The JvL Bi

This October 7^th, on the second anniversary of the bombing of Afghanistan, the Not In Our Name Youth Network is calling on youth and students to take a stand against the military recruiters. As the US Government's war and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continue, the recruiters have become even more aggressive in targeting us in our schools and communities, as well as on the airwaves. Increased ads on MTV and BET, as well as in magazines and billboards are meant to complement recruitment efforts on campuses, creating an environment of militarism which cannot be ignored or avoided.

The unjust and immoral wars that the government wages in our name can only continue with a constant supply of fresh recruits. We have a responsibility to stand with the people of the world and refuse to fight in these wars of empire. Every day more and more young people are enticed with empty promises and outright lies about the purposes and benefits of the military. We must counter this by spreading truth and resistance to the war machine.

We won't be the cops of the world!

We refuse to take part in the killing and torturing of innocent people and the occupying of their lands! Dick Cheney said this "war on terrorism" could last a generation. We say it is going to take a generation to stop these wars.

The Anti-Recruitment campaign is a youth-led initiative aimed at stopping the recruiters. This broad campaign will bring together youth from around the country to speak out against and resist the military's invasion of our schools, as we say powerfully and with many voices: NOT IN OUR NAMES!!

On October 7^th do everything possible to speak out and organize against the military recruiters:

Walk-outs: Either the recruiters leave or we leave!

Speak-outs: On or off campus, unite with other youth!

Teach-ins: Educate and learn from one another!

Concerts: Art as resistance!

Street theatre: Act out against militarism!

Direct Action: Manifest resistance at military recruitment stations or recruitment booths at your school!

Sponsor: Have your organization sign on in support!

Promote: Spread the word far and wide that youth are standing up to military recruiters!

For Teachers, parents, and community leaders:

While this is a youth led campaign, we need your help and support. Demand that the military recruiters stop targeting your sons, daughters, students and the youth for their endless wars. Support the youth, students, and soldiers who resist! Join in the organizing and resistance.

2. EMPIRE OF REVENGE. BEFORE THE ERA OF INSECURITY

SAUL LANDAU

After 9/11, as much of the world recoiled in shock, the US media began to televise a stupefying loop of images of the infamous day, interrupted by information-bytes provided by the US government. It offered the tritest of historical context for the events. In the newspaper editorials and TV and radio commentaries, the pundits tended to suggest courses for immediate action as if terrorism had no antecedents. The president should immediately avenge the dirty deeds!

Few commented about the causes of the attacks or the significance of the President and Vice President going into hiding at that dramatic moment. Instead, TV news directors endlessly repeated the sci-fi like pictures of the burning tower one and the plane flying into tower two. Then came images of the Pentagon aflame. Citizens stared, mesmerized by the sight of the impossible, and shook their heads in disbelief.

TV directed the public to divide the images into good and evil. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani took charge as a hero at the site of the catastrophe as Bush began to emerge form his two-day trance.

For most of the country, the virtual had become the real. Yet, the mass media did nothing to channel the population toward dialogue, much less reflection on the events themselves. Instead, TV elicited sympathy for the dead, praise for the heroes and scorn for the villains. Viewers saw the avengers and the rescuers as the good guys and the swarthy males wearing kefiyas on their heads as the black hats. In this way our media (I include here White House and State Department press secretaries) would conduct the post-traumatic orchestra. Few commentators asked: what did these fiends want?

Some leftists talked conspiracy, including a role for the CIA and Israel's Mossad. I sighed in despair. I thought of the people I knew inside the national security gates of the US and British governments, the opportunists who didn't have the imagination to hatch such a diabolical plot but who after the events saw the inherent possibilities of expanding their own power and influence. Some of those scheming bureaucrats viewed 9/11 as the chance to adorn the most trivial of their departments' issues with the sacred drapes of' 'national security,' which they quickly hung over the windows of routine policies and procedures. They also took advantage of the vacuum of oversight during the traumatic post 9/11 days. Who would monitor them when the President directed all government energy to meet the crisis?

A silent and unseen panic seemed to vibrate through the public, a kind of national anxiety attack encouraged by official pronouncements of impending danger. As the media predictably embellished on all potentially bloody and explosive stories, the ambience for the heightened 'security' state reverberated as well through the Halls of Congress.

Without significant debate, the Members, more panicked than the public, passed the UNITING and STRENGTHENING AMERICA by PROVIDING APPROPRIATE TOOLS REQUIRED to INTERCEPT and OBSTRUCT TERORISM ACT (25 October 2001), aka the USA PATRIOT ACT, enabling non-elected officials to assume increased bureaucratic control: tightening immigration procedures; legalizing intrusion in personal privacy, including probing of social organizations and their bank accounts; and invasion of telephone and computer messaging. Within months, bureaucracies had created their near-perfect world, one of permanent emergency in which the CIA, FBI and the newly created Homeland security department could escalate their anxiety-security game.

In Washington, DC, as veteran observers have learned, nothing succeeds like failure. Incompetent agencies whose unwieldy size, top heavy hierarchy and inflated budgets now possessed even larger budgets and were managed by the same lethargic, but more powerful, insiders. And the money, as all Washington insiders know, must be spent before the end of the fiscal year.

Most important, since Congress and the Courts had agreed, the citizens could no longer claim certain inalienable rights. The media, which feeds anxiety to the public as its own means of reproducing itself, loved the emergency atmosphere: 'You better watch TV or you might miss something vital in the daily hysteria about terrorism!' Security had become incompatible with liberty.

The quotidian salvo of bloody and trivial stories makes concentration hard, the obvious obscure. Indeed, one can read daily newspapers from small towns to major metropolitan areas and watch and listen to the network and local news without ever hearing the obvious fact: a small group of fanatic Muslims successfully attacked the greatest Empire in the history of the world.

But Americans presume they live in a republic. The dictionary defines 'republic' as the antonym of 'empire.' The imperial government availed itself of the confusion and offered a transcendent message to cover the fact that it no longer even wore republican clothes; revenge!

3. NOBEL NOMINEE ATTACKS US OVER LIBERTIES

MAKKA TIME INTERVIEW

WITH

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

One of South America's most prominent literary figures has accused the US of sacrificing liberty in the name of security after the 9/11 attacks.

Peruvian-born writer Mario Vargas Llosa, a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, made his stinging comments at a think tank in Washington.

Sacrificing freedoms in the name of heightened US security after the September 11 attacks is "extremely dangerous" and gives "reason to the terrorists," he told the Cato Institute.

The "11^th of September has produced a trauma in America and immediately there's been a reaction. Quite natural, that we know very well in Latin America: In order to be more effective against terrorism, we should restrict some liberties," he said.

"This is a very big mistake, a very, very big mistake. We know this kind of reasoning because in Latin America, effectiveness has been used once and again in our countries to justify not only restriction but abolition of private and civil liberties," he added.

Best Tool

However, Vargas Llosa said, "Freedom is the best tool that we have to fight not only terrorism but all the aggressions and conspiracies against freedom."

"If, in order to be more effective, we reduce or abolish freedom, we are giving reason to the terrorists, to the enemy, we are accepting that the rules of the game are not the rules of law but the rules of effectiveness, of power – and this is extremely dangerous," he said.

"This can produce a dynamic in which effectiveness can be used as a pretext in order to restrict or abolish what is really the raison d'etre of a free society," he warned.

4. MEDIA TIPS FOR THE NEXT RECALL

NORMAN SOLOMON

Now that California's electorate has rewarded a dramatic recall effort, some sequels are likely elsewhere in the near future. It's a good bet that political operatives in many states will try to learn from this fall's Golden State extravaganza.

Media strategists were key to the recall drive that ended in triumph for Arnold Schwarzenegger's savvy corporate backers. So, as a public service, here are some tips for any partisans who want a shot at spinning their way into recall history:

· Do your best to capitalize on smoldering resentments. Don't bother to illuminate much about the actual underlying causes of social discontent. Try to use citizen outrage as bait to attract the support of talk-show hosts, pundits, ambitious politicians and well-heeled contributors.

Spark plugs for the California recall were happy to vilify Gray Davis as a crafty charlatan and/or incompetent cold fish. The governor made such caricatures easy; he raked in lots of sizeable checks from vested interests and engaged in budgetary sleight of hand. But instead of confronting his deference to energy firms that functioned as rip-off artists – or denouncing his refusal to back tax hikes for large corporations and wealthy individuals – the recall's conservative boosters preferred to blame Davis for too much spending and not enough solicitude to big business.

· Try to throw a manipulative harness on sincere concerns among voters. Keep the media messages simple and simplistic.

In California, an anti-tax drumbeat – with lots of media reverb - went a long way toward drowning out voices that called for a major shift to progressive taxation. Little news coverage and scant paid advertising explained that such a shift could mean higher taxes for the rich and large companies but lower taxes for everyone else.

· If a luminary on the campaign team goes "off message" with a genuinely sensible observation, put a sock in it, pronto.

Early in the short campaign, a much-ballyhooed economic adviser for Schwarzenegger made improperly logical comments. Warren Buffet pointed out that Proposition 13, California's venerable property-tax limitation law, "doesn't make sense." The fabled financier noted that he was paying $2,264 for a year's worth of property taxes on a Southern California home valued at $4 million. But a press secretary for the actor-turned – politician rushed to proclaim that "Mr. Buffett doesn't speak for Mr. Schwarzenegger" and hastened to add that the candidate "has supported Prop. 13 for 25 years."

· Do your best to generate a steady stream of media messages that obscure complexities of underlying power relations while providing plenty of buzz phrases and images that mostly serve as triggers for pre-existing assumptions.

Sound-bite platitudes and Schwarzenegger's muscle-bound celeb candidacy were well-suited to what passed for news on television, where even "in-depth" stories were usually the word-length equivalent of a few short paragraphs. While newspapers provided some notably serious reporting, for the most part the TV news zone was predictably agog with glitz and sizzle.

· Personalize to dodge basic issues.

In California, for well over a century, oligopolies of land holdings have throttled the state. Yet when recall promoters claimed to be speaking truth about power, they zeroed in on the corporate front man in the governor's office rather than confront (or even acknowledge) the dominance of real estate interests: from urban concrete labyrinths and suburban developments to the vast tracts of rural acreage owned by multi-multimillionaires and agribusiness.

· Cloak a candidate eager to serve elites in the garb of a populist champion.

Schwarzenegger's plain-speaking clichés supplied media window dressing for an economic mind-set amounting to a dream come true for upper-class combatants in the class wars.

· Whenever possible, conflate entertainment fantasies with social realities, even while claiming to always know the difference.

After decades as a media creature of entertainment, this fall Arnold Schwarzenegger easily made the transition to being a media creature of politics. His victory will encourage other mind-numbing celebrities to further blur the distinctions between arrogant stores and rational government policies.

5. LESSONS IN HOW TO LIE ABOUT IRAQ

(The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind of things we think about)

BRIAN ENO

When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor. One day we were talking about life during 'the period of stagnation' – the Brezhnev era. 'It must have been strange being so completely immersed in propaganda,' I said.

'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,' Sacha.

That is the difference. Russian propaganda was so obvious that most Russians were able to ignore it. They took it for granted that the government operated in its own interests and any message coming from it was probably slanted – and they discounted it.

In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don't notice it – or laugh at the notion it even exists. We watch the democratic process taking place – heated debates in which we feel we could have a voice – and think that, because we have 'free' media it would be hard for the Government to get away with anything very devious without someone calling them on it.

It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look a bit more closely and ask: 'How did we get there?' How exactly did it come about that, in a world of AIDS, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really that big a problem? Or were we somehow manipulated into believing the Iraq issue was important and had to be fixed right now – even though a few months before few had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the interim.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America. According to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their new book Weapons of Mass Deception, it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would justify an invasion of Iraq. Rampton and Stauber expose how news was fabricated and made to seem real. But they also demonstrate how a coalition of the willing - far Right officials, neo-con-think-tanks, insanely pugilistic media commentators and of course well-paid PR companies - worked together to pull off a sensational piece of intellectual dishonesty. Theirs is a study of modern propaganda.

What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. (What else can the spat between the BBC and Alastair Campbell be but a prime example of this?)

With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then 'use the democratic process' to agree or disagree – for, after all, their intention is to mobilize enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent. The more emotional debate, the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

An example of this process is one highlighted by Rampton and Stauber which, more than any other, consolidated public and congressional approval for the 1991 Gulf war. We recall the horrifying stories, incessantly repeated, of babies in Kuwaiti hospitals ripped out of their incubators and left to die while the Iraqis shipped the incubators back to Baghdad – 312 babies, we were told.

The story was brought to public attention by Nayirah, a 15-year-old 'nurse' who, it turned out later, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Nayirah had been tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton PR agency (which in turn received $1.4 million from the American government for their work in promoting the war). Her story was entirely discredited within weeks but by then its purpose had been served: it had created an outraged and emotional mindset within America which overwhelmed rational discussion.

As we are seeing now, the most recent Gulf war entailed many similar deceits; false linkages made between Saddam, al-Qaeda and 9/11, stories of ready-to-launch weapons that didn't exist, of nuclear programs never embarked upon. As Rampton and Stauber show, many of these allegations were discredited as they were being made, not least by the newspaper for which I write, but nevertheless were retold.

Throughout all this, the hired-gun PR companies were busy, preconditioning the emotional landscape. Their marketing talents were particularly useful in the large-scale manipulation of language that the campaign entailed. The Bushites realized, as all ideologues do, that words create realities, and that the right words can overwhelm any chance of balanced discussion. Guided by the overtly imperial vision of the Project for a New American Century, PNAC (whose members now form the core of the American administration), the PR companies helped finesse the language to create an atmosphere of simmering panic where American imperialism would come to seem not only acceptable but right, obvious, inevitable and even somehow kind.

Aside from the incessant 'weapons of mass destruction', there were 'regime change' (military invasion), 'pre-emptive defense' (attacking a country that is not attacking you), 'critical regions' (countries we want to control), the 'axis of evil' (countries we want to attack), 'shock and awe' (massive obliteration) and 'the war on terror' (a hold-all excuse for projecting American military force anywhere).

Meanwhile, US federal employees and military personnel were told to refer to the invasion as 'a war of liberation' and to the Iraqi paramilitaries as 'death squads', while the reliably sycophantic American TV networks spoke of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' – just as the Pentagon asked them to – thus consolidating the supposition that Iraqi freedom was the point of the war. Anybody questioning the invasion was 'soft on terror' (liberal) or, in the case of the UN, 'in danger of losing its relevance'.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognize when I was being lied to. I hope writers such as Rampton and Stauber and others may have the same effect and help to emasculate the culture of spin and dissembling that is overtaking our political establishments.

6. JIM CROW IN CYBERSPACE

(FROM THE BOOK, THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY)

GREG PALAST

In the days following the presidential election, there were so many stories of African Americans erased from voter rolls you might think they were targeted by some kind of racial computer program. They were.

I have a copy of it: two silvery CD-ROM disks right out of the office computers of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Once decoded and fed into a database, they make for interesting, if chilling, reading. They tell us how our president was elected—and it wasn't by the voters.

Here's how it worked; Mostly, the disks contain data on Florida citizens—57,700 of them. In the months leading up to the November 2000 balloting, Florida Secretary of State Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local elections supervisors to purge these 57,700 from voter registries. In Harris's computers, they are named as felons who have no right to vote in Florida.

Thomas Cooper is on the list: criminal scum, bad guy, felon, attempted voter. The Harris hit list says Cooper was convicted of a felony on January 30, 2007. 2007?

You may suspect something's wrong with the list. You'd be right. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, over half—about 54 percent—are Black and Hispanic voters. Overwhelmingly, it is a list of Democrats.

Secretary of State Harris declared George W. Bush winner of Florida, and thereby president, by a plurality of 537 votes over Al Gore. Now do the arithmetic. Over 50,000 voters wrongly targeted by the purge, mostly Blacks. My BBC researchers reported that Gore lost at lest 22,000 votes as a result of this smart little blackbox operation.

The first reports of this extraordinary discovery ran, as you'd expect, on page one of the country's leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the USA, it ran on page zero—the story was simply not covered in American newspapers. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also grabbed big television coverage. But again, it was the wrong continent: on BBC Television, broadcasting from London worldwide—everywhere, that is, but the USA.

Was this some off-the-wall story that the British press misreported? Hardly. The chief lawyer for the US Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise Florida's Black votes. So why was this story investigated, reported and broadcast only in Europe, for God's sake? I'd like to know the answer. That way I could understand why a Southern California ho'daddy like me has to commute to England with his wife and kiddies to tell this and other stories abut my country.

In this chapter, I take you along the path of the investigation, step by step, report by report, from false starts to unpretty conclusions. When I first broke the story, I had it wrong. Within weeks of the election, I said the Harris crew had tried to purge 8,000 voters. While that was enough to change the outcome of the election (and change history), I was way off. Now, after two years of peeling the Florida elections onion, we put the number of voters wrongly barred from voting at over 90,000, most Blacks and Hispanics, and by a wide majority, Democrats.

That will take us to the Big Question: Was it deliberate, this purge so fortunate for the Republicans? Or just an honest clerical error? I dug back into the computers, the e-mail traffic in the Florida Department of Elections, part of the secretary of state's office. And sure enough, the office clerks were screaming: They'd found a boatload like Mr. Cooper on the purge list, convicted in the future, in the next century, in the next millennium.

The jittery clerks wanted to know what to do. I thought I knew the answer. As a product of the Los Angeles school system, where I Pledged my Allegiance to the Flag every morning, I assumed that if someone was wrongly accused, the state would give them back their right to vote. But the Republican operatives had a better idea. They told the clerks to blank out the wacky conviction dates. That way, the county elections supervisors, already wary of the list, would be none the wiser. The Florida purge lists have over 4,000 blank conviction dates.

You've seen barely a hair of any of this in the US media. Why? How did 100,000 US journalists sent to cover the election fail to get the vote theft story (and preferably before the election)?

7. TIME IS NOW FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

DAVE ZWEIFEL

There are those who scoff at the assertion that if we took the administrative costs out of our jury-rigged medical system and coupled it with the tens of billions we currently spend on insurance premiums and other fees, we'd have enough money to provide much-needed health insurance for every American citizen.

Now there's a study that backs that up.

An article in a recent New England Journal of Medicine states that the private bureaucracy that collectively handles our health care costs Americans $294.3 billion in 1999 – the last year for which complete figures are available – or roughly $1,059 per person.

That, the report adds, is three times the $307 per person in paperwork costs that Canada spends on its national health insurance system. In other words, if we could cut our private administrative costs to the Canadian level, we'd have saved $209 billion that year.

The authors of the report found that those administrative costs accounted for 31 percent of the total health spending in '99. That's up from slightly less than 20 percent in 1969, the report said.

The NEJM article attributed the high costs to three factors. First, private insurers have high overhead that's only getting higher. Second, America's fragmented payment system dries up administrative costs for doctors and hospitals who must deal with hundreds of different insurance plans, referrals and complicated rules. And third, the increasing business orientation of hospitals and insurers has expanded their bureaucracy.

Applying those findings to Wisconsin, a separate report estimates that administrative costs here this year will hit $7.7 billion. The report concludes that $5.5 billion of this could be saved under a national health insurance program.

That, a group of local physicians says, equals $13,513 for each of Wisconsin's 409,000 uninsured residents – enough to provide universal coverage with money left over to offer seniors full prescription drug coverage and to upgrade coverage for others who are under-insured.

"Hundreds of billions are squandered each year on health care bureaucracy in our nation," say Dr. Steffie Woohandler, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard. "Americans spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as Canadians, who have universal coverage and live two years longer."

Unfortunately, this country's insurance companies, pharmaceutical giants and other corporate medical interests and charlatan politicians have fostered the myth that a government-run health system would be wasteful and inefficient.

The truth, however, is exactly the opposite and it's time for Americans to wake up to that fact.