Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Why does the US media lie so much?
A good opinion piece on how American media blatantly lies to its own people, & the world. However, they always thought, & still think, that there would be no adverse consequences from this lying. Well, there are consequences for every action.
The lying & false statements about Afghanistan war, Iraq war, & in general, war on terror, for instance, have made our world a lot less safe. Those wars brought hell to innocent people in those regions where those wars are taking place, & at the same time, American soldiers, their families, & the whole American economy, also suffered, & in fact, is still suffering. Imagine the world now, if that same American media would have reported the news as it should have been reported in the first place, instead of saying, “the news is what we say it is.”
War on terror is just one example out of many. The opinion piece gives an example of how chemicals injected into cows to force them to give more milk harms the Americans, themselves, who drink that milk. We can easily extend that example to meat, fruits & vegetables, & many other kinds of foods American public is eating & suffering from multiple health problems.
Media, & by extension, journalism, are supposed to be vanguard of the public, against the wrongdoers; be that wrongdoers be the governments or anyone else. But when the media falsifies & lies about what is going on in the country, then the consequences are horrifying. Now, that lying of media has brought on Trump & its supporters labelling each & everything coming out of MSM (mainstream media) as false, lies, & "fake news." It's not that Trump is not lying, either, but the public becomes completely confused as to who to believe, when both parties are saying that what they are reporting or saying is true & the other is lying.
On top of that, this opinion piece also shows the hypocrisy of Americans. We in the developing world think that the developed world got to where it is by being honest, truthful, & transparent. No. Their development has got nothing to do with these noble traits of a society & people. The developed world got to where it is now by lying, cheating, & defrauding the other party.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Either by omission or by commission, the US media actively misinforms the public on crucial issues that matter. The reason they do this is because they legally can.
My mentor and dissertation committee member, Dr. Peter Dale Scott, recently wrote on his Facebook page: “Inadequate decently priced housing is one of America's most urgent domestic problems, with developers vacating neighborhoods to build third and fourth homes for the one percent. It is a symptom of what's wrong that Cynthia McKinney, one of the relatively few former members of Congress with a Ph.D., has to go to RT to discuss a crisis that is so under-reported in the US media.”
And therein lies the problem with US media: The news is so filtered and in some cases propagandized that it bears little resemblance to the day-to-day intellectual needs of the average US citizen. It fails to provide solutions, let alone information that allows US citizens to cast informed votes. Either by omission or by commission, the US media actively under-, ill-, or misinforms the public on crucial issues that matter! The reason they do this is because they legally can. Media in the US has at least one court ruling that allows them to knowingly lie to the public.
Let’s start with the First Amendment to the US Constitution that protects freedom of speech. Courts in the US have ruled on many occasions that freedom of speech also includes the freedom to lie. The rationale is that such rulings give space for unpopular statements of fact. For example, in 2012, the US Supreme Court voted 6-3 to affirm a lower court decision to overturn a conviction for lying about one’s credentials.
The lower court judge in that case wrote, “How can you develop a reputation as a straight shooter if lying is not an option?”
Washington State Supreme Court even ruled that lying to get votes, distinguishing between fact and opinion, was not something that the state should negotiate. It wrote that people and not the government should be the final arbiter of truth in a political debate.
Now, the First Amendment does not protect some types of lying: like, for instance, lying while under oath, lying to a government official, lying to sell a product. Even in defamation cases, the plaintiff has a firm threshold to overcome, especially if the person targeted is a “public person.” However, the Supreme Court has emphatically ruled that individuals have a right to lie: what about corporations and media outlets? In 2012, the Supreme Court extended First Amendment rights to organizations and corporations in its Citizens United decision.
My local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (AJC), ran a headline against me just days before my election that read: “McKinney Indicted.” One had to pore over the article to learn that the McKinney referred to was neither me nor my father, nor anyone related to me. But the AJC never stated that fact. It was a dirty trick carried out by the US press. And sadly, it happens all the time. I filed a lawsuit against the AJC, but had to withdraw it because of a lack of money to finance the lawsuit and, worse, the hostile environment regarding the media and anybody's efforts to make them tell the truth. I remained powerless before the media monolith and wondered why and how they could get away with such blatant and outright lies.
Then, in 2010, 'Project Censored' ran a story that caught my eye: “The Media Can Legally Lie.” After having had my series of run-ins with my local media as they always failed to report the truth about me, I was drawn to this story. Project Censored is a media watchdog based at Sonoma State University in California. Its goal is to end the junk food news diet of misinformation and disinformation fed to the US public by the corporate media. It is a project of students and faculty to shine a light on underreported or unreported stories that should be of great interest to the public. The Project Censored movie tells a part of its important story.
The 2010 story centers on two journalists, hired by FOX News as investigative journalists, who became whistleblowers when they were instructed to report “news” that they knew was not true.
According to Project Censored, in February 2003, FOX News argued that there was no prohibition on media outlets distorting or falsifying the news in the United States. And skipping ahead, FOX News won on that claim! But to backtrack to provide some context, the issue was the placement of Bovine Growth Hormone, BGH, manufactured by Monsanto, into the milk stream without labeling it.
A husband and wife reporting team produced a four-part series revealing the health risks for humans in drinking milk from cows treated with BGH to boost milk production. FOX News wanted the reporters to add statements from Monsanto that the couple knew were not factual. When they refused to make the suggested edits, the couple was fired. They sued and a Florida jury decided the couple was wrongfully fired. FOX News appealed the case. Basically, the Florida Appeals Court ruled that there is no law, rule, or even regulation against distorting the news and that the decision to report honestly resides with the news outlet.
FOX News was joined in its court action by other news outlets, notably Cox Television, Inc., a sister organization to the Cox-owned Atlanta Journal and Constitution. In an incredible and chilling turnabout, the two truth-telling journalists were ordered to pay FOX News millions of dollars to cover the company’s attorney fees. The reporters were told by FOX News executives, “The news is what we say it is.”
And there we have it. Now, this Court action immediately affected the right of people in the US to know what is in the food they buy. Media consolidation in the US is such that six corporations control 90% of the junk food news and entertainment fed to the people of the US and around the world. And US Courts not only say that this is OK, but also decided that it’s OK for them to knowingly lie to the public. That, in a nutshell, is why the US media lie: Because they can. And that, in a nutshell, is why the people of the US are increasingly turning to RT and alternative news outlets for information: Because they must.
Mandatory Water Restrictions in California Fail to Address Abuse of Resources
A good short interview. All over the world people are thinking we have an abundance of water & hence, we can use it as we wish, for as long we wish. Ask about the lack of water from those people who don't have access to this precious commodity; water is the blue gold.
In water stressed countries, governments & the general public needs to start thinking how to conserve water. We can't stop its use but we all need to start self-auditing ourselves, in regards to water usage, & start thinking how do I save water. Governments, like when California was going through drought, need to start mandating how much water people can use. Problem is people start thinking about water conservation when it's too late. Water conservation strategies need to be thought out & implemented way before the deadline when water is expected to be finished for all.
In Pakistan, the general public & the government are thinking that building dams is going to save the country from impending water crisis. Heck, no!! Dams is one of the solutions out of many, to help a little bit in alleviating the pain of water scarcity. Dams will be able to store some water that when the water crisis hits, the public can be provided with water for a few days. But that stored water will eventually end. Then, what? Water conservation strategies still need to be implemented. But saving water at that time would be a lot harder, since the public is not used to it, then implementing those strategies right now, when water is almost scarce, & work towards postponing that water crisis deadline for as long as it's possible.
As Maude Barlow says it in the end that, "there isn’t a place in the world where we don’t have to start taking care of water in a very different way than we have."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Governor Brown of California’s mandatory reduction of 25%, I guess, is first of all a reflection of a broad, global problem. But let’s start first of all with California. Do you think this measure is adequate?
MAUDE BARLOW, NATIONAL CHAIRPERSON OF FOOD & WATER WATCH: Well, it’s terrible that it’s taken so long for California to actually take this kind of action. It was only last year that they brought in legislation to give some kind of control to their groundwater, which has just been a free-for-all. Everybody’s known this has been coming for 30 years. There’s no snowpack, the overextraction of water is incredible. In California, 80% of the water use goes to agriculture and much of that is for export to other states, but they produce all the almonds, 80% of the almonds for the world, for instance. I mean, they use so much water to produce almonds every year that you could take a shower for ten minutes every day for the next 86 million years. That’s how much water it takes.
So there’s no, there’s been no control. There’s been no limit. There’s been a kind of everybody can take whatever they want mentality. Move it around from one place to another through canals and aqueducts and so on. And hence the problem. And this is not only in California but around the world.
We have this notion that, what I call the myth of abundance, that we don’t have to take care of our water and we wait until the crisis hits before we take inadequate measures.
JAY: with climate change, at least to begin with. If I understand it correctly, California’s been draining water from neighboring states for decades, also affecting the water table in those states. And everyone knows this has been coming.
But how much does climate change, do scientists thing, have to do with the current drought?
BARLOW: Well, climate change, of course is a part of it. But it depends on how you define climate change. Most people think of it as greenhouse gas emission changes the climate and warms the climate, and that’s true and that impacts water. But what we’re beginning to really understand is that when we displace water from where it is put in watersheds, or we displace the vegetation that protected that watershed, we actually change the local hydrologic cycle.
What’s happened in California is not as much climate change from greenhouse gas emissions as climate change from the abuse, mismanagement, and displacement of water. Water has been put where it belongs. As you say, not only has California been borrowing from other states, it’s been borrowing from its future groundwater. They’re pumping groundwater far faster than it can be replenished by nature, and the system of water rights that gives these big industrial interests the right to do this basically says they can keep doing it till the cows come home.
Well, at some point, something’s got to give. It’s like a bunch of people around a bathtub, and they all have blindfolds, and they have straws, and they’re drinking the water as fast as they can. And they think it’s fine. And it is fine. Until one day it isn’t fine for anybody.
They have had a system of allowing basically the commodification of water, privatization of water, through these water rights. And what California needs to do is declare its groundwater to be a public trust. They need to bring in terribly strict management. They have to bring in a hierarchy of access. And frankly, they’ve got to stop making all the almonds and the, the hay for Japan, and everything. Alfalfa that they ship off to Japan. They’ve got to start taking care of their water, and put it back in the center of all policy.
JAY: But can you do that and at the same time have such a massive agribusiness in California?
BARLOW: No. You can’t have both. But you’re not going to have it, anyway. The water dries up, it’s gone. I remember being in Australia a couple of years ago when they first announcement that the rice exports were down 98%. I mean, the bottom fell out of the rice industry, which is huge in Australia, because they ran out of water. So ... it’s not like jobs versus the environment. If you don’t have water, you can’t grow crops. There isn’t any such thing as big agribusiness, or small farming, if we don’t have water.
We have to have what I call a new water ethic, where water is put in the center of our lives, and all policy, from how we grow food to how we produce energy, to how we trade with one another, asks the question about the impact on water. And until we do that, California’s just going to be one of the many crises we’re going to face around the world.
Another happening right now is Brazil. Brazil, up until recently, has been seen as the most water-rich country in the world. But greater São Paolo has about 20 million people. They don’t think they have enough water to last six months. That’s because they’ve cut down the Amazon, and that has removed the whole hydrologic cycle that produced the rain.
So, we have to stop thinking that somehow, big technology is going to fix this. We are a planet running out of clean, accessible water.
JAY: That certainly is the thinking, that somehow eventually it will become economical to spend the money for technology to save us. So for example, in California, at some point it becomes profit-making and worthwhile to bring water down from Canada. There is lots of fresh water not that far north of California agriculture.
BARLOW: There’d be an awful big fight if Americans or California or businesses think that Canada’s going to sell its water to the United States. It’s a very, very hot issue here. We need our water. We do not have that much. We have about 6.5% of the world’s available water. Most of our water is running North, in mighty rivers running north, and there is no way that we’re going to allow the re-engineering of our entire environment to, frankly, to feed a state that hasn’t looked after its own water.
I mean, I think a lot of people around the world are going to say, what did you do to protect your water? And when you run out because you haven’t heard the warnings that have been at least 30 years coming, why should other parts of the world so-called share their water, or sell their water to you when you haven’t taken care of it yourself?
We need to understand that everywhere there are maybe different water realities, but there isn’t a place in the world where we don’t have to start taking care of water in a very different way than we have.
Monday, July 8, 2019
The climate change and its impact on democracy
A good opinion piece. On one end, the developed countries keep screaming that world keeps getting hotter & hotter, & the weather patterns keep getting drastic, which in turn, is throwing everything else out of whack; people's lives & their livelihoods are in severe danger. On the other hand, these same developed countries, while asking developing countries to not use fossil fuels, are using fossil fuels themselves, & have built an economic system, which is globalized, so it affects everyone around the world, & that economic system measures a country's development based on exploitation of earth's limited resources, esp. fossil fuels.
Companies of these developed countries get in contract with developing countries, where they exploit (dig up) these fossil fuels, without any regard to the climate change, due to them being cheaply available, & then export these products around the world & make a handsome profit. All the while, the developing countries, might be showing a good GDP & a positive Current Account figure, but they are also suffering due to those fossil fuels being used abundantly & adversely affecting the climate around the world. Their public is far susceptible to fighting each other for limited amount of healthy food, clean water, & clean air, & in absence of these items, these developing countries are also bear the responsibility of adverse health conditions of their public, due to unavailability of basic necessities of life.
As the author correctly suggests, the world economic system needs to separate itself from this usage & exploitation of fossil fuels. Countries should be measuring exports & current accounts based on export of solar & wind-generated energy, instead of oil & coal, & this change needs to happen now, because we have already crossed the red line, & in some places, weather patterns have drastically changed. Remember, today, it's them; tomorrow, it'll be us, fighting for healthy & clean food, clean water, & clean air.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Climate change intensifies conflicts and creates mass migrations. Tens of millions of people are displaced owing to climate change, according to the United Nations. Severe droughts and heatwaves in Syria and the Middle East at large preceded the war, leaving people without jobs, food or hope - and migrating for their lives.
...
...
Climate change is a result of the Bretton Woods institutions and their deliberate policy to globalise the world economy based on extensive exports of natural resources from poor nations. This means petroleum, coal and gas, minerals, metals, forest products and meat.
Since their creation in 1945, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization have been based on hyper-exploitation of natural resources that they encouraged and even coerced from poor nations.
Low prices of natural resources have contributed a several fold increase in the wealth gap between the poor and the rich nations since World War II. This was the most successful period of industrialisation the world ever saw. It was based on extensive overconsumption of natural resources, and the direct result is climate change.
...
...
Almost a decade ago, the UN warned that "indigenous people are among the first to face the direct consequences of climate change owning their dependence upon, and close relationship with the environment and its resources." ...
Water is now one of the scarcest resources globally, according to the UN. The story is the same around the entire developing world.
What to do?
We need to replace the Bretton Woods system. They were the first global financial institutions the world ever saw. They fulfilled their mission and now they are dragging the world into an environmental disaster.
New global financial institutions are needed to get things right. We need to limit the exploitation of the planet's atmosphere, its bodies of water and its biodiversity. These are basic needs for human survival: we need clean water, clean air and food without which we cannot survive. All this is possible and must be done.
The limits on resource use can be flexible over time with the creation of equitable and efficient global markets for the global commons.
Limits on the use of water, air and biodiversity is what humanity needs to survive. This parallels the limits on emission of CO2 nation by nation, which was achieved by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and its carbon market that became international law in 2005.
...
...
The recent Paris Agreement - which has no emission limits and no teeth - must be improved. The establishment of a new system that respects our planets' vital resources for life will change the global capitalistic system - as they value the global commons, clean air, clean water and biodiversity. These have no economic value today, but it can be and should be done.
We need to decouple economic progress from fossil fuels if we are to survive as a species. The International Energy Agency recently reported that this is already starting. A detailed footprint and the attendant economic policies must redress economic growth to be harmonious with the world's resources and with the survival of humankind.
Graciela Chichilnisky is a professor of economics and of statistics at Columbia University and the Director of the Columbia Consortium for Risk Management.
The True Cost of Incarceration in Baltimore’s Poorest Neighborhoods
Although, it was good to watch this interview that US has started to look into reforming its prison system, I don't have much hope of something actually happening. Reason being that US prison system, similar to its medical system, is becoming profit-driven, as it is also mentioned in the interview.
Some states have contracted out the prison system to private contractors. Those private contractors benefit from prison population's almost-free / "slave" labour & they also get subsidies / tax breaks from the government (similar to several other companies / industries). Of course, if the contractors are profiting from the labour, they need more of that "free" labour. So, of course, they lobby hard & get the judiciary (judges, attorney generals etc.) on their side of the table.
Result is harsh sentencing laws, e.g. minimum mandatory sentence, are then passed. By the way, there was a good crime drama 2013 movie on this issue, "Snitch," starring Dwayne Johnson, & based on a real story. Anyway, so contractors need to keep a certain level of beds fill in their prisons. They may even be getting tax breaks or subsidies based on prison fill-rate (sort of like how hotels operate their business). On top of that, attorneys' successes are measured based on their conviction rate. So the more they put people behind bars, the more they are considered as making the public safe. That perception comes in very handy if those attorneys are dreaming of getting into government one day.
So who suffers in all of this self-serving agendas, fiasco & corruption? The Public.
1. Taxpayers: As the interviewee explains that millions of taxpayer $$$ are spent in housing these prisoners; some counties are spending almost $10 -15 million a year. Those same millions which could have been spent on improving infrastructure, putting food on the poor family's table (by increasing the budget of food stamp program, instead of cutting it), improving schools in poor, urban areas so kids of disadvantaged families also get the same quality of education as the kid from an elite family.
2. People: Those people who get snared in this prison system. Racism is still existent in the American society; African-Americans, who are usually on the disadvantaged spectrum of the general population, face the brunt of these harsh laws. They get locked up for minor offences, assuming they did commit an offence in the first place.
Once they caught up in that cycle, there is no exit out of that maze. Even when they do get out, they have a hard time securing employment and/or housing. Result is they may not have enough money to pay alimony or provide a suitable place to live for their kids or live in a safe & secure place just by themselves.
So, if, due to unemployment, that person, who was not a violent offender in the first place, but has an "ex-con" label now, doesn't pay child support, then he is put into prison. If that person, due to unemployment, can't secure housing, & starts living on the streets, where he/she can easily become a drug addict, & if he gets caught with a drug, he/she visits the prison, again. What happens with all these prison visits? That person is labelled a multiple offender, & has much longer sentences.
Essentially, that person, who was wrongly / perhaps, harshly convicted of a minor offense, becomes a hardened criminal. Who gets the blame then? That person him/herself.
But, at the end of the day, will things really change for the better? I still say, no. Because, the political will is not there. Mr. Trump thinks that the crime is increasing, even though, it isn't, & Republicans are trying to bring in legislation to become much more tough on crime. That "toughness" will always always ensnare poor people of colour, which will continue the vicious cycle of incarceration, drug addiction, unemployment, homelessness, poverty, & death. Big money is involved in this cycle & after all, who wants to let go money?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
STEPHEN JANIS, TRNN PRODUCER: America’s reputation as a incarceral nation is well-established. The United States accounts for 25% of the world’s entire prison population, while representing just 5% of the world’s total population.
But a new study reveals a different perspective on the country’s penchant for imprisonment–the price tag–and not just for the country as a whole, but for specific neighborhoods in Baltimore. And what the study found is not just how much we’re spending to keep people locked up, but how much [of what] we’re spending is concentrated in poor minority neighborhoods.
The numbers are stunning. Maryland is spending $50 million to incarcerate residents of roughly five neighborhoods.
One of the things that I found interesting about the study is just why you decided to look at these neighborhoods and look at incarceration from an entirely different perspective. Could you talk about that little bit?
MARC SCHINDLER, EXEC. DIRECTOR, JUSTICE POLICY INSTITUTE: Sure. Well, this is a significant issue for the state of Maryland and for the country as a whole, as you talked about. The amounts that we’re spending to lock people up in our cities and states around the country is extraordinary. In Maryland, we spend nearly $1 billion on the corrections agency–and just in Baltimore City, almost $300 million a year to lock people up.
And so one of the things that we talk about from a policy perspective–and I used to run a corrections agency–is: what are we getting for that investment? Are our communities safer? And, unfortunately, the answer largely is no.
And so what we did when there was some data available here in Baltimore, particularly, was look more closely at the data, particularly where people who are incarcerated live prior to their incarceration and what’s going on in those communities. And are there different ways that we might spend scarce public resources that would get us better outcomes?
JANIS: Now, you found specifically there were five communities where the most was spent. And what you looked at were some of characteristics, some of the outcomes in those committees. What did you find there?
SCHINDLER: So what we found across the cities. So there are about half of Baltimore’s communities, so about 25 of the 50-some odd communities, spend more than $5 million a year on incarceration. And as you pointed out, ten of those communities are spending more than $10 million. And one community in particular is actually spending about $17 million to lock up almost 500 people.
What we saw in common across those communities is that those are communities that are facing a variety of challenges. That includes everything from housing to high levels of substance abuse within those communities, to low education and low earnings in those communities. So we found a range of challenges within those communities.
And what the study really draws people and shows what we need to be asking is what is the link between those things and is spending on incarceration the best way we can spend money to address some of those issues.
JANIS: Now, of course, one of the big issues in criminal justice system is race and the involvement of race in criminal justice and where criminal justice resources are targeted. These neighborhoods, what was the racial composition?
SCHINDLER: So, overwhelmingly the neighborhoods that are sending the most people to prisons in Maryland are overwhelmingly communities of color, particularly African-American. And so you’re absolutely right. It’s virtually impossible to have a responsible discussion about criminal justice policy in this country without talking about the impact of race. And so what we see, whether it’s the juvenile justice system, the adult criminal justice system, is a disparate impact on communities of color, including people of color getting locked up for longer periods for similar types of behavior, as is exhibited in the white community.
JANIS: So why do you think it is that this subject of cost is so often not discussed within the context of criminal justice? I mean, your study is pretty much unique. I mean, there’ve been other studies that have covered this, but not in detail. Why is cost always sort of left out of the conversation?
SCHINDLER: Well, you know, I think it’s complicated, right? And so when we think about systems in government–and, again, I used to run a government agency. It was a juvenile corrections agency. Oftentimes you’re before the council or the state assembly, and you’re siloed into a committee that focuses on your issue. Right? And so, when I would testify about the juvenile justice budget in Washington, D.C., it was before a different set of council members that were talking about housing. Right? That was in a completely separate committee.
These things are related, right? So we know, for example, at the Baltimore City jail, there’s a percentage of people who are there who largely are there because they don’t have housing, right? And so, should we be locking people up essentially because they’re homeless. Right? And so these are issues that are intertwined.
But, unfortunately, the way government works, and sometimes the way the media works, is we don’t have a conversation that brings these issues together. And it is complicated, right? And so we need to make sure that we’re challenging ourselves to prove and say, okay, how exactly are we spending our resources? Where are we spending them? And what are the outcomes we’re getting?
JANIS: Well, that’s a great point you bring up, the efficacy of the criminal justice system. You’re saying that more incarceration doesn’t make us safer. How is that possible? And what aspects of this process make us less safer in your opinion?
SCHINDLER: Sure. There’s little bit of a tipping point here, right? So some level of incarceration clearly does impact public safety. Right? So there are people who are committing very, very dangerous acts, and if they’re incarcerated, they’re not committing those acts, at least on the streets, for the period that they’re incarcerated. But what the students have shown over time–and most recently a major report issued by the Bernard Center for Justice showed that incarceration has a limited impact on public safety. And, in fact, it has diminishing returns the more you get. Right? So, essentially there’s a tipping point.
And there has been research over the years–and I think if we looked at some of these communities in Baltimore, we would see this, in that in fact a high rate of incarceration actually can have a destabilizing impact on a neighborhood. Right? And you think about that, it’s sort of common sense. Right? So here in Baltimore, for example, in these neighborhoods that we’re talking about, we have a disproportionate number of African-American men going to prison. Right? These are men who have sons, who have daughters, who have spouses, who have families. When you’re removing them, right, you may be removing someone who committed a crime, but you’re also removing someone who can be an asset to that community, who most likely was doing some work of some kind, who was caring for a family member. Right? And so when you take a significant portion of those people out of the community, right, that community is stretched even more thin. Right?
And so this destabilizing effect on communities is something that we need to be aware of and look at: what are the other challenges within that community that we can be addressing and be addressing in a more cost-effective way? It’s essentially cheaper to get somebody trained for a job, right, which you can do–for the $37,000 that we pay to lock up an individual for a year in Maryland, you can have five people in a workforce development program. I would argue that if you’re doing a good job and have the right people in that program, it’s a much better investment and a much better use of your tax dollars that just locking up one person.
JANIS: And so I have to ask you to question, because everything you say makes perfectly common sense to me, and yet, even in Annapolis now there is talk of police reform, right? But it’s not going anywhere at the moment. What is the resistance to looking at this in this way, in ... purely economic context? And I’ve kind of asked this question before. And it’s still the more you say, what is preventing us from having a discussion about this, about our incarceration issue?
SCHINDLER: Yeah. I think there’s a number of things that are making this discussion hard, although there’s also some things that are starting to make it a little bit more possible in today’s times. So you mentioned the disproportionate impact on people of color in the criminal justice system. And so we should just call it for what it is, right? Race is a factor, and there is a reluctancy to have that discussion in public forums to acknowledge what is going on in the justice system.
We’re starting to see that in this country–unfortunately, due to tragedies. Right? But we have everyone from the president to the attorney general to leaders in Congress talking about the fact that we lock up too many people in this country not for good law enforcement reasons. So that’s one reason.
The other piece, though, is, quite frankly, we’re spending so much money on this criminal justice system now that we can no longer afford to ignore this conversation. Right? And so you have now fiscal conservatives coming to the table to talk about these issues, because essentially they’ve taken a hard look at this and they said, you know, we’re locking up two-thirds of the people in this country for nonviolent offenses and we’re spending extraordinarily amounts of money. So they’re starting to ask, can we do something differently? So that’s created some opportunity to have a discussion.
There’s also a part of the conservative movement that is libertarian. Right? And they’re concerned about more intrusive government. Right? And so government, through our corrections system, has gotten extraordinarily big. Right? And so it’s very expensive, it’s intrusive, and it’s not fair.
So I think a combination of those things–combined with unfortunate tragedies, quite frankly–is at least providing some opening for this discussion. Whether that will actually result in real reform is another question.
JANIS: Well, you bring up a good point. It’s an industry, too, right? I mean, what you’re talking about the criminal justice system–I’ve read somewhere it’s around $80 billion a year, employs thousands of people. How much does that factor into keeping that discussion on a limited plain?
SCHINDLER: Oh, there’s no question about it. It is a criminal-industrial complex, right? And so there are literally billions of dollars that are at stake. And there are private for-profit prison companies. There are companies that make the food that are served in prisons, that build prisons. And so this is an extraordinarily profitable industry and one that takes up a piece of our economy. So that does make this in some ways more challenging. And, if you will, there are special interests who have a vested interest in the status quo.
But I think we’re starting to see some pushback on that and some realization that this is not getting the outcomes that we’re looking for.
We also just can’t ignore the fact that we are at an all-time record low for crime in this country. That’s not necessarily because of incarceration. But I think that’s also giving us an opportunity to have a discussion where there’s not as much fear within the general public, because crime is relatively low right now.
JANIS: Moving forward, what do you think needs to happen, and what do you think will come with this report? Are you planning on doing any more research? Or moving forward, what will happen?
SCHINDLER: Sure. You know, our hope–and I think we’re starting to see this happen–is that people will start asking tougher questions in terms of how we are spending our scarce public dollars.
One of the things that we point to in the report–and I think there’s some discussion going on here in Maryland and in other places–is let’s really have a cost-benefit analysis when we’re talking about public policy.
So a place that is actually doing this quite well is in Washington state. Some years ago they created the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. And they are charged with actually doing a cost-benefit analysis in terms of looking at the likely outcomes for different changes in law and policy. There’s no reason that Maryland and other states shouldn’t be doing the same thing. So responsible elected officials should be asking, if we pass this law, or if we leave this long sentencing law in effect, what are we getting from that, from a cost-benefit analysis as it relates to public safety?
And so our hope is that people start to ask those questions, ’cause I think when those questions start to get asked and they start to see the answers, that’s a way to shift this discussion and move it forward more effectively.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
‘Death to the infidels!’ Why it’s time to fix Hollywood’s problem with Muslims
We all know that today's war is more of a media war than the good, old war with weapons. As the article correctly points out that what's happening in Middle East, what's happening in Muslim-majority countries around the world due to the world's sense of security & misrepresentations of Muslims countries as full of lecherous, evil, gun-toting Muslims, & the treatment of Muslims in Western countries is down to one fact only, which is that Hollywood movies have a big contribution in destroying the reputation of Muslims as responsible citizens of their countries, wherever they reside.
This narrative of all Muslims being evil is so ingrained in public's mind, with the help of media & Hollywood, that when Hollywood tries to tell a good story, like "Lions for Lambs," or "Redacted," the general public shun those movies, & those movies do horribly at the box office & later on, as rentals. The Western public wants to see Muslims being labelled as evildoers. That's why, movies like "American Sniper," & TV shows like 24, Homeland, & Quantico do great in the West.
Then, these same Western countries decry violence against Muslims in their own countries, & complain that Muslims in Muslim-majority countries seemingly hate them. That's their hypocrisy. Why make such movies, shows, & news media, which depicts Muslims as nothing less than barbaric individuals & then complain that Muslims don't like the Western public. Actually, Muslims are very forgiving people that they watch those movies, know that they are being discriminated & misrepresented, but still, they are not out to kill & hurt people in the West.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Great convo w studio execs in LA. Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative,” tweeted John Kerry on 16 February, along with a photo of himself in a Hollywood meeting lounge with executives from Universal, Warner, Fox, Disney, Sony, Dreamworks and other big players – overwhelmingly middle-aged white men in suits.
One can’t help imagining there were some awkward moments to this “great convo”, though. Especially if Kerry queried what Hollywood had done to counter the “#Daesh narrative” so far. Even more so, if he asked what juicy counter-terrorism stories they had coming down the pipeline. Looking at the current output, such as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Rock the Kasbah and London Has Fallen, you could easily get the impression that Hollywood is part of the problem, rather than a potential solution.
If you accept the notion of a “war of narratives”, it’s an area where the extremists have done most of the running. Still ringing in Washington’s ears and heading its PowerPoint presentations is the declaration the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri made in 2005: “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.” Isis/Daesh has been sending a steady stream of video content on to that media battlefield, the relative sophistication of which has filled western commentators with a mix of horror, concern and admiration. The US and its coalition partners have floundered over how to respond.
Kerry’s visit to Hollywood comes a month after the State Department revamped its Countering Violent Extremism programme. Since 2010, that role had been performed by the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC); its counter-messaging often leaned towards counter-productive messaging. One of its strategies, for example, was to engage directly with Isis jihadists on Twitter, but that only served to legitimise their voices. The CSCC also put out a parody recruitment video, repurposing Isis’s violent propaganda footage and broadcasting it under the seal of the State Department. “Run, do not walk to Isis land,” ran the text of the ad. “Travel is inexpensive because you won’t need a return ticket!” As the TV satirist John Oliver remarked: “You are banking a lot on any potential militants understanding that that is sarcasm.”
“If our message is that Daesh is a criminal organisation that represents a distorted view of Islam, the US government is not the best conveyor of that message,” says Richard Stengel, undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the State Department. “The best conveyors are local people and Muslims and clerics and NGOs. So, rather than be in the business of doing tit-for-tat tweets with Daesh, we realised that we have an expertise in funding and messaging. What can we do to empower, amplify, optimise the messaging that’s out there already? That’s the central paradigm shift.”
This is by no means the first time in the 21st century that the White House has turned to Tinseltown. Just a month after 9/11, George W Bush’s top adviser, Karl Rove, convened a similar council of movie execs for a counter-terrorist pitching session, although it apparently came to nothing. There was no discussion of putting government propaganda into movies, it was reported. “Content was off the table,” said Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Pictures Association of America.
Content was also off the table at Kerry’s Hollywood trip, it appears. “It wasn’t about asking them to make an Islamic Harry Potter,” says Stengel. “It’s not like the cold war, trying to insert positive narratives into movies. It’s connected in the largest possible way to defeating Daesh. It was an opportunity to talk to these people who shape content around the world, who shape the American brand around the world. An opportunity to go to them and say: ‘What can you do to help?’ in what [Kerry] has called the generational struggle of our time.”
But if Hollywood has any meaningful role to play here, content is arguably exactly what should be on the table. Throughout its history, American cinema has employed a lamentably narrow set of stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. “They’ve been the most vilified group in the history of Hollywood,” says the academic and author Jack Shaheen. His book Reel Bad Arabs surveys some 1,200 depictions of Arabs and Muslims in the movies. By his estimation, roughly 97% are unfavourable, coloured by orientalist myths, racist demonising and xenophobic paranoia. “At most, three dozen or so had balance, or what I would call positive images. In the rest of them, Arabs are either terrorists or shady sheikhs or people you would not want to associate with. Those images continue to pervade our psyches.”
There are too many egregious examples to list. Selected highlights would include True Lies (Arnold Schwarzenegger versus fanatical yet incompetent Palestinian terrorists, who detonate a nuclear device in Florida), Protocol (Goldie Hawn becomes concubine to a lecherous oil-rich sheikh, so that the US can build a military base in his country), Network (“The Arabs are simply buying us,” rails Peter Finch’s rebel presenter), and 1998 thriller The Siege (in which Arab-Americans are rounded up after a New York terrorist attack. The critic Roger Ebert wrote: “The prejudicial attitudes embodied in the film are insidious, like the antisemitism that infected fiction and journalism in the 1930s”). And special mention must go to William Friedkin’s 2000 thriller Rules of Engagement, in which Samuel L Jackson’s marine goes on trial for massacring a crowd of Yemenis, but is exonerated when it turns out they were all gun-toting evildoers, even the women and children.
Rules of Engagement was “probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs by Hollywood”, protested the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee at the time. But then 9/11 happened and things became even worse. Old-fashioned Islamophobia is still thriving, as demonstrated by current release London Has Fallen, in which Gerard Butler saves the world from yet another brown-skinned, detonator-happy terrorist with an Arab-sounding name, and dispatches evildoers with lines such as: “Get back to Fuckheadistan, or wherever you’re from.” Meanwhile, counter-terrorism-themed TV series such as 24, Homeland, Sleeper Cell and NCIS reiterate the “all Muslims are potential terrorists” notion, with the added point that they’re on American soil now. “Hollywood and television have created an even more dangerous precedent by vilifying American Arabs and American Muslims in particular,” says Shaheen. “They’ve blended the old stereotypes from ‘over there’ with new stereotypes from ‘over here’.”
When Hollywood has made attempts to address the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts directly, the casualty list has been high: Lions for Lambs, The Messenger, Stop Loss, Green Zone, In the Valley of Elah, Grace Is Gone, Redacted – all of them flopped at the box office. Even The Hurt Locker, with its Oscars and all-round acclaim, was greeted with widespread indifference by the American public, taking just $17m (£12m).
Only a handful of Afghanistan/Iraq films have struck a chord with US audiences: Zero Dark Thirty, detailing the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, made $95m domestically; Afghanistan action thriller Lone Survivor made $125m; and overshadowing them all is Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, based on the real-life Navy Seal Chris Kyle, who holds the record for the most kills in US military history. It took more than $350m, making it the highest grossing movie of 2014 in the US.
When viewed through the prism of “countering the #Daesh narrative”, these movies make uncomfortable viewing. Zero Dark Thirty took a relatively nuanced approach to the war on terror, but controversially depicted Arabs being tortured. Both American Sniper and Lone Survivor narrowly focus on US military personnel and their efforts to kill nameless, faceless “bad guys”. Wider questions about American foreign policy, or how ordinary Afghanis and Iraqis felt about being invaded, are sidestepped in favour of heat-of-the-battle immediacy. In its opening minutes, American Sniper gets in the “all Muslims are potential terrorists” trope, as Kyle guns down a woman and a child who both try to attack US troops (the attack did not happen in real life). It gets worse from there on in. Not that the reality was much better. In his autobiography, Kyle wrote: “I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.”
These are the narratives the US has been sending out on to this ideological battlefield. Shaheen is not alone in wondering what role they have played, not just in the rise of Isis, but in the decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, not to mention the manner in which those wars were conducted, from the high levels of civilian casualties to atrocities such as those at Abu Ghraib. And how can these mythologies not play into the increasingly Islamophobic climate back home? Republican presidential nominees are presently engaged in an arms race of anti-Muslim rhetoric, against a background of vandalised mosques, threats, shootings and general discrimination. Isis’s own atrocities have contributed to this climate, of course, but homespun narratives seem to be fanning the flames. The release of American Sniper triggered a reported three-fold increase in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab threats.
“When you create this fear and it manifests itself in hate crimes, bias and bullying, then it alienates people,” says Humera Khan, the founder and executive director of Muflehun, a counter-violent-extremism thinktank. “Society is telling you: ‘You don’t belong.’ It is reinforcing what Isis is telling them.” Islamic extremists represent, at best, 100,000 people out of a worldwide Muslim population of 1.6 billion, Khan points out, but with the exception of the occasional token “good Muslim”, these are overwhelmingly the ones we see on our screens. She offers an analogy: “Imagine if you introduced someone to white people only by way of the Ku Klux Klan, but then said afterwards, ‘Oh, by way, there are some good white people out there, too.’”
In stereotyping Arabs and Muslims, the US also reinforces stereotypes about itself, Khan adds. Muslims around the world watch Hollywood movies, too – in greater numbers than Americans. “When these movies play in majority Muslim countries, the assumption is, ‘Look: they’re misrepresenting us again.’ So for the average person who’s not interested in Isis, the impression is: ‘America doesn’t like us.’ When you think about Isis’s message, that this is ‘a war against Muslims’, that’s exactly what they’re showing.”
Mirroring Washington’s recent shift in counter-messaging, Hollywood also seems to be taking a different tack: it is now coming at the Afghanistan/Iraq wars by way of comedy. Perhaps the studio bosses looked at their casualty list of box-office bombs and wondered if all that death, torture and moral complexity wasn’t putting people off. Having repeated the history as tragedy, Hollywood is repackaging it as farce.
Rock the Kasbah is an all-too-literal example of this. The movie ... draws on the true story of Setara Hussainzada, a Pashtun teenager who bravely tested post-invasion waters by entering Afghanistan’s new X Factor/Pop Idol equivalent, Afghan Star (women singing or dancing was strictly forbidden under Taliban rule). Hussainzada was already the subject of a 2009 documentary, also titled Afghan Star, but in Rock the Kasbah, she’s discovered in a cave by Bill Murray’s jaded rock promoter. He puts her into the spotlight with the aid of some fellow Americans: a twitchy soldier, two corrupt arms dealers and a sympathetic prostitute, who operates out of a trailer on the edge of town. From a “#Daesh narrative” perspective, they could represent the horsemen of the apocalypse, but the comic tone places the gruesome realities of war well in the background. As one review put it: “Rock the Kasbah gives the impression that the nation’s ideological rebirth would have been impossible without the gumption of a hasbeen music manager learning to shed his cynicism.”
It’s a similar story with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which opened in the US this weekend. Again, the plight of war-ravaged Afghanistan is largely window-dressing for the journey of our war-reporter heroine, Tina Fey, a fortysomething singleton who is pitched into the battlefield and the hard-partying expat “Kabubble”. One character lets the cat out of the bag by describing it as “the most American-white-lady story I’ve ever heard”. A few Afghani characters do get speaking parts in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. One is a clownish local politician, basically a standard-issue “lecherous Arab”, played by the British actor Alfred Molina. The other, Fey’s Afghani helper, Fahim, is that rarest of things: a male Muslim movie character who is intelligent, educated, empathetic and not the slightest bit lecherous. That bad news is he’s played by an American actor, Christopher Abbott, best known as Charlie out of Girls.
There’s more of this to come. Such as War Dogs, formerly titled Arms and the Dudes, about two real-life Miami stoners who made a fortune illegally exporting arms to Afghanistan with US approval – directed by the guy who made The Hangover. It sounds like a cross between The Wolf of Wall Street and Pineapple Express. Then there’s War Machine, in which Brad Pitt plays General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, who famously talked himself out of a job in a profile for Rolling Stone magazine, by expressing his contempt for Barack Obama and his administration. It could be a great satire – and there is certainly a place for those in cinema, when you think back to movies such as Catch-22, M*A*S*H, Dr Strangelove, or even Three Kings or Team America. There have been a plethora of fine American documentaries chronicling this era, too. But again, what does it mean for the battle of narratives?
For Hollywood, it can look like a case of “damned if we do, damned if we don’t”. Either they take a purely US-centric point of view and dehumanise Arabs and Muslims – which plays right into the #Daesh narrative. Or they take a critical look at the US’s military and foreign policy failings – which also plays into the #Daesh narrative. What are they supposed to do?
A good start, says Shaheen, would be to stop perpetuating the same blinkered, divisive rhetoric as our enemies. It wouldn’t take much. “There really needs to be a couple of blockbuster films that squash these stereotypes, as well as some responsibility on the part of our political leaders, who are encouraging voters to hate their fellow Americans. It has to come from the top.” He cites the way Hollywood cleaned up its act with regard to racist depictions of African-Americans, Jews and LGBT characters.
Khan agrees: “If they were just more responsible in their portrayal of Arabs and Muslims, that would actually help the environment on the ground.” What happens on the ground, in Syria and Iraq especially, is obviously paramount if anything is to change, but movies absolutely have a role to play. “Is any narrative going to be sufficient? No. Is this a necessary part of this landscape of needs? Yes.”
Just as the US likes to think of itself as the world’s policeman, it is also unquestionably the world’s storyteller. That narrative supremacy comes with certain responsibilities, now more so than ever.
In the meantime, we can take comfort from the fact that even jihadis can’t resist a good movie. ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)