May 2004

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Look, Ma, I'm a TV Pundit

Making the world safe for soundbites

This afternoon I received a mildly panicked phone call from a reporter at Channel 5 News, the Twin Cities' hometown ABC affiliate. Since the networks had chosen not to broadcast Bush's speech--it's the last week of May sweeps, for God's sake--would I care to come into their studio and watch it? And would I then serve as chew toy to the ever-gleaming incisors of Minnesota's first lady of Republican punditry, Sarah Janacek, in a debate over the president's "plan"? Mindful of Gore Vidal's injunction that one should never turn from a microphone, I accepted.

Well. It was the same canting recitation of Bush rhetoric about a democratic Iraq that we've grown accustomed to, organized this time as a term paper. (The line with the loudest unintended resonance, and I am unfortunately paraphrasing: We are trying to make the Iraqis free, not to make them Americans.) 

Did it connect? the reporter wanted to know afterward. Janacek averred that it did, and I--shockingly--claimed that it did not. I pointed to what I called the three main lies in the speech, and Janacek gamely countered two of them and conceded the third. I noted that while scandals have come and gone, no administration in the past hundred years has been subjected to so many complaints from institutional voices about its base-level competence. I was asked to defend Kerry's waffling over withdrawal from Iraq, and declined.

We talked for 20 minutes or so on camera, and I have to say it wasn't bad. When we were done, the reporter, a woman named Joanne, thanked us profusely and told us she would be spending the next two hours turning Bush's speech on the war on Iraq and our reaction into a 1-minute, 15-second segment.

It's a sweeps period, as I said. Any other time the future of the "free world" might have gotten 1:45.

[Those three lies I alluded to, if you're curious, were: 1) Iraq is the hub of the war on terror; 2) the resistance fighters in Iraq are Saddam loyalists and foreign "terrorists"; and 3) the US wants a democratic government in Iraq.]

Posted by Steve Perry at May 24, 2004 9:32 PM

 

Abu Ghraib: A Google News Haiku

Your free press: still on message!

While cruising the online papers this morning, I stopped at Google News to run a search of some key terms in the Abu Ghraib story.

Abu Ghraib and:

Abuse                       19,100 results

Torture                     10,700

Geneva Conventions   5,910

War crime(s)              1,314

Posted by Steve Perry at May 16, 2004 9:58 AM

 

Undone by Cameras

What lesson will the Pentagon take from Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, etc.?

The Pentagon did a wonderful job of managing the embedded journalists under its care only to be undone by grunt soldiers collecting visual souvenirs. There's a lot of heated talk at present about investigations and reforms in the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal. Here's the one reform that I'm betting on myself: In future military engagements, troops will be enjoined from bringing along personal electronic recording devices--cameras, videocams, tape recorders--on the grounds that transmission of these materials might inadvertently endanger the security of military operations.

Which, as we now know, is perfectly true. 

Posted by Steve Perry at May 12, 2004 10:13 AM

 

The Berg Video

Below I'm posting a link to a mirrored copy of the video released by Muntada al-Ansar today, showing the murder of the American Nicholas Berg. (It was turned up by Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch.)

I don't necessarily suggest watching it, but I post the link (for as long as it lasts) because I think we've reached a juncture at which it's vital that Americans have the chance to see the same images the rest of the world is seeing--of what has been done in our names at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and of the response it's eliciting.

Click here if you care to see it. The video should start automatically after the page loads. 

Posted by Steve Perry at May 11, 2004 9:20 PM

 

Abu Ghraib: The Pictures and the "Pictures"

Note: Tuesday postscript added with new link; go to end of item.

I'm working on something about the Iraqi prison torture photos that may or may not materialize into a City Pages column for next week, but meanwhile let me register my disappointment with those comrades-in-bloggery who have chosen to post today's latest round of alleged gang-rape photos.

(For reference purposes, here they are--along with a gratuitous prefatory reference to "US-based Jewish pornographers.") 

They're fake, they're easily discerned as such [see below], and passing them along as real seems more than a little perverse: We have already seen manifest horrors--magnified all the more if you understand even the rudiments of the Islamic culture of masculinity--and we know that images of rape (not just of adults, either) and, reportedly, murder do exist. It's only a matter of time before we see them, too.

So why pass around this garbage? When the screenwriter Dennis Potter was dying of pancreatic cancer, he named his tumor "Rupert." Here's evidence that there's a little Murdoch in lots of us.

Why They're Fakes

a) First, and most resoundingly, the soldiers are wearing dark green jungle camouflage gear, which--understandably, if you think about it--was not issued in Iraq.

b) The faces are camo-painted, too. Have you seen any other Abu Ghraib torture image in which a soldier tries to conceal his/her face? Isn't the lesson of the prison photos we've seen so far that anything went--that there was no sense of shame or circumspection about anything they were doing?

c) A forensic point: Look at the body posture of the woman in the first photo. She's standing under her own power. I have read a few accounts of rape over the years, in police files and in books, and I've heard of very few in which the woman did not strain physically--reflexively--to recoil from her attacker. This woman stands almost languidly. It's porn, and coarse, standard-issue porn at that.

d) A compositional point: Look at the third shot, of the "rapist"'s penis entering the "victim"'s mouth. In the rough and tumble of a real, forced sexual encounter that involved 2-3 guys crowded around a victim, this would be a very difficult photo to take. Not impossible, but extremely unlikely. On the other hand, this very shot is an obligatory part of any porn production, still or video.    

POSTSCRIPT: Reader Gary Grass sent along a link to a PDF download that contains not only more of the patently fake rape-porn--in some of which the "soldiers" can be seen wearing hightop sneakers and loafers--but also some croppings I hadn't seen before of previously released genuine Abu Ghraib images. (And some shots of troops marching naked Iraqis through the streets that made the rounds internationally some time ago, though I don't think they got much attention stateside, even from bloggers.)

Worth a look, but be aware that this link is not to a page; it triggers an automatic download of a 19-page document. Here.   

Posted by Steve Perry at May 10, 2004 5:53 PM

 

The Rich Aren't Heavy, They're Our Brothers

A generation-long scandal, revisited

Get it at Amazon

I've been reading Perfectly Legal, David Cay Johnston's book about the devolution of the American tax system over the past generation. It's a book that, despite its snazzy cover and its New York Times authorial pedigree, was born to be overlooked--a book about tax policy that lends no fuel to the partisan fires of the hour. But it also happens to be the finest political book I've read this season, and the most accessible account anyone has written of the plethora of ways the tax system is rigged on behalf of the very wealthy.

Johnston traces the arc of the story in the first chapter: 

"Now, less than a century after its adoption, the tax system is being turned on its head. Since at least 1983 it has been the explicit, but unstated, policy in Washington to let the richest Americans pay a smaller portion of their incomes in taxes and to defer more of their taxes, which amounts to a stealth tax cut, while collecting more in taxes from those in the middle class.

"The Democrats embraced this in 1983, when they controlled Congress. They voted to raise Social Security taxes, changing it from a pay-as-you-go system to one in which people required to pay 50 percent more than the retirement and disability program's immediate costs, to build a trust fund to pay benefits more than three decades into the future. Those taxes were not, however, locked away but instead were spent to help finance tax cuts for the super rich that began in 1981.

"Under the Republicans, beginning in 1997, this policy of taxing the poor and the middle class to finance tax cuts for the super rich was expanded through changes in the income tax system. The changes were subtle and hardly reported in the news media, but they were also substantial. Under the first round of Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 the middle class and the upper middle class will subsidize huge tax cuts for the top 1 percent, and, especially the top one-tenth of 1 percent, the 130,000 richest taxpayers."

Well, we all knew the rich had gotten richer. The shocking thing about Johnston's tale is just how drastically concentrated the income growth of the past 30 years has been. The following numbers are culled from his analysis of National Bureau of Economic Research data for the period 1970-2000.

Bottom 90 percent: Inflation-adjusted income remained almost perfectly flat; share of national income fell from two-thirds to just over half.

Top 10 percent: Roughly 11.3 million households, or equivalent to the population of California. Share of national income rose from 33 to 48 percent. 

On closer analysis, though, the real gains were extraordinarily concentrated at the top of the range:

For those in the 6-10 slots on the income ladder--the bottom half of the top 10 percent of incomes--the collective share of national income was flat.

For those occupying rungs 2-5--all those who are part of the top 5 percent but not the top 1 percent--incomes grew by 19.5 percent.

The top 1 percent of households saw their share of the national income grow to a full 20 percent. Then the NBER researchers broke down the top 1 percent even further, and discovered the following:

The bottom half of the top 1 percent experienced income gains of 47 percent.

The four-tenths of 1 percent between .2 and .5 saw their incomes rise by 90 percent.

The top 1/10th of 1 percent--some 13,400 households--saw their incomes rise from an inflation-adjusted average of $3.6 million in 1970 to $23.9 million in 2000. In addition, their share of the overall national income went from 1 percent to 5 percent, and their incomes went from constituting 100 times the average national wage in 1970 to 560 times the average national wage in 2000.

As I said, it's a friendly, accessible little book. Perfectly Legal manages to unravel in broad strokes, through a well-chosen and well-told series of yarns, the secret arc of the past 20 years--specifically, the political roots of the explosion in wealth and inequality on the one hand, and of our evolving Third World approach to governance on the other. Johnston lays the foundation for a conversation we really should get around to having.

So skip that fifth volume of Bush-bashing you've already set on the nightstand. Read this instead.  

Posted by Steve Perry at May 3, 2004 6:33 PM

 

Still Life With Candidate

The "I'm John Kerry, Bitch!" factor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Iy-iy-iy! From happyfunpundit

Another Sunday in springtime, another sheaf of fresh testimonials to the insubstantiality of the Kerry campaign. The plainest way of putting the question is, how can Bush lose ground by the shovelful in public esteem without getting swamped by Kerry in the electoral polls?

The CW answer: Kerry has yet to define his campaign. He's got no story to tell, about himself or about GWB. I've now read a dozen iterations of that story in the past couple of months, and it's no less true than it was when the LAT's Ron Brownstein first wrote it back in February or early March. (Here's the latest, from Sunday's NYT.)

I've got news for you: If Kerry's campaign is ever "defined," it will be in spite of him. He is too cautious and too imperious by nature to exert himself overmuch. Why should he have to, after all? Remember the grounds on which Kerry almost lost the nomination that was his for the taking at the start. He showed up in Iowa, and elsewhere, bereft of message or fire and presented himself as the functionary whose turn it was to head the Democratic ticket. After rising briefly from the dead on the Iowa stump--albeit by speaking in the borrowed cadences of Howard Dean--Kerry has reverted to form.

So it's Bush v. Bush, with Kerry dancing round the perimeter of the ring hoping he'll knock himself out. He might. Anyhow it's a novel way to run a presidential campaign.

James Ridgeway at the Voice has actually called for Kerry's head. If only it could be so.    

Posted by Steve Perry at May 2, 2004 1:43 PM

 

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