The Washington Post has the story Cantor faces tea party fury in his back yard.

Just a few miles from his family home, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) felt the wrath of the tea party Saturday, when activists in his congressional district booed and heckled the second-most powerful House Republican.

I must admit to suffering from a severe case of schadenfreude. Perhaps now Eric Cantor knows how Dr. Frankenstein felt.

Steve Grossman, candidate for Massachusetts Governor, sent me an email with a link to his web page Save Net Neutrality!

This week, the FCC is set to vote on new rules about how government regulates and protects the free flow of information on the Internet. We can’t afford to allow extraordinary wealth to buy special access to high-speed traffic and repress free speech for the rest of us when we’re online.

It occurs to me that I have not been posting anything about why I am a supporter of Steve Grossman for Governor.  It’s certainly not that I am a one issue voter and that issue is net neutrality.  This position that Steve Grossman has taken is just one of the things that indicates to me that he really gets how the issue of extraordinary wealth concentration in the hands of the few has impacts on the rest of us in almost every aspect of life.

The one voice that we have had that the rich have not been able to throttle has been the internet.  It is no surprise that they want to control that too.  We can’t beat them by using superior wealth.  We can’t let them take away the one force that we have, and that is our numbers in the “public square” and at the ballot box.

I received an email from a friend who grew up in Russia, but has been living in  the USA for at least the 20 years that I have known him.  I am always curious about what he thinks of the Russian/Ukrainian situation, but I try not to pester him with too many questions.

Today, he sent me this unsolicited email.

Hi Steve,

I hope you will publish this on your blog.

First of all the disclaimer, I do not support either Russian or Ukrainian side in this conflict – I just do not know enough to have an educated opinion.
Hence I do not  side with either.

However, I am very disappointing with the NPR coverage of the conflict – I find it not only biased but explicitly misleading.

This Sunday, while listening to NPR report from the eastern Ukraine, on the the NPR correspondents
(I think this was  Silvia Poggioli, but I am not 100% sure) interviewed a couple of local residents.

One of them said the following, literally, in Russian: “I am a machine operator working for a factory. I think that this conflict is blown out of proportion by politicians on both sides, who are trying to pursue their own political goals. I am interested in my job and feeding and providing for my family …”.

The NPR translation:

“My Russian Supervisors receive orders from Moscow and force me to cut all my ties and boycott any Ukrainian authorities, …”.
Later. the corresponded has elaborated on how the unrest is sponsored and promoted by Russia.

The second interview was among the same lines.

The local people sounded completely apolitical, “live me alone”.
The NPR coverage tone was that Russia is stirring an unrest in this region. Even if it is so, it was not evident from the interviews.

I really was expecting much more honest coverage from especially the NPR.

Regards,

-Leon

Ever since public broadcasting became fearful of the right-wingers in Congress about continued funding of public broadcasting, I have noticed a profound rightward tilt to PBS and NPR reporting. That they would actually lie is not a surprise. With the number of multi-lingual native Russian speakers in this country, I do wonder how NPR thought they could get away with this.

For example Pando has the article More PBS conflict woes as activists move to eject David Koch from board of “NOVA” station.

Last month, Pando’s “Wolf of Sesame Street” investigation broke the news that one of PBS’s flagship outlets had inked a secret deal with anti-pension billionaire John Arnold. That deal, which was not explicitly disclosed to viewers, was designed to broadcast anti-pension programming on public television stations throughout the country.

The story spotlighted how ideological billionaires and powerful corporations are increasingly – and stealthily – attempting to launder their political agendas through the trusted public-television brand, potentially in violation of PBS’s own rules.

Naked Capitalism has the post Has America’s Use of Finance as a Foreign Policy Tool Backfired? by Yves Smith.  There is much to quote from the post, but I have selected a quote that Yves Smith made from the article The murderous history of USAID, the US Government agency behind Cuba’s fake Twitter clone by Mark Ames.

    There were many ways to transform Russia in the 1990s, but thanks to funding from USAID, the path chosen was the most brutal and disastrous of all: Shock therapy, mass privatization, and the mass impoverishment of 150 million people. As Janine Wedel and my former eXile partner Matt Taibbi documented, USAID funding and support empowered a single “clan” from St. Petersburg led by Anatoly Chubais, who oversaw the complete destruction of Russia’s social welfare system, and the handing over of lucrative assets to a tiny handful of oligarchs.

Under Chubais’ stewardship, Russia’s economic output declined some 60% in the 1990s, while the average Russian male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56 years. Russia’s population went into a freefall, Russia’s worst death-to-birth ratio at any time in the 20th Century — which is amazing when you think that USAID’s privatization program had to compete with the ravages Hitler, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin wreaked on Russia.

USAID funded Chubais through public-private organizations and a Harvard program that was so patently corrupt, Harvard and its program directors including economist Andrei Shleifer were sued by the US Department of Justice for “conspiring to defraud” the US government (not to mention Russians). USAID also paid public relations giant Burson-Marsteller to sell the disastrous voucher program to the Russian public, in a mass media advertising blitz that promoted Chubais’ political party on the eve of parliamentary elections. It was this USAID funded privatization, and the USAID-backed Russia “democrats,” which soured Russians on market capitalism and democracy (renamed “dermokratsia” or “shitocracy” in Russian).

What the Yves Smith article has to say about Larry Summers’ and Harvard’s role is devastating.  We all need to say ,”Thank you Elizabeth Warren for preventing Larry Summers’ from becoming the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.  We dodged a major bullet with that one.”  As a Harvard insider, perhaps Elizabeth Warren knew the real reason Summers was dismissed as Harvard President.