Bulletin 669
Subject: Activism vs. Defeatism.
23 October 2015
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The 6 items below represent events that have defined this phase of the United States of America and the contradictions which will continue to undermine this empire through the end of this decade. These events demand action-oriented analyses instead of passive theologies of defeat.
Sincerely,
Francis
Feeley
Professor of American Studies
University of Grenoble-3
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social
Movements
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ppY_KRxb_M
A.
From: "Mark Crispin
Miller" <markcrispinmiller@gmail.com>
To: "newsfromunderground" <newsfromunderground@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, 23 October, 2015 4:13:27 PM
Subject: [MCM] When Anderson Cooper—worth $100,000,000—red-baited Bernie Sanders,
he was obviously speaking for his class (and maybe working for the CIA).
On Cooper's CIA experience: https://web.archive.org/web/20061117044833/http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2006/09/anderson-coopers-cia-secret.php
Anderson Cooper Offers No Apology for Slandering Bernie Sanders
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33022-focus-anderson-cooper-offers-no-apology-for-slandering-bernie-sanders
by William Boardman
Who was the richest person
in CNN’s Democratic presidential debate?
The richest person in the Democratic presidential candidate debate on October
10 was not a candidate. The richest person on that Las Vegas stage was CNN
moderator and Vanderbilt heir Anderson Cooper, whose $100 million net worth
($100,000,000) is greater than all the candidates’ worth combined (about
$84,000,000). In a very real, if unspoken sense, this “debate” was more like an
exclusive club interview with Cooper vetting the applicants for their class
credentials.
These class aspects of the debate went unmentioned. In American politics, class
issues have traditionally gone unmentioned. The tacit understanding is that if
you have the bad taste to ask, then you have no class. If you have class, you
will have the right opinions. This year is different because of Bernie Sanders,
part of whose popular appeal is that he is so clearly the scion of no great
wealth and even less pretension. Sanders is calling for a social revolution
against the ruling class of millionaires and billionaires, yet even he did not
publicly object to having multi-millionaire Anderson Cooper of the One Per Cent
running the show. Sanders likely understands that his best chance to win is not
to confront the rich, but to surround them with everyone else whose net worth
is more like his ($700,000) or less.
Net worth is notoriously hard to pin down with any accuracy, but ballpark
figures are good enough at the highest levels, even if the numbers usually come
from the candidates themselves. In a candidates’ net worth listing published
October 13, the Democrats were evaluated as follows (with an alternative set of
estimates in parenthesis):
Hillary Clinton: $45 million ($31.2 herself, with Bill $111 million)
Lincoln Chaffee: $32 million ($31.9 million, mostly his wife’s trust)
Jim Webb: $6 million ($4.6 million)
Bernie Sanders: $700,000 ($528,014)
Martin O’Malley: $-0- ($256,000)
By one recent measure, it takes a net worth of $1.2 million, minimum, to make
it into the top One Per Cent of richest Americans (usually accompanied by
pre-tax income of more than $300,000 annually). A US senator’s salary is
$192,600, which is amplified significantly by perks and benefits.
Cooper’s life of wealth illuminates his gift as a glib carnival barker
Like most debate moderators, Anderson Cooper seemed
most interested in promoting a food fight among the candidates. While he had
snark for everyone, his most provocative and least conscionable jibes were
saved for Sanders, served up with class-based relish.
What does yellow journalism red-baiting sound like? Cooper started with the
lurking horror of every unjustifiably rich person:
“Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist
in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind
of socialist win a general election in the United States?”
How could such a horror happen in America? That’s the question he seems to be
asking. But to ask it that way, Cooper has to be deceitful and spin the Gallup
poll to fit his meaning (Cooper’s spin reflects the conventional coverage of
the poll at the time). The real news from the June 2015 poll was that 47% of
Americans were OK with electing a “socialist” (not further defined by
pollsters). That 47% is more than past polls, and those opposed to a
“socialist” make up only 50%, a difference close to the margin of error. In
other words, more than a year from the presidential election, Gallup finds
America more or less neutral on the question of whether or not a candidate is
“any kind of socialist.” For a Bernie kind of socialist, the simple answer to
getting elected is to make the kind of progress in the next year that he’s made
in the past six months.
Cooper’s approach uses “socialism” as something that is by definition
pejorative and comes out of a deep, common bias in the US. The American ruling
class has cultivated fear of “socialism” for close to two centuries, not
because it’s a threat to people’s freedom but because it’s a threat to the
wealth and power of people like the 158 families funding most of the 2016 race
for the presidency.
Anderson Coopers class roots: Vanderbilt, Dalton, Yale, CIA
Anderson Cooper was not only born into wealth and power, he has lived the life
of that class, as even his official CNN bio affirms. After attending New York’s
Dalton School, Cooper graduated from Yale College in 1989 with a BA in
political science and two summer internships at the CIA. He also studied
Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi.
Cooper kept his CIA experience in the closet until September 2006, when an
unnamed web site reported that Cooper had worked for the CIA. Cooper responded
on his CNN blog in minimizing, dismissive fashion. He said the website didn’t
have its facts straight, but cited no errors. His own facts are well fudged –
“for a couple of months over two summers I worked at the CIA headquarters in
Langley, Virginia…. It was pretty bureaucratic and mundane.” Cooper doesn’t say
what he did (of course) or even what years he was there (1987 and 1988, in the
aftermath of William J. Casey’s directorship). Whatever Cooper did at the CIA,
he was there when the CIA was running an illegal war in Nicaragua (and another
in El Salvador) and the agency’s activities were subject to serious
congressional efforts to curb them (the Boland Amendment).
When Sanders offered no direct answer to the question of how a “socialist”
could win a general election, Cooper followed up more vituperatively and
dishonestly:
“The question is really about electability here, and that’s what I’m trying to
get at. You — the — the Republican attack ad against you in a general election
— it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned
in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you’re not a capitalist.
Doesn’t — doesn’t that ad write itself?”
Cooper’s first dishonesty here is asking the “electability” question here only
of Sanders. Yes, everyone assumes Hillary Clinton is “electable,” but
O’Malley, Chaffee, or Webb? They’re not even as close to getting nominated as
Sanders. Why would anyone assume they’re electable in anything but a
flip-of-the-coin sense? Cooper’s addressing the electability question only to
Sanders may actually be a measure of how strong Cooper believes Sanders is or
may be.
Then Cooper stated: “You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.” He said it as
if there were no question that supporting the Sandinistas was a really bad
thing. That’s the talking point on Breitbart, National Review, and other
right-wing sites for whom Cooper was carrying water.
On Just Foreign Policy, Robert Naiman posted a prompt denunciation of Cooper
for playing the knee-jerk, pro-war media honcho.
Cooper on record in support of illegal war supported by drug traffic
Supporting the Sandinistas in the 1980s was, and is, a
principled position. The Sandinistas had overthrown the Somoza government, one
of the most vicious of the US-backed dictatorships in Central America.
President Reagan decided to wage an illegal covert war against the Sandinistas,
using the CIA to recruit the Contra army to fight in Nicaragua, supported by
CIA-supported drug traffic to the US. Cooper refers to none of this, which was
all taking place while he was doing summer internships at the CIA. Is Cooper a
CIA asset? Hard to know, but he plays one pretty well on TV. A Cooper-CIA tie
is perfectly credible – there’s means, motive, and opportunity all round. And
in 1988, Bob Woodward wasn’t getting any younger.
Supporting the illegal Contra war, run on drug money, is an unprincipled position,
but Cooper clearly implies that it’s still his position. Like the US
government, Cooper showed no respect for the International Court of Justice,
which issued a 1986 ruling strongly supporting Nicaragua’s claims against the
US, including the US mining of Nicaraguan harbors. The ruling awarded
reparations to Nicaragua that the US never paid. The lone dissent in the
decision came from Judge Stephen Schwebel, an American judge. The US defended
its position in the UN Security Council in soviet-style, blocking any action
with numerous vetoes. The UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in support
of Nicaragua, with only the US, El Salvador, and Israel opposed.
For Cooper to say that Sanders supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua would be
high praise in most of the world. Only in the boxed-in, unilluminated world of
American media can it pass for a criticism without bring the house down in
laughter. That’s another of the US government successes brought on by secret
agencies like the CIS and fellow-travelers like multi-millionaire Anderson
Cooper.
Bernie Sanders challenged the yellow journalist on the issue of Hillary
Clinton’s emails. His was an act of generosity and presidential stature. None
of his fellow candidates had the courage or character to repudiate Cooper’s
shameless red-baiting, not on Nicaragua, and not on his next slander, “You
honeymooned in the Soviet Union.”
Integrity is not a quality Cooper showed much interest in
Almost surely Cooper knew that statement was a
dishonest low blow, a neat way to brutalize the truth without actually lying.
Again Cooper was irresponsibly peddling another right wing trope, used with
similar hypocrisy by George Will and others.
As a Daily Kos blog details, the Sanders honeymoon was also part of a 1956
sister-cities program initiated by the Eisenhower administration. In 1988,
Sanders and his wife Jane were married, marched in a Memorial Day parade, then headed off to the Russian city of Yaroslavl on their
“honeymoon.” Somehow that doesn’t have the same impact as when Anderson Cooper
lies about it.
Cooper’s last dishonesty was: “And just this weekend you said you’re not a
capitalist.” Once again Cooper acted as if that was an undeniable evil, case
closed. But the instance he referred to on NBC was not so simple, and Cooper
provided no context. On NBC, Sanders bristled when his interviewer asked if
Sanders was a “socialist,” since Sanders has referred to himself a “democratic
socialist” for decades. Sanders asked the NBC toady parrot if he ever asked
others if they were “capitalists” and the guy cowered out. He asked Sanders if
he was a capitalist. And Sanders said, yet again, that he’s a democratic
socialist.
Returning to his distorted framing bias, a “Republican attack ad,” Cooper
asked, “Doesn’t that ad write itself?” Well, so what if it does? That just
means Republican ad writers have as little integrity as Cooper, and maybe
that’s what they’re all paid for.
As Sanders put in on CNN at the end of his opening statement:
“What this campaign is about is whether we can mobilize our people to take back
our government from a handful of billionaires and create the vibrant democracy
we know we can and should have.”
We are at the beginning of what might be a long learning curve as we find out
what our country is truly about. Bernie Sanders offers an opportunity to look
at realities in broad daylight and make up our minds about them. Anderson
Cooper is but one of a legion of self-serving, self-preserving One Per Cent
propagandists who will do all they can to keep the Sanders message in the dark.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print
journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He
has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
B.
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA,
and
the Rise of
America’s Secret Government
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/13/the_rise_of_americas_secret_government
by
David Talbot
=======
C.
Hillary Clinton, la reine du chaos
http://www.europalestine.com/spip.php?article11101
by Diana Johnstone
======
D.
Hillary Clinton on Gaddafi: We came, we saw, he died
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mYW5nmS9ps
=======
E.
How Gaddafi’s Great Man-Made
River Project became part of Water Wars
by Linda
Housman
F.
A
presidential campaign is about the issues
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