Propaganda

Everyone we fight in Iraq is now "al-Qaida"
(updated below)
Josh Marshall publishes an e-mail from a reader who identifies what is one of the most astonishing instances of mindless, pro-government "reporting" yet:
It's a curious thing that, over the past 10 - 12 days, the news from Iraq refers to the combatants there as "al-Qaida" fighters. When did that happen?
Until a few days ago, the combatants in Iraq were "insurgents" or they were referred to as "Sunni" or "Shia'a" fighters in the Iraq Civil War. Suddenly, without evidence, without proof, without any semblance of fact, the US military command is referring to these combatants as "al-Qaida".
Welcome to the latest in Iraq propaganda.That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term "Al Qaeda" to designate "anyone and everyeone we fight against or kill in Iraq" is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as "Al Qaeda."
But what is even more notable is that the establishment press has followed right along, just as enthusiastically. I don't think the New York Times has published a story about Iraq in the last two weeks without stating that we are killing "Al Qaeda fighters," capturing "Al Qaeda leaders," and every new operation is against "Al Qaeda."
The Times -- typically in the form of the gullible and always-government-trusting "reporting" of Michael Gordon, though not only -- makes this claim over and over, as prominently as possible, often without the slightest questioning, qualification, or doubt. If your only news about Iraq came from The New York Times, you would think that the war in Iraq is now indistinguishable from the initial stage of the war in Afghanistan -- that we are there fighting against the people who hijacked those planes and flew them into our buildings: "Al Qaeda."

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Bidness is Bidness
A little background first. A Pittsburgh law firm called Cohen & Grigsby was caught on YouTube detailing how they hire foreign employees through loopholes in the H-1B visa law, rather than seeking American employees. Why? To save money, of course. The Associated Press:
"The goal here of course is to meet the requirements, number one, but also do so as inexpensively as possible, keeping in mind our goal and our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker," Lawrence Lebowitz, the firm's vice president of marketing, told the audience in May.
Dastardly and inexcusable, since this firm practically admits to abusing the H-1B visa program. (Coincidentally, Senator Grassley introduced a bill in April which aims to close the loopholes in the H-1B law. If one chose to be conspiratorial about this, one might raise an eyebrow at the timing of this video leak story.)
But really, it's no different than the prevailing corporate mind-set here. A mind-set which Senator Grassley has repeatedly voted to support. More on that below.
The mind-set goes like so: hiring 'spensive, uppity American workers isn't good business sense when there exists a world of cheap, brown foreign labor to exploit; allowing wealthy CEOs to wade pantless in record profits... and Flomax. It's happening everywhere, and it's been enabled by the passage of NAFTA, GATT, and most recently CAFTA. America's borders are not unlike a gaping maw through which profitable corporations are encouraged to outsource their jobs overseas, and they're subsidized by your government to do so.
This thing called overseas outsourcing -- and not illegal immigration -- is the real crisis at our borders.
It's not so much the people coming in, it's the jobs going out.
It's one of many reasons why the middle class in America is rapidly fading away. From the much publicized exodus of GM in the 1980s to the more recent and less ballyhooed Hershey firings*, Ross Perot's prescient description of a giant sucking sound grows suckier by the damn day. At the time, we all thought it was just hilarious to hear a presidential candidate say the word "sucking" a lot. We should've paid more attention.
So on the sucking tip, enter Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. Upon hearing about the Cohen & Grigsby YouTube video, and after consulting with his colleague Senator Ted Stevens about how all those shrunken lawyers holed-up inside his computer machine survived being dumped through a series of tubes, he teamed up with several of his fellow anti-immigration Republicans and fired off a letter to the law firm:
"We would like you to please explain how this practice does not constitute outright discrimination based on nationality and why your firm so blatantly promotes this type of behavior."
Boiled down, Senator Grassley pitched a fit over this story because it involved foreign workers taking the place of American workers... on American soil. That last part is important. After all, he's one of the top gunners in the anti-immigration debate, so when he spots any sign of ferrnerrs coming in and taking American jobs, he lets-fly the frothy bud nipping. Ironically, however, he has no problem giving American jobs to ferrnerrs -- that is, when those ferrnerrs stay far, far away in their own labor lawless country.
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James Connaughton: The Bush Era Personified

Tim Dickinson has a piece in Rolling Stone on the Bush administration's coordinated attempts to stifle action on global warming, and it's worth a read. (Also worth checking out: the accompanying multimedia slideshow.) Lots of it will be familiar to Grist readers, but it's nice to see it pulled together into a single (extraordinarily damning) narrative.
One guy who plays a big role in the story is James Connaughton, the ex-dirty-energy lobbyist Bush brought in to head up the Council on Environmental Quality.
Side note: speaking of the CEQ, savor this:
Prior to joining the Cabinet, [ex-EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman] sought personal assurance from Bush that the EPA would be able to call its own shots without deferring to the CEQ - the Council on Environmental Quality, a policy arm of the White House. As Whitman recalls it, Bush made no effort to mask his bureaucratic ignorance. "What's CEQ?" he asked blankly.
Oy.
Bush was clueless, but Cheney -- to whom virtually all Bush era malevolence ultimately traces -- was not. He took the CEQ under his wing and made it his personal policy/propaganda shop, much like he did with the Office of Special Plans in the run up to the Iraq War. He used it to funnel favorable intelligence (read: bogus skeptic studies) up to the highest levels of gov't and out to the media, to interfere with scientific gov't reports, and to stymie executive rule-making. And of course Connaughton played along willingly.
As it happens, Connaughton's in the news again. On Wed., the Senate EPW Committee held a hearing on the abysmal EPA reaction to 9/11 air quality dangers. The EPA Inspector General issued a report (PDF) in 2003 revealing that the CEQ forced the EPA to tone down warnings about the air and reassure everyone it was safe. Connaughton testified at the hearing. Josh Marshall -- who has some video highlights from the testimony -- says that ...
... the result was such a tour de force of testimonial BS that we wanted to show you some of it. We see a lot of congressional testimony and thus a lot of non-denial-denying, obfuscation and generally bamboozling crap. But this performance stood out.
This guy really personifies the Bush era, with its fetid mix of mendacity, ideology, and incompetence. No doubt he'll be back in a cushy lobbying job before Bush's boxes are even cleared out of the White House.