Israel, Racism, and the Canadian Media

By Dan Freeman-Maloy
Canadian Dimension
2006

In the Canadian media, Israel is provoked, and then responds. For the military attacks on the Gaza Strip in late June and early July, we are told that the provocation was the June 25 operation by Palestinian resistance fighters against a military outpost near Gaza, and specifically the capture of an Israeli tank gunner.

The Palestinian operation, according to most Canadian media, was unprovoked - it could not have been provoked by the Israeli attacks leading up to the operation, though in June alone these had already killed 49 Palestinians. Nor could it have been provoked by the imprisonment of 359 Palestinian children, 105 Palestinian female adults and another 9000+ Arab males (mostly Palestinians) in Israeli jails, or by the mass starvation of Gaza. As a June 30 editorial in the Globe and Mail put it, “the onus for resolving the confrontation lies with Hamas,” and while Palestinians must quietly endure tank shelling, air strikes and starvation, “Israel is within its right to respond to terrorism and violence.”

Without pause, Israel has since gone on to invade Lebanon, killing hundreds of Lebanese, while Gaza continues to starve. In the Canadian media, Israel was provoked to do so, in this case by the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah.

Hizbollah has not been provoked in the same way the Palestinians have been. So what prompted their action? An obvious possibility is that they were moved to action by the Israeli assault on Gaza. By the time Hizbollah carried out its July 12 attack, the Israeli escalation following June 25 had already claimed another 67 Palestinian lives. More direct grievances with Israel include the continued Israeli imprisonment of many Lebanese, particularly Hizbollah supporters, and the Israeli live ammunition training on the Lebanese border which recently killed several Lebanese villagers. But one could barely begin to consider this on the basis of information provided by Canadian media. No attacks on Israel can have been provoked. All of Israel’s attacks must be provoked and defensive.

On July 13, Prime Minister Stephen Harper revealed the extent to which this logic has come to dominate Canadian diplomacy. With the Israeli military intensifying its assault on the Lebanese population and on critical civilian infrastructure, Harper described the massive attack as a “measured” exercise of Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Mainstream media joined in the chorus: “Faced with such aggression, Israel had no choice but to strike back,” a July 15 Globe and Mail editorial declared. The next day, several Canadians were added to the sky-rocketing death count from Israeli massacres.

Israel’s massacres in Gaza and southern Lebanon coincide with a shift in Canadian foreign policy. Under the past two regimes (Martin’s Liberals and now Harper’s Conservatives), Canada has rapidly shed any pretense of having an independent foreign policy and has aligned itself completely with the United States, Israel’s chief financial backer and arms dealer. Where past Canadian regimes would have settled for silent complicity in war crimes, Harper actively cheers and participates in them. This drastic realignment of Canadian policy happens at a time when the U.S. and Israel are embarking on aggressive, criminal wars involving major human rights violations.

For Canadians to accept this, they will have to consume an equally drastic dose of racism, dehumanization, and distorted understanding. Getting them to do so may be somewhat of a challenge. The Canadian media have taken up the task with gusto.

Aggression and defense

“No nation would stand by while its enemies bombarded its towns and cities.” -Globe and Mail Editorial, July 15

Of course, the Globe’s editors were not talking about the Palestinian nation. The Palestinians are expected to stand by while Israel bombards its towns and cities, as it has been doing continuously for the past six years, with a sharp escalation in June - well before June 25, by which time of the month 49 Palestinians had already been killed. But when Palestinians resist through armed struggle, we read on the Globe and Mail’s editorial pages that Israel’s “right to respond to the latest Palestinian provocations is beyond question.” We cannot expect “superhuman effort” from Israel, the editors explain, and this is what would be required “to resist retaliating.”

Through most of June, the situation was quite different - but then it was only Palestinians who were being killed, only Palestinians who were starving. This was, in the words of the Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter, a period of “relative calm.” For disturbing this calm, Palestinians bear a double responsibility: for aggression against Israel, and for forcing Israel to attack Palestinians in response. As Potter insists on repeating, the ongoing Israeli assault was itself “sparked initially by the June 25 capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants.”

In fact, if the notion of self-defense was applied with any consistency, the operation of June 25 would be beyond reproach. Following an economic siege and recurring air strikes on their communities, Palestinian fighters based in the Gaza Strip initiated an attack against the Israeli military. This is no small feat, since Gaza’s airspace and borders are under tight Israeli control, and it is difficult for a lightly armed popular resistance to bring down F-16s. Nonetheless, the fighters managed to tunnel their way underground for hundreds of metres, deep beneath Israeli fortifications, to reach a military outpost for their raid. Two Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting, as were two Palestinians, creating a very rare symmetry in the death count. Palestinian fighters also destroyed an Israeli tank, likely one of those that regularly shell Palestinian communities from such outposts. They captured the tank gunner and brought him back to Gaza as a prisoner of war.

The Palestinian resistance thus had one Israeli detainee, as against some 10,000 prisoners on the Israeli side. The resistance group offered a limited exchange. They would release the tank gunner if Israel freed Palestinian child prisoners, female prisoners, and approximately 1,000 “administrative detainees” currently in Israeli prisons without charge. A negotiated settlement reached through conditions of reciprocity and dignity could well have seen the soldier released. But Israel had a different plan.

As former Israeli intelligence director Shlomo Gazit explained, the situation served as a “pretext” for escalating military operations in Gaza. Israeli forces began a series of forceful incursions, destroying critical civilian infrastructure though air strikes, shelling Palestinian communities, and instituting a comprehensive siege on the territory. These escalations quickly revealed the Israeli goal as regime change. The Israeli military rounded up and detained 64 political leaders from the occupied West Bank and Gaza, including elected legislators and a third of the Palestinian Cabinet. It began aerial bombardment of central civilian structures housing the Palestinian Authority.

The Israeli regime responsible for these attacks enjoys thorough support from the Canadian government. Its Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, visited Canada little more than a year ago. During the visit, he received a pledge from the federal government that it would maintain preferential trade policies towards Israel. Olmert also visited Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty at Queen’s Park, where he helped to set up a parallel provincial trade arrangement. Joking with reporters as he presented McGuinty with a gift, Olmert asked: “Do you want us to hug?”[http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=6122&s=1http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=6122&s=1] Olmert and Canadian officials did everything but.

The Harper government strengthened links with Israel further, making Canada still more complicit in ongoing Israeli crimes. As Israeli attacks ravaged Gaza, journalists with concern for ‘balance’ ought to have paid attention to who was doing the killing and who the victims were.

Instead, Canadian media continued shifting focus to Palestinian culpability and encouraging the government’s pro-Israel partisanship. The spin in news coverage was spelled out explicitly on editorial pages. The Toronto Star’s editors called attention to “the folly of what [Palestinians] wrought by electing a Hamas government,” while staking limited optimism on “the hope of a chastened Palestinian Authority.”(June 29) The editors of the National Post and the Globe and Mail held Palestinians directly responsible for Israeli attacks. “That there is a humanitarian tragedy afflicting the Palestinian people there can be no doubt,” a July 29 National Post editorial conceded, “but in the current context it is a tragedy entirely of their own making.” On June 30, the Globe’s editors hammered away at the same theme: “The main responsibility for the death and destruction that has followed [June 25] lies with Palestinian militants and leaders.”

The capture of a tank gunner as a prisoner of war was translated into an act of aggression, a “kidnapping.” Within a couple of weeks, the three leading Anglo Canadian dailies - the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post - had published the name of the captured (”kidnapped”) soldier more than 100 times, often alongside his age and other personal information. The Globe’s Shira Herzog, reflecting a broad journalistic consensus, explained that strong Israeli retaliation was necessary: Israel “is a country that takes collective pride in the sanctity of every life, an ethos that comforts Israeli soldiers in combat who know that no human effort will be spared to rescue even a single one of them from enemy territory, dead or alive.”

As for the apparent contradiction given Israel’s approach to the lives of Palestinian prisoners, the issue could not be ignored entirely. On the thorny issue of child prisoners, the Globe referred readers to a front-page article on the topic it had published on June 19, titled “Getting locked up to get away from it all.” The piece argued that Palestinian children view imprisonment in Israeli jails as “a dream vacation” and are getting themselves imprisoned willfully as part of a Palestinian cultural trend. Regarding female prisoners, the paper published a June 27 report titled “Palestinian female prisoners have ‘blood on their hands.’” The title was based on a quote from the Israeli prison authority, and the article assured readers that those Palestinian women convicted in Israeli military courts were quite guilty and very bad. The Post, for its part, ran an editorial referring without distinction to all the Palestinians whom the resistance was demanding be released - children, women and “administrative detainees” alike - as “fanatics now justifiably languishing in Israeli prisons.”

Canadian media thus followed the Israeli lead, prizing the sanctity of every Israeli life while holding Palestinian lives in utter contempt.

Dehumanizing Palestinians

“It is our duty to prevent any danger of losing a Jewish majority or creating an inseparable bi-national reality in the Land of Israel.” -Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, June 20, 2006 (Speech to the 35th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem)

As disturbing as it is, contempt for Palestinian life on the part of Israel and its supporters is unsurprising. It is, in fact, a necessary cornerstone of the ideology of political Zionism, which guides the Israeli political establishment and determines the core of Israeli policy.

This policy is based on the determination to establish and maintain a state with a Jewish majority on lands that have long been home to a predominantly non-Jewish native population. Pursuit of this goal has involved expelling Palestinians from these lands, prohibiting their right to return to their homes, and encouraging large-scale Zionist settlement from abroad. This is a recipe for perpetual crisis and violence. Israeli forces effectively control all of historic (mandatory) Palestine, the territory stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And despite Israel’s forced exile of millions of Palestinians from these lands, the present inhabitants of this territory are in the majority not Jewish.

For Canadians to support Israel, they must adopt the Israeli perspective regarding the native population of this land, the view that the Palestinian population is an ethnic imbalance to be corrected, a problem to be dealt with, a “demographic threat” to a state which must be made “Jewish” at all costs. This thoroughly racist position frames mainstream Canadian debate.

It is hardly worth quoting the National Post on this, given that the paper is operated by CanWest Global, a media conglomerate founded by two of Canada’s leading Israel lobbyists (Israel Asper and Gerry Schwartz). But the position holds firm on the liberal wing of the Canadian mainstream.

Consider, for example, the work of Mitch Potter, the Toronto Star’s leading Israel-Palestine pundit in recent weeks. Potter is aware that Gaza is not the planet’s most densely-populated area by accident, but largely as a result of the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the 78% of historic Palestine occupied by Zionist forces in 1948 (when Zionists took their first real stab at achieving a Jewish majority). Some 700,000 Palestinians were then expelled from the territory claimed as the State of Israel, forced into either neighboring countries or the 22% of Palestine still outside of Zionist control (the West Bank and Gaza Strip). With respect to the southern Israeli settlement of Ashkelon, for example, Potter offers the following background: “The modern city was formed by Jewish immigrants to Israel in the site of the Arab town of Al-Majdal, whose 11,000 residents were mostly driven into Gaza after the 1948 war.”

Potter does not even feel it necessary to explain why those driven out cannot return to their homes in accord with the basic, inalienable rights of refugees displaced during wartime. Instead, Potter automatically assumes the Israeli perspective. He correctly explains that the Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza was simply an outgrowth of Israel’s agenda of ethnic and national discrimination. For obvious reasons, Israel has been finding it difficult to deny the indigenous presence on the land it has conquered. This difficulty, Potter explained, was addressed through an effort to permanently exclude the Palestinian refugees of Gaza from dominant settler society: “Analysts spoke of an emerging Israeli consensus that understood a bitter pill had to be swallowed once and for all in order for Israel to cure itself of the demographic realities of the burgeoning Palestinian birth rate.”

This is unabashed racism: the native majority population is described as a disease to be treated by state policy, though even conceding Palestinians a stretch of land to starve on is a “bitter pill.” None of the leading Canadian newspapers published a serious challenge to this racism.

Instead, they repeatedly published the flimsy argument that such a challenge would itself be racist. In a rhetorical sleight of hand that has become quite familiar, commentators repeatedly suggested that basic principles of human and national rights must be sacrificed on the altar of political Zionism, and that defending the rights of Palestinians (particularly those in exile) amounts to anti-Jewish racism. The point was put clearly in a July 3 column in the Globe and Mail: “it’s anti-Semitic to call, as CUPE did [http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/hanieh310506.htmlhttp://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/hanieh310506.html], for an unconditional right of return of all Palestinian refugees, since such a massive demographic change would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.”

The Globe thus tells us that Palestine’s indigenous population is not only inferior and troublesome, but also oppressively racist by its very presence.

From this perspective, contempt for Palestinian life comes all too naturally. On June 29, the National Post, ever a mouthpiece for Israeli diplomacy, addressed the issue through an interview with Israeli foreign and deputy prime minister Tzipi Livni. For Livni, as reporter Douglas Davis uncritically relayed to readers, international contempt for Palestinian life is still insufficient: “She is particularly irritated by the equivalence given to the deaths of Palestinian and Israeli children . ‘Only when the world sends the right message to the terrorists will they understand that it’s not the same.’” Canada’s leading journalists have already gotten the message.

Consider, again, the work of Mitch Potter, who in his recent position as the Toronto Star’s leading Israel-Palestine pundit is a canary in the mineshaft of liberal Canadian racism. On June 30, just one day after the publication of Livni’s anti-”equivalency” plea, Potter made the following assertion: “Despite five days of international headlines there has been but a single death - that of kidnapped 18-year-old Israeli hitchhiker Eliyahu Asheri.”

Apparently, it was not worth counting the two Palestinian children, aged 2 and 17, who were killed on June 28 by an unexploded Israeli shell in the Gaza community of Khan Yunis (though this had even been reported in the New York Times). Nor was it worth retracting or correcting Potter’s statement in light of the Israeli military’s killing of a Palestinian in nearby Rafah at 2am on the morning of the 30th, or of another in the West Bank city of Nablus a little more than 3 hours later (already by 6:13am, Agence France Press had reported the Nablus killing). There were reports of other deaths during this period, which Potter or his editors could easily have investigated if they took Palestinian life seriously.

Evidently, they do not. As the Palestinian death toll mounted in the following week, denying the fatalities outright became untenable. Instead, Potter reduced Palestinian resistance to stubborn stupidity and described the fallen fighters as animals: “Another batch of Palestinian militants drawn out lemming-like and falling by the dozen to higher-calibre Israeli fire, just like their predecessors.” [For Potter to call Palestinians lemmings is certainly ironic].

Falling, he might have added, to U.S. weapons, with the support of Canadian foreign policy and its loyal pundits.

Whitewashing collective punishment

“Hezbollah and Hamas . triggered the current crisis by staging guerrilla raids into Israel” -Toronto Star, July 19 (reporter Less Whittington)

On July 12, Hizbollah, for decades the main southern Lebanese group in resistance to Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed two more on the Israel-Lebanon border. That day, Israel not only killed 23 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but also began to bomb Beirut. Israeli military action against Lebanon swiftly escalated. On July 15, for example, Reuters reported that Israel used loudspeakers to order Lebanese civilians to leave the village of Marwaheen. 20 people, including 15 children, got in a van to leave. Israel then bombed the van, killing them all.

Of all of Israel’s international allies, including the United States, the Harper government was widely regarded as the most outspoken diplomatic supporter of escalating Israeli attacks. For Canadian media, fully accustomed to whitewashing Israeli atrocities, this was only appropriate. Massacres and the war crime of collective punishment were sanitized and reduced to offhand euphemisms: “As in the Palestinian territories,” the Globe’s Orly Halpern reported, “Israel is ratcheting up the pressure on the civilian population in an effort to push the Lebanese to reject Hezbollah tactics.”(July 14)

And as in Palestinian territory, the attacks were a matter of defense. On July 15, the Globe editorialized: “The kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers, in a small country that holds the life of every soldier dear, was a grievous provocation. Coming just weeks after the seizing of another soldier by militants at the other end of the country, it looks like a coordinated campaign of intimidation.”

The imputed “coordinated campaign of intimidation,” which Globe editors disapprove of, is not to be confused with Israel’s “ratcheting up the pressure on the civilian population,” with which the Globe raises only strategic objections.

As Israel continued to kill and starve Palestinians, and as the Lebanese death toll from Israeli massacres mounted into the hundreds (with several Canadians killed in the indiscriminate bombardment), Mitch Potter explained that Palestinians now shared blame for the violence - with Hizbollah: “The words Hamas and Hezbollah may sound equally foreboding to most Western ears. And the militant merger of the two has brought the Middle East to the brink of regional war.” (July 16)

Even for the killing of Canadians, Israeli culpability was sidelined: “Lebanon terror hits home,” read a Toronto Star headline on the topic for July 17; “Canadians were killed in crossfire of fight with Hezbollah,” read another headline, this one from the July 18 issue of the Globe and Mail. In much of the coverage, it was as if Canadians were fleeing a natural disaster, not a campaign of collective punishment fully condoned by the Harper government.

The reliance on Israeli sources became almost comical. By July 19, the Lebanese death count from Israeli massacres had reached 312, with more than 100,000 civilians displaced. As Canadians scrambled to leave Lebanon amidst the Israeli assault, the public relations line of the chief Israeli diplomatic to Canada received the widest possible circulation through a story printed by the Canadian Press. Drawing entirely from unsubstantiated claims, the piece ran with the headline “Canadians fleeing Lebanon could be Hezbollah targets: Israeli ambassador.”

Israel has since pledged to continue its invasion of Lebanon for weeks to come, and both the Canadian government and Canadian media are lining up in support. The Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter continues to get front-page attention for his articles, led by prominent cover references to Lebanese “terror” (July 18) and the suggestion that Hizbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah could be the “next Osama bin Laden” (July 19). Potter’s journalism is shallow public relations, most recently for Israeli assassination efforts against Nasrallah. Potter has described the leader as an eloquent, strategic figure with a mass base for regional resistance to Israel. From his vantage point in “the corridors of power” in Israel, Potter notes that “the strategies for Israeli victory are converging on Nasrallah’s head.”

Israel, while pledging a prolonged attack on Lebanon, has continued its atrocities in Gaza and escalated attacks on the West Bank, with incursions into the Palestinian towns of Nablus (where the Israeli military took over the municipality building, smashed cars and shot indiscriminately at residents’ houses), Tulkarem, Bethlehem and Jenin.

The Harper government’s nearly unconditional support for this Israeli aggression is scandalous, matched only by the media’s support for Harper. On July 20, the Globe and Mail’s editors reaffirmed this. The title of the editorial in ‘Canada’s national newspaper,’ which praised Harper for his “refreshing” pro-Israel diplomacy, conveys the general tone of coverage: “Harper is right on the Mideast.”

Mounting a challenge
There are indications that the Canadian population may be lagging behind the political establishment in its contempt for Palestinians. At the end of 2004, the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC) released polls which offer some hope in this regard. They found that prior to the recent intensification of support for Israel, official Canadian pro-Israel partisanship was opposed by majority public opinion. The polls found that the more Canadians learn about the Israel-Palestine conflict, the more they sympathize with the Palestinian cause.

In recent months, this sympathy has found increasingly organized expression. The past week’s massive demonstrations in Montreal come on the heels of various important displays of regional solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Prominent among these is the decision by the Ontario wing of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE-Ontario), Canada’s largest union of public sector workers, to identify Israel’s regime of systematic ethnic and national discrimination as apartheid, and to join the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until apartheid is dismantled. This movement is continuing to spread, and is picking up momentum within the United Church and elsewhere.

As the Canadian government opts instead for open rejection of the rights of Palestinians (and Lebanese), “Israel advocacy” groups like the Canada-Israel Committee take comfort in support from the mainstream press. When the Harper government became the first of Israel’s allies to support renewed suffocation of the Palestinian economy (in March 2006), CIC communications director Paul Michaels commented happily that the “decision was greeted positively on the editorial pages of most Canadian newspapers.” Again in late June, Canadian media indifference to attacks on Palestinians occasioned the expression of satisfaction on the part of the CIC: “While events on the ground included several Israeli air strikes in which civilians were injured or killed, this week’s media coverage was fairly light.”

With support from the government and the corporate press, Israel’s allies pretend to near universal Canadian representation. They are in turn able to depict Palestine solidarity as a rejection of the popular consensus: “This week,” a Globe article on July 8 declared, “public opinion was inflamed again when, contrary to the outrage [against CUPE for its Palestine work], the Toronto Conference of the United Church of Canada commended CUPE Ontario for its stand, and echoed the union’s call for a boycott of Israeli goods.”

There is no denying the real strength of Canada’s institutional base of support for Israel. However, there is good reason to believe that this does not flow from “popular opinion.” Rather, it results from the eagerness of the Canadian government to harmonize its foreign policy with the U.S., the support of corporate Canada for this agenda, and the strength of Canadian “Israel advocacy” groups which draw support from corporate organization, the United States and Israel itself. Mainstream media are reflecting and shaping the pro-Israel consensus determined by these powerful interests. But they have yet to bring a real public consensus behind them.

In this context, opportunities for a successful challenge to Canadian support for Israel remain very real. But it is only outside of the political establishment that this challenge can be built, and only through alternative information systems that it can be sustained. In any event, it is clear that while genuine awareness of the Israel-Palestine conflict may translate into Palestine solidarity, the mainstream press, far from the solution, is quite near to the core of the problem

Spinning Media for Government

By Chris Raphael
From CorpWatch
2005

A television pundit gets secret payments to promote a new United States government education policy. Columnists are paid to provide support for a White House marriage stance. Actresses play news reporters to promote drug laws. A system of ranking reporters who criticize official policy. These, and possibly many other public relations stunts, are some examples of publicity contracts paid for by the U.S. government, which has spent more than a quarter billion dollars on public relations in the past four years.

For example Armstrong Williams, a conservative African-American broadcaster, was paid $240,000 to produce advertisements on the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and plug the law in his syndicated television broadcasts. (see Leaving Children Behind)

The deal was brokered by Ketchum public relations, a subsidiary of media giant Omnicom, and approved by the U.S. Department of Education (DoE). In addition to the Williams contract, Ketchum was also paid $700,000 to rate media coverage of NCLB and produce video news releases on the law.

When the news of the Williams deal became public, Democratic members of Congress took a look at government contracts with PR firms, and the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform produced some quick but startling numbers. In a January report, the committee found that federal agencies spent more than $250 million on contracts with PR agencies between 2001 and 2004 – nearly twice as much as the $128 million that Clinton spent between 1997 and 2001.

“There used to be a time when our government would let the facts speak for themselves,” lamented Richard Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, during one Congressional debate. “It apparently is the position of the Bush administration that the facts in and of themselves are not articulate.”

Two more questionable examples have cropped up since the Williams flap. Conservative columnists Maggie Gallagher, whose writing is distributed by Universal Press Syndicate (which also publishes the Dear Abby column and comic strips like Doonesbury, Calvin & Hobbes and Garfield) and Mike McManus (whose work appears in over 50 newspapers like the Birmingham News in Alabama) were exposed as having been on the payroll of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Both columnists agreed to work on behalf of the Bush Administration efforts to promote marriage.

While President George Bush officially denounced the practice of government agencies paying commentators, it is yet to be seen whether the scandal will lead to any lasting ethical change on the part of some in the PR industry, where the need to identify political and ideological allies is routine practice, or on the part of the government, which has been historically concerned with the need to flash “positive” messages – and propaganda -- into what they perceive as a negative and hostile media landscape. Ketchum and the DoE, for instance, initially defended the Williams arrangement.

Ranking Reporters
According to the House report, companies owned by New York-based Omnicom have a virtual monopoly -- 89 percent -- of government PR contracts awarded between 2001 and 2004. The company, whose headquarters are on Madison Avenue, the heart of the advertising industry, reeled in $8.6 billion in revenue in 2003 from clients like Kodak, Dow Chemical and Heinz ketchup.

Ketchum held $97 million, one-third of the total, followed by the Matthews Media Group ($52 million), Fleishman-Hillard ($41 million) and Porter Novelli ($33 million).

While it is not known how many of these contracts involve practices such as the Williams deal, the government seems to take the scandal seriously. The list of agencies looking into PR contracts, in one way or the other, includes the Government Accountability Office, the Inspector General, the Federal Communications Commission, Congress and the Pentagon.

Ketchum, which has earned numerous Silver Anvils (the industry’s highest honor) from the Public Relations Society of America as well as a 2002 “Agency of the Year” award from PR Week, the popular industry magazine, initially responded to the incident via a January 13 PR Week editorial by Ray Kotcher, chief executive officer of Ketchum. In the editorial, Kotcher put a positive spin on the scandal, calling it a “transformational event.” He referred to Williams' behavior as "an oversight" and implied that the scandal was politically motivated.

“It is no coincidence that this activity occurred in Washington,” Kotcher wrote, “where political divisiveness is at an all-time high."

He also suggested the rise of punditry had something to do with the whole affair:

“Williams' unusual role as both a pundit and information source – through his ad-production firm – would seem to blur the lines that once so clearly defined journalism and news organizations,” Kothcer wrote. “I'm not sure even the media itself can agree anymore on how to strictly define and distinguish journalists and news organizations.”

As reporters hounded the firm, Ketchum released a later statement saying it had made a “lapse in judgment” -- but didn’t make the statement available on its website, as Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University noted. In his blog, PressThink, Rosen wrote that Ketchum’s site “shows no awareness at all that it is the ‘live’ public face of a company in the news and under pressure from peers. This would be mildly comical in the case of a chemical company. It is more amusing, and ironic in the instance of a public relations agency fighting for its reputation …”

In another curious development, a site on http://www.ketchum.com that touts the virtues of influencing public opinion leaders – through a special tool Ketchum calls “Influencer Relationship Management” – is no longer working.

Snapshots of the site on Wayback Machine (see http://www.archive.org and type in http://www.ketchum.com/IRM in the search bar) describe how the system works by “influencing the influencers.” The premise of Ketchum’s system, described in a press release and in snapshots of the site on Wayback Machine, is that there are a select group of people – such as elite media and analysts -- who mold public opinion. Through an “IRM portal,” clients can view the opinions of these influencers on an “attitude” scale. A snapshot of an “IRM portal” even seems to promise pictures of who these “influencers” are.

The DoE did not return calls seeking comment on whether they had access to the IRM portal, but Ketchum’s work for the DoE did entail identifying the reporters who routinely covered the NCLB Act, and ranking their stories.

According to documents obtained by People for the American Way, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit, Ketchum produced benchmark media analyses for the DoE showing how different newspapers and reporters in different states covered the NCLB Act. Stories were rated on a scale of 0 to 100 (with 100 being an “ideal media mention”), though some stories – “to allow for negative press,” as Ketchum put it -- earned marks less than zero.

Positive marks were given to stories that, among other things, mentioned that NCLB would "hold schools accountable for student's success," would "close the achievement gap," or generally mentioned that the Bush administration or the Republican party was "committed to education." Negative marks were given to stories which mentioned that 100 percent compliance with NCLB would be unrealistic, that the program is not properly funded, or that the Bush administration was interfering with state education duties.

The media analyses went on to rate the stories of reporters who covered NCLB most often. Low-ranked stories included few positive messages or else quoted NCLB critics, such as the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers. An op-ed by former Education Secretary Rod Paige earned the highest marks. The lowest marks? In one instance, Kenneth Remsen, a school principal who wrote a column for Vermont’s Burlington Free Press, received a mark of -70 for containing “12 negative messages” in an article Ketchum described as “creative conceit.”

This type of ranking isn't new. Former Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary found herself in a major flap in 1995, when it was revealed the Department of Energy hired a public relations firm to rank newspapers and reporters on department coverage. Today, it appears to have become standard practice within many PR firms.

"They [government agencies] can develop any kind of assessment they want," says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She doesn't see the practice of ranking reporters or news coverage as problematic -- unless it leads government agencies to deny reporters access. She noted the case of Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, who has directed his staff and 19 state agencies to stop speaking with two reporters from the Baltimore Sun.

Kevin Elliott, manager of PR giant Hill & Knowlton's San Francisco office, said ratings of media coverage are often produced because, from a public relations perspective, “it’s important to know which reporters to reach out to on a story.”

“A reason an organization might want to rank reporters is to track things like bias, accuracy…to see if the reporter understood the issue and had all the information,” said Mark Weiner, chief executive officer of Delahaye Medialink Worldwide, a media marketing and research firm. Technologies such as news database Lexis-Nexis, he added, have made the news-crunching task easier to perform.

The DoE did not return calls or an e-mail seeking comment, but told the Associated Press that the rankings did not influence how the department treated reporters. The Government Accountability Office is reportedly looking into how the ratings were used.

Reporter Greg Toppo of USA Today, which originally broke the Armstrong Williams story with a Freedom of Information Act request, said he had “no idea” what the DoE “was trying to accomplish.” In one analysis Ketchum produced, Toppo was given a score of 2 points for six articles that he produced between April and June of 2003 on NCLB. George Archibald of The Washington Times received a score of -2 points – “and he’s been generally supportive of NCLB, so the rankings don’t make much sense,” Toppo said.

“I was told that reporters who scored low would be targeted for some type of ‘re-education’ on NCLB, but no one ever contacted me,” Toppo said.

He also noted that the rankings didn’t lead to any kind of denial of access from the DoE -- but access, he said, “was pretty poor to begin with.”

Triangle of Silence
Omnicom, which holds 1,500 subsidiary agencies in public relations, advertising and other media industries, was also silent. A spokesperson in their New York office would only say that Ketchum was bound by Omnicom’s code of conduct, and referred all other calls to Ketchum, which did not return numerous calls and e-mails from CorpWatch. Ketchum has also referred other reporters to the DoE. But the DoE – which has defended the Williams arrangement while simultaneously pledging to get to the bottom of it – also did not return calls for comment.

Jack O’Dwyer, whose PR news website http://www.odwyerpr.com has been reporting on the Williams scandal, said he and his site have been playing the role of a default PR firm for Ketchum and Omnicom. He says has been handling media calls for the company – “supplying basic information, documents, and background including the history of PR and the major trends of the past few decades.” The companies might think twice about letting O’Dwyer handle their PR: He isn’t putting a positive spin on things, harrying both Ketchum and Omnicom in editorials such as “Heads Should Roll.”

PR Industry Denounces Ketchum
While the responses from Ketchum and Omnicom to the scandal were muted, the outcry from some in the PR industry itself was unequivocally clear. Richard Edelman, chief executive officer of Edelman Worldwide, the largest independent public relations firm, called the Williams incident “profoundly depressing.” He noted in his blog that advertising pays for space -- but PR “is supposed to earn it.”

“We are being asked to believe that the problem is convergence," Edelman continued, "that the blurring of the lines between advertising and PR is a function of technology and immediate access to information.” He disagreed with this rational, adding, “the response from several key members of the PR establishment is frankly very disappointing.”

Elliot Sloane, chief executive officer of Sloane & Company public relations, wrote that he withdrew his firm’s membership in the Council of Public Relations Firms after he said the agency laid the blame at Williams’ feet. Sloane called the response “tepid” and “apologetic,” although the Council has since said the kind of arrangement Ketchum had with Williams was “unacceptable.”

The Williams scandal comes at a bad time for the PR industry, which is under pressure from Wall Street to meet monthly financial goals and needs to “produce results almost immediately,” according to Judith Phair, president of the Public Relations Society of America.

At the same time, the industry is dealing with two major over-billing trials involving government agencies. In Los Angeles, John Stodder, a former Fleishman-Hillard senior vice president, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly helping to submit false bills that defrauded $250,000 from the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, which held a $3 million annual contract with Fleishman-Hillard. Stodder has pled not guilty to numerous counts of wire fraud.

Elsewhere, in New York, a trial is underway in which two Ogilvy & Mather employees – Shona Seifert and Thomas Early -- have been accused of helping over-bill PR work to disguise a $3 million shortfall in labor costs on an account for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The government settled a civil case against the firm in 2002 for $1.8 million.

Ketchum’s video news releases (VNRs)

Kechum's VNRs on the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) were found to be “covert propaganda” in a 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Ketchum hired a sub-contractor to produce VNRs for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) in the Health and Human Services Department.

VNRs provide video footage, graphics and audio edited together into a package directly to television stations in a manner that allows them to easily pick any of the component elements and create their own story.

The VNRs even featured a “reporter” – Karen Ryan – who was actually a public relations professional, and the releases contained “a favorable report on the effects [of the law] on Medicare beneficiaries.” Some broadcast stations ran the story unedited.

The GAO determined that although the videos were clearly labeled, the news story inside was produced in such a way that television viewers could not distinguish the “source” of the news. “The entire story package was developed with appropriated funds but [is made to] appear to be an independent news story,” the GAO wrote.

The GAO previously found that video news releases produced for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) were also propaganda. While both agencies have discontinued their use of the VNRs, the Health and Human Services Department continues to use them, said Bill Pierce, an HHS spokesperson.

“We can’t be responsible for journalistic ethics,” he said. Pierce added that HHS was keeping the GAO findings in mind, though the GAO report didn’t have a “dramatic” effect on the way the department used video releases.

“It’s kind of a dead letter,” said ONDCP spokesperson Tom Riley of the January GAO report which referred to the agency’s VNRs as propaganda. “We stopped doing VNRs last year, haven’t done any since then, and have no plans to use them in the future.”

French Protest Job Bill

By Jennifer Barnett
From Political Affairs Magazine

After a weekend of protests in which 1.5 million people took to the streets, French labor unions are preparing for a general strike in response to what they call a dangerous and disturbing new law.

The law would allow employers to fire people under age 26 without cause within two years of being hired. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin claims it will ease youth unemployment. But student and labor groups say it will aggravate the problem and allow employers to treat young workers like trash.

The youth unemployment rate in France is 23 percent, more than double the general jobless rate. In the poorest areas youth joblessness is as high as 50 percent.

France’s current, long-standing labor law allows employers just a few months to terminate a new employee without giving a reason. After that, the law sets strict standards for firing employees. Opponents of the so-called “first jobs contract” (CPE) have nicknamed it the “Kleenex contract” because of the disposable workforce it would create.

The new law is to be enacted when signed by President Jacques Chirac next month.

Unions have called for a national day of strike actions on March 28 to protest the plan. Bolstered by this support, student groups called for more large-scale protests March 21 and 23.

Public figures joining protests in 150 cities on March 18 included Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, Socialist Party leader François Hollande, former culture minister Jack Lang and Communist Party leader Marie-George Buffet.

The protest in Paris was marred by minor violence, in which a small number of demonstrators set fire to a police car. In response, police fired tear gas into the crowd. By and large the march was peaceful, though, with a festive atmosphere.

Carole Cases, a nurse who participated in the protest with two of her children, told The New York Times, “I’m sick and tired of all these phony contracts and I want to protect my children’s future. They’re trying to dupe the young.”

Many were upset with the quickness with which the measure passed through the Parliament. Bruno Julliard, a leader of the national student group UNEF, said the government “imposed the jobs plan without consulting anyone.” He said the government only agreed to talks after the large demonstrations. UNEF, in turn, has refused to join talks until the contract is withdrawn.

De Villepin was expected to offer an amended version of the contract, possibly requiring a justification for firing or shortening the trial period during which the young worker could be fired. He has said publicly that he will stand by the law and that it will not be withdrawn.

The CGT, France’s largest union federation, said in a March 21 statement, “This measure, ineffective for employment, offers employers a new means of pressuring employees to renounce most of their rights under the penalty that they will be pushed out the door: it is a welcome to unpaid additional hours, worsened work conditions, lower salaries, sick days not respected, scorned dignity, etc.”

According to the federation, 75 percent of the population wants the CPE to be withdrawn. CGT leader Bernard Thibault said, “If this momentum continues, I think we will quickly get the withdrawal.”

In a January statement, the Communist Party of France stated its opposition to the CPE. Instead, the party proposed “a large progressive reformation of the labor code, aiming for job security … and income for all.” The statement also called for businesses to be socially responsible.

In addition to the planned labor strikes, UNEF has led student strikes at a number of universities. Student groups also worry that the CPE would make housing problems worse for young workers. Many landlords won’t rent to young workers because of their precarious financial situation.

“There is a big housing crisis in France. With this contract, no young workers will be able to get an apartment,” said Julie Coudry, president of the Student Confederation.

The new law is seen as part of pro-corporate “structural reforms” called for by international financial institutions. European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said March 20 it was absolutely necessary for European governments to conduct such “reforms.”



Humiliation for French Government

By Caroline Wyatt
From BBC News

Trade unions and protesters in France are claiming victory after the French government performed a complete U-turn on its controversial youth jobs law.

On Monday, the French government said it would withdraw the law, which would have allowed employers to sack anyone under the age of 26 within the first two years of their employment.

The measure had provoked weeks of protests, until finally, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin conceded defeat and said he would find other ways of reducing the numbers of young jobless.

This was a humiliating climbdown for Mr de Villepin, who had staked his political reputation on pushing through what initially seemed like a minor reform to a wider law on equal job opportunities for the disadvantaged.

Vociferous anger
The youth jobs law, the CPE, was aimed at helping youngsters in the troubled suburbs find jobs, after anger over high unemployment exploded into rioting last November.

Yet these reforms unleashed almost equally vociferous anger across France, from mainly middle-class students who feared their future job security - and the jobs for life many of their parents had enjoyed - was being fatally undermined by the French government.

Over the past months, the French trade unions called out millions onto the streets in support of the students, with the demonstrations culminating in what the unions claimed were three million people marching in protest last week, though the police put the figure at half that number.

On this issue, the unions found a new voice, ultimately forcing President Jacques Chirac to back down - and Mr de Villepin with him. On Monday, Mr de Villepin did his best to paint this climbdown as the actions of a government and a prime minister listening to the French people.

'Deep anxiety'
"I wanted to act fast on joblessness, because the dramatic situation and the despair of many young people made it vital," he said.

"Initially, I wanted to put forward a strong solution. Not everyone understood that, and I regret it. The dialogue is now open and we should not close it again. This crisis reveals a deep anxiety in France, as much as a desire for modernisation."

Yet student leaders Victor Vidilles and Nabila Ramdani say Mr de Villepin's withdrawal of the law was only a first step, with more student protests planned for Tuesday to keep up the pressure on the French government as it formulates a new proposal this week. "It's not enough because there is still a high unemployment rate in France," said Mr Vidilles.

"We have to be extremely vigilant, and make sure that the government helps everyone - not just students - overcome the serious problem of unemployment here."

Ms Ramdani was more optimistic, though still guarded. "This is the first battle we have won, but not the whole war," she tells me outside Place de la Sorbonne, which is still fenced off by French police guarding the square against further student sit-ins. "We want to know exactly what proposals will be put forward by the government - and now that a real dialogue is possible, to discuss exactly what future the government can offer to young people."


The French prime minister's own future, however, is now in some doubt. Dominique de Villepin had wanted to show that he was a strong leader, who could push through reform in order to be seen as a serious presidential candidate for the right next year.

With this U-turn, almost all hope of that has now disappeared - along with any belief that Mr Chirac might use the final year of his presidency to try to reform the French economy and to liberalise France's labour market, as many on the right in France believe is necessary.

'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate

By Naomi Klein
From The Nation

It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George W. Bush's second term, and an announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location. But what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City.
It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We do torture."

It is here in Panama and, later, at the school's new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found. According to declassified training manuals, SOA students--military and police officers from across the hemisphere--were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since migrated to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximize shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation," humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions--and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment."

Some of the Panama school's graduates returned to their countries to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners, the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador and military coups too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that choosing Panama to declare "We do not torture" is a little like dropping by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United States a nation of vegetarians.

And yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the sordid history of its location. How could they? To do so would require something totally absent from the current debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials long predates the Bush Administration and has in fact been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam War.

It's a history that has been exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his upcoming book A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesizes this unwieldy cache of evidence, producing an indispensable and riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture," based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training programs.

It's not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples"--so too do many of torture's most prominent opponents. Apparently forgetting everything they once knew about US cold war misadventures, a startling number have begun to subscribe to an antihistorical narrative in which the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11, 2001, at which point the interrogation methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing recently in Newsweek on the need for a ban on torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them." It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had already launched the Phoenix program and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more than twenty thousand suspects and tortured thousands more," a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from press reports as well as Congressional and Senate probes.

Does it somehow lessen the horrors of today to admit that this is not the first time the US government has used torture to wipe out its political opponents--that it has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, at home, photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November 8 Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now." Molly Ivins, expressing her shock that the United States is running a prison gulag, wrote that "it's just this one administration...and even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Dick Cheney." And in the November issue of Harper's, William Pfaff argues that what truly sets the Bush Administration apart from its predecessors is "its installation of torture as integral to American military and clandestine operations."

Pfaff acknowledges that long before Abu Ghraib, there were those who claimed that the School of the Americas was a "torture school," but he says that he was "inclined to doubt that it was really so." Perhaps it's time for Pfaff to have a look at the SOA textbooks coaching illegal torture techniques, all readily available in both Spanish and English, as well as the hair-raising list of SOA grads.

Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by crying "Never Before"? I suspect it has to do with a sincere desire to convey the seriousness of this Administration's crimes. And the Bush Administration's open embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented--but let's be clear about what is unprecedented about it: not the torture but the openness. Past administrations tactfully kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were practiced in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush Administration has broken this deal: Post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimized by new definitions and new laws.

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush Administration's real innovation has been its in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons and transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure from clandestine etiquette, more than the actual crimes, that has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms: By daring to torture unapologetically and out in the open, Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability.

For those nervously wondering if it is time to start using alarmist words like totalitarianism, this shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and when those responsible merely deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man"; soon enough, victims no longer bother to search for justice, so sure are they of the futility (and danger) of that quest. This impunity is a mass version of what happens inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them.

In Latin America the revelations of US torture in Iraq have not been met with shock and disbelief but with powerful déjà vu and reawakened fears. Hector Mondragon, a Colombian activist who was tortured in the 1970s by an officer trained at the School of the Americas, wrote: "It was hard to see the photos of the torture in Iraq because I too was tortured. I saw myself naked with my feet fastened together and my hands tied behind my back. I saw my own head covered with a cloth bag. I remembered my feelings--the humiliation, pain." Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was brutally tortured in a Guatemalan jail, said, "I could not even stand to look at those photographs...so many of the things in the photographs had also been done to me. I was tortured with a frightening dog and also rats. And they were always filming."

Ortiz has testified that the men who raped her and burned her with cigarettes more than 100 times deferred to a man who spoke Spanish with an American accent whom they called "Boss." It is one of many stories told by prisoners in Latin America of mysterious English-speaking men walking in and out of their torture cells, proposing questions, offering tips. Several of these cases are documented in Jennifer Harbury's powerful new book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way.

Some of the countries that were mauled by US-sponsored torture regimes have tried to repair their social fabric through truth commissions and war crimes trials. In most cases, justice has been elusive, but past abuses have been entered into the official record and entire societies have asked themselves questions not only about individual responsibility but collective complicity. The United States, though an active participant in these "dirty wars," has gone through no parallel process of national soul-searching.

The result is that the memory of US complicity in far-away crimes remains fragile, living on in old newspaper articles, out-of-print books and tenacious grassroots initiatives like the annual protests outside the School of the Americas (which has been renamed but remains largely unchanged). The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the current torture debate is that in the name of eradicating future abuses, these past crimes are being erased from the record.

Every time Americans repeat the fairy tale about their pre-Cheney innocence, these already hazy memories fade even further. The hard evidence still exists, of course, carefully archived in the tens of thousands of declassified documents available from the National Security Archive. But inside US collective memory, the disappeared are being disappeared all over again.

This casual amnesia does a profound disservice not only to the victims of these crimes but also to the cause of trying to remove torture from the US policy arsenal once and for all. Already there are signs that the Administration will deal with the current torture uproar by returning to the cold war model of plausible deniability. The McCain amendment protects every "individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government"; it says nothing about torture training or buying information from the exploding industry of for-profit interrogators. And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over to Iraqi death squads, trained by US commanders like Jim Steele, who prepared for the job by setting up similarly lawless units in El Salvador.

The US role in training and supervising Iraq's Interior Ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently discovered in a Ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off. "Look, it's a sovereign country. The Iraqi government exists," Rumsfeld said. He sounded just like the CIA's William Colby, who when asked in a 1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix--a program he helped launch--replied that it was now "entirely a South Vietnamese program."

And that's the problem with pretending that the Bush Administration invented torture. "If you don't understand the history and the depths of the institutional and public complicity," says McCoy, "then you can't begin to undertake meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond to pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture apparatus--closing a prison, shutting down a program, even demanding the resignation of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But, McCoy says, "they will preserve the prerogative to torture."

The Center for American Progress has just launched an advertising campaign called "Torture is not US." The hard truth is that for at least five decades it has been. But it doesn't have to be.

20 Stories That Made A Difference For Better Or Worse

By Steve Rendall, Peter Hart and Julie Hollar
From Extra!/F.A.I.R
2006

FAIR was founded on the belief that journalism matters—that getting out the truth can improve the world, while news that distorts or denies reality can have terrible consequences.

To illustrate this conviction, we've compiled a list of 20 news stories published since FAIR's 1986 debut that had a major impact on society—for good or for ill. The list is not meant to be a comprehensive collection of the most momentous stories of the past 20 years, but rather to be illustrative of the power of media. Stories that should have led to serious changes, but were underplayed by corporate media, would be an entirely different list, of course.

1. The Contra Resupply Network

The Reagan administration's secret support for Nicaragua's Contras unraveled in 1986 when the Associated Press published stories (e.g., 10/8/86, 10/19/86, 10/27/86) revealing White House links to illegal resupply flights. The Contras, a rebel army created, funded and directed by the CIA, killed thousands of Nicaraguan civilians in a war to bring down the left-leaning, democratically elected Sandinista government. Through interviews and the examination of the log books from a CIA plane shot down by Sandinista forces in October 1986, AP reporter Robert Parry exposed the "Contra" side of the story that would soon be known as the Iran-Contra scandal.

2. The Iranian Arms-for-Hostages Deal

Days after AP's Contra revelations, the "Iran" side of Iran-Contra emerged as the Lebanese weekly Ash Shirra (11/3/86) revealed that the U.S. was secretly selling arms to Iran in hopes of getting U.S. hostages released by pro-Iran militants in Lebanon. The story infuriated President Ronald Reagan, who denied the U.S. was trading arms for hostages and lashed out at the press for spoiling what the White House depicted as an innocent diplomatic effort (Washington Post, 12/1/86): "What is driving me up the wall is that this wasn't a failure until the press got a tip from that rag in Beirut and began to play it up. . . . The press has to take responsibility for what they have done.''

But Reagan's defiance disappeared when digging by U.S. reporters, such as the Washington Post's David Hoffman (11/14/86, 11/16/86), contradicted the White House claims, ultimately revealing that the White House was funneling profits from the Iranian arms sales to the Contras. Iran-Contra, the largest of the Reagan White House's many scandals, would result in more than a dozen indictments and nine convictions.

3. Redlining

"Whites receive five times as many home loans from Atlanta's banks and savings and loans as blacks of the same income," the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution declared on May 1, 1988, "and that gap has been widening each year, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution study of $6.2 billion in lending shows."

So began Bill Dedman's lengthy Pulitzer Prize–winning series, which stands as a testament to the power of first-rate investigative journalism that sets out to measure and document social inequality.

Over four days, the paper detailed its community's discriminatory and illegal lending practices, known as "redlining." The local response was swift: "Within a week, Atlanta's nine largest banks and savings and loans announced they would lend $65 million at interest rates as low as the prime rate for home purchases and home improvements, mostly on the black Southside," the Austin Business Journal reported (2/19/90).

The stories reverberated throughout the country, eliciting calls for a Justice Department inquiry and a Senate Banking Committee investigation. As noted by the Columbia Journalism Review (3–4/95), Dedman's reporting changed the way lending institutions report loan data—a boon to investigators of all sorts, including other reporters.

But as Dedman noted in the documentary Fear and Favor in the Newsroom, some board members at Cox Newspapers, the Journal-Constitution's parent company, were unhappy with the series, feeling that it could harm the paper's advertising base—and the board members' own relationships with the local banking industry.

4. Civil Rights Era Crimes

Jerry Mitchell, a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, began to seriously investigate unsolved civil rights crimes after watching the film Mississippi Burning. His subsequent reporting has led to criminal prosecutions in some of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era.

Mitchell, for example, tracked down secret documents (10/1/89) that would eventually lead to the arrest of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Mitchell's investigation (beginning on 12/27/98) into the famous 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner led to the indictment and arrest of Edgar Ray Killen, a key figure in the crime who, according to Mitchell's reporting, whould have been behind bars 30 years ealier on the basis of confessions from two of Killen's co-conspirators.

And Mitchell revealed (7/4/99) that a suspect in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama church—which killed four young African-American girls—had provided authorities with a bogus alibi. "For three and a half decades, his alibi had gone unchallenged," Mitchell told American Journalism Review (4–5/05). "It was just Reporting 101."

5. The Kuwaiti Incubators

In the autumn of 1990, a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times (9/17/90) gave a harrowing report of the atrocities being committed by the Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait: "In one case, refugees reported that incubators for premature babies were confiscated by Iraqi troops and the babies inside were piled on the floor and left to die." The Times directly prefaced this with the information that "Western officials" were saying that many of the atrocities "appeared to be well-documented and supported by enough eyewitness accounts that they could be considered true."

A week later, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland repeated the tale (9/25/90), but the story wouldn't reach its full potential until October 10, when a 15-year-old girl calling herself "Nayirah" told a U.S. congressional caucus: "I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor." Excerpts of Nayirah's address ended up on Larry King Live (10/16/90) and the incubator story flourished in the press (e.g., USA Today, 10/11/90; AP, 10/15/90). President George H.W. Bush cited the incubator claim at least 10 times in his successful attempt to rally Americans and prospective allies to war against Iraq.

There is no doubt that Iraqis committed atrocities in Kuwait, but the incubator story was a hoax. Reporting by Alexander Cockburn (The Nation, 2/4/91), ABC reporter John Martin (World News Tonight, 3/15/91) and John R. MacArthur (Second Front) would show that the incubator stories were fabricated, and Nayirah al-Sabah, in truth the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, was working with public relations giant Hill & Knowlton to agitate for a U.S. war against Iraq.

But a successful hoax it was. In a segment critical of the incubator claims, CBS's 60 Minutes (1/19/92) described Nayirah's story as the "one image, one presence [that] touched American hearts and minds like no other."

6. The Rodney King Video

If George Holliday hadn't shot home video footage of Los Angeles police officers beating an African-American motorist following a high-speed chase, Rodney King would be just another unknown victim of police brutality.

But Holliday's oft-aired footage—first played in its nine-minute-plus entirety over local station KTLA (3/4/91)—turned the event into an iconic moment that focused widespread attention on King's mistreatment and the larger issue of police abuses. When the officers were acquitted on state charges despite the evidence of the tapes, the verdict sparked the L.A. riots (Extra!, 7–8/92) and provoked examination of racism in the criminal justice system. Holliday's video also encouraged an activist movement for grassroots newsgathering and monitoring of police agencies.

7. The Dili Massacre

Following the U.S.-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, U.S. news media maintained a virtual blackout for over 15 years about the occupation and the atrocities occurring in the tiny island country (Extra!, 11–12/93). But in 1991, three journalists forced East Timor back on the media map and into the public consciousness.

On November 12, Allan Nairn of the New Yorker, Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio and British filmmaker Max Stahl attended a peaceful funeral procession in the East Timorese capital of Dili that turned deadly when Indonesian military opened fire on the crowd and killed more than 250. Nairn and Goodman were beaten but managed to escape, as did Stahl, and their eyewitness reports and video of the massacre alerted the Western world to the dire situation in East Timor, sparking a grassroots movement opposing U.S. support for the Indonesian occupation.

Though the mainstream media's newfound attention to East Timor was initially slight, Goodman and Nairn continued to doggedly pursue the story throughout the '90s, with Nairn repeatedly returning to East Timor to file reports despite an Indonesian order barring his entry. His reporting helped to keep the story on the radar, and in 1999, the U.S. finally suspended all military ties with Indonesia, which promptly pulled out from East Timor.

8. Whitewater

New York Times investigative reporter Jeff Gerth (3/8/92) broke the Whitewater "scandal" with the front-page report, "Clintons Joined S&L Operator in an Ozark Real-Estate Venture." The piece, long on insinuation and short on evidence, suggested that Bill and Hillary Clinton traded regulatory favors for a sweetheart deal on a piece of Arkansas real estate known as Whitewater.

The piece was notable for withholding exculpatory information, like the fact that the S&L regulator supposedly appointed as a favor to S&L executive Jim McDougal actually tried to shut down his business. (See Extra!, 11–12/96.) As Gene Lyons, an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist and strong critic of the Times' Whitewater reporting, explained it in his book Fools for Scandal, the public never understood Whitewater because it was "a shaggy dog story"—a tale whose needless complexity conceals its pointlessness.

Nevertheless, Gerth's reporting spawned a cottage industry in Whitewater-related scandals that would eventually lead to Clinton being impeached on oral sex–related charges. As for Whitewater itself, the Clintons were cleared of any wrongdoing—after the Office of the Independent Council had spent 10 years and $73 million (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 3/27/02).

9. USAID Exporting Jobs

Conventional wisdom tells us that journalists should not be advocates. But sometimes great journalism is uncovered first by social justice activists. In 1992, Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee went to several corporate media outlets to share the story he'd uncovered: how the U.S. government was actively luring U.S. companies to move their manufacturing out of the United States.

The program was largely the work of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which provided tax breaks and low-interest loans to companies that would move jobs to Central America. The story broke on CBS's 60 Minutes (9/27/92), and included Kernaghan and two other men posing as officials from a bogus textile company. Their hidden cameras recorded a meeting with a USAID official who touted the many virtues of moving production to Honduras.

The story continued the next day in the Los Angeles Times (9/28/92), with the paper crediting Kernaghan ("an intense young union official") for much of the original research. A night later, the story was reprised on ABC's Nightline (9/29/92).

The timing of the story was key, as the country faced the lingering effects of recession and unemployment. As CBS reporter Ed Bradley asked a USAID official, "Do you think that it is in our national interest to create jobs in Central America through U.S. taxpayer money?" The USAID issue became part of the jobs debate that helped swing the 1992 presidential election. Kernaghan went on to generate another iconic moment for the anti-sweatshop movement when popular TV personality Kathie Lee Gifford cried on television (New York Daily News, 5/1/96) in response to his 1996 congressional testimony revealing that her clothing line was manufactured by children in Honduras.

10. The Bell Curve

Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's 1994 book The Bell Curve did not burst into the public consciousness based on new information or scholarly merit—indeed, the book attempted to recast old, discredited eugenic theories about the inferiority of the poor and non-white—but rather because many prestigious media outlets embraced it. New York Times science writer Malcolm Browne gave it a near-rave review (10/16/94), insisting that the authors were "recognized by colleagues as serious scholars." The Bell Curve, wrote Browne, "makes a strong case that America's population is becoming dangerously polarized between a smart, rich, educated elite and a population of unintelligent, poor and uneducated people." (See Extra! Update, 12/94.)

Respectful treatment by the Times helped set the tone for other media coverage that would follow. And follow it did. The New Republic devoted nearly an entire issue to a debate about the book (10/31/94), with editor Andrew Sullivan justifying the decision by writing, "The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief." As Extra! pointed out at the time (1–2/95), "In fact, the idea that some races are inherently inferior to others is the definition of racism."

The Bell Curve received prominent and serious coverage on such public affairs programs as Nightline (10/21/94), the McLaughlin Group (10/21/94) and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (10/28/94). The "controversy" also made the cover of Newsweek (10/24/94), while it took up nearly a full op-ed page in the Wall Street Journal (10/10/94).

These discussions were largely uninformed by the considered opinions of scientists in the field, and this was by design: Flouting scientific convention, the authors purposely avoided sending galleys to potentially critical readers. When The Bell Curve was finally scrutinized by scientific experts, it was nearly universally panned for shoddy and biased research (Slate, 1/18/97).

But it was too late to counteract the message put forth by the book's media supporters that racism is a legitimate intellectual position. As Murray wrote in a proposal for the book (New York Times Magazine, 10/9/94), there are "a huge number of well-meaning whites who fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say."

11. Death Row Exonerations

In 1996, four African-American men—two of whom were awaiting execution—were released from an Illinois prison after their wrongful convictions were overturned in court. The men had been found guilty of murdering a young couple in 1978. What made their story remarkable was the fact that the move to exonerate the Ford Heights Four was largely the work of journalism students (aided by an earlier investigation by the magazine Chicago Lawyer—7/92). The three students and their Northwestern University journalism professor, David Protess, would soon become the focus of worldwide media exposure.

About one year after Northwestern students were instrumental in exonerating yet another death row prisoner, Illinois Gov. George Ryan in February 2000 announced a death penalty moratorium. Similar hesitations about the death penalty among political elites across the country can be traced in part to the Northwestern students' work.

The fact that Protess was teaching his students about the real-world impact of investigative journalism was not universally appreciated. When several of Protess' students worked to prevent an earlier execution, a Chicago Tribune news article (5/11/95) questioned whether this was appropriate behavior, noting that "it might even give some parents pause about whether their stiff tuition is being appropriately invested."

12. "Saddam Must Go"

In the Weekly Standard's November 17, 1997 cover story, "Saddam Must Go," editor Bill Kristol and contributing editor Robert Kagan called for war against Iraq: "We know it seems unthinkable to propose another ground attack to take Baghdad. But it's time to start thinking the unthinkable." Kristol and Kagan, also the founders of the hawkish group Project for a New American Century, argued that Saddam Hussein had humiliated the United States by expelling U.S. officials from U.N. weapons inspection teams. The editorial cited unspecified sources about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons capabilities, and concluded with this dark warning: "If you don't like this option, we've got another one for you: continue along the present course and get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the Gulf. That day may not be far off."

The article was the first installment in what would be a relentless crusade for war in the Standard's pages. Just two weeks after it was published, the magazine ran "Overthrow Him," by Zalmay Kahlilzad and Paul Wolfowitz (12/1/97), who would both have prominent jobs in the Bush administration. In an In These Times story looking back over the Standard's 10-year history (10/6/05), Craig Aaron reported that the "Saddam Must Go" piece "is widely credited with planting the seeds for the invasion and occupation of Iraq." Indeed, that article, along with the Standard's extended pro-war campaign, are often cited as influencing elite thinking on the decision to go to war (e.g., Washington Post, 1/12/03; New York Times, 2/1/03). The neo-conservative Standard's paleo-conservative rival, the American Conservative (11/21/05), has even referred to the Iraq War as "The Weekly Standard's War."

13. The Contra-Crack Connection

Ten years after Robert Parry and Brian Barger (AP, 12/20/85) exposed the role of the CIA-backed Contras in the cocaine trade—to relatively little public attention—San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb advanced the story, writing an explosive three-part series (8/18–20/96) that documented a connection between Contra-linked cocaine traffickers and the crack explosion of the 1980s.

Webb also cited U.S. law enforcement officials who said the CIA had prevented investigation of the Contra traffickers, effectively protecting the flow of cut-rate cocaine into vulnerable urban centers. The series, initially ignored by other mainstream media but reaching a national audience through the emerging Internet, ignited protests in African-American and progressive communities, eventually forcing a new internal investigation at the CIA.

14. Contra-Crack Backlash

Webb's success in exposing government misdeeds was soon undercut by another feat of journalism: the mainstream media's full-scale assault on Webb. Having spent the previous 10 years either ignoring the Contra-cocaine story or dismissing it as a conspiracy theory, major newspapers seemed furious that a reporter at a small regional paper would challenge their status as the arbiters of truth. The Washington Post (10/4/96), Los Angeles Times (10/20–22/96) and New York Times (10/21/96) devoted much ink to pooh-poohing Webb's story, citing spurious complaints like Webb's referring to the Contras as "the CIA's army" (Extra!, 1–2/97). Webb's own editor, Jerry Ceppos, eventually caved to the pressure, publishing a front-page climb-down (5/11/97) and taking Webb off his beat.

The internal CIA probe sparked by Webb confirmed the substance of his report—that the CIA had known about Contra drug connections from the beginning, and had worked to keep the trafficking under wraps and undisturbed. But the establishment papers managed to squelch both Webb's story and the CIA report, keeping the CIA's deeds from the majority of the public and destroying the career of an outstanding reporter. In 2004, a despondent Webb took his own life.

15. Matthew Shepard

Before Matthew Shepard was beaten and left for dead in Laramie, Wyoming on October 7, 1998, homophobic violence and discrimination received little serious attention in the news or the general public. But the attack on the 21-year-old gay man struck a media nerve—starting with an AP story (10/9/98) whose lead memorably described Shepard as having been "tied to a wooden ranch fence like a scarecrow"—marking the first time an anti-gay attack received extensive and sympathetic coverage.

His orientation aside, Shepard's story had many of the elements that commercial media look for in a crime story: a young, good-looking white victim with a dramatic death (whose crucifixion imagery added poignancy). But some outlets produced remarkably in-depth and reflective journalism that shone a harsh light on homophobia; the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (10/15/98, 1/20/99) singled out the Casper Star-Tribune and the Denver Post in particular for their coverage.

Such reporting did much to transform the rights of the gay and lesbian community into a serious topic of discussion in the media and the public; even President Bill Clinton addressed the attack in a public speech (10/10/98). As a Boston Globe news article remarked (3/7/02), "The homicide that ushered the phrase ‘hate crime' into mainstream parlance has become an emotional and political watershed, the kind of event that stirs strong feelings in people who know none of the parties involved."

16. Trent Lott

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's long-term ties to the racist Council of Conservative Citizens emerged into public view in 1998 because of the dogged reporting of Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall (12/16/98) and New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch (12/30/98), with help from independent researchers (including FAIR—Extra!, 3–4/99). But the rest of the press was slow to catch on to the story, and in the end, Lott managed to survive the scandal with his job.

Then, on December 5, 2002, Lott praised the 1948 segregationist candidacy of retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond at the latter's 100th birthday party: "I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of him. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

Lott's retroactive endorsement of a racist campaign, whose chief planks were segregation and opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation, was a dramatic story, particularly in the context of the 1998 reporting. But despite the presence of 12 journalists at the party and its broadcast on C-SPAN, there was little mainstream mention of Lott's comments until five days later. While the press was snoozing, bloggers such as the left-leaning Joshua Micah Marshall (Talking Points Memo, 12/6/02) and right-leaning Andrew Sullivan (12/8/02) kept banging the drum, keeping the story alive until the mainstream media caught up. And when it did—on December 10, all three nightly network shows aired stories—Lott was forced by political pressure to step down from his job as majority leader (Washington Post, 12/16/02).

17. Weapons of Mass Destruction

In its push to sell a "pre-emptive" war against Iraq, the White House of George W. Bush had to convince the public that Iraq harbored dangerous weapons of mass destruction that might result in "a mushroom cloud" if military action were not taken quickly. Instrumental in making that case were mainstream media outlets that played up the Iraq WMD threat, lending credibility to administration claims. No reporter was more influential in that role than the New York Times' Judith Miller.

Miller's prominent stories hyping purported Iraqi weapons go back to 1998 (2/26/98), full of dramatic but unverified claims and unreliable sources. "All of Iraq is one large storage facility" for WMD, she credulously quoted one source (9/8/02). Miller played down skepticism and conflicting evidence, both of which were readily available to any reporter, and in so doing handed the Bush administration crucial support; with the "liberal" New York Times repeatedly trumpeting WMD claims on its front page, skeptics became increasingly marginalized in mainstream discussions.

The New York Times eventually published a lengthy editor's note (5/26/04) conceding that it botched its WMD reporting—but left unmentioned in that mea culpa was the fact that six of the nine faulty articles it examined were either written or co-written by Judith Miller. It took Miller's involvement in the vengeful leak of a CIA officer's name to finally goad the Times into letting her go—reportedly with a hefty severance package.

18. Niger Uranium

To hear former New York Times reporter Judith Miller's most passionate defenders tell it, anonymous sources are the key to breaking big stories. But the case of former diplomat Joe Wilson is an instructive counterexample. Wilson was a source for several reporters in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion (e.g., New York Times, 6/13/03), noting confidentially that the White House should have known that some of its claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were baseless. But it was only when Wilson emerged from the shadows on July 7, 2003, with an op-ed in the New York Times and an appearance on NBC's influential Meet the Press, that his dissenting information began to have an impact.

What Wilson had to say was certainly news—that he was the one sent to investigate rumors about an Iraq-Niger uranium deal, that he had deemed such a transaction unlikely and that his opinion had been shared by other intelligence analysts before his February 2002 trip. Wilson's on-the-record pronouncement caused a media firestorm, with White House officials advising reporters to keep a safe distance from Wilson's claims. Wilson's credibility was assailed by an assortment of pro–White House pundits, and his wife's classified CIA status was revealed by columnist Robert Novak (Washington Post, 7/14/03). The ensuing investigation has put some top administration officials in legal jeopardy; more importantly, the questions that Wilson raised about the White House's mishandling of intelligence have kept the story of how the country was misled into war on the media agenda.

19. Abu Ghraib

Though human rights groups had been sounding alarms since May 2003 (Wall Street Journal, 5/7/03; New York Times, 5/17/03), and allegations of mistreatment were reported in late 2003 by journalists such as AP's Charles Hanley (11/1/03), torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. personnel received little more than polite mention in U.S. media until April 2004. That's when CBS's 60 Minutes II (4/28/04) aired pictures of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison being sexually humiliated, threatened and attacked by dogs—and even the body of an Iraqi who had been beaten to death. Lamenting how long it had taken for the abuse story to get its due, Hanley told Editor & Publisher (5/13/04): "There seems to be a tendency at times to discount the statements of others—people like Iraqi former detainees—if they are not somehow supported by a U.S. source, or perhaps by some photographs."

Two days after the 60 Minutes II report, veteran reporter Seymour Hersh revealed on the New Yorker's website (4/30/04) the existence of a secret military report concluding that several instances of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuse" had transpired at Abu Ghraib. The report would later come to be known as the Taguba report, after its author, an Army general, who also suggested that ranking military and intelligence officers and private contractors were behind the abuse. Though the scandal has only resulted in low-level prosecutions so far, it has brought widespread condemnation and focused global attention on U.S. disregard for international law.

20. Hurricane Katrina

The first days after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters swept through New Orleans brought out some of the most honest and affecting journalism the public had seen in a long time. Because officials were nowhere to be found on the ground, reporters were getting their information raw and unfiltered, and they experienced the ravages of the flood and the shocking lack of government response firsthand along with trapped residents.

NBC photojournalist Tony Zumbado was one of the first reporters to visit the New Orleans convention center, where thousands of people had seen no help arrive for over four days. Zumbado delivered an impassioned nine-minute report on MSNBC (9/1/05), with stark footage of the desperate and dying, and heart-wrenching commentary that pointed the finger at the failure of authorities: "There's no support here. There's no foundation. There's no plan B, plan A. These people are very desperate. I saw two gentlemen die in front of me because of dehydration. . . . I just tell you, I couldn't take it."

Zumbado's report and other powerful pieces (Extra! Update, 10/05) were played over and over around the country, arousing enormous public outcry against the government's incompetence, and relief efforts were soon stepped up as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, was forced to step down. Though as the situation normalized and officials regained their footing, journalists gradually shifted back into their usual modes of reporting (Extra!, 11–12/05), for a short time, at least, they doggedly did what journalism is supposed to: hold government officials accountable.

Toward A New Politics?

After the CAW-NDP Divorce
By Sam Gindin
From Canadian Dimension
2006

On April 21, 2006, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) broke with a tradition that extended over half a century, and voted to leave the New Democratic Party (NDP). A few CAW activists shrugged their shoulders: the impact of the NDP on their daily struggles had been minimal and so setting it aside did not seem to matter much. Others, including a significant section of the Canadian Left, were outraged: leaving was a mistake because electoral politics remains crucial to our lives. We must, they argued, focus our response on getting back in.

A third perspective, which may turn out to be the most lasting and important aspect of the CAW leaving the NDP, was that this exit created an opening for those frustrated with what has recently passed for ‘politics.’ The auto workers have a long history of independent working class activism inside and outside of electoral politics; the break with the NDP poses the question of how today’s activists, confronting new pressures and the disappointments with the NDP, might contribute to creatively and concretely building on that earlier legacy of the union. Before elaborating on this, however, it is useful to return to the CAW’s decision to leave its traditional political home and assess what that move was actually about.

The CAW Exit: A Move to the Left?
The ostensible reason for leaving the Ontario NDP was that the party had unfairly expelled the union leader, Buzz Hargrove, for supporting Liberals during the election. The NDP did indeed act inconsistently; numerous other party members had also supported Liberal candidates without sanctions. Yet, did it make sense to let a particular spat lead to a reversal of an historic commitment to social democracy? If the debate was only over some tactic, then why not, for example, protest the NDP’s decision by withholding dues or by mobilizing to reverse the rather intemperate and daft decision the party had made? The point of course is that something larger was in fact going on: the CAW leadership was clearly moving away from the NDP before the ouster of Hargrove, and the NDP conveniently gave the CAW president the incident to formalize the rupture.

The union did subsequently explain its position in broader terms. It suggested that it had shifted from support for a tepid social democracy and narrow electoralism, toward a more explicit ‘movement politics.’ But the most visible signs of CAW involvement in the election had little to do with education of the members and movement building; rather, the election will be remembered for the presence of Paul Martin at the CAW convention, the smiles and hugs as the CAW president bestowed Martin with a CAW jacket, and the extent to which this left the membership confused, divided, and cynical. In the eyes of many activists — both inside and outside the CAW — the union’s politics are increasingly driven by pragmatism, not an expansive vision. In the auto industry in particular, where the union put its main energy into lobbying for money for the Big Three, the union seems to have gotten uncomfortably close to both the corporations and the Liberals.

In defending his electoral role during the 2006 Federal election, CAW President Buzz Hargrove has been able to call on a resolution passed by national delegates to the CAW Canadian Council. The NDP’s response, Hargrove argued, was therefore not just an attack on him personally, but a direct challenge to the overall union and its democratic autonomy.

It is interesting to note, however, that while the actual resolution explicitly called on delegates to ‘endorse sitting NDP members’ as well as NDP candidates in ‘winnable ridings,’ it stated that in other ridings, ‘the CAW will not endorse any specific candidates.’ In this context, the support given to Liberal candidates Belinda Stronach of Magna and a Toyota executive — both representatives of notoriously anti-union companies — was not only politically questionable in terms of the union’s long-standing challenge to anti-union employers, but debatable even in terms of the wording and intent of the resolution.

The CAW leadership nevertheless insisted that it was in fact moving to the left and pointed to its new internal structures — Union in Politics Committees or UPCs — as the basis for ‘a new way of doing politics’. But the UPCs had in fact been established back in September 2004 (a further reminder that the tensions with the NDP were not new).

In the more than two years since, they have been disappointingly dormant. To be fair, there have been a number of well-received training sessions for these committees; the CAW’s commitment to membership education remains unparalleled, and local CAW activists continue to play impressive roles in specific campaigns such as those around health care. Yet, without a larger overall commitment to challenging the status quo and a clear turn away from elite-oriented politics, the stagnation of the UPCs is virtually inevitable (the staff member assigned to act as a catalyst for the mobilization from below tellingly ended up concentrating his efforts on acting as the union lobbyist in Ottawa).

A ‘new politics’ would have meant more than rejecting the NDP and replacing it with new but lifeless structures. It would have included: ** Actively engaging its members in the process of developing an alternative (anti-capitalist) vision. Overcoming the CAW’s isolation from the rest of the labour movement, without whom any new politics is fundamentally limited. ** Asking what it means to link up with ‘other movements.’ Are they simply ‘others’ or do they speak to other dimensions of our own member’s lives, such as health, the environment, war?

Putting union organizing into the broader context of building the working class as a whole and addressing how to ‘organize’ the members who are already unionized Moving to a platform that included coping with our relationship to the US — an issue that can’t be ignored in any serious reorientation of Canadian society. This would overlap international political issues (the US invasion of Iraq, Canada’s role in Afghanistan, challenging the US-supported Israeli denial of Palestinian national rights); domestic ‘economic’ issues (free trade, democratic control over investment, Canadian energy policy) and domestic human rights issues (immigration and civil rights in the context of the extension into Canada — with the support of the Canadian government - of the US ’security’ state).

In short, raising the possibility of a new politics can’t help but raise rethinking the place of unions within today’s local and global struggle against neoliberalism. And alongside this addressing (a) how unions think about their members and their member’s role in the organization and (b) the adequacy of union’s structures — including structures for democratic debate and participation — to the challenges currently confronting unions and working people.

It is true enough that the NDP had moved to the center. The irony is that in leaving the NDP, the CAW leadership was hardly breaking new ground on the Left, but rather also moving, in its own way, to the center.

Back to the Party?
The frustrations with formal politics are certainly understandable. But bad politics is not a reason to give up on any politics. We take it as obvious that electoral politics and the state are too important to leave to Canada’s elite. And we take it as equally obvious that single-issue lobbying or one-off mass events — as important as they are to an overall politics — do not in themselves really constitute a serious challenge to the status quo. Ignoring the question of political power is therefore suicidal in terms of social progress. The question of how we organize ourselves to simultaneously defend ourselves AND develop the kind of capacities that can eventually address state power is therefore the most important political question we can ask.

However, fighting to get back into the NDP represents a step backwards. The NDP has not and cannot address the political task we face. This is, to begin with, not just a shortcoming in the Canadian NDP but something much more general. It’s a failure that has characterized every social democratic party in the world. Coming to grips with that failure involves recognizing that social democracy is not a milder form of socialism which has lost its way or radicalism, but a political project rooted in a particular vision, ideology, culture, and set of structures and practices. The two inter-related cornerstones of social democracy are that, first, social democracy doesn’t really believe that capitalism can be transformed and second, even if capitalism could be transformed, social democracy doesn’t believe that the working class can ever develop the political will and capacity to play a central role in such a transformation. And so, social democracy is left with the cramped vision of administering neoliberalism with a human face, and the cramped politics of workers’ needing to only know who to vote for.

This failure has a long history but it has been particularly exposed in the neoliberal period. Policy options under capitalism have, over the past quarter century, been polarized: the middle ground has given way. Corporations and their representatives have come to understand this and have responded decisively and aggressively. Social democracy never reached such an understanding — or when it did, it was awed at the implications and retreated.

One result of this was that the political initiative over the past two decades shifted to the non-electoral actions of unions and the social movements (with the CAW playing a very prominent role). This was first seen in the fight against the Canada-USA Free Trade Agreement in the mid-1980s, where it was the unions and movements that led this most political fight with the NDP largely tagging along behind. The political leadership of the unions and the movements was further reinforced in the creative Days of Action in the mid-1990s against the Harris cutbacks, by which time no-one even looked to ‘labour’s political arm’ to lead any non-electoral political mobilization.

There are many on the left who would not disagree with the above analysis yet would insist that since the ‘most advanced’ sections of the working class movement remain in the NDP, that’s where the politics of all progressives must also gravitate. This is an argument that cannot be discounted, especially at a time when no alternative political party seems on the horizon. The NDP is certainly not the enemy and the activists that remain in the NDP must be respected enough to continue to engage them in discussions and debates, to join with them around particular campaigns, and even to vote NDP at election time given the options. But we must do so without any illusions. The reality is that to the extent that many committed activists are in the NDP, the NDP also serves to limit their expectations and to mis-educate them on social possibilities and political potentials.

Taking ‘A New Politics’ Seriously
The issue therefore is not to return to the NDP, but to start addressing how to go beyond the NDP. The political choices we confront today are not real choices because we don’t in fact have the political capacity to implement them and – more distressing — we haven’t figured out a way of developing such capacities. At some point we are going to have to build a new political organization. This doesn’t just mean another party, but a different kind of party. We need a party that addresses how we build our collective political capacities, to not only come to power, but to do so with the intent of using that political power to transform states so they are democratic in the fullest sense - supporting the continued development of our collective capacity to transform and democratize our workplaces and communities and contribute to genuine global solidarity. That is, to move towards replacing capitalism.

What kind of party might this be? What kinds of relationships, structures and struggles should we be creating and experimenting with now, so that kind of party might be possible in the future? How do we bridge our immediate needs for self-defence with such a longer-term project? Might it, for example, make sense to begin by setting up ‘People’s Assemblies’ — regular meetings of representatives of the various progressive groups, including union locals, in each community – to provide mutual support, share and expand resources, determine some common priorities, and work to the development of a common platform?

The CAW’s reasons for leaving the NDP may, as we’ve suggested, have had nothing to do with posing such questions. But the contradictions inherent in the CAW leadership’s determination to leave the NDP may have created an opening for going beyond a return to the NDP. We need to sustain this debate — in the pages of Relay, Canadian Dimension and elsewhere, for the politics of limited social coalitions, social forums, single-issue protests, organized Leninist groups, and hope for a spontaneous anti-globalization rebellion have not formed into alternatives to neoliberalism — and invite fuller discussion of new possibilities.

Sam Gindin is the Packer Chair in Social Justice at York University.





Labour Stands Up Against War

By Geoff Bickerton
Canadian Dimension
2006

The Canadian Labour Congress’s statement on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan is clear and unequivocal; it calls for the troops to be brought home now. The statement marks a significant step forward for the labour movement concerning the development of policy with respect to the use the Canadian military.

Not only does the CLC demand the “safe and immediate withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan,” it also challenges many of the arguments used by those who would have our troops die and kill to support the American war in the Middle East.

The CLC states, “We do not support the argument that Canadian presence is intended to bring democracy to the people of Afghanistan. Nor do we accept the premise that our presence is intended to put Afghanistan on the road to sustainable development or improve women’s equality in that country. We reject the argument that our presence in Afghanistan will indirectly protect our safety here at home.”

For me, the issue of peace and war has always been a defining issue within the labour movement. In 1984, faced with NATO’s aggressive nuclear build-up and the development of a mass-based peace movement in Canada, the CLC passed a position paper entitled “Peace, Security and Dis-armament: A Canadian Labour Response,” in which the CLC and its affiliates rejected the use of force to resolve political and economic problems.

It has usually been easy for Canadians to be critical of the United States when it has intervened militarily in the affaires of others. But when Canada deploys troops, the debate has always been much more difficult and emotional. Torn between support for the troops and opposition to war, the labour movement has usually been unable to provide any coherent leadership.

At the 1999 CLC convention, there was a long and inconclusive debate on labour’s position concerning Canada’s participation in the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. At that time the convention was evenly split, half demanding an end to the bombing and half supporting the bombing as a means to protect the innocent people of Kosovo. In 2001, response to the involvement of the Canadian military in the invasion of Afghanistan was initially very muted, with a few exceptions. While the Canadian Labour Congress condemned the violent terrorist actions and the outbreak of racism in Canada and other countries, it initially declined to comment about Canadian participation in the war, using the excuse that it had not consulted with the affiliates.

While the CLC remained silent, a few unions did take positions against the war. The Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers both joined peace groups, churches, students and the Council of Canadians to launch The September Eleventh Peace Coalition, in order to oppose military retaliation for the terrorist attacks in the United States.

Now, in 2006, the CLC and the labour movement have taken a strong position against the deployment of Canadian troops in a foreign country. It has done so at a time when none of the major political parties and not one MP (prior to the May 17 parliamentary vote on extension of Canada’s commitment in Afghanistan) had been prepared to call for the withdrawal of our troops.

Sometimes it takes guts to do the right thing, and the CLC and the affiliate leadership should be commended for their stand.







The Dialectics of the Migrant Workers’ Movement

BY James Petras
Canadian Dimension
2006

Between March 25 and May 1, 2006 close to 5 million migrant workers and their supporters marched through nearly 100 cities of the United States. This is the biggest and most sustained workers’ demonstration in the history of the US. In all of its 50-year history, the US trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO has never been capable of mobilizing even a fraction of the workers convoked by the migrant workers movement. The rise and growth of the movement is rooted in the historical experience of the migrant workers (overwhelmingly from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean), the exploitative and racist experience they confront today in the US and the future in which they face imprisonment, expulsion and dispossession.

The migrant workers movement is engaged in an independent political struggle, directed against local, state and particularly the national government. The movement’s immediate objective is to defeat congressional legislation designed to criminalize employed migrant workers and a “compromise” designed to divide recently arrived workers from older workers. The key demand of the migrant workers is the legalization of all workers, new and old.

The choice of direct action methods is a response to the ineffectiveness of the legalistic and lobbying activities of established middle class controlled Latino organizations and the total failure of the labor confederation and its affiliates to organize migrant workers in trade unions or even build solidarity organizations.

To understand the dynamic growth of migrant labor movement in the US and its militancy, it is necessary to analyze the profound structural changes of the 1980’s and 1990’s in Mexico and Central America. NAFTA, Proxy Wars and Free Markets

Beginning in the 1980’s, the US via the IMF, and its client presidents in Mexico (Salinas, Zedillo and Fox) promoted a “free trade” policy codified in the North American Free Trade Area. This policy opened the door to the massive inflow of heavily subsidized US agricultural commodities undermining local small and medium size farmers. Large-scale foreign investments in retail enterprises, banking and finance led to the bankruptcy of millions of small business people.
The growth of free trade industrial zones (maquiladoras) led to the decline of protective social and labor legislation. Foreign debt payments, corrupt privatizations and large-scale growth of precarious employment led to an absolute decline of wage levels, even as the number of Mexican billionaires multiplied. Huge profits and interest payments accruing to US corporations and banks flowed back to the US, as did billions of dollars from corrupt politicians, money laundered by US banks like CITI Corporation.

Displaced and impoverished rural and urban workers soon followed the outward flows of profits and interest. The reasoning according to the “free markets” was that free flows of US capital to Mexico should be accompanied by the free flow of labor, of Mexican workers to the US. But the US did not practice the “free market” doctrine: it pursued a policy of unrestricted entry of capital into Mexico and a restricted policy on labor migration.

The free market policies created a vast reserve army of unemployed and underemployed Mexican labor while the legal restraints on free migration forced the workers to migrate without legal documents.

The huge influx of labor was not simply a result of Mexican or Central American workers seeking higher wages, it was a result of the adverse structural conditions imposed by NAFTA which expelled workers from their workplace. The Mexican free market structure was an ‘empire-centered model of accumulation’, and because it was empire-centered, it became a magnet attracting labor in pursuit of employment in the Empire.

The second major structural feature determining massive migrant worker movements from Central America was the US imperial wars of the 1980’s: the massive US military intervention via proxy armies in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras destroyed the possibility of social reform and viable economies throughout Central America. By financing death squads and promoting “scorched earth” counter-insurgency activity the US drove millions of Central Americans out of the countryside into the squalor of urban slums and overseas to Mexico, the US, Canada and Europe. The US “success” in imposing corrupt right-wing rulers throughout Central America, closed off all options for collective or self-improvement in the domestic economy. The implementation of neo-liberal measures led to even greater unemployment and a sharp decline in social services, forcing many to seek employment in the empire: the source of their misery.

Legacy of Struggle: Migrant Labor Militancy The first wave of immigrants in the 1980’s in the aftermath of the neo-liberal shock and the military terror sought anonymously any kind of work even under the worst conditions; many hid their militant past but did not forget it. As the flow of migrant workers gained momentum, great concentrations of Latino workers settled in major cities of California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. This led to the creation of a dense network of social, cultural and sports clubs and informal organizations based on previous family, neighborhood and regional ties. New small businesses flourished, consumer power increased, children attended school with clear Latino majorities and numerous radio station were directed to the migrant workers in their own language. Quickly the sense of solidarity grew from the strength of numbers, the facility of communication, the proximity of fellow workers, and above all from the common experience of unregulated and unmitigated exploitation at the hardest jobs and the lowest pay, accompanied by racist attitudes from employers, white workers, police and other public authorities.

The decision by the Congress to add the further threat of imprisonment and mass expulsions occurred at the same time in which the social networks and solidarity within the Latino communities was deepening and expanding. The earlier militancy carried over from the mass popular resistance to the death squads in El Salvador, the taste of freedom and dignity during the Sandinista period in Nicaragua, the multiple militant peasant movements in Mexico came out of the closet and found a new social expression in the mass migrant workers movement.

The convergence of submerged or latent militancy and the demands for labor rights and legal recognition in the new exploitative/repressive context created the impetus for social solidarity of entire communities. Participation included whole families, entire neighborhoods and crossed generational boundaries: high school students joined construction workers, gardeners, garment workers and domestics to fill the streets of Dallas, Texas and Los Angeles, California, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, much to the surprise of non-Latino observers ignorant of their historical legacy, their powerful social networks and their decision to draw the line now between social existence and massive expulsion.

In summary we cannot understand the massive labor migration from Mexico without examining the massive flow of US capital to Mexico, its destructive impact on the socio-economic relations and the unregulated outflow or remittance of profits and interests back to the US. Likewise we cannot explain the massive long-term flows of labor migrants from Central America to the US without taking into account the massive flow of US arms to the ruling classes of the region, the large-scale destruction of small scale agriculture, the restoration to power of the kleptocratic oligarchies and the reversal of social reforms, especially in Nicaragua.

Central American and Mexican labor migration is a direct result of the victory of the US-led counter-revolution in the region. The emergence of the mass movement of labor migrants, in a sense, is the replay of the earlier struggles between US capital and Mexican and Central American labor on the new terrain of US state politics and with a new set of issues. The continuity of the struggles, in Central America and Mexico and now in the US is found in the common demands for “self-determination” and the common methods of struggle, direct action. This is reflected in the strong working class or ‘popular’ composition of the struggle, and the historical memory of class solidarity. Significance of the New Mass Migrant Workers Movement (NMMWM) The emergence of the mass migrant workers’ movement opens a new chapter in the working class struggle both in North America, and Central America.

First and foremost it represents the first major upsurge of independent working class struggle in the US after over fifty years of decline, stagnation and retreat by the established trade union confederation. Secondly, NMMWM reveals a new class protagonist (“subject”) as the leading sector in the labor movement, the migrant worker. While in the past the dynamic sectors of organized labor in the private sector (auto, teamsters, steel, and longshore (West Coast)) have lost over 2/3 of their members and now represent only 9% of the private labor force, over 2 million migrant workers demonstrated and manifested the kind of social solidarity, unseen in the US since the 1930’s. Thirdly, NMMWM was organized without a big bureaucratic trade union apparatus, and with a minimum budget on the basis of voluntary workers through horizontal communication. In fact, one of the key factors accounting for the success of the mobilization was that it was largely out of the control of the dead hand of the trade union hierarchy, even as a minority of workers were members of trade unions. Fourthly, the leadership and strategists of the movement were independent of the two major capitalist parties, especially the deadly embrace of the Democratic Party. Because of their political independence, the NMMWM was in the streets, was critical of both Party policies of expulsion of labor migrants and did not confine itself to the futile action of ‘lobbying politicos’ in the corridors of Congress.

The mass migrant workers movement has served, to a certain extent, as a “social pole” attracting and politicizing tens of thousands of high school, community college and even university students especially those of Latin- American origins. In addition, a minority of dissident “Anglo” trade unionists, middle class progressives and clerical liberals has been activated to work with the labor struggles. The NMMWM struggle is political -–directed at influencing political power, national legislation and against the rule of ‘white capital’ directed at criminalizing and expelling ‘brown labor.’

The movement demonstrates the proper approach to combining race and class politics. The emergence of an organized mass labor-based socio-political pole has the potential to create a new political movement, which could challenge the hegemony of the two capitalist parties. The dynamic growth of the migrant workers movement in the US can serve as the basis for an international labor movement (free from the tutelage of the pro-imperialist AFL-CIO) from Panama to the US West, Southwest and southeastern states. Family and ethnic ties can strengthen class solidarity and create the basis of reciprocal support in struggles against the common enemy: the neo-liberal model of capitalism, the repressive state apparatus and legislation South and North.

The positive developments of the NMMWM however face political obstacles to growth and consolidation: First “from the outside” numerous employers fired workers who participated in the first wave of mass demonstrations. Latino workers who were trade unionists received little or no support from the labor bosses. Secondly, after the mass success of the movements, numerous traditional Latino politicos, social workers, professional consultants, non-governmental organizations and clerical notables jumped on the bandwagon and are active in deflecting the movement into the conventional channels of “petitioning” Congress or supporting the “lesser evil” Democratic Party politicians. These middle class collaborators are intent on dividing the movement to serve their purpose of gaining a political platform for career advancement. Finally the movement faces the problem of the uneven development of the struggle within the working class and between regions of the country. Most “Anglo workers” are at best passive while probably over half perceive migrant workers as a threat to their jobs, salaries and neighborhoods. The general absence of any anti-racist, class-based education by the trade union bureaucracy makes working class unity a difficult task. The challenge is for the migrant workers to reach out and build coalitions with black, Puerto Rican and Asian workers – as well as a minority of advanced Anglo trade unionists. There is also the pressure from the leaders of the capitalist parties to divide migrant workers, by passing legislation that favors ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ workers, ‘long-term’ versus ‘short-term’ workers, literate versus less literate workers, skilled versus unskilled workers. Finally there is the need to confront the new wave of large-scale police raids at workplaces and neighborhoods, where hundreds of Latino workers are rounded up and expelled.

Today, in Nazi style, entire Latino neighborhoods are closed and the police go on house-to-house searches. The Immigration police have recently escalated their mass ‘round-ups’ at work sites trying to provoke a climate of intimidation. During the week April 21-28, NeoCon Chief of Homeland Security Agency, Michael Chertoff directed the arrest of 1,100 undocumented migrants in 26 states. Despite these challenges the migrant workers movement is in the ascendancy: on March 25 hundreds of thousands demonstrated; on April 10 over 2 million marched and on May 1, millions more will join massive marches and workers strikes. While the reactionary politicians are holed up in Congress, scheming of new ways to divide and conquer the movement, the Latino people by the millions are in the streets…for their rights, their self-determination and their dignity.



Immigration issue draws thousands into streets

LAPD estimates 500,000 at protest
From MSNBC
2006


LOS ANGELES - They surprised the police, and maybe themselves, their T-shirts turning block after block of downtown Los Angeles streets white in a demonstration so massive that few causes in recent U.S. history have matched it.

Police said more than 500,000 people marched Saturday to protest a proposed federal crackdown on illegal immigration. Wearing white as a sign of peace, and waving flags from the U.S., Mexico, Guatemala and other countries, they came to show that illegal immigrants already are part of the American fabric, and want the chance to be legal, law-abiding citizens.

Police used helicopters to come up with the crowd estimate. “I’ve been on the force 38 years and I’ve never seen a rally this big,” said Cmdr. Louis Gray Jr., incident commander for the rally.