LA Dodgers a Microcosm of American Society

The LA Dodgers are bankrupt. They do not have the cash to pay their employees’ wages. We are talking about a community here. The Dodgers are a baseball team much loved by its many patrons, as sports teams usually are, whether big or small. And the Dodgers are bankrupt despite recent success—they made the play offs as recently as 2008 and 2009. Why then has this catastrophe engulfed the team? Andrew Gumbel of the UK Observer has explained it.

The fact is that the owner of the team has sucked them dry for his own aggrandisement. It should be a lesson for Americans, especially those who persistently defend the mega rich, people whom they do not know and never will, and people who are richer than they can ever imagine—America’s plutocrats, the corrupt and greedy rich.

Frank McCourt, not the deceased Irish novelist but a car lot magnate, bought the team and bled it dry to support a life of luxury for himself and his family. McCourt bought the Dodgers from News Corp, who had used it to build up a regional sports network. To do it, McCourt borrowed $150m from Bank of America, $75m from Major League Baseball and $196m from Fox, so he had not spent a penny of his own money.

McCourt then sliced off what was most profitable, the stadium car park and the ticket office as his own operations, which charged the Dodgers rent, and, in turn, giving McCourt security to borrow more dollars. He paid himself $5m a year, his wife, Jamie, $2m pa as chief executive, and their two children $600,000 each—one was a student at Stanford University and Goldman Sachs employed the other. McCourt also enjoyed a private jet and four luxurious houses in Hollywood and Malibu. In typical robbing financier style, the money and debt were spread among, and constantly moved between McCourt’s shell companies and subsidiaries to hide what was going on.

And what was going on was that the assets of the team were being stripped and moved into the personal accounts of a single family and a few hangers on.

Yes, it ought to be a lesson for the average American, whether poor and unemployed or middle class and imagining that they are well off. You just do not have a clue, especially you Tea Partiers taken in by rich men’s stunts to keep you on side. The invisible über rich of the USA are taking you all for the same sort of ride as McCourt took the community that supported the LA Dodgers. They are robbing you silly, and too many of you are defending them!

You cheer because they are sending your boys to distant lands to get maimed and killed, and they make money out of armaments and the vast support industry of the military-industrial complex that supports it. Often you don’t even get a badly paid job out of it. They manufacture more and more abroad in low cost countries. You lose your jobs, or the threat is used to keep wages down or to get concessions from the city and the state treasury, and all of it goes into pockets just as McCourt’s did. You don’t know what is going on because they are like McCourt experts in hiding it, and have a gigantic publicity service called the media to feed you anything to keep you confused and divided.

Get real! You Yankees are like the Dodgers fans—being conned!

Bin Laden Assassination—the Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories about the death of Osama bin Laden have been fueled by the US military’s rapid disposal of the body at sea, and the US announcement it would not release any images of bin Laden’s dead body. When the Americans killed Mullah Dadullah, Taliban’s chief military commander, they publicly showed the footage. Canadian deputy Leader of the Opposition and MP, Thomas Mulcair, stated in an interview with CBC Television:

I don’t think from what I’ve heard that those pictures [of bin Laden’s body] exist.

Fox News has challenged the DNA evidence confirming Bin Laden’s death. Andrew Napolitano of Freedom Watch said Bin Laden’s death could not be verified. To be 99.9 percent certain of the identity by DNA, as was claimed, the test had to have been compared against the DNA of a mother and father, or several natural brothers or sisters. DNA was available only from half brothers and half sisters, which makes that degree of certainty impossible, unless a busload of them had been tested.

Radio host, Alex Jones, among many others, thinks Bin Laden has been dead for years, and his body had been kept frozen on ice to be used as a propaganda tool at a future politically expedient time. In 2002, he claimed that an anonymous White House source had told him that bin Laden “is frozen, literally frozen and that he would be rolled out in the future at some date”. Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, said in 2003, “Yes we have been told by intelligence that they’ve got him, Bush may roll him out but because they exposed that at the election they didn’t do it”.

Stephen Lendman, citing former Pakistani president, Benazir Bhutto, said that Bin Laden died of natural causes in mid December 2001. Obama’s announcement was an excuse to involve the United States in wars with Pakistan. Maybe that is why the Pakistanis are particularly skeptical of the alleged raid and assassination.

Abbottabad residents said the announcement of Osama’s death was a US conspiracy against Pakistan. Some residents doubted not only that Bin Laden was dead, but also that he ever lived among them. A local lawyer agreed with Thomas Mulcair:

They’re just making it up. Nobody has seen the body.

Pakistani officials said no firefight had ever taken place:

Not a single bullet was fired from the compound at the US forces and their choppers.

Bin Laden was captured alive, and executed outside the compound in front of his 12-year old daughter. Then his body was taken away by helicopter. An article in the Urdu newspaper Ausaf quoted military sources as saying:

Arabic news network Al-Arabiya claimed senior Pakistani security officials said Osama Bin Laden was captured alive in his Pakistani hideout and then shot by US special forces. His 12 year old saw her father executed and his body dragged to a helicopter.

Another Pakistani official rejected US accounts of the bloody firefight, saying:

Bin Laden has been killed somewhere else. But since the US intends to extend the Afghan war into Pakistan, and accuse Pakistan, and obtain a permit for its military’s entry into the country, it has devised the [Seal operation] scenario.

Hamid Gul former head of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) said Bin laden had died many years ago and that the official death story given out by the American media was a hoax. He thinks the American government knew about Bin Laden’s death years ago:

They were keeping this story on the ice and they were looking for an appropriate moment, and it couldn’t be a better moment because President Obama had to fight off his first salvo in his next year’s election as he runs for president.

Contrary to that, others think Bin Laden was actually working with the US during the entire war on terror. Bin Laden was the main source of US help in the war on terror. He had been a US agent in Afghanistan when the Taliban were fighting the Soviets. A source was quoted as saying:

The West has been very pleased with Bin Laden’s operations in recent years. Now the West was forced to kill him in order to prevent a possible leak of information he had, information more precious than gold.

Pakistanis offer a unifying theory for the apparently discordant theories being bandied about. Bin Laden truly did die in 2001, but the US found a body double for them to pretend he was still alive, and to make the Bin Laden videos for “Al Qaida” to release after his death. US agencies and the Pakistan intelligence worked together to keep the double safe, eventually in the compound minutes away from the Pakistani military academy, a very safe place, and a place where videos could be made without fear of detection. Unbeknown to the poor dupe who was now Bin Laden, when the time was ripe, he was to be assassinated as Bin Laden! That is what happened on 2 May, but the release of photos meant the body might be recognized as not being Bin Laden. Diversionary fakes had to be released first, so that when the “real ones” come out, they too will be doubted!

Fox News and Conservative Talk Radio Promote False Beliefs

A survey of 750 Americans showed that people who relied on Fox News for their information were more likely than others to know four rumors about the New York City mosque—all of which have been refuted—and to believe them. Survey participants were all asked to rate how much they relied on various media outlets for their news. They were also asked whether they heard any of the rumors and if they believed in them.

The rumors were that:

1. the proposed center is scheduled to open on September 11, 2011 in celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks
2. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam backing the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque, is a terrorist sympathizer who refuses to condemn Islamic attack on civilians
3. the Muslim groups building the center have deep ties to radical anti-American and anti-Semitic organizations
4. the money for the center is coming primarily from foreign financial backers associated with terrorist organizations.

The results showed that people who said they relied on Fox News, either online or on television, were more aware of rumors about the mosque and were more likely to believe the rumors though they were untrue than those with low reliance on Fox. An average respondent with a low reliance on Fox News believed 0.9 rumors on average, while an otherwise average respondent with a high reliance on Fox believed 1.5 rumors—an increase of 66 percent. Respondents who relied heavily on CNN or NPR believed fewer false rumors, the study found. High reliance on CNN reduced the number of rumors believed by 23 percent, while heavy use of NPR reduced belief by 25 percent.

Erik Nisbet, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, conducted the study with R Kelly Garrett, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State. All the comparisons were made while holding constant other variables, such as education, party affiliation, ideology, and other media use. Garrett said:

Our analyses demonstrate that the relationships we found aren't just a side effect of some other characteristic, such as political ideology or party affiliation. These results suggest that even a well-educated, liberal Democrat would be more likely to believe the rumors, if he relied heavily on Fox for his news.

Reliance on conservative talk radio had a similar effect on users as did Fox News. Those with a heavy reliance on conservative talk radio heard on average two rumors, compared to 1.5 rumors for those with a low reliance—an increase of 33 percent. People who relied heavily on broadcast television news—ABC, CBS or NBC—were less likely to have been exposed to the rumors. Heavy reliance on those sources was linked to a 22 percent decrease in rumor exposure compared to those with low reliance on those outlets. Broadcast news placed less emphasis on the mosque controversy than did the cable news outlets.

People who said they relied heavily on newspapers for their news (either print or online) increased their exposure to rebuttals by 67 percent when compared to people who relied little on papers. These rebuttals were shown to strongly promote accurate knowledge about the rumors.

The best way to get accurate information about the proposed Islamic cultural center seemed to be newspapers, according to the study. Nisbet noted that it was not just because newspaper readers are more attuned to politics. Comparing people who paid similar attention to the mosque controversy, those who read newspapers still had greater exposure to the rebuttals. Nisbet said:

This is one of the unique contributions of newspapers in the media landscape. When you consider that newspaper readers are more likely to be exposed to rebuttals of false information compared to other media outlets, it is worrying that newspapers in general have been struggling. It is something we should be concerned about.

The findings suggest that among those who believed none of the four rumors, two-thirds are opposed to the proposed project. But that increases to 82 percent among those who believed three or more rumors. Even more dramatic is the effect that belief in these rumors has on support for mosques outside of New York. Predicted opposition to building of a mosque in the respondent's own neighborhood increased from 39 percent among people who believed none of the rumors to 63 percent among those who believed three or more of the rumors. Nisbet observed that:

These rumors have a negative effect well beyond the specific controversy in New York City. They seem to shape attitudes about Muslims and their role in our society, no matter where we live. That's a big concern.

The survey was designed to focus on how differences in exposure and belief in rumors and support for the proposed New York mosque were associated with media use. That is what it did but it is too small to accurately represent the whole American population. Nevertheless, the survey worryingly indicated the potentially unsocial effects of a type of reporting that falsely emphasizes human prejudices rather than seeking to correct or minimize them for the sake of social harmony.