Don DeBar's Blog

Interview with New York journalist Don DeBar, on RT.com, 23 Aug 2011 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5hz2UCR0RQ "Gaddafi opened up the armories to the people of Libya, more than a million rifles and other arms have been handed out to the people of Tripoli. The claim that has been made, wall-to-wall, from the so-called 'progressive' media of the United States to such a Fox is that Gaddafi is a hated dictator and that this is an indigenous rebellion. The dictator does not hand people guns and say: 'Please, defend me!' "This has more the appearance of a large-scale Bay of Pigs, where the invaders are being enticed to come in and engage the people on the ground, than it does some sort of a 'people's rebellion' backed by the United States which, by itself, would be a remarkable event if it were true."

Libya Coverage Provides a Peek Behind the Curtain By Don DeBar Coverage of the situation in Libya over the past three days, while useless to anyone trying to understand what is actually happening in Libya, nevertheless provides an interesting peek into the modus operandi of the global media that has broad application for the decoding of its coverage of all of the issues that touch our lives. The manufacture of events in Libya has been underway since the lead-up to the US-led invasion, including the narrative that enabled the UN resolutions 1970 and 1973 - prominent among these were the claim that the Libyan government was conducting an aerial war against protestors, countered by satellite evidence from the Russian military showing no such attacks took place, and the claim that African mercenaries were firing on protestors, which was both untrue and provoked racist killings of Libyans with African features and skin by rebel gangs. Absent from the manufactured narrative was th...

As Asian and European markets dropped and futures for US stocks followed, the blame is being placed on S&P's downgrade last week of US securities from AAA to AA+. Little note has been taken in the media - or in Washington - of Moody's continued AAA rating, or, more to the point, of the reasoning behind the S&P downgrade. Consequently, the narrative about the apparent loss of investor confidence has been, to say the least, fuzzy. First, it should be noted that the "investors" we are referring to are not lay people - they are sophisticated professionals (recent history and tendency towards herd behavior notwithstanding), and their investment decisions generally rest on substantial research. Such research would include a read of the actual S&P document which announced the downgrade. Within that eight page document, it becomes clear that the basis of the downgrade was political - it decried the failure to cut such "entitlements" as Medicare...

FIRST, READ THE ACTUAL DOCUMENT: http://www.washingtonpost.com/​wp-srv/politics/documents/spra​tingreport_080611.pdf It nets out to a political decision wherein S&P comes down on the side of those who want to "reduce entitlements" and without mention of the 1 Trillion lb gorilla in the budget - the military and prison complexes - as they talk about "debt trajectories." From the S&P document explaining their downgrade of US securities: "When comparing the U.S. to sovereigns with 'AAA' long-term ratings that we view as relevant peers--Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K.--we also observe, based on our base case scenarios for each, that the trajectory of the U.S.'s net public debt is diverging from the others. Including the U.S., we estimate that these five sovereigns will have net general government debt to GDP ratios this year ranging from 34% (Canada) to 80% (the U.K.), with the U.S. debt burden at 74%. By 2015, we project that their net pu...