Pardon Me

The Washington Times Organ of Propaganda

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
December 27, 2006

The American Right achieved its political dominance in Washington over the past quarter century with the help of more than $3 billion spent by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon on a daily propaganda organ, the Washington Times, according to a 21-year veteran of the newspaper.

George Archibald, who describes himself “as the first reporter hired at the Washington Times outside the founding group” and author of a commemorative book on the Times’ first two decades, has now joined a long line of disillusioned conservative writers who departed and warned the public about extremism within the newspaper.

In an Internet essay on recent turmoil inside the Times, Archibald also confirmed claims by some former Moon insiders that the cult leader has continued to pour in $100 million a year or more to keep the newspaper afloat. Archibald put the price tag for the newspaper’s first 24 years at “more than $3 billion of cash.”

At the newspaper’s tenth anniversary, Moon announced that he had spent $1 billion on the Times – or $100 million a year – but newspaper officials and some Moon followers have since tried to low-ball Moon’s subsidies in public comments by claiming they had declined to about $35 million a year.

The figure from Archibald and other defectors from Moon’s operation is about three times higher than the $35 million annual figure.
...
Washington Times articles are routinely cited by C-SPAN, for instance, without explanations to viewers that the newspaper is financed by an ultra-right religious cult leader, a convicted tax fraud and a publicly identified money-launderer. Most American listeners just think they’re getting straightforward news.
...
Arguably one of the measures of the Washington Times’ success was how the major U.S. news organizations increasingly seemed to march to the same drummer, even when not under direct pressure to do so.

Over the past half dozen years, it has often been hard to distinguish between the fawning coverage of George W. Bush from the Washington Times and from the Washington Post. Both major Washington dailies bought into Bush’s false claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction with almost no skepticism.
...

link to original

This muckraking reveals an important betrayal of the journalistic medium. Journalism relies on principles of ethics to function properly. Here we have an example, S. M. Moon and the Washington Times, of a fundamental breakdown in the system of journalism.

Bill Moyers recently asked how America could so readily and rapidly fall into the senseless abyss of the extreme right wing agenda. Here, Robert Parry has prepared an essay to (at the least partially) answer that question.

Merry Christmas

Islands Disappearing

Go to Original

Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island
For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas.
Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports
Published: 24 December 2006

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

It makes sense to take immediate and necessary steps to reduce our impact on climate change. Especially those of us living in highly developed and wealthy societies, such as in the West, where such changes are imminently feasible.

Light

I may have posted this image before, but I want to put it up again. December is the darkest month of the year. I think I am feeling some SAD. This photo helps me to remember the light of summer. It helps rekindle the feeling of goodness that comes with light.

The photo was taken in Olympia Washington's Priest Point Park, June 2005.

I hope that you can derive some benefit from it. Healing light:

Attack on Iran: Inevitable?

Several articles have been published recently in regard to the potential for military action against Iran. I received a letter from my Senator Patty Murray, which was all but gung ho about attacking Iran (Murray receives significant support from AIPAC.) Let me know if you want me to forward you a copy of this letter.

Amy Goodman published a conversation between Seymour Hersh and Scott Ritter about White House plans for regime change in Iran. Ritter concludes that an attack is inevitable, and that within mere days of an attack we will all feel it in our pocketbooks.

And in today's New York Times there appears an important article By FLYNT LEVERETT and HILLARY MANN that highlights White House schizophrenia regarding the publication of information about the potential invasion of Iran. White House behavior regarding the redaction of much of this article is provocative and disturbing.

The potential for a military assault on Iran is real. I worry that the prospect of invading Iran is made more appealing by the failure in Iraq, i.e. - Iran may provide an escape route, a reason to flee Iraq.

Driving in the Snow

When I woke up today I lounged around. I found some steel cut oats in the cupboard, so I didn't need to go straight into town - so I didn't go straight into town. I hanged(?) out. I read blogs and news articles. But I still needed to go to town. Later I told myself, later.

At about two o'clock it started snowing. Well, first it was ice pellets and freezing rain. But then it turned to big thick wet and fluffy flakes (there is such a thing). It was a perfect snow for building snowmen or throwing snowballs.

It was not a perfect snow for driving. Unless you like driving in that sort of thing. I was faced with the prospect of heading out in a thickening snow storm to procure some of the essentials (lettuce, eggs, doughnuts, whole wheat flour (for pancakes tomorrow morning)).

At about 3:30 I decided that it was then or never. I figured that the Island City Coop, which I intended to visit, might close earlier on. In fact they are open until 5 or 5:30 most days. With the rear-wheel-drive-only pickup waiting, I zipped up my jacket and headed out to the drive.

It was nice to drive through the clean white snow. I was in the first vehicle that made tracks through the new snow at first, on the side road.

After all was said and done, the pickup handled very well considering it is rear wheel drive, and the mission was accomplished. Now, I can go to bed without being hungry, and rest, while looking forward to pancakes and whatever tomorrow may bring.

Wealth Distribution

I was really shocked by these numbers. I knew that the ultra-wealthy were disproportionately wealthy, but I was unaware of the severity of the issue:

The Kansas City Star
By Rick Montgomery
...
While the rest of America rolls its eyeballs at such injustice, a spate of new studies and statistics throws a blinding spotlight on just how concentrated the world’s wealth has become. The richest of the rich are getting much richer, and ascending quicker, than are the rather wealthy.

And Average Joe? He appears stuck in the mud.

According to data recently prepared by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households saw an increase in real household income of 2 percent between 1990 and 2004. That’s adjusted for inflation.

Two. Percent. In 14 years.

Now creep up the income ladder to the top 1 percent of households. There, says the center’s Aviva Aron-Dine, real income shot up 57 percent in the same period.

Climb higher. For the top 0.1 percent — where incomes average about $4.5 million a year — the jump was 85 percent. For the top .01 percent, 112 percent.

“The increasing gulf between the rich and super rich is a reflection of the greater chasm throughout society,” says Aron-Dine. “What’s going on is an increasingly skewed assessment of wage and income over the long term.”

Not since the 1920s — the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rollicking Jay Gatsby — has such a small slice of America hoarded so much of the nation’s income, her findings show.

Globally, the richest 2 percent of adults now own more than half of the personal wealth, says a new study by U.N. researchers.
...

link to original

Here's another interesting source of infomration in re: wealth distribution:

Wealth, Income, and Power
by G. William Domhoff
September 2005 (updated December 2006)
...
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2001, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 33.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 51%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 84%, leaving only 16% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth, the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 39.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2004).
...

click here to see Table 1 and Figure 1.

Finally, here is a story from the Washington Post describing how the tax burden has shifted since George Bush entered the White House and began his tax cut regime:

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 13, 2004; Page A04

Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign.

The CBO study, due to be released today, found that the wealthiest 20 percent, whose incomes averaged $182,700 in 2001, saw their share of federal taxes drop from 64.4 percent of total tax payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year. The top 1 percent, earning $1.1 million, saw their share fall to 20.1 percent of the total, from 22.2 percent.
...

link

Fornax the Troll

When once a young lad

       Whose name was Thad,

Went for a walk in the country



There came a great shout

       And a tremulous cry

For he stumbled upon a monster.



Old Fornax the brute

       A foul-tempered troll

Who was given to travelers's travails



Came upon he with a great

       Wooden stump - a former tree

He did a thump thump thump.



He did proceed to wander

       Into the village proper.

Where he found to his surprise



The central square alight

       With adornment gay, and song and tune -

Chorus and Instrument combined.



Astonished was he,

       though brutish and vile,

He smiled and laid down and cried.

Oly October Sky