Salon has the article They’re lying about Ukraine, again: Primitive prejudice, stupidity and the reflexive compliance of the New York Times by Patrick L. Smith.

My concern is with what the Ukraine crisis has unexpectedly exposed: the bankruptcy of the story, the hollowness of the pose. To be revealed is the great collection of presuppositions, prejudices, presumptions, myths, representations and ideological beliefs that were the ink with which the American century narrative was written.

Good for Ukrainians, all of them in the end, that Washington’s effort to install a crew of neoliberal puppets in Kiev has been disrupted. Good for everyone, including Americans, that the Ukraine crisis exposes so many of the defects in the prevalent American worldview. I may judge the moment too optimistically, but there seems no going back from this.

This seems to be an explanation of why the propaganda is so deeply embedded in the reporting from prominent newspapers such as The New York Times.

To be charitable to the reporter that Leonid Goldgeisser mentioned in my previous post NPR Mistranslates Interviews With Russian Speaking Ukrainians, the reporter just could not believe what the interviewee was saying on the surface.  Perhaps the reporter was trying to read what the interviewee was saying between the lines, and that is how she came up with the complete reversal of what was actually said.  It would be interesting to know the chain of events that led from the interviewee’s Russian speech to the reporter’s English translation.  Was their an intermediate translator, or was the reporter fluent enough in Russian to attempt her own translation.  Was she thinking, “I hear the words, but I am going to do my listeners a favor by explaining what the interviewee is really saying.  After all, no westerner could understand how convoluted a former Soviet Union citizen has to speak to sneak their actual message past the censors.”

Credo Mobilize has a petition Alan Grayson: The perfect Democrat to fight back against Republicans’ Benghazi witch hunt.

In my previous post The Dems’ possible Plan C for the Republicans’ Benghazi committee, the referenced article mentions that MoveOn.org is thinking about a similar campaign.  I think it is time  for MoveOn to move off the dime and start a petition.  Having found no such petition on their web site, I decided to start one Alan Grayson: The perfect Democrat to fight back against Republicans’ Benghazi witch hunt.   Notice that I just used the same title as the Credo Mobilize petition.

To double your pleasure, double your fun, please sign both petitions.  Credo Mobilize is putting their own efforts behind getting signatures on their petition.  There is nobody but you, dear reader, and me to sign the petition on MoveOn.org.

The Rachel Maddow Show blog has the article The Dems’ possible Plan C for the Republicans’ Benghazi committee by Steve Benen.

The suggestion is that Alan Grayson from Florida should be the Democratic member on the panel.

Here is a video clip of Grayson’s participation in a previous Benghazi hearing in the House.

From the article, we have the excerpts below.

A petition on the Credo Mobilize site calling on House Democrats to send only Grayson has now garnered 17,000 signatures. Credo officials say they think it’s possible the signatures could soon pass the 50,000 mark.

The response by the Democratic House leaders below borders on insanity.

It’s easy to understand what progressive activists are thinking: if Republicans insist on engaging in an eye-rolling, election-year stunt masquerading as a select committee, Democrats might as well respond in kind, appointing one member who’d probably annoy GOP panelists as much as anyone else on Capitol Hill.

That said, it’s not clear House Democratic leaders would be amenable to the idea, with one House Democratic aide telling Greg, “It would be in our interest to have someone in there with great credibility and stature among both Democrats and Republicans. It’s unclear Grayson would be that person, despite his talents.”

What Republican panel member are they thinking of that they have to match who has “great credibility and stature among both Democrats and Republicans?” The Democrats seem to have no idea what the game is in the House of Representatives. Looking at the above video, can you imagine a better panel member than Alan Grayson?

If you don’t know if Grayson is tough enough for the position, you ought to look at the following video from the article:

Don’t you think it is time for the Democrats to give as good as they get?

Rawstory has the article Activist arrested at PBS annual meeting for protesting Koch brother’s ties to Boston affiliate.

The conservative philanthropist Koch has contributed more than $23 million to public television and began serving in 1997 as a trustee of PBS member station WGBH in Boston.

Do you still support WGBH with your contributions? Why? You may want to tell them what you think of having David Koch on their board at www.kochfreewgbh.org.

Elizabeth Warren’s Facebook page has posted the interview on the Charlie Rose show titled Elizabeth Warren on the 2008 Wall Street Bailout.

Elizabeth Warren talks with Charlie Rose about why the system is rigged against working families.

This is a great under 10 minute summary of what is at the heart of Warren’s new book. I think there are many avid Warren supporters who still don’t understand the depth of the problem she is fighting. In under 10 minutes you can get a heart wrenching look at what is at stake here.

If only people would listen, I think everybody with a soul would finally get the point.

Naked Capitalism has the article The Chronic Exporters’ Curse? by Yves Smith.

The article covers a number of facets of the issue.  She starts with a discussion of why the oligarchs don’t want the government to solve the unemployment problem.

Michal Kalecki made this point in his seminal essay, “Political Aspects of Full Employment” in 1943:

The reasons for the opposition of the ‘industrial leaders’ to full employment achieved by government spending may be subdivided into three categories: (i) dislike of government interference in the problem of employment as such; (ii) dislike of the direction of government spending (public investment and subsidizing consumption); (iii) dislike of the social and political changes resulting from the maintenance of full employment.

Yves Smith goes on to a discussion of some of the problems with being a chronic exporter.

One of the issues with being a chronic exporter is that you are effectively funding your sales. You wind up exporting capital. You sell your goods to them and take their currency in return. Now of course, you could just sell those dollars or euros or pesos and convert it into your currency, but that is pretty much never done on a large scale, since selling those currencies will drive the home currency price up relative to them, undermining your position as exporter. Now the exporter can simply hold those foreign currency payments as cash, but that is seen as unimaginative, so most recipients at least put it into something with more yield (government bills or bonds) or more speculative assets (stocks, real estate, re-investment in the country in question).

She goes on to relate her experiences advising Japanese entities on mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. during the ascendancy of the Japanese economy. The foreign investor is usually an easy mark for the banks and local investors. I have often thought about the idea of lifting investment restrictions on Chinese companies putting their country’s excess U.S. reserves to use. We could manage to cheat them just the way we did to Japanese investors.

I have thought that eventually the Chinese could stop depending on exports to create full employment when they transitioned to using their domestic market demand to maintain full employment. Yves Smith explains the problem with that idea.

… no country in modern times has made a crisis-free transition from being export-driven to having a large domestic consumer base. Development economists, late to recognize this issue, now recommend a more balanced growth model that places less emphasis on exports and more on building internal markets. But the current export champions seem unwilling or unable to abandon their past successful formula, even when it’s not working as well for them as it once did.

The one danger we face in trying to take advantage of knowing that a situation cannot go on forever, is that we don’t know exactly how that bad situation will end.  If we bet on the wrong mode of change, we could end up making a losing bet. Diversification would seem like a prudent course of action.

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.