Glenn Greenwald, writing in The Rise of Trump Shows the Danger and Sham of Compelled Journalistic “Neutrality” for The Intercept, explains:

Contrary to what U.S. media corporations have succeeded in convincing people, these journalistic neutrality rules are not remotely traditional. They are newly invented concepts that coincided with the acquisition of the nation’s most important media outlets by large, controversy-averse corporations for which “media” was just one of many businesses.

Large corporations hate controversy (it alienates consumers) and really hate offending those who wield political power (bad for business). Imposing objectivity rules on the journalists who work for their media divisions was a means to avoid offending anyone by forcing journalists to conceal their perspectives, assumptions, and viewpoints, and, worse, forcing them to dishonestly pretend that they had none, that they float above all that. This framework neutered journalism and drained it of all its vitality and passion, reducing journalists to stenography drones permitted to do little more than summarize what each equally valid side asserts. Worse, it ensures that people who wield great influence and power — such as Donald Trump — can engage in all sorts of toxic, dishonest, and destructive behavior without having to worry about any check from journalists, who are literally barred by their employers from speaking out (even as their employers profit greatly through endless coverage).

Anyone pretending to report news while hiding behind a corporate shield of objectivity is a cog, not a journalist.

Then there is Wiley Miller’s take on walls this morning.

Ta-Nehisi Coasts, writing in Nina Simone’s Face for The Atlantic, drills down:

In America, racism is a default setting. To do nothing, to go along with the market, to claim innocence or neutrality, is to inevitably be a cog in the machine of racist hierarchy.

The producers of Nina are the heirs of this history—not personal racists, but cogs. Jezebel’s Kara Brown researched the team behind Nina. It is almost entirely white. Doubtless, these are good, non-racist people—but not good enough. No one on the team seems to understand the absurdity at hand—making a movie about Nina Simone while operating within the very same machinery that caused Simone so much agony in the first place. I do not mean to be personally harsh here. I am not trying to hurt people. But there is something deeply shameful—and hurtful—in the fact that even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic. In this sense, the creation of Nina is not a neutral act. It is part of the problem.

It’s here that the term “appropriation” bears some usage. We’re not talking about someone inspired by the deeper lessons of Simone’s life and her music. We are talking about people who think it’s fine to profit off her music while heedlessly contributing to the kind of pain that brought that music into being. To acknowledge that pain, to consider it in casting, would be inconvenient—as anti-racist action always is. It would mean giving an opportunity to someone who’s actively experienced the kind of pain that plagued Simone. That would doubtlessly mean a diminished chance at garnering funds for such a film. And that, in turn, would court years of delays and the possibility of the film never coming into being. That would be unfortunate—but less so for Nina Simone than for the agents who feel themselves entitled to profit her story.

Coates is, of course, absolutely correct here. The words that jumped out at me, however, are these:

To do nothing, to go along…, to claim innocence or neutrality, is to inevitably be a cog in the machine.

We are not superheroes awaiting the call in our Hall of Justice with the Justice League of America. We have lives and we have survival needs that must be seen to. We can’t face every bully, call bullshit on every heinous act. We can’t save every starfish. We can save this starfish, or that starfish or even those starfish over there, and expect others to follow our example. We are a society chipping away at the acts of those who own the machine.

We can not recognize our limits if we have not pushed them as far, and as hard, as we are able and then pushed just a little more. No responsible adult can be innocent or neutral. We have to own our disinterest or inability to act, for whatever reasons, if that is the case, but we can not turn a blind eye and pretend that that is neutrality.

So, part of the largesse flowing into the City of Cleveland’s coffers in advance of the 2016 Republican Party National Convention Donald Trump Slug Fest is $50 million tagged for convention security. Thanks to that money, the Cleveland Police get to turn their officers into action figures wearing the Perfect Defender (now there’s a euphemism for you) riot suit. The American Civil Liberties Union rightly wants to ensure that after the smoke clears from the convention, the suits, and other military gear, leave Cleveland too.

Andrew J. Tobias, writing in Civil rights activists raise concerns about Cleveland’s plans to buy riot gear for Republican National Convention for the Plain Dealer reports:

Activists plan to hold a news conference at City Hall on Monday to voice concerns about Cleveland’s plans to buy riot gear and other efforts to beef up security during this July’s Republican National Convention.

In a news release Friday, the ACLU of Ohio said the city has not set up a “meaningful and transparent process” through which the public can provide timely input on how the city spends a $50 million federal grant to pay for security for the convention.

The activists said they plan to call on City Council to pass a resolution committing the city to decommission any “military type equipment” after the convention is over. Monday’s news conference will include representatives from Cleveland Peace Action, the Ohio chapters of the National Lawyers Guild and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and others.?

Personally, I think Donald Trump should be footing the bill and he can take the suits home with him for his personal security detail.

Bernie writes:

I want to tell you about something that encapsulates so much of what is wrong with our economy, our government, and our corrupt political system. Then I’m going to ask for your help to stop it.

Pfizer is a giant pharmaceutical company based in New York City that has a history of overcharging Americans for prescription drugs. It’s in the process of trying to merge with another company located in Ireland.

If the merger is successful, Pfizer would technically become a foreign company, meaning it could dodge around $35 BILLION in corporate taxes here in America.

Enough is enough. Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies cannot be allowed to evade taxes and rip off American patients who already pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

I sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew asking him to prevent Pfizer from taking many of the steps it wants in order to avoid paying taxes in America. Can you add your name to say you want Pfizer to pay the taxes it owes?

What Pfizer is trying to do is known as a “corporate inversion.” In this case, Pfizer, an American company, is merging with a company based abroad. The result of the merger is a company with an address in another country – even though the majority of shareholders are still based in America.

Pfizer apparently doesn’t want to pay the $35 billion in taxes it would owe in America. I don’t think that’s right.

No matter what, you can bet that Pfizer would continue to overcharge Americans for prescription drugs, too. Since 2014, the pharmaceutical company has hiked the prices of seven of its top selling drugs by an average of 39 percent.

Pfizer also charges 12 times as much in the U.S. under Medicare for these drugs as it charges in Ireland, where it’s claiming a new address for tax purposes.

All of this is the result of years of weakened tax laws, an abdication of responsibility by American companies to their country, and a corrupt political system that allows it to happen.

And I believe we can stop it.

Add your name and together we can stop Pfizer’s corporate tax dodge and take a big step forward for our political revolution.

Thank you for your support.

In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders

This could be a good time to take an out-of-state vacation.

Raw Story reported the news this way:

The city of Cleveland is bracing for what may become a violent Republican convention in July because the GOP establishment isn’t getting what it wants.

The city of Cleveland is freaking out, too. In preparation for the convention and anticipating the violence they’ve been shopping for 2,000 sets of riot gear. This includes “long-sleeve jackets, gloves and shin guards—that would be suitable for use by police riding bicycles,” according to Cleveland.com.

So, if Trump isn’t the nominee, Trump promises there will be riots. Meyers called Trump’s promise a classic New Jersey response “couching a threat as a prediction. ‘If you don’t pay your protection money there could be a fire. I don’t know, it wouldn’t be me, but there could be a fire.’”

Burn Cleveland Burn. Thank you leaders of Cleveland.

Via fellow Clevelander, Mano Singham.

On 18 March, Team Bernie wrote:

Twenty-four states have yet to vote in this nomination process, and starting this week the map now shifts dramatically in our favor.

The strength of this campaign lies in the amazing volunteers and the work you do contacting voters for Bernie. It’s how we’ve gone from 3 percent in the polls to a serious contender in this race.

But now more than ever, we need more Bernie supporters to get involved actively volunteering to help Bernie!

We don’t have billionaires or super PACs to help us win this election—there’s just us and the time that we give to organizing for Bernie. A quick way to get more involved is to sign up to volunteer with the campaign. You can check out some of the great local volunteer events in your area, and there are conference calls offered several times a week for volunteers. Please join one of these calls and hear about what you can do right now.

Spread the word with those you know who support Bernie Sanders. Feel free to share this link so they can also get involved helping Bernie.

No one said a political revolution would be easy. We are up against a billionaire class and super PACs that are determined to see us lose. But when we stand together, together we will win.

Thank you for everything you are doing to elect Bernie Sanders the next president of the United States.

In solidarity,
Team Bernie

In President Trump episode ‘warning to US’, says Simpsons writer for The Guardian, Esther Addley writes:

It was intended, according to its creator, as a “warning to America”, a horrifying and fantastical vision of the future in which the US—ludicrously—had elected as its president Donald Trump.

But with the property billionaire now the favourite to gain the Republican nomination for the presidency, the episode of The Simpsons that in 2000 foresaw such a laughable outcome has begun looking unnervingly prescient.

A possible future Trump presidency, said the episode’s writer Dan Greaney, “just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane.”

Then there is the secret of Donald’s hair…

There are perhaps three famous quote from our founders that we recall from our educations: Benjamin Franklin’s We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately; Patrick Henry’s Give me liberty, or give me death!; and, perhaps most importantly for us naval veterans and Bernie Sanders, Captain John Paul Jones response to a call for surrender, I have not yet begun to fight!

In Bernie Sanders says calls for him to drop out of Democratic race are ‘absurd’ in The Guardian, Reuters reports:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, responding to reports President Barack Obama called on Democrats to rally around Hillary Clinton as the likely nominee, said on Thursday it was “absurd” to suggest he drop out of the race.

Obama privately told a group of Democratic donors last Friday that Sanders was nearing the point at which his campaign against Clinton would end, and that the party must soon come together to back her, the New York Times reported.

Sanders, a Vermont senator and democratic socialist, while saying he did not want to comment directly on Obama’s reported remarks, pushed back on the idea that his campaign had run its course and he should throw in the towel.

“The bottom line is that when only half of the American people have participated in the political process … I think it is absurd for anybody to suggest that those people not have a right to cast a vote,” Sanders told MSNBC in an interview.

One more quote comes to mind, and that is brigadier general Anthony Clement McAuliffe’s (acting division commander of the 101st Airborne Division troops defending Bastogne) response to German General Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz’s call for surrender. McAuliffe simply replied: Nuts.

On 17 March, Bernie wrote:

No one ever said a political revolution would be easy.

But we must remember that the struggle for our rights is not the struggle of a day, or a year, or a generation. It is the struggle of a lifetime, and one that must be fought each and every generation. Today, it is our turn to fight.

The billionaire class and political establishment in this country would like very much for us to go away. They see our proposals and the way we fund our campaign as a threat to their existence and have been determined to see us lose from day one.

But the response from supporters across the country has made one thing clear: we aren’t going anywhere—we are going to win.

Since the polls opened on Tuesday, we have received more than 100,000 contributions and raised almost $3 million dollars. So we’ve set a goal that will give us the resources we need to win all three primaries and caucuses next Tuesday:

Make another contribution to our campaign and help us raise $5 million in online small-dollar contributions from working Americans by midnight tonight.

We are less than halfway through this Democratic primary and expect to do very well in the states to come. There are a lot of delegates left to be won: four states alone hold more delegates than Secretary Clinton has in total today.

Are we underdogs? For sure. But we have been underdogs from the beginning of this campaign. And the people powering our campaign, the people working longer and longer hours for lower wages, the sick without health care, and the students staring at the prospect of crushing debt, are underdogs as well.

But if we continue to stand together, we are going to keep chipping away at Hillary Clinton’s lead until we overtake her on June 7th.

The economic and political systems of this country are stacked against ordinary Americans. But we are fighting back through our campaign, and we can win.

In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders

Bernie writes:

When we started our campaign 10 months ago, I don’t think you could find a single person who would believe you if you said Bernie Sanders would win nine states by this point in the campaign.

Tuesday night we beat all the polls in almost every state. We earned a significant number of delegates, and are on track for the nomination. Here’s why:

What you will not hear from the political and media establishment is that, based on the primary and caucus schedule for the rest of the race, this is the high water mark for the Clinton campaign. Starting today, the map now shifts dramatically in our favor.

Arizona, Idaho, and Utah are up next Tuesday. Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington State caucus the Saturday after. Then it’s Wisconsin’s turn to vote.

That means we have an extremely good chance to win nearly every state that votes in the next month. If we continue to stand together, we’re just getting started for our political revolution.

No one said a political revolution would be easy. We are up against a billionaire class and super PACs that are determined to see us lose.

The fact remains that Hillary Clinton’s lead will never be as large as it is right now. From here on out we keep chipping away until we take the lead. But that can only happen if we keep fighting, and that’s why your contribution to our campaign is so important.

The whole country will be watching to see how we respond in this moment. Let’s send a message that millions of Americans are just as ready to fight for an economy that works for everyone as we were when this campaign started 10 months ago.

In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders

In my very early days as a blogger I recall a very early—like three o’clock early—morning accident when I caught a reader writing, and editing, a comment. I found the process fascinating. I watched as the reader carefully considered, changed, changed again, deleted and shifted tacks in crafting their message to me.

That is what writing is all about. Perfect words don’t flow in a constant stream from the brain to the page. We wish. After the writer is finished, however, the editor steps in. We all need good editors and in the age of print, we never got to see the editors hand. Editors don’t get bylines.

In the age of the Internet, that has changed. Words are edited in real time. An astute watcher gets to see the sausage made. That is what happened when an anonymous writer using the handle The Broken Ravioli caught the altering of a New York Times article on Senator Bernie Sanders. The lede for Proof That The New York Times Isn’t Feeling the Bern in Medium begins:

The New York Times seems to have inadvertently exposed its own political bias with a quiet, retroactive edit of an article originally headlined “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years Via Legislative Side Doors.” The piece was published on Monday, March 14, 2016, a day before polls opened in five crucial Democratic primary states.

Written by congressional reporter Jennifer Steinhauer, the article reflects on the Senator’s strategy for legislative accomplishments over the past 25 years?—?often passing new measures by attaching them to larger bills.

By Monday afternoon?—?once many people, including Sanders himself, had already shared the article widely on social media and other sites?—?the Times evidently rewrote rather significant portions of the article. (No mention has been made anywhere that the article was retroactively altered.) Several new paragraphs were injected, while other wording was subtly changed to shift the praiseful tone of the article to one of shrugging ambivalence toward Sanders’s accomplishments.

The article caught the eye of Matt Taibbi who writes in How the ‘New York Times’ Sandbagged Bernie Sanders for Rolling Stone:

The New York Times ran a piece about Bernie Sanders Monday, a sort of left-handed compliment of a legislative profile. It was called “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years Via Legislative Side Doors.”

I took notice of the piece by Jennifer Steinhauer because I wrote essentially the same article nearly 11 years ago. Mine, called “Four Amendments and a Funeral,” was a Rolling Stone feature. Sanders back then was anxious that people know how Congress worked, and also how it didn’t work, so he invited me to tag along for weeks to follow the process of a series of amendments he tried (and mostly succeeded) to pass in the House.

I came to the same conclusions that Steinhauer did initially: that Sanders was skilled at the amendment process and also had a unique ability to reach across the aisle to make deals.

Then the story gets interesting as editors—too often these days functioning much like a Congressional whip (see Frank Underwood) keeping the writers in line for the benefit of the people with the money—deleted and rewrote key passages in the original article to shift the message.

[T]he paper swiftly made a series of significant corrections online. A new version of the piece came out later the same day, and in my mind, the corrections changed the overall message of the article.

This isn’t journalism, this is propaganda.

George Sapin, a good friend especially of those who needed friends, has died. He was 91 years old. But somehow ever young.

George was an advertising exec who did TRW, Inc. ads but those are not the ads he should be remembered by. He was a principle in Fuller, Smith & Ross and then Wyse advertising.

But he wasn’t just a Madman ad guy. He was a man whose talents surpassed the corporate world. Ads you wouldn’t see produced today. Ads that had meaning.

Sapin did full-page ads during the late 1960s for the Council of Churches of Greater Cleveland. That’s when the organization had some sharp teeth.

Today no one would believe the Cleveland Plain Dealer would print Continue Reading »

Previously…

I’ll be buying a pie for my students this morning and presenting them with this puzzle.

Can you solve the puzzle?

Hint: you don’t need a calculator.

Michael Slezak, in February breaks global temperature records by ‘shocking’ amount for The Guardian, writes:

Global temperatures in February smashed previous monthly records by an unprecedented amount, according to Nasa data, sparking warnings of a climate emergency.

The result was “a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases”, wrote Jeff Masters and Bob Henson in a blog on the Weather Underground, which analysed the data released on Saturday.

—Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) March 13, 2016 February Smashes Earth’s All-Time Global Heat Record by a Jaw-Dropping Margin

It confirms preliminary analysis from earlier in March, indicating the record-breaking temperatures.

The global surface temperatures across land and ocean in February were 1.35C warmer than the average temperature for the month, from the baseline period of 1951-1980.

That 1.35 degrees Celsius is a whooping 2.43 degrees Fahrenheit.

The United States of America, indeed the world, faces an existential crisis literally of global proportions. Who we nominate for President this summer, and who wins that election in November, will have profound implications.

Bernie Sanders, with his People Before Polluters message, is clearly the candidate most likely to fight for our survival.

Previously in The Guardian emails…

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

[Update at 0300 on 14 March: Lee Sedol takes Game Four from AlphaGo.

Like Paul Newman running the table on Jackie Gleason, Google’s AI software AlphaGo has humiliated Go master Lee Sedol by winning three of three consecutive games in a best-of-five games match in Seoul.

Game One, Game Two, Game Three and Game Four

So, yesterday I left a comment on Ed Pilkington and Mona Chalabi’s The Bernie Sanders voters who would choose Trump over Clinton in The Guardian. I have serious problems with the methodology and message of the story, but that’s not what I took away.

Co-commentor Opinions Matter wrote:

There is a campaign Revolt Against Plutocracy, to write in Bernie Sanders if he does not win the nomination. The DNC with all their superdelegates has screwed the American people, negating much of their Constitutional voting rights.

I agree. My plan, in the unlikely event that Bernie does not win the nomination, was to vote third party. Mary Jo had already told me that she intended to vote for Bernie in November either as the Democratic Party candidate or as a write-in candidate. The idea that hundreds of thousands of other frustrated Democrats were taking a pledge to do the same makes perfect sense to me. This sends a much clearer message to the Democratic National Committee that they no longer get to anoint a candidate and expect voters to follow along out of fear.

If Trump wins in November, the DNC will only have themselves to blame.

When I walked into my school the day after this incident there were no grief counselors on hand, no special assembly to reassure the students that everyone would be OK; I didn’t find anyone who was even aware of the shooting.

We’re over school shootings. They are the new norm.

Via Mano Singham…