Failing the Midterms: Press overplays election results

Republican candidates won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday; meanwhile, Democratic candidates won two special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York and California. But it was very clear which set of elections corporate media wanted to portray as sending an important message about national politics--that voters were discontented with the White House and wanted Democrats to move to the right.

"By seizing gubernatorial seats in Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans on Tuesday dispelled any notion of President Obama's electoral invincibility," declared the Los Angeles Times (11/4/09)--as if Obama had previously been confused with Superman. On NPR, Mara Liasson reported (11/4/09): "There's already a feisty argument going on about what the election results tell us, but there's no argument about the score. The Democrats got a slap in the face. The Republicans a much-needed victory."

An Associated Press analysis by Liz Sidoti (11/4/09) similarly called the election results "a troubling sign for the president and his party" and a "double-barreled triumph" for Republicans--before noting that such conclusions "could easily be overstated. Voters are often focused on local issues and local personalities."

Another AP analysis by Beth Fouhy (11/4/09) began, "Voters nervous about the economy and fed up with the political establishment dominated the off-year elections, sending a strong message to President Barack Obama, who won the White House as a change agent but has himself become the face of political power and incumbency." How were the elections a "strong message" to Obama, exactly? Fouhy doesn't explain. According to exit polls (CBS News, 11/4/09):

"Majorities of voters in both states (56 percent in Virginia and 60 percent in New Jersey) said President Obama was not a factor in their vote today. Those who said Mr. Obama was a factor in New Jersey divided as to whether their vote was a vote for the president (19 percent) or against him (19 percent). In Virginia, slightly fewer voters said their vote was for Mr. Obama (17 percent) than against him (24 percent)."

The coverage's focus on the danger signs for Democrats is consistent with corporate media's traditional emphasis on the Democrats' need to move to the right (Extra!, 7-8/06). There was comparatively little discussion in post-Election Day commentary on the lessons to the Republican Party posed by New York's 23rd District, where national support for a far-right candidate led to a Democratic victory in an area that had voted Republican since the time of Ulysses S. Grant.

For some in the media, the important lesson was that the Democrats might have to put their agenda on hold. As the AP's Fouhy put it (albeit somewhat incoherently): "To be sure, each race was as much about local issues as about firing warning shots at the politically powerful. But taken together, the results of the 2009 off-year elections could imperil Obama's ambitious legislative agenda and point to a challenging environment in midterm elections next year."

And at the top of the media's list of what the Democrats should be rethinking: healthcare reform. On NBC's Today show (11/4/09), Meet the Press host David Gregory declared, "It's going to be a real fear within the White House that those moderate Democrats are going to now find it more difficult to cast a difficult vote on healthcare that could increase the deficit, that may be unpopular with key parts of their constituencies as they face voters next year." (According to the Congressional Budget Office, passing the House version of the healthcare reform bill would reduce the federal deficit by $104 billion over the next 10 years--CBO Director's Blog, 10/29/09.) On CBS Evening News (11/4/09), Bob Schieffer expressed a similar view about conservative Democrats and healthcare: "I think they're going to be more nervous about supporting it. If we do see any impact of these elections, I think it will be on the healthcare legislation and it may set it back a bit."

The AP's Sidoti wrote, "Democrats in swing-voting states and moderate-to-conservative districts may be less willing to back Obama on issues like healthcare after Virginia and New Jersey showed there are limits to how much he can protect his rank and file from fallout back home." Were Democratic gubernatorial candidates Jon Corzine and Creigh Deeds "rank-and-file" Democrats who were casting important healthcare votes?

The notion that the election will force Democrats to enact a healthcare reform bill with less healthcare in it is clearly an appealing one to corporate media. A Washington Post editorial (11/5/09) with the subhead "The Center Holds" concluded that the elections did

"signal to Democratic members of Congress--especially those who represent Republican-leaning states--that voters are getting nervous about the size and indebtedness of the federal government. If that fortifies centrist lawmakers and makes them more likely to insist that any healthcare reform come with a credible plan to pay for it, then that, too, would be a welcome consequence of Tuesday night."

By Norman Solomon
(Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America.)

In Washington, “healthcare reform” has degenerated into a sick joke.

At this point, only spinners who’ve succumbed to their own vertigo could use the word “robust” to describe the public option in the healthcare bill that the House Democratic leadership has sent to the floor.

“A main argument was that a public plan would save people money,” the New York Times has noted. But the insurance industry -- claiming to want a level playing field -- has gotten the Obama administration to bulldoze the plan. “After House Democratic leaders unveiled their health care bill [on October 29], the Congressional Budget Office said the public plan would cost more than private plans and only 6 million people would sign up.”

What remains is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will launch this country into a new phase of healthcare apartheid.

People who scrape together enough money to buy health insurance will discover that they’re riding in the back of the nation’s healthcare bus. The most “affordable” policies will be the ones with the highest deductibles and the worst coverage.

We’re hearing that large numbers of lower-income Americans will be provided with Medicaid coverage in the next decade. Translation: If funding holds up, they’ll get to hang onto a bottom rung of the healthcare ladder. Many will not be able to get the medical help they need, from primary care providers or specialists.

Not long ago, we were told that the Obama administration was aiming for a public option that could provide coverage to one out of every four Americans. Now the figure is around one out of every fifty.

Not long ago, the idea was that taxpayer-funded subsidies were to be used only for the public option. But now the entire concept has been hijacked by and for the private insurance industry. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it on October 8, private insurance companies “are going to get 50 million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the taxpayers.”

Pelosi was making the argument that the least the insurance industry could do, in return, would be to accept a higher level of taxation. But her comment was a telling acknowledgment that all the “public option” proposals now provide a massive funnel from the U.S. Treasury to the insurance conglomerates. The individual mandate is a monumental giveaway to private insurance firms.

The specter of “healthcare reform” that requires individuals to stretch their personal finances for often-abysmal insurance coverage is the worst of all worlds -- government intrusion for corporate benefit without any guarantees of decent health coverage.

In effect, the individual-mandate requirement tells people that obtaining health coverage is ultimately their own responsibility -- and the quality of the coverage is beside the point. In essence, when it comes to guaranteeing quality healthcare for all, the gist of the policy is: “Let’s not, and say we did.”

The predictable result is reinforcement of vast -- and often deadly -- inequities in access to healthcare.

With Washington making such a corporate mess of “healthcare reform,” the best way to get what we need -- healthcare for all as a human right -- will be to enact single-payer healthcare in one state after another.

But the House Democratic leadership has not been content to serve up a grimly pathetic “healthcare reform” bill. Speaker Pelosi has used her political leverage to quash Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s amendment -- approved months ago by the Education and Labor Committee -- that would grant waivers so that states could create their own single-payer system. Pelosi removed the Kucinich amendment from the House bill.

The California legislature has twice passed a strong single-payer bill, both times vetoed by the state’s current execrable governor. The official position of the California Democratic Party is unequivocally in favor of single-payer healthcare. And yet Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, did what she could to sabotage the single-payer position of her own party in her own state.

Sickening.

__________________________________

Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

EDITORIAL It's possible that Mayor Gavin Newsom took a long look at himself, his life, and his future last week and decided that politics — intense, 24/7/365 politics — wasn't what he wanted right now. It's possible (as Randy Shaw noted in Beyondchron.org) that Newsom "now joins longtime adversary Chris Daly in putting family relationships ahead of one's political career." It's possible that he never really wanted a future in electoral politics and was driven to run for governor less by personal ambition than by the desire of his advisors to see him in a higher political role.

In that case, Newsom has a responsibility to do the best job he can over the final two years of his term as mayor, then step away and find something else to do with his life.

But since it's also possible — even likely — that Newsom still hopes to have a political career, and that his decision to drop out of the governor's race was as much about his failure to gain any traction as it was about his family obligations, it's worth talking about why his campaign failed and what he can and should do next.

For starters, Newsom never expected to beat Attorney General Jerry Brown in the big-donor fundraising battle. He was hoping to put together a grassroots operation, to mobilize the Obama constituency, and build a war chest with tens of thousands of small donors organized through social media and technology. And that kind of effort could have worked — Brown has name recognition and money, but not much else. It's hard to imagine large masses of young activists donating time and energy to his primary campaign.

The problem was, those legions of California activists weren't terribly excited about Newsom either. And there are good reasons for that — reasons Newsom needs to understand if he wants to run for statewide elected office in the future.

If the real Gavin Newsom had been anything like the campaign picture his handlers tried to present, he would have been a serious candidate. Newsom the candidate was a leader who brought San Franciscans together to get things accomplished. He was a progressive thinker who created universal health care and an effective budget process with a rainy day fund that prevented teacher layoffs. He was bold enough to challenge federal and state law on same-sex marriage and demand equality for all.

But Newsom the mayor was actually a snippy politician who refused to work with the Board of Supervisors and would never engage his opponents. He was great at press releases but short on accomplishments — universal health care and the rainy day fund were projects put together by Tom Ammiano, one of the supervisors the mayor disdained, who is now a state Assembly member. He refused to take a lead role fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to promote clean energy and public power. And for all his success in moving same-sex marriage forward, he never once managed to bring that kind of progressive energy or policy-making to economic issues. His budget this year was the same as Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget — cuts and fees only. No new taxes.

As a result, the progressives and independent voters in his own town didn't support his campaign — and without the environmentalists, labor, tenants, and progressive elected officials from San Francisco behind him, there was no way he could generate an honest grassroots movement in a Democratic primary.

Now he's back from the campaign trail — and he has two years to pick up on the lessons of his ignominious political collapse. If he wants any kind of a political future, he needs to change. First, he needs to start engaging and working with the supervisors — even the ones who disagree with him. (Showing up for "question time" would be a huge step). He needs to take the city's structural budget deficit seriously and present plans for progressive taxes to help close it. He needs to show he can take on big powerful local interests — PG&E, for example — by opposing the utility's anti-public power initiative and putting his political capital on the line to support community choice aggregation.

Newsom the imperial mayor has, we hope, been a bit humbled. Let's see if he comes out of this chapter as an embittered, angry (and ultimately unsuccessful) mayor committed to punishing his enemies — or a serious city leader who can live up to his own hype. *

Photo by Jim Block

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Special note: read Barnett's scathing indictment of Examiner/Chronicle/JOA news coverage in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (9/31/1970)

Steve Barnett would have been highly amused with the way the Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle handled the obituary of his death on Oct. 13 of cardiac arrest. He was 73.

The AP and the Chronicle ran respectful obituaries of his illustrious career as a UC Berkeley law professor, prominent First Amendment advocate, critic of the California Supreme Court, a director of the California First Amendment Coalition, and widely published legal scholar on media, antitrust, and First Amendment law.

The Chronicle even tossed in a couple of paragraphs pointing out that Barnett was "a frequent commentator on the Newspaper Preservation Act, the 1970 federal law that allowed papers in the same market to cut costs by merging some of their operations."

In those days, the JOA combine had some serious antitrust and monopoly problems that were red meat for Barnett. The Chronicle and Examiner moved into a JOA monopoly in 1965 under the guise of preserving newspaper competition. They killed the third daily in town and then merged the Ex and Chron business functions to fix prices, pool profits, and share markets under a combination called a joint operating agreement (JOA.)

The big problem: the JOA was a violation of federal antitrust law and a U.S. Supreme Court decision in the famous Tucson JOA case that declared an existing JOA illegal. The Ex and Chron publishers were forced to work with the other JOA publishers to get a special act of Congress to legalize the merger retroactively, a most embarrassing position for the big daily newspapers. The San Francisco JOA was the latest and biggest JOA of them all and thus ought to have been the most newsworthy.

Barnett went to Washington in 1969 as an expert witness and testified against the special interest legislation before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. It was his first major volley against JOA journalism. He drew on his newspaper background (president of the Harvard Crimson, the daily paper at Harvard University, and reporter for small town dailies), his legal experience as a clerk for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr., and his UC legal credentials to put forth one of the most powerful statements against JOA journalism in San Francisco and against a total of 22 similar arrangements of 44 papers in 44 cities throughout the country.

He summed up the pre-merger Chronicle/Examiner position: "The Chronicle and Examiner presumably had competent legal advice, and any antitrust lawyer would have advised them in September 1965 that the Government had an excellent chance of winning the Tucson case (challenging an existing JOA); that their proposed combination was likewise vulnerable; that suit could be brought against it by a private plaintiff if not by the Justice Department; and that if they went ahead with the combination they were doing so at their own risk."

Barnett argued that JOAs were designed to protect monopolies, not competition, and should abide by federal antitrust law and the Supreme Court decision barring price-fixing, pooling profits, and sharing markets.

His most illustrative point came when he caught then Chronicle publisher Charles de Young Thieriot in a damning contradiction in testimony to the congressional committee in 1967.

Thieriot took the poverty oath when he testified on July 27, 1967. He said that he agreed to the merger with Hearst because he feared that Hearst might force the Chronicle out of business with its larger resources. In the same spirit, then Hearst publisher Charles Gould testified that San Francisco was a case of "three failing newspapers." Neither publisher bothered to produce financial statements to back up their claims of galloping poverty.

The day after the JOA publishers testified, J. Hart Clinton, publisher of the San Mateo Times and an antitrust attorney, blasted the two publishers by saying that the "failing status" of Hearst newspapers was the result not of "destructive competition" in Thieriot's phrase, but of the Chronicle's use of its profits from its government-licensed TV station, KRON-TV, to buy up expensive circulation in the suburbs and thereby gain the top position in the morning market and driving the Examiner "to the wall."

Clinton also placed in the record the July 1965 balance sheet of the Chronicle which showed, 60 days before the merger, that the Chronicle had $7 million in cash, of which $4,600,000 was cash on hand and $2,400,000 was in certificates of deposit. He said the Chronicle was making 15 per cent on its investment.

On Dec. 17th, backpedaling furiously, Thieriot responded to Clinton's charges in a letter to the subcommittee. The Chronicle's fortunes had taken a sudden and dramatic turn for the better. Instead of those "constant losses" from 1957 to 1963 that had prompted his fears for the Chronicle's survival, Thieriot now claimed that the Chronicle showed a profit for each year from 1959 to the time of the merger, with the exception of 1962.

Barnett pounced and summed up the contradictions in his 1969 testimony to the subcommittee. "The question arises," he said. "What kind of man, what kind of company, would submit to Congress, within the space of six months, two affirmations so fundamentally at war with each other?"

Barnett's point that JOA journalism kills competition was made clear back in San Francisco when the JOA partners blacked out his eminently newsworthy testimony. His point was made even more clear when the JOA partners either blacked out or watered down the JOA story for the duration. The other JOA papers and their chain papers performed in virtual lockstep.

In the spring of 1970, Barnett became a newspaper media critic. The FCC was holding hearings in San Francisco on whether to renew the lucrative television license of KRON-TV, owned by the Chronicle. It was an unprecedented and highly significant event in television history and was enormously important to the Chronicle and its JOA partner. The hearing was prompted by an explosive complaint to the FCC from Al Kihn, a KRON-TV cameraman, who charged that the station had slanted its news and programming to favor the Chronicle's ownership interests. Kihn provided many KRON memoes and specifics to back up his complaint and he testified at the hearing.

Barnett went every day to the 32 days of hearings, read the entire transcript of 6,396 pages, and then compared the coverage in both papers. He wrote a long, detailed story for the Guardian (10/31/1970) on his findings. He reported that he was hard put to realize the hearings and the Ex/Chron coverage were of the same event and that they came out as if directed by the Chronicle's family law firm.

"In sum," he wrote, "the hearing coverage was characterized by suppression, bias, obfuscation and just plain bad reporting. Of particular note: the Examiner and Chronicle both pitched in to slant and suppress the story to protect the interests of the Chronicle." He noted that the lengthy hearings went by without a word from the Chron/Ex star columnists Herb Caen, Charles McCabe, Art Hoppe, Ralph Gleason, Dick Nolan, Guy Wright, and others. And, he pointed out, the two television columnists, Terence O'Flaherty for the Chronicle and Dwight Newton for the Examiner, can point to "18 months of unblemished silence on the KRON case, the biggest story on their beat."

The hearing, he concluded, exemplifies JOA journalism. "The Chronicle and Examiner do not compete with each other with respect to news content. They have got what they wanted from their monopoly pact: the rich, quiet life of a journalistic leisure world."

Then, on July 25, 1970, one day after then President Nixon signed the Newspaper Preservation Act, Barnett dropped the bomb on the Ex/Chron/JOA. Barnett filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Bay Guardian challenging the constitutionality of the act. Barnett put forth an unusual argument: that the combination had taken the lion's share of print advertising in San Francisco through its monopoly-inflated joint rate, thereby leaving only crumbs for the Guardian and other papers in town. And this, he argued, violated the free press provision of the First Amendment.

It was a landmark case, pitting the four-year-old Guardian against the combined resources of the Chronicle and Hearst, with their family fortunes, and the resources of the largest and most powerful JOA chains in the country (Hearst, Knight-Ridder, Cox, Scripps-Howard, Block et al). Billions of dollars of JOA monopoly profits were at stake as well as the potential of serious fines and penalties for massive antitrust violations for years.

Barnett , an indefatigable adversary, recruited several attorneys along the way to keep the uphill battle going for five years. Alas, despite Barnett's magesterial briefs and legal maneuvers, the judge tossed out his First Amendment argument early on and the case was damaged. But he soldiered on with compelling federal antitrust arguments.

In 1975, the Ex/Chron/JOA forces had enough of Barnett and the Guardian and, concerned about their legal liability and bad publicity from the case and four related treble damage cases, threw in the towel. Barnett, with the valuable help of his latest co-counsel, the Joseph Cooper law firm, settled the case for the Guardian.

Barnett kept up his criticism of media monopoly through the years. "Steve became the leading critical commentator" on JOA legislation operating "under the umbrella of antitrust immunity," said Berkeley law professor Richard Busbaum in a UC Berkeley press release. "In legislative hearings, participation in litigation, and innumerable op-ed pieces, he kept the problematic exception under constant scrutiny." He was last heard blasting the Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News JOA for violating antitrust law when the Rocky Mountain News went out of business.

Barnett took on a lot of other battles and causes during his career, but to us at the Guardian his courageous JOA fight and his lawsuit were the most important and most enduring. He helped us define the Guardian as a real alternative paper and got us the money with the settlement to make the necessary move from bi-weekly to weekly circulation.

Barnett is survived by his wife, Karine, their son, Alexander, his stepson, Levon, and a sister, Linda Beiser of Avon, Connecticut. "Steve was a wonderful stepfather to Levon," his sister said. "As he pondered his accomplishments at retirement he rued the fact that he had never fathered any children of his own. He became a father for the first time at age 69 and they spent virtually every waking hour together and enjoyed a very close relationship."

Karine told me she and Steve had for months planned a party for Alex's fifth birthday. Steve had bought and wrapped a gift for him.

Karine decided to have a combined event of the birthday and a life celebration for Steve. It was held on Sunday, Oct. 25th in the Barnett home in the Montclair hills.

"The idea sounds strange," Karine said. "But it was good for everyone. Steve's old friends (faculty, neighbors, outside law school friends, family)and Alex's schoolmates with their parents and teachers with the kids came. All turned out to be very good. I had cooked all night the night before, so there was plenty of good food and drinks.

"All the guests went home with peace inside, seeing Alex, running around and carrying the life and the liveliness around, keeping his father's home alive. Steve would have loved seeing all the people around and especially his only son happy."

The family suggested donations in Barnett's memory to the Parkinson Association of Northern California, 900 Fulton Ave., Suite 100-5, Sacramento, Calif. 95825-4516.

By Dick Meister

It was 20 years ago this month that the Berlin Wall finally fell, one of the last vestiges of the Cold War. But though it's long gone, I and I'm sure many others, have not forgotten that Soviet-erected barrier which had stood for 28 years as a nearly impenetrable divider between the Soviet East and the West.

I especially remember the first time I saw the wall, just after it went up in 1961. The atmosphere was incredibly tense, a tension I and other reporters had found almost too acute to describe.

West Berliners sat at sidewalk cafes downtown, chatting amiably but without gaiety. Genuine relaxation seemed impossible because of the newly-constructed wall that stood just a few miles away. Out there the crowds were greater, but almost no one was talking.

The night before, an East Berliner had tried to get beyond the wall. Police chased him from rooftop to rooftop, but he reached a drainpipe on a building fronting on West Berlin.

West Berlin police fired across the wall, hoping to give the young man the chance to reach the sidewalk and the freedom he had shouted for. But he lost his grip and fell to his death.

Wreaths lay on the spot that fall afternoon, placed there by some of the West Berliners who stood in the large, quiet crowds lining the streets that bordered the wall. Twice before, their vigil had been broken. That had come earlier in the day, when the East Berlin police had fired across the wall, though without doing damage.

What would be next? Would it be just pistol fire? The crowd didn't know, so it waited. Here was the East-West confrontation in a single frightening capsule.

Rows and rows of red flags and the flags of the East's German Democratic Republic waved overhead. The wall below was a crude structure hurriedly constructed of used brick, but sturdy and topped with wicked-looking barbed wire and jagged chunks of broken glass.

Above the wall, caps of the East Berlin police standing guard were everywhere evident. Here and there a guard in bright green uniform showed himself -- always with at least two comrades. Their grimness contrasted sharply with the outward ease of the gray-uniformed West Berlin police standing across the street from them. They smiled as they chatted with the curious onlookers.

At one spot, East Berlin workmen were heightening the wall, placidly gazing now and then at the intently staring West Berliners. A young woman on the West Berlin side sauntered to within a few feet of the spot and casually pointed a camera into the face of a guard peering over. For what must have been the thousandth time, he allowed his photo to be taken. Then, for just a moment, the crisis was forgotten.

Other guards popped up to catch a glimpse of the woman, and one bantered with her suggestively. A nervous titter started through the crowd, but no one laughed out loud. The onlookers seemed embarrassed. The titter died away quickly and nerves were once more drawn taut. A West Berliner shouted insults at the East Berlin guards. His dog barked at them.

Then it was quiet again, save for the occasional roar of military jeeps as they sped through the city's western sector, constantly patrolling the wall.

On some street corners, West Berliners stood on ladders, looking across and above the wall through binoculars, waving at East Berliners in far-off buildings. In the upper floors of buildings on either side, people leaned from windows to view the scene below.

On both sides, the buildings mirrored desolation. Most showed heavy scars from the bombs of World War II, and piles of rubble lay near them. In the West, however, there were some new apartment houses, and laden fruit stands and bright shops. But there was a great difference, far beyond shops, buildings and the attitude of police. Whatever else was felt on the western side of the wall, it was not the helplessness and desolation that hovered on the eastern side.

Just beyond the wall in East Berlin stood a church, with a figure of Christ out front, beckoning. But close by the church stood armed men in bright green uniforms, there to keep people from the simple act of crossing from one side of a street to another.

Let A Hundred Theories Bloom

By George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz

BUDAPEST – The economic and financial crisis has been a telling moment for the economics profession, for it has put many long-standing ideas to the test. If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern.

But there is, in fact, a much greater diversity of ideas within the economics profession than is often realized. This year’s Nobel laureates in economics are two scholars whose life work explored alternative approaches. Economics has generated a wealth of ideas, many of which argue that markets are not necessarily either efficient or stable, or that the economy, and our society, is not well described by the standard models of competitive equilibrium used by a majority of economists.

A long line of research has shown that even using the models of the so-called “rational expectations” school of economics, markets might not behave stably, and that there can be price bubbles. The crisis has, indeed, provided ample evidence that investors are far from rational; but the flaws in the rational expectations line of reasoning—hidden assumptions such as that all investors have the same information—had been exposed well before the crisis.

Just as the crisis has reinvigorated thinking about the need for regulation, so it has given new impetus to the exploration of alternative strands of thought that would provide better insights into how our complex economic system functions – and perhaps also to the search for policies that might avert a recurrence of the recent calamity.

Fortunately, while some economists were pushing the idea of self-regulating, fully efficient markets that always remain at full employment, other economists and social scientists have been exploring a variety of different approaches. These include agent-based models that emphasize the diversity of circumstances; network models, which focus on the complex interrelations among firms (such as those that enable bankruptcy cascades); a fresh look at the neglected work of Hyman Minsky on financial crises (which have increased in frequency since deregulation began three decades ago); and innovation models, which attempt to explain the dynamics of growth.

Much of the most exciting work in economics now underway extends the boundary of economics to include work by psychologists, political scientists, and sociologists. We have much to learn, too, from economic history. For all the fanfare surrounding financial innovation, this crisis is remarkably similar to past financial crises, except that the complexity of new financial products reduced transparency, aggravating fear about what might happen should there not be a massive public bailout.

Ideas matter, as much or perhaps even more than self-interest. Our regulators and elected officials were politically captured – special interests in the financial markets gained a great deal from rampant deregulation and the failure to adapt the regulatory structure to the new products. But our regulators and politicians also suffered from intellectual capture. They need a wider and more robust portfolio of ideas to draw upon.

That is why the recent announcement by George Soros at the Central European University in Budapest of the creation of a well-funded Initiative for New Economic Thinking (INET) to help support these is so exciting. Research grants, symposia, conferences, and a new journal – all will help encourage new ideas and collaborative efforts to flourish.

INET has been given complete freedom – with respect to both content and strategy – and one hopes that it will draw further support from other sources. Its only commitment is to “new economic thinking,” in the broadest sense. Last month, Soros assembled a remarkable group of economic luminaries, from across the spectrum of the profession –theory to policy, left to right, young and old, establishment and counter-establishment—to discuss the need and prospects for such an initiative, and how it might best proceed.

For the past three decades, one strand within the economics profession was constructing models that assumed that markets worked perfectly. This assumption overshadowed a wide body of research that helped explain why markets often work imperfectly – why, indeed, there are widespread market failures.

The marketplace for ideas also often works in a way that is less than ideal. In a world of human fallibility and imperfect understanding of the complexity of the economy, INET holds out the promise of the pursuit of alternative strands of thought – and thereby at least ameliorating this costly market imperfection.

George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University and winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize, served as Chairman of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org

By Bruce B. Brugmann

As I was preparing to update my annual Halloween blog, I checked the Guardian politics blog to see what the action looked like for tomorrow night on Halloween Eve.

Two years ago, Mayor Gavin Newsom shut down the Halloween celebration in the Castro, killing off one of San Francisco's most famous party events. But this year, as Melanie Ruiz reports, a local flash mob operator by the name of Amandeep "Deep" Jawa is organizing an unauthorized "Take Back Halloween" party in front of the Ferry building.He has arranged for at least two mobile DJs to spin and more than 300 people have signed up on Facebook.
But he says that he has no permits and the police may shut down the event.

Well, back where I come from in the Halloweens of my youth, we didn't get permits, didn't have authorization, and the police tried and failed to shut us down our events. This was in my hometown of Rock Rapids, a small farming community nestled along the Rock River in northwest Iowa. But we did have some fast times and created some almost famous urban legends on Halloween. I can speak for a generation or two back in the early 1950s when Halloween was the one night of the year when we could raise a little hell and and hope to stay one step ahead of the cops.

It was all quite civilized. The Casjens gang would gather (no girls allowed) and set out about our evening's business, being careful to stay away from the houses of watchful parents and Shinny on patrol. Dave Dietz and I specialized in finding cars with keys in the ignition and driving them to the other end of town and just leaving them. We tipped over an outhouse or two, the small town cliche, but one time we thought there was someone inside. We never hung around to find out. There was some mischief with fences and shrubs and lawn sprinklers and potted plants on porches.

After an evening of such lusty adventures, we would go home about ll p.m. and tell our parents what we had been up to and how we evaded Shinny the whole evening and they would (generally) be relieved. Shinny would just drive around in his patrol car and shine his lights here and there and do some honking. But somehow he never caught anybody or made any serious followup investigation. And the targets of our pranks never seemed to make police complaints. I once asked Paul Smith, the editor of the Lyon County Reporter, why he never wrote up this bit of zesty small town lore. "Bruce," he said, "I don't want things to get out of hand." During my era, they never did.

Nonetheless, the city elders decided to keep Halloween devastation to a minimum and scheduled a dance in the Community Building, with the misbegotten idea the pranksters would give up their errant ways and come to the dance. The Casjens Gang would have none of this. In fact it was the year of the dance diversion that we made our most culturally significant contribution to Halloween lore in Rock Rapids. We happened upon a boxcar, loaded with coal, parked on a siding a block or so from Main Street, which also served as a busy main arterial highway for cars coming across northwest Iowa.

It is not clear to this day who came up with the idea of rolling the boxcar across Main Street and blocking all traffic coming from both directions. We massed behind the car and pushed and pushed but it wouldn't budge. Then Bob Babl came up with a brilliant stroke: to use a special lever his dad used to move boxcars full of lumber for his nearby lumberyard. Bob slipped through a fence behind the yard and somehow managed to find the lever in the dark.

We massed again, now some 20 or so strong, behind the car and waited for the signal to push. Willie Ver Meer climbed to the top of the car and wrenched the wheel that set the brakes. We heaved in unison and the car moved slowly on the tracks until it reached the middle of Main Street. Willie gave a mighty heave and ground the car to a dead stop, bang, square in the middle of the street. Almost immediately, the cars started lining up on both sides of the car, honking away. Grace under pressure. An historic event. Man, were we proud.

We slipped away and from a safe distance watched the fruits of our labor unfold. Shinny, the ever resourceful police chief, soon came upon the scene. He strode into the dance in the nearby Community Building and commandeered enough of the dancers to come out and help him move the car back onto its siding. We bided our time and then went back and pushed the car once again into the middle of the street. Jerry Prahl added a nice touch by rolling out a batch of Firestone tires onto the street from his Dad's nearby store. Suddenly, Main Street was a boxcar- blocked, tire-ridden mess. Again, the cars started lining up, honking away. Then we fled, figuring we were now wanted pranksters and needed to be on the lam.

The Casjens gang and groupies have retold the story through the years at our regular get togethers at the Sportsmen Club bar at Heritage Days in Rock Rapids and at our all-Rock Rapids Cocktail Party and Beer Kegger held in the back lawn of the Mary Rose Babl Hindt house in Cupertino. We would jokingly say that the statute of limitations never runs out in Rock Rapids and so we needed to be careful what we said and ought not to disclose fully the involvement of Dave Dietz, Hermie Casjens, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Jerry Prahl, Bob Babl, Romain Hahn, Willie Ver Meer, and lots of others, some who were there working in peril, others who declared they were there safely after the fact.

Two years ago, just before Halloween, I was invited back to Rock Rapids to speak to a fund-raising event for the local high school. It was a a crisp clear night just like the night of Halloween in l95l and a perfect setting to tell the story publicly in town for the first time. The event was at the new community building, on Main Street, just a block or so from the old Community Building, and a block or so from the siding where we found the boxcar. I told the audience that Shinny had assured me the statute of limitations had run out in Rock Rapids and that I could now, 54 years later, tell the boxcar- across -Main -Street caper with no fear of prosecution. And so I did, with relish.

Chuck Telford was in the audience and I recalled that he had driven up to us that night, as part of a civilian patrol, and inquired as to what we were doing. When he could see what we were doing, he just quietly drove off. "Very civilized behavior," I said. Afterward, I told Chuck I would back him for mayor, on the basis of that incident alone. Craig Vinson, then the highway patrolman for the area, came up to me and said he remembered the incident vividly because he was on duty that night and came upon the boxcar blocking the highway with long lines of honking cars. "I got ahold of Shinny that night and told him it was his job to move the boxcar and get it off the highway," he said. Others said they had gotten a whiff of the story but were never able to pin it down. The high school principal and superintendent didn't say much and, I suspect, were worried my tale might lead to the Rock Rapids version of the movie "Ferris Buhler Takes A Day Off."

For years, I said in my talk, I didn't think that Shinny ever knew exactly what happened or who was involved in the caper or how we pulled it off, twice, almost before his very eyes. Shinny retired in Rock Rapids and I saw him twice a year when I came back to visit my parents. But I never said anything and he never said anything but finally a couple of years ago I found the right moment and cautiously filled him in. He chuckled and said, "Let's drink to it." We did. And we have been drinking to it ever since.

This year, for our reunion of the famous Dream Class of l953, I invited Shinny to sit in with us. He was still going strong at 89. He assured us once again that the statute of limitations had run out and we could speak openly about the Halloween caper in his presence and in front of witnesses. So Dave Dietz and I retold the story with expansiveness and gusto. Shinny supplied some key missing details. For example, he said that he didn't get his troops out of the dance but out of the nearby movie theater with the threat that he would arrest them if they didn't help him move the boxcar.

So there we were, 57 years later, working to make the fast times even faster on Halloween in Rock Rapids. Did he ever arrest anybody on Halloween? "No," he said. "I would just shine my car lights and everybody would run."
Any hard feelings? Shinny chuckled. "Naw," he replied. "Let's drink to Halloween in the good old days." And so we did. Shinny still calls me now and then in my office in San Francisco and he always tells the receptionist, "Tell Bruce, it's Shinny. I'm his parole officer in Rock Rapids." Alas, Shinny died earlier this year but I am glad that we were able to confess properly to the top cop of Rock Rapids in l951 and to hear Shinny's side of the story.

Those were the days, my friends. The days of fast times and safe Halloweens in Rock
Rapids, Iowa. B3

P.S.: Ted Fisch, one of the conspirators, called me the other day. He was the center when I was the left-handed quarterback on our 195l team. He became a colonel in the Air Force and loved to say that he was the only field grade officer he knew of who was a solid Democrat. We went over the Obama prospects and the campaign in detail. And then he said, Bruce, a friend of mine googled my name the other day and found that I was mentioned in your Halloween story. How could that be? Does that mean I am up there forever? Somehow, it made me feel good.

P.S. I love smalltown lore and will from time to time lay out the life and fast times and wild adventures of my hometown, the best little town in the territory. I invite you to contribute your smalltown stories and lore.

1.

So why did President Obama

Decline to meet the Dalai Lama?

It's said that he must curry favor

With Chiina. Yes, it has our waiver

To toss its people in the clink

For how they pray or what they think

And we've resolved that we won't fret

About the way it rules Tibet.

2.

For going along when China's rotten

It's hard to think of what we've gotten.

Calvin Trillin, The Nation, ll/9/09

By David Balt , Stephanie Gross

(The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all.)

View the full memo (pdf)

Competition is the lodestar of the marketplace. Where competition thrives, consumers benefit from numerous choices, low prices, superior service, and innovation. But where competition is absent, consumers pay more for less, have fewer choices, and are at the mercy of market participants with unbridled power. Bringing competition to health insurance markets is essential to achieve meaningful health care reform, and as a first step Congress should eliminate the antitrust exemption that prevents effective federal enforcement against health insurers.

It is becoming clear in the health care debate that health insurance markets are broken. A tsunami of health insurance mergers has led to high levels of concentration in practically every market to the point where there are only one or two dominant insurers in many states. New companies face substantial entry barriers, and so these local monopolies go unchallenged.

By Dick Meister

“2X2L calling CQ … 2X2L calling CQ, New York …. Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone?

Millions of Americans – panic-stricken, many of them – waited anxiously for a response to the message, delivered over the CBS radio network in slow flat, mournful tones on a crisp Halloween eve. It was Oct. 30, 1938.

“Isn’t … there … anyone?”

There wasn’t. Listeners heard only the slapping sounds of the Hudson River.

Many of New York’s residents were dead. The others had fled in panic from “five great machines,” as tall as the tallest of the city’s skyscrapers, that the radio announcer had described in the last words he would ever utter. The metallic monsters had crossed the Hudson “like a man wading a brook,” destroying all who stood in their way.

It was the War of the Worlds, Mars versus Earth, and the Martians were winning with horrifying ease. Their giant machines had landed in the New Jersey village of Grovers Mill, and soon they would be coming to your town, too – and yours … and yours. Nothing could stop them.

The War of the Worlds had sprung with frightening clarity from the extremely fertile imagination of Orson Welles and the other young members of the Mercury Theater of the Air who adopted H.G. Wells’ novel of that name and dramatized it so brilliantly – and believably – from the CBS radio studios on that long ago Halloween eve.

Their use of realistic sounding bulletins and other tools of radio news departments made it sound as if Martian machines truly were everywhere, and everywhere invincible.

Studies done at the time show that at least one million of the program’s estimated six million listeners panicked.

“People all over the United States were praying, crying, fleeing frantically to escape death from the Martians,” noted Hadley Cantril, an actual Princeton professor who directed the most detailed study of the panic that was caused in part by the pronouncements of “Richard Pierson,” a bogus Princeton professor played by Welles.

“Some ran to rescue loved ones. Others telephoned farewells or warnings, hurried to inform neighbors … summoned ambulances and police cars …. For weeks after the broadcast, newspapers carried human interest stories relating the shock and terror of local citizens.”

“When the Martians started coming north from Trenton we really got scared,” a New Jerseyian told one of Professor Cantril’s interviewers. “They would soon be in our town. I drove right through Newberg and never even knew I went through it … I was going eighty miles an hour most of the way. I remember not giving a damn, as what difference did it make which way I’d get killed.”

Those who didn’t join the streams of cars that clogged the highways clogged the phone lines or huddled in cellars and living rooms to await the end, some with pitchfork, shotgun or Bible in hand.

“I knew it was something terrible and I was frightened,” a woman recalled. “When they told us what road to take, and to get up over the hills, and the children began to cry, the family decided to go. We took blankets and my granddaughter wanted to take the cat and the canary.”

It was an extremely rare occurrence, as Cantril noted: “Probably never before have so many people in all walks of life and in all parts of the country become so suddenly and so intensely disturbed ….”

And never since then has the country experienced such deep and widespread fear and anxiety. Not even after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor three years later. Not even in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was a unique display of widespread panic. Many people actually believed their very world was coming to an end and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

Welles had made clear at the start that the presentation was fictional. But radio listeners generally paid little attention to opening announcements, and many Sunday night listeners commonly turned first to the very popular Edgar Bergen-Charley McCarthy show that was broadcast over another network in the same 8 p.m. time slot, turning to the Mercury Theater out of curiosity only later.

What they heard that Sunday Halloween eve were primarily news reports and commentaries ingeniously patterned on the real reports and commentaries that were constantly interrupting programs to report the aggressive actions of Nazi Germany and other events that would shortly lead to the outbreak of World War II.

People expected to hear the worst. Most also expected that what they heard would be accurate, radio having supplanted newspapers as the most trusted and relied upon of the mass media.

It helped, too, that much of the information was presented by “experts” – Welles and other make-believe professors from universities around the world, supposed astronomers, army officers and Red Cross officials, even the otherwise unidentified “secretary of the interior.”

“I believed the broadcast as soon as I heard the professor from Princeton and the officials in Washington,” as one listener recalled.

Even relatively sophisticated and well-informed listeners were fooled by what Cantril cited as the program’s “sheer dramatic excellence.”

Events developed slowly, starting with the relatively credible – brief news bulletins calmly reporting some “atmospheric disturbances,” later some “explosions of incandescent gas,” and finally the discovery of what appeared to be a large meteorite. Only then came the incredible – the discovery that the “meteorite” was a Martian spaceship, reported in a halting, incredulous manner by the “reporter” supposedly broadcasting live from Grovers Mill.

The police, the New Jersey State Guard, the army – none could subdue the invaders. Finally, the “secretary of the interior” announced that man could do no more, that the only hope for deliverance from the Martians was to ”place our faith in God.”

Few listeners were in a position to make independent judgments about matters Martian. Few knew astronomy, and what standard does one use to judge an invasion from Mars anyway?

Listeners could easily have turned to other radio networks for the truth, of course, but many were too caught up in the masterful drama of the CBS program to think of that.

Even some people who lived near the alleged invasion site were fooled. “I looked out the window and everything was the same as usual,” said one, “so I thought it hadn’t reached our section yet.”

The second half of the hour-long broadcast, with “Professor Pierson” wandering dazedly through the deserted and ravaged streets of New York, should have made it obvious to even the most gullible that they had been listening to drama rather than news. Welles, shocked and shaken by the listener response, followed that quickly with an ad-libbed assurance that it had all been make-believe.

But by then, many people had left their radios. They had other ways in which to spend their last hours on Earth.

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom has set off something of a crisis in San Francisco government by insisting that he will defy the city law that seeks to protect immigrant youth from deportation. While Newsom claims that the sanctuary policy approved 8-2 by the supervisors last week violates federal law (something the same-sex marriage advocate hasn't worried so much about in the past), this is really a matter of politics. Newsom, candidate for governor of California, doesn't want to seem soft on crime — so Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, is siding with the federal immigration authorities.

He's also putting out a misleading message about the law.

The sanctuary legislation, by Sup. David Campos, is an attempt to deal with a very real — and serious — problem. Under the city's current policy, any time a young person is arrested and the juvenile probation department thinks he or she might be lack documentation, the officers involved contact Immigration Control and Enforcement. That means kids who have lived in this country for years and have no ties to their birth nation can be deported — just on the basis of an arrest that could turn out to be groundless.

Campos' law establishes a city policy that prohibits local law enforcement from reporting juvenile offenders to ICE until they've been convicted of a crime. That's just basic due process.

Newsom insists (and the city attorney's office agrees) that no city employee can be penalized for contacting ICE. But that's not the point of this law. Right now, juvenile officers are required to call ICE when they have someone in custody who may be undocumented. There's no federal law saying this has to happen. And it's perfectly legal — and appropriate — to lift that mandate and to say, in effect, that no city employee should be penalized for declining to turn a kid over to the feds.

At this point, the city attorney hasn't argued that the Campos bill is illegal or unenforceable, and no judge has overturned it. When, as expected, the supervisors override Newsom's certain veto, the bill will become city law — presumptively valid until a court rules otherwise. And Newsom has a legal obligation as mayor to abide by and enforce that law.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera is in something of a bind here since he has to represent both the mayor and the supervisors. But he needs to make clear, in public, that while he warned of possible legal implications of the Campos legislation, right now there is nothing preventing the law from taking effect — and that the mayor, like any other city official, is required to follow it.

The supervisors need to keep pushing the issue, too. And they need to be prepared to go to court to seek a writ mandating that the city's chief executive follow his sworn oath and faithfully execute the law.

None of this needs to happen. Newsom could have worked with Campos on the legislation. Instead, the mayor continues to defy the board and act like the sort of imperial executive who is utterly unqualified for any higher office. For the sake of innocent kids facing the horrors of deportation, San Francisco's reputation as a sanctuary city and Newsom's own political future, he needs to back off and agree to abide by the city's own laws.

"West Fest, Woodstock 40th Anniversary this Sunday October 25th, 72 acts, 4 stages, 26 poster artists- FREE-9 a.m. to 6 p.m.Golden Gate Park. Let the magic begin."

But I like to think of the event as full of Mel Belli's friends and coming in a direct line from the famous Human Be-In of l967 and the Summer 0f Love and the Summer of Love anniversaries and other such events in Golden Gate Park.

Let me explain the story as told to me by the late Michael Bowen, a promoter with Allen Cohen of the Be-In. Bowen called me from Sweden, where he was living, on the eve of the 40th Summer of Love event in 2007. He said the story, a closeted San Francisco classic, had never before been told and he wanted it out. Mel Belli was the famous San Francisco attorney and King of Torts, as he liked to call himself. He's been dead for many years, but to me his spirit will live on in Sunday's Woodstock event.
Bowen said he and Cohen were in desperate need of a permit for their event because, as hippie activists, they were persona non grata at City Hall. So Bowen went to the downtown office of his friend Mel Belli and asked for help.

Belli sent his secretary down to City Hall and she returned later that afternoon with a permit.

It read, "A permit for Mel Belli and his friends." And so Mel Belii and his friends showed up by the tens of thousands and turned the Human Be-In into a world famous cultural event and the precursor to the Summer of Love and anti-war events that followed. The event drove the tac squad crazy and police and City Hall officials scurried about trying to find out how this huge event blossomed almost over night. Bowen loved retelling the story and swore up and down to me that it was true. I believed him.

There will once again be tens of thousands at the Woodstock event. And they will all be in an Oraclean sense Mel Belli's friends. Mel would like that. B3

Poster by Carolyn Ferris

Poster by Mike Dolgushkin

To view more West Fest posters click here, here, and here.

Click here to read Johnny Ray Huston's preview of West Fest, Park life -- and 3,000 guitars.

EXPLANATIONS FROM

THE NOBEL COMMITTEE

Don't be surprised. Don't gasp. Don't faint.

We've simply said, "George Bush he ain't."

The prize diplomacy can reap'll

Prevent this guy from bombing people.

Since Henry Kissinger has won,

You know that this is all in fun.

Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet, The Nation, Nov. 2, 2009

By Norman Solomon

(Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”)

Almost eight years after choosing Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan government, Uncle Sam would like to give him a pink slip. But it’s not easy. And the grim fiasco of Afghanistan’s last election is shadowing the next.

Another display of electioneering and voting has been ordered up from Washington. But after a chemical mix has blown a hole through the roof -- with all the elements for massive fraud still in place -- what’s the point of throwing together the same ingredients?

This time, the spinners in Washington hope to be better prepared.

After such a show, the predictable encore will be further escalation of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

The runoff election has not been scheduled for the benefit of Afghan society. Many millions of people in Afghanistan are now bracing themselves. Every factor that boosted the crescendo of violence last time, cresting with several hundred insurgent attacks on election day, is still present.

The days between now and the scheduled runoff will bring heightened fear, more violence, more killing. And for what?

As with the last election, the intended beneficiaries are far from Afghanistan. In Kabul, shortly after the August 20 vote, I heard many Afghans comment that the purpose of the election was to satisfy North America and Western Europe.

Meanwhile, who is this guy Abdullah, often hyped but rarely scrutinized by the U.S. news media?

At the end of August, when I interviewed the courageous Afghan antiwar feminist Malalai Joya in Kabul, she put it this way: You can give a warlord a shave, a haircut and an expensive suit, but he’s still a warlord.

The most grisly years in Afghanistan’s capital were from 1992 to 1996, when dueling warlords mercilessly rocketed and shelled Kabul. Slaughter of civilians in the city was routine. Estimates of deaths among Kabul residents during those years range from 50,000 to 65,000. Abdullah was one of the warlords most directly engaged in ordering the carnage.

Now the Obama administration and congressional leaders -- with Sen. John Kerry playing a starring role in recent days -- are making a determined effort to legitimize the Afghan government as a prelude to further U.S. escalation of the war.

This kind of thing happened so many times during the Vietnam War that people lost count. The assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in early November 1963 was an especially dramatic delivery of a pink slip from the White House. What followed was a procession of corrupt human-rights abusers who led South Vietnam’s government.

Some, like bit player Nguyen Khanh, are barely remembered. Others, notably Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, had staying power as Uncle Sam’s servants in Saigon. And the Pentagon machinery kept revving its gears.

“We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality," freelance American reporter Michael Herr observed in Vietnam. "Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop."

In the midst of military escalation, the hopeful stories we tell ourselves -- and the tales that top U.S. officials and mass media keep tweaking and repeating -- are whistling past other people’s graveyards.

Doing some whistling themselves, many progressives have exaggerated the extent of recent concerns about this war among Democratic leaders in Congress and the White House. Tactical disputes and strategic
reviews should not be mistaken for willingness to move away from a basic policy of endless war.

While the absence of democracy in Afghanistan is glaring, the failure of democracy in the United States is pernicious. At the grassroots, we have yet to grasp the magnitude of this war’s momentum -- or to exercise our capacities to stop it.

_____________________________________

Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” His appearance on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” last month,
warning against escalation of the Afghanistan war, is now on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5v_Shz2do