Monday 29 December 2014

The Failure of Mainstream Media. - The AIM Network

The Failure of Mainstream Media. - The AIM Network



The Failure of Mainstream Media.














The way in which the mainstream media (MSM)
chooses to report and discuss the economy, i.e. in conventional
neo-liberal terms, reinforces the notion that the economy is some sort
of God who must be served and obeyed by the people in one particular
way to the exclusion of any other. This is a false concept wrapped in
metaphorical jargon that has not only poisoned our minds but, in the
process, allowed us to become enslaved to its will.



The way the media frames its articles and the language it uses to
present them, crowds out any alternative discussion and prevents
alternative concepts being presented. As a result, the present
government’s ideological agenda of austerity and surplus driven
macroeconomics becomes something akin to the Ten Commandments, which we
must obey and accept. This too, is a false concept.



It is time for a more progressive view to be aired, discussed and debated.


The progressive vision of an economy is the reverse of the existing
one, where it serves the people, advancing public purpose, whatever that
might be. It is a vision where, within the constraints of a healthy
environment, we live in harmony with the planet, where equality is the
principle commandment, where we control everything about it and we use
it to advance our quality of life, without destroying the planet and
without leaving anybody behind.



languageThe
barrier that is preventing this progressive view from being debated is
in the language used to explain it. We are trained in our early language
to think of the word ‘deficit’ as bad. It equates with concepts of
debt, of owing, of a burden, of having to restore a shortfall, etc. It
isn’t helped at all by comparing a nation’s economy to household
budgeting.



We haven’t been able to link the word, ‘deficit’ with something good,
with employment, with growth, because the mainstream media won’t
indulge it. They are seduced by convention, afraid to think outside the
square.



To this end, the MSM have allowed the present government’s failed
ideology to prevail. Where it fails is in thinking that a surplus is a
goal rather than a tool. Surpluses and deficits should be determined by
what we, as a nation, want and should be used to suit the circumstances
at the time. Surpluses and deficits are not an end in themselves, they
are tools used to achieve an outcome.



What we want right now is full employment or as close to full
employment as we can come. In our present circumstances, that will not
be achieved by trying to bring the budget into surplus. The media’s
so-called economic experts should be framing their articles to reflect
this. At the moment they are seduced by the metaphorical language that
undermines any hope of full employment.



Using the current issue of welfare, the one the media love to milk,
where they grasp at any suggestion of waste and abuse, of lazy people
not trying to find work, of the sick bludging on the system, we can
demonstrate an economic imperative they never highlight.



welfareWhat
they never explain and what the present government doesn’t realise is
that when tax revenues fall, welfare payments increase. One works
inversely with the other. These are the automatic stabilisers where the
common denominator is the workforce participation rate and by
association, the GDP growth rate.



These stabilisers restrict the range of the business cycle by
expanding and contracting depending on the level of fiscal policy. When
unemployment rises so do welfare payments. If, for example, Scott
Morrison thinks he can reduce welfare payments while tax revenues are in
decline he is effectively trying to reverse a natural outcome. It is a
bit like trying to go forward when the car is in reverse gear.



So, if his approach to welfare payments is similar to his approach to
stopping the boats, i.e. having no time for the personal impact on his
decisions, just the outcome relative to the government’s policy
position, he will discover that just like stopping the boats, reigning
in welfare spending is a dirty science. Outcomes will vary in ways he
and the government cannot foresee.



Thinking that having a business friendly conservative government will
automatically generate business confidence is foolhardy at best, also
lazy and already proving to be a false expectation. Only full or near
full employment will generate demand of the kind that will lift us out
of stagflation. The unemployed cannot find jobs if the jobs are not
there. At the last count, there were approximately 770,000 unemployed
and less than 150,000 jobs advertised.



As long as governments, like our present one, push supply side
economics (if you make it, buyers will come), instead of demand side
economics (making what buyers need and want), unemployment will continue
to rise. The private sector will not manufacture or produce goods
without a known ready market.



printThe
media has failed dismally in explaining this to its readers. It has
failed the people it is there to serve. It peddles a false and
misleading language that serves an exclusive minority, the super-rich.
Little wonder circulation has plummeted.



The task of explaining alternative, progressive economics has fallen
to the blogosphere and social media sites where much of the lost
readership of the MSM has found a new home, found what it wants to read
and the language it prefers.



Is it a forlorn hope that 2015 will see a breakthrough in progressive economic theory? We will certainly try.



Thursday 18 December 2014

Rundle: Monis was a criminal. The Tele made him a terrorist. –

Rundle: Monis was a criminal. The Tele made him a terrorist. –

Rundle: Monis was a criminal. The Tele made him a terrorist.


The Australian tabloids gave a lone gunman exactly what he wanted — the association with Islamic State.








There’s a lot of competition for what Andreas Baader of
Baader-Meinhof fame called “the most fucked up mission” in the crazy
1970s. Baader was speaking of the Stockholm siege hostage drama mounted
to free him and his co-conspirators from prison, but there’s no shortage
of others. Violent movements that began with some political aim and
comprehensibility in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Algerian
revolution, became the mere pretext for a series of floating obsessions
by the 1970s. One characteristic of this kind of violence is the
relatively dispassionate and rational focus of its perpetrators.
Obsessive mental disorganisation is what marks out the end of the
process. The Algerians had a country to win and an empire to break. The
Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst in 1975, was a
six-strong guerrilla band, led by a manipulative petty
criminal-turned-insurgent named Cinque and based in a share apartment in
Oakland. The 1960s, rich in so much, had become the 1970s, the “me”
decade, denuded of collective meaning. There would always be enough
people so desperate to give a collective heft to their private feelings
of alienation that they could wrap someone else’s flag around them and
go to war.



In our era, Islamic fundamentalism has taken the same path.
It arose in the Arab world, because Marxist and nationalist visions of
independence had faded (and a lot of Marxist and nationalists had been
killed). In Iran and Afghanistan, it had clear but limited historical
and territorial aims. Out of that came a movement, al-Qaeda, which
claimed a territory — the caliphate — so vast in conception that it
became universal. The caliphate was everywhere, and everyone could be
part of it. Such a conception empowers and arms people like the UK’s 7/7
bombers, who met as part of a network at a gym rather than a mosque.
And it gave meaning to the actions of Man Haron Monis and the resolve to
stage a piece of lethal theatre that, without the politics, he might
never have attempted, or not in the same way.



Narcissistic and manipulative, Man Haron Monis’ crimes to
date were those of an opportunistic man, albeit one with a strong dash
of Messiah complex. He may have murdered his wife. He appears to have
been that most familiar of figures, the alternative therapist who
doubles as a sexual predator. The vicious letters he wrote to the
families of service people had a Messianic touch to them as well. His
conviction, and the failure to overturn it by the High Court, was a
standing rebuke to that idea of himself. The enraged hostage-taking was a
way of dealing with that. Taking on the colours of the Islamic State
gave it meaning and collective connection. All it required was big R
recognition from the big O other — consecration by the world that his
lonely battle was a historical struggle.



The Daily Telegraph gave it to him.


In the list of demands Monis made, he offered to release one
hostage in exchange for an Islamic State flag. The police didn’t give
it to him. The Tele did, and without getting the hostage. Its front covers were an
Islamic State flag, doing the work of that organisation’s propaganda
department — using a spurious event to extend the reach of the
“caliphate”, into the territory, and into everyday life. The signal fact
of Australian life has been that there has been no visible Islamic
State act on our territory; those young men who have gone to fight for
IS in Syria appear to have taken seriously IS’s claim that their first
task was throwing out the invaders in the region. Whether some will come
back with violent intent here is unknown. But if they did, the act
would be nothing like John Wojtowicz’s crazed, lethal Dog Day Afternoon stand-off.



The Tele’s desperate attempt to create a coherent
political terrorist event out of this familiar scenario — a violent
narcissist who has painted himself into a corner — was joined by all the
usual and increasingly desperate right-wing crew. Even the News Corp
crowd who had flirted with the libertarianism of Spiked  — which regards both the Tele’s
absurd covers and the #illridewithyou hashtag as complementary
generators of fear — had to return to a neocon insistence that we were
at war with an implacable foe who presented an existential threat to us,
which would occur one violent fucked-up chocolate shop operation at a
time.



This is the endpoint of the decades-long complementarity
between the neocon Right and violent Islamist fundamentalism. They will
now actually do its propaganda work for it, for they need something that
will reflect them — a religious-political movement — while also being
able to define the superiority of Western civilisation against it. That
such aggrandisement portrays Western civilisation as fearful,
unconfident and jumping at shadows is unimportant so long as the
fragile, disappearing meaning of the West is maintained.



Unimportant too is the question of whether such
aggrandisement actually weaponises craziness, whether coverage of this
sort breeds copycats, who know that their deaths will gain not merely
fame but also meaning, by virtue of the press. Future victims are
unimportant, but so too are present ones, whose tragic deaths are used,
vampire-like, for the means to an end. The nihilism that Islamic
fundamentalism has drifted into has its mirror, too.



Or, to put it another way, one fucked-up operation.

Tuesday 16 December 2014

THE DARK LORD OF EARTH : RUPERT MURDOCH AND NEWS CORP


The Narrative Must Shift: Randa Abdel-Fattah On The Need For A New Conversation | newmatilda.com

The Narrative Must Shift: Randa Abdel-Fattah On The Need For A New Conversation | newmatilda.com

The Narrative Must Shift: Randa Abdel-Fattah On The Need For A New Conversation



By Randa Abdel-Fattah





The
exploitation by media and some in our community of the events of the
Lindt Cafe siege compel a different response, writes Randa
Abdel-Fattah. 




It’s
an ISIS flag. No it’s not. It’s a flag with Islamic writing. Wait
Islamic isn’t a language. Sydney is under siege. Well, actually a man
has taken hostages in a chocolate cafe in Sydney. The police are working
on the situation. No Ray Hadley is… no the police are… no Ray Hadley…
Devices have been planted around the city. We’re not sure how we know
this because no contact has been made with the gunman but let’s whip
people into a frenzied panic anyway. People have evacuated nearby
buildings… except for those who were taking selfies one hundred metres
from the café and posting them on social media.



The Daily Telegraph revealed yet again that it operates according to a
different version of the English language when it referred to a single
gunman as a ‘death cult’, ignoring important details like evidence.



Anecdotal stories came through of Muslim women wearing hijab being
abused in public because clearly the only way to fight extremism is with
racism and bigotry. The leader of the Australian Defence League, an
anti-Muslim organization, went to Martin Place to express his rage at
Islam. Presumably this was in solidarity with the hostages who would
clearly have been delighted to have their indescribable fear and
terrifying experience exploited for the sake of scoring some
Islamophobia points.



Muslim organisations – weary, under-resourced, under pressure – were
ready to condemn, to distance, to reassure because after 13 years of
condemning, distancing, and reassuring, the Australian public seems to
still be in doubt about Islam’s position on terrorism.



Hostages escaped and the media helpfully publicized it just in case
the gunman missed them. Various radio stations took emotional calls from
people who were in the Lindt café – not in the café yesterday, or even
the day before, but in the café ever, giving a whole new meaning to
‘insider account’.



People around Australia were all feeling sick to the stomach, sucked
into a vortex of fear at the thought that the IS threat had reached our
country.



To combat the fear among some Muslim women wearing hijab of being
attacked in public, an #illridewithyou campaign was launched, quickly
going viral and serving as a heartening antidote to the anger, fear and
helplessness many felt.



Like all Australians, Australian Muslims too worried about the fate
of the hostages, about their friends and family in the city. They also
contemplated (and in some cases experienced) the inevitable backlash,
and the repercussions of condemning (but doesn’t this just feed the
narrative that we are collectively responsible?) or not (but I don’t
have the luxury of assuming people will perform basic logic and accept
that, dare I say it, 1.6 billion Muslims might just happen to be a
diverse bunch of people).



Commentators and experts pontificated and speculated but nobody knew
what the gunman wanted, who he was, or what his motives were. Then the
experts in the US and UK woke up and we were condemned to hear their
long distance theories.



Of course, it was not surprising that the tragic events of yesterday
would be interpreted and analysed through the war on terror narrative,
even before any information about the gunman had come to light. Once
that black flag was sighted, a hostage crisis metamorphosed into a
crisis of terrorism, even if politicians, including Prime Minister Tony
Abbott, and the police, were not adopting that language.



In the end, the gunman was, according to various reports, a person
well-known to the legal system and police, with suggestions that he
suffered mental health issues. Despite his violent criminal history and
serious charges of murder and sexual assault, he was in the community
because he had been released on bail.



There are many people asking the right questions, and while no-one
can sensibly claim that this tragedy could have been foreseen and
prevented, it is reasonable to ask why it is that, as a systemic issue,
the system does not take crimes against women seriously enough?



There is another issue though, too. And that is whether Australian
Muslims will be entitled to grieve the deaths of the two hostages and
the trauma suffered by the survivors in a way that does not make their
empathy and grief contingent on condemning, apologizing and distancing
themselves from the gunman.



Some people will no doubt accuse me of insensitivity in raising
Islamophobia at this time, assuming that I cannot simultaneously feel
incomprehensible sorrow at the senseless death of two innocent people,
and also care about how the narrative we allow to play out as a result
of this crisis has far-reaching implications on matters of justice,
anti-racism, asylum seeker demonizing and individual’s rights.



It is not polemical to say that a mark of honour to the lives of
those lost is the capacity to step back and evaluate not only the
moment, but what it says about our past and our future.



Expectations that Muslim organisations must apologise or ‘explain’
and comment on the siege demonstrates that 13 years of press releases,
press conferences and community activism have not sufficiently
undermined the notion that Muslims bear collective responsibility for
people who profess to act in the name of Islam.



What is astonishing is that the gunman did not even make such an
explicit declaration. The mere presence of the flag-that-was-not-the-IS
flag was enough to squeeze the Islamic faith and Muslim community into
the witness box.




As a person straddling academia and activism, I am in a position to
sympathise deeply with Muslim activists and organisations because they
are caught in a double-bind, where to not speak is just as damaging as
speaking. The chasm between philosophy, on the one hand, and policy,
strategy and the complex, practical work of community leaders is wide.



It is widened even more when a crisis is urgent and the public
discourse has not shifted. The hope that you can ‘change the narrative’
may, in the immediate circumstances, seem noble and lofty, but too risky
when the price to pay for not playing by the rules is too high.



To even express sympathy and offer condolences becomes tainted. Do we
offer as human beings, as fellow Australians, as Muslims? To think that
these categories are neutral is dangerously naïve. For all those many
Australians who have the decency to see such expressions for what they
are – sincerely felt grief as fellow human beings – there are many
divisive voices operating in the structures of power in this country
that will use such gestures to reinforce the idea – even implicitly,
even unintentionally if you will – that Muslims must take
responsibility.



I do not know what the answer is, or how to narrow that chasm, other
than to say that we are all, in our own ways, trying to do so and that
the burden is heavy. And for every organization or leader who acts one
way, there are many who will have wished he or she had acted another.



What I do know is that there are those in the Australian community
(and, incidentally, media magnates too) who have already demonstrated a
callous and vile capacity to exploit the horrors of the past 24 hours to
further their Islamophobic agendas.



The narrative must shift or we are condemned to a cycle which does
little to illuminate the issues at hand, and denies Muslims their
dignity as fellow citizens.



We are all in this together. Racism does not stop when a Muslim woman
is abused on public transport and anti-racism does not stop when you
‘ride with her’.



The real work begins when we acknowledge that campaigns like
‘illridewithyou’ are necessary because racism exists, rather than
necessary to prove it doesn’t.