WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME??

Max Read in Gawker  on the “race war”

Are You Prepared for the Race War?.

If nothing else you’ve probably noticed that “race relations are probably worse now among the average person on the street than they were the day President Obama was elected,” as activist Ward Connerly tells McKay Coppins in Coppins’ “In Conservative Media, A ‘Race War’ Rages,” an excellent summary of the current state of conservative journalism. Connerly is filled with pearls of wisdom: “Obama has been more racial than any white president has ever been in my lifetime,” he tells Coppins in an attempt to explain his perception of a current low ebb in American race relations. What a wonderful way of putting into words the conservative problem with Obama! He’s more racial than other presidents.

But maybe you haven’t experienced the Race War at all. Maybe you’ve somehow managed to avoid the dangerous gangs of black teens, flash-mobbing across the country in their insatiable search for white flesh. It’s okay. I myself didn’t know there was a Race War on until I read Sowell’s most recent column and learned that “the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress” the plain fact that “the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places.” How frequently do these “coordinated attacks” take place? As McKay Coppins points out, Sowell’s column doesn’t “cite any statistics, relying instead on anecdotal evidence.” But what anecdotal evidence …

The local media might try to sweep these episodes under the proverbial rug, through its sophisticated false-flag tactic of “immediately and extensively covering these episodes,” but the national media will have trouble ignoring them when we have intrepid minds like Sowell (once called “our greatest contemporary philosopher” by no less a thinker than David Mamet) on the case. So long as someone is willing to do the hard, boots-on-the-ground journalistic work of visiting the Drudge Report, the truth of the Race War will never go unknown.

This brought to mind Randa Abdel-Fattah’s missive last week on The Drum:

What must Palestinians do to get your attention? – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

Dear Western leaders and the international media, what must a Palestinian do to get your attention?

I ask this question as I recall watching Gandhi with my parents when I was a teenager. With the confident zeal of an adolescent, I vividly recall telling my father (born in Palestine in 1945 and dispossessed of his land in 1967) that what the Palestinians needed to do to draw international attention to their plight was simply go on a mass hunger strike.

… since April 17, 2012, Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, there have been more than 2,000 Palestinian hunger strikers demanding an improvement in their living conditions in Israeli prisons, family visitations, education, an end to solitary confinement, repression and night searches.

And yet, in the face of this dramatic expression of Palestinian non-violent resistance, the media and our leaders remain unmoved.

That’s a very good question Ms Abdel-Fattah, what could Palestinians possibly do to get peoples’ attention? Because they definitely don’t have it now.

I mean, they could maybe try and get all of the major international newspapers to base their Middle East bureaus in Jerusalem. Or perhaps they could try and win sympathy from some major press outlets — like the BBC, or CNN, or our very own ABC and SBS. Maybe even that new Al Jazeera network that seems to be quite popular for its Middle East coverage — I’m sure it could be convinced to air a story or two about Palestinians.

Well yes, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict gets more media coverage than just about anything else on the planet. What Abdel-Fattah is really complaining about is that the coverage by-and-large does not reflect her worldview.

You can criticise someone for ignoring a problem (like I criticise people for ignoring Africa), but your criticism sounds a lot more hollow when you’re just complaining that no one agrees with you. It’s a common message from people on the extremes of the political spectrum — they all complain that their publications don’t sell and they aren’t given column inches in The Australian, therefore the media must be “biased”.

What never seems to occur to them is that they may just be wrong.

Think about it, Ms Abdel-Fattah. Maybe it’s not censorship. Maybe you’re being ignored because your views are based fringe ideas that people who know what they are talking about dismiss as misinformed and not worth giving a pedestal to.

I know it’s a harder truth to deal with than the idea that everyone is being sucked-in by some mass conspiracy that doesn’t want you to be heard, but it’s also far more realistic…

Knockout punch for national treasure

Remember that awful, conspiratorial-sounding polemic by the man in charge of Australia’s economy the other week? Well it’s been responded to by… the Opposition’s communications spokesperson. Will somebody please get rid of Hockey?

Meanwhile, there is no commentary needed really. Turnbull absolutely destroys Swan. Just take a look.

Swan:

The 0.01 Per Cent: The Rising Influence of Vested Interests in Australia | Wayne Swan | The Monthly.

Today, surveying the wreckage of the worst global downturn since the Great Depression, many leading thinkers argue the ideal of the middle-class society is under mortal threat in the West, even as a growing middle class is lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty in the East. One of the most compelling contributions to the debate comes from Francis Fukuyama, who wrote in Foreign Affairs about the dangers of the erosion of the middle-class social base in the developed world. “From the days of Aristotle,” writes Fukuyama, “thinkers have believed that stable democracy rests on a broad middle class and that societies with extremes of wealth and poverty are susceptible either to oligarchic domination or populist revolution.” These are the extremes, but, as he goes on to argue, we are already witnessing “some very troubling economic and social trends … which threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.”

These trends are all too evident in a recently released and widely discussed report by the OECD, ‘Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising’. It found that starting in the 1970s and through the 1980s, coinciding with the Reagan–Thatcher revolutions, inequality in the West has widened considerably. Across the developed world, the top is accelerating away from the middle much faster than the middle is moving away from the bottom.

The catchcry of Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park and the Occupy movement, ‘We are the 99%’, has shone a spotlight on the top 1%. Between 1979 and 2007 in the US, the top 1% saw their after-tax incomes rise 275%, while the middle two thirds saw their after-tax incomes increase by less than 40%.

And Turnbull:

Not classy, Wayne.

Defending workplace re-regulation, he claims “Australia’s egalitarian social contract is also underpinned by a fair and flexible industrial relations system”. But evidence for this is dubious –most studies say increased labour market regulation is, on balance, detrimental to equality, because any boost to earnings, conditions or job security for insiders are offset by diminished opportunities and social exclusion for more marginal outsiders, including young people seeking to enter the workforce.

The Treasurer also cites “a quiet revolution under way in recent years in our tax and transfer system”, presumably referring to changes since 2007. Targeting of transfers indeed matters, as we will see. But OECD comparisons of household income inequality which show Australia in a fairly favourable light are only available to 2008 – so if any “quiet revolution” had an impact, it wasn’t his. The jury is out on whether Labor has increased or decreased inequality.

In reality Australia has above-average inequality in individual earnings by advanced economy standards, though not as unequal as the US. But inequality in household incomes has increased only slightly over the past decade, because our below-average spend on transfers as a share of gross domestic product is closely targeted, and we barely tax poor households at all.

… Swan pays lip service at least to the education part of this agenda. But in the end he completely fails to link his many words about inequality (the bulk of which refer to other countries, not to Australia) to the allegedly baleful influence of “vested interests”.

Swan’s Monthly piece brings to mind some unsavoury images

I finally got round to reading the controversial “anti-billionaire” essay by Australian treasurer Wayne Swan in The Monthly. There were some connotations there that seemed uncomfortably familiar. Something about the language he was using really made me concerned.

The 0.01 Per Cent: The Rising Influence of Vested Interests in Australia | Wayne Swan | The Monthly.

In the last couple of years, Australia has seen the emergence of our own distributional coalitions willing to use their considerable wealth to oppose good public policy and economic reforms designed to benefit the majority. The combination of industry deep pockets, conservative political support, biased editorial policy and shock-jock ranting has been mobilised in an attempt to protect vested interest. It’s reflected in how the Coalition under Tony Abbott has recently radicalised itself into an Australian version of the Tea Party, more than willing to kneecap Australia’s three-decade reform project for cheap political points.

There are many Australians of great wealth who make important and considered contributions to the national debate. I always welcome that involvement in the discussion of public policy whether I agree with them or not. What characterises the vested interests that I’m concerned about is how they misrepresent their self-interest as the national interest. There has been a perceptible shift in this country in recent years, and it is sadly very much in the American direction of stronger and stronger influence being wielded by a smaller and smaller minority of vested interests. Crucially, much of our media seems more and more inclined to accept that growing influence.

… The latest example of this is the foray by Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, into Fairfax Media, reportedly in an attempt to wield greater influence on public opinion and further her commercial interests at a time when the overwhelming economic consensus is that it’s critical to use the economic weight of the resources boom to strengthen the entire economy. Without a blush, her friend and fellow media owner John Singleton let the cat out of the bag when he told the Sydney Morning Herald that he and Rinehart had been “able to overtly and covertly attack governments … because we have people employed by us like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Ray Hadley who agree with [our] thinking”.

I fear Australia’s extraordinary success has never been in more jeopardy than right now because of the rising power of vested interests. This poison has infected our politics and is seeping into our economy. Though these vested interests have not yet prevailed, every day their demands get louder.

… Instead of capitulating to the demands of the vested interests, and allowing the benefits to amass disproportionately to them, we have a chance to bend the extraordinary shift in the global economy from West to East to the advantage of all Australians. This is neither the fierce pro-market capitalism that got us into a global financial fix, nor is it anti-market socialist ideology. It’s simply the best way to keep growing Australia’s economic pie so ultimately we all end up better off. Ensuring the social contract does not erode is vital if we want to avoid a hollowed-out capitalism assured of its own collapse.

Then it clicked.

Wilhelm Marr, founder of the League of Antisemites, in Victory of Judaism over Germanism, 1879:

Highly gifted, with great flair for activities like these, the Jews dominated retail and wholesale trade as early as the Middle Ages and outwitted the hard working common folk.

The common people realized that their own sense of ethics was not shared by the Jews, because these, rather than striving for emancipation preferred to accumulate wealth.

… The same goal, disintegration of the Germanic state for the benefit of Jewish interests, is consistently pursued everywhere.

The daily press is predominantly in Jewish hands, which have transformed journalism into an object of speculation and industrial production, into a business with public opinion; critique of theater, of art in general — is to three quarters in the hands of Jews. Writing about politics and even religion is — in Jewish hands.

… After Jewish hustle and bustle had reduced journalism to a trivial but commercially successful enterprise directed at the mob’s liking of gossip and scandal, it had found the largest possible audience for its attempts at Judaizing. Centuries of a factual predominance of Jewish realism had done its preparatory work. Jewry dictated public opinion in the press.

…And in Germany, who carried off the prize of raw, material advantage? Jewry, represented by a handful of Jewish bankers; Semitic brokers. We Germans got the abstract, imaginary result — to be “Friends of the Reich”, to console us with the “Reich of dreams”.

… Starting from modest beginnings, [this Semitic people] outgrew you, it corrupted society in all of its aspects, squeezed all idealism out of it, occupies the most controlling influence in trade and daily life, penetrates ever more into public office, controls the theater, forms a social-political front and has left almost nothing for you, except raw labor which it itself has always shunned; it has tranformed talent into shiny virtuosity, pimpish advertising into the godess of public opinion and — rules you today.

… In our parliaments, where the topic of usury is paraded about as of burning importance, one can as usual, only hear — twaddle. The dogma of “individual freedom”, which really stands for the impertinence and gall of the most unbridled avarice, has become such a basic tenet of society, that our valiant representatives — what a despicable picture they offer — attempt to make an omelette without breaking the egg. Why! One might also have to curb the unbridled manipulations of big industry and of big capital and this is the reason why the question of usury remains without practical response and does not advance beyond theoretical resolutions.

The doctrinarism of our Judaized society is an aid in getting around the cliff of usury. The impoverished members of every layer of our society remain victims of usury and of its corrupted German helpers, who with the help of Jews would love to make 20 — 30% per month from the hardship and misery of the poor!

Note: I am very aware that Swan did not mention Jews or Israel anywhere and his essay is not remotely antisemitic. I am in no way equating him with the architect of Nazi-style antisemitism!

What I am doing is illustrating that his style of rhetoric and the specific accusations that he is levelling at Reinhart et al are polemical, conspiratorial and reminiscent of some extremely dangerous ideas from an earlier era.

The world’s biggest media companies

From the Fortune 500

Interesting that only one of them is accused of “controlling the world”. Disney is bigger than News Corp and Time Warner isn’t far off.

In fact, Time Warner is the biggest magazine publisher in the US and the UK and they make most of the big Hollywood movies. They have a  HUGE amount of influence.

Everyone’s always talking about the “evil Murdoch empire”. Why is no one ever conspiracy-theorising about Time Warner’s pernicious influence in our society?

I think it’s *ahem* time for action!

Fortune 500 2011: Industry: Entertainment.

			Revenues		Profits
Rank	Company	Fortune 500 rank	$ millions	% change from 2009	$ millions	% change from 2009
1	Walt Disney	65	38,063.0	5.3	3,963.0	19.8
2	News Corp.	83	32,778.0	7.7	2,539.0	N.A.
3	Time Warner	95	26,888.0	-6.8	2,578.0	4.5
4	CBS	174	14,059.8	8.0	724.2	219.7
5	Viacom	180	13,497.0	-0.9	1,548.0	-3.9
6	CC Media Holdings	391	5,865.7	5.7	-479.1	N.A.
7	Live Nation Entertainment	444	5,063.7	19.7	-228.4	N.A.

Why Paul McGeough was keeping Geddafi and Mubarak in power and supporting Bin Laden

As usual, Paul McGeough’s weekend missive left me seething for about 30 minutes on an otherwise beautiful Sydney Saturday. It actually wasn’t so bad for a few paragraphs, until, naturally, he started blaming America for everything that went wrong in the Middle East

The Middle East: A region reborn after the dictators

But Gaddafi had oil – lots of it. From time to time, leaders in the West would pay lip service to gross human rights violations in the region, but as long as Gaddafi and his ilk kept the oil flowing and were willing to act as Western proxies in fighting extremism, they could do as they pleased.

The West would buy their oil and arm them, asking for little more than a darkened room out the back, where ”enhanced interrogation” techniques that are frowned upon in the civilised salons of the West could be carried out on the QT.

He even figured that Council on Foreign Relations director Leslie Gelb “entirely ignored the nature of the revolutions” because he observed that the new Arab leadership will probably need to be more anti-Western in order to cater to various groups in their constituencies. McGeough’s quarrel with Gelb is that Gelb “missed the price that the Arab rank and file has been paying under Washington’s and the West’s deal with the dictators”.

That man’s ability to attribute every evil to the “puppet masters” sitting in the White House never ceases to amaze me; neither do the facts that he is still employed and people keep reading his work. He ends his “analysis” by condescendingly dismissing everyone who has doubts that Egypt and Libya are about to turn into Sweden, quoting analyst Fouad Ajami, saying:

”Grant the Egyptian people their right to swat away these warnings,” he writes. ”From afar, the ‘realists’ tell the Arabs that they are playing with fire, that beyond the prison walls there is danger and chaos. Luckily for them, the Arabs pay no heed to these ‘realists,’ and can recognise the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ that animates them.”

So apparently expecting that after thousands of years of dictator after dictator, a series of protests is not going to create a democratic haven overnight, is “soft bigotry”, but then expecting them to hate the rest of the democratic world is just common sense. After all, think of the “past crimes”. Luckily, not everyone shares this opinion. Israeli diplomat Dore Gold has pointed out that these revolutions may actually moderate the Arab world.

Protests Across Middle East Leave Israel Shaken – NYTimes.com.

“For years, Arab leaders who thought they had legitimacy problems because they were not elected played several chords to the populace — Arab unity, Islamic solidarity, and most important, the struggle against Israel. So if you have regimes legitimized by democratic elections and accountable governance, then they will depend less on the conflict for their own internal standing.”

You see, most Arab dictators tended to use Israel and the West as distractions when their people began questioning why exactly these rulers were stealing all of their money. This policy has been very successful, creating a strong anti-Israel and anti-Western sentiment that is perpetuated hugely in the Western Left, meaning that a certain Sydney Morning Herald journalist and his ilk were ultimately helping to prop-up Arab dictators by re-enforcing the idea that it was really the US and Israel causing all of their problems and not the evil asshole sitting in the palace up the road.

In fact, this was the ideology that initially separated Al-Qaeda from the rest of the Islamist extremists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood has always been focussed on overthrowing the “un-Islamic” regimes in Muslim countries and introducing Islamist regimes instead. Bin Laden, on the other hand, had the bright idea that the problems of the Muslim world were really a “Zio-Crusader” conspiracy, so attacking the Jews and the Christians wherever they were was the real way to “liberate” the Muslims. This is the ideology that eventually led to the terrorist threat that we in the West face.

So to sum-up, through his decades of embellishing the myth that the problems of the Arab world are solely caused by the US foreign policy and Israel’s undue influence on it, Paul McGeough has kept Arab dictators in power and supported terrorism. Good going McGeough…