Another day in paradise-- Steve Macek's Blog

2010-03-08T06:06:00.000-08:00

2009-01-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

Here's an op-ed I co-authored about the coming digital TV switchover. It is shaping up to be a real disaster. Thankfully, people seem to be waking up to this fact:

America's DTV Transition Beset with Problems

By Steve Macek and Mitchell Szczepanczyk

On February 17, 2009, all full-power analog television broadcasts in the
United States will cease and existing TV stations will begin
broadcasting exclusively in a digital format. The switch to digital
television (DTV) will free up frequencies for emergency uses and allow
broadcasters to provide more programming for their viewers through
"multicasting."

As a practical matter, people will need to subscribe to a cable or
satellite television service, use a digital-ready TV set, or hook up a
digital converter box to an analog TV set, in order to continue watching
broadcast television.

Unfortunately, the number of people who stand to lose their access to TV
programming in the coming DTV transition is considerable. Roughly 10 to
15 percent of all TV households (about 30 to 40 million people) still
rely on over-the-air television, most of whom are senior citizens, poor,
or non-English speakers. In a city like Chicago, with high poverty rates
and a large immigrant population, some 20 percent of residents still use
antenna-only TV and an estimated 230,000 households are completely
unready for the conversion.

The federal government has launched a coupon program that allows each
household to claim up to two $40 coupons to help offset the cost of
digital converter boxes for those that can't afford them otherwise. But
the coupons expire 90 days after issuance, and half of the more than 25
million people who have requested them have seen their coupons expire.

What's more, surveys show more than three-quarters of those who are
interested in getting converter boxes are not aware of the coupon
program.

Preliminary testing of digital-only TV broadcasting in the US has been
all but non-existent. The sole switchover test, enacted in September in
Wilmington, NC, amounts to a false positive, since 92 percent of the
viewers impacted by the test already subscribe to cable. Across the
country, there have been sporadic tests -- perhaps a minute or a few
minutes at a time at various times and in various locales, but nothing
systematic.

Outreach about the DTV conversion has been haphazard at best. For the
most part, the FCC is counting on public service announcements (PSAs)
voluntarily aired by broadcasters to inform viewers about the switch.

But only 13 percent of PSAs air during the most-watched hours of
primetime, and PSAs make up only one half of 1 percent of all TV
airtime.

In recent months, the FCC has partnered with senior centers and
community groups to stage a series of "town hall" meetings about the DTV
transition in an effort to educate some of the most vulnerable
populations. But scheduling of these town hall gatherings has been ad
hoc and in many cities the meetings have been poorly attended.

The distribution of set-top converter boxes has also been fraught with
serious problems. Research has shown that the sort of stores that carry
converter boxes are typically located far from the low-income
neighborhoods which need them most. And many retailers have been caught
flat-footed -- not knowing about the transition and sometimes providing
incorrect information about the conversion or the coupon program.

Amid widespread confusion about the DTV conversion, there has been no
shortage of unscrupulous retailers taking advantage. Both fly-by-night
scam businesses and major satellite and cable TV providers have been
pushing unwitting TV viewers to buy equipment they don't need at
inflated prices. Worse still, earlier this year, the FCC fined several
large big box retailers a combined $3.9 million for failing to correctly
label analog-only TV sets that will be rendered useless come February
17.

Just last week, government officials overseeing the transition told
Congress they may need an extra $330 million to keep up with the demand
for converter box coupons. They also admitted that there might not be
enough converter boxes available to fill anticipated needs -- and that
the shortfall could be as high as 2.5 million boxes.

The saddest thing about this entire situation is that America's
transition to DTV could've been handled much differently. The UK is
currently in the midst of its own switch to digital television. But
unlike here in the U.S., the British conversion is being rolled out
gradually over the course of four years, converting region-by-region,
practically neighborhood by neighborhood. What's more, the money the UK
has spent on outreach and infrastructure, per capita, puts American
efforts to shame. The British DTV conversion has had problems of its
own, but the problems have been far smaller in scale and easier to
address. Americans who watch TV and the regulators who shape our
communications policies would be wise to take notice.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Macek is an associate professor of speech communication at North Central
College and Szczepanczyk is an organizer with Chicago Media Action and a
frequent contributor to assorted Chicago-area independent media efforts
in print, web, radio and television.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 2008 by the American Forum. 1/09

2008-10-04T16:05:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Rabin in the London Review of Books this week published the best darn thing I've ever read about Sarah Palin and her very dubious, very swift rise to power in the Republican Party. Among other things it includes an account of Palin's reign of terror as mayor of Wasilla and an explanation of how skyrocketing oil prices swelled the Alaska government's tax coffers, thus allowing her buy popularity by sending $2000 checks to every state citizen. Below is a nice snippet that nails perfectly her (very annoying yet populist) rhetorical style:

What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile.

For the whole article go here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n19/raba01_.html

2008-08-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

Human Rights Crackdown in China

Reporters Without Borders/Reporters sans frontières
www.rsf.org

13 August 2008

2008 BEIJING GAMES
Crackdown continues for Chinese human rights
activists, with no Olympic truce during games

The start of the Olympic Games has done nothing
to help Chinese human rights activists, who
continue to be arrested, watched or threatened.
At the same time, incidents involving foreign
journalists, including an attack today on a
British TV reporter working for ITN, shows that
the security services are still preventing the
foreign press from working freely.

To illustrate this, Reporters Without Borders
today offers the comments of a foreign reporter
about surveillance and harassment by the Chinese
police.

"In view of the many incidents, we call on the
International Olympic Committee to intercede on
behalf of the Chinese citizens who are in danger
because of the position they have taken during
the Olympic Games," Reporters Without Borders
said.

"It is the duty of the Olympic movement in its
entirety to ensure respect for the spirit of the
Olympic truce," the organisation added. "Since
the origins of the Olympics, tradition has
required that peace should prevail during the
games."

The IOC website has this to say about the Olympic
truce in ancient Greece: "During the truce
period, the athletes, artists and their families,
as well as ordinary pilgrims, could travel in
total safety to participate in or attend the
Olympic Games and return afterwards to their
respective countries. (...) The International
Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to revive the
ancient concept of the Olympic Truce with the
view (...) to encourage searching for peaceful
and diplomatic solutions to the conflicts around
the world."

John Ray of the British television news service
ITN was today covering a protest by several
foreign activists who unfurled a pro-Tibet banner
near Beijing's main Olympic zone, when he was
arrested by police, dragged along the ground and
forcibly restrained for about 20 minutes although
he identified himself as a journalist. "This was
an assault in my mind, I am incredibly angry
about this," Ray told Agence France Presse.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC)
says there have been five incidents since 7
August. In one of these incidents, police
arrested two Associated Press reporters in the
northwestern province of Xinjiang and erased the
photos they had taken. One of them was arrested
while watching the opening ceremony on TV. Two
Scandinavian journalists were prevented from
interviewing peasants in Hebei province about the
impact of the games on their activities.

A European journalist who has been working in
Beijing for several years has given Reporters
Without Borders a gripping description of what it
is like for her and her colleagues in Beijing,
and the risks run by Chinese who dare to speak to
the foreign press.

"They don't stop following me, filming me and
photographing me," she said. "I think twice
before interviewing Chinese about sensitive
issues for fear that they could be arrested (...)
Last week several Chinese were arrested after
giving me interviews. Firstly, people living in
the Qianmen district that is in the process of
being renovated. They included a woman in charge
of an association of evicted residents who sued
the government for not paying them enough
compensation. The trial began in July but was
postponed because of the Olympics. I interviewed
her, as other journalists did. Since then she has
been detained.

"The same thing happened with the pastor of an
unrecognised church. Finally, a British woman of
Tibetan origin was arrested and expelled after
giving me an interview. Under these
circumstances, we are all forced to censor
ourselves and to refuse to interview certain
Chinese for fear of their being immediately
arrested. We are all in this situation of
intimidation, which makes it very hard for us to
work in China, despite the overall improvements.

"What's more, the official media have not stopped
attacking us since last March's events in Tibet.
In addition to the death threats received by
dozens of foreign journalists, the Chinese media
try to undermine our credibility. And all of this
gained pace in the run-up to the games."

She is right about Chinese being arrested for
talking to the foreign media. Zhang Wei, a former
resident of the Beijing district of Qianmen, was
arrested on 9 August after filing a request for
permission to protest about her family's eviction
two years ago to make way for Olympic
construction. The Associated Press quotes her son
as saying she is to be held for a month for
"disrupting the social order." The Public
Security Bureau said it was looking at her case
and had no other comment to make.

Other Chinese are being hounded by the
authorities, who fear they could protest during
the games. There has been no news since 7 August
of Zeng Jinyan, the wife of imprisoned activist
Hu Jia, and their seven-month-old daughter. Her
mother in law said to several Chinese-language
news outlets say she may has been forced her to
leave the capital. She had been under permanent
police surveillance for several years in the
"Freedom" residential area where she lives.

Some Beijing intellectuals such as Liu Xiaobo and
Yu Jie have not been detained, but are under
police surveillance. Wan Yanhai, the head of an
NGO that cares for AIDS sufferers, chose to leave
Beijing during the games to avoid being harassed
by the police.

Hua Huiqi, the head of an unrecognised protestant
church, was arrested in Beijing on 9 August while
on his way to a church service that was attended
by US President George W. Bush. His brother -
arrested at the same time but freed a few hours
later - says he has had no news of Hua since
then. The police deny ever arresting Hua and
claim they had no role in his disappearance.
Human Rights in China meanwhile says it got a
short letter in which Hua apparently recounts his
arrest and subsequent escape.

Ji Sizun, a human rights activist form Fujian
province, was arrested on 11 August for filing a
request several days earlier for permission to
demonstrate in one for the areas designated by
the Beijing authorities for protests. Human
Rights Watch says Ji wanted to organise a rally
to protest against corruption and to call for
more citizen participation in government
decisions.

According to HRW, several other Chinese have been
arrested or threatened for filing demonstration
requests. They include relatives of children
killed in the collapse of "tofu" (shoddily-built)
schools in the May earthquake in Sichuan. The
Washington Post reports that families were
prevent from boarding flights in the Sichuan
capital of Chengdu.

Several members of the outlawed China Democracy
Party were arrested in the days preceding the
games opening ceremony. According to Chinese
Human Rights Defenders, Xie Changfa of Hunan
province was arrested on 2 August, while Wang
Rongqing, 65, of Zhejiang province was arrested
on 31 July. They have been charged with inciting
subversion of state authority.

2008-08-08T06:26:00.001-07:00

International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples (ILC)

Emergency Press Release

(August 5th, 2008)

The ILC -- responding to the appeal for solidarity launched by the Korean Trade Union Confederation (KCTU) -- calls on all trade unionists, all working class activists, all the organisations, and all men and women committed to democracy and freedom around the world to respond to this emergency call.

In its press release the KCTU wrote:

* * * * *

"In the midst of mass candlelight protests calling for renegotiations of the April 18th Protocol on importation of US beef, KCTU decided to go into general strike on July 2 to reflect food safety concerns. KCTU general strike on July 2nd was aimed at renegotiation of April 18 protocol on US beef import, stopping privatization and marketization of public services, opposition to the plan of building Korea Grand Canal, and taking appropriate measures to solve the soaring consumer prices.

"The Korean Metal Workers' Union (KMWU) played a leading role in the general strike. The Ministry of Justice and the prosecutor concluded that KMWU's strike on July 2nd was illegal.

"The prosecutor filed for arrest warrants against and has pursued the arrest of the leadership of KCTU, KMWU and Hyundai Motor Branch on the grounds of 'obstruction of business’ provision in section 314 of the Penal Code.'

"We are calling for sending protest letters to the President Lee Myung-bak

By fax: President Lee Myung-bak +82-2-770-4735(Fax)

Or internet: president@cwd.go.kr

Copies should be sent to the Police authorities (Mr. Eo Cheong-soo cnpa100@police.go.kr)

List of detaineees or with arrest warrants

1. KCTU

Mr. Lee Suk-haeng, President, KCTU

Mr. Lee Yong-shik, General Secretary, KCTU

Mr. Jung Gab-deuk, President, KMWU

Mr. Nam Taek-gyu, First Vice-president, KMWU

Mr. Yoon Hae-mo, President, Hyundai Motor Branch

Mr. Kim Tae-gon, First Vice-president, Hyundai Motor Branch

Mr. Kim Jong-il, Vice-president, Hyundai Motor Branch

Mr. Jung Chang-bong, Vice-president, Hyundai Motor Branch

Mr. Joo In-koo, Vice-president, Hyundai Motor Branch

Mr. Jo Chang-min, Secretary,Hyundai Motor Branch

Ms. Jin Yeong-ok, First Vice-president, KCTU

2. Activists

Bak Won-suk, Joint Director of the Field Office of the Coalition

Han Yong-jin, Joint Director of the Field Office of the Coalition

Kim Dong-kyu, Director of the Organizational Team

Kim Kwang-il, Director of the March Team, All Together Steer Committee member

Baek Eun-jong, Vice-Representative, Anti-Lee Myung-bak Internet Café

Baek Seong-gyun, Representative, MichinCow.net

Kwon Hae-jin, Director of Education Movement Headquarters of the Young Korean Academy

3. Detained

Ahn Jin-geol,

Yoon Hui-suk,

Hwang Sun-won,

* * * * *

The ILC calls upon the international labour movement to respond immediately to this appeal:

The KCTU and the Metal Workers Union (KMWU) have done nothing other than to carry our their mandate as trade union organisations within the framework and in application of ILO conventions 87 and 98 providing for the right to organise, the right to represent workers and the right to strike.

The ILC demands the immediate release of all those detained, the immediate lifting of all charges and the immediate withdrawal of all the arrest warrants against the trade unionists concerned.

* Respect the right to strike!

* Respect the right to organise !

* Respect ILO conventions 87 and 98!

* Free all the trade unionists detained !

* Lift all charges !

* Withdraw all arrest warrants !

signed/

Daniel Gluckstein,

Coordinator,

International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples

Paris, France

Aug. 5, 2008

2008-08-06T21:07:00.000-07:00

The Cost of War...

2008-08-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

TAKE ACTION AGAINST YET ANOTHER ATTACK ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM

As anyone who reads this blog knows, since 9/11, the right has ramped up its attack on academics who dare to dissent from the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its policy in the Middle East more generally. Neo-McCarthyite groups like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Students for Academic Freedom and the David Project have published lists of “disloyal” faculty and scurrilous reports on allegedly "anti-American" courses dealing with U.S. imperialism, Islam and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Respected scholars who study and write about such subjects —such as Norman Finkelstein-- have been denied tenure solely on the basis of their politics. In similar instances, applications for tenure have been seriously threatened (Nadia Abu El-Haj: Joseph Massad) and books and their publishers have been targeted for censorship (i.e. Joel Kovel’s book “Overcoming Zionism” and University of Michigan Press). Now, the assault on academic freedom has effected yet another critical scholar: Terri Ginsberg, a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU and an authority on Israeli and Palestinian film.

Last fall, Terri was hired to a one year, non-tenure track position in Film Studies at North Carolina State University (with the possibility of renewal). As part of her teaching responsibilities, she offered advanced courses on film and media treatment of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and on the political aesthetics of Holocaust film (the subject of her recent book) ; she was also charged with helping to program a Middle Eastern film series.

Unfortunately, as Terri detailed in a grievance she filed with the NCSU Faculty in March 2008, the director of the film studies program and the director of the Middle East studies program at NCSU made a number of administrative decisions in the course of the past year that flagrantly violated Terri’s academic freedom.

To begin with, they limited her involvement in the film series which she had been hired to curate, and criticized the introduction she gave at a screening of the Palestinian film “Ticket to Jerusalem” as biased and overly political. Moreover, the director of the film studies program refused to purchase many of the materials Terri had requested for her Palestine/Israel film and media course and submitted her evaluation of Terri’s teaching prematurely. All of this culminate in her contract not being renewed for the upcoming academic year.

The grievance Terri filed with the NCSU Faculty alleged violations of her First Amendment and equal opportunity rights under the University Code. Despite a recommendation from the NCSU Faculty Chair that her case be given a full hearing, NCSU Chancellor James L. Oblinger summarily dismissed her petition on the grounds that it was filed “too late” and that Terri was no longer a university employee. To make matters worse, the AAUP—who had been helping Terri with her case— informed her in the wake of Oblinger’s decision that they would no longer provide her with assistance. (For more information about the facts of Terri’s case, read the following article:

http://media.www.technicianonline.com/media/storage/paper848/news

/2008/07/17/News/Professor.Claims.Unprotected.Speech-3391733.shtml)

In response to this outrage, people from around the world have beeninundating NCSU with letters demanding that the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees allow Terri’s grievance to go forward. An online petition has been started that requests that NCSU consider Terri’s case and asks the AAUP to give her the support she deserves.

Please take a few minutes to help support Terri in this fight. First, add your name to the petition
of support drafted by Academics for Justice (AcademicsForJustice.org):
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Protect-Academic-Freedom

Second, send e-mails and make phone calls to D. McQueen Campbell, chair of the Board of Trustees, and Larry Nielsen, its convener, urging that Terri’s case be heard:

D. McQueen Campbell, Chair

NCSU Board of Trustees

tele: 919-515-2195

fax: 919-831-3545

trustees@ncsu.edu

Dr. Larry A. Nielsen, NCSU Provost &

Executive Vice Chancellor

larry_nielsen@ncsu.edu

tele: 919-515-2195

fax: 919-515-5921

2008-08-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

COINTELPRO all over again!

For the past month or so, I have been researching the late-60s, early-70s underground press scene in Chicago, interviewing staff members of THE CHICAGO SEED and other movement publications, and reading through back issues of the 100s of "Movement"/hippie papers published in the Chicago area in that era. A huge theme that has emerged from this research has been the degree to which the local police and the FBI spied on, harassed and sought to destroy these publications. For instance, members of the Chicago PD's "Red Squad" routinely visited the office of the SEED to "talk" with/interrogate staff. The paper's editor, Abe Peck, was slapped with obscenity charges for an issue featuring a surreal sexual illustration (although, as often happened, the case was ultimately dismissed). Street vendors of the paper were regularly hassled and sometimes arrested. Store and news stand owners were pressured by police to stop selling the publication. Right-wing vigilantes shot out the windows of the paper's office with impunity (and the possible collusion of the cops). And the movements of the staff members were followed with great interest by all levels of law enforcement. The FBI and local police files on the writers, editors, artists and hangers-on associated with just the CHICAGO SEED -- a regional publication with a maximum circulation of 30-40,000 at its peak-- would fill a row of filing cabinets. The famous Church Committee hearings in the U.S. Senate (1975-1976) and a consent decree signed by the city of Chicago in response to a lawsuit brought by the Alliance to End Repression (1981) eventually disclosed that the targeting of the SEED and other underground papers was in fact part of a concerted, coordinated and thoroughly unconstitutional police/FBI/CIA campaign to crush the New Left ( the FBI portion of which was called COINTELPRO).

Now, it looks like the bad old days of Kafka-esque political repression are back (not that they were ever that far behind us, mind you). Turns out MD police have been spying on anti-war and anti-death penalty organizers and then putting their names on official "terrorist" watchlists. I think I'm going to be sick:

Spying uncovered -- baltimoresun.com

Source: www.baltimoresun.com

Undercover Maryland State Police officers repeatedly spied on peace activists and anti-death penalty groups in recent years and entered the names of some in a law-enforcement database of people thought ...

2008-07-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey

Geographer and urban critic David Harvey's work on Marxist economic theory-- especially his magnum opus, "The Limits to Capital," and his more recent "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" -- made a convert out of me. Now, he's made available a series of videos of his lectures on Capital Vol. 1. Brilliant stuff. Check out this lecture on the commodity:

For the entire series of lectures, look here.

2008-07-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

Mass Murder Has Been Conducted in Our Name...

This piece by Peter Phillips-- editor of the annual Project Censored list of top 25 most censored news stories-- really hits the nail on the head. Judged by any reasonable standard, U.S. forces in Iraq are guilty of serious war crimes and the leaders who gave the orders-- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, the Pentagon brass, the whole damn lot of them-- should be brought to justice.

U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq
By Peter Phillips

The United States is directly responsible for
over one million Iraqi deaths since the invasion
five and half years ago. In a January 2008
report, a British polling group Opinion Research
Business (ORB) reports that, "survey work
confirms our earlier estimate that over
1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result
of the conflict which started in 2003.. We now
estimate that the death toll between March 2003
and August 2007 is likely to have been of the
order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account
the margin of error associated with survey data
of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000".

This report comes on the heels of two earlier
studies conducted by Johns Hopkins University
published in the Lancet medical journal that
confirmed the continuing numbers of mass deaths
in Iraq. A study done by Dr. Les Roberts from
January 1, 2002 to March 18 2003 put the
civilian deaths at that time at over 100,000. A
second study published in the Lancet in October
2006 documented over 650,000 civilian deaths in
Iraq since the start of the US invasion. The
2006 study confirms that US aerial bombing in
civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of
these deaths and that over half the deaths are
directly attributable to US forces.

The now estimated 1.2 million dead,
as of July 2008, includes children, parents,
grandparents, great-grandparents, cab drivers,
clerics, schoolteachers, factory workers,
policemen, poets, healthcare workers, day care
providers, construction workers, babysitters,
musicians, bakers, restaurant workers and many
more. All manner of ordinary people in Iraq
have died because the United States decided to
invade their country. These are deaths in
excess of the normal civilian death rate under the prior government.

The magnitude of these deaths is undeniable. The
continuing occupation by US forces guarantees a
mass death rate in excess of 10,000 people per
month with half that number dying at the hands
of US forces- a carnage so severe and so
concentrated at to equate it with the most
heinous mass killings in world history. This act has not gone unnoticed.

Recently, Dennis Kucinich introduced a single
impeachment article against George W. Bush for
lying to Congress and the American people about
the reasons for invading Iraq. On July 15 The
House forwarded the resolution to the Judiciary
Committee with a 238 to 180 vote. That Bush
lied about weapons of mass destruction and
Iraq's threat to the US is now beyond doubt.
Former US federal prosecutor Elizabeth De La
Vega documents the lies most thoroughly in her
book U.S. Vs Bush, and numerous other
researchers have verified Bush's untrue statements.

The American people are faced with a serious
moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been
conducted in our name. We have allowed the
war/occupation to continue in Iraq and offered
ourselves little choice within the top two
presidential candidates for immediate cessation
of the mass killings. McCain would undoubtedly
accept the deaths of another million Iraqi
civilians in order to save face for America, and
Obama's 18-month timetable for withdrawal would
likely result in another 250,000 civilian deaths or more.

We owe our children and ourselves a future
without the shame of mass murder on our
collective conscience. The only resolution of
this dilemma is the immediate withdrawal of all
US troops in Iraq and the prosecution and
imprisonment of those responsible. Anything less
creates a permanent original sin on the soul of
the nation for that we will forever suffer.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at
Sonoma State University and director of Project
Censored a media research group. He is the
co-editor with Dennnis Loo of the book Impeach
the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney.

2008-07-26T13:04:00.000-07:00

Keeping the World at Bay...

As anyone who has been keeping count knows, since 9/11, the Bush administration has barred dozens of prominent foreign nationals from entering the country on the specious grounds that they had some sort of tie to a vaguely defined "terrorism." The case of Tariq Ramadan-- an eminent European Muslim scholar who was prevented from entering the US to take a post at Notre Dame-- is perhaps the most famous. But there have been others: Adam Habib, a South African scholar and outspoken critic of the war in Iraq; Waskar Ari, a Bolivian expert on Bolivian indigeonous religious beliefs and activism; several Cuban scholars and on and on. Now it appears that peaceful, nonviolent, secular human rights activists who just happen to oppose U.S. imperialism's various client regimes are also being barred. Will it never end?

Homeland insecurity
Peter Tatchell guardian.co.uk, Wednesday July 2 2008

In another bizarre twist to Washington's often illegal, irrational "war on terror", peaceful, lawful human rights campaigners are now apparently being refused entry to the US – without any right of appeal.

Noordin Mengal, a British citizen and Baluch human rights defender, was detained and deported by US immigration when he arrived at Newark Liberty airport from Dubai last week. Read more here.

2008-05-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

Pentagon Used Ex-Military Experts as Megaphones for Propaganda

A few weeks ago the New York Times reported what those of us in the anti-war movement have long suspected: that many of those ubiquitous former generals who are forever appearing on TV news shows to talk about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have been carefully coached and cultivated by the Pentagon to echo the administrations' talking points and misinformation. This is of course a violation of longstanding laws prohibiting the military -- or any branch of government-- from engaging in domestic propaganda. Add the "military analyst program" to the large and growing dossier of treasonous offenses for which Bush, Cheney and co. may some day stand trial.

2008-04-07T11:54:00.000-07:00

I should have blogged about this long ago.

A group of former North Central College Broadcasting/Media Students-- many of whom took my first ever "Introduction to New Media" course-- have launched an exciting new site devoted to "music and culture". Check it out here.

Among other things, the site features reviews, a concert calender, interviews with up and coming bands, MP3s and a clever V-blog of album reviews (see below). Nice work guys!

2008-03-28T14:56:00.000-07:00

The $3 Trillion Mistake

This is old news but still deserving of comment.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently co-authored a book (with Linda Bilmes), The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict, which puts the real cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the U.S. economy at roughly $ 3 trillion. They estimate that the war has cost the rest of the world another $ 3 trillion. And they claim that war will ultimately add another $2 trillion to our already enormous $5 trillion national debt. Who has profited from this expensive debacle? The defense and oil industries, the very industries who largely bankrolled the Bush-Cheney Presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004. Coincidence? Hmmm.

Now, I'm usually not a fan of Nobel-Prize winning economists. The Nobel Prize in Economics was created later than the original 5 Nobel Awards (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace) at the urging of and with funding from a group of Swedish bankers. Throughout its history, it has been used to ratify and legitimate what I would call "pro-capitalist," or what some heterodox economists aptly dub "autistic", classical and neoclassical economic dogma. Indeed, a Nobel Prize in Economics is often nothing more than license to perpetuate anti-worker lies and myths under the cover of scholarly respectability. Witness the case of Milton Friedman, who won the prize in 1976 at around the time he was acting as adviser to the bloodthirsty and criminal Pinochet junta in Chile. Usually when I hear "Nobel Laureate in Economics", I prepare myself for an onslaught of reactionary ideology dressed up in the language of "rational game theory" and buttressed by an arsenal of fudged statistics. So, the fact that someone like Stiglitz -- a rather mild-mannered and moderate critic of neoclassical economics-- is taking aim at the Bush administrations' expensive folly in Iraq is noteworthy. And, yes, welcome...Read more below

The $3 trillion war in Iraq

Only two winners have emerged from the conflict: oil companies and defence contractors...

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/339461

2008-03-12T15:12:00.000-07:00

As we approach the 5th anniversary of the illegal, catastrophic and mind-numbingly cruel U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is important to recognize what is really driving American imperialism and militarism: corporate greed, inter-imperialist rivalry and what Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex.It's also important to recognize that that U.S. has been an imperialist power almost since its inception and became the world's major imperialist power in the aftermath of WWII (although the USSR certainly was a close second). The American seizure of Iraq was just the latest in a very long line of "intervensions" that have overthrown governments-- often popularly elected governments-- around the globe. This is a point that is that is underscored by this clever little video:

2008-02-27T10:43:00.001-08:00

Here's a fine video from media reform group Free Press. Enjoy.

2007-07-31T08:26:00.000-07:00

Another expose of FOX NEWS...Of course, criticizing FOX is like shooting fat, disabled ducks in a barrel. But, still, FOX's stupid attack on blogs and bloggers-- who as a group tend to be libertarians, New (or Third Way) Democrats and independent centrists, not socialists or extreme leftists-- is absolutely misinformed. If only DAILY KOS and the other blogs being routinely attacked by O'Reilly were really calling for revolutionary change.

2007-06-18T13:32:00.000-07:00

More Bad News: The Demise of Punk Planet
The tiny club of independent, progressive/radical publications based here in Chicago is about to shrink yet again. I just got word that Punk Planet-- a zine that for 13 years combined service to the punk subculture with coverage of news and commentary about feminism, labor, sexual politics, race relations, the environment and a host of other issues--is going to close its doors. Here's a choice snippet from PP founder and editor Dan Sinker's letter to subscribers:

As much as it breaks our hearts to write these words, the final issue
of Punk Planet is in the post, possibly heading toward you right now.
Over the last 80 issues and 13 years, we've covered every aspect of
the financially independent, emotionally autonomous, free culture we
refer to as "the underground." In that time we've sounded many alarms
from our editorial offices: about threats of co-optation, big-media
emulation, and unseen corporate sponsorship. We've also done
everything in our power to create a support network for independent
media, experiment with revenue streams, and correct the distribution
issues that have increasingly plagued independent magazines. But now
we've come to the impossible decision to stop printing, having
sounded all the alarms and reenvisioned all the systems we can.
Benefit shows are no longer enough to make up for bad distribution
deals, disappearing advertisers, and a decreasing audience of
subscribers.

As to the latter two points, we could blame the Internet. It makes
editorial content—and bands—easy to find, for free. (We're sure our
fellow indie labels, those still standing, can attest to the
difficulties created in the last few years). We can blame educational
and media systems that value magazines focused on consumerism over
engaged dissent. And we can blame the popular but mistaken belief
that punk died several years ago.

But it is also true that great things end, and the best things end
far too quickly.

As to bad distribution deals, we must acknowledge that the financial
hit we took in October of 2005, when our newsstand distributor
announced that it was in dire straits, was worse than we originally
thought. As the dust began to clear from their January bankruptcy
announcement, we began to realize that the magazine was left in
significantly worse shape, distribution-wise, than they let on.

Add to that the stagnation that the independent record world is
suffering under and the effect that has had on our ad sales, not to
mention the loss of independent bookstores with a vested interest in
selling our publication, and it all adds up to a desperate situation.
This has been made far worse by the exhaustion felt from a year and a
half of fighting our own distributor. It was a situation that didn't
have an exit strategy other then, well, exiting.

Sinker goes on to explain that the PP website and book publishing imprint will continue on. Still, the world will be a vastly less interesting place without the excellent print magazine; it could always be counted on for thoughtful columns, eye opening feature articles, interviews with cutting edge bands, artists and activists, and sharp tongued reviews of music, books and media of all kinds. It sure beat the hell out of the corporate rock magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin. I'll miss it...

2007-06-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

An important announcement from...

National Project in Defense of Dissent
and Critical Thinking in Academia

Opposition Mounts as University of Colorado President
Calls for Ward Churchill to be Dismissed

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:Reggie Dylan: (626) 319-1730
Matthew Abraham: (773) 682-9322
Email: criticalxthinking@yahoo.com
Website: www.defendcriticalthinking.org

In a letter to the Board of Regents, University of Colorado President Hank
Brown has called for the dismissal of tenured Ethnic Studies Professor
Ward Churchill. His recommendation goes beyond that
of the faculty investigative committee that examined
charges of research misconduct; and of the faculty
Privilege and Tenure (P&T) committee that recently
heard Churchill’s appeal. Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado
joined Brown in calling for the firing of Churchill,
as his predecessor Bill Owens did two years earlier.
The Board of Regents is expected to make a final
decision in this case at a public hearing some time in
July.
A growing number of scholars see CU’s
investigation of Churchill’s scholarship as completely
illegitimate and a dangerous precedent threatening
dissent and critical thinking in the universities.
The CU - Boulder chapter of the American Association
of University Professors (AAUP) has written that "we
believe that the investigation now is widely perceived
to be a pretext for firing Churchill when the real
reason for dismissal is his politics." The
investigation was launched in the wake of controversy
provoked by an essay Churchill wrote after 9/11.
Churchill noted in response to Brown’s
letter that "the University had received no formal or
written complaints about my scholarship when it
initiated this ‘investigation.’ All of the
allegations investigated were either solicited or
brought directly by University administrators." He
also noted that "The Investigative Committee charged
with conducting a ‘fact-finding, nonadversarial’
investigation was chaired by law professor Mimi
Wesson, who - in February 2005 - had compared me to
'charismatic male celebrity wrongdoers' like O.J.
Simpson, Michael Jackson and Bill Clinton, and had
already come up with the faulty 'traffic stop' analogy
the Committee used to justify its conclusions." The
committee included no American Indians or experts in
American Indian Studies, and scholars that had used
Churchill's research in their own work were removed
from the committee.
The report of the committee hearing
Churchill’s appeal found that Churchill proved by a
"preponderance of the evidence" that "but for" his
exercise of his protected first amendment rights, the
subsequent investigation of his scholarship would
never have been initiated.
In a recent open letter to colleagues
around the country Dr. Margaret LeCompte, President of
the Boulder AAUP Chapter, wrote: "What has happened at
the University of Colorado makes a mockery of both due
process and academic freedom protections, AND what
faculty believe. It is a cruel violation of the
delicate balance between faculty rights and
administrative responsibilities… The entire process
was a sham---imitating the form, but not the intent,
of due process and fair, objective, scholarly
investigation."
Two faculty groups that have examined the
report of the investigative committee claim that the
report is seriously flawed. In an unprecedented
action, both have now filed formal charges of academic
misconduct against the members of the faculty
committee. The most recent group to do so, made up of
principally Indigenous scholars from around the
country and Canada, documented "many instances of
fraud, fabrication, plagiarism and/or serious
deviation from accepted scholarly practices" which
"demonstrate a consistent pattern of deliberate
misrepresentation intended to discredit Professor
Churchill’s larger body of scholarship." Eric
Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White Professor of American
Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, has
found "the Report turns what is a debate about
controversial issues of identity and genocide in
Indian studies into an indictment of one position in
that debate."
The implications of this case go beyond
the threat to Churchill's reputation and career, as
serious as those are. The attack on Churchill is seen
by many in academia as part of a much broader attack
on academic freedom and critical thinking and dissent.
Dr. LeCompte notes, "It is not limited to Colorado. In
fact, it is a test case by the US right wing to
emasculate faculty rights in US universities."
This is illustrated by the recent denial of tenure
for DePaul University political scientist Norman
Finkelstein. Though he was supported by his
department, Finkelstein was denied tenure after an
intense campaign spearheaded by Harvard Law School's
Alan M. Dershowitz, who called Finkelstein "worse than
Churchill." Many DePaul faculty and others were
alarmed at Dershowitz’s heavy-handed tactics and saw
them as an attempt to punish one side of a
controversial debate. Finkelstein said that DePaul’s
decision was based on "transparently political
grounds" and was an "egregious violation" of academic
freedom.
Churchill noted in his response to Brown’s
letter that "President Brown, his new VP Michael
Poliakoff, and Regent Tom Lucero, like Bill Owens, are
key players in Lynne Cheney’s American Council of
Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). ACTA and similar
neoconservative groups have received generous funding
[from] Castle Rock (Coors), Scaife, Bradley and Olin
foundations to eliminate Ethnic, Gender and Peace
Studies Programs and to purge higher education of
those who think critically, challenge historical
orthodoxy, or otherwise threaten the status quo."
Opposition to this impending firing has
been increasing nationally, as more and more academics
recognize the stakes involved in the Churchill case.
An open letter signed by numerous prominent scholars,
including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Derrick Bell and
Immanuel Wallerstein was published in the New York
Review of Books in April. Scores of others have
written letters of support, and there was a recent
Emergency National Forum in Boulder of academics and
supporters. The Society of American Law Teachers has
written a letter arguing against a firing.
Richard Falk, visiting Distinguished
Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara
recently wrote: "All of us who value academic freedom
should now stand in full solidarity with Ward
Churchill. The outcome of his case at the University
of Colorado is the best litmus test we have to tell
whether the right-wing’s assaults on learning and
liberty will stifle campus life in this country. Never
in my lifetime have we in America more needed the sort
of vigorous debate and creative controversy that Ward
Churchill's distinguished career epitomizes. We all
stand to lose if his principled defense fails."
# # #
Signed:
Matthew Abraham - Department of English, De Paul
University.
William Ayers - Distinguished Professor of Education
and Senior University Scholar, University of Illinois
at Chicago.
Derrick A Bell - Visiting Professor of Constitutional
Law, New York University School of Law.
Timothy Brennan - Departments of English and Cultural
Studies & Comparative Literature, University of
Minnesota.
Renate Bridenthal - Emerita Professor of History,
Brooklyn College, The City University of New York.
Bob Buzzanco - Department of History, University of
Houston.
Dana Cloud - Associate Professor of Communication
Studies at the University of Texas (Austin).
Drucilla Cornell - Professor in the Departments of Law
and Political Science at Rutgers University.
Sandi E Cooper - Professor of History, College of
Staten Island and the Graduate School, The City
University of New York.
Richard Delgado - University Distinguished Professor
of Law and Derrick Bell Fellow, University of
Pittsburgh.
Richard A Falk - Albert G. Milbank Professor of
International Law and Practice at Princeton
University; Visiting Distinguished Professor (since
2002), Global Studies, University of California, Santa
Barbara.
Seth Kahn - Assistant Professor of English, West
Chester University of PA.
Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies,
Middle East Institute, Columbia University.
Vinay Lal - Department of History, University of
California, Los Angeles.
Gary Leupp - Professor of History at Tufts University,
and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion.
Henry Silverman - Professor and Chairperson Emeritus,
Department of History, Michigan State University.
Immanuel Wallerstein - Senior Research Scholar, Yale
University.
Tim Wise - Author of "White Like Me: Reflections on
Race from a Privileged Son," and "Affirmative Action:
Racial Preference in Black and White."

2007-06-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

Depaul Caves in to Neo-Con Pressure and Denies Norman Finkelstein Tenure
This past Friday Norman Finkelstein-- a leading critic of the systematic U.S. and Israeli oppression of the Palestinians and a careful analyst of the way the Holocaust has been used by apologists to justify Israeli disregard for international law -- was denied tenure by DePaul University. This despite the fact that he enjoyed excellent teaching evaluations, is a prominent public intellectual with several books to his credit and had the full backing of his department. Yet his tenure bid was blocked first by his dean and then by his president. Why? As president Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider put it in his letter to Finkelstein:

reviewers at all levels, both for and against tenure, commented upon your ad hominem attacks on scholars with whom you disagree... In the opinion of those opposing tenure, your unprofessional personal attacks divert the conversation away from consideration of ideas, and polarize and simplify conversations that deserve layered and subtle consideration. As such, they believe your work not only shifts toward advocacy and away from scholarship, but also fails to meet the most basic standards governing scholarship discourse within the academic community.

A little later in the letter Holtschneider says that he cannot "in good faith conclude that you honor your obligations to 'respect and defend the free inquiry of associates,' 'show due respect for the opinions of others,' and 'strive to be objective in their professional judgment of colleagues.'"

Having only read one of Finkelstein's older books (The Holocaust Industry) and some of his popular articles, I can't say for certain that this is a total misrepresentation of his work but the stuff of his I have read not only exceeds "basic standards governing scholarship" but is much more politically relevant, more insightful, and better written than most of the dreck cranked out by legions of other, perhaps more polite, professors in history and political science. True, Finkelstein has been engaged in an ongoing feud with the ever obstreperous Allen Dershowitz, Harvard law professor and well known apologist for Israeli militarism. But in this particular spat, it has been Dershowitz who has failed to respect the free inquiry of others and whose behavior has consistently failed to meet the standards of the academic community: instead of attempting to refute Finkelstein's criticisms of his views on Israel, he actually lobbied Governor of California Arnold Schwartzenegger in an effort to prevent the University of California Press from publishing them.

Yet even if the charges Holtschneider makes about Finkelstein are true, is that sufficient grounds for silencing a unique and courageous voice who even the president himself admits is "provocative, challenging and intellectually interesting?" One wonders whether or not any of the more famous conservative/reactionary intellectuals of past few years would be able to pass muster if the DePaul standard were uniformly enforced throughout academia. Former Secretary of Education William Bennett, cultural critic Allan Bloom, historian Paul Johnson -- to name only three such right-of-center authors -- have made entire careers out of spewing hateful polarizing rhetoric and launching vicious personal attacks; hell, Johnson's Intellectuals is nothing but one long, gossip-filled ad hominem assault on every left-wing intellectual from Rousseau to Brecht. How much did Leo Strauss-- advocate of using noble lies to manipulate the allegedly witless masses-- "respect the opinion of others"? And has Pepperdine University's Daniel Pipes-- founder of the neo-McCarthyite outfit Campus Watch-- ever once acted to "defend the free inquiry" of left-wing opponents of U.S. foreign policy?

The standard Holtschneider invokes in his letter is ultimately so malleable as to be virtually useless in practice. The truth is that people whose views are on the receiving end of even the most rigorously argued, clearly delineated and factually based criticisms will inevitably read them as "personal attacks" (even when they are framed explicitly as "considerations of ideas"); this is doubly true if the people in question happen to be right-wing ideological hotheads like the Neo-Con crowd.

But, of course, the real reason Finkelstein got the ax had absolutely nothing to do with the "tone" of his work or his ad hominem attacks on Dershowitz or anyone else; rather, it had to do with the subversive ideas that he advocated. Since 9/11, criticism of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East-- and in particular, criticism of U.S. support of Israel-- has become the third rail of academia in this country. Touch it and your life in higher education may come to a sudden end. That is the clear message implicit in the Finkelstein tenure decision, in the firing of Ward Churchill at Colorado, in the carefully orchestrated public fervor over allegations about anti-Israeli bias at Columbia, and in the countless efforts made by college administrators and reactionary pundits like David Horowitz to punish faculty for speaking out against the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is a very dark day for academic freedom.

2007-06-06T21:28:00.000-07:00

We the People..Don't Want No War.

2007-06-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

Meen Erhabe/Who's the terrorist?
Interesting rap video that raises a vitally important question about Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the double standard involved in the way we in the West discuss "terrorism"...

2007-05-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

Burn in Hell, Jerry Falwell, Burn in Hell
If there is a Hell, Jerry Falwell's stunted, blackened, hate-filled little soul is at this moment almost certainly smoldering away in its deepest, hottest pit. How could a just God possibly spare a man who was an unapologetic segregationist (until the political winds started to shift), who supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, who gave his blessing to one U.S.-backed imperialist bloodbath after another, who callously applauded as the government slashed funding for the poor and the homeless, who saw the 9/11 attacks as divine retribution for "sins" committed by secular groups like the ACLU and People for the American way, who equated feminism with witchcraft, whose homophobic tirades (at least implicitly) legitimized hatred of and violence towards gays and lesbians, and who rarely missed an opportunity to spew demagogic misinformation about everything from children's TV characters to global warming in the national media? Unfortunately, as an atheist who is skeptical of the whole notion of an "afterlife," I strongly suspect that Falwell in death has evaded any sort of final reckoning for all the lives he destroyed in the course of his mean-spirited sanctimonious career. He now sleeps the blissful, eternal sleep of nonexistence. We, sadly, have to live with the legacy of evil he has left behind.

2007-04-18T13:10:00.000-07:00

Here's to the State of Missouri...*
According to Free Exchange on Campus, on April 12, "the Missouri House passed HB 213, the ACTA-inspired bill that mandates annual reporting to the coordinating board of higher education on issues of 'intellectual diversity' including protecting the viewpoint that 'the Bible is inerrant.' Rep. Jane Cunningham, the sponsor of the bill, wants the good folks of Missouri to believe this is based on the views of students because she has an individual case that she misrepresents as a systemic problem."

Every academic in the country ought to write a nasty letter to the speaker of the Missouri House and to every major newspaper in the the Show Me state protesting this nonsense. And we should be vigilant about this bill becoming a template for other states around the country. Among other things, the act opens the door to the teaching of so-called "intelligent design" as science and legitimates "monitoring" of the content of university classes. Of course, those of us on the socialist left could perhaps use the mandate for "intellectual diversity" in this legislation to protest the pro-business propaganda that often passes for scholarship and teaching in economics and business departments (where many faculty treat, not the Bible, but the equally loony pronouncements of Milton Friedman as "inerrant").

[ * Phil Ochs, at the height of the civil rights struggle in the south, penned a delightfully pointed little ditty called "Here's to the State of Mississippi" skewering that state for clinging to its racist, segregationist policies. The title of this post is an allusion to that song. Below is a choice snippet from Ochs' lyrics:

And here's to the schools of Mississippi
Where they're teaching all the children that they don't have to care
All the rudiments of hatred are present everywhere
And every single classroom is a factory of despair
There's nobody learning such a foreign word as fair
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of]

2007-04-16T19:41:00.000-07:00

The Death Knell of the Little Magazine?
Bob McChesney sent out an urgent letter earlier today alerting media reform activists and media studies scholars alike to the U.S. Post Office's impending rate hike and what it will do to "little magazines" like In These Times, The Nation, Monthly Review, Z Magazine and, for that matter, right wing publications like The National Review.

Here's some of the more important bits:

The U.S. Post Office is in the process of implementing a radical reformulation of its rates for magazines, such that smaller periodicals will be hit with a much much larger increase than the largest magazines.

Because the Post Office is a monopoly, and because magazines must use it, the postal rates always have been skewed to make it cheaper for smaller publications to get launched and to survive. The whole idea has been to use the postal rates to keep publishing as competitive and wide open as possible. This bedrock principle was put in place by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. They considered it mandatory to create the press system, the Fourth Estate necessary for self-government.

It was postal policy that converted the free press clause in the First Amendment from an abstract principle into a living breathing reality for Americans. And it has served that role throughout our history.

What the Post Office is now proposing goes directly against 215 years of postal policy. The Post Office is in the process of implementing a radical reformulation of its mailing rates for magazines. Under the plan, smaller periodicals will be hit with a much larger increase than the big magazines, as much as 30 percent. Some of the largest circulation magazines will face hikes of less than 10 percent.

The new rates, which go into effect on July 15, were developed with no public involvement or congressional oversight, and the increased costs could damage hundreds, even thousands, of smaller publications, possibly putting many out of business. This includes nearly every political journal in the nation. These are the magazines that often provide the most original journalism and analysis. These are the magazines that provide much of the content on Common Dreams. We desperately need them.

What the Post Office is planning to do now, in the dark of night, is implement a rate structure that gives the best prices to the biggest publishers, hence letting them lock in their market position and lessen the threat of any new competition. The new rates could make it almost impossible to launch a new magazine, unless it is spawned by a huge conglomerate.

Not surprisingly, the new scheme was drafted by Time Warner, the largest magazine publisher in the nation. All evidence available suggests the bureaucrats responsible have never considered the implications of their draconian reforms for small and independent publishers, or for citizens who depend upon a free press.

The corruption and sleaziness of this process is difficult to exaggerate. As one lawyer who works for a large magazine publisher admits, “It takes a publishing company several hundred thousand dollars to even participate in these rate cases. Some large corporations spend millions to influence these rates.” Little guys, and the general public who depend upon these magazines, are not at the table when the deal is being made.

The genius of the postal rate structure over the past 215 years was that it did not favor a particular viewpoint; it simply made it easier for smaller magazines to be launched and to survive. That is why the publications opposing the secretive Post Office rate hikes cross the political spectrum. This is not a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue, it is a democracy issue. And it is about having competitive media markets that benefit all Americans. This reform will have disastrous effects for all small and mid-sized publications, be they on politics, music, sports or gardening.

This process was conducted with such little publicity and pitched only at the dominant players that we only learned about it a few weeks ago and it is very late in the game. But there is something you can do. Please go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com and sign the letter to the Postal Board protesting the new rate system and demanding a congressional hearing before any radical changes are made. The deadline for comments is April 23

I want to reiterate Bob's call to action here. The disappearance of "little magazines" would be a huge blow to the left because-- in the absence of strong left political parties and militant unions--they are among the few institutions that give the left in the U.S. a national identity. And without them, I'd be forced to read Newsweek, Time, the New Republic, U.S. News and World Report, Foreign Policy and other such pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist, pop-culture-obsessed dreck. Please save me from this mind-numbing fate. Log onto www.stoppostalratehikes.com and make your voice heard....

2007-03-14T13:57:00.000-07:00

Check this out. Powerful stuff....

2007-02-19T19:18:00.000-08:00

On November 22nd 1987, someone hacked into the signals of Chicago TV stations WGN and WTTW and used the hijacked airwaves to broadcast a short piece of absurdist theater featuring a performer in an oversized Max Headroom mask. The people responsible for this bizarre little incident were never caught, despite the best efforts of the FBI and the FCC.

You can watch the video here
And you can read more about this strange episode in Chicago's media history here.

2007-02-07T21:03:00.002-08:00

Here's the latest stinking heap of bad news about the Bush administration's illegal and increasingly savage occupation of Iraq. So far this bloody misadventure has claimed the lives of over 150,000 Iraqi civilians (and 3,000 American GIs), caused countless more serious injuries and, according to a recent UN report, created some 3.7 million Iraqi refugees. The price tag for all this senseless mayhem? In the neighborhood of $ 2 trillion.

It is worth remembering that back in 2002, on the eve of the invasion, White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey was fired for predicting that an Iraq war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion.

For more on the true cost of the war, read on...

Iraq war could cost US over $2 trillion, says Nobel prize-winning
economist
Jamie Wilson in Washington
Saturday January 7, 2006
The Guardian

The real cost to the US of the Iraq war is likely to be between $1
trillion and $2 trillion (£1.1 trillion), up to 10 times more than
previously thought, according to a report written by a Nobel
prize-winning economist and a Harvard budget expert.

The study, which expanded on traditional estimates by including such
costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for troops injured in the
conflict as well as the impact on the American economy, concluded that
the US government is continuing to underestimate the cost of the war.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1681119,00.html

2006-12-14T14:18:00.001-08:00

More than a year ago lefty webzine Third Coast Press -- along with several members of Chicago Media Action and the local peace and justice movement-- challenged the licenses of every TV station in the Chicago market. Their petition to the FCC cited the stations' failure to adequately cover the debate over the war in Iraq and their chronic lack of attention to the city's African American, Latino and working class residents. Today, the FCC finally did what we always predicted they would do: they rejected the TCP petition. Indeed, those of us in the media reform/media democracy movement would have been shocked had that corrupt and venal agency actually done the right thing and launched further inquiries into TCP's complaints.

But this is not the end of this issue. Far from it. If the FCC had accepted the TCP petition, they would have had to hold a public hearing -- in Chicago-- about the stations' performance and their service to the public interest . Well, I can tell you that plans are already afoot to hold a public hearing, or perhaps even a series of public hearings, without the sanction of Bush's FCC. Chicago's TV broadcasters will not be able to escape public, democratic accountability so easily....

FCC Rejects Call for Chicago Stations' License Denial

By Ira Teinowitz

The Federal Communications Commission today rejected Third Coast Press' attempt to halt the license renewal of all 18 Chicago market TV stations, saying the progressive newspaper didn't prove its charge that the stations have been "systematically negligent" in serving the public service.
Read the whole story here: http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=11228

2006-10-24T13:15:00.000-07:00

Urban Communication Foundation

Press Release

23 October 2006

The Urban Communication Foundation announces the recipients of

the 2006 Jane Jacobs Publication Award.

First Prize: Urban Nightmares: The Media and the Moral Panic over the City by Steve Macek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

The University of Minnesota describes Urban Nightmares:

For the past twenty-five years, American culture has been marked by an almost palpable sense of anxiety about the nation's inner cities. Urban America has been consistently depicted as a site of moral decay and uncontrollable violence, held in stark contrast to the allegedly moral and orderly suburbs and exurbs.

In Urban Nightmares, Steve Macek documents the scope of these alarmist representations of the city, examines the ideologies that informed them, and exposes the interests they ultimately served. From exploring the conservative analysis of the urban poverty, joblessness, and crime that became entrenched during the post-Vietnam War era to how Hollywood filmmakers, advertisers, and journalists validate the right-wing discourse on the urban crisis, popularizing its vocabulary, Macek takes a hard-hitting look at the role of right-wing ideologues and the mass media in demonizing urban America.

The UCF Jane Jacobs Awards Committee in announcing its choice noted:

Steve Macek weaves a range of rich examples (from government reports to popular film to newspaper accounts) in an effort to show how public opinions have been formed about the inner city and the people who live there. The book challenges our preconceived notions of urban life and challenges us to re-think how we represent others and how we accept and/or reject representations put forth by public officials and mass media. The book is an outstanding representation of urban communication scholarship.

This recognition carries with it a $1500 award that will be presented at the Urban Communication Foundation reception at the National Communication Associations’ Annual meeting in San Antonio on Thursday, November 16 at 6:30 p.m.

Second Prize: More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell by Jane Golden, Robin Rice, and Natalie Pompilio. With Photographs by David Graham and Jack Ramsdale (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). In their description of this volume Temple University Press said

More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell continues the remarkable
story of an unlikely artistic collaboration that began as part of
Philadelphia's Anti-Graffiti Network. In June 1984, Jane Golden, a young
muralist headed up a project that was originally planned as a six-week youth
program in the fledgling Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network. This small
exercise in fighting graffiti grew into the Philadelphia Murals Arts Program
(MAP), one of the most vibrant public art projects in the United States. Two
decades later, MAP is now partnering with the criminal justice system, the
Department of Human Services, and the Philadelphia School District to work
with students in public schools who have truancy issues or criminal records.
This collaboration has helped bolster the ways in which public art helps
transform lives-one of the goals of MAP

The UCF Jane Jacobs Awards Committee in citing this work stated:

Philadelphia Murals: More Philadelphia Mural and the Stories They Tell describes and shows how art and community building can be interconnected. The murals discussed in this book and presented through beautiful photographs are representations of efforts made by artists and everyday people to communicate pride and joy, hopes and fears, and to protest injustice in a fashion that simultaneously reflects on-going public conversations and helps shape those conversations. The author's discussion and description of the Philadelphia murals foregrounds the mural as a communal communicative artifact.

This recognition is accompanied by a monetary award of $500 and will be presented at the Urban Communication Foundation reception on Thursday, November 16 at the National Communication Association’s annual meeting in San Antonio at 6:30 p.m.

6 Fourth Road

Great Neck, New York 11021-1506

www.urbancommunicationfoundation.com

Tel: 516.466.0136 Fax: 516.466.1782

Mobile: 516.567.9220 e-mail: listra@optonline.net

2006-10-22T16:02:00.000-07:00

“Black Writing” and “Urban Nightmares” authors to hold book-signing

NAPERVILLE, Ill. (Oct. 18, 2006) — North Central faculty authors and Naperville residents, Richard Guzman, professor of English, and Steve Macek, assistant professor of speech communication, will hold a joint book talk and signing on Thursday, Nov. 2, at 7 p.m. The public is invited to attend this free event at Barnes and Noble Booksellers, 47 E. Chicago Ave., where the authors will read excerpts, followed by a discussion and signing.

Guzman will discuss his newest book, “Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It?” The book combines poems, stories, memoirs, analysis, newspaper writing and radio drama, taking readers on a fascinating literary journey through Chicago’s rich cultural history. He collected the literature of more than 60 Black authors representing the 19th century through current day. “[It’s] a book of great importance and a sheer delight to read,” says Carolyn Rodgers, a poet and National Book Award nominee.

Macek’s “Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right and the Moral Panic Over the City” explores alarmist representations of the inner city and the urban poor created by the media, intellectuals and mainstream politicians. He analyzes Hollywood film, advertisements and television news in an attempt to find the sources of the negative perceptions of urban areas. One reviewer called the book’s approach “. . . a refreshing change of pace . . . in our current political environment.”

In addition, on Saturday, Oct. 21, Macek will be speaking about his book at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison, Wis. For more information: http://www.wisconsinbookfestival.org/presenters/presenters.php

Guzman may be reached at rrguzman@noctrl.edu or 630-637-5280 and Macek may be reached at shmacek@noctrl.edu or 630-637-5369.

2006-08-24T20:12:00.000-07:00

Ok. So it has been a good two or even three months since I've posted anything to this blog. And I've got lots and lots of issues I want to sound off about when I manage to find the time (the Kevin Barrett episode and the future of academic freedom, for one). For the time being, though, I just want to point out that a number of media policy battles that will have a profound impact on the future shape of the communication landscape have been heating up this August and, though the forces of democracy and the common good stand a decent chance of winning in each case, disaster is still not out of the question.

First of all, there is the on-going battle to insert some sort of protection for the principal of Internet "network neutrality" into the omnibus telecommunications legislation that has passed the House and is now under consideration in the Senate. As Mitchell Szczepanczyk and I detail in an op-ed we wrote for the Illinois Editorial Forum (that was published initially in La Raza), if the big telecomm companies (Comcast, ATT, etc.) get their way, they'll be allowed to grant preferential treatment to their own web-based services (streaming video, long distance telephony, etc.) and to those customers willing to pay for the privledge and will be more or less allowed to block or stifle their competitors.

Second, the same bill that is poised to destroy the Internet will also do immesurable damage to cable access TV (which is the one place on TV that most people can have a chance to see truly radical programming, like "Labor Beat" or the nationally syndicated "Democracy Now"). Essentially, it will reduse the funding base for cable access stations AND limit their future growth by fixing the number of channels set allocated for public access at its current (l980s, pre-digital) levels. Mitchell Szczepanczyk and I have written about this in yet another op-ed syndicated by the Illinois Editorial Forum; this one was published first in the Rock River Times.

Finally, the FCC has at long decided to revist its broadcast ownership rules for the first time since a groundswell of opposition forced it to back off of its proposed deregulation back in 2003. As Scott Sanders details in his July 24th post on the Chicago Media Action website:

Just a few hours ago, the 3-2 Republican-dominated Federal Communications Commission released its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on broadcast ownership and broadcast/newspaper cross-ownership. At last, here is the required followup to the broadly rejected 2003 attempt under the agency's former chair Michael Powell (son of Colin) to eliminate virtually all remaining broadcast ownership rules. Those proposed rule changes were ultimately discarded by the courts and the Senate too. According to Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein's mostly dissenting response, we may be heading in the direction of another fiasco similar to the one in 2003...

The public has until Friday September 22nd to file comments with the FCC.

In any case, I strongly encourage everyone out there in the blogosphere to weigh in on each of these issues. The most important thing people can do about net neutrality and cable access at this point is contact their U.S. Senators and demand they take a stand in favor of a democratic media system by protecting current levels of funding for cable access TV and passing legislation that ensures a "neutral" internet free of corporate censorship and control. And in the case of media ownership regulations, it is vital not only to file comments with the FCC but to prepare for protests and other forms of popular pressure in the likely even that the Republican-dominated FCC once again ignores the public will.

2006-04-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

Out this month on U of MN Press, finally, at long last, my first book:

Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right and the Moral Panic over the City. ISBN 0-8166-4361-X.

Click on the cover at left for more information.
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/M/macek_urban.html

2006-02-11T19:59:00.000-08:00

And I've got another book coming out this year, on Peter Lang, about Marxism and Communication Studies. When it rains, it pours...

2006-02-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

Giant Corporations Attack Net Freedom!
The big telecom giants are pressuring Congress to destroy the Internet as we know it. If they get their way, they'll be able to use their control over our access to the net to steer us all to their content and software and services and freeze out everything else. Read more about it here:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060220/wexler

To do something about it, go here:
http://netfreedomnow.org/

If you care at all about the future of freedom on the net, act now.

2006-01-30T07:40:00.000-08:00

ILO Director-General Juan Somavia warns of "unprecedented jobs crisis"Wednesday 25 January 2006 (ILO/06/02)DAVOS, Switzerland (ILO News) - The world is facing an "unprecedented globaljobs crisis of mammoth proportions", the Director-General of theInternational Labour Organization (ILO) said today in a statement issued forthe annual World Economic Forum (WEF) taking place here.ILO Director-General Juan Somavia hailed the decision of the WEF to place onits 2006 agenda an item on creating future jobs, and urged the world's topbusiness and government leaders attending the Forum to consider urgent stepsfor tackling a worsening global jobs situation. (...)The ILO Director-General said the global jobs crisis was illustrated by anumber of factors:* Half of all the workers in the world - some 1.4 billion working poor -currently live in families that survive on less than US$2 a day per person.They work in the vast informal sector - from farms to fishing, fromagriculture to urban alleyways - without benefits, social security or healthcare.*Unemployment in terms of actual people out of work is at its highest pointever and continues to rise. In the last ten years, official unemployment hasgrown by more than 25 per cent and now stands at nearly 192 millionworldwide, or about 6 per cent of the global workforce.*Of these unemployed, the ILO estimates that 86 million, or about half theglobal total, are young people aged 15 to 24.*When people cannot find work at home in their communities and societiesthey look elsewhere. In the present environment, labour migration easilybecomes a source of tension, not to speak of trafficking and other similaractivities.Complete text at http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inf/pr/2006/2.htm

2006-01-09T14:45:00.000-08:00

QUAKER ORGANIZATION CALLS FOR END TO GOVERNMENT SPYING

AFSC Says Surveillance of Peace Groups is "Outrageous"

PHILADELPHIA - An organization at the forefront of combating illegal FBI surveillance tactics in the seventies now urges Congress to undertake a complete and thorough review of reports that the Pentagon is spying on "peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups."

Calling it a "new McCarthyism," the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) also likened the troublesome revelation to the notorious COINTELPRO, an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program - the covert FBI project aimed at undercutting Vietnam anti-war organizing and the civil rights movement. COINTELPRO was publicly unmasked through congressional hearings in 1975, leading to stronger congressional oversight of federal law enforcement. Many of the protections instituted then have been eroded in recent years under the USA PATRIOT Act and other domestic surveillance activities authorized by the President. Concerned Americans are encouraged to write their Congressional representatives in Washington.

"Clearly the constitutional right of free speech and peaceful assembly is not a criminal offense," states Mary Ellen McNish, general secretary of AFSC, an international social justice organization and co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. "It's an outrage."

Early last week, NBC reported the existence of a secret Department of Defense (DOD) database related to "potential terrorist threats." One example of identified "threats" is a group in Lake Worth, Florida that included five Quakers and a 79-year old grandmother who met at their local Quaker meeting house to discuss how to protest military recruiting at an area high school. Other examples of "threatening" events in the database included handing out literature in front of military recruiting stations and commemorating the second anniversary of the Iraq War.

At least four of the events listed were activities coordinated or supported by AFSC.

The report by NBC News was followed last Friday by a story in the New York Times that President Bush has secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the U.S. without court-approved warrants. The President and the DOD now admit they've been spying on thousands of people in this country for simply exercising their constitutional rights.

Additionally, the ACLU recently released documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that show the FBI 'Joint Terrorism Task Force' is recording the names and license plate numbers of peaceful protesters.

"We must not forget that it was not so long ago that COINTELPRO was infiltrating student groups illegally and plotting against 'radical' activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.," states Joyce Miller, AFSC assistant general secretary for justice and human rights. "We must take action now to see that history doesn't repeat itself."

"This new wave of spying can only be seen as a threat to our constitutional rights to free speech and the freedom of assembly," McNish adds. "We have a fundamental right to speak our minds and organize on the issues of the day."

Recently AFSC legally challenged similar surveillance activities in Denver, Colorado, Chicago and other communities.

"In Denver, the courts agreed with us then that spying, not free speech, is a threat, as they did during the Vietnam War, when we helped win guarantees that our military will not spy on Americans," McNish observes.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, AFSC secured hundreds of federal files detailing government surveillance projects and intelligence documents targeting U.S. peace groups in the early 70s. Public exposure of the Pentagon papers, FBI files and other documents gave a glimpse of the vast extent of surveillance, record keeping and disruptive (and sometimes lethal) activity carried on by government intelligence agencies, from the CIA and FBI down to local police against large numbers of American citizens.

"It is imperative that we uphold the Bill of Rights and not trample the very principles upon which our country was founded, especially now - when war rages on in Iraq, and anxiety about terrorism causes fear and suspicion of our fellow citizens," McNish commented. "This is the great lesson learned from the mistakes of World War II and the unjust internment of our Japanese neighbors and fellow citizens."

Historically, members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) have been known for 'speaking truth to power,' hence becoming the subject of suspicion and at times violence because of their pacifism. Friends have worked to assist runaway slaves and have been prominent in the civil rights movement. The American Friends Service Committee, along with the British Friends Service Council, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the humanitarian work of Quakers during and after World Wars I and II. With national headquarters in Philadelphia, AFSC has offices across the United States and in 22 countries of the world working for peace, indigenous and immigrant rights and a host of social and economic justice issues.

For more information, including ways to write Congressional representatives to vocalize concerns about government spying, visit the AFSC web at afsc.org.

# # #

The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization that includes people of various faiths who are committed to social justice, peace and humanitarian service. Its work is based on the belief in the worth of every person and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice.

2005-12-20T10:30:00.000-08:00

Your Homeland Security dollars hard at work...harassing intellectually curious college students!

UMass student visited by Feds for requesting Mao's Little Red Book from library
Agents' visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior
By AARON NICODEMUS, Standard-Times staff writer

NEW BEDFORD -- A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federalagents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tomeon Communism called "The Little Red Book."

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams andRobert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the bookthrough the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism forProfessor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled outa form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number andSocial Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in NewBedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, theprofessors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book ison a "watch list," and that his background, which included significanttime abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

"I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book," Professor Pontbriand said."Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoringinter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.

The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002 in this country. The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants.

The Little Red Book, is a collection of quotations and speech excerpts from Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung. In the 1950s and '60s, during the Cultural Revolution in China, it was required reading. Although there are abridged versions available, the student asked for a version translated directly from the original book.

The student told Professor Pontbriand and Dr. Williams that theHomeland Security agents told him the book was on a "watch list." They brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student, the professors said.

Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that someof his calls are monitored. "My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think," he said.

Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk. "I shudder to think of all the students I've had monitoring al-Qaeda Websites, what the government must think of that," he said. "Mao Tse-Tungis completely harmless."

Contact Aaron Nicodemus at anicodemus@s-t.com From http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12-05/12-17-05/a09lo650.htm.

2005-11-14T13:51:00.000-08:00

Citizens Push FCC to Improve TV, Then and Now
By Stephen Macek and Mitchell Szczepanczyk

In 1961, Newton Minow, then chair of the Federal Communications Commission,
famously decried television programming at the time as a "vast wasteland."
Many citizens including area educators, religious groups, community
organizations, and unions agreed and complained that our TV stations were
consistently ignoring local issues.

In 1962, the FCC responded to these concerns by convening a landmark series
of hearings in Chicago to determine if television stations were fulfilling
their legal obligations to serve the public interest.

While the hearings didn't forge any key policy changes, they did reaffirm
the FCC's commitment to require TV broadcasters to reflect community
concerns and showcase community voices in at least some programming.

After more than four decades of rampant commercialism and lax FCC oversight,
television today is much worse than it was in the early 1960s.

Exhibit A: Chicago TV stations' horribly inadequate coverage of nonfederal
elections in 2004. The Center for Media and Public Affairs, a media research
group, found that the five highest-rated TV stations in the Chicago market
devoted less than 8 percent of their newscasts to election coverage in the
month before Election Day 2004.

Some 66 percent of that coverage dealt exclusively with the presidential
campaign, while less than 1 percent covered state legislative races. This
mirrors a pattern in local media across the country; the Lear Center's local
news archive at the University of Southern California studied 11 media
markets during this same time and found that a given half-hour of local news
averaged a mere 2.4 minutes devoted to local electoral coverage.

Exhibit B: Chicago's TV stations consistently ignore news about and
perspectives from communities of color. Chicago's population is 37 percent
African-American and 26 percent Latino, yet no person of color hosts any
locally-produced public affairs shows on the city's English-language
stations. A study of the guests appearing on one flagship news show found
that more than 79 percent of guests were white, only 12 percent were African
American, and less than 3 percent were Latino. Multiple studies also confirm
that local TV news coverage of predominately African-American and Latino
neighborhoods in Chicago overwhelmingly focus on crime and social
dysfunction and exclude all other topics.

Clearly, another FCC investigation into the inadequacies of television is
long overdue.
Fortunately, media reform activists may provide a glimpse of hope. TV
broadcasters must renew their broadcast licenses every eight years, at which
time citizens can file objections with the FCC. All of the TV licenses in
the state are up for renewal in 2005, and the growing media reform movement
has seized on this opportunity to force broadcasters to pay attention to
their concerns.

On November 1, Chicago Media Action -- the city's leading media reform group
-- petitioned the FCC to deny the license renewals of nine English-language
TV stations in Chicago. The petition pointed to the paucity of TV coverage
of local elections as its basis for complaint.

At the same time, Third Coast Press, a Chicago-based community newspaper and
web-site, filed its own petition asking the FCC to revoke the licenses of
nearly 20 Chicago-area stations. Their filing addressed a number of
concerns, including scant and dismissive news coverage of antiwar protests
and increasing violence against women on TV.

The FCC should take these petitions seriously. The performance of the
stations in question has been deplorable and their license renewal
applications should be closely scrutinized. Moreover, the problems with
Illinois' TV broadcasters are symptomatic of the shortcomings of American
television in general. Acting on the complaints raised by media reform
groups would send a powerful message to TV stations around the country.

If the FCC accepts either or both of these petitions, the license renewal
applications of the affected stations would be subject to a hearing.
Ultimately, the issues raised in these petitions deserve to be discussed in
an open and public forum so that area residents can finally weigh in on the
dismal service they receive from their TV outlets.

Forty-three years have elapsed since those 1962 hearings and the public has
been forced to endure a continuing "vast wasteland" with nary an oasis in
sight. It is high time citizens were given a chance to talk back to their TV
sets again.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Macek is an assistant professor of speech communication at North Central
College. Szczepanczyk is an organizer with Chicago Media Action and a
frequent contributor to assorted Chicago-area independent media efforts in
print, web, radio and television.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Copyright (C) 2005 by the Illinois Editorial Forum. Letters should be sent
to the Forum, P.O. Box 82, Springfield, IL 62705-0082 11/05

2005-11-02T07:51:00.000-08:00

CHICAGO MEDIA REFORM GROUP FILES FCC PETITION TO DENY RENEWAL OF ALL COMMERCIAL TV STATION LICENSES IN CHICAGO

GROUP CITES STATIONS' SYSTEMATIC FAILURE TO COVER STATE AND LOCAL ELECTIONS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 2, 2005

CONTACTS:Washington, DC:Andrew Jay Schwartzman (President, Media Access Project)202-232-4300andys@mediaaccess.org Chicago:Mitchell Szczepanczyk (Chicago Media Action)773-753-0818mitchell@chicagomediaaction.org Steve Macek (Chicago Media Action)630-995-6374 (cell)shmacek@noctrl.edu

Washington, DC -- On Tuesday, November 1st, lawyers for media reform group Chicago Media Action (CMA) filed a formal petition with the Federal Communication Commission requesting that it deny the pending license renewal applications of nine Chicago television stations. The petition charges that the stations in question -- WBBM, WMAQ, WLS, WGN, WCIU, WFLD, WCPX, WSNS and WPWR -- fell far short of their obligations to serve the public interest by failing to provide adequate coverage of local and state elections during the 2004 campaign.

Under the terms of their licenses, television broadcasters are required to serve the public interest, convenience and necessity. Stations must renew their licenses every eight years, at which time citizens can file objections with the FCC. All of the television licenses in the state of Illinois are up for renewal this year. If the FCC grants CMA's petition, the license renewals for the nine stations would be subject to a hearing, at least part of which would be held in or near Chicago.

Chicago Media Action's petition cites a study of locally produced news programming conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in support of its claims about the lack coverage of local elections in 2004. Based on a systematic review of all news and public affairs programming aired by the five highest-rated stations in the Chicago media market, the CMPA study found that just 7.8 percent of the station's newscasts during the last month of the 2004 campaign focused on elections. Some 79 percent of that election reporting dealt exclusively with the Presidential and Senate races. By contrast, U.S. House races accounted for just four percent of the stations' election coverage and Illinois House races accounted for less than one percent.

CMA's lawyer, Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Washington, DC-based public interest law firm Media Access Project, remarked, "The FCC has repeatedly affirmed the importance of broadcasters' service to the local community. It's impossible to reconcile this emphasis on localism with the paucity of local election coverage available to Chicago voters."

"These broadcasters get to use the public airwaves for free and rake in millions of dollars every year in advertising revenue," explained CMA board member Mitchell Szczepanczyk. "The least they can do in return is provide us with the news and information we need as citizens. Yet television news in Chicago consistently ignores state and local politics. Last year, for instance, WGN-TV did not air a single story about the many hotly contested races for the Illinois State Legislature. It's a disgrace. They simply don't deserve to stay on the air."

The document filed by CMA was not the only complaint the FCC received this week against Chicago's television outlets. Also on Tuesday, Third Coast Press, a Chicago-based community newspaper and website, submitted a "petition to deny" of its own one that challenged the license renewal applications of the city's commercial television stations as well as public broadcasters WTTW and WYCC on the grounds that, among other things, the stations' news programming marginalized the voices of anti-war activists in the lea—up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

ABOUT CHICAGO MEDIA ACTION. Chicago Media Action (CMA) is a Chicago area-group dedicated to analyzing and broadening Chicago's major media and to building Chicago s independent media. In 2004, CMA issued a widely-covered study of bias on WTTW's nightly news show, "Chicago Tonight." For more information about CMA, visit www.chicagomediaaction.org

For a copy of the CMA's petition, complete with supporting documents, please visit www.chicagomediaaction.org/pdffiles/2005petition.pdf

—30--

2005-09-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

Top Censored News Stories of 2004-05.
Project Censored at Sonoma State University announces the annual release of the most important under-covered stories of 2004-05. For full postings see: http://www.projectcensored.org/
For Interviews with Project Censored Spokespersons contact: Peter.Phillips@sonoma.edu

1. BUSH ADMINISTRATION MOVES TO ELIMINATE OPEN GOVERNMENT Common Dreams, September 14, 2004, New Report Details Bush Administration Secrecy, by Karen Lightfoot http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0914-05.htm;
http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/story.asp

The Bush administration has been working to make sure the public - and even Congress - can't find out what the government itself is doing. In the Fall of 2004, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) released an 81-page report that found that the feds have consistently "narrowed the scope and application" of the Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act, and other key public information laws. At the same time the government expanded laws blocking access to certain records - even creating new categories of "protected" information and exempting entire departments from public scrutiny.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives citizens the ability to file a request for specific information from a government agency and provides recourse in federal court if that agency fails to comply with FOIA requirements. Over the last two decades, beginning with Reagan, this law has become increasingly diluted and circumvented by each succeeding administration.

Under the Bush Administration, agencies make extensive and arbitrary use of FOIA exemptions such as those for classified information, privileged attorney-client documents and certain information compiled for law enforcement purposes.

Bush administration has even refused to release records to Congressional subcommittees or the Government Accountability Office. A few of the potentially incriminating documents being held secret from Congress include records of contacts between large energy companies and Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force; White House memos pertaining to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction; and reports describing torture at Abu Ghraib.

The Critical Infrastructure Information Act of 2002 (CIIA) as part of Homeland Security exempts from FOIA any information that is voluntarily provided to the federal government by a private party, if the information relates to the security of vital infrastructure. But under the act, even "routine communications by private sector lobbyists can be withheld from disclosure if the lobbyist asserts that the changes are related to the effort to protect the nation's infrastructure. Such a broad interpretation of CIIA could hide errors or misconduct by private-sector companies working with the Department of Homeland Security.

In March 2002, the Bush Administration reduced public access to information through FOIA by mandating that agencies safeguard any records having to do with "weapons of mass destruction." This included "information that could be misused to harm the security of our nation and the safety of our people," according to a memo by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. However, the memo did nothing to define these terms and agencies were left free to withhold virtually any information under the vague charge of "national security." In 2003, the Bush Administration won a new legislative exemption from FOIA for all National Security Agency "operational files." The Administration's main rationale for this new exemption is that conducting FOIA searches diverts resources from the agency's mission. Congressman Waxman describe the government secrecy moves as "an unprecedented assault on the laws that make our government open and accountable,"

2 MEDIA COVERAGE FAILS ON IRAQ: FALLUJAH AND THE CIVILIAN DEATHTOLL
Peacework, December 2004-January 2005, The Invasion of Fallujah: A Study in the Subversion of Truth" By Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell World Socialist Web Site, November 17, 2004, US Media Applauds Destruction of Fallujah, by David Walsh, The NewStandard, December 3, 2004, Fallujah Refugees Tell of Life and Death in the Kill Zone, by Dahr Jamail, The Lancet, October 29, 2004, Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, By Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi and Gilbert Burnham, The Lancet, October 29, 2004, The War in Iraq: Civilian Casualties, Political Responsibilities, by Richard Horton, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2005, Lost Count, by Lila Guterman, Asheville Global Report, April 15, 2004, CNN to Al Jazeera: Why Report Civilian Deaths?"

Les Roberts, an investigator with the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, conducted a rigorous inquiry into pre- and post-invasion mortality in Iraq, sneaking into Iraq by lying flat on the bed of an SUV and training observers on the scene. The results were published in the Lancet, a prestigious peer-reviewed British medical journal, on Oct. 29, 2004 - Roberts and his team (including researchers from Columbia University and from Al-Mustansiriy University in Baghdad concluded that the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is about 100,000 civilians, and may be much higher. 95% of those deaths were caused by helicopter gunships, rockets, or other forms of aerial weaponry and more than half of the fatalities were women or children.

The study was done before the second invasion of Fallujah in the Fall of 2004. More than 83 percent of Fallujah's 300,000 residents fled the city. The people had nowhere to flee and ended up as refugees. Many families were forced to survive in fields, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings without access to shelter, water, electricity, food or medical care.

The 50,000 citizens who either chose to remain in the city or who were unable to leave were trapped by Coalition forces and were cut off from food, water and medical supplies Men between the ages of 15 and 45 were refused safe passage, and all who remained were treated as enemy combatants. Coalition forces cut off water and electricity, seized the main hospital, shot at anyone who ventured out into the open, executed families waving white flags while trying to swim across the Euphrates or otherwise flee the city. US forces shot at ambulances, raided homes and killed people who didn't understand English, rolled over injured people with tanks, and allowed corpses to rot in the streets and be eaten by dogs.

Medical staff and others reported seeing people, dead and alive, with melted faces and limbs, injuries consistent with the use of phosphorous bombs. As of December of 2004 at least 6,000 Iraqi citizens in Fallujah had been killed, and one-third of the city has been destroyed.

The International Committee for the Red Cross reported on December 23, 2004 that three of the city's water purification plants had been destroyed and the fourth badly damaged.

Not long after the "coalition" had embarked on its second offensive, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour called for an investigation into whether the Americans and their allies had engaged in "the deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the killing of injured persons, and the use of human shields," among other possible "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions ... considered war crimes" under federal law.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists, has noted that the U.S. invasion of Fallujah is a violation of international law that the U.S. had specifically ratified: "They [US Forces] stormed and occupied the Fallujah General Hospital, and have not agreed to allow doctors and ambulances to go inside the main part of the city to help the wounded, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions." Updates: English Al-Jazeera website at http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage, and website at www.dahrjamailiraq.com, The World Tribunal on Iraq at www.worldtribunal.org

3. ELECTION FRAUD LIKELY IN 2004
In These Times, 02/15/05, A Corrupted Election, by Steve Freeman and Josh MitteldorfSeattle Post-Intelligencer, January 26, 2005, Jim Crow Returns To The Voting Booth, by GregPalast, Rev. Jesse Jackson www.freepress.org, Nov. 23, 2004, How a Republican Election Supervisor Manipulated the 2004 Central Ohio Vote, by Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman

On Nov. 2, 2004. Bush prevailed by 3 million votes despite exit polls that clearly projected Kerry winning by a margin of 5 million. The 8-million-vote discrepancy was well beyond the poll's recognized, less-than-1-percent margin of error. And when Freeman and Mitteldorf analyzed the data collected by the two companies that conducted the polls, they found concrete evidence of potential fraud in the official count.

The overall margin of error should statistically have been under one percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than five percent-a statistical impossibility of over a 100,000 to one.

"Exit polls are highly accurate," Steve Freeman, professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Organizational Dynamics, and Temple University statistician Josh Mitteldorf. "They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for."

"Only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error. And "the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states.

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, the two companies hired to do the polling for the Nation Election Pool in a final report stated that the discrepancy was "most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters."

The corporate media widely reported that this proved the accuracy of the official count and a Bush victory. The body of the report, however, offers no data to substantiate this position. In fact, the report shows that Bush voters were more likely to complete the survey than Kerry voters. The report also states that the difference between exit polls and official tallies was far too great to be explained by sampling error, and that a systematic bias is implicated.

In precincts that were at least 80 percent for Bush, the average within-precinct error (WPE) was a whopping 10.0 percent-the numerical difference between the exit poll predictions and the official count.

Also, in Bush strongholds, Kerry received only about two-thirds of the votes predicted by exit polls. In Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly.

Greg Palast reported how in June 2004, well before the election, his co-author of "Jim Crow" Rev. Jesse Jackson brought him to Chicago to have breakfast with Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards. The Reverend asked the Senator to read Palast's report of the "spoilage" of Black votes-one million African Americans who cast ballots in 2000 but did not have their votes register on the machines.

Edwards said he'd read it over after he'd had his bagel. Jackson snatched away his bagel. No read, no bagel. A hungry Senator was genuinely concerned-these were, after all, Democrats whose votes did not tally, and he shot the information to John Kerry. A couple of weeks later, Kerry told the NAACP convention that one million African-American votes were not counted in 2000, but in 2004 he would not let it happen again. But he did let it happen again. More than a million votes in 2004 were cast and not counted

For the rest of the top 25 see: http://www.projectcensored.org/

2005-08-29T07:52:00.000-07:00

Peter Rachleff -- labor history professor at Macalester College in St. Paul and a leader of the progressive wing of the Minnesota labor movement-- wrote the following statement of solidarity with Northwest workers who are on strike. Please sign and encourage others to sign. Reply to Peter at rachleff@macalester.edu.

A STATEMENT OF PROTEST AND SOLIDARITY

As union leaders and activists, we want to make it clear that we stand against the behavior of Northwest Airlines management and with the workers of Northwest Airlines and their unions as they seek economic justice.

For too many years, the management of Northwest Airlines -- and other U.S. corporations -- has demanded that workers give more hours, more effort, and more of their lives to their jobs while receiving reduced compensation, less security, and less respect. At the same time, management has taken home fat compensation packages, stock options, bonuses, and golden parachutes.

NWA management is now in the midst of spending, by their own admission, more than $100 million to bust the mechanics' union. They are recuiting hastily trained scabs and employing the infamous union-busting Vance Security company to intimidate the hard-working men and women who have given decades of their lives to Northwest.

NWA management has demanded that mechanics allow the contracting-out of the 53% of their work that remains since management already contracted out 38% of it. Fewer than one-fourth of the mechanics employed in 2000 will continue to have jobs. For those who remain, management demands a 26% wage cut and the emptying of their underfunded defined-benefit pensions into 401K plans tied to the stock market.

NWA management has demanded that flight attendants undergo a 40% cut in their overall compensation. They are seeking similar cuts from other workers and, if they are able to force the mechanics and the flight attendants to accept these cuts, these other workers -- pilots, baggage handlers, ticket agents, clerical workers, and others -- will have little base from which to resist. The flying public will also have many reasons to question the safety of NWA flights.

NWA management's behavior is all too familiar. It mirrors the actions of Hormel, the Detroit newspapers, Caterpillar, Staley, Delphi Auto Parts, Enron, and United Airlines. It also sets the stage for other corporate employers to demand that their workers and unions allow expanded outsourcing of work, accept slashed wages and benefits, and give up the pensions that they have sacrificed for over many years.

This must stop. These actions by NWA management, combined with their abuse of the trust of Minnesota citizens, tax-payers, and state government, make them a suitable poster child for the labor movement's renewed efforts to educate, organize, and mobilize all Americans -- native-born and immigrant, blue collar and white collar, manufacturing and service, women and men, union members and non-union members.

All of us need to say "NO!" to this kind of behavior. NO to union-busting! NO to corporate greed! NO to a race to the bottom of the economic ladder!We union leaders and activists stand against Northwest Airlines' behavior and we stand with Northwest's workers and their unions in their struggle for economic justice.

2005-08-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

TWO THINGS TO CHEER ABOUT

Happily, Pat Robertson's crazy demand that the U.S. murder Hugo Chavez has-- much to my suprise-- actually gotten the attention it deserves. It is all over the papers and has been the focus of quite a lot of debate on TV talk shows, talk radio and in the blogosphere. Granted, the corporate media continue to ignore the Bush administration's repeated and illegal efforts to destabilize the Venezuelan government (including, of course, its backing for the failed 2002 coup which breifly ousted Chavez from power). But at least they seem appropriately outraged at the open suggestion that the U.S. state should just start killing foreign leaders they don't like. Yeah!

Even more encouraging, the American Library Association Council just endorsed a strongly worded resolution calling for the immediate withdrawl of American troops in Iraq. Here's the text:

Resolution on the Connection Between the Iraq War and Libraries

WHEREAS, The justifications for the invasion of Iraq have proven to be
completely unfounded; and

WHEREAS, The war already has taken the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqis
and more than 1700 U.S. soldiers; and

WHEREAS, These numbers will continue to mount as long as the U.S.
remains in Iraq; and

WHEREAS, During the current occupation, many of Iraq's cultural
treasures, including libraries, archives, manuscripts, and artifacts,
have been destroyed, lost, or stolen; and

WHEREAS, As long as U.S. forces remain in Iraq, the inevitable
escalation of fighting threatens further destruction of Iraq's cultural
heritage; and

WHEREAS, The U.S. is spending billions of dollars every month for the
occupation; and

WHEREAS, Even a small fraction of these resources would be more than
sufficient for rebuilding and greatly enhancing the libraries and
educational institutions of both Iraq and the U.S.; now, therefore, be
it

RESOLVED, That the American Library Association calls for the withdrawal
from Iraq of all U.S. military forces, and the return of full
sovereignty to the people of Iraq; and, be it further

RESOLVED, That the American Library Association urges the United States
government to subsequently shift its budgetary priorities from the
occupation of Iraq to improved support for vital domestic programs,
including United States libraries; and, be it further

RESOLVED, That the American Library Association calls upon the United
States government to provide material assistance through the United
Nations for the reconstruction of Iraq, including its museums,
libraries, schools, and other cultural resources; and, be it further

RESOLVED, That this resolution be sent to all members of Congress, the
Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the President of the
United States, and the press.

Adopted by the Council of the American Library Association

Wednesday, June 29, 2005
In Chicago, Illinois

From
http://www.ala.org/ala/ourassociation/governanceb/council/councilagendas/annual2005a/CD62.doc

2005-08-23T10:51:00.000-07:00

Who Would Jesus Assassinate? (WWJA)

The contempt of the American religious right for democracy has been evident to rational observers for quite some time and exhibits clear parallels with the authoritarian passions of the Islamic fundamentalists they supposedly abhor. That Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson-- longtime freind and business associate of bloodthirsty Zairian dictator Mobuto Sese Seko -- has called for the assasination of Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected President of Venezuala, is thus hardly surpising. What is shocking, though, is that other than AP, few news organizations have seen fit to report on his comments.

Pat Robertson calls for assassination of Hugo Chavez
By Gene Puskar, AP

VIRGINIA BEACH (AP) - Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson called on
Monday for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez,
calling him a "terrific danger" to the United States.

Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former
pre
sidential candidate, said on "The 700 Club" it was the United States'
duty to stop Chavez from making Venezuela a "launching pad for communist
infiltration and Muslim extremism."

Chavez has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of President
Bush, accusing the United States of conspiring to topple his government
and possibly backing plots to assassinate him. U.S. officials have
called the accusations ridiculous.

"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he
thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to
go ahead and do it," Robertson said. "It's a whole lot cheaper than
starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."

Electronic pages and a message to a Robertson spokeswoman were not
immediately returned Monday evening.

Venezuela is the fifth largest oil exporter and a major supplier of oil
to the United States. The CIA estimates that U.S. markets absorb almost
59% of Venezuela's total exports.

Venezuela's government has demanded in the past that the United States
crack down on Cuban and Venezuelan "terrorists" in Florida who they say
are conspiring against Chavez.

Robertson accused the United States of failing to act when Chavez was
briefly overthrown in 2002.

"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that
we exercise that ability," Robertson said.

"We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know,
strong-arm dictator," he continued. "It's a whole lot easier to have
some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

2005-08-17T05:03:00.000-07:00

That the military and the U.S. government is attempting to suppress further evidence of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib is perhaps understandable. What is surprising, though, is that they are arguing that releasing the photos would violate the prisoner's rights under the Geneva Conventions. This is a tacit admission that the people detained by U.S. troops in Iraq are, in fact, prisoners of war. And that , in turn, could provide more fuel for the human rights law suits against Rumsfeild and Co.

RIGHTS:New Abuse Photos Could Spark Riots, US General Warns
William Fisher

NEW YORK, Aug 16 (IPS) - Civil libertarians and the Pentagon appear headed for yet another trainwreck in the ongoing dispute over the so-called second batch of photos from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and a number of medical and veterans groups demanding release of 87 new videos and photographs depicting detainee abuse at the now infamous prison, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, said the release would result in ”riots, violence and attacks by insurgents.”

In court papers filed to contest the lawsuit, Gen. Myers said he consulted with Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the United States Central Command, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq. Both officers also opposed the release, Gen. Myers said.

He believes the release of the photos would ”incite public opinion in the Muslim world and put the lives of American soldiers and officials at risk,” according to documents unsealed in federal court in New York. ”The situation on the ground in Iraq is dynamic and dangerous,” Myers added, with 70 insurgent attacks daily. He also said there was evidence that the Taliban was gaining ground because of popular discontent in Afghanistan.

Gen. Myers cited the violence that erupted in some Muslim countries in May after Newsweek published an item, which it later retracted, saying that a Koran had been thrown in a toilet in the United States detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He also said the images could fuel terrorist disinformation campaigns.

"It is probable that Al Qaeda and other groups will seize upon these images and videos as grist for their propaganda mill, which will result in, besides violent attacks, increased terrorist recruitment, continued financial support and exacerbation of tensions between Iraqi and Afghani populaces and U.S. and coalition forces,” he said.

The 87 ”new” photos and four videotapes taken at Abu Ghraib were among those turned over to Army investigators last year by Specialist Joseph M. Darby, a reservist who was posted at the prison.

In legal papers unsealed last week, the ACLU and its allied groups urged the court to order the release of photographs and videos, and also asked the court to reject the government's attempt to file some of its legal arguments in secret. It said that until the first photos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, the government had consistently denied that any wrongdoing had taken place, despite news reports to the contrary. Since then, the ACLU has obtained, through a court order, more than 60,000 pages of government documents regarding torture and abuse of detainees.

At a court hearing on Monday, the judge said he generally ruled in favour of public disclosure and ordered the government to reveal some redacted parts of its argument for blocking the release of pictures and videotapes. U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said his rulings pertained to arguments by Gen. Myers. ”By and large, I ruled in favour of public disclosure,” he said.

The judge said he believes photographs ”are the best evidence the public can have of what occurred” at the prison. He scheduled arguments on the question of whether the photographs and videos should be released for Aug. 30, saying a speedy decision is important so the public's right to know isn't compromised.

The ACLU has also called for an independent counsel with subpoena power to investigate the torture scandal, including the role of senior policymakers, and has filed a separate lawsuit to hold Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and high-ranking military officers accountable. Reed Brody, head of international programmes for Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS, ”The problem is not the photos but the policy of abuse. The release of the first photos last year led us to the revelations that senior U.S. officials had secretly sidelined the Geneva Conventions, re-defined 'torture', and approved illegal coercive interrogation methods.”

”The release of new photos showing crimes perpetrated on detainees could create new impetus to expose and prosecute those ultimately responsible and hopefully prevent these practices from being repeated.” Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, noted that, ”The administration's response to the release of the photos is to kill the messenger, rather then to investigate and prosecute the real culprits: Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, Generals Miller and Sanchez, and others.”

He agreed that ”the photos will be upsetting to anyone who cares about humane treatment and particularly to those in the Muslim world, but the photos reflect the reality of the type of treatment detainees were subjected to.”

”Rather than suppress the best evidence of widespread torture of Muslim detainees, the Administration ought to launch a fully independent investigation and ought to see that an independent prosecutor is appointed,” Ratner told IPS. He added, ”Ensuring accountability for the torture conspiracy is the best way of demonstrating to the Muslim world that this outrage has come to an end and will not be repeated.”

The government initially objected to the release of the images on the grounds that it would violate the Geneva Conventions rights of the detainees depicted in the images. That concern was addressed by court order on Jun. 1 directing the government to redact any personally identifying characteristics from the images. The ACLU did not object to those redactions.

The ACLU said the government has repeatedly taken the position that the detainees themselves cannot rely on the Geneva Conventions in legal proceedings to challenge their mistreatment by U.S. personnel. In a court declaration, former U.S. Army Colonel Michael E. Pheneger, a retired military intelligence expert, responded to the government's ”cause-and-effect” argument that release of the images would spark violence abroad.

”Our enemies seek to prevent the United States from achieving its objectives in the Middle East,” he said. ”They do not need specific provocations to justify their actions.” Attacks by insurgents ”will continue regardless of whether the photos and tapes are released,” he added.
The case arose from a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the ACLU, the Centre for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. (END/2005)

2005-08-05T10:56:00.000-07:00

Finally, Bob Novak gets kicked off the air and is accurately labeled "inexcusable and unacceptable" by CNN. Maybe there really is a God...

CNN Suspends Novak After He Walks Off Set

By DAVID BAUDER
The Associated Press
Friday, August 5, 2005; 12:42 AM

NEW YORK -- CNN suspended commentator Robert Novak indefinitely after he swore and walked off the set Thursday during a debate with Democratic operative James Carville.

The live exchange during CNN's "Inside Politics" came during a discussion of Florida's Senate campaign. CNN correspondent Ed Henry noted when it was over that he had been about to ask Novak about his role in the investigation of the leak of a CIA officer's identity.

A CNN spokeswoman, Edie Emery, called Novak's behavior "inexcusable and unacceptable." Novak apologized to CNN, and CNN was apologizing to viewers, she said.

"We've asked Mr. Novak to take some time off," she said.

A telephone message at Novak's office was not immediately returned Thursday.

Carville and Novak were both trying to speak while they were handicapping the GOP candidacy of Katherine Harris. Novak said the opposition of the Republican establishment in Florida might not be fatal for her.

"Let me just finish, James, please," Novak continued. "I know you hate to hear me, but you have to."

Carville, addressing the camera, said: "He's got to show these right wingers that he's got a backbone, you know. It's why the Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching you. Show 'em that you're tough."

"Well, I think that's bull---- and I hate that," Novak replied. "Just let it go."

As moderator Henry stepped in to ask Carville a question, Novak walked off the set.

Only two weeks ago, CNN executives defended their decision to keep Novak on the air during the ongoing probe into the revelation of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity. In a July 2003 newspaper column, Novak identified Plame, the wife of administration critic and former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, as a CIA operative.

Wilson has said the leak of his wife's name was an attempt by the administration to discredit him. Two other reporters connected to the case openly fought the revelation of their sources, and Judith Miller of The New York Times has been jailed for refusing to cooperate with prosecutors.

Novak has repeatedly refused to comment about his role in the federal investigation.

After Novak walked off on Thursday, Henry said that Novak had been told before the segment that he was going to be asked on air about the CIA case.

"I'm hoping that we will be able to ask him about that in the future," Henry said.

Novak has been a longtime contributor to CNN, taking the conservative point of view during the just-canceled "Crossfire" show.

2005-08-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=19345

David Horowitz's Battlefield Academia

Sixties lefty turned right wing activist, provocateur, and GOP
political consultant is leading a McCarthy-like charge on college
campuses across the country

Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange

07.14.05 - A specter is again haunting U.S. colleges and universities.

At the beginning of the Cold War in the early 1950s, Joseph McCarthy,
the infamous Republican Senator from Wisconsin, stalked the political
landscape hurling reckless charges that hordes of Communists had
infiltrated the U.S. government before, during and after World War II.

Sen. McCarthy and his band of self-proclaimed patriots also trained
their guns on the creative community -- writers, directors and actors
working in Hollywood and on Broadway -- as well as public school
teachers and academics on college campuses across the country.

The hysteria these men stirred up through largely unsubstantiated
charges caused thousands of people to lose their jobs. Some committed
suicide.

Flash forward 50 years: David Horowitz, the 1960s left-wing radical
turned right-wing activist/provocateur and Republican political
consultant, has picked up McCarthy's baton. Disguised as an attempt
to broaden free speech on campus, Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights
-- which aims to stifle the speech of liberal academics -- has been
making the rounds of state houses and college campuses during the
past year or so.

In Florida, State Representative Dennis Baxley (R-Ocala) has
introduced an Academic Freedom Bill of Rights after he "attended a
conservative conference in St. Louis last summer where Horowitz spoke
about academic freedom," the St. Petersburg Times reported.

Baxley's legislation, which in late March passed out of the House
Choice and Innovation Committee by an 8-to-2 vote (the only two
Democrats on the committee voted against it), was a broad assault on
academic freedom.

In addition to guaranteeing that students would "not be punished for
professing beliefs with which their professors disagree," the bill
would have advised professors "to teach alternative 'serious academic
theories' that may disagree with their personal views."

"Some professors say, 'Evolution is a fact. I don't want to hear
about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don't
like it, there's the door,'" Baxley maintained.

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, students who
felt their views were disrespected in the classroom or thought they
were singled out for "public ridicule" by their professors would have
the right to sue them and the university.

"Despite the state Senate's decision not to consider Baxley's bill, I
have heard that he hasn't given up and may reintroduce the House bill
next session," Susan Greenbaum, the president of the Faculty Senate
at the University of South Florida, told IPS.

"Baxley also appealed directly to the state's university presidents
to implement his proposals administratively. As chair of the
Education Council and as a member of the Education Appropriations
Committee, a very important House committee, Baxley certainly has
their attention."

"The real test," Greenbaum pointed out, "will come in whether there
is an escalation in student grievances at Florida universities, and
what happens to those complaints. However, what seems to be lacking
in this whole issue is real student dissatisfaction. They have
garnered almost no action among students on these campuses; David
Horowitz presented a pitiful array of dubious anecdotes when he
testified in Tallahassee."

In addition to Florida, legislators in 13 other states have
introduced some type of "Academic Freedom" legislation. California
and Maine are considering "an academic bill of rights [containing] an
eight-point credo designed to increase political diversity in the
classroom."

In early June, the Christian Science Monitor reported that "four
state universities in Colorado... [had] adopted the principles under
legislative pressure in 2004."

In Minnesota, right-wing state senator Michelle Bachman, a vocal
opponent of gay rights, introduced two bills modeled on Horowitz's
complaints, one targeted at state colleges and universities and one
at state high schools.

Horowitz, who operates a number of projects -- including the online
magazine Frontpagemag.com -- out of the well-funded offices of his
Los Angeles, California-based Center for the Study of Popular
Culture, set up Students for Academic Freedom in 2003 to do the grunt
work. Since then, the Washington-based outfit has been making headway
on college campuses across the nation.

Students for Academic Freedom is not only involved with lobbying
state legislatures; on some campuses, they and similarly minded
groups have launched an all-out assault on liberal professors, using
classic McCarthyite tactics.

At Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC) in Santa Rosa, California, the
struggle over academic freedom took a particularly ugly turn earlier
this year. Conservative students, supporting a California version of
a Student Bill of Rights, issued "leaflets quoting Section 51530 of
the [California] Education Code," and then "anonymously posted [them]
on the doors of ten faculty members" at the College, veteran
journalist David Bacon reported.

The leaflet quoted the code:

"No teacher... shall advocate or teach communism with the intent to
indoctrinate, inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for
communism." Such "advocacy," the statute says, means teaching "for
the purpose of undermining patriotism for, and the belief in, the
government of the United States and of this state."

Claiming responsibility for the action, SRJC Republicans issued a
press release stating that they "did this because we believe certain
instructors at SRJC are in violation of California state law."

At the same time, a news release with the headline "Operation 'Red
Scare,'" appeared on the website of California College Republicans.
In McCarthyite cant, the organization's chair, Michael Davidson, told
reporter John Gorenfeld "a lot of the college professors are
leftovers from the Seventies -- and Communist sympathizers."

Meanwhile, in Florida, Horowitz's local partner, Rep. Dennis Baxley,
appears to see himself as a modern-day Daniel fighting the lions of
liberal academia. During the debate over his legislation, Baxley
claimed he was called a McCarthyist by "leftist critics [who]
ridicule me for daring to stand up for students and faculty."

Then, similar to a tactic used by Sen. Joseph McCarthy himself,
Baxley claimed that he "had a list of students who were discriminated
against by professors," but, the St. Petersburg Times reported, he
"refused to reveal names because he felt they would be persecuted."

Horowitz's efforts at campuses across the country, and Rep. Baxley's
work in Florida "represents an inversion of the original intent of
academic freedom, which is to protect the right of professors to
express controversial ideas without fear of retaliation," Susan
Greenbaum maintains.

"This protection is designed to shield free inquiry and encourage
innovation. It enables the creation of new knowledge and secures the
basis to challenge old ideas," she continued.

"In Baxley's bill -- which is really the Horowitz bill -- students
are customers, whose tastes and prejudices must be accommodated.
Professors are likened to vendors who must take care not to offend or
disturb those who have come to purchase their wares."

"It's like the Wal-Mart model: Maybe they can import holographic
images of professors made in China, attractive classroom automatons
who can be programmed to present marketable and politically
acceptable material," she said dryly.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

2005-07-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

This is an important and welcome development. Read on...

AFL-CIO CONVENTION CALLS FOR TROOP WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ
By David Bacon

CHICAGO, IL (7/26/05) - On the second day of its convention inChicago, the AFL-CIO took an historic step, calling for the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, and an end to the country's occupation. Public attention has focused largely on the split in US labor, and the decision by two of the federation's largest unions to leave. Yet the impact of this call will reverberate for years, with asprofound effect on the future of US workers and their unions.
Brooks Sunkett, vice-president of the Communications Workers of America(CWA), started a train of passionate speeches on the convention floor,saying that the government had lied to him when it sent him to war inVietnam three decades ago. "We have to stop it from lying to a newgeneration now," he implored. Henry Nicholas, a hospital union leaderin the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees,told delegates that his son, who has served four tours of duty in Iraq,is now threatened with yet another.
Speaker after speaker rose to condemn the war and occupation, and todemand the return of the troops. No one dared defend a policy that hascaused revulsion throughout US unions. Watching from the visitors' gallery was a handful of Iraqi unionleaders. One of them had traveled to the US two months ago, with fiveother union activists, to plead the case of Iraqi workers. For 16 daysthey traveled to more than 50 cities, often speaking before hundreds ofangry workers, demanding an end to the occupation. The Iraqis urgedtheir US union counterparts to take action.
The resolution at the convention was the answer to this call. It wasthe culmination as well of an upsurge that has swept through US unionssince before the war started two years ago. From the point when itbecame clear that the Bush administration intended to invade Iraq,union activists began organizing a national network to oppose it, USLabor Against the War. What started as a collection of small groups,in a handful of unions, has today to become a coalition of unionsrepresenting over a million members.
The network organized the tour of the Iraqi unionists, to provide thema chance to speak directly to US workers. "We believed strongly thatif unions in our country could hear their Iraqi brothers and sistersasking for the withdrawal of US troops, they would respond in a spiritof solidarity and human sympathy," said Gene Bruskin, one of USLAW'snational coordinators. "We were right."
Resolutions calling for troop withdrawal poured in from unions, laborcouncils, and state labor federations across the country. But as theconvention began, AFL-CIO national staff tried to substitute anotherresolution that called for ending the occupation "as soon aspossible." This was the same position as that put forward by the Bushadministration.
Delegates at the convention, who belong to the USLAW network thencalled for using instead the phrase "rapid withdrawal" of the troops. At a strategy-planning session attended by over 150 delegates, US andIraqi unionists joined together to plan a fight on the convention floorto win that language. Before it could take place, however, CWAVice-president Larry Cohen went to the AFL-CIO executive council, thefederation's ruling body, and asked them to accept the change.
Knowing that a fight was in store, and suddenly unsure of their abilityto win it, the council agreed.
The resolution was put on the floor of the convention Tuesday afternoon, two days before the scheduled debate on Iraq. When the proposal for rapid withdrawal was introduced by Fred Mason, head of theAFL-CIO in Maryland, it was obvious what he meant by the words. Hiscall to "get out now" became a chorus thundering from speaker afterspeaker. The new language was adopted with the votes of an overwhelming majority.
The resolution marks a watershed moment in modern US labor history. It is the product of grassroots action at the bottom of the US labormovement, not a directive from top leaders. The call for bringing thetroops home echoes the sentiments of thousands of ordinary workers andrank-and-file union members, whose children and family have been calledon to fight the war. A growing number, who now form a majority in US unions, believe the best way to protect them is to bring them home.
The resolution represents a deeper understanding that is making its wayinto thousands of discussions in workplaces and union halls. The warin Iraq never had much credibility as an effort to find weapons of massdestruction, since none were ever found. The administration's claimthat it is fighting to bring democracy to Iraqi people inspired asimilar disbelief. After five years of administration attacks on USworkers and unions, none but the most diehard of its supporters havemuch faith left in its pro-democracy pronouncements.
Over the last year, however, the Iraqis themselves have provided a newunderstanding of the occupation's anti-democratic impact. Americanmilitary authorities, they told US union members, have banned labororganization in oil fields, factories and other Iraqi publicenterprises. Meanwhile, Bush political operatives have begun toengineer the sell off of those enterprises to foreign corporations,with a potential loss of thousands of jobs and the income needed torebuild the country.
"This is not liberation. It is occupation," said Ghasib Hassan, aleader of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, one of the unions thatsent its members to speak in the US. "At the beginning of the 21stcentury, we thought we'd seen the end of colonies, but now we'reentering a new era of colonization."
In the many meetings and discussions that finally led to the resolution, union members understood the purpose of the occupation in anew way - as the imposition, at gunpoint, of Bush administration freemarket policies on Iraq. After the resolution's passage, the Iraqiscalled on delegates to act on that understanding, and asked the AFL-CIOto bring its members out to coming national demonstrations against thewar.
Rapid withdrawal means more than just bringing US soldiers home. Calling for it puts American workers on the side of Iraqis, as theyresist the transformation of their country for the benefit of a wealthy global elite. Brooks Sunkett, Vietnam vet turned union leader, spokepowerfully for this renewed unwillingness to wage wars based on liesand greed. His call for rapid withdrawal breathes new life into theVietnam syndrome - so feared by US administrations intent on militaryintervention to defend their free market policies around the world.

2005-06-05T19:42:00.000-07:00

Finally, a well financed, politically progressive challenge to the hegemony of the big (American) media conlomerates. It'll certainly be an experiment worth following....

MEDIA-LATIN AMERICA:
New Regional Network of the South is BornHumberto Márquez
CARACAS, May 24 (IPS) - Telesur, a regional public TV network envisioned as a Latin American version of the Arab world's Al Jazeera broadcasting group, was officially launched Tuesday at a ceremony in the Venezuelan capital. The fledgling broadcasting company is jointly owned by Argentina, Cuba, Uruguay and Venezuela.

"After 513 years of looking at ourselves through foreign eyes, we Latin Americans are beginning to see ourselves through our own eyes," said the director of the new regional network, Aram Arahonian, a Uruguayan journalist based in Venezuela for the last 18 years, at the official ceremony. Venezuelan Information Minister Andrés Izarra, the chairman of Telesur, reported that the new network has already invested roughly 10 million dollars in facilities, equipment, and the leasing of a satellite.

The first brief broadcast on Monday consisted of a 10-minute video reflecting what Telesur aims to be, nationally televised in Venezuela and aired on TV networks in other countries of the region. These first images emphasised the social struggles and progressive movements of Latin America, including statements from indigenous organisations, scenes of street protests against free-market economic policies and U.S. meddling, and footage of students attending schools in poor, working-class neighbourhoods. Also shown were photographs of leftist icons like legendary Cuban-Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara and former Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende, overthrown in a 1973 military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.

Telesur "will indeed be biased, towards promoting Latin American integration, diversity and plurality, and against the uniform point of view imposed through the privately owned media's control of information," Aharonian told IPS. The Telesur director added that the new network is a response to the current "media latifundia", an allusion to the system of land ownership in which enormous areas are controlled by a single private owner.

Left-leaning Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has been a driving force behind Telesur. He has promoted the initiative at numerous international forums over the past year, asking, "Why do we have to be told everything we know about ourselves by a network from the North, like CNN? Why this media dictatorship?"

When former Ecuadorian president Lucio Gutiérrez was removed by Congress, Chávez admitted he found out about it on CNN. In response to a reporter's question of whether the new network will be fully devoted to spreading the messages of state TV networks in the participating countries, Aharonian stressed that if it were only used to broadcast speeches by Chávez and other presidents, "we would have to take it for granted that no one would watch it. If this were to turn into a propaganda tool, we would all leave."

The brief promotional segment that premiered Monday will be repeated in a number of countries until Jul. 24 - the anniversary of the birth of Simón Bolívar, founding father of South American independence and fervent proponent of the integration of the region's nations - when full-length programmes will begin to be aired, followed by 24-hour broadcasting as of mid-September.

News and current affairs will account for 40 percent of all programming, according to the Telesur board of directors, which includes Beto Almeida from Brazil, Jorge Botero from Colombia and Ovidio Cabrera from Cuba. In addition to a full-length newscast, a morning news and analysis show and other current events programming, brief news updates will be aired every half hour. Other regular segments will include a showcase of Latin American filmmaking, past and present, entitled Memories in Development (a play on the title of the classic Cuban film Memories of Underdevelopment), and another featuring movies from non-Latin American countries other than the United States, called Nojolivud (the Spanish phonetic spelling of "No Hollywood").

Another segment, Memories of Fire, will be entirely devoted to documentaries. "Last year, there were 646 documentaries filmed in Latin America, according to the figures we have gathered, but only 21 of them have ever been shown. We will be providing a space for all of these productions," said Aharonian. There are also plans for regularly scheduled shows dedicated to music, regional travel and tourism destinations, agriculture, and survival in the large urban centres of Latin America.

Telesur plans to air programming produced by both privately owned and national and local public TV stations, as well as community, university and independent producers. The network will also have a branch devoted to promoting regional TV production dubbed the Latin American Content Factory. But while the programming directors will be open to submissions from all sources, their decisions will be based on high standards of quality in terms of both content and form, said Aharonian. When Telesur is fully functioning at the end of the year, viewers will be able to tune in throughout the Americas, in western Europe, and in the northwest tip of Africa, according to the network management.

"This is a challenge we have always dreamed of pursuing," said Gabriel Marotto, the Argentine media undersecretary. "We are counting on providing a different vision of our reality, and on the fact that this will be a TV network run by states, and not by governments," he added.

Venezuela owns 51 percent of the shares in the Empresa Multiestatal Telesur, Compañía Anónima, as the Telesur broadcasting company is officially known, while Argentina owns 20 percent, Cuba 19 percent, and Uruguay 10 percent. "But more than a financial or commercial operation, the participating states are taking part in Telesur for a political purpose, which is to foster the integration of our peoples," stressed Izarra.

In view of the notable absence of Brazil - which has come to play a leading role in regional integration - Izarra noted that the project is still open to the incorporation of all other Latin American nations. Venezuela provided the start-up financing for the network, while the other shareholding partners are contributing programming, equipment and staff, he added. Botero, the head of news and current affairs programming, reported that local bureaux have already been opened in Brasilia, Bogota, Caracas and La Paz, and will soon be followed by others in Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, Montevideo and Washington, D.C.

(END/2005)

2005-06-03T05:02:00.000-07:00

While I'm a fan of the 'Daily Show,' McManus, of the fine watchdog group Grade the News, is absolutely on the money here. As a college professor, I encounter evidence that young people are "tuning out" the news every damn day. It has gotten to the point where I actually had to explain to some students exactly what Bush's Social Security reform proposal was so that I could proceed to criticize the news media's coverage of it. Of course, as our collective quality of life deteriotates in the coming years thanks to the misrule of the plutocrats, maybe some of them will develop an interest in current affiars. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

When the 'Daily Show' Becomes Your News
By John McManus, Grade the News. Posted June 2, 2005.
What does it say about journalism when young people use “fake news” as their primary source of information?

So many people -- particularly young people -- tell me they now get most of their news from Comedy Central’s "Daily Show," I decided to record it for analysis.
Jon Stewart is a brilliant comic. Watching his show I learned more about national stories like the confirmation hearings for John Bolton, the Bush administration’s proposed United Nations ambassador, than I read on the front pages of some American newspapers.

But the "Daily Show" makes no pretense of being real news. It skims the events of the day for the comic or ironic. It pokes fun at journalism’s hallowed conventions of accuracy, objectivity and fairness. And while you may learn something about national and international events, it doesn’t cover local news.

What does it say about journalism when intelligent people claim a program that prides itself as “fake news” is their primary source of information about current events?
Turning away from real news makes no sense. Not for those interested in democracy’s promise of self-government, certainly. Not even for those seeking more entertaining alternatives to news.

It defies economic logic.

When a product becomes more useful, more available and cheaper, you would expect its popularity to soar. It happened with automobiles, television, computers and cell phones.
But oddly, not journalism. News has never been so valuable, so accessible and so inexpensive. Yet study after study shows Americans under the age of 40 have never valued it less.
News is about change

The purpose of journalism is to help people make sense of change. Driven by technology, the world around us has never changed so rapidly.

A hundred years ago, if you knew little about the world you got along fine. Then, what labor was paid in China didn’t affect workers in California. Only the most cataclysmic distant events mattered at home.

Today ignorance of world affairs can take food off your table as corporations hire globally and fire locally. What’s being discussed by militants half a world away today may take more than your job tomorrow. The radius of news that matters now spans the planet. Distance is obsolete.
The reach of government has also expanded from 100 years ago, making political news more valuable. Government decisions now affect almost every aspect of life – from the quality of air and water to schools, transportation, job availability, public safety, even spotted owls.

Technology has also exponentially increased the volume of news available. On cable, satellite, and the Web, a world of news outlets has bloomed – from main stream media to bloggers -- almost all offering information for free.

Yet polls, circulation numbers and Nielsen ratings show unmistakably that Americans under 40 are following current events less than their parents. Even less than their parents and grandparents did when they were young.

Eighteen to 24-year-olds may be the Internet Generation, but a recent poll found only 11 percent use the ‘net to learn of current events. Not surprisingly, other polls show those under 40 know less and care less about politics.

A democracy, more than other forms of government, is a continuous contest for power among many constituencies. Nearly everything not nailed down by the Constitution is up for grabs.

Groups that don’t know what’s going on are sure losers in our system.

Young people at risk
The effects of youthful disengagement from news may already be evident. Arguably, young people are the least likely to benefit from the Bush administration’s policies.
• The burdens of war always fall hardest on the young, who risk life, limb and psyche.
• The proposed privatization of Social Security won’t change the system for those about to retire, but it raises risks for younger workers.
• The Medicare drug benefit is aimed at the elderly. The federal health program helping the most young people is Medicaid. The administration proposes to cut billions from its budget.
• And the growing federal budget deficit is shifting debt from current to future tax-payers.
Madison's warning
When you abandon the news, you don’t lose your vote. But you may lose its effectiveness.
Unaware of their records and policies, you may elect politicians indifferent or hostile to your interests. And when people organize to promote their agenda before school boards, city councils, county supervisors, state legislatures and congress, your place at democracy’s table will be taken by someone else.

Almost 200 years ago, James Madison warned that “knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

In the information age, Madison’s words ring truer still.

John McManus is director of Grade the News — a media research project focusing on the quality of the news media in the San Francisco Bay Area.

2005-05-24T18:16:00.000-07:00

The conservative flak-machine is apparently once again in attack mode, this time targeting Newspaper Guild president Linda Foley for suggesting that the U.S. military has a "cavalier" attitude toward the slaughter of journalists in Iraq. Given the evidence, Foley's criticisms were, if anything, too mild. Steve Weissman of Truthout last year wrote a four part series, Dead Messengers: How the U.S. Military Threatens Journalists, that makes a good case that it is U.S. military policy to attack independent reporters covering the occupation (which would certainly explain the whole Giuliana Sgrena incident). Since the right-wing media have no reporters in Iraq who aren't "in bed" with the military, it is hardly surprising that they haven't taken up the issue. Read more below....

Guild chief under fire for comments about attacks on journalists in Iraq
From Editor & Publisher, May 20, 2005
By Joe StruppNEW YORK

Linda Foley, national president of The Newspaper Guild, drew criticism Thursday from some conservatives for comments she made last Friday about the killing of journalists in Iraq. Foley said, among other things, that she was outraged by “the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq. I think it’s just a scandal.”

Last month, Foley sent a letter to President Bush criticizing the U.S. investigation into the deaths of journalists in Iraq.The backlash became so severe Thursday that staffers at Guild headquarters in Washington, D.C., stopped answering the phone because of abusive phone calls and “people screaming at us,” Foley said. Instead, callers were required to leave messages on voice mail and await a return call.

“We don’t want people to be subjected to that kind of abuse,” Foley said, adding that the angry calls began early Thursday. “It is annoying, but it isn’t deterring us from doing what we have to do.”

The calls were apparently in reaction to comments Foley made during a panel discussion at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis on May 13. There she offered a lengthy commentary on corporate ownership of media, and she refuted certain criticism of journalists. During that session, she also briefly discussed deaths of journalists covering the war.

Foley’s comments, which she says have been distorted, have drawn the ire of several conservative news organizations, including NewsMax.com, The Washington Times, and Sinclair Broadcasting, charging that she accused the U.S. forces of deliberately targeting journalists.

According to a video of the session available on the conference’s Web site, her only comments on this specific subject were:“Journalists are not just being targeted verbally or politically. They are also being targeted for real in places like Iraq. And what outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there’s not more outrage about the number and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq. I think it’s just a scandal.”

“It’s not just U.S. journalists either, by the way. They target and kill journalists from other countries, particularly Arab countries, at news services like Al Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios, with impunity. This is all part of the culture that it is OK to blame the individual journalists, and it just takes the heat off of these media conglomerates that are part of the problem.”

A NewsMax.com story charged that Foley had accused U.S. soldiers of “committing atrocities without offering any evidence to back the charge up.” Mark Hyman, a Sinclair commentator, called her comments “irresponsible” and “horrible allegations.” Several critics immediately compared her criticism to the case of Eason Jordan, the former CNN executive who resigned after suggesting that the U.S. military may have targeted some journalists in Iraq.

Foley told E&P Thursday that her words were taken out of context by critics and said her original intent was to discuss how journalists are often scapegoated for their coverage.

“This was almost an aside,” she said. “But it is true that hundreds of journalists are killed around the world, and many have been killed in Iraq.”

When asked if she believed U.S. troops had targeted journalists in Iraq, she said, “I was careful of not saying troops, I said U.S. military. Could I have said it differently? There are 100 different ways of saying this, but I’m not sure they would have appeased the right.”

She did point out that those who bombed the Al Jazeera studios in Baghdad in 2003 had the coordinates of the television station, “because Al Jazeera had given it to them and they bombed the hell out of the station. They bombed it knowing it was the Al Jazeera station. Absent any independent inquiry that tells the world otherwise, that is what I believe.”

Her comments at the conference followed the letter she sent last month to President Bush criticizing the U.S. investigation into the deaths of journalists in Iraq, including several during an attack on the Palestine Hotel in 2003. In that attack, two journalists — one from Spain and the other from Ukraine — were killed. She also noted the bombing of the Al Jazeera office the same day, in which a reporter died.

“Neither of these attacks has been independently investigated nor have the deaths been properly explained to the satisfaction of the victims’ families, their friends and their colleagues,” the letter said, in part.

This article is from Editor & Publisher. If you found it informative and valuable, we strongly encourage you to visit their website and register an account to view all their articles on the web. Support quality journalism.

2005-04-22T11:36:00.000-07:00

The relentless right-wing campaign to eliminate all independent and critical voices from the public sphere continues unabated. First, they forced Howard Stern -- no hero of mine but a defender of free speech and a thorn in the side of the hated Bushies nonetheless-- off commercial radio. Then they got CBS anchor Dan Rather to resign (just for practicing semi-hard-hitting journalism). Now, they're hellbent on ousting even the lukewarm liberals at CPB and PBS. Scary stuff.

washingtonpost.com
New Scrutiny of PBS Has Raised Political Antennas

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 22, 2005; Page C01

Liberal commentator Bill Moyers is out on PBS stations. Buster the
animated rabbit is under a cloud of suspicion. And right-wing yakkers
from the Wall Street Journal editorial page have been handed their own
public-television chat show.

Some observers, including people inside the Public Broadcasting
Service, see these recent developments as troubling. PBS, they say, is
being forced to toe a more conservative line in its programming by the
Republican-dominated agency that provides about $30 million in
federal funds to the Alexandria-based service.

Officials at the agency, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, say
they are merely seeking to ensure balance and fairness in the
network's presentation of political news and ideas.

Under its mandate from Congress, which created the agency in 1967,
CPB is required to act as an independent buffer between lawmakers
and public broadcasters, although it can set broad programming
goals. Appointees of President Bush currently control the majority of
seats on CPB's eight-member board. Each board member serves a
six-year term.

Typically one of the quietest bureaucracies in Washington, the
quasi-governmental CPB has been unusually active in recent weeks.
CPB this month appointed a pair of veteran journalists to review public
TV and radio programming for evidence of bias, the first time CPB has
sought such oversight in its 38-year history. PBS officials were
unaware that the corporation intended to review its news and public
affairs programs, such as "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" and
"Frontline," until the appointments were publicly announced.

In negotiations with PBS earlier this year, the corporation also insisted,
for the first time, on tying new funding to an agreement that would
commit the network to strict "objectivity and balance" in each of its
programs -- an idea that PBS's general counsel described in an
internal memo as amounting to "government encroachment on and
supervision of program content, potentially in violation of the First
Amendment."

Late last week, CPB's board declined to renew the contract of its chief
executive, Kathleen Cox, a veteran administrator at the agency. She
was replaced by Ken Ferree, a Republican who had been a top adviser
to Michael Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission. The Ferree appointment followed the dismissals or
departures in recent months of at least three other senior CPB officials,
all of whom had Democratic affiliations.

"We don't want to be alarmist, but I would be less than honest if I said
there wasn't concern here," said one senior executive at PBS, who
insisted on anonymity because CPB provides about 10 percent of its
annual budget. "When you put it all together, a pattern starts to
emerge."

A senior FCC official, who would not speak for attribution because he
must rule on issues affecting public broadcasting, went further, saying
CPB "is engaged in a systematic effort not just to sanitize the truth, but
to impose a right-wing agenda on PBS. It's almost like a right-wing
coup. It appears to be orchestrated."

In an interview yesterday, CPB board chairman Ken Tomlinson called
such comments "paranoia," and said critics of CPB's initiatives should
"grow up."

"We're only seeking balance," said Tomlinson. "I am concerned about
perceptions that not all parts of the political spectrum are reflected on
public broadcasting. [But] there are no hidden agendas."

Asked for specific examples of slanted or unfair programming,
Tomlinson declined to name any. "You've heard the same complaints
of bias that I have in congressional hearings year after year," he said.

In fact, congressional Republicans have been generally critical of
public broadcasting's news and informational programming for years,
saying it favors liberal ideas. These criticisms fueled a movement led
by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich to "zero out" CPB's federal
funding a decade ago. Those efforts failed; federal appropriations to
CPB have grown 40 percent since then, to some $386.8 million this
year. About 90 percent of this money is passed directly to public radio
and TV stations, which then pay fees to PBS and National Public Radio
for programming such as "Nova" and "All Things Considered."

However, conservatives recently were exercised that Moyers -- an
outspoken liberal -- was involved in hosting a weekly newsmagazine
called "Now." (Moyers left the show in December, citing personal
reasons.) PBS responded, in part, by trying to recruit Gingrich to host a
weekly program. It wound up developing public affairs shows starring
the Wall Street Journal's conservative pundits and Tucker Carlson, a
columnist for the conservative Weekly Standard and a co-host of CNN's
"Crossfire." (Carlson has since left PBS and CNN for a job at MSNBC.)

In January, PBS came in for more criticism, this time a rebuke from
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings over an episode of a children's
travelogue program in which a rabbit character named Buster paid a
visit to two families headed by lesbians. PBS pulled the episode from
distribution to stations around the country.

Tomlinson would not comment on specific programs. He said CPB's
efforts were aimed at making "incremental changes that meet the
needs of the American people and the aspirations of the American
people."

The corporation's own research indicates broad public satisfaction with
the quality of news programming on PBS and NPR. A series of focus
group sessions and two national surveys conducted by two polling
firms -- the Tarrance Group and Lake Snell Perry & Associates -- found
few perceptions of bias in PBS's or NPR's reporting in 2002 and 2003.
For example, among people who identified themselves as "news and
information consumers," 36 percent said PBS's coverage of the Bush
administration in 2003 was "fair and balanced," and 46 percent offered
no opinion. Eleven percent judged NPR's coverage of the Middle East
to be biased, and this group split almost equally between those who
felt NPR was biased toward Israel and those who felt it was biased
toward the Arab or Palestinian side.

Wayne Godwin, PBS's veteran chief operating officer, said in an
interview yesterday that he wanted to give CPB's new chief executive,
Ferree, some time before he drew conclusions. "They're in such a
significant state of flux at this time that we want to be fair in looking
at
it," he said.

He added, "I don't know that Ken [Tomlinson] is or is not trying to
change our programming. . . . I will say there is reason to remain aware
and vigilant to what is going on. The long run will determine if he wants
changes."

Tomlinson said his goal is to seek increases in federal funding of
public broadcasting in order to strengthen it in an increasingly
competitive media environment. "Public TV, public broadcasting, is in
trouble," he said. "It will wither and die if we continue the way we have.
That's why it's so important for us to rally national support for it. If we
don't have true excellence, we won't be able to gain the support we
need. We have to make sure that these [programming] concerns don't
prevent us from gaining the national consensus we need."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

2005-03-21T08:24:00.000-08:00

A distressing example of "target marketing" in action. And the Republicans have the gall to accuse the left of dividing the country along lines of race....

www.slate.com
The Soft Bigotry of Life Expectancy
Different Social Security messages for blacks and Latinos.
By William SaletanPosted Wednesday, March 16, 2005, at 1:08 PM PT

Different strokes for different folks?Why is President Bush's Social Security reform plan heading south inthe polls? Maybe because he's selling different messages to differentaudiences and some audiences are overhearing messages meant forothers. He's telling older people that nothing relevant to them willchange. Meanwhile, he's telling the younger people who are propping upthe system that it's a dead end and he'll help them get out.

This iswhy Republican "town halls" that were supposed to boost the plan inthe polls failed so miserably. The town halls were for the youngerfolks, but the older folks showed up. Oops!It turns out the young and the old aren't the only groups gettingdifferent pitches. Bush is narrowcasting to blacks and Latinos, too.

The message to blacks is that Social Security screws them because theydie younger. By all accounts, that's what Bush told black business andcommunity leaders at a two-hour private meeting on Jan. 25. It's alsothe centerpiece of black community town halls and speeches to blackaudiences by GOP chairman Ken Mehlman, according to the Los AngelesTimes.

At one forum, Bush told a black executive, "African Americanmales die sooner than other males do, which means the system isinherently unfair to a certain group of people." The executive,referring to black male life expectancy, said to Bush, "If you'retelling me that it's 69, and the [retirement] age is going to go to67, you do the math." Bush replied, "Right."Bush was encouraging a misconception.

As Paul Krugman has explained,remaining life expectancy for a 65-year-old black man is 14.6 years,not two. It's true that black male life expectancy at birth is only69, but black-white mortality differences trail off throughout life.(By the late stages, black men outlive white men of the same age.) So,while blacks are likely to spend fewer years taking money out, they'realso likely to spend fewer years paying in.

What's more interesting, however, is another misconception Bush seemsto have floated. On Dec. 21, he met with Kweisi Mfume, the outgoingpresident of the NAACP. According to a Federal Document Clearing Housetranscript, Mfume told reporters afterward that in the meeting Bush"was very strong in his belief that some communities in particular,because of low life expectancy rates, don't get a chance to get outmuch of what they put in all their lives." Black men and women "havedisproportionately lower life expectancies," said Mfume. "And so myassumption is that that group, along with Latinos, may be what thepresident was referring to."

Mfume said he hadn't pressed Bush to clarify the reference to "somecommunities." But the reference did its job. The next day, the Coxnewspaper chain reported that "Mfume said they discussed how toaccount for groups, such as African-Americans and Latinos, that havelower-than-average life expectancy rates and, as a result, don't drawretirement benefits commensurate with what they pay in payroll taxesover the course of their working lives."

There's no record of anyeffort by the White House to correct this account. Indeed, three weekslater, the White House issued a "fact" sheet claiming that "Hispanics,African-Americans, and unmarried elderly women are even more relianton Social Security." The sheet added nothing to suggest that therationales for making this claim about the three groups might differ.A couple of weeks ago, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles-based newspaperLa Opinión, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez reportedly argued thatbecause of their disproportionate reliance on Social Security, Latinosstood to lose disproportionately if Bush's plan were defeated. (Theop-ed can't be found online, and I've asked the Commerce Departmentfor a copy of it but haven't received it, so for now I'm relying on aMarch 4 Los Angeles Times account of it.)

What Gutierrez and the White House seem not to have mentioned is that,contrary to the impression Bush gave Mfume, Latinos can expect tooutlive whites. According to a report issued five years ago by what isnow Gutierrez's department, life expectancy for Americans of "Hispanicorigin" in 1999 was 77.1 years among men and 83.7 years among women.That's a 2.4-year surplus for Latino men over white men and a 3.6-yearsurplus for Latino women over white women.So, here's the situation. In an op-ed written in Spanish and not madeavailable in English on any federal Web site, the administrationargues that Latinos, who live longer than whites do, should supportBush's reform plan because upon retirement they relydisproportionately on Social Security.

Meanwhile, in forums andprivate meetings aimed at blacks, the administration argues thatblacks, who upon retirement rely disproportionately on SocialSecurity, should support Bush's reform plan because they don't live aslong as whites do. Only once has Bush slipped up and alluded to onegroup in the course of making his pitch to the other. And on thatoccasion, at best, he seems to have conveyed?and failed to correctafter its publication?an impression that helped him politically butwas contrary to the truth.

The only other ethnic groups analyzed in the 2000 Commerce Departmentreport on life expectancy?or apparent in any other such governmentreport?are Asian-Americans and American Indians. Asian-Americans werebeating white life expectancy by six years among men and 6.5 yearsamong women. American Indian men were trailing white men by two yearsin life expectancy, but American Indian women were exceeding whitewomen by the same amount.

So, here are two questions for PresidentBush: When you told Mfume that some communities in particular were getting shafted by Social Security due to low life expectancy, which communities were you talking about? And if you're telling the wholetruth to blacks and Latinos, why aren't you telling them the samething?

William Saletan is Slate's chief political correspondent and author ofBearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.Photograph of George Bush by Roger L. Wollenberg/UPI Photo

2005-03-07T15:10:00.000-08:00

Stop the Right's Attack on Academic Freedom!
An Open Letter From Concerned Academics

March 2, 2005

URGENT: The University of Colorado Board of Regents will be making
its recommendations about Ward Churchill in the week of March 7.

We call on all those who teach and research at colleges and
universities to raise their voices in opposition to this inquisition.
Sign and act on this open letter. Circulate it widely. Inform the
media.

As an immediate step, we call on our colleagues to pass emergency
resolutions in faculty and professional associations and send them to
the University of Colorado Board of Regents. We offer the following
as a template for such resolutions:

Resolved, that the attempt, escalated by government authority, to
fire Ward Churchill and the trial by media which he is undergoing
amount to a serious assault on dissent, critical inquiry, and
academic freedom, and a heightening of the repressive atmosphere in
American society overall. This attack is intolerable and must stop
now. The precedents already set in this case - that a professor can
be publicly pilloried and threatened with dismissal for what he
writes - must not be allowed to stand. The University of Colorado
Board of Regents must drop any effort to fire Churchill, cease its
spurious investigation into his body of work and repudiate its
actions up to now; and all colleges and universities must reaffirm,
in word and deed, their commitment to defend critical thinking.

The past month has witnessed a chilling turn in American political
and intellectual life. Ward Churchill, a tenured professor and
former chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of
Colorado, has been made the object of an unprecedented nationwide
attack for an essay he wrote three years ago. Two governors,
including the governor of Colorado, have called for his firing. The
national and local media have not only misrepresented his work and
views, but have increasingly vilified and slandered Ward Churchill
himself. Some of Churchill's speaking engagements have been
cancelled. Death threats have been made against him. In response,
the University of Colorado Board of Regents not only "apologized" for
Churchill's remarks - itself an utterly gratuitous and inappropriate
action - but initiated an investigation into his entire body of work
to search for mistakes and supposed evidence of "fraud." During the
week of March 7, the Board of Regents will conclude its 30-day review
of all of Churchill's writings and statements.

One must go back to the "scoundrel time" of the McCarthy years to
find anything even close to this. And now, as an unmistakable sign
of what this portends, just a week ago the University of Colorado at
Boulder announced an investigation into campus records to make sure
that every faculty member has actually signed his or her
state-required loyalty oath!

All this is intolerable and must be reversed--immediately.

To be clear: the issues here have nothing to do with the quality of
Ward Churchill's scholarship or his professional credentials. However
one views his choice of words or specific arguments, he is being put
in the dock solely for his radical critique of U.S. history and
present-day policy in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001.
Apparently, 9/11 is now the third rail of American intellectual life:
to critically probe into its causes and to interrogate the
international role of the United States is treated as heresy; those
inquiring can be denied forums, careers, and even personal safety.
And now Churchill's persecutors have gone further, repeatedly
ridiculing his scholarly argumentation that the United States
committed genocide against the indigenous people of this continent,
and that the FBI systematically attempted to disrupt and destroy the
movements and leaders of the 1960s. Rather than debate or disprove
such theses, Churchill's attackers attempt to render them beyond the
pale of respectable discourse. Through all this, new ground rules
are being established: any criticism or even questioning of the
institutional foundations of the United States, or of the motives and
interests behind its policies, will be treated as essentially
treasonous. Left unopposed, this trajectory will lead to a situation
of uncontested indoctrination enforced by the state.

The Churchill case is not an isolated incident but a concentrated
example of a well-orchestrated campaign launched in the name of
"academic freedom" and "balance" which in fact aims to purge the
universities of more radical thinkers and oppositional thought
generally, and to create a climate of intimidation. While the
right-wing claim that the universities are "left-wing dictatorships"
is specious beyond belief, it is unfortunately true that the campus
remains one of the few surviving refuges of critical thinking and
dissent in this country. This is something to defend and strengthen.

It would be hard to overstate the serious nature of what has already
happened, let alone what it would mean should the Regents fire
Churchill. If this assault on academe succeeds, the consequences for
American society as a whole will be nothing short of disastrous.

The response from the academic world has thus far fallen short of
what is required. Voices have been raised in opposition, but many
have been intimidated. What is needed is an outpouring of faculty
resolutions condemning this witch-hunt. Teach-ins. Protests.

We propose that emergency faculty resolutions be passed and sent to
the University of Colorado Board of Regents (secretary:
millie.cortez@colorado.edu, cc:
EthnicStudies@colorado.edu) and major media outlets. We further
propose that if the Colorado authorities continue their persecution
of Churchill, we mount major nationally coordinated protests on
campuses all over America - and internationally - as soon as
possible, and that we begin to join efforts to reverse this dangerous
direction in American political and intellectual life

The hour is very late; this case is nothing less than a watershed. We
must act, and act now.

Initial Signatories:

Steven P. Best, Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas-El Paso

Henry A. Giroux, Global Television Network Chair Professor in English
and Communications, McMaster University

Ruth Y. Hsu, Associate Professor of English, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Alan Jones, Dean of Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs,
Pitzer College

Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the History of
Religions, University of Chicago

Raymond Lotta, author and lecturer

Henry Silverman, Professor and Chairperson Emeritus, Michigan State University

Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University

Allen W. Wood, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University
******************

AMONG NEW SIGNATORIES TO THE OPEN LETTER:
Robert M. Baum, Director of African Studies, Iowa State University

Prasenjit Duara, Chair, Department of History, University of Chicago

Allen F. Roberts, Director, James S. Coleman African Studies Center,
University of California, Los Angeles

******************
E-mail this letter to colleagues, as well as people and institutions
in other walks of life. Please get back to us with your ideas and let
us know what you are doing. Send us copies of resolutions and
statements. Add your name to this Open Letter.

E-mail to: criticalthinking@pitzer.edu

2005-02-22T10:09:00.000-08:00

Sleuths of Spin

By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet
Posted on February 22, 2005, Printed on February 22, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21307/

Given the sorry state of the journalism these days, The Center for
Media and Democracy's John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton are setting
about an ambitious – yet necessary – undertaking: reinventing
journalism.

Several right-wing activists/pundits/columnists have already developed
their own roadmap for reinventing journalism. The latest case is that
of Jeff Gannon, whose real name is James D. Guckert. As Gannon, Guckert
reported for a conservative news site called Talon News. Somehow,
Guckert gained access to White House briefings and and was seen tossing
softballs at White House officials. Gannon/Guckert even got called on
by President Bush at a news conference. He ended his question with "How
are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves
from reality?" referring to Sen. Hillary Clinton and Senate Minority
Leader Harry Reid.

Gannon/Guckert had about 13 of his 15 minutes before Media Matters for
America and John Aravosis' Americablog blew the lid off his charade.
Underneath that lid was James D. Guckert on full display – he was outed
as a contributor to such sites as Hotmilitarystud.com, Workingboys.net,
Militaryescorts.com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com.

The administration's payoffs to syndicated newspaper columnists
Armstrong Williams, Mike McManus and Maggie Gallagher may not be nearly
as scrumptious a story as the Gannon/Guckert Affair, but they could be
far more significant. After all, this loose coalition of the shilling
received government money to write about their support for Bush
administration policies. In early January, USA Today revealed that
Williams, a prominent African-American radio and television
personality, had received $240,000 from the Department of Education –
through a contract with the Ketchum public relations firm – for his
support for the president's No Child Left Behind project. Mike McManus
and Maggie Gallagher received their checks from the Department of
Health and Human Services to help promote the president's healthy
marriages initiative.

Sleuths of spin John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have exposed how
corporate shills and government spokespersons manipulate the media and
undermine democracy for more than a decade. Through the Madison,
Wis.-based Center for Media and Democracy, they have produced a number
of groundbreaking books, including Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies,
Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (Common Courage Press,
1995), Trust Us, We're Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and
Gambles with Your Future (Tarcher/Penguin, 2001), Weapons of Mass
Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
(Tarcher/Penguin, 2003) and most recently, Banana Republicans: How the
Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State (Tarcher/Penguin,
2004).

Two years ago, the Center launched Disinfopedia, a web site that
Rampton described in a recent e-mail as "an experiment in media
democracy and citizen investigative journalism." Rampton pointed out
that Disinfopedia had "grown into a leading resource on the players who
work behind the scenes to shape public opinion and public policy."
Since its mission has evolved and expanded during the past two years,
the Center recently renamed it SourceWatch. (Disclosure: I have been
cited by SourceWatch.)

Rampton maintains that SourceWatch "is an example of media democracy in
action – an information source that is truly 'of, by and for the
people' who use it. It has become a tool that journalists and activists
use to research and report on key issues such as media concentration
and reform, democratic revitalization, environmental health and
sustainability, the war in Iraq, corporate manipulation of government
agencies, and the power and influence of right-wing special interest
groups and lobbies."

In late February, I conducted an e-mail interview John Stauber. We
covered a number of issues related to the media, starting with the
current payola scandal.

Bill Berkowitz: How do you view the recent scandals involving the Bush
administration giving payoffs to Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher
and Michael McManus in exchange for favorable coverage of their issues?

I'm very happy to see this coming out, but it's really just the tip of
an iceberg. Sheldon Rampton and I wrote our expose of the Public
Relations industry, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, ten years ago. It's
filled with propaganda horror stories. Forty percent or more of what
passes for news and information these days is the result of organized
PR campaigns. It's been wonderful to see these scandals exposed and
others such as the "Karen Ryan reporting" news reports. Karen Ryan runs
a PR firm, and her government funded video news releases (VNRs) are
aired as news by hundreds of TV news directors.

In Toxic Sludge we reported that there were already thousands of
corporate and government VNRs produced and aired each year, and that
number continues to increase. The skillful manipulation of the media by
professional propagandists, often with the consent and approval of
editors and news directors, is rampant and worsening.

Do you think there will be more revelations?

The mainstream media does a horrific job of reporting on itself, and I
think that there will be more revelations only to the extent that
independent journalists are able to document and expose these abuses.
The best PR, like the best propaganda, is invisible. In the more than a
decade that our organization has been reporting on and exposing
propaganda in the media, not one major newspaper to my knowledge has
committed a reporter to this as an investigative beat.

What can reporters do to break through the sound bite/talking points
media culture?

Reporters need to understand the business of propaganda and to view the
public relations industry and the culture of spin as anathema to
journalism and to democracy. Today PR flacks outnumber real working
journalists, and many of the flacks are former reporters who know
exactly how best to manage, cajole and manipulate the media because
they are from the media. J-schools have combined journalism and public
relations and told students that it's all the same, it requires the
same skills, and there is little fundamental difference. This is like
combining accounting and embezzling as a field of study.

Today in the corporate mainstream media reporters are overworked,
underpaid and pressured to avoid topics that offend advertisers.
Reporters need to dedicate themselves to real journalism and find ways
to practice it. Journalism is a sacred trust in a democracy, and if you
don't believe that you should probably go into PR.

Your books have generally focused on the way the American people are
getting hoodwinked by PR companies that set and then explain the agenda
of powerful corporations and politicians. Is there any way to render
them less powerful?

Simply stated, PR firms are corporations that help other corporations
and government agencies to manage public information, perceptions and
policy. Many people think that propaganda doesn't exist in democratic
societies, that it is a problem of dictatorships. Alex Carey, the
Australian academic, and others have pointed out that it is precisely
in democracies where sophisticated, hidden propaganda is most
prevalent, and the news media has become the major disseminator of
propaganda, rather than a force for exposing it.

In our book Weapons of Mass Deception, Sheldon and I explained how
rather than challenge Bush's war and exposing the falsehoods and
failures in Bush's claims, the U.S. news media became a propaganda arm
of the government. It shut out and ridiculed critics of the war, and
enabled it to take place. There are many fundamental reforms that could
be legislated to limit and control the power of corporations to
dominate our news and our politics. But powerful special interests and
governmental ideologues will use the best available techniques of
propaganda to manipulate and manage public perception. It is the
responsibility of journalists, educators and citizen activists to
expose and thwart such manipulation, and it's specifically our mission.

Given such a closed system, why the efforts around building media
democracy?

Twelve years ago when I founded our investigative quarterly PR Watch, I
chose the name Center for Media and Democracy for our non-profit
organization in order to emphasize the idea that without a vigorous,
independent, courageous and muckraking media, democracy cannot survive,
especially in this age of cranked-up propaganda. I've been happy to see
the term "media democracy" come into wide use. With the emergence of
the internet it has taken on new meaning in the age of blogs,
indymedia, wiki web sites like SourceWatch, and all the wonderful
reporting from web sites like AlterNet, Common Dreams, Buzzflash,
WorkingForChange, and those associated with the left[ist] press.

Media democracy seems like a catch-all phrase that is pretty ambiguous.
How would you define it?

Media democracy means that we recognize that one-way, top-down,
corporate mass communications has become much more a foe of democracy
than its friend. Democratic society is impossible without a courageous
and independent news media. The dominant mainstream media, the MSM, is
driven by the corporate bottom line and filled primarily with fluff,
sensationalism, right-wing politics, PR posing as news, and a
commitment to serve corporate advertisers. We need a powerful new
political movement to fundamentally challenge and change the corporate
media environment, and we also need to create new media that takes
advantage of internet technology to better serve democracy. Community
radio stations, non-profit media watchdogs, investigative bloggers, and
alternative news websites are all becoming important producers of
online web-based news and information that is building media democracy.
One project our organization is currently discussing with other groups
committed to media democracy is to develop standards for online
journalism that enable it to fulfill its promise of becoming a vital
media that serves our democracy.

What makes "SourceWatch" unique?

SourceWatch is unique because it is an experiment in collaborative
online investigative reporting. It's a very powerful educational,
organizing, research and networking tool that allows a growing
community of global citizens to collaborate to research and write
investigative news articles.

The open source "wiki" software that powers SourceWatch is in the
public domain, as are the articles that are written. Anyone can go to
SourceWatch and read, write and edit the information there. And every
change made in any article is logged for transparency. Bob Burton, an
investigative journalist, author and activist from Australia, is our
online editor.

We are constantly striving to improve the accuracy, depth and quality
of articles on SourceWatch. It is only two years old [it was originally
launched as Disinfopedia], and we are really just at the beginning of
this experiment. Anyone who first hears about it understandably says,
as I did when my colleague Sheldon Rampton proposed SourceWatch, "what
good is it if anyone with internet access can write or edit or for that
matter vandalize its articles?" But the fact is that the vast majority
of users are dedicated to the concept of investigative online
journalism, and by insisting on journalistic standards of accuracy and
fairness, and relegating opinions to an opinion page, the experiment is
working.

One problem it is solving is that by harnessing the investigative power
of hundreds of citizen journalists, we are finally able to keep track
of the myriad of industry front groups, PR firms, lobbyists and
anti-environmental PR campaigns that exist and are created every day.

SourceWatch has been a great success in its first two years, yet it is
just starting to take off. That said, everyone who reads an article on
the site should understand its limitations; that the article has not
necessarily been vetted by us, that no article is 100 percent accurate,
that anyone can contribute, and that it is a work in progress with no
copyright on its articles. So SourceWatch, like every other bit of the
news media, needs to be read with a critical eye. But with that
qualification I must say that I find most of the information very
accurate and much of it very unique. Wiki websites like SourceWatch are
becoming an important part of the online information environment.

Are you working on another book? What will it be about and when can we
expect it?

Sheldon and I have just begun outlining a new book examining media
corruption, spin and the growing media democracy movement. It would in
some ways be a return to the territory of our first and third books,
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You and Trust Us, We're Experts. We hope to
have it out in hardcover sometime in 2006. We've co-authored two books
in less than two years, timely paperbacks exposing the selling of the
war on Iraq and the political propaganda and strategy of the Republican
right. It seems to be a good time to step back and examine how citizens
might understand and overcome the toxic propaganda emanating from the
right-wing echo chamber.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21307/

2005-02-16T09:20:00.000-08:00

McCain waves stick at TV over news coverage

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - Lawmakers' pique over the networks' incredible shrinking news hole is prompting legislation that will both shorten the time broadcasters have between license renewals and require full commission review of 5% of all licenses.

The legislation was introduced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Tuesday after the release of a report by the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California found evening TV newscasts contained little coverage of local political campaigns last year.

It also would require broadcasters to post on their Internet sites information detailing their commitment to local public-affairs programming, and it calls for the Federal Communications Commission to complete its open proceeding on whether public-interest obligations should apply to broadcasters in the digital era.

According to the survey, 64% of 4,333 broadcasts examined by the center included at least one election story. A typical half-hour contained 3 minutes, 11 seconds of campaign coverage, the report claims.

While 55% of the broadcasts contained a presidential story, just 8% of broadcasts contained a story about a local candidate race for U.S. House, state house seats, city council seats and other local and regional offices. Eight times more coverage went to stories about accidental injuries, the Lear Center said.

"If a local candidate wants to be on TV and can't afford advertising, his only hope is to have a freak accident," McCain said.

The researchers monitored evening-news broadcasts by 44 major network affiliates in markets that account for 23% of all TV viewers: New York; Los Angeles; Philadelphia; Dallas; Seattle; Miami; Denver; Orlando; Tampa, Fla.; Dayton, Ohio; and Des Moines, Iowa.

McCain argued that the dearth of local political coverage on local TV is a result of the increasing consolidation of the media industry.

"Perhaps some media groups have expanded more local news, but most observers see a decrease in local news," he said. "It defies logic that large, centrally owned media groups would expand local news. They would just take the national feed."

Broadcasters disputed the study, claiming that the foundation surveyed only 11 of 210 local TV markets and left out thousands of hours of election coverage in morning news programs, noon news programs, 4 p.m. local news programs, late night programming like "Nightline" and weekend political talk shows.

"The Lear Center review is disappointing on so many levels that it would be a disservice to the academic community to label this legitimate research," the National Association of Broadcasters said.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

2005-02-13T19:32:00.000-08:00

Tariq Ali on the Iraqi Elections
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1407404,00.html
Out with the old, in with the new
The Iraqi elections were designed not to preserve the unity of Iraq but to re-establish the unity of the west.
Tariq Ali
Monday February 7, 2005Guardian

The US, unlike the empires of old Europe, has always preferred to exercise its hegemony indirectly. It has relied on local relays - uniformed despots, corrupt oligarchs, pliant politicians, obedient monarchs - rather than lengthy occupations. It was only when rebellions from below threatened to disrupt this order that the marines were dispatched and wars fought.During the cold war, money was supplied indiscriminately to all anti-communist forces (including the current leadership of al-Qaida); the 21st-century recipients are more carefully targeted. The aim is slowly to replace the traditional elites in the old satrapies with a new breed of neo-liberal politicians who have been trained and educated in the US. This is the primary function of the US money allocated to "democracy promotion". Loyalty can be purchased from politicians, parties and trades unions. And the result, it is hoped, is to create a new layer of janissary politicians who serve Washington.This most recent variant of "democracy promotion" has now been applied in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it will hit Haiti (another occupied country) in November. Create a new elite, give it funds and weaponry to build a new army and let them make the country safe for the corporations.The 2004 Afghan elections, even according to some pro-US commentators, were a farce, and the much vaunted 73% turnout was a fraud. In Iraq, the western media were celebrating a 60% turnout within minutes of the polls closing, despite the fact that Iraq lacks a complete register of voters, let alone a network of computerised polling stations. The official figure, when it comes, is likely to be revised downwards (according to Debka, a pro-US Israeli website, turnout was closer to 40%).The "high" turnout was widely interpreted as a rejection of the Iraqi resistance. But was it? Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's many followers voted to please him, but if he is unable to deliver peace and an end to the occupation, they too might defect.The only force in Iraq the occupiers can rely on are the Kurdish tribes. The Kurdish 36th command battalion fought alongside the US in Falluja, but the tribal chiefs want some form of independence, and some oil. If Turkey, loyal Nato ally and EU aspirant, vetoes any such possibility, then the Kurds too might accept money from elsewhere. The battle for Iraq is far from over. It has merely entered a new stage.Despite strong disagreements on boycotting the elections, the majority of Iraqis will not willingly hand over their oil or their country to the west. Politicians who try to force this through will lose all support and become totally dependent on the foreign armies in their country.The popular resistance will continue. Many in the west find it increasingly difficult to support this resistance. The arguments for and against it are old ones. In 1885, the English socialist William Morris celebrated the defeat of General Gordon by the Mahdi: "Khartoum fallen - into the hands of the people it belongs to". Morris argued that the duty of English internationalists was to support all those being oppressed by the British empire despite disagreements with nationalism or fanaticism.The triumphalist chorus of the western media reflects a single fact: the Iraqi elections were designed not so much to preserve the unity of Iraq but to re-establish the unity of the west. After Bush's re-election the French and Germans were looking for a bridge back to Washington. Will their citizens accept the propaganda that sees the illegitimate election (the Carter Centre, which monitors elections worldwide, refused to send observers) as justifying the occupation?The occupation involved a military and economic invasion as envisaged by Hayek, the father of neo-liberalism, who pioneered the notion of lightning air strikes against Iran in 1979 and Argentina in 1982. The re-colonisation of Iraq would have greatly pleased him. Politicians masking their true aims with weasel words about "humanity" would have irritated him.What of the media, the propaganda pillar of the new order? In Control Room, a Canadian documentary on al-Jazeera, one of the more disgusting images is that of embedded western journalists whooping with joy at the capture of Baghdad. The coverage of "elections" in Afghanistan and Iraq has been little more than empty spin. This symbiosis of neo-liberal politics and a neo-liberal media helps reinforce the collective memory loss from which the west suffers today.Carl Schmitt, a theorist of the Third Reich, developed the view that politics is encompassed by the essential categories of "friend" and "enemy". After the second world war, Schmitt's writings were adapted to the needs of the US and are now the bedrock of neocon thinking. The message is straightforward: if your country does not serve our needs it is an enemy state. It will be occupied, its leaders removed and pliant satraps placed on the throne.But when troops withdraw, satrapies often crumble. Occupation, rebellion, withdrawal, occupation, self-emancipation is a pattern in world history.At the Nuremberg trials, Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, was charged for providing the justification for Hitler's pre-emptive strike against Norway. Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Jack Straw in a dock of the future? Unlikely, but desirable.

· Tariq Ali's latest book is Bush in Babylon: the Recolonisation of Iraqtariq.ali3@btinternet.com[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

2004-12-14T07:11:00.000-08:00

PBS' Future Post-Moyers
By Jeffrey Chester, AlterNet. Posted December 14, 2004.
As PBS lobbies for a billion-dollar trust fund, it's time to challenge the status quo.
It's fitting that as Bill Moyers formally ends his 30-year journey working at PBS, the noncommercial network itself is about to embark on a new effort to determine its own future. This Friday, Moyers signs-off as the host of his "NOW" program, and also leaves PBS. At the same time, public broadcasting's new "Enhanced Funding Initiative" advisory committee is about to hold their first public meeting. Its goal is to "develop ... sustainable ... funding for public service media in the digital era." At issue is whether public broadcasting will finally succeed in securing what has been an endless Holy Grail-like quest since its founding in the 1960s: to secure ongoing and independent funding for noncommercial radio and TV.
For decades, public TV and radio have been buffeted by political forces of Congress, which controls the key federal contributions to its annual budget. It's always been kept on a very short funding leash, which has helped keep both PBS and NPR from engaging in the kind of programming that would significantly challenge the status quo (both of media and of politics). But PBS President Pat Mitchell believes that there is now a serious opportunity to create a permanent trust fund worth billions of dollars. The new funding initiative will recommend how PBS (and presumably NPR and public TV and radio stations) can gain the revenues made possible from the sale of publicly owned airwaves.
Mitchell is correct that the country's congressionally mandated transition to an all-digital broadcast system provides a unique opportunity to explore permanent funding. There are 20 to 30 billions of dollars worth of public spectrum (airwaves) that will return to the government from commercial and public TV stations. Even a small portion of the proceeds could easily generate sustainable annual revenues for noncommercial TV and radio.
But it is unlikely that either PBS or its elite panel of advisors (the panel is chaired by former Netscape CEO James Barksdale and former FCC Chair Reed Hundt) will ask whether PBS actually deserves such a major gift from the American public. Nor will the process likely examine – in a very open and public way – how noncommercial communications should be restructured in the digital era.
For example, before any discussion of raising new revenues, we should be assured that the spirit of the original mission of public broadcasting is fully honored. Where is the commitment to producing serious news and public affairs (both at the station and national level)? How will significant programming slots be controlled by persons of color (at a time when Tavis Smiley, for example, is quitting NPR for its failure to "meaningfully reach out" to a multi-cultural audience)? How much of the schedule will be controlled by independent producers? Will ad-like underwriting vanish from PBS, especially its news and children's programs? How will the governance of public broadcasting change so it becomes more democratic? What new innovative programming ventures will be created that can harness the more than 2,000 digital channels soon to be available to public TV?
Unless there is public pressure on PBS and the Congress to ask such questions, they won't be on the agenda. We should be engaged in the kind of serious review about the future of public service broadcasting (PSB) now underway in the U.K., where a very public and focused process about how to "redefine PSB for the digital age" has already produced significant recommendations. Given the expanded capabilities of digital TV, broadband, and other new media, there is no reason to rely on any one central institution, such as PBS, to provide the public with quality noncommercial programming. One U.K. proposal to create a "Public Service Publisher" that would use independent producers to create and "distribute content on broadband, mobile networks as well as cable [and] satellite" should be embraced here as well. So should its call for a noncommercial system that is "genuinely open, transparent ... and involves the public adequately in decision making."
The new media landscape of TV and online will likely become even more commercialized, as Big Media and Madison Avenue target consumers with pinpoint digital accuracy. It is vital that we create as far-reaching a noncommercial media landscape as we can. To truly do so would be honoring Bill Moyers. In his roles as journalist and storyteller, he has demonstrated how TV can serve democracy as well as the spirit. We can only hope that the country's noncommercial future reflects the rich legacy that Moyers has given us.
For more on this subject, visit:
The Ofcom Review of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) Television
BBC Charter Review
Independent Panel's Report "Emerging Themes"
"PBS CEO Pat Mitchell Charts a Course for Robust Public Service Media in America"
In 2004, PBS Focuses on New Platforms while Delivering on Public Service Mission
Jim Romenesko, "Tavis Smiley Decides against Renewing NPR Contract"
"The Public Broadcasting Service: An Overview"

2004-11-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

November 16, 2004
Contact: Dr. Susan Linn (617) 278-4282 slinn@jbcc.harvard.edu
For Immediate Release

PARENTS BEWARE: SPONGEBOB MOVIE RIFE WITH
COMMERCIALISM

Citing the film’s promotions with Burger King, Kellogg’s, and
Keebler, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood
(CCFC) is warning parents to beware of the excessive and
harmful levels of commercialism in the new SpongeBob
SquarePants Movie.

“This movie is essentially a ninety minute commercial for junk
food,” said CCFC’s Dr. Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids:
The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. “Parents who take their
children to see the film should expect to be besieged with
requests for products from the movie’s promotional partners.”

Burger King is offering exclusive SpongeBob toys and watches
at its restaurants. Kellogg’s and Keebler have launched several
SpongeBob products to coincide with the movie, including
Kellogg’s SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Cereal, Keebler
SpongeBob SquarePants Movie E.L. Fudge Cookies, Kellogg’s
SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Rice Krispie Treats, and
Kellogg’s SpongeBob SquarePants Pop Tarts.

It has become commonplace for media characters popular with
children to adorn the packages of food products of dubious
nutritional value. Ever since rising to superstardom on
Nickelodeon, SpongeBob SquarePants has been ubiquitous in
grocery stores. In 2002, SpongeBob macaroni and cheese was
Kraft’s top-selling pasta brand. SpongeBob also fronts for
products such as SpongeBob SquarePants cereal, Cheez-Its, and
Wild Bubble-Berry Pop Tarts.

Marketing to children is a factor in childhood obesity. A
number of children’s health organizations – including the
American Academy of Pediatrics – have called for restrictions
on food marketing to children. The Institute of Medicine
recently called for a national conference to develop guidelines
for the advertising of foods and beverages directed at children.

Psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint of the Judge Baker Children’s
Center hopes that parents will factor in the film’s commercial
ties when deciding whether or not to let their children see
SpongeBob on the big screen. “The cost of this movie is more
than the price of a ticket. The nagging that marketers
deliberately and effectively cultivate can be extremely stressful
for families. And for those parents who give in, there are the
potential costs of childhood obesity and its attendant health
problems.”

The Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood (formerly
Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children) is a national
coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy
groups and concerned parents who counter the harmful effects
of marketing to children through action, advocacy, education,
research, and collaboration among organizations and individuals
who care about children. CCFC supports the rights of children
to grow up – and the rights of parents to raise them – without
being undermined by rampant consumerism. For more
information, please visit: www.commercialfreechildhood.org

Josh Golin
Action Coordinator
CCFC: Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood
jgolin@jbcc.harvard.edu
(617) 278-4172

2004-11-22T09:22:00.000-08:00

Hello Supporters of Low Power FM and Community Radio,
and Greetings from the Prometheus Radio Project!

We're writing this note to let you know about a great opportunity to
expand Low Power FM -- and to encourage you to act on it now, before
time runs out. We need you to file comments at the FCC before -December
1st-, and tell the Commission how much LPFM means to you.

The FCC is collecting comments from organizations and community members,
trying to find out how their local broadcasters are impacting them.
Some organizations, like the Educational Media Foundation, are filing
comments -against- Low Power FM radio! They want their sattelite-fed,
non-local translators to take precedence over our community-run,
volunteer-driven stations.

Tell the FCC that your LPFM stations, and thousands more like it around
the country, are the kind of local media that America needs most. Go to
http://www.prometheusradio.org/localism to file a brief comment today!

Thanks for fighting for real community radio,
The Organizers at Prometheus Radio Project

* * * * *

(to be removed from this list, email hannah@prometheusradio.org. thanks
for reading!)

2004-09-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib
By Alfred W. McCoy

From ancient Rome's red-hot irons and lacerating hooks to medieval
Europe's thumbscrews, rack, and wheel, for over 2,000 years anyone
interrogated in a court of law could expect to suffer unspeakable
tortures. For the last 200 years, humanist intellectuals from
Voltaire to members of Amnesty International have led a sustained
campaign against the horrors of state-sponsored cruelty, culminating
in the United Nation's 1985 Convention Against Torture, ratified by
the Clinton administration in 1994.

Then came 9/11. When the Twin Towers collapsed killing thousands,
influential "pro-pain pundits" promptly repudiated those
Enlightenment ideals and began publicly discussing whether torture
might be an appropriate, even necessary weapon in George Bush's war
on terror. The most persuasive among them, Harvard academic Alan M.
Dershowitz, advocated giving courts the right to issue "torture
warrants," ensuring that needed information could be prized from
unwilling Arab subjects with steel needles.

Despite torture's appeal as a "lesser evil," a necessary expedient in
dangerous times, those who favor it ignore its recent, problematic
history in America. They also seem ignorant of a perverse pathology
that allows the practice of torture, once begun, to spread
uncontrollably in crisis situations, destroying the legitimacy of the
perpetrator nation. As past perpetrators could have told today's
pundits, torture plumbs the recesses of human consciousness,
unleashing an unfathomable capacity for cruelty as well as seductive
illusions of potency. Even as pundits and professors fantasized about
"limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration, following the
President's orders to "kick some ass," was testing and disproving
their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that
spread quickly from use against a few "high target value" Al Qaeda
suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent
Iraqis.

As we learned from France's battle for Algiers in the 1950s,
Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s, and Britain's Northern Ireland
conflict in the 1970s, a nation that harbors torture in defiance of
its democratic principles pays a terrible price. Its officials must
spin an ever more complex web of lies that, in the end, weakens the
bonds of trust that are the sine qua non of any modern society. Most
surprisingly, our own pro-pain pundits seemed, in those heady early
days of the war on terror, unaware of a fifty-year history of torture
by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), nor were they aware that
their enthusiastic proposals gave cover to those in the Bush
Administration intent on reactivating a ruthless apparatus.

Torture's Perverse Pathology

In April 2004, the American public was stunned by televised
photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis
stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering
humiliating abuse while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As the
scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld quickly assured Congress that the abuses were
"perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military," whom New York Times
columnist William Safire soon branded "creeps."

These photos, however, are snapshots not of simple brutality or even
evidence of a breakdown in "military discipline." What they record
are CIA torture techniques that have metastasized like an undetected
cancer inside the U.S. intelligence community over the past half
century. A survey of this history shows that the CIA was, in fact,
the lead agency at Abu Ghraib, enlisting Army intelligence to support
its mission. These photographs from Iraq also illustrate standard
interrogation procedures inside the gulag of secret CIA prisons that
have operated globally, on executive authority, since the start of
the President's war on terror.

Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a
deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of
the Cold War. At the UN and other international forums, Washington
has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal
standard for human rights. Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated
ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same
international conventions, a number of which the U.S has ratified. In
battling communism, the United States adopted some of its most
objectionable practices -- subversion abroad, repression at home, and
most significantly torture itself.

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA conducted massive, secret research into
coercion and the malleability of human consciousness which, by the
late fifties, was costing a billion dollars a year. Many Americans
have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of
this research -- the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects. While
these CIA drug experiments led nowhere and the testing of electric
shock as a technique led only to lawsuits, research into sensory
deprivation proved fruitful indeed. In fact, this research produced a
new psychological rather than physical method of torture, perhaps
best described as "no-touch" torture.

The Agency's discovery was a counterintuitive breakthrough, the first
real revolution in this cruel science since the seventeenth century
-- and thanks to recent revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo,
we are now all too familiar with these methods, even if many
Americans still have no idea of their history. Upon careful
examination, those photographs of nude bodies expose the CIA's most
basic torture techniques -- stress positions, sensory deprivation,
and sexual humiliation.

For over 2,000 years, from ancient Athens through the Inquisition,
interrogators found that the infliction of physical pain often
produced heightened resistance or unreliable information -- the
strong defied pain while the weak blurted out whatever was necessary
to stop it. By contrast, the CIA's psychological torture paradigm
used two new methods, sensory disorientation and "self-inflicted
pain," both of which were aimed at causing victims to feel
responsible for their own suffering and so to capitulate more readily
to their torturers. A week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke,
General Geoffrey Miller, U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and formerly
in Guantanamo), offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase
torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the
detainees," the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions
in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep
deprivation in any of our interrogations."

Under field conditions since the start of the Afghan War, Agency and
allied interrogators have often added to their no-touch repertoire
physical methods reminiscent of the Inquisition's trademark tortures
-- strappado, question de l'eau, "crippling stork," and "masks of
mockery." At the CIA's center near Kabul in 2002, for instance,
American interrogators forced prisoners "to stand with their hands
chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled," an effect similar to
the strappado. Instead of the Inquisition's iron-framed "crippling
stork" to contort the victim's body, CIA interrogators made their
victims assume similar "stress positions" without any external
mechanism, aiming again for the psychological effect of self-induced
pain

Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, the CIA's "no
touch" torture actually leaves deep, searing psychological scars on
both victims and -- something seldom noted -- their interrogators.
Victims often need long treatment to recover from a trauma many
experts consider more crippling than physical pain. Perpetrators can
suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating acts of
cruelty and lasting emotional disorders. When applied in actual
operations, the CIA's psychological procedures have frequently led to
unimaginable cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual
perpetrators whose improvisations are often horrific and only
occasionally effective.

Just as interrogators are often seduced by a dark, empowering sense
of dominance over victims, so their superiors, even at the highest
level, can succumb to fantasies of torture as an all-powerful weapon.
Our contemporary view of torture as aberrant and its perpetrators as
abhorrent ignores both its pervasiveness as a Western practice for
two millennia and its perverse appeal. Once torture begins, its
perpetrators, plunging into uncharted recesses of consciousness, are
often swept away by dark reveries, by frenzies of power and potency,
mastery and control -- particularly in times of crisis. "When
feelings of insecurity develop within those holding power," reads one
CIA analysis of the Soviet state applicable to post-9/11 America,
"they become increasingly suspicious and put great pressures on the
secret police to obtain arrests and confessions. At such times police
officials are inclined to condone anything which produces a speedy
'confession' and brutality may become widespread."

Enraptured by this illusory power, modern states that sanction
torture usually allow it to spread uncontrollably. By 1967, just four
years after compiling a torture manual for use against a few top
Soviet targets, the CIA was operating forty interrogation centers in
South Vietnam as part of its Phoenix Program that killed over 20,000
Viet Cong suspects. In the centers themselves, countless thousands
were tortured for information that led to these assassinations.
Similarly, just a few months after CIA interrogators first tortured
top Al Qaeda suspects at Kabul in 2002, its agents were involved in
the brutal interrogation of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners. As its most
troubling legacy, the CIA's psychological method, with its
legitimating scientific patina and its avoidance of obvious physical
brutality, has provided a pretext for the preservation of torture as
an acceptable practice within the U.S. intelligence community.

Once adopted, torture offers such a powerful illusion of efficient
information extraction that its perpetrators, high and low, remain
wedded to its use. They regularly refuse to recognize its limited
utility and high political cost. At least twice during the Cold War,
the CIA's torture training contributed to the destabilization of two
key American allies, Iran's Shah and the Philippines' Ferdinand
Marcos. Yet even after their spectacular falls, the Agency remained
blind to the way its torture training was destroying the allies it
was designed to defend.

CIA Torture Research

The CIA's torture experimentation of the 1950s and early 1960s was
codified in 1963 in a succinct, secret instructional booklet on
torture -- the "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual,
which would become the basis for a new method of torture disseminated
globally over the next three decades. These techniques were first
spread through the U.S. Agency for International Development's Public
Safety program to train police forces in Asia and Latin America as
the front line of defense against communists and other
revolutionaries. After an angry Congress abolished the Public Safety
program in 1975, the CIA worked through U.S. Army Mobile Training
Teams to instruct military interrogators, mainly in Central America.

At the Cold War's end, Washington resumed its advocacy of universal
principles, denouncing regimes for torture, participating in the
World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna in 1993 and, a year later,
ratifying the UN Convention Against Torture. On the surface, the
United States had resolved the tension between its anti-torture
principles and its torture practices. Yet even when Congress finally
ratified this UN convention it did so with intricately-constructed
reservations that cleverly exempted the CIA's psychological torture
method. While other covert agencies synonymous with Cold War
repression such as Romania's Securitate, East Germany's Stasi, and
the Soviet Union's KGB have disappeared, the CIA survives -- its
archives sealed, its officers decorated, and its Cold War crimes
forgotten. By failing to repudiate the Agency's propagation of
torture, while adopting a UN convention that condemned its practice,
the United States left this contradiction buried like a political
land mine ready to detonate with such phenomenal force in the Abu
Ghraib scandal.

Memory and Forgetting

Today the American public has only a vague understanding of these CIA
excesses and the scale of its massive mind-control project. Yet
almost every adult American carries fragmentary memories of this past
-- of LSD experiments, the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, the
murder of a kidnapped American police adviser in Montevideo who was
teaching CIA techniques to the Uruguayan police, and of course the
Abu Ghraib photographs. But few are able to fit these fragments
together and so grasp the larger picture. There is, in sum, an
ignorance, a studied avoidance of a deeply troubling topic, akin to
that which shrouds this subject in post-authoritarian societies.

With the controversy over Abu Ghraib, incidents that once seemed but
fragments should now be coming together to form a mosaic of a
clandestine agency manipulating its government and deceiving its
citizens to probe the cruel underside of human consciousness, and
then propagating its discoveries throughout the Third World.

Strong democracies have difficulty dealing with torture. In the
months following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the United
States moved quickly through the same stages (as defined by author
John Conroy) that the United Kingdom experienced after revelations of
British army torture in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s -- first,
minimizing the torture with euphemisms such as "interrogation in
depth"; next, justifying it on grounds that it was necessary or
effective; and finally, attempting to bury the issue by blaming "a
few bad apples."

Indeed, since last April, the Bush administration and much of the
media have studiously avoided the word "torture" and instead blamed
our own bad apples, those seven Military Police. In July, the Army's
Inspector General Paul T. Mikolashek delivered his report blaming 94
incidents of "abuse" on "an individual failure to uphold Army
Values." Although the New York Times called his conclusions
"comical," the general's views seem to resonate with an emerging
conservative consensus. "Interrogation is not a Sunday-school class,"
said Republican Senator Trent Lott. "You don't get information that
will save American lives by withholding pancakes." In June, an ABC
News/Washington Post poll found that 35% of Americans felt torture
was acceptable in some circumstances.

In August, Major General George R. Fay released his report on the
role of Military Intelligence at Abu Ghraib. Its stunning revelations
about the reasons for this torture were, however, obscured in opaque
military prose. After interviewing 170 personnel and reviewing 9,000
documents, the general intimated that this abuse was the product of
an interrogation policy shaped, in both design and application, by
the CIA.

Significantly, General Fay blamed not the "seven bad apples," but the
Abu Ghraib interrogation procedures themselves. Of the 44 verifiable
incidents of abuse, one-third occurred during actual interrogation.
Moreover, these "routine" interrogation procedures "contributed to an
escalating 'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for
additional and severe abuses to occur."

After finding standard Army interrogation doctrine sound, General Fay
was forced to confront a single, central, uncomfortable question:
what was the source of the aberrant, "non-doctrinal" practices that
led to torture during interrogation at Abu Ghraib? Scattered
throughout his report are the dots, politely unconnected, that lead
from the White House to the Iraqi prison cell block: President Bush
gave his defense secretary broad powers over prisoners in November
2001; Secretary Rumsfeld authorized harsh "Counter-Resistance
Techniques" for Afghanistan and Guantanamo in December 2002; hardened
Military Intelligence units brought these methods to Iraq in July
2003; and General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad authorized these extreme
measures for Abu Ghraib in September 2003.

In its short answer to this uncomfortable question, General Fay's
report, when read closely, traced the source of these harsh
"non-doctrinal methods" at Abu Ghraib to the CIA. He charged that a
flouting of military procedures by CIA interrogators "eroded the
necessity in the minds of soldiers and civilians for them to follow
Army rules." Specifically, the Army "allowed CIA to house 'Ghost
Detainees' who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib,"
thus encouraging violations of "reporting requirements under the
Geneva Conventions." Moreover, the interrogation of CIA detainees
"occurred under different practices and procedures which were absent
any DoD visibility, control, or oversight and created a perception
that OGA [CIA] techniques and practices were suitable and authorized
for DoD operations." With their exemption from military regulations,
CIA interrogators moved about Abu Ghraib with a corrupting "mystique"
and extreme methods that "fascinated" some Army interrogators. In
sum, General Fay seems to say that the CIA has compromised the
integrity and effectiveness of the U.S. military.

Had he gone further, General Fay might have mentioned that the 519th
Military Intelligence, the Army unit that set interrogation
guidelines for Abu Ghraib, had just come from Kabul where it worked
closely with the CIA, learning torture techniques that left at least
one Afghani prisoner dead. Had he gone further still, the general
could have added that the sensory deprivation techniques, stress
positions, and cultural shock of dogs and nudity that we saw in those
photos from Abu Ghraib were plucked from the pages of past CIA
torture manuals.

American Prestige

This is not, of course, the first American debate over torture in
recent memory. From 1970 to 1988, the Congress tried unsuccessfully,
in four major investigations, to expose elements of this CIA torture
paradigm. But on each occasion the public showed little concern, and
the practice, never fully acknowledged, persisted inside the
intelligence community.

Now, in these photographs from Abu Ghraib, ordinary Americans have
seen the reality and the results of interrogation techniques the CIA
has propagated and practiced for nearly half a century. The American
public can join the international community in repudiating a practice
that, more than any other, represents a denial of democracy; or in
its desperate search for security, the United States can continue its
clandestine torture of terror suspects in the hope of gaining good
intelligence without negative publicity.

In the likely event that Washington adopts the latter strategy, it
will be a decision posited on two false assumptions: that torturers
can be controlled and that news of their work can be contained. Once
torture begins, its use seems to spread uncontrollably in a downward
spiral of fear and empowerment. With the proliferation of digital
imaging we can anticipate, in five or ten years, yet more chilling
images and devastating blows to America's international standing.
Next time, however, the American public's moral concern and
Washington's apologies will ring even more hollowly, producing even
greater damage to U.S. prestige.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin, CIA
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, an examination of the CIA's
alliances with drug lords, and Closer Than Brothers, a study of the
impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine
military. He will publish a fuller version of this essay in The New
England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 19, No. 2, 2004).

2004-09-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

For Immediate Release
September 3, 2004

Project Censored Announces Release of

Censored 2005, The Top 25 Censored News Stories
Media Democracy in Action

Sonoma State University's student run media research group Project Censored announces the release of its annual publication, Censored 2005, a compilation of the year's 25 most significant news stories that were overlooked or under-reported by the country's major national news media, as well as chapters on the grass roots media democracy, media ownership maps, real news about US involvement in Palestine, Haiti, Iraq, and more.

With introduction by Greg Palast and the political cartoon commentary of Tom Tomorrow throughout, this year's book covers critical issues facing the American public this election year. In Chapter 1's list of top 25 stories focus on politics, economics, foreign policy, food and health, the environment, energy, domestic policy, and the military.

"We define censorship as interference with the free flow of information," states Peter Phillips, Director of the Project, "Corporate media in the United States is interested primarily in entertainment news to feed their bottom-line priorities. Very important news stories that should reach the American public often fall on the cutting room floor to be replaced by sex-scandals and celebrity updates."

The Sonoma State University research group is composed of nearly 200 faculty, students and community experts who review about 1000 story submissions for coverage, content, reliability of sources and national significance. The top 25 stories are submitted to a panel of judges who then rank them in order of importance. Current judges include, Norman Solomon, Michael Parenti, Cynthia McKinney, Howard Zinn, and 20 other national journalists, scholars and writers.

Censored 2005, now available in bookstores nationwide, can also be purchased on the project's website at www.projectcensored.org.

For more information, contact:
Project Censored
Trish Boreta
707-664-2500
censored@sonoma.edu

************************************************************************

Top Most Censored News Stories

#1 Wealth Inequity in 21st Century Threatens Economy and Democracy
Multinational Monitor, May 2003, Vol. 24, No. 5
Title: "The Wealth Divide" (An interview with Edward Wolff)
Author: Robert Weissman
Buzzflash, March 26 and 19, 2004
Title: "A Buzzflash Interview, Parts I and II" (with David Cay Johnston)
Author: Mark Karlin
London Guardian, October 4, 2004
Title: "Every third person will be a slum dweller within 30 years, UN agency warns"
Author: John Vidal
Multinational Monitor, July/August, 2003
Title: "Grotesque Inequality"
Author: Robert Weissman

Wealth inequality increased dramatically in the United States in the late1990s. The top 5% is now capturing an increasingly greater portion of the pie while the bottom 95% is clearly losing ground, resulting in the rapidly vanishing middle class. This trend is the product of legislative policies carefully crafted and lobbied for by corporations and the ultra-wealthy over the past 25 years. America's economic trends have a global footprint, and today, the top 400 income earners in the U.S. make as much in a year as the entire population of the 20 poorest countries in Africa. A series of reports released in 2003 by the UN warn that further increases in the imbalance in wealth throughout the world will have catastrophic effects if left unchecked, such as the collapse of the entire global economy.

#2 Ashcroft vs. the Human Rights Law that Holds Corporations Accountable
One World.Net and Asheville Global Report, May 19, 2003
Title: "Ashcroft goes after 200-year-old Human Rights Law"
Author: Jim Lobe

Attorney General John Ashcroft is seeking to strike down one of the world's oldest human rights laws, the Alien Torts Claim Act (ATCA) which holds government leaders, corporations, and senior military officials liable for human rights abuses taking place in foreign countries. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) vehemently oppose the removal of this law, as it is one of the few legal defenses victims of human rights violations can claim against powerful organizations such as governments or multinational corporations. By attempting to throw out this law, the Bush Administration is effectively opening the door for human rights abuses to continue under the veil of foreign relations diplomacy.

#3 Bush Administration Manipulates Science and Censors Scientists
The Nation, March 8, 2004
Title: "The Junk Science of George W. Bush"
Author: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Censorship News: The National Coalition Against Censorship Newsletter, Fall 2003, #91
Title: "Censoring Scientific Information"
Author: The National Coalition Against Censorship staff
Environment News Service and OneWorld.Net, February 20, 2004
Title: "Ranking Scientists Warn Bush Science Policy Lacks Integrity"
Author: Sunny Lewis
Office of U.S. Representative Henry A. Waxman, August 2003
Title: "Politics and Science in the Bush Administration"
Prepared by: Committee on Government Reform - Minority Staff
(Updated November 13, 2003

In Washington D.C. more than 60 of the nation's top scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, medical experts, and former federal agency directors, issued a statement February 18, 2004 accusing the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific results for political ends. They are calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking. Under the current administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has blacklisted scientists who pose a threat to pro-business ideology, and many unqualified scientists with close industry ties have been appointed to advisory boards.

# 4 High Uranium Levels Found in Troops and Civilians
Uranium Medical Research Center, January 2003
Title: "UMRC's Preliminary Findings from Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom" and "Afghan Field Trip #2 Report: Precision Destruction - Indiscriminate Effects"

Author: Tedd Weyman, UMRC Research Team
Awakened Woman, January 2004
Title: "Scientists Uncover Radioactive Trail in Afghanistan"
Author: Stephanie Hiller
Dissident Voice, March 2004
Title: "There Are No WordsŠ Radiation in Iraq equals 250,000 Nagasaki Bombs"
Author: Bob Nichols
New York Daily News, April 5, 2004
Title: "Poisoned?"
Author: Juan Gonzales
Information Clearing House, March 2004
Title: "International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan At Tokyo, The People Vs. George Bush"
Author: Professor Ms. Niloufer Bhagwat J.

Civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq and occupying troops have been contaminated with astounding levels of radioactive uranium as a result of post-9/11 United States' use of tons of uranium munitions. Four million pounds of radioactive uranium were dropped on Iraq in 2003 alone.
Most American weapons (missiles, smart bombs, bullets, tank shells, cruise missiles, etc.) contain high amounts of uranium that on detonation, release a radioactive dust. Once ingested, these subatomic particles slice through DNA. With a half-life of 4.5 billion years, it is a permanent contaminant distributed throughout the environment.
Scientists from around the world testify to the huge increase in birth deformities and cancers wherever uranium munitions have been used. The effects of the U.S. deployment will be felt in all the neighboring countries in the Middle East and Asia, as well as in our returning troops.

#5 The Wholesale Giveaway of Our Natural Resources
In These Times, November 23, 2003
Title: "Liquidation of the Commons"
Author: Adam Werbach
High Country News, Vol. 35, No. 11, June 9, 2003
Title: "Giant Sequoias Could Get the Ax"
Author: Matt Weiser

The Bush Administration's environmental policies are destroying much of the environmental progress made over the past 30 years. Between the "Clean Skies Initiative," a recent policy that allows power plants to emit more than five times more mercury and twice as much sulfur dioxide, and the "Healthy Forests Initiative," which allows the wholesale liquidation of ancient forests by corporate timber interests under the guise of fire prevention, resource extraction and pollution is occurring at unprecedented rates.

#6 The Sale of Electoral Politics
In These Times, December 2003
Title: "Voting Machines Gone Wild"
Author: Mark Lewellen-Biddle
Independet/UK, October 13, 2003
Title: "All The President's Votes?"
Author: Andrew Gumbel
Democracy Now!, September 4, 2003
Title: "Will Bush Backers Manipulate Votes to Deliver GW Another Election?"
Reporter: Amy Goodman and the staff of Democracy Now!

Conflicts of interest exist between the largest suppliers of electronic voting machines in the United States and key leaders in the Republican Party. While the voting machines themselves present some technical issues, the political affiliations within the voting machine industry pose even more serious questions. The three major companies involved in implementing the new, often faulty, technology at voting stations throughout the country have strong ties to the Bush Administration, Republican leaders, and major defense contractors.
It must be noted that under the Help America Vote Act control over the electoral process has been taken away from local officials and placed in the hands of a very small number of for-profit corporations. In effect we are privatizing America's most public endeavor.

#7 Conservative Organization Drives Judicial Appointments
The American Prospect, Vol. 14, Issue 3, March 1, 2003
Title: " A Hostile Takeover: How the Federalist Society is Capturing the Federal Courts"
Author: Martin Garbus
Title: "Courts vs. Citizents"
Author: Jamin Raskin

In 2001 George W. Bush eliminated the longstanding influence of the American Bar Association (ABA) in the evaluation of the prospective federal judges. ABA's judicial ratings had long kept extremists from the right and left off the bench. In its place, Bush has been using the Federal Society for Law and Public Policy Studies-a national organization whose mission is to advance a conservative agenda by moving the country's legal system to the right.

One of the most important issues in the country is the control of one of the three branches of government, the judiciary. While Presidents and Congress-members get elected every few years, judicial appointments are for life, Our courts deal with nearly every aspect of life; work conditions and wages, schools, civil rights, affirmative action, crime and punishment, abortion and the environment, amongst others.

#8 Secrets of Cheney's Energy Task Force Come to Light
Judicial Watch, July 17, 2003
Title: "Cheney Energy Task Force Documents Feature Map of Iraqi Oilfields"
Author: Judicial Watch Staff
Foreign Policy in Focus, January 2004
Title: "Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring the Rest of the World's Oil"
Author: Michael Klare

Cheney Energy Task Force documents turned over in the summer of 2003 by the Commerce Department as a result of the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Sierra Club and Judicial Watch contain maps of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals. The documents, dated March 2001, also contain plans of occupation and exploitation that predate September 11, confirming suspicions that the Bush Administration energy policy is driving U.S. military strategy.

#9 Widow Brings RICO Case Against U.S. Government for 9/11
Scoop.co.nz, November 2003 and December 2003
Title: "911 Victim's Wife Files RICO Case Against GW Bush"
Author: Philip J. Berg
Title: "Widow's Bush Treason Suit Vanishes"
Author: W. David Kubiak

Ellen Mariani became widowed when her husband Louis Neil Mariani perished in the collision between United Airlines flight 175 and the South Tower of the World Trade Center. In addition to her refusal of the government's million-dollar settlement offer, Mrs. Mariani has filed a 62 page complaint in federal district court charging that President Bush and officials: (1) had adequate foreknowledge of 911, yet failed to warn the country or attempt to prevent it; (2) have since been covering up the truth of that day; (3) have therefore abetted the murder of plaintiff's husband and violated the Constitution and multiple laws of the United States; and (4) are thus being sued under the Civil Racketeering, Influences, and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act for Malfeasant conspiracy, obstruction of justice and wrongful death.

#10 New Nuke Plants: Taxpayers Support, Industry Profits
Nuclear Information and Resourse Service, November 17, 2003
Title: "Nuclear Energy Would Get $7.5 Billion in Tax Subsides, US Taxpayers Would Fund Nuclear Monitor Relapse If Energy Bill Passes"
Authors: Cindy Folkers and Michael Mariotte
WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor, August 2003
Title: "US Senate Passes Pro-Nuclear Energy Bill"
Authors: Cindy Folkers and Michael Mariotte

Senator Peter Domenici (R-NM), along with the Bush Administration, is looking to give the nuclear power industry a huge boost through the new Energy Policy Act. The Domenici-sponsored bill will give nuclear power plants credits costing taxpayers an estimated 7.5 billion dollars, to build six new privately owned, for-profit reactors across the country. Safety standards will be lowered and liability will be passed on to taxpayers. This is in addition to the $4 billion already provided for other nuclear energy programs.

#11 The Media Can Legally Lie
CMW Report, Spring 2003
Title: "Court Ruled That Media Can Legally Lie"
Author: Liane Casten
Organic Consumer Association, March 7, 2004
Title: "Florida Appeals Court Orders Akre-Wilson Must Pay Trial Costs for $24.3 Billion Fox Television; Couple Warns Journalists of Danger to Free Speech, Whistle Blower Protection"
Author: Al Krebs

In 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals ruled that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. It agreed with an argument by Fox Television that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Under the current ruling, it is up to the public to discover whether or not they are being lied to.

#12 The Destabilization of Haiti
KPFA Radio-Flashpoints, April 1, 2004
Title: "Interview with Aristide's lawyer, Brian Concannon"

Reporter: Dennis Bernstein
globalresearch.ca, February 29, 2004
Title: "The destabilization of Haiti"
Author: Michel Chossudovsky
Dollars and Sense, September/October 2003
Title: "Still Up Against the Death Plan in Haiti"
Author: Tom Reeves
KPFA - Democracy Now!, March 17, 2004
Title: "Aristide talks with Democracy Now! About the leaders of the coup and US funding of the opposition in Haiti"
Reporter: Amy Goodman
Associated Press, March 16, 2004
Title: "Aristide Backers Left Out of Coalition"
Author: Ian James

On February 29, 2004, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced into exile by American military. While U.S. officials were eventially forced to acknowledge the kidnapping allegations, they were quick to discredit them and deny responsibility. Meanwhile, the circumstances that led to the current situation in Haiti, as well as the history of U.S. involvement, are being ignored by U.S. officials and the mainstream media.

#13 Schwarzenegger Met with Enron's Ken Lay Before the California Recall
Common Dreams, August 17, 2003
Title: "Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Gray Davis"
Author: Jason Leopold
The London Observer, October 6, 2003
Title: "Arnold Unplugged-It's Hasta la Vista to $9 Billion"
Author: Greg Palast
San Francisco Chronicle and CommonDreams, October 11,2003
Title: "Schwarzenegger Electricity Plan Fuels Fears of Another Debacle"
Author: Zachary Coile
San Francisco Chronicle, May 26, 2001
Title: "Enron's Secret Bid to Save Deregulation: Private Meeting With Prominent Californians"
Authors: Christian Berthelsen, Scott Winokur, Chronicle Staff Writers

In 2002, while the California Governor and his deputy were attempting to re-regulate the energy industry (and get back the $9 billion that was defrauded from California taxpayers by Enron and other energy companies) Arnold Schwarzenegger was being groomed to overthrow Governor Davis in a recall - and cancel plans to re-regulate or to recoup the $9 billion. Back in May of 2001, in the midst of California's energy crisis, Schwarzenegger met with Enron's Ken Lay to discuss "fixing" California's energy crisis.

#14 New Bill Threatens Intellectual Freedom
Yale Daily News, November 6, 2003
Title: "New Bill threatens intellectual freedom in area studies"
Author: Benita Singh
Christian Science Monitor, March 11, 2004
Title: "Speaking in 'Approved' Tongues"
Author: Kimberly Chase

The International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2003 threatens academic freedom and classroom curriculum. Under this act, professors whose ideological principles do not support U.S. practices abroad can have their appointments terminated, any course curriculum containing criticism of U.S. foreign policy can be censored, and any course deemed anti-American can be barred from the classroom.

#15 US Develops Lethal New Bio-weapon Viruses
The New Scientist, October 29, 2003
Title: "US develops lethal new viruses"
Author: Debora MacKenzie

Scientists funded by the US government have developed a way to make pox viruses incredibly deadly. The stated goal of this research is to fight possible bio-terror attacks. The new virus kills all mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs along with a vaccine that would normally protect the victim from death.

# 16 Law Enforcement Agencies Spy on Innocent Citizens
Agenda, July--August 2003
Title: "Big Brother Gets Bigger--Domestic Spying & the Global Intelligence Working Group"
Author: Michelle J. Kinnucan
Community Alliance, April 2003
Title: "Police Infiltrate Local Groups"
Author: Mark Schlosberg
CovertAction Quarterly, Fall 2003
Title: "Denver Police Keeping Files On Peace Groups"
Author: Loring Wirbel
North Bay Progressive, Volume 2 # 8, October 2003
Title: "Fresno Peace group Infiltrated by Government Agent"
Author: Mike Rhodes
World Socialist Web Site, www.wsws.org, 1/10/04
Title: "Bush Administration Expands Police Spying Powers"
Author: Kate Randall

With little media comment, federal, state and local agencies have begun working as partners in the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence information. Under the "Global Intelligence Working Group" (that oversees the new network) police departments receive increased funding for surveillance activity. This has resulted in the recent COINTELPRO-style instances of police infiltration of groups critical of government policies.

#17 U.S. Government Represses Labor Unions in Iraq in Quest for Business Privatization
The Progressive, December 2003
Title: "Saddam's labor laws live on"
Author: David Bacon
Left Turn, March/April 2004, v. 12
Title: "Ambitions of Empire: The Radical Reconstruction of Iraq's Economy"
Author: Antonia Juhasz

According to the Wall Street Journal (alone), the Bush Administration has "sweeping plans to remake Iraq's economy in the US image." The US is calling for the privatization of state-owned industries such as oil and water. But it has chosen not to overturn Sadaam-era edicts that outlaw unions. Every day the economic policies of occupying authorities create more hunger among Iraq's working people, transforming them into a pool of low-wage, semi-employed labor, desperate for jobs at any price.

#18 Media and Government Ignore Dwindling Oil Supplies
New Internationalist, October 31, 2003
Title: "Running on empty; Oil is disappearing fast"
Author: Adam Porter
Guardian Unlimited, December 2, 2003
Title: "Bottom of the Barrel"
Author: George Monbiot

Even industry executives affirm that oil is close to reaching, or may have already reached, its highest levels of production potential. Once the peak is reached, oil prices will start to rise (as they have every year since 2000). As oil decline accelerates, prices will rise even faster, with devastating effects to the US economy. Over the years, U.S. leaders, bowing to oil industry pressure, have not worked to develop viable alternatives (as they have done in Europe).

#19 Global Food Cartel Fast Becoming the World's Supermarket
Left Turn, August/September 2003
Title: "Concentration in the Agri-Food System"
Author: Hilary Mertaugh

Agribusiness and supermarket alliances are transforming the agri-food system into a powerful network of transnational corporations. They now have the power to control the world's food supply at every stage of food production. As fewer corporations control food production, traditional farming is becoming a high-tech form of serfdom. Lack of competition is leading to higher prices, lower choice and quality, and employee abuse.

#20 Extreme Weather Prompts New Warning from UN
UK Independent, July 2003
Title: "Extreme Weather Prompts Unprecedented Global Warming Alert"

In 2003, The UN's World Meteorological Organization reported unprecedented levels of extreme weather and climate occurrences all over the world. The report emphasized an alarming increase in global warming and pointed to the impact of human activity. The significance of this particular report is that the highly respected UN organization is known for its normally conservative predictions and statements.

#21 Forcing a World Market for GMOs
Globalinfo.org, 12/3/03
Title: "Agriculture: Biotech Links to Big Lenders Worry Farm Experts"
Author: Katherine Stapp
Inter Press Service (IPS) News Agency, May 14, 2003
Title: "U.S. WTO Dispute Could Bend Poor Nations to GMOs-Groups"
Author Emad Mekay
CMW Report, Summer 2003
Title: "A Rebuttal to the Tribune"
Author: Liane Casten
SF Weekly, June 2-8, 2004
Title: "Bioscience Warfare"
Author: Alison Pierce

The Bush Administration is trying to force Europe to drop trade barriers against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Meanwhile, the agricultural biotechnology industry is focusing even more intently on developing countries, where regulations governing their use are generally more lax. At the same time, biotech promoters continue to suppress studies that show GMOs may have adverse effects on health and the environment.

#22 Exporting Censorship to Iraq
The American Prospect, Volume 14, Issue 9, October 1, 2003
Title: "Exporting Censorship to Iraq"
Author: Alex Gourevitch
Asheville Global Report, May 12, 2003
Title: "U.S Army Major Refuses Order to Seize Iraq TV Station"
Author: Charlie Thomas

After the fall of Saddam, Paul Bremer told journalists they were now "free to criticize whoever, or whatever, you want." But when negative critiques of U.S. policies appeared in the Iraqi media, Bremer quickly placed controls on its content. And rather than hiring a media outlet to run the Iraqi media (or simply allowing the news groups already there to continue reporting), the Pentagon chose a defense contractor to define the news.

#23 Brazil Opposes US-style FTAA agreements, But Provides Little Comfort for the Poor of South America
Globalinfo.org, November 15, 2003
Title: "Trade: US Moves to Squeeze FTAA Opponents"
Author: Emad Mekay
Left Turn, Mar/Apr, 2004
Title: "Lula's First Year"
Author: Brian Campbell

The Free Trade Area of the America's (FTAA) could become the biggest trading block in history, expanding NAFTA to 34 countries from Canada to the bottom of South America. This deal is unlikely to meet its January 2005 deadline, now that the second largest player in the negotiations, Brazil, is holding back. However, Brazilian President Lula has begun, of his own volition, to institute his own brand of FTAA austerity policies that are sure to drive the poor of the region deeper into poverty.

#24 Reinstating the Draft
Salon, November 3, 2003
Title: "Oiling up the Draft Machine?"
Author: Dave Lindorff
Buzzflash.com, November 11, 2003
Title: "Would a Second Bush Term Mean a Return to Conscription?'
Author: Maureen Farrell
War Times, October-November, 2003
Title: "Military Targets Latino Youth"
Author: Jorge Mariscal

The Selective Service System (SSS), the Bush Administration, and the Pentagon have been quietly moving to fill draft board vacancies nationwide in order to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005. Several million dollars have been added to the 2004 SSS budget. Meanwhile, through an on-going militarization of public school systems, the Pentagon has begun efforts to double the number of Latinos in the U.S. military by 2006.

#25 Wal-Mart Brings Inequity and Low Prices to the World
Multinational Monitor, October 2003
Title: "Welcome to Wal-World"
Author: Andy Rowell

The vision of the international division of Wal-Mart is one where Wal-Mart becomes a global brand, just like McDonald's or Coca- Cola, monopolizing the global retail market. The next five or six years could see about 5,000 to 6,000 Wal-Mart stores outside of the United States. Wal-Mart is Americanizing retailing around the world and exercising an inordinate amount of economic power.

2004-08-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

Published on Sunday, August 22, 2004 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Bush Weds Religion, Politics to Form World View

by David Domke

American presidents beginning with George Washington have included religious language in their public addresses. Claims of the United States as a divinely chosen nation and requests for God to bless U.S. decisions and actions have been commonplace. Scholars have labeled such discourse "civil religion," in which political leaders emphasize religious symbols and transcendent principles to engender a sense of unity and shared national identity.

George W. Bush is doing something altogether different.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, the president and his administration have converged a religious fundamentalist worldview with a political agenda -- a distinctly partisan one, wrapped in the mantle of national interest but crafted by and for only those who share their outlook. It is a modern form of political fundamentalism -- that is, the adaptation of a self-proclaimed conservative Christian rectitude, by way of strategic language choices and communication approaches designed for a mass-media culture, into political policy.

Motivated by this ideology, the Bush administration has sought to control public discourse and to engender a climate of nationalism in which the public views presidential support as a patriotic duty and Congress (and the United Nations) is compelled to rubber-stamp administration policies.

The goal is a national mood of spiritual superiority under the guise of a just sovereignty. The ultimate irony is that in combating the Islamic extremists responsible for Sept. 11, the administration has crafted, pursued and engendered its own brand of political fundamentalism -- one that, while clearly tailored to a modern democracy, nonetheless functions ideologically in a manner similar to the version offered by the terrorists.

All of this has a facade of merely politics as usual. It is not. Unfortunately, as too often occurs with matters of religion, the mainstream news media have missed the story almost entirely, and thus so has much of the U.S. public.

Bush is the most publicly religious president since at least Woodrow Wilson. Ronald Reagan had great appeal to religious conservatives, but he was far less outspoken about religion -- a point noted in a June eulogy of the late president by Ron Reagan, who said his father did not "(wear) his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage," a comment many interpreted as a critique of the current president. Indeed, Bush speaks often about his "born-again" faith and regularly references a divine power in public statements, a practice that religion scholar Martin E. Marty has termed "God talk."

That the president -- any president -- is a person of religious faith is generally viewed by the U.S. public in favorable terms, the better to be grounded when facing momentous decisions. I share this view because I know how central the Christian faith is to my life and to many others I know and respect. Invocations of a higher power, when emphasizing inclusive and transcendent principles, seem to me to be legitimate and adroit rhetoric for a leader of 290 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom believe in God in some form. What is deeply troubling about Bush's religiosity, however, is that he consistently evinces a certainty that he knows God's will -- and he then acts upon this certainty in ways that affect billions of humans.

For example, in his address before Congress and a national television audience nine days after the terrorist attacks, Bush declared: "The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." Similarly, in the 2003 State of the Union address, with the conflict in Iraq imminent, he declared: "Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." These are not requests for divine favor; they are declarations of divine wishes.

From this position, only short theological and rhetorical steps are required to justify U.S. actions. For instance, at a December 2003 news conference, Bush said: "I believe, firmly believe -- and you've heard me say this a lot, and I say it a lot because I truly believe it -- that freedom is the Almighty God's gift to every person, every man and woman who lives in this world. That's what I believe. And the arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in Iraq. Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq."

Further, this view of divinely ordained policy infuses the public discourse of several administration leaders, irrespective of their particular religious outlook. I systematically examined hundreds of administration public communications -- by the president, John Ashcroft, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld -- about the "war on terrorism" in the 20 months between Sept. 11, 2001, and the end of "major combat" in Iraq in spring 2003. This research showed that the administration's public communications contained four characteristics simultaneously rooted in religious fundamentalism while offering political capital:

Simplistic, black-and-white conceptions of the political landscape, most notably good vs. evil and security vs. peril.

Calls for immediate action on administration policies as a necessary part of the nation's "calling" and "mission" against terrorism.

Declarations about the will of God for America and for the spread of U.S. conceptions of freedom and liberty.

Claims that dissent from the administration is unpatriotic and a threat to the nation and globe.

In combination, these characteristics have transformed Bush's "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" policy to "Either you are with us, or you are against God." To the great misfortune of American democracy and the global public, such a view looks, sounds and feels remarkably similar to that of the terrorists it is fighting.

Indeed, one is hard-pressed to see how the perspective of Osama bin Laden, that he and his followers are delivering God's wishes for the United States (and others who share Western customs and policies), is much different from the perspective of George W. Bush, that the United States is delivering God's wishes to the Taliban or Iraq. Clearly, flying airplanes into buildings in order to kill innocent people is an indefensible, immoral activity. So, too, some traditional allies told the Bush administration, is an unprovoked pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation. In both instances, the aggression manifested in a form that was available to the leaders. Fundamentalism in the White House is a difference in degree, not kind, from fundamentalism exercised in dark, damp caves. Democracy is always the loser.

The ascendancy of the administration's political fundamentalism after Sept. 11 was facilitated by mainstream U.S. news coverage, which substantially echoed the administration's views. That became apparent when I analyzed how 20 leading and geographically diverse newspapers and the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC covered each of Bush's national addresses (15 in 20 months, a remarkable pace) and the administration's push for key "war on terrorism" policies and goals in 2001 and 2002, including passage of the USA Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and congressional and U.N. resolutions regarding Iraq.

This analysis revealed that news media consistently amplified the words and ideas of the president and other administration leaders. They did that by echoing throughout their coverage similar claims made by multiple administration members, thereby having the administration's perspectives establish the terms of public discourse. For example, only two of more than 300 editorials that I analyzed in response to the president's national addresses criticized the administration's description of the campaign against terrorism as an epic struggle of good vs. evil. None questioned his explicit declarations of God's will. With so many around the globe expressing a different view during these 20 months, by echoing these fundamentalist messages within these editorials, the press failed its readers.

To be clear, the U.S. news media did not emphasize the administration's messages to the same extent as the White House did during this time. Such an equation would imply that the commercial, independent news media merely served as mouthpieces, and that is not the case. Disagreement with the administration sometimes appeared in news stories--either as a presentation of different factual information or of divergent observations by other sources -- and in newspaper editorials. Coverage also included occasional strong criticisms of government policy, in particular in regard to the administration's diplomatic difficulties in early 2003.

The chief failure of members of the mainstream media, though, is that they did not adequately cover the deeply religious motivations to the administration's actions and, as a result, too rarely questioned the administration's religious-cum-political discourses. Once these fundamentalist discourses became consistently amplified -- but not analyzed -- in leading media outlets, the administration gained the rhetorical high ground, and that went far in determining policy decisions.

While Christian conservatives and hard-line neo-conservatives may see the developments after Sept. 11 in a positive light (after all, one might say that God and the United States have been given a larger piece of the planet with which to work), all Americans should be leery of any government that merges religiosity into political ends. Noble ideals such as freedom and liberty are clearly worth pursuing, but the administration promoted those concepts with its left hand while using its right hand to treat others -- including many U.S. citizens -- in an authoritarian, dismissive manner. Unfortunately, the Bush administration appears to be the latest entry in a historical record that shows that beliefs and claims about divine leading are no guarantee that one will exercise power in a consistently liberating, egalitarian manner.

David Domke, a former journalist, is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the relationships among political leaders, news coverage and public opinion in the United States. He is the author of "God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the 'War on Terror,' and the Echoing Press" (Pluto Press, 2004). The book is available in the United States through the University of Michigan Press.

2004-08-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

Wal-Mart Tries to Shine Its Image by Supporting Public Broadcasting
August 16, 2004
By CONSTANCE L. HAYS , New York Times

Wal-Mart, stung by criticism of its labor practices,
expansion plans and other business tactics, is turning to
public radio, public television and even journalists in
training to try to improve its image.

So far this year, the company has become a sponsor on
National Public Radio, where recorded messages promote its
stores. It has underwritten a popular talk show, "Tavis
Smiley," accompanied by similar promotional messages, on a
public television station in California.

And earlier this month, Wal-Mart announced plans to award
$500,000 in scholarships to minority students at journalism
programs around the country, including Howard University,
University of Southern California and Columbia University.

Wal-Mart has not supported any of those organizations in
the past. But as the company outgrows its rural roots and
moves into suburbs and cities, it is encountering more
resistance from people whose traditions and values may be
different from those of Wal-Mart's historic customers.

The company has been faulted for its selective approach
toward the publications that it sells, which has included
banning three men's magazines and ordering plastic covers
to conceal what it considered "uncomfortable" headlines on
several women's titles, including Glamour and Redbook. It
has refused to sell music albums with what it deems
offensive lyrics, and manufacturers acknowledge producing
sanitized versions of popular CD's in order to maintain a
presence in the giant retailer's stores.

Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said the
journalism scholarships were "a first of their kind" for
the retailer, and came about because of the recent
publicity around its business practices.

"We've really been in the spotlight and I think that's made
us especially sensitive to the need for balanced coverage,"
Ms. Williams said. "It doesn't matter if the subject is
Wal-Mart or something else. You just aren't going to have
that unless different perspectives are represented."
Without diversity, she added, "the result can be narrower
thinking as news events are presented to the public."

Influencing that presentation may be at the heart of the
effort, although Ms. Williams said there was "no hidden
agenda here" and added that it probably would have been
done even if Wal-Mart had not come under scrutiny.

John Siegenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center at
Vanderbilt University, said, "Wal-Mart is doing what most
corporations do: when they feel pain, they try to salve the
wound." He predicted that "they may get less out of it than
they expect to," but he added that "if it helps minority
journalism, I hope they salve it with more than half a
million dollars."

As for public radio, Ms. Williams said the company sought
the demographic that National Public Radio listeners
represent. The goal is to "reach community leaders and help
them understand the value that we bring to their areas."

"We want those folks to know that having a Wal-Mart in
their town is a good thing," she said.

A spokeswoman for NPR, Jenny Lawhorn, said its audience
consisted of "intelligent and well-educated people" who
"tend to be business leaders and tend to be engaged in the
civic process." According to a recent survey, about 56
percent of them are Wal-Mart shoppers, she said, compared
with 66 percent of the general population.

Wooing community leaders fits well into Wal-Mart's plans.
The company has stumbled in recent months against
opposition to its stores. In April, its effort to win voter
support for a store in the Inglewood, Calif., suburb of Los
Angeles was defeated after the company took the unusual
step of putting the issue on the ballot. An attempt to
build a store in Chicago was rejected, although a second
store was approved, while plans to open a store in downtown
New Orleans have been slowed by opposition as well.

The company has also been criticized by labor unions, which
say Wal-Mart fights their organizing efforts. In
California, unionized supermarket workers staged a lengthy
strike earlier this year seeking benefits that stores said
they could not afford because they needed to compete with
Wal-Mart.

Neither Wal-Mart nor NPR would reveal what it pays as an
NPR sponsor. The contract began Feb. 16 and extends until
January. Total corporate financing is expected to reach $30
million this year, Ms. Lawhorn said. As part of its NPR
arrangement, Wal-Mart is described several ways when it is
mentioned as an underwriter on the air. The descriptions
include the following: "Wal-Mart. Providing jobs and
opportunities for millions of Americans of all ages and all
walks of life." Another says the company is "bringing
communities job opportunities, goods and services and
support for neighborhood programs."

NPR has received letters and e-mail messages from listeners
since the Wal-Mart underwriting information began to be
broadcast. One listener wrote: "What a disappointment!
Maybe next it will be Halliburton." The role of Wal-Mart
was taken up by NPR's ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, who wrote
in his NPR.org online column, "Wal-Mart symbolizes values
that some listeners believe to be antithetical to the
values of public radio" and suggested that "one way that
NPR could prove that underwriting has no effect on its
integrity is for NPR to produce more hard-hitting
interviews, more investigative reporting and yes, even more
scandalizing satires."

The company also underwrites "Tavis Smiley," a talk show on
KCET, the public television station in Los Angeles. The
program began in January and Wal-Mart was on board
immediately, a spokesman for the show, Joel Brokaw, said.
In late March, Mr. Smiley interviewed Wal-Mart's chief
executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., who is seldom made available
to reporters. After disclosing twice that Wal-Mart
sponsored the show, Mr. Smiley went on to ask his guest
about Wal-Mart's image problems. Mr. Brokaw said he did not
know how much Wal-Mart paid to be a sponsor.

The journalism plan evolved separately, Ms. Williams said.
Ten journalism schools will receive $50,000 each, which
will be distributed as $2,500 scholarships to four students
at each school. The scholarships will be awarded in each
student's junior year and can be renewed for the senior
year as well.

The recipients chosen include Arizona State University and
Syracuse University. Administrators at the universities
said the selections came as a complete surprise. In most
cases, corporate donations for scholarships are unheard of,
the administrators said, unless the corporation is involved
in the news business or another communications medium like
advertising.

"It's kind of a reach to expect companies that don't see
themselves as part of the media world to support journalism
education," said Steve Doig, the interim director of the
Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at
Arizona State, where some scholarships have been provided
by newspaper companies like Gannett.

Mr. Doig, a former reporter for the Miami Herald, said that
he was aware of Wal-Mart's practices with magazines but
that did not prevent him from accepting the scholarship
money.

"It's not the American Nazi Party," he said. "I don't see
Wal-Mart as problematic enough to miss the opportunity they
are offering to several of our students."

He added: "Both the banning of certain magazines and the
decision to give money to journalism schools are calculated
behaviors and not necessarily contrary. I don't support
banning newspapers or any particular publication, but a
company has the right to decide what it wants to sell."

Wal-Mart also plans to include the scholarship students at
next year's annual shareholder meeting, Ms. Williams said.

"They will be guests in the audience, and we think that
would be a great educational experience for them," she
said. They may also have tours of the company's offices in
Bentonville, Ark., as well as a warehouse nearby.

Tom Bowers, dean of the School of Journalism and Mass
Communication at the University of North Carolina in Chapel
Hill, said the move was "saying to the public, look at the
good thing we're doing." North Carolina was not one of the
journalism schools designated by Wal-Mart for scholarships,
but the university awards about $100,000, some from media
companies, to students every year, Mr. Bowers said.

"The people who win our scholarships typically don't go to
any national meetings and aren't put on display by these
corporate donors," he said. "We certainly make sure there
is no quid pro quo on these. The only obligation is to
write them a letter and thank them for the scholarship. The
student isn't expected to do anything for the company."

Of the programs chosen, only the University of Southern
California's Annenberg School has received corporate
funding from nonmedia companies in the past. A spokesman,
Geoffrey Baum, said the school had gotten money from Nissan
and General Motors, as well as from Raytheon and Home Depot
for public-relations programs. Some journalism programs are
in states where Wal-Mart has opened a large number of
stores. The University of Florida and the University of
Texas made the list; those states have nearly 600 of
Wal-Mart's 3,596 stores, according to Wal-Mart.

Jannette L. Dates, dean of Howard University's John H.
Johnson School of Communications, hopes that Wal-Mart's
scholarship will encourage other nonmedia companies to
contribute.

"I'm going to go after some of those others and say 'See,
Wal-Mart did this, why don't you?' " she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/business/16walmart.html?ex=1093708926&ei=1&en=9ac89bda624039b5

2004-07-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

Chicago Media Action Study Finds WTTW's "Chicago Tonight" Favors Affluent Whites, Ignores People of Color and Workers

According to a study released today by media watchdog Chicago Media Action, the topics, sources and views aired on Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW's flagship public affairs program, Chicago Tonight, consistently cater to the interests of advertisers and white affluent Chicagoans while ignoring news and perspectives of interest to other constituencies. The study, "Chicago Tonight: Elites, Affluence and Advertising", covers thirty episodes of Chicago Tonight, twenty of which aired in September 2003, and ten episodes that aired in January and February 2004.

"Public television is supposed to provide us with an alternative to commercial broadcasting. Yet CMA's study demonstrates that WTTW's signature news and public affairs program showcases the same white, male, professional voices that already dominate commercial TV news," explained Stephen Macek, Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at North Central College in Naperville and a collaborator on the study.

James Owens, principal author of Chicago Media Action's research effort, said "Over 40% of the Chicago area is made up of people of color - 58% in the City - but 79% of the guests on Chicago Tonight are white. During our study, Chicago Tonight presented only white guests in stories on business and economy. In addition, on stories of business and economy during our study, corporate representatives made up over 47% of the guests, while labor representatives made up less than 5% of the guests and no public interest representatives appeared."

Citizen activists, public interest representatives and labor representatives accounted for only 3.1% of the guests on Chicago Tonight in our study. Average citizens, with extremely rare exception, were permitted to give their opinions only in entertainment segments on Chicago Tonight. Owens further explained, "We live in a time of unprecedented public anger over the media's shortcomings in the performance of its democratic function, with no less than the New York Times apologizing for huge journalistic errors regarding Iraq. It is essential that we take this opportunity to look closely at public broadcasting too. And fix it."

Chicago Media Action co-organizer and study contributor Scott Sanders stated: "We call for the creation of a carefully selected local commission to investigate all the changes necessary to ensure that underrepresented communities are given direct, hands-on control of programming on WTTW that best meets their needs. And we call for the creation by WTTW of programming that provides for the discussion of issues of special interest to African Americans, hosted by African Americans, and programming that provides a live monthly forum for the public to discuss issues of debate and controversy, including discussion of independent documentaries. Lastly, we call for an independent audit of the station's finances due to the theft and gross negligence cited elsewhere."

Sanders continued: "The working people, communities of color and other diverse constituencies in Chicago are getting shut out by the elite class and the commercial interests which set the agenda for Chicago Tonight. Thirty-nine out of WTTW's board of sixty self-elected trustees run or control a corporation. Twenty-six trustees run or control a financial firm. Our study proves in many ways what we have all sensed for some time - that the station's call letters really do stand for 'Winnetka Talks To Wilmette'. We're going to have to fully discuss and rethink the way our public media is managed, funded and structured."

ABOUT CHICAGO MEDIA ACTION
Founded in 2002, Chicago Media Action (CMA) is a membership-run organization that monitors and analyzes media in the Chicago area in order to expose the economic and political interests that control them. We seek to democratically empower and organize the working-class to challenge corporate control of major media, and to create their own media.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CMA VISIT OUR WEBSITE WWW.CHICAGOMEDIAACTION.ORG TO OBTAIN A COPY OF "Chicago Tonight: Elites, Affluence and Advertisers", PLEASE VISIT:

The Executive Summary
http://www.chicagomediaaction.org/pdffiles/CMA_WTTW_ExecSummary.pdf

The Full Study (including the Executive Summary)
http://www.chicagomediaaction.org/pdffiles/CMA_WTTW.pdf

The Appendix
http://www.chicagomediaaction.org/pdffiles/CMA_Appendix.pdf

OR E-MAIL US AT cma@chicagomediaaction.org, 773-753-0818

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2004-07-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

Why the Press Failed
By Orville Schell

When, on May 26, 2004, the editors of the New York Times published a mea
culpa for the paper's one-sided reporting on weapons of mass destruction and
the Iraq war, they admitted to "a number of instances of coverage that was
not as rigorous as it should have been." They also commented that they had
since come to "wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining claims" made
by the Bush Administration. But we are still left to wonder why the Times,
like many other major media outlets in this country, was so lacking in
skepticism toward administration rationales for war? How could such a poorly
thought through policy, based on spurious exile intelligence sources, have
been so blithely accepted, even embraced, by so many members of the media?
In short, what happened to the press's vaunted role, so carefully spelled
out by the Founding Fathers, as a skeptical "watchdog" over government?

There's nothing like seeing a well-oiled machine clank to a halt to help you
spot problems. Now that the Bush administration is in full defensive mode
and angry leakers in the Pentagon, the CIA, and elsewhere in the Washington
bureaucracy are slipping documents, secrets, and charges to reporters, our
press looks more recognizably journalistic. But that shouldn't stop us from
asking how an "independent" press in a "free" country could have been so
paralyzed for so long. It not only failed to seriously investigate
administration rationales for war, but little took into account the myriad
voices in the on-line, alternative, and world press that sought to do so. It
was certainly no secret that a number of our Western allies (and other
countries), administrators of various NGOs, and figures like Mohamed
ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Hans Blix,
head of the UN's Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission, had
quite different pre-war views of the "Iraqi threat."

Few in our media, it seemed, remembered I. F. Stone's hortatory admonition,
"If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words:
Governments lie." Dissenting voices in the mainstream were largely buried on
back pages, ignored on op-ed pages, or confined to the margins of the media,
and so denied the kinds of "respectability" that a major media outlet can
confer.

As reporting on the lead-up to war, the war itself, and its aftermath
vividly demonstrated, our country is now divided into a two-tiered media
structure. The lower-tier -- niche publications, alternative media outlets,
and Internet sites -- hosts the broadest spectrum of viewpoints. Until the
war effort began to unravel in spring 2004, the upper-tier -- a relatively
small number of major broadcast outlets, newspapers, and magazines -- had a
far more limited bandwidth of critical views, regularly deferring to the
Bush Administration's vision of the world. Contrarian views below rarely
bled upwards.

As Michael Massing pointed out recently in the New York Review of Books,
Bush administration insinuations that critics were unpatriotic -- White
House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer infamously warned reporters as war
approached, "People had better watch what they say" -- had an undeniably
chilling effect on the media. But other forms of pressure also effectively
inhibited the press. The President held few press conferences and rarely
submitted to truly open exchanges. Secretive and disciplined to begin with,
the administration adeptly used the threat of denied access as a way to
intimidate reporters who showed evidence of independence. For reporters,
this meant no one-on-one interviews, special tips, or leaks, being passed
over in press conference question-and-answer periods, and exclusion from
select events as well as important trips.

After the war began, for instance, Jim Wilkinson, a 32 year-old Texan who
ran Centcom's Coalition Media Center in Qatar, was, according to Massing,
known to rebuke reporters whose copy was deemed insufficiently "supportive
of the war," and "darkly warned one correspondent that he was on a 'list'
along with two other reporters at his paper." In the play-along world of the
Bush Administration, critical reporting was a quick ticket to exile.

A media world of faith-based truth

The impulse to control the press hardly originated with George W. Bush, but
his administration has been less inclined than any in memory to echo Thomas
Jefferson's famous declaration that, "The basis of our government being the
opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right;
and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without
newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment
to prefer the latter."

The Bush Administration had little esteem for the watchdog role of the
press, in part because its own quest for "truth" has been based on something
other than empiricism. In fact, it enthroned a new criterion for veracity,
"faith-based" truth, sometimes corroborated by "faith -based" intelligence.
For officials of this administration (and not just the religious ones
either), truth seemed to descend from on high, a kind of divine revelation
begging no further earthly scrutiny. For our President this was evidently
literally the case. The Israeli paper Ha'aretz reported him saying to
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister of the moment, "God told me to
strike Al Qaeda and I struck, and then he instructed me to strike Saddam,
which I did."

It is hardly surprising, then, that such a President would eschew newspapers
in favor of reports from other more "objective sources," namely, his staff.
He has spoken often of trusting "visceral reactions" and acting on "gut
feelings." For him as for much of the rest of his administration,
decision-making has tended to proceed not from evidence to conclusion, but
from conclusion to evidence. Reading, facts, history, logic and the complex
interaction between the electorate, the media, and the government have all
been relegated to subsidiary roles in what might be called "fundamentalist"
policy formation.

Just as the free exchange of information plays little role in the
relationship between a fundamentalist believer and his or her God, so it has
played a distinctly diminished role in our recent parallel world of divine
political revelation. After all, if you already know the answer to a
question, of what use is the media, except to broadcast that answer? The
task at hand, then, is never to listen but to proselytize the political
gospel among non-believers, thereby transforming a once interactive process
between citizen and leader into evangelism.

Although in the Bush political universe, "freedom has been endlessly
extolled in principle, it has had little utility in practice. What possible
role could a free press play when revelation trumps fact and conclusions are
preordained? A probing press is logically viewed as a spoiler under such
conditions, stepping between the administration and those whose only true
salvation lies in becoming part of a nation of true believers. Since there
was little need, and less respect, for an opposition (loyal or otherwise),
the information feedback loops in which the press should have played a
crucial role in any functioning democracy, ceased operating. The media
synapses which normally transmit warnings from citizen to government froze
shut.

Television networks continued to broadcast and papers continued to publish,
but, dismissed and ignored, they became irrelevant, except possibly for
their entertainment value. As the press has withered, the government,
already existing in a self-referential and self-deceptive universe, was
deprived of the ability to learn of danger from its own policies and thus
make course corrections.

A Universe in Which News Won't Matter

Karl Rove, the president's chief political advisor, bluntly declared to New
Yorker writer Ken Auletta that members of the press "don't represent the
public any more than other people do. I don't believe you have a
check-and-balance function." Auletta concluded that, in the eyes of the Bush
Administration, the press corps had become little more than another
special-interest lobbying group. Indeed, the territory the traditional media
once occupied has increasingly been deluged by administration lobbying,
publicity, and advertising -- cleverly staged "photo ops," carefully
produced propaganda rallies, preplanned "events," tidal waves of campaign
ads, and the like. Afraid of losing further "influence," access, and the
lucrative ad revenues that come from such political image-making, major
media outlets have found it in their financial interest to quietly yield.

What does this downgrading of the media's role say about how our government
views its citizens, the putative sovereigns of our country? It suggests that
"we the people" are seen not as political constituencies conferring
legitimacy on our rulers, but as consumers to be sold policy the way
advertisers sell product. In the storm of selling, spin, bullying, and
"discipline" that has been the Bush signature for years, traditional news
outlets found themselves increasingly drowned out, ghettoized, and cowed.
Attacked as "liberal" and "elitist," disesteemed as "trouble makers" and
"bashers" (even when making all too little trouble), they were relegated to
the sidelines, increasingly uncertain and timid about their shrinking place
in the political process.

Add in a further dynamic (which intellectuals from Marxist-Leninist
societies would instantly recognize): Groups denied legitimacy and disdained
by the state tend to internalize their exclusion as a form of culpability,
and often feel an abject, autonomic urge to seek reinstatement at almost any
price. Little wonder, then, that "the traditional press" has had a difficult
time mustering anything like a convincing counter-narrative as the
administration herded a terrified and all-too-trusting nation to war.

Not only did a mutant form of skepticism-free news succeed -- at least for a
time -- in leaving large segments of the populace uninformed, but it
corrupted the ability of high officials to function. All too often they
simply found themselves looking into a fun-house mirror of their own making
and imagined that they were viewing reality. As even the conservative
National Review noted, the Bush administration has "a dismaying capacity to
believe its own public relations."

In this world of mutant "news," information loops have become one-way
highways; and a national security advisor, cabinet secretary, or attorney
general, a well-managed and programmed polemicist charged to "stay on
message," the better to justify whatever the government has already done, or
is about to do. Because these latter-day campaigns to "dominate the media
environment," as the Pentagon likes to say, employ all the sophistication
and technology developed by communications experts since Edward Bernays,
nephew of Sigmund Freud, first wed an understanding of psychology to the
marketing of merchandise, they are far more seductive than older-style news.
Indeed, on Fox News, we can see the ultimate marriage of news and PR in a
fountainhead of artful propaganda so well-packaged that most people can't
tell it from the real thing.

For three-plus years we have been governed by people who don't view news, in
the traditional sense, as playing any constructive role in our system of
governance. At the moment, they are momentarily in retreat, driven back from
the front lines of faith-based truth by their own faith-based blunders. But
make no mistake, their frightening experiment will continue if Americans
allow it. Complete success would mean not just that the press had
surrendered its essential watchdog role, but -- a far darker thought --
that, even were it to refuse to do so, it might be shunted off to a place
where it would not matter.

As the war in Iraq descended into a desert quagmire, the press belatedly
appeared to awaken and adopt a more skeptical stance toward an already
crumbling set of Bush administration policies. But if a bloody, expensive,
catastrophic episode like the war in Iraq is necessary to remind us of the
important role that the press plays in our democracy, something is gravely
amiss in the way our political system has come to function.

Orville Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley. This piece is adapted from the preface
to a collection of New York Review of Books articles on the media's coverage
of the war in Iraq by Michael Massing. It will be published soon as a short
book, Now They Tell Us (The New York Review of Books, 2004).

Copyright C2004 Orville Schell

2004-07-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

Antiwar group says its ad is rejected
From New York Times, July 12, 2004
By Raymond Hernandez and Andrea Elliott

A group of antiwar advocates is accusing Clear Channel Communications, one of the nation's largest media companies, with close ties to national Republicans, of preventing the group from displaying a Times Square billboard critical of the war in Iraq.

The billboard - an image of a red, white and blue bomb with the words "Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War" - was supposed to go up next month, the antiwar group said, and it was to be in place when Republicans from across the country gathered in New York City to nominate President Bush for a second term.

But members of the group, Project Billboard, contend that Clear Channel backed out of a leasing agreement last month that the two had reached in December for the billboard site, on the Marriott Marquis Hotel at Broadway and 45th Street.

A Project Billboard spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said the group planned to file a lawsuit today in federal court in Manhattan charging Clear Channel with breach of contract and asking it to live up to what the group said were the terms of the deal.

Last night, the president and chief executive of Clear Channel, Paul Meyer, said the company had objected to the group's use of "the bomb imagery" in the proposed billboard. Mr. Meyer said Clear Channel had accepted a billboard that would replace the bomb with a dove. However, he said, any billboard at the site required the approval of the Marriott Marquis management, which he said also objected to the bomb.

"We have no political agenda," Mr. Meyer said. "It's the bomb imagery we objected to."

A spokeswoman for the hotel, Kathleen Duffy, said that the management considered the ad with the bomb "inappropriate," but that it had not seen the version with the dove.

Told of Mr. Meyer's comments, Mr. Wolfson said that earlier, Clear Channel had rejected the ad with the dove as well as the one with the bomb, demanding that the words be changed, too. "It's news to us, and not reflected in any prior communications between Clear Channel and Project Billboard," Mr. Wolfson said last night. "This contradicts Clear Channel's demand that the copy be changed."

The dispute had led members of the antiwar group to accuse Clear Channel of censorship.

"I think the idea that political advertising is banned from some part of New York City would be repellent to New Yorkers," Mr. Wolfson said. "I guess we can have a war, but we can't talk about it."

This is not the first time that Clear Channel, one of the nation's largest owners of radio stations, has found itself in the middle of a debate over free speech and censorship.

The company has been accused of using its radio stations to rally support for the war in Iraq, while trying to silence musicians who oppose it.

The company's critics point out, for instance, that some Clear Channel country music stations stopped playing the songs of the Dixie Chicks last year after the group's lead singer, Natalie Maines, told fans during a London concert, "We're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

The company's critics also point out that the Federal Communications Commission is considering regulations that would make it easier for companies like Clear Channel to own more television and radio stations.

But even some of its fiercest critics agree that some claims against Clear Channel are overstated. As it turns out, for example, its stations were only sporadically involved in a boycott against the Dixie Chicks.

Part of what may be fueling speculation about the company's motives is the close relationship that its executives have with the Republican Party and the Bush administration. In the 2000 and 2002 election cycles, for instance, the company and its officials donated slightly more than $300,000 in unregulated money, almost all of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization in Washington that monitors political contributions.

In addition, Tom Hicks, the Texas Rangers' owner who has longtime ties to President Bush, is a top executive at Clear Channel.

Project Billboard's representatives said the contract they signed in December with Spectacolor, a division of Clear Channel, required the antiwar group to pay $368,000 to use the billboard space from Aug. 2 through Nov. 2, Election Day.

But they said Spectacolor began balking after company officials saw the ad that included the image of the bomb. The group then sent a second ad, which replaced the bomb with a red, white and blue dove accompanied by the same words, but Mr. Wolfson said that was also rejected.

A lawyer for Project Billboard, Doug Curtis, said that at one point Clear Channel suggested that the group use a less provocative billboard ad, one with the image of a little girl waving a flag accompanied by the words, "Democracy is best taught by example."

Mr. Curtis said that earlier this month, a vice president for marketing for Spectacolor and Clear Channel, Barry Kula, sent the group an e-mail message that said, in part, "We hope you will appreciate that New York City has endured a horrific attack and businesses in this area that serve a wide array of clientele are extremely sensitive to references to war."

Project Billboard's director, Deborah Rappaport, indicated that the reaction of Clear Channel executives was not a complete surprise given what she described as its poor record on free expression. "This is not the first time," she said. "They try to suppress speech with which they don't agree."

The dispute between Clear Channel and the antiwar group drew a mixed reaction yesterday from visitors in Times Square.

When shown a printed copy of the antiwar ads that Clear Channel is said to have rejected, Nene Ofuatey-Kodjoe, 36, of Stamford, Conn., became visibly upset. "Clear Channel should not have a position one way or another about what they put up there as long as it's not obscene," he said.

He also scoffed at the alternative billboard proposed by Clear Channel, with a little girl waving the flag. "All the fence-sitting is what has gotten us to where we are today," he said. "You have got to take a stand."

Terry and Jim Baugh, two Californians strolling north on Seventh Avenue, said the image of the bomb bordered on treason. "That looks like they're trying to blow up America," said Mrs. Baugh, 59, a retired dental hygienist.

This article is from New York Times. If you found it informative and valuable, we strongly encourage you to visit their website and register an account to view all their articles on the web. Support quality journalism.

2004-07-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

Assault on the Labor Movement in Iraq
by Ralph Nader
Published on Monday, June 28, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

What is going on among Iraq's working classes? We do not hear about those workers except for the high number of unemployed.
Thanks to the Labor Party Press we learn that George W. Bush's top representative in Iraq, Paul Bremer, continues to enforce Saddam Hussein's decree banning unions using military force where necessary. Bush's coalition authority also would interpret "illegal" unions, demonstrations and strikes as inciting civil disorder which can result in the workers being arrested and treated as prisoners of war.
Labor Party Press reports that Bremer has lowered Saddam Hussein's minimum wage and has cutoff the dictator's welfare benefits of housing and food. Ironic! All this is depriving and embittering millions of Iraqi families and increasing their sympathy for the insurgency. The Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI) has been working to keep both the occupying soldiers and the insurgents from remaining inside the cities and residential areas.
All kinds of political movements - secular and religious - are churning in Iraq. The secular populist associations - labor, women, self-help, civic - believe the U.S. occupation has attracted fundamentalist mobilizations from outside and inside the country. There is now a Union of the Unemployed (UUI) that in the past year has enrolled 300,000 members. Their desire is to get some of the 300,000 reconstruction jobs under the U.S. occupation. Apparently Labor Party Press reports UUI spokesman describing then meeting with the U.S. Coalition authority as follows:
"We went in with out [membership] records in our hands, and they said 'Who are you? Who do you represent? You are nobody. We are the power here." Well, at least, that is the impression by the UUI of the reception they received. So they demonstrated in front of the Coalition's Palace, followed by a sit-in. Fifty of the demonstrators were arrested.
Daily life is what concerns most Iraqis, not the politics of various religions and ethnic groups. The U.S. occupation still has not meet the people's needs for adequate water, food, cooking, oil and often electricity.
Before Saddam came to power, with U.S. help in 1979, there used to be a strong labor movement. Now two union federations are emerging. American labor journalist David Bacon is reporting on the struggles of Iraqi workers to restore their jobs in the oil industry that U.S. companies like Halliburton were replacing with foreign workers. Teachers and women workers are also engaging in labor activity, he says.
For more information, see www.laboragainstwar.org.

2004-06-27T21:26:00.000-07:00

Published on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Remembering Guatemala, 1954: It’s the Impunity, Stupid

by Rosa Maria Pegueros

The photographs of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib will haunt our political
landscape for a long time but the one that will not leave me is that of the
elated 300 prisoners, innocent of any crime or terrorist act, who were the
first to be released. It has awakened a frightful memory of the time when I
first learned about political violence.

In 1955, I was living in my native city of San Francisco, California. My
mother, a Salvadoran immigrant, had left behind several younger brothers
then living in Guatemala. One evening, the phone rang with terrifying news:
My beloved Tio, uncle, César Homero Mendez, had been abducted on the stairs
of the University of San Carlos of Guatemala, where he was studying law. No
one knew why my uncle, a gentle, scholarly man who had never been involved
in politics or activism of any sort would be kidnapped, although it seems
that everyone knew that it was more than a common crime.

During those terrible days, my mother and her sisters who lived nearby,
waited with rising dread for the phone to ring again. Their anxiety was
heightened by the difficulty of telephone communication with Guatemala. No
one in the Guatemalan branch of the family had a telephone at home, so we
could do nothing but wait for them to call us. Even at the age of four I
understood that something awful was taking place.

He was gone for three days; it seemed endless at the time. By the time the
call came, we had resigned ourselves to the inevitable. The news was good
and bad; Tio Homero was alive, but barely.

The torture he had suffered left him frail and broken. During his
detention, they had held his head under water until he had fainted; they
had beaten him. They had used electrodes to shock him. There were other
punishments that I overheard in whispered conversations but did not fully
understand the nature of until I was much older. Heaven knows what else
they did to him. It would take years for him to recuperate. He never
recovered completely.

My poor uncle was a victim of mistaken identity. The democratically-elected
leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, had been overthrown by a
CIA-sponsored coup in 1954. Following Arbenz’s ouster and exile to Mexico,
Guatemala fell into the clutches of a string of dictators before it
dissolved into its long civil war.

The men who kidnapped Tio Homero thought that he was a leftist guerrilla
named Cesar Romero Mendez who was thought to be connected to Arbenz.
“Mendez” is as common a surname in Latin America as “Smith” is here. They
realized that they had the wrong man only when a judicial official visiting
the jail recognized him as the college professor and vouched for his
innocence. Naked, half dead, he was put into a taxi and sent home.

My uncle eventually became a family law judge in Guatemala. My aunt says
that the terrible physical injuries he suffered were dwarfed by the
spiritual and mental damage that the experience left behind.

In the sad history of Guatemala, my uncle’s story has a fairly happy
ending. After all, he had a relatively long life in a country torn apart by
a CIA-sponsored coup and a 36 year-long civil war underwritten by the
United States. He paid a terrible price but he was lucky; many others did
not escape with their lives.

Many Latin Americans, Guatemalans, Chileans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, to
name a few, harbor a deep and abiding hatred of the United States because
of our interventions in their internal affairs, our sponsorship of their
dictators, and our unblinking disregard for the “collateral damage” we
leave in our wake. Some, like my uncle, had the education to recognize our
shameful role in their sorrowful history.

Although we present ourselves as fighters for freedom and justice, our
actions in Guatemala and many other Latin American countries do not bear
out these boasts. As forensic anthropologists exhume the bodies of the dead
from the mass graves in which they've lain for a third of a century, the
evidence of our misdeeds is there in the bones, most of which contain
American bullets. Amnesty International, Americas Watch, and even the
American Associate for the Advancement of Science have compiled a sickening
record of our part in these abuses.

Guatemalans, citizens of a poor and powerless country, cannot raise a hand
against America: we should be grateful for that. Their guerrillas never had
the money to organize a 9-11-style attack on the United States but the
bitterness is there. The families of the dead will remember who killed
their countrymen and women; who was ultimately responsible for the
disappearances, torture, and killings.

Iraqis, too, will long remember the murderers of their innocents. Yes,
Saddam Hussein gassed and murdered his own citizens, but we dropped bombs
on innocent civilians, destroyed the infrastructure of their cities, and
now want to take credit for bringing them freedom and peace. It’s like the
guy who rapes your sister and impregnates her then wants credit for having
married her.

America must face the fallout of Bush’s misadventure in Iraq with humility;
with the honesty to acknowledge what really happened; and with the resolute
will to punish those who are responsible for the deaths of more than 846
dead American troops in Iraq (combat and combat-related accidents)
http://icasualties.org/oif/, and an estimated 8000 Iraqi civilian dead
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft,
Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and all of their henchman
should be impeached but any move in that direction would be squandered
energy since it would be summarily squelched so long as both houses of
Congress are controlled by Republicans.

We, the people, can throw the bums out of the White House and out of
Congress. We can rebuild our tattered relationships with our allies, and we
can offer more than hypocritical rhetoric about honor, freedom and justice
by changing our foreign policy and our comportment in the world
accordingly. The Middle East, long a tinderbox, has exploded; the fire is
fed by our government’s treachery and misuse of the noble military men and
women who serve our country honorably. If we truly believe that we are a
good people, then we must ferret out the corruption that is poisoning us
and our place in the world.

In memory of Cesar Homero Mendez, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and the victims of
the CIA coup in Guatemala, June 27, 1954, on its fiftieth anniversary.
------------------------------
Dr. Rosa Maria Pegueros is an associate professor of Latin American History
and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She may be reached
at Pegueros@uri.edu