'Bush's Blacks: Race Traitors?' -- Part One of Two

For over one hundred years, the African-American middle class has largely supported what I call "liberal integrationism," the organized attempt to assimilate into the U.S. mainstream to achieve a "color blind" society.

Through groups such as the NAACP, liberal integrationists have allied themselves usually with the Democratic Party, and have pursued reform strategies such as affirmative action and minority economic set-asides, that promoted capital formation and the long-term expansion of the middle class within the black community. This liberal approach to racial policy, however, has never been universally accepted within the black bourgeoisie as a class.

Fending off the Threat of Peace

To fend off the threat of peace, determination is necessary. Elected officials and high-level appointees must work effectively with reporters and pundits.

This is no time for the U.S. government to risk taking "yes" for an answer from Iraq. Guarding against the danger of peace, the Bush administration has moved the goal posts, quickly pounding them into the ground.

In early August, a State Department undersecretary swung a heavy mallet. "Let there be no mistake," said John Bolton. "While we also insist on the reintroduction of the weapons inspectors, our policy at the same time insists on regime change in Baghdad -- and that policy will not be altered, whether inspectors go in or not."

A sinister cloud briefly fell over the sunny skies for war. The U.S. Congress got a public invitation. A letter from a top Iraqi official "said congressional visitors and weapons experts of their choice could visit any site in Iraq alleged to be used for development of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons," USA Today reported.

The Old Spin on the 'New Economy'

With the "New Economy" now in shambles, it's easy for media outlets to disparage the illusions of the late 1990s -- years crammed with high-tech mania, fat stock options and euphoria on Wall Street. But we hear very little about the fact that much of the bubble was filled with hot air from hyperventilating journalists.

Traveling back on a time machine, we would see mainstream reporters and pundits routinely extolling the digitally enhanced nirvana of huge profits and much more to come. The "New Economy" media juggernaut was not to be denied.

Sure, journalists occasionally offered the common-sense observation that the boom would go bust someday. But it was a minor note in the media's orchestral tributes to the New Economy. And the bullish pronouncements included an awful lot of hyped bull.

Five years ago, Business Week's July 28 edition was scorning "economic dogma" for its failure to embrace the glorious future at hand. "The fact is that major changes in the dynamics of growth are detonating many

A perfectly glorious political year in Texas

AUSTIN, Texas -- You can already tell it's going to be a perfectly glorious political year in Texas. Four months out, and we've already got one gubernatorial candidate accusing the other of being a drug dealer, naturally causing the maligned party to in turn describe his opponent as a raving liar. This is going to be so much fun.

A grand old slugfest is developing in the race between Gov. Rick (Goodhair) Perry and his Democratic challenger, Tony Sanchez, and it shows all the signs of becoming a fall classic in Texas' toughest contact sport.

For starters, this is a backward, upside-down race. Normally we have Republican outsiders with no government experience running on their credentials as bidnessmen, a la in Bill Clements and George W. Bush, while claiming, "My opponent is nothing but a professional politician." This year we have a Republican incumbent we didn't vote for -- as Sanchez's ads keep reminding us -- who is a career politician being challenged by a Democratic businessman. But it could be a bad year to be a successful bidnessman, even in Texas.

War and Forgetfulness -- A Bloody Media Game

Three and a half years ago, some key information about U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq briefly surfaced on the front pages= of American newspapers -- and promptly vanished. Now, with= righteous war drums beating loudly in Washington, let's reach deep down= into the news media's Orwellian memory hole and retrieve the story.

"U.S. Spied on Iraq Under U.N. Cover, Officials Now Say," a front-page New York Times headline announced on Jan. 7, 1999.= The article was unequivocal: "United States officials said today= that American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors ferreting out secret Iraqi weapons programs....= By being part of the team, the Americans gained a first-hand= knowledge of the investigation and a protected presence inside Baghdad."

A day later, a followup Times story pointed out: "Reports= that the United States used the United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq as cover for spying on Saddam Hussein are dimming any= chances that the inspection system will survive."

With its credibility badly damaged by the spying, the U.N.

Will this be an 'Official Scandal' -- or Something Else?

With huge financial scandals causing turmoil in the United States, this year has seen some vigorous reporting about high-level misdeeds and corporate manipulation. But many news stories just take the lead from top officials. In the months ahead, we'll find out how deep American media outlets are willing to go.

Big scandals always generate plenty of headlines and lots of excitement. Important information can emerge. But frequently, key facts remain buried and crucial questions go unasked. If it's true that reporters produce a first draft of history, they often serve as conformist "jiffy historians" who do little more than recycle the day's conventional wisdom.

A dozen years ago, when journalist Martin A. Lee and I were writing a book about media bias ("Unreliable Sources"), we tried to assess what had gone wrong with news coverage of the Iran-contra scandal. Along the way -- under the heading of "Signs of an Official Scandal" -- we listed some general characteristics of coverage routinely providing much more heat than light.

Today, it may be useful to consider how some "signs of an official

Reforming Corporate America

AUSTIN, Texas -- Now some fools want to fire Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the only straight-shooter in the Cabinet. Tell you what I like about O'Neill: He's from Widget World. This Cabinet is wall-to-wall corporate America, but most of them -- including the president -- are from Enron Economics, whereas O'Neill was CEO of a business that makes something useful, to wit, aluminum.

As many economic poohbahs have been at pains to explain to us lately, out there in Widget World, where people produce actual goods and provide useful services, things are going along quite nicely.

It's the financial sector that's the disaster, the part where they play fancy games with other people's money for a living. That's Enron Economics, the land of stock options, commodities futures, derivatives, swaps, financializing markets and offshore partnerships.

Before we get back to our ongoing project of connecting the consarn, dag-rabbiting dots between corporate theft and government corruption, let's see if we can stop Congress from actually making things worse. Good project, eh?

WorldCom

AUSTIN, Texas -- OK, it's now hundreds of thousands of words past the WorldCom bankruptcy, with the media might of this great nation devoted to explaining it all to you, and there are still six words I cannot find anywhere -- the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of 1996. Don't you think that's carrying our famously ahistorical journalism a little too far?

When the cause of a disaster is a mere six years back in time, surely even American journalists can dredge up a twinge or two of memory. For those of you not afflicted by Alzheimer's in recent years, Bob McChesney, the media critic and professor at Southern Illinois, sums it up nicely: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was one of the most important of the last 50 years. It was also the most corrupt and undemocratic bill of the time: It was of, by and for special interests. Most of the congresspeople who voted for it didn't even know what they were voting on."

He understates. The bill was actually written by industry lobbyists, each of the several components of telecom snarling at one another

The Hog Wallow

When did the great executive stock option hog wallow really start? You can go back to the deregulatory push under Carter in the late Seventies, then move into the Reagan Eighties, when corporate purchases of shares really took off. But the true binge got going between 1994 and 1998, when non-financial companies sank themselves in debt by either repurchasing their own shares or acquiring shares as a result of mergers. The annual value of the repurchases quadrupled, testimony to the most hectic sustained orgy of self-aggrandizement by an executive class in the history of capitalism.

Why did these chief executive officers, chief financial officers and boards of directors choose to burden their companies with debt? Since stock prices were going up, companies needing money could have raised funds by issuing shares, rather than borrowing money to buy shares back.

Top corporate officers stood to make vast killings on their options, and by the unstinting efforts of legislators such as Senator Joe Lieberman, they were spared the inconvenience of having to report to

So what's a conscientious citizen to do?

First it was all about drugs - or so we were told. Sen. Mike DeWine helped craft Plan Colombia for the Clinton Administration, and $1.3 billion flowed to Colombia's declared drug war. Two years later President Bush demands more dollars and weapons - having broadened US objectives to fighting terror and insurgency - and DeWine cheers him on.

The U.S. insists its intervention in Colombia is protecting democracy and the rule of law. But our policy there violates both of those principles, as well as the human rights which depend upon them. And the violation - of rights and logic - is extreme.

For starters, many drug policy and human rights organizations refute the Drug War rationale for supporting the Colombian military. Even the relatively conservative Rand Corporation has concluded that drug treatment for U.S. cocaine users is 10 times more cost-effective than drug interdiction, and 23 times more cost-effective than coca eradication!

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