What Jeffrey Epstein’s death reveals about the shocking state of US jails

While there have been all manner of speculations about how Jeffrey Epstein may have met his death in jail, lawyer Ken White, who has been a federal prosecutor, says that those who think that “jailers could not possibly be so incompetent, cruel, or indifferent as to let such a high-profile prisoner commit suicide” do not realize that the truth may be less sensational but more disturbing, that this kind of death in US prisons is far more common than people think and is due to a culture of neglect, lack of staff, poor training, abuse, and sheer cruelty on the part of those who run these institutions.
[Read more…]

The phony binary choice of conspiracy versus journalistic independence

I mentioned in an earlier post how the media propaganda system works to tilt coverage in favor of candidates who will favor the interests of the oligarchy and against those who attack them. I used as an example the case of the New York Times reporter who was assigned to cover Bernie Sanders.

Now, the editor of the Washington Post Marty Baron has responded to the accusation by Bernie Sanders that this newspaper, owned by Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, may tend to be biased against politicians like him because he has lambasted the greed of the wealthy and their exploitation of workers and called for tax increases on them to fund programs that serve the less well-to-do.
[Read more…]

This is the bridge too far for evangelicals?

Many evangelicals have been perfectly willing to overlook all of Donald Trump’s appalling acts but apparently there is one thing that he did recently that has seriously rankled some of them. What could possibly be worse than all those other things, you ask? It was something Trump said at the recent rally in North Carolina where his supporters made the infamous ‘send her back’ chant about congresswoman Ilhan Omar while Trump smugly smiled
[Read more…]

Bernie has always been Bernie

One of the things that happens to candidates who seek high national office like the presidency is that their past comes under the microscope and it often happens that they have said things and supported policies that are at odds with what they say they stand for now and what the voters want. This can lead to them having to give explanations that the impression of the past is misleading or, if that is not plausible, to give apologies and say they have learned from their mistakes.
[Read more…]

What next for the Epstein investigation?

The death of Jeffrey Epstein in jail has caused a great deal of anger among his many victims who were hoping that his trial would serve to bring justice. They now fear that the whole investigation may shut down. If it does, there will be huge sighs of relief among all Epstein’s friends and associates. But the prosecutors in the case say that the investigations will continue. The vast scale of the sex trafficking of minors means that there had to have been other people involved. One of the charges against Epstein was a conspiracy charge and that means that other people’s roles were also being investigated.
[Read more…]

What Brexit meant in practice was never clear

Faux journalist Jonathan Pie points out that in the 2016 Brexit referendum, while the choice between Remain and Leave seemed straightforward enough, in practice only one position, the Remain one, was well-defined because that kept the status quo. What Leave meant was never quite thought through and this led to Leave voters being able to project onto it all their frustrations with the status quo and with Europe, resulting in the current mess where there is a real possibility of a breakup of the UK, something that I doubt few Leave voters seriously wanted.

The Democratic candidates’ donor bases

The New York Times has some nice graphics of the donors to the various candidates. What is clear is the Bernie Sanders has the broadest base of support that spans the entire country, rural and urban. His support is so wide that the others get obliterated so they had a second graphic without Sanders. We then see that next to him, Elizabeth Warren also has a nationwide base, while all the other candidates tend to have most of their support from their local regions.
[Read more…]

NYT’s reporter’s corporate ties and sources

That the major media have institutional biases that cause them to frame politics in ways that are beneficial to the establishment is not news. But the way this works is not by the people who own or run the media giving orders to those below, though in some cases such as Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes at Fox News that does happen. How the media filters work is by hiring people who share the values of the institution and then letting them report ‘freely’, since you can be sure that they will believe what they are saying. Such reporters will be outraged if they are accused of bias because they have internalized all the biases and do not see them as such. This is a much better propaganda model than giving direct orders because the propaganda is so invisible. (Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann explored these and other media biases in their excellent book Manufacturing Consent.)
[Read more…]

What happens when you attack a Democratic party establishment favorite

Matt Taibbi writes that what happened to presidential candidate Tulise Gabbard when she attacked Kamala Harris during the second round of debates is a telling indicator of how the mainstream media operates. Harris has been trying to rewrite her history to portray herself as having been a ‘progressive prosecutor’ as attorney general in California when in reality she was pretty much a standard prosecutor who prided herself on being ‘tough on crime’ and throwing as many people in jail as possible even for minor offenses and blocking attempts to clear those who felt that they had been wrongfully convicted.
[Read more…]