Social Democracy Now

One of the biggest mysteries in Australian history - especially if you believe the official story and can't see what anyone would have to hide - is why the Australian media pays virtually no attention to the Port Arthur massacre whatsoever. This is a subject of endless bafflement to me, given that the tragedy represents the biggest murder case in the annals of modern Australian crime: 35 deaths and 22 injured. Yet the only episodes the media in this country deems to be of public interest are those serving to illustrate the narrative that has been imposed upon the event: the story of collective recovery from trauma and return to normality. Corny as it is, this is the story, the one story, the one and only story. Everything else has slipped down a memory hole.

After the case vanished from the headlines, it lingered on in the public's attention only insofar as it was synonymous with the suffering of just one person: Walter Mikac, a photogenic young pharmacist from the nearby town of Nubeena, whose wife and two young daughters numbered among the casualties. The media strategy from the first was to focus on a person who had been affected by the tragedy in a way that most people could relate to instantly - he had lost his entire family in a few minutes, something most of us dread happening to ourselves - but who conveniently knew nothing about what had happened, because he hadn't been there at the time. He had been playing golf with friends nearby to celebrate his 34th birthday.

BELOW: Walter Mikac with his murdered wife and children:



From the standpoint of the media's obligation to the government to help cover up the crime, Mikac was an ideal personality around whom to orchestrate public sympathy. Since he had not been a witness to the actual shootings, there was little risk of him saying anything that could trigger doubts about the official story. Instantly 'tabloidized' and elevated to the status of one of the best known people in the country, he became the subject of a media-directed psychodrama that succeeded in identifying the nation with his personal recovery process to the exclusion of almost everything else about the case that actually mattered. It would not be an exaggeration to observe that the better part of everything that has appeared in print or on television relating to the massacre over the last ten years has been about how Mikac was coping. When he remarried in 2000 and started a new family, therefore, it symbolized an Australia which had at last put the massacre behind it and embraced normality again.

But whether or not you regard Mikac's tragedy and subsequent remarriage as a legitimate human interest story, the attention the media devoted to his recovery was entirely tactical: it was part of a cunning strategy to divert attention from the actual victims of the carnage and from those who had watched the tragedy unfold. While the media is always happy to focus on Mikac - who 1) wasn't a victim himself and 2) shows no tendencies to ask uncomfortable questions - it has no interest in anyone who might actually know something about the case. After an initial wave of attention, most of these people have vanished into thin air. Some of them, no doubt, were planted witnesses using false identities, but others would have been genuine victims. Among the latter group, there are, no doubt, many who would only welcome the opportunity to put their experiences on the public record. But it is not hard to see why the media is not interested in giving them a forum: they might raise questions as to what had really happened that day, while others might go so far as to denounce the official story. (At least one of the eyewitnesses, Wendy Scurr has done so publicly. As a volunteer emergency services worker, she was of some interest to the media up until the point at which she announced her conviction that there had been a government coverup.)

Another striking absence over the last ten years is the young woman who was allegedly Martin Bryant's girlfriend at the time of the massacre, Petra Wilmott. You'd think that sooner or later 'the girlfriend' would talk - that she'd unburden herself of such matters as her impressions of Bryant, the complex emotions she must have felt when she first learned that he had been declared responsible for the massacre and how the ordeal has changed her life. Yet although the tabloids would be able to offer considerable financial inducement to this woman if they actually wanted to interview her, she made no media appearances after the first anniversary of the tragedy in 1997 and did not resurface for its tenth anniversary a few days ago (when, to tell you the truth, I was almost certain she would reappear). Nothing could be more suspicious - or suggestive of the possibility that she was part of the conspiracy to set Bryant up as a patsy - than her enigmatic non-existence since 1997. It seems the media is not interested in finding her.

Above all, the media is firmly resolved to suppress information about the alleged perpetrator, 29 year-old Martin Bryant. The official line is that people shouldn't talk about Bryant because it's not good to give him any more 'publicity.' (The reasoning seems to be that mass murderers kill because they crave attention, and if we so delve into their backgrounds and their motives, we are helping them win by giving them what they want.)

The public's intelligence is clearly insulted by this preposterous idea. As Gary Linnell, editor of the magazine The Bulletin, stated in an Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) interview, 'Here is someone who killed 35 people, here is someone who transformed the gun laws in this country, who had a major effect on the Prime Ministership of John Howard, and to simply ignore him and walk away from him and pretend that he never existed and that it never happened, is to me, it just staggers me. It absolutely staggers me. And I just wonder what sort of society we're living in, if people are [I assume he means 'aren't'] asking those sort of questions.' (SOURCE)

The striking fact Linnell seems to have overlooked is that Australians have actually been living in a society in which it has been deemed unfit to ask such questions for some ten years now. The mystery is whether the Australian government has implemented this almost total blackout on discussion of the Port Arthur tragedy by means of the carrot or the stick.

Back in 2000, a critic of the official narrative of the massacre, retired policeman Andrew S. MacGregor, related having been informed that Port Arthur was subject to a D-notice (short for Defence Notice), that is to say, an official government request not to discuss a particular subject. For those who don't know anything about D-notices, they were created by the English government in 1912 as a means of deterring the press from publishing information that might have been of value to England's then enemy, Germany. It is generally stated that they are voluntary, but this is a total fiction; they are in fact perceived by newspaper editors as direct orders from the government. The Guardian, for example, has several times pulled items from its website the instant a D-notice was served. (Example here)

The D-Notice system was introduced into Australia in 1952 by the conservative prime minister Robert Menzies and is administered by the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). In 1977, under the Fraser government - the government in which the present prime minister John Howard was treasurer - a D-Notice was issued on matters relating to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). (SOURCE) 'The overseas spy service has always been the most secretive member of the Australian intelligence establishment. Its existence wasn't officially acknowledged until 1977, and it was placed on a legislative footing only in 2001.' (SOURCE)

Although some members of the Australian public are under the misapprehension that the D-Notice system is defunct, this is not the case. The DSD may be defunct (it has not met since 1982), but all pre-existing D-Notices, including that on ASIS, remain in force. If the Port Arthur massacre was orchestrated by ASIS, then the Australian media is prohibited by means of the 1977 D-Notice from discussing the case.

A brief digression is required to consider the question of whether ASIS could have carried out such a monstrous crime as the Port Arthur massacre. The very fact that ASIS operations are exempt from media scrutiny (or they were at least until 2001) makes it the first organization that should be suspected of involvement. It would certainly make a great deal of sense for this blackest of black ops to have been organized and executed by the only instrument of the Australian government whose activities the media are not allowed to talk about. However, there is a second reason why ASIS looks like a prime candidate: from the inception of the organization in 1952 until 2001, it appears to have been subject to no legal restrictions whatever.

Let's assemble a few relevant facts about ASIS. Although its priority is the collection of foreign intelligence, its operations are not confined to intelligence gathering and it is not barred from conducting operations inside Australia. In fact, ASIS is known to have conducted training exercises in Australia: in 1983, it carried out 'a bungled training exercise at the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne ... during which ASIS recruits bailed up hotel management with machine guns. In the resulting uproar, ASIS was ordered to stop paramilitary activities and to drop the use of firearms.' (SOURCE)

The million dollar question is whether ASIS genuinely ceased such operations after the Sheraton Hotel debacle, or whether it simply got better at concealing them. It may be no accident that the mass shootings that took place in Australia all took place shortly afterwards, the first two occurring in Melbourne in 1987. A theory I would certainly consider plausible, therefore, is that the Port Arthur massacre was an ASIS counter-terrorist exercise whose eventual mutation into a real massacre was brought about by through the machinations of its top officers (presumably in response to instructions that originated elsewhere).

Astonishingly, ASIS may even have been authorized to commit such horrendous acts in 1996, or at least was not expressly prohibited from committing them. According to an ABC report, it was not until the Intelligence Services Act of 2001 that legislation existed that actually prohibited ASIS from planning or undertaking 'paramilitary activities or activities involving violence against the person or the use of weapons.' (SOURCE) If no such restrictions on ASIS existed in 1996, there would seem no reason why it could not have conducted 'paramilitary activities' and 'activities involving violence against the person' and 'the use of weapons' at Port Arthur. After all, if such restrictions had constrained the organization in 1996, what was the point of the 2001 legislation?

But whether or not a D-Notice on ASIS operations has been responsible for the media's silence about the Port Arthur massacre, it is in any case clearly not the only censorship weapon in the government's arsenal. The media coverage of the massacre implies that a shift to the more sophisticated (and probably much more expensive) methods used by the United States government to control and manipulate public opinion has taken place and are in use here as well. The ABC article that discusses the decision by the editor of the Bulletin to publish an article on Martin Bryant yields a number of insights into the nature of the strategies that have been employed to suppress discussion of the massacre.

What this article reveals is that in addition to the asinine and insulting argument that talking about Bryant only gives him extra publicity, there is the idea that nothing should be written that might injure the sensitivities of the victims. Such rhetoric is disingenuous, because it's not always clear who the victims actually are and whether any particular individual (such as Walter Mikac) can legitimately be presented to the public as a spokesperson for the victims. It also presumes to speak on behalf of the victims, even though there is no evidence to suggest that there are not among the survivors many who are suspicious of the official story and would like to see it scrutinized more carefully.

In this case, the article actually suggests that priority should go to respecting the sensitivities of the 'Port Arthur community,' whose alleged spokesperson is Peter Roche, owner and operator of the Port Arthur Historical Site ferry service. Gerald Tooth, the ABC journalist interviewing Gary Linnell of The Bulletin, goes so far as to imply that anything being published about the case ought to possess the express sanction of the 'Port Arthur community.' Like any serious journalist, Linnell seems puzzled by the suggestion:

Gerald Tooth: How much consultation with the community did you engage in before you did this story, and were you aware of a forum that was held recently in Hobart, discussing this very topic of reporting the anniversary? ... how did you go about consulting with the community there before publishing this story?

Garry Linnell: Well I don't understand what you mean by consulting - with which community?

Gerald Tooth: The Port Arthur community.(SOURCE)

The ABC report - which misleadingly implies that the 'Port Arthur community' was the chief victim of the massacre (most of the casualties were in fact not locals but tourists from all over the world) - seems to be nothing more than an attempted public shaming of Linnell for having had the audacity to deal with the question of Martin Bryant's background without allowing this nebulous creation the 'Port Arthur community' to decide whether he may do so. (Since Peter Roche is the sole representative of the Port Arthur community interviewed in this report, are we to assume that Linnell is obliged to not publish anything that Roche would not want to see published?)

This kind of media coverage is typical of that which has appeared over the last ten years in that it panders to - and thereby helps perpetuate - a host of taboos that were erected in place within a few months of the massacre that cumulatively inhibit the objective discussion of the case. These include 'don't give Bryant publicity,' 'spare the sensitivities of the local people,' 'don't add to the burden of the suffering of the victims' 'we have to put the tragedy behind us' etc. etc.

If there is one reason why the Australian media has been successful in suppressing discussion of the most heinous crime in modern Australian history, it is because examination of what happened is blocked by a wall of bogus hypersensitivity. No matter which aspect of the case one looks into, one encounters the idea that it is insensitive or even sacrilegious to pry there. Don't ask question about Bryant, don't interview any witnesses - this would only upset them by forcing them to relive their dreadful experiences - and, above all, don't get into the forensics of the case. The only legitimate subject for discussion is, of course, how Walter Mikac is getting on.



FURTHER READING: Moyra Grant, "The D Notice."
Ned Wood, "The Port Arthur Massacre 10 Years On: The Secrecy Continues."

Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of the most traumatic episode in modern Australian history, the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, April 28, 1996. In summary, Carl Wernerhoff writes in his new e-book, What's Going On?: A Critical Study of the Port Arthur Massacre, the story the appalled public was told 'was that shortly before 1.30 p.m. that cloudless Sunday afternoon, the gunman had entered the Broad Arrow Café at the Port Arthur Historical Site [PAHS] and picked off, with unfathomable callousness, one tourist after another. He killed a number of other individuals [including small children - ed] as he exited the PAHS and holed himself up in a nearby tourist guest house, the Seascape, in a siege that only ended when he burned the building down the following morning (an event that was seen shortly afterwards on television).'

As Wernerhoff explains, in the immediate aftermath of the shootings the alleged perpetrator - a 29-year old simpleton (IQ 66) with practically no shooting experience whatsoever named Martin Bryant - was subjected to a campaign of vilification which has surpassed that directed against anyone in Australian history. [After Hitler he is the most vilified individual I know of - ed.] In addition to reports that implied that he may have been responsible for two prior deaths (those of his benefactor - an eccentric old woman, Helen Hervey - and his father), the Australian public was told that he persistently harassed women, threatened to shoot his neighbours for no reason and slept with a pig in his bed. Here's Wernerhoff on the pig story, surely the most damning of them all:

'It is not my purpose in this book to provide a systematic analysis and critique of the campaign of character assassination waged against Martin Bryant by the police and the media after the Port Arthur massacre. What I would like to do, first of all, is remind readers that by far the most incriminating component of the anti-Bryant rhetoric - his alleged partiality for violent videos – turned out to be wholly unfounded. Bryant’s video collection not only contained entirely standard fare, his tastes in films were far from violent. According to his girlfriend, Petra Wilmott, he once walked out of a movie because it depicted violence too realistically for his liking. His preferences in videos - his favourites were musicals such as The Sound of Music - seem to have been as anodyne as his preferences in music, which included The Lion King and Cliff Richard.

But, second, it is important to realize that the allegedly violent nature of his video collection was only one of a great many lines of defamation that were pursued by those who were determined to depict him as a monster. Most Australian readers will recall that Bryant is supposed to have threatened to kill a number of people, and to have given women the creeps. The best known book about the case, Mike Bingham’s trashy book Suddenly One Sunday (1996; second edition 2001), is replete with (mostly unattributed) stories of Bryant’s untoward behaviour to women, presumably in order to encourage disturbed female readers [who, after all, make up fifty percent of the public the police was trying to convince of Bryant's guilt - ed] to draw the conclusion that the police must definitely have found the right mass murderer.

However, most Australians will probably have forgotten one of the most sensational ‘revelations’ the media diffused about Bryant – which was that he slept with a pig in his bed! According to Macer Hall (The Star, April 30, 1996) – Hall is now the political editor of the same London tabloid in which the story appeared - "The psycho behind the Tasmanian massacre was a twisted loner who slept with a pig. … Bryant was known to wander around toting guns under cover of darkness - and snuggle up to his pet porker during the day."’ (SOURCE)

BELOW: Picture of a pig. Why have police refused to release pictures of Bryant's pet porker? Could the truth be that the massacre was the result of a love triangle involving Bryant, his girlfriend Petra Wilmott and the pig that went terribly wrong? Why wasn't the pig mentioned even once during Bryant's sentencing hearing? What's being covered up here?



Any resemblance between the pig shown in the above photo and Bryant's pet porker is entirely coincidental. This pig is NOT being accused of any kind of complicity in the massacre at all.

Wernerhoff continues: 'Without wishing to impugn the journalistic integrity of a Macer Hall (who is a member of the British parliamentary press gallery, and therefore should possess at least a modicum of the stuff), I would suggest that this particular claim can be pretty much dismissed as an unsubstantiated allegation. If there was a pig in Bryant’s bed, Bryant's girlfriend seems not to have noticed it there, while his mother, Carleen Bryant, who regularly cleaned her son’s house for him, never mentions the pig droppings she must have been finding all over the place.

What’s more, the identity of the pig itself – and other pertinent facts, such as its sex, age and breed - have never been released by the Tasmania Police. Whether or not the police have obfuscated the truth about Martin Bryant by deliberately suppressing information about the pig is a matter that concerned readers should probably take up with the Tasmanian Department of Public Prosecutions rather than with this author, who is entirely unfamiliar with the appropriate forensic procedures for investigating intimate relationships between psycho killers and porcine bedmates.

*****

A question I would like to leave the reader with is whether such an extensive campaign of personal vilification as that which was waged after the massacre against Martin Bryant, however deviant or creepy he may have been (and there is no reason to think that he was either), would have been necessary if there had actually been some evidence that he had in fact been its perpetrator?'

NOTE: Carl Wernerhoff's What's Going On?: A Critical Study of the Port Arthur Massacre can be downloaded free of charge from the following locations:

http://www.badongo.com/file/536915

http://www.sendspace.com/file/tixyyu

http://www.savefile.com/files/3620746

One of the myths that enjoys general acceptance on the left is actually a millstone around its neck: the idea that mass immigration does no harm to native workers' wages, working conditions and employment opportunities, and therefore opposition to it is misguided or else it is disguised racism. As I will show in this piece, the idea that immigration does not adversely affect native-born workers is so wrong it's delusional. (I leave aside for now the idea that anti-immigration views reflect 'racism' because - even if true - this raises the question of whether it is the proper role of leftwing political activists to seek to reform people of their racist views.)

Greece, the European country which has experienced the highest influx of immigrants in recent times, offers an open and shut case of the negative impact of immigration on a country, albeit one that, as we shall see, neoliberal commentators have tried to paper over by making unsubstantiated assertions about popular attitudes. From 1991, onwards, the country was flooded with (mostly illegal) immigrants from Albania, Bulgaria and other (mostly) neighbouring European countries. The immigrants, around three-quarters of whom were males of prime working age, rapidly displaced native workers in the agricultural, manufacturing and construction sectors, that is to say, the sectors which employ most workers.

In terms of official statistics, the result was an increase in the unemployment rate from 7.7 percent in 1990 to 11.7 percent in 1999. The burden of the increase in unemployment was mainly borne by young people (15-24). By 2000, the young male unemployment rate had reached 30 percent and the female rate 37.7 percent (Baldwin-Edwards 2002). Although the national unemployment rate has gone down slightly since 1999 (it stands at 10.7 percent today), the fact that the unemployment rate in Greece today is three percentage points higher than it was prior to the immigrant influx should put paid to the idea that immigration does not increase unemployment. Since 1991, Greece has seen a permanent increase in its unemployment rate.

Unfortunately, unemployment statistics are not idle academic exercises, but reflections of what is happening to real people. And what is happening is that more Greeks are vulnerable to unemployment than ever. Writes Theodoros Papadopoulos of the University of Bath, 'the risk of unemployment has increased dramatically in recent years. In a study of social precariousness that covered the period 1996-2001, Greece was reported as the only country in Europe where the risk of unemployment had risen significantly. Indeed, the proportion of employees who had recently experienced unemployment rose substantially from 14.9 per cent in 1996 to 31.8 per cent in 2001; the highest increase among all EU countries.' (Papadopoulos 2006)

As in most countries, official unemployment statistics dramatically understate the real extent of the problem. As Papadopoulos reminds us, 'the levels of welfare support for the unemployed in Greece are extremely low by international standards [and] access to them is restricted to only small numbers of this group.' Most unemployed young people therefore rely wholly on their families for their survival and go uncounted in the official statistics. Unemployment would also be higher were it not for the fact that, like young people in many other parts of the globe, young Greeks are now opting for longer years in education in the (usually vain) hope that this will result in a better job in the end. Mass immigration - and immigrants now comprise 10.3 percent of Greece's population - has taken place, but mainly at the expense of the young, who have increased their dependency upon their parents.

But if young people have suffered most, mass immigration has also harmed employment prospects for women: 'while male unemployment doubled during the 1990s, from 4 per cent in 1990 to almost 8 per cent in 1999 ..., this amounted to less than half the increase in female unemployment. The latter rose much faster, from about 11 per cent in 1990 to an all-time high of 18 per cent in 1999, an increase of almost 8 percentage points. Although this figure had dropped to 15.5 per cent by 2001 ... it remains, after Spain, the second highest figure in the EU.' (Papadopoulos 2006)

Thanks to this adverse trend, the participation rate for working age women, which rose in the 1980s, is now among the lowest in Europe – 49 percent compared to a European average of 60 percent. If the country had not been inundated with immigrant workers after 1991, it is hard to believe that Greek women would not have continued increasing their participation rate to a level that was at least on a par with the European average.

In the Greek case, the neoliberal commentariat has drawn on some dubious arguments to discount the idea that immigration has disadvantaged native workers. The chief argument apologists for cheap labour capitalism use is that the immigrants only took up jobs that natives didn't want anyway. ‘Immigrants in Greece work in a highly-segmented labour market, in temporary, part-time, heavy or dangerous occupations – the jobs that Greeks refuse to do, especially in construction, heavy industry and agriculture,’ writes Martin Baldwin-Edwards of the Mediterranean Migration Observatory in Athens. (Baldwin-Edwards 2004)

Kathy Tzilivakis, who writes on migration issues for the Athens News invariably takes the same line, even though she tends to restrict the subject to agriculture. 'The inflow of immigrants in Greece (and across the EU) has not resulted in a rise of unemployment. Simply stated, migrant workers generally take jobs snubbed by the vast majority of Greeks,' she claims. (Tzilivakis 2002)

As always, neoliberal propagandists cite experts from the migration lobby to back up their opinions. Tzilivakis quotes Danail Ezras of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), who argues, 'We have to realise that immigration does not create unemployment. Migrants take work that Greeks don't want. There is no Greek woman who now wants to clean homes, or Greeks willing to work in the agricultural sector or to paint homes. Greeks today are the contractors who hire migrants to do the manual labour. But someone still has to pick the olives."' (Quoted in Tzilivakis 2002) Ditto for Charalambos Kasimis, professor of rural sociology at the Agricultural University of Athens: ‘Bottom line, young Greeks don’t want to have anything to do with farmwork.’ (Tzilivakis 2005) (NOTE)

But such arguments are based upon tendentious assumptions, not facts. No survey data of Greeks' employment attitudes is ever invoked to substantiate such allegations, nor is any explanation given as to why it wasn't until the country was flooded by immigrants that Greeks suddenly became much very choosy about the kinds of employments they would accept.

Since there were no labour shortages in the agricultural, manufacturing and construction sectors before 1991, there is no reason to assume that Greeks were deserting those employments. The decline in native participation rates is in fact a product of the post-1991 period of mass immigration, not a phenomenon that preceded it and therefore made mass immigration a practical necessity. Neoliberal spin doctors like Baldwin-Edwards and Ezras seem to be trying to turn history on its head, presenting a result (declining Greek participation rates) as a cause in order to discredit popular dissatisfaction with the result. It's a 'blame the victim' strategy.

Let's look specifically at the case of agriculture, which in terms of the number of people employed remains even today the largest sector of the Greek economy. In 1991, the bulk of agricultural labour, which is now apparently provided by immigrants, was performed by Greeks - 873,000 of them. The equivalent figure has subsequently fallen to 623,819 (2002). To account for this decline (of about a quarter of a million) the experts are asking us to believe that, around 1991, Greeks suddenly began looking down their noses at agricultural employment.

If we examine the statistics, though, we find that the fall was largely due to the decrease in the female participation rate, which fell from 26.4 percent in 1992 to 17.86 percent ten years later (Chletsos 2003) But rather than positing a sudden mutation in the character of Greek females around 1991, it would be more rational to conclude that the immigrants who arrived in the country after 1991 displaced female workers.

BELOW: Migrant workers harvesting watermelons. It is not hard to see why farmers would have preferred immigrant males like those shown in the photo to native females: they would not only have been cheaper but, in most cases, stronger and lacking domestic obligations that would restrict their working hours.



Whether Greek females suddenly became too snobbish to do farmwork around 1991, I have no way of knowing, but the Greek case presents abundant evidence against the theory that immigrants only take jobs that natives are unwilling to accept. The immigrants may have started out mainly in agriculture, but they rapidly penetrated every sector of the Greek economy; today, they are conspicuously absent only from sectors like the media and government in which high level ability in the Greek language is required. Baldwin-Edwards acknowledges in an article on Albanian workers in the city of Thessaloniki that immigrants work in a great variety of occupations. The same goes for Kasimis, who recently reported that ‘Immigrants are mainly employed in construction (24.5 percent), “other services,” meaning mostly domestic work (20.5 percent), agriculture (17.5 percent), and “commerce, hotels, and restaurants” (15.7 percent)’ (Kasimis & Kassimi 2004) Yet this finding has not prompted Baldwin-Edwards, Kasimis or any of the other major commentators on the country's unemployment problem to revise their views on the alleged lack of competition between natives and immigrants over jobs.

BELOW: Martin Baldwin-Edwards, a proponent of the facile 'job snob' theory of unemployment. Even though his own research shows that immigrants are employed in every major sector of the Greek economy, he still peddles the theory that migrants only take up jobs that Greeks would refuse. (Given that migrants now make up a substantial proportion of the employment in every sector, Baldwin-Edwards would seem to be suggesting that during the 1990s Greeks suddenly decided that they didn't want to work at all.)



But not only do immigrants work in every major sector of the Greek economy, they are significantly overrepresented in every one. Since the figures Kasimis cites are official statistics that do not count illegal workers, they dramatically understate the reality. The percentage of immigrants working in agriculture, for example, is very much higher than 17.5 percent. (Most commentators acknowledge that immigrants comprise a majority of the agricultural workforce today.) Since Greece, in 1991, was not suffering from labour shortages in any sector, it seems no point denying that most of the jobs occupied by immigrants today would otherwise be occupied by Greeks.

Other negative consequences of mass immigration include 1) a doubling in 'self-employment'; 2) the second-highest rate of long-term unemployment in the European Union and 3) the significant expansion of the underground economy. The latter is a particular concern, as it has grown to constitute probably 35 percent of the economy. This is so large that it seriously undermines the development of the legal employment sector, thereby compounding the problems faced by young Greeks and women.

In Greece, as in every country that has suffered the curse of mass immigration in recent decades, the subject of its generally negative effects have been circumvented by means of tendentious arguments designed to reinforce the illusion that what is good for the employer class is good for everyone. While most writers have fallen back on the 'job snob' theory, even a writer who does not invoke it at all - Theodoros Papadopoulos - gives immigration a wide berth: 'Overall, unemployment in Greece increased dramatically during the 1990s and continues at very high levels,' he avers. 'This is mainly the result of the intensification of economic restructuring, the economic austerity measures that accompanied Greece’s effort to join the EMU and the changes in the structure of the Greek labour force.' (Papadopoulos 2006) Even if he uses the word 'changes' as a timid allusion to the influx of immigrants, it seems obvious that no commentator on the issue of unemployment can have any credibility who does not openly address the self-evident causal relationship between rising unemployment and the large-scale influx of mostly able-bodied workers in precisely the same period.

My point, of course, is not that immigrants were necessarily responsible for the increase in Greek unemployment during the 1990s in its entirety, but that there is no reason to think that, absent the mass immigration of that era, employment trends would not have been broadly favourable. As for the spectre of 'restructuring,' this term partly describes a phenomenon by which capitalism is able to take advantage of increasingly abundant cheap labour. If there weren't so many immigrants, there wouldn't be as much 'restructuring' - and employers would have to engage in practices such as collective bargaining (which they are usually free to repudiate now) in order to keep their businesses running smoothly. Can it really be all that hard for the left to figure out that large-scale immigration is just as much of a factor in the erosion of employment opportunities, wages and working conditions in the last 30-odd years as the fetish for downsizing?

NOTE: Examples of lazy authors relying on the prejudiced 'job snob' theory could be multiplied indefinitely, e.g., Maria Siadima, who insists that 'young people in Greece are very unwilling to take up jobs that have low prestige and are underpaid, preferring to be supported by their families.' Such writers seem to me to be pandering to the pro-immigration bias of their peers and institutions rather more than they are interested in representing the situation accurately.

In his most recent writings, an Australian-born journalist based in London, John Pilger, minces no words about the iniquities of either the Bush regime in Washington or the Blair cabal in London. In the wake of the Blair government's accelerating attack on traditional civil liberties, Pilger has taken to referring to the British government in the darkest tones, e.g., 'A small, determined and profoundly undemocratic group is killing freedom in Britain, just as it has killed literally in Iraq.' (SOURCE) Few could disagree.

Yet I read most everything Pilger writes and, while much is excellent from a moral point of view, I can recall no occasion on which he expresses scepticism or disbelief about the preposterous official narratives of 9-11 or the London bombings of July 7, 2005, nor any indication that he recognizes the current wave of terrorism as a synthetic phenomenon.

In Pilger's distorted take on terrorism, everything changed on September 11: 'In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.' (SOURCE) According to Pilger, terrorism a la Bali, Madrid and London represents 'the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west.' (SOURCE) By this interpretation, we are now living in a world in which the 'weak' are striking back against the 'powerful' and the authorities, in both the US and the UK, are simply responding to the threat by heavy-handedly increasing the power of the national security state.

Despite its popularity in the mainstream left (the same view is held by George Galloway, for instance), the theory that post-9-11 terrorism represents a stage in the war of the 'weak' against the 'powerful' seems to me a case of wishful thinking; it should be placed on a par with other reactionary moral-political fairy tales such as 'the good king' (stories about kings who wandered the streets of their cities incognito, thereby gaining insights into reality they were previously deprived of by their evil counsellors) and 'the good war' (the idea that the present war, whoever it's against, will lead to the creation of a more just world in which war will become unnecessary).

Many of us remain vulnerable to the attractions of moral-political fairy tales and would, no doubt, like to think that the victims of western imperialism had the capacity to strike back. While none of us would like to be counted among the victims of attacks coming from any source, our sense of justice does compel us to recognize the fact that sometimes the weak use abhorrent methods to punish their oppressors. Many of us probably find the idea even a little comforting (so long as we are not personally the victims), for who wants to live in a world in which the powerful are forever exempt from the consequences of their malevolent deeds?

Yet however comforting the idea may be that the 'weak' have begun striking back, there is no reason to believe that the current wave of terrorism has any such origin. For starters, if the 'weak' were striking back by means of terror attacks, the official stories of those attacks would make sense and all the evidence would be duly made public. Yet in every case the official stories are transparent and the evidence nonexistent. The CCTV images of the alleged London bombers at Kings Cross station, for example, still have not been released, even though they were apparently clear enough that they enabled the authorities to work out who the bombers were in the first place. Now if these images exist, there can be no reason for not releasing them. The fact that they still have not been released invites only one conclusion, and that is that the authorities are lying - lying about either the very existence of the footage or lying when they claimed that the images of the four men were sufficiently clear to enable their prompt identification.

BELOW: Instead of releasing the CCTV image of the alleged London bombers at Kings Cross station on July 7, the actual day of the bombings, the police have released an image of three of the four allegedly involved taken at Kings Cross station on June 28. They seem to think that the public is stupid enough to accept as evidence for the July 7 bombing a photo that was taken over a week before!:



I fail to see how a veteran crusading journalist like Pilger is unable to graduate to awareness that the authorities are lying to us. How seriously can we take the analysis of a person who can't even work out that there is no evidence to support the official story of the London bombings and unable to draw appropriate conclusions? Why should we exempt a 'determined and profoundly undemocratic group' from the allegation of lying? Why would a group of people determined to 'kill freedom' not use every means at their disposal to do so, including staged terror operations? Why should we assume that they would only pursue their ends by means of congenial legislation, when at the very least a suitable climate has first to be created to ensure that the public will tolerate legislation which in normal circumstances it would find abhorrent?

A depressing part of the experience of being a leftwinger today is the glaring lack of informed leftwing leadership at all levels - in party politics, the union movement, the media, the universities. By and large, the left's leaders today either have to be suffering from intellectual maladies that render them incapable of grasping the obvious, or someone is paying them to play dumb. At first glance, there seems no obvious reason why someone like Pilger should be suspected of belonging to the latter group. His commentary on the Middle East is usually so spot on, that it is hard to think of him as any other than what he presents himself as, a morally-earnest investigative journalist who's angry about the festering wound that is Palestine.

The fact, though, is that Pilger's commentaries on the Middle East situation have allowed him to build up an enormous amount of credibility on the left, while at the same time not telling most leftwingers anything they don't already know. This would make someone like him an ideal vehicle for manipulating the left. For the service that Pilger is doing to power - along with the likes of Chomsky and Galloway - is that he has helped inoculate many on the left against the idea of state-sponsored domestic terrorism. Many self-identified leftwingers remain deeply suspicious of 'conspiracy theories,' albeit usually without having done the least research into any of them. Their logic is pretty much: if there was anything to such theories, whether about 9-11 or the London bombings or any other terror attack, why don't people like Chomsky or Pilger endorse them? Viewed in this light, it's pretty clear that leftwing superbrains don't actually have to lie or disinform to control the left: they merely have to help police ruling class notions of what constitute the outer limits of acceptable leftwing discourse.

If we start from the most charitable hypothesis, which is that he is naive rather than complicit, it has to be said that Pilger, like Chomksy and other leftwing gatekeepers, has not discovered the one fundamental fact about the nature of contemporary power: it is more malevolent than ever because it is less accountable than ever. Once violent and other harmful acts are cloaked as the work of weaker groups to whom leftwingers are normally somewhat sympathetic, e.g., Muslims, the powerful effectively have carte blanche to do whatever they want to us. And thanks to the myopia of people like Pilger, who fall for the official (i.e., ruling class) explanations of these events, the powerful are sure to remain unaccountable for their appalling acts of terrorism long enough for them to accomplish all their ends. The most charitable interpretation I can put upon Pilger's recent writings, therefore, is that he truly believes in his own fable of the weak striking back against the powerful. But we will never navigate the present crisis while we allow ourselves to be led down the garden path by naifs subscribing to fairy tales.

SUPERBRAIN'S MOST IDIOTIC PRONOUNCEMENT EVER?: I neglected to mention in my previous post that Chomsky's response to the 9-11 caller on the McChesney radio show contains the following 'gem' of sophisticated political analysis: 'If you look at the evidence for that [the theory that 9-11 was an inside job] ... the evidence ... [is] the kind of evidence that you could put together to show that the White House was bombed yesterday.' (Mp3 audio file here) WHHAAAAT? How can anyone continue to respect Chomsky who has heard this blindingly stupid remark? Chomsky also claims, quite incredibly, that 9-11 conspiracy theorists 'are rather welcome to centres of power so they get a fair amount of publicity.' This is a bald-faced lie, to be blunt.

Noam Chomsky is undoubtedly an icon of the mainstream left. Since the Vietnam War era, he's acquired a reputation as the leading leftwing critic of U.S. foreign policy. During the 1980s, against the backdrop of Reaganism, his books became fixtures in most leftwing households, and by the 1990s he was unquestionably the world's most famous 'leftwing' intellectual. His star is clearly not on the wane, for a recent poll of so-called public intellectuals planted him firmly at the top. (SOURCE)

Typical of the quasi-veneration in which Chomsky is held is the reaction of a self-described 'leftie' of my acquaintance who, at the mere mention of the man's name, flew into raptures. 'Chomsky knows so much!' I was informed. 'And you know what? he reads everything. He reads the New York Times from cover to cover. And he cites amazingly obscure magazines and journals! Although my friend agreed with me that Chomsky probably had a team of researchers culling newspapers and magazines for him, this did not lessen the awe in which he held Chomsky. Chomsky was ... Superbrain.

The fact that my friend also ridicules 'conspiracy theories,' led me to question the role the Chomksy cult plays in shaping the worldview of the English-speaking left. I am finding myself more and more concurring with those who argue that Chomsky should be thought of as a leftwing gatekeeper, that is, someone whose real function is not to empower the left but to control and manipulate it.

My misgivings about Chomsky began with the realization that an America which no longer tolerates the slightest hint of open political dissent still seems to tolerate Chomsky remarkably well. He seems to be free to say whatever he apparently wants to say about U.S. foreign policy, while academics with far lower profiles who've said nowhere near as much have been censured or even driven out of academia altogether. These days even humble high school teachers are not exempt from the right's hypervigilance. Jay Bennish, for example, recently endured a massive amount of opprobrium and was suspended from his job merely for discussing the Middle East crisis from a pro-Palestinian perspective. (SOURCE) Another teacher, Deb Mayer, has effectively been sacked - her contract was not renewed - merely for answering a student's question as to whether she would attend a peace protest. (SOURCE)

Yet MIT - less an educational institution than a major bastion of the U.S. military-industrial complex - seems to have not the slightest problem hosting a professor who endlessly opines on the evils of U.S. foreign policy - activities that surely consume so much of his waking hours that it is hard to see how he possibly fulfills his professional obligations to MIT as a professor of linguistics. If the right, which professes to loathe Chomsky, had really wanted to knock him down from off his perch, they have had plenty of opportunities to do so by now. That they haven't even tried, speaks volumes for their real feelings towards the 'leftwing' phenomenon that is Noam Chomsky.

At least part of the answer to the mystery of Chomsky's inviolability is that he seems to possess some kind of connection with the Israel lobby. As James Petras pointed out recently, Chomsky's legendary brain seems to stop working altogether when it comes to the issue of Zionist influence in America. Writes Petras,

'Chomsky’s speeches and writing on the Lobby emphasizes several dubious propositions.

The pro-Israel Lobby is just like any other lobby; it has no special influence or place in US politics.

The power of the groups backing the Israel lobby are no more powerful than other influential pressure groups.

The Lobby’s agenda succeeds because it coincides with the interests of the dominant powers and interests of the US State.

The Lobby’s weakness is demonstrated by the fact that Israel is ‘merely a tool’ of US empire building to be used when needed and otherwise marginalized.

The major forces shaping US Middle East policy are “big oil” and the “military-industrial complex”, neither of which is connected to the pro-Israel lobby.

The interests of the US generally coincide with the interests of Israel.

The Iraq War, the threats to Syria and Iran are primarily a product of “oil interests” and the “military-industrial complex” and not the role of the pro-Israel lobby or its collaborators in the Pentagon and other government agencies.'

Petras responds with an extensive critique of Chomsky's positions - too long to reproduce here - showing that for all his reputed sagacity Chomsky is strangely blind when it comes to the power the Israel lobby exercises over the United States. Chomsky seems determined to depict Israel as America's insignificant little proxy in the Middle East, when the historical record proves over and over again that Israeli interests invariably trump American interests. As Petras remarks, 'To ignore the pro-Israel lobby is to allow it a free hand in pushing for the invasion of Iran and Syria. Worse, to distract from their responsibility by pointing to bogus enemies is to weaken our understanding not only of the war, but also of the enemies of freedom in this country. Most of all it allows a foreign government a privileged position in dictating our Middle East policy, while proposing police state methods and legislation to inhibit debate and dissent.'

It seems to me that Chomsky's obvious blindness with regard to the Israel lobby seriously undermines his reputation as the authoritative leftwing critic of our times. How can anyone acquire any kind of reputation at all as a political analyst who has not assimilated into his analysis the overwhelming fact of Jewish power? It is probably no co-incidence that Chomsky has strangely little to say about any of the central historical events of our time. The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, for example, is utterly ignored in Chomsky's analysis, even though it proves that 1) Israel is not an ally of America, but has its own agenda and 2) an American president will not stand up to Israel, even in the face of extreme provocation.

When it comes to other central episodes in American history in which Zionist machinations can be suspected, Chomsky has shown a consistent pattern of downgrading the significance of the event. I won't dwell on Chomsky's attitude towards the assassination of President Kennedy, because his longstanding complicity in the coverup has been dealt with by Michael Worsham and DCDave (a favourite writer of mine). (Chomsky endorses the utterly unsustainable 'lone gunman' theory, even though he admits to not having studied the case in any detail.)

In another example of the pattern, Chomsky notoriously had nothing to say about the incident at Waco, when the FBI murdered 76 members of the Branch Davidian sect. This incident was, at the time it took place, 'easily the largest domestic U.S. government mass murder of this century, and possibly the largest of its kind in American history.' (SOURCE) In the same spirit, Chomsky utterly ignores the glaring facts that the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were both stolen.

When Chomsky doesn't ignore an event altogether, he likes to make chalk-and-cheese comparisons that serve to minimize its significance. In regard to Watergate, for example, Chomsky argued that ''What CREEP was trying to do to the Democrats is insignificant in comparison with the bipartisan attack on the Communist Party in the post-war era' and that Ambassador Godley's testimony 'that 15,000-20,000 Thai mercenaries had been employed by the U.S. in Laos, in direct and explicit violation of Congressional legislation' ... is a far more serious matter than anything revealed at the Ervin hearings.' (SOURCE)

There can be no better example of this tendency than Chomsky's conscientious ignorance in relation to 9-11. Recently on Robert McChesney's radio programme Media Matters, Chomsky was asked by a caller to clarify his current position on 9-11. (Mp3 audio file here.) A most embarrassing moment followed when a bored-sounding Superbrain - who proved that he had never read anything on the subject at all, not even David Ray Griffin's well-documented, carefully-reasoned books and articles - reiterated the feeble commonplaces that accomplices of the military-industrial complex are always using to explain away obvious conspiracies. To my ears, it sounded like the kind of poorly thought out argumentation you'd get from a five-year-old who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar (although a five-year-old would muster rather more passion).

Slowly rising to the challenge laid down by the caller, Chomsky insisted that even if it were true that 9-11 was an inside job, it wasn't very important anyway! 'Let's say it's true ... they blew up the World Trade Center ... OK, that's a crime ... but it doesn't weigh very heavily in the balance as compared with other crimes that they're carrying out, including crimes against the American population,' he muttered. In other words, the world's greatest 'leftwing' guru doesn't think it important for the American public to ponder the significance of the fact that their government organized the murder of 3,000 people. In the light of this astonishing remark, I find it very hard to imagine what kind of domestic political event Chomsky would actually consider important enough to justify political mobilization. It's like Chomsky wants to talk about every imaginable crime of U.S. foreign policy, except those that might get the bulk of the American population angry enough to demand root-and-branch reform of the political system.

Thus Chomsky consistently shows a pattern of either ignoring domestic acts of political violence altogether or minimizing their significance by comparing them to other events - invariably events about which the average politically active citizen in America can do even less - in a way that subtly indicates to the leftwing reader that there's nothing to see here and s/he should simply move along. The important stuff is always the crimes of American imperialism, but never the domestic events that, when studied carefully, would disclose the inner workings of the beast that actually commits the crimes. So while Chomsky's work seems to enhance political literacy insofar as it promotes an understanding of American imperialism, it actually exacerbates political illiteracy insofar as it obscures what is happening at the political centre, where imperial policy is actually made.

The problem with Chomsky, in the final analysis, is the same problem with most of the pre-eminent leftwing gatekeepers (in whose company I would include other alleged leftwing luminaries like John Pilger and George Galloway), the tendency to depict the U.S. as an international criminal but, apparently, never a criminal at home. Chomsky, for example, refers to the U.S. 'a leading terrorist state.' While this is undoubtedly so, five minutes later he will tell his audience that the very idea that the U.S. government could have perpetrated 9-11 is preposterous. So what makes him - or Pilger, or Galloway - think that the U.S. government wouldn't commit terrorism at home? Or that, to minimize the risk of being exposed, it wouldn't subcontract the operation out to an organization such as the Mossad? John Kaminski observed recently that, four years after the 9-11 attacks, 'the only people who believe George Bush’s story of what happened on 9/11/2001 are those who are brain damaged and those who are paid well to believe it.' Which category do you think Chomsky belongs to?

FURTHER READING: (1) Daniel L. Abrahamson, "Noam Chomsky: Controlled Asset of the New World Order" here. According to this article, John Coleman has identified Chomsky as a deep cover CIA agent in his book The Conspirator's Hierarchy. I suspect this is true - and if so it would do a lot to explain the ubiquitousness of Chomsky's works - at a time when the works of real leftwing intellectuals (e.g., Michael Parenti) can scarcely be found anywhere - and his relationship to MIT, a well-known organ of the American military-industrial complex.

(2) Bob Feldman, "MIT Professor Noam Chomsky's Ties to the Military" here.

(3) "Where Noam will not roam" here.

For a leftwing alternative to Chomsky, Amy Goodman and all the other leftwing gatekeepers, I recommend, as always, the invaluable radio programme Taking Aim, by Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone.

France scraps youth job law (SOURCE)

Who said protesting never accomplished anything?

More good news:

Humala in the lead in Peru

Berlusconi looks set to lose in Italy

UPDATE: Chavez sure isn't dumb: he's instantly divined that the incident in Caracas in which the U.S. ambassador's convoy was allegedly harrassed by Chavez 'macho motorcyclists' was staged: '"The ambassador went to Coche seeking an incident," Chavez said during his weekly televised address Sunday. "It was a provocation to look for another incident, seeking an escalation." Chavez also furnished a significant detail which would help support the 'conspiracy theory' of the event presented in my previous post: "Chavez said Brownfield failed to advise the local mayor's office or the foreign ministry of his travel plans." So which 'local authorities' referred to by the ambassador's spokesperson had been informed that Brownfield was going to Coche? (SOURCE )

Wayne Madsen on the diplomatic crisis looming between the U.S. and Venezuela over an act of anti-American 'terrorism' in Caracas:

U.S. ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield is spinning a Venezuelan vegetable, egg, and fruit protest pelting of his motorcade as some sort of terrorist attack. The U.S. State Department complained to Venezuela's ambassador in Washington that Venezuela was in violation of the international treaty on the protection of diplomats. Spinning an unfounded conspiracy theory (they are only conspiracy theories when the left-wing cites them), State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the incident in a poor Caracas neighborhood was condoned by the city's mayor, police, and local government. McCormack vowed that the United States will not be intimidated by such attacks of vegetables, fruit, and eggs on U.S. diplomatic vehicles. U.S. embassy spokesman Brian Penn bemoaned, ''Our car is stained all over . . . the motorcyclists were throwing things at us for at least 10 minutes, and the police did nothing." Penn did not indicate whether there were any funds left in the embassy's CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency slush funds used to foment insurrections, secessionist movement, coups, street protests, and election chicanery to afford a car wash for the ambassador's car. (SOURCE)

Very amusing, Mr. Madsen. A possibility the normally canny Madsen doesn't consider, however, is that the anti-Chavez opposition organized the incident in the hope of generating bad publicity for Venezuela. Bad publicity like this, an early news report which is, incidentally, replete with lies (since no one was hurt, the incident was clearly not 'very violent' - nor is there any evidence Brownfield was at risk of being hit by anything - he was inside a limousine, for crying out loud) and this.

It is not unthinkable that the incident took place with the embassy's prior knowledge and co-operation. Indeed, as SanDiego.com points out, 'It was the third time in three weeks that Brownfield has been met by protests. Earlier, demonstrators burned tires and torched an American flag.' (SOURCE)

Something strange is going on with respect to the ambassador's movements which could well be explained by a strategy to afflict Brownfield with pseudo-incidents. According to U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Salome Hernandez, the embassy 'co-ordinates' with local authorities when the ambassador travels. (SOURCE) However, the Venezuelan security services are no longer being notified of the ambassador's movements. So which 'local authorities' is Hernandez referring to? The kind of 'local authorities' that can promptly organize an anti-U.S. demonstration? It's unlikely the U.S. embassy is going to share knowledge of the ambassador's movements with pro-Chavez forces. It seems much more likely that the 'local authorities' Hernandez is referring to - and why doesn't she say the mayor's office, if that's what she means? - are local anti-Chavez organizations. That would explain why suddenly, in the last three weeks, the ambassador's car is being met by protests. A possible motive for this series of demonstrations aimed at Ambassador Brownfield is that the Bush administration wants to fabricate a pretext to break off diplomatic relations with Venezuela. No doubt the claim will be made that the ambassador has to be withdrawn because the Venezuelan government can no longer guarantee his safety.



A few facts and observations are in order: (1) The AP video footage of the incident available on the USA Today website was filmed from the rear window of the press vehicle, one of four limousines comprising the motorcade, which means that someone was ready with a camera, waiting for the 'incident' to happen (see the video here). Question? Was the ambassador's PR stunt - he was on his way back to the embassy after presenting 'a donation to a youth baseball team at the sports center in the working-class suburb of Coche' - cooked up to provide an opportunity for the incident to take place?

BELOW: Extract from the article in the pro-American Caracas Daily Journal:



(2) Incident? What incident? The AP footage does not show any of the motorcyclists throwing anything or even being sufficiently close to the vehicles that they could have pummeled on them with their fists. (Incidentally, pounding on a moving car doesn't seem easily done from motorcycles and would in fact be somewhat risky for the motorcyclists themselves.) So far, there is no other visual evidence of the incident other than the footage taken by a member of the ambassador's party. Yet curiously the released footage doesn't show any of the incidents which the U.S. embassy is making such a fuss about. If these things had really happened, why didn't the camera(wo)man inside the press vehicle capture them on video? If s/he did, why isn't the AP and/or USA Today showing us the relevant parts of the footage? Come on people, SHOW US THE VEGETABLES!

(3) We have no idea who the motorcyclists actually were. It's entirely speculation that they were Chavez supporters.

BELOW: This 'macho' motorcyclist has got two chicks on board. Maybe they brought the vegetables:



(4) There is no evidence the incident was 'condoned' by the Venezuelan authorities. In fact, everyone from the mayor's office up has expressly repudiated it.

Although the incident in Caracas is hardly Kristallnacht, it does seem an inexpensive way to foster the view beyond U.S. ruling class circles that 'something has to be done about Chavez.' Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns has already 'warned Venezuela's ambassador that there will be "severe diplomatic consequences" if there is another incident.' (SOURCE) Why do I have a sneaking feeling that 'another incident' is only a week or two away?

BELOW: A capture from the AP footage showing two of the motorcycle riders involved in the incident. They don't seem to be throwing anything, or even trying to. In any case, they don't appear to be well stocked with fruit and vegetables.