More on the subject of media control

Has anyone heard of Sinclair Broadcast Group? Jono gave me an article from the December issue of GQ magazine that was all about Sinclair Broadcast Group, a family-controlled media company. SBG is the operator of the largest number of local television stations in the US, and they have been accused of fixing the news for the neo-cons.

I had never heard of Sinclair and I found the article shocking. I would like to give you more information from the article, but I left it with another friend in London. Instead I offer you Wikipedia's entry on SBG, which discusses the controversies of their packaged news, disallowing a Nightline broadcast, and forcing their stations to air a documentary that was critical of John Kerry just before the 2004 election, amongst other things. The Wikipedia entry also has a list of stations owned by Sinclair. Please have a look at it, I think you will find it enlightening.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcasting

Thanks, Jono.

Max is away

The Elite-Controlled Mass Media

My interest in researching who really controls our media and how it affects the military-corporate complex grew immensely upon reading an essay by Gore Vidal entitled “Mickey Mouse, Historian” which originally appeared in The Nation in 1996.

On June 3, 1996, The Nation showed in a foldout chart how most of the US media are now owned by a handful of corporations. Several attractive octopi decorated the usually chaste pages of this journal. The most impressive of these cephalod molluscs was that headed by Disney-ABC, taking precedence over the lesser Time Warner, General Electric-NBC, and Westinghouse Corporation calamari, from which dangle innumerable tentacles representing television (network and cable), weapons factories (GE aircraft engines and nuclear turbines) and, of course, GNA and other insurance firms unfriendly to health care reform.

Today I spent quite a bit of time researching this issue. What finally struck me is that the websites I was referred to over and over again as being the seminal sources for what I was after no longer exist.

The first was the Project on Media Ownership (PrOMO) at New York University. Their website was www.promo.org, which is now a website with nothing but links for promotion and advertising. I searched the NYU website and found nothing. Apparently not only is the website gone, but the entire project seems to have been over for a while. I have to ask, why? The situation is not that there is no longer a need for it. On the contrary, the situation of the media being controlled by the military-corporate complex is one about which people need to be informed.

The second website I looked for was www.americanresurrection.com, which domain is now for sale. Index on Censorship (www.indexonline.org) describes AR as, “The hard hitting website [that] takes no prisoners in the fight against an ‘elite-controlled mass media’.” Where did it go?

I was able to collect bits and pieces of information from different sources, but I was not able to locate anything with all of the power I wanted. I would have liked to have found a diagram of who owns what or exactly how specific media outlets are connected to the arms industry. In addition, all of the information I did find was slightly out of date. I could have missed something, certainly, but I am a good internet researcher and if something is out there (and most things are), I do not need hours and hours to find them.

Even Wikipedia let me down. There is an entry for Mark Crispin Miller, who is/was the director of PrOMO, but it is four lines long + a bibliography and one quote. The entry mentions PrOMO, but there is no hyperlink. I found two results on Blog Search, but neither of the links worked.

Draw your own conclusions. I leave you now with the single quote from Mark Crispin Miller: “Big brother is you, watching.”

Defining Fascism

It is not easy to define exactly what fascism is. Check out Wikipedia for a very broad explanation. I will begin here with the definition from the Oxford Dictionary of English.

fascism an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organisation. (in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices.

The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922-1943); the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also Fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.

Given this definition, I would not say that The America has yet descended into full-fledged fascism, but I would say that we are headed dangerously towards it.

An approach to defining fascism that is currently popular, and especially ubiquitous on blogs, is an outline of the “12 warning signs”. I have borrowed the 12 warning signs from other sources, but I have come up with my own explanations and supporting evidence to demonstrate that, at the very least, the warning signs are there.

1. Exuberant nationalism

We have the flags, we have the yellow ribbons, we know we are a great nation. When the national anthem is played at sporting events, we sing along with great passion and tears come to our eyes. We do what we have to do when it comes to fighting terrorists – it is our burden and we must bear it. No one else can tell us how to fight our war. The America is, after all, the greatest country in the world.

2. Enemies Identified

You are either with us or you are with the terrorists.

3. Rights Disappear

By now we all understand that we have to make sacrifices for this great effort. What is the importance of the right to privacy or the right to travel freely when compared with this great struggle to maintain our security? Of course the government has to listen to our phone calls – you and I may be sharing only a recipe for apple pie, but our neighbours, especially the darker-skinned ones, might be sharing recipes for bombs.

4. Secrecy Demanded

For reasons of national security we can no longer demand explanations from our leaders. Any kind of democratic transparency is a security risk. The terrorists might use the information. We must trust our government to know what is best for us and to act on that knowledge. There can no longer be any accountability.

5. Military Glorified

“Support our troops, they are defending our freedom.” And the military is taking all of our money, but it does not matter how much the war against terror is costing us. No, it does not, because we are on a mission from God.

6. Corporations Shielded

Halliburton, Carlyle Group, the military-industrial complex. I am not going to rant about it yet again.

7. Corruption Unchecked

Again, the military-industrial complex, and the old boys’ network. Have a look at where the contracts for rebuilding Iraq have gone, and believe that the tenders have not all been legitimate.

8. Media Controlled

This is another argument I have made before. I believe that our press is not as free as it should be. And while journalists and even bloggers are free to write what we want, our ideas and opinions that do not agree with the “official” version of events are called “crack-pot conspiracy theories”, and the general public are encouraged to dismiss them as such.

9. Rampant Sexism

This is not just good old-fashioned male chauvinism. Sexism also means limiting a woman’s right to control her own body as well as homophobia and discrimination based on sexual orientation.

10. Intellectual Bullying

This has already happened on our school boards and at some universities. Tow the party line or be reported as un-patriotic and/or get beaten up.

11. Militarised Police

This includes so-called security surveillance. And I wrote a couple of months ago about the Department of Fatherland Security infiltrating our metropolitan police forces. Not to mention the new US Secret Service Uniformed Division.

12. Elections Stolen

I continue to maintain that neither of the two most recent presidential elections was truly free and fair.

These are simplistic arguments, but I could also write whole essays on any of the twelve points. As I said above, I am not claiming that The America is Mussolini’s Italy or Nazi Germany. All I am saying is that we have been going in a dangerous direction for some time and we need to take note of the situation we are in as a country. We need to demand transparency and we need to hold the government to account. We no longer have a true democracy. If that is because democracy does not actually work anymore, fine. But then we need to go forward to something better, not backwards into the last century and totalitarianism.

Hooray for Google!

When the White House asked internet search engine operators to hand over records, most of them cowardly complied. When the White House obtained a subpoena to force Google to hand over their records, Google refused.

The White House says it needs data to build up a profile of internet use for a specific purpose connected to online pornography legislation, and that it will not connect the data with individual people or computers. And we all know how much the word of the White House is worth.

Luckily for those of us who use Google, they are not willing to reveal information about us; they are also protecting the information as trade secrets.

This is exactly the kind of thing we have been worrying about with search engines for some time. Google should be commended for fighting this… When you are looking at that blank search box, you should remember that what you fill can come back to haunt you unless you take precautions.
- Pam Dixon, Executive Director, World Privacy Forum

I, for one, do not use any US-based search engine except for Google – now I feel very lucky to have unconsciously adopted that practice. Thank you, Google. I appreciate you standing up for what is right.

Amongst the internet companies that have released data to the White House are MSN and Yahoo. It makes me wonder if Yahoo is also free and easy with my e-mail.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1691273,00.html

Ludo, I'm late

Nothing has changed. Happy Birthday, Broučku.

Because I have been enjoying so much the tour of Palmengrad on your blog, here is a little tour for you of our spiritual Bohemian home, Ústí nad Labem or, as our Sudeten friends like to say, Aussig an der Elbe.

First we have a view of the bend in the Labe river below Mariánská skála.

We look north to the modern bridge – Mariánský most. Of course that was not there when we lived in Ústí, but you would like it anyway (weird enhanced colours for you).


And then we go south to the castle Střekov on the hill.

And finally we travel west to Klíše, to look at the lovely new paint on the residence halls that were grey when we lived in them,

and then we'll go for a beer, which will rest on a vintage beer mat.

Všechno nejlepší, Ludo. Hodně štěstí, zdraví a lásky.

Max xo

A winter's morn

Photograph submitted by the lovely Jo in Moscow. Thanks, Jo.

A public service message

Al Gore delivered a dynamic speech this past Monday night at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. If you have not yet seen, heard or read it, please have a look at it (links below). Or, at the very least, please continue reading this post. I offer you small bits and pieces from the speech (the italics) and my own summary and comments. Gore’s message was powerful and absolutely essential for all Americans, or at least those of us who value our liberty. It was inspiring to hear a mainstream politician voice some of the concerns that many of us have been expressing for a rather long time already.

In his opening line, Gore defined a principal problem:

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

Gore argued for restoration of the rule of law, and asserted that a president should never be beyond the rule of law. He shared the thoughts of our Founding Fathers:

“The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.” – John Adams

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” – James Madison

But G.W. Bush has assumed powers that do not belong in the hands of the president. Amongst the examples which Gore offered were the suspension of habeas corpus and the practices of torture and rendition.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then - until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.

For those of you, like Max's brother, who still think that Bush’s tiny little baby steps towards fascism do not amount to anything, here is a bit of analysis from Harold Koh, the Dean of Yale Law School:

“If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”

Or perhaps you will prefer the words of Justice Frankfurter, as written in the Steel Seizure Case:

“The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.”

Gore described the theory of the unitary, or unilateral, executive:

This legal theory threatens to expand the president’s powers until the contours of the Constitution that the framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the president's authority when acting as commander-in-chief, or when making foreign policy, cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as commander-in-chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

We have a problem with dishonesty. As an example, Gore used Cheney’s claim of the week before, that had the Administration had its eavesdropping programme in place prior to 9/11, they would have learned the names of some of the hijackers. But the facts are entirely different:

Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers.

Gore went on diplomatically to blame incompetence for the mishandling of that information. But in this instance, I prefer the conclusions of Gore Vidal, who has compared 9/11 with Pearl Harbour - both were real attacks, but neither was in any way a surprise.

It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President means that the next President will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has done. If this President's attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible.

Gore accused the judicial and legislative branches of our government of not exercising their muscles in our system of checks and balances. He pointed out that there are justices on the Supreme Court that believe in a powerful executive, most notably Bush’s appointee, Chief Justice Roberts and his current nominee, Judge Alito. Congress kowtows to the president, and its members are too busy raising money to engage in meaningful debate of the issues. There is corruption. Both Democrats and Republicans are to blame.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you’re supposed to be.

And Gore then blamed We the people, and shared another couple of quotes:

“An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.” – Thomas Jefferson

“All just power is derived from the consent of the governed.” – John Locke (Enlightenment philosopher)

We the people have become stupid and uninformed because, according to Gore, for the past 40 years, the majority of Americans have got their news primarily from television. We have dumbed ourselves right out of government by the people. We do not know what is going on so we believe what we are told. One of the ways the Bush administration has tried to influence what we hear and what we think is through the culture of fear that they have created.

As President Eisenhower said, “Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.”

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

In his conclusion, Gore stated that the founders of our country faced greater threats than we do today, and yet they came up with the Bill of Rights – guaranteeing freedoms rather than restricting them. And finally, he outlined the steps he feels we should take to begin turning things back round towards the rule of law, and liberty.

And Gore’s delivery was actually dynamic, believe it or not, at least in the excerpts that I saw.

You can find that clip of excerpts at www.crooksandliars.com, and the full text of the speech at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11584.htm.

Words of wisdom from the right-eous

The Golden Globe Awards: conclusive evidence that anti-family immoral corrupt left-wing depraved crack-smoking paedophile poultry-fucking satanist gays are out to take over the world.

When Hollywood is pumping out anti-family movies with sexually explicit, twisted and perverse themes that glorify homosexuality, trans-sexuality and every other kind of sexual immorality - then awarding itself for doing so - Middle America [had] better take note.

Hollywood [has] exposed its own corrupt agenda. [It] is no doubt out on a mission to homosexualise America.

- Stephen Bennett of Straight Talk Radio

Hallelujah! I've got to get to the cinema more often. And I had better get laid a lot while I can - before all men are seduced to the gay side. It must really be happening because half the men I know are already there.

Passport Jr

Why are people pleased? So the government has changed its mind and instead of requiring American citizens to have passports to travel to Mexico and Canadia, we will need only “passport cards”.

Fatherland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described what passport junior will look like: “We're talking about, essentially, the kind of driver’s licence or other simple card identification that almost all of us carry in our wallets day in and day out.”

Oh really? Something just like my driving licence? Then why the fuck do I need another one? Can you say “national ID card”?

The main reason for the “compromise” that I have seen thus far is cost. A passport currently costs $85 and is good for 10 years. I have no idea what the new hi-tech biometric super-surveillance big brother passports will cost, but we will be finding out soon enough. Apparently the cute little baby passport cards will be cheaper so we should all be satisfied, but, of course, they will cost something.

And I, for one, am not satisfied. We have always been able to go to Mexico and Canadia with nothing more than a driving licence, so why should we be forced to carry another card that is “essentially” another one of the same. I have already got enough shit in my wallet.

And guess what – a new kind of passport junior is not going to stop the bogeyman from striking again. This is just another case of the government trying to take two giant fascist steps forward and being forced back one of those fascist steps so they have a net gain of only one giant fascist step. Compromise, my arse – the people are allowing themselves to be fooled again.