New York Times Propagandizes Shamelessly For Obama

And so too does, shamefully, Democracy Now!, if a bit unintentionally.

Take as our starting point this headline from the "liberal" New York Times:

Obama’s 78 Pardons and 153 Commutations Extend Record of Mercy. [1]

Let's take a look at this "mercy."

On December 19, Obama "pardoned" 78 individuals, meaning their convictions were erased, and commuted (shortened) the sentences of 153 prisoners, meaning they won't have to wait as long to get out of prison.

In some cases, it means they won't die in prison. As in this case cited by the Times:

Anthony DeWayne Gillis of Supply, Va., was convicted in 2005 of possessing cocaine, making false statements and possessing a firearm in “furtherance of drug trafficking.” He was sentenced to 145 years in prison. Mr. Obama’s grant of commutation reduces the sentence to 20 years.

Meaning he'll be out in 2025. See? Obama's all heart!

One might reasonably ask, What sort of cruel country imposes such draconian sentences in the first place? But the Times doesn't ask that question. Instead we are meant to be touched by the compassion of the Merciful Obama.

The Times article points out that commutations do nothing to restore rights lost for the rest of their lives to people with felony convictions. Oh, and those pardons all go to people who have already finished serving their sentences. And the Times doesn't tell you how many of Obama's commutations merely lopped a few months of time off prisoners soon to be release anyway. (It was a large percentage in his previous commutation media blitzes.)

So there is much less than meets the eye in the Times celebratory headline.

Of course, by buffing the image of the chief executive of the nation-state, they reinforce the perceived legitimacy and humaneness [!] of the system the Times is an integral part of. That is their motive, not some imaginary "liberal bias."

Every time Obama has deigned to show a bit of "mercy" towards Federal prisoners, he gets a blitz of positive propaganda from the press. He went through most of his presidency being extremely parsimonious in his issuances of clemency and pardons, for which criticism began to build up, belatedly.

The Times puts his "acts of clemency" total to date at 1,324, pardons and commutations combined. Of these, over 1,000 were commutations, "more than 50 times the number of people whose sentences were commuted by President George W. Bush and more than the past 11 presidents combined." Gee, sounds impressive. This is out of a total of over 200,000 convicted Federal prisoners, and tens of thousands more immigrant prisoners not convicted of anything. But he looks good compared to the remorseless cruelty of his predecessors. (On the other hand, Horrible Russia has freed 20,000 prisoners by official pardon in the last few years, including the 3 members of Pussy Riot, whose case was of such interest to the Western media. If only they paid 1/1,000 the amount of attention to U.S. political prisoners.) [2]

During past tranches of Obama Mercy, U.S. Government propaganda network NPR has put on groveling prisoners, in tears of gratitude for The Master's Mercy, so psychologically beaten down are they. Obviously the prisoners sought are those in deep self-abnegation who will show the proper ring-kissing gratitude towards the emperor.

What's unmentioned in all the fawning gratitude is the fact that Obama deliberately kept 6,000 drug war prisoners locked up for longer. That is six times the number whose sentences he has reduced, many reduced by only a few months, and over four times his total "acts of clemency." (Commutations plus pardons, but he's given pardons to people only after they've completed their sentences. That way, no one can criticize him for letting "criminals" off "easy." He cares much more about avoiding criticism than about freeing prisoners.)

Here's how he kept those 6,000 prisoners locked up. Congress, also being "merciful," reduced the "disparity" in sentencing for crack vs. powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to "just" 18 to 1. That means, under the previous law, 1/100 the weight of crack cocaine gave casualties of the drug war the same sentence as an amount of powdered cocaine. In other words, it took 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine to receive the same sentence as for a given amount of crack. That's soo unfair! They should get the same prison time, right? (How about no prison, because the government has no right to outlaw cocaine if people want to use it- and they obviously do.) So Congress "reformed" the law by reducing the "disparity" to a mere 18 to 1 ratio.

With that change in the law, lawyers for victims serving sentences under the prior law filed suit in Federal court to apply the new law retroactively to current cocaine prisoners in Federal prisons- the aforementioned 6,000 prisoners. Which, if they had won, would have shortened the sentences of those prisoners.

In comes Obama. He sicced his then-Attorney General, the millionaire corporate lawyer Eric "Friend of High Finance" Holder, Jr., on them, to fight them all the way to the Supreme Court. Where the government, as virtually always happens when it's the government versus "criminals," prevailed.

Now, if the U.S. government had simply not opposed the suit, the prisoners might have won.
Furthermore, if the government had come in on the prisoners side, and said "We agree, they should be resentenced under the new law," almost certainly the Supreme Court would have said Okay.

If Obama had simply nothing, then someone else would have taken responsibility for freeing those prisoners- Congress and the courts. Instead he exerted himself to keep them in prison, away from their families and friends.

Why Obama thought it was so important to keep these 6,000 mostly black and Hispanic prisoners locked up longer, you'd have to ask him.

But this story is never mentioned in all the puff-pieces about Obama The Merciful. [3]

And oddly, it goes unmentioned by most progressives when they report on Obama's Mercy. I mentioned Democracy Now!  a program that should know better, because they just did it again. It should be told, to put Obama's Mercy in proper perspective, alongside his numerically far greater cruelty, and also to make people aware that Obama did this, as it is only through repetition that people remember.

Let the likes of the NY Times and its establishment ilk burnish Obama's "legacy." Progressives should NOT be doing that. Or have they learned nothing in eight years about Obama?

While we're on the topic, Obama won't be commuting the 35 year sentence of political prisoner Chelsea Manning, who he first tortured for two years in the Marine brig at Quantico. (Manning is in he U.S. Army, so they had no business sticking him in the Marine brig in the first place. And it was the UN Rapporteur on Torture that found the conditions constituted torture.) Then he staged a "trial" at which no official transcript was kept, and army spies peered over the shoulders of journalists who managed to force the Army to let them into the "courtroom."

Nor will he commute the sentences of other political prisoners, innocent men like Leonard Peltier. And he sure won't be pardoning any of them.

And Obama the Merciful won't be apologizing for breaking the arm of Medea Benjamin, or murdering 16-year-old American Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his cousin, and five other people while eating in a restaurant. Or any of the other family members of putative jihadists the U.S. singles out. (If they really want to defeat jihadism, they need to go after Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani military "intelligence," the ISI- Inter Services Intelligence.)  [4]

Nor will Obama be expressing regret for his cheerleading the last time Israel "mowed the lawn" in Gaza, killing 550 Palestinian children in the process, many more adults. (One Israeli child was killed by Hamas' return fire. That prompted Obama to express sympathy and understanding- for the Israeli "need" to bombard Gaza for the third time in a decade. It's to protect "the children," you see.)

But one could write thousands of pages about Obama's cruelties and repression, which he hides behind a cynical mask of benignness and thoughtful concern. I don't think any more is necessary to make the case. Not that he is atypical for U.S. presidents in this regard. Empires are about imposing domination, so emperors must be ruthless and cruel. It's a requirement for the job.

1] "Obama’s 78 Pardons and 153 Commutations Extend Record of Mercy," New York Times, December 19, 2016.

2] See for example "NY Times Obsessed With Plight Of Dissidents- But Only In Certain Countries," August 8, 2012; "Pussy Riot Get Exact Same Sentence As Tim deChristopher," August 25, 2012; "One Member of Pussy Riot Freed; Tim deChristopher Still In Prison," October 10, 2012.

3] Glenn Ford of Black Agenda Report discussed this on The Real News Network. That's how I learned of it. See "A Critical Look at VICE's Story on Mass Imprisonment with Obama and Holder," October 1, 2015.

It's worth noting that the U.S. has the highest rate of imprisonment as a percentage of the adult population of any country on earth. That includes places like North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia. The U.S. has more people imprisoned than any other nation, including China, even though China has over four times the population.

The number of people locked up in Federal and state prisons and local and county jails is about 2,500,000. That is almost one of every 100 adults.  The U.S. has 25% of the world's total prisoners. It currently has 4.38% of global population, derived from UN population estimates.

For good measure, U.S. police killed over 1,200 people last year, the most ever recorded.

U.S. Census current population estimate.

4] For Medea Benjamin's mauling, arranged by Obama, see "Obama Has Egyptian Military Regime Break American Peace Activist's Arm," March 8, 2014. For the murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki et al, see "Obama Ordered the Murder of a 16-Year-Old American," November 19, 2014.

NY Times Obsessed With Plight Of Dissidents- But Only In Certain Countries

The New York Times has run full-length articles for four days in a row now, about the prosecution of the Russian female punk rock band Pussy Riot. These articles appear in the main news section, not Arts, for example.

Pussy Riot is being prosecuted for performing an anti-Putin and "sacrilegious" song in a Moscow cathedral of the arch-reactionary Russian Orthodox Church. (That church has the same kind of relationship to the Russian State as the Roman Catholic Church has to the New York State and City governments, that is, very close and influential.) Of course I don't think they should be prosecuted. (Wonder what would happen if some punk rockers performed a raucous, anti-Catholic and anti-U.S. Government song inside St. Patricks's Cathedral, say? Think they'd be prosecuted?)

However, unmentioned in all the Times' lavish coverage of the fate of three formerly obscure punk rockers in Russia, are the U.S. antecedents and precedents. The U.S. has a long history of persecuting rock musicians and other entertainers who run afoul of the establishment. The U.S. media keeps reminding us that the Russian punk rockers face a possible maximum of 7 years in prison. (All indications are that they won't get that. Putin himself publicly signaled as much.) Under the Nixon regime, radical band MC5 frontman John Sinclair was lured into giving two joints to an undercover agent of the U.S. police state, for which he was sentenced to ten (not seven) years.* And more recently, the Los Angeles County D.A. went after the scalps of the Dead Kennedys. The charge?  "Distribution of Harmful Matter to Minors" Despite being acquitted, their albums were subsequently banned from large chain stores. The Dead Kennedys broke up under the pressure. The D.A. openly announced his political intent: to "send a message" to the underground/alternative music scene that their expression would not be tolerated. (See http://www.alternativetentacles.com/bandinfo.php?band=jello&page=3. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Kennedys and   http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/dead+kennedys/biography.html )

When "Communists" (Bolshevik hacks) still ruled Czechoslovakia, the U.S. media liked to hold up that state's persecution of the band Plastic People of the Universe as an example of how repressive and unfree their Cold War enemies were, by implication in contrast to the allegedly "free" "West." What ludicrous, bald-faced hypocrisy. But the propaganda works, because the corporate media is as disciplined and uniform as the state media of any totalitarian system, so the fate of persecuted musicians and dissidents in America is completely unknown to the vast majority of the populace, since the propaganda system never reports it. (Or rarely, and only in the way that Soviet or Chinese media reports the persecution of their dissidents, in a way that portrays the victims as guilty, weird, different, dirty, depraved, sexually libertine, on drugs...gee, sounds familiar!)

While the NY Times gives loving coverage to every time Chinese artist Ai Weiwei sneezes (and I certainly think the Chinese regime is loathsome and should be overthrown, unlike what the U.S. elites think, for all their tut-tutting about dissidents there!) you'd be hard-pressed to find anything about the persecution of peace activists and "leftist" protesters in the U.S. It has long been routine to repress demonstrations against the WTO, NATO, the two corporate stooge parties, and so on. They are targets in advance for raids, arrests, infiltration, entrapments, bugging, wiretapping, the entire panoply of state repression. Obama imprisoned environmental activist Tim deChristopher for two years for bidding at a Federal auction for oil leases. (By contrast, James, O'Keefe, the reactionary libel-artist, who was caught red-handed trying to bug the offices of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, was let off scot-free, as I predicted, despite committing Federal felonies, including conspiracy. Because even Democrats don't prosecute reactionaries, only progressives.)

Here's another example of the NY Times obsession with harassment of dissidents in other places, from today's nytimes.com:

THE LEDE BLOG

Kremlin Critic Debugs Office. Tweets About It.

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Aleksei Navalny, a blogger and anticorruption crusader in Russia, arrived at work on Monday to find that his office had been bugged.

Gee, we never get bugged here! You bastards never report that.

And check out the first paragraph of this article on the Times website dated today (8/8/12):

 A Russian court reduced the prison sentence for a business partner of the oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky on Wednesday, a rare show of leniency amid a spate of criminal cases against opposition leaders. ["Russian Court Lowers Jail Term for Oil Tycoon’s Associate."]

"Rare show of leniency"? Speaking of which, in the U.S., there's no Federal parole. It was abolished years ago. And their are harsh mandatory minimum sentences- like ten years for a few grams of crack cocaine. (Lately the NYT has editorialized against some mandatory minimums, out of pragmatism. The U.S.is absolutely demented in its punitive penal policies, imprisoning far more people as a percentage of population than any country on earth. And the deranged "war on drugs" is as irrational and zealous as Nazi anti-Semitism.

And U.S. Presidents and Governors have gotten more and more merciless in refusing to dole out pardons to prisoners.

As for "criminal trials against opposition leaders": well, of course the U.S. has a very long history of persecuting leaders of dissident political movements, and lately the GOP has used the legal system to persecute Democrats, with barely a whimper from that supine party. Remember how the Bush/Gonzalez gang fired 9 U.S. attorneys for refusing to bring bogus criminal charges against Democrats? Nothing ever came of that. Imagine if Democrats had done that! A Democratic President doing that would have been impeached (with the "liberal" media leading the charge). And Craig Unger, author of a new book, Boss Rove, about "Turdblossom"-that's George Bush's nickname for him- Karl Rove, says that the GOP takeover of the judiciary has led to criminal prosecutions of "hundreds" of "up and coming" Democratic politicians on questionable or spurious charges, citing specifically the persecution of ex-GA Governor Don Siegelman. [Radio interview: "The Influential Karl Rove," Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC, 8/7/12.]

        

*John Lennon, through his very public drumming up of protests against the imprisonment of Sinclair, was instrumental in getting Sinclair freed early. This was yet another black mark against Lennon in the minds of the U.S. secret police and reactionary politicians like Nixon. Ultimately the CIA arranged Lennon's assassination through its MK-Delta program of hypno-programmed assassins.