Tom Roche

From the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, Charles Haycock will challenge the way you perceive animals and, recorded at the YYC Comedy Festival, Nour Hadidi demonstrates why she many never be allowed in the province of New Brunswick...with love of course!

Today we have comedy from Katie-Ellen Humphries, Keith Pedro and Mayce Galoni. It's about challenges toda! Getting men to take selfies, getting kids to read...and getting into the most comfortable underwear. Buckle up!

Paul Sinha - comedian, lapsed GP, Chaser and genuinely the fourth best quizzer in the United Kingdom - returns to tell you about... well, everything. Paul has already told you about history in the Rose d'Or-winning Paul Sinha's History Revision, as well as Britishness (Paul Sinha's Citizenship Test), Magna Carta (The Sinha Carta), the Olympics (The Sinha Games) and, most importantly, cricket (The Sinha Test). But, as a competitive quizzer, Paul learns fascinating facts all the time. As a curious man, he then looks up the stories behind those facts and they often turn out to be even more fascinating. In Paul Sinha's General Knowledge, he shares these stories with you. In this week's episode, Paul explains the illustrious company he’s joined since the previous recording of this series - in a showbiz-themed episode that ranges over the great American songbook, the biggest-selling single to have never been a hit in America, and a Nobel Literature Laureate's contribution to action movies. Written and performed by Paul Sinha Produced by Ed Morrish A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4

Alexei offers his thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn and the left, laments the decline of small business and explains what the 1997 film Starship Troopers can teach us all. Written by Alexei Sayle Performed by Alexei Sayle Produced by Joe Nunnery Music and Lyrics by Tim Sutton A BBC Studios Production

Will Menaker of Chapo Trap House joins Katie and Matt to discuss the Democratic presidential candidates, plus a conversation about the relationship between Op-Ed writers and their critics. 

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Intelligent minds have disagreed, vehemently, ever since Karl Marx wrote his ideas down in the mid-1800s. They disagree some more in this IDEAS episode about Marx and the modern political left, featuring Sheila Copps, Charlie Foran, and Rick Salutin. *Originally broadcast on Sept. 10, 2019.

 

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (CJR, 8/26/19) has recently noted, corporate ownership of media interferes with the core societal function of the press: reporting and investigating key issues at the intersection of public need and governance. And nowhere is that more critical than when it comes to climate. Due to their corporate conflicts of interest, trusted news authorities have diverted us from our primary responsibility—assuring a viable habitat for our children and grandchildren.

As a journalist who has worked both inside and outside of establishment media, I see influence as embedded in a corporate media culture rather than in isolated cases of CEO dictates. It happens in little ways, such as how an interviewer frames a question, and in big ways, like the decision to exclude a topic, a person or a group of people from the airwaves.

Like most US companies, news organizations are hierarchies, which people who have worked in corporate offices can readily understand. Given that “90% of the United States’ media is controlled by five media conglomerates,” the top executive at many news outfits is likely the CEO of a multinational corporation. The word comes down from the business execs to the company’s division chiefs, as seen in countless movies (like the 1976 classic Network). This was how it was when I worked on primetime national news at CBS in the 1990s.

On the inside, it wasn’t easy to see organizational bias, when job security and team work required overlooking it. The response to the heavily promoted primetime news pairing of two well-known anchors exemplified how news personnel learn to toe the line. The two anchors had zero chemistry, but no one mentioned it, as if an unwritten code had been instantly internalized. This dragged on for two years, pulling down the network’s ratings.

Higher-ups would never offer editorial staff direct input on content. That’s what the executive and middle management were for. Would these managers confide to their staff that the big guns gave them a certain direction? No. Whatever it was, they would present it as their own, and it would be adopted.

Within this culture, controlling the content goes on in whispers, frowns, headshakes and decisions made behind closed doors. If anyone strays into a verboten zone, as I did when I proposed a feature about Native Americans, those in the know privately communicate the ethos that is expected and allowed. “We never put American Indians on air because they talk too slow,” a producer explained.

Despite such experiences, when I left CBS, I respected the many producers with whom I’d worked, many of whom are still employed at the various networks. That work experience honed editorial judgment in ways impossible to measure, for which I am infinitely grateful. It also showed me that organizational agendas and values can trump claims to objectivity.

Reporting from Independent Media

Yet over a decade later, working in progressive online media, I was still astonished that several major stories I covered, were anywhere from underplayed to entirely absent from establishment news.

When I began to cover fracking in New York state in 2009, at first both 60 Minutes (11/14/10) and the New York Times (11/27/09, 10/29/11) covered it as a Hatfield/McCoy feud between upstate rural neighbors, rather than as an invasive industrial activity with a host of health and environmental repercussions.

During the critical years of the major fracking buildout from 2005 to 2016, the  New York Times gave a prominent environmental platform to self-declared “climate champion” Andrew Revkin, whose reporting FAIR (Extra!, 2/10) called “a source of some comfort—and crowing—for the climate change denial crowd.” His pro-industry stance on fracking and naysaying on methane impacts condoned an industrial expansion that has produced far-reaching environmental damage.

The Times’ Ian Urbina (6/25/11)  did invaluable reporting on fracking’s faulty economic model. But in 2013, the paper of record closed its environmental desk, even as   Inside Climate News (1/11/13) was reporting that “worldwide coverage of climate change continued a three-year slide.”

MSNBC show hosts like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes rarely covered fracking, instead letting gas and oil industry ads reassert claims of safety. Nonprofit environmental groups, leading activists, along with a growing body of independent journalists filled the media void, including my own reporting at Huffington Post, AlterNet and EcoWatch.

The TTP

In 2014, I began to report on the Transpacific Partnership (TTP) and other concurrent global trade agreements, which are often characterized as core to President Barack Obama’s “legacy” (e.g., New York Times, 6/14/15; Washington Post, 6/24/15). The agreement’s full provisions were never revealed to the public prior to the June 2015 vote granting absolute trade authority to Obama—authority that would have passed to Trump if the agreement had been ratified in late 2016, as Obama hoped.

In conducting multiple interviews with trade analysts, as well as following the protests in Europe and the resulting leaks of the contents, I learned from  trade analyst William Waren (Connect the Dots,  1/28/15) that even prior to the TPP’s  passage and ratification, plans were underway for the buildout of  fracking, gas and oil, and coal trade and global export freed by its anticipated passage.

Nothing within the unenforceable Paris Agreement would have prevented it. In fact, the Paris Agreement provisions were nonbinding, while the trade agreements that were being secretly negotiated concurrently, including the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), were designed to be binding, to “effectively trump whatever commitment is made in Paris,” Waren revealed on Connect the Dots (12/9/15).

Further, the TPP’s planned instatement of an international corporate tribunal with international legal authority over all nations would have mortally injured global democracies. In 2016, Mark Ruffalo summed up what was at stake in the fight: Expanding the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in NAFTA via TPP

would block worldwide environmental and social progress while empowering corporations to undermine existing climate and environmental policies.

As we witness the Trump administration’s deconstruction of US environmental regulatory infrastructure—appointment by appointment, policy by policy—let’s appreciate that in defeating TPP and associated trade deals (thanks to the work of grassroots organizers and independent media), Americans dodged a bullet.

If the US had passed the TPP as planned during the 2016 lame duck session of Congress, both the US and all co-signers (a total of 12 countries) would have been contractually bound to a wholesale takedown of environmental regulations and economic barriers to fossil fuel development—as well as the loss of any right to challenge corporate rule or prevent health and environmental impacts. The climate impacts of the intended gas and oil buildout would likely have been devastating and decisive.

Nevertheless, the forward drive to pass the TPP occurred in a near void of corporate coverage. What had been negotiated behind closed doors with multinational corporations remained their business secrets. Prior to its authorization in June 2015, no mainstream outlet thoroughly investigated and disclosed the TPP’s provisions. Obama’s most memorable pro-TPP television appearance was singing about it with Jimmy Fallon.  FAIR (6/11/16) called the enthused Vox coverage (6/10/16) of Obama’s performance

a borderline parody of everything wrong with corporate-owned “new media”: What we have here is a Comcast-funded website plugging a Comcast-owned TV show to promote a trade deal aggressively lobbied for by Comcast.

Both the New York Times and its liberal economist columnist, Paul Krugman, covered the TPP infrequently. Krugman (10/6/15) professed he was a “lukewarm opponent” of it, and minimized its importance. “We’re not talking about a world-shaking deal here,” he wrote (3/11/15) three months before the Senate granted Obama the authority to sign the final agreement without further consultation or deliberation.

Prior to the vote, a college friend of the MSNBC host Chris Hayes assured me that Hayes, a former environmental reporter for The Nation, would be deeply concerned about these trade deals. I was dubious, but she was insistent. With the contact she provided, I sent all of my TPP research and sources on to Hayes. I received no response.

Rather than cover the TPP, MSNBC went on to fire Ed Schultz, the sole show host who covered trade agreements. (Sadly, the 64-year-old Schultz died in 2018.) In surveying TPP coverage, Media Matters (2/4/15) found that Schultz was the exception in a near-total blackout by all three major networks. Week after week, Hayes and other MSNBC hosts devoted airtime to meticulously dissecting far more minor concerns.

As in any large organization, the firing and hiring of staff speaks volumes to surviving staff members about the owners’ priorities. The unseen casualties among reporters of integrity, and the disservice to journalism, cannot be overestimated. Those working in corporate media get the message without anyone having to tell them, and highly paid show hosts have the most to lose.

The press’ mission is to inform the citizenry and flag abuses to power, not promote special interests. When citizens blind themselves to a news organization’s corporate entanglements, and trust the outlet to be truthful anyway, it is, to put it mildly, extraordinarily naïve.

It’s not about whether or not the public has access to a private conversation or confidential memo sent to editorial with a corporate dictate. The evidence is what’s given airtime and what isn’t over many years.

Was it just happenstance that MSNBC, for example, failed to cover the TPP after firing Ed Schultz? Comcast, the owner of MSNBC, sat at the table behind closed doors during the five-year long negotiations of the TPP’s specific trade provisions.

Have MSNBC or any of its competitors uncovered Comcast’s agenda for the trade agreements? What if concerns over intellectual property rights, for example, made it a corporate mission to pass a deal that also happened to radically hasten the climate tipping point? Should any company have that much power?

No business, no matter how sizeable, should have the right to subvert the actions and political choices necessary to address climate, as well as the activated movement capable of assuring that at long last we do what needs to be done. The only sane response is to support the movement, and the independent media outlets that provide a platform for ideas, facts, studies, polls, policy initiatives and disclosures outside the corporate media frame—and to overhaul the media to address this unfair use of public airwaves for gain and compromise as the world burns.

 

Thanks to his clever use of social media, he was dubbed the first prime minister of the Instagram age – but after four years in power, cracks in his image have started to show. By Ashifa Kassam. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Behind the News, 9/12/19 - guests: Margaret Corvid, John Clegg - Doug Henwood

“The Education of an Idealist” — a new memoir by Samantha Power, America’s ambassador to the U.N. from 2013 to 2017 — could have been among the greatest books ever written about politics. Power took an idiosyncratic path into the U.S. foreign policy nomenklatura after winning a Pulitzer Prize for her 2002 book, “‘A Problem From Hell’: America in the Age of Genocide.” She’s an anomaly at the summit of U.S. diplomacy, with the intelligence, audacity, curiosity, humane instincts, and freedom needed to face the deepest questions head on. Plus she has the perfect name.

How does the foreign policy of the U.S., seen from the inside, truly function? What should a morally serious American, surveying the world’s berserk cruelty, do? What compromises and self-deceptions are necessary to get power? Can they be worth it, even if you personally are going to hell?

An honest book about this would have been a genuine, no-kidding service to humanity. But Power chose not to write it. Instead, “The Education of an Idealist” will take its place with the numberless other banal, sludgy 500-page memoirs by political exiles.

When talking about U.S. foreign policy, Republicans use transparent lies that insult the intelligence of every American. By contrast, Democrats respect their fellow citizens enough to tell more complex lies, ones that sound plausible as long as you don’t think about them for more than three seconds. Power’s book hews strongly to this tradition.

Power favors lies of omission. For instance, you’ll hear a lot in “The Education of an Idealist” about the barbarism of Syrian President Bashar Assad. There are also thousands of damning words about what Russia did at the U.N. to protect Assad’s government as it murdered its own citizens. You can quibble with the presentation, and lack of context, but this is all generally accurate.

However, you’ll learn literally nothing from Power about these subjects:

• The Obama administration’s massive campaign of drone strikes across the world. Power was there from the beginning, starting out in 2009 on Obama’s National Security Council as senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights.

• The three major Israeli attacks on Gaza during Obama’s time in office.

• How the U.S. and our Gulf allies accidentally (?) ended up arming an Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, which Russia claimed motivated it to back the Syrian government more heavily.

• Saudi Arabia’s assault on Yemen, which began in 2015 with America’s committed logistical support, including targeting intelligence and aerial refueling of fighter aircraft.

• Obama’s decision not to prosecute the men and women who built and ran black sites where prisoners were tortured during the George W. Bush administration.

• Power’s chummy hijinks with Henry Kissinger, one of the 20th century’s varsity war criminals. In 2014, she tweeted a picture of herself buddying up with Kissinger at a baseball game. She later received a prize both named after and personally awarded by Kissinger.

When I turned the last page of “The Education of an Idealist” and was confronted by the acknowledgements section, I honestly thought I must have missed something. But the index confirms these topics just aren’t there. There is no entry for “drones” between Drew, Nelson and Drudge Report. There’s nothing about Kissinger or Israel’s bombings of Gaza. (We do learn on page 468 that she played basketball once with “Palestinian girls who hoped to become engineers, architects and politicians.”)

The omission of the Saudi war on Yemen might be the most glaring of all. Now that she’s out of office, Power is very upset about it. But as the attack began in 2015, Power stood behind what The Atlantic called “an unrealistic and one-sided resolution drafted by the Saudis, introduced by the British and passed … with U.S. support.” At that moment, Power personally seized the opportunity to blame the Houthi side, by and large the situation’s victims. About 100,000 people have died in the actual fighting; 85,000 children have died of starvation; and according to the U.N., 10 million more Yemenis are now “one step away from famine.” But you’ll learn nothing about Yemen in her book, beyond the fact that it’s one of six countries on Earth that executes people for being gay.

Of course, this is unremarkable for a U.S. diplomat. But what makes Power different from the standard factory-issued apparatchik is the documentation that she knows exactly what she’s doing. In fact, she mentions it in her book.

During her Senate confirmation hearings, she explains, she was confronted by an essay she wrote in 2003. It calls the U.S. “the most potent empire in the history of mankind,” and contains lamentations that could appear in The Intercept. “U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought,” she said. “It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States, [including] the CIA-assisted coups in Guatemala, Chile, and the Congo; the bombing of Cambodia; and the support for right-wing terror squads in Latin America.”

As Power describes it in “The Education of an Idealist,” she simply refused to be responsive to GOP questions about this. Asked “Do you believe the United States has committed or sponsored crimes?” by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., she just repeated that “the United States is the greatest country on earth.”

At that moment, Power says, “I had lost my innocence” — but she was confirmed by the Senate 87-10.

This is one of Power’s complicated lies. She lost her innocence long before that, in exactly the same way.

While covering the dissolution of Yugoslavia as a reporter in the 1990s, Power grew horrified by the Clinton administration’s failure to stop various bouts of mass murder. This led her to write “A Problem From Hell,” which examines other times America looked on as thousands or millions were exterminated: the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia in the 1970s, Saddam Hussein’s assault on Iraqi Kurds during the 1980s, and Rwanda in the 1990s.

“A Problem From Hell” is exactly like “The Education of an Idealist” in that Power is sincerely angry about the evildoing of other countries. But active U.S. participation in other genocides and war crimes is consigned to near-total silence. There’s nothing in “A Problem From Hell” about the Korean War, in which we killed 20 percent of the population in the north; our support for the mass slaughter of at least 500,000 Indonesians after a military coup in 1965; the fact we dropped 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos, more than we used during World War II; near-genocide in East Timor, conducted by Indonesia with money, arms, and protection from the Ford and Carter administrations; or actual genocide in Guatemala. The Vietnam War appears mainly as an explanation for our lack of action against the Khmer Rouge.

And while Power is rightfully consumed by the significance of the Armenian genocide — the first industrialized genocide, the one that demonstrated countries could do this in an age of modern communications and get away scot-free — she omits a key story about it. The thesis of her book is that because the U.S. bloviates endlessly about how much we care about the lives of foreigners, this should manifest itself in reality. But what the Armenian genocide shows is that all governments bloviate about their concern for foreigners, and even in the most extreme cases, this is just a tactic to get what they actually want: more wealth and power.

It was no secret that the Ottoman Empire was slaughtering Armenians during World War I. Its opponents — France, the U.K., and Russia — publicized the atrocities and cried out to the heavens about these “crimes against humanity and civilization.”

But in 1915, Djemal Pasha, one of the three Young Turks then running the Ottoman Empire, secretly sent an offer to the three countries. If they would help him eliminate the other two members of the triumvirate and seize sole power, he would remove Turkey from the war — and halt the genocide. There was just one other thing he wanted in return: for France and the U.K. to abandon their aspirations to slice off tasty parts of the Ottoman Empire, such as present-day Syria and Iraq, for themselves.

It turned out that France and the U.K. didn’t care about the Armenians that much. They rejected the idea, and the genocide continued for years. As one famous history of the period puts it, “Djemal appears to have acted on the mistaken assumption that saving the Armenians — as distinct from merely exploiting their plight for propaganda purposes — was an important Allied objective.” Emitting giant clouds of moral rhetoric, while possessing total disinterest in moral action: That’s just what countries do. The question is whether America is a country like other countries.

This is what makes Power different from America’s endlessly carping leftists. It’s not that she’s operating from different facts. It’s that, as she did in her 2003 essay, she’s asked “whether the United States is structurally capable of using its tremendous power for the good of others,” and decided the answer is yes. Most people who know U.S. perfidy chapter and verse never need to consider this seriously, because we have neither the talent nor inclination to ever get within a million miles of the ambassador penthouse at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. But Power did. You don’t have to agree with her decisions to want to know more about why she made them.

In an alternate reality, Power is using her formidable might right now to make this case:

I was complicit in evil because that got me in the room where I could make U.S. foreign policy two percent better — which, for the most powerful country on earth, is a lot.

I’m OK with being a cynical hypocrite, because that got me to a place where I could help stop a potential genocide in the Central African Republic before it started.

Noam Chomsky is wrong when he says, “There’s really an easy way to stop terrorism: Stop participating in it.” In fact, if you’re one isolated official in the U.S. government, it’s actually much easier to squelch the malefactors in enemy countries.

I’m a shameless liar, and that’s why I was there to help organize competent professionals to deal with a terrifying outbreak of Ebola.

The U.S. empire isn’t going anywhere, and if you actually care about human beings, you need someone willing to play the game and get filthy down in the mud.

But here in this dimension, “The Education of an Idealist” is simultaneously heartbreaking and boring. Power has returned from the mountaintop but won’t honestly tell us what she saw because she wants to get back there. As a recent Guardian article about her reported, “she would consider a return to government or even elected office.” Secretary of State Power? Senator Power? Who knows what the future holds, but Power is anxious to continue a life worthy of her name.

The post A Memoir From Hell: Samantha Power Will Do Anything for Human Rights Unless It Hurts Her Career appeared first on The Intercept.

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In the latest episode of Have You Heard we go back to school. And not to the idealized, romantic notion of school but to the harsh reality that awaits too many students and teachers. But wait! Our special guests are all intent on doing something about it. We hear from four educators who have a keen understanding of what needs to change, both inside and outside of school. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to do what they’re doing! Complete transcript of the episode available here. And if you’re a fan of our work, consider supporting us with a donation.

Comedian and podcaster Jimmy Dore joins Matt and Katie to discuss his show and media bias. Matt and Katie break down the fact-checking controversy involving The Washington Post and Bernie Sanders. 

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The irrepressible Jack Rasmus, who has never demonstrated any real understanding of how economic statistics are constructed, has a new post claiming that the “real” unemployment rate is more like 10–12% than the officially reported 3.7%. He has a point, even if it’s somewhat overstated. The government’s own broad unemployment rate, U-6, was 7.2% in August, nearly twice the headline rate, though short of the Rasmus rate. (See table A-15 here.)

One of the ways the government undercounts the unemployed, says Rasmus, is that the monthly survey “misses a lot of workers who are undocumented and others working in the underground economy in the inner cities”—but by Rasmus’s own account, these people are working, not unemployed. No doubt there are many uncounted unemployed living at the margins, but Rasmus can’t even make his own point accurately.

All that’s a topic in itself, which I’ve written about here and here. But I just want to address this claim about why the participation rate—the share of the adult population working for pay or actively looking for such work—has failed to return to pre-Great Recession levels:

Finally, there’s the corroborating evidence about what’s called the labor force participation rate. It has declined by roughly 5% since 2007. That’s 6 to 9 million workers who should have entered the labor force but haven’t. The labor force should be that much larger, but it isn’t. Where have they gone? Did they just not enter the labor force? If not, they’re likely a majority unemployed, or in the underground economy, or belong to the labor dept’s ‘missing labor force’ which should be much greater than reported. The government has no adequate explanation why the participation rate has declined so dramatically. Or where have the workers gone. If they had entered the labor force they would have been counted. And their 6 to 9 million would result in an increase in the total labor force number and therefore raise the unemployment rate.

Jack’s numbers are, as usual, a little off. The participation rate hasn’t declined by 5 percentage points since 2007. At its peak (which was in January 2008, not 2007, but let’s not quibble) it was 66.2%. In August 2019, it was 63.2%. That’s a 3-point decline, not 5. (It got as low as 62.4% in 2015, but it’s recovered some since.) But that’s beside the point I want to make now. What I want to do now is to refute the claim that “The government has no adequate explanation why the participation rate has declined so dramatically.”

Rasmus writes as if he’s the only person to ask the question. But he’s not. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has published a good deal of material on the issue, like here, here, here, and here. Tl;dr: the baby boomers are aging and retiring or shuffling towards retirement. (I develop that point here, arguing that aging explains about half the decline between 2000 and 2017.) The BLS also has an essay here that suggests that the culprits are “less-generous maternity and child-care policies, higher incarceration rates, poorer health outcomes, and less spending on on-the-job retraining and job-search assistance programs.” Outside the BLS, Federal Reserve economists have also written on the topic, like here, where Kansas City Fed staffer Didem Tüzemen argues that job market polarization—the disappearance of middle-skill jobs and the bifurcation of the job market into high-skill and low-skill jobs—may be responsible. Outside government, the late Alan Krueger argued that chronic pain and opioid addiction accounted for a lot of the decline in participation. In other words, lots of people, including the BLS, have addressed this issue.

You can really learn a lot by reading, Jack. And if you do, you can mount a sharper and more credible critique of this wretched system than with the usual off-the-cuff bloviating.

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Mahan Esfahani visits Azerbaijan to explore the effect of a border on musical cultures.

Behind the News, 9/5/19 - guests: Meleiza Figueroa, Anton Jäger - Doug Henwood

They hate Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. They no longer trust the BBC. They love civil servants, legal experts and James O’Brien. And now, consumed by the battle against Brexit, hardcore remainers are no longer the moderates. By Daniel Cohen. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

 

Thomas Edsall’s demographic analysis is almost always misleading (FAIR.org, 2/10/15, 10/9/15, 6/5/16, 3/30/18, 7/24/19)—and his latest column for the New York Times (8/28/19) is no exception.

“We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is,” the headline complains—with the subhead explaining, “A crucial part of his coalition is made up of better-off white people who did not graduate from college.”

Why does this matter? Edsall’s column is largely a write-up of a paper by two political scientists, Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm, who note that better-off whites without college degrees “tend to endorse authoritarian noneconomic policies and tend to oppose progressive economic policies,” and are therefore “a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party.” (By “authoritarian policies,” the researchers are mainly talking about racism and xenophobia.) Low-income, low-education whites, by contrast, “tend to support progressive economic policies and tend to endorse authoritarian policies on the noneconomic dimension,” and are therefore “conflicted in their partisan allegiance.”

What’s at stake in presenting one of these constituencies as “crucial” is how you approach the task of defeating Trump: If he’s turning out his key supporters through race-baiting and immigrant-bashing, the argument goes, then Democrats need to take care not to be too outspoken on issues of race and immigration. And so Edsall confidently concludes:

The 2020 election will be fought over the current loss of certainty—the absolute lack of consensus—on the issue of “race.”… Democrats are convinced of the justness of the liberal, humanistic, enlightenment tradition of expanding rights for racial and ethnic minorities. Republicans, less so…. If Democrats want to give themselves the best shot of getting Trump out of the White House…they must make concerted efforts at pragmatic diplomacy and persuasion—and show a new level of empathy.

(This is an argument Edsall has made before—see “What’s a Non-Racist Way to Appeal to Working-Class Whites? NYT’s Edsall Can’t Think of Any,” FAIR.org, 3/30/18.)

But there’s an entirely different conclusion that one can draw from the 21st century political terrain—one that is better supported by the data presented in Edsall’s column. Take a close look at the graphic he presents depicting “the shifting voting patterns of whites”:

Bear in mind that these are not equal slices of the electorate: As Edsall notes, the low-income, low-education voters are about 40% of white voters; the high-income, low-education voters are 22%; the low-income, high-education group is 14%; and the high-income, high-education make up 26% of the white vote.

So the supposedly “crucial” better-off white non–college grads are about half as plentiful as their poorer counterparts—and they have been voting Republican fairly consistently since 1972, through good years for Republicans and bad. What was actually crucial to Trump’s 2016 success is that the larger group of poorer less-educated whites, which traditionally leans Democratic or splits its vote, went decisively Republican.

And while this group was susceptible to Trump’s racist appeals, equally important (according to Edsall’s political scientist sources) was his “repeated campaign promise to protect Medicare and Social Security.” The false impression that Trump was a moderate Republican on economic issues “removed cognitive dissonance and inhibitions” that might deter such voters from supporting an economic conservative, leaving them free to be swayed by Trump’s appeal to a white racial identity.

If that’s the truly crucial group, then Democrats will not win the 2020 election by embracing, as Edsall seems to suggest, an agnosticism on the issue of race (or “the issue of ‘race,'” as he puts it), but rather by advancing a strongly progressive, redistributionist economic message. It’s political common sense that if the voters who are up for grabs are those who are socially conservative and economically progressive, then Democrats should emphasize left-wing economics and Republicans should stress right-wing social policies—while crucially reassuring their bases that they maintain their commitments to a progressive social agenda or a conservative economic program, respectively. (See FAIR.org, 6/20/17.)

But this common sense runs against the New York Times‘ historic role of guiding the Democratic Party away from positions that threaten the wealthy. This is why Adolph Ochs, great-great-grandfather of the current Times publisher, was bankrolled by bankers to buy the paper in 1896 (FAIR.org, 10/28/17), and it’s why the paper today has an editorial page editor who proudly declares, “The New York Times is in favor of capitalism” (FAIR.org, 3/1/18). Edsall, it seems, has the task of providing the intellectual arguments for why the Democrats should not adopt the progressive economic agenda that would benefit them electorally—a job that necessarily involves a great deal of doubletalk and hand-waving.

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You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTOpinion). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comment thread of this post.

 

Behind the News, 8/29/19 - guests: Yasha Levine, Maria Luisa Mendonça - Doug Henwood

As China and America go head to head in Asia, on trade and security issues, can Australia remain neutral? John Mearsheimer says that in the future if the competition heats up we'll have to choose.  

Guest: Whitney Webb. We continue the discussion on Whitney’s multi-part investigative journalism articles on the Jeffrey Epstein affair, the multi-national criminal enterprise, with an American wing that is whole heartedly bipartisan and perennial. Today we focus on Part 4 of the series: From “Spook Air” to the “Lolita Express”: The Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship. 

Both familiar and unfamiliar names and events turn up in this episode. Iran Contra, Bill & Hillary Clinton, Mena, Arkansas, Rose Law Firm, William Barr, BCCI, PROMIS, Systematics, Danny Casolaro, Jackson Stephens, Adnan Khashoggi, and more. Part 4 is the final piece of this series but not really the end, and Whitney gives us some hints about spinoff investigations that will be pursued. 

Whitney Webb is a MintPress news journalist and the co-host of the MintCast podcast. She is based in southern Chile and has contributed to numerous independent media outlets with writing and interviews and Whitney is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.  

FOLLOW @_whitneywebb, find her work at MintPress News and the MintCast podcast. Support her work by contributing to MintPress News or by becoming a patron at patreon.com/MintPressNews.

Around the Empire is listener supported, independent media. Pitch in at Patreon: patreon.com/aroundtheempire or paypal.me/aroundtheempirepod. Find all links at aroundtheempire.com. 

SUBSCRIBE on YouTube. FOLLOW @aroundtheempire and @joanneleon. 

SUBSCRIBE/FOLLOW on iTunes, iHeart, Spotify, Google Play, Facebook or on your preferred podcast app.

Recorded on August 23, 2019. Music by Fluorescent Grey.

Reference Links:

1. MintPress: From “Spook Air” to the “Lolita Express”: The Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship (Part IV of “Too Big to Fail” investigative series by Whitney Webb)
2. Around the Empire: Ep 115 Epstein, Trafficking & Blackmail feat Whitney Webb
3. Around the Empire: Ep 117 The Mega Group and the Epstein Affair feat Whitney Webb

Guest: Whitney Webb. We discuss Whitney’s multi-part investigative journalism articles on the Jeffrey Epstein affair, his ties to intelligence and organized crime, trafficking networks and sexual blackmail operations, and the origins of the Epstein case, going back decades. We focus on Part 2 of the series, titled Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era. 

Whitney Webb is a MintPress news journalist and the co-host of the MintCast podcast. She is based in southern Chile and has contributed to numerous independent media outlets with writing and interviews and Whitney is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.  

FOLLOW @_whitneywebb, find her work at MintPress News and the MintCast podcast.

Around the Empire is listener supported, independent media. Pitch in at Patreon: patreon.com/aroundtheempire or paypal.me/aroundtheempirepod. Find all links at aroundtheempire.com. 

SUBSCRIBE on YouTube. FOLLOW @aroundtheempire and @joanneleon. 

SUBSCRIBE/FOLLOW on iTunes, iHeart, Spotify, Google Play, Facebook or on your preferred podcast app.

Recorded on July 26, 2019. Music by Fluorescent Grey.

Reference Links:

1. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case, Whitney Webb, MintPress News
2. Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era, Whitney Webb, MintPress News
3. WSJ: Jeffrey Epstein’s Pilots Are Subpoenaed in Sex-Trafficking Investigation
4. NYT: How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women

Guest: Whitney Webb. We continue the discussion on Whitney’s multi-part investigative journalism articles on the Jeffrey Epstein affair, his ties to intelligence and organized crime, trafficking networks and sexual blackmail operations, and the origins of the Epstein case, going back decades. We focus on Part 3: Mega Group, Maxwells, and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal,

Whitney Webb is a MintPress news journalist and the co-host of the MintCast podcast. She is based in southern Chile and has contributed to numerous independent media outlets with writing and interviews and Whitney is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.  

FOLLOW @_whitneywebb, find her work at MintPress News and the MintCast podcast.

Around the Empire is listener supported, independent media. Pitch in at Patreon: patreon.com/aroundtheempire or paypal.me/aroundtheempirepod. Find all links at aroundtheempire.com. 

SUBSCRIBE on YouTube. FOLLOW @aroundtheempire and @joanneleon. 

SUBSCRIBE/FOLLOW on iTunes, iHeart, Spotify, Google Play, Facebook or on your preferred podcast app.

Recorded on August 7, 2019. Music by Fluorescent Grey.

Reference Links:

1. Around the Empire: Ep 115 Epstein, Trafficking & Blackmail feat Whitney Webb
2. Mega Group, Maxwells, and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal, Whitney Webb, MintPress News