News & Views

Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivated U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to allegedly kill 16 Afghans, including 9 children: he was drunk, he was experiencing financial stress, he was passed over for a promotion, he had a traumatic brain injury, he had marital problems, he suffered from the stresses of four tours of duty, he “saw his buddy’s leg blown off the day before the massacre,” etc.

Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful Terrorists.

For years, corporations have been peddling myths to rally us behind their interests. Here are three things everyone “knows,” and why they're wrong.

By the time you read this, the PR hacks of Goldman Sachs will be vigorously pressing their efforts to destroy the reputation of whistle-blower Greg Smith, a former Goldman executive director whose exposé in Wednesday’s New York Times Op-Ed page was so devastating that the 143-year-old firm might actually, finally, be held accountable.

On November 1, more than 100 wealthy political donors, including former New York Stock Exchange CEO Dick Grasso, streamed into the luxurious Conrad Suite at the Waldorf-Astoria on Manhattan's Park Avenue for a lunchtime fundraiser. The event was a smashing success, raising six figures for Mitt Romney—three times what had been expected. Save for the candidate himself, no one could have been more pleased than Ken Langone, the legendary investment banker who had organized the fundraiser and who, armed with a fat Rolodex and the pugnacity of a by-the-bootstraps billionaire, wants nothing more than to defeat Barack Obama in 2012.

Killing at least sixteen Afghan civilians as they slept. Urinating on dead Afghan bodies while laughing about it. Setting fire to their Korans. Day after day, a tired American public hears that these are just “isolated acts” and that these incidents “cast shadows” and “complicate” Washington’s plan for a gradual withdrawal of troops over the next thirty-four months. We are told that the raging anger and distrust between many Afghan and American troops is a further sign that the steady plan is at risk.

“It was as that search party was forming that we began to have indications of the outcome of his departure,” General John Allen, our commander in Afghanistan, told Wolf Blitzer on CNN. He was talking about how an American sergeant walked off his base toward village homes where, allegedly, he murdered children and grownups, sixteen in all. (Jon Lee Anderson wrote more about the massacre yesterday, as did I.) General Allen declined to name the sergeant, in order “to protect the investigation.” He said that he didn’t know yet what role P.T.S.D. or the sergeant’s three previous tours might have played—those would be subjects for investigators. (CNN, citing a Defense official, said that the soldier had had a traumatic brain injury, “but was found fit for duty.”) There are dozens of other factual questions, before one even gets to the moral ones. Years of war and night raids make the narrative even harder to sort out.

The single largest obstacle to meaningful economic recovery is a man who most Americans have probably never heard of, Edward J. DeMarco.

WASHINGTON - March 12 - Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich today released the following statement after an American soldier killed at least 16 Afghan civilians, including children:

“Yesterday’s shooting in Afghanistan which left at least 16 civilians dead is a tipping point.  This shooting follows days of deadly rioting after it was revealed that U.S. troops had incinerated copies of the Koran.  Despite more than a decade at war and nearly $600 billion of U.S. tax-payer dollars, it is obvious that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan has created instability in that country, not stability.”     

Did middle-class incomes really decouple from overall economic growth in the mid-'70s? If you look at median family income vs. GDP per capita, the answer is yes. From 1950 through 1975, both grew at about the same rate. After that, median family income grew quite a bit more slowly than GDP per capita.

We expect ever-grosser competitive lying from the presidential primary candidates. We should expect no less from the media "analysts," politicians and academics competing for big business favors. With those expectations, we might be less disappointed by what we get.