Knowing that the United States and the world are on a course toward instability and chaos ensured by irreversible climate change and economic deterioration, the Obama administration and those who expect to inherit its role and powers “want the mechanisms by which they can criminalize any form of dissent,” Hedges continued. The attack on the press, which the AP phone records scandal exposes, is “an excuse to ferret out and destroy legitimate movements that challenge centers of power” by scaring potential whistle-blowers and dissidents into silence.
Chris Hedges: The ‘Terrifying’ State Assault on Press Freedom - Truthdig
Frightening words from the guy who handed Kevin O’Leary his ass a year and a half ago.
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Source: truthdig.com
Sadly, crusading has never been the rage in newsrooms. It is less so now, thanks to a corporate death grip on vast swaths of this profession. As Lewis Lapham put it, “The big media identify themselves with wealth and privilege and the wisdom in office. They preserve the myths that society deems precious … By telling their audience what they assume they already know, the news media reflect what the society wants to believe about itself.” Here is what a lot of people want to believe about the Aboriginal Spring in Canada. They hold fast to the idea that the only thing behind native unrest is a bottomless lust for public subsidies. They want to believe that Canada has been just and generous to this misfit people who stubbornly won’t assimilate. They cling to the notion that, left to their own devices, aboriginals are unable to govern themselves and will quickly fall into corruption.
Malcolm X on the corporate media.
(But of course that was a long time ago. We’re past that now.)
(h/t @OccupyWallStreet)
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Even when First Nations are open and transparent, media types behave as though they are not. And so, for example, Attawapiskat annual audits are posted on the Attawapiskat website for all to see. A Management Letter from 2011 is up there in plain sight, detailing shortcomings in the reserve’s bookkeeping, but Ottawa Citizen reporter Jordan Press tells us he went through Access to Information to get it—a bit like kicking down a door instead of trying the doorknob. The press as a whole responded like puppies to a biscuit when the PMO leaked a Deloitte audit that covers the same ground and says the same things, making it all sound like some kind of bombshell revelation.
Stereotyping Attawapiskat - Dawg’s Blawg (Blog)
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- Keep the Indians off the front-page. That, in a phrase, is the Harper approach to aboriginal issues in Canada
- Back to Joe Clark. Why did he lend his prestige as a former PM to a woman the Harper government is treating like someone who doesn’t yet realize her full insignificance?
- Thought this might work with the #IdleNoMore theme
Source: drdawgsblawg.ca
Apparently the U.S., unlike India, has moved past its own backward history of victim-blaming. Apparently, I am to believe, according to the New York Times and Nicholas Kristof, that it is India which must deal with its sexual violence. And the Good Mr. Kristoff and the New York Times know this because the US has dealt with its own sexual violence. It’s now in the past, judging from the smug authority of the Times.
Glass Houses: Rapes and Victim-Blaming in the Western World « Translation Exercises
(h/t Stephanie Guthrie and Sarah Barker)
Once again, forgetting the Real Victims …
Of course it helps to be sitting on top of a geyser farm and not have to transport the energy over huge distances, but still.
Truck driver Paul Whitcomb doesn’t like tree-huggers:
He’s leaning Republican, and has a warning for environmentalists who may come to Williston: “People will probably want to tie you to one of the trees you wanna hug.”
Ha-ha-ha! What a kidder! Of course, maybe us regular folks should talk that way about these oil industry parasites. Maybe we’d get more of a hearing for our views if people knew how upset we are about how they’re putting civilization at risk for their own pecuniary self-interest. (I know, I know. Some environmentalists do talk that way already. Only when they say it, it’s not received with a chuckle about the common sense of the salt of the earth. When a greenie talks like that, he or she is condemned for being an unhinged, eco-radical …
“Fuck your unpaid internship.”
This was one of the more colour-ful slogans scrawled on a sign at the peak of the Occupy movement. Held up by young people who stand to lose large from financial-crisis fallout, placards like these are refreshingly frank refusals of the mantra that we must be willing to do “more for less” nowadays. A 21st-century update on Bartleby’s famous reply to the duties assigned by his boss – “I’d prefer not to” – the intern invective expresses the frustration bubbling among youth facing mounting student debt and diminishing prospects for employment.
#cARTographyTO and Astral Media: subverting the commercial colonization of public space | #TOpoli
Via The Grid and Torontoist, news of an inspired and inspiring guerrilla action over the weekend.
Dozens of sidewalk-blocking, ad-filled eyesores, laughably known as “info pillars,” were repurposed and turned into art installations, social and political statements, and focus points for satire.
It’s hard not to sympathize with cARTography Toronto. Public space and public amenities are under relentless pressure from the advocates of privatization and the purveyors of commercial messaging; with the dogma of “austerity” comes more and more pressure to find new sources of revenue, especially when we’re saddled with a municipal administration intent on choking off one of the most traditional sources.
I’m sure these goddamn things are good for someone. No doubt they’re good for Astral. And perhaps they get the advertisers’ messages in front of more eyeballs. And who knows, maybe they bring in a dollar or two in licencing fees or something. But, in the words of one of the activists:
How you see this depends, as do many things, on how you define terms and how you frame the questions. If we’re committed to making the public good paramount, then the reclamation of public space from those who seek to colonize it is something to be encouraged. And while aesthetics are admittedly subjective, it’s hard not to be disturbed by the incessant, intrusive, and garish invasions of public sightlines, the cheapening of the visual environment, and the cumulative assault on our senses. Factor in the removal of bike posts, the destruction of trees and the interference with pedestrian traffic and it’s hard to see how the community as a whole comes out ahead. Surely we’re surrounded by enough vulgarity already.
Of course, that’s only one viewpoint. If we buy into commercial orthodoxy and the gospel of privatization, then anything that brings in revenue is good, and anything that questions the underlying assumptions or interferes with the sacred operation of the market is suspect, elitist, anti-capitalist, and quite probably a threat to national security. And by that logic, it won’t be long before the corporate media are pounding that drum day and night, the activists (already a word with negative connotations for some) are demonized, and the resources of the criminal-justice system are marshalled in their pursuit.
It would be easy to reduce this to competing visions of what public space should be. And while that’s certainly part of the discussion, not all such visions are advanced with the same energy. Not everyone has the resources for lawyers, lobbyists and SLAPP suits. Not everyone has the same degree of access and influence to the decision-makers or conversation-shapers. And not everyone has the same fluency with the technocratic, class-biased language that informs so many public-policy debates.
As we work for more inclusive and democratic conversations, it’s worth keeping that in mind.
(Image via torontoist)
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Citizen, cyclist, father, diver, cheap-laugh aficionado, sanctimonious wanker, #BadJew. Thoughts are my own.
