Understanding the media spin cycle

Here's a list from some blog laying out the various techniques used by official spokes-maggots to avoid telling the truth.  I probably don't agree with the guy's politics, but it is a nice synopsis of spin techniques.  Next time you watch a press conference, see if you can identify the tricks as they come up.

1. Dummy up. If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't happen.
2. Wax indignant. This is also known as the "how dare you?" gambit.
3. Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild rumors." If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors."
4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike.
5. Call the skeptics names like "conspiracy theorist," "nut," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and of course, "rumor monger." You must then carefully avoid fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned.
6. Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money.
7. Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can be very useful.
8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."
9. Come half-clean. This is also known as "confession and avoidance" or "taking the limited hang-out route." This way, you create the impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively harmless, less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often requires the embrace of a fall-back position quite different from the one originally taken.
10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.
11. Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance. With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant. For example: We have a completely free press. If they know of evidence that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) had prior knowledge of the Oklahoma City bombing they would have reported it. They haven't reported it, so there was no prior knowledge by the BATF. Another variation on this theme involves the likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press that would report it.
12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely.
13. Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or reporting a distraction. 

He missed one: answer the wrong question and quickly move on.  I find that many replies sound like they are answering the question, but if you pay attention to the actual words critically, you see they do no such thing.

He missed another trick: filibuster.  I remember an old quote from some NPR journalist about the technique whereby the speaker rambles on for minutes going off on tangents.  It is essentially composed of changing the subject, and a bit of answering the wrong question, but then the subject speaks for so long that the interviewer and listener stop paying attention, and are reluctant to answer a follow-up question because it is so painful.

[From] Thirteen Techniques for Truth Suppression

We committed at least $13 trillion to bailout reckeless banks

.. and we can't find a few billion for the poor and unemployed.

 http://voltagecreative.com/articles/scary-bailout-money-info-graphic/



OTHER COVERAGE
Bailout Costs vs Big Historical Events
Adding up the Government's Bailout Tab
Total Bailout Cost Now $12.8 Trillion

A Tally of Federal Rescues:

We gonna spend $3 trillion on that war

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/threetrilliondollarwar.jpg 

Word of the day: "Deficit Hawkoprite"

"The bottom line: As a party, the Republicans who will be railing against fiscal irresponsibility and threatening to block a raise in the debt limit are the irresponsible ones themselves who created the need to raise that debt limit [in the first place]."

Deficit Hawkoprite Watch 

http://baselinescenario.com/2011/01/17/deficit-hawkoprite-watch/

 

"Some critics continue to assert that President George W. Bush’s policies bear little responsibility for the deficits the nation faces over the coming decade — that, instead, the new policies of President Barack Obama and the 111^th Congress are to blame. Most recently, a Heritage Foundation paper downplayed the role of Bush-era policies (for more on that paper, see p. 4). Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years"

Critics Still Wrong on What's Driving Deficits in Coming Years: Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036

Call me iPop, or: What is "modern rock"?

While recently visiting my town's new brewpub, I commented that I did not much like the music being played.  (It may have been coming off the owner’s iPod I think.)   It's not so much that I disliked it, more that I simply had no idea about it.  I did not recognize a single song and certainly could not name the artists to be sure.  But more interestingly, I could not even place it as a genre.

It was some kind of modern pop-rock.  Not too intrusive, certainly no “edge” to speak of.  It employed the usual variety of instruments I suppose, and the singer was just sort of, well, there.  So I guess it is not an alt- or indie-somethingorother since no one was shouting or playing their instruments with any particular emphasis.  Somehow it blended the upbeat backbeat snap of Jack Johnson with the nasal melancholy somberness of a Moby dirge.  (Moby, I am wiki-informed, belongs to the genre: ambient electronica)

Absent the lyrics it could not be differentiated from Christian Rock.  There were perhaps the vaguest hints of a lineage with metal and honky hip-hop, but fleeting and very very subtle.  It was in fact kind of medium-to-up-tempo electronic elevator music; perfectly at home in a quiet bar, but also in a mall, or backing a car commercial.

TV commercials in particular these days seem to be in fact avenues to showcase new release for new bands, which is an interesting phenomena in itself: commercials no longer just raid existing music favorites, they have become a place to release new music, or for bands to make a name for themselves. I find that interesting: new bands probably now aspire to be featured on a TV commercial.

It could be that there is an entirely new genre that exists only in iTunes-land, composed by Generation-Ritalin, targeted for television commercials, and sold at 99 cents a pop.  So I decided to name this genre: iPop.

If forced to guess the names of the bands, I would have gone with Radiohead, or Cold Play, or Green Day.  Which is pathetic of course, since those guesses are probably outdated by a decade.  So anyway, it struck me that I was not only unable to name the genre, but I cannot name a single new artist from the last decade.

None of this is a surprise to people who know me of course, the last new album I bought from an emerging style, when it was released, was probably London Calling by the Clash.  Granted, I was there at the emergence of the second wave Jam Band Yonder Mountain, but pretty much fell off the backside of that wave in short order.  My record collection is composed of about 80% pre-2000, 70% pre-1990, and 40% pre-1970 issues.  The genre's rotating in my CD player are largely blues and bluegrass.  Most of my "new" music I do buy is actually new recordings of old music. (The astute may note: I just used the word record collection.  And while I literally still own hundreds of LPs, I also still refer to CDs as "records" and have no idea what to call music available only on iTunes - ok; I do know, it's playlists)

Confession: I do not own an iPod, and rarely listen to music on my computer.  My stereo (yes, stereo) is oriented around a 100-watt receiver and a pair of JBL speakers from the 1970's that still squat like pieces of furniture in my living room.  (Anyone surprised by that?)

Anyway, in my research, I came across this interesting inventory of musical styles since the 1990s.

What Are The Ingredients In This Nasty Soup We Call “Modern Rock”?

http://idolator.com/5220851/what-are-the-ingredients-in-this-nasty-soup-we-call-modern-rock

Naomi Klein saw this coming

Klein claims that crisis’s are manufactured or at least exploited on purpose - what she calls disaster capitalism (but is more accurately crisis capitalism) – we can now see that the end goal is the laundering of electronic money into hard assets.

In the financial bubble version of crisis capitalism, everyone’s wealth is first hyper-inflated via transient electronic/virtual currency and the velocity of speculative financial transactions bids prices up, and then eventually the bottom falls out.  However, some people are still left with considerable piles of money after the fall, and those left with the biggest piles of wealth after the crash are in an excellent position to exploit everyone else by scooping up assets in distressed sales and defaults.  During the crisis; cash is king.

In this phase we see huge purchases happening at prices far below the levels of just a few years ago, but since no one has access to cash or loans, the prices (while comparatively low) are effectively unreachable for most people since no one will lend them money to match up to buyers with cash.  As a result, all sorts of hard & productive assets change hands: prime real estate is purchased for a song, productive companies are swallowed by others, publicly owned assets and revenue streams are privatized (roads, state parks, and public parking systems), access to markets and resources is acquired through long-term sweetheart-deal leases with state and local governments, etc.

As a bonus to the elite in this phase, various public gains are un-done in the name of austerity and shared sacrifice.  Union contracts are nullified via obligation-laundering bankruptcies, long-term pension obligations are renegotiated under bipartisan crisis committees, worker pay is slashed to levels it takes decades to recover from, and the like.  This time around, we see also the perverse argument that in order to recover from the crisis, taxes must be further cut for the elite. This is all textbook disaster capitalism.

But in order to make this orgy of wealth transfer possible, you must first get the current owners of prime assets into a leveraged position, so that when the crash happens, they are desperate to sell.  This is accomplished by the speculative bubble phase.  But to make the speculative phase happen, you must first entice people to play along; which you do with cheap money and a loose regulatory environment, along with a variety of other mechanisms from official cheerleading to a milieu of arcane regulatory and fiscal incentives...  which is where the US government comes in.

The government itself sets up the scheme.  What’s more, the US government is financing the end game: the US government and central bank is literally bankrolling this elite spending spree by providing low interest loans, toxic debt laundering, and other subsidies directly to the elite (via the banks), while simultaneously doing very little to prop up the financial strength of everyone else.

In absolute dollar terms, the elite look worse off compared to before the bubble burst, but in terms of real wealth relative to everyone else, they are much better off.  In the end when the dust settles, a few people have taken over ownership of a whole lot more real wealth.  The post-crash atmosphere creates an extent of wealth transfer that makes it apparent that although the bubble was lucrative, the real point of the game is the crash.  In the end, everyone’s balance sheets have shrunk, but a very few people now hold a bigger pile of deeds and titles in their safe, which reflects a concentrating of the real wealth.

Of course crisis capitalism has been practiced by the US and global elites around the globe for decades; what is new is that it is being practiced by the west, on the west itself.

You can see evidence of it here:

In Corrupt Global Food System, Farmland Is the New Gold - IPS ipsnews.net

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54119

But the evidence is everywhere, just watch the headlines about banks consuming smaller banks, which commercial and prime real estate changes hands, what assets are being sold off by cash-strapped governments at a discount, and anything bought by Goldman Sachs.

Krugman's oversimplification

Intro.  In a recent NY Times column, Paul Krugman takes a stab at explaining the chasm between the political left & right.  His take: we suffer from fundamentally differing premise in terms of the moral basis for government policy.  Krugman thinks that conservatives oppose any sort of welfare state government intervention, as a moral basis.  I disagree, I believe conservatives only claim they oppose expansive or activist government, while they gladly embrace it in many forms.... in short, conservatives' actions & advocacy, in contrast to their stated values, are often at odds.

A Tale of Two Moralities

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14krugman.html

My Comment.  While Krugman’s oversimplification about moral-based values is a fair generalization as far as it goes, it does not go very far.  It omits the fact that in politics, the moral and the pragmatic are not so easily separated.

The left may well believe in the moral values of a welfare state and progressive taxation, but it believes also with equal commitment that the practical implication of such a system is wider, deeper, and more lasting prosperity for all.  The moral dimension of supporting the poor is only a portion of the overall belief set.  It is the corresponding belief that “red in claw” capitalist systems tend to devour themselves and lead to widespread suffering that forms the foundation for the moral framework.

Meanwhile on the right, one must wonder why so much of their alleged moral belief system in terms of economics must be sustained through the extensive use of myth, deception, magical thinking, and denial.  Not to mention that so many purported followers of right-wing economic “morality” tend to be living contradictions of their own views in the extreme.  Be it the hilarious specter of health care plan protesters who are recipients of Medicare, or any other of the “welfare state’s” largess to which they willingly consume, nay, demand.