A superlative takedown of the contemptible pro-war cowards in corporate media

My take is that this won’t have a lasting political impact. But I’m noting that I could be wrong, and that the last time corporate “news” media behaved this despicably, pandering to the most misinformed and gullible segment of the population, Trump ended up in the White House.

Mainstream coverage of Kabul’s fall and its aftermath has been anything but circumspect. Attempts to weigh the benefits of America’s withdrawal (e.g., the humanitarian gains inherent to the cessation of 20 years of civil war) against its costs have been rare; attempts to judge Biden’s execution of that withdrawal against rigorous counterfactuals have been rarer still. Instead, ostensibly neutral correspondents and anchors have (1) openly editorialized against the White House’s policy; (2) assigned Biden near-total responsibility for the final collapse of the proto-failed state his predecessors had established; and then (3) reported on the potential political costs of Biden’s actions, as though they were not actively imposing those costs through their own speculations about just “how politically damaging” the president’s failures of “competence” and “empathy” would prove to be...

One can critically report on concrete failings in the Biden administration’s withdrawal plans. But one cannot presume Biden’s responsibility for every negative consequence that follows from ending a misbegotten war and deserve the title journalist. By privileging the victims of American military withdrawal over those of American military engagement — while presuming the U.S. president’s capacity to decisively shape events in foreign lands — the media has rendered itself objectively pro-war. In allowing personal attachments to dictate its humanitarian concerns, mainstream reporters have concentrated moral outrage on an injustice that the U.S. can’t resolve without resort to violence (the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan), while enabling mass indifference to a much larger injustice that the U.S. can drastically mitigate without killing anyone (the global shortfall of COVID-19 vaccines). - New York Magazine

Line 3 protesters are seeing it all the way through

It’s just a matter of time, until the miserable boondoggle is sitting there empty except for a few vile remnant puddles of tar sands sludge. I suppose then Enbridge will demand some sort of compensation from American taxpayers.

The dog days of summer have been bittersweet for “water protectors,” as members of the fight against Line 3 call themselves. Moments of joy like these take place even as a devastating reality sinks in: The pipeline is weeks away from completion, and they won’t be able to stop it.

Many feel betrayed by a governor and president who pledged to prioritize tribal relations and environmental issues, then remained silent as construction barreled ahead. They’re considering how to use lessons learned for future fights, even as they mourn the loss of this one.

“It’s like that David and Goliath story, but this time, Goliath still won,” said Jaike Spotted Wolf, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish Nation. “But when the pipeline is over, there’s a lot of other Indigenous issues that need to be addressed. We can’t just walk away.” - Minnesota Reformer

Something righteous happened re: trade and labor

It's been a long, long time coming, and hopefully there will be a lot more of it.

Last week, something revolutionary happened in the history of U.S. trade policy. The government used trade law to help labor, not to help capital.

Government switching sides gives a whole new political meaning to globalization. Global trade, with the right politics and policies, doesn’t have to produce a race to the bottom. It can even start a race to the top. Who knew?

The specific case involved an auto parts company called Tridonex, located in the border town of Matamoros, Mexico. Tridonex is owned by a Philadelphia outfit called Cardone Industries—which in turn is owned by a Canadian hedge fund! Tridonex makes things like reconditioned used brakes. It sends most of its products to the U.S., and is a classic case of offshoring jobs to Mexico, as enabled by NAFTA.

But in 2019, the Democrats in Congress and Trump trade chief Robert Lighthizer rewrote NAFTA. The successor agreement, called USMCA, includes tough, enforceable labor rights provisions, guaranteeing workers in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada the right to organize and join unions free from harassment. - The American Prospect

Afghanistan withdrawal shows U.S. corporate "news" media at its worst

OK, not its absolute, all-time worst; that goes to all it did to put Trump in the White House. And the lasting effects of this “journalistic” debacle will be few, if any, because in a week most people will care about as much about Afghanistan as they did a week ago. But it’s still atrocious.

Treating the Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan’s capitol over the weekend as a shocking event in the wake of U.S. troops withdrawing from the war-torn country, the press eagerly jumped into the blame game. In the process, they diligently did the GOP’s bidding by omitting key context in its rush to pin the blame for a 20-year, extraordinarily complex and heartbreaking military and foreign policy failure on a single man who took office just seven months ago...

In truth, the Republican policy is to leave U.S. troops there forever and spend untold billions in the process. Yet the only Republican perspective journalists focused on in recent days was that Republicans were very mad at Biden. (Yes, many of them were stalwart supporters of the Iraq War and stood by Bush’s botched handling of the war for years.)

When Biden announced earlier this year that all U.S. troops were coming home from Afghanistan, 70 percent of Americans supported the move, including 56 percent support from Republicans.

Would those polling results be different today, given the collapse of Kabul and the Taliban’s newfound control of Afghanistan? It’s possible. But after the U.S. fought a losing war there for two decades, my guess is that most Americans will not swing their positions and urgently demand that U.S. forces return to mountainous fighting.- Crooks and Liars

An Afghanistan post-mortem

Prof. Juan Cole's take, with which I largely agree. Though I think the U.S. stayed in Afghanistan more because war pigs like Rumsfeld psychologically "get off" on it all. And of course some truly loathsome, despicable assholes got richer.

The US in 2002-2003 had a good outcome in Afghanistan. We should just have left then. I can’t imagine why we didn’t. I think then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to surround Russia so it couldn’t reemerge as a peer power. It had nothing to do with Afghanistan.

The US lost Afghanistan in part by trying to occupy it militarily. In 2005 US troops used flamethrowers to burn poppy crops of Afghan farmers, who had nothing else to live on. One in 7 as a result had to sell a daughter. I doubt they have forgiven the US.

If you occupy a country, you have to suppress insurgents. Insurgents come from towns and villages and have friends and relatives there. When insurgents hit a US outpost, the US troops had to go into the nearby village and shake it down, looking for the guerrillas. They’d go into Afghan homes at night, with the women folk rustled from their sleep and standing there bare-faced and in their bed clothes before 18-year-old strangers from Alabama and South Carolina. After a thing like that, the men of the family would have had at least to try to kill some Americans. Search and destroy missions gradually turned people against the US, just as had happened in Vietnam. - Informed Comment

Tell your Republican friends to watch out for the "pre-checked box."

I remember back when online petitions were a bigger deal. I saw where Republicans started demanding a phone number, so they could later hassle you for money, before they’d include your “signature.” I indulged righteous indignation, until Democrats soon started doing that as well. Hopefully that won’t be the case with this.

Concerns around Trump's donation scheme first emerged in April, when a Times investigation found that the former president's campaign operation had routinely been signing up contributors for monthly — or even weekly — recurring contributions, through deliberately bewildering online forms and pre-checked authorizations. In the weeks before Election Day last fall, the Trump campaign rolled out an increasingly opaque array of these boxes, which featured huge blocks of boldface or all-caps text, full of aggressive phrasing, evidently intended to distract donors from the opt-out language in smaller, fainter type below.

This tactic, the Times reported, "ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president's own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars."

Trump's campaign was forced to refund $122.7 million as a result of 200,000 disputed transactions in 2020. Refunds to donors who exceed legal limits are not infrequent in political campaigns, but that was a vastly higher sum than the amount refunded by Joe Biden's campaign. This captured the attention of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which in May sent a formal recommendation to Congress, asking for an outright ban on pre-checked recurring donation boxes.

That doesn't appear to have had made any meaningful impact on Trump's fundraising effort. In fact, Salon's reporting reveals that dozens of other Republican candidates and organizations now rely on pre-checked boxes to keep the money flowing, so much so that it can essentially be regarded as standard operating procedure on conservative fundrasing. - Salon

YouTube is probably not driving right-wing extremism

Among other things far-right fanaticism has been around, and very problematic, since long before YouTube, or for that matter the internet, came to be.

We've all seen it happen: Watch one video on YouTube and your recommendations shift, as if Google's algorithms think the video's subject is your life's passion. Suddenly, all the recommended videos—and probably many ads—you're presented with are on the topic.

Mostly, the results are comical. But there has been a steady stream of stories about how the process has radicalized people, sending them down an ever-deepening rabbit hole until all their viewing is dominated by fringe ideas and conspiracy theories.

A new study released on Monday looks at whether these stories represent a larger trend or are just a collection of anecdotes. While the data can't rule out the existence of online radicalization, it definitely suggests that it's not the most common experience. Instead, it seems like fringe ideas are simply part of a larger self-reinforcing community. - Ars Technica

It's no surprise that corporate "news" is back to the same old

I question, myself, to what real extent they could ever be said to have moved away from it.

After January 6, we noted (FAIR.org, 1/18/21) that many in corporate media finally found the courage to cast aside their commitment to false equivalence. Presumably shocked by what they had witnessed, reporters began using words like “sedition” and “incitement” without having to put them in the mouth of a source who could then be balanced by an opposing view. News outlets directly stated that Donald Trump “set in motion” (New York Times, 1/6/21) or was responsible for “inciting” (CNN.com, 1/12/21) the deadly attack on democracy.

Yet we also noted that Trump’s lack of support at the time from within the establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, made that honesty easier for reporters—some of whom nevertheless couldn’t shake their old habits as a debate began over whether Trump should be impeached yet again for inciting the insurrection.

Six months later, Trump has solidified his grip on the right, and elite journalists have largely returned to their perfunctory both-sides reporting. - FAIR

Corporate Ag fails badly in Africa

This is no surprise. Indeed, sadly predictable.

According to an anonymous inside source, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is preparing a campaign to raise $1 billion in the coming months to fund its promotion of industrialized agriculture through 2030. The organization, which has spent $1 billion since its founding in 2006, is reportedly counting on the September United Nations Food System Summit as a key platform for its fundraising. AGRA’s president, Agnes Kalibata, was named Special Envoy last year by U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres to lead the summit. The simultaneous fund drive raises immediate questions about her conflicts of interest.

The reported funding campaign comes one year after our research documented that AGRA was failing on its own terms. Our review of national-level data from 13 AGRA focus countries showed that Green Revolution programs were falling far short of stated goals of doubling productivity and incomes for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half by 2020.

AGRA’s fund drive is sure to intensify calls from African farm, environmental and community organizations to demand that donors shift their funding from expensive Green Revolution programs to more affordable and sustainable approaches such as agroecology. Ecological agriculture received another vote of confidence earlier this month when the U.N. Committee on World Food Security approved a set of policy recommendations supporting such measures. - IATP