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progressive books 8/5/2010

Andrew J. Bacevich on How to Dismantle the American Empire

The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?

The Afghanistan decision was his [Obama's] opportunity to begin to chart a new course on national security policy, to begin to break away from this pattern of behavior that we’ve adhered to for the past sixty or so years. And he blew it. I can’t pretend to look into his heart and understand what factors caused him to make the decision he did. I suspect that a political calculation may have weighed more heavily than a strategic calculation or a moral calculation. And I find that deeply upsetting, because I, and I think many of us, felt that here, finally, was a public figure who—whose decisions would not be influenced primarily by political calculations... My guess is the President probably right now has a case of buyer’s remorse and is wishing that he hadn’t actually made the decision that he did, but it has become Obama’s war. I mean, he finds himself in a circumstance now where, having bought the war, it’s going worse now than it was last year. And he’s basically facing a reelection campaign right around the corner. Unless David Petraeus, our new commander, truly pulls a rabbit out of the hat, then President Obama will run for reelection in 2012 with this war still very much ongoing and, in all likelihood, with no end in sight.

But you asked the question, where does the pressure come from? And the pressure comes from what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. The pressure comes from the national security apparatus. There are people in institutions who are deeply invested in maintaining the status quo. There are budgets, there are prerogatives, there are ambitions, that ostensibly get satisfied by maintaining this drive for American globalism, again, backed by an emphasis on military power. So I don’t discount for a second that the President would have had to, you know, shove aside some fairly stubborn resistance to make that course change on Afghanistan, and he chose not to do it. - Andrew J. Bacevich from a DemocracyNow! interview.

There exists an alternative tradition to which Americans today could repair, should they choose to do so. This tradition harks back to the nearly forgotten anti-imperial origins of the Republic. Succinctly captured in the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” this tradition is one that does not seek trouble but insists that others will accord the United States respect. Updated for our own time, it might translate into the following substitute for the existing sacred trinity.

First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests. However necessary, military power itself is neither good nor inherently desirable. Any nation defining itself in terms of military might is well down the road to perdition, as earlier generations of Americans instinctively understood. As for military supremacy, the lessons of the past are quite clear. It is an illusion and its pursuit an invitation to mischief, if not disaster. Therefore, the United States should maintain only those forces required to accomplish the defense establishment’s core mission.

Second, the primary duty station of the American soldier is in America. Just as the U.S. military should not be a global police force, so too it should not be a global occupation force. Specific circumstances may from time to time require the United States on a temporary basis to establish a military presence abroad. Yet rather than defining the norm, Americans should view this prospect as a sharp departure, entailing public debate and prior congressional authorization. Dismantling the Pentagon’s sprawling network of existing bases promises to be a lengthy process. Priority should be given to those regions where the American presence costs the most while accomplishing the least. According to those criteria, U.S. troops should withdraw from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia forthwith.

Third, consistent with the Just War tradition, the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self-defense. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war -- the United States bestowing on itself the exclusive prerogative of employing force against ostensible threats even before they materialize—is a moral and strategic abomination, the very inverse of prudent and enlightened statecraft. Concocted by George W. Bush to justify his needless and misguided 2003 invasion of Iraq, this doctrine still awaits explicit abrogation by authorities in Washington. Never again should the United States undertake “a war of choice” informed by fantasies that violence provides a shortcut to resolving history’s complexities.

Were this alternative triad to become the basis for policy, dramatic changes in the U.S. national security posture would ensue. Military spending would decrease appreciably. The Pentagon’s global footprint would shrink. Weapons manufacturers would see their profits plummet. Beltway Bandits would close up shop. The ranks of defense- oriented think tanks would thin. These changes, in turn, would narrow the range of options available for employing force, obliging policy makers to exhibit greater restraint in intervening abroad. With resources currently devoted to rehabilitating Baghdad or Kabul freed up, the cause of rehabilitating Cleveland and Detroit might finally attract a following.

Choosing

President Lyndon Johnson had hoped that an ambitious domestic reform program known as the Great Society might define his legacy. Instead, he bequeathed to his successor a nation that was bitterly divided, deeply troubled, and increasingly cynical.

To follow a different course would have required Johnson to depart from the Washington rules. This he -- although not he alone -- lacked the courage to do.

Here lies the real significance -- and perhaps the tragedy -- of Barack Obama’s decision, during the first year of his presidency, to escalate the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. By retaining Robert Gates as defense secretary and by appointing retired four-star officers as his national security adviser and intelligence director, Obama had already offered Washington assurances that he was not contemplating a radical departure from the existing pattern of national security policy. Whether wittingly or not, the president now proffered his full-fledged allegiance to the Washington consensus, removing any lingering doubts about its durability.

In his speech of December 1, 2009, while explaining to the cadets at West Point why he felt it necessary to widen a war already in its ninth year, Obama justified his decision by appending it to a much larger narrative. “More than any other nation,” he declared, “the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades -- a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, and markets open, and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress and advancing frontiers of human liberty.” Obama wanted it known that by sending tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan his own administration was carrying on the work his predecessors had begun. Their policies were his policies.

The six decades to which the president referred in his artfully sanitized rendering of contemporary history were the years during which the American credo and the sacred trinity had ascended to a position of uncontested supremacy. Thus did the president who came into office vowing to change the way Washington works make known his intention to leave this crucially important element of his inheritance all but untouched. Like Johnson, the president whose bold agenda for domestic reform presaged his own, Obama too was choosing to conform - an excerpt from WASHINGTON RULES: America's Path To Permanent War by Andrew J. Bacevich. permalink comments

Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (American Empire Project) by Andrew Bacevich Metropolitan Books
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progressive books 8/1/2010

Stacy Malkan on Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry

Last month Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced legislation that would toughen safety standards for beauty products and require regular government testing for hazardous ingredients. DemocracyNow! hosted a debate between Stacy Malkan, founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and author of Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, and John Bailey, chief scientist at the Personal Care Products Council and a spokesperson for the cosmetics industry. We feature some excerpts from Stacy Malkan's comments:

I actually was a lover of makeup when I was a teenager. I used lots of products. And I was using about twenty products a day. So that was shampoos, lotions, hair gels, all kinds of makeup. And for the book, I went back, and I actually looked up all of those products that I had been using as a teen and learned that I had been exposing myself to 230 synthetic chemicals every day, you know, before even getting on the school bus. And that’s pretty typical kind of exposures for a teenage girl.

So, in that mix were seventeen carcinogens, chemicals linked to cancer. There were dozens of hormone-disrupting chemicals, many parabens, which can act like estrogen in the body. Lots of these products, as we know from the product tests we’ve conducted at Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, are contaminated with carcinogens like formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane, that are not listed on the label. We found those chemicals in dozens of top-selling children’s bath products.

There are two huge loopholes in labeling laws. The companies don’t have to tell us what’s in fragrance, and that can be a dozen or more chemicals that are in any shampoo or conditioner with a fragrance, for example. They also don’t have to tell us about contaminants or byproducts, and those are some common ones that typically get into products from the chemical processes that are used. So, formaldehyde, 1,4-dioxane would be examples, nitrosamines. Those are carcinogens. We find lead in lipstick. We’ve done tests of kids’ face paint and found low levels of lead, as well as other heavy metals like nickel and chromium.

So, contaminants are very common. The industry knows about them. FDA knows about them. But there are no limits. And the only way to find out if your product contains them is to send it to a lab and spend a couple of hundred dollars to test it.

So the problem with cosmetics, as I was saying about my own daily exposures, it’s the mixture of low levels of hazardous chemicals that we’re exposed to continually, day after day after day. And the companies always say, and I’m sure John will say, it’s just low levels, it’s just a little bit, just traces of1,4-dioxane and formaldehyde. But, you know, these are chemicals derived from oil products with known toxicities, and they’re mixed together. So a typical baby in a tub could be exposed to formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane from the shampoo, the bubble bath, the body wash. The same chemicals are used in laundry detergent, dish soap. So the exposures are continual. And there’s no need for it. There’s absolutely no reason on earth for baby shampoos to contain carcinogens. The companies already know how to make products without those chemicals, and that’s what they should be doing. - Stacy Malkan from DemocracyNow!. permalink comments

Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry by Stacy Malkan New Society Publishers
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progressive books 7/10/2010

Joy Gordon on the Invisble War, the United States and Iraq Sanctions

Joy Gordon, author of Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, discusses the comprehensive sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s that killed 500,000 children, the US led effort to literally starve Iraq by cutting off food importation, how the Gulf War and subsequent sanctions destroyed Iraq’s modern infrastructure and prevented rebuilding, contradictory US and UN policies on rewarding compliance of Security Council resolutions and how the US “reverse veto” power guaranteed the sanctions would never be lifted while Saddam Hussein remained in power. Listen to Scott Horton's interview of Joy Gordon on Anti-war Radio.

It is important to remember that the U.S. presence in Iraq, and the harm done by the Unted States to the Iraqi population, did not begin in 2003. Starting in August 1990, the United States was instrumental in imposing the cruelest sanctions in the history of international governance. While the United Nations (UN) Security Council was within its mandate to respond to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the sanctions regime it imposed, in conjunction with the massive bombing campaign of 1991, destroyed nearly all of Iraq's infrastructure, industial capacity, agriculture, telecommunications, and critical public services, particularly electricity and water treatment. For the next twelve years the sanctions would prevent Iraq from restoring any of these to the level Iraq had achived in the 1980s and would devestate the health, education, and basic well-being of almost the entire Iraqi population... - from Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University. permalink comments

Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon Harvard University Press
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progressive books 6/26/2010

Tom Engelhardt on the American Way of War

"The reality of modern war, from the early twentieth century on, is that what we call collateral damage has increasingly become the central damage of the war. Collateral damage means damage to civilians. But as war has progressed into our time, you could really say that the soldiers, increasingly, on either side, are the collateral damage, and increasingly, the civilians are the central damage of any war." We have bombed about seven wedding parties, says Tom Engelhardt on DemocracyNow! "I find this shocking. But we are incredibly detached from the wars that we fight. And as long as we are thinking in terms of our own safety, we think very little about wedding parties, funerals, baby naming parties... If you’re going to fight from the air—and that is part of the American way of war—you are going to kill civilians, period. And you’re going to probably kill them in greater numbers than any other way. That’s just a fact of war." - Tom Engelhardt, from DemocracyNow!

Listen to Tom Engelhardt discuss his new book, The American Way of War, with Scott Horten on Antiwar Radio. On the trillion-plus-dollar war budget: “Of course the striking thing…is that [these wars] in essence never end. If there were ever a victory, it would kind of get in the way of the American style of warfare. Basically, our wars no longer result in victory; they just go on and on and on.”

Author Tom Engelhardt is also the creator and editor of the website TomDispatch - "essential reading...a one-stop-shop where you can find the most provocative thinkers writing the most eloquent and hard hitting articles about the most pressing issues of the day. Read, get mad, and take action" - Howard Zinn on Tom Dispatch. permalink comments

The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's by Tom Engelhardt Haymarket Books
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progressive books 6/7/2010

Joe Meadors: I seem to have all the bad luck in the world when it comes to the Israelis.

For second time, Joe Meadors was aboard a ship attacked by Israeli forces in international waters. He was aboard the Svendoni, one of the Free Gaza boats that was seized early Monday morning (not the Mavi Marmara where nine activists were killed); and he was a signalman on the USS Liberty, the US Navy ship that was attacked by Israeli forces in international waters 43 years ago in 1967. Thirty-four Americans were killed and more than 170 were wounded in that attack.

Capt. William McGonagle: It appeared, from the ferocity of the attack, that the intent of the attackers was to sink the ship. Maybe they hoped to have no survivors, so that they would not be held accountable for the attack after it occurred.

Stan White: We didn’t know who was attacking us. They didn’t know who was attacking us. I don’t know how Washington can say, "Don’t go, because they’re friends of ours." So that’s the thing that’s always bothered me right there.

Dean Rusk: I never, myself, accepted the Israeli purported explanation. Accidents don’t occur through repeated attacks by service vessels and by aircraft. It obviously was a decision taken pretty high up on the Israeli side, because it involved combined forces. The ship was flying an American flag. Even if it had been unidentified from an Israeli point of view, it was a reckless thing for them to do. Suppose it had been a Soviet ship. That could have produced very large problems indeed.

James Akins: George Ball, the brilliant and courageous Undersecretary of State at the time of the '67 war, wrote about the attack on the Liberty subsequently. He said, "The ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack" was that it "had far more effect on policy in Israel than in America. Israel's leaders concluded that nothing they might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal. If America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything."

- from the documentary Loss of Liberty.

Joe Meadors: They [Israel] claimed that they mistook us for an Egyptian tramp steamer. They claimed it was a mistake, and they apologized for the mistake. The US government accepted it. But then again, the US government has never conducted an investigation of the attack. War crimes were committed by both Israel and the United States during that attack, and we’ve been trying to get them investigated, but the US government just ignores our request.

Amy Goodman: Your thoughts about what happened last weekend in the early morning hours of Monday?

Joe Meadors: I was kind of apprehensive, given the history I’ve had with the Israelis. I seem to have all the bad luck in the world when it comes to the Israelis.

- from a DemocracyNow! interview with Joe Meadors. permalink comments

The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship by James Scott Simon & Schuster
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progressive books 5/30/2010

Historian Bruce Cumings on the rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula

This particular incident [North Korea’s March 26 sinking of South Korea's Cheonan naval ship where 46 sailor's lost their lives] is just ripped out of context, the context of a continuing war that has never ended. Just an armistice holds the peace. But in the case of this particular incident, which happened very close to the North Korean border, we’ve had incidents like this...going back more than ten years. In 1999, a North Korean ship went down with thirty sailors lost and maybe seventy wounded. That’s a larger total of casualties than this one. And last November, a North Korean ship went down in flames. We don’t know how many people died in that. This is a no man’s land, or waters, off the west coast of Korea that both North and South claim. And the Cheonan ship was sailing in those waters when it was hit by a torpedo...I’m sure it’s a 95 percent case that the US and South Korea are right that North Korea fired this torpedo. Let’s say they did. The fact is, our government has not pointed out the background that I just pointed out, the sinking last November, the clashes in 1999 and 2002. This is a no man’s land, where the US and South Korea demarcated a so-called Northern limit line unilaterally. The North has never accepted it. The North says that this area is under the joint jurisdiction of the North and South Korean militaries. So you have an incident waiting to happen...Regardless of whether the North Koreans fired it or not, this incident is being blown way out of proportion. Secretary of State Clinton referred to it a couple days ago as unprovoked aggression, which of course is what we accused the North of when the Korean War started sixty years ago. I noticed in your clip she’s now simply calling it a provocation. I do think there’s probably an attempt on the part of the Obama administration to draw down the tension over this. But the fact is, you have a structure in Korea that’s ongoing since the Korean War, where these incidents can happen and you can have a ratcheted-up escalation that might result in a second Korean War. So it’s imperative to try to end this war and find a way to have a dialogue with the North, so that the Peninsula can be denuclearized and these incidents don’t come along every once in awhile and raise such a threat to peace.

- Bruce Cumings, from an interview on DemocracyNow!. permalink comments

The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) by Bruce Cumings Modern Library
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progressive books 5/6/2010

"We have more than an oil slick out of control, we also have these big corporations out of control." - Marine toxicologist Rikki Ott on the BP and Exxon Valdez oil spills.

As a former commercial salmon "fisherma'am in Alaska," marine toxicologist Riki Ott experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Exxon did everything it could to reduce its liability. Exxon never paid for long-term damages. It only paid for short-term damages. So this is really something to watch out for. It’s one thing to say we’re going to hold- the President- listening to him say, we’re going to hold BP accountable to our laws. Our laws are pretty darn weak. For starters, they’re will only going to protect directly damaged parties. So fisherman, I’m sorry, but in our community, as I’m sure down in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, the fisherman buy groceries, good restaurants, put children in school, by clothes. If the fishermen don’t have money, where- it damages all the shoreside industry as well. So, there’s collateral damage to businesses that won’t necessarily be compensated under the law. And unfortunately, the Exxon Valdez case set president in the Supreme Court that these big companies don’t have to pay much on the issue of punitive damage. It got knocked way down. So it’s more like a business expense. These big companies will go on making business, drilling for oil, and fishermen are going to go bankrupt. That’s certainly what we saw in Cordova.

Exxon got away with not reporting cleanup workers’ health problems. There over 6,722 workers reported upper respiratory illnesses, I discovered in toxic tort lawsuits. And there is an exemption to the Occupational Safety and Health Act that says these industries don’t have to report colds and flu. So instantly, all this coughing and these cold and flu-like symptoms become colds and flu instead of probably what it really is which is a chemical-induced illnesses. This is work related. So we really need to close that loophole in OSHA.

- two excerpts from a DemocracyNow! interview with Rikki Ott. permalink comments

Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill by Riki Ott Chelsea Green Publishing
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progressive books 4/24/2010

"This is too important. We cannot leave this to governments": Cormac Cullinan on the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights

South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan on the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, one of the key initiatives to come out of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia:

What the declaration is, essentially, is—it’s intended to complement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of—on the Human Rights. So the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights only recognizes that human beings have got inherent rights. In other words, it says just because you exist as a human being, you have these rights, regardless of whether your country or government tries to take them away from you.

What we’re saying is that everything has inherent rights. By virtue of the fact that the earth exists and all other creatures and mountains and rivers exist, they must also have inherent rights. At least the right to exist, to play their part in the evolutionary processes of Mother Earth. So the problem is, because we’ve only recognized human rights, we’ve created an imbalance. So human rights trump everything else, because they don’t have rights. And we’re trying to redress that balance by recognizing the rights which surround human rights…Democracy used to be something that happened between diplomats behind closed doors, etc. Now we are saying—you’re seeing people saying, “This is too important. We cannot leave this to governments. We have to take responsibility for addressing these issues.” So this is about people saying, “We’d like the UN to take this up, but even if it doesn’t, we are—this is what we believe, and we’re going to work on these issues right now.”… [The Universal Declaration of Human Rights] essentially came out the horrors of the Second World War and people feeling that something had to be done, this can’t go on anymore. And we’re in a similar position in history. We are sitting here saying climate change is threatening humanity and many species, etc. And what ‘s happening through these very formal negotiating processes between governments aren’t fast enough and don’t go far enough and don’t address the root causes. And so, this is an initiative which comes out of a similar period of crisis to say we’ve go to cut to the chase: what is wrong is our relationship with Mother Earth, and we must heal that. So a lot of this declaration is about human responsibilities to Mother Earth, as well as the rights of Mother Earth.

- South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan from an interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! See World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change for the entire week of DemocracyNow! coverage of the conference. permalink comments

Wild Law: Protecting Biological and Cultural Diversity by Cormac Cullinan Green Books
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progressive books 2/24/2010

The banks have had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing: Robert Manning on Credit Card Nation

Just as we demand credit card users to act responsibly, we demand that credit card companies act responsibly too - President Obama's words on May 22, 2009 before signing the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD).

The CARD Act finally took effect on Monday, Feburary 22. It prohibits some of the worst industry practices including billing systems that generate finance charges on paid-off balances, some retroactive interest-rate increases and unrestricted marketing to consumers under the age of 21. But in the nine months since May, credit card companies have found new ways to increase their profits from consumer borrowing despite the CARD Act including annual fees, cutting credit limits, hiking interest rates and various hidden charges. On Tuesday, Robert Manning discussed the CARD act on DemocracyNow!. Robert Manning is the author of Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America’s Addiction to Credit. and the founder of the Responsible Debt Relief Institute.

This would have been a great bill when it was first discussed about seven or eight years ago, but in the depths of this recession and the fact that there is no usury law and there are not any fee caps, and the fact that the banks had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing,... most Americans...are going to be shocked at how limited the help is, offered by the CARD Act...It’s one thing to be able to be told how long it’s going to take you to pay off your bill. It’s another thing to find out that your interest rate’s been doubled from 15 percent to 29.9 percent...[and] it’s happened already in the nine months preceding the implementation of the act...This is a fee-driven industry now. The effort to disconnect risk and lending and transfer that risk to investors means that banks make more and more of their money...in late and penalty over-limit fees. Banks are going to be charging annual fees....Any benefit that you get is going to come with a fee. - Robert Manning, speaking on DemocracyNow!. permalink comments

Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America's Addiction to Credit by Robert D. Manning Basic Books
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progressive books 2/9/2010

Robert McChesney and John Nichols the history and necessity of government subsides for US journalism

Discussing their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert McChesney and John Nichols relate how for the first hundred years of American history, it was understood that the duty of a democratic state was to see to the existence of an independent, uncensored journalism. Journalism was seen as a public good. The government helped American journalism by the granting of subsidies. There was no assumption that independent journalism would be provided for by market forces.

There are two great components of free press in the United States in our tradition. The first great component is the one we all know about, that government shouldn’t censor content, it shouldn’t regulate journalists, it shouldn’t prohibit anyone from entering doing media, like any of us. And that should never be compromised. But the second great tradition of the American free press tradition is that it’s the first duty of the state to make sure free press exists. And that part has been lost in the shuffle. One of the striking things we discovered, Amy and Juan, when we did our research is we reread all the First Amendment cases of the US Supreme Court in the last hundred years, all the freedom of the press cases. And what was striking in Hugo Black, in Potter Stewart, in all the great cases, was the assumption that it was the first duty of a democratic government to make sure a credible Fourth Estate exists. Otherwise the entire governance of the country will collapse. You cannot have a democracy and self-government and the rule of law.

Just start with the American tradition first, our own tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century. We wanted to compute, you know, this federal subsidy from the post office, which primarily was the distribution arm of newspapers—that’s 95 percent of its traffic—and the printing subsidies in the first half of the nineteenth century. How significant were they? And so, we actually went back and determined what percentage of GDP they were in the first half of the nineteenth century. If we had the same percentage of gross domestic product today, by the federal government as a subsidy to journalism, how much would the federal government pay? And it was $30 billion. I mean, it was such an enormous investment by the federal government to create a free press. It wasn’t just a piddly side thing; it was, after military, the largest expense of the federal government for the first seventy-five years of our history, into the Civil War period. And then we went to look at other—you know, generally, when people ask about government subsidies, they think of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot. They think of all these terrible dictatorships. We said, well, that’s not really the relevant comparison for the United States. We should look at other democracies. What are they doing in Europe and in Asia, and even in third world countries that are democracies? And what we discovered is, all of them, or almost all them, have significantly large public media, community media and journalism subsidies. They vary from country to country, but they’re all enormous compared to the United States. And if you look at northern Europe, for example, this average country up there in Scandinavia or Holland or Germany, in US terms, if you put it to per capita basis and put it in the United States, we’d have to spend between $20 and $35 billion a year to subsidize public media and journalism to be equal to those countries.

- two selections from a DemocracyNow! interview with Robert McChesney and John Nichols. permalink comments

The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again by Robert W. McChesney Nation Books
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