Advertisement

Report from National Conference for Media Reform

Hello,
I am writing (May 13) from St. Louis where I am attending the National Conference for Media Reform. I intend to share what I am learning when I return. I wanted to relate a bit of what I am experiencing so far. You can read about it perhaps see/hear some recorded content at www.freepress.net

There are 2300 people here from all 50 states and 8 countries. It is very clear we are winning the battle for media reform. Numerous legal setbacks have dealt a blow to broadcasters’ efforts to keep their control of our airwaves. Soon the battle will go to Congress where the big media and telecom companies will try to regulate the open digital networks so only they can be the content providers.

The battle ahead * the 2006 Telecom Act for one * will be about the individual right to speak through digital spectrum without having to get the permission of Verizon or any other network owner.

There is a lot of buzz here about “municipal broadband,” cities providing broadband to citizens like a public utility. Philadelphia will be offering citizens broadband for as little as $9 a month. The

Seymour Hersh, Other Prominent Media Personalities Offer Perspectives on Media Control at University of Illinois Conference

Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman was one of several distinguished guests, including Seymour Hersh, Rep. Bernie Sanders, Phil Donahue, Naomi Klein and other prominent media professionals.

...Hersh claimed the Iraq War was increasingly being conducted “off the books” by mercenaries, retired military personnel, and private contractors beyond the scope of accountability.

... “Body bags aren’t going to stop him,” Hersh said, referring to Bush.

...According to...Congressman (Sanders), this media distortion is no accident; as fewer and fewer corporations control more and more media outlets, viewpoints are increasingly channeled and contrived to benefit narrow commercial interests at the expense of the public good.

...Klein defined the obsessive prominence of the Michael Jackson and Terri Schiavo cases in the media as “spasms of collective mourning.”

Nuking Democracy

At the height of the nuclear arms race, those who marched against it used to say that in the ashes of a nuclear war, no one could tell a capitalist from a communist. "Not necessarily," others would joke, "Richard Perle could tell." For Perle, even total annihilation would have its victors and losers, and he knew which side he wanted to be on.

Perle has continued to preach the virtues of usable nuclear weapons while helping orchestrate our invasion of Iraq. Now he's a key allied strategist of an administration willing to obliterate democracy itself if they don't get their way on judicial nominees and everything else.

I'm thinking of the ease with which Trent Lott, Bill Frist, and other Republicans have talked of a "nuclear option" to intimidate the Democrats into capitulating on every right wing judge that Bush sends to Congress. Although Republicans have backed off from using the phrase since it began polling negative, it may reveal more than they intended about their Party. They doesn't just seek to enact particular programs, but have done their best to turn politics into total war, seeking to annihilate the opposition completely.

Political Bluster and the Filibuster

The battle over the filibuster is now one of the country’s biggest political news stories. The Bush administration seems determined to change Senate rules so a simple majority of senators, instead of three-fifths, can cut off debate and force a vote on the president’s judicial nominees. Both sides claim to be arguing for procedural principles.

But a Senate filibuster is not inherently good or bad. Throughout U.S. history, the meaning of the filibuster has always been a matter of political context. The merits have everything to do with what kind of nation people want.

During the 1950s and ’60s, to anyone who supported civil rights legislation, “filibuster” was a very ugly word. In Washington, it was the ultimate maneuver for avian racists whose high-flown rhetoric accompanied their devotion to Jim Crow. The gist of many speeches and commentaries was that civil rights bills were part of an ominous plot against “states’ rights” and sacred American traditions.

The names of many senators who fought for racial segregation -- Russell, Stennis, Eastland, Ellender -- are now displayed on federal

The decline of the left, from Laura Bush to the mayor of Spokane

Justifying my long years of public devotion to her intelligence and beauty (also the fact that she is the frail hawser linking G.W. Bush to reality), Laura Bush fired off those jokes at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, mostly minted by Landon Parvin. And don't start whining about her stuff being "scripted." You think FDR wrote that thing about the Four Freedoms, or Dwight Eisenhower made up that phrase about the military industrial complex? It's what they decide to read aloud that counts, not who wrote it.

Laura chose some edgy lines: "George and I are complete opposites -- I'm quiet, he's talkative; I'm introverted, he's extroverted; I can pronounce nuclear ..."

She accurately called her ghastly mother-in-law "actually more like ... hmm ... Don Corleone," made fun of George's pretensions to being a rancher, had some cracks about male strip clubs and "Desperate Wives."

Conscientious Objection on Trial: The Court Martial of Keith Benderman

This Wednesday, May 11, the court martial of Sgt. Keith Benderman begins. Sgt. Benderman, who has served in the military for eight years including one tour of duty in Iraq, filed for conscientious objector status after seeing the reality of war in Iraq. He has been denied and now faces court martial on two counts, for desertion with the intent to avoid hazardous duty and missing movement by design. He could spend five years incarcerated if found guilty of the first charge and up to two years for the second.

Keith Benderman's opposition to war – all war – is based on his experience in Iraq. As Rep. Cynthia McKinney said on the floor of the House of Representatives on April 28:

Unjustice Sunday

I was brought up in a very Republican family. What is being called GOP these days is not my father's Republican Party.

I suppose people could accuse me of being a little "out there" when I say that there is a well organized move by the extreme rite to overthrow the government of the USA and replace it with a theocracy that is the opposite of anything Christian or American.

The circus we saw last Sunday during [Un]Justice Sunday from a mega-church in Louisville is a graphic illustration of the mechanics of this overthrow. Now, having Dominists pontificating on "activist judges" is nothing new -- anyone paying any attention to these subversives knows that the buzz phrase “activist judges" indicates the attack of the rite on our tradition of checks and balances.

But what really underlined and highlighted the approach of the American Inquisition was the tape of the Republican Senate Majority Leader, Dr. Frist, joining these cultists in the attack on our tradition of discussion and respect for minority opinion, in the name of religion.

Who are these nominees who are so important to this religious agenda?

To add to Wasserman's article...

Here is an anecdote about the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" of 1964. I had a childhood friend named Bob Revenue who enlisted in the marines in 1963 and was a radioman with the 1st Marine Division floating around Tonkin on the night in question. In 1970 he related his side of the story. He was on radio watch the night the shooting happened. His duty was to monitor the radio frequencies between the command networks ane do the things that radiomen do. When he went on watch that night at midnight he said that the network was dead. No radio traffic, no noise, no nothing. In all his time at sea with that fleet (his division was deverted to Da Nang shortly afterword) there had never been a time when the network shut down. The attack took place around three of four in the morning if memory serves me but Bob swore that in the six hours he was on duty from 00:00am to 06:00am there was nothing but static. Of course you can speculate that when the fleet went into "action" the command switched over to krypto secure communication of whatever but there was no abrupt stop of radio traffic because there was NO radio traffic that night. Bob said that none of the

Meanwhile, back in Iraq

AUSTIN, Texas -- Meanwhile, back in Iraq. I was going to leave out of this column everything about how we got into Iraq, or whether it was wise, and or whether the infamous "they" knowingly lied to us. (Although I did plan to point out I would be nobly refraining from poking at that pus-riddled question.)

Since I believe one of our greatest strengths as Americans is shrewd practicality, I thought it was time we moved past the now unhelpful, "How did we get into his mess?" to the more utilitarian, "What the hell do we do now?"

However, I cannot let this astounding Downing Street memo go unmentioned.

On May 1, the Sunday Times of London printed a secret memo that went to the defense secretary, foreign secretary, attorney general and other high officials. It is the minutes of their meeting on Iraq with Tony Blair. The memo was written by Matthew Rycroft, a Downing Street foreign policy aide. It has been confirmed as legitimate and is dated July 23, 2002. I suppose the correct cliche is "smoking gun."

With Voinovich still undecided, key global security groups organize a campus debate on John Bolton

COLUMBUS, OH – The nomination of John Bolton to be Ambassador to the United Nations has sharpened a debate about the U.S. role in the international community. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is deadlocked on the nomination, with Ohio Senator George Voinovich playing a pivotal role. His critical position on Bolton prevented the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from proceeding ahead with the nomination last month.

  To crystallize the debate, 20/20 Vision, a global security educational organization based in Washington, D.C., and Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress, have teamed up with several other organizations to coordinate a debate on campus between Lawrence J. Korb, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration and an opponent of Bolton’s confirmation, and Prof. Ruth Wedgwood, a current member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee for International Law, and a supporter of the nomination.

Pages

Subscribe to ColumbusFreePress.com RSS