Great piece.
Democracynow.org is a showcase for capital’s favorite oppositionists. Day after day a parade of faux Lefties–Naomi Klein, Medea Benjamin, Michael Moore, Slavoj Zizek and the like–appear on set to spin the news in favor of the oligarchs, while pretending to do precisely the opposite. She is an important Left gatekeeper, making sure dissent doesn’t overtop the levies constructed by capital to channel it into acceptable, non-threatening directions.
DN reports are often deliberately inaccurate. Deliberately? On numerous occasions, I have sent e-mails to the show precisely what the errors of fact were, accompanied by sources when available online, and not only were the corrections not made, I never even received a response. Goodman isn’t in the news business, she’s in disinformation.
An excellent example: One day Goodman described Nelson Mandela as a proponent of Gandhian passive resistance.
Mandela was a terrorist. He was caught red-handed attempting to blow up a train station. It was for this act, called Sabotage under South African law, that he was sent to Robbin Island.
However one might feel about political violence, violence it is. He and the ANC openly endorsed violent tactics after exhausting peaceful methods.
I sent ample evidence of this to DN, but to no avail. Mandela is the darling of international capital these days. After all, it was he who saved their economic interests from the South African Revolution. Once in power (actually before settling into his new golden sinecure), Mandela took IMF money and followed their direction, violating several campaign promises along the way. Thanks to Mandela, the net result of the transition from the White Government to the ANC was a further transfer of national wealth upward to the oligarchs, and a reduction in the already precariously low living standards of average South Africans, many of whom can no longer afford to pay their electricity bill once Mandela privatized the energy sector.
Mandela became Wall Street’s man, so their agents in the media have reinvented him as a hippie peacenik to appeal to the hippie peaceniks who watch shows like DN foolishly believing that they are being told the truth.
saveourcola 