Michael Riordon

the view from where I live

Tag Archives: propaganda


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Greece: It was a moment

Shining moments happen now and then. While the big ones demand attention, small ones often escape notice.  Some are in the eye of the beholder.

Lightning over parthenonThe Parthenon, Athens, Greece

For this beholder, a few of the big shining moments that come to mind: When years of massive popular uprising finally brought down the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. When Iceland defied the European bankers. When indigenous Bolivians forced US corporate giant Bechtel to drop its plan to make them pay for their own water, even for rain that fell from the Andean sky.  And then, just a week ago:

Despite a deluge of propaganda and threats, 61%of Greeks said Όχι, No! to financial-political strangulation by Euro-banks, Greek corporate gangsters and their wholly owned media.

That was a shining moment. It followed the January 2015 election of the Syriza movement to govern Greece, primarily on a promise to end imposed ‘austerity,’ a toxic mix of impoverishment and grand theft that had already devastated the country.

I am hungry for these shining moments, as I imagine many of us are. The big ones don’t come very often.  Our grasping at straws can make us naive, trip us up on our own illusions.

A week later, the Όχι moment is over.

Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras overrode democracy and the clear wishes of his own people to accept, behind closed doors, a set of conditions guaranteed to be even more viciously destructive to his country than the ones a strong majority of Greeks had just refused in their historic referendum.

In their castles today, the international bankers and politicians who serve them are surely celebrating. They have made an example of the Greek people, as kings used to do with heads on pikes: See what we do to those who defy us.

How Greeks who invested their hopes in the new government and its promises feel today, I can hardly imagine. The grief and rage of two other observers is eloquently expressed here, and here.

And in a rapidly growing international protest on Twitter, #ThisIsACoup, here.

But the story doesn’t end there. It continues where it always does, in Greece and everywhere else, often out of sight on streets, in markets, cafés and tavernas, in offices, schools and barracks.  People talk, they learn, they unravel the lies, patch the disappointments, share, organize, resist.  And so it goes.

The story also continues in the turmoil and the quiet of our minds, where many small shining moments are born.  Often they grow, and sometimes they bear fruit.


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Snake oil: a must-read exposé

The more people learn about the extreme dangers of bitumen, tar sands oil slurry, the more resistance grows along the planned routes of pipelines to transport the toxic muck across country to refineries and coastal ports.  And as resistance grows, so do propaganda and dirty tricks from the industry and its partners in government.

Pipeline spill, Yellowstone River

Oil pipeline spill, Yellowstone River, 2011. Photo: The New York Times.

A new must-read exposé from PRWatch, a US-based investigative research group, takes an inside look at what we can expect in the escalating battle over the proposed TransCanada pipeline from Alberta to Quebec/New Brunswick, aka “Energy East”:

“Leaked documents expose a plan for TransCanada to launch an ‘aggressive’ American-style PR campaign to persuade Canadians to support a Canada-based alternative to the stalled Keystone XL pipeline, to get controversial tar sands oil to refineries in eastern Canada for export. [MR: Prices are higher overseas, and diminished domestic supplies will ensure higher prices here, too. Oil-pushers call this a win-win situation.]

“According to the documents, this Canada-centric campaign would actually be run out of an office in Washington, DC. And the digital campaign is being led by a rightwing American political operative employed by the world’s largest public relations firm…”

Their battle plan includes investigations [read: attacks] on Canadian groups opposing the pipeline, and recruitment of buyable scientists “to build an echo chamber of aligned voices.”

Talk about 1984 (+ 30).

The dirty details are here.

For an antidote, a dose of honest science, see chapters 9 & 10 in Bold Scientists.  Read excerpts here.

 

 

 


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Weather report: no climate change.

extreme weatherPhoto: National Geographic

This week in Canada, the Harper regime decreed:

Henceforth, there will be no talk of climate change from any meteorologist employed by the Canadian Meteorological Service (a division of Environment Canada).

Investigative reporter Mike De Souza revealed the new ban here.

A government official who is permitted to talk to the media – but not to say anything of substance – told De Souza that meteorologists are qualified to talk about extreme weather, but not climate.

The ban – officially known as a “communications protocol” – extends the Harper regime’s aggressive silencing of scientists whose research might provoke questions about the regime’s pro-corporate, anti-environment agenda.  True to the most insidious forms of censorship, the boundaries of what’s forbidden are not specified.

Apparently this ongoing reign of terror works.  De Souza reports that, since the government’s 2007 decree that all federal scientists must obtain management approval before giving any interviews on their research, an internal Environment Canada analysis noted an 80 per cent drop in media coverage of climate change issues.

Fortunately, scientists are resisting.  Follow their stories in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, autumn 2014 from Between the Lines.