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The Washington Post’s columnist Scott Wilson provides all those nostalgic for US interventionism with a rare glimpse into the past.
In light of yesterday’s coup against President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, Wilson explains how Obama should warn the president of Columbia during their upcoming meeting to avoid seeking a third term.
According to Wilson, Zelaya had it coming.
It was greed that led him to pursue a third term in office, which sealed his fate in the coup that unseated him from power.
And if right-wing Columbian leader Uribe is to avoid some of the same, he must heed the words of president Obama.
Even despite Uribe’s ‘huge popularity’, he should be on guard, says Wilson (who dares not mention the popularity of leftist Zelaya).
Analyzing the situation, Wilson elaborates. Why the coup? “The region’s rich tradition of public corruption and political patronage,” explains Wilson. The barbaric destruction of the principles of democracy have a long history in Latin America. But for some reason no mention is made of the “rich tradition” of the CIA’s efforts.
After all, there was of course the CIA-backed coup that overthrew democratically elected Ecuadorian president Velasco Ibarra in 1961, the CIA campaign in 1962 to keep João Goulart from gaining power in congress, the CIA-backed coup against Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, the far right-wing coup backed by the CIA against popular candidate Juan José Arévalo in Guatemala in 1963, and the CIA’s covert financial support for the right-wing opposition against Chile’s Salvador Allende during and after his election in 1970.
And none of that even begins to cover the Reagan era!
Considering the “rich tradition” of relations between the US and Latin America, many might consider it slightly hypocritical for any US president to begin preaching about democracy. Even to a Latin American leader that has as mixed a human rights record as president Uribe. Then again, Wilson probably wouldn’t want issues like ‘human rights’ to muddy the waters anyway. This is only about one thing: keeping a US ally out of harm’s way.
Only once does Wilson acknowledge that Obama may just pass up his advice “for fear of seeming to meddle in another country’s domestic affairs.” But this suggestion is quickly brushed away after the first paragraph.
To a person with no understanding of history in Latin America, no knowledge of US foreign policy, or all previous US presidents, this suggestion may seem preposterous. But I for one hope president Obama has a few more wits about him than either Wilson, or his above mentioned counterparts.
Posted June 29, 2009 at 3:09 pm. Add a comment
“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time people as base as itself.”
-Joseph Pulitzer, 1904
The growth of corporate media ownership has called into question the assumption that the media should facilitate the functioning of a democratic society. By this it is understood that within a democracy the media is obligated to uphold the values of free speech and equal representation. However, in the race to expand private holdings, the danger is that corporate ownership has resulted in media oligopolies that are more accountable to the market, advertisers, and investors than the public.
Free Press or Free Market?
There is a distinct correlation between the free market ethos and the western tradition of freedom of the press. Both advocate autonomy from the state and antipathy toward government intervention. As Keane states, “the early modern ideal of a free press originated in the days of small-scale enterprise and widespread belief in decentralized market competition as a vital antidote to political despotism.” In the media vs. state narrative, the market is understood as the best medium for spreading unfettered public opinion. This view is supported by media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, who insists that private ownership, as oppose to publicly owned media, creates “freedom and choice, rather than regulation and scarcity.”
Yet the image of a freedom-fighting press in a perpetual battle with an overbearing state seems wholly incongruous with modern western capitalist society. The government-media dichotomy appears to be based on a formulaic and ahistorical framework. The state played a key role in nurturing the media from its inception through trade protections, and given their mutual adherence to free market principles, the media and state tend to operate like business partners rather than opposing forces. For instance, Ronald Reagan’s first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Mark Fowler once said TV is “only a toaster with pictures.” In other words, Fowler agreed with the view of media owners that TV is a commodity that requires only minimal product-safety regulation. The conciliatory nature of the state-media arrangement ensures that the notion of ‘freedom of the press’ used by corporate media outlets safeguards little more than the freedom of the market.
Market-led Media
Opponents of private ownership argue that a profit-seeking media is in danger of sacrificing the public interest for stories that are ‘interesting to the public’. As Fallows explains, what drives corporate media owners like Murdoch is “the belief that the media should be treated like any other business, not as a semi-sacred public trust.” As a result, the division between news and entertainment is often blurred. This point is demonstrated by Republican Senator Alan Smith, who once said after an encounter with paparazzi, “they don’t want to know whether anything was resolved for the betterment of the United States…they’re interested in confusion, controversy, and conflict.”
The trend toward ‘infotainment’ is perhaps best illustrated by Murdoch’s News Corp, which has been criticised for sensationalist and racy coverage in many of its outlets, such as the Sun’s Page Three girl or the New York Post headline, “Headless Body in Topless Bar”. Most recently, Murdoch has taken over the Wall Street Journal, and as Clark wrote in the Guardian: “Six months on from Rupert Murdoch’s takeover, the pace of change is unremitting. A ponderous culture of research, analysis and preparation is out. Breaking news, shorter stories, politics and sports are in.”
Critics of Murdoch often claim that his political stance interferes with the content of his publications. Yet the evidence suggests that Murdoch’s business interests are more important to the News Corp agenda than direct political advocacy. Murdoch was a great proponent of Thatcher and Reagan because their interests suited his own, and when the ‘new Labour’ government of Tony Blair advocated a relaxation of media ownership rules he unhesitatingly shifted allegiances. However, Murdoch is not afraid to promote his political views when it makes ‘good business sense’. For example, Murdoch was accused by Democrat Byron Dorgan of broadcasting three hundred hours of ‘conservative talk’ and only five hours of ‘liberal talk’ in the US. His response was, “apparently, conservative talk is more popular.”
The danger of this market-led approach is that it encourages the view that people are consumers rather than citizens, which may foster political malaise. As McChesney states, “class inequality and individualism tend to be taken as natural and even benevolent, whereas political activity, civic values, and anti-market activities are marginalized.”
Competition and Diversity
Proponents of private media ownership argue that the market will force the media to continually better itself as networks attempt to stave off competition. Additionally, it is said that private, as oppose to public ownership, increases the diversity of content by providing new media outlets with unlimited market access. Yet little attention is given to the fact that many of the largest media firms, of which there are fewer and fewer, often have the same shareholders or own portions of one another. As McChesney argues, the media “more closely resembles a cartel than it does the competitive marketplace found in economic textbooks.” As a result, few alternative media outlets have enough capital or resources to actively compete.
Additionally, smaller firms are readily gobbled up by larger ones. As the President of News Corp Peter Chernin stated, “there are great arguments about whether content is king or distribution is king. At the end of the day, scale is king.” Indeed, the comment reflects the view of Murdoch himself, who once said: “Monopoly is a terrible thing, until you have it.”
The concentration of media power has effectively ensured that only a minority of privileged citizens are given access to dominate the public debate. Furthermore, the majority of media owners will compete for the widest audience share by offering mass appeal programs, which can often lead to a lack of diversity in programming and repetition of the same type of programs. A further danger is that political diversity itself is lost within the corporate media, as profit-seeking networks are unlikely to seriously challenge the (capitalist) system from which they benefit.
Overall, the view of private media ownership promulgated by market liberals fails to take into account the repercussions of operating the media like any other market-driven business. In a democratic society the media should aim to inform citizens, not merely entertain them. Media owners are keen to demand the right to a ‘free press’ when it suits their interests. Yet few will admit to the inherent incongruities between the free market ideology and the reality: a system reliant on the state to grant protection for a growing number of media monopolies that effectively stymie both competition and diversity.
Bibliography
Posted June 14, 2009 at 8:14 am. Add a comment
The Volvo S40 1.6D DRIVe has been named Green Car of the Year by the leading UK automotive magazine What Car? at an award ceremony attended by the Mayor of London on Monday night.
The yearly award was presented by London Mayor Boris Johnson, who praised the Volvo S40 1.6D DRIVe for its pioneering Start/Stop technology, and it’s extremely low CO2 emissions of 104g/km.
“I just want to say how vitally important this is,” said Mayor Johnson.
“ What you are doing is promoting a technology which I think will be of indispensable importance for our city, and of course you are playing your part in saving the planet, and saving it in a way that is technologically optimistic,” he added.
The Volvo S40 DRIVe beat the BMW 118d and the Renault Megane in the Small Family category and then raced ahead to victory in the final competition, beating the Audi A8 and MINI Cooper S for the “What Car? Green Car of the Year” title.
With fuel consumption of only 3.9 litres per 100 kilometres, judges commended the S40 DRIVe for maintaining shockingly low carbon emissions while still relying on a diesel engine.
Stuart Kerr, Volvo’s Regional President of Europe said: “We are pleasantly surprised about winning in the sense that [the focus of environmentally-friendly vehicle development] has very much been driven by an electrification programme, but the car does what it should do, and I am incredibly pleased that that’s been recognized.”
Peter Rask, managing director of Volvo Cars UK said that winning the award “shows that Volvo is one of the brands that has a future.”
“We’ve been working on this for over 20 years, and it just shows where we are today,” said Rask. “It’s a step toward the future of making cleaner and cleaner motor cars.”
But environmentally conscious consumers may find it difficult to afford the S40 DRIVe, at a whopping standard rate of £17,500.
Rask points to the scrappage scheme introduced by the Government in mid-May as a way to cut down the price. The scheme allows car owners to trade in 10-year-old motors and receive £2,000 in return, which can contribute toward the cost of a new car.
Volvo Cars has recently partnered with electricity company Vattenfall in Sweden, and plans to mass produce electrical vehicles by 2012.
Posted June 9, 2009 at 2:20 pm. 1 comment
Men could learn a thing or two from the spider world when it comes to sex, scientists have found.
Male nursery web spiders (Pisaura mirabilis), native to the UK, have fine-tuned their techniques for courting females, bringing them gifts of food tightly wrapped in silk. The male copulates with the female while she is busy opening the present, and the more carefully wrapped the food, the longer the copulation period.
“What the male has done is he’s kind of cheating the system slightly, because normally the bigger the gift, the longer he gets to copulate,” says expert Dr Edward Sykes from the Science Media Centre in London.
“But now the [the male Nursery web spider] benefits because it takes a lot of energy to go out and get the food. And the bigger and better the food, the harder it is to get, which is why wrapping is a perfect solution,” he adds. Gift-giving from male to female spiders is a common practice in many species, as the food source given to the female allows them to make more eggs and live longer.
But not every male insect has his partners’ well-being in mind. At least one species, the scorpion fly (Mecoptera), habitually tricks the female by presenting her with seeds or bits of fluff disguised as food. However, the female often realizes the ploy quickly and the male is given less time for copulation.
“It’s kind of a trade-off for the male,” says Dr Sykes, “because the better the present, the longer he gets to mate.”
However, it can get a bit more challenging when the male has to avoid becoming a food gift himself. It is not uncommon for the female spider to eat the male after copulation.
Trine Bilde of Aarhus University discovered that some male nursery web spiders avoided being eaten by playing dead after giving gifts to the female. This improved their chance of survival, as the females soon forgot about them.
Another species, the Wolf spider (Lycosidae), avoids being eaten by exhausting the female during copulation. He then makes a quick get-away before his mate knows what hit her.
The crab spider (Xysticus cristatus) is even more creative. Over time this spider has developed his own bondage techniques. The male ties the female down and wraps her legs up in silk during copulation so she is unable to grab him. This makes for a safer session, and certainly a more adventurous love-life.
Posted June 5, 2009 at 3:02 pm. Add a comment
Most Britons were acutely horrified to learn of the case of John Worboys; the London taxi driver guilty of attacking hundreds of women after victims’ reports of assault were ignored by police. Many were shocked to hear that an officer even told one woman that black-cab drivers “don’t do that sort of thing”.
And it wasn’t long after Worboys was jailed that another sexual predator slipped through police radar. South London chef Kirk Reid came to the attention of the police 12 times before he was finally arrested. At this point Reid was believed to have already targeted more than 70 women, though he was only convicted for 26 of these assaults.
Coverage of the cases was extensive, and many papers referred to the men as the worst serial rapists in British criminal history. Comments from the public were awash in disgust.
But was public anger directed at the right target? Worboys and Reid were extreme examples, but they are not isolated incidents in Britain. A climate of impunity in the judicial system appears to be growing, as rape convictions have dropped from 19 per cent 20 years ago to 6.5 per cent today.
In a study released this month by London Metropolitan University professor Liz Kelly, an expert on sexual violence, it was found that out of 33 countries, Britain had the lowest number of rape convictions. This is despite the fact that the proportion of false allegations was extremely low, ranging from two per cent to nine per cent.
It would seem that there is a growing problem within the institutional framework for rape prevention, which filters from the federal level down to individual police officers ignoring complaints by victims.
If officials don’t recognize the seriousness of rape cases, then how can we expect the law to act as a serious deterrent against would-be criminals?
A 2005 survey by Amnesty International revealed that a third of the British public blame the victim instead of the perpetrator in cases of rape. Amnesty International UK director Kate
Allen told the Times that “police officers, prosecutors, jury members and judges are all very likely to share such prejudicial thinking”.
There is a serious shortcoming in Britain if rape cases are failing because the judge, jury, and even police officers blame the victim because she is wearing “sexy” clothing or acting provocatively. Such thinking is certainly a relic from a bygone age, where sexist behaviour is accepted under the aphorism ‘boys will be boys’.
A new project launched by the policing standards watchdog HM Inspectorate of Constabulary will be asking rape victims about their experience with the police as part of a nationwide audit of police forces and Crown Prosecution Service performance.
Such an initiative is long overdue.
Posted June 3, 2009 at 1:33 pm. 1 comment
