Once upon a time in Iraq… Money makes the world go around

Once upon a time in Iraq… Money makes the world go around
By Gabriele Zamparini

Fucking shit! That’s all I can say every time I see that “interesting flowchart showing the flow of money from foundations to progressive media and other organizations of the left”, as dissident US historian William Blum described it back in October 2005, when he sent it with his Anti-Empire Report.

I thought back of that “interesting flowchart” when a few days ago I read on AlterNet, “Is the Right Really Rising Up Against the Iraq Occupation?”, the latest fatigue of Homeland’s anti-war movement’s policy maker Phyllis Bennis. Her article is also available on ZNet, needless to say...

Bennis writes:

“(…) this new period is going to be very dangerous, and create new problems for the anti-war movement. (...) Bush administration officials are responding with new dire reports from military and White House officials about the dire consequences of troop withdrawals. But with mainstream Republicans increasingly distancing themselves from Bush on Iraq, there's a danger that their counterparts in the Democratic leadership are likely to soften their own [already wobbly] opposition to the U.S. occupation in order to reach the brass ring of a "bipartisan" [read: politically safe] position. That could well mean agreement on a "post-surge redeployment" designed to partially withdraw some troops (probably about half the current 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq), and establish what is already being touted as the prize: a "sustainable" U.S. military occupation of Iraq. Sustainable, in this context, means permanent. Partial withdrawal will set the stage for permanent occupation. A smaller, less visible occupation force stationed primarily at the huge U.S. bases built across Iraq will keep U.S. soldiers mostly off Iraq's IED-filled roads and far away from Iraq's resistance-stoked major cities. The U.S. troops will no longer maintain even the fiction of responsibility for protecting Iraqi civilians, and crucially, will take far fewer casualties. The result (since the far more numerous Iraqi casualties are so easily ignored): Iraq will be largely out of the headlines and off the front page.”

Now, let’s skip the passage where she writes,

“the Democratic leadership are likely to soften their own [already wobbly] opposition to the U.S. Occupation”

since from where I stand I haven’t seen much of that opposition, wobbly or otherwise; but perhaps from Homeland things look different.

Besides what Phyllis Bennis reported in her article, [Hillary Clinton says that even with redeployment, "remaining vital national security interests in Iraq" require "a continuing deployment of American troops."] she-Clinton also said,

“The American military has done its job. Look what they accomplished. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They gave the Iraqis a chance for free and fair elections.”

Bennis must have missed it. It happens.

Let’s skip also this other passage,

“The U.S. troops will no longer maintain even the fiction of responsibility for protecting Iraqi civilians, and crucially, will take far fewer casualties”

It seems to me that - fiction or not fiction - she’s missing the primary responsibility of the US troops in the actual, direct killing of Iraqi civilians. Again, it happens to miss details.

What caught my eyes in her article was the last line in the little piece I reported above,

“The result (since the far more numerous Iraqi casualties are so easily ignored): Iraq will be largely out of the headlines and off the front page.”

Now, wouldn’t it have been quite easy and simple at this very point of the article to give the actual figures of those “Iraqi casualties”? Wouldn’t it have been even more useful to the point she was making and to the alleged broader message of her article, namely, “the anti-war movement will continue its fight”, as she proclaims at the end of her piece? Why didn’t Bennis take this chance to highlight the 1,000,000 Iraqi lives slaughtered since the Iraqi “liberation” four years ago, since, as she rightly admits, “Iraqi casualties are so easily ignored”?

Am I being too fussy?

Back in April 2006 I had an email exchange with Phyllis Bennis. But first, a few words to paint a little background are needed. Please, follow me now even if it could seem a little complicated and I promise at the end we’ll all have some fun together.

At that time most of the Homeland’s anti-war organizations and alternative media were still using Iraq Body Count’s ridiculous figures and I was trying to understand why they had not adopted the figures coming from the first study published in the peer reviewed British medical journal the Lancet in the fall of 2004. Its findings: 100,000 Iraqi human lives slaughtered in the first year and half alone of the “liberation”.

At the same time Media Lens [the guys who first dared to adventure in this fog of war] and a very few of us were challenging the mainstream media’s use of IBC’s figures, I wrote also to many anti-war organizations and activists, both here in the UK and in the US.

By the way, in those months, quite a lot was achieved. The BBC, the Guardian and other “respectable media”, gave the spotlight to IBC’s Sloboda to attack viciously Media Lens and those of us (very few and very isolated!) guilty of trying to focus on the most important aspect of this madness, the extent of the carnage caused by the “liberators” in Iraq, and its burying by the mainstream media.

Sloboda interviewed by the BBC:

BBC’s question: Your critics claim that your work is a vast undercount, how do you answer that?

IBC’s John Sloboda’s answer: The claim (that our work is a vast undercount) is made basically on the back of some quite shaky extrapolations from a single study that was carried out with a particular methodology in 2004. That is the celebrated Lancet study. (…) Some critics of the Lancet study have said it's like a drunk throwing a dart at a dartboard. It's going to go somewhere, but who knows if that number is the bulls eye. Unfortunately many many people have decided to accept that that 98,000 figure is the truth - or the best approximation to the truth that we have.

As a result of the work of IBC's Sloboda, Human Rights Watch and Pentagon's expert Marc Garlasco and the atrocious job of most of the mainstream media, that Lancet study was discredited and millions of people (among them also many mainstream journalists in good faith) deceived. [That deception is still going on in these very hours]

But that was not enough. IBC’s Sloboda had to discredit also the few people who were asking uncomfortable questions:

BBC’s question: How would you describe Media Lens?

IBC’s John Sloboda: They are a pressure group that use aggressive and emotionally destructive tactics. On the belief that the gravity of the issues they're dealing with justify that, and also on the belief that that's somehow effective. (…) I think it's because we don't fit into their worldview. The hard left and the hard right, they're both utterly rigid, and the stuff that's going on in the middle, they can't handle. They want certainty. They want something they can latch onto and say - this is what I believe. They like the sense of being a beleaguered minority. What's most chilling is if you look at people's allegiance to much more dangerous causes than either of our critics are adopting. This is also the mindset that draws angry young men towards terrorism. And it's ultimately self-destructive."

More fog of war in this FLASHBACK

I got my part too. In one of the numerous Iraq Body Count’s attempts to discredit the two scientific studies published in the peer-reviewed journal the Lancet, IBC’s John Sloboda, Hamit Dardagan and Josh Dougherty were so courteous to recognize my persistence in campaigning for the truth about the genocide against the Iraqi people,

“One of the campaigns' most persistent email crusaders, and regular Media Lens message board users”.

Yes, I’m really proud of these words [hey, I am vane as everybody else] and I’ll never be able to repay such a kindness. Thank you.

Where was at that time the "anti-war" movement of peace, justice and solidarity? Besides a few noble exceptions, the panorama was darkened with silence and omerta.

In those same months, ZNet’s Brian Dominick, one of the main members of Michael Albert’s ZNet’s family, was very busy in sending private emails (again, I got my part too) to help IBC’s plan to silence those few voices that dared to ask uncomfortable questions or, in Dominick’s vocabulary, a “ridiculous Iraq Body Count bickering”.

Even worse, when the second Lancet study came out in 2006 and after IBC’s shameful new attempt to discredit it, Dominick went public on the Media Lens message board and stood, needless to say, as a brave chevalier, next to IBC and against… the truth!

Finally, to end this depressing backstage, this IBC’s scandal was the reason I resigned from the BRussells Tribunal [BT], an organization I had trusted and spent a few energies to help. The irrational persistence with which a few decision makers of the BT would keep defending Sloboda and his IBC, forced me to pose this scandal to the attention of a larger circle of BT’s members. I resigned and the BT had to expel Sloboda from its Advisory Committee; but the BT’s persistence in defense of IBC can be seen in the wording of the short note the BT itself made public:

Dear friends,
John Sloboda has been excluded from the BRussells Tribunal. Not because of the conflict about IBC, but because he's apparently heading the Oxford Research Group, a think tank. They published this report recently: http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/books/iraqiliberation.htm .
Because of this report, that is in total opposition with everything the BT stands for, he really cannot be a part of our network.
Thought I'd let you know.
Dirk.

Isn't it amazing how sometimes coincidences are really unbelievable? Anyway, all and each piece of this miserable background has already been in public domain. I just like to help here recollect our collective fragile memory in these horrendous years, for those who still care about that 1,000,000 and counting and above all for those 1,000,000 and counting. 1,000,000 Iraqis slaughtered in four years. 1,000,000. Let's try to think of this number. Where is the outrage?

Back to April 2006 and my email exchange with Phyllis Bennis.

Zamparini: “Don’t you think that United for Peace and Justice’s website is misleading and it hides the truth when it writes: “over 33,000 Iraqi civilian lives (and some estimates are as high as 100,000 lives)”?

Bennis: No it's not. There are plenty of estimates out there. No one is hiding anything.

It’s true, there was a positive follow-up to those exchanges and when the new Lancet study came out later in the same year, its findings were finally presented to the US Congress

But it was too little, too late. The mainstream media, both in the UK and in the US would keep burying those uncomfortable numbers and too many anti-war organizations and websites are still using the Iraq Body Count’s figures with the result that the vast majority of the population has no idea of the real extent of the carnage caused by “Iraqi Freedom”.

Maybe if the “anti-war movement” - instead of trying to silence those few voices; solidarity my ass! - had been more active and responsible in campaigning and informing the public opinion about the real extent of the carnage the US were inflicting to Iraqis, things could have been different by now. Who knows? But even Phyllis Bennis will agree with me that after two scientific studies have been published in the peer reviewed journal the Lancet, we can by now be quite confident that there are NOT “plenty of estimates out there” and therefore it should be our first moral responsibility to focus on that number, 1,000,000, EVERY SINGLE TIME we talk and write about Iraq and lecture about or on behalf of the “anti-war” movement. That 1,000,000 is not a detail, Phyllis, that’s THE issue. Everything else comes after, including “realistic” strategies and allegiances to political parties.

Bennis’ article is very long, yet it misses the essential; the real scale of the horror “our troops” have inflicted to Iraqis and our responsibility for this genocide. Any strategy, tactic, response of the anti-war movement should move from that horror. But maybe Bennis didn’t want to ruin the breakfast to those delicate ears her article was addressed to; because that article looks to me like a spot for the Democratic Party.

In that 2006 email exchange, Bennis also wrote me:

“My concern is that we figure out how to bring the war to an end, in a period in which we have overwhelmingly won the battle for public opinion.”

[Who's “we”? The Homeland’s antiwar movement? its policy makers?]

This thesis is also expressed in the first paragraph of her latest article:

“The sudden "surge" of anti-war positions among powerful Republican senators, most recently John Warner and Richard Lugar, and other elite forces (such as the editors of the New York Times) is putting intense new bi-partisan pressure on the White House to begin withdrawing troops. And while it is certainly an indication that our years of work are bearing fruit, this new period is going to be very dangerous, and create new problems for the anti-war movement.”

Now, the thesis that “we” [?] “have overwhelmingly won the battle for public opinion” so that even “powerful Republican senators” and “other elite forces (such as the editors of the New York Times)” have been converted, sounds like a mind-boggling assertion. In other words, more than a “fruit”, it smells of bullshit.

In the Homeland the establishment is abandoning the collapsing Bush Junta because it understands the Bush Junta can’t go anywhere at this point. The Democratic Party, pieces of the Republican Party, the Media, the Money are all jumping out from the sinking boat. Even some of the neo-cons! So now we see the New York Times, the powerful TV networks, and all these brave politicians saying: “It’s all Bush fault”. Well, you know what? That’s not all Bush fault. They are as responsible as Bush. Their hands are as dirty as Bush’s ones. Dirty with the blood of innocent people. The genocide of Iraqis didn’t start in 2003 (when Hilary Clinton and her Democratic comrades were clapping and clapping and clapping in Congress their dear president) but in 1990 with the genocidal UN (read: US+UK) embargo, and then the first Gulf War, and then the (illegal) bombings of the (illegal) No Fly Zones. The liberal Democrats with their beloved president, Bill Clinton, killed as many Iraqis as the two Bushs combined, if not more.

Let alone for now Afghanistan, remember? the Just War which reminds me of another Just War, Yugoslavia. And then we still have the big taboo, the genocide of Palestinians. Sh! Sh! Let’s not scare the big donors of the Democratic Party! The fruit has not matured for all this, I guess. Let’s give it more time, who knows? And Iran? Sh! Sh! Those donors are listening!

Maybe the reasons of that ‘conversion’ of the Homeland’s elites need to be looked again for somewhere else? Maybe those Homeland’s elites are abandoning the sinking boat because they want to save their Empire and their dirty ass with it? Maybe the resistance of the Iraqi people, which has never been recognized as such, respected as such, let alone supported dear Bennis, by the anti-war movement and its policy makers, that resistance (not insurgency) has more to do with that sinking boat? Yes, the Homeland’s public is starting to count the bodies. But only the bodies of those brave troops, not the Iraqis; ONE MILLION and counting.

But of course the Homeland’s anti-war movement’s policy makers and their Democrats friends are using the “politics of reality”. Pilger recently explained in Chicago:

A senior member of the antiwar coalition, United For Peace and Justice, said recently, and I quote her, "The Democrats are using the politics of reality." Her liberal historical reference point was Vietnam. She said that President Johnson began withdrawing troops from Vietnam after a Democratic Congress began to vote against the war. That's not what happened. The troops were withdrawn from Vietnam after four long years. And during that time the United States killed more people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with bombs than were killed in all the preceding years. And that's what's happening in Iraq. The bombing has doubled since last year, and this is not being reported. And who began this bombing? Bill Clinton began it. During the 1990s Clinton rained bombs on Iraq in what were euphemistically called the "no fly zones." At the same time he imposed a medieval siege called economic sanctions, killing as I've mentioned, perhaps a million people, including a documented 500,000 children. Almost none of this carnage was reported in the so-called mainstream media. Last year a study published by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that since the invasion of Iraq 655, 000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the invasion. Official documents show that the Blair government knew this figure to be credible. In February, Les Roberts, the author of the report, said the figure was equal to the figure for deaths in the Fordham University study of the Rwandan genocide. The media response to Robert's shocking revelation was silence. What may well be the greatest episode of organized killing for a generation, in Harold Pinter's words, "Did not happen. It didn't matter."

Most Americans tend to think that Vietnam was an American problem. The same Americans seem now to believe that Iraq is an American problem. The reality is that as with Vietnam, Iraq is not an American problem; it’s America to be a problem for Humanity.

The US’ leadership, its media, its Hollywood stars, its Academia, its institutions, its mainstream culture need a thorough de-Nazification, not the never coming impeachment or a new tenant at the White House. Bush is not the new Hitler. He’s simply the latest of a long series of Hitlers. Each of them has been worse than the previous one. When you have such a rapacious Empire to satisfy, you can’t be a good führer. That’s the reality. And the only strategy, the only tactic, the only politics for all of us, trying to look toward peace and justice is really simple: telling the truth, repeating it every single time and building on it.

But the truth is not welcome from that “politics of reality” the Democratic Party and its friends among the hierarchy of the Homeland’s “anti-war” movement have been adopting.

A few days ago this is what we were forced to read:

The pro-Democratic blog Daily Kos warns the anti-war Cindy Sheehan that if she does, indeed, challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it will ban her from promoting her candidacy on the blog. She may have soured their relationship when she attacked Democrats in a Daily Kos diary:

“The Democrats are the party of slavery and were the party that started every war in the 20th Century except the other Bush debacle. The Federal Reserve, permanent federal (and unconstitutional) income taxes, Japanese Concentration Camps and, not one, but two atom bombs dropped on the innocent citizens of Japan were brought to us via the Democrats. Don’t tell me the Democrats are our ‘Saviors’ because I am not buying it.”

Prison Planet reported a few days ago:

Sheehan slammed Pelosi as a warmongering elitist who lives in a mansion on a hill and is completely out of touch with her electorate, as well as a major supporter of AIPAC, a group which has expressed its explicit support for an attack on Iran.

"You can't have allegiance to two countries when you're a lawmaker in one of those countries," said Sheehan, adding that many politicians put America's best interests second behind Israel.

Ouch! Ouch! That taboo again.

Of course Cindy Sheehan has her limits and contradictions, as I have mine and Bennis has hers. But I wish those limits and contradictions were all could be said of the Democratic Party of she-Clinton and her comrades. Sheehan was of course good to be waved as a flag when that would bring consent, media attention and votes. But hey, Cindy, keep having fun with the toys we give you and let the real “business as usual” to “us”.

And so the silencing of Cindy Sheehan has begun.

This is nothing new of course. When Ralph Nader, who had devoted his life to social justice, decided to run for the US Presidential Elections in 2000 and then again in 2004, there was an insurrection among liberal and progressive intellectuals and activists. Open letters, dedicated websites, rational arguments, polite invitations, reasonable articles and vicious attacks started to demolish the image of one of the most decent people in American political landscape.

I remember an American friend who told me at that time, “Nader’s fault is in his name”. Why? Maybe its sound is too uncomfortable for the delicate ears of the generous donors of the Democratic Party?

Those were the times of Anyone But Bush. Bush won and kept his ass in the White House but - surprise surprise - Nader didn’t determine Bush’s victory against Kerry. However, the Homeland’s anti-war movement and all those people who still believe in peace and justice, and there is no doubt they are the vast majority of the United States’ citizens, lost a formidable chance to build a more organized front able to break what Gore Vidal has called the Property Party:

"[t]here is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."

Interestingly, for those “anti-war” movement’s policy makers, progressive intellectuals and liberal minds, the times of Anyone But… never seem to end and there’s always been an emergency situation for “let’s not waste our vote” and support the Democratic Party and its “politics of reality”. Meanwhile in the real world…

"Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." [From: Harold Pinter Nobel Lecture]

Bennis’ misleading spot is just the latest and more innocent example of an incestuous, necrophilic relationship between the Homeland’s hierarchy of the “anti-war movement” and the Democratic Party. In that e-mail exchange I had with her in 2006, she writes:

“Since you're monitoring the U.S. press and anti-war movement so closely i assume you are familiar with the rising polls of anti-war sentiment and the near 2/3 of americans who say bring the troops home -- our challenge is how to empower that sentiment into political action at a moment when the supposed opposition party is frightened and supine, rendering congress largely unwilling to challenge the white house. I am less concerned with which figures get cited as the wars consequences than in finding a good strategy for ending it altogether.
many thanks for your ideas.”

Now, let’s not pay attention to her “Since you're monitoring the U.S. press and anti-war movement so closely” and “many thanks for your ideas”; each of us can have a bad day. Let’s focus instead on the essential here:

“the supposed opposition party is frightened and supine”

Are we talking of the same Democratic Party of she-Clinton and her comrades? They didn’t seem very “frightened and supine” when I watched them in the US Congress, year after year, giving several standing ovations to their beloved President Bush. And the recent she-Clinton’s words, “The American military has done its job. Look what they accomplished. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They gave the Iraqis a chance for free and fair elections.”, do they seem to you the words of a “frightened and supine” Senator wannabe President?

In spite of the unspeakable atrocities and horror that the American military has accomplished, in Iraq people seem still to be able to think and speak common sense:

"I am Shiite," Ali said. "My uncles and cousins were murdered by Saddam's regime. I wanted desperately to get rid of him. But today, if Saddam's feet appeared in front of me, I would fall to my knees and kiss them!"

Obviously common sense has nothing to do with those “politics of reality” that the anti-war’s mandarins have been diligently following.

“The Democrats don’t really want to end the war despite their veneer of opposition. If they desired to end the war they would have halted its funding long ago.” wrote a few days ago Joshua Frank.

“[T]he Democratic leadership chose merely to appear to oppose the war while continuing to fund it. This they have now achieved, amid the satisfied cheers of the progressive sector.” commented a few months ago Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

So, why do the anti-war movement and its policy makers keep supporting this party? Or, the same problem in different terms, why is there all this deafening silence on the hijacking of the anti-war sentiment in support of she-Clinton’s Democratic Party?

Probably Upton Sinclair’s answer would be,

"It is difficult to get a man [or a woman] to understand something when his [or her] salary depends on his [or her] not understanding it."

Phyllis Bennis concludes her article:

“This moment's spike in anti-war sentiment, including from some unlikely sources, is an indication of the strength and breadth of the anti-war movement and of anti-war sentiment throughout the country. (…) All of this points to the importance of remembering that Congress is not the peace movement. (…) U.S. occupation of Iraq, "sustainable" or not, must end. Until it does, the anti-war movement will continue its fight.”

If only rhetoric could save human lives!

A few days ago, Alex Cockburn asked at the end of his piece,

“The American people are largely against the war, to the huge embarassment and distress of the Republican and Democratic leadership. So does it matter that there's not much of an antiwar movement? Very much so. It's how the left down the years has learned its internationalist ABC.”

How’s it possible that on the same days, two among the most famous intellectuals of the American left can express such different points of view?

But an even more important, decisive question I believe is, Which kind of anti-war movement?

The main preoccupation of this “anti-war” movement has been from the beginning the legitimization of the puppet Green Zone’s government. This is true both for the movement’s main intellectuals who shaped the course and for its main organizations’ policy makers who implemented it.

Remember United for Peace and Justice’s “pleasure to welcome” puppet Maliki “in the United States”? “Politics of reality” or beyond Orwell and Kafka?

Remember the deafening silence of this “anti-war” movement during the lynching-trial and then assassination of the President of the Republic of Iraq?

Remember that sinister caw in the air or the noble art of rewriting history?

This is the “anti-war” movement of those who still deny the influence of the Jewish-Zionist-Israeli lobby on the US foreign policy when that lobby highly conditions that movement from within, if we have to believe Rabbi Michael Lerner

“Nor was there any of the Israel-bashing or Marxist rhetoric that has tended to make other demonstrations feel so distant from the people who attend them that no one wants to listen. So, curiously, and happily, people listened.”

Is there anyone out there who still wonders why Palestine is still a taboo, even within the Homeland’s “anti-war” movement or why decent people and fine intellectuals are marginalized and attacked from within that “movement”?

Which kind of “anti-war” movement is Phyllis Bennis talking about? Is the one whose policy makers are only interested in the safety of “our troops”, those troops that have raped, tortured, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of human beings and transformed Iraq into a wilderness? Is the “anti-war” movement whose establishment is worried to not use the word “resistance” and that still considers the “insurgency” the enemy while siding with the puppet Iraqi so-called government, and giving revolting show of welcoming? Which kind of meaning that “anti-war” movement’s policy makers give to the words “peace and justice”? Or shall we believe that those words have a whole different meaning in Homeland? Maybe is that another side of the infamous American exceptionalism? I don’t think so.

The American anti-war people deserve better. The World anti-war people deserve better. But above all, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Palestinians... the victims of imperialism deserve better than this charade, an “anti-war” farce whose main actors are much closer to Hollywood’s star system than to any decent resistance movement in human history.

"Politics of reality" my ass, dear comrade Judith LeBlanc, UFPJ co-chair!

We’ve finally got back to the starting point. Money.

Political Science Professor Joan Roelofs writes in the first chapter (available online in PDF) of her book, Foundations and Public Policy. The Mask of Pluralism:

My studies also have been guided and inspired by educational theorist Robert Arnove’s anthology, Philantropy and Cultural Imperialism, and its contributors. Arnove maintains that:

… [F]oundations like Carnegie, Rockfeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish and agenda of what merits society’s attention. They serve as “cooling out” agencies, delaying and preventing more radical, structural change.

Where does this “corrosive influence on a democratic society” stop?

Bob Feldman writes:

The multi-billion dollar Ford Foundation's historic relationship to the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] is rarely mentioned on Pacifica's DEMOCRACY NOW / Deep Dish TV show, on FAIR's COUNTERSPIN show, on the WORKING ASSETS RADIO show, on The Nation Institute's RADIO NATION show, on David Barsamian's ALTERNATIVE RADIO show or in the pages of PROGRESSIVE, MOTHER JONES and Z magazine. One reason may be because the Ford Foundation and other Establishment foundations subsidize the Establishment Left's alternative media gatekeepers / censors.

I have no certainties and I make no allegations here but surely the problem deserves to be kept in mind, especially in these dark times of fog of war and “politics of reality”. In other words, nobody is perfect but here we have gone too far folks!

More Once upon a time… fairy tales soon. But first, as I’ve promised, let’s have some fun…