NRC's Caroline de Gruyter en Andere Clowns 33

Allereerst dit: de gerenommeerde Amerikaanse econoom en historicus, professor Michael Hudson ‘is one of the foremost critics of contemporary finance capitalism and the worldwide power “the 1%” wields because of government tax breaks and other favorable legislation.’ Wikipedia meldt over hem: ‘Zijn aandacht voor de ontwrichtende kracht van schuld maakte hem tot een bijzonder alert waarnemer: hij voorspelde zowel de Latijns-Amerikaanse schuldencrisis (1982) als de kredietcrisis (2007).’

Wikipedia’s Engelstalige editie voegt hieraan toe: 

In 1972, Hudson published Super Imperialism, which traced the history of the formation of American imperialism after the end of World War I. In Hudson's interpretation, super-imperialism is a stage of imperialism in which the state does not realize the interests of any group, but it is itself wholly and entirely aimed at imperializing the seizure of other states. Continuing the position outlined in A Financial Payments-Flow Analysis of U.S. International Transactions, 1960-1968, Hudson stressed the aid system formed after the end of World War II was called upon to solve the problem of the economy. All American foreign politics (including tied aid and debts) were aimed at restraining the economic development of Third World countries in those sectors of the economy where the United States was afraid of the emergence of competition. At the same time, the US imposed free trade policies on developing countries, a policy that was the reverse of the one that had led to US prosperity.

After the cancellation of the conversion of dollars into gold, the US forced foreign central banks to buy US treasuries that are used to finance the federal deficit and large military. In exchange for providing a net surplus of assets, commodities, debt financing, goods and services, foreign countries are forced to hold an equal amount of US treasuries. It drives US interest rates down, which drives down the dollar's foreign exchange rate.

Professor Hudson waarschuwt dat de Verenigde Staten niet in staat is zijn almaar toenemende buitenlandse leningen, die midden september 2021 zijn opgelopen tot ruim 28 biljoen dollar, af te lossen. China is na Japan de grootste schuldeiser van de VS. Daarnaast toont Hudson aan dat de zogeheten: 

Washington Consensus has encouraged the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to impose austerity that the United States itself is not exposed to thanks to dollar dominance, which leads to subjecting other countries to unfair trade that depletes natural resources and privatizing infrastructure that is sold at distressed prices that uses parasitic finance techniques (including Western-style tax breaks) to extract the maximum amount of the country's surplus rather than providing a price-competitive service.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hudson_(economist) 

In zijn boek The Bubble And Beyond (2014), benadrukt professor Hudson in het laatste hoofdstuk -- getiteld  De-Dollarization And The End Of America’s Empire. Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation, And Global Crisis --  hoe de economische en financiële macht vooral naar Azië is verschoven, en de positie van Washington en Wall Street steeds meer ondermijnt. Hij schrijft: 

For Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), challenging America was the prime focus of meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) on June 15–16, 2009. The SCO alliance is composed of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It was joined on June 16 by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China). 

In addition to avoiding having to finance the U.S. buyout of their domestic industry and U.S. military encirclement of the globe, China, Russia and other countries no doubt would like to get the same kind of free ride that America has been getting since it went off gold in 1971. As matters stand, they see the United States as a lawless nation, financially as well as militarily. How else to characterize a nation that holds out a set of laws for others — on war, debt repayment and treatment of prisoners — but ignores them itself? The United States has long been the world’s largest debtor, yet has avoided the pain of ‘structural adjustments’ imposed on other debtor economies. U.S. interest-rate and tax reductions in the face of exploding trade and budget deficits are seen as the height of hypocrisy in view of the austerity programs that Washington forces on other countries via the IMF and other U.S.-controlled vehicles.

The United States tells debtor economies to sell off their public utilities and natural resources, raise their interest rates and increase taxes while gutting (decimeren. svh) their social safety nets to squeeze out money to pay creditors. At home, Congress blocked China’s National Offshore Oil Co. (CNOOC) from buying Unocal on grounds of national security, much as it blocked Dubai from buying U.S. ports, and other sovereign wealth funds from buying key infrastructure. Foreigners are invited to emulate (navolgen. svh) the Japanese purchase of white elephant trophies (nutteloos bezit. svh) such as Rockefeller Center, on which investors quickly lost a billion dollars and ended up walking away.

In this respect the United States has not given China and other payments-surplus nations much alternative but to find a way to avoid further dollar buildups. At first, China’s attempts to diversify its dollar holdings beyond Treasury bonds were only marginal. For starters, Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs steered its central bank into higher-yielding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities, explaining that these were de facto public obligations. They collapsed in 2008, but the U.S. Government took these two mortgage-lending agencies over, formally adding their $5.2 trillion in obligations onto the national debt. In fact, it was largely foreign official investment that prompted the bailout. Imposing a loss for foreign official agencies would have broken the Treasury-bill standard then and there, destroying U.S. credibility. The problem is that there are too few Government bonds to absorb the dollars being flooded into the world economy by the soaring U.S. balance-of-payments deficits.

Kort samengevat laat Hudson zien hoe het parasitaire ‘Amerika’ opereert; door de buitenlandse financiële wereld te misbruiken kan het de voortdurende oorlogsvoering financieren, om zodoende de wankelende Amerikaanse hegemonie zolang mogelijk in stand te houden. De kritische hoofdredacteur van het tijdschrift Canadian Patriot Review (www.canadianpatriot.org), Matthew Ehret, wiens werk ‘has been featured in Global Times, RT, Strategic Culture Foundation, Asia Times, 21st Century Science and Technology, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Duran, Zero Hedge, Off-Guardian, Ron Paul Institute,’ zette midden december 2020 op de website van The Saker uiteen dat de held van de liberals — de met ‘fiduciair geld’ speculerende multi-miljardair George Soros  een aanval had ingezet op de Aziatische markten, zoals hij eerder al, op 16 september 1992, de Britse regering had gedwongen om het pond drastisch in waarde te verminderen waardoor deze ‘superspeculant,’ aldus de Volkskrant van 11 december 1998:

twee miljard gulden [verdiende] toen hij na een heroïsch gevecht met minister van Financiën Lamont het Britse Pond Sterling uit de voorloper van de EMU dwong. Die dag heet in Groot-Brittannië nog steeds Zwarte Woensdag.

Tezamen met een kleine groep andere hedgefund managers, was zijn aanval op de Britse munteenheid begonnen door met tien miljard pond, waarvan zeven miljard van hemzelf, in te wisselen voor Duitse marken. Hij ging ervan uit dat het pond tegen een veel te hoge koers deel uitmaakte van het Europees Wisselkoersmechanisme, en wilde om zoveel mogelijk winst te maken een devaluatie forceren. Lamont verzette zich met zes miljard pond steunaankopen, maar dat bleek weggegooid geld. Het pond devalueerde, en Soros incasseerde zijn winst. Zelfs voor de politici van de Conservatieve Partij, vereerders van de vrije markt, werd hij zo het 'vuile gezicht van het mondiale kapitalisme.’ Soros financiële capriolen kostten iedere Brit twaalf pond. Veel Conservatieven verweten Soros hun nederlaag bij de laatste verkiezingen omdat op 16 september 1992 de regering van John Major haar geloofwaardigheid onherstelbaar had verloren. In 1992 was Azië aan de beurt. Ook daar wilde Soros zijn macht laten voelen, met het oog op The Irresistible Shift Of Global Power, zoals de Singaporese hoogleraar Kishore Mahbubani, naderhand in zijn bestseller The New Asian Hemisphere (2008) onweerlegbaar duidelijk maakte.   

https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/britten-in-katzwijm-voor-het-vuile-gezicht-van-kapitalisme~b5a44283/   

Soros stond vanaf die dag bekend als een ‘superspeculant,’ zoals de Volkskrant van 11 december 1998 berichtte. 

Ondanks de geslepen ‘wisseltruc’ van Soros, oordeelde de liberale opiniemaker Ian Buruma dat ‘Soros might be described as the personification of the West,’ aangezien ‘[h]e is everything that nativists and anti-Semites hate: rich, cosmopolitan, Jewish, and a liberal dedicated to what Karl Popper, yet another child of Jewish origin from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, called ‘the open society.’ Die ‘open maatschappij,’ onder aanvoering van banken en veroordeelde speculanten als George Soros (volgens Buruma een ‘internationale investeerder en filantroop’)  leidde, zoals bekend, de afgelopen vier decennia tot de afbraak van de verzorgingsstaat, het overhevelen van werk naar lage lonen landen, de deregulering en privatisering van de economie waardoor de overheid steeds minder greep op de toekomst heeft gekregen, en er een almaar toenemende kloof tussen rijk en arm is ontstaan, met als gevolg dat nu in Nederland één op de dertien kinderen in armoede opgroeit. ‘Opgroeien in een gezin met geldzorgen belemmert de ontwikkeling van kinderen en zorgt ervoor dat zij hun talenten veelal niet optimaal kunnen benutten,’ aldus de Rijksoverheid op 9 augustus 2021. Nogmaals Ehret:

From May 1997, George Soros’ targeting of the Southeast Asian ‘Tigers economies’ of Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Laos, and Malaysia with speculative short sales of their local currencies resulted months of vast anarchy across all of Asia and the world more broadly. Currencies collapsed from 10-80% over the next 8 months and took many years to begin to recover.

Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammed was brave enough to call out Soros’ economic warfare and did much to help his nation weather the storm by imposing capital controls to maintain some semblance of stability calling out the speculator saying: ‘as much as people who produce and distribute drugs are criminals, because they destroy nations, the people who undermine the economies of poor nations are too.’ Chinese President Jiang Zemin followed suit calling Soros ‘a financial sniper’ and stated he would not let the speculator enter Chinese markets.

As analyst Michael Billington astutely wrote in his August 1997 EIR report:

‘The ultimate target is China. The British are particularly worried about the increasingly close collaboration between China and the ASEAN nations, which are being integrated into the massive regional and continental development projects initiated by China under the umbrella of the Eurasian Continental Land-Bridge program. Such real development policies offer the alternative to the cheap-labor, colonial-style export industries of the “globalization” model — the model that has led to the financial bubbles now bursting worldwide.’ […]

9-11 unleashed a new era of warfare which deflected attention from the rot of the financial system while derivatives were deregulated, and ‘Too Big To Fail’ banking formed in short order growing far beyond the powers of any nation state to rein in. 

https://theduran.com/who-is-creating-a-new-chinese-boogey-man-an-examination-of-modern-psychological-warfare/?ml_subscriber=1579831149239211431&ml_subscriber_hash=j1c6&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_duran_daily&utm_term=2020-12-19 

Sinds begin van de 21ste eeuw geldt dat ‘the war on terror will not be won on the defensive,’ aldus president Bush junior in 2002, ‘We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.’ Deze oorlogszuchtige strategie kreeg de naam ‘preemptive war.’ Daarover verklaarde de Amerikaanse generaal Wesley Clark, die ‘commanded Operation Allied Force during the Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000’:

About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, ‘Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re too busy.’ He said, ‘No, no.’ He said, ‘We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.’ This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, ‘We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘I guess they don’t know what else to do.’ So I said, ‘Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?’ He said, ‘No, no.’ He said, ‘There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.’ He said, ‘I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.’ And he said, ‘I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.’

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, ‘Are we still going to war with Iraq?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s worse than that.’ He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, ‘I just got this down from upstairs’ — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — ‘today.’ And he said, ‘This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.’ I said, ‘Is it classified?’ He said, ‘Yes, sir.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t show it to me.’ And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, ‘You remember that?’ He said, ‘Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!’

https://www.globalresearch.ca/we-re-going-to-take-out-7-countries-in-5-years-iraq-syria-lebanon-libya-somalia-sudan-iran/5166 

Het spreekt voor zich dat de NAVO daarbij onder druk werd gezet om deel te nemen aan die geplande oorlogen, waaraan tot nu toe alleen Iran is ontkomen. Nu het Midden Oosten door het ingrijpen van de VS, gesteund door de NAVO, in chaos is achtergelaten, richt Washington zich op Rusland en China. Woensdag 15 september 2021 werd bekend dat:

The US, the UK and Australia have announced they are setting up a trilateral security partnership aimed at confronting China, which will include helping Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines. US President Joe Biden, UK prime minister Boris Johnson and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison announced the deal together,

aldus The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2021/sep/16/watch-in-full-biden-johnson-and-morrison-announce-nuclear-powered-submarine-deal-video 

Eerder al, op 15 juni 2021, werd bekend dat:

Nato leaders meeting for a summit in Brussels have warned of the military threat posed by China, saying its behavior is a ‘systemic challenge.’

China, they said, was rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, was ‘opaque’ about its military modernization and was co-operating militarily with Russia.

Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg warned China was ‘coming closer’ to Nato in military and technological terms…

Nato has become increasingly concerned about the growing military capabilities of China, which it sees as a threat to the security and democratic values of its members.

In recent years, the alliance has also grown wary of China's activities in Africa, where it has established a military base in Djibouti.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57466210 

Dat de Chinese overheid de meer dan 800 Amerikaanse/NAVO bases (waarvan 29 in Afrika), verspreidt over de gehele wereld, en de voortdurende Amerikaanse/NAVO interventies  als een bedreiging ziet van de Chinese belangen, verzwijgt de BBC. Hetzelfde geldt voor de belangen van de Russische overheid. Desondanks suggereert NRC-columniste Carolyne de Gruyter dat op grond van het NAVO-verdrag het tijd wordt om een gewapend conflict te beginnen tegen de Russische Federatie. En zij is niet de enige van de bellicose polderpers, ook Geert Mak, Bas Heijne, Hubert Smeets, beschouwen, Rusland en China als, in de woorden van Ian Buruma, ‘mafia societies.’  Tegelijkertijd omarmen zij bewust of onbewust ‘The doctrine of preventive war,’ waarbij, aldus Noam Chomsky, er vanuit wordt gegaan: 

that the United States alone — since nobody else has this right — can attack any country that it claims to be a potential challenge to it. So if the United States claims, on whatever grounds, that someone may sometime threaten it, then it can attack them… the US will rule the world by force… it will do so for the indefinite future, because if any potential challenge arises to US domination, the US will destroy it before it becomes a challenge,’ terwijl er toch niets ‘more foolish is than to think that war can be stopped by war. You don’t 'prevent' anything by war except peace, 

zoals zelfs president Harry S. Truman moest toegeven. Bovendien is een oorlog tussen grootmachten, uitgerust met massavernietigingswapens, volstrekt onmogelijk, aangezien de verliezende partij zich uiteindelijk genoodzaakt zal voelen juist die wapens in te zetten, en de Mutual Assured Destruction van start kan gaan. Een Derde Wereldoorlog is een eufemisme voor wereldwijde genocide.  

Degenen die de klassieken hebben bestudeerd, weten dat er opvallend veel parallellen bestaan tussen enerzijds hetgeen de onovertroffen Britse historicus Edward Gibbon na 1774 schreef in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, én anderzijds het naderende einde van wat Ian Buruma de ‘Pax Americana’ betitelt. Zo stelt Gibbon in het hoofdstuk Reflections on the Fall of Rome:

The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy (wonder. svh), the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. 

The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. 

The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.

Edward Gibbon zag het Romeinse Rijk, toen het eenmaal over zijn hoogtepunt heen was, als een overrijpe vrucht op het punt van verrotting. Die verrotting was, in Gibbon's weergaloze beschrijving, het gevolg van een combinatie van ‘immoderate greatness, imperial over-reach, oppressive acts by the legions, the relative weakness of the emperors, and dissolution (ontbinding. svh).’ Wat daarnaast zijn werk zo interessant maakt is dat hij tenslotte Europa, ‘along with its colonies,’ ziet als ‘one great republic,’ die hetzelfde lot kan ondergaan als het noodlottige lot ‘that befell the Roman Empire.’ 

Net als alles op aarde zijn imperia niet eeuwigdurend. Het is een natuurwet dat zij hun eigen ondergang oproepen. De van origine Zuid-Afrikaanse Nobelprijswinnaar Literatuur, J.M. Coetzee, herinnert de lezers van zijn roman Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) eraan dat:

One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

Maar uiteindelijk weet geen enkel ‘imperium’ het natuurlijke proces van de eigen ondergang te stoppen, hoe gewelddadig en misdadig het tracht  zijn almaar slinkende macht in stand te houden. Het meest ironische is wel dat  het zelfs niet bij machte is zijn eigen normen en waarden te handhaven, zoals nu ook weer blijkt uit de Amerikaanse oorlogsmisdaden die het in samenwerking met de NAVO begaat. Juist de berichtgeving van de ‘vrije pers’ is exemplarisch voor de wijze waarop het ‘democratische’ Westen de algehele geestelijke verpaupering van het grote publiek bevordert. De bekende Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournalist Matt Taibbi toont in zijn boek Hate Inc. Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another (2021) hoe die propaganda werkt en hoe ‘With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and conviction.’ Ook de polderpers presenteert herhaaldelijk een beschuldiging als een vonnis. Zo pleitte Caroline de Gruyter op grond van twee onbewezen beschuldigingen voor een NAVO-aanval op Rusland, en bekende de inmiddels voormalige NRC-journaliste Laura Starink ruim vijf jaar nadat de VS in Afghanistan intervenieerde: 'Na de aanslagen op de Twin Towers was ik voor de inval in Afghanistan,’ zonder ook maar over één juridisch bewijs te beschikken dat Osama bin Laden de aanslagen van 11 september 2001 had gepland of gecoördineerd. Ze slikte de Amerikaanse propaganda voor zoete koek. Op 2 november 2009 wees de Amerikaanse voormalige hoogleraar godsdienstfilosofie en theologie, David Ray Griffin, op het volgende:

Here is a surprising but little-known fact, because it has scarcely been reported in the mainstream media: The FBI's ‘Most Wanted Terrorist’ webpage on ‘Usama bin Laden’ does not list the 9/11 attacks as one of the crimes for which he is wanted. It does list bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi as terrorist acts for which he is wanted. But it makes no mention of 9/11. In 2006, Rex Tomb, then the FBI's chief of investigative publicity, was asked why not. He replied: ‘The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.’

After this story started flying around the Internet and was even covered by a TV station in Louisiana, Dan Eggen (journalist van The Washington Post. svh) tried to downplay its significance in an August 2006 Washington Post article entitled ‘Bin Laden, Most Wanted For Embassy Bombings?”' Complaining about ‘conspiracy theorists’ who claimed that ‘the lack of a Sept. 11 reference [on the FBI's "Most Wanted" webpage for bin Laden] suggests that the connection to al-Qaeda is uncertain,’ Eggen quoted the explanation offered by a former US attorney, who said that the FBI could not appropriately ‘put up a wanted picture where no formal charges had been filed.’

But that explanation, while true, simply pushes the issue back a step to this question: Why have such charges not been filed? Rex Tomb's fuller statement, which Eggen failed to mention, had answered this question the previous June, saying:

‘The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, Bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.’

https://www.globalresearch.ca/osama-bin-laden-responsible-for-the-9-11-attacks-where-is-the-evidence/15892 

Daarom stelden op 6 juni 2006 de samenstellers van een ‘Muckraker Report’:

Who is it that is controlling the media message, and how is it that the U.S. media has indicted Usama Bin Laden for the events of September 11, 2001, but the U.S. government has not?  How is it that the FBI has no ‘hard evidence’ connecting Usama Bin Laden to the events of September 11, 2001, while the U.S. media has played the Bin Laden — 9/11 connection story for five years now as if it has conclusive evidence that Bin Laden is responsible for the collapse of the twin towers, the Pentagon attack, and the demise of United Flight 93?    

https://acikradyo.com.tr/arsiv-icerigi/fbi-says-no-hard-evidence-connecting-bin-laden-911 

Maar deze voor de hand liggende vraag wordt nog steeds, 20 jaar na dato, door de westerse commerciële media angstvallig verzwegen, om de simpele reden dat het niet in de officiële versie van de aanslagen past, waarbij jaar na jaar Osama bin Laden geportretteerd wordt als het brein achter de aanslagen op 11 september 2001. De Britse onderzoeksjournalist Nick Davies die voor The Guardian en The Observer schrijft, ‘and been named Reporter of the Year, Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards’ schreef over de leugenachtigheid van de mainstream-journalisten het boek Flat Earth News 2009), waarin deze ‘award winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media’ 420 pagina’s lang voorbeelden geeft van de westerse media-corruptie. In de epiloog schrijft hij dat: 

All this matters deeply to our world and the way we run it. There is a There is a great passage in a book by John Nichols and Robert McChesney called It's the Media Stupid, in which they consider the impact of the commercialized media on the culture of the in societies: 

‘This a generation that is under pressure from the media it consumes to be brazenly materialistic, selfish, depoliticized and non-socially minded. To the extent one finds these values problematic for a democracy, we all should be concerned. The commercial media system is the ideological linchpin (spil) of the globalizing market economy. 

Consider the case of the Czech Republic. Only a decade ago the young generation led the "Velvet Revolution" against the communist regime under the slogan "Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred." Ten years later, even the Wall Street Journal acknowledged that the Czech Republic had turned into a demoralized morass, where "an unnerving dash, to the free market" had created a society awash with greed, selfishness, corruption, and cams (oplichterij. svh).'

They add: 

‘The type of political culture that accompanies the rise of the corporate media system worldwide looks to be increasingly like that found in the United States: in the place of informed debate or political parties organizing along the full spectrum of opinion, there will be vacuous (inhoudsloze. svh) journalism and elections dominated by public relations, big money, moronic (mallotige. svh) political advertising and limited debate on tangible issues. It is a world where the market and commercial values overwhelm notions of democracy and civic culture, a world where depoliticization runs rampant, and a world where the wealthy few face fewer and fewer threats of political challenge.’

I’m afraid that I think the truth is that, in trying to expose the weakness of the media I am taking a snapshot of a cancer. Maybe it helps a little to be able to see the illness. At least that way we know in theory what the cure might be. But I fea                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        r the illness is terminal.

Fifty years ago, in ‘The Hidden Persuaders,’ excellant Vance Packard, himself ‘a journalist, recognized the threat while it was still gathering and he emerged with a cry of optimism. ‘We can choose not to be persuaded,’ he urged. Fifty years on, I’m not so sure.

At the Columbia School of Journalism in New York, they display the words of the former newspaper proprietor and editor, Joseph Pulitzer: ‘A cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in time a people as base as itself.’ He was probably right. 

Nick Davies is nog voorzichtig. Eén avondje televisie kijken, of de geschreven media doornemen, of de radio beluisteren, en u merkt dat Pulitzer’s waarschuwing tevergeefs is geweest. De mainstream-media zijn tot op het bot corrupt geraakt. Meer daarover de volgende keer.