by Linh Dinh / May 23rd, 2012
Until 1982, Philadelphia had three daily newspapers, and the surviving two, the Inquirer and Daily News, are owned by the same company. Both are hurting. Fewer and fewer readers force extreme cost-cutting measures that reduce the quality of each rag, which means even fewer readers. Competition from the internet, as well as the degraded reading habits it fosters, choppier and sloppier, are mostly to blame, but corporate greed and shortsightedness also played an important role.
The Inquirer used to rake in Pulitzers, but serious reporting required a sustained investment of money, time and intellect, so when its then-owner, Knight Ridder, balked …
by Media Lens / May 23rd, 2012
Advertising revenue is almost the life-blood of the press. Although the figure has fallen in recent years, today it constitutes around 60 per cent of newspapers’ total income, including ‘quality’ titles like the Guardian and the Independent.
This obviously has profound implications for media performance, as even the corporate media are sometimes willing to accept. Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson notes in the Financial Times: ‘Behind their journalistic missions, most news organisations have always been commercial operations that sell audiences to advertisers.’
Media corporations are also typically owned …
by Glen Barry / May 23rd, 2012
The year was 1988 – current Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is running for Marquette University student body President. Hoping to shake off the embarrassing loss to a write-in candidate for resident hall President the year before, Walker is pulling out all the charm and hardnosed political tactics at his disposal. Things are going well until the student newspaper retracts its endorsement, calling candidate Walker “unfit for office”, but I am getting ahead of myself.
For the 99% of you reading this essay – who are not from Wisconsin – Scott Walker is the latest tea party right wing, uneducated, superstitious nut …
by Jonik / May 23rd, 2012
Jonik examines the hypocrisy and hysteria behind banning marijuana use.
by Nathan Fuller / May 23rd, 2012
On Friday, 93% of the U.S. House of Representatives affirmed a resolution escalating America’s already aggressive position on Iran, from “crippling” sanctions to a zero-tolerance policy on nuclear weapons. The Congressional Research Service summarized the bill:
Affirms that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening. Urges increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran to secure an agreement that includes: (1) suspension of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, (2) complete cooperation with the International Atomic
…
by Alexandra Morton / May 22nd, 2012
On May 15 Mainstream, owned by Cermaq, which is largely owned by the Norwegian government announced their farm at Dixon Island, Clayoquot Sound is positive for IHN virus. This is different from the European ISA virus I have been tracking. IHN virus is local to BC, but what happens to it in salmon farms is highly unnatural. Mainstream reports, “Third-party lab PCR test results have shown the presence of the virus. Sequencing has confirmed the presence of IHN virus in these fish.” No one I know has seen these results. Since reading all their emails posted now as Cohen …
by Burkely Hermann / May 22nd, 2012
It was a cold, dreary day. Right after I heard the articulate, fiery man speak to a crowd of about fifty for over an hour, I went up the stairs to get my book signed. That fiery man was Chris Hedges, a vocal participant in the Occupy movement and anti-corporate activist. When I got my chance, I asked Mr. Hedges if he had expected President Obama to voice approval of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline after he had previously rejected it. Hedges said that he did expect Obama to voice his approval for the project because …
by Gary Brumback / May 22nd, 2012
President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, gave a talk on behalf of the administration April 30 of this year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. The talk’s title was “The Ethics and Efficacy of the President’s Counterterrorism Strategy.” What chutzpah! I read the transcript and George Orwell immediately leapt to mind. Political prose, he said, makes “lies sound truthful and murder respectable—.”
Let’s examine the administration’s political prose in claiming that its drone strikes are efficacious, ethical, legal, and wise.
On the Orwellian Claim that Drone Strikes are Efficacious
To be efficacious, drone strikes must a) actually achieve their objective and by …
by Ko Tha Dja / May 22nd, 2012
From the China Post on May 21st, 2012, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the suspension of sanctions at a news briefing on Thursday with Myanmar Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin, on his long-isolated nation’s first official visit to Washington in decades.
“Today we say to American business: invest in Burma and do it responsibly,” Clinton said.
As inglorious as it sounds, Myanmar is open for plunder to American corporations. All of which, will, ahem, plunder responsibly.
Several months ago at a posh hotel lounge three Norwegian officials with their Burmese guide sat near me. A part of their indiscreet conversation was …
Watch For These New Diseases
by Martha Rosenberg / May 22nd, 2012
The first week in May brought a new leader in France and new prospects for same sex couples seeking marriage. But at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, attended by 11,000 psychiatrists, it was the same old same old. Instead of listening to the public outcry about overmedicated children, soldiers, elderly and everyday people watching too many drug ads, the psychiatry group re-affirmed its resolve to pathologize healthy people and even rolled out new groups to target.
This is the year the APA puts the finishing touches on DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a compendium …
Countering the myths spread by pro-Israel ideologues
by Annette Herskovits / May 21st, 2012
Annette Herskovits writes, “The myth that Israel is the victim of unprovoked attacks by uncivilized Arabs persists, even in the face of Israel’s brutality and violations of international law in its 44-year long occupation of the Palestinian Territories.” Superficially, her article based on a review of Gilbert Achbar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust reads as a courageous acknowledgement of Palestinian dispossession and suffering, but how morally grounded is it?
Past Events Do Not Obviate That We Are All Equally Human
by Kim Petersen / May 21st, 2012
Annette Herskovits wrote an essay that is strongly supportive of Palestinians rights and dismissive of many myths surrounding Palestine. For example, she states, “That Israel was built on Arab land, whether bought or confiscated, is undeniable.”
It is a seeming admission that the entirety of Israel is situated on historical Palestine, something few Jews care to admit. It is similar to how few Canadians or Americans care to admit that their states are erected on the territory of Indigenous nations. However, Herskovits also writes of Israel’s “44-year …
David Harvey's Rebel Cities
by Ron Jacobs / May 21st, 2012
I live in the small city of Burlington Vermont in the United States. Most every day I walk through the city’s main public square known by its street name, Church Street. A public street that has been semi-privatized, the street is often the center of a struggle between citizens and private interests over the nature of the public square. Battles over the rights of street performers, political activists, panhandlers and regular citizens that want to hang out without shopping are frequent. Thanks to quick public reaction from these groups and others, most efforts by merchants and politicians to further …
by Frank Scott / May 21st, 2012
A world without workers is impossible. A world without capitalists is necessary.
– World Federation of Labor
The unemployment rate in the USA is down to just over 8%. This is evidence that we are in a recovery from a recession. But that rate is actually higher than it was when this particular recession began.
The patient’s temperature has gone up, a sure sign that the patient is getting better. Huh?
Living under the rules of a profit and loss religion in a market church controlled by private clergy, almost anything negative can be made to sound positive, especially to those …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 21st, 2012
Investors that shoot for IPO allocations needn’t worry that a high stock price overvalues the company if they are confident they can find a ‘greater fool’ willing to pay more.
— Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2012
With cult-like projections, Mark Zuckerberg’s face was beamed across a screen at Hacker Square. Facebook was, after all, having its heralded float as a public company, though the occasion could not cease but be a social event of some magnitude. That, and the fact of its founder’s marriage, which received the usual empty adulation that such a network facilitates.
The shares in the company’s shares finished …
Come High Water, Come Fire, Come Exhaustion: The Amazon Way is America's Way
by Nichole Gracely / May 21st, 2012
Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley (LV) is a distribution hub, and many fellow Amazon associates and Integrity Staffing Solutions temps had previously worked in other local warehouses.
I have and I can say that they’re typically rough workplaces.
At first glance, Amazon’s LV fulfillment center appears benign.
Primary red, yellow, green and blue splashes of color brighten the place, and motivational posters and friendly educational signs that feature cute characters provide guidance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers populate the warehouse at once, diligently taking direction from hand-held scanners or computers, and the place is enormous so it doesn’t appear cramped. Seriously, the place could …
by Linh Dinh / May 21st, 2012
Outside the Gallery, Philadelphia’s low-class shopping mall, Jimbo sits in a wheelchair and begs behind a large sign, “I AM A CANCER VICTIM. I CANNOT WORK. CAN YOU HELP ME.” Under a leather cowboy hat, his eyes are still alert, though a pinch of his lower lip has turned purple. A reader and thinker, Jimbo will talk your ears off about FDR’s foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor, the FBI’s infiltration of all protest movements and, especially, how the IMF has enslaved the world,
Seventy-seven-years-old, Jimbo had a vending business selling pretzels, among other stuff, and worked at a factory making vent …
Interview of a former Amazon warehouse worker Nichole Gracely
by Paul Haeder / May 19th, 2012
Nichole Gracely has the inside scoop on demerits, humiliation, and the work ethic Amazon warehouses demand (think: Columbus’ marauders taking their pound of flesh from the Taino).
Overview (5 w’s): I worked in their Lehigh Valley Fulfillment Center for a year altogether and I served as Morning Call reporter Spencer Soper’s inside informant before, during, and after the investigation ran. Check this out if you haven’t already. I’m proud to have been a part of this story, perhaps the first anti-Amazon piece that really stuck.
Paul K. Haeder: Why’d you become a source for a news expose on this Amazon …
by Daniel Ibn Zayd / May 19th, 2012
In May of 2005 I joined a group of students and activists to watch a documentary entitled Paul Robeson: Here I Stand. Paul Robeson was an American political figure, though he remains virtually unknown by most in his home country. Many might recognize him from a booklet of stamps published by the United States Postal Service, entitled “African-Americans on Stamps: A celebration of African-American Heritage”. The booklet opens with Robeson’s smiling face, and states: “By the late 1930s, [Robeson] had become very active and outspoken on behalf of racial justice, social progress, and international peace.” This is true. He was …
by James Petras / May 19th, 2012
Capitalism and its defenders maintain dominance through the ‘material resources’ at their command, especially the state apparatus, and their productive, financial and commercial enterprises, as well as through the manipulation of popular consciousness via ideologues, journalists, academics and publicists who fabricate the arguments and the language to frame the issues of the day.
Today, material conditions for the vast majority of working people have sharply deteriorated as the capitalist class shifts the entire burden of the crisis …
