Saturday, March 19, 2011

Ten Reasons the Iraq War Was No Cakewalk

March 19 marks the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a nation that had no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in the 9/11 attacks. It was sold to the American public as a war to defend our nation and free the Iraqi people. U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said our soldiers would be greeted as liberators and that Iraqi oil money would pay for the reconstruction. Vice President Dick Cheney said the military effort would take “weeks rather than months.” And Defense Secretary Assistant Ken Adelman predicted that “liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”
Eight years on, it’s time to look back at that “cakewalk.”
1. 4,400 U.S. Soldiers Lost for a Lie


More than 4,400 Americans have died as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq – more than were killed on 9/11. Over 32,000 U.S. soldiers have been seriously wounded, many kept alive only thanks to the miracle of modern medicine.
But those numbers don't tell the half of it. Stanford University and Naval Postgraduate School researchers who examined the delayed onset of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) found that, by 2023, the rate of PTSD among Iraq war veterans could rise as high as 35 percent. And for the second year in row, more soldiers committed suicide in 2010 than died in combat, a tragic but predictable human reaction to being asked to kill – and watch your friends be killed – for a war based on lies.


2. Bankrupting Our Nation
In 2008, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University's Linda Blimes put the cost of the Iraq war at roughly $3 trillion, or about 60 times what the Bush administration first said the invasion would cost. But while a staggering figure, Stiglitz and Blimes now say that their estimate “was, if anything, too low.” In an update published last fall in The Washington Post, they note that the war not only drove up the federal debt, but helped drive the skyrocketing oil prices that contributed to the crashing of the global economy.
According to the National Priorities Project, the money the U.S. government spent destroying Iraq could have provided yearly salaries for 12.5 million teachers or paid the annual healthcare costs for 167 million Americans. When elected officials tell us our nation is bankrupt, we should tell them to bring our war dollars home.

3. Hundreds of Thousands of Iraqi Dead
The ones who have suffered the most from the Iraq “cakewalk,” of course, are the Iraqis themselves. For an invasion sold as an act of liberation and “profound morality” by propagandists like Jeffrey Goldberg, the U.S. and its allies sure managed to kill a staggering number of those they were liberating. The group Iraq Body Count (IBC) has documented at least 99,900 violent civilian deaths as a direct result of the U.S.-led invasion. But that's an extremely conservative estimate based largely off deaths reported in Western media, an approach bound to undercount the massive death toll from the invasion. Indeed, as WikiLeaks revealed last October, the U.S. government covered up the violent killings of more than 15,000 Iraqi civilians – killings that weren't reported by any Western paper – or roughly 20 percent of IBC's official count at the time.

Unfortunately, the number of Iraqi souls liberated from their bodies is likely a lot higher than IBC's count. A 2006 study by researchers at John Hopkins University published in the Lancet medical journal found that in just over three years there had been 654,965 “excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war,” with Iraq's death rate more than doubling due to gunfire – the leading cause of mortality – and a lack of medicine and clean water. A January 2008 analysis by British polling firm Opinion Research Business, meanwhile, estimated “that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.”
 

4. Lights Still Out
Thirteen years of bombings and sanctions crippled the infrastructure and basic services of what was once a wealthy country. Then came the 2003 invasion, which destroyed electrical plants, sewage systems, water treatment facilities, hospitals and more. Eight years later, the living conditions of Iraqis are worse than under Saddam Hussein, with the country plagued by a continued lack of electricity, clean water, medical care and security. Iraqis wonder how it is, after the most powerful country in the world occupied it and ostensibly spent billions on reconstruction, they are still living in the dark.



5. Millions Flee Their Homes
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, since 2003 “more than 4.7 million Iraqis have fled their homes, many in dire need of humanitarian care”-- hardly an endorsement of life in the “liberated” nation. Many Iraqis fled their homes to seek asylum in Iran, Jordan and Syria, while roughly 1.5 million fled to other parts of Iraq, the majority of which “have found no solutions to their plight,” according to the UN. In the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, millions will never be able to return.

6. Women and Girls Forced into Prostitution
Women in Iraq have been particularly hit by the invasion and occupation. The Iraqi government estimates there are up to 3 million widows in Iraq today. Meanwhile, violence against women – including honor killings, rape and kidnapping – has soared , forcing many women to remain at home and limiting employment and educational opportunities, according to a new Freedom House report.
“A deep feeling of injustice and powerlessness sometimes leads women to believe that the only escape is suicide,” the report notes.
Many Iraqi women who fled to neighboring countries have found themselves unable to feed their children. Just to make ends meet, tens of thousands of them – including girls 13 and under – have been forced into lives of prostitution, particularly in Syria.
“From what I’ve seen, 70 percent to 80 percent of the girls working this business in Damascus today are Iraqis,” one refugee told The New York Times. “If they go back to Iraq they’ll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available.”

7. Poisoning Iraqi Society
The U.S. military dropped thousands of bombs across Iraq laced with depleted uranium, the radioactive waste produced from manufacturing nuclear fuel. Valued by the military for its density and ability to ignite upon impact, depleted uranium bombs continue to kill years after they've been dropped. In Fallujah, which was bombarded more than anywhere else in Iraq, British researchers uncovered a massive increase in infant mortality and rates of cancer, with the latter exceeding “those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” according to The Independent.
And it's not just Fallujah facing a cancer epidemic. Al Jazeera reports that in the central Iraq province of Babil, reported cancer cases rose from 500 in 2004 to 7,000 in 2008. And in Basrah, the last 15 years have seen the childhood leukemia rate more than double, according to a study published last year in the American Journal of Public Health.
8. Trading One Strongman for Another
Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Yet his worst crimes, including the 1980 invasion of Iran, came when he was backed by the U.S. government, which was well aware of his penchant for torture and extrajudicial killings – talents American officials were fine with so long as he was slaughtering Iranians. Now his U.S.-backed successor, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is torturing and killing those who speak out against his rule – all he hasn't done is invade that other, not-yet-liberated member of the “axis of evil.”


Friday, March 18, 2011

Why Did the Zetas Ambush Two US Agents on a Lonely Mexican Desert Road?

The FBI and other security agencies are still investigating the attack and fishing around for fiendish plots against Americans, but it’s not likely this was a planned gig.
President Felipe Calderon at the White House on March 3, Barack Obama discussed the idea of letting armed US agents operate on Mexican territory. You know, to help us deal with our deadly drug violence. Boy oh boy do we Mexicans feel safe now!

I wonder if the idea to put US troops on Mexican soil has anything to with a recent trip by a few ICE agents into Northern Mexico that ended with one dead, one injured and one SUV turned to swiss cheese?
The attack took place on the night of February 11, when two ICE agents met a fake checkpoint while traveling with no escort on a lonely desert road between Monterrey and Mexico City. Right there was their first mistake. Every 5 year old kid around here knows that you might as well paint a target on your truck if you’re gonna travel solo like that. Mexican roads are very dangerous right now, specially in states with Zeta presence―and your ICE boys were deep in Zeta-infested territory.
Regular folk can travel in relative safety during the day, but it’s pretty much off-limits at night. But, if like the ICE agents, you’re traveling in a dark blue Suburban (obviously up-armored, judging by its window panels) with diplomatic plates, well, you’re just asking to be hit. Begging for it. And the agents got exactly what they asked for.

Regular folk can travel in relative safety during the day, but it’s pretty much off-limits at night. But, if like the ICE agents, you’re traveling in a dark blue Suburban (obviously up-armored, judging by its window panels) with diplomatic plates, well, you’re just asking to be hit. Begging for it. And the agents got exactly what they asked for.
What were the agents doing there? Well, from what I could find out, the dead guy, agent Zapata, was based in Laredo, Texas, and worked in ICE’s human smuggling and trafficking unit. There’s a good chance that his investigations must have led him very often to a certain criminal organization, whose name starts with the last letter of the alphabet. Yes, the good-old, instant soup-eating Zetas.
Was the attack somehow related to one of his cases? Did the Zetas set up an ambush to terminate his line of inquiry? Maybe. But probably not.
About a week after the ambush, Mexican authorities captured six Zetas supposedly involved in the attack. Their guns tied them to a ring of gun runners operating in Dallas, Texas. Which is not very surprising. Most cartels buy their weapons from you yanks. I don’t mean to fluff any of you gun-crazed Americans out there, but it’s just a fact that Mexican cartels prefer shiny new American weapons to rusted AKs from El Salvador or some other Central American tropical hellhole. It makes sense: Buying new rather than used. So there’s not much of scent of a conspiracy there, if you ask me.

The FBI and other security agencies are still investigating the attack and fishing around for fiendish plots against Americans, but it’s not likely this was a planned gig. Targeting Americans is never good for business, much less American government officials. Even the Zetas must realize this. Regardless of what the Americans find (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they cook up some grand conspiracy connecting Mexican drug cartels with al Qaida), there is a very good chance that their meeting with the false checkpoint was random, like many acts of the drug war.
But one thing is clear: these agents should’ve been on an airplane, not in no man’s land in San Luis Potosi, a state that’s suffering an escalation of violence courtesy of the Gulf Cartel-Zeta war. (When Yasha Levine visited me in Mexico last year and we travelled through those parts, things were not even half as bad as they are right now. Even so, we constantly saw convoys of army trucks packed with Marines hunting for Zetas.)

The ICE agents could have gotten away with a solo road trip maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when everyone still played nice. Back then, narcos holding US agents at gunpoint were known to allow their prisoners to “slip away” in order to avoid bringing unnecessary heat on their trafficking operation from pissed off, trigger happy Americans. Osiel Cardenas, the former leader of the Gulf Cartel, who is now sitting in a Texas prison, pulled this a few times on DEA agents who he caught meeting with informants. But the world has changed since them.

Japan Radiation Leaks Feared as Nuclear Experts Point to Possible Coverup

 Nuclear experts have thrown doubt on the accuracy of official information issued about the Fukushima nuclear accident, saying that it followed a pattern of secrecy and cover-ups employed in other nuclear accidents. "It's impossible to get any radiation readings," said John Large, an independent nuclear engineer who has worked for the UK government and been commissioned to report on the accident for Greenpeace International.
"The actions of the Japanese government are completely contrary to their words. They have evacuated 180,000 people but say there is no radiation. They are certain to have readings but we are being told nothing." He said a radiation release was suspected "but at the moment it is impossible to know. It was the same at Chernobyl, where they said there was a bit of a problem and only later did the full extent emerge."

According to some reports, 17 helicopter crewmen helping in rescue efforts were contaminated with low-level radiation, but Japanese officials declined to comment.
The country's government has previously been accused of covering up nuclear accidents and hampering the development of alternative energy.
In a newly released diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks, politician Taro Kono, a high-profile member of Japan's lower house, tells U.S. diplomats that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry – the Japanese government department responsible for nuclear energy – has been "covering up nuclear accidents and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry."
In 2008, Kono told them: "The ministries were trapped in their policies, as officials inherited policies from people more senior to them, which they could then not challenge." 

He mentioned the dangers of natural disasters in the context of nuclear waste disposal, citing Japan's "extensive seismic activity, and abundant groundwater, and [he] questioned if there really was a safe place to store nuclear waste in the 'land of volcanoes.'"
"What we are seeing follows a clear pattern of secrecy and denial," said Paul Dorfman, co-secretary to the Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters, a UK government advisory committee disbanded in 2004.
"The Japanese government has always tended to underplay accidents. At the moment the Japanese claims of safety are not to be believed by anyone. The health effects of what has happened so far are imponderable. The reality is we just do not know. There is profound uncertainty about the impact of the accident."
The Japanese authorities and nuclear companies have been implicated in a series of coverups. In 1995, reports of a sodium leak and fire at Japan's Monju fast breeder reactor were suppressed and employees were gagged. In 2002, the chairman and four executives of Tepco, the company that owns the stricken Fukushima plant, resigned after reports that safety records were falsified.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Can U.S. Nuclear Plants Handle a Major Natural Disaster?

by John Sullivan, Special to ProPublica
As engineers in Japan struggle to bring quake-damaged reactors under control, attention is turning to U.S. nuclear plants and their ability to withstand natural disasters.

 

As seen here, Hurricane Gustave damaged the River Bend Nuclear Generation Station in St. Francisville, La. (NRC photo provided by Union of Concerned Scientists) Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has spent years pushing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission toward stricter enforcement of its safety rules, has called for a reassessment. Several U.S. reactors lie on or near fault lines, and Markey wants to beef up standards for new and existing plants.
"This disaster serves to highlight both the fragility of nuclear power plants and the potential consequences associated with a radiological release caused by earthquake related damage," Markey wrote NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko in a March 11 letter.

Specifically, Markey raised questions about a reactor design the NRC is reviewing for new plants that has been criticized for seismic vulnerability. The NRC has yet to make a call on the AP1000 reactor, which is manufactured by Westinghouse. But according to Markey, a senior NRC engineer has said the reactor’s concrete shield building could shatter "like a glass cup" under heavy stress.
The New York Times reported last week that the NRC has reviewed the concerns raised by the engineer, John Ma, and concluded that the design is sufficient without the upgrades Ma recommended. Westinghouse maintains that the reactor is safe.
Boiling water reactors, like the ones hit by the Japanese earthquake, are built like nested matroyshka dolls.
The inner doll, which looks like a gigantic cocktail shaker and holds the radioactive uranium, is the heavy steel reactor vessel. It sits inside a concrete and steel dome called the containment. The reactor vessel is the primary defense against disaster -- as long as the radiation stays inside everything is fine.
The worry is that a disaster could either damage the vessel itself or, more likely, damage equipment that used to control the uranium. If operators cannot circulate water through the vessel to cool the uranium it could overheat and burn into radioactive slag -- a meltdown.
Reports say a partial meltdown is suspected in two of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, which was hit by the 8.9 magnitude quake and ensuing tsunami.
Reactors have multiple layers of equipment to make sure this never happens. But last year, Markey asked Congress's investigative agency, the Government Accountability Office, to look into a long list of nuclear safety issues, including earthquake and flood protection.
Markey cited the 2007 Chuetsu earthquake (6.6 magnitude) that hit the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant. The quake started a fire, spilled some low-level radioactive waste and damaged equipment that was not critical to the reactor. It led Japanese regulators to reassess earthquake danger near the plant, and Markey wanted GAO to see whether NRC had been on top of earthquake risk in the U.S.
He also listed a few cases in which other natural disasters had damaged nuclear plants, like a 1998 tornado that knocked out power to the Davis-Besse plant outside Toledo, Ohio, or Hurricane Andrew, which knocked out power to the Turkey Point plant south of Miami site for five days in 1992. In 2008, Hurricane Gustav damaged the River Bend Nuclear Generation Station in St. Francisville, La. 
At both Davis-Besse and Turkey Point, the plants' emergency diesel generators kept the equipment running until crews fixed the power lines.
News reports have said the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station went to backup diesel power after the quake but lost it, along with the ability to keep cooling water flowing.
Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Reuters that U.S. reactors don't have adequate backup power. "We do not believe the safety standards for U.S. nuclear reactors are enough to protect the public today," he told the news agency.
NRC spokesman David McIntyre said the agency was not granting interviews about the Japan quake. He pointed to the agency's website, which does have a lot of information on the seismic issues.
For instance, NRC regulations require that every plant is built to survive an earthquake larger than the strongest ever recorded in the area. The agency says it periodically updates earthquake estimations as more detailed information becomes available.
Most recently, the NRC spent five years reassessing earthquake risk for nuclear plants in the Midwest and eastern United States. The results of the study, which were released last September, confirmed that the plants were built to withstand the heaviest quake likely for their area.
However, the NRC found that the risk of earthquake was greater than expected in some areas, so the agency plans further research.
In an NRC meeting on earthquake safety last September, Torrey Yee, an engineer for the San Onofre nuclear plant near San Diego, said designers evaluate two levels of earthquakes: the maximum possible quake for a site; and an "operating basis" quake, usually about half of the maximum strength.
The critical structures and equipment at the plant are built to withstand the maximum quake, and the plant has to shut down for inspection if it sustains a quake higher than the operating basis.
The 104 commercial reactors in the United States produce 20 percent of the nation's power.

Bank Of America Anonymous Leak Alleges 'Corruption And Fraud'

A group called Anonymous has released material relating to mortgages issued by a major US bank.

by Ryan McCarthy
The WikiLeaks-allied hacker group Anonymous has posted a series of emails purported to be from a former Bank of America employee, which the organization says prove "corruption and fraud" at the nation's largest bank.
 
 
In a release announced with the Twitter hashtag #BlackMonday, Anoymous posted the emails on the site BankofAmericasuck.com, where an emailer who identifies himself as an ex-Bank Of America employee airs a number of grievances against his former employer. The website's availability was up and down early Monday morning, potentially due to high traffic. The e-mails could not be independently verified.
In a statement to Reuters on Sunday, a Bank of America spokesman said the emails are simply clerical and administrative errors. ""We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue," the spokesman told Reuters.
Bank of America did not immediately return multiple calls on Monday.
The claims of the person purporting to be a former employee appear to begin with so-called "forced-place insurance," in which a mortgage borrower who doesn't maintain an insurance policy on their home has a policy "placed" for them by their insurer.


The problem with forced-place insurance, as Felix Salmon noted in November, comes when a mortgage servicer owns an insurer. This can allow for highly inflated premiums and inadequate policies forced upon borrowers without their knowledge.
The emailer's accusations involve Balboa Insurance, a company that Bank of America acquired in its purchase of Countrywide Financial in 2008 and recently sold to the QBE Group, an Australian insurer. Balboa is a market leader in forced-place insurance.
The following section appears to be the main thrust of the emails:





"My name is (Anonymous). For the last 7 years, I worked in the Insurance/Mortgage industry for a company called Balboa Insurance. Many of you do not know who Balboa Insurance Group (soon to be rebranded as QBE First by Australian Reinsurance Company QBE according to internal communication sent to all Balboa associates) is, but if you’ve ever had a loan for an automobile, farm equipment, mobile home, or residential or commercial property, we knew you. In fact, we probably charged you money…a lot of money…for insurance you didn’t even need. Balboa Insurance Group, and it’s largest competitor, the market leader Assurant, is in the business of insurance tracking and Force Placed Insurance (aka Lender Placed Insurance, FOH, LPI, etc). What this means is that when you sign your name on the dotted line for your loan, the lienholder has certain insurance requirements that must be met for the life of the lien. Your lender (including, amongst others, GMAC, Aurora Loan Services [a subsidiary of Lehman Bros Holdings], IndyMac Federal Bank [a subsidiary of OneWest Bank], Saxon, HSBC, PennyMac [a collection agency started by former Countrywide Home Loans executive Stan Kurland after CHL and Balboa were sold to BAC], Downey Savings and Loans, Financial Freedom, Select Portfolio Services, Wells Fargo/Wachovia, and the now former owners of Balboa Insurance themselves…Bank of America) then outsources the tracking of your loan with them to a company like Balboa Insurance.
Balboa makes some money by charging these companies to track your insurance (the payment of which is factored into your loan). If you do not meet the minimum insurance requirements set by your lienholder, Balboa Insurance places a force placed insurance policy on your loan. You are sent a letter telling you that you do not have insurance, and your escrow account is then adjusted for the inflated premium of a full coverage policy placed by Balboa’s insurance tracking group, run by Steven Ramsthel, Sr Vice President of Loan Tracking Operations & Customer Care at Balboa Insurance Group, as seen on his LinkedIn profile below..
How is Balboa able to charge such inflated premiums and get away with it?
It’s all very simple.
First, when you call in to customer service, for say, GMAC, you’re not actually speaking to a GMAC employee. You’re actually speaking to a Bank of America associate working for Balboa Insurance who is required by their business to business contract with GMAC to state that they are, in fact, an employee of GMAC. The reasoning is that if you do not realize you’re speaking to a Bank of America/Balboa Insurance employee, you have no reason to question the validity of the information you are receiving from them. If you call your insurance agent and ask them for the lienholder information for your GMAC/Wells Fargo/etc lien (home or auto) you will be provided with their name, but the mailing address will be a PO Box at one of Balboa’s 3 main tracking locations (Moon Township/Coreaopolis, PA, Dallas/Ft Worth, TX, or Phoenix/Chandler, AZ)
The scope of these emails, according to their author, reaches far beyond poor customer service. In the email below, the author claims the bank's actions go much further, extending to what would seem to be extreme disorganization, or an allegedly willful intent to obscure Balboa's management of customer insurance policies.

The post includes what appear to be internal Balboa emails containing communications about mismatched -- and possibly deleted -- loan file numbers in Balboa's system.
In one email, a Balboa employee wonders about creating "huge red flags" for auditors over a change in record keeping, adding that it "just doesn't seem right to me."
When asked by Anonymous about his motivation for revealing this information, the author writes: "The only reason I'm doing this is because they already took everything from me…these people are still employees and have bills to pay and think it's illegal to expose fraud at this bank… Nobody wants to end up like me hiding out in my house having to talk to police officers and lawyers. Nobody will stand up until they see me in the traditional news. That's my short term goals right now."

Nuclear Rods Melting Inside Three Fukushima Reactors, Japan Admits

JAPAN’S NUCLEAR AUTHORITIES say they believe that three reactors at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant are now melting.

 

A woman who fled from the vicinity of the Fukushima nuclear power plant sits at an evacuation center set in a gymnasium in Kawamata, Fukushima Prefecture in northern Japan, March 14, 2011. (REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao) The country’s chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said that although staff at the nuclear facility – where two containment buildings have been destroyed by hydrogen explosions – were unable to check for certain, it was “highly likely” that the nuclear cores at reactors, 1 2 and 3 at Fukushima I nuclear station had begun to melt.

Reuters had earlier reported that the cooling mixture of seawater and boron in the number 2 reactor had totally evaporated, with the reactor’s nuclear rods therefore totally exposed for a significant period of time.
The plant operator TEPCO had earlier said it couldn’t rule out the possibility of a nuclear meltdown in the reactor – and had admitted that a partial meltdown could already be underway.
TEPCO had previously said it believed a partial meltdown had occurred at the number 1 reactor, where a hydrogen explosion occurred at a containment building on Saturday, but retracted reports that a similar meltdown had occurred following another hydrogen blast today at the number 3 reactor.
Though authorities are adamant that the explosions at reactors 1 and 3 have not resulted in any leak, they believe the increased level of radioactive emissions detected outside the Onagawa plant 120 miles away may be a result of Saturday’s explosion at the number 1 containment building.
Authorities still maintain, however, that any meltdown can be contained by the various safety structures in place at each reactor, and that there is no significant chance of any release of radiation into the atmosphere.
AP explained that some experts would refuse to use the term ‘meltdown’ when referring to the plant, unless the nuclear fuel was to melt through the innermost chamber at each nuclear reactor.
A report in the NY Daily News cited a US military spokesman as saying 17 members of the US Navy had been contaminated with low levels of radiation during their first humanitarian efforts in Japan.
The US’s 7th Fleet, which is position around 100 miles northeast of Fukushima, had to move its ships further away in order to avoid ‘airborne radioactivity’.


The affected staff had been treated with soap and water, the military said, and “no further contamination was detected.”
The helicopters in which the marines had been travelling were also decontaminated.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

$1.2 Trillion: The Real U.S. National Security Budget No One Wants You to Know About

If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.

The Right Wing's New War for Culture

The new conservative mediamakers are shedding the baggage of culture war hangups, freeing up energy to infiltrate culture industries and attack the left.
 

“You looking for Hollywood? Come on in!”
I walked into a small but packed room at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for a primer on entering show business stage right. It was the panel’s second year at the annual convention, and the young people gathered were planning to skip the D.C. internships and look for jobs in film, music and television.
The movement is shifting away from the outright opposition to popular culture that defined the culture wars of the 1990s. They have embraced a two-pronged strategy to get their message out: making their own films and music, and using Tea Party or church networks to distribute them; and working inside the mainstream entertainment industry to release films and other products with movement themes into the mass market.
The prospect of political action and personal fame proves alluring for a generation where online celebrity meshes easily with real-world political power. A young man canvassed the room--“who does video?”--saying that he helps young videographers plug into local campaigns as he passed out his business card. Young men discussed their Twitter feeds, and two others tried to understand Obama through the prism of Star Wars.

Larry O’Connor, editor-in-chief at Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart.tv (of ACORN and Shirley Sherrod political character assassination fame), delivered an insider account. Before coming to the right-wing web-o-sphere, O’Connor worked as a production manager on Broadway and in Los Angeles. Wearing square-frame glasses, with untucked dress shirt, jacket, and jeans, salt and pepper stubble, and a proclivity to strike a sardonic tone, I would have easily mistaken him for a liberal.
“If you’re thinking about coming to Washington to be in politics or you’re thinking of working for some congressperson and be their aide,” an animated O’Connor told the room, “there are a hell of a lot of people who can do that already...We need conservatives in Hollywood...The culture and what happens in Hollywood and in the entertainment industry is a driving factor for what happens in our country and, frankly, for what happens in Washington.”


“Politics is downstream of popular culture,” moderator Kevin McKeever chimed in. “That’s one of the reasons why we do this panel.”
Presenters encouraged the eager young attendees to paddle upstream. One suggested that young conservatives become “sleeper agents” in the entertainment world: establish yourself doing high quality but conventional work as an actor, agent or producer. Keep quiet on politics until you have established influence and power.
Remarkably, John Nolte, editor-in-chief of Big Hollywood (another Breitbart enterprise), pointed to the gay rights movement as an example of the power of (what conservatives tend to call) “the culture.”
“Look at the issue of gay marriage,” he said, arguing that it was an important case study whatever your position was. (This was itself supporting evidence for his argument, as his comments reflected an important shift: gay rights have become a seriously contested issue at CPAC and throughout the conservative movement.) “Look how far we’ve come on gay marriage in 10 years. In the '90s, we were saying ‘are we gonna' do civil unions, are we okay with that as a country?’ Now we’re one vote away probably from legalizing gay marriage throughout the country. And that’s not politics. That’s the culture. That’s television, and movies, and music changing the way we think, and changing what we believe.”
The new conservative film movement has two main currents: the political documentary and the Christian moral narrative. Fahrenheit 9/11 was a wake-up call for right-wing documentarians eager to match the power of progressive documentary. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ sent the opposite message to conservatives and to Hollywood at large: we have a market.

In popular culture as in politics, conservatives don’t openly defend the oppressor against the oppressed. They deny that any such injustice exists--particularly when it comes to race. The overall goal is simple: more movies with clearly defined good and evil. Less moral ambiguity.
Producer Ralph Winter, who made The Fantastic Four and the X-Men trilogy, is an evangelical. He also produced the film versions of the best-selling “Left Behind” book series--the plot of which is: what happens when Jesus comes back? He throws all the non- or wrong-believers into a lake of fire. He has also made a number of “small-budget, direct-to-video movies based on popular Christian novels.”
“I think things are changing in Hollywood,” said Nolte. “You do have a better environment to walk into than there was five years ago. Andrew Breitbart has a lot to do with that...For your country, I think it’s a very patriotic thing to be willing to go in there.”
Megachurches are also tapping their substantial resources to produce sophisticated media in-house. Evangelical producer Dallas Jenkins, the son of one of the “Left Behind” series’ two authors, is now director of visual media at Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago and is planning to produce feature films directly out of the church. This is a remarkable feat of vertical integration.
The Chronicles of Narnia and even Lord of the Rings strike religious notes in the guise of fantasy. One Baptist writer, though acknowledging that the “Hobbit habit of ingesting mushrooms and smoking ‘pipe weed" got translated into drug use for counter-culture readers,’ was pleased that the Christian J.R.R. Tolkien had set out “the reality of evil and the task to struggle against it."
After a major delay caused by Chapter 11, MGM is planning to release its remake of the Cold War classic Red Dawn. The original Soviet invasion of the U.S. will be Chinese in the new version.
The biggest, most recent and utterly surprising coup for the religious right is the 3-D “documentary” of tween idol Justin Bieber, whose mother is a devout evangelical Christian. Paramount has a Christian outreach plan with special church screenings, which a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article calls “a page torn from the Passion of the Christ marketing playbook.” (Though Wonkette notes that Focus on the Family is worried that Bieber has fallen prey to an “entertainment industry [that] is a sexual and political minefield” thanks to an ambiguous comment about pre-marital sex.
Hollywood is a complicated thing for the right, which hates it for sex and moral ambiguity but celebrates or declines comment on the glorification of war and crass commercialism. And they blame liberals for everything, including stuff that most liberals dislike. Left-wing forces cannot be held responsible for the music video of 17-year-old pop star Miley Cyrus writhing on a bed in her underwear. The conservative hysterics about Hollywood ignore the role big business plays in keeping the system conservatives so cherish up and running.