Journalistic Leaches and Diebold Machines
by John Maxwell
This
article originally appeared in Jamaica
Observer.
"In the United States journalists condemn racism while
being in the forefront of the promotion of prejudice."
Sanguivorous
- bloodsucking - leeches are an extremely low form of life, a kind of worm
which is basically an animated alimentary canal. There is a mouth at one end
provided with teeth used to perforate the skin of its prey and nothing but a
gut until the other end of the animal where there is an anus.
Sanguivorous
leeches can ingest several times their own weight in blood at one meal. After
feeding the leech retires to a dark spot to digest its meal Some leeches will even take a meal from
other sanguivorous leeches which may die after the attack.
I first
came upon leeches - or rather they came upon me - about forty years ago in a
water-meadow - a pasture - in Berkshire, England, where I had been admiring a
herd of cattle of a kind I hadn't seen before Afterwards, as I was cleaning my
boots of the mud and cattle dung I realised that there were about half a dozen
ugly little worms attached to my calves, just above my socks. They were
leaches, sucking my blood. I persuaded them to cease and desist by bringing a
lighted cigarette near to one end of each leech, when the other end let go
falling to the ground to await another food supply.
"Talk show hosts,
newspaper columnists and cartoonists can be found among the ranks of leeches."
I am reminded of leeches by the activities of some people
who masquerade as journalists both here and abroad.
Their modus
operandi is simple; they sink their teeth into people who they esteem as more
important than they, hoping that the blood they may draw may bestow upon them
some of the attributes of their hosts. Which is why people like Wolf Blitzer,
Glenn Beck and others on CNN and Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity and many others
on the Fox network in the US spend so much time putting the needle into people
they fear or hold in awe. In Britain
the stimulus is more sex than power. In Jamaica, as in every other activity,
leeches are not specialists. They are omnivorous. But whatever their prey, the
idea is to draw attention to themselves. Talk show hosts, newspaper columnists
and cartoonists can be found among the ranks of leeches. One of the most
egregious gets his rocks off by an annual exercise in denigrating those he
considers his superiors. The proprietor of this newspaper and I (a "Jurassic
fossil") are among his latest targets. I am delighted to be among his bêtes
noir. I am specially gratified because this is at least my third or fourth time
on one of his lists.
Even
Tyrannosaurus Rex had his leeches - as
I can personally attest. In any case, a man may be known by his enemies.
A Public Trust
Journalism
is allegedly a public trust in which journalists and their employers are
supposedly committed to the protection and defense of the public interest -
acting as guides, counselors, sentries and
guards as we report, discuss, analyze and advise on the vents and
developments in our environments.
These
self-assigned duties and responsibilities mean that the successes and failures
of our societies are intimately related to the performance of journalists. Many
of us are quick to criticize our societies and governments as careless,
corrupt, brutal and uncaring, forgetting that if the societies and governments
are so, we are part of the reason they got that way.
Journalists
are now criticizing the Jamaican police for brutality, having spent forty years
conniving at and condoning police murder because they thought it was in their
interest. In the United States journalists condemn racism while being in the
forefront of the promotion of prejudice. American journalists still find it
difficult to adopt stances against torture and other corruptions and breaches
of the US constitution because they connived at and condoned the stealing of
voters rights in the "election" of their chosen hero, George Bush in 2000 and
2004.
And soon -
wait for it - they will begin a wholesale official assault on the usurers and shysters who conned a substantial
number of blacks, Hispanics and other poor people out of billions of dollars
and cheated them out of hundreds of thousands of houses. They will
probably not attack however, the banks and finance houses that enabled and
financed the usurers and made (and have now lost) billions of dollars in the
casino that is the free market. In the last few weeks some of these loses have
been revealed: Citibank alone has written off
22 billion dollars in bad mortgages and bad loans, Merrill Lynch perhaps
as much as 30 billion and other banks and assorted financial houses like Bear
Stearns, Morgan Stanley, the American Insurance Group, Barclays and HSBC have
written off or lost billions more, leading central banks and the financial
establishment to try to finance a $75 billion bailout fund to avert a complete
and universal meltdown in financial markets. These astronomical sums were the
proceeds of funds sucked out of the poorest sectors of working class America.
The total involved is more than the Gross National Products of Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica combined.
And then,
of course, there is New Orleans.
"These derivatives are simply a way for the private
sector to print their own money."
What
happened is that the banks accepted IOUs from mortgage lenders and sold
packages of IOUs/mortgages as new
"investment products" that were traded as if they represented real assets,
being sold at increasing discounts to other speculators who figured that
eventually the investment products or "derivatives" as they are called, would
mature, as they say, and everybody would get a piece of the action. These derivatives are simply a way for the
private sector to print their own money - the very sin against which they rail
when governments do it. Governments of course, can't go bankrupt and unlike the
private sector have to pay their debtors one way or another. And when the
private sector money printing machine crashes, it is governments - ordinary
taxpayers - that must come to the rescue to prevent the total, catastrophic
dislocation of their economies and societies.
The private
sector are paid astronomical sums, win or lose. Stan O'Neil, head of Merrill
Lynch, took home a parting gift amounting to more than $200 million and the
head of the disastrous Countrywide mortgage company took home more than $250
million for the last two years sterling work in digging his company and its
clients into a multibillion dollar hole.
The winners
do even better, with rank and file employees of Goldman Sachs, for instance,
sharing nearly $20 billion, almost a million dollars each for their part as
winning bookmakers in the capitalist bucket shop. As they say - the invisible
hand is faster than the eye and the
financial sector is nothing more than the world's largest floating crap game.
In all of
this the journalists of the world are too intimidated to emulate the little boy
who noticed that the Emperor's new clothes did not exist. Instead the press are the Judas Goats of capitalist
speculation, leading their fellows to
slaughter or forced labor for the greater profit of their employers and
patrons.
Why the dog did not bark
In the
mystery of "the Hound of the Baskervilles" as Sherlock Holmes noted, the most
important piece of evidence, the major ‘clue' was the curious fact that the dog
did not bark when the intruder entered
the house to commit his foul crimes. . To Holmes this fact pointed to the
perpetrator; dogs don't bark at intruders they know and love. It was an ‘inside
job'.
Last week
Hilary Clinton won a spectacular "victory" in the New Hampshire Primary against
all expectations and to the great
consternation and astonishment of almost everybody. "How did the polls get it
so wrong" was the typical question asked by newspaper and television pundits.
It was an
odd question, because apart from this rogue result, the polls got everything
thing else spot on.
What was so
odd about Clinton's "victory," as I pointed out last week, was the fact that
people questioned after they'd voted said Obama was more likely to be elected
president than Clinton. This conformed with what the voters said they had done
in the voting booths but not what the election results said. What was strange
was that Clinton got the votes predicted for Obama and Obama got the votes
predicted for Clinton. In every other respect the exit polls were accurate.
Even John
Zogby - the most accurate pollster - seemed to feel constrained to agree with
his sometimes statistically illiterate critics: "Going into the New Hampshire
primary, we certainly did see Clinton holding on to a significant lead among
women and older voters. But we were focusing on Obama's massive lead among
younger and independent voters. We seem to have missed the huge turnout of
older women that apparently [sic] put
Clinton over the top. We expected that Obama would receive the lion's share of
independents and drain the Republican primary of these voters. It now appears
that, perhaps with a sense that Obama had a lock on the Democratic side,
independents felt free to vote on the Republican side and reward their hero,
John McCain." This, as it later transpired, was not true either.
"In the one fifth of precincts where votes were counted
by hand, the actual results matched the poll predictions."
Zogby's
grudging admission that something may have been overlooked by his polls is an
argument that hasn't been bought by many serious bloggers.
Brad
Friedman of Bradblog says, "a few folks in the world are finally beginning to
open their eyes, and realize that not counting ballots, and trusting instead,
in error-prone, hackable machines for "faith-based results" doesn't
make a lot of sense. Particularly in an election for which nobody - and I mean
nobody - has come up with a legitimate explanation for the surprising results."
The
candidates' own polls contradicted the electoral "result". According to Bradblog: "... [On MSNBC] Olbermann repeated what
Russert had said earlier, that Obama's internal polls showed him winning by
14%, Clinton's internal polls had Obama winning by 11%."
Brad and others dedicated and skilled at this sort of
analysis have uncovered what appears to account for the curious circumstance of
the dog that did not bark.
In New
Hampshire 80 percent of the precincts (polling divisions) had their votes
counted by Diebold scanning machines, a process which has been thoroughly
discredited in the United States. In the one fifth of precincts where votes
were counted by hand, the actual results matched the poll predictions. In the
Diebold-counted precincts there was a 7 point swing for Clinton. One
unreconstructed troublemaker, Dennis Kucinich, also a candidate for the
Democratic nomination, is not content to let sleeping Diebolds lie.
In a letter
to the Secretary of State for New Hampshire, Kucinich points out that
the integrity of the electoral system
is at the heart of the democratic process.
Kucinich
wrote: "Ever since the 2000 election - and even before - the American people
have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted.
This ... isn't about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It's about establishing
whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they
cast them.
"This is
not about my candidacy or any other individual candidacy. It is about the
integrity of the election process."
"New
Hampshire is in the unique position to address - and, if so determined, rectify
- these issues before they escalate into a massive, nation-wide suspicion of
the process by which Americans elect their President. Based on the
controversies surrounding the Presidential elections in 2004 and 2000, New
Hampshire is in a prime position to investigate possible irregularities and to
issue findings for the benefit of the entire nation."
Kucinich is
alarmed, as are many other Americans, that the Republican party and its
military industrial complex of support is well on the way to turning American democracy
into the qualitative equivalent of a Nineteen Thirties Banana republic. In
those places democracy was rather like Henry Ford's cars: "You can have any
color you want, as long as it's black."
And, as
Henry Ford foresaw, the media saluted, and the band played on.
Copyright
2007 © John Maxwell
John Maxwell of
the University of the West Indies (UWI) is the veteran Jamaican journalist who
in 1999 single-handedly thwarted the Jamaican government's efforts to build
houses at Hope, the nation's oldest and best known botanical gardens. His
campaigning earned him first prize in the 2000 Sandals Resort's Annual
Environmental Journalism Competition, the region's richest journalism prize. He
is also the author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists
and Journalists. Jamaica, 2000. Mr. Maxwell can be reached at jankunnu@gmail.com
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