De Commerciele Massamedia 200

March 25, 2009
The Need for Plan C on the Economy
Media Revolution or Mirage?
http://www.counterpunch.org/blackburn03252009.html
By ROBIN BLACKBURN

Perhaps you have to be a visitor, as I am from the UK, to register the
astonishing media revolution currently underway in the United States –
and the threat it constitutes to the country’s progressive press.

Once upon a time the New York Times backed the Iraq War, published phoney
reportage on WMD and supported an [unsuccessful] coup against
Venezuela’s elected leader. Some of its star columnists – with
super-jingo Thomas Friedman heading the list – purveyed market
fundamentalism. As for the US cable networks, their chauvinism and demagogy
is a by-word.

Yet suddenly I’m living in a parallel universe where Newsweek’s cover
declares ‘We Are All Socialists Now’, and the New York Times outflanks
the Nation, the Comedy channel turns deadly serious and MSNBC mocks the
consensus.

Instead of neo-liberal triumphalism the New York Times finds space to cover
some real issues. Safire and Kristol have been dropped and in their place a
steady drumbeat from Krugman and Dowd urges Obama to nationalize the banks
and lock up miscreant CEOs. Recently a detailed op-ed explained that the
administration’s foreclosure policy – giving tiny loans to help
mortgagees make their interest payments - was useless. What had to be done
was for Treasury to pony up serious money to pay down principal on mortgage
debt. Another outlined ‘How to Leave Afghanistan’. On March 14 Evo
Morales explained to Times readers that the campaign to criminalise the
chewing of coca, ‘a healthy indigenous past-time’, was cruel and
unjust. And in the Business section Gretchen Morgensohn’s exposé of the
Pharaonic scale of the public indulgence of AIG and the zombie banks was
picked up and endorsed by the main section.

Meanwhile the most circulated item on Facebook is Jon Stewart’s Daily
Show interview with Jim Cramer of CNBC’s ‘Mad Money’, in which he
took the strident share-booster to the cleaners, complete with deadly clips
showing Cramer advocating scams he now claims to disavow. Stewart
previously denounced Israeli slaughter in Gaza when the rest of the US
media and political world preferred to look the other way.

The new openness of the Times no doubt reflects a new conjuncture – the
voters’ pain at depression hits, anger at bail-outs for the rich and
greedy, a creeping paralysis which the White House fails to address, and,
close to home, the purchase of the paper’s stock by Carlos Slim, the
Mexican billionaire – not forgetting the specter of an end to print
newspapers. Likewise the Daily Show is occupying new territory at a time
when Rachel Maddow of MSNBC is refreshing the tired recipes of cable news
by imitating alternative network stars like Amy Goodman and Laura Flanders.

Obama’s Plan A – inviting those who created the catastrophe to fix it -
is foundering before our eyes, so it is good that some are working on Plan
B. The trouble is Plan B needs a lot of work if it is not to collapse like
a credit default swap issued by Lehman Brothers. Indeed what is really
needed is Plan C.

Thus nationalizing the banks is a good starting point if the aim is to
construct a public utility finance system. But if the aim is simply to
return the banks to the private sector as soon as possible – as Krugman
urges - their lending policy will not help investment and small businesses
on the scale now needed. Likewise ‘withdrawal’ from Iraq and
Afghanistan is fine, but should not mean leaving behind huge military bases
bulging with US troops.

All those pieces comparing Obama with Roosevelt alert us to a problem. Then
the president had to reckon with a surging labor movement. And he could
mobilise a strategic detail of red experts when he gave $40 billion to the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation to build five hundred giant plants,
taking a strategic stake in all the corporations which need these
facilities. By 1945 the US government owned large chunks of Lockheed,
Boeing and GM, but red scares led to the closing of the RFC.

The TVA and RFC were examples of the sort of bold public enterprise now
needed but where are those needed to staff them? Some of those laid-off
bankers might serve as useful foot-soldiers but they will need competent
commanders and planners.

Of course there is a dream-like quality to media radicalization.
Friedman’s effort in the Times of March 18 brought me back to reality.
Apparently we all have to rally behind an even larger bail-out of the very
same banks that have been rescued at such cost several times before. Forget
nationalization. Instead US households who have lost about $12 trillion (so
far) must foot the bill for ‘bank healing’ which requires ‘another
big, broad taxpayers’ safety net’.

The media revolution may be exhausted but if the president follows this
advice it could be street barricades and bank occupations next.

Robin Blackburn writes for New Left Review and is a visiting professor at
the New School in New York. He can be reached at
robinblackburn68@hotmail.com