain how our media really works. Rather than offer a case study of coverage of one issue, or an analysis of this or that flaw or media “mistake,” they set out to try to make sense of the way the media functions as a “system” what rules govern the behavior of media institutions in reporting on crisis abroad. They didn’t call it a theory because they believed they were not being speculative but factual.

They came up with what they called a “model,” not of journalism, but of propaganda.

The ambitious book, since revised, explained their “Propaganda Model.” It’s called, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. It became a best seller among a public angry with the news we are getting and popular with media students worldwide who saw that there was now a systematic way to analyze media performance in a structural way. It’s still in print and still provoking controversy.

The author’s names are Edward Herman, and Noam Chomsky, both considered intellectual heroes and heavyweights among generations of rebels and critics worldwide.

At the same time, despite the many scholars who have validated it, even with some nitpicks, their “model” is ignored in most journalism schools and newsrooms because its real focus is on the powers behind the media and how they shape it to serve their own interest.

Many of the mainstream journalists who even know about it dismiss it as a “conspiracy theory,” even though Chomsky is a well-known critic of conspiracy theorizing. (This is like that old joke in which someone says they are an “anti-communist” only to be told, “I don’t care what kind of communist you are.”)

This past week, I spoke at a conference in Canada, not the US of course, where its impact is widely appreciated, still debated and updated. Still, there was only one mainstream corporate journalist there, Antonia Zerbisias, the always insightful media columnist of the Toronto Star who explained the “model’s focus on the “filters” that much news has to pass through.

“Stripped down for purposes of, as Chomsky would say, typical media “concision,” they are: ownership interests, advertiser concerns, the nature of journalists’ sources, flak (or negative feedback) and ideology.”

In a talk to a conference plenary, Zerbisias smiled before pronouncing that the model is “true.” There it is– a media veteran said it!

True-but not necessarily up to date in this new ever changing media era of diverse technologies, major outlets losing audience and credibility, increasing top-down control by conglomerized monopolies, vast information available on the internet, increasing media production by citizens and media makers, and growing disenchantment with a media that does more selling than telling.

Of course, media outlets have an ideological orientation that usually conforms with the interests of their governments. Journalists who challenge it are often marginalized, ignored or fired. I have documented that in my books and film WMD about the deplorable media coverage of the Iraq war. I am not the only one to argue that there was complicity and collaboration between a servile press corps and the Bush Administration that we both cheerleading for war.

There are two other aspects to this that needs to be examined including top-down coercion as when politically motivated moguls like Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi or Conrad Black buy a media outlet and discharge journalists with whom they disagree.

There has just been a worrisome recent development at the one media outlet in the world known for its independence, AlJazeera where a new board has been named with a gutsy independent journalist replaced as managing director by a former Ambassador to Washington. You just know what that will result in–Foxeera, was the formulation coined by one reader.

In some countries, media dissenters are jailed or even killed. That’s why it was suggested at the conference that the title Manufacturing Consent today should be modified for “Manufacturing Compliance.” Increasingly governments don’t care what people think at all– or if they consent-just that they go along with the program by hook, crook or club. Most prefer that we don’t vote at all. That’s why elections are treated as sports events. The non-voters increasingly outnumber whose who cast ballots.

Even more distressing is the trend towards the depoliticalization of politics through the merger of showbiz and newsbiz to assure that much of the media agenda is noisy and negative, stripped of all meaning: superficial, often celebrity-dominated with little in-depth explanatory or investigative journalism. They would rather market American Idol as the American Ideology. To them, the only “hegemony” in Canada is its beer and hockey.

The people who run our media are, after all, in the end, promoting a culture of consumption, not of engaged citizenship. They want eyeballs for advertisers, not activists to promote change. The sound-bytes presented as substance are there for entertainment, not illumination. It’s heat, not light, all the way.

So truth be told, the real propaganda in an era where with more pundits than journalists, is less real coverage. It is pervasive and invisible at the same time–omission more than commission. They want to dumb us down, not smarten us up. They foster passivity, skepticism and resignation. Forget beliefs of any kind–just buy, buy, buy. Why even use deception when distraction works just as well?

Yes, the lack of coverage of East Timor that Noam Chomsky railed against was atrocious, as is today’s war coverage. but so is the absence of reporting on the devolution of democracy and much of the suffering in our own country.

Perhaps the more appropriate title in what Detroit calls a “new model year,” is “Manufacturing Indifference.”

News Dissector Danny Schechter is “blogger-in-chief” of Mediachannel.org. His new film is IN DEBT WE TRUST (indebtwetrust.com). Comments to