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| ---> Ass-Hole of 2004 |
| 12.31.04 (1:26 pm) [edit] |
[b]Welcome to the BuzzFlash.com Hypocrite of . . . the Year.[/b]
Perhaps a quote from Machiavelli gets to the crux of the matter: "a prince must take great care ... [that] he should seem to be all mercy, faith, integrity, humility and religion." As a book, "The Politics of Deceit," http://www.buzzflash.com/prem... notes, this is the foundation of a fundamental and ruinous cynicism by which Bush claims the mantle of American leadership: "Pretending to these qualities makes it all the more easier [for Bush] to rule with their antitheses."
Can one explain any better the basic paradox of the Bush Cartel cynical reign of horror?
It is, as BuzzFlash has repeatedly observed, an Orwellian state of affairs, born of a bastard presidency won by a 5-4 GOP-rigged Supreme Court vote in 2000 (after the citizens of America had elected Al Gore president) -- and re-seized through the use of dirty tricks, voter suppression, and questionable privatized vote counting in 2004.
In Orwell's 1984, there are slogans that become the mantras for a nation under the grip of a dictatorship that rules by image, advertising, propaganda and the erasing of history and the eradication of dissent. In this Orwellian world of 1984 -- and in Bush's world of 2004 -- war is peace and ignorance is strength.
Bush has also abused freedom to make it into a clarion call for a reduction in our actual liberties. Freedom becomes redefined as repression.
Democracy is merely a patriotic catch phrase for the Mayberry Machiavellis in the White House. It is -- as Orwell would call it -- another example of "Newspeak" and "Prolefeed," words meant to arouse the masses to obey the patriarchal father figure, leader of the "homeland."
For the Bush Cartel, the realties of the democratic process, the legal guarantees of our Constitution, the right of a full public debate on issues -- these are all road blocks to elitist rule by the self-appointed so-called enlightened ones.
The Bush Administration crimes against democracy and their war crimes; the death and destruction that they have caused; their pillaging of the middle class and working poor; and their violations of civilized standards of behavior -- all of these would be cause enough to charge, prosecute and convict them for crimes against the nation and against the laws of the land -- as well as the community of nations.
But remember this, above all else. Despite taking a wrecking ball to our Constitution, their most underrated crime perhaps is failure: failure on Iraq, failure on national security, failure on the economy, failure to protect our personal health, and failure to protect our environment. The only thing that they have succeeded at is failure itself -- and leaving future generations with a massive "baby tax" debt.
They are a radical regime, with an extremist, distorted self-proclaimed "Christian" vision of the world. Led by Bush, they are the Crusader counterpart of Al-Qaeda, lining their pockets as they sing hymns of praise to a Lord who must be looking down upon the White House in disgust and dismay.
But George W. Bush, first and foremost, is our GOP Hypocrite of 2004, because he has allowed Al-Qaeda to win. If they hate democracy, as Bush claims, Bush has done everything possible to curtail our freedoms and our right to elect officials as a national community. He has accomplished their terrorist goal for them; something that surely warms the cockles of Osama bin Laden's heart.
Osama checkmated Bush -- and we are the pawns.
So, as we begin a new year, just remember our motto at BuzzFlash.com: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.
Catch up with you soon.
[b]A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Note[/b]: This January 1, 2005, BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Year marks the first in 20 consecutive editorials BuzzFlash will be publishing through January 20th. - http://www.buzzflash.com/edit...
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| ---> GOP Hypocrisy 101: Always Play the Victim - Often and Loudly ... |
| 12.31.04 (7:04 am) [edit] |
In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, when the topic of conversation turned to religion and a) republican's claim to be the party of Christianity; and b) the claim that evangelicals helped re-elect Bush; one of the callers to my radio show made the suggestion that we should not try and "out-Jesus" the right. I agreed, and added that we should also endeavor to demonstrate that the right is not anywhere near as "Jesus-y" as they claim to be (along with of course, alerting our fellow citizens as to who owns the media, not to mention the machines that count the votes.)
Looking back at this Christmas season and what it's supposed to represent, namely, the whole "Christ thing" republicans always get their edible undies and leather G-strings in a wad over; I found myself pondering a few remarks attributed to alleged "Christian" spokespeople. You have Pat Robertson rallying millions to lobby God for the deaths of liberal Supreme Court justices - recommending prayers for coronaries and cancer; you have the gluttonous Jerry Falwell calling for the deaths of our enemies; and you've got the chaste Jimmy Swaggart calling for the deaths of gays.
I then thought about the millions of brainwashed, brain-dead, Bush boot lickers who continue on their merry quest for a seemingly utopian, fascist state (where blissful, willful ignorance reigns supreme) and continue to support the wanton murder of innocent human beings in Iraq (and anywhere else the Bush administration lies them into thinking they have go to kill people). And yet, over the holidays, I would hear these same people - these same self-professed "Christians" - call conservative talk radio, completely unaware of what colossal hypocrites and fools there were exposing themselves to be.
On the one hand, they seemed completely oblivious to the fact of how they have willfully eliminated the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" Commandment from their subverted, perverted and immensely watered down republican version of Christianity (not to mention being their brother's keeper or loving their enemy). They seemed equally unconscious to how they're completely ignoring the atrocities and war crimes against humanity that they are sanctioning and allowing to be committed in their name. Instead, remarkably - the only thing these perverters and subverters of true Christianity seemed to be concerned about this holiday season with regards to Christianity was chastising department store clerks for saying "Happy Holidays", instead of "Merry Christmas."
Talk about misguided priorities! But we always have to remember - this is all just part of the conservative republican ideology. Live in delusion, denial and ignorance - and the most important element, of course, remains - whine, moan, bitch and complain, and accuse the other side of that which they are most guilty of themselves. Author Paul Waldman (Fraud) calls it "Orwellian Misdirection."
And how does that work? Here's where the lessons of fascist propagandization come in handy. They whine and accuse so often (because they've been so thoroughly brainwashed into believing they actually have a legitimate complaint), and they whine and accuse so loudly - that even those who know they're full of crap eventually give up trying to combat their lies out of sheer frustration and disgust (except you and me, Thom Hartman, Air America and a few others, of course.) But when that happens - by and large - the abuser then gets to play the victim instead.
Classic example? The media. Rather than admitting to being the biggest abusers, subverters and perverters of the media which they now own - they just keep whining about, and accusing the media of being the "liberal media", which in the real world is absolutely ludicrous. But done often enough and loudly enough - and promulgated by the very media they now own - even rational thinkers begin to consider the irrational as a possibility. Ultimately, the very people who abuse the media the most get to play the victim of the media instead - victims of the republican owned, republican managed and republican controlled liberal media. Makes sense, doesn't it? To a psychotic, delusional, perverted and brainwashed republican mind - yes it does, sadly. Don't believe me? Tune in to conservative radio sometime. This scenario as I just laid it out is replayed on a daily basis on literally hundreds of radio stations coast to coast.
And it's the same thing with Christianity. Rather than admitting to being the biggest abusers, subverters and attackers of Christianity - they just keep whining about, and accusing the other side of, trying to remove either Christianity or Christ himself from their already un-Christian, anti-Christ lives. And done often enough and loudly enough - and promulgated by the media, which they now own - again, the irrational becomes rational. Unreality becomes reality. The un-Christian becomes Christian. And the real attackers of Christianity get to play the victims of Christian attacks instead.
Nothing has exposed these self professed Christians' ignorance, blatant hypocrisy and lack of ownership of the religion they claim to own - than has George W. Bush's murderous, corporate invasion of Iraq (although almost any other republican policy would suffice.) But here's where republican's adherence and devotion to denial, ignorance and quite frankly, gross stupidity, comes into play. Just like they ignore who owns the media they claim to be a victim of; and just like they ignore a) the ownership of the voting machines that somehow ran counter to the traditionally reliable exit polls and b) the fact that their boy Bush can only manage a 48% approval rating the month after the election in a Fox News Poll - and instead, tell us he was elected overwhelmingly; they also ignore their own blatant Christ crimes and their transparent ignorance as to even the basic tenets of Christianity; and accuse the other side of trying to subvert Christianity instead.
Would sure love to be a fly on the wall when it's time for these religious hypocrites to give an accounting of themselves before their Creator. Tell Him how 9-11 changed everything - including His Commandments. Tell Him how the oceans He created no longer protected you. Tell Him how you demonized and deemed every one of His human creations who dared disagree with your false Bush prophet a "terrorist." Tell him why you disagreed with Christ's message of peace - and why you laughed at Dennis Kucinich when he suggested a Department of Peace. And tell me how you're going to respond when He asks, "Where was your faith?" Just a hunch, but somehow, I just don't think playing the victim will absolve you of your earthly republican crimes before the Almighty.
And this inherent delusion, ignorance and stupidity doesn't stop with Christianity, the media or voting machines. Consider the run up to the election - when it came to the issue of military service. Rather than admitting it was their boy who had the less than stellar military record, they accused the other side (who actually did have a genuine war hero) of having a candidate with a less than a stellar record. And done often enough and loudly enough - and promulgated by the media which they now own - once again, the irrational became rational. And instead of the focus being on draft dodging, drugs, alcohol, womanizing, bribery, coercion, influence, going AWOL, and deserting, the focus was shifted to whether or not the other guy was injured seriously enough to warrant his first military decoration.
Now I'm no psychiatrist, but I would be willing to bet when an abuser or a victimizer constantly claims to be the abused or the victimized - over infractions far less egregious than those they commit themselves - these are truly sick people, and ones that should have no influence what so ever in government, religion, the media or elections. To draw an analogy; it's exactly the same as a rapist complaining because his victim scratched him in the face. And why would this rapist do this? If he felt he was "entitled" to rape his victim. And so it is with republicans. They feel entitled to rape this country. Of course, they call it "governing," but for those of us who have found it increasingly more difficult to sit down the past 4 years, rape is probably a more accurate terminology. (Haven't these Neanderthals ever heard of Vaseline?)
Bottom line? These people should be committed immediately - not only because they're a danger to themselves - but also before they can do any more harm to what was once considered to be the most intelligent, progressive nation in the world.
It is truly amazing that an ideology this shallow, this despicable and this disingenuous and downright hypocritical - can be marketed, sold and bought as one that is married to Christianity and Jesus Christ himself - when in reality, it is an ideology that is so entirely and transparently un-Christian and anti-Christ. But welcome to the insanity that has become George W. Bush's republican, neo-theocratic America.
And as I heard a familiar and valuable message throughout this Holiday season (the one pertaining to drinking and driving and the roll friends must play at times like these) I paraphrased that message into one I think has the potential to be even more valuable and more critical.
Friends don't let friends vote republican. For Christ's sake.
[b]Doug Basham broadcasts every weekday morning on AM 1230 KLAV in Las Vegas from 9 - 10 a.m. and than again, each weekday evening from 10 p.m. - 12 midnight. (both times Pacific) All shows are simulcast on the Internet. For more show or guest information, to listen live on the web, or for audio archives of the show, please visit http://www.dougbasham.com. Doug can be reached at bashamradio@yahoo.com.[/b] - http://www.buzzflash.com/cont...
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| ---> GOP Hypocrisy 101: Always Play the Victim - Often and Loudly ... |
| 12.31.04 (6:59 am) [edit] |
In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, when the topic of conversation turned to religion and a) republican's claim to be the party of Christianity; and b) the claim that evangelicals helped re-elect Bush; one of the callers to my radio show made the suggestion that we should not try and "out-Jesus" the right. I agreed, and added that we should also endeavor to demonstrate that the right is not anywhere near as "Jesus-y" as they claim to be (along with of course, alerting our fellow citizens as to who owns the media, not to mention the machines that count the votes.)
Looking back at this Christmas season and what it's supposed to represent, namely, the whole "Christ thing" republicans always get their edible undies and leather G-strings in a wad over; I found myself pondering a few remarks attributed to alleged "Christian" spokespeople. You have Pat Robertson rallying millions to lobby God for the deaths of liberal Supreme Court justices - recommending prayers for coronaries and cancer; you have the gluttonous Jerry Falwell calling for the deaths of our enemies; and you've got the chaste Jimmy Swaggart calling for the deaths of gays.
I then thought about the millions of brainwashed, brain-dead, Bush boot lickers who continue on their merry quest for a seemingly utopian, fascist state (where blissful, willful ignorance reigns supreme) and continue to support the wanton murder of innocent human beings in Iraq (and anywhere else the Bush administration lies them into thinking they have go to kill people). And yet, over the holidays, I would hear these same people - these same self-professed "Christians" - call conservative talk radio, completely unaware of what colossal hypocrites and fools there were exposing themselves to be.
On the one hand, they seemed completely oblivious to the fact of how they have willfully eliminated the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" Commandment from their subverted, perverted and immensely watered down republican version of Christianity (not to mention being their brother's keeper or loving their enemy). They seemed equally unconscious to how they're completely ignoring the atrocities and war crimes against humanity that they are sanctioning and allowing to be committed in their name. Instead, remarkably - the only thing these perverters and subverters of true Christianity seemed to be concerned about this holiday season with regards to Christianity was chastising department store clerks for saying "Happy Holidays", instead of "Merry Christmas."
Talk about misguided priorities! But we always have to remember - this is all just part of the conservative republican ideology. Live in delusion, denial and ignorance - and the most important element, of course, remains - whine, moan, bitch and complain, and accuse the other side of that which they are most guilty of themselves. Author Paul Waldman (Fraud) calls it "Orwellian Misdirection."
And how does that work? Here's where the lessons of fascist propagandization come in handy. They whine and accuse so often (because they've been so thoroughly brainwashed into believing they actually have a legitimate complaint), and they whine and accuse so loudly - that even those who know they're full of crap eventually give up trying to combat their lies out of sheer frustration and disgust (except you and me, Thom Hartman, Air America and a few others, of course.) But when that happens - by and large - the abuser then gets to play the victim instead.
Classic example? The media. Rather than admitting to being the biggest abusers, subverters and perverters of the media which they now own - they just keep whining about, and accusing the media of being the "liberal media", which in the real world is absolutely ludicrous. But done often enough and loudly enough - and promulgated by the very media they now own - even rational thinkers begin to consider the irrational as a possibility. Ultimately, the very people who abuse the media the most get to play the victim of the media instead - victims of the republican owned, republican managed and republican controlled liberal media. Makes sense, doesn't it? To a psychotic, delusional, perverted and brainwashed republican mind - yes it does, sadly. Don't believe me? Tune in to conservative radio sometime. This scenario as I just laid it out is replayed on a daily basis on literally hundreds of radio stations coast to coast.
And it's the same thing with Christianity. Rather than admitting to being the biggest abusers, subverters and attackers of Christianity - they just keep whining about, and accusing the other side of, trying to remove either Christianity or Christ himself from their already un-Christian, anti-Christ lives. And done often enough and loudly enough - and promulgated by the media, which they now own - again, the irrational becomes rational. Unreality becomes reality. The un-Christian becomes Christian. And the real attackers of Christianity get to play the victims of Christian attacks instead.
Nothing has exposed these self professed Christians' ignorance, blatant hypocrisy and lack of ownership of the religion they claim to own - than has George W. Bush's murderous, corporate invasion of Iraq (although almost any other republican policy would suffice.) But here's where republican's adherence and devotion to denial, ignorance and quite frankly, gross stupidity, comes into play. Just like they ignore who owns the media they claim to be a victim of; and just like they ignore a) the ownership of the voting machines that somehow ran counter to the traditionally reliable exit polls and b) the fact that their boy Bush can only manage a 48% approval rating the month after the election in a Fox News Poll - and instead, tell us he was elected overwhelmingly; they also ignore their own blatant Christ crimes and their transparent ignorance as to even the basic tenets of Christianity; and accuse the other side of trying to subvert Christianity instead.
Would sure love to be a fly on the wall when it's time for these religious hypocrites to give an accounting of themselves before their Creator. Tell Him how 9-11 changed everything - including His Commandments. Tell Him how the oceans He created no longer protected you. Tell Him how you demonized and deemed every one of His human creations who dared disagree with your false Bush prophet a "terrorist." Tell him why you disagreed with Christ's message of peace - and why you laughed at Dennis Kucinich when he suggested a Department of Peace. And tell me how you're going to respond when He asks, "Where was your faith?" Just a hunch, but somehow, I just don't think playing the victim will absolve you of your earthly republican crimes before the Almighty.
And this inherent delusion, ignorance and stupidity doesn't stop with Christianity, the media or voting machines. Consider the run up to the election - when it came to the issue of military service. Rather than admitting it was their boy who had the less than stellar military record, they accused the other side (who actually did have a genuine war hero) of having a candidate with a less than a stellar record. And done often enough and loudly enough - and promulgated by the media which they now own - once again, the irrational became rational. And instead of the focus being on draft dodging, drugs, alcohol, womanizing, bribery, coercion, influence, going AWOL, and deserting, the focus was shifted to whether or not the other guy was injured seriously enough to warrant his first military decoration.
Now I'm no psychiatrist, but I would be willing to bet when an abuser or a victimizer constantly claims to be the abused or the victimized - over infractions far less egregious than those they commit themselves - these are truly sick people, and ones that should have no influence what so ever in government, religion, the media or elections. To draw an analogy; it's exactly the same as a rapist complaining because his victim scratched him in the face. And why would this rapist do this? If he felt he was "entitled" to rape his victim. And so it is with republicans. They feel entitled to rape this country. Of course, they call it "governing," but for those of us who have found it increasingly more difficult to sit down the past 4 years, rape is probably a more accurate terminology. (Haven't these Neanderthals ever heard of Vaseline?)
Bottom line? These people should be committed immediately - not only because they're a danger to themselves - but also before they can do any more harm to what was once considered to be the most intelligent, progressive nation in the world.
It is truly amazing that an ideology this shallow, this despicable and this disingenuous and downright hypocritical - can be marketed, sold and bought as one that is married to Christianity and Jesus Christ himself - when in reality, it is an ideology that is so entirely and transparently un-Christian and anti-Christ. But welcome to the insanity that has become George W. Bush's republican, neo-theocratic America.
And as I heard a familiar and valuable message throughout this Holiday season (the one pertaining to drinking and driving and the roll friends must play at times like these) I paraphrased that message into one I think has the potential to be even more valuable and more critical.
Friends don't let friends vote republican. For Christ's sake.
[b]Doug Basham broadcasts every weekday morning on AM 1230 KLAV in Las Vegas from 9 - 10 a.m. and than again, each weekday evening from 10 p.m. - 12 midnight. (both times Pacific) All shows are simulcast on the Internet. For more show or guest information, to listen live on the web, or for audio archives of the show, please visit http://www.dougbasham.com. Doug can be reached at bashamradio@yahoo.com.[/b] - http://www.buzzflash.com/cont...
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| ---> The Top 10 American Hypocrites: All Right-Wing Neo-Fascist Neo-Cons!!! |
| 12.30.04 (1:02 pm) [edit] |
[b]The top 10 American hypocrites, crooks & war-criminals are all right-wing neo-fascist neo-cons!!![/b]
[b]10. Rush (Suck Any Corporate Cock in Sight) Limbaugh:[/b] Right-wing demagogue, blow-hard, liar and crook-- Drug addict, ugly wind-bag and rapacious thief who spreads neo-hitlerian diatribes only lapped-up by brain-dead sheeple. Also, the creep has been married at least 3 times. So much for "family values"!
[b]9. Bill (Loud-Mouth Buffoon) O'Reilly:[/b] Asshole who sexually harrasses female (and male?) colleagues while shouting, howling and crooning about "family values"-- The mother-fucker claimed that he'd apologize if NO WMDs were found in Iraq! We're waiting O'Reilly fucker!
[b]8. Senate Majority Leader Bill (Cover-Up) Frist:[/b] Tortured cats when practicing "medicine". So it's no wonder he relishes the torture of the elderly in the Bush-GOP Medicare swindle (a giveaway for the Pharmaceutical Corporate Fascists). He also [i]jerks-off [/i]to pics and films of U.S. torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and refuses to bring charges against those really responsible: Bush & Cheney.
[b]7. House of Representatives Majority Whip Tommy-boy (Bug Exterminator) DeLay:[/b] Fraudster, embezzler, election-rigger, unethical crook who lusts for the extermination of the Palestinian people. The stench when he enters a room renders those present sick to their stomachs.
[b]6. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz & Feith/Bolton (4 of the Bush Mass-Murderers--[i] For the rest, see below[/i]):[/b] Neo-con cabal of mother-fucking traitors who should be fired; put on trial at the Hague; and, hung by their cowardly necks-- These arm-chair chicken-hawks lied, cheated and stole the lives (and treasure) of Americans and innocent Iraqis in their lust for war, torture, rape-- The self-proclaimed "geniuses" are arrogant neo-nazi pieces-of-shit who aren't fit to wipe toilets at Abu Ghraib (where they belong).
[b]5. John (Fuck-the-Constitution) Ashcroft & Alberto (The Torture Guy) Gonzales:[/b] Jointly collaborating to murder, torture, rape and abuse anybody who doesn't worship at the altar of the Mad King Georgey-boy (Bush couldn't get a job wiping toilets in WalMart if it wasn't for Poppy Bush the Incompetent).
[b]4. Condosleezy (Suck Bush's Cock) Rice:[/b] Bush's Ass-Licking Lewinsky, willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to further her own pathetic "career". The most incompetent, over-rated and corrupt NSA ever to disgrace the U.S.A. is now being elevated to the position of Secretary of State. If she wasn't a black woman, she'd be in prison for treason, malfeasance and perjury. She doesn't give a damn about the United States of America-- willing to betray America for power & wealth.
[b]3. Karl "Joseph Goebbels" Rove:[/b] The neo-nazi who worships Adolf Hitler, adopting his mantra: ""Tell the Big Lie", and the People Will Believe"" ... The fucker wants to install his neo-fascist 1000-Year-Reich with Useful Idiots like Bushy-boy to front his corporate-take-all slave state.
[b]2. Dicky-boy (I'm Making a Bloody Fortune, So 'Fuck-Yourself') Cheney:[/b] Dick-the-Slut, Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay's protege. Cheney embezzles hundreds of billions for himself & his pimp Halliburton-- laughing while our U.S. troops are slaughtered in Iraq. He thinks he is clever because he gets away with mass-murder & torture while stealing U.S. treasury dollars in his 'get-rich-quick' embezzlement scheme.
[b]1. The Mad (and Stupid) King George:[/b] Bushy-boy the Useful Idiot vomits whatever mindless crap Karl (Joseph Goebbels) Rove, Dick (Halliburton) Cheney and Condi (Lewinsky) Rice shove in front of his smirking imbecilic face (and he[i] can't even read [/i]that shit very well! Bush couldn't qualify for a job wiping toilets at WalMart, without Poppy Bush[i] who put him [/i]where he is today!) ... The hypocritical traitor pretends to be "christian" while [i]fucking [/i]everybody who isn't rich[i] up-the-ass [/i]... Also, the asshole LIED us into his illegal and immoral war for which he should be impeached and put on trial for War Crimes & Crimes Against Humanity ...
I urge you to check-out SmartWithHeart web-site: http://www.smartwithheart.org... reporting:--
Amount Bush set aside for his inauguration events: $30-40 Million
Amount Bush has pledged to for the Asian Tsunami relief efforts: $35 Million
(By the way, our friendly neighbors to the north have already pledged $40 million)
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| ---> The Secular Founding Fathers |
| 12.30.04 (12:42 pm) [edit] |
I've never been one for "founding fathers" idolatry, so the impact of this article http://www.msmagazine.com/fal... on my beliefs is essentially nil, but it ought to make for very unpleasant reading for religious conservatives, who overwhelmingly combine a belief in the infallibility of the fathers of the nation with the conviction that America was founded on Christian principles; given what we know, however, both of these things can't simultaneously be true.
[Via Metafilter http://www.metafilter.com/mef... .]
PS: Via a Mefi commenter in the aforementioned thread comes this page http://www.swarthmore.edu/Nat... which contains helpful disclaimers on all sorts of "theories" out there (as in "evolution is just a theory" ...)
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| ---> Bill Moyers: 'Our democracy is in danger of being paralyzed' |
| 12.30.04 (7:15 am) [edit] |
[b]By Bill Moyers, transcript of [i]Democracy Now [/i]broadcast, http://www.democracynow.org/a...%2F12%2F24%2F1731220 December 24, 2004[/b]
Thank you for inviting me tonight. I'm flattered to be speaking to a gathering as high-powered as this one that's come together with an objective as compelling as "media reform." I must confess, however, to a certain discomfort, shared with other journalists, about the very term "media." Ted Gup, who teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve, articulated my concerns better than I could when he wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 2001) that the very concept of media is insulting to some of us within the press who find ourselves lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a loud voice were all one and the same. ...David Broder is not Matt Drudge. "Meet the Press" is not "Temptation Island." And I am not Jerry Springer. I do not speak for him. He does not speak for me. Yet 'the media" speaks for us all.
That's how I felt when I saw Oliver North reporting on Fox from Iraq, pressing our embattled troops to respond to his repetitive and belittling question, "Does Fox Rock? Does Fox Rock?" Oliver North and I may be in the same "media" but we are not part of the same message. Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of us live in "medialand," and God knows we need some "media reform."
I'm sure you know those two words are really an incomplete description of the job ahead. Taken alone, they suggest that you've assembled a convention of efficiency experts, tightening the bolts and boosting the output of the machinery of public enlightenment, or else a conclave of high-minded do-gooders applauding each other's sermons. But we need to be - and we will be - much more than that. Because what we're talking about is nothing less than rescuing a democracy that is so polarized it is in danger of being paralyzed and pulverized.
Alarming words, I know. But the realities we face should trigger alarms. Free and responsible government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed public. That's a cliche, I know, but I agree with the presidential candidate who once said that truisms are true and cliches mean what they say (an observation that no doubt helped to lose him the election.) It's a reality: democracy can't exist without an informed public. Here's an example: Only 13% of eligible young people cast ballots in the last presidential election. A recent National Youth Survey revealed that only half of the fifteen hundred young people polled believe that voting is important, and only 46% think they can make a difference in solving community problems. We're talking here about one quarter of the electorate. The Carnegie Corporation conducted a youth challenge quiz of l5-24 year-olds and asked them, "Why don't more young people vote or get involved?" Of the nearly two thousand respondents, the main answer was that they did not have enough information about issues and candidates. Let me rewind and say it again: democracy can't exist without an informed public. So I say without qualification that it's not simply the cause of journalism that's at stake today, but the cause of American liberty itself. As Tom Paine put it, "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth." He was talking about the cause of a revolutionary America in 1776. But that revolution ran in good part on the energies of a rambunctious, though tiny press. Freedom and freedom of communications were birth-twins in the future United States. They grew up together, and neither has fared very well in the other's absence. Boom times for the one have been boom times for the other.
Yet today, despite plenty of lip service on every ritual occasion to freedom of the press radio and TV, three powerful forces are undermining that very freedom, damming the streams of significant public interest news that irrigate and nourish the flowering of self-determination. The first of these is the centuries-old reluctance of governments - even elected governments - to operate in the sunshine of disclosure and criticism. The second is more subtle and more recent. It's the tendency of media giants, operating on big-business principles, to exalt commercial values at the expense of democratic value. That is, to run what Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called broadcasting's "money-making machine" at full throttle. In so doing they are squeezing out the journalism that tries to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth; they are isolating serious coverage of public affairs into ever-dwindling "news holes" or far from prime- time; and they are gobbling up small and independent publications competing for the attention of the American people.
It's hardly a new or surprising story. But there are fresh and disturbing chapters.
In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the law - padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands. But they've found new ones now, in the name of "national security." The classifier's Top Secret stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially labeled "secret" there hovers a culture of sealed official lips, opened only to favored media insiders: of government by leak and innuendo and spin, of misnamed "public information" offices that churn out blizzards of releases filled with self-justifying exaggerations and, occasionally, just plain damned lies. Censorship without officially appointed censors.
Add to that the censorship-by-omission of consolidated media empires digesting the bones of swallowed independents, and you've got a major shrinkage of the crucial information that thinking citizens can act upon. People saw that coming as long as a century ago when the rise of chain newspaper ownerships, and then of concentration in the young radio industry, became apparent. And so in the zesty progressivism of early New Deal days, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 was passed (more on this later.) The aim of that cornerstone of broadcast policy, mentioned over 100 times in its pages, was to promote the "public interest, convenience and necessity." The clear intent was to prevent a monopoly of commercial values from overwhelming democratic values - to assure that the official view of reality - corporate or government - was not the only view of reality that reached the people. Regulators and regulated, media and government were to keep a wary eye on each other, preserving those checks and balances that is the bulwark of our Constitutional order.
What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation." Giant megamedia conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.
Consider where we are today.
Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and - in defiance of the Constitution - from their representatives in Congress. Never has the so powerful a media oligopoly - the word is Barry Diller's, not mine - been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the people's need to know. When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked by a college student to define "real news", he answered: "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms." When journalism throws in with power that's the first news marched by censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.
Which brings me to the third powerful force - beyond governmental secrecy and megamedia conglomerates - that is shaping what Americans see, read, and hear. I am talking now about that quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that in turn is the ally and agent of the most powerful interests in the world. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas today in a phenomenon unique in our history. You need not harbor the notion of a vast, right wing conspiracy to think this more collusion more than pure coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when ideology hungers for power and its many adherents swarm of their own accord to the same pot of honey. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to the faux news of Rupert Murdoch's empire to the nattering nabobs of no-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks paid for and bought by conglomerates - the religious, partisan and corporate right have raised a mighty megaphone for sectarian, economic, and political forces that aim to transform the egalitarian and democratic ideals embodied in our founding documents. Authoritarianism. With no strong opposition party to challenge such triumphalist hegemony, it is left to journalism to be democracy's best friend. That is why so many journalists joined with you in questioning Michael Powell's bid - blessed by the White House - to permit further concentration of media ownership. If free and independent journalism committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated, the oxygen goes out of democracy. And there is a surer way to intimidate and then silence mainstream journalism than to be the boss.
If you doubt me, read Jane Kramer's chilling account in the current New Yorker of Silvio Berlusconi. The Prime Minister of Italy is its richest citizen. He is also its first media mogul. The list of media that he or his relatives or his proxies own, or directly or indirectly control, includes the state television networks and radio stations, three of Italy's four commercial television networks, two big publishing houses, two national newspapers, fifty magazines, the country's largest movie production-and-distributi on company, and a chunk of its Internet services. Even now he is pressing upon parliament a law that would enable him to purchase more media properties, including the most influential paper in the country. Kramer quotes one critic who says that half the reporters in Italy work for Berlusconi, and the other half think they might have to. Small wonder he has managed to put the Italian State to work to guarantee his fortune - or that his name is commonly attached to such unpleasant things as contempt for the law, conflict of interest, bribery, and money laundering. Nonetheless, "his power over what other Italians see, read, buy, and, above all, think, is overwhelming." The editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, was asked recently why a British magazine was devoting so much space to an Italian Prime Minister. He replied that Berlusconi had betrayed the two things the magazine stood for: capitalism and democracy. Can it happen here? It can happen here. By the way, Berlusconi's close friend is Rupert Murdoch. On July 3lst this year, writes Jane Kramer, programming on nearly all the satellite hookups in Italy was switched automatically to Murdoch's Sky Italia
So the issues bringing us here tonight are bigger and far more critical than simply "media reform." That's why, before I go on, I want to ask you to look around you. I'm serious: Look to your left and now to your right. You are looking at your allies in one of the great ongoing struggles of the American experience - the struggle for the soul of democracy, for government "of, by, and for the people."
It's a battle we can win only if we work together. We've seen that this year. Just a few months ago the FCC, heavily influenced by lobbyists for the newspaper, broadcasting and cable interests, prepared a relaxation of the rules governing ownership of media outlets that would allow still more diversity-killing mergers among media giants. The proceedings were conducted in virtual secrecy, and generally ignored by all the major media, who were of course interested parties. In June Chairman Powell and his two Republican colleagues on the FCC announced the revised regulations as a done deal.
But they didn't count on the voice of independent journalists and citizens like you. Because of coverage in independent outlets - including PBS, which was the only broadcasting system that encouraged its journalists to report what was really happening - and because citizens like you took quick action, this largely invisible issue burst out as a major political cause and ignited a crackling public debate. You exposed Powell's failure to conduct an open discussion of the rule changes save for a single hearing in Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts led to a real participatory discussion, with open meetings in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta. Then the organizing that followed generated millions of letters and "filings"at the FCC opposing the change. Finally, the outcry mobilized unexpected support for bi-partisan legislation to reverse the new rules that cleared the Senate - although House Majority Leader Tom De Lay still holds it prisoner in the House. But who would have thought six months ago that the cause would win support from such allies as Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey Hutchinson, from my own Texas. You have moved "media reform" to center-stage, where it may even now become a catalyst for a new era of democratic renewal.
We working journalists have something special to bring to this work. This weekend at your conference there will be plenty of good talk about the mechanics of reform. What laws are needed? What advocacy programs and strategies? How can we protect and extend the reach of those tools that give us some countervailing power against media monopoly - instruments like the Internet, cable TV, community-based radio and public broadcasting systems, alternative journals of news and opinion.
But without passion, without a message that has a beating heart, these won't be enough. There's where journalism comes in. It isn't the only agent of freedom, obviously; in fact, journalism is a deeply human and therefore deeply flawed craft - yours truly being a conspicuous example. But at times it has risen to great occasions, and at times it has made other freedoms possible. That's what the draftsmen of the First Amendment knew and it's what we can't afford to forget. So to remind us of what our free press has been at its best and can be again, I will call on the help of unseen presences, men and women of journalism's often checkered but sometimes courageous past.
Think with me for a moment on the reasons behind the establishment of press freedom. It wasn't ordained to protect hucksters, and it didn't drop like the gentle rain from heaven. It was fought and sacrificed for by unpretentious but feisty craftsmen who got their hands inky at their own hand presses and called themselves simply "printers." The very first American newspaper was a little three-page affair put out in Boston in September of 1690. Its name was Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick and its editor was Benjamin Harris, who said he simply wanted "to give an account of such considerable things as have come to my attention." The government shut it down after one issue - just one issue! - for the official reason that printer Ben Harris hadn't applied for the required government license to publish. But I wonder if some Massachusetts pooh-bah didn't take personally one of Harris's proclaimed motives for starting the paper - "to cure the spirit of Lying much among us"?
No one seems to have objected when Harris and his paper disappeared - that was the way things were. But some forty-odd years later when printer John Peter Zenger was jailed in New York for criticizing its royal governor, things were different. The colony brought Zenger to trial on a charge of "seditious libel," and since it didn't matter whether the libel was true or not, the case seemed open and shut. But the jury ignored the judge's charge and freed Zenger, not only because the governor was widely disliked, but because of the closing appeal of Zenger's lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His client's case was:
Not the cause of the poor Printer, nor of New York alone, [but] the cause of Liberty, and. . . every Man who prefers Freedom to a Life of Slavery will bless and honour You, as Men who. . .by an impartial and uncorrupt Verdict, [will] have laid a Noble Foundation for securing to ourselves, our Posterity and our Neighbors, That, to which Nature and the Laws of our Country have given us a Right, -- the Liberty - both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power...by speaking and writing - Truth.
Still a pretty good mission statement!
During the War for Independence itself most of the three dozen little weekly newspapers in the colonies took the Patriot side and mobilized resistance by giving space to anti-British letters, news of Parliament's latest outrages, and calls to action. But the clarion journalistic voice of the Revolution was the onetime editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Tom Paine, a penniless recent immigrant from England where he left a trail of failure as a businessman and husband. In 1776 - just before enlisting in Washington's army - he published Common Sense, a hard-hitting pamphlet that slashed through legalisms and doubts to make an uncompromising case for an independent and republican America. It's been called the first best seller, with as many as 100,000 copies bought by a small literate population. Paine followed it up with another convincing collection of essays written in the field and given another punchy title, The Crisis. Passed from hand to hand and reprinted in other papers, they spread the gospel of freedom to thousands of doubters. And why I bring Paine up here is because he had something we need to restore - an unwavering concentration to reach ordinary people with the message that they mattered and could stand up for themselves. He couched his gospel of human rights and equality in a popular style that any working writer can envy. "As it is my design," he said, "to make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet."
That plain language spun off memorable one-liners that we're still quoting. "These are the times that try men's souls." "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered." "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly." "Virtue is not hereditary." And this: "Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived." I don't know what Paine would have thought of political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite but he could have held his own in any modern campaign.
There were also editors who felt responsible to audiences that would dive deep. In 1787 and '88 the little New-York Independent Advertiser ran all eighty-five numbers of The Federalist , those serious essays in favor of ratifying the Constitution. They still shine as clear arguments, but they are, and they were, unforgiving in their demand for concentrated attention. Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that it owed the best to its readers, and the readers knew that the issues of self-government deserved their best attention. I pray your goal of "media reform" includes a press as conscientious as the New-York Advertiser, as pungent as Common Sense, and as public-spirited as both. Because it takes those qualities to fight against the relentless pressure of authority and avarice. Remember, back in l79l, when the First Amendment was ratified, the idea of a free press seemed safely sheltered in law. It wasn't. Only seven years later, in the midst of a war scare with France, Congress passed and John Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act. The act made it a crime - just listen to how broad a brush the government could swing - to circulate opinions "tending to induce a belief" that lawmakers might have unconstitutional or repressive motives, or "directly or indirectly tending" to justify France or to "criminate," whatever that meant, the President or other Federal officials. No wonder that opponents called it a scheme to "excite a fervor against foreign aggression only to establish tyranny at home." John Ashcroft would have loved it.
But here's what happened. At least a dozen editors refused to be frightened and went defiantly to prison, some under state prosecutions. One of them, Matthew Lyon, who also held a seat in the House of Representatives, languished for four months in an unheated cell during a Vermont winter. But such was the spirit of liberty abroad in the land that admirers chipped in to pay his thousand-dollar fine, and when he emerged his district re-elected him by a landslide. Luckily, the Sedition Act had a built-in expiration date of 1801, at which time President Jefferson - who hated it from the first - pardoned those remaining under indictment. So the story has an upbeat ending, and so can ours, but it will take the kind of courage that those early printers and their readers showed.
Courage is a timeless quality and surfaces when the government is tempted to hit the bottle of censorship again during national emergencies, real or manufactured. As so many of you will recall, in 1971, during the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration resurrected the doctrine of "prior restraint" from the crypt and tried to ban the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and the Washington Post - even though the documents themselves were a classified history of events during four earlier Presidencies. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, and Katherine Graham of the Post were both warned by their lawyers that they and their top managers could face criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they printed the material that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked - and, by the way, offered without success to the three major television networks. Or at the least, punitive lawsuits or whatever political reprisals a furious Nixon team could devise. But after internal debates - and the threats of some of their best-known editors to resign rather than fold under pressure - both owners gave the green light - and were vindicated by the Supreme Court. Score a round for democracy.
Bi-partisan fairness requires me to note that the Carter administration, in 1979, tried to prevent the Progressive magazine, published right here in Madison, from running an article called "How to Make an H-Bomb." The grounds were a supposed threat to "national security." But Howard Morland had compiled the piece entirely from sources open to the public, mainly to show that much of the classification system was Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors. The courts again rejected the government's claim, but it's noteworthy that the journalism of defiance by that time had retreated to a small left-wing publication like the Progressive.
In all three of those cases, confronted with a clear and present danger of punishment, none of the owners flinched. Can we think of a single executive of today's big media conglomerates showing the kind of resistance that Sulzberger, Graham, and Erwin Knoll did? Certainly not Michael Eisner. He said he didn't even want ABC News reporting on its parent company, Disney. Certainly not General Electric/NBC's Robert Wright. He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the network didn't want to offend conservatives with a liberal sensibility during the invasion of Iraq. Instead, NBC brought to its cable channel one Michael Savage whose diatribes on radio had described non-white countries as "turd-world nations" and who characterized gay men and women as part of "the grand plan to cut down on the white race." I am not sure what it says that the GE/NBC executives calculated that while Donahue was offensive to conservatives, Savage was not.
And then there's Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. In the very week that the once-Tiffany Network was celebrating its 75th anniversary - and taking kudos for its glory days when it was unafraid to broadcast "The Harvest of Shame" and "The Selling of the Pentagon" - the network's famous eye blinked. Pressured by a vociferous and relentless right wing campaign and bullied by the Republican National Committee - and at a time when its parent company has billions resting on whether the White House, Congress, and the FCC will allow it to own even more stations than currently permissible - CBS caved in and pulled the miniseries about Ronald Reagan that conservatives thought insufficiently worshipful. The chief honcho at CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, not politics, dictated his decision. But earlier this year, explaining why CBS intended to air a series about Adolf Hitler, Moonves sang a different tune: "If you want to play it safe and put on milquetoast then you get criticized...There are times when as a broadcaster when you take chances." This obviously wasn't one of those times. Granted, made-for-television movies about living figures are about as vital as the wax figures at Madame Tussaud's - and even less authentic - granted that the canonizers of Ronald Reagan hadn't even seen the film before they set to howling; granted, on the surface it's a silly tempest in a teapot; still, when a once-great network falls obsequiously to the ground at the feet of a partisan mob over a cheesy mini-series that practically no one would have taken seriously as history, you have to wonder if the slight tremor that just ran through the First Amendment could be the harbinger of greater earthquakes to come, when the stakes are really high. And you have to wonder what concessions the media tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no one is looking.
So what must we devise to make the media safe for individuals stubborn about protecting freedom and serving the truth? And what do we all - educators, administrators, legislators and agitators - need to do to restore the disappearing diversity of media opinions? America had plenty of that in the early days when the republic and the press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit - just a few hundred dollars - to start a paper, especially with a little political sponsorship and help. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840, mostly small-town weeklies. And they weren't objective by any stretch. Here's William Cobbett, another Anglo-American hell-raiser like Paine, shouting his creed in the opening number of his 1790s paper, Porcupine's Gazette. "Peter Porcupine," Cobbett's self-bestowed nickname, declared:
Professions of impartiality I shall make none. They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense, when used by a newsmonger; for, he that does not relate news as he finds it, is something worse than partial; and . . . he that does not exercise his own judgment, either in admitting or rejecting what is sent him, is a poor passive tool, and not an editor.
In Cobbett's day you could flaunt your partisan banners as you cut and thrust, and not inflict serious damage on open public discussion because there were plenty of competitors. It didn't matter if the local gazette presented the day's events entirely through a Democratic lens. There was always an alternate Whig or Republican choice handy - there were, in other words, choices. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, these many blooming journals kept even rural Americans amazingly well informed. They also made it possible for Americans to exercise one of their most democratic habits - that of forming associations to carry out civic enterprises. And they operated against the dreaded tyranny of the majority by letting lonely thinkers know that they had allies elsewhere. Here's how de Tocqueville put it in his own words:
It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.
No wandering spirit could fail to find a voice in print. And so in that pre-Civil War explosion of humanitarian reform movements, it was a diverse press that put the yeast in freedom's ferment. Of course there were plenty of papers that spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes and land-grabbers proclaiming America's Manifest Destiny to dominate North America. But one way or another, journalism mattered, and had purpose and direction.
Past and present are never as separate as we think. Horace Greeley, the reform-loving editor of the New York Tribune, not only kept his pages "ever open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering," but said that whoever sat in an editor's chair and didn't work to promote human progress hadn't tasted "the luxury" of journalism. I liken that to the words of a kindred spirit closer to our own time, I.F. Stone. In his four-page little I.F. Stone's Weekly, "Izzy" loved to catch the government's lies and contradictions in the government's own official documents. And amid the thunder of battle with the reactionaries, he said: "I have so much fun I ought to be arrested." Think about that. Two newsmen, a century apart, believing that being in a position to fight the good fight isn't a burden but a lucky break. How can our work here bring that attitude back into the newsrooms?
That era of a wide-open and crowded newspaper playing field began to fade as the old hand-presses gave way to giant machines with press runs and readerships in the hundreds of thousands and costs in the millions. But that didn't necessarily or immediately kill public spirited journalism. Not so long as the new owners were still strong-minded individuals with big professional egos to match their thick pocketbooks. When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time immigrant reporter for a German-language paper in St. Louis, took over the New York World in 1883 he was already a millionaire in the making. But here's his recommended short platform for politicians:
1.Tax luxuries
2. Tax Inheritances
3. Tax Large Incomes
4. Tax monopolies
5. Tax the Privileged Corporation
6. A Tariff for Revenue
7. Reform the Civil Service
8. Punish Corrupt Officers
9. Punish Vote Buying.
10. Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in Elections
Also not a bad mission statement. Can you imagine one of today's huge newspaper chains taking that on as an agenda?
Don't get me wrong. The World certainly offered people plenty of the spice that they wanted - entertainment, sensation, earthy advice on living - but not at the expense of news that let them know who was on their side against the boodlers and bosses.
Nor did big-time, big-town, big bucks journalism extinguish the possibility of a reform-minded investigative journalism that took the name of muckraking during the Progressive Era. Those days of early last century saw a second great awakening of the democratic impulse. What brought it into being was a reaction against the Social Darwinism and unrestrained capitalistic exploitation that is back in full force today. Certain popular magazines made space for - and profited by - the work of such journalists - to name only a few - as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and David Graham Phillips. They ripped the veils from - among other things - the shame of the cities, the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the Senate and the villainies of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous medicines. And why were they given those opportunities? Because, in the words of Samuel S. McClure, owner of McClure's Magazine, when special interests defied the law and flouted the general welfare, there was a social debt incurred. And, as he put it: "We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end, the sum total of the debt will be our liberty."
Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good deal of it consists of raking personal and sexual scandal in high and celebrated places. Surely, if democracy is to be served, we have to get back to putting the rake where the important dirt lies, in the fleecing of the public and the abuse of its faith in good government.
When that landmark Communications Act of 1934 was under consideration a vigorous public movement of educators, labor officials, and religious and institutional leaders emerged to argue for a broadcast system that would serve the interests of citizens and communities. A movement like that is coming to life again and we now have to build on this momentum.
It won't be easy, because the tide's been flowing the other way for a long time. The deregulation pressure began during the Reagan era, when then-FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who said that TV didn't need much regulation because it was just a "toaster with pictures," eliminated many public-interest rules. That opened the door for networks to cut their news staffs, scuttle their documentary units (goodbye to "The Harvest of Shame" and "The Selling of the Pentagon"), and exile investigative producers and reporters to the under-funded hinterlands of independent production. It was like turning out searchlights on dark and dangerous corners. A crowning achievement of that drive was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest corporate welfare program ever for the most powerful media and entertainment conglomerates in the world - passed, I must add, with support from both parties.
And the beat of "convergence" between once-distinct forms of media goes on at increased tempo, with the communications conglomerates and the advertisers calling the tune. As safeguards to competition fall, an octopus like GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be able to secure cable channels that can deliver interactive multimedia content - text, sound and images - to digital TVs, home computers, personal video recorders and portable wireless devices like cell phones. The goal? To corner the market on new ways of selling more things to more people for more hours in the day. And in the long run, to fill the airwaves with customized pitches to you and your children. That will melt down the surviving boundaries between editorial and marketing divisions and create a hybrid known to the new-media hucksters as "branded entertainment."
Let's consider what's happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today's newspaper markets are monopolies. And now most of the country's powerful newspaper chains are lobbying for co-ownership of newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same market, increasing their grip on community after community. And are they up-front about it? Hear this: Last December 3 such media giants as The New York Times, Gannett, Cox, and Tribune, along with the trade group representing almost all the country's broadcasting stations, filed a petition to the FCC making the case for that cross ownership the owners so desperately seek. They actually told the FCC that lifting the regulation on cross ownership would strengthen local journalism. But did those same news organizations tell their readers what they were doing? Not all. None of them on that day believed they had an obligation to report in their own news pages what their parent companies were asking of the FCC. As these huge media conglomerates increase their control over what we see, read, and hear, they rarely report on how they are themselves are using their power to further their own interests and power as big business, including their influence over the political process.
Take a look at a new book called Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering published as part of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The people who produced the book all love newspapers - Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times; Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism; Charles Layton, a veteran wire service reporter and news and feature editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the newspaper industry is in the middle of the most momentous change in its three hundred year history - a change that is diminishing the amount of real news available to the consumer. A generation of relentless corporatization is now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers, from the mightiest dailies to the humblest weeklies. It is a world where "small hometown dailies in particular are being bought and sold like hog futures. Where chains, once content to grow one property at a time, now devour other chains whole. Where they are effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another, further minimizing competition. Where money is pouring into the business from interests with little knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations newspapers have to democracy." They go on to describe the toll that the never-ending drive for profits is taking on the news. In Cumberland, Maryland, for example, the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But newspaper management had a cost-saving solution: put a fax machine in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. In New Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the Asbury Park Press, then sent in a publisher who slashed fifty five people from the staff and cut the space for news, and was rewarded by being named Gannett's Manager of the Year. In New Jersey, by the way, the Newhouse and Gannett chains between them now own thirteen of the state's nineteen dailies, or seventy three percent of all the circulation of New Jersey-based papers. Then there is The Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a circulation of 23,500. Here, the authors report, is a paper that prided itself on being in hometown hands since the Johnson administration - the Andrew Johnson administration. But in 1998 it was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three years.
You'd better get used to it, concluded Leaving Readers Behind, because the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning - it won't be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates.
You can see the results even now in the waning of robust journalism. In the dearth of in-depth reporting as news organizations try to do more with fewer resources. In the failure of the major news organizations to cover their own corporate deals and lobbying as well as other forms of "crime in the suites" such as Enron story. And in helping people understand what their government is up to. The report by the Roberts team includes a survey in l999 that showed a wholesale retreat in coverage of nineteen key departments and agencies in Washington. Regular reporting of the Supreme Court and State Department dropped off considerably through the decade. At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter and, incredibly, at the Interior Department, which controls five to six hundred million acres of public land and looks after everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there were no full-time reporters around.
That's in Washington, our nation's capital. Out across the country there is simultaneously a near blackout of local politics by broadcasters. The public interest group Alliance for Better Campaigns studied forty-five stations in six cities in one week in October. Out of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public affairs - less than one-half of 1% of local programming nationwide. Mayors, town councils, school boards, civic leaders get no time from broadcasters who have filled their coffers by looting the public airwaves over which they were placed as stewards. Last year, when a movement sprang up in the House of Representatives to require these broadcasters to obey the law that says they must sell campaign advertising to candidates for office at the lowest commercial rate, the powerful broadcast lobby brought the Congress to heel. So much for the "public interest, convenience, and necessity."
So what do we do? What is our strategy for taking on what seems a hopeless fight for a media system that serves as effectively as it sells - one that holds all the institutions of society, itself included, accountable?
There's plenty we can do. Here's one journalist's list of some of the overlapping and connected goals that a vital media reform movement might pursue.
First, we have to take Tom Paine's example - and Danny Schecter's advice - and reach out to regular citizens. We have to raise an even bigger tent than you have here. Those of us in this place speak a common language about the "media." We must reach the audience that's not here - carry the fight to radio talk shows, local television, and the letters columns of our newspapers. As Danny says, we must engage the mainstream, not retreat from it. We have to get our fellow citizens to understand that what they see, hear, and read is not only the taste of programmers and producers but also a set of policy decisions made by the people we vote for.
We have to fight to keep the gates to the Internet open to all. The web has enabled many new voices in our democracy - and globally - to be heard: advocacy groups, artists, individuals, non-profit organizations. Just about anyone can speak online, and often with an impact greater than in the days when orators had to climb on soap box in a park. The media industry lobbyists point to the Internet and say it's why concerns about media concentration are ill founded in an environment where anyone can speak and where there are literally hundreds of competing channels. What those lobbyists for big media don't tell you is that the traffic patterns of the online world are beginning to resemble those of television and radio. In one study, for example, AOL Time Warner (as it was then known) accounted for nearly a third of all user time spent online. And two others companies - Yahoo and Microsoft - bring that figure to fully 50%. As for the growing number of channels available on today's cable systems, most are owned by a small handful of companies. Of the ninety-one major networks that appear on most cable systems, 79 are part of such multiple network groups such as Time Warner, Viacom, Liberty Media, NBC, and Disney. In order to program a channel on cable today, you must either be owned by or affiliated with one of the giants. If we're not vigilant the wide-open spaces of the Internet could be transformed into a system in which a handful of companies use their control over high-speed access to ensure they remain at the top of the digital heap in the broadband era at the expense of the democratic potential of this amazing technology. So we must fight to make sure the Internet remains open to all as the present-day analogue of that many-tongued world of small newspapers so admired by de Tocqueville.
We must fight for a regulatory, market and public opinion environment that lets local and community-based content be heard rather than drowned out by nationwide commercial programming.
We must fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies and other information sources. Let the message go forth: No Berlusconis in America!
We must fight to expand a noncommercial media system - something made possible in part by new digital spectrum awarded to PBS stations - and fight off attempts to privatize what's left of public broadcasting. Commercial speech must not be the only free speech in America!
We must fight to create new opportunities, through public policies and private agreements, to let historically marginalized media players into more ownership of channels and control of content.
Let us encourage traditional mainstream journalism to get tougher about keeping a critical eye on those in public and private power and keeping us all informed of what's important - not necessarily simple or entertaining or good for the bottom line. Not all news is "Entertainment Tonight." And news departments are trustees of the public, not the corporate media's stockholders
In that last job, schools of journalism and professional news associations have their work cut out. We need journalism graduates who are not only better informed in a whole spectrum of special fields - and the schools do a competent job there - but who take from their training a strong sense of public service. And also graduates who are perhaps a little more hard-boiled and street-smart than the present crop, though that's hard to teach. Thanks to the high cost of education, we get very few recruits from the ranks of those who do the world's unglamorous and low-paid work. But as a onetime "cub" in a very different kind of setting, I cherish H.L. Mencken's description of what being a young Baltimore reporter a hundred years ago meant to him. "I was at large," he wrote,
in a wicked seaport of half a million people with a front seat at every public . . . By all orthodox cultural standards I probably reached my all-time low, for the heavy reading of my teens had been abandoned in favor of life itself. . .But it would be an exaggeration to say I was ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer or a midwife.
We need some of that worldly wisdom in our newsrooms. Let's figure out how to attract youngsters who have acquired it.
And as for those professional associations of editors they might remember that in union there is strength. One journalist alone can't extract from an employer a commitment to let editors and not accountants choose the appropriate subject matter for coverage. But what if news councils blew the whistle on shoddy or cowardly managements? What if foundations gave magazines such as the Columbia Journalism Review sufficient resources to spread their stories of journalistic bias, failure or incompetence? What if entire editorial departments simply refused any longer to quote anonymous sources - or give Kobe Bryant's trial more than the minimal space it rates by any reasonable standard - or to run stories planted by the Defense Department and impossible, for alleged security reasons, to verify? What if a professional association backed them to the hilt? Or required the same stance from all its members? It would take courage to confront powerful ownerships that way. But not as much courage as is asked of those brave journalists in some countries who face the dungeon, the executioner or the secret assassin for speaking out.
All this may be in the domain of fantasy. And then again, maybe not. What I know to be real is that we are in for the fight of our lives. I am not a romantic about democracy or journalism; the writer Andre Gide may have been right when he said that all things human, given time, go badly. But I know journalism and democracy are deeply linked in whatever chance we human beings have to redress our grievances, renew our politics, and reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those are difficult tasks at any time, and they are even more difficult in a cynical age as this, when a deep and pervasive corruption has settled upon the republic. But too much is at stake for our spirits to flag. Earlier this week the Library of Congress gave the first Kluge Lifetime Award in the Humanities to the Polish philosopher Leslie Kolakowski. In an interview Kolakowski said: "There is one freedom on which all other liberties depend - and that is freedom of expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it would be soon suppressed."
That's the flame of truth your movement must carry forward. I am older than almost all of you and am not likely to be around for the duration; I have said for several years now that I will retire from active journalism when I turn 70 next year. But I take heart from the presence in this room, unseen, of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, the muckrakers, I.F. Stone and all those heroes and heroines, celebrated or forgotten, who faced odds no less than ours and did not flinch. I take heart in your presence here. It's your fight now. Look around. You are not alone.
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Reprinted from Democracy Now:
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| ---> Bill Moyers: 'Our democracy is in danger of being paralyzed' |
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[b]By Bill Moyers, transcript of [i]Democracy Now [/i]broadcast, http://www.democracynow.org/a...%2F12%2F24%2F1731220 December 24, 2004[/b]
Thank you for inviting me tonight. I'm flattered to be speaking to a gathering as high-powered as this one that's come together with an objective as compelling as "media reform." I must confess, however, to a certain discomfort, shared with other journalists, about the very term "media." Ted Gup, who teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve, articulated my concerns better than I could when he wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 2001) that the very concept of media is insulting to some of us within the press who find ourselves lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a loud voice were all one and the same. ...David Broder is not Matt Drudge. "Meet the Press" is not "Temptation Island." And I am not Jerry Springer. I do not speak for him. He does not speak for me. Yet 'the media" speaks for us all.
That's how I felt when I saw Oliver North reporting on Fox from Iraq, pressing our embattled troops to respond to his repetitive and belittling question, "Does Fox Rock? Does Fox Rock?" Oliver North and I may be in the same "media" but we are not part of the same message. Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of us live in "medialand," and God knows we need some "media reform."
I'm sure you know those two words are really an incomplete description of the job ahead. Taken alone, they suggest that you've assembled a convention of efficiency experts, tightening the bolts and boosting the output of the machinery of public enlightenment, or else a conclave of high-minded do-gooders applauding each other's sermons. But we need to be - and we will be - much more than that. Because what we're talking about is nothing less than rescuing a democracy that is so polarized it is in danger of being paralyzed and pulverized.
Alarming words, I know. But the realities we face should trigger alarms. Free and responsible government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed public. That's a cliche, I know, but I agree with the presidential candidate who once said that truisms are true and cliches mean what they say (an observation that no doubt helped to lose him the election.) It's a reality: democracy can't exist without an informed public. Here's an example: Only 13% of eligible young people cast ballots in the last presidential election. A recent National Youth Survey revealed that only half of the fifteen hundred young people polled believe that voting is important, and only 46% think they can make a difference in solving community problems. We're talking here about one quarter of the electorate. The Carnegie Corporation conducted a youth challenge quiz of l5-24 year-olds and asked them, "Why don't more young people vote or get involved?" Of the nearly two thousand respondents, the main answer was that they did not have enough information about issues and candidates. Let me rewind and say it again: democracy can't exist without an informed public. So I say without qualification that it's not simply the cause of journalism that's at stake today, but the cause of American liberty itself. As Tom Paine put it, "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth." He was talking about the cause of a revolutionary America in 1776. But that revolution ran in good part on the energies of a rambunctious, though tiny press. Freedom and freedom of communications were birth-twins in the future United States. They grew up together, and neither has fared very well in the other's absence. Boom times for the one have been boom times for the other.
Yet today, despite plenty of lip service on every ritual occasion to freedom of the press radio and TV, three powerful forces are undermining that very freedom, damming the streams of significant public interest news that irrigate and nourish the flowering of self-determination. The first of these is the centuries-old reluctance of governments - even elected governments - to operate in the sunshine of disclosure and criticism. The second is more subtle and more recent. It's the tendency of media giants, operating on big-business principles, to exalt commercial values at the expense of democratic value. That is, to run what Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called broadcasting's "money-making machine" at full throttle. In so doing they are squeezing out the journalism that tries to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth; they are isolating serious coverage of public affairs into ever-dwindling "news holes" or far from prime- time; and they are gobbling up small and independent publications competing for the attention of the American people.
It's hardly a new or surprising story. But there are fresh and disturbing chapters.
In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the law - padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands. But they've found new ones now, in the name of "national security." The classifier's Top Secret stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially labeled "secret" there hovers a culture of sealed official lips, opened only to favored media insiders: of government by leak and innuendo and spin, of misnamed "public information" offices that churn out blizzards of releases filled with self-justifying exaggerations and, occasionally, just plain damned lies. Censorship without officially appointed censors.
Add to that the censorship-by-omission of consolidated media empires digesting the bones of swallowed independents, and you've got a major shrinkage of the crucial information that thinking citizens can act upon. People saw that coming as long as a century ago when the rise of chain newspaper ownerships, and then of concentration in the young radio industry, became apparent. And so in the zesty progressivism of early New Deal days, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 was passed (more on this later.) The aim of that cornerstone of broadcast policy, mentioned over 100 times in its pages, was to promote the "public interest, convenience and necessity." The clear intent was to prevent a monopoly of commercial values from overwhelming democratic values - to assure that the official view of reality - corporate or government - was not the only view of reality that reached the people. Regulators and regulated, media and government were to keep a wary eye on each other, preserving those checks and balances that is the bulwark of our Constitutional order.
What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation." Giant megamedia conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.
Consider where we are today.
Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and - in defiance of the Constitution - from their representatives in Congress. Never has the so powerful a media oligopoly - the word is Barry Diller's, not mine - been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the people's need to know. When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked by a college student to define "real news", he answered: "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms." When journalism throws in with power that's the first news marched by censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.
Which brings me to the third powerful force - beyond governmental secrecy and megamedia conglomerates - that is shaping what Americans see, read, and hear. I am talking now about that quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that in turn is the ally and agent of the most powerful interests in the world. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas today in a phenomenon unique in our history. You need not harbor the notion of a vast, right wing conspiracy to think this more collusion more than pure coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when ideology hungers for power and its many adherents swarm of their own accord to the same pot of honey. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to the faux news of Rupert Murdoch's empire to the nattering nabobs of no-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks paid for and bought by conglomerates - the religious, partisan and corporate right have raised a mighty megaphone for sectarian, economic, and political forces that aim to transform the egalitarian and democratic ideals embodied in our founding documents. Authoritarianism. With no strong opposition party to challenge such triumphalist hegemony, it is left to journalism to be democracy's best friend. That is why so many journalists joined with you in questioning Michael Powell's bid - blessed by the White House - to permit further concentration of media ownership. If free and independent journalism committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated, the oxygen goes out of democracy. And there is a surer way to intimidate and then silence mainstream journalism than to be the boss.
If you doubt me, read Jane Kramer's chilling account in the current New Yorker of Silvio Berlusconi. The Prime Minister of Italy is its richest citizen. He is also its first media mogul. The list of media that he or his relatives or his proxies own, or directly or indirectly control, includes the state television networks and radio stations, three of Italy's four commercial television networks, two big publishing houses, two national newspapers, fifty magazines, the country's largest movie production-and-distributi on company, and a chunk of its Internet services. Even now he is pressing upon parliament a law that would enable him to purchase more media properties, including the most influential paper in the country. Kramer quotes one critic who says that half the reporters in Italy work for Berlusconi, and the other half think they might have to. Small wonder he has managed to put the Italian State to work to guarantee his fortune - or that his name is commonly attached to such unpleasant things as contempt for the law, conflict of interest, bribery, and money laundering. Nonetheless, "his power over what other Italians see, read, buy, and, above all, think, is overwhelming." The editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, was asked recently why a British magazine was devoting so much space to an Italian Prime Minister. He replied that Berlusconi had betrayed the two things the magazine stood for: capitalism and democracy. Can it happen here? It can happen here. By the way, Berlusconi's close friend is Rupert Murdoch. On July 3lst this year, writes Jane Kramer, programming on nearly all the satellite hookups in Italy was switched automatically to Murdoch's Sky Italia
So the issues bringing us here tonight are bigger and far more critical than simply "media reform." That's why, before I go on, I want to ask you to look around you. I'm serious: Look to your left and now to your right. You are looking at your allies in one of the great ongoing struggles of the American experience - the struggle for the soul of democracy, for government "of, by, and for the people."
It's a battle we can win only if we work together. We've seen that this year. Just a few months ago the FCC, heavily influenced by lobbyists for the newspaper, broadcasting and cable interests, prepared a relaxation of the rules governing ownership of media outlets that would allow still more diversity-killing mergers among media giants. The proceedings were conducted in virtual secrecy, and generally ignored by all the major media, who were of course interested parties. In June Chairman Powell and his two Republican colleagues on the FCC announced the revised regulations as a done deal.
But they didn't count on the voice of independent journalists and citizens like you. Because of coverage in independent outlets - including PBS, which was the only broadcasting system that encouraged its journalists to report what was really happening - and because citizens like you took quick action, this largely invisible issue burst out as a major political cause and ignited a crackling public debate. You exposed Powell's failure to conduct an open discussion of the rule changes save for a single hearing in Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts led to a real participatory discussion, with open meetings in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta. Then the organizing that followed generated millions of letters and "filings"at the FCC opposing the change. Finally, the outcry mobilized unexpected support for bi-partisan legislation to reverse the new rules that cleared the Senate - although House Majority Leader Tom De Lay still holds it prisoner in the House. But who would have thought six months ago that the cause would win support from such allies as Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey Hutchinson, from my own Texas. You have moved "media reform" to center-stage, where it may even now become a catalyst for a new era of democratic renewal.
We working journalists have something special to bring to this work. This weekend at your conference there will be plenty of good talk about the mechanics of reform. What laws are needed? What advocacy programs and strategies? How can we protect and extend the reach of those tools that give us some countervailing power against media monopoly - instruments like the Internet, cable TV, community-based radio and public broadcasting systems, alternative journals of news and opinion.
But without passion, without a message that has a beating heart, these won't be enough. There's where journalism comes in. It isn't the only agent of freedom, obviously; in fact, journalism is a deeply human and therefore deeply flawed craft - yours truly being a conspicuous example. But at times it has risen to great occasions, and at times it has made other freedoms possible. That's what the draftsmen of the First Amendment knew and it's what we can't afford to forget. So to remind us of what our free press has been at its best and can be again, I will call on the help of unseen presences, men and women of journalism's often checkered but sometimes courageous past.
Think with me for a moment on the reasons behind the establishment of press freedom. It wasn't ordained to protect hucksters, and it didn't drop like the gentle rain from heaven. It was fought and sacrificed for by unpretentious but feisty craftsmen who got their hands inky at their own hand presses and called themselves simply "printers." The very first American newspaper was a little three-page affair put out in Boston in September of 1690. Its name was Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick and its editor was Benjamin Harris, who said he simply wanted "to give an account of such considerable things as have come to my attention." The government shut it down after one issue - just one issue! - for the official reason that printer Ben Harris hadn't applied for the required government license to publish. But I wonder if some Massachusetts pooh-bah didn't take personally one of Harris's proclaimed motives for starting the paper - "to cure the spirit of Lying much among us"?
No one seems to have objected when Harris and his paper disappeared - that was the way things were. But some forty-odd years later when printer John Peter Zenger was jailed in New York for criticizing its royal governor, things were different. The colony brought Zenger to trial on a charge of "seditious libel," and since it didn't matter whether the libel was true or not, the case seemed open and shut. But the jury ignored the judge's charge and freed Zenger, not only because the governor was widely disliked, but because of the closing appeal of Zenger's lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His client's case was:
Not the cause of the poor Printer, nor of New York alone, [but] the cause of Liberty, and. . . every Man who prefers Freedom to a Life of Slavery will bless and honour You, as Men who. . .by an impartial and uncorrupt Verdict, [will] have laid a Noble Foundation for securing to ourselves, our Posterity and our Neighbors, That, to which Nature and the Laws of our Country have given us a Right, -- the Liberty - both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power...by speaking and writing - Truth.
Still a pretty good mission statement!
During the War for Independence itself most of the three dozen little weekly newspapers in the colonies took the Patriot side and mobilized resistance by giving space to anti-British letters, news of Parliament's latest outrages, and calls to action. But the clarion journalistic voice of the Revolution was the onetime editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Tom Paine, a penniless recent immigrant from England where he left a trail of failure as a businessman and husband. In 1776 - just before enlisting in Washington's army - he published Common Sense, a hard-hitting pamphlet that slashed through legalisms and doubts to make an uncompromising case for an independent and republican America. It's been called the first best seller, with as many as 100,000 copies bought by a small literate population. Paine followed it up with another convincing collection of essays written in the field and given another punchy title, The Crisis. Passed from hand to hand and reprinted in other papers, they spread the gospel of freedom to thousands of doubters. And why I bring Paine up here is because he had something we need to restore - an unwavering concentration to reach ordinary people with the message that they mattered and could stand up for themselves. He couched his gospel of human rights and equality in a popular style that any working writer can envy. "As it is my design," he said, "to make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet."
That plain language spun off memorable one-liners that we're still quoting. "These are the times that try men's souls." "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered." "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly." "Virtue is not hereditary." And this: "Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived." I don't know what Paine would have thought of political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite but he could have held his own in any modern campaign.
There were also editors who felt responsible to audiences that would dive deep. In 1787 and '88 the little New-York Independent Advertiser ran all eighty-five numbers of The Federalist , those serious essays in favor of ratifying the Constitution. They still shine as clear arguments, but they are, and they were, unforgiving in their demand for concentrated attention. Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that it owed the best to its readers, and the readers knew that the issues of self-government deserved their best attention. I pray your goal of "media reform" includes a press as conscientious as the New-York Advertiser, as pungent as Common Sense, and as public-spirited as both. Because it takes those qualities to fight against the relentless pressure of authority and avarice. Remember, back in l79l, when the First Amendment was ratified, the idea of a free press seemed safely sheltered in law. It wasn't. Only seven years later, in the midst of a war scare with France, Congress passed and John Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act. The act made it a crime - just listen to how broad a brush the government could swing - to circulate opinions "tending to induce a belief" that lawmakers might have unconstitutional or repressive motives, or "directly or indirectly tending" to justify France or to "criminate," whatever that meant, the President or other Federal officials. No wonder that opponents called it a scheme to "excite a fervor against foreign aggression only to establish tyranny at home." John Ashcroft would have loved it.
But here's what happened. At least a dozen editors refused to be frightened and went defiantly to prison, some under state prosecutions. One of them, Matthew Lyon, who also held a seat in the House of Representatives, languished for four months in an unheated cell during a Vermont winter. But such was the spirit of liberty abroad in the land that admirers chipped in to pay his thousand-dollar fine, and when he emerged his district re-elected him by a landslide. Luckily, the Sedition Act had a built-in expiration date of 1801, at which time President Jefferson - who hated it from the first - pardoned those remaining under indictment. So the story has an upbeat ending, and so can ours, but it will take the kind of courage that those early printers and their readers showed.
Courage is a timeless quality and surfaces when the government is tempted to hit the bottle of censorship again during national emergencies, real or manufactured. As so many of you will recall, in 1971, during the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration resurrected the doctrine of "prior restraint" from the crypt and tried to ban the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and the Washington Post - even though the documents themselves were a classified history of events during four earlier Presidencies. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, and Katherine Graham of the Post were both warned by their lawyers that they and their top managers could face criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they printed the material that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked - and, by the way, offered without success to the three major television networks. Or at the least, punitive lawsuits or whatever political reprisals a furious Nixon team could devise. But after internal debates - and the threats of some of their best-known editors to resign rather than fold under pressure - both owners gave the green light - and were vindicated by the Supreme Court. Score a round for democracy.
Bi-partisan fairness requires me to note that the Carter administration, in 1979, tried to prevent the Progressive magazine, published right here in Madison, from running an article called "How to Make an H-Bomb." The grounds were a supposed threat to "national security." But Howard Morland had compiled the piece entirely from sources open to the public, mainly to show that much of the classification system was Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors. The courts again rejected the government's claim, but it's noteworthy that the journalism of defiance by that time had retreated to a small left-wing publication like the Progressive.
In all three of those cases, confronted with a clear and present danger of punishment, none of the owners flinched. Can we think of a single executive of today's big media conglomerates showing the kind of resistance that Sulzberger, Graham, and Erwin Knoll did? Certainly not Michael Eisner. He said he didn't even want ABC News reporting on its parent company, Disney. Certainly not General Electric/NBC's Robert Wright. He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the network didn't want to offend conservatives with a liberal sensibility during the invasion of Iraq. Instead, NBC brought to its cable channel one Michael Savage whose diatribes on radio had described non-white countries as "turd-world nations" and who characterized gay men and women as part of "the grand plan to cut down on the white race." I am not sure what it says that the GE/NBC executives calculated that while Donahue was offensive to conservatives, Savage was not.
And then there's Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. In the very week that the once-Tiffany Network was celebrating its 75th anniversary - and taking kudos for its glory days when it was unafraid to broadcast "The Harvest of Shame" and "The Selling of the Pentagon" - the network's famous eye blinked. Pressured by a vociferous and relentless right wing campaign and bullied by the Republican National Committee - and at a time when its parent company has billions resting on whether the White House, Congress, and the FCC will allow it to own even more stations than currently permissible - CBS caved in and pulled the miniseries about Ronald Reagan that conservatives thought insufficiently worshipful. The chief honcho at CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, not politics, dictated his decision. But earlier this year, explaining why CBS intended to air a series about Adolf Hitler, Moonves sang a different tune: "If you want to play it safe and put on milquetoast then you get criticized...There are times when as a broadcaster when you take chances." This obviously wasn't one of those times. Granted, made-for-television movies about living figures are about as vital as the wax figures at Madame Tussaud's - and even less authentic - granted that the canonizers of Ronald Reagan hadn't even seen the film before they set to howling; granted, on the surface it's a silly tempest in a teapot; still, when a once-great network falls obsequiously to the ground at the feet of a partisan mob over a cheesy mini-series that practically no one would have taken seriously as history, you have to wonder if the slight tremor that just ran through the First Amendment could be the harbinger of greater earthquakes to come, when the stakes are really high. And you have to wonder what concessions the media tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no one is looking.
So what must we devise to make the media safe for individuals stubborn about protecting freedom and serving the truth? And what do we all - educators, administrators, legislators and agitators - need to do to restore the disappearing diversity of media opinions? America had plenty of that in the early days when the republic and the press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit - just a few hundred dollars - to start a paper, especially with a little political sponsorship and help. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840, mostly small-town weeklies. And they weren't objective by any stretch. Here's William Cobbett, another Anglo-American hell-raiser like Paine, shouting his creed in the opening number of his 1790s paper, Porcupine's Gazette. "Peter Porcupine," Cobbett's self-bestowed nickname, declared:
Professions of impartiality I shall make none. They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense, when used by a newsmonger; for, he that does not relate news as he finds it, is something worse than partial; and . . . he that does not exercise his own judgment, either in admitting or rejecting what is sent him, is a poor passive tool, and not an editor.
In Cobbett's day you could flaunt your partisan banners as you cut and thrust, and not inflict serious damage on open public discussion because there were plenty of competitors. It didn't matter if the local gazette presented the day's events entirely through a Democratic lens. There was always an alternate Whig or Republican choice handy - there were, in other words, choices. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, these many blooming journals kept even rural Americans amazingly well informed. They also made it possible for Americans to exercise one of their most democratic habits - that of forming associations to carry out civic enterprises. And they operated against the dreaded tyranny of the majority by letting lonely thinkers know that they had allies elsewhere. Here's how de Tocqueville put it in his own words:
It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.
No wandering spirit could fail to find a voice in print. And so in that pre-Civil War explosion of humanitarian reform movements, it was a diverse press that put the yeast in freedom's ferment. Of course there were plenty of papers that spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes and land-grabbers proclaiming America's Manifest Destiny to dominate North America. But one way or another, journalism mattered, and had purpose and direction.
Past and present are never as separate as we think. Horace Greeley, the reform-loving editor of the New York Tribune, not only kept his pages "ever open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering," but said that whoever sat in an editor's chair and didn't work to promote human progress hadn't tasted "the luxury" of journalism. I liken that to the words of a kindred spirit closer to our own time, I.F. Stone. In his four-page little I.F. Stone's Weekly, "Izzy" loved to catch the government's lies and contradictions in the government's own official documents. And amid the thunder of battle with the reactionaries, he said: "I have so much fun I ought to be arrested." Think about that. Two newsmen, a century apart, believing that being in a position to fight the good fight isn't a burden but a lucky break. How can our work here bring that attitude back into the newsrooms?
That era of a wide-open and crowded newspaper playing field began to fade as the old hand-presses gave way to giant machines with press runs and readerships in the hundreds of thousands and costs in the millions. But that didn't necessarily or immediately kill public spirited journalism. Not so long as the new owners were still strong-minded individuals with big professional egos to match their thick pocketbooks. When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time immigrant reporter for a German-language paper in St. Louis, took over the New York World in 1883 he was already a millionaire in the making. But here's his recommended short platform for politicians:
1.Tax luxuries
2. Tax Inheritances
3. Tax Large Incomes
4. Tax monopolies
5. Tax the Privileged Corporation
6. A Tariff for Revenue
7. Reform the Civil Service
8. Punish Corrupt Officers
9. Punish Vote Buying.
10. Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in Elections
Also not a bad mission statement. Can you imagine one of today's huge newspaper chains taking that on as an agenda?
Don't get me wrong. The World certainly offered people plenty of the spice that they wanted - entertainment, sensation, earthy advice on living - but not at the expense of news that let them know who was on their side against the boodlers and bosses.
Nor did big-time, big-town, big bucks journalism extinguish the possibility of a reform-minded investigative journalism that took the name of muckraking during the Progressive Era. Those days of early last century saw a second great awakening of the democratic impulse. What brought it into being was a reaction against the Social Darwinism and unrestrained capitalistic exploitation that is back in full force today. Certain popular magazines made space for - and profited by - the work of such journalists - to name only a few - as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and David Graham Phillips. They ripped the veils from - among other things - the shame of the cities, the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the Senate and the villainies of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous medicines. And why were they given those opportunities? Because, in the words of Samuel S. McClure, owner of McClure's Magazine, when special interests defied the law and flouted the general welfare, there was a social debt incurred. And, as he put it: "We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end, the sum total of the debt will be our liberty."
Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good deal of it consists of raking personal and sexual scandal in high and celebrated places. Surely, if democracy is to be served, we have to get back to putting the rake where the important dirt lies, in the fleecing of the public and the abuse of its faith in good government.
When that landmark Communications Act of 1934 was under consideration a vigorous public movement of educators, labor officials, and religious and institutional leaders emerged to argue for a broadcast system that would serve the interests of citizens and communities. A movement like that is coming to life again and we now have to build on this momentum.
It won't be easy, because the tide's been flowing the other way for a long time. The deregulation pressure began during the Reagan era, when then-FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who said that TV didn't need much regulation because it was just a "toaster with pictures," eliminated many public-interest rules. That opened the door for networks to cut their news staffs, scuttle their documentary units (goodbye to "The Harvest of Shame" and "The Selling of the Pentagon"), and exile investigative producers and reporters to the under-funded hinterlands of independent production. It was like turning out searchlights on dark and dangerous corners. A crowning achievement of that drive was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest corporate welfare program ever for the most powerful media and entertainment conglomerates in the world - passed, I must add, with support from both parties.
And the beat of "convergence" between once-distinct forms of media goes on at increased tempo, with the communications conglomerates and the advertisers calling the tune. As safeguards to competition fall, an octopus like GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be able to secure cable channels that can deliver interactive multimedia content - text, sound and images - to digital TVs, home computers, personal video recorders and portable wireless devices like cell phones. The goal? To corner the market on new ways of selling more things to more people for more hours in the day. And in the long run, to fill the airwaves with customized pitches to you and your children. That will melt down the surviving boundaries between editorial and marketing divisions and create a hybrid known to the new-media hucksters as "branded entertainment."
Let's consider what's happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today's newspaper markets are monopolies. And now most of the country's powerful newspaper chains are lobbying for co-ownership of newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same market, increasing their grip on community after community. And are they up-front about it? Hear this: Last December 3 such media giants as The New York Times, Gannett, Cox, and Tribune, along with the trade group representing almost all the country's broadcasting stations, filed a petition to the FCC making the case for that cross ownership the owners so desperately seek. They actually told the FCC that lifting the regulation on cross ownership would strengthen local journalism. But did those same news organizations tell their readers what they were doing? Not all. None of them on that day believed they had an obligation to report in their own news pages what their parent companies were asking of the FCC. As these huge media conglomerates increase their control over what we see, read, and hear, they rarely report on how they are themselves are using their power to further their own interests and power as big business, including their influence over the political process.
Take a look at a new book called Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering published as part of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The people who produced the book all love newspapers - Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times; Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism; Charles Layton, a veteran wire service reporter and news and feature editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the newspaper industry is in the middle of the most momentous change in its three hundred year history - a change that is diminishing the amount of real news available to the consumer. A generation of relentless corporatization is now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers, from the mightiest dailies to the humblest weeklies. It is a world where "small hometown dailies in particular are being bought and sold like hog futures. Where chains, once content to grow one property at a time, now devour other chains whole. Where they are effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another, further minimizing competition. Where money is pouring into the business from interests with little knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations newspapers have to democracy." They go on to describe the toll that the never-ending drive for profits is taking on the news. In Cumberland, Maryland, for example, the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But newspaper management had a cost-saving solution: put a fax machine in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. In New Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the Asbury Park Press, then sent in a publisher who slashed fifty five people from the staff and cut the space for news, and was rewarded by being named Gannett's Manager of the Year. In New Jersey, by the way, the Newhouse and Gannett chains between them now own thirteen of the state's nineteen dailies, or seventy three percent of all the circulation of New Jersey-based papers. Then there is The Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a circulation of 23,500. Here, the authors report, is a paper that prided itself on being in hometown hands since the Johnson administration - the Andrew Johnson administration. But in 1998 it was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three years.
You'd better get used to it, concluded Leaving Readers Behind, because the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning - it won't be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates.
You can see the results even now in the waning of robust journalism. In the dearth of in-depth reporting as news organizations try to do more with fewer resources. In the failure of the major news organizations to cover their own corporate deals and lobbying as well as other forms of "crime in the suites" such as Enron story. And in helping people understand what their government is up to. The report by the Roberts team includes a survey in l999 that showed a wholesale retreat in coverage of nineteen key departments and agencies in Washington. Regular reporting of the Supreme Court and State Department dropped off considerably through the decade. At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter and, incredibly, at the Interior Department, which controls five to six hundred million acres of public land and looks after everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there were no full-time reporters around.
That's in Washington, our nation's capital. Out across the country there is simultaneously a near blackout of local politics by broadcasters. The public interest group Alliance for Better Campaigns studied forty-five stations in six cities in one week in October. Out of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public affairs - less than one-half of 1% of local programming nationwide. Mayors, town councils, school boards, civic leaders get no time from broadcasters who have filled their coffers by looting the public airwaves over which they were placed as stewards. Last year, when a movement sprang up in the House of Representatives to require these broadcasters to obey the law that says they must sell campaign advertising to candidates for office at the lowest commercial rate, the powerful broadcast lobby brought the Congress to heel. So much for the "public interest, convenience, and necessity."
So what do we do? What is our strategy for taking on what seems a hopeless fight for a media system that serves as effectively as it sells - one that holds all the institutions of society, itself included, accountable?
There's plenty we can do. Here's one journalist's list of some of the overlapping and connected goals that a vital media reform movement might pursue.
First, we have to take Tom Paine's example - and Danny Schecter's advice - and reach out to regular citizens. We have to raise an even bigger tent than you have here. Those of us in this place speak a common language about the "media." We must reach the audience that's not here - carry the fight to radio talk shows, local television, and the letters columns of our newspapers. As Danny says, we must engage the mainstream, not retreat from it. We have to get our fellow citizens to understand that what they see, hear, and read is not only the taste of programmers and producers but also a set of policy decisions made by the people we vote for.
We have to fight to keep the gates to the Internet open to all. The web has enabled many new voices in our democracy - and globally - to be heard: advocacy groups, artists, individuals, non-profit organizations. Just about anyone can speak online, and often with an impact greater than in the days when orators had to climb on soap box in a park. The media industry lobbyists point to the Internet and say it's why concerns about media concentration are ill founded in an environment where anyone can speak and where there are literally hundreds of competing channels. What those lobbyists for big media don't tell you is that the traffic patterns of the online world are beginning to resemble those of television and radio. In one study, for example, AOL Time Warner (as it was then known) accounted for nearly a third of all user time spent online. And two others companies - Yahoo and Microsoft - bring that figure to fully 50%. As for the growing number of channels available on today's cable systems, most are owned by a small handful of companies. Of the ninety-one major networks that appear on most cable systems, 79 are part of such multiple network groups such as Time Warner, Viacom, Liberty Media, NBC, and Disney. In order to program a channel on cable today, you must either be owned by or affiliated with one of the giants. If we're not vigilant the wide-open spaces of the Internet could be transformed into a system in which a handful of companies use their control over high-speed access to ensure they remain at the top of the digital heap in the broadband era at the expense of the democratic potential of this amazing technology. So we must fight to make sure the Internet remains open to all as the present-day analogue of that many-tongued world of small newspapers so admired by de Tocqueville.
We must fight for a regulatory, market and public opinion environment that lets local and community-based content be heard rather than drowned out by nationwide commercial programming.
We must fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies and other information sources. Let the message go forth: No Berlusconis in America!
We must fight to expand a noncommercial media system - something made possible in part by new digital spectrum awarded to PBS stations - and fight off attempts to privatize what's left of public broadcasting. Commercial speech must not be the only free speech in America!
We must fight to create new opportunities, through public policies and private agreements, to let historically marginalized media players into more ownership of channels and control of content.
Let us encourage traditional mainstream journalism to get tougher about keeping a critical eye on those in public and private power and keeping us all informed of what's important - not necessarily simple or entertaining or good for the bottom line. Not all news is "Entertainment Tonight." And news departments are trustees of the public, not the corporate media's stockholders
In that last job, schools of journalism and professional news associations have their work cut out. We need journalism graduates who are not only better informed in a whole spectrum of special fields - and the schools do a competent job there - but who take from their training a strong sense of public service. And also graduates who are perhaps a little more hard-boiled and street-smart than the present crop, though that's hard to teach. Thanks to the high cost of education, we get very few recruits from the ranks of those who do the world's unglamorous and low-paid work. But as a onetime "cub" in a very different kind of setting, I cherish H.L. Mencken's description of what being a young Baltimore reporter a hundred years ago meant to him. "I was at large," he wrote,
in a wicked seaport of half a million people with a front seat at every public . . . By all orthodox cultural standards I probably reached my all-time low, for the heavy reading of my teens had been abandoned in favor of life itself. . .But it would be an exaggeration to say I was ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer or a midwife.
We need some of that worldly wisdom in our newsrooms. Let's figure out how to attract youngsters who have acquired it.
And as for those professional associations of editors they might remember that in union there is strength. One journalist alone can't extract from an employer a commitment to let editors and not accountants choose the appropriate subject matter for coverage. But what if news councils blew the whistle on shoddy or cowardly managements? What if foundations gave magazines such as the Columbia Journalism Review sufficient resources to spread their stories of journalistic bias, failure or incompetence? What if entire editorial departments simply refused any longer to quote anonymous sources - or give Kobe Bryant's trial more than the minimal space it rates by any reasonable standard - or to run stories planted by the Defense Department and impossible, for alleged security reasons, to verify? What if a professional association backed them to the hilt? Or required the same stance from all its members? It would take courage to confront powerful ownerships that way. But not as much courage as is asked of those brave journalists in some countries who face the dungeon, the executioner or the secret assassin for speaking out.
All this may be in the domain of fantasy. And then again, maybe not. What I know to be real is that we are in for the fight of our lives. I am not a romantic about democracy or journalism; the writer Andre Gide may have been right when he said that all things human, given time, go badly. But I know journalism and democracy are deeply linked in whatever chance we human beings have to redress our grievances, renew our politics, and reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those are difficult tasks at any time, and they are even more difficult in a cynical age as this, when a deep and pervasive corruption has settled upon the republic. But too much is at stake for our spirits to flag. Earlier this week the Library of Congress gave the first Kluge Lifetime Award in the Humanities to the Polish philosopher Leslie Kolakowski. In an interview Kolakowski said: "There is one freedom on which all other liberties depend - and that is freedom of expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it would be soon suppressed."
That's the flame of truth your movement must carry forward. I am older than almost all of you and am not likely to be around for the duration; I have said for several years now that I will retire from active journalism when I turn 70 next year. But I take heart from the presence in this room, unseen, of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, the muckrakers, I.F. Stone and all those heroes and heroines, celebrated or forgotten, who faced odds no less than ours and did not flinch. I take heart in your presence here. It's your fight now. Look around. You are not alone.
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Reprinted from Democracy Now:
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| ---> Bill Moyers: 'Our democracy is in danger of being paralyzed' |
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[b]By Bill Moyers, transcript of [i]Democracy Now [/i]broadcast, http://www.democracynow.org/a...%2F12%2F24%2F1731220 December 24, 2004[/b]
Thank you for inviting me tonight. I'm flattered to be speaking to a gathering as high-powered as this one that's come together with an objective as compelling as "media reform." I must confess, however, to a certain discomfort, shared with other journalists, about the very term "media." Ted Gup, who teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve, articulated my concerns better than I could when he wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 2001) that the very concept of media is insulting to some of us within the press who find ourselves lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a loud voice were all one and the same. ...David Broder is not Matt Drudge. "Meet the Press" is not "Temptation Island." And I am not Jerry Springer. I do not speak for him. He does not speak for me. Yet 'the media" speaks for us all.
That's how I felt when I saw Oliver North reporting on Fox from Iraq, pressing our embattled troops to respond to his repetitive and belittling question, "Does Fox Rock? Does Fox Rock?" Oliver North and I may be in the same "media" but we are not part of the same message. Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of us live in "medialand," and God knows we need some "media reform."
I'm sure you know those two words are really an incomplete description of the job ahead. Taken alone, they suggest that you've assembled a convention of efficiency experts, tightening the bolts and boosting the output of the machinery of public enlightenment, or else a conclave of high-minded do-gooders applauding each other's sermons. But we need to be - and we will be - much more than that. Because what we're talking about is nothing less than rescuing a democracy that is so polarized it is in danger of being paralyzed and pulverized.
Alarming words, I know. But the realities we face should trigger alarms. Free and responsible government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed public. That's a cliche, I know, but I agree with the presidential candidate who once said that truisms are true and cliches mean what they say (an observation that no doubt helped to lose him the election.) It's a reality: democracy can't exist without an informed public. Here's an example: Only 13% of eligible young people cast ballots in the last presidential election. A recent National Youth Survey revealed that only half of the fifteen hundred young people polled believe that voting is important, and only 46% think they can make a difference in solving community problems. We're talking here about one quarter of the electorate. The Carnegie Corporation conducted a youth challenge quiz of l5-24 year-olds and asked them, "Why don't more young people vote or get involved?" Of the nearly two thousand respondents, the main answer was that they did not have enough information about issues and candidates. Let me rewind and say it again: democracy can't exist without an informed public. So I say without qualification that it's not simply the cause of journalism that's at stake today, but the cause of American liberty itself. As Tom Paine put it, "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth." He was talking about the cause of a revolutionary America in 1776. But that revolution ran in good part on the energies of a rambunctious, though tiny press. Freedom and freedom of communications were birth-twins in the future United States. They grew up together, and neither has fared very well in the other's absence. Boom times for the one have been boom times for the other.
Yet today, despite plenty of lip service on every ritual occasion to freedom of the press radio and TV, three powerful forces are undermining that very freedom, damming the streams of significant public interest news that irrigate and nourish the flowering of self-determination. The first of these is the centuries-old reluctance of governments - even elected governments - to operate in the sunshine of disclosure and criticism. The second is more subtle and more recent. It's the tendency of media giants, operating on big-business principles, to exalt commercial values at the expense of democratic value. That is, to run what Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called broadcasting's "money-making machine" at full throttle. In so doing they are squeezing out the journalism that tries to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth; they are isolating serious coverage of public affairs into ever-dwindling "news holes" or far from prime- time; and they are gobbling up small and independent publications competing for the attention of the American people.
It's hardly a new or surprising story. But there are fresh and disturbing chapters.
In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the law - padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands. But they've found new ones now, in the name of "national security." The classifier's Top Secret stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially labeled "secret" there hovers a culture of sealed official lips, opened only to favored media insiders: of government by leak and innuendo and spin, of misnamed "public information" offices that churn out blizzards of releases filled with self-justifying exaggerations and, occasionally, just plain damned lies. Censorship without officially appointed censors.
Add to that the censorship-by-omission of consolidated media empires digesting the bones of swallowed independents, and you've got a major shrinkage of the crucial information that thinking citizens can act upon. People saw that coming as long as a century ago when the rise of chain newspaper ownerships, and then of concentration in the young radio industry, became apparent. And so in the zesty progressivism of early New Deal days, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 was passed (more on this later.) The aim of that cornerstone of broadcast policy, mentioned over 100 times in its pages, was to promote the "public interest, convenience and necessity." The clear intent was to prevent a monopoly of commercial values from overwhelming democratic values - to assure that the official view of reality - corporate or government - was not the only view of reality that reached the people. Regulators and regulated, media and government were to keep a wary eye on each other, preserving those checks and balances that is the bulwark of our Constitutional order.
What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation." Giant megamedia conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.
Consider where we are today.
Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and - in defiance of the Constitution - from their representatives in Congress. Never has the so powerful a media oligopoly - the word is Barry Diller's, not mine - been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the people's need to know. When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked by a college student to define "real news", he answered: "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms." When journalism throws in with power that's the first news marched by censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.
Which brings me to the third powerful force - beyond governmental secrecy and megamedia conglomerates - that is shaping what Americans see, read, and hear. I am talking now about that quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that in turn is the ally and agent of the most powerful interests in the world. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas today in a phenomenon unique in our history. You need not harbor the notion of a vast, right wing conspiracy to think this more collusion more than pure coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when ideology hungers for power and its many adherents swarm of their own accord to the same pot of honey. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to the faux news of Rupert Murdoch's empire to the nattering nabobs of no-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks paid for and bought by conglomerates - the religious, partisan and corporate right have raised a mighty megaphone for sectarian, economic, and political forces that aim to transform the egalitarian and democratic ideals embodied in our founding documents. Authoritarianism. With no strong opposition party to challenge such triumphalist hegemony, it is left to journalism to be democracy's best friend. That is why so many journalists joined with you in questioning Michael Powell's bid - blessed by the White House - to permit further concentration of media ownership. If free and independent journalism committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated, the oxygen goes out of democracy. And there is a surer way to intimidate and then silence mainstream journalism than to be the boss.
If you doubt me, read Jane Kramer's chilling account in the current New Yorker of Silvio Berlusconi. The Prime Minister of Italy is its richest citizen. He is also its first media mogul. The list of media that he or his relatives or his proxies own, or directly or indirectly control, includes the state television networks and radio stations, three of Italy's four commercial television networks, two big publishing houses, two national newspapers, fifty magazines, the country's largest movie production-and-distributi on company, and a chunk of its Internet services. Even now he is pressing upon parliament a law that would enable him to purchase more media properties, including the most influential paper in the country. Kramer quotes one critic who says that half the reporters in Italy work for Berlusconi, and the other half think they might have to. Small wonder he has managed to put the Italian State to work to guarantee his fortune - or that his name is commonly attached to such unpleasant things as contempt for the law, conflict of interest, bribery, and money laundering. Nonetheless, "his power over what other Italians see, read, buy, and, above all, think, is overwhelming." The editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, was asked recently why a British magazine was devoting so much space to an Italian Prime Minister. He replied that Berlusconi had betrayed the two things the magazine stood for: capitalism and democracy. Can it happen here? It can happen here. By the way, Berlusconi's close friend is Rupert Murdoch. On July 3lst this year, writes Jane Kramer, programming on nearly all the satellite hookups in Italy was switched automatically to Murdoch's Sky Italia
So the issues bringing us here tonight are bigger and far more critical than simply "media reform." That's why, before I go on, I want to ask you to look around you. I'm serious: Look to your left and now to your right. You are looking at your allies in one of the great ongoing struggles of the American experience - the struggle for the soul of democracy, for government "of, by, and for the people."
It's a battle we can win only if we work together. We've seen that this year. Just a few months ago the FCC, heavily influenced by lobbyists for the newspaper, broadcasting and cable interests, prepared a relaxation of the rules governing ownership of media outlets that would allow still more diversity-killing mergers among media giants. The proceedings were conducted in virtual secrecy, and generally ignored by all the major media, who were of course interested parties. In June Chairman Powell and his two Republican colleagues on the FCC announced the revised regulations as a done deal.
But they didn't count on the voice of independent journalists and citizens like you. Because of coverage in independent outlets - including PBS, which was the only broadcasting system that encouraged its journalists to report what was really happening - and because citizens like you took quick action, this largely invisible issue burst out as a major political cause and ignited a crackling public debate. You exposed Powell's failure to conduct an open discussion of the rule changes save for a single hearing in Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts led to a real participatory discussion, with open meetings in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta. Then the organizing that followed generated millions of letters and "filings"at the FCC opposing the change. Finally, the outcry mobilized unexpected support for bi-partisan legislation to reverse the new rules that cleared the Senate - although House Majority Leader Tom De Lay still holds it prisoner in the House. But who would have thought six months ago that the cause would win support from such allies as Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey Hutchinson, from my own Texas. You have moved "media reform" to center-stage, where it may even now become a catalyst for a new era of democratic renewal.
We working journalists have something special to bring to this work. This weekend at your conference there will be plenty of good talk about the mechanics of reform. What laws are needed? What advocacy programs and strategies? How can we protect and extend the reach of those tools that give us some countervailing power against media monopoly - instruments like the Internet, cable TV, community-based radio and public broadcasting systems, alternative journals of news and opinion.
But without passion, without a message that has a beating heart, these won't be enough. There's where journalism comes in. It isn't the only agent of freedom, obviously; in fact, journalism is a deeply human and therefore deeply flawed craft - yours truly being a conspicuous example. But at times it has risen to great occasions, and at times it has made other freedoms possible. That's what the draftsmen of the First Amendment knew and it's what we can't afford to forget. So to remind us of what our free press has been at its best and can be again, I will call on the help of unseen presences, men and women of journalism's often checkered but sometimes courageous past.
Think with me for a moment on the reasons behind the establishment of press freedom. It wasn't ordained to protect hucksters, and it didn't drop like the gentle rain from heaven. It was fought and sacrificed for by unpretentious but feisty craftsmen who got their hands inky at their own hand presses and called themselves simply "printers." The very first American newspaper was a little three-page affair put out in Boston in September of 1690. Its name was Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick and its editor was Benjamin Harris, who said he simply wanted "to give an account of such considerable things as have come to my attention." The government shut it down after one issue - just one issue! - for the official reason that printer Ben Harris hadn't applied for the required government license to publish. But I wonder if some Massachusetts pooh-bah didn't take personally one of Harris's proclaimed motives for starting the paper - "to cure the spirit of Lying much among us"?
No one seems to have objected when Harris and his paper disappeared - that was the way things were. But some forty-odd years later when printer John Peter Zenger was jailed in New York for criticizing its royal governor, things were different. The colony brought Zenger to trial on a charge of "seditious libel," and since it didn't matter whether the libel was true or not, the case seemed open and shut. But the jury ignored the judge's charge and freed Zenger, not only because the governor was widely disliked, but because of the closing appeal of Zenger's lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His client's case was:
Not the cause of the poor Printer, nor of New York alone, [but] the cause of Liberty, and. . . every Man who prefers Freedom to a Life of Slavery will bless and honour You, as Men who. . .by an impartial and uncorrupt Verdict, [will] have laid a Noble Foundation for securing to ourselves, our Posterity and our Neighbors, That, to which Nature and the Laws of our Country have given us a Right, -- the Liberty - both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power...by speaking and writing - Truth.
Still a pretty good mission statement!
During the War for Independence itself most of the three dozen little weekly newspapers in the colonies took the Patriot side and mobilized resistance by giving space to anti-British letters, news of Parliament's latest outrages, and calls to action. But the clarion journalistic voice of the Revolution was the onetime editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Tom Paine, a penniless recent immigrant from England where he left a trail of failure as a businessman and husband. In 1776 - just before enlisting in Washington's army - he published Common Sense, a hard-hitting pamphlet that slashed through legalisms and doubts to make an uncompromising case for an independent and republican America. It's been called the first best seller, with as many as 100,000 copies bought by a small literate population. Paine followed it up with another convincing collection of essays written in the field and given another punchy title, The Crisis. Passed from hand to hand and reprinted in other papers, they spread the gospel of freedom to thousands of doubters. And why I bring Paine up here is because he had something we need to restore - an unwavering concentration to reach ordinary people with the message that they mattered and could stand up for themselves. He couched his gospel of human rights and equality in a popular style that any working writer can envy. "As it is my design," he said, "to make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet."
That plain language spun off memorable one-liners that we're still quoting. "These are the times that try men's souls." "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered." "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly." "Virtue is not hereditary." And this: "Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived." I don't know what Paine would have thought of political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite but he could have held his own in any modern campaign.
There were also editors who felt responsible to audiences that would dive deep. In 1787 and '88 the little New-York Independent Advertiser ran all eighty-five numbers of The Federalist , those serious essays in favor of ratifying the Constitution. They still shine as clear arguments, but they are, and they were, unforgiving in their demand for concentrated attention. Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that it owed the best to its readers, and the readers knew that the issues of self-government deserved their best attention. I pray your goal of "media reform" includes a press as conscientious as the New-York Advertiser, as pungent as Common Sense, and as public-spirited as both. Because it takes those qualities to fight against the relentless pressure of authority and avarice. Remember, back in l79l, when the First Amendment was ratified, the idea of a free press seemed safely sheltered in law. It wasn't. Only seven years later, in the midst of a war scare with France, Congress passed and John Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act. The act made it a crime - just listen to how broad a brush the government could swing - to circulate opinions "tending to induce a belief" that lawmakers might have unconstitutional or repressive motives, or "directly or indirectly tending" to justify France or to "criminate," whatever that meant, the President or other Federal officials. No wonder that opponents called it a scheme to "excite a fervor against foreign aggression only to establish tyranny at home." John Ashcroft would have loved it.
But here's what happened. At least a dozen editors refused to be frightened and went defiantly to prison, some under state prosecutions. One of them, Matthew Lyon, who also held a seat in the House of Representatives, languished for four months in an unheated cell during a Vermont winter. But such was the spirit of liberty abroad in the land that admirers chipped in to pay his thousand-dollar fine, and when he emerged his district re-elected him by a landslide. Luckily, the Sedition Act had a built-in expiration date of 1801, at which time President Jefferson - who hated it from the first - pardoned those remaining under indictment. So the story has an upbeat ending, and so can ours, but it will take the kind of courage that those early printers and their readers showed.
Courage is a timeless quality and surfaces when the government is tempted to hit the bottle of censorship again during national emergencies, real or manufactured. As so many of you will recall, in 1971, during the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration resurrected the doctrine of "prior restraint" from the crypt and tried to ban the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and the Washington Post - even though the documents themselves were a classified history of events during four earlier Presidencies. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, and Katherine Graham of the Post were both warned by their lawyers that they and their top managers could face criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they printed the material that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked - and, by the way, offered without success to the three major television networks. Or at the least, punitive lawsuits or whatever political reprisals a furious Nixon team could devise. But after internal debates - and the threats of some of their best-known editors to resign rather than fold under pressure - both owners gave the green light - and were vindicated by the Supreme Court. Score a round for democracy.
Bi-partisan fairness requires me to note that the Carter administration, in 1979, tried to prevent the Progressive magazine, published right here in Madison, from running an article called "How to Make an H-Bomb." The grounds were a supposed threat to "national security." But Howard Morland had compiled the piece entirely from sources open to the public, mainly to show that much of the classification system was Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors. The courts again rejected the government's claim, but it's noteworthy that the journalism of defiance by that time had retreated to a small left-wing publication like the Progressive.
In all three of those cases, confronted with a clear and present danger of punishment, none of the owners flinched. Can we think of a single executive of today's big media conglomerates showing the kind of resistance that Sulzberger, Graham, and Erwin Knoll did? Certainly not Michael Eisner. He said he didn't even want ABC News reporting on its parent company, Disney. Certainly not General Electric/NBC's Robert Wright. He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the network didn't want to offend conservatives with a liberal sensibility during the invasion of Iraq. Instead, NBC brought to its cable channel one Michael Savage whose diatribes on radio had described non-white countries as "turd-world nations" and who characterized gay men and women as part of "the grand plan to cut down on the white race." I am not sure what it says that the GE/NBC executives calculated that while Donahue was offensive to conservatives, Savage was not.
And then there's Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. In the very week that the once-Tiffany Network was celebrating its 75th anniversary - and taking kudos for its glory days when it was unafraid to broadcast "The Harvest of Shame" and "The Selling of the Pentagon" - the network's famous eye blinked. Pressured by a vociferous and relentless right wing campaign and bullied by the Republican National Committee - and at a time when its parent company has billions resting on whether the White House, Congress, and the FCC will allow it to own even more stations than currently permissible - CBS caved in and pulled the miniseries about Ronald Reagan that conservatives thought insufficiently worshipful. The chief honcho at CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, not politics, dictated his decision. But earlier this year, explaining why CBS intended to air a series about Adolf Hitler, Moonves sang a different tune: "If you want to play it safe and put on milquetoast then you get criticized...There are times when as a broadcaster when you take chances." This obviously wasn't one of those times. Granted, made-for-television movies about living figures are about as vital as the wax figures at Madame Tussaud's - and even less authentic - granted that the canonizers of Ronald Reagan hadn't even seen the film before they set to howling; granted, on the surface it's a silly tempest in a teapot; still, when a once-great network falls obsequiously to the ground at the feet of a partisan mob over a cheesy mini-series that practically no one would have taken seriously as history, you have to wonder if the slight tremor that just ran through the First Amendment could be the harbinger of greater earthquakes to come, when the stakes are really high. And you have to wonder what concessions the media tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no one is looking.
So what must we devise to make the media safe for individuals stubborn about protecting freedom and serving the truth? And what do we all - educators, administrators, legislators and agitators - need to do to restore the disappearing diversity of media opinions? America had plenty of that in the early days when the republic and the press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit - just a few hundred dollars - to start a paper, especially with a little political sponsorship and help. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840, mostly small-town weeklies. And they weren't objective by any stretch. Here's William Cobbett, another Anglo-American hell-raiser like Paine, shouting his creed in the opening number of his 1790s paper, Porcupine's Gazette. "Peter Porcupine," Cobbett's self-bestowed nickname, declared:
Professions of impartiality I shall make none. They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense, when used by a newsmonger; for, he that does not relate news as he finds it, is something worse than partial; and . . . he that does not exercise his own judgment, either in admitting or rejecting what is sent him, is a poor passive tool, and not an editor.
In Cobbett's day you could flaunt your partisan banners as you cut and thrust, and not inflict serious damage on open public discussion because there were plenty of competitors. It didn't matter if the local gazette presented the day's events entirely through a Democratic lens. There was always an alternate Whig or Republican choice handy - there were, in other words, choices. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, these many blooming journals kept even rural Americans amazingly well informed. They also made it possible for Americans to exercise one of their most democratic habits - that of forming associations to carry out civic enterprises. And they operated against the dreaded tyranny of the majority by letting lonely thinkers know that they had allies elsewhere. Here's how de Tocqueville put it in his own words:
It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.
No wandering spirit could fail to find a voice in print. And so in that pre-Civil War explosion of humanitarian reform movements, it was a diverse press that put the yeast in freedom's ferment. Of course there were plenty of papers that spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes and land-grabbers proclaiming America's Manifest Destiny to dominate North America. But one way or another, journalism mattered, and had purpose and direction.
Past and present are never as separate as we think. Horace Greeley, the reform-loving editor of the New York Tribune, not only kept his pages "ever open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering," but said that whoever sat in an editor's chair and didn't work to promote human progress hadn't tasted "the luxury" of journalism. I liken that to the words of a kindred spirit closer to our own time, I.F. Stone. In his four-page little I.F. Stone's Weekly, "Izzy" loved to catch the government's lies and contradictions in the government's own official documents. And amid the thunder of battle with the reactionaries, he said: "I have so much fun I ought to be arrested." Think about that. Two newsmen, a century apart, believing that being in a position to fight the good fight isn't a burden but a lucky break. How can our work here bring that attitude back into the newsrooms?
That era of a wide-open and crowded newspaper playing field began to fade as the old hand-presses gave way to giant machines with press runs and readerships in the hundreds of thousands and costs in the millions. But that didn't necessarily or immediately kill public spirited journalism. Not so long as the new owners were still strong-minded individuals with big professional egos to match their thick pocketbooks. When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time immigrant reporter for a German-language paper in St. Louis, took over the New York World in 1883 he was already a millionaire in the making. But here's his recommended short platform for politicians:
1.Tax luxuries
2. Tax Inheritances
3. Tax Large Incomes
4. Tax monopolies
5. Tax the Privileged Corporation
6. A Tariff for Revenue
7. Reform the Civil Service
8. Punish Corrupt Officers
9. Punish Vote Buying.
10. Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in Elections
Also not a bad mission statement. Can you imagine one of today's huge newspaper chains taking that on as an agenda?
Don't get me wrong. The World certainly offered people plenty of the spice that they wanted - entertainment, sensation, earthy advice on living - but not at the expense of news that let them know who was on their side against the boodlers and bosses.
Nor did big-time, big-town, big bucks journalism extinguish the possibility of a reform-minded investigative journalism that took the name of muckraking during the Progressive Era. Those days of early last century saw a second great awakening of the democratic impulse. What brought it into being was a reaction against the Social Darwinism and unrestrained capitalistic exploitation that is back in full force today. Certain popular magazines made space for - and profited by - the work of such journalists - to name only a few - as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and David Graham Phillips. They ripped the veils from - among other things - the shame of the cities, the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the Senate and the villainies of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous medicines. And why were they given those opportunities? Because, in the words of Samuel S. McClure, owner of McClure's Magazine, when special interests defied the law and flouted the general welfare, there was a social debt incurred. And, as he put it: "We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end, the sum total of the debt will be our liberty."
Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good deal of it consists of raking personal and sexual scandal in high and celebrated places. Surely, if democracy is to be served, we have to get back to putting the rake where the important dirt lies, in the fleecing of the public and the abuse of its faith in good government.
When that landmark Communications Act of 1934 was under consideration a vigorous public movement of educators, labor officials, and religious and institutional leaders emerged to argue for a broadcast system that would serve the interests of citizens and communities. A movement like that is coming to life again and we now have to build on this momentum.
It won't be easy, because the tide's been flowing the other way for a long time. The deregulation pressure began during the Reagan era, when then-FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who said that TV didn't need much regulation because it was just a "toaster with pictures," eliminated many public-interest rules. That opened the door for networks to cut their news staffs, scuttle their documentary units (goodbye to "The Harvest of Shame" and "The Selling of the Pentagon"), and exile investigative producers and reporters to the under-funded hinterlands of independent production. It was like turning out searchlights on dark and dangerous corners. A crowning achievement of that drive was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest corporate welfare program ever for the most powerful media and entertainment conglomerates in the world - passed, I must add, with support from both parties.
And the beat of "convergence" between once-distinct forms of media goes on at increased tempo, with the communications conglomerates and the advertisers calling the tune. As safeguards to competition fall, an octopus like GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be able to secure cable channels that can deliver interactive multimedia content - text, sound and images - to digital TVs, home computers, personal video recorders and portable wireless devices like cell phones. The goal? To corner the market on new ways of selling more things to more people for more hours in the day. And in the long run, to fill the airwaves with customized pitches to you and your children. That will melt down the surviving boundaries between editorial and marketing divisions and create a hybrid known to the new-media hucksters as "branded entertainment."
Let's consider what's happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today's newspaper markets are monopolies. And now most of the country's powerful newspaper chains are lobbying for co-ownership of newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same market, increasing their grip on community after community. And are they up-front about it? Hear this: Last December 3 such media giants as The New York Times, Gannett, Cox, and Tribune, along with the trade group representing almost all the country's broadcasting stations, filed a petition to the FCC making the case for that cross ownership the owners so desperately seek. They actually told the FCC that lifting the regulation on cross ownership would strengthen local journalism. But did those same news organizations tell their readers what they were doing? Not all. None of them on that day believed they had an obligation to report in their own news pages what their parent companies were asking of the FCC. As these huge media conglomerates increase their control over what we see, read, and hear, they rarely report on how they are themselves are using their power to further their own interests and power as big business, including their influence over the political process.
Take a look at a new book called Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering published as part of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The people who produced the book all love newspapers - Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times; Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism; Charles Layton, a veteran wire service reporter and news and feature editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the newspaper industry is in the middle of the most momentous change in its three hundred year history - a change that is diminishing the amount of real news available to the consumer. A generation of relentless corporatization is now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers, from the mightiest dailies to the humblest weeklies. It is a world where "small hometown dailies in particular are being bought and sold like hog futures. Where chains, once content to grow one property at a time, now devour other chains whole. Where they are effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another, further minimizing competition. Where money is pouring into the business from interests with little knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations newspapers have to democracy." They go on to describe the toll that the never-ending drive for profits is taking on the news. In Cumberland, Maryland, for example, the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But newspaper management had a cost-saving solution: put a fax machine in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. In New Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the Asbury Park Press, then sent in a publisher who slashed fifty five people from the staff and cut the space for news, and was rewarded by being named Gannett's Manager of the Year. In New Jersey, by the way, the Newhouse and Gannett chains between them now own thirteen of the state's nineteen dailies, or seventy three percent of all the circulation of New Jersey-based papers. Then there is The Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a circulation of 23,500. Here, the authors report, is a paper that prided itself on being in hometown hands since the Johnson administration - the Andrew Johnson administration. But in 1998 it was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three years.
You'd better get used to it, concluded Leaving Readers Behind, because the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning - it won't be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates.
You can see the results even now in the waning of robust journalism. In the dearth of in-depth reporting as news organizations try to do more with fewer resources. In the failure of the major news organizations to cover their own corporate deals and lobbying as well as other forms of "crime in the suites" such as Enron story. And in helping people understand what their government is up to. The report by the Roberts team includes a survey in l999 that showed a wholesale retreat in coverage of nineteen key departments and agencies in Washington. Regular reporting of the Supreme Court and State Department dropped off considerably through the decade. At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter and, incredibly, at the Interior Department, which controls five to six hundred million acres of public land and looks after everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there were no full-time reporters around.
That's in Washington, our nation's capital. Out across the country there is simultaneously a near blackout of local politics by broadcasters. The public interest group Alliance for Better Campaigns studied forty-five stations in six cities in one week in October. Out of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public affairs - less than one-half of 1% of local programming nationwide. Mayors, town councils, school boards, civic leaders get no time from broadcasters who have filled their coffers by looting the public airwaves over which they were placed as stewards. Last year, when a movement sprang up in the House of Representatives to require these broadcasters to obey the law that says they must sell campaign advertising to candidates for office at the lowest commercial rate, the powerful broadcast lobby brought the Congress to heel. So much for the "public interest, convenience, and necessity."
So what do we do? What is our strategy for taking on what seems a hopeless fight for a media system that serves as effectively as it sells - one that holds all the institutions of society, itself included, accountable?
There's plenty we can do. Here's one journalist's list of some of the overlapping and connected goals that a vital media reform movement might pursue.
First, we have to take Tom Paine's example - and Danny Schecter's advice - and reach out to regular citizens. We have to raise an even bigger tent than you have here. Those of us in this place speak a common language about the "media." We must reach the audience that's not here - carry the fight to radio talk shows, local television, and the letters columns of our newspapers. As Danny says, we must engage the mainstream, not retreat from it. We have to get our fellow citizens to understand that what they see, hear, and read is not only the taste of programmers and producers but also a set of policy decisions made by the people we vote for.
We have to fight to keep the gates to the Internet open to all. The web has enabled many new voices in our democracy - and globally - to be heard: advocacy groups, artists, individuals, non-profit organizations. Just about anyone can speak online, and often with an impact greater than in the days when orators had to climb on soap box in a park. The media industry lobbyists point to the Internet and say it's why concerns about media concentration are ill founded in an environment where anyone can speak and where there are literally hundreds of competing channels. What those lobbyists for big media don't tell you is that the traffic patterns of the online world are beginning to resemble those of television and radio. In one study, for example, AOL Time Warner (as it was then known) accounted for nearly a third of all user time spent online. And two others companies - Yahoo and Microsoft - bring that figure to fully 50%. As for the growing number of channels available on today's cable systems, most are owned by a small handful of companies. Of the ninety-one major networks that appear on most cable systems, 79 are part of such multiple network groups such as Time Warner, Viacom, Liberty Media, NBC, and Disney. In order to program a channel on cable today, you must either be owned by or affiliated with one of the giants. If we're not vigilant the wide-open spaces of the Internet could be transformed into a system in which a handful of companies use their control over high-speed access to ensure they remain at the top of the digital heap in the broadband era at the expense of the democratic potential of this amazing technology. So we must fight to make sure the Internet remains open to all as the present-day analogue of that many-tongued world of small newspapers so admired by de Tocqueville.
We must fight for a regulatory, market and public opinion environment that lets local and community-based content be heard rather than drowned out by nationwide commercial programming.
We must fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies and other information sources. Let the message go forth: No Berlusconis in America!
We must fight to expand a noncommercial media system - something made possible in part by new digital spectrum awarded to PBS stations - and fight off attempts to privatize what's left of public broadcasting. Commercial speech must not be the only free speech in America!
We must fight to create new opportunities, through public policies and private agreements, to let historically marginalized media players into more ownership of channels and control of content.
Let us encourage traditional mainstream journalism to get tougher about keeping a critical eye on those in public and private power and keeping us all informed of what's important - not necessarily simple or entertaining or good for the bottom line. Not all news is "Entertainment Tonight." And news departments are trustees of the public, not the corporate media's stockholders
In that last job, schools of journalism and professional news associations have their work cut out. We need journalism graduates who are not only better informed in a whole spectrum of special fields - and the schools do a competent job there - but who take from their training a strong sense of public service. And also graduates who are perhaps a little more hard-boiled and street-smart than the present crop, though that's hard to teach. Thanks to the high cost of education, we get very few recruits from the ranks of those who do the world's unglamorous and low-paid work. But as a onetime "cub" in a very different kind of setting, I cherish H.L. Mencken's description of what being a young Baltimore reporter a hundred years ago meant to him. "I was at large," he wrote,
in a wicked seaport of half a million people with a front seat at every public . . . By all orthodox cultural standards I probably reached my all-time low, for the heavy reading of my teens had been abandoned in favor of life itself. . .But it would be an exaggeration to say I was ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer or a midwife.
We need some of that worldly wisdom in our newsrooms. Let's figure out how to attract youngsters who have acquired it.
And as for those professional associations of editors they might remember that in union there is strength. One journalist alone can't extract from an employer a commitment to let editors and not accountants choose the appropriate subject matter for coverage. But what if news councils blew the whistle on shoddy or cowardly managements? What if foundations gave magazines such as the Columbia Journalism Review sufficient resources to spread their stories of journalistic bias, failure or incompetence? What if entire editorial departments simply refused any longer to quote anonymous sources - or give Kobe Bryant's trial more than the minimal space it rates by any reasonable standard - or to run stories planted by the Defense Department and impossible, for alleged security reasons, to verify? What if a professional association backed them to the hilt? Or required the same stance from all its members? It would take courage to confront powerful ownerships that way. But not as much courage as is asked of those brave journalists in some countries who face the dungeon, the executioner or the secret assassin for speaking out.
All this may be in the domain of fantasy. And then again, maybe not. What I know to be real is that we are in for the fight of our lives. I am not a romantic about democracy or journalism; the writer Andre Gide may have been right when he said that all things human, given time, go badly. But I know journalism and democracy are deeply linked in whatever chance we human beings have to redress our grievances, renew our politics, and reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those are difficult tasks at any time, and they are even more difficult in a cynical age as this, when a deep and pervasive corruption has settled upon the republic. But too much is at stake for our spirits to flag. Earlier this week the Library of Congress gave the first Kluge Lifetime Award in the Humanities to the Polish philosopher Leslie Kolakowski. In an interview Kolakowski said: "There is one freedom on which all other liberties depend - and that is freedom of expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it would be soon suppressed."
That's the flame of truth your movement must carry forward. I am older than almost all of you and am not likely to be around for the duration; I have said for several years now that I will retire from active journalism when I turn 70 next year. But I take heart from the presence in this room, unseen, of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, the muckrakers, I.F. Stone and all those heroes and heroines, celebrated or forgotten, who faced odds no less than ours and did not flinch. I take heart in your presence here. It's your fight now. Look around. You are not alone.
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Reprinted from Democracy Now:
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| ---> Is George W. Bush a psychopath — literally? |
| 12.30.04 (7:09 am) [edit] |
I know a psychologist who thinks our president is a psychopath. Obviously, them's fightin' words, and whether George W. Bush possesses all or some of the traditional indicators of psychopathy--egocentricit y, deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse--is a tough call.
But really, come on[i], it's just in plain old bad taste [/i]to go around lumping the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth into the same category as Jeff Dahmer or Ted Bundy. And aren't those the guys we think of when we talk about psychopaths? It's not like the president eats body parts or entices young women into Volkswagen Beetles and bludgeons them to death--although I'm sure you wouldn't have to look very far to find a soldier back from Iraq who feels like he's been eaten alive or nearly bludgeoned to death. Of course, the president didn't actually do that. He just heedlessly and under false pretences put those soldiers into situations in which it happened. That's not psychopathy, is it? Oh, it's all so confusing.
The real problem with the idea of the president being a psychopath is that it generates the vexing question: What kind of nation re-elects a psychopath to the highest office in the land? The answer could be one or all of three things: a dumb one, a mean one or a thoroughly conned one.
The question has to be recast. The traditional thinking about political campaigns is that they're an orderly process that in some ways make sense, that result in a reasonable outcome. This is clearly not the case. The political campaign in this country is two parts snake oil and one part psychological manipulation. It's been demonstrated again and again that Iraq had nothing to do with the events of Sept. 11, yet three weeks before the presidential election, the polls indicated that 51 percent of those queried believed it did. Jon Stewart, most of his savvy viewers and I laughed when, in early October, Donald Rumsfeld--supposedly addressing the challenges involved in stopping al Qaeda--repeatedly confused Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein, long since in custody. We got real smug savoring yet another example of how smart we are compared to them. Well, Donald Rumsfeld is clearly not dumb. He knew exactly what he was doing conflating the two men, and it worked beautifully. Rumsfeld simply reinforced the ignorance fueling the fear that's been incubating within millions of Americans for the last three-plus years. The television keeps saying this election was about "moral values," but I don't believe it.
The result of the 2004 presidential election was about fear. As a nation, we're still scared shitless by the events of Sept. 11, because virtually nothing has been done to prevent similar events from happening again. As any schoolteacher will tell you, fear renders intelligence null and void. Oh, the exit pollers may have heard the words "moral" and "family values" until they were blue in the face. But isn't that really just a case of attacking someone you can--gays, artists, liberals and various nefarious persons--because you can't get anywhere near the fear actually dominating your life? We see it in microcosm all the time: the white-trash cracker who hates blacks, the abused wife who beats her kids. Is it really so unreasonable to think it happens in macrocosm as well? Not only has this fear caused the deaths and maiming of more than 10,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqi non-combatants, but it's caused the United States of America to start feeding on itself as well. We don't trust each other. We don't like each other. Some of us are beginning to question our core beliefs about what this country is.
Maybe my friend's right. Anyone who could manipulate a tragedy like Sept. 11 into a mess like this must be a serious lunatic.
Could be, could be. I've read up on the subject further and--according to the literature--egocentricity , deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse are quite common in the realms of corporate America, the military establishment ... hell, even academia. The ability and willingness to ruthlessly exploit the fears and weaknesses of others so you can get what you want is not ultimately nor exclusively the domain of people who wind up in metal cages. Not even close. - http://www.tucsonweekly.com/g...%3A63670
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| ---> Is George W. Bush a psychopath — literally? |
| 12.30.04 (6:31 am) [edit] |
I know a psychologist who thinks our president is a psychopath. Obviously, them's fightin' words, and whether George W. Bush possesses all or some of the traditional indicators of psychopathy--egocentricit y, deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse--is a tough call.
But really, come on[i], it's just in plain old bad taste [/i]to go around lumping the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth into the same category as Jeff Dahmer or Ted Bundy. And aren't those the guys we think of when we talk about psychopaths? It's not like the president eats body parts or entices young women into Volkswagen Beetles and bludgeons them to death--although I'm sure you wouldn't have to look very far to find a soldier back from Iraq who feels like he's been eaten alive or nearly bludgeoned to death. Of course, the president didn't actually do that. He just heedlessly and under false pretences put those soldiers into situations in which it happened. That's not psychopathy, is it? Oh, it's all so confusing.
The real problem with the idea of the president being a psychopath is that it generates the vexing question: What kind of nation re-elects a psychopath to the highest office in the land? The answer could be one or all of three things: a dumb one, a mean one or a thoroughly conned one.
The question has to be recast. The traditional thinking about political campaigns is that they're an orderly process that in some ways make sense, that result in a reasonable outcome. This is clearly not the case. The political campaign in this country is two parts snake oil and one part psychological manipulation. It's been demonstrated again and again that Iraq had nothing to do with the events of Sept. 11, yet three weeks before the presidential election, the polls indicated that 51 percent of those queried believed it did. Jon Stewart, most of his savvy viewers and I laughed when, in early October, Donald Rumsfeld--supposedly addressing the challenges involved in stopping al Qaeda--repeatedly confused Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein, long since in custody. We got real smug savoring yet another example of how smart we are compared to them. Well, Donald Rumsfeld is clearly not dumb. He knew exactly what he was doing conflating the two men, and it worked beautifully. Rumsfeld simply reinforced the ignorance fueling the fear that's been incubating within millions of Americans for the last three-plus years. The television keeps saying this election was about "moral values," but I don't believe it.
The result of the 2004 presidential election was about fear. As a nation, we're still scared shitless by the events of Sept. 11, because virtually nothing has been done to prevent similar events from happening again. As any schoolteacher will tell you, fear renders intelligence null and void. Oh, the exit pollers may have heard the words "moral" and "family values" until they were blue in the face. But isn't that really just a case of attacking someone you can--gays, artists, liberals and various nefarious persons--because you can't get anywhere near the fear actually dominating your life? We see it in microcosm all the time: the white-trash cracker who hates blacks, the abused wife who beats her kids. Is it really so unreasonable to think it happens in macrocosm as well? Not only has this fear caused the deaths and maiming of more than 10,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqi non-combatants, but it's caused the United States of America to start feeding on itself as well. We don't trust each other. We don't like each other. Some of us are beginning to question our core beliefs about what this country is.
Maybe my friend's right. Anyone who could manipulate a tragedy like Sept. 11 into a mess like this must be a serious lunatic.
Could be, could be. I've read up on the subject further and--according to the literature--egocentricity , deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse are quite common in the realms of corporate America, the military establishment ... hell, even academia. The ability and willingness to ruthlessly exploit the fears and weaknesses of others so you can get what you want is not ultimately nor exclusively the domain of people who wind up in metal cages. Not even close. - http://www.tucsonweekly.com/g...%3A63670
|
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| |
| ---> Is George W. Bush a psychopath — literally? |
| 12.30.04 (6:21 am) [edit] |
I know a psychologist who thinks our president is a psychopath. Obviously, them's fightin' words, and whether George W. Bush possesses all or some of the traditional indicators of psychopathy--egocentricit y, deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse--is a tough call.
But really, come on[i], it's just in plain old bad taste [/i]to go around lumping the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth into the same category as Jeff Dahmer or Ted Bundy. And aren't those the guys we think of when we talk about psychopaths? It's not like the president eats body parts or entices young women into Volkswagen Beetles and bludgeons them to death--although I'm sure you wouldn't have to look very far to find a soldier back from Iraq who feels like he's been eaten alive or nearly bludgeoned to death. Of course, the president didn't actually do that. He just heedlessly and under false pretences put those soldiers into situations in which it happened. That's not psychopathy, is it? Oh, it's all so confusing.
The real problem with the idea of the president being a psychopath is that it generates the vexing question: What kind of nation re-elects a psychopath to the highest office in the land? The answer could be one or all of three things: a dumb one, a mean one or a thoroughly conned one.
The question has to be recast. The traditional thinking about political campaigns is that they're an orderly process that in some ways make sense, that result in a reasonable outcome. This is clearly not the case. The political campaign in this country is two parts snake oil and one part psychological manipulation. It's been demonstrated again and again that Iraq had nothing to do with the events of Sept. 11, yet three weeks before the presidential election, the polls indicated that 51 percent of those queried believed it did. Jon Stewart, most of his savvy viewers and I laughed when, in early October, Donald Rumsfeld--supposedly addressing the challenges involved in stopping al Qaeda--repeatedly confused Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein, long since in custody. We got real smug savoring yet another example of how smart we are compared to them. Well, Donald Rumsfeld is clearly not dumb. He knew exactly what he was doing conflating the two men, and it worked beautifully. Rumsfeld simply reinforced the ignorance fueling the fear that's been incubating within millions of Americans for the last three-plus years. The television keeps saying this election was about "moral values," but I don't believe it.
The result of the 2004 presidential election was about fear. As a nation, we're still scared shitless by the events of Sept. 11, because virtually nothing has been done to prevent similar events from happening again. As any schoolteacher will tell you, fear renders intelligence null and void. Oh, the exit pollers may have heard the words "moral" and "family values" until they were blue in the face. But isn't that really just a case of attacking someone you can--gays, artists, liberals and various nefarious persons--because you can't get anywhere near the fear actually dominating your life? We see it in microcosm all the time: the white-trash cracker who hates blacks, the abused wife who beats her kids. Is it really so unreasonable to think it happens in macrocosm as well? Not only has this fear caused the deaths and maiming of more than 10,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqi non-combatants, but it's caused the United States of America to start feeding on itself as well. We don't trust each other. We don't like each other. Some of us are beginning to question our core beliefs about what this country is.
Maybe my friend's right. Anyone who could manipulate a tragedy like Sept. 11 into a mess like this must be a serious lunatic.
Could be, could be. I've read up on the subject further and--according to the literature--egocentricity , deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse are quite common in the realms of corporate America, the military establishment ... hell, even academia. The ability and willingness to ruthlessly exploit the fears and weaknesses of others so you can get what you want is not ultimately nor exclusively the domain of people who wind up in metal cages. Not even close. - http://www.tucsonweekly.com/g...%3A63670
|
|
|
| |
| ---> Is George W. Bush a psychopath — literally? |
| 12.30.04 (6:20 am) [edit] |
I know a psychologist who thinks our president is a psychopath. Obviously, them's fightin' words, and whether George W. Bush possesses all or some of the traditional indicators of psychopathy--egocentricit y, deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse--is a tough call.
But really, come on[i], it's just in plain old bad taste [/i]to go around lumping the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth into the same category as Jeff Dahmer or Ted Bundy. And aren't those the guys we think of when we talk about psychopaths? It's not like the president eats body parts or entices young women into Volkswagen Beetles and bludgeons them to death--although I'm sure you wouldn't have to look very far to find a soldier back from Iraq who feels like he's been eaten alive or nearly bludgeoned to death. Of course, the president didn't actually do that. He just heedlessly and under false pretences put those soldiers into situations in which it happened. That's not psychopathy, is it? Oh, it's all so confusing.
The real problem with the idea of the president being a psychopath is that it generates the vexing question: What kind of nation re-elects a psychopath to the highest office in the land? The answer could be one or all of three things: a dumb one, a mean one or a thoroughly conned one.
The question has to be recast. The traditional thinking about political campaigns is that they're an orderly process that in some ways make sense, that result in a reasonable outcome. This is clearly not the case. The political campaign in this country is two parts snake oil and one part psychological manipulation. It's been demonstrated again and again that Iraq had nothing to do with the events of Sept. 11, yet three weeks before the presidential election, the polls indicated that 51 percent of those queried believed it did. Jon Stewart, most of his savvy viewers and I laughed when, in early October, Donald Rumsfeld--supposedly addressing the challenges involved in stopping al Qaeda--repeatedly confused Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein, long since in custody. We got real smug savoring yet another example of how smart we are compared to them. Well, Donald Rumsfeld is clearly not dumb. He knew exactly what he was doing conflating the two men, and it worked beautifully. Rumsfeld simply reinforced the ignorance fueling the fear that's been incubating within millions of Americans for the last three-plus years. The television keeps saying this election was about "moral values," but I don't believe it.
The result of the 2004 presidential election was about fear. As a nation, we're still scared shitless by the events of Sept. 11, because virtually nothing has been done to prevent similar events from happening again. As any schoolteacher will tell you, fear renders intelligence null and void. Oh, the exit pollers may have heard the words "moral" and "family values" until they were blue in the face. But isn't that really just a case of attacking someone you can--gays, artists, liberals and various nefarious persons--because you can't get anywhere near the fear actually dominating your life? We see it in microcosm all the time: the white-trash cracker who hates blacks, the abused wife who beats her kids. Is it really so unreasonable to think it happens in macrocosm as well? Not only has this fear caused the deaths and maiming of more than 10,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqi non-combatants, but it's caused the United States of America to start feeding on itself as well. We don't trust each other. We don't like each other. Some of us are beginning to question our core beliefs about what this country is.
Maybe my friend's right. Anyone who could manipulate a tragedy like Sept. 11 into a mess like this must be a serious lunatic.
Could be, could be. I've read up on the subject further and--according to the literature--egocentricity , deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse are quite common in the realms of corporate America, the military establishment ... hell, even academia. The ability and willingness to ruthlessly exploit the fears and weaknesses of others so you can get what you want is not ultimately nor exclusively the domain of people who wind up in metal cages. Not even close. - http://www.tucsonweekly.com/g...%3A63670
|
|
|
| |
| ---> Is George W. Bush a psychopath — literally? |
| 12.30.04 (6:20 am) [edit] |
I know a psychologist who thinks our president is a psychopath. Obviously, them's fightin' words, and whether George W. Bush possesses all or some of the traditional indicators of psychopathy--egocentricit y, deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse--is a tough call.
But really, come on[i], it's just in plain old bad taste [/i]to go around lumping the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth into the same category as Jeff Dahmer or Ted Bundy. And aren't those the guys we think of when we talk about psychopaths? It's not like the president eats body parts or entices young women into Volkswagen Beetles and bludgeons them to death--although I'm sure you wouldn't have to look very far to find a soldier back from Iraq who feels like he's been eaten alive or nearly bludgeoned to death. Of course, the president didn't actually do that. He just heedlessly and under false pretences put those soldiers into situations in which it happened. That's not psychopathy, is it? Oh, it's all so confusing.
The real problem with the idea of the president being a psychopath is that it generates the vexing question: What kind of nation re-elects a psychopath to the highest office in the land? The answer could be one or all of three things: a dumb one, a mean one or a thoroughly conned one.
The question has to be recast. The traditional thinking about political campaigns is that they're an orderly process that in some ways make sense, that result in a reasonable outcome. This is clearly not the case. The political campaign in this country is two parts snake oil and one part psychological manipulation. It's been demonstrated again and again that Iraq had nothing to do with the events of Sept. 11, yet three weeks before the presidential election, the polls indicated that 51 percent of those queried believed it did. Jon Stewart, most of his savvy viewers and I laughed when, in early October, Donald Rumsfeld--supposedly addressing the challenges involved in stopping al Qaeda--repeatedly confused Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein, long since in custody. We got real smug savoring yet another example of how smart we are compared to them. Well, Donald Rumsfeld is clearly not dumb. He knew exactly what he was doing conflating the two men, and it worked beautifully. Rumsfeld simply reinforced the ignorance fueling the fear that's been incubating within millions of Americans for the last three-plus years. The television keeps saying this election was about "moral values," but I don't believe it.
The result of the 2004 presidential election was about fear. As a nation, we're still scared shitless by the events of Sept. 11, because virtually nothing has been done to prevent similar events from happening again. As any schoolteacher will tell you, fear renders intelligence null and void. Oh, the exit pollers may have heard the words "moral" and "family values" until they were blue in the face. But isn't that really just a case of attacking someone you can--gays, artists, liberals and various nefarious persons--because you can't get anywhere near the fear actually dominating your life? We see it in microcosm all the time: the white-trash cracker who hates blacks, the abused wife who beats her kids. Is it really so unreasonable to think it happens in macrocosm as well? Not only has this fear caused the deaths and maiming of more than 10,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqi non-combatants, but it's caused the United States of America to start feeding on itself as well. We don't trust each other. We don't like each other. Some of us are beginning to question our core beliefs about what this country is.
Maybe my friend's right. Anyone who could manipulate a tragedy like Sept. 11 into a mess like this must be a serious lunatic.
Could be, could be. I've read up on the subject further and--according to the literature--egocentricity , deceit, shallow affect, manipulativeness, selfishness and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse are quite common in the realms of corporate America, the military establishment ... hell, even academia. The ability and willingness to ruthlessly exploit the fears and weaknesses of others so you can get what you want is not ultimately nor exclusively the domain of people who wind up in metal cages. Not even close. - http://www.tucsonweekly.com/g...%3A63670
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| ---> In 1938, TIME's Man of the Year was Adolf Hitler... In 2004, It's Herr Fuhrer Bushy-boy!!! |
| 12.19.04 (1:32 pm) [edit] |
[b]TIME Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938 was Adolf Hitler http://history1900s.about.com... ... In 2004, Herr Fuhrer Bushy-boy, the Mass-Murderer is given this distinction for he is truly a Fascist War Criminal of enormous proportions ...[/b]
[u][b]Bush Named Time's Person of 2004[/b][/u]
NEW YORK - After winning re-election and "reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style," President George Bush (news - web sites) for the second time was chosen as Time magazine's Person of the Year.
The magazine's editors tapped Bush "for sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes — and ours — on his faith in the power of leadership."
Time's 2004 Person of the Year package, on newsstands Monday, includes an Oval Office interview with Bush, an interview with his father, former President George H. W. Bush, and a profile of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
In an interview with the magazine, Bush attributed his victory over Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) to his foreign policy and the wars he began in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites).
"The election was about the use of American influence," Bush said.
After a grueling campaign, Bush remains a polarizing figure in America and around the world, and that's part of the reason he earned the magazine's honor, said Managing Editor Jim Kelly.
"Many, many Americans deeply wish he had not won," Kelly said in a telephone interview. "And yet he did."
In the Time article, Bush said he relishes that some people dislike him.
"I think the natural instinct for most people in the political world is that they want people to like them," Bush said. "On the other hand, I think sometimes I take kind of a delight in who the critics are."
Bush joins six other presidents who have twice won the magazine's top honor: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower (first as a general), Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) and Bill Clinton (news - web sites). Franklin Roosevelt holds the record with three nods from the editors.
Kelly said Bush has changed dramatically since he was named Person of the Year in 2000 after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency.
"He is not the same man," Kelly said. "He's a much more resolute man. He is personally as charming as ever but I think the kind of face he's shown to the American public is one of much, much greater determination."
The magazine gives the honor to the person who had the greatest impact, good or bad, over the year.
Kelly said other candidates included Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, "because in different ways their movies tapped in to deep cultural streams," and political strategist Rove, who is widely credited with engineering Bush's win. Kelly said choosing Rove alone would have taken away from the credit he said Bush deserves.
This is the first time an individual has won the award since 2001, when then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was celebrated for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The American soldier earned the honor last year; in 2002, the magazine tapped Coleen Rowley, the FBI (news - web sites) agent who wrote a critical memo on FBI intelligence failures, and Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on scandals at Enron and Worldcom. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
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| |
| ---> In 1938, TIME's Man of the Year was Adolf Hitler... In 2004, It's Herr Fuhrer Bushy-boy!!! |
| 12.19.04 (1:30 pm) [edit] |
[b]TIME Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938 was Adolf Hitler http://history1900s.about.com... ... In 2004, Herr Fuhrer Bushy-boy, the Mass-Murderer is given this distinction for he is truly a Fascist War Criminal of enormous proportions ...[/b]
[u][b]Bush Named Time's Person of 2004[/b][/u]
NEW YORK - After winning re-election and "reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style," President George Bush (news - web sites) for the second time was chosen as Time magazine's Person of the Year.
The magazine's editors tapped Bush "for sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes — and ours — on his faith in the power of leadership."
Time's 2004 Person of the Year package, on newsstands Monday, includes an Oval Office interview with Bush, an interview with his father, former President George H. W. Bush, and a profile of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
In an interview with the magazine, Bush attributed his victory over Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) to his foreign policy and the wars he began in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites).
"The election was about the use of American influence," Bush said.
After a grueling campaign, Bush remains a polarizing figure in America and around the world, and that's part of the reason he earned the magazine's honor, said Managing Editor Jim Kelly.
"Many, many Americans deeply wish he had not won," Kelly said in a telephone interview. "And yet he did."
In the Time article, Bush said he relishes that some people dislike him.
"I think the natural instinct for most people in the political world is that they want people to like them," Bush said. "On the other hand, I think sometimes I take kind of a delight in who the critics are."
Bush joins six other presidents who have twice won the magazine's top honor: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower (first as a general), Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) and Bill Clinton (news - web sites). Franklin Roosevelt holds the record with three nods from the editors.
Kelly said Bush has changed dramatically since he was named Person of the Year in 2000 after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency.
"He is not the same man," Kelly said. "He's a much more resolute man. He is personally as charming as ever but I think the kind of face he's shown to the American public is one of much, much greater determination."
The magazine gives the honor to the person who had the greatest impact, good or bad, over the year.
Kelly said other candidates included Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, "because in different ways their movies tapped in to deep cultural streams," and political strategist Rove, who is widely credited with engineering Bush's win. Kelly said choosing Rove alone would have taken away from the credit he said Bush deserves.
This is the first time an individual has won the award since 2001, when then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was celebrated for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The American soldier earned the honor last year; in 2002, the magazine tapped Coleen Rowley, the FBI (news - web sites) agent who wrote a critical memo on FBI intelligence failures, and Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on scandals at Enron and Worldcom. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
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| |
| ---> TIME's Person of 2004: The Bloody Neo-Fascist War Criminal |
| 12.19.04 (4:53 am) [edit] |
[u][b]Bush Named Time's Person of 2004[/b][/u]
NEW YORK - After winning re-election and "reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style," President George Bush (news - web sites) for the second time was chosen as Time magazine's Person of the Year.
The magazine's editors tapped Bush "for sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes — and ours — on his faith in the power of leadership."
Time's 2004 Person of the Year package, on newsstands Monday, includes an Oval Office interview with Bush, an interview with his father, former President George H. W. Bush, and a profile of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
In an interview with the magazine, Bush attributed his victory over Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) to his foreign policy and the wars he began in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites).
"The election was about the use of American influence," Bush said.
After a grueling campaign, Bush remains a polarizing figure in America and around the world, and that's part of the reason he earned the magazine's honor, said Managing Editor Jim Kelly.
"Many, many Americans deeply wish he had not won," Kelly said in a telephone interview. "And yet he did."
In the Time article, Bush said he relishes that some people dislike him.
"I think the natural instinct for most people in the political world is that they want people to like them," Bush said. "On the other hand, I think sometimes I take kind of a delight in who the critics are."
Bush joins six other presidents who have twice won the magazine's top honor: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower (first as a general), Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) and Bill Clinton (news - web sites). Franklin Roosevelt holds the record with three nods from the editors.
Kelly said Bush has changed dramatically since he was named Person of the Year in 2000 after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency.
"He is not the same man," Kelly said. "He's a much more resolute man. He is personally as charming as ever but I think the kind of face he's shown to the American public is one of much, much greater determination."
The magazine gives the honor to the person who had the greatest impact, good or bad, over the year.
Kelly said other candidates included Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, "because in different ways their movies tapped in to deep cultural streams," and political strategist Rove, who is widely credited with engineering Bush's win. Kelly said choosing Rove alone would have taken away from the credit he said Bush deserves.
This is the first time an individual has won the award since 2001, when then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was celebrated for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The American soldier earned the honor last year; in 2002, the magazine tapped Coleen Rowley, the FBI (news - web sites) agent who wrote a critical memo on FBI intelligence failures, and Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on scandals at Enron and Worldcom. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
|
|
|
| |
| ---> TIME's Person of 2004: The Bloody Neo-Fascist War Criminal |
| 12.19.04 (4:53 am) [edit] |
[u][b]Bush Named Time's Person of 2004[/b][/u]
NEW YORK - After winning re-election and "reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style," President George Bush (news - web sites) for the second time was chosen as Time magazine's Person of the Year.
The magazine's editors tapped Bush "for sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes — and ours — on his faith in the power of leadership."
Time's 2004 Person of the Year package, on newsstands Monday, includes an Oval Office interview with Bush, an interview with his father, former President George H. W. Bush, and a profile of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
In an interview with the magazine, Bush attributed his victory over Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) to his foreign policy and the wars he began in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites).
"The election was about the use of American influence," Bush said.
After a grueling campaign, Bush remains a polarizing figure in America and around the world, and that's part of the reason he earned the magazine's honor, said Managing Editor Jim Kelly.
"Many, many Americans deeply wish he had not won," Kelly said in a telephone interview. "And yet he did."
In the Time article, Bush said he relishes that some people dislike him.
"I think the natural instinct for most people in the political world is that they want people to like them," Bush said. "On the other hand, I think sometimes I take kind of a delight in who the critics are."
Bush joins six other presidents who have twice won the magazine's top honor: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower (first as a general), Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) and Bill Clinton (news - web sites). Franklin Roosevelt holds the record with three nods from the editors.
Kelly said Bush has changed dramatically since he was named Person of the Year in 2000 after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency.
"He is not the same man," Kelly said. "He's a much more resolute man. He is personally as charming as ever but I think the kind of face he's shown to the American public is one of much, much greater determination."
The magazine gives the honor to the person who had the greatest impact, good or bad, over the year.
Kelly said other candidates included Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, "because in different ways their movies tapped in to deep cultural streams," and political strategist Rove, who is widely credited with engineering Bush's win. Kelly said choosing Rove alone would have taken away from the credit he said Bush deserves.
This is the first time an individual has won the award since 2001, when then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was celebrated for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The American soldier earned the honor last year; in 2002, the magazine tapped Coleen Rowley, the FBI (news - web sites) agent who wrote a critical memo on FBI intelligence failures, and Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on scandals at Enron and Worldcom. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
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| ---> What Is Conservatism??? |
| 12.18.04 (6:15 am) [edit] |
Given the growing importance of "conservatism" in American politics and government, it seems worth posing a basic question: What does the term mean, exactly?
The public position of political conservatism is certainly clear. But consider the wide variety of organizations and persons who call themselves "conservative": economic conservatives, religious conservatives, social conservatives, libertarians, neo-conservatives, and the traditional conservatives (such as my former colleague Pat Buchanan) who are now sometimes called paleo-conservatives.
Among them, there are many philosophical and practical conflicts. But what is it that they have in common? Why are they all under the same tent, and (for now, anyway) in the Republican Party?
In their recent book The Right Nation: Conservative Power In America, John Micklethwait (the U.S. editor of the right-of-center Economist) and Adrian Wooldridge (the Washington correspondent for the Economist) seek to explain conservatism to Europeans (if not Americans). But they conclude that "[ c ]onservativism has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged" -- especially since conservatives insist "their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed."
Are Micklethwait and Wooldridge correct? Or can the core of conservatism be defined?
[b]Speeches on Conservatism: Failing to Agree on a Core Definition of the Term[/b]
To answer this question, I started with the grand-daddy of the conservative think tanks, The American Enterprise Institute http://www.aei.org/ . On its site was a fascinating 1995 speech by conservative columnist George Will http://www.aei.org/include/ne... . The speech is a 6,000 word tour de force - and it was plainly delivered before the arrival of "compassionate conservatism."
In the speech, Will scolds conservatives for ceaselessly hammering on big government. But his larger point is that "conservatism has not had to ask itself some hard questions about what it is prepared to tell people that people would rather not be told." Here is one example Will gives: Quoting President Woodrow Wilson, he says that "no man must look to have the government take care of him, but every man must take care of himself."
Also on the AEI site was a lengthy talk by Charles Kessler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. But Kessler concentrated on the difficulties of defining conservatism, rather than offering a definition. He contended that "American conservatives have always been more confident of what they were against than what they were [i]for[/i]." (Emphasis in original.) And he said that conservatives needed goals, but had none -- notwithstanding Congressional conservatives' promotion of their Contract With America.
The Heritage Foundation site http://www.heritage.org/ui/ta... offered a 1986 speech by William Bennett, then President Reagan's drug czar. Bennett announced, "American conservatism today is optimistic" - in that "conservatives do not expect completion or perfection in the things of this world. Just as, when in the wilderness, conservatives knew that there were no lost causes, so they know, while governing, that there are no causes finally and irrevocably won."
Also on the site, Edward Fullner, the president of Heritage, reminded the faithful in an essay that "Conservatism is based on freedom, opportunity and responsibility--ideas that span centuries because they [i]work[/i]. The same can't be said for liberalism." (Emphasis in original.)
[b]Conservatives and the Judiciary: Activist, Restrained - Or Both?[/b]
The Heritage Foundation site also offers a 1993 talk by Professor David Forte -- a Harvard-trained lawyer with a Ph.D. in political economy -- on "Conservatism on the Rehnquist Court." Professor Forte gave Chief Justice Rehnquist passing grades on his conservatism. But unlike Bill Bennett, Professor Forte did not find much for conservatives to be happy about.
To the contrary, Forte explained, "The greatest disappointments for conservatives … lay in the areas of school prayer and abortion." Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Souter, he argues, not only voted to uphold Roe v. Wade, but halted a trend towards greater tolerance for religious expression. He expressed little respect for the basis for their votes, opining that "[ W ]hile the "principle of stare decisis is designed to maintain worthy precedents … Roe v. Wade is without any constitutional worth."
Also in 1993, James L. Huffman, a resident scholar at Heritage, talked about judicial activism: "Most political conservatives believe in the principle of judicial restraint. I share that conviction, but I also believe in judicial activism."
In short, conservatism embraces both judicial restraint and activism. They can have it any way they want - overruling Roe if it suits them, while arguing that conservative precedents ought to be respected under the same rule of stare decisis they reject for Roe.
[b]Is Libertarianism Conservative? Is Conservatism Necessarily Libertarian?[/b]
The Cato Institute website, http://www.cato.org/index.htm... meanwhile, raises the issue of the problematic relationship between libertarianism and conservatism.
The Cato site quoted Reagan to suggest the two are, at least, closely related: "Ronald Reagan often said that 'the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.'" And Cato Vice President David Boaz -- who has written extensively on libertarianism - added that, "These days I put it somewhat differently: the best aspect of American conservatism is its commitment to protecting the individual liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed in the Constitution."
As for George W. Bush's conservatism, Boaz observed, "It's a far cry from the individualist, free-market, less-government conservatism of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 presidential nominee and author of The Conscience of a Conservative, who inspired a generation of conservative activists, and Ronald Reagan, who later put into practice much of Goldwater's agenda."
Interestingly, when many conservatives were cheering Bush's tax cuts, Cato scholars were pointing out how wrong they were. Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren explained that, "conservatives in Washington have completely abandoned their campaign against big government. Rather than tackle spending head-on, Republican politicians trot out tax cuts as a symbolic surrogate . . . forgetting the fact that tax cuts have nothing to do with the size of government. They have to do with how we pay for government."
With so many factions among conservatives, what unites them all? As I see it, one major factor is simply a common antipathy (or worse) toward liberalism. And this antipathy proves to be a powerful glue.
[b]What Really Defines Conservatism: An Antipathy to Liberalism [/b]
Sidney Blumenthal, then a staff writer at The Washington Post, concluded in his 1986 book, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power, that "conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning." For "without the enemy [of liberalism] to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organizing principle."
The ensuing decades, it seems, have only proved Blumenthal more right. Talk radio could barely exist without its endless bloviating about, and bashing of, all things perceived "liberal." And distaste for all that is considered liberal has remained a constant theme of conservatives. Ironically, this aversion persists even though many conservative believe that its object is dead. For example, in 1998, Newt Gingrich flatly stated, "The age of liberalism is over."
Nevertheless, condemnation of the liberal bogyman continues to unite conservatives of all stripes. Consider recent, bestselling conservative titles by Ann Coulter's work: Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002), Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2003), and currently How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).
Realizing what all conservatives are against, and what appears to hold them together, however, is not much of a definition of what they affirmatively believe in. We know what they all hate - but what, if anything, do they all love?
I have come to agree with Micklethwait and Wooldridge that conservativism no longer can be accurately defined. There is no Conservative Manifesto. And as the speeches and books I have cited show, there are endless and widely varying descriptions of contemporary conservative beliefs.
Even America's preeminent conservative thinker, William F. Buckley, Jr., the normally verbally facile founder of the National Review, found "conservatism" hard to define. Responding to Chris Matthews on "Hardball," Buckley stammered, "The, the, it's very hard to define, define conservatism." Then he proceeded to offer a definition, however: "A famous professor, University of Chicago, was up against it when somebody said, 'How do you define it.' He didn't want to say, well, he said, he said, [i]'Conservatism is a paragon of essences towards which the phenomenology of the world is continuing approximation[/i]." (Emphasis added.)
Got that? - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| ---> What Is Conservatism??? |
| 12.18.04 (6:13 am) [edit] |
Given the growing importance of "conservatism" in American politics and government, it seems worth posing a basic question: What does the term mean, exactly?
The public position of political conservatism is certainly clear. But consider the wide variety of organizations and persons who call themselves "conservative": economic conservatives, religious conservatives, social conservatives, libertarians, neo-conservatives, and the traditional conservatives (such as my former colleague Pat Buchanan) who are now sometimes called paleo-conservatives.
Among them, there are many philosophical and practical conflicts. But what is it that they have in common? Why are they all under the same tent, and (for now, anyway) in the Republican Party?
In their recent book The Right Nation: Conservative Power In America, John Micklethwait (the U.S. editor of the right-of-center Economist) and Adrian Wooldridge (the Washington correspondent for the Economist) seek to explain conservatism to Europeans (if not Americans). But they conclude that "[ c ]onservativism has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged" -- especially since conservatives insist "their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed."
Are Micklethwait and Wooldridge correct? Or can the core of conservatism be defined?
[b]Speeches on Conservatism: Failing to Agree on a Core Definition of the Term[/b]
To answer this question, I started with the grand-daddy of the conservative think tanks, The American Enterprise Institute http://www.aei.org/ . On its site was a fascinating 1995 speech by conservative columnist George Will http://www.aei.org/include/ne... . The speech is a 6,000 word tour de force - and it was plainly delivered before the arrival of "compassionate conservatism."
In the speech, Will scolds conservatives for ceaselessly hammering on big government. But his larger point is that "conservatism has not had to ask itself some hard questions about what it is prepared to tell people that people would rather not be told." Here is one example Will gives: Quoting President Woodrow Wilson, he says that "no man must look to have the government take care of him, but every man must take care of himself."
Also on the AEI site was a lengthy talk by Charles Kessler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. But Kessler concentrated on the difficulties of defining conservatism, rather than offering a definition. He contended that "American conservatives have always been more confident of what they were against than what they were [i]for[/i]." (Emphasis in original.) And he said that conservatives needed goals, but had none -- notwithstanding Congressional conservatives' promotion of their Contract With America.
The Heritage Foundation site http://www.heritage.org/ui/ta... offered a 1986 speech by William Bennett, then President Reagan's drug czar. Bennett announced, "American conservatism today is optimistic" - in that "conservatives do not expect completion or perfection in the things of this world. Just as, when in the wilderness, conservatives knew that there were no lost causes, so they know, while governing, that there are no causes finally and irrevocably won."
Also on the site, Edward Fullner, the president of Heritage, reminded the faithful in an essay that "Conservatism is based on freedom, opportunity and responsibility--ideas that span centuries because they [i]work[/i]. The same can't be said for liberalism." (Emphasis in original.)
[b]Conservatives and the Judiciary: Activist, Restrained - Or Both?[/b]
The Heritage Foundation site also offers a 1993 talk by Professor David Forte -- a Harvard-trained lawyer with a Ph.D. in political economy -- on "Conservatism on the Rehnquist Court." Professor Forte gave Chief Justice Rehnquist passing grades on his conservatism. But unlike Bill Bennett, Professor Forte did not find much for conservatives to be happy about.
To the contrary, Forte explained, "The greatest disappointments for conservatives … lay in the areas of school prayer and abortion." Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Souter, he argues, not only voted to uphold Roe v. Wade, but halted a trend towards greater tolerance for religious expression. He expressed little respect for the basis for their votes, opining that "[ W ]hile the "principle of stare decisis is designed to maintain worthy precedents … Roe v. Wade is without any constitutional worth."
Also in 1993, James L. Huffman, a resident scholar at Heritage, talked about judicial activism: "Most political conservatives believe in the principle of judicial restraint. I share that conviction, but I also believe in judicial activism."
In short, conservatism embraces both judicial restraint and activism. They can have it any way they want - overruling Roe if it suits them, while arguing that conservative precedents ought to be respected under the same rule of stare decisis they reject for Roe.
[b]Is Libertarianism Conservative? Is Conservatism Necessarily Libertarian?[/b]
The Cato Institute website, http://www.cato.org/index.htm... meanwhile, raises the issue of the problematic relationship between libertarianism and conservatism.
The Cato site quoted Reagan to suggest the two are, at least, closely related: "Ronald Reagan often said that 'the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.'" And Cato Vice President David Boaz -- who has written extensively on libertarianism - added that, "These days I put it somewhat differently: the best aspect of American conservatism is its commitment to protecting the individual liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed in the Constitution."
As for George W. Bush's conservatism, Boaz observed, "It's a far cry from the individualist, free-market, less-government conservatism of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 presidential nominee and author of The Conscience of a Conservative, who inspired a generation of conservative activists, and Ronald Reagan, who later put into practice much of Goldwater's agenda."
Interestingly, when many conservatives were cheering Bush's tax cuts, Cato scholars were pointing out how wrong they were. Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren explained that, "conservatives in Washington have completely abandoned their campaign against big government. Rather than tackle spending head-on, Republican politicians trot out tax cuts as a symbolic surrogate . . . forgetting the fact that tax cuts have nothing to do with the size of government. They have to do with how we pay for government."
With so many factions among conservatives, what unites them all? As I see it, one major factor is simply a common antipathy (or worse) toward liberalism. And this antipathy proves to be a powerful glue.
[b]What Really Defines Conservatism: An Antipathy to Liberalism [/b]
Sidney Blumenthal, then a staff writer at The Washington Post, concluded in his 1986 book, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power, that "conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning." For "without the enemy [of liberalism] to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organizing principle."
The ensuing decades, it seems, have only proved Blumenthal more right. Talk radio could barely exist without its endless bloviating about, and bashing of, all things perceived "liberal." And distaste for all that is considered liberal has remained a constant theme of conservatives. Ironically, this aversion persists even though many conservative believe that its object is dead. For example, in 1998, Newt Gingrich flatly stated, "The age of liberalism is over."
Nevertheless, condemnation of the liberal bogyman continues to unite conservatives of all stripes. Consider recent, bestselling conservative titles by Ann Coulter's work: Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002), Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2003), and currently How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).
Realizing what all conservatives are against, and what appears to hold them together, however, is not much of a definition of what they affirmatively believe in. We know what they all hate - but what, if anything, do they all love?
I have come to agree with Micklethwait and Wooldridge that conservativism no longer can be accurately defined. There is no Conservative Manifesto. And as the speeches and books I have cited show, there are endless and widely varying descriptions of contemporary conservative beliefs.
Even America's preeminent conservative thinker, William F. Buckley, Jr., the normally verbally facile founder of the National Review, found "conservatism" hard to define. Responding to Chris Matthews on "Hardball," Buckley stammered, "The, the, it's very hard to define, define conservatism." Then he proceeded to offer a definition, however: "A famous professor, University of Chicago, was up against it when somebody said, 'How do you define it.' He didn't want to say, well, he said, he said, [i]'Conservatism is a paragon of essences towards which the phenomenology of the world is continuing approximation[/i]." (Emphasis added.)
Got that? - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| ---> What Is Conservatism??? (Seems to Me, Today's Version is a SIN!!!) |
| 12.18.04 (6:12 am) [edit] |
[b]Today's conservatives would have tortured & killed Jesus Christ and they spit on his teachings ...[/b]
Given the growing importance of "conservatism" in American politics and government, it seems worth posing a basic question: What does the term mean, exactly?
The public position of political conservatism is certainly clear. But consider the wide variety of organizations and persons who call themselves "conservative": economic conservatives, religious conservatives, social conservatives, libertarians, neo-conservatives, and the traditional conservatives (such as my former colleague Pat Buchanan) who are now sometimes called paleo-conservatives.
Among them, there are many philosophical and practical conflicts. But what is it that they have in common? Why are they all under the same tent, and (for now, anyway) in the Republican Party?
In their recent book The Right Nation: Conservative Power In America, John Micklethwait (the U.S. editor of the right-of-center Economist) and Adrian Wooldridge (the Washington correspondent for the Economist) seek to explain conservatism to Europeans (if not Americans). But they conclude that "[ c ]onservativism has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged" -- especially since conservatives insist "their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed."
Are Micklethwait and Wooldridge correct? Or can the core of conservatism be defined?
[b]Speeches on Conservatism: Failing to Agree on a Core Definition of the Term[/b]
To answer this question, I started with the grand-daddy of the conservative think tanks, The American Enterprise Institute http://www.aei.org/ . On its site was a fascinating 1995 speech by conservative columnist George Will http://www.aei.org/include/ne... . The speech is a 6,000 word tour de force - and it was plainly delivered before the arrival of "compassionate conservatism."
In the speech, Will scolds conservatives for ceaselessly hammering on big government. But his larger point is that "conservatism has not had to ask itself some hard questions about what it is prepared to tell people that people would rather not be told." Here is one example Will gives: Quoting President Woodrow Wilson, he says that "no man must look to have the government take care of him, but every man must take care of himself."
Also on the AEI site was a lengthy talk by Charles Kessler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. But Kessler concentrated on the difficulties of defining conservatism, rather than offering a definition. He contended that "American conservatives have always been more confident of what they were against than what they were [i]for[/i]." (Emphasis in original.) And he said that conservatives needed goals, but had none -- notwithstanding Congressional conservatives' promotion of their Contract With America.
The Heritage Foundation site http://www.heritage.org/ui/ta... offered a 1986 speech by William Bennett, then President Reagan's drug czar. Bennett announced, "American conservatism today is optimistic" - in that "conservatives do not expect completion or perfection in the things of this world. Just as, when in the wilderness, conservatives knew that there were no lost causes, so they know, while governing, that there are no causes finally and irrevocably won."
Also on the site, Edward Fullner, the president of Heritage, reminded the faithful in an essay that "Conservatism is based on freedom, opportunity and responsibility--ideas that span centuries because they [i]work[/i]. The same can't be said for liberalism." (Emphasis in original.)
[b]Conservatives and the Judiciary: Activist, Restrained - Or Both?[/b]
The Heritage Foundation site also offers a 1993 talk by Professor David Forte -- a Harvard-trained lawyer with a Ph.D. in political economy -- on "Conservatism on the Rehnquist Court." Professor Forte gave Chief Justice Rehnquist passing grades on his conservatism. But unlike Bill Bennett, Professor Forte did not find much for conservatives to be happy about.
To the contrary, Forte explained, "The greatest disappointments for conservatives … lay in the areas of school prayer and abortion." Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Souter, he argues, not only voted to uphold Roe v. Wade, but halted a trend towards greater tolerance for religious expression. He expressed little respect for the basis for their votes, opining that "[ W ]hile the "principle of stare decisis is designed to maintain worthy precedents … Roe v. Wade is without any constitutional worth."
Also in 1993, James L. Huffman, a resident scholar at Heritage, talked about judicial activism: "Most political conservatives believe in the principle of judicial restraint. I share that conviction, but I also believe in judicial activism."
In short, conservatism embraces both judicial restraint and activism. They can have it any way they want - overruling Roe if it suits them, while arguing that conservative precedents ought to be respected under the same rule of stare decisis they reject for Roe.
[b]Is Libertarianism Conservative? Is Conservatism Necessarily Libertarian?[/b]
The Cato Institute website, http://www.cato.org/index.htm... meanwhile, raises the issue of the problematic relationship between libertarianism and conservatism.
The Cato site quoted Reagan to suggest the two are, at least, closely related: "Ronald Reagan often said that 'the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.'" And Cato Vice President David Boaz -- who has written extensively on libertarianism - added that, "These days I put it somewhat differently: the best aspect of American conservatism is its commitment to protecting the individual liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed in the Constitution."
As for George W. Bush's conservatism, Boaz observed, "It's a far cry from the individualist, free-market, less-government conservatism of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 presidential nominee and author of The Conscience of a Conservative, who inspired a generation of conservative activists, and Ronald Reagan, who later put into practice much of Goldwater's agenda."
Interestingly, when many conservatives were cheering Bush's tax cuts, Cato scholars were pointing out how wrong they were. Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren explained that, "conservatives in Washington have completely abandoned their campaign against big government. Rather than tackle spending head-on, Republican politicians trot out tax cuts as a symbolic surrogate . . . forgetting the fact that tax cuts have nothing to do with the size of government. They have to do with how we pay for government."
With so many factions among conservatives, what unites them all? As I see it, one major factor is simply a common antipathy (or worse) toward liberalism. And this antipathy proves to be a powerful glue.
[b]What Really Defines Conservatism: An Antipathy to Liberalism [/b]
Sidney Blumenthal, then a staff writer at The Washington Post, concluded in his 1986 book, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power, that "conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning." For "without the enemy [of liberalism] to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organizing principle."
The ensuing decades, it seems, have only proved Blumenthal more right. Talk radio could barely exist without its endless bloviating about, and bashing of, all things perceived "liberal." And distaste for all that is considered liberal has remained a constant theme of conservatives. Ironically, this aversion persists even though many conservative believe that its object is dead. For example, in 1998, Newt Gingrich flatly stated, "The age of liberalism is over."
Nevertheless, condemnation of the liberal bogyman continues to unite conservatives of all stripes. Consider recent, bestselling conservative titles by Ann Coulter's work: Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002), Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2003), and currently How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).
Realizing what all conservatives are against, and what appears to hold them together, however, is not much of a definition of what they affirmatively believe in. We know what they all hate - but what, if anything, do they all love?
I have come to agree with Micklethwait and Wooldridge that conservativism no longer can be accurately defined. There is no Conservative Manifesto. And as the speeches and books I have cited show, there are endless and widely varying descriptions of contemporary conservative beliefs.
Even America's preeminent conservative thinker, William F. Buckley, Jr., the normally verbally facile founder of the National Review, found "conservatism" hard to define. Responding to Chris Matthews on "Hardball," Buckley stammered, "The, the, it's very hard to define, define conservatism." Then he proceeded to offer a definition, however: "A famous professor, University of Chicago, was up against it when somebody said, 'How do you define it.' He didn't want to say, well, he said, he said, [i]'Conservatism is a paragon of essences towards which the phenomenology of the world is continuing approximation[/i]." (Emphasis added.)
Got that? - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
|
|
|
| |
| ---> What Is Conservatism??? |
| 12.18.04 (6:12 am) [edit] |
Given the growing importance of "conservatism" in American politics and government, it seems worth posing a basic question: What does the term mean, exactly?
The public position of political conservatism is certainly clear. But consider the wide variety of organizations and persons who call themselves "conservative": economic conservatives, religious conservatives, social conservatives, libertarians, neo-conservatives, and the traditional conservatives (such as my former colleague Pat Buchanan) who are now sometimes called paleo-conservatives.
Among them, there are many philosophical and practical conflicts. But what is it that they have in common? Why are they all under the same tent, and (for now, anyway) in the Republican Party?
In their recent book The Right Nation: Conservative Power In America, John Micklethwait (the U.S. editor of the right-of-center Economist) and Adrian Wooldridge (the Washington correspondent for the Economist) seek to explain conservatism to Europeans (if not Americans). But they conclude that "[ c ]onservativism has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged" -- especially since conservatives insist "their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed."
Are Micklethwait and Wooldridge correct? Or can the core of conservatism be defined?
[b]Speeches on Conservatism: Failing to Agree on a Core Definition of the Term[/b]
To answer this question, I started with the grand-daddy of the conservative think tanks, The American Enterprise Institute http://www.aei.org/ . On its site was a fascinating 1995 speech by conservative columnist George Will http://www.aei.org/include/ne... . The speech is a 6,000 word tour de force - and it was plainly delivered before the arrival of "compassionate conservatism."
In the speech, Will scolds conservatives for ceaselessly hammering on big government. But his larger point is that "conservatism has not had to ask itself some hard questions about what it is prepared to tell people that people would rather not be told." Here is one example Will gives: Quoting President Woodrow Wilson, he says that "no man must look to have the government take care of him, but every man must take care of himself."
Also on the AEI site was a lengthy talk by Charles Kessler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. But Kessler concentrated on the difficulties of defining conservatism, rather than offering a definition. He contended that "American conservatives have always been more confident of what they were against than what they were [i]for[/i]." (Emphasis in original.) And he said that conservatives needed goals, but had none -- notwithstanding Congressional conservatives' promotion of their Contract With America.
The Heritage Foundation site http://www.heritage.org/ui/ta... offered a 1986 speech by William Bennett, then President Reagan's drug czar. Bennett announced, "American conservatism today is optimistic" - in that "conservatives do not expect completion or perfection in the things of this world. Just as, when in the wilderness, conservatives knew that there were no lost causes, so they know, while governing, that there are no causes finally and irrevocably won."
Also on the site, Edward Fullner, the president of Heritage, reminded the faithful in an essay that "Conservatism is based on freedom, opportunity and responsibility--ideas that span centuries because they [i]work[/i]. The same can't be said for liberalism." (Emphasis in original.)
[b]Conservatives and the Judiciary: Activist, Restrained - Or Both?[/b]
The Heritage Foundation site also offers a 1993 talk by Professor David Forte -- a Harvard-trained lawyer with a Ph.D. in political economy -- on "Conservatism on the Rehnquist Court." Professor Forte gave Chief Justice Rehnquist passing grades on his conservatism. But unlike Bill Bennett, Professor Forte did not find much for conservatives to be happy about.
To the contrary, Forte explained, "The greatest disappointments for conservatives … lay in the areas of school prayer and abortion." Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Souter, he argues, not only voted to uphold Roe v. Wade, but halted a trend towards greater tolerance for religious expression. He expressed little respect for the basis for their votes, opining that "[ W ]hile the "principle of stare decisis is designed to maintain worthy precedents … Roe v. Wade is without any constitutional worth."
Also in 1993, James L. Huffman, a resident scholar at Heritage, talked about judicial activism: "Most political conservatives believe in the principle of judicial restraint. I share that conviction, but I also believe in judicial activism."
In short, conservatism embraces both judicial restraint and activism. They can have it any way they want - overruling Roe if it suits them, while arguing that conservative precedents ought to be respected under the same rule of stare decisis they reject for Roe.
[b]Is Libertarianism Conservative? Is Conservatism Necessarily Libertarian?[/b]
The Cato Institute website, http://www.cato.org/index.htm... meanwhile, raises the issue of the problematic relationship between libertarianism and conservatism.
The Cato site quoted Reagan to suggest the two are, at least, closely related: "Ronald Reagan often said that 'the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.'" And Cato Vice President David Boaz -- who has written extensively on libertarianism - added that, "These days I put it somewhat differently: the best aspect of American conservatism is its commitment to protecting the individual liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed in the Constitution."
As for George W. Bush's conservatism, Boaz observed, "It's a far cry from the individualist, free-market, less-government conservatism of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 presidential nominee and author of The Conscience of a Conservative, who inspired a generation of conservative activists, and Ronald Reagan, who later put into practice much of Goldwater's agenda."
Interestingly, when many conservatives were cheering Bush's tax cuts, Cato scholars were pointing out how wrong they were. Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren explained that, "conservatives in Washington have completely abandoned their campaign against big government. Rather than tackle spending head-on, Republican politicians trot out tax cuts as a symbolic surrogate . . . forgetting the fact that tax cuts have nothing to do with the size of government. They have to do with how we pay for government."
With so many factions among conservatives, what unites them all? As I see it, one major factor is simply a common antipathy (or worse) toward liberalism. And this antipathy proves to be a powerful glue.
[b]What Really Defines Conservatism: An Antipathy to Liberalism [/b]
Sidney Blumenthal, then a staff writer at The Washington Post, concluded in his 1986 book, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power, that "conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning." For "without the enemy [of liberalism] to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organizing principle."
The ensuing decades, it seems, have only proved Blumenthal more right. Talk radio could barely exist without its endless bloviating about, and bashing of, all things perceived "liberal." And distaste for all that is considered liberal has remained a constant theme of conservatives. Ironically, this aversion persists even though many conservative believe that its object is dead. For example, in 1998, Newt Gingrich flatly stated, "The age of liberalism is over."
Nevertheless, condemnation of the liberal bogyman continues to unite conservatives of all stripes. Consider recent, bestselling conservative titles by Ann Coulter's work: Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002), Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2003), and currently How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).
Realizing what all conservatives are against, and what appears to hold them together, however, is not much of a definition of what they affirmatively believe in. We know what they all hate - but what, if anything, do they all love?
I have come to agree with Micklethwait and Wooldridge that conservativism no longer can be accurately defined. There is no Conservative Manifesto. And as the speeches and books I have cited show, there are endless and widely varying descriptions of contemporary conservative beliefs.
Even America's preeminent conservative thinker, William F. Buckley, Jr., the normally verbally facile founder of the National Review, found "conservatism" hard to define. Responding to Chris Matthews on "Hardball," Buckley stammered, "The, the, it's very hard to define, define conservatism." Then he proceeded to offer a definition, however: "A famous professor, University of Chicago, was up against it when somebody said, 'How do you define it.' He didn't want to say, well, he said, he said, [i]'Conservatism is a paragon of essences towards which the phenomenology of the world is continuing approximation[/i]." (Emphasis added.)
Got that? - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| ---> Bush's 2004 Whitehouse Christmas Card ... I Got Mine Early!!! |
| 12.18.04 (6:05 am) [edit] |
I got mine early:
"If love and peace doesn’t fill your heart, 50,000 volts should do the trick." - http://hammeroftruth.com/2004...
But if[i] this [/i]doesn't fill you with joy, then consider what[i] more [/i]is being done to prisoners at Abu Ghraib:
[u][b]Company fed rotten food to Abu Ghraib prisoners, sparking rebellion[/b][/u]
To those Iraqi detainees whom guards and interrogators did not humiliate or torture last winter -- along with those who they did -- a private military contractor fed spoilt and rancid meals laden with dirt and bugs, according to an article published by CorpWatch, an organization that investigates war profiteering.
Army Major David Dinenna, a military policeman stationed at the facility, spent part of last fall trying to remedy the food situation, which he described to his superiors in an email as a "contract meals disaster" that led to prisoners falling violently ill after meals. A military report quoted by CorpWatch concluded that the "deplorable food and living conditions" had in fact led to a prisoner uprising the Army had originally blamed on a "mass" escape attempt.
The contract company blamed for the bad food is identified as a small, Qatar-based firm called American Service Center.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TheNewsStandard, http://newstandardnews.net/co...
Project for the OLD American Century, http://www.oldamericancentury...
[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]
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| ---> Bush's 2004 Whitehouse Christmas Card ... I Got Mine Early!!! |
| 12.18.04 (6:05 am) [edit] |
I got mine early:
"If love and peace doesn’t fill your heart, 50,000 volts should do the trick." - http://hammeroftruth.com/2004...
But if[i] this [/i]doesn't fill you with joy, then consider what[i] more [/i]is being done to prisoners at Abu Ghraib:
[u][b]Company fed rotten food to Abu Ghraib prisoners, sparking rebellion[/b][/u]
To those Iraqi detainees whom guards and interrogators did not humiliate or torture last winter -- along with those who they did -- a private military contractor fed spoilt and rancid meals laden with dirt and bugs, according to an article published by CorpWatch, an organization that investigates war profiteering.
Army Major David Dinenna, a military policeman stationed at the facility, spent part of last fall trying to remedy the food situation, which he described to his superiors in an email as a "contract meals disaster" that led to prisoners falling violently ill after meals. A military report quoted by CorpWatch concluded that the "deplorable food and living conditions" had in fact led to a prisoner uprising the Army had originally blamed on a "mass" escape attempt.
The contract company blamed for the bad food is identified as a small, Qatar-based firm called American Service Center.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TheNewsStandard, http://newstandardnews.net/co...
Project for the OLD American Century, http://www.oldamericancentury...
[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]
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| ---> Bush's 2004 Whitehouse Christmas Card ... I Got Mine Early!!! |
| 12.18.04 (6:02 am) [edit] |
I got mine early:
"If love and peace doesn’t fill your heart, 50,000 volts should do the trick." - http://hammeroftruth.com/2004...
But if[i] this [/i]doesn't fill you with joy, then consider what[i] more [/i]is being done to prisoners at Abu Ghraib:
[u][b]Company fed rotten food to Abu Ghraib prisoners, sparking rebellion[/b][/u]
To those Iraqi detainees whom guards and interrogators did not humiliate or torture last winter -- along with those who they did -- a private military contractor fed spoilt and rancid meals laden with dirt and bugs, according to an article published by CorpWatch, an organization that investigates war profiteering.
Army Major David Dinenna, a military policeman stationed at the facility, spent part of last fall trying to remedy the food situation, which he described to his superiors in an email as a "contract meals disaster" that led to prisoners falling violently ill after meals. A military report quoted by CorpWatch concluded that the "deplorable food and living conditions" had in fact led to a prisoner uprising the Army had originally blamed on a "mass" escape attempt.
The contract company blamed for the bad food is identified as a small, Qatar-based firm called American Service Center.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TheNewsStandard, http://newstandardnews.net/co...
Project for the OLD American Century, http://www.oldamericancentury...
[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]
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| ---> Bush's 2004 Whitehouse Christmas Card ... I Got Mine Early!!! |
| 12.18.04 (6:02 am) [edit] |
I got mine early:
"If love and peace doesn’t fill your heart, 50,000 volts should do the trick." - http://hammeroftruth.com/2004...
But if[i] this [/i]doesn't fill you with joy, then consider what[i] more [/i]is being done to prisoners at Abu Ghraib:
[u][b]Company fed rotten food to Abu Ghraib prisoners, sparking rebellion[/b][/u]
To those Iraqi detainees whom guards and interrogators did not humiliate or torture last winter -- along with those who they did -- a private military contractor fed spoilt and rancid meals laden with dirt and bugs, according to an article published by CorpWatch, an organization that investigates war profiteering.
Army Major David Dinenna, a military policeman stationed at the facility, spent part of last fall trying to remedy the food situation, which he described to his superiors in an email as a "contract meals disaster" that led to prisoners falling violently ill after meals. A military report quoted by CorpWatch concluded that the "deplorable food and living conditions" had in fact led to a prisoner uprising the Army had originally blamed on a "mass" escape attempt.
The contract company blamed for the bad food is identified as a small, Qatar-based firm called American Service Center.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TheNewsStandard, http://newstandardnews.net/co...
Project for the OLD American Century, http://www.oldamericancentury...
[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]
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| ---> This Asshole Sure As Hell Ain't Emulating Jesus Christ!!! |
| 12.16.04 (2:31 pm) [edit] |
[b]Bush is an asshole, who sure as hell [i]ain't [/i]emulating Jesus Christ!!![/b]
Michael Leavitt, President Bush (news - web sites)'s choice to be secretary of Health and Human Services (news - web sites), may "have" to cut billions of dollars from the government's mammoth health programs for the elderly, poor and disabled to pare the budget deficit. [No cuts are planned for the skyrocketing Military Industrial Complex; rapacious corporations making a fortune from scams including the crooked missile "defense" boondoggles; insane tax cuts for the rich; and, weapons-[i]n[/i]-arms build-up and warfare to make the Bush Crime Family & Halliburton [i]et. al.[/i] filthy rich!]
The Medicare and Medicaid programs, consuming nearly $500 billion a year and growing quickly, could be vulnerable in the context of last year's $413 billion budget deficit, the ongoing war in Iraq (news - web sites), costly domestic security commitments and administration plans to revamp Social Security (news - web sites) without raising taxes.
Bush selected Leavitt, the Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites) chief, on Monday, filling one of the last two openings in his second-term Cabinet. Bush praised Leavitt as a "fine executive" and "a man of great compassion ... an ideal choice to lead one of the largest departments of the United States government."
Leavitt, Utah's governor for 11 years before joining the administration in late 2003, would succeed Tommy Thompson if confirmed by the Senate.
Before becoming governor, he was chief operating officer of the Leavitt Group, a family insurance firm in which he maintains an investment worth between $5 million and $25 million, according to a financial disclosure report he filed in 2003.
The company owns 100 independent insurance agencies that sell supplemental Medicare policies, among other insurance products, according to company literature.
The Medigap policies account for less than 1 percent of company revenues, said Dane Leavitt, the president and CEO. He is Michael Leavitt's brother.
"I have never had a discussion with him on any of those topics and I don't anticipate having one," Dane Leavitt said.
Michael Leavitt also has small stakes in pharmaceutical makers Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co., and in medical equipment maker Medtronic Inc. Each investment was worth less than $15,000, according to the 2003 disclosure.
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said, "We're confident that Gov. Leavitt will take the necessary steps to avoid any conflicts of interest."
Meanwhile, John Walters, the national drug policy director, plans to stay in his post, White House officials said.
Bush still must name a new head of the Homeland Security Department to take the place of Bernard Kerik, who abruptly withdrew Friday night, citing immigration problems with a family housekeeper.
"He himself said he should have brought it to our attention sooner," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "Commissioner Kerik pointed out that this was a mistake."
After failing to disclose the nanny problem during an initial screening, Kerik acknowledged it during a subsequent vetting phase as he filled out a clearance form, McClellan said.
Among the names mentioned as possible candidates for the post are Asa Hutchinson, the department's undersecretary for transportation and border security; White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend; White House deputy chief of staff for operations Joseph Hagin, and Robert Bonner, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Potential successors to Leavitt at EPA include Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, who was a leading candidate before Leavitt's appointment; Douglas H. Benevento, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health (news - web sites) and Environment; David Struhs, head of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection under Gov. Jeb Bush, and a brother-in-law to Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, and Barry McBee, former chairman of the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission.
At Monday's White House announcement, Leavitt, 53, thanked Bush for showing confidence in him, though he also said, "I feel a real sense of understandable regret" about leaving EPA.
He said the Department of Health and Human Services (news - web sites) plays a vital part in the lives of every American.
"I look forward ... to the implementation of the Medicare prescription drug program in 2006, medical liability reform and finding ways to reduce the cost of health care," Leavitt said.
Leavitt also has experience with the Medicaid program from his time as Utah governor. The Bush administration granted Utah a rules waiver that Leavitt said Monday resulted in health insurance for thousands of working families. Critics have said the waivers have produced minimal increases in Medicaid enrollment, but have cut benefits and increased costs to others who receive Medicaid.
The HHS secretary also oversees the Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web sites), the National Institutes of Health (news - web sites) and the Indian Health Service. In all, the agency has a budget of more than $500 billion and 67,000 employees.
If Congress undertakes serious budget cutting next year, Medicare and Medicaid would be unlikely to escape, senior Republican congressional aides said last week.
Ron Pollack, executive director of the consumer group Families USA and an administration critic, said the costs of Bush's second- term agenda coupled with his opposition to tax increases "points to Medicaid potentially taking a very large hit."
Dr. Mark McClellan, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had been a leading candidate for the HHS job. He is the brother of the White House spokesman.
But Mark McClellan is overseeing the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, which takes full effect in 2006, and Bush was said to have been reluctant to take him from his post.
Leavitt shares Bush's enthusiasm for market-based approaches to fixing problems. Former HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, a Democrat, called him "a very skillful administrator and manager."
Leavit, a Mormon and father of five, moved to Washington in the past year with his wife, Jacalyn, and a son who is in high school. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
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| ---> American Democracy Hangs by a Thread in Ohio |
| 12.16.04 (7:08 am) [edit] |
As the whole world watches, American democracy may be hanging by a thread in Ohio.
Monday, December 13, saw a triple play that will live in electoral infamy. But every new day brings still more stunning revelations -- this time from Toledo -- of vote theft and fraud and a towering wall of resistance and sabotage against a fair recount of the votes that allegedly gave George W. Bush four more years in the White House.
Three major events made December 13 a monument to electoral theft: a lawsuit filed in the morning at the Ohio State Supreme Court demanding a recount of all Ohio ballots; a Congressional hearing held in Columbus City Council chambers filled with angry, high-profile testimony of vote fraud and disenfranchisement and the illegal sabotaging of a recount; and then, at noon, a block away at the statehouse, the vote of Ohio's twenty illegitimate electors designating their choice of George W. Bush to be president.
On Tuesday, demonstrators staged the latest in a long string of protests at the statehouse. And at an evening hearing in Toledo, stunning new sworn testimony revealed that Diebold technicians have tainted official voting machines before a recount could be done, irrevocably compromising the process.
The December 13 lawsuit was filed in the presence of Rev. Jesse Jackson, who compared it to the attempts to win voting rights for African-American citizens in the era of Dr. Martin Luther King.
The suit seeks to overturn Ohio's presidential vote. It asked an immediate court order to stop Republican presidential electors from meeting and voting for George W. Bush.
Republican election officials prevented a vote count from starting until that very morning. Supervised by Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, co-chair of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Ohio simply ignored all challenges to the vote count and all requests for a recount. Within hours the Bush electors cast their votes, even though the bitterly contested ballots that allegedly gave them standing as electors had not been recounted.
In other words, while every legal remedy to determine who won Ohio’s presidential election was being pursued, the state’s Republican political machine blocked the rights of those seeking to verify the vote.
“Today, in the state capital of Ohio, we are witnessing a crime against democracy, a crime against the right to vote and a crime against the Constitution,” said John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute and attorney for the Green and Libertarian Parties in the recount. Ohio Republicans have " no right to convene a meeting of the presidential electors prior to the completion of the recount,” he said.
Bonifaz’s remarks came amidst testimony at the second field hearing on the 2004 election held by Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Last week in Washington, the committee opened what it said would be the first in an ongoing series of investigations into what happened on Election Day, when exit polls showed John Kerry heading toward victory but after midnight the returns shifted and network television declared Bush the victor.
“At the outset of this hearing, I would like to announce that 10 members of Congress, including myself, have written to (Ohio) Gov. Taft asking him to either delay or treat as provisional the vote of Ohio’s presidential electors,” Rep. John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee said at the outset. “The closer we get to Columbus and the Ohio presidential election, the worse it looks. Each and every day it becomes increasingly clear that the Republican power structure in this state is acting as if it has something to hide.”
Ironically, Democratic State Senator Ray Miller of Columbus had secured the North Hearing Room in the statehouse. But Republicans cancelled that, and forced the gathering to convene at city hall, a block away.
Thus Ohio Republicans snubbed Conyers and Reps. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH), Ted Strickland (D-OH), Jerold Nadler (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA) as well as Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr (D-IL).
Packed to overflowing, the nearly four hour hearing hosted new disclosures about election irregularities and fraud on Nov. 2, while also pursuing remedies to account for the vote and delay the Electoral College certification of the president.
Prime target in the hearings was GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who supervised the state's elections while also serving as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Calls for Blackwell's removal were constantly repeated.
Conyers noted that Blackwell has ordered local election boards to not allow citizens to review poll registers of voters, a lockdown that is an apparent violation of Ohio state law.
David Cobb, the Green Party presidential candidate, told the panel that he had confirmed reports that an employee of one electronic voting machine manufacturer had come to one county election office and had taken apart the county tabulator of voting machine results, apparently replacing parts, before that county had conducted its recount. Such an action would taint any recount. “This could be a serious matter,” Conyers replied, asking Cobb to meet privately with committee staff to further investigate the matter.
Rev. Jesse Jackson told the congressmen that over the weekend he had spoken to John Kerry, who has since sent a letter to each of the state’s 88 county election boards, saying he supported three areas of inquiry in the recount. Jackson said Kerry wanted “forensic computer experts” to examine voting machines, especially those using optical scan technology, because in other states, notably New Mexico, Bush had won all the precincts with that voting system in place. Kerry also wanted to examine 92,000 ballots that recorded no vote for president, and 155,000 provisional ballots that were rejected.
But early responses from the counties to Freedom of Information Act requests for their voting records indicate such an effort may already have been sabotaged. Shelby County officials have admitted to discarding key election data. One county referred requesters to the software company that programmed the county's voting machines, saying the company's permission would be required for access to a recount, as the code is proprietary.
New reports of voter suppression and fraud corroborated the Supreme Court filing, which presented a detailed analysis of where votes were incorrectly counted for Bush instead of Kerry. An election challenge must prove the wrong presidential candidate was declared the winner. The challenge lawsuit asks the Ohio Supreme Court to declare Kerry the victor. Numerous witnesses offered testimony to support that conclusion.
A second brief was also filed Monday, seeking a temporary restraining order to block Republican presidential electors from meeting until the recount was done and the challenge was litigated. It focused on “overwhelming statistical evidence” that pointed to “statewide fraud allegedly conducted at the direction of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.”
The TRO filing was primarily based on national and statewide exit poll data, which was the extensive, non-partisan polling done by a consortium of the nation’s major news organizations. Expert affidavits accompanying the brief said an analysis of exit poll data found that the final vote tallies in all but the most contested battleground states mirrored the exit poll’s predictions. The experts said it was unlikely the exit polls could be so accurate in some states while significantly wrong in others. They said election fraud was the only plausible explanation for the discrepancy.
The TRO filing identified exactly when they believe the fraud occurred – at about 12.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 3. At that time of night, Ohio’s final voting returns were being tabulated at regional and county offices. It was about this time that the Ohio exit poll data – posted on websites such as CNN – put Bush ahead of Kerry, even though the exit polls expected Kerry to win with 52.1 percent of the vote.
What experts like Steven Freeman, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania say happened was at this time the raw poll data, showing Kerry ahead, was replaced online and on television by “calibrated” data. This adjusted data was intended to reflect the total vote counts, once the results came in from late-reporting precincts – if it didn’t match the raw exit poll results. Ohio’s results didn’t match, and the likely reason is because across the state, in a variety of ways, the reported vote totals were being manipulated. If Bush votes were added to the total, or votes were taken away from Kerry, this shift was first noticed at about 12:30 a.m., when the networks started to report ‘calibrated’ figures, not the raw data.
“The media has largely ignored this discrepancy (although the Blogosphere has been abuzz), suggesting the polls were either flawed, within normal sampling error, or could otherwise be easily explained away,” Freeman wrote in an article, cited in the TRO filing. Instead, it simply reported Bush’s final tally as 51 percent to Kerry’s final tally of 48.5 percent.
As Rev. Jackson and election attorneys explained to the packed hearing, the election challenge suit describes how votes were added to Bush’s total, or in many cases, taken away from Kerry – because they were added to the totals of other Democratic candidates further down the ballot.
The Democrat whose totals were most likely to have been boosted by this kind of ‘vote-shifting’ was C. Ellen Connally, an African-American candidate for Ohio Chief Justice, who was little-known and outspent in the southern part of the state, the challenge complaint says. Because Secretary Blackwell has obstructed most efforts to examine ballots and poll records, it has been almost impossible to investigate and explain anomalies like Connally’s strong showing in the southern part of the state.
"What are they hiding?" asked Rev. Jackson. One after the other, witnesses argued that by making a recount virtually impossible, Blackwell has offered firm indication that the Republicans have something to hide.
"The secrecy of the ballot has been converted to the secrecy of the vote count," added Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy. Now based in Massachusetts, the legendary Dugger is founder of the Texas Observer. He said when Texas Republicans heard complaints that voting machines could be corrupted, "they knew that had found what they were looking for." Voting machines, he said, are the "most anti-democratic technology ever employed."
Dr. Ron Baiman, a statistician from the University of Illinois, Chicago, confirmed that the odds on vote counts diverting from exit polls as they did the night of November 2 were on the order of magnitude of millions to one. Baiman told freepress.org that the odds of the exit polls being wrong in the key battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio alone were "155,000,000 to one."
Dr. Norman Robbins of Cleveland testified that over 10,000 voters in Cuyahoga County alone were disenfranchised by various means, and that nearly all were "youth, poor and minorities."
In one Cleveland ward, he said, 51% of the provisional votes cast were thrown in the trash, virtually all of them from African-Americans.
Eve Roberson, a former election official from Santa Rosa, California, testified that while working as observer at precinct 354 in Wilberforce, home of Central State University, she witnessed conscious fraud aimed at a student body that went 95% for Kerry. Election officials used an inconsistent, discriminatory set of demands for Wilberforce students to register as opposed to those used in white precincts in Greene County.
Roberson and others also testified that after the election they discovered ballots sitting open, on unguarded tables where manipulation and random disposal could easily have occurred. It was, she said "a serious breech" of election security.
Riveting testimony followed from Clinton Curtis, a Tallahassee-based computer programmer who told the hearing he had been hired by US Rep Tom Feeney, then Speaker of the Florida House, to write a program that would conceal the theft of an election. Curtis said Feeney was then a lobbyist for a major computer company as well as Speaker. Curtis said Feeney wanted a program that could use voting machines to "flip an election" without being detected. Curtis said he wrote a prototype program, then quit.
Under questioning Curtis said a program could be written that would protect the security of voting machines, but that it had not been deployed in Ohio. He said it would be a simple matter, involving perhaps 100 lines of code and some simple switches, to turn an entire election.
"One person in a simple tab machine can affect thousands of votes," Curtis testified. "There is absolutely no assurance of anything on those machines."
Given what he had seen, he said, the Ohio election was "probably hacked."
The last hour of the Columbus hearing was filled with testimony from local voters who were harassed, intimidated and made to stand in long lines to cast votes that may well have been pitched in the trash.
Similar sworn testimony surfaced Tuesday at a citizens' hearing in Toledo. Among other things eye witnesses confirmed that a Diebold programming team entered the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of Elections to "reprogram" the opti-scan voting machines on the day the recount began.
Catherine Buchanan, a Democratic Party observer, testified that one of the sample precincts chosen as a control for the recount---Sylvania Precinct 3---had the programming card reprogrammed prior to the ballot testing. While the observers watched, nearly seven out of fifteen test ballots were rejected at least three times before the machine would read them.
Janet Albright told hearing officers she had been voting at the same Lucas County polling place for fourteen years but that the polling place was changed this year without notification to a station farther away. Machines throughout Lucas County malfunctioned in tests through the week prior to the election, and on election day. Thousands of Ohioans---primarily in Democratic precincts--thus lost their right to vote.
During the Lucas County reprogramming, election observers were shocked when they were denied the right to look at sheets that had target test results on them, or the reprogramming of the opti-scan machines used in the recount. Diebold-leased machines and software malfunctioned in the weeks prior to the election.
That echoed similar testimony from Green Party candidate David Cobb in the Columbus hearing. Witnesses said an unauthorized programmer from the Triad Corporation dismantled at least one voting machine in rural Hocking County. Conyers referred to the incident as "pretty outrageous" and asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a county prosecutor, to investigate "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering" in Hocking and perhaps several other Ohio counties.
Brett Rapp, president of Triad, told the [i]New York Times [/i]it might be unusual to do what was done in Hocking County, but that Triad was involved in voting machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties.
The Hocking County investigation was spurred in particular by testimony Sherole Eaton, the deputy elections director. Such testimony will be transcribed and presented at www.freepress.org as it becomes available. But in the interim the battle of Ohio rages on, machine by machine and hearing by hearing. Because the recount process has been so severely tainted, the call for a revote is growing.
On January 6, Congress is scheduled to vote on whether or not to approve the tally of electors, including Ohio's tainted 20 votes. Conyers and the other US Representatives present made it clear more public hearings will be held before then.
In 2001, a host of US Representatives, most from the Black Caucus, asked that the tainted Bush electors be challenged. This year at least 14 members of the House of Representatives will demand an immediate "investigation of the efficacy of the voting machines and new technologies used in 2004 election, how election officials responded to the difficulties they encountered, and what we can do in the future to improve our elections systems and administration."
Their action requires the consent of a single Senator, which did not come in 2001. As the battle to save democracy rages in Ohio and elsewhere, January, 2005, could be very different.
[b]Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of the upcoming OHIO'S STOLEN ELECTION: VOICES OF THE DISENFRANCHISED, 2004 (http://freepress.org).[/b] - http://www.commondreams.org/h...
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| ---> American Democracy Hangs by a Thread in Ohio |
| 12.16.04 (7:08 am) [edit] |
As the whole world watches, American democracy may be hanging by a thread in Ohio.
Monday, December 13, saw a triple play that will live in electoral infamy. But every new day brings still more stunning revelations -- this time from Toledo -- of vote theft and fraud and a towering wall of resistance and sabotage against a fair recount of the votes that allegedly gave George W. Bush four more years in the White House.
Three major events made December 13 a monument to electoral theft: a lawsuit filed in the morning at the Ohio State Supreme Court demanding a recount of all Ohio ballots; a Congressional hearing held in Columbus City Council chambers filled with angry, high-profile testimony of vote fraud and disenfranchisement and the illegal sabotaging of a recount; and then, at noon, a block away at the statehouse, the vote of Ohio's twenty illegitimate electors designating their choice of George W. Bush to be president.
On Tuesday, demonstrators staged the latest in a long string of protests at the statehouse. And at an evening hearing in Toledo, stunning new sworn testimony revealed that Diebold technicians have tainted official voting machines before a recount could be done, irrevocably compromising the process.
The December 13 lawsuit was filed in the presence of Rev. Jesse Jackson, who compared it to the attempts to win voting rights for African-American citizens in the era of Dr. Martin Luther King.
The suit seeks to overturn Ohio's presidential vote. It asked an immediate court order to stop Republican presidential electors from meeting and voting for George W. Bush.
Republican election officials prevented a vote count from starting until that very morning. Supervised by Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, co-chair of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Ohio simply ignored all challenges to the vote count and all requests for a recount. Within hours the Bush electors cast their votes, even though the bitterly contested ballots that allegedly gave them standing as electors had not been recounted.
In other words, while every legal remedy to determine who won Ohio’s presidential election was being pursued, the state’s Republican political machine blocked the rights of those seeking to verify the vote.
“Today, in the state capital of Ohio, we are witnessing a crime against democracy, a crime against the right to vote and a crime against the Constitution,” said John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute and attorney for the Green and Libertarian Parties in the recount. Ohio Republicans have " no right to convene a meeting of the presidential electors prior to the completion of the recount,” he said.
Bonifaz’s remarks came amidst testimony at the second field hearing on the 2004 election held by Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Last week in Washington, the committee opened what it said would be the first in an ongoing series of investigations into what happened on Election Day, when exit polls showed John Kerry heading toward victory but after midnight the returns shifted and network television declared Bush the victor.
“At the outset of this hearing, I would like to announce that 10 members of Congress, including myself, have written to (Ohio) Gov. Taft asking him to either delay or treat as provisional the vote of Ohio’s presidential electors,” Rep. John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee said at the outset. “The closer we get to Columbus and the Ohio presidential election, the worse it looks. Each and every day it becomes increasingly clear that the Republican power structure in this state is acting as if it has something to hide.”
Ironically, Democratic State Senator Ray Miller of Columbus had secured the North Hearing Room in the statehouse. But Republicans cancelled that, and forced the gathering to convene at city hall, a block away.
Thus Ohio Republicans snubbed Conyers and Reps. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH), Ted Strickland (D-OH), Jerold Nadler (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA) as well as Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr (D-IL).
Packed to overflowing, the nearly four hour hearing hosted new disclosures about election irregularities and fraud on Nov. 2, while also pursuing remedies to account for the vote and delay the Electoral College certification of the president.
Prime target in the hearings was GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who supervised the state's elections while also serving as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Calls for Blackwell's removal were constantly repeated.
Conyers noted that Blackwell has ordered local election boards to not allow citizens to review poll registers of voters, a lockdown that is an apparent violation of Ohio state law.
David Cobb, the Green Party presidential candidate, told the panel that he had confirmed reports that an employee of one electronic voting machine manufacturer had come to one county election office and had taken apart the county tabulator of voting machine results, apparently replacing parts, before that county had conducted its recount. Such an action would taint any recount. “This could be a serious matter,” Conyers replied, asking Cobb to meet privately with committee staff to further investigate the matter.
Rev. Jesse Jackson told the congressmen that over the weekend he had spoken to John Kerry, who has since sent a letter to each of the state’s 88 county election boards, saying he supported three areas of inquiry in the recount. Jackson said Kerry wanted “forensic computer experts” to examine voting machines, especially those using optical scan technology, because in other states, notably New Mexico, Bush had won all the precincts with that voting system in place. Kerry also wanted to examine 92,000 ballots that recorded no vote for president, and 155,000 provisional ballots that were rejected.
But early responses from the counties to Freedom of Information Act requests for their voting records indicate such an effort may already have been sabotaged. Shelby County officials have admitted to discarding key election data. One county referred requesters to the software company that programmed the county's voting machines, saying the company's permission would be required for access to a recount, as the code is proprietary.
New reports of voter suppression and fraud corroborated the Supreme Court filing, which presented a detailed analysis of where votes were incorrectly counted for Bush instead of Kerry. An election challenge must prove the wrong presidential candidate was declared the winner. The challenge lawsuit asks the Ohio Supreme Court to declare Kerry the victor. Numerous witnesses offered testimony to support that conclusion.
A second brief was also filed Monday, seeking a temporary restraining order to block Republican presidential electors from meeting until the recount was done and the challenge was litigated. It focused on “overwhelming statistical evidence” that pointed to “statewide fraud allegedly conducted at the direction of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.”
The TRO filing was primarily based on national and statewide exit poll data, which was the extensive, non-partisan polling done by a consortium of the nation’s major news organizations. Expert affidavits accompanying the brief said an analysis of exit poll data found that the final vote tallies in all but the most contested battleground states mirrored the exit poll’s predictions. The experts said it was unlikely the exit polls could be so accurate in some states while significantly wrong in others. They said election fraud was the only plausible explanation for the discrepancy.
The TRO filing identified exactly when they believe the fraud occurred – at about 12.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 3. At that time of night, Ohio’s final voting returns were being tabulated at regional and county offices. It was about this time that the Ohio exit poll data – posted on websites such as CNN – put Bush ahead of Kerry, even though the exit polls expected Kerry to win with 52.1 percent of the vote.
What experts like Steven Freeman, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania say happened was at this time the raw poll data, showing Kerry ahead, was replaced online and on television by “calibrated” data. This adjusted data was intended to reflect the total vote counts, once the results came in from late-reporting precincts – if it didn’t match the raw exit poll results. Ohio’s results didn’t match, and the likely reason is because across the state, in a variety of ways, the reported vote totals were being manipulated. If Bush votes were added to the total, or votes were taken away from Kerry, this shift was first noticed at about 12:30 a.m., when the networks started to report ‘calibrated’ figures, not the raw data.
“The media has largely ignored this discrepancy (although the Blogosphere has been abuzz), suggesting the polls were either flawed, within normal sampling error, or could otherwise be easily explained away,” Freeman wrote in an article, cited in the TRO filing. Instead, it simply reported Bush’s final tally as 51 percent to Kerry’s final tally of 48.5 percent.
As Rev. Jackson and election attorneys explained to the packed hearing, the election challenge suit describes how votes were added to Bush’s total, or in many cases, taken away from Kerry – because they were added to the totals of other Democratic candidates further down the ballot.
The Democrat whose totals were most likely to have been boosted by this kind of ‘vote-shifting’ was C. Ellen Connally, an African-American candidate for Ohio Chief Justice, who was little-known and outspent in the southern part of the state, the challenge complaint says. Because Secretary Blackwell has obstructed most efforts to examine ballots and poll records, it has been almost impossible to investigate and explain anomalies like Connally’s strong showing in the southern part of the state.
"What are they hiding?" asked Rev. Jackson. One after the other, witnesses argued that by making a recount virtually impossible, Blackwell has offered firm indication that the Republicans have something to hide.
"The secrecy of the ballot has been converted to the secrecy of the vote count," added Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy. Now based in Massachusetts, the legendary Dugger is founder of the Texas Observer. He said when Texas Republicans heard complaints that voting machines could be corrupted, "they knew that had found what they were looking for." Voting machines, he said, are the "most anti-democratic technology ever employed."
Dr. Ron Baiman, a statistician from the University of Illinois, Chicago, confirmed that the odds on vote counts diverting from exit polls as they did the night of November 2 were on the order of magnitude of millions to one. Baiman told freepress.org that the odds of the exit polls being wrong in the key battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio alone were "155,000,000 to one."
Dr. Norman Robbins of Cleveland testified that over 10,000 voters in Cuyahoga County alone were disenfranchised by various means, and that nearly all were "youth, poor and minorities."
In one Cleveland ward, he said, 51% of the provisional votes cast were thrown in the trash, virtually all of them from African-Americans.
Eve Roberson, a former election official from Santa Rosa, California, testified that while working as observer at precinct 354 in Wilberforce, home of Central State University, she witnessed conscious fraud aimed at a student body that went 95% for Kerry. Election officials used an inconsistent, discriminatory set of demands for Wilberforce students to register as opposed to those used in white precincts in Greene County.
Roberson and others also testified that after the election they discovered ballots sitting open, on unguarded tables where manipulation and random disposal could easily have occurred. It was, she said "a serious breech" of election security.
Riveting testimony followed from Clinton Curtis, a Tallahassee-based computer programmer who told the hearing he had been hired by US Rep Tom Feeney, then Speaker of the Florida House, to write a program that would conceal the theft of an election. Curtis said Feeney was then a lobbyist for a major computer company as well as Speaker. Curtis said Feeney wanted a program that could use voting machines to "flip an election" without being detected. Curtis said he wrote a prototype program, then quit.
Under questioning Curtis said a program could be written that would protect the security of voting machines, but that it had not been deployed in Ohio. He said it would be a simple matter, involving perhaps 100 lines of code and some simple switches, to turn an entire election.
"One person in a simple tab machine can affect thousands of votes," Curtis testified. "There is absolutely no assurance of anything on those machines."
Given what he had seen, he said, the Ohio election was "probably hacked."
The last hour of the Columbus hearing was filled with testimony from local voters who were harassed, intimidated and made to stand in long lines to cast votes that may well have been pitched in the trash.
Similar sworn testimony surfaced Tuesday at a citizens' hearing in Toledo. Among other things eye witnesses confirmed that a Diebold programming team entered the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of Elections to "reprogram" the opti-scan voting machines on the day the recount began.
Catherine Buchanan, a Democratic Party observer, testified that one of the sample precincts chosen as a control for the recount---Sylvania Precinct 3---had the programming card reprogrammed prior to the ballot testing. While the observers watched, nearly seven out of fifteen test ballots were rejected at least three times before the machine would read them.
Janet Albright told hearing officers she had been voting at the same Lucas County polling place for fourteen years but that the polling place was changed this year without notification to a station farther away. Machines throughout Lucas County malfunctioned in tests through the week prior to the election, and on election day. Thousands of Ohioans---primarily in Democratic precincts--thus lost their right to vote.
During the Lucas County reprogramming, election observers were shocked when they were denied the right to look at sheets that had target test results on them, or the reprogramming of the opti-scan machines used in the recount. Diebold-leased machines and software malfunctioned in the weeks prior to the election.
That echoed similar testimony from Green Party candidate David Cobb in the Columbus hearing. Witnesses said an unauthorized programmer from the Triad Corporation dismantled at least one voting machine in rural Hocking County. Conyers referred to the incident as "pretty outrageous" and asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a county prosecutor, to investigate "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering" in Hocking and perhaps several other Ohio counties.
Brett Rapp, president of Triad, told the [i]New York Times [/i]it might be unusual to do what was done in Hocking County, but that Triad was involved in voting machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties.
The Hocking County investigation was spurred in particular by testimony Sherole Eaton, the deputy elections director. Such testimony will be transcribed and presented at www.freepress.org as it becomes available. But in the interim the battle of Ohio rages on, machine by machine and hearing by hearing. Because the recount process has been so severely tainted, the call for a revote is growing.
On January 6, Congress is scheduled to vote on whether or not to approve the tally of electors, including Ohio's tainted 20 votes. Conyers and the other US Representatives present made it clear more public hearings will be held before then.
In 2001, a host of US Representatives, most from the Black Caucus, asked that the tainted Bush electors be challenged. This year at least 14 members of the House of Representatives will demand an immediate "investigation of the efficacy of the voting machines and new technologies used in 2004 election, how election officials responded to the difficulties they encountered, and what we can do in the future to improve our elections systems and administration."
Their action requires the consent of a single Senator, which did not come in 2001. As the battle to save democracy rages in Ohio and elsewhere, January, 2005, could be very different.
[b]Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of the upcoming OHIO'S STOLEN ELECTION: VOICES OF THE DISENFRANCHISED, 2004 (http://freepress.org).[/b] - http://www.commondreams.org/h...
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| ---> Center for Justice & Democracy: "Bush Chooses Death Over Life" |
| 12.16.04 (7:01 am) [edit] |
For many Americans, reforming our health care system is a matter of life or death. The Bush Administration has decided to side with death and profits.
The medical malpractice legislation that Bush advocated at today’s Economic Summit - the Administration’s solution to this country’s vast health care problems - would take away legal protections that have saved thousands of lives. These laws have protected us from dangerous and defective drugs and medical devices like Vioxx, the Dalkon Shield and Copper-7 IUDs, an antibiotic that caused cancer, oral contraceptives that caused life-threatening injuries, a pregnancy test that led to false-positives for cancer, and many others (see LIFESAVERS: CJ&D's Guide to Lawsuits that Protect Us All, http://centerjd.org.).
Without these laws in place, drugs like Vioxx would still be sold and people would be hurt or killed. The Administration’s plan will result in Americans dying so that the drug companies can make even more money.
President Bush should stop putting corporate profits and special interests before the lives of average Americans, who will die under his proposals.
For further information, contact the Center for Justice & Democracy, http://centerjd.org.
[b]CONTACT: [/b]Center for Justice & Democracy - http://centerjd.org/
Joanne Doroshow, Laurie Beacham; 212-267-2801
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| ---> Center for Justice & Democracy: "Bush Chooses Death Over Life" |
| 12.16.04 (7:00 am) [edit] |
For many Americans, reforming our health care system is a matter of life or death. The Bush Administration has decided to side with death and profits.
The medical malpractice legislation that Bush advocated at today’s Economic Summit - the Administration’s solution to this country’s vast health care problems - would take away legal protections that have saved thousands of lives. These laws have protected us from dangerous and defective drugs and medical devices like Vioxx, the Dalkon Shield and Copper-7 IUDs, an antibiotic that caused cancer, oral contraceptives that caused life-threatening injuries, a pregnancy test that led to false-positives for cancer, and many others (see LIFESAVERS: CJ&D's Guide to Lawsuits that Protect Us All, http://centerjd.org.).
Without these laws in place, drugs like Vioxx would still be sold and people would be hurt or killed. The Administration’s plan will result in Americans dying so that the drug companies can make even more money.
President Bush should stop putting corporate profits and special interests before the lives of average Americans, who will die under his proposals.
For further information, contact the Center for Justice & Democracy, http://centerjd.org.
[b]CONTACT: [/b]Center for Justice & Democracy - http://centerjd.org/
Joanne Doroshow, Laurie Beacham; 212-267-2801
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| ---> Center for Justice & Democracy: "Bush Chooses Death Over Life" |
| 12.16.04 (6:59 am) [edit] |
For many Americans, reforming our health care system is a matter of life or death. The Bush Administration has decided to side with death and profits.
The medical malpractice legislation that Bush advocated at today’s Economic Summit - the Administration’s solution to this country’s vast health care problems - would take away legal protections that have saved thousands of lives. These laws have protected us from dangerous and defective drugs and medical devices like Vioxx, the Dalkon Shield and Copper-7 IUDs, an antibiotic that caused cancer, oral contraceptives that caused life-threatening injuries, a pregnancy test that led to false-positives for cancer, and many others (see LIFESAVERS: CJ&D's Guide to Lawsuits that Protect Us All, http://centerjd.org.).
Without these laws in place, drugs like Vioxx would still be sold and people would be hurt or killed. The Administration’s plan will result in Americans dying so that the drug companies can make even more money.
President Bush should stop putting corporate profits and special interests before the lives of average Americans, who will die under his proposals.
For further information, contact the Center for Justice & Democracy, http://centerjd.org.
[b]CONTACT: [/b]Center for Justice & Democracy - http://centerjd.org/
Joanne Doroshow, Laurie Beacham; 212-267-2801
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| ---> Center for Justice & Democracy: "Bush Chooses Death Over Life" |
| 12.16.04 (6:57 am) [edit] |
For many Americans, reforming our health care system is a matter of life or death. The Bush Administration has decided to side with death and profits.
The medical malpractice legislation that Bush advocated at today’s Economic Summit - the Administration’s solution to this country’s vast health care problems - would take away legal protections that have saved thousands of lives. These laws have protected us from dangerous and defective drugs and medical devices like Vioxx, the Dalkon Shield and Copper-7 IUDs, an antibiotic that caused cancer, oral contraceptives that caused life-threatening injuries, a pregnancy test that led to false-positives for cancer, and many others (see LIFESAVERS: CJ&D's Guide to Lawsuits that Protect Us All, http://centerjd.org.).
Without these laws in place, drugs like Vioxx would still be sold and people would be hurt or killed. The Administration’s plan will result in Americans dying so that the drug companies can make even more money.
President Bush should stop putting corporate profits and special interests before the lives of average Americans, who will die under his proposals.
For further information, contact the Center for Justice & Democracy, http://centerjd.org.
[b]CONTACT: [/b]Center for Justice & Democracy - http://centerjd.org/
Joanne Doroshow, Laurie Beacham; 212-267-2801
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| ---> Center for Justice & Democracy: "Bush Chooses Death Over Life" |
| 12.16.04 (6:57 am) [edit] |
For many Americans, reforming our health care system is a matter of life or death. The Bush Administration has decided to side with death and profits.
The medical malpractice legislation that Bush advocated at today’s Economic Summit - the Administration’s solution to this country’s vast health care problems - would take away legal protections that have saved thousands of lives. These laws have protected us from dangerous and defective drugs and medical devices like Vioxx, the Dalkon Shield and Copper-7 IUDs, an antibiotic that caused cancer, oral contraceptives that caused life-threatening injuries, a pregnancy test that led to false-positives for cancer, and many others (see LIFESAVERS: CJ&D's Guide to Lawsuits that Protect Us All, http://centerjd.org.).
Without these laws in place, drugs like Vioxx would still be sold and people would be hurt or killed. The Administration’s plan will result in Americans dying so that the drug companies can make even more money.
President Bush should stop putting corporate profits and special interests before the lives of average Americans, who will die under his proposals.
For further information, contact the Center for Justice & Democracy, http://centerjd.org.
[b]CONTACT: [/b]Center for Justice & Democracy - http://centerjd.org/
Joanne Doroshow, Laurie Beacham; 212-267-2801
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| ---> Where Was Rudy (& Bushy-boy & Alberto-the-Torture-Guy) in the Kerik Mess?????? |
| 12.15.04 (6:33 am) [edit] |
In the wake of the Bernard Kerik fiasco, nearly everyone who endorsed the former New York Police Commissioner looks naïve at best and irresponsible at worst. The President’s attempt to place this disreputable figure in charge of the Department of Homeland Security reads like a bad sitcom plot.
Such blunders are inevitable when the chief executive prefers political fidelity and tough posturing to competence and judgment. It’s hardly surprising that George W. Bush would be attracted to a figure like Mr. Kerik, who apparently compensates for his meager credentials with extra swaggering.
The White House counsel’s office, under the direction of Alberto Gonzales, our next likely Attorney General, has yet to justify its failure to uncover Mr. Kerik’s checkered history. The President’s advisors have faulted Mr. Kerik himself, as if the government could simply depend on nominees for self-vetting. Evidently they were unable to discover anything he didn’t remember to tell them. (Their strange passivity reflects the same Bush administration attitude that trusts major corporations to report their own environmental pollution and consumer swindling.)
Any exercise in shifting blame inevitably pointed to Mr. Kerik’s most important endorser: his mentor, confidant, employer and business partner, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Whether the former Mayor actually accepts any responsibility for the Kerik error wasn’t clear from his public statements, but he apologized to Mr. Bush at a White House dinner.
Unfortunately for Mr. Giuliani, no apology will satisfy the press appetite for tawdry Kerik tales. Very rarely does a story exposing abuse of police authority include such beguiling details as a jewel-encrusted badge, a mobbed-up crony, a multimillion-dollar stock trade and a flashy mistress. The more we hear about the bodyguard and driver whom Mr. Giuliani promoted to police commissioner, the more we also learn about the man who likes to be called America’s Mayor.
The scrutinizing of Mr. Kerik reopened questions about the Giuliani administration that once seemed to have been closed forever on Sept. 11, 2001. Everything has changed since that day, perhaps—but not everything has been forgotten.
A government that prides itself on ostentatious religiosity and moralizing is probably most embarrassed by the sexual peccadilloes of its New York backers. But what could embarrass Mr. Giuliani is his wayward protégé’s coddling of a city contractor with alleged Mafia connections.
That firm, known as Interstate Industrial Corporation, hired Mr. Kerik’s close friend Lawrence Ray to overcome obstacles to doing business with the city. Interstate’s main problem was that city officials suspected the New Jersey company and its principal, Frank DiTommaso, of long and intimate ties with organized crime. According to reports in the Daily News and The New York Times, Mr. Ray gave Mr. Kerik "more than $7,000 in cash and other gifts while Mr. Kerik was commissioner of correction and the police."
At some point in 1999, when he was running the city’s prisons, Mr. Kerik reportedly spoke up for Interstate in a chat with Raymond V. Casey, the chief of enforcement for the city’s Trade Waste Commission. Although Mr. Kerik says he doesn’t recall the conversation, Mr. Casey told reporters that Mr. Kerik had vouched for the integrity of Mr. Ray, the Interstate lobbyist, which he considered a "weird" sort of endorsement by the then-corrections commissioner. Mr. Ray was indicted in 2000 for his role in a mob-connected financial fraud. And it later turned out that Mr. Kerik was also quite friendly with Mr. DiTommaso, who vehemently denies doing business with the Gambino and DeCavalcante crime families, as government agencies have alleged.
Turning the multibillion-dollar Homeland Security budget over to a hack who took money and favors in that seedy milieu doesn’t seem prudent, but it almost happened.
So the Mayor who sponsored his rise has some explaining to do. What did Mr. Giuliani know about his corrections commissioner’s "weird" relationships and behavior when he promoted him to police commissioner? He might well have learned about the Interstate matter from Mr. Casey, a regulator he appointed who also happens to be his cousin.
Two months before Mr. Kerik was named Mr. Giuliani’s police commissioner, the city Department of Investigation opened an inquiry into Mr. Kerik’s relationship with Mr. DiTommaso. Mr. Giuliani says he was not aware of the probe at the time.
The former Mayor has welcomed Mr. Kerik back into the fold at Giuliani Partners, where the disappointed office-seeker will presumably remain discreet about their shared secrets.
Much like the President he plans to succeed in office, Mr. Giuliani as Mayor increasingly surrounded himself with a tight circle of lackeys and cronies. His post-disaster performance obscured those negative qualities for a while, and rightly so. But now we’re reminded how the former prosecutor discarded important values of independence and integrity when they conflicted with his political needs.
He’ll make a terrific Presidential candidate. - http://www.observer.com/pages...
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| ---> Where Was Rudy (& Bushy-boy & Alberto-the-Torture-Guy) in the Kerik Mess?????? |
| 12.15.04 (6:33 am) [edit] |
In the wake of the Bernard Kerik fiasco, nearly everyone who endorsed the former New York Police Commissioner looks naïve at best and irresponsible at worst. The President’s attempt to place this disreputable figure in charge of the Department of Homeland Security reads like a bad sitcom plot.
Such blunders are inevitable when the chief executive prefers political fidelity and tough posturing to competence and judgment. It’s hardly surprising that George W. Bush would be attracted to a figure like Mr. Kerik, who apparently compensates for his meager credentials with extra swaggering.
The White House counsel’s office, under the direction of Alberto Gonzales, our next likely Attorney General, has yet to justify its failure to uncover Mr. Kerik’s checkered history. The President’s advisors have faulted Mr. Kerik himself, as if the government could simply depend on nominees for self-vetting. Evidently they were unable to discover anything he didn’t remember to tell them. (Their strange passivity reflects the same Bush administration attitude that trusts major corporations to report their own environmental pollution and consumer swindling.)
Any exercise in shifting blame inevitably pointed to Mr. Kerik’s most important endorser: his mentor, confidant, employer and business partner, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Whether the former Mayor actually accepts any responsibility for the Kerik error wasn’t clear from his public statements, but he apologized to Mr. Bush at a White House dinner.
Unfortunately for Mr. Giuliani, no apology will satisfy the press appetite for tawdry Kerik tales. Very rarely does a story exposing abuse of police authority include such beguiling details as a jewel-encrusted badge, a mobbed-up crony, a multimillion-dollar stock trade and a flashy mistress. The more we hear about the bodyguard and driver whom Mr. Giuliani promoted to police commissioner, the more we also learn about the man who likes to be called America’s Mayor.
The scrutinizing of Mr. Kerik reopened questions about the Giuliani administration that once seemed to have been closed forever on Sept. 11, 2001. Everything has changed since that day, perhaps—but not everything has been forgotten.
A government that prides itself on ostentatious religiosity and moralizing is probably most embarrassed by the sexual peccadilloes of its New York backers. But what could embarrass Mr. Giuliani is his wayward protégé’s coddling of a city contractor with alleged Mafia connections.
That firm, known as Interstate Industrial Corporation, hired Mr. Kerik’s close friend Lawrence Ray to overcome obstacles to doing business with the city. Interstate’s main problem was that city officials suspected the New Jersey company and its principal, Frank DiTommaso, of long and intimate ties with organized crime. According to reports in the Daily News and The New York Times, Mr. Ray gave Mr. Kerik "more than $7,000 in cash and other gifts while Mr. Kerik was commissioner of correction and the police."
At some point in 1999, when he was running the city’s prisons, Mr. Kerik reportedly spoke up for Interstate in a chat with Raymond V. Casey, the chief of enforcement for the city’s Trade Waste Commission. Although Mr. Kerik says he doesn’t recall the conversation, Mr. Casey told reporters that Mr. Kerik had vouched for the integrity of Mr. Ray, the Interstate lobbyist, which he considered a "weird" sort of endorsement by the then-corrections commissioner. Mr. Ray was indicted in 2000 for his role in a mob-connected financial fraud. And it later turned out that Mr. Kerik was also quite friendly with Mr. DiTommaso, who vehemently denies doing business with the Gambino and DeCavalcante crime families, as government agencies have alleged.
Turning the multibillion-dollar Homeland Security budget over to a hack who took money and favors in that seedy milieu doesn’t seem prudent, but it almost happened.
So the Mayor who sponsored his rise has some explaining to do. What did Mr. Giuliani know about his corrections commissioner’s "weird" relationships and behavior when he promoted him to police commissioner? He might well have learned about the Interstate matter from Mr. Casey, a regulator he appointed who also happens to be his cousin.
Two months before Mr. Kerik was named Mr. Giuliani’s police commissioner, the city Department of Investigation opened an inquiry into Mr. Kerik’s relationship with Mr. DiTommaso. Mr. Giuliani says he was not aware of the probe at the time.
The former Mayor has welcomed Mr. Kerik back into the fold at Giuliani Partners, where the disappointed office-seeker will presumably remain discreet about their shared secrets.
Much like the President he plans to succeed in office, Mr. Giuliani as Mayor increasingly surrounded himself with a tight circle of lackeys and cronies. His post-disaster performance obscured those negative qualities for a while, and rightly so. But now we’re reminded how the former prosecutor discarded important values of independence and integrity when they conflicted with his political needs.
He’ll make a terrific Presidential candidate. - http://www.observer.com/pages...
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| ---> When NOT Thinking Is Fundamental ... |
| 12.15.04 (6:29 am) [edit] |
[i][b]I still believe in God. But I do my own thinking...[/b][/i]
A little more than 20 years ago when I was living on Chicago's South Side, I became deeply involved with a fundamentalist Christian church. I'll admit up front that the only reason I even bothered visiting in the first place was because of a woman I was dating at the time. Actually she was kind of my fiancee, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that leaving that woman and leaving that church were two of the smartest moves I ever made.
Her name was Barbara. Her ex-brother-in-law, a guy named Bear, had been working on her for years to get her saved because he was convinced (with good reason) that she was a bit out of control. Barbara finally figured, "What the hell?" She went to visit this Pentecostal church that Bear said was quite the bomb (as far as churches go). I didn't give it much thought, and on that one wintry Sunday morning Barbara more or less assured me that this wasn't about anything except getting Bear off her back so she could live her life without this guy constantly telling her she was on her way to hell. By the way, Bear said, a good step away from hell would be to dump me and reconcile with his alcoholic, abusive, ignorant-assed fool of a brother. After all, a wife (now ex-wife) should always love and honor her husband, Bear said, noting that he was only passing along what the good book said.
Barbara was fond of Bear, who was nice enough in his own way, so she overlooked his pushiness and decided this once to indulge him. He had come through for her any number of times when Bear's brother Horace -- Barbara's ex-husband -- was on one of his alcohol-fueled tangents. She figured what could it hurt to see what was up with this church thing, right? Make the guy happy. Not that there was a chance in hell she was getting saved.
Barbara was supposed to show up at my place several hours later, but she never made it. She called instead saying that she had been saved and then some, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost. Furthermore, she was afraid she'd jeopardize her salvation if she came back to my worldly crib because, well, who knew what might happen? Matter of fact, it pained her to say that we probably couldn't see each other again unless ... well ... unless I got saved, sanctified, etc. You gotta be kidding me, I said. Nope. Not kidding at all, she replied. She was with Jesus now, and I should be too. Then I could feel as wonderful as she did.
OK. Deal. I'll give it a shot.
Actually the deal didn't go down quite that smoothly, but the long and short of it is that I eventually showed up at the church. Hallelujah. I got saved. Had to go through an exorcism first, you know, to get rid of those demons of lust and whatever else they said the devil had planted inside of me, but it was all good in the end. Joy all around. Pastor's happy. Congregation shouting and dancing. Barbara's crying. Yeah, it was great.
I began attending church twice a day on Sunday and a couple of times during the week. We had overnight prayer shut-ins. I was loving it, and I was hooked. I felt so much better. I had new friends. So many people cared about me.
So it didn't seem the least bit strange when one Sunday the pastor told us that Jesus didn't even want us to think. He just wanted us to be open to his will and let him direct our each and every step. Not one move without Jesus. He'll guide you.
"But that's too deep for you right now," he said, his voice suddenly dropping in volume.
The place went nuts. All you could hear were shouts of "Glory!" and "Hallelujah!" We were all so thrilled to hear that Jesus didn't want us to think for ourselves that we didn't even stop to think of what that meant because, after all, we weren't supposed to be thinking. Jesus would do our thinking now.
It was more than two years before I left the woman, the church and Chicago behind, and another two years before I managed to undo the knots in my brain. Putting hundreds of miles -- and months of free-thinking -- between myself and that fundamentalist thing had a lot to do with getting back into my right mind. Becoming a cynical, critical, judgmental, hedonistic journalist probably helped too.
OK, maybe that's going too far. For the record, I still believe in God. Jesus too. But I do my own thinking (for better or worse); as my mother always says, "That's why God gave you a brain, son." Also for the record, there were some wonderful people in that church, and in other fundamentalist churches I have attended -- and belonged to -- over the years. One of my cousins is a longtime fundamentalist minister. I'm not attacking all Christian fundamentalists, even though I seriously question their version of Christianity.
I do have a serious problem when this rigid mentality dictates how the rest of us live our lives -- and even how other Christian denominations and other religions are permitted to spread their messages. Which brings us to NBC and CBS's controversial refusal to broadcast a United Church of Christ ad that essentially says everyone is welcome and no one is turned away. The ad shows two burly bouncer-types standing guard in front of a church, picking and choosing who can and can't enter. Among those getting the thumbs-down is a gay couple. That was too deep for NBC and CBS (though surprisingly not for Fox) so the same networks that regularly run ads featuring natural male enhancement and that initially saw no problem with a Super Bowl ad earlier this year showing a horse farting in someone's face just can't quite stomach the concept of a truly loving God who doesn't require that your credentials be checked at the door of his church, as if it is some sort of exclusive nightclub.
A CBS official said, "Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations, and the fact that the executive branch has recently proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast."
Alan Wurtzel, NBC's president of research, who is also in charge of broadcast standards, said the spot "violated a longstanding policy of NBC, which is that we don't permit commercials to deal with issues of public controversy.
"The problem is not that it depicted gays, but that it suggested clearly that there are churches that don't permit a variety of individuals to participate. If they would make it just a positive message, 'We're all-inclusive,' we'd have no problem with that spot."
No. The problem is that the newly energized and politicized Christian right has CBS and NBC by the balls. What's really eerie is that the two networks fell in line and axed the ad before there had even been any type of protest lodged against it. The execs knew their orders without even having to be told. It was as if they didn't even have to think ... - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
|
|
|
| |
| ---> When NOT Thinking Is Fundamental ... |
| 12.15.04 (6:29 am) [edit] |
[i][b]I still believe in God. But I do my own thinking...[/b][/i]
A little more than 20 years ago when I was living on Chicago's South Side, I became deeply involved with a fundamentalist Christian church. I'll admit up front that the only reason I even bothered visiting in the first place was because of a woman I was dating at the time. Actually she was kind of my fiancee, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that leaving that woman and leaving that church were two of the smartest moves I ever made.
Her name was Barbara. Her ex-brother-in-law, a guy named Bear, had been working on her for years to get her saved because he was convinced (with good reason) that she was a bit out of control. Barbara finally figured, "What the hell?" She went to visit this Pentecostal church that Bear said was quite the bomb (as far as churches go). I didn't give it much thought, and on that one wintry Sunday morning Barbara more or less assured me that this wasn't about anything except getting Bear off her back so she could live her life without this guy constantly telling her she was on her way to hell. By the way, Bear said, a good step away from hell would be to dump me and reconcile with his alcoholic, abusive, ignorant-assed fool of a brother. After all, a wife (now ex-wife) should always love and honor her husband, Bear said, noting that he was only passing along what the good book said.
Barbara was fond of Bear, who was nice enough in his own way, so she overlooked his pushiness and decided this once to indulge him. He had come through for her any number of times when Bear's brother Horace -- Barbara's ex-husband -- was on one of his alcohol-fueled tangents. She figured what could it hurt to see what was up with this church thing, right? Make the guy happy. Not that there was a chance in hell she was getting saved.
Barbara was supposed to show up at my place several hours later, but she never made it. She called instead saying that she had been saved and then some, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost. Furthermore, she was afraid she'd jeopardize her salvation if she came back to my worldly crib because, well, who knew what might happen? Matter of fact, it pained her to say that we probably couldn't see each other again unless ... well ... unless I got saved, sanctified, etc. You gotta be kidding me, I said. Nope. Not kidding at all, she replied. She was with Jesus now, and I should be too. Then I could feel as wonderful as she did.
OK. Deal. I'll give it a shot.
Actually the deal didn't go down quite that smoothly, but the long and short of it is that I eventually showed up at the church. Hallelujah. I got saved. Had to go through an exorcism first, you know, to get rid of those demons of lust and whatever else they said the devil had planted inside of me, but it was all good in the end. Joy all around. Pastor's happy. Congregation shouting and dancing. Barbara's crying. Yeah, it was great.
I began attending church twice a day on Sunday and a couple of times during the week. We had overnight prayer shut-ins. I was loving it, and I was hooked. I felt so much better. I had new friends. So many people cared about me.
So it didn't seem the least bit strange when one Sunday the pastor told us that Jesus didn't even want us to think. He just wanted us to be open to his will and let him direct our each and every step. Not one move without Jesus. He'll guide you.
"But that's too deep for you right now," he said, his voice suddenly dropping in volume.
The place went nuts. All you could hear were shouts of "Glory!" and "Hallelujah!" We were all so thrilled to hear that Jesus didn't want us to think for ourselves that we didn't even stop to think of what that meant because, after all, we weren't supposed to be thinking. Jesus would do our thinking now.
It was more than two years before I left the woman, the church and Chicago behind, and another two years before I managed to undo the knots in my brain. Putting hundreds of miles -- and months of free-thinking -- between myself and that fundamentalist thing had a lot to do with getting back into my right mind. Becoming a cynical, critical, judgmental, hedonistic journalist probably helped too.
OK, maybe that's going too far. For the record, I still believe in God. Jesus too. But I do my own thinking (for better or worse); as my mother always says, "That's why God gave you a brain, son." Also for the record, there were some wonderful people in that church, and in other fundamentalist churches I have attended -- and belonged to -- over the years. One of my cousins is a longtime fundamentalist minister. I'm not attacking all Christian fundamentalists, even though I seriously question their version of Christianity.
I do have a serious problem when this rigid mentality dictates how the rest of us live our lives -- and even how other Christian denominations and other religions are permitted to spread their messages. Which brings us to NBC and CBS's controversial refusal to broadcast a United Church of Christ ad that essentially says everyone is welcome and no one is turned away. The ad shows two burly bouncer-types standing guard in front of a church, picking and choosing who can and can't enter. Among those getting the thumbs-down is a gay couple. That was too deep for NBC and CBS (though surprisingly not for Fox) so the same networks that regularly run ads featuring natural male enhancement and that initially saw no problem with a Super Bowl ad earlier this year showing a horse farting in someone's face just can't quite stomach the concept of a truly loving God who doesn't require that your credentials be checked at the door of his church, as if it is some sort of exclusive nightclub.
A CBS official said, "Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations, and the fact that the executive branch has recently proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast."
Alan Wurtzel, NBC's president of research, who is also in charge of broadcast standards, said the spot "violated a longstanding policy of NBC, which is that we don't permit commercials to deal with issues of public controversy.
"The problem is not that it depicted gays, but that it suggested clearly that there are churches that don't permit a variety of individuals to participate. If they would make it just a positive message, 'We're all-inclusive,' we'd have no problem with that spot."
No. The problem is that the newly energized and politicized Christian right has CBS and NBC by the balls. What's really eerie is that the two networks fell in line and axed the ad before there had even been any type of protest lodged against it. The execs knew their orders without even having to be told. It was as if they didn't even have to think ... - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
|
|
|
| |
| ---> When NOT Thinking Is Fundamental ... |
| 12.15.04 (6:27 am) [edit] |
[i][b]I still believe in God. But I do my own thinking...[/b][/i]
A little more than 20 years ago when I was living on Chicago's South Side, I became deeply involved with a fundamentalist Christian church. I'll admit up front that the only reason I even bothered visiting in the first place was because of a woman I was dating at the time. Actually she was kind of my fiancee, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that leaving that woman and leaving that church were two of the smartest moves I ever made.
Her name was Barbara. Her ex-brother-in-law, a guy named Bear, had been working on her for years to get her saved because he was convinced (with good reason) that she was a bit out of control. Barbara finally figured, "What the hell?" She went to visit this Pentecostal church that Bear said was quite the bomb (as far as churches go). I didn't give it much thought, and on that one wintry Sunday morning Barbara more or less assured me that this wasn't about anything except getting Bear off her back so she could live her life without this guy constantly telling her she was on her way to hell. By the way, Bear said, a good step away from hell would be to dump me and reconcile with his alcoholic, abusive, ignorant-assed fool of a brother. After all, a wife (now ex-wife) should always love and honor her husband, Bear said, noting that he was only passing along what the good book said.
Barbara was fond of Bear, who was nice enough in his own way, so she overlooked his pushiness and decided this once to indulge him. He had come through for her any number of times when Bear's brother Horace -- Barbara's ex-husband -- was on one of his alcohol-fueled tangents. She figured what could it hurt to see what was up with this church thing, right? Make the guy happy. Not that there was a chance in hell she was getting saved.
Barbara was supposed to show up at my place several hours later, but she never made it. She called instead saying that she had been saved and then some, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost. Furthermore, she was afraid she'd jeopardize her salvation if she came back to my worldly crib because, well, who knew what might happen? Matter of fact, it pained her to say that we probably couldn't see each other again unless ... well ... unless I got saved, sanctified, etc. You gotta be kidding me, I said. Nope. Not kidding at all, she replied. She was with Jesus now, and I should be too. Then I could feel as wonderful as she did.
OK. Deal. I'll give it a shot.
Actually the deal didn't go down quite that smoothly, but the long and short of it is that I eventually showed up at the church. Hallelujah. I got saved. Had to go through an exorcism first, you know, to get rid of those demons of lust and whatever else they said the devil had planted inside of me, but it was all good in the end. Joy all around. Pastor's happy. Congregation shouting and dancing. Barbara's crying. Yeah, it was great.
I began attending church twice a day on Sunday and a couple of times during the week. We had overnight prayer shut-ins. I was loving it, and I was hooked. I felt so much better. I had new friends. So many people cared about me.
So it didn't seem the least bit strange when one Sunday the pastor told us that Jesus didn't even want us to think. He just wanted us to be open to his will and let him direct our each and every step. Not one move without Jesus. He'll guide you.
"But that's too deep for you right now," he said, his voice suddenly dropping in volume.
The place went nuts. All you could hear were shouts of "Glory!" and "Hallelujah!" We were all so thrilled to hear that Jesus didn't want us to think for ourselves that we didn't even stop to think of what that meant because, after all, we weren't supposed to be thinking. Jesus would do our thinking now.
It was more than two years before I left the woman, the church and Chicago behind, and another two years before I managed to undo the knots in my brain. Putting hundreds of miles -- and months of free-thinking -- between myself and that fundamentalist thing had a lot to do with getting back into my right mind. Becoming a cynical, critical, judgmental, hedonistic journalist probably helped too.
OK, maybe that's going too far. For the record, I still believe in God. Jesus too. But I do my own thinking (for better or worse); as my mother always says, "That's why God gave you a brain, son." Also for the record, there were some wonderful people in that church, and in other fundamentalist churches I have attended -- and belonged to -- over the years. One of my cousins is a longtime fundamentalist minister. I'm not attacking all Christian fundamentalists, even though I seriously question their version of Christianity.
I do have a serious problem when this rigid mentality dictates how the rest of us live our lives -- and even how other Christian denominations and other religions are permitted to spread their messages. Which brings us to NBC and CBS's controversial refusal to broadcast a United Church of Christ ad that essentially says everyone is welcome and no one is turned away. The ad shows two burly bouncer-types standing guard in front of a church, picking and choosing who can and can't enter. Among those getting the thumbs-down is a gay couple. That was too deep for NBC and CBS (though surprisingly not for Fox) so the same networks that regularly run ads featuring natural male enhancement and that initially saw no problem with a Super Bowl ad earlier this year showing a horse farting in someone's face just can't quite stomach the concept of a truly loving God who doesn't require that your credentials be checked at the door of his church, as if it is some sort of exclusive nightclub.
A CBS official said, "Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations, and the fact that the executive branch has recently proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast."
Alan Wurtzel, NBC's president of research, who is also in charge of broadcast standards, said the spot "violated a longstanding policy of NBC, which is that we don't permit commercials to deal with issues of public controversy.
"The problem is not that it depicted gays, but that it suggested clearly that there are churches that don't permit a variety of individuals to participate. If they would make it just a positive message, 'We're all-inclusive,' we'd have no problem with that spot."
No. The problem is that the newly energized and politicized Christian right has CBS and NBC by the balls. What's really eerie is that the two networks fell in line and axed the ad before there had even been any type of protest lodged against it. The execs knew their orders without even having to be told. It was as if they didn't even have to think ... - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
|
|
|
| |
| ---> When NOT Thinking Is Fundamental ... |
| 12.15.04 (6:27 am) [edit] |
[i][b]I still believe in God. But I do my own thinking...[/b][/i]
A little more than 20 years ago when I was living on Chicago's South Side, I became deeply involved with a fundamentalist Christian church. I'll admit up front that the only reason I even bothered visiting in the first place was because of a woman I was dating at the time. Actually she was kind of my fiancee, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that leaving that woman and leaving that church were two of the smartest moves I ever made.
Her name was Barbara. Her ex-brother-in-law, a guy named Bear, had been working on her for years to get her saved because he was convinced (with good reason) that she was a bit out of control. Barbara finally figured, "What the hell?" She went to visit this Pentecostal church that Bear said was quite the bomb (as far as churches go). I didn't give it much thought, and on that one wintry Sunday morning Barbara more or less assured me that this wasn't about anything except getting Bear off her back so she could live her life without this guy constantly telling her she was on her way to hell. By the way, Bear said, a good step away from hell would be to dump me and reconcile with his alcoholic, abusive, ignorant-assed fool of a brother. After all, a wife (now ex-wife) should always love and honor her husband, Bear said, noting that he was only passing along what the good book said.
Barbara was fond of Bear, who was nice enough in his own way, so she overlooked his pushiness and decided this once to indulge him. He had come through for her any number of times when Bear's brother Horace -- Barbara's ex-husband -- was on one of his alcohol-fueled tangents. She figured what could it hurt to see what was up with this church thing, right? Make the guy happy. Not that there was a chance in hell she was getting saved.
Barbara was supposed to show up at my place several hours later, but she never made it. She called instead saying that she had been saved and then some, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost. Furthermore, she was afraid she'd jeopardize her salvation if she came back to my worldly crib because, well, who knew what might happen? Matter of fact, it pained her to say that we probably couldn't see each other again unless ... well ... unless I got saved, sanctified, etc. You gotta be kidding me, I said. Nope. Not kidding at all, she replied. She was with Jesus now, and I should be too. Then I could feel as wonderful as she did.
OK. Deal. I'll give it a shot.
Actually the deal didn't go down quite that smoothly, but the long and short of it is that I eventually showed up at the church. Hallelujah. I got saved. Had to go through an exorcism first, you know, to get rid of those demons of lust and whatever else they said the devil had planted inside of me, but it was all good in the end. Joy all around. Pastor's happy. Congregation shouting and dancing. Barbara's crying. Yeah, it was great.
I began attending church twice a day on Sunday and a couple of times during the week. We had overnight prayer shut-ins. I was loving it, and I was hooked. I felt so much better. I had new friends. So many people cared about me.
So it didn't seem the least bit strange when one Sunday the pastor told us that Jesus didn't even want us to think. He just wanted us to be open to his will and let him direct our each and every step. Not one move without Jesus. He'll guide you.
"But that's too deep for you right now," he said, his voice suddenly dropping in volume.
The place went nuts. All you could hear were shouts of "Glory!" and "Hallelujah!" We were all so thrilled to hear that Jesus didn't want us to think for ourselves that we didn't even stop to think of what that meant because, after all, we weren't supposed to be thinking. Jesus would do our thinking now.
It was more than two years before I left the woman, the church and Chicago behind, and another two years before I managed to undo the knots in my brain. Putting hundreds of miles -- and months of free-thinking -- between myself and that fundamentalist thing had a lot to do with getting back into my right mind. Becoming a cynical, critical, judgmental, hedonistic journalist probably helped too.
OK, maybe that's going too far. For the record, I still believe in God. Jesus too. But I do my own thinking (for better or worse); as my mother always says, "That's why God gave you a brain, son." Also for the record, there were some wonderful people in that church, and in other fundamentalist churches I have attended -- and belonged to -- over the years. One of my cousins is a longtime fundamentalist minister. I'm not attacking all Christian fundamentalists, even though I seriously question their version of Christianity.
I do have a serious problem when this rigid mentality dictates how the rest of us live our lives -- and even how other Christian denominations and other religions are permitted to spread their messages. Which brings us to NBC and CBS's controversial refusal to broadcast a United Church of Christ ad that essentially says everyone is welcome and no one is turned away. The ad shows two burly bouncer-types standing guard in front of a church, picking and choosing who can and can't enter. Among those getting the thumbs-down is a gay couple. That was too deep for NBC and CBS (though surprisingly not for Fox) so the same networks that regularly run ads featuring natural male enhancement and that initially saw no problem with a Super Bowl ad earlier this year showing a horse farting in someone's face just can't quite stomach the concept of a truly loving God who doesn't require that your credentials be checked at the door of his church, as if it is some sort of exclusive nightclub.
A CBS official said, "Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations, and the fact that the executive branch has recently proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast."
Alan Wurtzel, NBC's president of research, who is also in charge of broadcast standards, said the spot "violated a longstanding policy of NBC, which is that we don't permit commercials to deal with issues of public controversy.
"The problem is not that it depicted gays, but that it suggested clearly that there are churches that don't permit a variety of individuals to participate. If they would make it just a positive message, 'We're all-inclusive,' we'd have no problem with that spot."
No. The problem is that the newly energized and politicized Christian right has CBS and NBC by the balls. What's really eerie is that the two networks fell in line and axed the ad before there had even been any type of protest lodged against it. The execs knew their orders without even having to be told. It was as if they didn't even have to think ... - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
|
|
|
| |
| ---> Pull the Wool Over Your Own Eyes |
| 12.15.04 (6:21 am) [edit] |
David Brooks, the usually docile mouthpiece of the Republican echo chamber, today had a surprisingly snarky take http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... on tomorrow's satirically titled 'Economic Summit,' wherein Mr. Bush will begin his sales pitch on pilfering Social Security:
"When addressing a Republican crowd, especially one including President Bush, three Henry James references per presentation are more than sufficient. Actually, it's better to quote down. Instead of citing a great intellectual, it's better to cite a wise but ordinary person with a poignant, uplifting life story (in Washington jargon, a W.B.O.P.W.A.P.U.L.S.).
"Mr. President, I was on my way to a faith-based soup kitchen, where I lead Bible study for the alcoholic children of recovering Wahhabis, when I ran into Luis, who lost his job at the ANWR Energy Company because of junk lawsuit costs, and he was saying he prays every night for a personal Social Security account that will offer him incentives to work, save and invest." Stories like this confirm the essential wisdom of the common people."
Mr. Brooks' startling burst of honesty clues you in on to expect. As scams go, as cons, snake oil and sucker games... the Bush Social Security Privatization Scheme is a big winner. Big Time. In fact, perhaps one of the bigger con jobs in history.
[b]"President Bush on Thursday flatly rejected the possibility of raising payroll taxes to pay for an overhaul of Social Security, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... a project that is likely to cost trillions of dollars over the next several decades[/b].
"We will not raise payroll taxes to solve this problem," Mr. Bush told reporters after meeting with trustees of the Social Security system.
It was his most explicit declaration so far that he intended to borrow the money needed for the centerpiece of his approach, which is to let people divert some of their payroll taxes to private savings accounts.
.....
Mr. Bush risked running afoul of other Republicans, some of whom worry about a giant surge of new borrowing and some of whom worry about a plan that is likely to include big cuts in benefits for future retirees.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who, like Mr. Bush, is an ardent advocate of private accounts, recently departed from him by suggesting that higher taxes might be preferable to soaring debt.
And a Republican trustee to the Social Security fund, Thomas Saving, proposed on Thursday to reduce the public cost of personal accounts by requiring workers and employers to make some of the contributions from their own pockets.
.......
Mr. Bush wants to replace part of the traditional Social Security program with a system of personal savings accounts, and his proposal is likely to couple that with a sharp reduction in traditional benefits for future retirees.
Analysts estimate that the government would have to borrow as much as $2 trillion to cover transition costs over the next two decades because payroll taxes would plunge immediately while the government's obligation to existing retirees would decline slowly.
........
Mr. Bush must still reconcile his goals on Social Security with his campaign pledge to reduce the federal deficit by half by 2009.
The deficit hit a record of $413 billion this year, but it would have been much higher had the budget not been supplemented by an annual surplus of more than $200 billion in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.
If the government was to let people divert part of their payroll taxes to private accounts, the budget deficit would be more than $100 billion a year higher than otherwise and the surpluses in the Social Security trust fund expected over the next 13 years would disappear.
....
Senator Graham said this week that he would consider raising the ceiling on payroll taxes to pay for some of the transition costs.
At the moment, workers stop paying payroll taxes when their income for the year climbs above $87,900, and that ceiling will rise to about $90,000 in 2005. Analysts say raising the ceiling, or eliminating it, could come close to wiping out the projected shortfall in one swoop.
"We need to have everything on the table, and that includes taxes," Mr. Graham said in an interview on Wednesday. [b]"If you borrow money, that creates a deficit for 50 years to come. It really is a tax on the future, and it is locking the deficit into our national economy in a way that's very unhealthy as far as I see it."" [/b]
Mr. Graham is exactly right on that point. The fact is, the Social Security shortfall [which won't happen for almost 50 years] could be solved very easily. Bill Clinton actually fixed it by raising the payroll tax on employers very slightly. That's why we have a surplus. All that needs to happen is to put the current SS Surplus [and bet you didn't know there was one, did you? They never mention that.] into a - remember lockboxes?
Just invest the current surplus into bonds for future retirees, instead of spending it now as part of the General Funds in the budget. Or we could eliminate the 'ceiling' on payroll taxes, as Mr. Graham explains above. The ceiling was never fair in any case. Why should you, if you make less than $87,900, be penalized by having to be taxed on your entire income, when someone else pays LESS because they make MORE?
Either of those would 'fix' the problem. But you see, that's exactly the opposite of what they want. They WANT to break it. Conservatives have been screaming about Social Security since FDR. They hate the idea of anything that doesn't make a huge profit for someone, preferably them. And Social Security doesn't... its administrative fees are low, and almost all the monies collected go into the hands of retirees.
But with the Bush Scam, huge profits will be guaranteed - for the fund managers. Because you won't be able to invest in just any fund. They will pick the funds for you to 'choose' among.. and you can bet your life savings they will be managed by Republican cronies, at high risk and higher fees.
Care to invest your retirement funds in Enron, people? That's what you will be getting. And if you lose everything in the market, you will truly lose it all, because your Social Security benefits will be continue to be reduced, and so will your employer's contributions. This is actually about phasing Social Security out altogether.
Notice one of the suggestions above, by a Mr. "Saving" - 'to reduce the public cost of personal accounts by requiring workers and employers to make some of the contributions from their own pockets'? That means you will be forced to make payments out of your own pocket into a fund they choose. No thanks.
You want to privatize Social Security? Fine. Just give me all the money that's been collected from me over 40 years, with a reasonable rate of interest. I make that about $250,000.
If you want privatization, ask for your money back. Or be the biggest sucker in history. This is simply replacing an insurance policy-- a safety net-- with a roulette wheel.
Are we really that profoundly stupid as a nation? He fooled us once with his phony WMD. Fooled you once, will you get fooled again? - http://www.claudialong.com/bl...
|
|
|
| |
| ---> Pull the Wool Over Your Own Eyes |
| 12.15.04 (6:21 am) [edit] |
David Brooks, the usually docile mouthpiece of the Republican echo chamber, today had a surprisingly snarky take http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... on tomorrow's satirically titled 'Economic Summit,' wherein Mr. Bush will begin his sales pitch on pilfering Social Security:
"When addressing a Republican crowd, especially one including President Bush, three Henry James references per presentation are more than sufficient. Actually, it's better to quote down. Instead of citing a great intellectual, it's better to cite a wise but ordinary person with a poignant, uplifting life story (in Washington jargon, a W.B.O.P.W.A.P.U.L.S.).
"Mr. President, I was on my way to a faith-based soup kitchen, where I lead Bible study for the alcoholic children of recovering Wahhabis, when I ran into Luis, who lost his job at the ANWR Energy Company because of junk lawsuit costs, and he was saying he prays every night for a personal Social Security account that will offer him incentives to work, save and invest." Stories like this confirm the essential wisdom of the common people."
Mr. Brooks' startling burst of honesty clues you in on to expect. As scams go, as cons, snake oil and sucker games... the Bush Social Security Privatization Scheme is a big winner. Big Time. In fact, perhaps one of the bigger con jobs in history.
[b]"President Bush on Thursday flatly rejected the possibility of raising payroll taxes to pay for an overhaul of Social Security, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... a project that is likely to cost trillions of dollars over the next several decades[/b].
"We will not raise payroll taxes to solve this problem," Mr. Bush told reporters after meeting with trustees of the Social Security system.
It was his most explicit declaration so far that he intended to borrow the money needed for the centerpiece of his approach, which is to let people divert some of their payroll taxes to private savings accounts.
.....
Mr. Bush risked running afoul of other Republicans, some of whom worry about a giant surge of new borrowing and some of whom worry about a plan that is likely to include big cuts in benefits for future retirees.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who, like Mr. Bush, is an ardent advocate of private accounts, recently departed from him by suggesting that higher taxes might be preferable to soaring debt.
And a Republican trustee to the Social Security fund, Thomas Saving, proposed on Thursday to reduce the public cost of personal accounts by requiring workers and employers to make some of the contributions from their own pockets.
.......
Mr. Bush wants to replace part of the traditional Social Security program with a system of personal savings accounts, and his proposal is likely to couple that with a sharp reduction in traditional benefits for future retirees.
Analysts estimate that the government would have to borrow as much as $2 trillion to cover transition costs over the next two decades because payroll taxes would plunge immediately while the government's obligation to existing retirees would decline slowly.
........
Mr. Bush must still reconcile his goals on Social Security with his campaign pledge to reduce the federal deficit by half by 2009.
The deficit hit a record of $413 billion this year, but it would have been much higher had the budget not been supplemented by an annual surplus of more than $200 billion in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.
If the government was to let people divert part of their payroll taxes to private accounts, the budget deficit would be more than $100 billion a year higher than otherwise and the surpluses in the Social Security trust fund expected over the next 13 years would disappear.
....
Senator Graham said this week that he would consider raising the ceiling on payroll taxes to pay for some of the transition costs.
At the moment, workers stop paying payroll taxes when their income for the year climbs above $87,900, and that ceiling will rise to about $90,000 in 2005. Analysts say raising the ceiling, or eliminating it, could come close to wiping out the projected shortfall in one swoop.
"We need to have everything on the table, and that includes taxes," Mr. Graham said in an interview on Wednesday. [b]"If you borrow money, that creates a deficit for 50 years to come. It really is a tax on the future, and it is locking the deficit into our national economy in a way that's very unhealthy as far as I see it."" [/b]
Mr. Graham is exactly right on that point. The fact is, the Social Security shortfall [which won't happen for almost 50 years] could be solved very easily. Bill Clinton actually fixed it by raising the payroll tax on employers very slightly. That's why we have a surplus. All that needs to happen is to put the current SS Surplus [and bet you didn't know there was one, did you? They never mention that.] into a - remember lockboxes?
Just invest the current surplus into bonds for future retirees, instead of spending it now as part of the General Funds in the budget. Or we could eliminate the 'ceiling' on payroll taxes, as Mr. Graham explains above. The ceiling was never fair in any case. Why should you, if you make less than $87,900, be penalized by having to be taxed on your entire income, when someone else pays LESS because they make MORE?
Either of those would 'fix' the problem. But you see, that's exactly the opposite of what they want. They WANT to break it. Conservatives have been screaming about Social Security since FDR. They hate the idea of anything that doesn't make a huge profit for someone, preferably them. And Social Security doesn't... its administrative fees are low, and almost all the monies collected go into the hands of retirees.
But with the Bush Scam, huge profits will be guaranteed - for the fund managers. Because you won't be able to invest in just any fund. They will pick the funds for you to 'choose' among.. and you can bet your life savings they will be managed by Republican cronies, at high risk and higher fees.
Care to invest your retirement funds in Enron, people? That's what you will be getting. And if you lose everything in the market, you will truly lose it all, because your Social Security benefits will be continue to be reduced, and so will your employer's contributions. This is actually about phasing Social Security out altogether.
Notice one of the suggestions above, by a Mr. "Saving" - 'to reduce the public cost of personal accounts by requiring workers and employers to make some of the contributions from their own pockets'? That means you will be forced to make payments out of your own pocket into a fund they choose. No thanks.
You want to privatize Social Security? Fine. Just give me all the money that's been collected from me over 40 years, with a reasonable rate of interest. I make that about $250,000.
If you want privatization, ask for your money back. Or be the biggest sucker in history. This is simply replacing an insurance policy-- a safety net-- with a roulette wheel.
Are we really that profoundly stupid as a nation? He fooled us once with his phony WMD. Fooled you once, will you get fooled again? - http://www.claudialong.com/bl...
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| ---> The Mad King George W. Bush Trailing in the Polls |
| 12.14.04 (4:15 pm) [edit] |
President Bush’s re-election was viewed negatively by a majority of people in several European countries — including those in Britain, America’s strongest ally in the war in Iraq, Associated Press polling found.
[b]More [/b]... http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ---> SinclairAction.com |
| 12.14.04 (6:56 am) [edit] |
The good folks over at Media Matters, backed by MoveOn, Working Assets and several other liberal heavy hitters, is taking on Sinclair http://www.latimes.com/news/p...,0,1765019.story?coll=la-home-politi cs again:
"A coalition of liberal political groups is launching a nationwide protest against Sinclair Broadcast Group, charging that the 62-station TV broadcaster, which was also the target of intense criticism during the presidential campaign, is misusing public airwaves with partisan news programming.
The groups, led by Media Matters for America, today will announce a campaign to pressure Sinclair's advertisers with letters. The groups, however, are stopping short of demanding an advertiser boycott."
The campaign is one of the first broad attempts to reenergize liberal political activists in the wake of the Democrats' electoral defeat in November.
[b]SinclairAction.com [/b]
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| ---> SinclairAction.com |
| 12.14.04 (6:56 am) [edit] |
The good folks over at Media Matters, backed by MoveOn, Working Assets and several other liberal heavy hitters, is taking on Sinclair http://www.latimes.com/news/p...,0,1765019.story?coll=la-home-politi cs again:
"A coalition of liberal political groups is launching a nationwide protest against Sinclair Broadcast Group, charging that the 62-station TV broadcaster, which was also the target of intense criticism during the presidential campaign, is misusing public airwaves with partisan news programming.
The groups, led by Media Matters for America, today will announce a campaign to pressure Sinclair's advertisers with letters. The groups, however, are stopping short of demanding an advertiser boycott."
The campaign is one of the first broad attempts to reenergize liberal political activists in the wake of the Democrats' electoral defeat in November.
[b]SinclairAction.com [/b]
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| ---> Needed: Enlightened Business Leaders |
| 12.14.04 (6:49 am) [edit] |
When I read last month that James Rowse http://www.wggb.com/archive/o... --the chairman of Veryfine Products Inc., the juice bottling concern, had died, I thought of how this man's life embodied a much more enlightened era in the history of American business.
When Kraft purchased Rowse's company in early 2004, Rowse set aside $15 million in proceeds that he then distributed to his company's workers. He ensured that all of Veryfine's 400 employees would keep their jobs, and that those with a minimum of 20 years experience would receive an extra year's pay.
In a recent email, Scott Klinger, http://www.thenation.com/dire... co-director of the Responsible Wealth http://www.responsiblewealth.... project at United for a Fair Economy http://www.faireconomy.org/ in Boston, cited other examples of enlightened business leadership. One of his favorites, he said, is Bob Kierlin, founder and recently retired CEO of Fastenal http://twincities.bizjournals... , an Ohio-based public company.
As Klinger wrote, Kierlin took justifiable pride in the fact "that many other employees made more than he did, but he paid employees' stock options personally out of his founder's stock. Kierlin also eschewed the palatial lifestyle...preferring to drive a few hours to visit customers, stay at budget motels, and, much to the chagrin of many colleagues, share a room with associates."
Rowse and Kierlin are exceptions to the rule. We live in times when morality is disdained in corporate boardrooms. The social compact that rested on the idea that honest labor deserves a living wage has all but disappeared.
The Bush Administration http://www.thenation.com/dire... and Republicans in Congress have formed an alliance with rapacious CEOs to foster an anything-goes atmosphere. Labor is devalued, fair play is dishonored and greed and corporate ethics have become synonymous. (Is it any surprise that in the 2004 elections, the largest corporate PACs favored Republicans over Democrats by a ten to one margin http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... ?)
It was recently disclosed http://www.talkaboutsupport.c... that pharmaceutical giant Merck established a golden parachute for its 230 senior executives so if the company is bought, managers would be able to walk away with three years in salary and bonuses. And three years after the Enron debacle, http://www.usatoday.com/news/... business groups are fighting a pitched battle with state employee pension funds against reforms which would make future corporate looting of employee pensions much more difficult.
Part of "the problem," as Klinger sees it, "is the stories that corporate executives tell themselves about their worth, relative to the rest of their colleagues. The ‘star culture' has invaded many large company cultures. Executives are convinced that their work is what creates shareholder value and other employees are commodities to be acquired at the lowest possible cost."
Klinger and Responsible Wealth http://www.responsiblewealth.... co-director Mike Lapham "lay responsibility for the growing divide between workers and executives largely at the feet of Congress." Congress has refused "to require stock options to be counted as expenses in corporate earnings reports." It has "allowed lavish executive pay in the hundreds of millions per CEO to be deducted as a ‘reasonable' business expense from companies' taxes."
Meanwhile, Congress hasn't even held a vote to raise the minimum wage--stuck at a mere $5.15 per hour since 1996. "Since that time, they've raised their own salaries seven times and doubled the pay of the President," Klinger pointed out.
Moreover, between 1970 and 2001, the top 100 executives' median income increased from 35 times the average worker's salary to 500 times what the average worker makes. In 2003, Bank of America cut 5,000 jobs from its payroll, while its CEO Kenneth Lewis took home $37.9 million.
Things are likely to get worse before they improve. The Bush Administration recently floated a proposal that would cut taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains and give additional tax breaks to big business. At the same time, the White House wants to eliminate federal tax deductions of state and local income taxes and to forbid businesses to deduct the value of health coverage from their tax bills. (Enacting the last change will be "the quickest way to create millions of uninsured people," John Irons, a tax and budget analyst at the Center for American Progress, says http://soulphoto.net/pmachine... .)
Changing the culture of greed and re-establishing a social compact that values work will require serious changes in key policy areas. First, Klinger says, "We need different people on corporate boards. The people responsible for overseeing executive pay are the very same people who themselves are receiving excessive pay."
Second, the SEC should follow through on what it "proposed a year ago, opening up the corporate director election process by allowing shareholders to put forth competitive slates." The idea became "the most commented-on proposal in the history of the SEC, receiving more than 10,000 public comments, over 90 percent of which were in favor. But, "the SEC has yet to issue a final rule because of behind-the-scenes belly-aching from corporate lobbyists," who are threatening to sue the Commission. ("The Soviet Union," Klinger adds, "used to put up one candidate for each elected office and it was thoroughly excoriated for it. Today's corporate elections are no different, and yet we are told this is good governance.")
Third, "the public should no longer subsidize unlimited executive pay." Our laws state that corporations are allowed to "deduct ‘reasonable business expenses,' so let's define what that means," says Klinger. "The Income Equity Act, introduced in the last several sessions of Congress, would allow corporations to deduct for tax purposes corporate pay up to 25 times the pay of the lowest-paid workers. Corporations could continue to pay whatever they wished, but shareholders would have to pay the full cost of huge pay packages."
It's also important, Lapham argues, to understand--and change--the fact that "we live in a winner-takes all society, where individual achievement is honored and concepts like teamwork and community are generally ignored. There is a myth in our society that certain individuals are smarter, more motivated, get up earlier, work harder, take risks…and thereby create wealth all by themselves…We often come across successful individuals saying with a straight face ‘I never got any help from anybody.'"
Such an idea, he says, is absurd. "This attitude discounts the role of society in helping create wealth." http://www.trentonian.com/sit... It discounts "the role of public education" and "public infrastructure - roads, bridges, airports, etc...What about the role of government in maintaining a legal system and a system of contracts that makes business possible?" If America can form a different answer to the wealth-creation question, it "would lead to radical changes in pay structure, tax policy and health care policy."
It would also go a long way to reclaiming the ideals of hard work and fair play that James Rowse fought to make into reality. - http://www.thenation.com/edcu...
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| ---> Needed: Enlightened Business Leaders |
| 12.14.04 (6:49 am) [edit] |
When I read last month that James Rowse http://www.wggb.com/archive/o... --the chairman of Veryfine Products Inc., the juice bottling concern, had died, I thought of how this man's life embodied a much more enlightened era in the history of American business.
When Kraft purchased Rowse's company in early 2004, Rowse set aside $15 million in proceeds that he then distributed to his company's workers. He ensured that all of Veryfine's 400 employees would keep their jobs, and that those with a minimum of 20 years experience would receive an extra year's pay.
In a recent email, Scott Klinger, http://www.thenation.com/dire... co-director of the Responsible Wealth http://www.responsiblewealth.... project at United for a Fair Economy http://www.faireconomy.org/ in Boston, cited other examples of enlightened business leadership. One of his favorites, he said, is Bob Kierlin, founder and recently retired CEO of Fastenal http://twincities.bizjournals... , an Ohio-based public company.
As Klinger wrote, Kierlin took justifiable pride in the fact "that many other employees made more than he did, but he paid employees' stock options personally out of his founder's stock. Kierlin also eschewed the palatial lifestyle...preferring to drive a few hours to visit customers, stay at budget motels, and, much to the chagrin of many colleagues, share a room with associates."
Rowse and Kierlin are exceptions to the rule. We live in times when morality is disdained in corporate boardrooms. The social compact that rested on the idea that honest labor deserves a living wage has all but disappeared.
The Bush Administration http://www.thenation.com/dire... and Republicans in Congress have formed an alliance with rapacious CEOs to foster an anything-goes atmosphere. Labor is devalued, fair play is dishonored and greed and corporate ethics have become synonymous. (Is it any surprise that in the 2004 elections, the largest corporate PACs favored Republicans over Democrats by a ten to one margin http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... ?)
It was recently disclosed http://www.talkaboutsupport.c... that pharmaceutical giant Merck established a golden parachute for its 230 senior executives so if the company is bought, managers would be able to walk away with three years in salary and bonuses. And three years after the Enron debacle, http://www.usatoday.com/news/... business groups are fighting a pitched battle with state employee pension funds against reforms which would make future corporate looting of employee pensions much more difficult.
Part of "the problem," as Klinger sees it, "is the stories that corporate executives tell themselves about their worth, relative to the rest of their colleagues. The ‘star culture' has invaded many large company cultures. Executives are convinced that their work is what creates shareholder value and other employees are commodities to be acquired at the lowest possible cost."
Klinger and Responsible Wealth http://www.responsiblewealth.... co-director Mike Lapham "lay responsibility for the growing divide between workers and executives largely at the feet of Congress." Congress has refused "to require stock options to be counted as expenses in corporate earnings reports." It has "allowed lavish executive pay in the hundreds of millions per CEO to be deducted as a ‘reasonable' business expense from companies' taxes."
Meanwhile, Congress hasn't even held a vote to raise the minimum wage--stuck at a mere $5.15 per hour since 1996. "Since that time, they've raised their own salaries seven times and doubled the pay of the President," Klinger pointed out.
Moreover, between 1970 and 2001, the top 100 executives' median income increased from 35 times the average worker's salary to 500 times what the average worker makes. In 2003, Bank of America cut 5,000 jobs from its payroll, while its CEO Kenneth Lewis took home $37.9 million.
Things are likely to get worse before they improve. The Bush Administration recently floated a proposal that would cut taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains and give additional tax breaks to big business. At the same time, the White House wants to eliminate federal tax deductions of state and local income taxes and to forbid businesses to deduct the value of health coverage from their tax bills. (Enacting the last change will be "the quickest way to create millions of uninsured people," John Irons, a tax and budget analyst at the Center for American Progress, says http://soulphoto.net/pmachine... .)
Changing the culture of greed and re-establishing a social compact that values work will require serious changes in key policy areas. First, Klinger says, "We need different people on corporate boards. The people responsible for overseeing executive pay are the very same people who themselves are receiving excessive pay."
Second, the SEC should follow through on what it "proposed a year ago, opening up the corporate director election process by allowing shareholders to put forth competitive slates." The idea became "the most commented-on proposal in the history of the SEC, receiving more than 10,000 public comments, over 90 percent of which were in favor. But, "the SEC has yet to issue a final rule because of behind-the-scenes belly-aching from corporate lobbyists," who are threatening to sue the Commission. ("The Soviet Union," Klinger adds, "used to put up one candidate for each elected office and it was thoroughly excoriated for it. Today's corporate elections are no different, and yet we are told this is good governance.")
Third, "the public should no longer subsidize unlimited executive pay." Our laws state that corporations are allowed to "deduct ‘reasonable business expenses,' so let's define what that means," says Klinger. "The Income Equity Act, introduced in the last several sessions of Congress, would allow corporations to deduct for tax purposes corporate pay up to 25 times the pay of the lowest-paid workers. Corporations could continue to pay whatever they wished, but shareholders would have to pay the full cost of huge pay packages."
It's also important, Lapham argues, to understand--and change--the fact that "we live in a winner-takes all society, where individual achievement is honored and concepts like teamwork and community are generally ignored. There is a myth in our society that certain individuals are smarter, more motivated, get up earlier, work harder, take risks…and thereby create wealth all by themselves…We often come across successful individuals saying with a straight face ‘I never got any help from anybody.'"
Such an idea, he says, is absurd. "This attitude discounts the role of society in helping create wealth." http://www.trentonian.com/sit... It discounts "the role of public education" and "public infrastructure - roads, bridges, airports, etc...What about the role of government in maintaining a legal system and a system of contracts that makes business possible?" If America can form a different answer to the wealth-creation question, it "would lead to radical changes in pay structure, tax policy and health care policy."
It would also go a long way to reclaiming the ideals of hard work and fair play that James Rowse fought to make into reality. - http://www.thenation.com/edcu...
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| ---> DimWit Bush Spares PhonyTony Blair the Misery of Another Disastrous Visit to the U.K. ... |
| 12.13.04 (5:11 pm) [edit] |
[b]President spares Blair by avoiding trip to Britain[/b]
PRESIDENT BUSH will avoid Britain on his post-inauguration trip to Europe amid concerns that his presence so close to the general election would make life uneasy for Tony Blair.
Mr Bush is to visit Brussels and at least two other countries in late February on a visit billed as a post-war “kiss and make up” tour, but he will steer clear of London, where the Prime Minister is likely to be in the final stages of a phoney election campaign that he is expected to make official at the end of March.
Mr Blair’s strategists were concerned that Mr Bush’s presence, which would showcase his close relationship with the Prime Minister as well as the Iraq war, would raise the hackles of Britons, including many Labour voters who fiercely opposed the conflict.
“Downing Street was not exactly queueing up for the President to visit,” an official in Washington said. Mr Blair and Mr Bush discussed the trip when the Prime Minister visited Washington last month.
Mr Blair did not suggest that Mr Bush should include Britain on his itinerary, according to American and British officials. Instead, he encouraged Mr Bush to visit countries where he needs to work on his image.
A senior Downing Street source said that Mr Blair had been making it clear that relations had to improve between the US and Europe, but White House officials said that they understood that a visit by Mr Bush could backfire badly on Mr Blair. “We understand that it would not necessarily be helpful,” one said.
Transatlantic relations were facing further strain yesterday after[i] The Washington Post [/i]revealed that the US tapped the phone of Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog.
Administration hawks have criticised Mr ElBaradei for being too lenient towards Iran, but Mr ElBaradei is well regarded by Britain, France and Germany, the countries working with him to prevent Iran manufacturing nuclear weapons. - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...,,3-1401860,00.html
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| ---> Republican Senators McCain & Hagel Have NO CONFIDENCE in Rummy Rumsfeld |
| 12.13.04 (2:53 pm) [edit] |
[u][b]McCain: 'No Confidence' in Rumsfeld[/b][/u]
PHOENIX - U.S. Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) said Monday that he has "no confidence" in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, citing Rumsfeld's handling of the war in Iraq (news - web sites) and the failure to send more troops.
McCain, speaking to The Associated Press in an hourlong interview, said his comments were not a call for Rumsfeld's resignation, explaining that President Bush (news - web sites) "can have the team that he wants around him."
"I have strenuously argued for larger troop numbers in Iraq, including the right kind of troops — linguists, special forces, civil affairs, etc.," said McCain, R-Ariz. "There are very strong differences of opinion between myself and Secretary Rumsfeld on that issue."
When asked if Rumsfeld was a liability to the Bush administration, McCain responded: "The president can decide that, not me." - http://news.yahoo.com/news?tm...
[b]Over on CNN, GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel gave Wolf Blitzer an earful about Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld. Here's the highlight, via Atrios http://atrios.blogspot.com/ :[/b]
HAGEL: Well, the secretary of defense reports to the president
of the United States. I've had my differences with this
secretary of defense, and I have been very clear on it. I don't
like the way he has done some things. I think they have been
irresponsible. I don't like the way we went into Iraq. We
didn't go into Iraq with enough troops. He's dismissed his
general officers. He's dismissed all outside influence. He's
dismissed outside counsel and advice. And he's dismissed a lot
of inside counsel and advice from men and women who have been
in military uniforms for 25 and 30 years. One of the reasons
we've got this problem, Wolf, in my opinion, is that we were
unprepared for what we were going to face, what we are facing,
in a post-Saddam Iraq. And this is just one more manifestation
of the problem. Listen, when I talk to these young troops that
come back from Nebraska, National Guard Reserves, active duty,
and I sit down with them alone in a room and no one there, no
cameras, I ask them -- I was hearing some of these same things
over the last year: not the right kind of weaponry, personal
body armor they didn't have. They didn't have armor for their
vehicles. But yet too many of our leaders in this administration
were going around the country telling and reassuring Americans
our troops had everything they wanted. Certainly the Congress
was passing a lot of money to make sure they had everything they
wanted. So there are a lot of pieces in this. I do think there
is some good news. I do think the military is working to resolve
these issues. I do think we are putting more armor on those
vehicles and we are getting the personal armor to these troops
and the weapons. But it goes beyond that, Wolf.
BIDEN: Hey, Wolf, can I make one...
BLITZER: I want to take a quick break, Senators. Hold on one second.
BIDEN: OK.
BLITZER: But very briefly to you, Senator Hagel, were you
disappointed that the president asked Rumsfeld to stay on?
HAGEL: The president's decision is his decision. He will live
with that decision. He'll have to defend that decision. And
that's all I want to say about it.
That's all you need to say about it, Chuck! Talk about applying the red-ass to Rummy -- in fact, we wouldn't be surprised if Grampa Don's out on his bony ass sooner than most people suspect -- including his alleged boss, the Kennedrunkport Kowboy. - http://www.americanpolitics.c...
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| ---> POVERTY – One Billion Children Hungry and Unhealthy |
| 12.13.04 (2:12 pm) [edit] |
An estimated 29,158 children under five die from mostly preventable diseases every day, http://www.guardian.co.uk/int...,3604,1370066,00.html according to UNICEF's annual State of the World's Children report, http://www.unicef.org/sowc05/... released on Thursday. The report found that "more than 1 billion children were growing up hungry and unhealthy, schools had become targets for warring parties, and whole villages were being killed off by AIDS." Governments around the world take much of the blame in the report for having failed to live up to past agreements and responsibilities, like those outlined in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. UNICEF also notes that the spread of poverty is not confined to developing nations; the proportion of children living in low-income households has risen in 11 of the top 15 industrialized nations over the last decade.
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| ---> DimWit Bush's Bungled War in Iraq May Cause Iraqi "Hitler" Worse than Saddam (or Dubya)!!! |
| 12.13.04 (7:06 am) [edit] |
[b]Iraq President: Citizens That Feel Humiliated Could Lead to 'Iraqi Hitler' [/b]
DUBAI - Long-term instability in Iraq could give birth to an "Iraqi Hitler" if citizens continue to feel humiliated and despondent, Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar has said.
Daily bombings and kidnappings have plagued Iraq since last year's U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein and the relentless Sunni-led insurgency has crippled reconstruction and development projects in the country.
"This could in the long term create an environment in which an Iraqi Hitler could emerge like the one created by the defeat of Germany and the humiliation of Germans in World War I," Yawar told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper in remarks published on Monday.
Iraq's interim leaders have also come under fire for failing to reach out to some alienated factions and U.S.-led offensives on rebel-held cities have led to further divisions.
Yawar -- a Sunni Muslim who was chosen for the largely symbolic post of president in June -- also urged Iraq's neighbors to break their "negative silence" about attacks in Iraq and play a positive role in helping stabilize the country.
"When a fire breaks out in your neighbor's house you should act quickly to put it out, not only for the sake of your neighbor's but also so that you are not forced to put it out in your own home when it spreads there," the president said.
Earlier this month, Iraq and its neighbors made vague promises to improve security cooperation after a meeting in which Iraqi officials voiced growing frustration that neighboring states were not doing enough to halt the flow of people, arms and funds linked to guerrilla violence in Iraq.
Yawar, who has said that parliamentary elections should go ahead on time on January 30, told BBC radio that he expected more violence in Iraq aimed at derailing the landmark polls.
"Their tactical target is to undermine the electoral process and to stop us having our first elections. This is why we see it is a challenge we have to meet.
"The problem is we are not fearing representation, we are fearing the time of the elections. If people can feel safe enough to go and cast their vote," he said, adding that Iraq was "exploring all ideas" to ensure an acceptable majority of people voted as well as balanced representation in the assembly.
Most of the parties representing Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who make up about 20 percent of the country's 26 million population, recently called for the elections to be postponed for up to six months, saying a free and fair poll could not be held amidst the violence, most of which is affecting Sunni areas.
Yawar said the security situation could not be solved unless Iraqi forces became completely efficient. He said some former army and police officers with clean records should be reinstated, adding that Washington had made a mistake when it dissolved the defense and interior ministries. - http://www.commondreams.org/h...
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| ---> US Attacks UN |
| 12.12.04 (3:24 pm) [edit] |
[b]NOTE:[/b] Rumors are circulating regarding the possible replacement for Bush's UN ambassador, John Danforth, who resigned last week. Selection of Nicholas Burns, current ambassador to NATO and a smart hold-over from the Clinton years, would likely signal a Colin Powell-type effort to use and co-opt the UN and to try to portray the Bush administration as diplomatically serious and multi-dimensional. Choosing John Bolton, a leading right-wing ideologue whose history of UN-bashing dates back to his role in the Reagan administration, would indicate that the administration intends to maintain its attacks on the UN and escalate its unilateralist anti-UN strategy. Keep tuned.
** The attacks on Kofi Annan and the oil-for-food "scandal" are really a right-wing political attack on the UN. ** The U.S. and other Security Council governments, not the UN Secretariat, were responsible for allowing Iraq to sell oil to Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere outside of the oil-for-food program despite knowledge that billions of dollars would go directly to Saddam Hussein's government. ** The U.S. and its allies, not the UN Secretariat, also held primary responsibility for accepting or rejecting oil-for-food contracts; they never publicly raised concerns or held back contracts because of kickbacks or surcharges. ** The report of the UN reform panel, while seriously flawed regarding possible UN legitimation of the use of military force, still represents an important step towards reclaiming the UN as a partner in the global movement against empire.
[b]OIL-FOR-FOOD "SCANDALS"[/b]
The escalating attacks on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, including calls for his resignation, are not responses to any "scandal." Rather, they must be seen as major attacks on the United Nations as a whole. While they are so far coming from right-wing elements in Congress and the media, rather than the Bush administration directly (see below), they reflect among other things a growing view among many in Washington that the UN has gone too far in challenging U.S. legitimacy and credibility, particularly regarding Iraq.
The New York Times, ironically enough, had it right. Its 5 December 2004 lead editorial acknowledged that "Iraq accumulated far more illicit money through trade agreements that the United States and other Security Council members knew about for years but chose to accept. ... The United Nations bureaucracy had no power to prevent these illicit oil or arms deals outside the oil-for-food program. It was the responsibility of member nations... Thus the primary blame for allowing Iraq to accumulate illicit billions lies with the United States and other Security Council members that winked at prohibited oil sales...."
The ideologically-driven attacks are led by Senator Norm Coleman (the Minnesota Republican who replaced Paul Wellstone), Claudia Rossett (a one-note reporter jumping from the Wall Street Journal to the right-wing Rumsfeld-endorsing New York Sun), columnists William Safire in the NY Times and Charles Krauthamer in the Washington Post, and the pundits of the American Enterprise Institute. But much of the background comes from documents made public by the dubious Ahmad Chalabi, the former CIA asset and Pentagon favorite. When he returned to Iraq shortly after the U.S. invasion under protection of the U.S. military, following decades in CIA-backed exile, the U.S. military turned over to Chalabi massive quantities of alleged Iraqi government files. Among those documents, Chalabi claims, were lists of people and international corporations who were offered the right to sell Iraqi oil allocations by Saddam Hussein's regime.
The effect of the right-wing campaign has been to focus public and media attention on the alleged responsibility of the UN secretariat, especially Kofi Annan personally, in overseeing the oil-for-food program, rather than keeping the focus where it belongs, on the role of the U.S. and other Security Council member states. The power to approve contracts for Iraq to sell its oil or purchase humanitarian supplies rested entirely with the UN's "661 Committee," made up of all members of the Security Council - whatever the back-up role of the UN Secretariat in initially examining some contracts, the ultimate power to approve or reject belonged solely to the member governments. U.S. Deputy Ambassador James Cunningham was the U.S. official who most often participated in the work of the 661 Committee. The U.S. and Britain routinely and publicly used their power on that committee to delay or cancel contracts based on their often-cited (though rarely substantiated) claim of "dual use," meaning potential military as well as civilian use. But there are no publicized reports of an American or British representative (or any other Council member) putting holds on a contract because of the widely-known practice (typical of the global oil industry) of kickbacks and surcharges.
The attacks have focused on Kofi Annan personally largely because it is easier to demonize the symbol of an institution than an institution itself; unspoken appeals to racism no doubt make attacking Annan even more popular. Also, Annan and the Secretariat, in failing to make all the records completely public right from the beginning, enhanced the rumor-mongering grist mill.
It is certainly not a coincidence that the anti-UN attacks are escalating after the election; during the campaign, accountability to wide-spread U.S. support for the UN might have had to be taken into account. Further, it is emerging at least partially in response to Annan's important (however belated) public recognition that the U.S. war in Iraq was illegal. After all, the UN's official independent investigation of the oil-for-food imbroglio, under the direction of quintessential Washington insider and former Fed chief Paul Volcker, has been underway for months and is expected to produce its first interim report in January.
The kickback and corruption claims have focused primarily on two individuals. Benon Sevan, a long-time UN employee who was in charge of the UN's Office of the Iraq Program and thus nominally overseeing the oil-for-food program, is alleged to have been on Iraq's list of oil allocation recipients. The other is Kofi Annan's son Kojo Annan, a former consultant for the Swiss firm Cotecna that the UN hired to oversee the oil contracts. His continuing financial arrangement with the company, even after leaving their employ shortly before the UN signed the contract, has given the appearance of possible nepotism and/or influence peddling. There is one key question that so far Cotecna has refused to answer: Why did Cotecna's common and perfectly legal "non-compete" payments to Kojo Annan, that began at the end of the 1990s, stop in February 2004, just after public rumors began to surface about Kojo's involvement?
Certainly the allegations against Sevan should be investigated and he and any others should be held accountable for any proven violation of UN rules that prohibit international civil servants from profiting from UN programs. Similarly, any appearance of inappropriate influence by Kojo Annan should be thoroughly examined. Volcker's panel is properly looking at both those claims. But neither of them have anything to do with what should be recognized as the REAL oil-for-food scandals: (1) The role of the U.S. in deliberately approving (or at times acquiescing with a wink and a nod) out-of-program oil sales to Jordan and Turkey that led to billions of dollars in unaccountable hard currency going directly to Saddam Hussein's regime. (The special oil sales to Jordan were based on a special Council protocol. Sales to Turkey, a NATO member and key U.S. military ally vitally important for supporting the U.S.-British military "no-fly zone" patrols and frequent bombing campaigns against Iraq, were informally approved but widely known in the Council. Both arrangements were based on the UN Charter's Article 50 that gives special consideration to countries impacted by UN sanctions imposed against a neighboring state.) (2) The role of the U.S. in undermining the oil-for-food program's capacity to sustain Iraq's civilian population by demanding that the UN divert up to 30% of Iraq's oil income to pay for UN overhead costs and for reparations claims from Kuwait, Israel and other wealthy countries; and by placing holds on contracts that undermined Iraq's ability to obtain vital humanitarian goods. (3) Most important, the role of the U.S. in imposing what ultimately became genocidal economic sanctions against Iraq, and how it manipulated the Security Council to maintain them.
The claim that Kofi Annan should resign now, based on rumors and innuendo, can be seen as nothing more than a means of attacking the UN as a whole. The fact that the attacks are coming largely from right-wing Congressional, think tank and media sources, rather than the White House itself, may reflect Bush administration ties to U.S. oil companies, which, in purchasing Iraqi oil, were active participants for years in the kickback scheme. It may reflect the grudging recognition in the White House that right now, on the eve of the flawed plans for Iraqi elections the U.S. needs greater, not lesser, UN involvement in Iraq. And it may mean simply that the administration has determined it is better served by letting surrogates take the lead.
[b]UN REFORM PANEL [/b]
The release of the report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change is an important accomplishment for the UN, bringing to the front of the global agenda many crucial interlocking issues involving poverty, disempowerment, environmental degradation and more. The media attention to the report has focused much too much on the issue of Security Council expansion, ignoring more important assessments. It is significant, for instance, that the report explicitly rejects the idea of "security being best preserved by a balance of power, or by any single - even benignly motivated - superpower."
The panel, while carefully identifying contending positions, recognized that "the refusal of the Security Council to bow to United States pressure to legitimate the [Iraq] war is proof of its relevance and indispensability: although the Security Council did not deter war, it provided a clear and principled standard with which to assess the decision to go to war. The flood of Foreign Ministers into the Security Council chambers during the debates, and widespread public attention, suggest that the United States decision to bring the question of force to the Security Council reaffirmed not just the relevance but the centrality of the Charter of the United Nations."
The panel fails in a key area of improving UN democracy. It calls for strengthening the thoroughly undemocratic Security Council, calling on it to be "more proactive" in the future. But it charges that the General Assembly, by far the most democratic of UN agencies, has "lost vitality and often fails to focus effectively on the most compelling issues of the day." This despite the crucial role played by the Assembly in building UN and international rejection of Bush's Iraq war, and the potential for greater UN relevance by further empowering the far more democratic Assembly.
An important contribution of the panel's report is the recognition of the breadth of threats facing the UN and the 21st century world: not limited to the threat of terrorism, as the Bush administration continues to claim, but a range of interconnected threats including poverty; infectious disease, especially HIV/AIDS; environmental degradation; inter-state conflict; internal conflicts including civil war and genocide; nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons; terrorism; and transnational organized crime. Recognizing these broad social crises, and the inter-connected and indivisible nature of them, is an important contribution.
A crucially significant development in the report, however, has to do with redefining the legitimacy of the use of pre-emptive or preventive force. It is important that the panel did not favor abandoning, or even officially reinterpreting Article 51 of the UN Charter, which outlines the very restrictive conditions in which a nation can legitimately use military force in self-defense. (It states that such force can be used "if an armed attack occurs," and only "until" the Security Council can meet to determine a collective response.)
The report acknowledges that Article 51 should be understood to include self-defense by a state facing an imminent threat - such as a hostile state loading ballistic missiles onto launch pads. But crucially, the report ultimately fails to answer the fundamental question of what to do when a state justifies self-defense by claiming to face an imminent threat, but in fact the claim is false, and fails to determine who has the right to determine the legitimacy of the claim. There is a dangerous implication that any country, following the pattern of bald-faced lies that undergirded Washington's and London's claims of Iraq's imminent threat (remember Tony Blair's claim of 45 minutes for Iraq to launch a missile?), might have the right to simply announce to the world that X country represents an imminent danger and therefore claim it has the right to go to war without Security Council authorization. The panel says nothing about who might hold such governments accountable for such false claims. The other key unanswered question is whether there is an implicit recognition of the kind of double standard that characterizes so much of UN policy-- with the veto-wielding members of the Security Council held to a lesser standard of accountability than other countries.
The panel did provide the beginning of a set of criteria for determining the legitimacy of military force. The guidelines are proposed for UN authorization of force, but the panel urges governments to accept them as well. They include the threat being serious enough to justify the use of military force; clarity that the primary purpose of the proposed military action is in fact to halt the threat; insuring that every non-military alternative has or will fail; the military force is proportional to the threat; and that there is a "reasonable consequence"
that the military action will work against the threat and the consequences will not be worse than the consequences of inaction. But again there is no proposal for holding governments accountable to those guidelines, let alone how to deal with rogue governments taking military action in defiance of those guidelines, such as Washington's war in Iraq.
The panel distinguished "preemptive" military force, used unilaterally by a country claiming to face an ostensibly imminent threat, from "preventive" force, used in "anticipatory self-defense," meaning a longer-range threat that is not claimed to be imminent. "The short answer," as the panel describes it, "is that if there are good arguments for preventive military action ... they should be put to the Security Council, which can authorize such action if it chooses to." In other words, the panel anticipates that even without "rewriting or reinterpretation of Article 51," the Council may authorize the use of preventive force -- something never before considered as legitimate in international law. Such authorization, if the Council granted it, would compromise even further, perhaps irreparably, United Nations credibility.
In the diplomatically difficult area of genocide and ethnic cleansing within an ostensibly sovereign state, the panel breaks some new ground in defending the obligation of the international community to protect endangered peoples. It states that "there is a growing recognition that the issue is not the 'right to intervene' of any State, but the 'responsibility to protect' of every State, when it comes to people suffering from avoidable catastrophe - mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease. And there is a growing acceptance that while sovereign Governments have the primary responsibility to protect their own citizens from such catastrophes, when they are unable or unwilling to do so that responsibility should be taken up by the wider international community - with it spanning a continuum involving prevention, response to violence, if necessary, and rebuilding shattered societies." It remains unclear whether this language might be used to strengthen calls for the UN to provide international protection to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
In other areas there are significant advances in the panel's report, including the recognition that the Non-Proliferation Treaty's Article VI requires the U.S. and other acknowledgement nuclear powers to move towards full and complete nuclear disarmament. The report bemoans the weakening of the NPT overall. But by recognizing the obligations of the most powerful nuclear weapons states rather than focusing, as U.S. policy does, only on the possible proliferation of such weapons to other non-nuclear weapons states, the panel supports a more equitable global accountability for compliance with the NPT.
The sections that deal with changing Security Council composition provide two parallel proposals for Council expansion to the existing structure of five permanent, veto-wielding members and ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms; both proposals would add a total of nine new Council seats. One calls for adding six new permanent but non-veto seats (two from Africa, two from Asia, one from Latin America and one from Europe), plus three additional non-permanent seats. The other calls for eight new four-year, renewable seats (giving powerful countries a kind of "illusion of permanence") without veto rights, as well as one new two-year non-permanent seat. The panel does not recommend any expansion of veto power, but they also do not propose methods of ending the anti-democratic veto arrangement altogether.
The panel acknowledged that any expansion of the Council, under either proposal, should "give preference for permanent or longer-term seats to those States that are among the top three financial contributors in their relevant regional area to the regular budget, or the top three voluntary contributors from their regional area, or the top three troop contributors from their regional areas to United Nations peacekeeping missions." This would undermine the long-standing UN principle that financial support for the organization is based on an "equity of pain" principle - that holds that it is equally difficult for the U.S. to pay the multi-million dollar 22% of the UN budget as it is for impoverished Chad or Laos to pay the tiny fraction of one percent that constitutes their share. It would privilege the wealthiest states and in a few instances those with a military big enough to send troops for years abroad on UN missions.
In fact it is unlikely that either proposal for Council expansion will become reality any time soon. Rather, the panel report is fueling an important global discussion of the undemocratic and illegitimate nature of the current Council composition, thereby advancing the more useful effort to delegitimize Council power in favor of reimpowering the far more democratic General Assembly.
Overall, despite its significant inadequacies, the panel's report represents a major institutional advance in the cause of UN reform and the fight for UN global centrality, particularly in recognizing the interlocked relationships between economic, social, environmental and security crises. While not endorsing the recommendations wholesale, the international peace and justice movements should view the panel's report overall as an important step in reclaiming the United Nations as part of our global mobilization against the ravages of empire. - http://www.zmag.org/content/s...
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In the summer of 1994, I was part of a four-person Christian Peacemaker Team dedicated to filing reports on human rights conditions in Jeremie, located in the southern finger of Haiti. When I arrived, I spent one day in Port au Prince, waiting to travel by ferry to the tiny coastal town of St. Helene. That day, eager to be Helpful Hannah, I joined some young girls to haul Hinckley Schmidt size water containers, destined for a neighborhood center in Port au Prince's appalling Cite Soleil, across a ravine. My arms were trembling almost immediately. When we reached the cement ledge where the plastic water containers were lined up for vehicle transport, I dropped mine down with an exhausted hurrah and then watched in horror as it split. The girls flew into action trying to save some of the precious water. "Si ou cache verite, ou enterre dlo" - the Haitian proverb says that to hide the truth is like trying to bury water. The truth was gushing out. Throughout that summer I watched women carry water, on their heads, walking miles uphill. One day my friend Madame Ti Pa nearly fainted from the ordeal.
Madame Ti Pa struggled to support three children: Natasha, 8, Petiarson, 2, and Patricia, 1. Natasha was an orphan whose parents were killed when the overcrowded Neptune ship capsized off Haiti's coastline. Madame Ti Pa found Natasha wandering tearfully in the street and took her into her home. Natasha was eligible for financial help to attend school, but Madame Ti Pa couldn't afford to buy her a uniform, socks and shoes. Nor did she have money to feed the children properly. The children appeared malnourished and were often feverish. Even so, they sang, laughed and cuddled together, obviously responsive to Madame Ti Pa's animated spontaneity.
St. Helene's hilly roads were rocky and jagged, rough on wheels, shoes and bare feet. Beyond St. Helene, one path led to a smooth, paved road with attractive interlocking stones called "adoken". Lined by gorgeous plants, trees and flowers, the road passed through the richest section of Jeremie.
Our Christian Peacemaker Team members hurried along this route two mornings each week to make radio contact with Port-au-Prince. The sisters at the House of the Good Shepherd let us use their equipment. Afterward, it was always pleasant to chat with the kindly sisters and to hear of progress at the cooperative farm they sponsored. Sixty-five families were supported by women who cultivated crops in fields next to the sisters' home.
One day, Madame Ti Pa asked me to go with her to talk to the sisters about joining the project. A woman in Port-au-Prince had written her a letter of recommendation. Madame Ti Pa's eyes shone with hope when she showed me the typed letter. Then, she asked for a bar of soap. She hadn't been able to wash clothes for weeks, soap having become a luxury.
Letter in hand, dressed in a clean skirt and top, Madame Ti Pa met me to walk up to the Good Shepherd House. When we reached the smooth road, Madame Ti Pa told me the story behind it. The "adoken" bricks were ordered by President Jean Bertrand Aristide to build a road through St. Helen, but the shipment was delayed and didn't arrive until after the coup d'etat. The bricks were then confiscated and used instead to cover the already paved road through the richest section of town. The people of St. Helen felt disappointed and cheated.
More disappointment was in store for Madame Ti Pa when we arrived at the Good Shepherd house. Sr. Angeline firmly told her that it was impossible for them to accept any more women into the project. Madame Ti Pa was one of many who had begged to join.
Walking back along the "adoken" road, Madame Ti Pa trembled with weakness. She hadn't eaten since the previous morning. I thought again of the attitude I'd heard macoutes express: "The poor are too lazy and stupid to run the country. They just want to cheat and steal." On that road, even the very stones would cry out. (Habakkuk 2: 9-11)
What could we say to people who had driven Haitians to raw despair? Days later I met a man reputed to have committed the worst crimes. He was accused of theft, torture and murder, yet because he had a gun, he had power. He used this power against simple people who had nothing and craved little more than basic rights. Yet, I had to ask, did I come from a country that had more in common with him or with the people he persecuted?
A cold shiver ran through me when I recalled similar awareness of the power of water, the power of guns and the grinding power of poverty encountered in Basra, Iraq during the summer of 2000. Our small peace team, again four in number, wanted to settle into the poorest area of Iraq's southern port city to study Arabic and better understand conditions in a neighborhood blighted by the effects of economic sanctions and a dictatorship's abusive rule. Three of the first words I wanted to learn, in Arabic, were, "Don't do that!" I wanted to shout the phrase at playful boys who, in the blasting heat, would cup their hands, dip into the sewage ditch running alongside the road, and pour water over their heads to cool off. By the end of the summer, my companions and I would sometimes clap our hands over our eyes and shout "OK, my turn," then pucker our lips as the boys poured water over our heads. The alternative was to pass out under the harsh sun as the temperature rose to 140 degrees.
Each morning, in the household where I stayed, Nadra, whose name means "exceptional," would rise at 4:00 a.m. to begin scrubbing every surface in the sparsely furnished home. Her next task would involve removing a stone, lowering an electric pump into the well below, and siphoning off some of the available tap water supply. Nadra was one of a very few people who could afford such a pump. Our team members didn't drink the pumped water, for fear of becoming deathly ill. We drank bottled water and spent more money on two days of bottled water for ourselves than Nadra's household spent for an entire month. So you can see the pecking order: Americans get purified bottled water, an Iraqi family in the good graces of the regime could at least manage to pump somewhat sanitized water, and the poor would be the most vulnerable to water-borne diseases.
Again, memory takes me to a scene of painful conflict over water. I'm remembering a time when our friend Caoihme Butterly walked into the wretched remains of the Jenin Camp on the West Bank, in April of 2002, carrying two heavy six packs of bottled water. Immediately, small boys ran up to her, eager to greet her. "Caoihme, Caoihme!" they shouted. Caoihme is a tall woman. She towered over them, holding the valuable water. I watched her eyes fill with tears when the boys, in frustration, began to fight with each other as they reached up to grab her cargo, eager to bring a bottle home to their family.
I wonder how Natasha, the eight year old orphan whom I met in St. Helene, has fared. Is she an eighteen year old woman with luminous eyes and a gorgeous smile? Would she remember waiting outside her home, each morning, to run and greet me when I stepped out of mine? I hope she doesn't remember a morning when she was crouched on the ground and looked away when I called her name. I walked toward her, wondering if I had done something to hurt the child's feelings the previous day. Drawing closer, I could see tiny pebbles glistening on Natasha's lip. Natasha hadn't run to see me because Natasha was eating dirt.
"You can't bury water," said our Haitian friends. "And you can't bury truth." The British medical journal, the Lancet, estimates that upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Child malnutrition is escalating and chronic outbreaks of such diseases as hepatitis and cholera occur regularly.
After 18 months of US war and occupation, contaminated wells cause water borne diseases; rivers are so polluted that not even animals can safely drink from the rivers; the lack of electricity means food and medicine can't be preserved and water and sewage can't be treated. Because of chaos and corruption in the US occupation, Iraqis remain in desperate need of jobs, services and security.
A decade has passed since I first met children in Haiti. Next month, Voices in the Wilderness will mark a decade since we first declared our intent to become "criminals" by traveling to Iraq. Several of our members are returning from recent trips to Haiti with stories worse than mine. I hope the children we've met and all those who hunger and thirst for justice will teach us to tell the truth, nonviolently, and to never be so foolish as to think you can get anywhere by burying water. Many of the people in Haiti and Iraq have the truth but don't have the water. We have the water, but we don't have the truth.
[b]Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org), a campaign to end U.S. economic and military warfare abroad and in our own locales. She can be reached at kathy@vitw.org [/b]- http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| ---> Burying Water |
| 12.12.04 (5:48 am) [edit] |
In the summer of 1994, I was part of a four-person Christian Peacemaker Team dedicated to filing reports on human rights conditions in Jeremie, located in the southern finger of Haiti. When I arrived, I spent one day in Port au Prince, waiting to travel by ferry to the tiny coastal town of St. Helene. That day, eager to be Helpful Hannah, I joined some young girls to haul Hinckley Schmidt size water containers, destined for a neighborhood center in Port au Prince's appalling Cite Soleil, across a ravine. My arms were trembling almost immediately. When we reached the cement ledge where the plastic water containers were lined up for vehicle transport, I dropped mine down with an exhausted hurrah and then watched in horror as it split. The girls flew into action trying to save some of the precious water. "Si ou cache verite, ou enterre dlo" - the Haitian proverb says that to hide the truth is like trying to bury water. The truth was gushing out. Throughout that summer I watched women carry water, on their heads, walking miles uphill. One day my friend Madame Ti Pa nearly fainted from the ordeal.
Madame Ti Pa struggled to support three children: Natasha, 8, Petiarson, 2, and Patricia, 1. Natasha was an orphan whose parents were killed when the overcrowded Neptune ship capsized off Haiti's coastline. Madame Ti Pa found Natasha wandering tearfully in the street and took her into her home. Natasha was eligible for financial help to attend school, but Madame Ti Pa couldn't afford to buy her a uniform, socks and shoes. Nor did she have money to feed the children properly. The children appeared malnourished and were often feverish. Even so, they sang, laughed and cuddled together, obviously responsive to Madame Ti Pa's animated spontaneity.
St. Helene's hilly roads were rocky and jagged, rough on wheels, shoes and bare feet. Beyond St. Helene, one path led to a smooth, paved road with attractive interlocking stones called "adoken". Lined by gorgeous plants, trees and flowers, the road passed through the richest section of Jeremie.
Our Christian Peacemaker Team members hurried along this route two mornings each week to make radio contact with Port-au-Prince. The sisters at the House of the Good Shepherd let us use their equipment. Afterward, it was always pleasant to chat with the kindly sisters and to hear of progress at the cooperative farm they sponsored. Sixty-five families were supported by women who cultivated crops in fields next to the sisters' home.
One day, Madame Ti Pa asked me to go with her to talk to the sisters about joining the project. A woman in Port-au-Prince had written her a letter of recommendation. Madame Ti Pa's eyes shone with hope when she showed me the typed letter. Then, she asked for a bar of soap. She hadn't been able to wash clothes for weeks, soap having become a luxury.
Letter in hand, dressed in a clean skirt and top, Madame Ti Pa met me to walk up to the Good Shepherd House. When we reached the smooth road, Madame Ti Pa told me the story behind it. The "adoken" bricks were ordered by President Jean Bertrand Aristide to build a road through St. Helen, but the shipment was delayed and didn't arrive until after the coup d'etat. The bricks were then confiscated and used instead to cover the already paved road through the richest section of town. The people of St. Helen felt disappointed and cheated.
More disappointment was in store for Madame Ti Pa when we arrived at the Good Shepherd house. Sr. Angeline firmly told her that it was impossible for them to accept any more women into the project. Madame Ti Pa was one of many who had begged to join.
Walking back along the "adoken" road, Madame Ti Pa trembled with weakness. She hadn't eaten since the previous morning. I thought again of the attitude I'd heard macoutes express: "The poor are too lazy and stupid to run the country. They just want to cheat and steal." On that road, even the very stones would cry out. (Habakkuk 2: 9-11)
What could we say to people who had driven Haitians to raw despair? Days later I met a man reputed to have committed the worst crimes. He was accused of theft, torture and murder, yet because he had a gun, he had power. He used this power against simple people who had nothing and craved little more than basic rights. Yet, I had to ask, did I come from a country that had more in common with him or with the people he persecuted?
A cold shiver ran through me when I recalled similar awareness of the power of water, the power of guns and the grinding power of poverty encountered in Basra, Iraq during the summer of 2000. Our small peace team, again four in number, wanted to settle into the poorest area of Iraq's southern port city to study Arabic and better understand conditions in a neighborhood blighted by the effects of economic sanctions and a dictatorship's abusive rule. Three of the first words I wanted to learn, in Arabic, were, "Don't do that!" I wanted to shout the phrase at playful boys who, in the blasting heat, would cup their hands, dip into the sewage ditch running alongside the road, and pour water over their heads to cool off. By the end of the summer, my companions and I would sometimes clap our hands over our eyes and shout "OK, my turn," then pucker our lips as the boys poured water over our heads. The alternative was to pass out under the harsh sun as the temperature rose to 140 degrees.
Each morning, in the household where I stayed, Nadra, whose name means "exceptional," would rise at 4:00 a.m. to begin scrubbing every surface in the sparsely furnished home. Her next task would involve removing a stone, lowering an electric pump into the well below, and siphoning off some of the available tap water supply. Nadra was one of a very few people who could afford such a pump. Our team members didn't drink the pumped water, for fear of becoming deathly ill. We drank bottled water and spent more money on two days of bottled water for ourselves than Nadra's household spent for an entire month. So you can see the pecking order: Americans get purified bottled water, an Iraqi family in the good graces of the regime could at least manage to pump somewhat sanitized water, and the poor would be the most vulnerable to water-borne diseases.
Again, memory takes me to a scene of painful conflict over water. I'm remembering a time when our friend Caoihme Butterly walked into the wretched remains of the Jenin Camp on the West Bank, in April of 2002, carrying two heavy six packs of bottled water. Immediately, small boys ran up to her, eager to greet her. "Caoihme, Caoihme!" they shouted. Caoihme is a tall woman. She towered over them, holding the valuable water. I watched her eyes fill with tears when the boys, in frustration, began to fight with each other as they reached up to grab her cargo, eager to bring a bottle home to their family.
I wonder how Natasha, the eight year old orphan whom I met in St. Helene, has fared. Is she an eighteen year old woman with luminous eyes and a gorgeous smile? Would she remember waiting outside her home, each morning, to run and greet me when I stepped out of mine? I hope she doesn't remember a morning when she was crouched on the ground and looked away when I called her name. I walked toward her, wondering if I had done something to hurt the child's feelings the previous day. Drawing closer, I could see tiny pebbles glistening on Natasha's lip. Natasha hadn't run to see me because Natasha was eating dirt.
"You can't bury water," said our Haitian friends. "And you can't bury truth." The British medical journal, the Lancet, estimates that upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Child malnutrition is escalating and chronic outbreaks of such diseases as hepatitis and cholera occur regularly.
After 18 months of US war and occupation, contaminated wells cause water borne diseases; rivers are so polluted that not even animals can safely drink from the rivers; the lack of electricity means food and medicine can't be preserved and water and sewage can't be treated. Because of chaos and corruption in the US occupation, Iraqis remain in desperate need of jobs, services and security.
A decade has passed since I first met children in Haiti. Next month, Voices in the Wilderness will mark a decade since we first declared our intent to become "criminals" by traveling to Iraq. Several of our members are returning from recent trips to Haiti with stories worse than mine. I hope the children we've met and all those who hunger and thirst for justice will teach us to tell the truth, nonviolently, and to never be so foolish as to think you can get anywhere by burying water. Many of the people in Haiti and Iraq have the truth but don't have the water. We have the water, but we don't have the truth.
[b]Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org), a campaign to end U.S. economic and military warfare abroad and in our own locales. She can be reached at kathy@vitw.org [/b]- http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| ---> Burying Water |
| 12.12.04 (5:45 am) [edit] |
In the summer of 1994, I was part of a four-person Christian Peacemaker Team dedicated to filing reports on human rights conditions in Jeremie, located in the southern finger of Haiti. When I arrived, I spent one day in Port au Prince, waiting to travel by ferry to the tiny coastal town of St. Helene. That day, eager to be Helpful Hannah, I joined some young girls to haul Hinckley Schmidt size water containers, destined for a neighborhood center in Port au Prince's appalling Cite Soleil, across a ravine. My arms were trembling almost immediately. When we reached the cement ledge where the plastic water containers were lined up for vehicle transport, I dropped mine down with an exhausted hurrah and then watched in horror as it split. The girls flew into action trying to save some of the precious water. "Si ou cache verite, ou enterre dlo" - the Haitian proverb says that to hide the truth is like trying to bury water. The truth was gushing out. Throughout that summer I watched women carry water, on their heads, walking miles uphill. One day my friend Madame Ti Pa nearly fainted from the ordeal.
Madame Ti Pa struggled to support three children: Natasha, 8, Petiarson, 2, and Patricia, 1. Natasha was an orphan whose parents were killed when the overcrowded Neptune ship capsized off Haiti's coastline. Madame Ti Pa found Natasha wandering tearfully in the street and took her into her home. Natasha was eligible for financial help to attend school, but Madame Ti Pa couldn't afford to buy her a uniform, socks and shoes. Nor did she have money to feed the children properly. The children appeared malnourished and were often feverish. Even so, they sang, laughed and cuddled together, obviously responsive to Madame Ti Pa's animated spontaneity.
St. Helene's hilly roads were rocky and jagged, rough on wheels, shoes and bare feet. Beyond St. Helene, one path led to a smooth, paved road with attractive interlocking stones called "adoken". Lined by gorgeous plants, trees and flowers, the road passed through the richest section of Jeremie.
Our Christian Peacemaker Team members hurried along this route two mornings each week to make radio contact with Port-au-Prince. The sisters at the House of the Good Shepherd let us use their equipment. Afterward, it was always pleasant to chat with the kindly sisters and to hear of progress at the cooperative farm they sponsored. Sixty-five families were supported by women who cultivated crops in fields next to the sisters' home.
One day, Madame Ti Pa asked me to go with her to talk to the sisters about joining the project. A woman in Port-au-Prince had written her a letter of recommendation. Madame Ti Pa's eyes shone with hope when she showed me the typed letter. Then, she asked for a bar of soap. She hadn't been able to wash clothes for weeks, soap having become a luxury.
Letter in hand, dressed in a clean skirt and top, Madame Ti Pa met me to walk up to the Good Shepherd House. When we reached the smooth road, Madame Ti Pa told me the story behind it. The "adoken" bricks were ordered by President Jean Bertrand Aristide to build a road through St. Helen, but the shipment was delayed and didn't arrive until after the coup d'etat. The bricks were then confiscated and used instead to cover the already paved road through the richest section of town. The people of St. Helen felt disappointed and cheated.
More disappointment was in store for Madame Ti Pa when we arrived at the Good Shepherd house. Sr. Angeline firmly told her that it was impossible for them to accept any more women into the project. Madame Ti Pa was one of many who had begged to join.
Walking back along the "adoken" road, Madame Ti Pa trembled with weakness. She hadn't eaten since the previous morning. I thought again of the attitude I'd heard macoutes express: "The poor are too lazy and stupid to run the country. They just want to cheat and steal." On that road, even the very stones would cry out. (Habakkuk 2: 9-11)
What could we say to people who had driven Haitians to raw despair? Days later I met a man reputed to have committed the worst crimes. He was accused of theft, torture and murder, yet because he had a gun, he had power. He used this power against simple people who had nothing and craved little more than basic rights. Yet, I had to ask, did I come from a country that had more in common with him or with the people he persecuted?
A cold shiver ran through me when I recalled similar awareness of the power of water, the power of guns and the grinding power of poverty encountered in Basra, Iraq during the summer of 2000. Our small peace team, again four in number, wanted to settle into the poorest area of Iraq's southern port city to study Arabic and better understand conditions in a neighborhood blighted by the effects of economic sanctions and a dictatorship's abusive rule. Three of the first words I wanted to learn, in Arabic, were, "Don't do that!" I wanted to shout the phrase at playful boys who, in the blasting heat, would cup their hands, dip into the sewage ditch running alongside the road, and pour water over their heads to cool off. By the end of the summer, my companions and I would sometimes clap our hands over our eyes and shout "OK, my turn," then pucker our lips as the boys poured water over our heads. The alternative was to pass out under the harsh sun as the temperature rose to 140 degrees.
Each morning, in the household where I stayed, Nadra, whose name means "exceptional," would rise at 4:00 a.m. to begin scrubbing every surface in the sparsely furnished home. Her next task would involve removing a stone, lowering an electric pump into the well below, and siphoning off some of the available tap water supply. Nadra was one of a very few people who could afford such a pump. Our team members didn't drink the pumped water, for fear of becoming deathly ill. We drank bottled water and spent more money on two days of bottled water for ourselves than Nadra's household spent for an entire month. So you can see the pecking order: Americans get purified bottled water, an Iraqi family in the good graces of the regime could at least manage to pump somewhat sanitized water, and the poor would be the most vulnerable to water-borne diseases.
Again, memory takes me to a scene of painful conflict over water. I'm remembering a time when our friend Caoihme Butterly walked into the wretched remains of the Jenin Camp on the West Bank, in April of 2002, carrying two heavy six packs of bottled water. Immediately, small boys ran up to her, eager to greet her. "Caoihme, Caoihme!" they shouted. Caoihme is a tall woman. She towered over them, holding the valuable water. I watched her eyes fill with tears when the boys, in frustration, began to fight with each other as they reached up to grab her cargo, eager to bring a bottle home to their family.
I wonder how Natasha, the eight year old orphan whom I met in St. Helene, has fared. Is she an eighteen year old woman with luminous eyes and a gorgeous smile? Would she remember waiting outside her home, each morning, to run and greet me when I stepped out of mine? I hope she doesn't remember a morning when she was crouched on the ground and looked away when I called her name. I walked toward her, wondering if I had done something to hurt the child's feelings the previous day. Drawing closer, I could see tiny pebbles glistening on Natasha's lip. Natasha hadn't run to see me because Natasha was eating dirt.
"You can't bury water," said our Haitian friends. "And you can't bury truth." The British medical journal, the Lancet, estimates that upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Child malnutrition is escalating and chronic outbreaks of such diseases as hepatitis and cholera occur regularly.
After 18 months of US war and occupation, contaminated wells cause water borne diseases; rivers are so polluted that not even animals can safely drink from the rivers; the lack of electricity means food and medicine can't be preserved and water and sewage can't be treated. Because of chaos and corruption in the US occupation, Iraqis remain in desperate need of jobs, services and security.
A decade has passed since I first met children in Haiti. Next month, Voices in the Wilderness will mark a decade since we first declared our intent to become "criminals" by traveling to Iraq. Several of our members are returning from recent trips to Haiti with stories worse than mine. I hope the children we've met and all those who hunger and thirst for justice will teach us to tell the truth, nonviolently, and to never be so foolish as to think you can get anywhere by burying water. Many of the people in Haiti and Iraq have the truth but don't have the water. We have the water, but we don't have the truth.
[b]Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org), a campaign to end U.S. economic and military warfare abroad and in our own locales. She can be reached at kathy@vitw.org [/b]- http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| ---> Burying Water |
| 12.12.04 (5:45 am) [edit] |
In the summer of 1994, I was part of a four-person Christian Peacemaker Team dedicated to filing reports on human rights conditions in Jeremie, located in the southern finger of Haiti. When I arrived, I spent one day in Port au Prince, waiting to travel by ferry to the tiny coastal town of St. Helene. That day, eager to be Helpful Hannah, I joined some young girls to haul Hinckley Schmidt size water containers, destined for a neighborhood center in Port au Prince's appalling Cite Soleil, across a ravine. My arms were trembling almost immediately. When we reached the cement ledge where the plastic water containers were lined up for vehicle transport, I dropped mine down with an exhausted hurrah and then watched in horror as it split. The girls flew into action trying to save some of the precious water. "Si ou cache verite, ou enterre dlo" - the Haitian proverb says that to hide the truth is like trying to bury water. The truth was gushing out. Throughout that summer I watched women carry water, on their heads, walking miles uphill. One day my friend Madame Ti Pa nearly fainted from the ordeal.
Madame Ti Pa struggled to support three children: Natasha, 8, Petiarson, 2, and Patricia, 1. Natasha was an orphan whose parents were killed when the overcrowded Neptune ship capsized off Haiti's coastline. Madame Ti Pa found Natasha wandering tearfully in the street and took her into her home. Natasha was eligible for financial help to attend school, but Madame Ti Pa couldn't afford to buy her a uniform, socks and shoes. Nor did she have money to feed the children properly. The children appeared malnourished and were often feverish. Even so, they sang, laughed and cuddled together, obviously responsive to Madame Ti Pa's animated spontaneity.
St. Helene's hilly roads were rocky and jagged, rough on wheels, shoes and bare feet. Beyond St. Helene, one path led to a smooth, paved road with attractive interlocking stones called "adoken". Lined by gorgeous plants, trees and flowers, the road passed through the richest section of Jeremie.
Our Christian Peacemaker Team members hurried along this route two mornings each week to make radio contact with Port-au-Prince. The sisters at the House of the Good Shepherd let us use their equipment. Afterward, it was always pleasant to chat with the kindly sisters and to hear of progress at the cooperative farm they sponsored. Sixty-five families were supported by women who cultivated crops in fields next to the sisters' home.
One day, Madame Ti Pa asked me to go with her to talk to the sisters about joining the project. A woman in Port-au-Prince had written her a letter of recommendation. Madame Ti Pa's eyes shone with hope when she showed me the typed letter. Then, she asked for a bar of soap. She hadn't been able to wash clothes for weeks, soap having become a luxury.
Letter in hand, dressed in a clean skirt and top, Madame Ti Pa met me to walk up to the Good Shepherd House. When we reached the smooth road, Madame Ti Pa told me the story behind it. The "adoken" bricks were ordered by President Jean Bertrand Aristide to build a road through St. Helen, but the shipment was delayed and didn't arrive until after the coup d'etat. The bricks were then confiscated and used instead to cover the already paved road through the richest section of town. The people of St. Helen felt disappointed and cheated.
More disappointment was in store for Madame Ti Pa when we arrived at the Good Shepherd house. Sr. Angeline firmly told her that it was impossible for them to accept any more women into the project. Madame Ti Pa was one of many who had begged to join.
Walking back along the "adoken" road, Madame Ti Pa trembled with weakness. She hadn't eaten since the previous morning. I thought again of the attitude I'd heard macoutes express: "The poor are too lazy and stupid to run the country. They just want to cheat and steal." On that road, even the very stones would cry out. (Habakkuk 2: 9-11)
What could we say to people who had driven Haitians to raw despair? Days later I met a man reputed to have committed the worst crimes. He was accused of theft, torture and murder, yet because he had a gun, he had power. He used this power against simple people who had nothing and craved little more than basic rights. Yet, I had to ask, did I come from a country that had more in common with him or with the people he persecuted?
A cold shiver ran through me when I recalled similar awareness of the power of water, the power of guns and the grinding power of poverty encountered in Basra, Iraq during the summer of 2000. Our small peace team, again four in number, wanted to settle into the poorest area of Iraq's southern port city to study Arabic and better understand conditions in a neighborhood blighted by the effects of economic sanctions and a dictatorship's abusive rule. Three of the first words I wanted to learn, in Arabic, were, "Don't do that!" I wanted to shout the phrase at playful boys who, in the blasting heat, would cup their hands, dip into the sewage ditch running alongside the road, and pour water over their heads to cool off. By the end of the summer, my companions and I would sometimes clap our hands over our eyes and shout "OK, my turn," then pucker our lips as the boys poured water over our heads. The alternative was to pass out under the harsh sun as the temperature rose to 140 degrees.
Each morning, in the household where I stayed, Nadra, whose name means "exceptional," would rise at 4:00 a.m. to begin scrubbing every surface in the sparsely furnished home. Her next task would involve removing a stone, lowering an electric pump into the well below, and siphoning off some of the available tap water supply. Nadra was one of a very few people who could afford such a pump. Our team members didn't drink the pumped water, for fear of becoming deathly ill. We drank bottled water and spent more money on two days of bottled water for ourselves than Nadra's household spent for an entire month. So you can see the pecking order: Americans get purified bottled water, an Iraqi family in the good graces of the regime could at least manage to pump somewhat sanitized water, and the poor would be the most vulnerable to water-borne diseases.
Again, memory takes me to a scene of painful conflict over water. I'm remembering a time when our friend Caoihme Butterly walked into the wretched remains of the Jenin Camp on the West Bank, in April of 2002, carrying two heavy six packs of bottled water. Immediately, small boys ran up to her, eager to greet her. "Caoihme, Caoihme!" they shouted. Caoihme is a tall woman. She towered over them, holding the valuable water. I watched her eyes fill with tears when the boys, in frustration, began to fight with each other as they reached up to grab her cargo, eager to bring a bottle home to their family.
I wonder how Natasha, the eight year old orphan whom I met in St. Helene, has fared. Is she an eighteen year old woman with luminous eyes and a gorgeous smile? Would she remember waiting outside her home, each morning, to run and greet me when I stepped out of mine? I hope she doesn't remember a morning when she was crouched on the ground and looked away when I called her name. I walked toward her, wondering if I had done something to hurt the child's feelings the previous day. Drawing closer, I could see tiny pebbles glistening on Natasha's lip. Natasha hadn't run to see me because Natasha was eating dirt.
"You can't bury water," said our Haitian friends. "And you can't bury truth." The British medical journal, the Lancet, estimates that upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Child malnutrition is escalating and chronic outbreaks of such diseases as hepatitis and cholera occur regularly.
After 18 months of US war and occupation, contaminated wells cause water borne diseases; rivers are so polluted that not even animals can safely drink from the rivers; the lack of electricity means food and medicine can't be preserved and water and sewage can't be treated. Because of chaos and corruption in the US occupation, Iraqis remain in desperate need of jobs, services and security.
A decade has passed since I first met children in Haiti. Next month, Voices in the Wilderness will mark a decade since we first declared our intent to become "criminals" by traveling to Iraq. Several of our members are returning from recent trips to Haiti with stories worse than mine. I hope the children we've met and all those who hunger and thirst for justice will teach us to tell the truth, nonviolently, and to never be so foolish as to think you can get anywhere by burying water. Many of the people in Haiti and Iraq have the truth but don't have the water. We have the water, but we don't have the truth.
[b]Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org), a campaign to end U.S. economic and military warfare abroad and in our own locales. She can be reached at kathy@vitw.org [/b]- http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| ---> Burying Water |
| 12.12.04 (5:45 am) [edit] |
In the summer of 1994, I was part of a four-person Christian Peacemaker Team dedicated to filing reports on human rights conditions in Jeremie, located in the southern finger of Haiti. When I arrived, I spent one day in Port au Prince, waiting to travel by ferry to the tiny coastal town of St. Helene. That day, eager to be Helpful Hannah, I joined some young girls to haul Hinckley Schmidt size water containers, destined for a neighborhood center in Port au Prince's appalling Cite Soleil, across a ravine. My arms were trembling almost immediately. When we reached the cement ledge where the plastic water containers were lined up for vehicle transport, I dropped mine down with an exhausted hurrah and then watched in horror as it split. The girls flew into action trying to save some of the precious water. "Si ou cache verite, ou enterre dlo" - the Haitian proverb says that to hide the truth is like trying to bury water. The truth was gushing out. Throughout that summer I watched women carry water, on their heads, walking miles uphill. One day my friend Madame Ti Pa nearly fainted from the ordeal.
Madame Ti Pa struggled to support three children: Natasha, 8, Petiarson, 2, and Patricia, 1. Natasha was an orphan whose parents were killed when the overcrowded Neptune ship capsized off Haiti's coastline. Madame Ti Pa found Natasha wandering tearfully in the street and took her into her home. Natasha was eligible for financial help to attend school, but Madame Ti Pa couldn't afford to buy her a uniform, socks and shoes. Nor did she have money to feed the children properly. The children appeared malnourished and were often feverish. Even so, they sang, laughed and cuddled together, obviously responsive to Madame Ti Pa's animated spontaneity.
St. Helene's hilly roads were rocky and jagged, rough on wheels, shoes and bare feet. Beyond St. Helene, one path led to a smooth, paved road with attractive interlocking stones called "adoken". Lined by gorgeous plants, trees and flowers, the road passed through the richest section of Jeremie.
Our Christian Peacemaker Team members hurried along this route two mornings each week to make radio contact with Port-au-Prince. The sisters at the House of the Good Shepherd let us use their equipment. Afterward, it was always pleasant to chat with the kindly sisters and to hear of progress at the cooperative farm they sponsored. Sixty-five families were supported by women who cultivated crops in fields next to the sisters' home.
One day, Madame Ti Pa asked me to go with her to talk to the sisters about joining the project. A woman in Port-au-Prince had written her a letter of recommendation. Madame Ti Pa's eyes shone with hope when she showed me the typed letter. Then, she asked for a bar of soap. She hadn't been able to wash clothes for weeks, soap having become a luxury.
Letter in hand, dressed in a clean skirt and top, Madame Ti Pa met me to walk up to the Good Shepherd House. When we reached the smooth road, Madame Ti Pa told me the story behind it. The "adoken" bricks were ordered by President Jean Bertrand Aristide to build a road through St. Helen, but the shipment was delayed and didn't arrive until after the coup d'etat. The bricks were then confiscated and used instead to cover the already paved road through the richest section of town. The people of St. Helen felt disappointed and cheated.
More disappointment was in store for Madame Ti Pa when we arrived at the Good Shepherd house. Sr. Angeline firmly told her that it was impossible for them to accept any more women into the project. Madame Ti Pa was one of many who had begged to join.
Walking back along the "adoken" road, Madame Ti Pa trembled with weakness. She hadn't eaten since the previous morning. I thought again of the attitude I'd heard macoutes express: "The poor are too lazy and stupid to run the country. They just want to cheat and steal." On that road, even the very stones would cry out. (Habakkuk 2: 9-11)
What could we say to people who had driven Haitians to raw despair? Days later I met a man reputed to have committed the worst crimes. He was accused of theft, torture and murder, yet because he had a gun, he had power. He used this power against simple people who had nothing and craved little more than basic rights. Yet, I had to ask, did I come from a country that had more in common with him or with the people he persecuted?
A cold shiver ran through me when I recalled similar awareness of the power of water, the power of guns and the grinding power of poverty encountered in Basra, Iraq during the summer of 2000. Our small peace team, again four in number, wanted to settle into the poorest area of Iraq's southern port city to study Arabic and better understand conditions in a neighborhood blighted by the effects of economic sanctions and a dictatorship's abusive rule. Three of the first words I wanted to learn, in Arabic, were, "Don't do that!" I wanted to shout the phrase at playful boys who, in the blasting heat, would cup their hands, dip into the sewage ditch running alongside the road, and pour water over their heads to cool off. By the end of the summer, my companions and I would sometimes clap our hands over our eyes and shout "OK, my turn," then pucker our lips as the boys poured water over our heads. The alternative was to pass out under the harsh sun as the temperature rose to 140 degrees.
Each morning, in the household where I stayed, Nadra, whose name means "exceptional," would rise at 4:00 a.m. to begin scrubbing every surface in the sparsely furnished home. Her next task would involve removing a stone, lowering an electric pump into the well below, and siphoning off some of the available tap water supply. Nadra was one of a very few people who could afford such a pump. Our team members didn't drink the pumped water, for fear of becoming deathly ill. We drank bottled water and spent more money on two days of bottled water for ourselves than Nadra's household spent for an entire month. So you can see the pecking order: Americans get purified bottled water, an Iraqi family in the good graces of the regime could at least manage to pump somewhat sanitized water, and the poor would be the most vulnerable to water-borne diseases.
Again, memory takes me to a scene of painful conflict over water. I'm remembering a time when our friend Caoihme Butterly walked into the wretched remains of the Jenin Camp on the West Bank, in April of 2002, carrying two heavy six packs of bottled water. Immediately, small boys ran up to her, eager to greet her. "Caoihme, Caoihme!" they shouted. Caoihme is a tall woman. She towered over them, holding the valuable water. I watched her eyes fill with tears when the boys, in frustration, began to fight with each other as they reached up to grab her cargo, eager to bring a bottle home to their family.
I wonder how Natasha, the eight year old orphan whom I met in St. Helene, has fared. Is she an eighteen year old woman with luminous eyes and a gorgeous smile? Would she remember waiting outside her home, each morning, to run and greet me when I stepped out of mine? I hope she doesn't remember a morning when she was crouched on the ground and looked away when I called her name. I walked toward her, wondering if I had done something to hurt the child's feelings the previous day. Drawing closer, I could see tiny pebbles glistening on Natasha's lip. Natasha hadn't run to see me because Natasha was eating dirt.
"You can't bury water," said our Haitian friends. "And you can't bury truth." The British medical journal, the Lancet, estimates that upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Child malnutrition is escalating and chronic outbreaks of such diseases as hepatitis and cholera occur regularly.
After 18 months of US war and occupation, contaminated wells cause water borne diseases; rivers are so polluted that not even animals can safely drink from the rivers; the lack of electricity means food and medicine can't be preserved and water and sewage can't be treated. Because of chaos and corruption in the US occupation, Iraqis remain in desperate need of jobs, services and security.
A decade has passed since I first met children in Haiti. Next month, Voices in the Wilderness will mark a decade since we first declared our intent to become "criminals" by traveling to Iraq. Several of our members are returning from recent trips to Haiti with stories worse than mine. I hope the children we've met and all those who hunger and thirst for justice will teach us to tell the truth, nonviolently, and to never be so foolish as to think you can get anywhere by burying water. Many of the people in Haiti and Iraq have the truth but don't have the water. We have the water, but we don't have the truth.
[b]Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org), a campaign to end U.S. economic and military warfare abroad and in our own locales. She can be reached at kathy@vitw.org [/b]- http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| ---> A Defeat for an Empire |
| 12.12.04 (5:42 am) [edit] |
The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing.
I don't mean that the loss of American and Iraqi lives is to be celebrated. The death and destruction are numbingly tragic, and the suffering in Iraq is hard for most of us in the United States to comprehend.
The tragedy is compounded because these deaths haven't protected Americans or brought freedom to Iraqis. They have come in the quest to extend the American empire in this "new American century."
So, as a U.S. citizen, I welcome the U.S. defeat for a simple reason: It isn't the defeat of the United States -- its people or their ideals -- but of that empire. And it's essential that the American empire be defeated and dismantled.
The fact that the Bush administration says we are fighting for freedom and democracy (having long ago abandoned fictions about weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties) does not make it so.
We must look at the reality, no matter how painful. The people of Iraq are better off without Saddam Hussein's despised regime, but that does not prove our benevolent intentions or guarantee that the United States will work to bring meaningful democracy to Iraq.
In Iraq, the Bush administration invaded not to liberate but to extend and deepen U.S. domination. When Bush said, "We have no territorial ambitions; we don't seek an empire," on Nov. 11, 2002, he told a half-truth.
The United States doesn't want to absorb Iraq or take direct possession of its oil. That's not the way of empire today; it's about control over the flow of oil and oil profits, not ownership.
In a world that runs on oil, the nation that controls the flow of oil has great strategic power. U.S. policy-makers want leverage over the economies of competitors -- Western Europe, Japan and China -- that are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
The Bush administration has invested money and lives in making Iraq a platform from which the United States can project power.
That requires not the liberation of Iraq but its subordination. But most Iraqis don't want to be subordinated, which is why the United States in some sense lost the war on the day it invaded. One lesson of contemporary history is that occupying armies generate resistance that, inevitably, prevails over imperial power.
When we admit defeat and pull out -- not if, but when -- the fate of Iraqis will depend in part on whether the United States makes good on legal and moral obligations to pay reparations and allows international institutions to aid in creating a truly sovereign Iraq.
We shouldn't expect politicians to do either without pressure. An anti-empire movement -- the joining of anti-war forces with the movement to reject corporate globalization -- must create that pressure.
We should all carry a profound sense of sadness at where decisions made by U.S. policy-makers -- not just the gang in power today but a string of Republican and Democratic administrations -- have left us and the Iraqis. But that sadness should not keep us from pursuing the most courageous act of citizenship in the United States today: pledging to dismantle the American empire.
The planet's resources do not belong to the United States. The century is not America's. We own neither the world nor time. And if we don't give up the quest -- if we don't find our place in the world instead of on top of the world -- there is little hope for a safe, sane and sustainable future.
[b]Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity."[/b] - http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/ne...
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| ---> A Defeat for an Empire |
| 12.12.04 (5:39 am) [edit] |
The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing.
I don't mean that the loss of American and Iraqi lives is to be celebrated. The death and destruction are numbingly tragic, and the suffering in Iraq is hard for most of us in the United States to comprehend.
The tragedy is compounded because these deaths haven't protected Americans or brought freedom to Iraqis. They have come in the quest to extend the American empire in this "new American century."
So, as a U.S. citizen, I welcome the U.S. defeat for a simple reason: It isn't the defeat of the United States -- its people or their ideals -- but of that empire. And it's essential that the American empire be defeated and dismantled.
The fact that the Bush administration says we are fighting for freedom and democracy (having long ago abandoned fictions about weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties) does not make it so.
We must look at the reality, no matter how painful. The people of Iraq are better off without Saddam Hussein's despised regime, but that does not prove our benevolent intentions or guarantee that the United States will work to bring meaningful democracy to Iraq.
In Iraq, the Bush administration invaded not to liberate but to extend and deepen U.S. domination. When Bush said, "We have no territorial ambitions; we don't seek an empire," on Nov. 11, 2002, he told a half-truth.
The United States doesn't want to absorb Iraq or take direct possession of its oil. That's not the way of empire today; it's about control over the flow of oil and oil profits, not ownership.
In a world that runs on oil, the nation that controls the flow of oil has great strategic power. U.S. policy-makers want leverage over the economies of competitors -- Western Europe, Japan and China -- that are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
The Bush administration has invested money and lives in making Iraq a platform from which the United States can project power.
That requires not the liberation of Iraq but its subordination. But most Iraqis don't want to be subordinated, which is why the United States in some sense lost the war on the day it invaded. One lesson of contemporary history is that occupying armies generate resistance that, inevitably, prevails over imperial power.
When we admit defeat and pull out -- not if, but when -- the fate of Iraqis will depend in part on whether the United States makes good on legal and moral obligations to pay reparations and allows international institutions to aid in creating a truly sovereign Iraq.
We shouldn't expect politicians to do either without pressure. An anti-empire movement -- the joining of anti-war forces with the movement to reject corporate globalization -- must create that pressure.
We should all carry a profound sense of sadness at where decisions made by U.S. policy-makers -- not just the gang in power today but a string of Republican and Democratic administrations -- have left us and the Iraqis. But that sadness should not keep us from pursuing the most courageous act of citizenship in the United States today: pledging to dismantle the American empire.
The planet's resources do not belong to the United States. The century is not America's. We own neither the world nor time. And if we don't give up the quest -- if we don't find our place in the world instead of on top of the world -- there is little hope for a safe, sane and sustainable future.
[b]Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity."[/b] - http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/ne...
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| ---> A Defeat for an Empire |
| 12.12.04 (5:39 am) [edit] |
The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing.
I don't mean that the loss of American and Iraqi lives is to be celebrated. The death and destruction are numbingly tragic, and the suffering in Iraq is hard for most of us in the United States to comprehend.
The tragedy is compounded because these deaths haven't protected Americans or brought freedom to Iraqis. They have come in the quest to extend the American empire in this "new American century."
So, as a U.S. citizen, I welcome the U.S. defeat for a simple reason: It isn't the defeat of the United States -- its people or their ideals -- but of that empire. And it's essential that the American empire be defeated and dismantled.
The fact that the Bush administration says we are fighting for freedom and democracy (having long ago abandoned fictions about weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties) does not make it so.
We must look at the reality, no matter how painful. The people of Iraq are better off without Saddam Hussein's despised regime, but that does not prove our benevolent intentions or guarantee that the United States will work to bring meaningful democracy to Iraq.
In Iraq, the Bush administration invaded not to liberate but to extend and deepen U.S. domination. When Bush said, "We have no territorial ambitions; we don't seek an empire," on Nov. 11, 2002, he told a half-truth.
The United States doesn't want to absorb Iraq or take direct possession of its oil. That's not the way of empire today; it's about control over the flow of oil and oil profits, not ownership.
In a world that runs on oil, the nation that controls the flow of oil has great strategic power. U.S. policy-makers want leverage over the economies of competitors -- Western Europe, Japan and China -- that are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
The Bush administration has invested money and lives in making Iraq a platform from which the United States can project power.
That requires not the liberation of Iraq but its subordination. But most Iraqis don't want to be subordinated, which is why the United States in some sense lost the war on the day it invaded. One lesson of contemporary history is that occupying armies generate resistance that, inevitably, prevails over imperial power.
When we admit defeat and pull out -- not if, but when -- the fate of Iraqis will depend in part on whether the United States makes good on legal and moral obligations to pay reparations and allows international institutions to aid in creating a truly sovereign Iraq.
We shouldn't expect politicians to do either without pressure. An anti-empire movement -- the joining of anti-war forces with the movement to reject corporate globalization -- must create that pressure.
We should all carry a profound sense of sadness at where decisions made by U.S. policy-makers -- not just the gang in power today but a string of Republican and Democratic administrations -- have left us and the Iraqis. But that sadness should not keep us from pursuing the most courageous act of citizenship in the United States today: pledging to dismantle the American empire.
The planet's resources do not belong to the United States. The century is not America's. We own neither the world nor time. And if we don't give up the quest -- if we don't find our place in the world instead of on top of the world -- there is little hope for a safe, sane and sustainable future.
[b]Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity."[/b] - http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/ne...
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| ---> A Defeat for an Empire |
| 12.12.04 (5:39 am) [edit] |
The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing.
I don't mean that the loss of American and Iraqi lives is to be celebrated. The death and destruction are numbingly tragic, and the suffering in Iraq is hard for most of us in the United States to comprehend.
The tragedy is compounded because these deaths haven't protected Americans or brought freedom to Iraqis. They have come in the quest to extend the American empire in this "new American century."
So, as a U.S. citizen, I welcome the U.S. defeat for a simple reason: It isn't the defeat of the United States -- its people or their ideals -- but of that empire. And it's essential that the American empire be defeated and dismantled.
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