See also Jack Shaheen’s books, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People and Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11 .

Portland author Jules Boykoff sees dissent’s demise at the hands of big media

In November, A K Press published “Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States,” an important new book that shows us what we are up against if we hold dissenting political views. Author Jules Boykoff explores eight distinct techniques used by the U.S. government to suppress dissent, from direct violence and public prosecution to harder-to-detect and rarely acknowledged measures such as harassment, infiltration, surveillance and propaganda. A separate chapter is dedicated to each of these tactics, with historical examples, most of them since World War II.

Boykoff dedicates four more chapters to the role mass media plays in such suppression, looking at manipulation, what he calls bi-level demonization, deprecation and simple disregard.

The government’s methods of suppressing dissent — the murder of Black Panthers, say, or the illegal surveillance since 9/11 — eventually come under press scrutiny, even though it may take decades for the facts to come to light. But the press has been less disposed to analyze, criticize or, for that matter, even recognize its own role in the suppression of dissent.

Jules Boykoff, who lives in Portland and teaches political science at Pacific University in Forest Grove, was glad for the opportunity to speak with me, glad that Street Roots shares his alarm.

Martha Gies: Jules, for you, which were you aware of first – the role of government or the role of the press? And how did that awareness come about?

Jules Boykoff: Well, I regret to say that I was never taught in school that the government actively suppresses dissent or that the media have an ingrained tendency to cover political activists in negative ways, if they even bother to cover them at all. It wasn’t until later that I began to figure this out, that I began to get an education about my education, if you will. Once I got on that road, pretty quickly it became glaringly apparent that much of what I had been taught as U.S. history was really the managed vantage of the elite classes in our society.

Books that were important in my personal transformation include Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America,” Angela Davis’s “Women, Race, & Class,” and Michael Parenti’s “Democracy for the Few.”

Conversations with activists also helped raise my awareness. In the mid-1990s I was working at the Outside In drop-in center for homeless youths in Portland, and my partner, Kaia Sand, was writing for the Burnside Cadillac (forerunner to Street Roots), and we were both volunteering for Yellow Brick Road, a group that hands out medical supplies, referrals, and condoms to young people on the streets. During this time we engaged in what we thought was pretty creative activism, like handing out tickets for camping violations to people who had set out blankets the night before the Rose Parade to reserve their spots. But we got zero media coverage whatsoever. That was pretty eye-opening for me.

M.G.: Let’s take the press tactics one at a time. You argue, in Chapter 10, that the mass media have been subject to manipulation by government, both in the sense that branches of government implant stories and that they may go so far as to strong-arm journalists or threaten publishers. You talk about the tragic case of screen actress Jean Seberg, whom the FBI hounded with false press stories until they drove her to suicide. What is a current example of this tactic?

J.B.: This is one tactic from the FBI’s bag of tricks that usually takes years to bubble up to public awareness. After all, we often learn about this manipulation through whistleblowers who are afraid to speak out while the strongarming is going on, for fear of losing their jobs. That said, examples of the government manipulating media abound. For instance, just after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush’s then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice cajoled ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox to massively edit videotaped statements from Osama bin Laden. She claimed this was necessary because his public statements might contain coded messages for al-Qaeda followers and sympathizers, including disaffected people in the U.S. Getting the media to impose a blackout — or at least a thick filter — using flimsier than flimsy evidence was ever-so-handy for the Bush administration, since it meant the media could essentially block out the words and ideas of one of its most trenchant critics. After all, if you cut through bin Laden’s abhorrent terrorist rhetoric, there’s actually a pretty cutting critique of U.S. foreign policy there.

Well what do you suppose the media said in response to this plea for silence? They practically fell over themselves seeing who could be most compliant. The president of CBS News found the censorship “appropriate” and a way of “fulfilling our responsibilities to the public.”

More recently, under pressure from the Bush administration, the New York Times sat for more than a year on the story that the National Security Agency was illegally spying on Americans though warrantless wiretaps on their telephones and e-mail accounts. I believe that we have the right to know about such blatant governmental misconduct and I don’t think the Bush administration’s “national security” rationale holds water. We deserve better.

M.G: So is the press being hoodwinked or lazy or both?

J.B.: Although I am super-critical of corporate journalism, I generally hesitate to call journalists lazy. More often, feeble media coverage emerges from journalistic biases towards novelty, drama, and personalities. In other words, “bad” reporting often emerges from “good” journalists following the rules they learned in school. So, inadequate, pro-government media coverage is usually less a conspiracy and more an accumulation of learned strategies carried out by reporters facing intense pressures in terms of both deadlines as well as the amount of space or airtime they are given by the boss. That’s part of the reason we continue to see immense deference to government authorities as official sources.

The overuse of anonymous sources is also an accepted part of the professional code, even though journalists don’t like it and don’t believe it makes for high-quality reporting. We need to remember, too, that under our current brand of capitalism — what some call neoliberalism or neoliberal capitalism — there’s the obsessive penchant for downsizing, which means that those journalists who are not fired when their company downsizes are asked to do more with less. They’re asked to cover more topics, many of which they have little or no familiarity with. This leads them to rely on crutches like official sources and pseudo-balance. So in my opinion, it’s less about laziness and more about on-the-job stress and submission to authority.

So there’s my “sympathy for journalism” moment! Seriously, though, it’s really disconcerting that time and time again, when it comes to the important issues of our day, the mainstream media keep getting it wrong. This just points to the need to continue to build alternative media venues where the truth can get out. That’s one reason why Street Roots is important, why the radio show Democracy Now! is important, why KBOO radio in Portland is important.

M.G: You write: “Bi-level demonization entails the state and mass media linking dissidents to a demonized group or individual from the international area, even if the activists are not working directly with or supporting the demonized external foe materially or ideologically.” Obviously, we saw the House Un-American Activities Committee practice this, as they desperately attempted to link American leftists to Communists in the Soviet Union back in the late 1940s early ’50s. Where do you see it at work today?

J.B.: Today, with the Cold War a thing of the past, activists are more likely to be dubbed terrorists. We see this with anti-war protesters in Oakland in April 2003 whom police pelted with so-called non-lethal weapons. In the aftermath of these violent attacks, Bay Area newspapers quoted a spokesperson from the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center who said that blocking a port, which the protesters were attempting to do, was terrorism because it was designed to have an economic impact. What kind of overbroad definition of terrorism is that? And what, you might ask yourself, was a representative of the Anti-Terrorism Information Center doing at a peaceful, non-violent anti-war protest?

Basically, in the post-9/11 era, “terrorism” has become a dead word that means whatever the government wants it to mean. Here in Oregon, environmentalists who burn down buildings and SUVs, without inflicting so much as a scratch on human beings, are being called the biggest domestic terrorist threat in our country. The government is handing these activists terrorist-enhanced sentences, which means their time in jail is extended simply because the government labeled them terrorists. All the while, the government is focusing its suppressive attention on political activists fighting for social change. The government’s tactic of labeling political activists terrorists has come to a head recently with the House of Representatives’ passage of a bill, called the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, which explicitly zeros in on people who are fighting for social and political change. This proposed law, which I hope the Senate has the good sense to stop in its tracks, is just the most recent example of how the government uses this time-honored tactic of bi-level demonization to squelch political activity it finds threatening.

M.G: You did a lot of original work in chapter 12, where you analyze 10 days of media coverage for both the 1999 Seattle WTO protests and the April 2000 demonstrations in Washington state in protest of the World Bank and the IMF. Could you talk a little about your findings?

J.B.: Basically I tried to identify the main ways the media portrayed activists in those two intense episodes of boots-to-pavement dissent. I read the more than 350 news stories that emerged about the protests from the most influential mainstream media sources — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Boston Globe, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox. All the while I was trying to figure out what were the most common ways these media outlets portrayed dissident citizens. In the end, I found that the media tended to rely on five main themes or frames: the violence frame, the disruption frame, the ignorance frame, the freak frame, and the amalgam of grievances frame. By and large, activists were not depicted by the media as conscientious, courageous people taking to the streets to fight against an inherently unjust set of economic policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer and that condemn thousands and thousands of hard-working people to live on the global streets. Rather these activists were described as violent, anarchistic, window-smashing, counter-cultural thugs who were disrupting the lives of hard-working Americans. On top of that, all too often the media portrayed these activists as freakish people who were often ignorant about the supposedly overly wide range of causes they claimed to be fighting for. You can read the book for the specific statistics, but the bottom line is that activists not only got pummeled by the cops in the streets of Seattle, but they also got thumped pretty regularly by the stick of media degradation.

M.G.: Okay, last question: what’s worse, Jules, what we read in the newspapers or what we will never read there?

J.B.: In a lot of ways I think what we never read in the news is more devastating in the long term, because by not reporting dissent in all its gorgeous, innovative forms the media actually constrict possibility. Such media coverage stunts the social imagination. It blunts creativity.

When we start to feel that inkling of dejection, that our activism won’t actually make a difference, we’d do well to remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who once said, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” If we want deep social change that makes a more just, equitable world, we need to dig our collective heels in for the struggle. We need to draw from our history — ugly as it may be at times — as we chart our ethical, righteous future.

By Martha Gies

Reprinted from Street Roots

© Street News Service: www.street-papers.org

Katherine

Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United State
By Jules Boykoff

The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community
By Steve Marglin

Another holiday season has come and gone with more reruns of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” We could sure use banker George Bailey now that the mortgage mess threatens to do what the rapacious Mr. Potter, the town’s richest citizen, could not: end the “nonsense” of providing mortgages for the working poor. For some time to come, people in the real world of 21st-century America without a good deal of money in the bank and super-secure jobs will find it difficult to qualify for mortgage loans.

George Bailey isn’t coming to the rescue. If you are a borrower, you may send your monthly payment to Bailey’s bank, but Bailey is long since out of the picture. Shortly after originating your loan, Bailey sold it to a consolidator, very likely a government-sponsored agency such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac that packages individual mortgages into a mortgage-backed security. With many mortgages packaged together, or “securitized,” the law of averages is supposed to obtain, and investors without intimate knowledge of the particulars of each loan become willing to finance home ownership. The pool of money available for home mortgages grows, and the theory is that mortgage interest rates fall.

But even leaving aside various sorts of fraud and chicanery that have subverted mortgage securitization, especially in the subprime sector, the basic idea was flawed. Risks of default that were supposed to be random turned out to be anything but. What makes one borrower default turns out to affect other borrowers pretty much the same: higher interest rates when it’s time to reset the rates on adjustable mortgages, especially for those who could just get by with a low teaser rate; an end to the upward spiral of housing prices that compensated for a multitude of sins; the absence of job and wage growth.

Though the subprime fraction is small, the ripple effect threatens a large swath of the US housing market. One hoped-for result of the meltdown is a tightening of lending standards, but beware what you wish for. Tighter standards will punish both those who would repay and those who would default. A lot of legitimate potential homebuyers will be turned away. This problem is in the very nature of securitization.

To calculate the risks for securitized loans, John Jones and Sally Smith must be reduced to a set of statistical characteristics: age, income, debt, credit history. But statistics have their limit. Sixty years ago, Bailey’s bank held your loan until you paid it off. To keep the bank solvent and profitable, Bailey had to be able to distinguish the trustworthy borrower from the likely deadbeat, and to do so he had to know his customer, not just his customer’s statistics.

Today’s securitization leaves no room for knowing your customer and other intangibles. All that matters is that by hook or by crook – too often by crook – an application passes the statistical hurdles necessary to qualify a loan for inclusion in a package.

Securitization didn’t come out of the blue. It is the latest stage in the unbridled expansion of markets. And central to an impersonal market system is the same process that makes George Bailey irrelevant: algorithmic knowledge, the knowledge of formulas, eclipses experiential knowledge, the knowledge of life that Bailey brought to bear on the lending process.

Markets, for all the good they’ve done, have also done considerable collateral damage.

An expanding market system takes over more of our lives, shaping and forming us into people whose relationships are circumscribed and reduced by the market. Community has been one casualty: markets have crowded out the economic reciprocity that made the community necessary for its members. Reciprocity once brought neighbors together in a barn-raising for the unfortunate farmer whose barn went up in smoke.

If my barn burns down, I call my insurance company.

Focusing on barns, or farmers as individuals, a case can be made for the greater efficiency of a system based on the division of labor and specialization that has produced insurance companies, contractors, and so forth. But if we focus on the community of people who build and use barns, an equally strong case can be made against undermining that community – warts and all – by the spread of the market.

Some 2,000 years ago Rabbi Hillel recognized the tension between the individual and the community.

“If I am not for myself,” he asked, “who will be?” But he went on to ask, “And if I am only for myself, what am I?” This tension is desirable, healthy, and creative. We need more of it, not the headlong rush to the individualistic pole entailed in the market. We could also use less of an economics that is an accessory before and after the fact, an economics in which an ideology that glorifies algorithm, the knowledge system of homo economicus, is central. The mortgage crisis is the tip of an iceberg.

Stephen A. Marglin is the Walter Barker professor of economics at Harvard University. His new book, “The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community,” is being published by Harvard University Press.

By David Krieger President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

            Few people have looked as deeply into the nuclear abyss, seen the monster of our own making and grappled with it as has the writer Jonathan Schell.  But Schell is more than a writer.  He is also a philosopher of the Nuclear Age and an ardent advocate of caging the beast and rendering it harmless.  Schell’s first book on the subject, The Fate of the Earth, awakened many people to the breadth and depth of the nuclear danger and is now a classic.  He has returned to the issue of nuclear dangers (nuclear insanity?) in several of his other books, always providing penetrating insights into the confrontation between humanity and its most deadly invention.

His latest book, The Seventh Decade, The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, may be Schell’s most important book yet.  In this book, he examines the roots of the Nuclear Age and its current manifestations.  He unearths the truth, which once brought to light seems obvious, that the bomb began as a construct in the mind.  “Well before any physical bomb had been built,” he says, “science had created the bomb in the mind, an intangible thing.  Thereafter, the bomb would be as much a mental as a physical object.” 

One of the key concepts of the Nuclear Age is deterrence, the belief that the threat of nuclear retaliation can prevent nuclear attack.  Schell takes a hard-headed look at deterrence, and finds the concept “half-sane and half-crazy.”  While it seems sane to seek to forestall a nuclear attack, the half-crazy part (perhaps more than half), “consists of actually waging the war you must threaten, for in that event the result is suicide all around.”  That suicide writ large becomes what philosopher John Somerville termed “omnicide,” the death of all.  “In short,” Schell deduced, “to threaten seems wise, but to act is deranged.”

In the post-Cold War period, deterrence has become even more complex and less certain, tilting toward the “deranged.”  It is no longer the mental task of threat and counter threat aimed at keeping a fixed and powerful opponent at bay, as it was during the Cold War standoff between the US and USSR.  Now, states must consider the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorist groups, not locatable and not subject to being deterred.  In such circumstances, the rationality of deterrence is shattered and even great and powerful states are placed at risk of nuclear devastation by far weaker opponents.  In such circumstances, overwhelming nuclear superiority is of no avail. 

The “bomb in the mind” can only do so much.  It cannot deter those who cannot be located or are suicidal.  Despite their devastating power, nuclear weapons in the hands of powerful states are actually a tepid threat.  Yet, they stand as a major impediment to the post-Cold War imperial project of the United States, a project failing on many fronts, but poised to fail far more spectacularly if nuclear weapons find their way into the hands of terrorist groups.

In today’s world, when deterrence has for nearly all sane thinkers lost its magical power in the mind (although in truth it was always a highly risky venture), it has become far harder to justify nuclear arsenals, and the United States has resorted to the vague possibility of a reemergent threat.  In considering this, Schell finds, “In the last analysis, the target of the U.S. nuclear arsenal became history and whatever it might produce – not a foe but a tense, the future itself.” 

Schell correctly concluded that the George W. Bush administration had far more ambitious and sinister plans for the US nuclear arsenal.  Although there was no clearly definable enemy, there was a strongly held vision and normative goal of US global dominance, set forth in the 2001 US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).  Nuclear weapons were required, in Schell’s careful study of the NPR “to dissuade, deter, defeat or annihilate – preventively, preemptively, or in retaliation – any nation or other grouping of people on the face of the earth, large or small, that militarily opposed, or dreamed of opposing, the United States.”

Schell examines the US imperial project under George W. Bush and its role in shaping US nuclear policy.  He points out that the Bush administration ordered its nuclear threats in this way: Iraq, with whom it went to war; Iran, with whom it threatened war; North Korea, which withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed nuclear weapons; and Pakistan, which already had nuclear weapons and a chaotic political environment.  Of course, Bush chose exactly the wrong order in terms of the actual security threats posed by these nations.  Schell found, “In responding to the universal danger posed by nuclear proliferation, the United States therefore had two suitably universalist traditions that it could draw on, one based on consent and law, the other based on force.  Bush chose force.  It was the wrong choice.  It increased the nuclear danger it was meant to prevent.”

In the final section of his book, Schell, who is himself an ardent nuclear abolitionist, reviews earlier attempts to achieve abolition of these weapons.  He goes into heartbreaking detail of the efforts of Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev to achieve the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.  The two leaders, acting on their own initiative, without the advice or support of their aides (George Shultz is an exception), were incredibly close to agreement to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, but as we know faltered on the issue of missile defenses, which Reagan saw as key and which Gorbachev couldn’t accept.  After coming so close to agreement on a plan for abolition, the world settled back to nuclear business as usual.  As Schell pointed out, after the Reagan-Gorbachev Summit at Reykjavík, “Nuclear arsenals may remain not so much because anyone wants them as because a world without them is outside the imagination of the leadership class.”

The possibilities of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism led Schell to the conclusion that “with each year that passes, nuclear weapons provide their possessors with less safety while provoking more danger.  The walls dividing the nations of the two-tiered [nuclear] world are crumbling.”  The Reagan-Gorbachev vision has new advocates in former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn.  Their basic premise is that deterrence can no longer be the foundation for 21st century security. 

Schell suggests that should the will for nuclear abolition materialize – something already favored by the majority of Americans – the following principles could guide the effort:

* At the outset, adopt the abolition of nuclear arms as the organizing principle and goal of all activity in the nuclear field;

* Join all negotiations on nuclear weapons – on nuclear disarmament, on nonproliferation, and on nuclear terrorism – in a single forum;

* Think of abolition less as the endpoint of a long and weary path of disarmament and more as the starting point for addressing a new agenda of global action;

* Design a world free of nuclear weapons that is not just a destination to reach but a place to remain.

Schell concludes that the “bomb in the mind,” with us from the outset of the Nuclear Age, will remain with us, but that this is not necessarily a detriment.  He points out, “even in a world without nuclear weapons, deterrence would, precisely because the bomb in the mind would still be present, remain in effect.  In that respect, the persisting know-how would be as much a source of reassurance as it would be a danger in a world without nuclear weapons.”

Jonathan Schell has provided an essential book for our time.  He peels back the layers of veils and myths surrounding nuclear dangers and strategies, and offers a sound set of guidelines for moving to a nuclear weapons-free world.  This book can help to create the necessary political will to achieve this end.  It is required reading for every person on the planet who cares about assuring the future.

            David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: www.wagingpeace.org.

KH: Jonathan Schell’s book is published by The American Empire Project. More books from this project are available here.

“Americans have long believed that the very notion of empire is an offense against our democratic heritage, yet in recent months, these two words — American empire — have been on everyone’s lips. At this moment of unprecedented economic and military strength, the leaders of the United States have embraced imperial ambitions openly. How did we get to this point? And what lies down the road?” (more…)

I highly recommend the new book by David Cole and Jules Lobel, “Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror.” Cole and Lobel are law professors and Constitutional scholars. The writing is very accessible to the layperson.

Below are a couple of quotes from the introduction to the book. (Cole and Lobel are talking about the government’s “preventive paradigm” approach in the so-called war on terror and the consequences for the rule of law, which the Bush administration treats as “optional protocols.”):

P.2 “The rule of law demands, at a minimum, equality, transparency, fair procedures, individual culpability, clear rules, checks and balances, and respect for basic human rights. Bush’s preventive paradigm has violated each of these commitments, imposing double standards on the most vulnerable, operating in secret, denying fair trials, imposing guilt by association, intentionally obscuring clear rules, asserting unchecked unilateral power, and violating universal prohibitions on torture, disappearance, and the like.”

P.5 “The preventive paradigm renders the rule of law virtually unrecognizable. The rule of law, after all, is designed to subject state power to careful checks, to scrupulously enforce the line between guilt and innocence, and to hold government officials accountable to clear rules. These ideals mix uneasily with the strategies of the preventive paradigm, which generally demand sweeping executive discretion, eschew questions of guilt or innocence (because no wrong has yet occurred), and substitute secrecy and speculation for accountability and verifiable fact.”

P.10 “In preventive-paradigm immigration initiatives, the administration called in 80,000 foreign nationals for fingerprinting, photographing, and “special registration,” simply because they came from predominantly Arab or Muslim countries, sought out another 8,000 young men from the same countries for FBI interviews, and placed more that 5,000 foreign nationals here in preventative detention. Yet as of January 2007, not one of these individuals stands convicted of terrorist crime. The government’s record, in what is surely the largest campaign of ethnic profiling since the Japanese internment of World War II, is 0 for 93,000.”

Buy the book at Amazon.com