Well, I've managed to put down the Cheetos long enough to dust my tinfoil hat off, so for the sake of the 3 or 4 people still remotely interested in this thread, let's keep it rolling.
I genuinely was not referring to anyone in this thread! I promise. I'm trying to be as respectful as possible to the forum posters, but I can't say the same for some of the journalists, because I think they're willfully BS-ing people in some cases with phony arguments.
RE: the articles about silencing anti-Iraq war journalists, it was shameful but I wouldn't characterize it as systematic. Some networks are going to cater to a particular audience at particular times. That's the nature of the beast with privately owned media and people have to be educated media consumers. I don't want to accuse anyone of cherry-picking, because it's a weak argument, but at the same time, there is plenty of good international analysis in mainstream media on Ukraine, on Iraq, on Afghanistan, etc. The articles here are exhibiting some of the instances where mainstream media has failed. They're no less important, but like I said, my day job involves media research, and I've just found that, on aggregate, most media outlets do a decent job of articulating the basic truth about a given situation.
In an interesting way, this alludes to a ruling made by your supreme court recently, where corporations were acknowledged to be 'people', and money was acknowledged as 'free speech'. Aside from the overtly-heinous precedent this sets, we would be best to avoid likening the struggles of corporate entities to those of individuals for the sake of rationality. Should we assume corporations retain the rights of individuals, then I suppose we could say that those corporations are some of the most powerful individuals on the planet, and that perhaps might go hand in hand in explaining the status quo of why half of the planet's wealth resides in the hands of 1% of its populace. Regardless of any potential cognitive en masse 'awakening' to this structural violence, it doesn't change the fact that the wealth gap is widening, and the power itself is becoming decidedly more concentrated. If one were to rely on the same legislation which landed this wealth in the hands of the 1% in the first place to somehow redistribute it... well, I really wouldn't know what to say to such an individual that isn't blatantly obvious unto itself.
Couldn't agree more. Money is a tool that produces institutional incumbency and it will be hard to roll back that SCOTUS ruling. One of the areas where I really feel like democracy (at least in the U.S., if not elsewhere) hasn't worked very well.
We already built the bases and Iraq is in a very valuable geographical position. We have bases in other countries. The war may have been a mistake, but I don't think there's anything wrong with keeping them, especially when we're considered the failsafe security button for most of the world during crises (see: Ukraine).
The petrodollar theory is an interesting one, but I have a major problem with it. There's an endogenous variable issue. The countries that people suggest we're destabilizing because they switched from dollars to Euros (Iran, Venezuela, Iraq) all have one thing in common: they are/were, to varying degrees, avowedly anti-American states. The impetus to switch from the dollar, and I can say this definitively in Venezuela, is almost certainly due to fears of their assets being seized, having sanctions kill their oil industry, or a simple anti-American gesture, rather than for economic reasons. More importantly, the underlying variable for why we aren't friendly toward them isn't that they switched to the Euro, but that they're anti-American and do things that undermine American interests.
Even if that weren't true, the hypothesis doesn't hold up. We have basically left Venezuela well alone since the early 2000s and let the PSUV do its thing.
That first link is bullshit, pure and simple. It's "oooh, I'm going to MAKE THIS SOUND SCARY and use the word imperialism! Never mind the policy merits, the fact that Nuland's job is literally to conduct diplomacy with politically important actors, or a long-standing U.S. desire for Ukraine to become integrated with Europe,
as most of its ethnically Ukrainian citizens want. The US is the real problem!" Arguments like this deny agency to real people and make them pawns in a global chess game. Yeah, of course the US is probably probably helping the protesters out. The question is how much, and whether the movement remains organic. I would suggest the answers are, respectively, not a lot, and absolutely.
The CFR connections the author makes are a pitch-perfect example of why I don't read these sorts of websites. CFR is a giant think tank that attracts people who have been in and will later go into government. Yeah, it attracts former policymakers. DC is a very connected place, and think tanks serve as revolving doors for government officials and academics. Find me a major policymaker who hasn't been at CFR and I'll be surprised.
These "independent journalists" make connections that have a layer of truth - yes, these people who work at X also work at Y, and are involved with policy Z - but they can't prove anything beyond that, because nothing exists. Implying malfeasance doesn't actually prove malfeasance. They're just using scare quotes and scary words to make people feel like something shady is going on.
I don't want to sound like an arrogant jerk when I make these posts, because I fully understand and realize that you don't need a degree to be an educated media consumer, or to understand foreign affairs. But there is a reason I mention education-related stuff:
It means I've spent a lot of time doing research, reading media reports and academic journal articles, talking to professors, talking to practitioners, and talking to peers about these issues. So when people suggest that the wool has been pulled over my eyes and I'm so stupid not to see what's really going on, it's tremendously insulting and arrogant. Education gives you access to diverse viewpoints, and academia in general lends much more credence to the sorts of views embedded in these independent media sources than the mainstream press. But the thing is, they provide data, supporting argumentation, etc., and they're critiqued by their peers. These independent journalists you're citing operate in a bizarro-land intellectual vacuum where they all see a nefarious fairy at the bottom of the garden, and nobody seems willing to say, "Hey, uh, that's crap and you offer no supporting evidence."
Some of this is kind of abstract, so at risk of becoming even more long-winded, I am going to explain what I mean by picking apart a piece from the site mentioned earlier, First Look Media,
about Venezuela. Obviously one article isn't the be-all-end-all of independent media, but it exemplifies the things I'm talking about.
At one point, the article quotes Michael Shifter “president of Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington”, as giving the following analysis of the situation: “López is saying, ‘this is intolerable, let’s not be resigned to it.’… He felt this wasd his moment to act, to take to the streets.” Going further, the piece also quotes Moisés Naím – omitting to mention that he too is a member of the Inter-American Dialogue – excoriating the previous opposition leader for not going far enough in challenging Maduro when he had the opportunity.
What the authors (1) failed to explain is that the Inter-American Dialogue is a think-tank whose members happen to include several officials from Venezuela’s previous government – (2) the same one deposed by Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution. Even more distressingly, (3) the Dialogue counts among its funders organizations such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, the U.S. government through USAID, and the embassies of Canada, Mexico and Guatemala among others.
(1) Again, think tanks were created to host public intellectuals and former and current policymakers. Having former policymakers is not some shady thing.
(2) Chávez didn't "depose" anybody, but it sure sounds like they were a nefarious bunch, right? In fact, Chávez staged a military coup in 1992. He failed and was put in prison. He was later elected in 1998. The previous government was a two-party democracy. It was awful, corrupt, and didn't represent the interests of average Venezuelans, but the author wants to make it sound as if it was Castro deposing Fulgencio Batista, which is not the case.
(3) This is a fair point, but how much funding, proportionally, does IAD receive from each of these organizations? The author doesn't discuss that, because it would involve substantiating his point.
That these groups have distinct political and financial interests in Venezuela casts some doubt on the impartiality of the viewpoints their funded analysts produce. Indeed, a 2006 diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks uncovered the fact that (4) U.S. officials were planning to implement a “5-point strategy” to undermine the Chavez government, specifically using USAID as a means to accomplish this. That USAID also happens to be a prime funder of the Inter-American Dialogue raises some serious questions about its unstated mission in the country.
(4) Read the Wikileaks cable. USAID's stated purpose is to consolidate democracy and human development, and the people mentioned in the cable correctly noted that the chavista movement has systematically excluded and harassed political opposition to make the PSUV the only guarantor of social progress. USAID programs, then, were necessarily going to run afoul of the government. And the programs cited focus on civil society, providing essential public services, and deepening public engagement to counter the "PSUV is the only provider of public services" narrative. I see nothing wrong with any of that.
For his part, Shifter has become a high-profile public critic of the Maduro administration in the mainstream press, where his organization is still depicted as a benign, “nonpartisan policy group”.
Again: oooh, allegations of malfeasance that sound very naughty!
Indeed, a 2012 study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) documented both Shifter’s political and corporate connections as well as the breadth of his reach in the media, remarking that, “What he says is very likely indistinguishable from the views of the monied interests backing his think tank.“ His appearance in the Washington Post last week was far from an aberration. He — along with others from the Dialogue — are regularly cited in articles on the region and Shifter himself has penned articles for the New York Times, Foreign Policy and others. In a 2005 op-ed in the Post he wrote:
Chavez is aggressively using rhetoric that bashes the Bush administration and claims the banner of social justice to consolidate his power…The challenge for U.S. policy is to contest the validity of Chavez’s claims and his grandiose but wrongheaded designs.
Not to be outdone, Moisés Naím also took to the pages of Post in 2011 to publish an article entitled “Imagining a World Without Hugo Chavez“, forecasting his death and the continued empowerment of his elected government. At one point, Naím laments American hesitance to involve itself more forcefully in Venezuelan politics due to its entanglements elsewhere saying:
[W]hat role would Chavez’s opponents play in a transition? These include the growing segment of Venezuela’s civil society that opposes him — especially the student movement and a new breed of young leaders — and, of course, the United States. In both cases, their influence would probably be limited: The former lacks guns, thugs or money; the latter is too busy dealing with crises elsewhere.
That the sources of this supposedly expert analysis are funded by corporations and governments openly hostile to the Venezuelan government, and which have even attempted its overthrow in the past, would appear to be a fairly glaring omission.
Again: they receive funding from corporations (which, let it be noted, fund all sorts of other things, too), so therefore they're corporate shills, bought and sold by monied interests. But the author also discounts that, hey, maybe that's just their opinion? I haven't received any funding from ExxonMobile, but I also think the PSUV is a thuggish, authoritarian institution. If I were working for CFR or IAD, I would say the same thing. That's not journalism. That's
an ad hominem attack. Don't you hate those, Ermz?
A Washington Post reader emailed the co-author of the story, Post staff writer Nick Miroff, asking why he didn’t explain the Inter-American Dialogue’s ties to Venezuela’s opposition and to business interests. In an email that made its way to The Intercept, Miroff wrote back that he didn’t think it necessary. (Contacted by The Intercept, Miroff confirmed the email was his, but said we did not have his permission to publish it. We don’t need his permission.)
Miroff wrote that he “quoted Michael Shifter for the simple reason that he’s a terrific Latin America analyst, and often has smart, thoughtful observations to share.” He pointed out that he stated in the story that Shifter had known Lopez for many years, “signaling to readers that he has a personal relationship with him.” He continued:
As for his organization receiving money from oil companies, or USAID, I think it’s relevant, but not necessarily worth spending ink on. A LOT of DC think tanks and universities and NGOs receive money from oil companies and other interests. Do we need to disclose all of those affiliations, every time? Chevron is one of the biggest foreign oil companies working in Venezuela and paying royalty $ to the government.
Miroff praised what he called “a good question,” but concluded that “I think in many cases it’s up to the reader to look up the organization and decide whether or not they think the comments are colored by donor interests. In Shifter’s case, I don’t believe they are.”
So there you have it: Because the infiltration of oil companies and other vested interests in policymaking has become so entrenched, there’s no point even mentioning it anymore. That Michael Shifter runs an organization funded by many of the same corporations and governments which have open conflicts with the Venezuelan government is apparently immaterial to him also providing expert analysis on political developments in Venezuela.
Nick Miroff articulates EXACTLY my point. Here's the authors' causal mechanism:
Chevron gives $$$ [we don't know or say how much] to IAD --> Michael Shifter works for IAD, knows Leopoldo Lopez (who went to Harvard and has strong ties to the US academic community) --> OMG CORPORATE SHILL, BOUGHT AND SOLD
Here's Nick Miroff's, and my, causal mechanism:
People know people. Companies make donations. DC is a kind of incestuous place, intellectually speaking.
Merely drawing connections on a white board doesn't make you a good analyst. It makes you a Glenn Beck of the left.
It's made all the more ridiculous by the fact that Michael Shifter and Moises Naim are just exhibiting a mainstream DC policy/think tank community view of Venezuela. It's what most academics, students, journalists, and human rights officials think about the country. So unless Chevron is paying literally everybody in DC, including me, a 23-year-old grad student, to think similar things, that's some weird convergence of opinion!
Even more incredibly, his colleague at the Inter-American Dialogue Moisés Naím was formerly Venezuela’s Minister of Trade and Industry during the tenure of (6 or whatever) President Carlos Andrés Pérez – a leader who was electorally deposed by Chavez and who presided over the massacre of hundreds of unarmed protestors in the country. Nonetheless, his commentary has been included without even the slightest acknowledgment of what appears to be a deeply prejudicial history.
None of this is written necessarily as a defence of the Venezuelan government or a commentary on events in that country, but rather to demonstrate the fundamental incapacity of the mainstream media to cover this story in a way that is not corrupted by corporate and political interests.
The corrosive influence of corporations and government in the news media has long been documented. The establishment press has demonstrated time and again its reflex to serve as a tool of powerful vested interests, and to act essentially as the communications arm of U.S. foreign policy. The Washington Post‘s coverage is just the most glaring and recent example of such behavior.
(6) Hugo Chavez beat Henrique Salas Romer in the 1998 election, not Carlos Andres Perez. CAP was the one he tried to unseat in a military coup. But hey, facts, right? Also, Naim was in that position for one year, and left after the caracazo to which the author refers.
Hopefully this shows that I'm not talking out my butt, and why I have such an aversion to "independent" media outlets.
BTW, I worked briefly for a foreign NGO doing fundraising, and 90% of all international NGO funding comes from multinational corporations. I am not exaggerating. Fully 90%, if not higher. Does that make them corporate shills, too? Corporations give money to think tanks because think tanks are non-profits and it's tax-deductible. I've spent time in academia, the NGO world, and I know a lot of government people. Yes, corporations make donations. But there's no smoke-filled room where we get together with bankers and the UN and government agencies and Exxon and decide what to say.
It is, though, important to recognize that I don't necessarily agree with these public intellectual think tank types, because yeah, Moises Naim is influenced by his background in Venezuela, his role in the AD-COPEI party system government structure, and his connections to people in the opposition. But I'm an educated media consumer, so I realize these things. The mainstream media outlets could do a better job of getting impartial experts, but that would basically require hiring academics, and the level of analysis they provide is too nuanced for most mainstream media consumers. So instead, they revert to think-tanks, which are admittedly part of a somewhat intellectually incestuous "beltway bandit" community that isn't a secret to most people.
. Money and power are what move this world, regardless which part of the globe (and all throughout history, for that matter).
