Begnini hugging his ill-deserved Oscars.

Camping Out: Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful”

Kurt Jacobsen

[from New Politics, vol. 7, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 27, Summer 1999]

Prefatory note: As a movie buff I was baffled and offended that an insufferable mediocrity like Roberto Begnini would catch as many accolades as he did on this side of the Atlantic. Alas, there’s no telling about the depths that American yuppies and their counterparts in other developed nations will go to indulge their passion for cheap sentimentality.  In my view—and I have remained badly isolated i n this for quite a while, conferring the Oscars on Begnini was an act of defiant film illiteracy. But so it goes in this hypermediated society: fads have the power to make demigods of artists with truly modest talents. Can anyone in his right mind compare Begnini’s nonsense to the muscular but always supremely human comedy of a Chaplin? OK, that was a bit low, no one can.  But Begnini is nothing when compared with Italy’s great comics, too, it’s only American ignorance and the yuppie’s misguided sensibility that has made this man into a megastar. Italy has given us the sublime Toto, the unforgettable Carotenuto brothers, Nino Manfredi, Ugo Tognazzi, and even performers with a spectrum as formidable as Marcello Mastroianni (see Divorce Italian Style if you doubt me), and his contemporary, the great Vittorio Gassman (Big Deal on Madonna Street, for example). I could go on. But there’s no need. I am just gratified that Kurt Jacobsen has put this clown in his place. —Patrice Greanville

¶

IN THE LATE 80S, FOR A CHICAGO WEEKLY, I reviewed Elim Klimov’s Come and See, a superb Soviet war film depicting the partisan struggle in the blood bath of the Eastern Front. A cavalcade of Goyaesque horrors climaxes with a sequence of gloating SS troops “ethnically cleansing” a Byelorussian village — with extreme prejudice. When a survivor of that onslaught contacted me later, I asked her if the screened brutality was at all exaggerated or if the Nazis were caricatured, as another Chicago movie critic, to my amazement, had suggested. No, she answered, scenes of villagers being tortured, butchered, and finally burnt alive inside a church, if anything, had understated the unspeakable acts she had witnessed (and narrowly escaped) as a little girl. Nazis were not just “mean guys who yell a lot” by any stretch, or lack, of even a child’s imagination.

Mass market films about the holocaust are curious but canny creatures in which essential elements of the excruciating experience must always be sacrificed for the sake of sustaining entertainment. Scripts undergo “commercial cleansings” to appease their fretful producers’ fallible sense of what audiences are willing to pay to see — and tragedy of any kind just isn’t boffo box office. Film makers, if they want to go on working, observe tacit but extremely rigid narrative rules: celebrate a hero who strikes back at tormentors even if only by spitting in their onion soup or by manufacturing dud munitions, stir in a tempestuous love story, draw a neat line between good and bad guys, and concoct a poignant or upbeat ending.

Audiences must see themselves as part of the solution, not the problem. So one is quite content with the unreflective applause of realtors who move “riff-raff” out of gentrifying neighborhoods, bankers who red line, and business men who downsize to the detriment of everyone and everything but the bulging size of their wallets. To his credit Steven Spielberg, after consecrating Schindler as a proto-yuppie hero and assuring us that only Germans ever behave like Nazis, gave us gut-wrenching glimpses of cold-blooded atrocities managed by something akin to real Nazis: venal, corrupt, banal and only zealously inhuman toward those dregs officially deemed ‘life unworthy of life.’ Appallingly ordinary people. Indeed, ordinary law-abiding people (or enough of them), as the holocaust amply demonstrated, are capable of anything that the law compels or allows. The SS just happened to speak German. This is a striking caveat that artists like Benigni can help us to bear soberly in mind. Of course, he doesn’t. What does he want us to bear in mind?

Six dead is a crying shame, goes the sardonic lament; six or eleven million dead is arithmetic. Do atrocities of the latter magnitude permit a comedic treatment if it allows a harrowing message (pace, Western Union) to strike home? In principle, why not? Catch-22 arguably told us as much of value about warfare as did All Quiet on the Western Front. Sugaring the pill is excusable if the pill serves its bitterer purpose. In Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful critics and audiences beheld Samuel Johnson’s dog not only dancing but doing a bit of ballet, and with such good intentions. The supreme soviet of sentimentality, formally known as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, responded with a gush by awarding Benigni, this ebullient bully of bonhomie, Oscars for a best foreign picture and best actor. Has Benigni prat-fallen his way past our callous defenses to insinuate a valuable searing lesson we otherwise would not get? Does his premeditated brand of audacity excuse the otherwise insane intrusion of comedy into the environs of the camps? Night and fog and chuckles too.

Unprecedented, Benigni is not — even in Italy. Comedy and concentration camps blended there on another notable occasion. In the 1970s Bruno Bettelheim, unjustly disparaged after his death, took Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties severely to task for its flip and, he feared, dangerously misleading view of camp survivors, and what it took to be one. What perturbed Bettelheim was not the director’s intent — which he could not presume to pinpoint anyway — but how enraptured and deluded audiences were by this raucous and dazzling work. (Wertmuller recently told me that, although she felt he misunderstood her intent, she agreed with many of his trenchant comments.) Indeed, Bettelheim at the time got it mostly right as to how movie audiences perceived the demented moral: “survival is all — it does not matter how, why, what for” — a lesson Bettelheim condemned for distorting camp realities and for pandering to a cheap cynicism. The most urbane cynicism, unfortunately, posed no barrier to any societal stirrings or inklings of a replay of Nazi-like conduct and crimes. Good intentions, even for a gifted artist, are not enough.

Enough about Wertmuller. What’s not to like about Benigni? Apart from a grotesque misrepresentation of the camps? Apart from a smug underlying message that a little guile and a lot of pluck enabled survival.(Bettelheim, Rousset, and Levi have news for you: it didn’t.) Apart from the unnoticed presence of a child in the men’s barracks? Apart from the absence of kapos? Apart from every inmate speaking Italian? One can go on and on. But are these opportunistic violations — not just suspensions — of reality justified by the film’s impact not only as “pure” cinema but as a humanistic work? After all, Benigni could have picked less well-documented plights, or else a patently imaginary one. Benigni is so impressively, or oppressively, charming that one feels kind of churlish pointing out that the prince-inmate is wearing a freshly laundered striped tunic.

IN AN OPENING SCENE AT A PICTURE POSTCARD FARM the skinny, raggedy, cunning clown Guido first literally catches a classy signorina, and then her eye — gallantly sucking a wasp stinger from her trembling thigh. Our self-declared prince of the province spins a medley of often serendipitous tricks to woo this cool and rather uppercrust young lady. Next stop is Guido’s uncle who dwells in a vast ramshackle beauty of a house (“Nothing is more necessary than the unnecessary”) strewn with enchanting antiques, a nag named Robin Hood and, by the looks of it, a few million bucks worth of paintings. Guido moves in and, while courting the lady and awaiting official permission to start a bookstore, takes a lowly waiter’s job in a plush hotel where we find he can crack any riddle quicker than a lobster’s claw. A German doctor enjoys, if that is quite the verb for his deadly earnest delight, spinning riddles with the waiter — an amiable duel of wits which sets up an ugly realization much later in the camps of how profoundly banal evil men can be.

A plethora of implausibilities pile up, setting the half-lyrical, half-daffy tone. A heady mix of alternating inanities and dramatic shocks unfolds. Benigni invents a Marx Brothers Mediterranean universe where, without any serious reprisal, he drops flower pots on bumptious bureaucrats, steals hats (and an automobile), impersonates a pompous school inspector who instructs a classroom in the joys of possessing a racially superior belly button, and gallops aboard a green horse around a posh hotel ballroom filled with swaggering admirers of Mussolini, grabs a girl and gets away unmolested. You gotta like this guy even if you can’t believe him. His successful antics evidently are all jokingly owed to will power and Schopenhauer.

“Ingenuity uber alles” is Benigni’s keynote. Into this occasionally tedious frivolity he drops somber notes and disquieting scenes: none more so than a blithe dinner table conversation among enthused fascisti about a children’s math book problem posed in terms of how much money the liquidation of 300,000 cripples will save the state — for 300,000 patients were killed by the Reich in a warm-up for the final solution. The diners chatter brightly about arithmetic, not the gruesome reality. The German doctor will be anally absorbed in abstractions, not the plight of human beings. The film is nearly redemptive despite the unlikelihood of a rich girl marrying Guido, once a poor waiter and now a poor book seller (How did he get permission from her former boy friend, a local official, to start the shop anyway?)

CUT TO SEPTEMBER 1943 OR THEREABOUTS when Germany occupied Italy and tried to pry loose its Jews — murdering about one in ten. Nazi troops strut nearby. Anti-semitic epithets are smeared on the book shop and Guido dutifully misinforms his son that the scrawling refers to something silly, like “spiders and Visigoths.” It seems far from clear, though, that being deceived is any better for five-year-old boys than it is for 25-year-old men and women. Is this really something to admire? Father and son are carted off to the camps anyway; momma insistently joins them with help from an obliging SS officer. They are, I swear, actually helped aboard the train by the Nazi guards — or get, at worst, an impatient shove.

In camp barracks, where the son wouldn’t have lasted five seconds, Guido’s hilarious mistranslation of the Nazi’s instructions would have gotten his skull bashed in not by the Nazis, but by fellow prisoners whose own lives would have been that much more endangered. There is a double deceit or delusion going on: Guido of the child and then of the filmmaker regarding the audience. For poignancy to arrive, reality has to go. The loudspeaker and use of the station would have gotten him and child instantly killed, but he gets away. Guido can grandstand for his son and the actor grandstand for his audience who will not be much pushed by the distance between the “mean guys who yell a lot” and the staggering routine callousness and brutality of a precisely gauged and totally monitored hell.

Not that this camp isn’t grim. The prisoners are disgruntled, they are scruffy, they are pretty depressed about it all. Everybody speaks Italian instead of the babel of tongues that aided the “divide and conquer” system. They tote heavy anvils all day long. But reality intrudes most

rudely in the women’s barracks, where with the blithest and blithering inconsistency, momma learns that “children and old women” are selected for death. Why hasn’t the men’s barracks gotten word? Guido’s Uncle meanwhile is led with a shrug off to death. The mother happens on the gray gruesome mound of entangled corpses. There is a child’s kitten crawling over discarded clothing, which is Benigni’s answer to Spielberg’s scarlet-coated girl in the ghetto clearance sequence in Schindler’s List. But Benigni’s most brilliant moment is when Guido dissuades his son regarding wild rumors of extermination: “Who would turn people into buttons and soap? That’ll be the day. Preposterous!”

The prisoners are remarkably complicit in fooling the child that this is all a game to win a thousand points and win a real tank. As American troops near the camp, and liberation beckons, Guido ultimately is killed in the frantic course of saving his family. He clearly would have survived had he not had a wife to save; his fate, unlike that of any actual inmate, was in his hands. The denouement bring the son a tank, liberty and mother again. Guido bluffed the kid and us, the audience. It’s a pity that for the film to work that the camp must become an outrageous lie.

AGONY IS KEPT MOSTLY OFF-SCREEN on the belated and, I thought, offensive ploy that this really all was a child’s eye view (“This is my story”). No wonder the Academy loved it: a Walt Disnified concentration camp, love melting the class divide, a Chaplin-ish figure tweaking authority — as if tweaking made any difference. To boot, it masquerades as a true story (like Europa, Europa), a story full of weird miracles where the naive and innocent triumph. (One thinks instead of the Yad Vashem memorial of glittering mirrors and candles commemorating the children killed.) The filmmaker simply counted on substituting this sentimentality for deeper and more disturbing lessons about camps. It is tempting to walk away knowing love conquers all, and that moxie alone will see you through. If it worked for Benigni’s hero, why didn’t more survive? Did we really get a profound insight, or any insight at all, into these systemic murder machines, into camps infernally designed to reduce you to what your captors think of you? Nope.

The real tribute to holocaust victims is depicting and facing their experiences honestly with an eye to preventing it ever happening again through developing, as it were, informed hearts. Shock value, audacity and nerviness carefully wrapped in certified good intentions is what the latter half of Life is Beautiful has to offer as a successful counterfeit. Benigni means well, but since when does meaning well obliterate other criteria — since when does the intent excuse the content? What audiences need to know is how ordinary men, not psychos and fanatics, carried out these deeds. But that appears to be one abiding riddle that Benigni is uninterested in posing, let alone solving.

People support Snowden all over the world.

Free citizen Dennis Leahy, affiliated with Facebook’s group Edward Snowden Supporters, to which I also subscribe, is making the following material available. Share as widely as you can.—Sean Lenihan

Here is a listing of 27 quotes, pulled from the Edward Snowden interview:

#1 “The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.”

#2 “…I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”

#3 “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

#4 “…I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

#5 “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.”

#6 “With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

#7 “Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…”

#8 “To do that, the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they are collecting YOUR communications to do so.”

#9 “I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinized most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.”

#10 “…they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.”

#11 “Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. …it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life.”

#12 “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”

#13 “Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

#14 “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

#15 “I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”

#16 “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.”

#17 “I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.”

#18 “There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich.”

#19 “The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things… And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that… because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny.”

#20 “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

#21 “You can’t come up against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.”

#22 “I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.”

#23 “We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”

#24 “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end.”

#25 “There’s no saving me.”

#26 “The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won’t be able to help any more. That’s what keeps me up at night.”

#27 “I do not expect to see home again.”

This new guide, Growing Apart by historian Colin Gordon, taps the latest research on inequality — from all over the world — and links readers to a broad array of source material. One-stop shopping, so to speak, for stopping inequity. More on that inequity — and the struggle against it — in this week’s Too Much. About Too Much,
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GREED AT A GLANCE U.S. Trust, the oldest and largest private wealth manager for America’s wealthy, has just completed an in-depth survey of the nation’s “high net worth families,” households that hold over $3 million in “investable assets.” The survey’s most fascinating finding: Only 43 percent of the 711 deep pockets U.S. Trust quizzed “consider themselves wealthy.” Still, says U.S. Trust, most all the high-net-worth set remains “optimistic” and “confident” about the future. You might be confident, too, if you held at least 275 times more financial wealth than the typical American family. New research from NYU economist Edward Wolff places America’s median financial wealth at just $10,890 . . .You can call Nick Hanauer a top 1 percenter. You can call him filthy rich. But don’t ever call Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based venture capitalist, a “job creator.” Hanauer told a U.S. Senate subcommittee earlier this month that “rich business people like me” neither “create” jobs nor deserve tax breaks for creating them. So who does create jobs? Average people, Hanauer testified, with money in their pockets. Added the veteran entrepreneur: “Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist’s course of last resort, something we do if and only if increasing customer demand requires it.” If “lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy” actually did create work, Hanauer’s testimony summed up, “then today we would be drowning in jobs.”No corporation works harder at making its annual shareholder meeting a made-for-media spectacle than Wal-Mart, and this year’s annual session, just held in Arkansas, had everything from in-person pop-ins by Tom Cruise and Kelly Clarkson to a giant puppet white elephant. All these people and props, naturally, sang Wal-Mart’s praises. But companies have to give shareholders at least some floor time at annual meetings, and activists made the most of the 15 minutes — out of four hours — Wal-Mart grudgingly opened up. Wal-Mart worker Janet Sparks contrasted the low wages workers like herself receive with CEO Michael Duke’s $20.7 million 2012 paycheck. Noted Sparks to audience cheers: “I don’t think that’s right.” Making the cheers even more significant: Wal-Mart execs pack their annual meeting audience with employees they consider loyalists. Quote of the Week

“Our economy is currently experiencing a ‘members only’ recovery. Ninety-nine percenters needn’t apply.”
Timothy Noah, Fairness Doctrine, Democracy, Summer 2013 PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK IRAs, 401(k)s, and other similar vehicles shelter income from taxes. The original rationale: help average Americans save for retirement. But the nation’s wealthy are now exploiting these tax-sheltered accounts to dodge billions in taxes, the reason why the White House now wants to limit the nest-eggs that savers can shelter to $3.4 million. Putnam Investments CEO Robert Reynolds is leading the charge to kill that limit. His bizarre case for no cap: “Right now elderly poverty is at an all-time high.” That’s “nonsense” as an argument, noteseconomist Dean Baker, on two counts. Elderly poverty isn’t sitting near any all-time high, and the elderly who do live in poverty aren’t worrying about brushing “up against the $3.4 million tax-exempt limit” the White House has proposed.  

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to a friend IMAGES OF INEQUALITY First the rich had yachts, then yachts that carried little submarines. Now the rich can have it all: a yacht that doubles as a sub. The new Migaloo, as designed by the Austrian yacht studio Motion Code: Blue, will stretch longer than a football field, dive below 300 meters, and, one report notes, “satisfy the ever raising demands from super-rich yacht owners who want to stand out from the crowd.” Web Gem

Move Your Money/ A campaign that encourages individuals and institutions to divest from the nation’s largest Wall Street banks and shift their assets to local financial institutions. PROGRESS AND PROMISE Earlier this month, at London’s flagship Apple store, protestors packed the premises, sang Irish songs, and waved placards that read “Take a tax holiday in Ireland” — exactly what Apple execs are doing to avoid billions in taxes. This past December activists jammed UK Starbucks outlets, turning the shops into faux-day-care-centers to highlight the child services cuts corporate tax evasion is forcing. Credit both these protests to UK Uncut, a grassroots movement that’s inspiring similar efforts worldwide, including in the United States. One sign of the overall protest impact: Germany’s finance minister is now calling fora global minimum tax on multinational corporations. Take Action
on InequalityFind out more — and spread the word — about Inequality for All, the engaging new egalitarian documentary that features former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich and will hit the Los Angeles Film Festival this weekend. INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS  

Stat of the Week

America’s most typical income-earners, analysts at Sentier Research are now estimating, took home this past January 7.3 percent less, after inflation, than they earned in January 2000 — and 4.5 percent less than they earned in June 2009, the year the Great Recession officially ended. IN FOCUS Where Uncle Sam Ought to Be SnoopingLet’s place private corporations with government contracts under surveillance — to make sure no one is getting rich off our tax dollars.Only 23 percent of Americans, says a new Reuters poll, consider former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden a “traitor” for blowing the whistle on the federal government’s massive surveillance of the nation’s telecom system.

Many Americans, the poll data suggest, clearly do find the idea of government agents snooping through their phone calls and emails a good bit unnerving.

But Americans have more on the surveillance front to worry about than overzealous government agents. Government personnel aren’t actually doing the snooping the 29-year-old Snowden revealed. NSA officials have contracted this snooping out — to private corporate contractors.

These surveillance contracts, in turn, are making contractor executives exceedingly rich. And none have profited personally more than the power suits who run Booz Allen Hamilton and the private equity Carlyle Group.

Whistle-blower Snowden did his snooping as a Booz Allen employee. Booz Allen, overall, has had tens of thousands of employees doing intelligence work for the federal government.

Booz Allen alumni also populate the highest echelons of America’s intelligence apparatus — and vice versa. The Obama administration’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, just happens to be a former Booz Allen exec. The George W. Bush intelligence chief, John McConnell, now serves as the Booz Allen vice chair.

All these revolving doors open up into enormously lucrative worlds. In their 2010 fiscal year, the top five Booz Allen execs together pocketed just under $20 million. They averaged 23 times what members of Congress take home.

But the real windfalls are flowing to top execs at the Carlyle Group, Booz Allen’s parent company since 2008. In 2011, Carlyle’s top three power suits shared a combined payday over $400 million.

More windfalls will be arriving soon. Carlyle paid $2.54 billion to buy up Booz Allen. Analysts are now expecting that Carlyle’s ultimate return on the acquisition will triple the private equity giant’s initial cash outlay.

What do all these mega millions have to do with the massive surveillance that Edward Snowden has so dramatically exposed? Washington power players, from the President on down, are insisting that this surveillance has one and only one purpose: keeping Americans safe from terrorism.

But who can put much faith in these earnest assurances when other motives — financial motives — so clearly seem at play?

Corporate execs at firms like Booz Allen and the Carlyle Group are making fortunes doing “systematic snooping” for the government. These execs have a vested self-interest in pumping up demand for their snooping services — and they’re indeed, the Washington Post reported last week, pumping away.

This past April, the Post notes, Booz Allen established a new 1,500-employee division “aimed at creating new products that clients (read: government agencies) don’t know they need yet.” This new division is developing “social media analytics” that can anticipate the latest “cyber threat.”

In other words, this new unit will be figuring out how to get the federal government to pay up even more for investigating who we “like” on Facebook.

In one sense, none of this should surprise us. Corporate executives — particularly in the defense industry — have been enriching themselves off government contracts for years. Post-9/11 political dynamics have only turbocharged that process. America now sports, as Pulitzer Prize-winning analyst David Rohde observed last week, a “secrecy industrial complex.”

Do the Snowden revelations have the potential to upset Corporate America’s long-running government contracting gravy train? Maybe, but only if anger over the revelations translates into real changes that keep private corporate contractors from getting rich off tax dollars.

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What might these changes entail? The Affordable Care Act enacted in 2010 — Obamacare — suggests one initial step. Under this new legislation, private health insurance companies can no longer deduct off their corporate income taxes any compensation over $500,000 that they pay their top executives.

A more potent antidote to contracting windfalls would be simply denying government contracts to corporations that overcompensate their top execs, a course of action U.S. senator Hugo Black from Alabama, later a noted Supreme Court justice, proposed back in the early years of the Great Depression.

How might this approach work today? The President of the United States makes about 25 times the compensation of the lowest-paid federal employee. We could apply that standard to federal contracting and deny our tax dollars to companies that pay their top execs over 25 times what any of their workers are making.

Protecting privacy in a dangerous world will never be easy. But we’ll never have even a shot at protecting privacy until we take the profit out of violating it. Ending windfalls for contractors would be the logical place to start. New Wisdom
on WealthMark Schmitt, George Packer’s U.S.A., American Prospect, June 11, 2013. The most insightful commentary yet on an important new book that tracks a generation of growing inequality.

David Moberg, New Visions from the New Left, In These Times, June 12, 2013. A top labor journalist explores two long-haul approaches to building an alternative to a top-heavy America.

Rev. Chuck Arnold, Working to fill the most important gaps, Lompoc Record, June 13, 2013. A minister contemplates our global distribution of wealth and happiness.

Chris Dillow, Why real wages are falling,Stumbling and Mumbling, June 13, 2013. The current five-year drop in U.S. real wages has been the worst since 1921-26, the second largest since 1855. Why so severe? One explanation.

Jacob Hacker, How to reinvigorate the centre-left? Predistribution,Guardian, June 13, 2013. Why redistribution alone will never be enough to ensure equity.

Paul Krugman, Sympathy for the Luddites, New York Times, June 14, 2013. Why education can’t be the answer to rising inequality.

Donnie Maclurcan and Jen Hinton, How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-For-Profit World by 2050, Daly News, June 15, 2013. Imagining what might happen if all of us realized that an economic system that concentrates wealth will never be socially and ecologically sustainable.

Need a summer read? A new history of America’s first — and so far only — triumph over plutocracy. NEW AND NOTABLE The Pirates Attacking Our Social SecuritySarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Javier Rojo, Corporate Pirates of the Caribbean: Pro-Austerity CEOs look to Widen Tax Loophole, Institute for Policy Studies, June 12, 2013.Pirates plunder. Pirates don’t pay taxes on their plunder. And pirates love to frolic down Caribbean way.

That’s how pirates operated back in the day. And that’s how pirates operate today. Only back centuries ago pirates brandished gaudy cutlasses. Today’s pirates brandish gaudy cufflinks.

Today’s pirates lead America’s biggest corporations, and these “corporate pirates,” details this new Institute for Policy Studies report, pocket more loot than Blackbeard and his buddies could have ever imagined.

The CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, the IPS report shows, have been parking billions in overseas tax havens throughout the Caribbean. Now they’re “brazenly seeking to widen tax haven loopholes” with a full-court press on behalf of a tax “reform” they call a “territorial tax system.”

This “reform” would permanently exempt the foreign earnings of U.S. corporations from U.S. federal income taxes — and give these firms even more of an incentive to play the accounting games that shift U.S. profits offshore.

The 59 U.S. corporations that belong to “Fix the Debt,” the lobby group pushing for austerity cuts to Social Security, are already shifting plenty. At the end of 2012, the CEOs of these companies had $544 billion in profits sitting overseas, up 15 percent over the $473 billion offshore at the end of 2011.

These profits currently don’t face any U.S. corporate income tax unless they’re brought back stateside. If America’s top CEOs get Congress to swallow a territorial tax system, Corporate Pirates of the Caribbean reveals, their corporations could win “as much as $173 billion in immediate tax windfalls.” Like Too Much?
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JOHN PILGER: One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?” [This is in itself an American Cold War propaganda meme.]

Vietnamese battalion commander Captain Thach Quyen interrogates a captured Viet Cong suspect. The US “satellite armies” are notorious for their villainy and brutality, often outdoing their masters, amply meriting the old appellative, “running dogs of capitalism”. Photo Credit: Huynh Thanh My, 1965 (AP). Online Source: http://digitaljournalist.org/issue9711/req10.htm

What is the secret? It is a question seldom asked in newsrooms, in media colleges, in journalism journals, and yet the answer to that question is critical to the lives of millions of people. On August 24 last year the New York Times declared this in an editorial: “If we had known then what we know now the invasion if Iraq would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by not doing their job and by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and his gang, instead of challenging them and exposing them. What the Times didn’t say was that had that paper and the rest of the media exposed the lies, up to a million people might be alive today.

From our archives—

The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda

The truth about most modern journalism: You first become a career media worker, you start climbing the ladder, and then you prostitute yourself. It’s as common as it’s straightforward.

The following is a transcript of a talk given by John Pilger at Socialism 2007 Conference in Chicago this past June:

The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which is the title of my book, and the book is meant as an antidote to the propaganda that is so often disguised as journalism. So I thought I would talk today about journalism, about war by journalism, propaganda, and silence, and how that silence might be broken. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called “professional journalism” was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment-objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, “entirely bogus”.

For what the public did not know was that in order to be “professional”, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign-you’ll find they’re dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism. I am not suggesting that independent journalism was or is excluded, but it is more likely to be an honorable exception. Think of the role Judith Miller played in the New York Times in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, her work became a scandal, but only after it played a powerful role in promoting an invasion based on lies. Yet, Miller’s parroting of official sources and vested interests was not all that different from the work of many famous Times reporters, such as the celebrated W.H. Lawrence, who helped cover up the true effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945. “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,” was the headline on his report, and it was false.

Consider how the power of this invisible government has grown. In 1983 the principle global media was owned by 50 corporations, most of them American. In 2002 this had fallen to just 9 corporations. Today it is probably about 5. Rupert Murdoch has predicted that there will be just three global media giants, and his company will be one of them. This concentration of power is not exclusive of course to the United States. The BBC has announced it is expanding its broadcasts to the United States, because it believes Americans want principled, objective, neutral journalism for which the BBC is famous. They have launched BBC America. You may have seen the advertising.

The BBC began in 1922, just before the corporate press began in America. Its founder was Lord John Reith, who believed that impartiality and objectivity were the essence of professionalism. In the same year the British establishment was under siege. The unions had called a general strike and the Tories were terrified that a revolution was on the way. The new BBC came to their rescue. In high secrecy, Lord Reith wrote anti-union speeches for the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and broadcast them to the nation, while refusing to allow the labor leaders to put their side until the strike was over.

So, a pattern was set. Impartiality was a principle certainly: a principle to be suspended whenever the establishment was under threat. And that principle has been upheld ever since.

Take the invasion of Iraq. There are two studies of the BBC’s reporting. One shows that the BBC gave just 2 percent of its coverage of Iraq to antiwar dissent-2 percent. That is less than the antiwar coverage of ABC, NBC, and CBS. A second study by the University of Wales shows that in the buildup to the invasion, 90 percent of the BBC’s references to weapons of mass destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them, and that by clear implication Bush and Blair were right. We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by the British secret intelligence service MI-6. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI-6 agents planted stories about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All of these stories were fake. But that’s not the point. The point is that the work of MI-6 was unnecessary, because professional journalism on its own would have produced the same result.

Listen to the BBC’s man in Washington, Matt Frei, shortly after the invasion. “There is not doubt,” he told viewers in the UK and all over the world, “That the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now in the Middle East, is especially tied up with American military power.” In 2005 the same reporter lauded the architect of the invasion, Paul Wolfowitz, as someone who “believes passionately in the power of democracy and grassroots development.” That was before the little incident at the World Bank.

None of this is unusual. BBC news routinely describes the invasion as a miscalculation. Not Illegal, not unprovoked, not based on lies, but a miscalculation.

The words “mistake” and “blunder” are common BBC news currency, along with “failure”-which at least suggests that if the deliberate, calculated, unprovoked, illegal assault on defenseless Iraq had succeeded, that would have been just fine. Whenever I hear these words I remember Edward Herman’s marvelous essay about normalizing the unthinkable. For that’s what media clichéd language does and is designed to do-it normalizes the unthinkable; of the degradation of war, of severed limbs, of maimed children, all of which I’ve seen. One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?”

What is the secret? It is a question seldom asked in newsrooms, in media colleges, in journalism journals, and yet the answer to that question is critical to the lives of millions of people. On August 24 last year the New York Times declared this in an editorial: “If we had known then what we know now the invasion if Iraq would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by not doing their job and by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and his gang, instead of challenging them and exposing them. What the Times didn’t say was that had that paper and the rest of the media exposed the lies, up to a million people might be alive today. That’s the belief now of a number of senior establishment journalists. Few of them-they’ve spoken to me about it-few of them will say it in public.

Ironically, I began to understand how censorship worked in so-called free societies when I reported from totalitarian societies. During the 1970s I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group Charter 77, including the novelist Zdener Urbanek, and this is what he told me. “In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know it’s propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive.”

In modern systems of perfected manipulated consent, the government uses shady public relations techniques to literally sell its policies. While this is not inherently bad in ALL situations, as we may envision a day when convincing the public about the good of certain policies is desirable (i.e., in Afghanistan sending girls to school to learn to read and write), in plutocratic societies such as the US the practice is almost always a sham.

Vandana Shiva has called this subjugated knowledge. The great Irish muckraker Claud Cockburn got it right when he wrote, “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.”

One of the oldest clichés of war is that truth is the first casualty. No it’s not. Journalism is the first casualty. When the Vietnam War was over, the magazine Encounter published an article by Robert Elegant, a distinguished correspondent who had covered the war. “For the first time in modern history,” he wrote, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all on the television screen.” He held journalists responsible for losing the war by opposing it in their reporting. Robert Elegant’s view became the received wisdom in Washington and it still is. In Iraq the Pentagon invented the embedded journalist because it believed that critical reporting had lost Vietnam.

The very opposite was true. On my first day as a young reporter in Saigon, I called at the bureaus of the main newspapers and TV companies. I noticed that some of them had a pinboard on the wall on which were gruesome photographs, mostly of bodies of Vietnamese and of American soldiers holding up severed ears and testicles. In one office was a photograph of a man being tortured; above the torturers head was a stick-on comic balloon with the words, “that’ll teach you to talk to the press.” None of these pictures were ever published or even put on the wire. I asked why. I was told that the public would never accept them. Anyway, to publish them would not be objective or impartial. (sic)

At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this. I too had grown up on stories of the good war against Germany and Japan, that ethical bath that cleansed the Anglo-American world of all evil. But the longer I stayed in Vietnam, the more I realized that our atrocities were not isolated, nor were they aberrations, but the war itself was an atrocity. That was the big story, and it was seldom news. Yes, the tactics and effectiveness of the military were questioned by some very fine reporters. But the word “invasion” was never used. The anodyne word used was “involved.” America was involved in Vietnam. The fiction of a well-intentioned, blundering giant, stuck in an Asian quagmire, was repeated incessantly. It was left to whistleblowers back home to tell the subversive truth, those like Daniel Ellsberg and Seymour Hersh, with his scoop of the My-Lai massacre. There were 649 reporters in Vietnam on March 16, 1968-the day that the My-Lai massacre happened-and not one of them reported it.

In both Vietnam and Iraq, deliberate policies and strategies have bordered on genocide. In Vietnam, the forced dispossession of millions of people and the creation of free fire zones; In Iraq, an American-enforced embargo that ran through the 1990s like a medieval siege, and killed, according to the United Nations Children’s fund, half a million children under the age of five. In both Vietnam and Iraq, banned weapons were used against civilians as deliberate experiments. Agent Orange changed the genetic and environmental order in Vietnam. The military called this Operation Hades. When Congress found out, it was renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, and nothing changed. That’s pretty much how Congress has reacted to the war in Iraq. The Democrats have damned it, rebranded it, and extended it. The Hollywood movies that followed the Vietnam War were an extension of the journalism, of normalizing the unthinkable. Yes, some of the movies were critical of the military’s tactics, but all of them were careful to concentrate on the angst of the invaders. The first of these movies is now considered a classic. It’s The Deerhunter, whose message was that America had suffered, America was stricken, American boys had done their best against oriental barbarians. The message was all the more pernicious, because the Deerhunter was brilliantly made and acted. I have to admit it’s the only movie that has made me shout out loud in a Cinema in protest. Oliver Stone’s acclaimed movie Platoon was said to be antiwar, and it did show glimpses of the Vietnamese as human beings, but it also promoted above all the American invader as victim.

I wasn’t going to mention The Green Berets when I set down to write this, until I read the other day that John Wayne was the most influential movie actor who ever lived. I saw the Green Berets starring John Wayne on a Saturday night in 1968 in Montgomery Alabama. (I was down there to interview the then-infamous governor George Wallace). I had just come back from Vietnam, and I couldn’t believe how absurd this movie was. So I laughed out loud, and I laughed and laughed. And it wasn’t long before the atmosphere around me grew very cold. My companion, who had been a Freedom Rider in the South, said, “Let’s get the hell out of here and run like hell.”

We were chased all the way back to our hotel, but I doubt if any of our pursuers were aware that John Wayne, their hero, had lied so he wouldn’t have to fight in World War II. And yet the phony role model of Wayne sent thousands of Americans to their deaths in Vietnam, with the notable exceptions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Last year, in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the playwright Harold Pinter made an epochal speech. He asked why, and I quote him, “The systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought in Stalinist Russia were well known in the West, while American state crimes were merely superficially recorded, let alone, documented.” And yet across the world the extinction and suffering of countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power. “But,” said Pinter, “You wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” Pinter’s words were more than the surreal. The BBC ignored the speech of Britain’s most famous dramatist.

I’ve made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first was Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia. It describes the American bombing that provided the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot. What Nixon and Kissinger had started, Pol Pot completed-CIA files alone leave no doubt of that. I offered Year Zero to PBS and took it to Washington. The PBS executives who saw it were shocked. They whispered among themselves. They asked me to wait outside. One of them finally emerged and said, “John, we admire your film. But we are disturbed that it says the United States prepared the way for Pol Pot.”

I said, “Do you dispute the evidence?” I had quoted a number of CIA documents. “Oh, no,” he replied. “But we’ve decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator.”

Now the term “journalist adjudicator” might have been invented by George Orwell. In fact they managed to find one of only three journalists who had been invited to Cambodia by Pol Pot. And of course he turned his thumbs down on the film, and I never heard from PBS again. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries and became one of the most watched documentaries in the world. It was never shown in the United States. Of the five films I have made on Cambodia, one of them was shown by WNET, the PBS station in New York. I believe it was shown at about one in the morning. On the basis of this single showing, when most people are asleep, it was awarded an Emmy. What marvelous irony. It was worthy of a prize but not an audience.

Harold Pinter’s subversive truth, I believe, was that he made the connection between imperialism and fascism, and described a battle for history that’s almost never reported. This is the great silence of the media age. And this is the secret heart of propaganda today. A propaganda so vast in scope that I’m always astonished that so many Americans know and understand as much as they do. We are talking about a system, of course, not personalities. And yet, a great many people today think that the problem is George W. Bush and his gang. And yes, the Bush gang are extreme. But my experience is that they are no more than an extreme version of what has gone on before. In my lifetime, more wars have been started by liberal Democrats than by Republicans. Ignoring this truth is a guarantee that the propaganda system and the war-making system will continue. We’ve had a branch of the Democratic party running Britain for the last 10 years. Blair, apparently a liberal, has taken Britain to war more times than any prime minister in the modern era. Yes, his current pal is George Bush, but his first love was Bill Clinton, [one of ] the most violent president of the late 20th century. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown is also a devotee of Clinton and Bush. The other day, Brown said, “The days of Britain having to apologize for the British Empire are over. We should celebrate.”

Like Blair, like Clinton, like Bush, Brown believes in the liberal truth that the battle for history has been won; that the millions who died in British-imposed famines in British imperial India will be forgotten-like the millions who have died in the American Empire will be forgotten. And like Blair, his successor is confident that professional journalism is on his side. For most journalists, whether they realize it or not, are groomed to be tribunes of an ideology that regards itself as non-ideological, that presents itself as the natural center, the very fulcrum of modern life. This may very well be the most powerful and dangerous ideology we have ever known because it is open-ended. This is liberalism. I’m not denying the virtues of liberalism-far from it. We are all beneficiaries of them. But if we deny its dangers, its open-ended project, and the all-consuming power of its propaganda, then we deny our right to true democracy, because liberalism and true democracy are not the same. Liberalism began as a preserve of the elite in the 19th century, and true democracy is never handed down by elites. It is always fought for and struggled for.

A senior member of the antiwar coalition, United For Peace and Justice, said recently, and I quote her, “The Democrats are using the politics of reality.” Her liberal historical reference point was Vietnam. She said that President Johnson began withdrawing troops from Vietnam after a Democratic Congress began to vote against the war. That’s not what happened. The troops were withdrawn from Vietnam after four long years. And during that time the United States killed more people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with bombs than were killed in all the preceding years. And that’s what’s happening in Iraq. The bombing has doubled since last year, and this is not being reported. And who began this bombing? Bill Clinton began it. During the 1990s Clinton rained bombs on Iraq in what were euphemistically called the “no fly zones.” At the same time he imposed a medieval siege called economic sanctions, killing as I’ve mentioned, perhaps a million people, including a documented 500,000 children. Almost none of this carnage was reported in the so-called mainstream media. Last year a study published by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that since the invasion of Iraq 655, 000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the invasion. Official documents show that the Blair government knew this figure to be credible. In February, Les Roberts, the author of the report, said the figure was equal to the figure for deaths in the Fordham University study of the Rwandan genocide. The media response to Robert’s shocking revelation was silence. What may well be the greatest episode of organized killing for a generation, in Harold Pinter’s words, “Did not happen. It didn’t matter.”

Many people who regard themselves on the left supported Bush’s attack on Afghanistan. That the CIA had supported Osama Bin Laden was ignored, that the Clinton administration had secretly backed the Taliban, even giving them high-level briefings at the CIA, is virtually unknown in the United States. The Taliban were secret partners with the oil giant Unocal in building an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. And when a Clinton official was reminded that the Taliban persecuted women, he said, “We can live with that.” There is compelling evidence that Bush decided to attack the Taliban not as a result of 9-11, but two months earlier, in July of 2001. This is virtually unknown in the United States-publicly. Like the scale of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. To my knowledge only one mainstream reporter, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian in London, has investigated civilian casualties in Afghanistan, and his estimate is 20,000 dead civilians, and that was three years ago.

The enduring tragedy of Palestine is due in great part to the silence and compliance of the so-called liberal left. Hamas is described repeatedly as sworn to the destruction of Israel. The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Boston Globe-take your pick. They all use this line as a standard disclaimer, and it is false. That Hamas has called for a ten-year ceasefire is almost never reported. Even more important, that Hamas has undergone an historic ideological shift in the last few years, which amounts to a recognition of what it calls the reality of Israel, is virtually unknown; and that Israel is sworn to the destruction of Palestine is unspeakable.

There is a pioneering study by Glasgow University on the reporting of Palestine. They interviewed young people who watch TV news in Britain. More than 90 percent thought the illegal settlers were Palestinian. The more they watched, the less they knew-Danny Schecter’s famous phrase.

The current most dangerous silence is over nuclear weapons and the return of the Cold War. The Russians understand clearly that the so-called American defense shield in Eastern Europe is designed to subjugate and humiliate them. Yet the front pages here talk about Putin starting a new Cold War, and there is silence about the development of an entirely new American nuclear system called Reliable Weapons Replacement (RRW), which is designed to blur the distinction between conventional war and nuclear war-a long-held ambition.

In the meantime, Iran is being softened up, with the liberal media playing almost the same role it played before the Iraq invasion. And as for the Democrats, look at how Barak Obama has become the voice of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the propaganda organs of the old liberal Washington establishment. Obama writes that while he wants the troops home, “We must not rule out military force against long-standing adversaries such as Iran and Syria.” Listen to this from the liberal Obama: “At moment of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders.”

That is the nub of the propaganda, the brainwashing if you like, that seeps into the lives of every American, and many of us who are not Americans. From right to left, secular to God-fearing, what so few people know is that in the last half century, United States administrations have overthrown 50 governments-many of them democracies. In the process, thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, with the loss of countless lives. Bush bashing is all very well-and is justified-but the moment we begin to accept the siren call of the Democrat’s drivel about standing up and fighting for freedom sought by billions, the battle for history is lost, and we ourselves are silenced.

So what should we do? That question often asked in meetings I have addressed, even meetings as informed as those in this conference, is itself interesting. It’s my experience that people in the so-called third world rarely ask the question, because they know what to do. And some have paid with their freedom and their lives, but they knew what to do. It’s a question that many on the democratic left-small “d”-have yet to answer.

Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all-and I believe that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn’t true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn’t true of the United States.

In all the years I’ve been a journalist, I’ve never known public consciousness to have risen as fast as it’s rising today. Yes, its direction and shape is unclear, partly because people are now deeply suspicious of political alternatives, and because the Democratic Party has succeeded in seducing and dividing the electoral left. And yet this growing critical public awareness is all the more remarkable when you consider the sheer scale of indoctrination, the mythology of a superior way of life, and the current manufactured state of fear.

Why did the New York Times come clean in that editorial last year? Not because it opposes Bush’s wars-look at the coverage of Iran. That editorial was a rare acknowledgement that the public was beginning to see the concealed role of the media, and that people were beginning to read between the lines.

If Iran is attacked, the reaction and the upheaval cannot be predicted. The national security and homeland security presidential directive gives Bush power over all facets of government in an emergency. It is not unlikely the constitution will be suspended-the laws to round up hundreds of thousands of so-called terrorists and enemy combatants are already on the books. I believe that these dangers are understood by the public, who have come along way since 9-11, and a long way since the propaganda that linked Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. That’s why they voted for the Democrats last November, only to be betrayed. But they need truth, and journalists ought to be agents of truth, not the courtiers of power.

I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people’s movement, that monitors, deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity. Such a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known. This is all possible. Silences can be broken. In Britain the National Union of Journalists has undergone a radical change, and has called for a boycott of Israel. The web site Medialens.org has single-handedly called the BBC to account. In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the web-I can’t mention them all here-from Tom Feeley’s International Clearing House, to Mike Albert’s ZNet, to Counterpunch online, and the splendid work of FAIR. The best reporting of Iraq appears on the web-Dahr Jamail’s courageous journalism; and citizen reporters like Joe Wilding, who reported the siege of Fallujah from inside the city.

In Venezuela, Greg Wilpert’s investigations turned back much of the virulent propaganda now aimed at Hugo Chávez. Make no mistake, it’s the threat of freedom of speech for the majority in Venezuela that lies behind the campaign in the west on behalf of the corrupt RCTV. The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground and take it to ordinary people.

We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s. His most recent book is Freedom Next Time.

—FINIS—
© 2007 John Pilger

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The Hack

By Miles Corwin, Columbia Journalism Review

The video on this page offers a textbook example of how far establishment liberals and especially Democratic party apparatchiks are likely to go to defend the status quo. The subject is a tete a tete between MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the wiliest operators at MSNBC, and Glenn Greenwald on the question of NSA’s unwarranted surveillance powers. What makes this video different is that the exchange is analyzed, almost blow-by-blow, by a team of libertarians affiliated with the School Sucks Project, an initiative we are neither implicitly endorsing nor disavowing at this time, as we need more information to take an educated position. As our audience knows, we don’t often use libertarian materials on this site. Fact is, we have little patience with most libertarians’ ahistorical, knee-jerk defense of savage laissez-faire capitalism. But fairness at this extreme hour requires us to say this: while centrist liberals and Democrats have proved once more pathetically useless in standing up for the rights of the masses against the government’s creeping intrusions, and failed to criticize Obama’s escalation of the war in Syria (some, not content with standing silent, like abject Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) have actually joined the Snowden backlash), prominent libertarians like Ron Paul have held true to their antiwar stance, stepping up to denounce the sinister doings of the national security state. There’s a lesson here somewhere, but I’ll delay comment on that. Meantime, tell us what you think. —P. Greanville