JUST A MOTION AWAY

JUST A MOTION AWAY: Our high school Economics class had us bored to tears. For a red diaper baby in the midst of the late 60's "revolution" it held little relevance. But we do remember one thing- the way Mr. Voorhies would ask questions of our equally narcoleptic classmates and, when no one raised their hands, he would rub his thumb across his other four fingers, indicating the inevitable answer to every question in economics... money.

Perhaps it has stuck with us because every time we see the Hawai`i State Legislature, or any legislative body in the country for that matter, propose some inane and out-of-touch piece of legislation- many times either in opposition to pervasive public opinion or presenting a version of the ideal that is so watered-down you can actually hear it gurgling as it goes down for the third time- we leap to the conclusion that the answer as to "why" can be summed up with Mr. Voorhies' gesture.

So when we heard that rather than ban those one-time-use, white, plastic grocery bags like Kaua`i and Maui have done, the bill streaking through the legislature aims to simply put a 10 cent fee on them- to go to 25 cents if it doesn't decrease the use significantly.

At first blush we assume it was, as usual, the "money in the system" from both the supermarkets and plastic bag makers that was the proverbial fly in the ointment.

But the reality is that the reason why the corporate media is framing any controversy over the bill as whether in fact to institute a fee and if so how much it should be, is that our own people have sold us down the river once again.

Rather than look at how incredibly beautiful the roadsides, beaches and, everything else looks on Kaua`i and Maui now that everything isn't draped in white plastic and advocate for a total ban statewide, according to Civil Beat:

Sierra Club director Robert Harris told the House Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection Thursday that a fee — which would be charged to consumers at the checkout counter — has worked to reduce plastic bag use in other areas.

Harris was among those testifying on House Bill 2260. Environmental groups, including The Nature Conservancy and Surfrider Foundation, as well as government department heads and even major supermarkets, testified in support of the bill.

The important part that tells you something is wrong is that last part- it wasn't just the environmental group but "even major supermarkets, testified in support of the bill."

Now we get the "strange bedfellows" aspect of politics. Many times we have to question our own sanity when we find ourselves agreeing on some issue with various and sundry fascists, war mongers and general all-around creeps and cretins.

But that isn't the case here.

Way too often, especially in "the Aloha State," those who put themselves out as allies in the fight to stop despoilment in the name of progress in the islands abandon the fight to enact effective legislation in favor of compromising our environment before the fight even begins.

The thought process, as we've been told in similar circumstances in the past, is that the good fight isn't worth fighting this time. We've been admonished by the leadership of the above listed groups that certain battles aren't worth fighting and scoring political points for the organization on "this one" is more important than staking out the "perfect" so that the final "good" will be just a little better when all is said and done.

The way politics is supposed to work is that you stake out your perfect position and either win over the other side or find a happy medium. But lately- whether it's the Hawai`i environmental groups or the national Democratic Party, the position taken going into negotiations is already compromised to the extent that the final measure is inevitably horrific.

It isn't the money itself in many of these situations. Rather it's the acknowledging- and therefore condoning- of the fear from legislators over the use of that money to challenge them at election time that creates the defeatist attitude of progressive organizations these days.

Yes- getting all money out of politics is the ultimate solution to our broken political system. But if we give up before we begin, we're giving that money exponentially more power than it already has.

THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW AGAINST YOU COMING AROUND

THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW AGAINST YOU COMING AROUND: It gets old quick.

You check in at your activist organization’s web site and there, one of those gullible ninnies has posted comments regarding the conspiracy of the week of the month of the year... chem trails, smart meters, aspartame.

One of the favorites is the contention that all the top corporate media execs and anchors get together every weekend to agree on the spin they will give the news this week. Noam Chomsky laughs off the concept saying basically that these people don't need to be told how to conspire because years of working their way to the top has given them all the required corporate perspective they need.

But last Monday morning even we were startled at how everywhere we turned, TV and print media moved on a dime from a somewhat sympathetic if confused take on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) takeovers of city centers across the nation, to a sort of "get a job you dirty smelly hippies and stop blocking those of us with a job from getting to it" slant on the movement.

We had a feeling this didn't bode well for the integrity of the skulls of the OWS denizens and sure enough, by the next morning, as though directed by the invisible hand of totalitarian oppression, cities across the country had let loose their police to perpetrate violent, head-cracking crackdowns, throwing those in the streets out into the streets- so to speak.

But the oddest thing happened Tuesday. Reports started to trickle in that, in fact, 11 mayors across the nation had held a conference call to discuss the planned removal of those pesky whiners, according to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan- many of whom, including Quan, acted Monday night.

Although many like Portland Mayor Sam Adams denied the call was a strategy session, none denied it was the topic de jour of their confab.

We had a feeling it was only going to get worse but we had council meetings to watch and local buffoons to skewer. So Saturday, when we began to see the inklings of some kind of viral video of protesters getting pepper sprayed we paid little attention- we'd seen plenty all week already and were all too aware of the all-out effort to all-but-kill-off OWS movement.

But they kept coming... emails... Facebook postings... tweets. Until by halftime of the big Kapa`a High School football game it all got so obtrusive upon our little sports cocoon that we had to watch that which had become the object of all the 'lookie-here" finger pointing.

And it didn't take long to see that the video was- if anything was- going to be a game changer.

So much so that we posted the following to those who had inundated us with links to the quickly and virally-spinning-out-of-control YouTube clip:

This has to be one of the most bizarre things (we)'ve ever seen.

The line of seated protesters had quite obviously been trained in non-violent, passive resistance, yet the cops apparently have not. In fact the officer nonchalantly sprays the whole line of arm-linked dissidents like he's spraying a mound of termites with insecticide while dozens of fellow officers stand there looking on with acquiescence indicating that this was approved if not directed by higher-ups.

But even more distressing is the fact that this is Davis, California, known as one of the most progressive city governments in the country where one would assume that there had been communication and police training in responses to non-violent civil disobedience... (It's) unfathomable that this could happen in this location.

By the evening the clip remained the sole domain of the internet where you couldn't click a clack without finding a link to yet another shot angle or someone else virtually scratching their head in a "is this what it's come to" manner.

Yet the point is- and we do have one- that the deafening nature of the on-line attention paid was apparently inversely proportional to the national TV news coverage.

Saturday brought nothing. Sunday there were a couple of broadcast notes on a "viral video" of a UC Davis pepper spraying event and a couple of outlets even played the most egregious 10 or 15 seconds.

It wasn't until late Sunday night our time (Monday morning on the east coast) that the clip broke through and began running in rotation on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Bloomberg and the rest.

Seems that the Monday through Friday regulars were back on the job and after some confusion by the weekend crew over whether to actually "cover" the event, the big bosses settled on a spin of "look at what went viral over the weekend" rather than "look what actually happened Friday."

Though the difference may seem like one without a differentiation, the two divergent views of the event point out how any story line that challenges the preconceived and previously broadcast notions of the corporate shills has to be presented with a "we didn't miss this but had to show it to you because so many people were watching it" caveat.

It becomes understandable sometimes how those who see conspiracies everywhere miss the simpler explanations. Because when the herd moves in unison, their eyes in their pocket and their noses on the ground, you got to figure they know something is happening here- they just don't quite know what it is.

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A note on the performance by "Makana" for the APEC leaders. Despite notes we received that it was "neither the time or place" for a protest song, in a NY Times editorial on how bad the wealth gap is in Hawai`i- and about our horrific homelessness problems- they note that:

The divide in Hawaii between haves and have-nots is grotesque. So is the reluctance to challenge it. A Hawaiian musician, Makana, recently got a chance and blew it. He was invited to play at an APEC dinner, where he quietly sang a protest song, “We Are the Many,” for 45 minutes. Too quietly: world leaders, including President Obama, kept chatting and chewing, undisturbed.

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We'll be light posting this week- so much college basketball, so little time.

HYDROPHOBIC HYSTERIA

HYDROPHOBIC HYSTERIA: Back during the waning days of the reign of Crawford Texas’ village idiot most of the brain dead, consumerist, greedy, self absorbed Americans figured out what the wise knew in 2000- and Bush’s “popularity” hovered at about 20%.

Most progressives saw this as an encouraging development in that three-in-five of the US’ ditto-headed, brain-dead fat-tubs-of-lard that pass themselves off as human beings had wised up after being been beaten silly for almost eight years due to their own actions at the ballot box.

But really it the most astonishing part of the poll was that there were still 20% of hard core dim-witted knee-jerk “too stupid to live” left tucked away in mega-churches and mini-malls of America the country.

“Who are these people?” we wondered but more importantly “where are they?”

Well we found them this month- the hard core, “don’t confuse me with the facts”, chest-pounding twits- raising gorilla dust at the various health care reform town meetings held recently.

And even though they probably represent only half of those die hard knuckleheads that argued among themselves whether Bush was “a great president or the greatest president”, the media- in their typical “’both’ sides of the issue” coverage- still cling to the notion that this “movement” is really about health care and not just a diminishing clique of white people who see their majority status in the land they stole from brown people slowly disappearing and want to wrest back control of “our” country back from the hands of a black president.

Perhaps the thing that baffles the pea-brained pundits most is where are those 80% of Americans- as polls indicated earlier this year- that demand real health care reform?

Well what the press hasn’t grasped is that those of us who understand that the only form of reform that can demonstrably be launched fully formed- the single payer “Medicare for all” format- gave up on true heath care reform months ago when it was conveniently taken “off the table” by the president and congress.

The noisiest of squeaky wheels have not only gotten the grease they’ve provided the context for lazy, simplistic, easy-answer-seeking reporters to file stories defining the “opposition” as those shrieking drivel in the non-sequitor, talking-point Hannity/ Limbaugh/ Beck echo chamber, as they spew high decibel inanities at their cameras.

The corporate media refuse to think through why there is seemingly little of no support for the “single payer is off the table” non-reform that we’ve been offered.

With their Hobson’s choice loaded-question, in true corporate governance bought-and-paid-for style, it’s just a matter of how much they will allow the insurance industry to continue to screw us in the butt, essentially asking us whether we want our sh-t sandwich on white or wheat.

And they expect us to enthusiastically show up and fight the “keep the government away from my Medicare” crazies for, at best, a kinder gentler insurance industry (yeah, that’ll happen).

The fact is, unless you’re still one of those among the delusionally naive Obama-as-messiah sycophantic minions- a group whose numbers are shrinking daily as they meet the new boss’ war-mongering corporate-kow-towing style- you’ve given up on the centrist Democratic Party’s “bend-over” opposition to the slack-jawed, wing-nut creationist, gun-toting Republicans.

The ribbon placed on the repackaging of the old-boss is but an illusion that we who’ve long since rejected the duopoly warned of when, as always, Tweedledum ran against Tweedledumber.

Health care reform is dead. It died when all the members of congress decided we couldn’t have the only reform that would and could be fair, affordable and cover everyone as we detailed last month because the other 534 corporate lackeys had been bought off by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Don’t expect us to stand up and defend the insult to our intelligence that the Democrats are trying to substitute for basic human right to heath care we all want deserve and could have had.

BUT IT MAKES ITS OWN GRAVY

BUT IT MAKES ITS OWN GRAVY: Another day another “casualty” as we move toward a world where people won’t have anything in which to wrap fish or train puppies.

But of course you wouldn’t know that the demise of the corporate press is self-inflicted due to the friendly fire death of solid investigative content combined with a penchant for printing truth and lies side by said and calling it objectivity.

In the Honolulu Advertiser’s version of the story of the 23 layoff at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and MidWeek, Rick Daysong writes

The layoffs come as the nation's newspaper industry has lost thousands of jobs because of economic conditions and advertising revenue due to the Internet.

Yup- blame it on the economy and the internet, even though the problems started long before the current conditions and the fact that it is the newspaper industry’s own greed and competitive nature that has stopped them from micro-charges for the on-line news- probably because no one would pay for either the pap or articles that promote the corporate version of events they publish these days.

Sometimes you wouldn’t even know you were hearing about the same source content when you read the corporate version and the alternative or independent press reports,. as when the articles describing a study of the effects of sonar on dolphins was released recently.

Today the Advertiser’s “Military Writer” William Cole has an article headlined (what did you expect?) “Sonar's effect on dolphins minimal”..

He rotely regurgitates the apparent military press release version of what the study found:

In a study replicating Navy sonar, the Hawai`i Institute of Marine Biology found that a captive bottlenose dolphin had to remain relatively close to a high-intensity sonar source for a prolonged period to experience even temporary hearing loss — a finding the Navy seized upon to say it "may have vastly overestimated impacts of mid-frequency active sonar on marine mammals."

But the day before independent reporter Joan Conrow reported on the study in her reporting blog quoting an Associated Press article on the study as saying

When the pings reached 203 decibels and were repeated, the neurological data showed the mammal had become deaf, for its brain no longer responded to sound.

You’ll want to read Joan’s entire entry. Turns out the “study” was done in what amounts to a swimming pool with short bursts, negating the effects on behavior such as rapid surfacing, which is how many marine mammals deaths have apparently occurred due to sonar.

So how far does the clutches of corporate press go?

Well in the broadcast realm the “news” is usually even more worthless than the modern “objective” newspaper.

Thank goodness we have PBS, eh?

Not so fast.

A couple of Monday nights back we watched “Sick Around America” on PBS’s program “Frontline”, public broadcasting’s signature, award-winning, investigative series.

And while we were stuck with the usual liturgy of horror stories about insurance companies killing their clients to make more money- similar to the stories in Michael Moore’s disturbing movie "Sicko"- the program quite blatantly pinned the whole problem on the fact that there are “uninsured” who are not paying into the system until they get sick and, therefore, promoting the Massachusetts model of “mandatory insurance”.

Though the first half of the program seemed to lead to the obvious conclusion- one that polls show the vast number of American’s hold- that only eliminating insurance companies from the equation and implementing a single-payer so-called “Medicare for All” system will really do anything about what all acknowledge is our “healthcare crisis”.

So it was with great interest that we read a piece by Russell Mokhiber of Corporate Crime Reporter entitled Something is Rotten at PBS.

He detailed how Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid had done a Frontline piece called “Sick Around the World” a few years back and Frontline had asked him to do another on America.

But when he turned in his work and the producers did their editing he found that “this is not my beautiful documentary”.

The article describes how apparently instead of presenting Reid’s work presenting the well known horrors of insurance company coverage and reaching the obvious conclusion that getting the profit motive out of the equation is the sensible way to proceed, the produces went 180 degrees on him.

As we said they stressed the “mandatory coverage” model saying the problem of high costs wasn’t due to insurance company greed and need to maximize profit but due to people not paying the insurance companies to be covered when they’re healthy..

The article tells the sorry tale in Reid’s own words:

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“We spent months shooting that film,” Reid explains. “I was the correspondent. We did our last interview on January 6. The producers went to Boston and made the documentary. About late February I saw it for the first time. And I told them I disagreed with it. They listened to me, but they didn't want to change it.”

Reid has a book coming out this summer titled The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Press, August 2009.)

“I said to them -- mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world,” Reid said. “I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said – I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways.”

“Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit,” Reid said. “But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance.”

“I don't think they deliberately got it wrong, but they got it wrong,” Reid said.

As you can imagine the producers tried to defend themselves. The next week Mokhiber wrote that they accuse Reid of being the one with a bias and actually tried to deny that they promoted the mandatory converge model even though the whole second half hour essentially did nothing but present the case for it.

The single payer Medicare for all model was never even mentioned except in passing and then as being a political impossibility.

In reality PBS is nothing but a non-commercial version of the corporate press these days except the corporate world just pays them directly, using the phony term “underwriting” instead of “bought and paid for programming”.

Although there used to be a strict PBS rule forbidding underwriting for a specific program by a company who had any “interest” directly or even indirectly in the subject they abandoned that almost 20 years ago- a move which encouraged other non commercial media such as public access TV and community radio like KKCR on Kaua`i to justify doing the same and abandoning all pretense of lack of commercial control over content.

While the newspaper industry keeps up the drumbeat of their supposed investigative reporting being essential to a democratic America, the examples of it cited recently are few, far between and generally weak, especially when compared to the 99% of the fare consisting of essentially free advertising and “he said- she said” shilling for the same politicians they should be- and aren’t- investigating.

Instead of actually improving their product to be once again a commodity people will pay for, their penny-wise pound-foolish methodology is to fire more reporters and say they can’t afford to do real journalism any more out of one side of their mouths while claiming they are worth saving because they are still doing it out of the other.

As Conrow concluded in her blog piece today, where she links to her two excellent articles in the Honolulu Weekly- one on the Reinstated Nation’s case regarding their trip to Kaho`olawe and one on GMO's in Hawai`i- “Support your independent newspapers!”

The press is dead- long live the press.