Dos comentarios para el Sr. Bassets, referente a su artículo "Esclavos del holocausto" (05 marzo 2010, El Pais):
1. Los colonos no se pueden describir con un término como "xenófobo". Según la Real Academia Española 'xenofobia' es "odio, repugnancia u hostilidad hacia los extranjeros."
Los palestinos nunca se pueden calificar de 'extranjeros' cuando viven en su propia tierra.
Los colonos son racistas y el sistema que opera en los territorios ocupados se llama 'apartheid': una "segregación racial".
Si a alguién realmente le interesa el 'negocio' del holocausto, debería leer los libros de Norman Finkelstein, hijo de sobrevivientes del mismo. También se estrena un nuevo documental sobre él: se titula "American Radical".
2. Referente a Cuba. Sr, Bassets tiene dos varas de medir. Una para Cuba (enemigo 'oficial'), el otro para régimenes más totalitarios pero 'amigos' como Marruecos, Arabia Saudí, o Egypto.
El doble moral del discurso de las élites como Bassets es siempre lo mismo - en realidad es una demagogia barata, cutre, y ya muy repetida. ¿No es hora de buscar otros argumentos? ¿Qué pasó con la universalidad? Los principios morales deben aplicarse por igual a todos. ¿O no Sr Bassets?
05 March 2010
BBC Confirms Russia Today Report on Supposed Chavez Haiti Earthquake Conspiracy Theory is "Innacurate"
Following the earlier reports from Russia Today, and mentioned here, attributing to Hugo Chavez a conspiracy theory about the Haiti Earthquake being caused by the US, Charlie Brooker of the BBC's Newswipe programme repeated the accusations. As this was not true I made the following official complaint to the BBC:
"{Programme Name:} Newswipe
{Transmission Date:} 03/02/2010
{Network:}
{Summary:} Newswipe Charlie Brooker and Hugo Chavez
{Complaint:} Yesterday 03 February 2010 on BBC's Newswipe programme at about 2.05 into the programme, Charlie Brooker said this: "And in astonishing scenes carefully outlined on the informative Russia Today, Hugo 'one plane' * Chavez went on to blame America for causing the disaster - by testing an
earthquake inducing super-weapon.".
He then played a clip from Russia Today: "He adds that this time it was only a drill and the final target is destroying and taking over Iran.".
Of course, Chavez did NOT blame the US (why do BBC reporters always say 'America' which is the name of the continent, and not use the country's name The United States? Is it ignorance?), in fact Chavez didn't say anything at all.
It's extremely disappointing to hear someone on the BBC with such shoddy and misleading journalism. If Charlie Brooker had bothered to investigate a little (surely that is what he is paid for as a 'journalist' on a programme called NEWSwipe?) he would have found that the Russia Today report was a case of extremely careless and shoddy journalism itself.
In fact, the Russia Today report quoted an article in the Spanish Daily ABC. ABC in turn quoted a report on Venezuelan state broadcaster VIVE. In fact, the link in the ABC article to the VIVE website takes one to a VIVA page with nothing but headlines.
The actual VIVE report makes no mention at all of Chavez or any member of the Venezuelan government having said anything at all about this, it doesn't mention how it came to read the report at all.
Surely, a member of the public doesn't need to point out to the BBC that quoting a report on the BBC isn't the same as quoting the British government or its head of government?
Surely, the BBC, with its huge resources could have done better than an ordinary citizen such as myself?
It is imperative that Charlie Brooker make a full apology on air for his shoddy journalism. This is a classic case of a lazy journalist using false information to attack a western bogeyman. Call it misinformation, disinformation or plain propaganda this sort of journalism has no place at the BBC.
I'm sure the BBC Spanish department can confirm everything I am complaining about."
{Transmission Date:} 03/02/2010
{Network:}
{Summary:} Newswipe Charlie Brooker and Hugo Chavez
{Complaint:} Yesterday 03 February 2010 on BBC's Newswipe programme at about 2.05 into the programme, Charlie Brooker said this: "And in astonishing scenes carefully outlined on the informative Russia Today, Hugo 'one plane' * Chavez went on to blame America for causing the disaster - by testing an
earthquake inducing super-weapon.".
He then played a clip from Russia Today: "He adds that this time it was only a drill and the final target is destroying and taking over Iran.".
Of course, Chavez did NOT blame the US (why do BBC reporters always say 'America' which is the name of the continent, and not use the country's name The United States? Is it ignorance?), in fact Chavez didn't say anything at all.
It's extremely disappointing to hear someone on the BBC with such shoddy and misleading journalism. If Charlie Brooker had bothered to investigate a little (surely that is what he is paid for as a 'journalist' on a programme called NEWSwipe?) he would have found that the Russia Today report was a case of extremely careless and shoddy journalism itself.
In fact, the Russia Today report quoted an article in the Spanish Daily ABC. ABC in turn quoted a report on Venezuelan state broadcaster VIVE. In fact, the link in the ABC article to the VIVE website takes one to a VIVA page with nothing but headlines.
The actual VIVE report makes no mention at all of Chavez or any member of the Venezuelan government having said anything at all about this, it doesn't mention how it came to read the report at all.
Surely, a member of the public doesn't need to point out to the BBC that quoting a report on the BBC isn't the same as quoting the British government or its head of government?
Surely, the BBC, with its huge resources could have done better than an ordinary citizen such as myself?
It is imperative that Charlie Brooker make a full apology on air for his shoddy journalism. This is a classic case of a lazy journalist using false information to attack a western bogeyman. Call it misinformation, disinformation or plain propaganda this sort of journalism has no place at the BBC.
I'm sure the BBC Spanish department can confirm everything I am complaining about."
On 01 March 2010 I finally got the following reply confirming what I complained about:
"Dear Mr Sketchley
Thank you for you contacting us regarding "Newswipe with Charlie Brooker" on 3rd February, specifically the programme's inclusion of the claim by Russia Today that Hugo Chavez had blamed the United States for causing the Haiti earthquake.
In hindsight it appears that the Russia Today coverage attributing to Hugo Chavez the comment about a US super weapon was in fact inaccurate.
Although "Newswipe" is primarily an entertainment programme offering an irreverent and satirical look at how the media present news stories, rather than offering comment on news events themselves or investigating those events, the programme does report on actual events. In this instance, the programme showed the clip in good faith as it had been widely reported.
I would like to assure you that the section in question will be edited out of any future repeats of the programme.
We'd like to thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Simon Wilson
Executive Editor, Comedy"
Thank you for you contacting us regarding "Newswipe with Charlie Brooker" on 3rd February, specifically the programme's inclusion of the claim by Russia Today that Hugo Chavez had blamed the United States for causing the Haiti earthquake.
In hindsight it appears that the Russia Today coverage attributing to Hugo Chavez the comment about a US super weapon was in fact inaccurate.
Although "Newswipe" is primarily an entertainment programme offering an irreverent and satirical look at how the media present news stories, rather than offering comment on news events themselves or investigating those events, the programme does report on actual events. In this instance, the programme showed the clip in good faith as it had been widely reported.
I would like to assure you that the section in question will be edited out of any future repeats of the programme.
We'd like to thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Simon Wilson
Executive Editor, Comedy"
I am not happy with this reply and have made the following follow-up official complaint:
"I received a reply to my original complaint from Simon Wilson Executive Editor, Comedy.
The reply is not acceptable. The damage done by Mr Brooker has been done and nothing short of a correction on air by Mr Brooker or a Newsipe presenter is acceptable.
Mr Wilson has already accepted that "the comment about a US super weapon was in fact inaccurate."
I insist that this information be given, in the form of correction/apology to Newswipe viewers, as otherwise they will continue to think this claim was true."
The reply is not acceptable. The damage done by Mr Brooker has been done and nothing short of a correction on air by Mr Brooker or a Newsipe presenter is acceptable.
Mr Wilson has already accepted that "the comment about a US super weapon was in fact inaccurate."
I insist that this information be given, in the form of correction/apology to Newswipe viewers, as otherwise they will continue to think this claim was true."
04 March 2010
Mossad's Dubai Hit: Who is Yuval Tal?
(See Updates below)
Hidden in the UK press coverage of terrorist organisation Mossad's Dubai hit, is information about the bank that issued credit cards used by the terrorists. The Times and the Financial Times are the only UK media to report this information, with the FT providing more than the Times.
The Times reports: "Dubai police have already traced credit cards used by the suspected assassins to the US-based MetaBank and Payoneer Inc, a card distributor. Payoneer, a company founded in New York in 2005 with offices in Israel, is run by Yuval Tal, who appeared as a television commentator on Fox News during the 2006 Lebanon war identifying himself as a former Israeli special forces soldier."
Meanwhile the FT's Simeon Kerr reports from Dubai: "Dubai police said it had also identified the use of 14 Mastercard credit cards issued by a US bank, MetaBank of Ohio, and two by IDT Finance of Gibraltar.
A visa card issued by Nationwide Building Society of the UK and DZ Bank of Germany were also used by other alleged members of the squad, to book hotel rooms and pay for air travel...
Dubai also said Payoneer, a New York-based company, was involved in issuing some of the MetaBank credit cards used by the suspects, but did not say what exact role the company played.
Payoneer, which also has a branch in Israel, has worked with MetaBank to issue prepaid credit cards since February 2009. Yuval Tal, its chief executive, identifies himself as a former Israeli special forces soldier.
A spokeswoman for Payoneer said: ”We are aware of the news reports. We are cooperating with the bank and the authorities to explore the matter.”"
Adam Scheck of AP also did a piece mentioning Yuval Tal, so we can be sure that the rest of the UK media received the information. They just decided not to publish it, thus participating directly in the cover-up of the murder.
Schleck: "Payoneer provides prepaid MasterCards issued by MetaBank and other lenders. The company is based in New York and has a research and development center in Tel Aviv, raising suspicions of Israeli involvement in the killing...
Payoneer is headed by Yuval Tal, who in a 2006 Fox News interview was identified as a former member of the Israeli special forces.
Payoneer has said it was cooperating with authorities but has declined further comment. It has not made Tal available to discuss the company's involvement."
Gulf News asks the pertinent question "Who is Yuval Tal?" And proceeds to answer:
"Tal started his career as a product manager, moved on to business development, and in 1999 founded his first company E4X where he was CEO. He then moved on to found his current company, Payoneer, in 2005.
Payoneer raised $14 million in venture capital funding, and although it is registered in the US, most of its employees are based in Petah Tikva, Israel. The company was named by Israel’s business newspaper Globes in 2008 as one of Israel's most promising start-ups."
...
"In a 2006 FOX News interview about Israel's summer war on Lebanon, Tal was presented as a "special ops commando" on Fox and Friends, and stated that "this is a war Israel cannot [afford to] lose" after an Israeli apache helicopter went down in Israel, apparently shot at by Hezbollah. The video had disappeared from video sharing web sites after the assassination, but was recently uploaded to YouTube again [see video below]."
"One of Payoneer’s investors, too, has a past in Israeli intelligence. Moshe Mor, founder of Greylock partners, one of the venture capital funds that has invested in Payoneer. According to Greylock’s website, Mor formerly served in the Israeli army as a military intelligence captain.
The other two venture capital funds that have invested in Payoneer are Carmel Ventures and Crossbar Capital.
Carmel Ventures is based in Herzliya, Israel and Crossbar Partners is run by Charlie Federman, who is also managing director of the BRM Group, also in Herzliya that was founded by Nir and Eli Barkat, the former of whom is the mayor of occupied Jerusalem."
Carmel Ventures co-founder Shlomo Dovrat began "his IT career in an elite technology unit of the Israeli Defense Forces."
TechCrunch, a website founded in 2005, is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies, says this about Payoneer:
"Founded in 2005, Payoneer employs 25 and is headquartered in New York with R&D in Tel-Aviv, Israel. A $2M seed round was raised from Payoneer’s CEO himself, Yuval Tal and private investors including Zohar Gilon, Charlie Federman, Michael Loeb and Ilan Kaufthal. Greylock (Israel) added a total of $4M in Series A this year, with Moshe Mor the partner attached to the deal."
In reply to a couple of comments in the article: "What about Money Laundering and Know Your Customer laws? This sounds like a great way for drug traffickers and terrorists to move money around." and "payoneer is definitely in the legal gray area when it comes to the patriot’s act, anti-money laundering, and a host of other laws around “know your customer”", Yuval Tal himself replied: "Payoneer is meticulously compliant with all federal, state and MasterCard regulations, including AML, BSA, Patriot act, KYC etc. There is nothing grey about it. As a certified MasterCard Member Service Provider we undergo rigorous ongoing diligence related, among others, to our regulatory compliance level. We employ multiple layers of checks and balances, both technological and human, so that we are able to minimize the hassle that users have to overcome to receive their payments. As these regulations continue to evolve, we adapt our procedures accordingly to the changing needs."
On another page, Payoneer VP Marketing 'Tomer Bar ZeevMoney laundering involves money from illegal sources, since we verify the source and destination of the funds and we open this service only to selected card holders this is not the case.Payoneer will only issue cards if the users asking for the card registered to get the card from one of our partners , we only work with US corporation paying users worldwide, we don’t serve walk-ins, among our partners you can find companies like iStockPhoto, 2Checkout, Elance, oDesk, etc hence we always verify the destination of the funds are coming from one of them.
And onj yet another page we find that Payoneer "(whose headquarters are in New York City), will use the new cash to fund expansion into more markets and invest in technologies to detect and prevent fraud and abuse by criminals and terrorists."
Meanwhile, Dubai police will be asking "the Dubai prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for Binyamin Netanyahu and Meir Dagan this week".
And over at Al Jazeera's Clayton Swisher's Middle East Blog, we find that Yuval Tal could soon be behind bars:
"I also find the Payoneer connection interesting given that its CEO is Yuval Tal, a former Israeli special forces commando. Mr Tal did not exactly conceal his prior affiliations when he appeared on Fox News during the 2006 Lebanon war. He opined then that "this is a war that Israel cannot afford to lose".
If Tal or his Payoneer firm are in any way involved in the conspiracy to help a foreign intelligence service (like, say providing Mossad operatives with credit cards), he may soon find himself in his own battle with little prospects of winning - in a US courtroom.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the lead agency with statutory authority and responsibilities for investigating foreign espionage activities on US soil. It's a job they take seriously and with a proven record of not shying away from the numerous instances when America's special ally played foul.
As an initial inquiry, I imagine case agents will subpoena all financial records associated with the fraudulently issued credit cards. This would include the original credit card applications, which requires such things as a delivery address (to mail the card to), social security numbers, dates of birth, and employment information.
If the applications were made on paper, then the documents may contain all manner of evidence, from handwriting samples to fingerprints. There will be a similar trail to pore over if the applications were made over the phone or electronically via computer.
I also smell money laundering, as the money was supposedly dumped into prepaid accounts to conceal its purpose and origination. So US investigators may even want to tap in on the US treasury department's crack financial investigator, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN).
Don't be put off by FINCEN's location in a Northern Virginia building that resembles a toilet seat. They have all manner of ways of putting a ring around financial transactions and credit reports in all reaches of the world.
There is still no word on whether or not the US has begun co-operating. On paper, there should be no reason why they would not. The Emirates are a friendly country to the United States and a member of INTERPOL. They have also been a key country used by the US administration to apply pressure on Iran, so presumably they want to keep them happy.
It's not clear if the FBI is silently participating or if its officials are fence-sitting.
If it's the latter, then they may want to consider the following: if a foreign national was murdered on US soil with the help of credit cards issued in the Emirates, what sort of co-operation would they demand?"
----------------------------------------------------
Update 1:
Interesting article from AP: "Dubai death: 'The last assassination of its kind'?" In particular, the last paragraphs, which tend to support the Haaretz claim that the fake passport photos were doctored.
"Jonna Mendez, who spent some of her 27 years in the CIA as the agency's chief of disguise, believes the Dubai perpetrators took the fallout into account, all of it: the TV footage, the blown aliases and the head shots. The agents, she said, clearly knew they were under surveillance — they had simply decided it was unavoidable and a price worth paying.
"You can be sure they knew they were being surveilled. Likewise, they would assume that the documents they were using would be made available after the fact," said Mendez. "What does this mean? It means it didn't matter. The faces and the documents that were captured by the cameras will probably never be seen again."
The fact that the perpetrators had to take the identities of real people rather than simply invent false identities is a symptom of the new world facing modern-day spies, one of databases and traceable passport information, she said.
The real agents likely don't resemble the faces in the photos, she said: "Bald? Not really. No facial hair? Not normally. Blonde? Are you kidding," Mendez said. And if they do, plastic surgery, dental implants and hair grafts can ensure they are unrecognizable afterward.
"Steal the identity, disguise the participants, be ready on the other side with another set of identities and documents, and embrace and conceal the protagonists on their return," she said. "With that goal in mind this may, in fact, be the operation of the future."
-----------------------------------------------
Update 2:
Website Designer Today carried an article back in 2008 "Is uTest and Payoneer a Scam?", in which the writer mused about whether Payoneer and Utest could be a "ruse to trick unsuspecting consumers into divulging personal information to be used for identity theft". Considering that identity theft is what hapened, this should surely be a line of investigation for the Dubai police, the FBI and the Australian, British, French and German police...
-----------------------------------------------
Update 3
Another article in Haaretz gets to the Tel Aviv offices of Payoneer: "Did they know? Israel-U.S. startup linked to Dubai hit"
Bloomberg's Business Week has a piece "MetaBank Says Dubai Suspects Used Fraud to Get Cards".
"Suspected assassins of a Hamas leader in Dubai “fraudulently” acquired prepaid payroll cards and stole identities to obtain jobs or compensation from U.S. companies, according to card-issuer MetaBank...The bank said the cards were issued through New York- based Payoneer, which markets them to U.S. companies and has a research and development facility in Tel Aviv."
This doesn't ring true if we are to believe Payoneer's previous statements above: "Payoneer VP Marketing 'Tomer Bar Zeev: Money laundering involves money from illegal sources, since we verify the source and destination of the funds and we open this service only to selected card holders this is not the case.Payoneer will only issue cards if the users asking for the card registered to get the card from one of our partners , we only work with US corporation paying users worldwide, we don’t serve walk-ins,".
Another blogger puts it better:
"Payoneer is not a bank or credit card company and they don't solicit public customers. They only work through corporate and non-profit accounts (they have about 50)for their employees and/or customers. They don't work directly with the public. With only a few dozen employees, Payoneer would not overlook a new customer with Mideast ties, especially Arab or Iranian ones...Carmel Ventures only office is also in Herzliya with an all Israel cast. Crossbar Partners is a one man show of Charlie Federman of New Jersey (I've never met him or heard of him before now). However, Federman is a Managing Director of the BRM Group, a venture capital firm also located in Herzliya, Israel and run by the Barkats, Eli and Nir. Interesting enough Nir is now the mayor of Jerusalem and is the one in the center of the housing conflict in East Jerusalem."
Al Jazeera has an interview with Dubai police chief:
Hidden in the UK press coverage of terrorist organisation Mossad's Dubai hit, is information about the bank that issued credit cards used by the terrorists. The Times and the Financial Times are the only UK media to report this information, with the FT providing more than the Times.
The Times reports: "Dubai police have already traced credit cards used by the suspected assassins to the US-based MetaBank and Payoneer Inc, a card distributor. Payoneer, a company founded in New York in 2005 with offices in Israel, is run by Yuval Tal, who appeared as a television commentator on Fox News during the 2006 Lebanon war identifying himself as a former Israeli special forces soldier."
Meanwhile the FT's Simeon Kerr reports from Dubai: "Dubai police said it had also identified the use of 14 Mastercard credit cards issued by a US bank, MetaBank of Ohio, and two by IDT Finance of Gibraltar.
A visa card issued by Nationwide Building Society of the UK and DZ Bank of Germany were also used by other alleged members of the squad, to book hotel rooms and pay for air travel...
Dubai also said Payoneer, a New York-based company, was involved in issuing some of the MetaBank credit cards used by the suspects, but did not say what exact role the company played.
Payoneer, which also has a branch in Israel, has worked with MetaBank to issue prepaid credit cards since February 2009. Yuval Tal, its chief executive, identifies himself as a former Israeli special forces soldier.
A spokeswoman for Payoneer said: ”We are aware of the news reports. We are cooperating with the bank and the authorities to explore the matter.”"
Adam Scheck of AP also did a piece mentioning Yuval Tal, so we can be sure that the rest of the UK media received the information. They just decided not to publish it, thus participating directly in the cover-up of the murder.
Schleck: "Payoneer provides prepaid MasterCards issued by MetaBank and other lenders. The company is based in New York and has a research and development center in Tel Aviv, raising suspicions of Israeli involvement in the killing...
Payoneer is headed by Yuval Tal, who in a 2006 Fox News interview was identified as a former member of the Israeli special forces.
Payoneer has said it was cooperating with authorities but has declined further comment. It has not made Tal available to discuss the company's involvement."
"Tal started his career as a product manager, moved on to business development, and in 1999 founded his first company E4X where he was CEO. He then moved on to found his current company, Payoneer, in 2005.
Payoneer raised $14 million in venture capital funding, and although it is registered in the US, most of its employees are based in Petah Tikva, Israel. The company was named by Israel’s business newspaper Globes in 2008 as one of Israel's most promising start-ups."
...
"In a 2006 FOX News interview about Israel's summer war on Lebanon, Tal was presented as a "special ops commando" on Fox and Friends, and stated that "this is a war Israel cannot [afford to] lose" after an Israeli apache helicopter went down in Israel, apparently shot at by Hezbollah. The video had disappeared from video sharing web sites after the assassination, but was recently uploaded to YouTube again [see video below]."
"One of Payoneer’s investors, too, has a past in Israeli intelligence. Moshe Mor, founder of Greylock partners, one of the venture capital funds that has invested in Payoneer. According to Greylock’s website, Mor formerly served in the Israeli army as a military intelligence captain.
The other two venture capital funds that have invested in Payoneer are Carmel Ventures and Crossbar Capital.
Carmel Ventures is based in Herzliya, Israel and Crossbar Partners is run by Charlie Federman, who is also managing director of the BRM Group, also in Herzliya that was founded by Nir and Eli Barkat, the former of whom is the mayor of occupied Jerusalem."
Carmel Ventures co-founder Shlomo Dovrat began "his IT career in an elite technology unit of the Israeli Defense Forces."
TechCrunch, a website founded in 2005, is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies, says this about Payoneer:
"Founded in 2005, Payoneer employs 25 and is headquartered in New York with R&D in Tel-Aviv, Israel. A $2M seed round was raised from Payoneer’s CEO himself, Yuval Tal and private investors including Zohar Gilon, Charlie Federman, Michael Loeb and Ilan Kaufthal. Greylock (Israel) added a total of $4M in Series A this year, with Moshe Mor the partner attached to the deal."
In reply to a couple of comments in the article: "What about Money Laundering and Know Your Customer laws? This sounds like a great way for drug traffickers and terrorists to move money around." and "payoneer is definitely in the legal gray area when it comes to the patriot’s act, anti-money laundering, and a host of other laws around “know your customer”", Yuval Tal himself replied: "Payoneer is meticulously compliant with all federal, state and MasterCard regulations, including AML, BSA, Patriot act, KYC etc. There is nothing grey about it. As a certified MasterCard Member Service Provider we undergo rigorous ongoing diligence related, among others, to our regulatory compliance level. We employ multiple layers of checks and balances, both technological and human, so that we are able to minimize the hassle that users have to overcome to receive their payments. As these regulations continue to evolve, we adapt our procedures accordingly to the changing needs."
On another page, Payoneer VP Marketing 'Tomer Bar ZeevMoney laundering involves money from illegal sources, since we verify the source and destination of the funds and we open this service only to selected card holders this is not the case.Payoneer will only issue cards if the users asking for the card registered to get the card from one of our partners , we only work with US corporation paying users worldwide, we don’t serve walk-ins, among our partners you can find companies like iStockPhoto, 2Checkout, Elance, oDesk, etc hence we always verify the destination of the funds are coming from one of them.
And onj yet another page we find that Payoneer "(whose headquarters are in New York City), will use the new cash to fund expansion into more markets and invest in technologies to detect and prevent fraud and abuse by criminals and terrorists."
Meanwhile, Dubai police will be asking "the Dubai prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for Binyamin Netanyahu and Meir Dagan this week".
And over at Al Jazeera's Clayton Swisher's Middle East Blog, we find that Yuval Tal could soon be behind bars:
"I also find the Payoneer connection interesting given that its CEO is Yuval Tal, a former Israeli special forces commando. Mr Tal did not exactly conceal his prior affiliations when he appeared on Fox News during the 2006 Lebanon war. He opined then that "this is a war that Israel cannot afford to lose".
If Tal or his Payoneer firm are in any way involved in the conspiracy to help a foreign intelligence service (like, say providing Mossad operatives with credit cards), he may soon find himself in his own battle with little prospects of winning - in a US courtroom.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the lead agency with statutory authority and responsibilities for investigating foreign espionage activities on US soil. It's a job they take seriously and with a proven record of not shying away from the numerous instances when America's special ally played foul.
As an initial inquiry, I imagine case agents will subpoena all financial records associated with the fraudulently issued credit cards. This would include the original credit card applications, which requires such things as a delivery address (to mail the card to), social security numbers, dates of birth, and employment information.
If the applications were made on paper, then the documents may contain all manner of evidence, from handwriting samples to fingerprints. There will be a similar trail to pore over if the applications were made over the phone or electronically via computer.
I also smell money laundering, as the money was supposedly dumped into prepaid accounts to conceal its purpose and origination. So US investigators may even want to tap in on the US treasury department's crack financial investigator, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN).
Don't be put off by FINCEN's location in a Northern Virginia building that resembles a toilet seat. They have all manner of ways of putting a ring around financial transactions and credit reports in all reaches of the world.
There is still no word on whether or not the US has begun co-operating. On paper, there should be no reason why they would not. The Emirates are a friendly country to the United States and a member of INTERPOL. They have also been a key country used by the US administration to apply pressure on Iran, so presumably they want to keep them happy.
It's not clear if the FBI is silently participating or if its officials are fence-sitting.
If it's the latter, then they may want to consider the following: if a foreign national was murdered on US soil with the help of credit cards issued in the Emirates, what sort of co-operation would they demand?"
----------------------------------------------------
Update 1:
Interesting article from AP: "Dubai death: 'The last assassination of its kind'?" In particular, the last paragraphs, which tend to support the Haaretz claim that the fake passport photos were doctored.
"Jonna Mendez, who spent some of her 27 years in the CIA as the agency's chief of disguise, believes the Dubai perpetrators took the fallout into account, all of it: the TV footage, the blown aliases and the head shots. The agents, she said, clearly knew they were under surveillance — they had simply decided it was unavoidable and a price worth paying.
"You can be sure they knew they were being surveilled. Likewise, they would assume that the documents they were using would be made available after the fact," said Mendez. "What does this mean? It means it didn't matter. The faces and the documents that were captured by the cameras will probably never be seen again."
The fact that the perpetrators had to take the identities of real people rather than simply invent false identities is a symptom of the new world facing modern-day spies, one of databases and traceable passport information, she said.
The real agents likely don't resemble the faces in the photos, she said: "Bald? Not really. No facial hair? Not normally. Blonde? Are you kidding," Mendez said. And if they do, plastic surgery, dental implants and hair grafts can ensure they are unrecognizable afterward.
"Steal the identity, disguise the participants, be ready on the other side with another set of identities and documents, and embrace and conceal the protagonists on their return," she said. "With that goal in mind this may, in fact, be the operation of the future."
-----------------------------------------------
Update 2:
Website Designer Today carried an article back in 2008 "Is uTest and Payoneer a Scam?", in which the writer mused about whether Payoneer and Utest could be a "ruse to trick unsuspecting consumers into divulging personal information to be used for identity theft". Considering that identity theft is what hapened, this should surely be a line of investigation for the Dubai police, the FBI and the Australian, British, French and German police...
-----------------------------------------------
Update 3
Another article in Haaretz gets to the Tel Aviv offices of Payoneer: "Did they know? Israel-U.S. startup linked to Dubai hit"
Bloomberg's Business Week has a piece "MetaBank Says Dubai Suspects Used Fraud to Get Cards".
"Suspected assassins of a Hamas leader in Dubai “fraudulently” acquired prepaid payroll cards and stole identities to obtain jobs or compensation from U.S. companies, according to card-issuer MetaBank...The bank said the cards were issued through New York- based Payoneer, which markets them to U.S. companies and has a research and development facility in Tel Aviv."
This doesn't ring true if we are to believe Payoneer's previous statements above: "Payoneer VP Marketing 'Tomer Bar Zeev: Money laundering involves money from illegal sources, since we verify the source and destination of the funds and we open this service only to selected card holders this is not the case.Payoneer will only issue cards if the users asking for the card registered to get the card from one of our partners , we only work with US corporation paying users worldwide, we don’t serve walk-ins,".
Another blogger puts it better:
"Payoneer is not a bank or credit card company and they don't solicit public customers. They only work through corporate and non-profit accounts (they have about 50)for their employees and/or customers. They don't work directly with the public. With only a few dozen employees, Payoneer would not overlook a new customer with Mideast ties, especially Arab or Iranian ones...Carmel Ventures only office is also in Herzliya with an all Israel cast. Crossbar Partners is a one man show of Charlie Federman of New Jersey (I've never met him or heard of him before now). However, Federman is a Managing Director of the BRM Group, a venture capital firm also located in Herzliya, Israel and run by the Barkats, Eli and Nir. Interesting enough Nir is now the mayor of Jerusalem and is the one in the center of the housing conflict in East Jerusalem."
Al Jazeera has an interview with Dubai police chief:
Livni: Israel is a pariah state
The mob war (of words) continues in the Zionist state. On the one hand we have the Likud mafia, on the other the Kadima gangsters. See Israel's Gangster State.
The new head of the Kadima gangsters has accused the boss of the Likud mafia of turning Israel into "a pariah state". "Since you took control, Israel has become a pariah country in the world," she said.
What chutzpah!
Kadima leader Tzipi Livni has an impeccable gangster curriculum. Daughter of Irgun terrorists (her father was chief operations officer), she herself was a member of a Mossad assasination squad which murdered an innocent Palestinian waiter in Norway. In an interview 15 years ago, published by the Sunday Times last year she said "To kill and assassinate, though it’s not strictly legal, if you do it for your country, it’s legitimate."
As Minister for Foreign Affairs, Livni shares responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel in last year's Gaza massacre. Someone should perhaps let her know that she should shoulder her fair share of responsibility for the Zionist regime's pariah status.
She was of course complaining about the murder by the Zionist state's Mossad enforcers in Dubai of the Hamas official responsiible for arms procurement, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. but not only that. She was also referring to the lack of support given by Netanyahu to "Police Commissioner Dudi Cohen in the face of criticism leveled by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who is under investigation by police for corruption."
Right. Livni's successor is still under investigation, and the Police Commissioner has received death threats: "You have been condemned to the next life, your end is nigh," Police "have not entirely ruled out a gangland connection" according to AFP
08 February 2010
César Alierta, Telefonica Spain to charge Google, Yahoo, Microsoft for access to Spain's internauts
The President of Telefónica Spain, César Alierta, says in today's El Pais that Telefonica Spain will now begin to charge search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. He states that these search engines use the Telefonica networks without paying anything.
Now, I am all in favour of multinational corporations charging other multinational corporations, and even of multinational corporations fighting among themselves. The problem here though, seems to be the fact that César Alierta wants to have the best of both worlds, he wants to be paid twice for the same service. To give an idea, it would be like the electricity companies charging Bosch or Whirlpool because their washing machines use electricity.
Now if he were to reduce Telefonica's DSL charges to consumers at the same time, I'm sure he'd get a lot of support. This won't happen, of course, and the end result will see search engines beginning to charge for their services, meaning that in the end it's always the consumer who pays.
It appears telecommunications companies are deliberately being allowed to make excess profits.
The European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA) reported last year that:
"Financial results from incumbents, such as Telefonica’s last week, show that they are primarily focused on increasing profitability at the expense of vital infrastructure investment What is particularly disingenuous is that, at the same time, they are threatening governments and European politicians that they will not invest in next generation access unless there is a relaxation of competition rules that allow rivals to offer services over these networks.”...“Despite Spanish regulator CMT granting Telefonica a regulatory moratorium for next generation fibre networks, ostensibly to support a €1bln fibre investment programme, there is little or no evidence that it will prioritise infrastructure investment in future. Instead it is committed to ‘preserving the company’s strong cash flow generation’, to the benefit of shareholders.”
ECTA continues: "Telefonica Spain posted an 8.9% increase in profit (EBITDA) and cashflows up 14% to €8bln, but a reduction of 7.2% in investment (Capex) in 2008."
“We have no problem with companies prioritising profitability, making healthy profits and benefiting from their own investment and innovation. However, we do have a problem with healthy companies using the recession as an excuse to blackmail policy-makers into relaxing regulation, with the aim of strengthening their own dominant position further at the expense of competitors and consumers. For companies such as Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom, investment in next generation fibre networks should be part of their normal upgrade strategy to replace decades-old copper networks, which have been fully paid for, and not a licence for stifling competition.”
Telefonica's.results for the third quarter of 2009 showed a tiny drop in profits but the profits are still enormous and T. was "was able to boost the company’s dividend for the year 2010 by 22% in the last month and pledged a higher payment for 2012."
And `presumably we the consumers can go fuck ourselves again.
Now, I am all in favour of multinational corporations charging other multinational corporations, and even of multinational corporations fighting among themselves. The problem here though, seems to be the fact that César Alierta wants to have the best of both worlds, he wants to be paid twice for the same service. To give an idea, it would be like the electricity companies charging Bosch or Whirlpool because their washing machines use electricity.
Now if he were to reduce Telefonica's DSL charges to consumers at the same time, I'm sure he'd get a lot of support. This won't happen, of course, and the end result will see search engines beginning to charge for their services, meaning that in the end it's always the consumer who pays.
It appears telecommunications companies are deliberately being allowed to make excess profits.
The European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA) reported last year that:
"Financial results from incumbents, such as Telefonica’s last week, show that they are primarily focused on increasing profitability at the expense of vital infrastructure investment What is particularly disingenuous is that, at the same time, they are threatening governments and European politicians that they will not invest in next generation access unless there is a relaxation of competition rules that allow rivals to offer services over these networks.”...“Despite Spanish regulator CMT granting Telefonica a regulatory moratorium for next generation fibre networks, ostensibly to support a €1bln fibre investment programme, there is little or no evidence that it will prioritise infrastructure investment in future. Instead it is committed to ‘preserving the company’s strong cash flow generation’, to the benefit of shareholders.”
ECTA continues: "Telefonica Spain posted an 8.9% increase in profit (EBITDA) and cashflows up 14% to €8bln, but a reduction of 7.2% in investment (Capex) in 2008."
“We have no problem with companies prioritising profitability, making healthy profits and benefiting from their own investment and innovation. However, we do have a problem with healthy companies using the recession as an excuse to blackmail policy-makers into relaxing regulation, with the aim of strengthening their own dominant position further at the expense of competitors and consumers. For companies such as Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom, investment in next generation fibre networks should be part of their normal upgrade strategy to replace decades-old copper networks, which have been fully paid for, and not a licence for stifling competition.”
Telefonica's.results for the third quarter of 2009 showed a tiny drop in profits but the profits are still enormous and T. was "was able to boost the company’s dividend for the year 2010 by 22% in the last month and pledged a higher payment for 2012."
And `presumably we the consumers can go fuck ourselves again.
05 February 2010
This Time We Went Too Far - Norman Finkelstein
For the Palestinians who live in the narrow coastal strip of Gaza, the December 2008 Israeli invasion was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions: in the 22-day-long action 1,400 Gazans were killed, several hundred on the first day alone. More than 6,000 homes were destroyed or badly damaged. The cost of the destruction and disruption of economic life, in one of the worlds poorest areas, is estimated at more than $3 billion.
And yet, while nothing should diminish recognition of Palestinian suffering through these frightful days, it is possible something redemptive will emerge from the tragedy of Gaza. For, as Norman Finkelstein details, in a concise work that melds cold anger with cool analysis, the profound injustice of the Israeli assault has been widely recognized by organizations impossible to brand as partial or extremist.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN investigation headed by Richard Goldstone, in documenting Israel's use of indiscriminate and intentional force against the civilian population during the invasion (100 Palestinians died for every one Israeli), have had an impact on traditional support for Israel. Jews in both the United States and the United Kingdom, for instance, are beginning to voice dissent, and this trend is especially apparent among the young.
Such a shift, Finkelstein contends, can result in new pressure capable of moving the Middle East crisis towards a solution, one that embraces justice for Palestinians and Israelis alike. The seeds of hope were thus sown in the bitter anguish of Gaza. This Time We Went Too Far, written with Finkelsteins customary acuity and precision, will surely advance the process it so eloquently describes.
Norman G. Finkelsteins books include Beyond Chutzpah, The Holocaust Industry, A Nation on Trial and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
02 February 2010
The Challenges of 21st Century Socialism in Venezuela By William I. Robinson
Interview with William I. Robinson,
Professor of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara
By Chronis Polychroniou
Editor, Greek daily newspaper Eleftherotypia
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There are scare stories coming from Venezuela. The border is heating up, infiltration is taking place, a new Colombian military base near the border, US access to several new bases on Colombia and constant subversion. Is the regime concerned about a possible invasion? If yes, who is going to intervene?
The Venezuelan government is concerned about a possible US invasion and certainly an outright invasion cannot be ruled out. However I think the US is pursuing a more sophisticated strategy of intervention that we could call a war of attrition. We have seen this strategy in other countries, such as in Nicaragua in the 1980s, or even Chile under Allende. It is what in CIA lexicon is known as destabilization, and in the Pentagon's language is called political warfare - which does not mean there is not a military component. This is a counterrevolutionary strategy that combines military threats and hostilities with psychological operations, disinformation campaigns, black propaganda, economic sabotage, diplomatic pressures, the mobilization of political opposition forces inside the country, carrying out provocations and sparking violent confrontations in the cities, manipulation of disaffected sectors and the exploitation of legitimate grievances among the population. The strategy is deft at taking advantage of the revolution's own mistakes and limitations, such as corruption, clientalism, and opportunism, which we must acknowledge are serious problems in Venezuela. It is also deft at aggravating and manipulating material problems, such as shortages, price inflation, and so forth.
The goal is to destroy the revolution by making it unworkable, by exhausting the population's will to continue to struggle to forge a new society, and in this way to undermine the revolution's mass social base. According to the US strategy the revolution must be destroyed by having it collapse it in on itself, by undermining the remarkable hegemony that Chavismo and Bolivarianismo has been able to achieve within Venezuelan civil society over the past decade. US strategists hope to provoke Chavez into a crackdown that transforms the democratic socialist process into an authoritarian one. In the view of these strategists, Chavez will eventually be removed from power through any number of scenarios brought about by constant war of attribution - whether through elections, a military putsch from within, an uprising, mass defections from the revolutionary camp, or a combination of factors that can not be foretold.
In this context the military bases in Colombia provide a crucial platform for intelligence and reconnaissance operations against Venezuela and also for the infiltration of counterrevolutionary military, economic sabotage, and terrorist groups. These infiltrating groups are meant to harass, but more specifically, to provoke reactions from the revolutionary government and to synchronize armed provocation with the whole gamut of political, diplomatic, psychological, economic, and ideological aggressions that are part of the war of attrition.
Moreover, the mere threat of US military aggression that the bases represent in itself constitutes a powerful US psychological operation intended to heighten tensions inside Venezuela, force the government into extremist positions or into "crying wolf," and to embolden internal anti-Chavista and counterrevolutionary forces.
However, it is important to see that the military bases are part of the larger U.S. strategy towards all of Latin America. The US and the Right in Latin America have launched a counteroffensive to reverse the turn to the Left or the so-called "Pink Tide." Venezuela is the epicenter of an emergent counter-hegemonic bloc in Latin America. But Bolivia and Ecuador, and more generally, the region's burgeoning social movements and left political forces are as much targets of this counteroffensive as is Venezuela. The coup in Honduras has provided impetus to this counteroffensive and emboldened the Right and counterrevolutionary forces. Colombia has become the epicenter regional counterrevolution - really a bastion of 21st century fascism.
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Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution" has been very popular with the poor. Could you lay out how the Venezuelan society has changed since Chavez came to power?
First of all, let us acknowledge that the Bolivarian revolution has placed democratic socialism back on the worldwide agenda after we went through a period in the 1990s were most were scared to even talk of socialism, when it seemed that global capitalism had reached the apex of its hegemony and when some on the left even bought into the "end of history" thesis.
The Bolivarian revolution has given the poor and largely Afro-Caribbean masses their voice for the first time since the war of independence from Spanish colonialism. The Chavez government has reoriented priorities to the poor majority. It has been able to use oil revenues, in particular, to develop health, education, and other social programs that have had dramatic results in reducing poverty, virtually eliminating illiteracy, and improving the health of the population. International organizations and data collecting agencies have recognized these remarkable social achievements.
However, as someone who visits Venezuela regularly, I would say that the more fundamental change since Chavez came to power is not these social indicators but the political and socio-psychological awakening of the poor majority - a broad process of popular, grassroots mobilization, cultural expression, political participation and empowerment. The old elite and the bourgeoisie have been partially replaced from the state and from formal political power - although not entirely. But the real fear and resentment of the old dominant groups, the panic and their hatred for Chavez, is because they have felt slip from their grip the facile ability to exercise cultural and socio-psychological domination over the popular classes as they have for decades, nay centuries. Of course, there other still plenty of mechanisms through which the bourgeoisie and the political agents of the ancien regime are able to wield their influence, particularly through the mass media that is still largely in their hands...and this is why the "media battles" in Venezuela play such a prominent role.
That said, there are all kinds of problems and contradictions internal to the Bolivarian revolution.
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How widespread are nationalization plans under Chavez and is there any evidence so far that they bring the desired results?
The obvious major economic change has been the recovery of the country's oil for a popular project - and even at that there is still a PDVSA bureaucratic oligarchy. Other key enterprises, such as steel, have been nationalized. And the cooperative sector - with all its problems - has spread. Nonetheless, let's be clear: economic power is still largely in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
Let us recall that the Venezuelan revolution is unique in that the old reactionary state was not "smashed" as it was in other revolutions. The strategy of the revolution has been to set up new parallel institutions and to also try to "colonize" the old state. But the Venezuelan state is still largely a capitalist state. The key question is how can a transformative project move forward while operating through a corrupt, clientalist, bureaucratic, and often inert state bequeathed by the ancient regime? If revolutionary and socialist forces come to power within a capitalist political process how do you confront the capitalist state and the brakes it places on transformative processes? In fact, in Venezuela, and also in Bolivia and elsewhere, prevailing state institutions often act to constrain, dilute, and coopt mass struggles from below.
In my view, in Venezuela the biggest threat from the revolution does not come from the right-wing political opposition but from the so-called "endogenous" or "Chavista" Right, and that chunks of the revolutionary bloc, including state elites and party officials, will develop a deeper stake in defending global capitalism over socialist transformation.
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The revolution has been going on for over a decade now. Is it maturing or is it reaching a stage of decline and deformation?
I would not say, in answer to your question, that the revolution is in "decline" or "deformation". Rather, we need to be more expansive in our historical analysis and even theoretical reflection on what is going on at this historical juncture of 21st century global capitalism and its crisis. The turn to the left in Latin America started out as a rebellion against neo-liberalism. The post-neo-liberal regimes undertook mild redistributive reform and limited nationalizations, particularly of energy resources and public services that had previously been privatized. They were able to reactive accumulation. But post-neo-liberalism that does not now move towards a deeper socialist transformation runs up against limits.
The Bolivarian process faces contradictions, problems, and limitations, as do all historic projects! I would say that both the Venezuelan revolution and also the Bolivian and Ecuadoran processes, may be coming up against the limits of redistributive reform within the logic of global capitalism, especially given the crisis of global capitalism. Anti-neo-liberalism that does not challenge more fundamentally the very logic of capitalism runs up against limitations that may now have been reached.
It may be that the best or the only defense of the revolution is to radicalize and deepen the revolutionary process, to push forward structural transformations that go beyond redistribution. The fact is that the Venezuelan bourgeoisie may have been displaced in part from political power but it is still very much in economic control. Breaking that economic control implies a more significant change in property and class relations. This in turn means breaking the domination of capital, of global capital and its local agents. Naturally this is a Herculian task. There is no clear way forward and each step generates complex new contradictions and Gordian knots. Of course these are matters the whole Global Left must contemplate.
Let us recall the lessons of the Nicaraguan and other revolutions. Multiclass alliances generate contradictions once the honeymoon stage of easy redistributive reform and social programs reach their limit. Then multiclass alliances begin to collapse because there are fundamental contradictions between distinct class projects and interests. At that point a revolution must more clearly define its class project; not just in discourse or in politics but in actual structural transformation.
At a more technical level, we could say that the contradictions generated by trying to break the domination of global capital are not the fault of the revolution. Venezuela is still a capitalist country in which the law of value, of capital accumulation, is operative. Efforts to establish a contrary logic - a logic of social need and social distribution - run up against the law of value. But in a capitalist society violating the law of value throws everything into haywire, generating many problems and new disequilibria that the counterrevolution is able to take advantage of. This is the challenge for any socialist-oriented revolution within global capitalism.
Chris Hedges: The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News
"Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader. The creed of objectivity and balance, formulated at the beginning of the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from advertisers, disarms and cripples the press.
Or read it at truthdig.com
And the creed of objectivity becomes a convenient and profitable vehicle to avoid confronting unpleasant truths or angering a power structure on which news organizations depend for access and profits. This creed transforms reporters into neutral observers or voyeurs. It banishes empathy, passion and a quest for justice. Reporters are permitted to watch but not to feel or to speak in their own voices. They function as “professionals” and see themselves as dispassionate and disinterested social scientists. This vaunted lack of bias, enforced by bloodless hierarchies of bureaucrats, is the disease of American journalism.
“The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is report what both sides say and you’ve done a fine job of objective journalism debilitates the press,” the late columnist Molly Ivins once wrote. “There is no such thing as objectivity, and the truth, that slippery little bugger, has the oddest habit of being way to hell off on one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between any two opposing points of view. The smug complacency of much of the press—I have heard many an editor say, ‘Well, we’re being attacked by both sides so we must be right’—stems from the curious notion that if you get a quote from both sides, preferably in an official position, you’ve done the job. In the first place, most stories aren’t two-sided, they’re 17-sided at least. In the second place, it’s of no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying, ‘Cat,’ and the other side saying ‘Dog,’ while the truth is there’s an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes.”
Ivins went on to write that “the press’s most serious failures are not its sins of commission, but its sins of omission—the stories we miss, the stories we don’t see, the stories that don’t hold press conferences, the stories that don’t come from ‘reliable sources.’ ”
This abject moral failing has left the growing numbers of Americans shunted aside by our corporate state without a voice. It has also, with the rise of a ruthless American oligarchy, left the traditional press on the wrong side of our growing class divide. The elitism, distrust and lack of credibility of the press—and here I speak of the dwindling institutions that attempt to report news—come directly from this steady and willful disintegration of the media’s moral core.
This moral void has been effectively exploited by the 24-hour cable news shows and trash talk radio programs. The failure of the fact-based press to express empathy or outrage for our growing underclass has permitted the disastrous rise of “faith-based” reporting. The bloodless and soulless journalism of the traditional media has bolstered the popularity of partisan outlets that present a view of the world that often has no relation to the real, but responds very effectively to the emotional needs of viewers. Fox News is, in some sense, no more objective than The New York Times, but there is one crucial and vital difference. Fox News and most of the other cable outlets do not feel constrained by verifiable facts. Within the traditional news establishment, facts may have been self-selected or skillfully stage-managed by public relations specialists, but what was not verifiable was not publishable.
The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to be objective, and promise a return to “genuine” objectivity. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly argues, “If Fox News is a conservative channel—and I’m going to use the word ‘if’—so what? … You’ve got 50 other media that are blatantly left. Now, I don’t think Fox is a conservative channel. I think it’s a traditional channel. There’s a difference. We are willing to hear points of view that you’ll never hear on ABC, CBS or NBC.”
O’Reilly is not wrong in suggesting that the objectivity of the traditional media has an inherent political bias. But it is a bias that caters to the power elite and it is a bias that is confined by fact. The traditional quest for “objectivity” is, as James Carey wrote, also based on an ethnocentric conceit: “It pretended to discover Universal Truth, to proclaim Universal Laws, and to describe a Universal Man. Upon inspection it appeared, however, that its Universal Man resembled a type found around Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Cambridge, England; its Universal Laws resembled those felt to be useful by Congress and Parliament; and its Universal Truth bore English and American accents.”
Objectivity creates the formula of quoting Establishment specialists or experts within the narrow confines of the power elite who debate policy nuance like medieval theologians. As long as one viewpoint is balanced by another, usually no more than what Sigmund Freud would term “the narcissism of minor difference,” the job of a reporter is deemed complete. But this is more often a way to obscure rather than expose truth.
Reporting, while it is presented to the public as neutral, objective and unbiased, is always highly interpretive. It is defined by rigid stylistic parameters. I have written, like most other reporters, hundreds of news stories. Reporters begin with a collection of facts, statements, positions and anecdotes and then select those that create the “balance” permitted by the formula of daily journalism. The closer reporters get to official sources, for example those covering Wall Street, Congress, the White House or the State Department, the more constraints they endure. When reporting depends heavily on access it becomes very difficult to challenge those who grant or deny that access. This craven desire for access has turned huge sections of the Washington press, along with most business reporters, into courtiers. The need to be included in press briefings and background interviews with government or business officials, as well as the desire for leaks and early access to official documents, obliterates journalistic autonomy.
“Record the fury of a Palestinian whose land has been taken from him by Israeli settlers—but always refer to Israel’s ‘security needs’ and its ‘war on terror,’ ” Robert Fisk writes. “If Americans are accused of ‘torture’, call it ‘abuse’. If Israel assassinates a Palestinian, call it a ‘targeted killing’. If Armenians lament their Holocaust of 1,500,000 souls in 1915, remind readers that Turkey denies this all too real and fully documented genocide. If Iraq has become a hell on earth for its people, recall how awful Saddam was. If a dictator is on our side, call him a ‘strongman’. If he’s our enemy, call him a tyrant, or part of the ‘axis of evil’. And above all else, use the word ‘terrorist.’ Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Seven days a week.”
“Ask ‘how’ and ‘who’—but not ‘why’,” Fisk adds. “Source everything to officials: ‘American officials’, ‘intelligence officials’, ‘official sources’, anonymous policemen or army officers. And if these institutions charged with our protection abuse their power, then remind readers and listeners and viewers of the dangerous age in which we now live, the age of terror—which means that we must live in the Age of the Warrior, someone whose business and profession and vocation and mere existence is to destroy our enemies.”
“In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk,” the former New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote. “Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won’t work? We give you another who says they will. The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.”
Journalists, because of their training and distaste for shattering their own exalted notion of themselves, lack the inclination and vocabulary to discuss ethics. They will, when pressed, mumble something about telling the truth and serving the public. They prefer not to face the fact that my truth is not your truth. News is a signal, a “blip,” an alarm that something is happening beyond our small circle of existence, as Walter Lippmann noted in his book “Public Opinion.” Journalism does not point us toward truth since, as Lippmann understood, there is always a vast divide between truth and news. Ethical questions open journalism to the nebulous world of interpretation and philosophy, and for this reason journalists flee from ethical inquiry like a herd of frightened sheep.
Journalists, while they like to promote the image of themselves as fierce individualists, are in the end another species of corporate employees. They claim as their clients an amorphous public. They seek their moral justification in the service of this nameless, faceless mass and speak little about the vast influence of the power elite to shape and determine reporting. Does a public even exist in a society as fragmented and divided as ours? Or is the public, as Walter Lippmann wrote, now so deeply uninformed and divorced from the inner workings of power and diplomacy as to make it a clean slate on which our armies of skilled propagandists can, often through the press, leave a message?
The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. The press became, as seen in the Iraq war and the aftermath of the financial upheavals, a class of courtiers. The press, which has always written and spoken from presuppositions and principles that reflect the elite consensus, now peddles a consensus that is flagrantly artificial. Our elite oversaw the dismantling of the country’s manufacturing base and the betrayal of the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the press dutifully trumpeted this as a form of growth. Our elite deregulated the banking industry, leading to nationwide bank collapses, and the press extolled the value of the free market. Our elite corrupted the levers of power to advance the interests of corporations and the press naively conflated freedom with the free market. This reporting may have been “objective” and “impartial” but it defied common sense. The harsh reality of shuttered former steel-producing towns and growing human misery should have, in the hands of any good cop reporter, exposed the fantasies. But the press long ago stopped thinking and lost nearly all its moral autonomy.
Real reporting, grounded in a commitment to justice and empathy, could have informed and empowered the public as we underwent a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. It could have stimulated a radical debate about structures, laws, privilege, power and justice. But the traditional press, by clinging to an outdated etiquette designed to serve corrupt power structures, lost its social function. Corporations, which once made many of these news outlets very rich, have turned to more effective forms of advertising. Profits have plummeted. And yet these press courtiers, lost in the fantasy of their own righteousness and moral probity, cling to the hollow morality of “objectivity” with comic ferocity.
The world will not be a better place when these fact-based news organizations die. We will be propelled into a culture where facts and opinions will be interchangeable, where lies will become true, and where fantasy will be peddled as news. I will lament the loss of traditional news. It will unmoor us from reality. The tragedy is that the moral void of the news business contributed as much to its own annihilation as the protofascists who feed on its carcass.
AP / Elaine Thompson"
“The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is report what both sides say and you’ve done a fine job of objective journalism debilitates the press,” the late columnist Molly Ivins once wrote. “There is no such thing as objectivity, and the truth, that slippery little bugger, has the oddest habit of being way to hell off on one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between any two opposing points of view. The smug complacency of much of the press—I have heard many an editor say, ‘Well, we’re being attacked by both sides so we must be right’—stems from the curious notion that if you get a quote from both sides, preferably in an official position, you’ve done the job. In the first place, most stories aren’t two-sided, they’re 17-sided at least. In the second place, it’s of no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying, ‘Cat,’ and the other side saying ‘Dog,’ while the truth is there’s an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes.”
Ivins went on to write that “the press’s most serious failures are not its sins of commission, but its sins of omission—the stories we miss, the stories we don’t see, the stories that don’t hold press conferences, the stories that don’t come from ‘reliable sources.’ ”
This abject moral failing has left the growing numbers of Americans shunted aside by our corporate state without a voice. It has also, with the rise of a ruthless American oligarchy, left the traditional press on the wrong side of our growing class divide. The elitism, distrust and lack of credibility of the press—and here I speak of the dwindling institutions that attempt to report news—come directly from this steady and willful disintegration of the media’s moral core.
This moral void has been effectively exploited by the 24-hour cable news shows and trash talk radio programs. The failure of the fact-based press to express empathy or outrage for our growing underclass has permitted the disastrous rise of “faith-based” reporting. The bloodless and soulless journalism of the traditional media has bolstered the popularity of partisan outlets that present a view of the world that often has no relation to the real, but responds very effectively to the emotional needs of viewers. Fox News is, in some sense, no more objective than The New York Times, but there is one crucial and vital difference. Fox News and most of the other cable outlets do not feel constrained by verifiable facts. Within the traditional news establishment, facts may have been self-selected or skillfully stage-managed by public relations specialists, but what was not verifiable was not publishable.
The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to be objective, and promise a return to “genuine” objectivity. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly argues, “If Fox News is a conservative channel—and I’m going to use the word ‘if’—so what? … You’ve got 50 other media that are blatantly left. Now, I don’t think Fox is a conservative channel. I think it’s a traditional channel. There’s a difference. We are willing to hear points of view that you’ll never hear on ABC, CBS or NBC.”
O’Reilly is not wrong in suggesting that the objectivity of the traditional media has an inherent political bias. But it is a bias that caters to the power elite and it is a bias that is confined by fact. The traditional quest for “objectivity” is, as James Carey wrote, also based on an ethnocentric conceit: “It pretended to discover Universal Truth, to proclaim Universal Laws, and to describe a Universal Man. Upon inspection it appeared, however, that its Universal Man resembled a type found around Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Cambridge, England; its Universal Laws resembled those felt to be useful by Congress and Parliament; and its Universal Truth bore English and American accents.”
Objectivity creates the formula of quoting Establishment specialists or experts within the narrow confines of the power elite who debate policy nuance like medieval theologians. As long as one viewpoint is balanced by another, usually no more than what Sigmund Freud would term “the narcissism of minor difference,” the job of a reporter is deemed complete. But this is more often a way to obscure rather than expose truth.
Reporting, while it is presented to the public as neutral, objective and unbiased, is always highly interpretive. It is defined by rigid stylistic parameters. I have written, like most other reporters, hundreds of news stories. Reporters begin with a collection of facts, statements, positions and anecdotes and then select those that create the “balance” permitted by the formula of daily journalism. The closer reporters get to official sources, for example those covering Wall Street, Congress, the White House or the State Department, the more constraints they endure. When reporting depends heavily on access it becomes very difficult to challenge those who grant or deny that access. This craven desire for access has turned huge sections of the Washington press, along with most business reporters, into courtiers. The need to be included in press briefings and background interviews with government or business officials, as well as the desire for leaks and early access to official documents, obliterates journalistic autonomy.
“Record the fury of a Palestinian whose land has been taken from him by Israeli settlers—but always refer to Israel’s ‘security needs’ and its ‘war on terror,’ ” Robert Fisk writes. “If Americans are accused of ‘torture’, call it ‘abuse’. If Israel assassinates a Palestinian, call it a ‘targeted killing’. If Armenians lament their Holocaust of 1,500,000 souls in 1915, remind readers that Turkey denies this all too real and fully documented genocide. If Iraq has become a hell on earth for its people, recall how awful Saddam was. If a dictator is on our side, call him a ‘strongman’. If he’s our enemy, call him a tyrant, or part of the ‘axis of evil’. And above all else, use the word ‘terrorist.’ Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Seven days a week.”
“Ask ‘how’ and ‘who’—but not ‘why’,” Fisk adds. “Source everything to officials: ‘American officials’, ‘intelligence officials’, ‘official sources’, anonymous policemen or army officers. And if these institutions charged with our protection abuse their power, then remind readers and listeners and viewers of the dangerous age in which we now live, the age of terror—which means that we must live in the Age of the Warrior, someone whose business and profession and vocation and mere existence is to destroy our enemies.”
“In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk,” the former New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote. “Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won’t work? We give you another who says they will. The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.”
Journalists, because of their training and distaste for shattering their own exalted notion of themselves, lack the inclination and vocabulary to discuss ethics. They will, when pressed, mumble something about telling the truth and serving the public. They prefer not to face the fact that my truth is not your truth. News is a signal, a “blip,” an alarm that something is happening beyond our small circle of existence, as Walter Lippmann noted in his book “Public Opinion.” Journalism does not point us toward truth since, as Lippmann understood, there is always a vast divide between truth and news. Ethical questions open journalism to the nebulous world of interpretation and philosophy, and for this reason journalists flee from ethical inquiry like a herd of frightened sheep.
Journalists, while they like to promote the image of themselves as fierce individualists, are in the end another species of corporate employees. They claim as their clients an amorphous public. They seek their moral justification in the service of this nameless, faceless mass and speak little about the vast influence of the power elite to shape and determine reporting. Does a public even exist in a society as fragmented and divided as ours? Or is the public, as Walter Lippmann wrote, now so deeply uninformed and divorced from the inner workings of power and diplomacy as to make it a clean slate on which our armies of skilled propagandists can, often through the press, leave a message?
The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. The press became, as seen in the Iraq war and the aftermath of the financial upheavals, a class of courtiers. The press, which has always written and spoken from presuppositions and principles that reflect the elite consensus, now peddles a consensus that is flagrantly artificial. Our elite oversaw the dismantling of the country’s manufacturing base and the betrayal of the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the press dutifully trumpeted this as a form of growth. Our elite deregulated the banking industry, leading to nationwide bank collapses, and the press extolled the value of the free market. Our elite corrupted the levers of power to advance the interests of corporations and the press naively conflated freedom with the free market. This reporting may have been “objective” and “impartial” but it defied common sense. The harsh reality of shuttered former steel-producing towns and growing human misery should have, in the hands of any good cop reporter, exposed the fantasies. But the press long ago stopped thinking and lost nearly all its moral autonomy.
Real reporting, grounded in a commitment to justice and empathy, could have informed and empowered the public as we underwent a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. It could have stimulated a radical debate about structures, laws, privilege, power and justice. But the traditional press, by clinging to an outdated etiquette designed to serve corrupt power structures, lost its social function. Corporations, which once made many of these news outlets very rich, have turned to more effective forms of advertising. Profits have plummeted. And yet these press courtiers, lost in the fantasy of their own righteousness and moral probity, cling to the hollow morality of “objectivity” with comic ferocity.
The world will not be a better place when these fact-based news organizations die. We will be propelled into a culture where facts and opinions will be interchangeable, where lies will become true, and where fantasy will be peddled as news. I will lament the loss of traditional news. It will unmoor us from reality. The tragedy is that the moral void of the news business contributed as much to its own annihilation as the protofascists who feed on its carcass.
AP / Elaine Thompson"Or read it at truthdig.com
01 February 2010
Letter to Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) about its Goldcorp investment
Sirs,
In March 2009 the BBC published a story "Canadian mine accused of causing skin infections" in which PSAC was mentioned indirectly:
"Bill Brassington heads a Canadian union pension fund that invests in Goldcorp and has seen the pictures taken by a North American non-governmental organisation called Rights Action.He points out that Rights Action has no medical evidence to support its claims. Still, as an ethical investor he is worried."
On 31 December 2009, the UK daily The Guardian published yet another story about the Goldcorp mine in Honduras "Gold giant faces Honduras inquiry into alleged heavy metal pollution" in whch we read the following:
"The community's complaints have been backed by two studies, commissioned by the UK-based advocacy group Cafod. The studies detected high acidity which could be linked to cyanide "heap-leaching" methods to extract gold from low-grade deposits. They describe how the process soaks piles of crushed gold ore in a cyanide solution which filters down, leaching out the precious metal from the rock but also releasing other toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury and lead. Without careful management it can contaminate streams and groundwater.
The first study, by Paul Younger, a Newcastle university hydro-geochemical engineering professor and expert on mine water management, detected acidic mine drainage, whereby sulphides in the rock are exposed to oxygen and water and produce sulphuric acid. Younger said this can have devastating effects on animals and plants.
A follow-up study by Adam Jarvis and Jaime Amezaga, also of Newcastle University, found evidence of "severe" contamination in the form of highly acidic and metal-rich water from the mine site flowing into a stream used by villagers for agriculture and domestic purposes. The data was in a previously undisclosed 2008 report by Defomin, Honduras's mining regulatory authority.
"This new information provides concrete evidence that the San Martin mine has caused pollution in Honduras," said Sonya Maldar of Cafod. "Goldcorp must clean up its act so that the people of Siria Valley are not left with a toxic legacy."
In light of the fact that Goldcorp has caused massive damage to the population and the natural resources, I would like to know whether PSAC will be withdrawing its investment in Goldcorp immediately? If not, why not, considering PSAC states in its own blurb:
1. "The PSAC...has been at the front of a variety of significant and successful campaigns for workplace and human rights, including the struggle for equal pay, enhanced workplace health and safety and the rights of same sex spouses."
2. "The PSAC is working to achieve a compassionate and inclusive society free of sexism, racism, homophobia and all other forms of discrimination."
3. "PSAC is committed...to social justice...around the world."
Not only that but PSAC POLICY 22 on the Environment states:
"As a socially responsible union, the Alliance recognizes that protection of the environment from acid rain, toxins and ecologically unsound consumer products is of paramount importance if the world is to survive into the 21st century. Over the long term, economic growth and employment creation will be impossible unless the environmental destruction of the past is reversed.
As a result, and in cooperation with the Canadian Labour Congress and environmental groups, the Alliance will:
(d) review its own practices and procurement policies to ensure that it is not contributing to the deterioration of the environment;"
In view of the reports mentioned above in the Guardian article, it can safely be said that Goldcorp and consequently, its investors such as PSAC, are intimately involved in the environmental destruction it professes to abhor.
When can we expect the announcement that PSAC has definitively withdrawn its investments from Goldcorp?
Yours Sincerely,
David Sketchley
NB: Interesting to note that Bill Brassington, "chair of its (PSAC's) socially responsible investment sub-committee...recently became a signatory to the UN Principles of Responsible Investment" on behalf of the PSAC Staff Pension Plan. The PRI "process was coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) and the UN Global Compact."
In March 2009 the BBC published a story "Canadian mine accused of causing skin infections" in which PSAC was mentioned indirectly:
"Bill Brassington heads a Canadian union pension fund that invests in Goldcorp and has seen the pictures taken by a North American non-governmental organisation called Rights Action.He points out that Rights Action has no medical evidence to support its claims. Still, as an ethical investor he is worried."
On 31 December 2009, the UK daily The Guardian published yet another story about the Goldcorp mine in Honduras "Gold giant faces Honduras inquiry into alleged heavy metal pollution" in whch we read the following:
"The community's complaints have been backed by two studies, commissioned by the UK-based advocacy group Cafod. The studies detected high acidity which could be linked to cyanide "heap-leaching" methods to extract gold from low-grade deposits. They describe how the process soaks piles of crushed gold ore in a cyanide solution which filters down, leaching out the precious metal from the rock but also releasing other toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury and lead. Without careful management it can contaminate streams and groundwater.
The first study, by Paul Younger, a Newcastle university hydro-geochemical engineering professor and expert on mine water management, detected acidic mine drainage, whereby sulphides in the rock are exposed to oxygen and water and produce sulphuric acid. Younger said this can have devastating effects on animals and plants.
A follow-up study by Adam Jarvis and Jaime Amezaga, also of Newcastle University, found evidence of "severe" contamination in the form of highly acidic and metal-rich water from the mine site flowing into a stream used by villagers for agriculture and domestic purposes. The data was in a previously undisclosed 2008 report by Defomin, Honduras's mining regulatory authority.
"This new information provides concrete evidence that the San Martin mine has caused pollution in Honduras," said Sonya Maldar of Cafod. "Goldcorp must clean up its act so that the people of Siria Valley are not left with a toxic legacy."
In light of the fact that Goldcorp has caused massive damage to the population and the natural resources, I would like to know whether PSAC will be withdrawing its investment in Goldcorp immediately? If not, why not, considering PSAC states in its own blurb:
1. "The PSAC...has been at the front of a variety of significant and successful campaigns for workplace and human rights, including the struggle for equal pay, enhanced workplace health and safety and the rights of same sex spouses."
2. "The PSAC is working to achieve a compassionate and inclusive society free of sexism, racism, homophobia and all other forms of discrimination."
3. "PSAC is committed...to social justice...around the world."
Not only that but PSAC POLICY 22 on the Environment states:
"As a socially responsible union, the Alliance recognizes that protection of the environment from acid rain, toxins and ecologically unsound consumer products is of paramount importance if the world is to survive into the 21st century. Over the long term, economic growth and employment creation will be impossible unless the environmental destruction of the past is reversed.
As a result, and in cooperation with the Canadian Labour Congress and environmental groups, the Alliance will:
(d) review its own practices and procurement policies to ensure that it is not contributing to the deterioration of the environment;"
In view of the reports mentioned above in the Guardian article, it can safely be said that Goldcorp and consequently, its investors such as PSAC, are intimately involved in the environmental destruction it professes to abhor.
When can we expect the announcement that PSAC has definitively withdrawn its investments from Goldcorp?
Yours Sincerely,
David Sketchley
NB: Interesting to note that Bill Brassington, "chair of its (PSAC's) socially responsible investment sub-committee...recently became a signatory to the UN Principles of Responsible Investment" on behalf of the PSAC Staff Pension Plan. The PRI "process was coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) and the UN Global Compact."
"Marines may carry portable brain scanners"
So reads the headline over at the Marine Corps Times (I kid you not!). Optimists they are if they're hoping this machine will detect a single brain in the Marine Corps!
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