It appears PandoDaily is gone, gone. The original pando.com url is now an HR company and the site with the archives, pandodaily.com, was either hijacked or the domain was purchased.
Which is quite a loss as Pando chronicled the Silicon Valley go-go years, 2012 - 2019, when tech bros and unicorns and all that entered the mainstream.
Here's one of their non-Silicon Valley stories via the Internet Archive,
“The Times wasn’t nearly as happy when we went after business wrongdoing as when we were kicking around some slob in government.” — Seymour HershIn its original meaning, “muckraking journalism” was all about exposing the awful power that corporations, trusts, and monopolies exercised over people and the broader public interest. So why doesn’t Seymour Hersh, considered the premiere “muckraker” of the past few decades, turn his fearless muckraking guns on private corporate power?
Ida Tarbell dug deep into Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire and all the ways it exercised a kind of private government tyranny over huge swathes of public life; Tarbell’s work directly influenced the antitrust breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. Upton Sinclair exposed brutality in the meatpacking industry — on its workers, the slaughtered animals, and the diseased, rat-infested meats that eventually wound up in consumers’ homes — leading to the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drug Administration. Other muckraking exposés led to state-level child labor and workers’ comp laws, the progressive income tax amendment, and laws placing vast expanses of land and forests under federal protection from rapacious robber barons.
But Hersh and others we today call “muckrakers” focus almost exclusively on taking on government power and the national security state power — not the power of private governments (corporations, oligopolies) that exert so much mundane existential power over our mundane little existences. To the extent that muckrakers today do delve into concentrated private power, it’s usually to expose the influence of corporate money in government, which reinforces the basic operating assumptions today that power is in the hands of public government, and that corporate power is only a problem when it co-opts government power.
The nearly exclusive focus on fighting government power started with the baby boomers in the mid-late 1970s, as they retreated from politics and labor unions, and ditched the sort of university Marxist rhetoric that filled the pages of old Ramparts magazine issues.
There are a lot of reasons for this trend in muckraking journalism over the past few decades, away from fighting private corporate power, in favor of fighting government power — but the most obvious reason of all is the one you won’t hear about much because it’s not very glamorous or heroic: It’s better for your journalism career — and easier — to take on the government leviathan, than it is to take on private corporate power.The best illustration of this is what happened when Seymour Hersh once tried his hand at corporate muckraking — and failed. The reasons he failed offer important lessons for anyone interested in understanding why investigative journalism chooses to emphasize and amplify some stories over others.
Before getting into the story, it’s important to situate Hersh’s politics back in the 1970s, when he first rose to fame exposing the horrific My Lai massacre and the massive illegal CIA domestic spying programs. Back in the mid-70s, when they were muckraking rivals, Bob Woodward described Hersh as “an old line radical . . . interested more in the abuse of really big power, concentrated power, in the military and international capitalism.” In the New York Times newsroom, editor Abe Rosenthal used to affectionately refer to Hersh as “my little commie.”
In 1975, Hersh was at the very top of his game. As I wrote about earlier this month, Hersh’s bombshell story in the New York Times exposing the massive CIA domestic spying program MH-CHAOS — which the Times dubbed “son of Watergate” — led to an entire year of Congressional committees and White House investigations into US intelligence abuses, followed by a rash of reforms, some serious, some half-baked.
That same year, as Hersh’s colleagues jumped on the muckraking-government bandwagon exposing intel agency abuses (after initially attacking Hersh’s CIA reporting), Hersh himself decided that it was time for a shift — to focus on fighting private corporate power and abuses. As Hersh told NY Times editor Abe Rosenthal:
“The biggest story in the next ten years is going to be corporations.”After years in Washington, Hersh had moved to New York in 1975 and spent three years there because that’s where his wife was going to medical school. Moving from the capital of government power to the capital of capitalism helped focus Hersh on this other source of huge and often unaccountable power: corporations.
In principle, the New York Times agreed with Hersh’s idea — as managing editor Seymour Topping said in 1977,
“There is no reason why we should not scrutinize the private sector as we have government in the Watergate affair.”But as the Times would find out when they tried this out, it’s a lot more dangerous and tricky to put a bug up private power’s ass than government power’s.
It started in 1976, when Hersh did a groundbreaking series of articles on perhaps the most powerful (and scary) mob attorney of the 20th century: Sidney Korshak, who served everyone from Al Capone, Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa, to Hollywood-Vegas moguls Lew Wasserman and Kirk Kerkorian. Hersh’s story included allegations that Korshak had planted a camera and a call girl in Senator Estes Kefauver’s hotel room to blackmail him into halting an investigation into the mob, which Kefauver suddenly and unexpectedly did halt; and that many years later, it was thanks to a phone call from Korshak that Al Pacino was released from his MGM contract so that he could play the role of Michael Corleone in Paramount Pictures’ The Godfather.
But Korshak was not the type of guy people — journalists — felt comfortable writing about publicly. He once told a former New York Times journalist turned budding film producer,
“Do you know what’s the best insurance policy in the world that absolutely guarantees continued breathing? Silence.”The ex-journalist, Peter Bart, immediately burned his notes, and went on to a successful career in Hollywood.
So it’s a wonder that Hersh and his collaborator on the Korshak articles, Jeff Gerth (now at ProPublica), didn’t find themselves in the obit pages shortly afterwards, their careers tragically cut short in mysterious car crashes or suicide overdoses. . . .
Instead, Hersh smelled blood: the Korshak articles opened his eyes to a company that was, in the 1970s, the symbol of aggressive, shady corporate power: Gulf & Western. Most people have probably forgotten Gulf & Western, once considered the most aggressively acquisitive conglomerate in the US, so aggressive that even Wall Street nicknamed the company “Engulf & Devour” (immortalized as the evil corporation in Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie”). G&W’s best known subsidiary was Paramount Pictures, which Gulf & Western bought in the mid-1960s during its massive acquisition spree, underwritten by easy money from banking giants Chase Manhattan and Manufacturers Hanover.
Under Gulf & Western, Paramount made some classic films including Chinatown, The Godfather, Airplane!, and Three Days of the Condor. G&W also made the career of future media tycoon Barry Diller, who was named Paramount’s CEO and chairman in 1974 and served there for a decade.
Mob attorney Korshak was so integral to Gulf & Western’s Paramount subsidiary, he was known as the film company’s “consigliere,” and rumored to be the model for Robert Duvall’s consigliere character in Paramount’s “The Godfather.” Two years after acquiring Paramount in 1968, G&W pulled off a mind-boggling transaction with notorious Sicilian mafia financier Michele Sindona, who oversaw the mafia’s global heroin money laundering operations, managed the Vatican’s global portfolio (earning the nickname “God’s banker”), and helped the CIA move money around the globe. Somehow, Gulf & Western managed to exchange reams of worthless commercial paper in a broke subsidiary, Commonwealth United, at a vastly inflated price in exchange for a 10.5% stake in Sindona’s investment empire, Societa General Immobilaire — which was followed by another shady transaction giving half of Paramount Studio’s movie lot to Sindona’s mafia bank. Sindona explained the transaction thus:
“I always sell a company for less than it is worth to someone I want to please.”In the mid-1970s, Sindona’s investment empire collapsed, triggering what was then the largest US bank failure in history — eventually leading to Sindona’s arrest and extradition to Italy, where was poisoned to death with cyanide....
....MUCH MORE
Updated—Seymour Hersh Is Back With A Big Story: "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline"Seymour Hersh Accuses US of Nord Stream ‘Cover Up’
The Columbia Journalism Review Destroys The New York Times Over Their Russiagate/Trump Coverage
My next book won’t be the non-fiction Silicon Valley exposé we desperately need (but here’s what it will be)"Mystery Solved: Left-Wing Billionaire Pierre Omidyar Bankrolls Shadowy Anti-Musk Group" (EBAY; TSLA)
....Similarly, when Mark Ames showed me a document proving that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar had funded opposition groups in Ukraine right before the Maidan revolution, I assumed Omidyar – the Pez dispenser guy! – must have been duped by his friends in the State Department. Tech founders simply didn’t go around instigating military coups.
Perhaps I saw the first glimmer of the real story when I dug out the White House visitor logs and saw how many times Omidyar’s name appeared, and who he met. Or when I noticed the growing line of tech billionaires leading to the Oval Office, the Kremlin and various Saudi royal palaces....
