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Newspaper Raids – “Exceedingly Rare”
It is always curious when an opener of a piece of news is contradicted by its content.
Raid of Small Kansas Newspaper Raises Free Press Concerns – NY Times
The search of Marion County Record’s office led to the seizure of computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors.
A small town in Kansas has become a battleground over the First Amendment, after the local police force and county sheriff’s deputies raided the office of The Marion County Record.
Raids of news organizations are exceedingly rare in the United States, with its long history of legal protections for journalists. …
Three paragraphs later …
The raid is one of several recent cases of local authorities taking aggressive actions against news organizations — some of which are part of a dwindling cohort left in their area to hold governments to account. And it fits a pattern of pressure being applied to local newsrooms. One recent example is the 2019 police raid of the home of Bryan Carmody, a freelance journalist in San Francisco, who was reporting on the death of Jeff Adachi, a longtime public defender.
There is now only a "dwindling cohort" of local newspapers but there are still "several recent cases" of such incidents. To me that contradicts the claim of those raids being "exceedingly rare". Would any decent writer really put it like that?
It seems to me that one of the editor of the piece, who probably hadn't read through it, attempted to put some aggrandizing "USA! USA! USA!" cheers into the opener. The propaganda effort failed for readers who read a bit more than the headline.
Adults who act like Children will defend these psychopaths and are more than willing to die on that hill.
Rather than admit to themselves that they were completely fooled and brainwash by the media and education coup that took place.
It’s a sickness that causes all of the problems. What is so fascinating to watch for me is watching many people attack the fools who fell for the war propaganda in Ukraine driven by the western media and education coup. Yet fell for the exact same coup that took place in economics. Neither camp will admit it.
There’s no way out of it as there is nobody to vote for to get us out of it.
What has allowed these morbid symptoms’ to emerge as the dominant reaction to neoliberalism and globalisation, however, is simply the fact that right-wing forces have been much more effective than left-wing or progressive forces at tapping into the legitimate grievances of the masses disenfranchised, marginalised, impoverished, and dispossessed by the 40-year-long neoliberal class war waged from above.
The one party nation state that caused it are offering same old same old but calling it something new.
In particular, they are the only forces that have been able to provide a (more or less) coherent response to the widespread – and growing – yearning for greater territorial or national sovereignty, increasingly seen as the only way to regain some degree of collective control over politics and society, in the absence of effective supranational mechanisms of representation. Given neoliberalism’s war against sovereignty, it should come as no surprise that ‘sovereignty has become the master-frame of contemporary politics’.
After all, the hollowing out of national sovereignty and curtailment of popular-democratic mechanisms – what has been termed depoliticisation – has been an essential element of the neoliberal project, aimed at insulating macroeconomic policies from popular contestation and removing any obstacles put in the way of economic exchanges and financial flows. In this sense, neoliberalism and globalisation have not entailed a retreat of the state vis-à-vis the market, as most left analyses contend, but rather a reconfiguration of the state, aimed at placing the commanding heights of economic policy ‘in the hands of capital, and primarily financial interests.
Given the nefarious effects of depoliticisation, it is only natural that the revolt against neoliberalism should first and foremost take the form of demands for a repoliticisation of national decision-making processes.
The fact that the vision of national sovereignty that was at the centre of the Trump and Brexit campaigns and that currently dominates the public discourse is a reactionary, quasi-fascist one – mostly defined along ethnic, exclusivist, and isolationist lines, aimed at ensuring the security and protection of the ‘national community’ against the threat posed by a variety of internal and external enemies and based on an even more exploitative and authoritarian form of capitalism – should not be seen as an indictment of national sovereignty as such. History attests to the fact that national sovereignty and national self-determination are not intrinsically reactionary or jingoistic concepts – in fact, they were the rallying cries of countless nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialist and left-wing liberation movements. Even if we limit our analysis to core capitalist countries, it is patently obvious that virtually all the major social, economic, and political advancements of the past centuries were achieved through the institutions of the democratic nation state, not through international, multilateral, or supranational institutions, which in a number of ways have, in fact, been used to roll back those very achievements, as we have seen in the context of the euro crisis, where supranational (and largely unaccountable) institutions such as the European Commission, Eurogroup, and ECB used their power and authority to impose crippling austerity on struggling countries. The problem, in short, is not national sovereignty as such, but the fact that the concept in recent years has been largely monopolised by the right and extreme right, which understandably see it as a way to push through a xenophobic and identitarian agenda.
What what Is so desperately Needed Is A different Vision Of National Sovereignty below.
https://www.socialeurope.eu/needed-progressive-vision-national-sovereignty
To do that we need to reclaim the state for ourselves. For each and every one of us. For the many not just the few.
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745337326/reclaiming-the-state/
Posted by: Echo Chamber | Aug 14 2023 18:31 utc | 26
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