Media G-20 hype

As reported in the Post-Gazette in "Free Speech Advocates Urging Police Restraint" (July 29), Pittsburgh City Council members heard documented and unrefuted testimony that various state security forces (not including police infiltrators and provocateurs) have been responsible for instigating nearly 90 percent of the violent incidents at G-20-like demonstrations over the past 10 years. Invited officials, Police Chief Nate Harper and Public Safety Director Michael Huss, chose not to appear at the public hearing.

What purpose then, one might ask, is served by the G-20-friendly corporate media's fixation on the supposed black-clad 19-year-olds coming to throw a rock through a replaceable Gap store window?

Not unlike the fear-mongering Bush propaganda spoon-fed us around WMDs and color-coded security threats, Pittsburgh's newspapers and television stations are purposefully intending to shift the focus away from the human and planetary crimes committed by the global capitalist class hiding in the shadows of the G-20 leaders and their financial ministers.

Permanent plant closings, disappeared pensions, global warming, de-logged ancient forests and oceanic degradation are just a few of the unspeakable consequences of the G-20's insane pursuit of profit maximization. These calamities, unlike a possible broken window or burning Dumpster, are not so easily fixed or replaced.

Equally insidious are the repeatedly projected hyped-images of threatened urban chaos served up by these print and electronic platforms for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, AIG, et al., in hopes of intimidating and dissuading Pittsburghers from exercising our democratic right and civic responsibility to peaceably confront those responsible for our collective misery come Sept. 24-25.

 

ALBERT PETRARCA
Highland Park