Fuck Obama: revisting a post from 2008

Well, it looks like the knife in our collective back is being rammed in even deeper.

With that in mind, I just wanted to take a second to remind everyone that I WARNED YOU.

Yes, way back on November 21, 2008, I posted the following in my now defunct old blog.

Enjoy!

Obama Wins! … Ad Age’s Marketer of the Year

“I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers,”  to see what he’s done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it’s created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It’s very easy for people to participate.”

~ Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions

B(a)RAND Obama Won!!!!

He didn’t just beat McCain, either.

He whupped all comers. Including, according to Ad Age, Apple, Nike, and Coors.

Ad Age Poll – How they voted

Marketer	% of votes
Obama	36.1%
Apple	27.3%
Zappos	14.1%
Nike	9.4%
Coors	8.7%
McCain	4.5%

This really shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, considering that Obama spent a cool $339.8 MILLION on “media” during the 2008 election cycle.

For the sake of perspective, I’ll provide a few comparisons:

John McCain spent $118.8 Million

Ralph Nader spent $2.0 Million

Cynthia McKinney spent $78.7 Thousand

You were told that you wanted CHANGE.

You were told that you wanted HOPE.

Then you were told over, and over, and over again, that Barack Obama represented that change and hope. You were told this by newspapers, and magazines, and t-shirts, and signs in people’s windows, and on the radio, and on stickers on people’s cars, and most importantly, on TV.

Then, you probably heard people talking about it at your places of business. I know that I did. I’d walk into our little office kitchen and hear people saying things like “You know, the Republicans have had eight years to screw things up; we need change.”

I’d hear statements like this and just shake my head, astonished at how open most people are to suggestion. It’s very similar to the way that people will say things like “I’m lovin’ these fries,” or “but Fox is fair and balanced,” or “those towers came down because the jet fuel burned so hot that it melted the steel beams,” or even “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

You know, I was just considering the relevance of that last quote, and I almost deleted it. The more I think about it, though, the more it seems to be the most accurate description of the phenomenon that I’m attempting to describe here.

Marketing really is a lot like the “old Jedi mind trick” that Obi Wan Kenobi used so brilliantly in Star Wars. Instead of mind-fucking stormtroopers though, we get brainwashed into thinking that America is in Afghanistan in order to spread democracy, that it’s anti-Semitic to criticize the policies of the government of Israel, and that Barack Obama represents change and hope.

The parallels run even deeper than that, though, as the stormtroopers in the clip linked above seemed to have no idea that they were being manipulated. If there’s a strormtrooper version of the water cooler, my guess is that there’d be lots of conversations about how silly it is that those wacky Jedi Knights think that they’re actually able to influence the weak minded, when in reality, everyone knows that the Jedi mind trick doesn’t work at all…

And THAT is the brilliance of both the Jedi mind trick AND propaganda.

Oops. I almost forgot that we only call it propaganda when it happens OUTSIDE of the United States.

Sorry.

What I really meant to say was … THAT is the brilliance of both the Jedi mind trick AND advertising.

After all, how many people do you know who would admit to being influenced by advertising?

How often do you hear one of your friends say something like this:

“I saw a poster the other day that subtly, but beautifully combined the noble visage of Barack Obama with the colors of the American flag and an all caps version of the word HOPE. Even though it presented nothing more than a slickly designed, but intellectually empty platitude, it convinced me that he has my best interests at heart. It probably has a lot to do with its resemblance to that totally boss Che Guevara poster that I had over my bed when I was in high school.”

I’m guessing that you NEVER hear any of your friends say anything even remotely like that, and yet MILLIONS of dollars were spent on exactly this sort of poster, which seemingly led to millions of people repeating the Obama Hope/Change meme INCESSANTLY, and voting him into the (arguably) most powerful position in the world, despite the apparent fact that he does NOT represent hope, change, or the best interests of normal people (READ: people who are NOT politicians, bankers, or corporate CEOs).

It’s always “the other guy” who falls for the swindle.  You’re too smart for that, though.

So, why then are billions upon billions of dollars spent every year on advertising?

The answer is BECAUSE IT WORKS.

It works on the other guy, and it works on YOU, too. If you really think that Barack Obama represents any kind of real change, then you’re in dire need of a wake-up call.

Barack Obama voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

Barack Obama voted for the FISA legislation that gives immunity to the telecom corporations that cooperate with the Bush Administration’s illegal wire-tapping.

Here’s how the ACLU describes the FISA bill:

“an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that violates the Fourth Amendment and eliminates any meaningful role for judicial oversight of government surveillance”

Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office called the bill “a Constitutional nightmare” and noted “with one vote, Congress has strengthened the executive branch, weakened the judiciary and rendered itself irrelevant.”

This past August, Barack Obama reversed his original stance against off-shore oil drilling.

Obama believes that “the death penalty is appropriate in certain circumstances.”

He is planning to INCREASE troop levels in Afghanistan.

Obama will NOT rule out the continued use of private security firms, such as Blackwater, in Iraq.

Regarding the EXPANSION of the United States military, Obama had this to say in January, 2008:

“I strongly support the expansion of our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 Marines.”

He flip-flopped on his primary election ANTI-NAFTA stance, once Hillary Clinton was gone and it became useful to do so.

As I recently pointed out, Obama had this to say about former President George H.W. Bush and his foreign policy team (Including Sec. of Defense, Dick Cheney):

“You know, one of the things that I think George H.W. Bush doesn’t get enough credit for was his foreign policy team and the way that he helped negotiate the end of the Cold War and prosecuted the Gulf War. That cost us $20 billion dollars. That‘s all it cost. It was extremely successful. I think there were a lot of very wise people.”
~ (Larry King Live 3/23/08).

Obama voted IN FAVOR of the taxpayer funded $700 billion Wall Street bailout, which brings me to what is perhaps the most important issue of all.  Obama has been deafeningly silent on the legalized pyramid/ponzi scheme known as fractional reserve banking, and the Federal Reserve Bank, which, combined with all of the other world’s Central Banks, is the engine that drives the world’s WAR MACHINE. I’ve never heard Obama come anywhere near a discussion regarding the abolition, or at the very least, the nationalization of the Federal Reserve, despite the fact that under the Fed system, the U.S. government is forced to BORROW, at interest, every single dollar it spends (your tax dollars actually go directly to paying the interest on this debt).  THIS insane mechanism is the root cause of inflation, and is also the reason why the United States is over 10 TRILLION dollars IN DEBT.

I plan to devote a lengthy essay to this very topic in the not too distant future. I assure you, however, that you will NEVER hear Barack Obama talk about it.

The reason is simple. It’s because he doesn’t care about CHANGE, or HOPE, or YOU.

Unless, as I said earlier, you happen to be a politician, a banker, or a corporate CEO.

As Chuck D. once famously opined:

“Don’t believe the hype”

****

For much more current evidence of Obama’s corporo-fascist servitude, see my recent post titled I’m sorry, but Obama is a corporatist tool.

Rafeef Ziadah: We teach life, sir

“Today, my body was a TV’d massacre, and let me just tell you, there is nothing your U.N. resolutions have ever done about this, and no soundbyte I come up with, no matter how good my English gets, no soundbyte, no soundbyte, no soundbyte will bring them back to life. No soundbyte will fix this.

We teach life, sir.

We teach life, sir.

We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.”

~ Rafeef Ziadah

Occupy Wall Street Photo Essay – Part 2

Part 1 of the America Psycho Occupy Wall Street Photo Essay is so enormous at this point that it’s launching extremely slowly on underpowered PCs. With that in mind, I bring you Part 2.

As with Part 1, I’ll be updating this on a continuing basis, so stay tuned.

LAST UPDATED 11/20/11

The Newest photos are at the bottom.

 

Occupy Wall Street Photo Essay

LAST UPDATED 11/3/11

I’ve been attending the Occupy Wall Street protests quite a bit.

If you have the means and the inclination, I highly recommend that you take part, as civil disobedience seems to be the only tool left to us.

As Mario Savio said:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Yesterday, we shut down the Brooklyn Bridge.

Join me, and put your bodies upon the gears.

I don’t have much time to write these days, so I’m just going to continuously update this photo essay, so stay tuned.

The newest photos are at the bottom.

 

Fukushima: Orders of magnitude worse than Chernobyl

‎”Nearly a million people have already died as a result of Chernobyl, despite what W.H.O. says, and the I.A.E.A. This is one of the most monstrous cover-ups in the history of medicine. Then we extrapolate through to Japan. Japan is, by orders of magnitude, many times worse than Chernobyl.”

~ Dr. Helen Caldicott

As I said last week, governments lie, and the compliant corporate media generally serve to amplify those lies. You really need to dig for solid information from more independent sources like Arnie Gunderson, and Dr. Helen Caldicott. Especially since the Peace Laureate is still pushing for new plants to be built in the U.S.

Gunderson, a former nuclear power industry executive and whistleblower, has been providing very informative periodic updates on Fairewinds.com. Here’s his latest.

In addition to Gunderson, I came across a video of Dr. Helen Caldicott, who has spent 38 years educating the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age and the changes we must make to human behavior in order to reverse environmental destruction.

As the quote at the top of the page would suggest, she doesn’t paint a rosy picture. According to her, we’ve really screwed the pooch this time, guaranteeing a cancer-filled future for millions with our short-sighted, greed based energy policies.

She claims that the Fukushima disaster is producing a fallout cocktail of plutonium, radioactive iodine 129, strontium, cesium, tritium, and more, and that it will eventually spread over the entire northern hemisphere, and since in some cases we’re talking about half-lives of millions of years, we’ll be seeing a smorgasbord of thyroid cancer, bone cancer and leukemia until we finally figure out a way to destroy the entire planet and just be done with it already.

I’m not a religious person, but hey, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

Chris Hedges Speech – April 15, 2011 – BOA Protest

“Liberal or Conservative, it makes no difference now. Barack Obama serves corporate interests as assiduously as George W. Bush. And to place our faith in any party or established institution as a mechanism of reform is to be entranced by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave.”

~ Chris Hedges

As I mentioned here, New York City’s Union Square was my destination yesterday for a Bank of America/plutocracy protest. In all honesty, I expected a much bigger turnout than the 250ish people who showed up, especially since Chris Hedges was slated to make an appearance, but those of us who made it were fierce and on point.

And since Hedges can say it better than I could on my best day, I’ll just pass him the mic…

Oh, and you really need to see this guy dance to the jazzy rage of Junkyard Empire’s version of Get Up, Stand Up.

Dancing goodness begins at 0:41.

Greenwald: Obama’s “bad negotiating” is actually shrewd negotiating

I’m too busy to write at the moment, so I’m just going to highlite Glenn Greenwald’s latest piece in which he does a great job of shattering the “incompetence theorist” myth that continues to propose that poor Obama keeps on “failing” to enact progressive policies, while being “forced” to enact corporatist friendly ones.

It’s a point that I made here last week, and it’s really nice to see that Glenn and I are on the same wavelength, because he’s awesome.

Obama’s “bad negotiating” is actually shrewd negotiating

Wednesday, Apr 13, 2011 09:14 ET

By Glenn Greenwald

In December, President Obama signed legislation to extend hundreds of billions of dollars in Bush tax cuts, benefiting the wealthiest Americans. Last week, Obama agreed to billions of dollars in cuts that will impose the greatest burden on the poorest Americans. And now, virtually everyone in Washington believes, the President is about to embark on a path that will ultimately lead to some type of reductions in Social Security, Medicare and/or Medicaid benefits under the banner of “reform.” Tax cuts for the rich — budget cuts for the poor — “reform” of the Democratic Party’s signature safety net programs — a continuation of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies and a new Middle East war launched without Congressional approval. That’s quite a legacy combination for a Democratic President.

All of that has led to a spate of negotiation advice from the liberal punditocracy advising the President how he can better defend progressive policy aims — as though the Obama White House deeply wishes for different results but just can’t figure out how to achieve them. Jon Chait, Josh Marshall, and Matt Yglesias all insist that the President is “losing” on these battles because of bad negotiating strategy, and will continue to lose unless it improves. Ezra Klein says “it makes absolutely no sense” that Democrats didn’t just raise the debt ceiling in December, when they had the majority and could have done it with no budget cuts. Once it became clear that the White House was not following their recommended action of demanding a “clean” vote on raising the debt ceiling — thus ensuring there will be another, probably larger round of budget cuts — Yglesias lamented that the White House had “flunked bargaining 101.” Their assumption is that Obama loathes these outcomes but is the victim of his own weak negotiating strategy.

I don’t understand that assumption at all. Does anyone believe that Obama and his army of veteran Washington advisers are incapable of discovering these tactics on their own or devising better strategies for trying to avoid these outcomes if that’s what they really wanted to do? What evidence is there that Obama has some inner, intense desire for more progressive outcomes? These are the results they’re getting because these are the results they want — for reasons that make perfectly rational political sense.

Conventional D.C. wisdom — that which Obama vowed to subvert but has done as much as any President to bolster — has held for decades that Democratic Presidents succeed politically by being as “centrist” or even as conservative as possible. That attracts independents, diffuses GOP enthusiasm, casts the President as a triangulating conciliator, and generates raves from the DC press corps — all while keeping more than enough Democrats and progressives in line through a combination of anti-GOP fear-mongering and partisan loyalty.

Isn’t that exactly the winning combination that will maximize the President’s re-election chances? Just consider the polling data on last week’s budget cuts, which most liberal commentators scorned. Americans support the “compromise” by a margin of 58-38%; that support includes a majority of independents, substantial GOP factions, and 2/3 of Democrats. Why would Democrats overwhelmingly support domestic budget cuts that burden the poor? Because, as Yglesias correctly observed, “just about anything Barack Obama does will be met with approval by most Democrats.” In other words, once Obama lends his support to a policy — no matter how much of a departure it is from ostensible Democratic beliefs — then most self-identified Democrats will support it because Obama supports it, because it then becomes the “Democratic policy,” by definition. Adopting “centrist” or even right-wing policies will always produce the same combination — approval of independents, dilution of GOP anger, media raves, and continued Democratic voter loyalty — that is ideal for the President’s re-election prospects.

That tactic in the context of economic policy has the added benefit of keeping corporate and banking money on Obama’s side (where it overwhelmingly was in 2008), or at least preventing a massive influx to GOP coffers. And just look at the team of economic advisers surrounding Obama from the start: does anyone think that Bill Daley, Tim Geithner and his army of Rubin acolytes and former Goldman Sachs executives are sitting around in rooms desperately trying to prevent budget cuts and entitlement “reforms”?

Why would Obama possibly want to do anything different? Why would he possibly want a major political war over the debt ceiling where he looks like a divisive figure and looks to be opposing budget cuts? Why would he possibly want to draw a line in the sand defending Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from any “reforms”? There would be only two reasons to do any of that: (1) fear that he would lose too much of his base if he compromised with the GOP in these areas, or (2) a genuine conviction that such compromises are morally or economically intolerable. Since he so plainly lacks both — a fear of losing the base or genuine convictions about this or anything else — there’s simply nothing to drive him to fight for those outcomes.

Like most first-term Presidents after two years, Obama is preoccupied with his re-election, and perceives — not unreasonably — that that goal is best accomplished by adopting GOP policies. The only factor that could subvert that political calculation — fear that he could go too far and cause Democratic voters not to support him — is a fear that he simply does not have: probably for good reason. In fact, not only does Obama not fear alienating progressive supporters, the White House seems to view that alienation as a positive, as it only serves to bolster Obama’s above-it-all, centrist credentials. Here’s what CNN’s White House Correspondent Ed Henry and Gloria Borger said last night about the upcoming fight over entitlements and the debt ceiling:

Henry: I was talking to a senior Democrat who advises the White House, outside the White House today who was saying look, every time this president sits down with Speaker Boehner, to Gloria’s point about negotiating skills, the president seems to give up another 5 billion dollars, 10 billion dollars, 20 billions dollars. It’ s like the spending cuts keep going up. If you think about where the congressional Democrats started a couple of months ago they were talking about no spending cuts on the table. It keeps going up.

But this president has a much different reality than congressional Democrats.

Borger (sagely): Right.

Henry: He’s going for re-election, him going to the middle and having liberal Democrats mad at him is not a bad thing.

Borger: Exactly.

That’s why I experience such cognitive dissonance when I read all of these laments from liberal pundits that Obama isn’t pursuing the right negotiating tactics, that he’s not being as shrewd as he should be. He’s pursuing exactly the right negotiating tactics and is being extremely shrewd — he just doesn’t want the same results that these liberal pundits want and which they like to imagine the President wants, too. He’s not trying to prevent budget cuts or entitlement reforms; he wants exactly those things because of how politically beneficial they are to him — to say nothing of whether he agrees with them on the merits.

When I first began blogging five years ago, I used to write posts like that all the time. I’d lament that Democrats weren’t more effectively opposing Bush/Cheney National Security State policies or defending civil liberties. I’d attribute those failures to poor strategizing or a lack of political courage and write post after post urging them to adopt better tactics to enable better outcomes or be more politically “strong.” But then I realized that they weren’t poor tacticians getting stuck with results they hated. They simply weren’t interested in generating the same outcomes as the ones I wanted.

It wasn’t that they eagerly wished to defeat these Bush policies but just couldn’t figure out how to do it. The opposite was true: they were content to acquiesce to those policies, if not outright supportive of them, because they perceived no political advantage in doing anything else. Many of them supported those policies on the merits while many others were perfectly content with their continuation. So I stopped trying to give them tactical advice on how to achieve outcomes they didn’t really want to achieve, and stopped attributing their failures to oppose these policies to bad strategizing or political cowardice. Instead, I simply accepted that these were the outcomes they most wanted, that Democratic Party officials on the whole — obviously with some exceptions — weren’t working toward the outcomes I had originally assumed (and which they often claimed). Once you accept that reality, events in Washington make far more sense.

That Obama’s agenda includes an affirmative desire for serious budget cuts and entitlement “reforms” has been glaringly obvious from the start; it’s not some unintended, recent by-product of Tea Party ascendancy. Since before Obama was even inaugurated, Digby has been repeatedly warning of his support for a so-called “Grand Bargain” that would include cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And Jane Hamsher and Ezra Klein had a fairly acrimonious exchange very early on in the Obama presidency over the former’s observation that Obama officials were expressly advocating cuts in Social Security while Klein insisted that this would never happen (yesterday, Klein reported that Obama would be supportive of Bowles-Simpson, which proposes deep cuts to Social Security, and boasted of his anticipation weeks ago that this would happen). Before Obama’s inauguration, I wrote that the most baffling thing to me about the enthusiasm of his hardest-core supporters was the belief that he was pioneering a “new form of politics” when, it seemed obvious, it was just a re-branded re-tread of Clintonian triangulation and the same “centrist”, scorn-the-base playbook Democratic politicians had used for decades.

What amazes me most is the brazen claims of presidential impotence necessary to excuse all of this. Atrios has written for weeks about the “can’t do” spirit that has overtaken the country generally, but that mindset pervades how the President’s supporters depict both him and the powers of his office: no bad outcomes are ever his fault because he’s just powerless in the face of circumstance. That claim is being made now by pointing to a GOP Congress, but the same claim was made when there was a Democratic Congress as well: recall the disagreements I had with his most loyal supporters in 2009 and 2010 over their claims that he was basically powerless even to influence his own party’s policy-making in Congress.

Such excuse-making stands in very sharp contrast to what we heard in 2008 and what we will hear again in 2012: that the only thing that matters is that Obama win the Presidency because of how powerful and influential an office it is, how disaster will befall us all if this vast power falls into Republican hands. It also contradicts the central promise of the Obama candidacy: that he would change, rather than bolster, the standard power dynamic in Washington. And it is especially inconsistent with Obama’s claimed desire to be a “transformational” President in much the way that Ronald Reagan was (but, Obama said to such controversy, Bill Clinton was not). Gaudy claims of Fundamental Change and Transformation and Yes, We Can! have given way to an endless parade of excuse-making that he’s powerless, weak and there’s nothing he can do.

Obama’s most loyal supporters often mock the notion that a President’s greatest power is his “bully pulpit,” but there’s no question that this is true. Reagan was able to transform how Americans perceived numerous political issues because he relentlessly argued for his ideological and especially economic world-view: a rising tide lifts all boats, government is not the solution but is the problem, etc. — a whole slew of platitudes and slogans that convinced Americans that conservative economic policy was optimal despite how much it undermined their own economic interests. Reagan was “transformational” because he changed conventional wisdom and those premises continue to pervade our political discourse.

When has Obama ever done any of that? When does he offer stirring, impassioned defenses of the Democrats’ vision on anything, or attempt to transform (rather than dutifully follow) how Americans think about anything? It’s not that he lacks the ability to do that. Americans responded to him as an inspirational figure and his skills of oratory are as effective as any politician in our lifetime. It’s that he evinces no interest in it. He doesn’t try because those aren’t his goals. It’s not that he or the office of the Presidency are powerless to engender other outcomes; it’s that he doesn’t use the power he has to achieve them because, quite obviously, achieving them is not his priority or even desire.

Whether in economic policy, national security, civil liberties, or the permanent consortium of corporate power that runs Washington, Obama, above all else, is content to be (one could even say eager to be) guardian of the status quo. And the forces of the status quo want tax cuts for the rich, serious cuts in government spending that don’t benefit them (social programs and progressive regulatory schemes), and entitlement “reform” — so that’s what Obama will do. He won’t advocate, and will actually oppose, steps as extreme as the ones Paul Ryan is proposing: that’s how he will retain his “centrist” political identity and keep the fear levels high among his voting base. He’ll pay lip service to some Democratic economic dogma and defend some financially inconsequential culture war positions: that’s how he will signal to the base that he’s still on their side. But the direction will be the same as the GOP desires and, most importantly, how the most powerful economic factions demand: not because he can’t figure out how to change that dynamic, but because that’s what benefits him and thus what he wants.

Ironically, Obama is turning out to be “transformational” in his own way — by taking what was once the defining GOP approach to numerous policy areas and converting them into Democratic ones, and thus ensconcing them in the invulnerable protective shield of “bipartisan consensus.” As Digby put it: “Reagan was a hard-core ideologue who didn’t just tweak some processes but radically changed the prevailing conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, Obama is actually extending the Reagan consensus, even as he pursues his own agenda of creating a Grand Bargain that will bring peace among the dueling parties (a dubious goal in itself.)” That has been one of the most consequential outcomes of the first two years of his presidency in terms of Terrorism and civil liberties, and is now being consecrated in the realm of economic policy as well.

Governments Lie: Japan’s Nuclear Crisis

With the carnival of confusion and mis/disinformation emerging from our latest reality show, Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown: Countdown to Catastrophe™, I figured that this would be a great time to remind everyone of a longstanding truism; governments lie, and the compliant corporate media generally serve to amplify those lies.

It’s always much worse than you’re being told by mainstream sources.

Always.

Search for alternative voices. They’re out there, and they’re doing a great job of digging for real information, but unfortunately, you’re probably not going to see them on the nightly news with Dirk Squarejaw and Anderson Cooper.

Keep your eyes and ears on former nuclear power industry executive and whistleblower, Arnie Gundersen, beginning with this video:

 

And while you’re at it, have a look at this 2004 piece from Amy and David Goodman, outlining the colossal government/media cover-up of the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust perpetrated against the Japanese by the United States at the end of World War II. And incidentally, this occurred well before the consolidation that’s led to five corporations controlling the vast majority of news media (as of 2004).

 
Hiroshima Cover-up:  How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

Published on Tuesday, August 10, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Governments lie.
~ I. F. Stone, Journalist

At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.

Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur’s orders.

Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts. He saw people’s shadows seared into walls and sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss. Burchett was among the first to witness and describe radiation sickness.

Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”

Burchett’s article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation. Burchett’s candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. “In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

“When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.”

Burchett’s searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists’ access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even killing dispatches that described the horror. The official narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation. Reporters whose dispatches convicted with this version of events found themselves silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there. Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”

U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett’s revelations: They attacked the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness. The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.

Four days after Burchett’s story splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico. Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times. Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test. His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site. Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military’s line; the general was not disappointed.

Laurence’s front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors. “This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity,” the article began.3 Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended “to give the lie to these claims.”

Laurence quoted General Groves: “The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. If this is true, the number was very small.”

Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms . . . Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.”

But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum about the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.

William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

It turns out that William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons. The intent, according to the Times, was “to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb’s operating principles in laymen’s language.” Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

Laurence eagerly accepted the offer, “his scientific curiosity and patriotic zeal perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same time compromising his journalistic independence,” as essayist Harold Evans wrote in a history of war reporting. Evans recounted: “After the bombing, the brilliant but bullying Groves continually suppressed or distorted the effects of radiation. He dismissed reports of Japanese deaths as ‘hoax or propaganda.’ The Times’ Laurence weighed in, too, after Burchett’s reports, and parroted the government line.” Indeed, numerous press releases issued by the military after the Hiroshima bombing-which in the absence of eyewitness accounts were often reproduced verbatim by U.S. newspapers-were written by none other than Laurence.

“Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department’s official press release for worldwide distribution,” boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over Zero. “No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter.”

“Atomic Bill” Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for an American nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual status as government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to American military officials-he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. His reports on the atomic bomb and its use had a hagiographic tone, laced with descriptions that conveyed almost religious awe.

In Laurence’s article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military censors until a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people. Laurence waxed: “Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. . . . It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

Laurence later recounted his impressions of the atomic bomb: “Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one . . . felt oneself in the presence of the supranatural.”

Laurence was good at keeping his master’s secrets-from suppressing the reports of deadly radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan. The Times was also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence’s dual status as government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the Hiroshima bombing-and four months after Laurence began working for the Pentagon. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, “Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time.”

Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with William L. Laurence. (Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his memoirs and his 1983 book, Shadows of Hiroshima.) Unlike the War Department’s Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett. (William L. Laurence, after flying in the squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was subsequently called back to the United States by the Times and did not visit the bombed cities.)

W.H. Lawrence’s original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945. He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that “all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb’s lingering effects.” He described how “persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died.”

Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN. For this article, the Pentagon’s spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett’s horrifying account of “atomic plague.” W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, “denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” Lawrence’s dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.

The conflicting accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might be ancient history were it not for a modern twist. On October 23, 2003, The New York Times published an article about a controversy over a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty. A former correspondent in the Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a famine that had killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. The Pulitzer Board had launched two inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of his prize. The Times “regretted the lapses” of its reporter and had published a signed editorial saying that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” Current Times executive editor Bill Keller decried Duranty’s “credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda.”

On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding Duranty’s award, concluding that there was “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in the articles that won the prize.

As an apologist for Joseph Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about the “deliberate deception” of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon’s paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of “uncritical parroting of propaganda”-as long as it is from the United States?

It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima’s apologist be stripped. 

MLK: The state-sponsored assassination

I guess I should have posted this a couple of days ago on April 4, but I was wrapped up in my Obama is a corporatist tool post.

Priorities!

Anyway, if you’re here on my site, you probably already have a pretty good idea that the official story about Martin Luther King’s murder is yet another episode in the Lone Gunman fairy tale series made so popular by the combined efforts of the U.S. government and the corporate media.

Episode six of the fabulous Evidence of Revision series, on the other hand, uses archival news footage and audio, much of which has been previously unavailable, to piece together the events leading up to King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. The film makes a compelling case that King was assassinated by a nexus of the FBI, the Memphis Police, the U.S. Army, and a rouges gallery of Memphis locals in order to silence his criticism of the Vietnam war.  In fact, in the 1999 wrongful death court case, Coretta Scott King, et al. vs. Lyod Jowers, et al., a Memphis jury found that a local restauranteur named Loyd Jowers conspired with governmental agencies to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King, and awarded $100,000 in damages.

Here’s Evidence of Revision – Part 6

WARNING: This film contains graphic and disturbing images.

Incidentally, the Evidence of Revision team has also tackled the JFK and RFK assassinations, as well as CIA black ops, mind control, Jonestown and more.  All are highly worthy of your time and consideration.

NYC Bank of America Protest – Fri, 4/15/2011

This past December, Chris Hedges protested in front of the White House and gave this inspiring speech that gives me shivers every time I listen to it.

This Friday, 4/15/2011, I’ll be joining the fantastically awesome Hedges and the political action group Prosperity Agenda in a protest of Bank of America.

The event takes place at Union Square in New York City, and begins at 11:00 am.

I’m looking forward to meeting some of you there.

Here’s how Hedges described the event in his most recent column.

This Is What Resistance Looks Like
April 3, 2011
Chris Hedges

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,” which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated, the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in” in your neighborhood.

Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.

“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,” Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.”

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.