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Furnishing the war 
It's an historically-recognized ignominy that in 1898 major American newspapers fanned the flames of war with Spain over Cuba. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer put their competing scandal sheet empires to the purpose of inventing offenses by the Spanish on the Caribbean island. There’s no evidence to support this following particular anecdote-- later popularized by the film Citizen Kane, but the story goes that a bored artist on Hearst’s rolls asked to be returned home from Cuba in 1897, with the missive “There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.” The mogul reportedly denied the man’s request-- as well as his general assessment of the Cuban political situation-- with the volley, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”

The inventions to come included false claims related to Spanish atrocities, in particular the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine. The war made a hero of Theodore Roosevelt, a wave he rode all the way to the U.S. presidency, and it marked the beginning of the U.S. naval fleet as a global power. Print journalism, in its infancy at the time, was not marked by any distinct ethics or standards. Sensation sold papers-- and in cooperation with the power shakers of Washington, sold policy to boot. A later inquiry, far off into the future in 1974, determined that the explosion that sunk the Maine stemmed from an accident on board, not an enemy attack at all, but “Remember the Maine” was a battle cry in print that served to pump up the edgy conflict into full-blown war at the time.

It still occurs that the U.S. government uses tentacles of the dominant media as asset in achieving its aims. At the turn of the 20th century, it was Cuba we wanted. In 2019, it’s Venezuelan oil for the possession and greed of multi-national energy companies. The Nation has published that the U.S. government staged a fraudulent coup d’etat of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in recent days, in hopes that the media reports would encourage Venezuelans to attempt a coup for real, and would also soften-- among Americans-- the hypothetical of U.S. military intervention. Both CNN and the New York Times, ever credulous, took the bait and offered exhaustive coverage of the manufactured incident.

On April 30th, a CNN reporter went on the air and reported that the CIA’s man in Caracas, and the Trump administration’s choice for Venezuelan president, Juan Guaido, was addressing “thousands of supporters” at a military airfield, when in actually he was addressing nobody at all in the staged video, and was not located on occupied military property, but along a highway. The “thousands” of purported military personnel ready to join the coup is now thought to have numbered as few as 30 soldiers.

Shoddy, lazy journalism with little to no standards being applied, along with a plethora of mistakes-- or concerted propaganda funneled through the corporate press from a U.S. intelligence state that has targeted Venezuela’s democratically-elected Socialist government at least as far back as a failed 2002 coup attempt against then-president Hugo Chavez? That’s the question left to be answered. Here’s the published account from The Nation.

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The Worst Democrat 
It’s bad enough that New Jersey congressman Josh Gottheimer is on the take from Israel and Saudi Arabia. He also chides progressive revolutionaries in Congress as the “Herbal Tea Party,” and talks down to colleagues in private meetings where he meets them with binders outlining things they may or may not have ever said publicly. And what we all need to understand about this two-party system that AOC, Tlaib, and Omar are trying to infiltrate is that it would leave corporate Democrats with nowhere to go. Joe Lieberman was forced to become an independent-- which is something the centrists believe only “radicals” should be forced to do. Gottheimer has made his political career lying to-- but relying upon the support of-- self-identified Democrats and so he’s not about to split with the new progressives (that will be soon taking over) and join the Republicans. That’s a branding problem for a former Bill Clinton speechwriter even though that’s the party with which he aligns and to which he should belong. He truly could not be a more of a damaging figure to the future of the Democratic Party and to the cause of progressivism if he were a paid operative of the right, which, I guess, he technically is. The tent’s not large enough for the bank crooks and war profiteers like him and also the people’s advocates. We’ll come to watch it implode.

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Open minds 
Madeleine Pape held bitterness for years over losing to Caster Semenya in track competition at the World Championships in Berlin in 2009. This month, in the Guardian, she issues a mea culpa over her initial feelings of dispossession. She writes…

Quite unexpectedly, I found myself taking a class where I was made to revisit what had unfolded at those championships. For the first time, I encountered the vast literature written by advocates of women’s sport who oppose the exclusion of women athletes with naturally high testosterone for both scientific and ethical reasons: scientifically, because biological sex and athletic ability are both far too complex for scientists to reduce to measures of testosterone, and ethically, because these regulatory efforts have always been characterised by considerable harm to the women athletes singled out for testing. While I was initially confronted and confused by this discovery, I eventually began to question the convictions about fairness and sex difference that I had long held as an athlete. 
Critically, during this time I also befriended some women with high testosterone. Enter another complicating factor: scientific and ethical concerns aside, was I willing to recognise my friends as women outside of sport yet deny them the right to compete alongside me on the track? The short answer, I realised, was no. The issue had shifted from one I could keep at a distance and discuss in the abstract to one that implicated the lives of people I actually knew and cared about.

posted by CM @ 8:13 PM