Inside the NYC Beltway Mentality

It's not every day I blog from NYC. It occurs to me that there's an "inside the beltway" analogy for New York City. You see it in the devolution of the quality of information in the New York Times. You also see it at CBS (See "Update").

Example. Does Jeffrey Gettleman and his editors at the Times recognize the irony of the front page piece from April 25, 2007 entitled "People Who Feed Off Anarchy in Somalia Are Quick to Fuel It"? The US has fueled it and feeds off of it. The US has opened another front in the Mid-east War, See the Map. The US is now operating under the cover of Chaos; they couldn't do that with the Islamic Courts maintaining order in Somalia.

The coalition Islamic Courts, who were not all fundamentalists, had begun to bring a sense of order to Somalia before the US covert operations, supported by Ethiopia, created the current chaos. Prior to that, the US CIA had backed the Somali war lords who fostered the kinds of things Gettleman describes in his article. Note the "Oil Factor In Somalia," a 1993 article.

The US-installed Somali Prime Minister, Ali Mohammed Ghedi, recently told the Dow Jones News Network that Somalia is welcoming back multi-national oil compaines with similar oil production sharing agreements that the Bush Administration is pushing for in Iraq. Companies seeking new or renewed contracts include Conoco-Phillips and Royal Dutch Shell. Ghedi said,

The [Somali] parliament will approve the new oil laws in two months.

I recall arriving in Washington DC in the mid-1980s to discover that stacks of resumes from Ivy League schools were a common feature of congressional offices. Few of these people were hired, but those that were spent much of their time angling for career advancement, and had little interest in the issues of the day (Star Wars and the US covert war in Central America). Very few of these people had any honest understanding of the atrocities being committed in Central America at the time by US backed death squads. Naive, superficial and as a result, dangerous, because they effectively run Congress.

The same holds in New York City. Of course, I didn't have to come up here to recognize this. It's just that being here heightens my awareness to it.

This phenomenon can be generalized: The political and economic elite are, for the most part, uniformed. True, there are insiders who are fully informed, who call the shots on the use of force to advance and maintain power, but they are the minority.

But, even some of those closest to the execution of that power fail to realize what they are doing. They are the pawns and those in denial. It's not hard to fall into that trap, particularly when you're isolated as people become when wrapped up in the fast pace of NYC upper rank activities, like reporting for the Times.

I could go on with examples, but will use just one. Richard Khanlian of Santa Fe, NM questions whether the US "success" in Iraq can be any different than the Iraq of Saddam Hussein in light of US military complicity, and participation in similar behavior. Khanlian was prompted by the NY Times April 22 front page article, "3 Suspects Talk After Iraqi Soldiers Do Dirty Work."

In general, those "inside the beltway," "inside the Manhattan buzz zone," what I call the inside crowd, are swept up in a dangerous current. They need to step back and ask themselves some sobering questions and act on their basic values.

Update:

High Tech Parent, Jadegreen, provides another example. Remember the Katie Couric plagiarism espose'? Jadegreen followed up the follow-up. In doing so, Jadegreen refelects on the following comment by Katie Couric:

this was a very unfortunate incident because the person who did this is a lovely person, but clearly inexperienced about the tenets of basic journalism.

Jadegreen points out the obvious, if one stops to think about it; how is it that a person who attains the privilage of writing for the CBS anchorperson is "inexperienced about the tenets of basic journalism"? The answer lies in the thesis that America is in decline, which was my initial reaction to the Couric scandal and the general point of this essay, with superficial NYC insiders providing more evidence.

Sources:

DemocracyNow, April 27, 2007, "The Most Lawless War of Our Generation" - Former UN Spokesperson on Somalia.


DemocracyNow, Tuesday, April 3, 2007, 400 Die in Mogadishu's Worst Fighting in 15 years.

DemocracyNow, Tuesday, January 9, 2007,
U.S. Launches Targeted Assassination Air Strikes in Somalia, Many Reported Killed.

DemocracyNow, hursday, December 28, 2006,
Conflict in Somalia: Islamic Courts Abandon Mogadishu as UN Warns of Humanitarian Crisis.

Flashpoints Radio, Knight Report, April 26, 2007: Somalia oil information.
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