Dominant United States media and policymakers
express apprehension about the dangerous prospect of "nuclear
weapons in the Middle East." By this they mean the prospect
that Iran might be able to develop one or two such weapons at some
point in the future. The interesting fact that Israel is already
precariously armed to the teeth with thermonuclear weaponry is
not for them a cause for trepidation.
There is considerable expressed "mainstream" unease
over the death and injury experienced by American soldiers in Iraq. The
fact that America's occupation of that nation has killed tens of
thousands of Iraqi civilians elicits no remotely comparable alarm.
White Americans are concerned with appropriate
moral behavior on the part of public and private officials and
leaders. They remain relatively disinterested, however,
in the moral character of leading public and private institutions
that all too commonly spread death, destruction, misery, and hierarchy
at home and abroad. Thus, Bill Clinton was placed in the
public pillory for playing around with Monica Lewinsky but got
a free pass for ravaging public family cash assistance, cutting
back other social programs needed by the poor, and advancing racially
disparate mass incarceration in the world's leading prison state. He
got in historic trouble for lying about what he did "with
that woman," but paid no serious price for launching a murderous
and unjustified missile strike on Sudan or raining bombs and Depleted
Uranium on the people of Belgrade in the false name of humanitarian
concern.
Mainstream America has become somewhat
critical of those who voice racist sentiments. Jimmy the
Greek loses his job and Trent Lott is demoted for making racially
insensitive comments. While the majority congratulates itself on its
opposition to open bigotry, however, it has little to say
about the richly racist character of numerous social processes,
practices, and policies it continues to sanction in the "post-Civil
Rights era." Persistent strong de facto racial school and
housing segregation, racially disparate policing, imprisonment,
and felony-marking, and savage educational race inequity march
on without skipping a beat. They face no serious reckoning with
public morality. They are more firmly entrenched by constant celebration
of past and ongoing civil rights victories over open racial bigotry
and legal segregation, which lead many Americans to conclude that
racism is over as an obstacle to black advancement.
Dominant white U.S. opinion is agitated
by the "problem" of affirmative action policies that
provide some compensatory avenues to higher education and middle-class
employment for some relatively fortunate people of color. But
it is nearly mute about rampant legacy admissions granted
to under-qualified Ivy League (and other elite higher-educational)
applicants like the dangerous and moronic George W. Bush, whose
youthful drug conviction was expunged from the criminal record
thanks to family name and wealthy connections.
Here in Chicago, local policy and media
authorities are shocked by "terrible" outcomes on
the culturally biased and anti-intellectual standardized tests
that are administered in the city's hundreds of desperately impoverished,
under-funded, under-staffed, and hyper-segregated public schools. They do
not worry, however, about miserable "educational [and moral-intellectual]
outcomes" over at the prestigious University of Chicago, a
leading contributor to elitist neo-liberal and neo-conservative
doctrines and a notorious bastion and agent of race and class privilege.
City policy and opinion-architects are
angry at "overpaid" public school teachers and "failed" public
schools. Ghetto schools are denounced and targeted for closure
and corporate-capitalist takeover under the city's aggressive new
privatization-heavy "Renaissance 2010" Plan. But
nobody seems to express much concern about the education-disabling
impact of racial isolation and related socioeconomic failure produced
by corporate-capitalist abandonment and hyper-segregation in the
inner city.
The public is officially upset when
white firemen make racially bigoted comments over the fire
department's radio system and applauds the Mayor for denouncing
those comments but few authorities or commentators have much
to say about the way City Hall's zoning policies and contract
award practices feed racial separatism and hierarchy in
the city.
The Chicago's area's predominantly white
automobile commuters are bothered by escalating highway tolls
but the white majority rarely speaks about the massive expense
of their state's sprawling, racially disparate prisons, which
house more than 45,000 inmates – two thirds of whom are black in
a 15-percent black state. It does not spend much time
worrying about the tens of millions of city and state taxpayer
dollars spent to lure gigantic job-eliminating corporations
to bring their headquarters to, or keep their headquarters in,
Chicago's global downtown. It does not overly concern
itself with the way its expensive, publicly financed
highway system subsidizes the nation's ecologically
destructive automobile addiction and at the same time pushes
economic resources, population, and opportunity and political power
yet further away from the disproportionately impoverished
and nonwhite inner-city.
Two Thursdays ago, my fellow Chicagoans
and I watched a large and dramatic mid-day press conference where
the chief of our "global city's" police force
filled us in on the latest details regarding the investigation
of the recent murder of the husband and mother of federal judge
Joan Lefkow. The crime in question was a horrible double-homicide
I was glad to see solved.
But I don't recall any comparable mid-day
media extravaganzas being held to explain city efforts to solve
the killing of others among the very disproportionately black and
Latino group of 1,773 people who have been murdered in Chicago
since January 1, 2002. I've seen no equivalent high-profile
law-enforcement briefings about the fact that the black homicide
rate in the city is more than 10 times higher than the white rate.
This is an invisible little fact, lost amidst recent celebration
over the fact that the city's overall murder rate is falling. Meanwhile,
we are relieved that the Lefkow killings appear to have nothing
to do with imprisoned white supremacist Mathew Hale, who is supposed
to have threatened Judge Lefkow – another opportunity to
disregard racism as a factor in American life.
It's one thing, of course, for a relatively
voiceless and invisible black or Latino teenager to get gunned
down on the city's West or South Sides. That "happens
all the time" in forgotten neighborhoods where ex-prisoners
outnumber legitimate jobs, where full-service grocery stores, coffee
shops, and sit-down restaurants are non-existent, and where children
carry levels of trauma that would be recognizable by battlefield
doctors.
It's another thing, unfortunately, when violent
tragedy visits the family of an affluent white agent of high state
power living in comfortable, tree-lined streets on the city's predominantly
Caucasian North Side.
Also two weeks ago, to give a local example
with a stronger imperial and global dimension, we were told by
local media authorities to fret over the fact that the CEO of the
Chicago-based Boeing Corporation, Harry Stonecipher, had an adulterous
affair with an unnamed female executive within his firm. This
was the front-page story in the March 8th Chicago Sun
Times, which reported Stonecipher's resignation, and the lead story
on local television news.
Deeper in the Sun Times, we learned
from a Loyola University business professor why the CEO had to
go. "The stakes," the professor notes, "were too
high for Stonecipher to stay." Those "stakes" are
the "good graces" and "absolute trust" of the
U.S. Defense Department, which "did about $30 billion of business
with Boeing in 2004" – equaling nearly 60 percent of the company's
revenue that year.
I have yet to hear citizens or media fret
about the thoroughly legal but terribly lethal nature of Boeing's
activities. Those activities in recent years have included the
company's emergence as the main contractor for the Pentagon's dangerous,
destabilizing, and costly Star Ways System, a key part of the United
States' open plan to extend its total domination of the planet
through the militarization of outer space.
Beyond working to wreak havoc from the
stars, Boeing has contributed to the killing and maiming of countless
world citizens with such monumentally expensive high-tech tools
of death and destruction as the notorious Apache AH-64A helicopter
and the F-15 (an "air superiority fighter" with what
Boeing calls "first look, first-shot, and first-kill capability")
and F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets. Boeing's famous B-52, the longtime "backbone
of the manned-strategic bomber forces in the United States," (according
to Boeing's web-site in 2002), includes among its accomplishments
the "anti-terrorist" bombing of Afghanistan, conducted
from heights guaranteed to produce significant deadly civilian "collateral
damage."
Boeing and Northrop's B-2 Stealth Bomber
is one of the most terrifying technological creations to date.
It is a monument to the Dark Side of Star Wars (the movie) fame – a "multi-role
bomber, capable of delivering both nuclear and conventional munitions," in
Boeing's words, "to strike targets all over the world from
bases in the United States." It is perfectly matched to the
White House's quest for permanent US military supremacy and unlimited
global offensive capacity even in the absence of a single remotely
threatening rival state.
One of Boeing's other productions is the
Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV), dedicated to the proposition
that "the only way to completely protect the person flying
a combat mission is to have them fly it from somewhere else." With
the UCAV, Boeing takes the appropriate lesson from Vietnam: efficient
dispensation of death and destruction for Evil Others with minimum
risk for the agents of imperial mayhem. "We build UCAV and
other innovative defense products," wrote the Orwellian content
providers of Boeing's web site in 2002, "because they do one
thing and do it very well – they save lives." Yes: War is
Peace, Love is Hate, and Death is Life.
All of these lovely, taxpayer-financed
killing machines were deployed in the illegal, bloody (mainly for
Iraqis), and (for Boeing) profitable seizure of Iraq. According
to USA Today business writer Byron Acohido in the fall of 2003, "profits
from the military sector" "pumped up" Boeing's third-quarter
returns. That historic year of triumphant imperial war criminality
challenged Boeing's ability to meet investor expectations with
a "soft commercial jet market." But 2003 "pleasantly
surprised" Boeing with a "38 percent pop in profits for
Boeing's Integrated Defense Systems division, which supplies mostly
military products." According to Acohido, "defense contractors
Northrop Gruman and Lockheed Martin" joined Boeing in "beating
earnings estimates, largely on the strength of supplement war and
homeland defense spending," leading analysts to note that "the
airplane maker's emphasis on military programs is paying off."
Consistent with its commitment to "saving
lives," if course, Boeing is a major world arms dealer,
with its products widely used in deadly conflicts and by repressive
regimes around the world. "Its Apache AH-64A," Kevin
Martin noted in 2001, "has been sold to Egypt, Greece, Israel,
Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. Israel has used the helicopter
in raids against the Palestinians. Boeing's F-15 Eagle has been
sold to Israel, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, and its F/A-18 Hornet
has been sold to Australia, Canada, Finland, Kuwait, Malaysia,
Spain, and Switzerland."
To deepen its life-saving mission, Boeing
capitalizes on its overseas sales to drive demand at home. "In
a perverse manifestation of the pursuit of its interests above
national or international security concerns," Martin observed, "Boeing
uses its weapons exports to help perpetuate demand for its future
planes. New weapons...developed for the U.S. military...are sold
to allies around the world. (Often, the potential export market
is factored into and helps justify research and development costs.)
These weapons exports, in turn, fuel the push for higher and more
expensive technology to be developed by U.S. weaponeers to maintain
our military superiority." (Kevin Martin, Tim Nafziger, Jeremy
Shenk, & Mark Swier, "The Boeing Corporation," Z
Magazine, November 2001). You don't read about this in the
Chicago Sun Times or the Chicago Tribune.
The fact that all this is not generally
understood as scandalous has little to do with the natural inclination
of most citizens. The main problem is that it isn't generally
understood at all. Chicagoans and other Americans are generally
fair minded people. Few of them actually think that it's a
bigger deal that Boeing's CEO fooled around than it is that he
is (or was) a key member of a class of imperial war masters. Few consciously
believe that a poor black person's murder is less morally
relevant than the killing of a well-off white or that stupid rich
white people with felony convictions should receive covert record
expungements and privileged access to the best universities while
poor black young adults pay for their often nonviolent "crimes" by
rotting in the nation's racist prison complex.
The primary trouble is that local
and national society is significantly misinformed about the
nature and sources of evil and misery in the world. Many citizens of
all races don't know because they generally don't hear
or read in dominant media about Iraqi victims and about other,
disproportionately nonwhite people on the wrong ends of American
empire and inequality. US client state Israel's nuclear arsenal
is a rarely mentioned subject in "mainstream" (corporate-state)
media, but officially designated "enemy states" North
Korea and Iran's efforts to obtain their first nuclear weapons
is frequently discussed. United States casualties receive frequent
and often detailed, sensitive coverage but Iraqis die nameless,
faceless, and without serious ongoing notice in that media. The
real nature and consequences of Boeing and other "defense" contractors'
deadly trade do not receive serious coverage. The same goes for
the nation's stunning class and racial inequities. Rich white legacy
admissions probably do not receive one hundredth of the media attention
that goes to affirmative action for people of color. Transportation
racism, favoring suburban roads and automobiles over public city
transit, is relegated to the distant margins of journalistic interest.
Dominant corporate white-run and white-owned
media select the scandals and problems the populace "chooses" to
see. It tells people about the individual moral failings of
certain individuals but says next to nothing about the deeper and
broader scourges of structural inequality - the dangerous, unjust,
interrelated, and highly racialized concentrations of wealth and
power at home and abroad.
That unfortunate reality is hardly accidental.
Expecting dominant media to tell the truth and whole truth about
current events is like expecting the company newspaper at the Ford
Motor Company to give the full scoop on working and living conditions
in and around its far-flung global auto plants. That corporate-state
media is not simply beholden to the corporate-imperial global establishment. It
is also and quite fundamentally a part, and a fairly major one
at that, of that very establishment, with dangerous political and
moral consequences that ought to put media reform at the top of
every progressive's agenda.
Paul Street ([email protected]) is the author of Empire and
Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder,CO: Paradigm
Publishers, 2004). His book Segregated Schools: Race,
Class, and Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (New
York, NY: Routledge, 2005) will be available later this year.