Tag Archives: corporate media

After Tony Blair?

Posted on by
Reply

The whole English speaking world breathed a sigh of relief when Tony Blair finally was replaced by Gordon Brown. Gone was a toady for the US neocon Bush regime and in was….?

Well, a British Hillary Clinton perhaps? At least it was thought, that Brown would move to get British troops out of Iraq and the corporate media has tried to give the impression that this was the actual case. But is it so really?

What seems to be happening is that British troops are merely being redeployed as support platoons for the Pentagon. See AFP report Troops enter Taliban-held town as British PM visits 10/12/2007 They are being pulled out of Southern Iraq step by step, but then are being sent into Afghanistan!

There seems to be a division of labor developing, where the US does Iraq, and the British do Afghanistan. Hey! And who gets Pakistan then? Musharaf still gets last use from Bush maybe? And Jewish Israel certainly is doing their part by continuing to eagerly subjugate the Palestinians for the US and their ownselves. It’s an ethnic cleansing on a mass scale led by D.C. and the Pentagon.

What we have are new lines being drawn in the US made regional war for regime changes in the Middle East-Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan chain of Muslim countries. Gordon Brown is not retreating from Tony Blair’s melding of the British as junior partners for the US neocon imperialist game plan. Instead, he is continuing that relationship in full.

In short, after Tony Blair we get more of the same, not any real change. And that will be what we get with a Democratic Party President, too. More imperialistic colonialism so that the US-Brit governments continue to control their supply of oil. Lots of corporations are depending on them to do just that.

Commerce takes Visa or anti-Visa

Posted on by
Reply

Life takes Visa not cashI love this commercial. Life Takes Visa. Life –or here its commerce equivalent– is a well choreographed bakery, a happy flow of patrons interrupted only by a hapless customer who bottlenecks the process by presuming to pay with cash. The scenario presages acceptance of the viewer/consumer’s role as willing cog, but it offers an important economics truism to those who would aspire to monkey-wrench such a dehumanized construct. What does it take to disrupt a well oiled machine? A trifle.

Ever wonder what would happen if a store’s customers all decided to shop the same day? We see it the day after Thanksgiving, but otherwise most of us distribute ourselves evenly across the calendar. It’s the market’s invisible hand and retail business models are fashioned accordingly. What happens when someone organizes a boycott, or otherwise interferes with the statistical flow? We can see it in this ad: Chaos and collapse. A boycott doesn’t have to convince a majority of consumers to curb their spending, it need only reach a number critical to upset the applecart. As management practices streamline labor efficiencies, even a small interruption in demand can wreak a disproportion of havoc.

It will not be for lack of a credit card (though certainly for lack of consumer credit!), but fliers or a picket line, can effect the balance sheet, most of all because the potential liabilities they pose cannot be predicted, and margins of profit cannot then be insured. The demise of your worst nightmare of a blood-sucking capitalist is but a garlic-breath away. You may be kept to feel by the corporate media that you are powerless to contravene, but here’s an ad they are too cynical to have censored. YOU can bring their machinations to a cathartic stop.

Media Hysteria pushes for US military attack on Iranian people

Posted on by
2

One of Iran’s government leaders visits New York City to attend a United Nations function and the US media uses this as an excuse to rabidly push for a US war against that country.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s right to free speech was so threatening to Bush and Cheney that they had to deny him a visit to the site of the ruins of 9/11 to place a wreath in remembrance of those that died there. Why?

The truth is, the US government feared what he had to say, so they censured him by denying him access to the World Trade Center site. It was a simple as that. He did speak at Columbia University though, and The New York Times printed some of that transcript

What is noticeable about the media reporting is how all the hysteria comes from the US Right Wing, the US government, and their corporate media lackeys. Ahmadinejad toned down and resisted from what would have been correct in labeling the US government as the main source of world terrorism. After all, this is the country that through the last decades has been responsible for killing millions of Iranians and Iraqis through its promotion of war in the Middle East.

That is not even to mention the deaths from US government terrorism that have wracked Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and the Occupied Territories controlled by US backed Israel. Instead, Ahmadinejad spoke out for Peace, something that the US corporate media has a real problem doing.

The US media in contrast, has tried to churn up a surge to more war. We, The American People, have to learn how to read between the lines of our corporate media sources and resist their propaganda and its call for yet more bloodshed.

Enough is enough. We should understand by now that demonization of the leader of another country is usually the prelude to attacking it.

Recasting the shadow of the bomb

Posted on by
1

smoking gun threatDo you know what to make of the B-52 nuclear warhead story? I may have an idea. The reporting of this mishap was leaked, that is all we know. But whether it was an ordnance handling error or pure psych-ops, whether it was an intelligence leak or a whistle-blower putting the brakes on a development of sinister portent, the ball was handed to the corporate media, responsible for reporting to us the actual state of affairs in Iraq. Etc.

The understanding Americans were intended to gather from the many possible scenarios, I think, was confusion. Confusion in the company of a bygone boogeyman, the specter of nuclear annihilation. NUKES (Beethoven’s Fifth), flown over head, over our homes, over our homeland, NUKES!

The same day I heard a report about Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where our armament and energy industries have finagled from Native American lands a sinkhole in which to bury their eternally radioactive waste. The facility is due to go online in 2010, the fight over the sacred mountain has gone on for decades, why was this news today?

It turns out someone in Bush’s DOE decided the state of Nevada could not withhold its water to impede the progress of drilling into the mountain, even thought a judge had ruled otherwise. The net effect, straight from the horse’s ass, American stability is threatened with nowhere to dispose of our hazardous nuclear waste. DadadaDum, Dadadadum, NUKES!

This September 11 in Colorado Springs

Posted on by
Reply

All THEIR plans for continued warfare are predicated on the US as being some sort of grand victim in the world, but it is not. Once the Christian Right Wing claimed that their persecution of Jewish people around the globe was based on their perception that Jews had killed Christ. Now, they substitute Muslims for Jews, and claim that persecution of Muslims is due to Muslims having attacked the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001.

Iraq is a Muslim country, therefore ‘Christian’ America attacked and continues to occupy it. Payback for September 11 many Americans still continue to think. In reality, the ‘Christian’ warfare is far more due to the ‘Christian’ corporations worshiping their stock portfolios more than they do God. It’s the dollar that counts, but they combine it with God as cover. They combine it with their supposed patriotism, too. But they are not patriots, these ‘Christian’ corporations. They are money makers for the super-rich, and job givers to those who have few real Christian scruples.

This September 11 in Colorado Springs, peace activists will be going out to where these ‘Christian’ corporations congregate in their profit making/ war making. In Colorado Springs, that site is the corner of Fountain and South Academy Blvd. There, one can find Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, and a host of other lesser known corporations, but war making/ blood sucking/ profit making vampire corporations none the less. They have non-descriptive names like GTEC, Alliant (largest maker of depleted uranium munitions in the world), Intecom, BAE Systems, etc. These are all concentrated in 2 buildings at this single intersection in our city.

Many people go by, yet simply do not notice the presence of these war profiteers! This September 11 we plan to change that, and will vigil at this intersection from 10AM in the morning to 4PM in the afternoon. Our signs will concentrate on three points.

Here are the Merchants of Death…
Kids, Not Bombs!
Disarm Lockheed’s WOMD Now!

We hope you participate and have your participation help keep you from becoming depressed later about the propaganda you are likely to see and hear through the US corporate media on 9/11. It’s your chance to tell the public passing by on this busy intersection, just who you think are the real war mongers out there in our world. It is truly the American corporations that make a killing with their constant killing that fits the bill as for who is being the bloodiest war mongers these days. They are All American, but you will be more so, simply if you protest the bloodshed that they are causing.

See you there on 9/11! Be there and send a message that you don’t want more war against other countries. Enough is enough!

Hateful Hamas and Friendless Fatah

Posted on by
2

FatahHamas and Fatah. Do you know which is which? I try to keep abreast of the people’s struggle, so I find it strange and disappointing that in the news I so often cannot differentiate the two. I blame a slanderous media intent on confusing us about which are the Honest representatives of Palestine, and which are the Fake.

Fatah stands for Palestinian National Liberation Movement in Arabic backward, and they came First. Though they emerged from Yasser Arafat’s PLO, they settled into the bureaucracy of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s Kapos in the occupied territories. Fatah now enforce Western Foreign interests in the Middle East and as concerns representing the oppressed Palestinians, Fatah have become Frauds.

That’s how in a landslide election last year, Hamas came to take the reins, and why Israel which holds the purse strings, refuses to give Hamas its due tax revenues.

Hamas, or Islamic Resistance Movement, may sound like Hotheads to you, but who are we to say what will work best for the Palestinians? Their land has been stateless for going on sixty years, they remain in permanent dislocation, made worse forty years ago under direct Israeli occupation. But I oversimplify. Israelis seem satisfied to create a Palestinian Diaspora same as was done to the Israelites in 500 BC, or let the non-Jews die in refugee camps in the meantime, but for Hamas.

Still uncertain? Watch how the corporate media covers Palestine. If there’s something Favorable to say, it’s about Fatah. If it’s Horrible, it’s about Hamas. Perhaps my continued disorientation grows from the optimism that one day the media will show some respect and Hope for the Palestinian people.

Hamas are considered terrorists, and like the IRA and Sinn Fein, they lead Palestine’s fight for independence from colonial empire. Those who do not want to condone armed struggle should ponder Occupied France under the Nazis, a cakewalk compared to Gaza. With whom would Gandhi or Mandela have sided, the Resistance or Vichy?

Mincing Words with Nature’s Matriarch

Posted on by
3

I learned about Sudden Wetland Dieback yesterday. What’s that? The salt marshlands of America’s east coast are turning inexplicably to muddy wastelands and scientists have developed a euphemism for the occasion.
Not nice to fool Mother NatureThe nomenclature reminds me of another unnatural phenomena that’s been given its own death form: Coral Bleaching. That describes coral reefs which have suddenly expired white as ghosts. As if we’d need to call the piles of bones in the elephant graveyard, Elephant Bleaching.

I understand that scientist want to name what they are seeking to study, but doesn’t a name confer the unfortunate suggestion of a natural occurrence?

It also adds a step, is seems to me at least psychologically, between the effect and the cause. The poor Indonesians in 2004 didn’t suffer a Rapid Oft-Fatal High Water Relocation. It was a Tsunami. Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance wasn’t due to Cement Negative Buoyancy Cankles. It was the mob. Do we need to study the criminal element’s access to poured concrete, or do we need to go after who done it?

The immediate agent of the dieback may be dust from Africa, just as an impassive Pacific may be blamed on an intensified gulf stream (belittled with the appellation El Nino), but wherefore comes this unprecedented toxicity of the elements? We all know. It’s not nice to fool mother nature.

I’d like to know what specifically is meant by dieback? Perhaps those subversive academics are allowing after all for the inclusion of the principle of equal and opposite reaction: blow-back.

We know what’s behind wetland dieback, coral dieback and El Nino blowback, it’s man’s unnatural pollution. It’s our excess carbon emissions and then some, which are heating and killing the globe. There’s already a neat term, sufficiently unnatural sounding: Global Warming. Corporate polluter think-tanks have already re-termed the problem Climate Change to introduce an ambiguity of inherent badness. Change can be good. Only Luddites fear change. The fittest survive change.

The corporate media very cleverly reframed the recent Enviro-palooza concert event as A Climate In Crisis. Sound the alarm there’s a crisis! But what to do, what to do?! The Global Warming warning was too simple. When bath water becomes too warm, for example, we know what to do: shut off the hot water.

Do we need to rename extinction as Pervasive Survival-Instinct Reversal? We could, if we are seeking to ameliorate the intermediate effectiveness of the death blow. Or we could find out who took out the contract on our murder and prevent it.

To belabor mixed metaphors, put an ambulance at the base of the cliff to address Near-Instant Altitude Deceleration Injury, or go to the mountain and curb Dead Man’s Curve.

Repugnican win in 2008

Posted on by
1

I predict a Republican win in 2008, sorry to say, with really little we can do about it unless we can silence the media forked tongues. This country is headed for an election in 2008 we the people can’t win, and it won’t take black box voting, purged voter registers, or harassment at the polls to do it. Rove’s crew, the corporate interests and the GOP are lining up opposition candidate(s) who can’t win.

Barack, Hillary. Give me a break. In 2004 we couldn’t get Joe public to vote in great enough number to remove our certifiable idiot in chief, and this time he’s going to vote for a black president? Americans are still not ready to give gay partners equal treatment under the law, do you mean to tell me they’re ready for a woman president?

And those of us who can scrape together a third party coalition, are we going to do any better than split the vote between the Democratic Party stooge and a third party hopeful? The corporate media will blame the former for defeatism in Iraq and lambaste the latter as unelectable. Unless the power can be pulled from the traitors-to-democracy at the microphones, the average American lout will cast his lot with the Republican mafia/mormon/moron don du jour.

Impeach! Goodbye Dems.

Posted on by
5

Bush is claiming Executive Privilege in refusing to shed light on the possible nefarious dealing of his underlings. The press describes any investigation at an impasse “until one side or the other blinks.” Nonsense. Impeach!
 
Cheney surprises everyone by declaring that the Vice-Presidency is actually a fourth branch of government, out of reach of the checks and balances familiar to all. Congressmen want to joke about cutting off his funding, etc, meanwhile Cheney’s boys elude oversight. Impeach!

The Justice Department acting politically? Impeach! The Supreme Court behaving like cronies? Impeach.

Congress pretending to oppose endless war, yet refusing to cut off the funding? And eschewing that power, preferring false “impasses” to the option(s) above?

Apparently it’s the best they can do, at least that’s how the corporate media has it. But why let the corporations tell us what is or isn’t our prerogative? It’s time to impeach the lot of them. If the Democrats don’t want to do what they were elected to do, let’s leave them. And turn away from the TV.

It’s time for real bipartisanship. Real conservatives and real progressives need to bail from the two imposter parties and opt for representatives of their own. If big-oil interests can conspire with big-pharma, insurance, multi-national, communications and agri-biz to plunder America’s wealth, I’d hope from the people’s side, the Greens could join the Socialists could join the Libertarians could join the Reformers could join everyone else, Ross Perot’s upstarts perhaps. We can address our differences after we’ve wrestled the reins from the corporate greed parties. If even that will be possible. But we’re not going to see national health care, less war, or more equitable and just policies until we do.

And to those Democrats who fear that abandoning their so-called representatives will release them to the dark side, it shows what little faith you had in your candidates in the first place. The results are already in from last election: having a Democratic representative in Congress, unless it’s John Conyers, is like having no one at all. If the politician you elected really has firm intentions, he’ll have them without you. It’s time to nurture someone else, someone with potential, into power.

Have you seen Barack do anything? Hillary? You’ve seen Edwards capitulate to a fraudulent election. Gore too. You’ve seen Kucinich pretend that the Democratic tent was inclusive enough for voices against the war and that turned out to be a lie. The Dems have no one unsuited to do their bidding, and what a surprise, it’s not yours.

Venezuela was correct in not renewing a TV license for RCTV

Posted on by
Reply

It was not censorship for Venezuela to not renew a public TV license to RCTV, a station that fabricated news coverage during the US backed coup effort against Venezuela’s government in 2002. If any TV station tried to do the same in the US, its top officials would go to jail for years on charges of treason.

In the US, even top Democratic Party officials are having to deal with the same sort of manipulation of information by news outlets, like Fox News. Certainly governments have a right to ensure that national news outlets don’t cooperate with foreign powers in trying to foment presidential coups. See also the ZNet published commentary, ‘Venezuela and Media: Fact and Fiction‘ that comments about that.

Luckily for Venezuela, the people of that nation were able to thwart the ruling elites of their society from helping the US government kidnap their president in the same way and manner that Haiti’s president, Aristide, was kidnapped by the US military. Below is an excellent 1 1/2 hour long documentary about how Venezuela’s private corporate media cooperated in trying to install that made-in-US coup d’etat into power that can be seen free from youtube in 8 parts.

If you are interested in conspiracy theories like those surrounding 9/11 and the Kennedy Assassination, then check this film out. This was certainly a conspiracy carried out against the Venezuelan people from Washington DC.

Llaguno Bridge: Key to a Massacre
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

Goodbye, Jerry, Paul, and Tony

Posted on by
Reply

They were all here with us so long, and now they have gone away. In the next year yet more of them will go away, too, and the corporate media will be ablaze with shouts about the glory of it all. Yet nothing has changed, nor will real change come with the US elections. The banality of corruption and decay of the US Empire will continue, with resistance mainly confined to the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Latin America, and Somalia. We will go on shopping, though the price of gasoline will be a little higher. Short term local forecast?

More cloudy weather with gradually rising temperatures ahead. Local pressure confined mainly to a few individuals resisting as they can.

America’s Colombian friends

Posted on by
2

Horrrible testimony is coming out daily in Colombia about the American government’s Colombian friends, the Paramilitary death squads.

All of Colombia is following the continual unfolding of new scandal about the Colombian government and military’s deep connections with the paramilitaries. Check out the video some even though it is in Spanish. Your tax monies went to help make these atrocities happen, so don’t hide your eyes and ears away. Take a look.

America made this level of total criminality possible by funding the Colombian military for decades now. The techniques used by the death squads organized by the Colombian military rival the worst crimes of the Japanese and the Nazis during WW2. Still, our US corporate media keeps it all quite hidden away from the American public, and most Americans still continue to think that the US government is only there fighting drugs, if they think about Colombia at all.
…………
from ‘El Tiempo’ below which is the New York Times of Colombia….
…………
…Villalba assures that for the cutting up learning they used peasants who brought up together during the occupations of neighboring towns. “They were older people taken on trucks, alive, tied”, he described. The victims arrived to the estate on topped trucks. They were taken down with their hands tied and moved to a room, where they remained locked for several days, waiting for the training to start.

Then the “bravery instruction” came up: people were separated in four or five groups “and there they were cut into pieces”, Villalba told during the deposition. “The instructor told me: ‘You stand up here and secures the one who cuts’. Every time a town was occupied and someone is going to be cut, the ones doing that job must be provided with security”.

Men and women were taken out the rooms on their underwear. Still with their hands tied, they were taken to the place where the instructor awaited to start the first recommendations: “The instructions were to take off their arms, their head, to cut them alive. They came out crying and asked us not to hurt them, [they said] they had a family”.

Villalba describes the process: “The people were opened from the chest to the belly to take out the guts, the innards. Their legs, their arms, their heads were ripped off, with a machete or a knife. The rest, their remains, [were taken out] by hand. We, who were on instruction, took out the intestines”.

The training was compulsory, according to him, to “test [their] courage and learn how to disappear people”. During the month and a half Francisco Villalba says he was in the course, he saw cutting instructions three times. “They chose the students to participate. Once, one of them refused to do it. ‘Doble cero’ [a paramilitary chief] stood up and told him: ‘Come here, I can do it’. Then he ordered to cut him up. They made me to cut one girl’s arm. She was already taken her head and one leg out. She asked them not to do it, because she had two children”.

The bodies were taken to common graves at the same place, La 35, where it is estimated 400 people were buried….

much more, including video of the undercovering of the 10,000 PLUS bodies at El Tiempo.

How cavalierly they have destroyed the peace in Somalia

Posted on by
Reply

Americans have one of the most self-centered medias in the world. Our whole corporate media universe revolves around a DisneyLand fairy tale version of ‘ourselves’. One week it is Ann Nicole Smith, and this week it has been the shootings at Virginia Tech. We are to see no interconnections with the rest of the world outside our borders as much as the corporate hacks can make it possible. Their media tears are as shallow as a mall shopping experience is.

Yes, the killings at Virginia Tech were part of our real world, but so is the news of what our attack on Somalia has brought about…. what our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have brought about. Disgusting but true, the US attack on Somalia, which the corporate media pretends has not happened, now has created over 320,000 refugees fleeing Mogadishu, out of a population of 2,000,000 according to the United Nations. Our government creates neither national security, nor international. Our bipartisan corporate government seems only able to destroy and never to construct.

Bush changed the colors of his tie today, to express supposedly some concern about the shootings at Virgiania Tech! What a shallow phoney the man is. What a shallow display of ‘mourning’ our media engages in. There is neither peace in Virginia, peace in Colorado, nor peace that ‘our government has brought to the people of Africa. That whole continent is a powder keg of suffering, war, poverty, disease, and despair. How cavalierly our rulers have destroyed the peace in Somalia just as they did to Iraq, Colombia, and Afghanistan. How cavalierly they are as they destroy the peace of America, too.

Unfortunately, much of our population has helped bring their own increasing misery about. Sad days lie ahead until apathy asnd playing stupid gets laid aside. Until then, the violence continues everywhere and that’s no DisneyLand world at all. US citizens will not escape this nightmare either.

Laura Bush’s ‘Take a Child to the Libary to Read’ program

Posted on by
Reply

The corporate media does such a snow job on us, that most Americans actually seem to buy deep into the image making that is pushed off onto us. Dubya the Clown sez, No Child Left Behind’ and we take that crap seriously, all due to the media dope we are brainwashed with so constantly. Dorothy, I’ve fallen to the ground amongst the poppies.

And how ’bout Laura’s Oprah-style booklists? They sold us on Reading, Righting, and Rithmatick, haven’t they? Such people people they are! Helping the little kids along…. to learn how to read. So let’s take a trip to the libary, shall we not? Let’s go to Salt Lake City’s public library with Chip Ward! Might be good to take some pepper spray along? What do you think?

Cuba lives on as Fidel lies dying

Posted on by
15

Fidel Castro has been dying for half a year now, and yet Cuba continues to stand strong resisting US imperialist power. Almost 1/2 a century of US imposed war on the island, and it will be Castro’s digestive tract that will finally bring Cuba’s great leader down, and not some CIA exploding cigar, poison placed in his food, or some other terrorist plot launched by the gusanos of Miami and their US government handlers.

The corporate media at home made most of us think that Castro was merely some sort of island Ceausescu. They had us believing that it was only Fidel and his mad charisma that made Cuba a non-capitalist country, all against the desires of its people. But surprise, there is no movement to restore capitalism there, no celebration at the nearing death of Castro. Instead, there has been a strengthening of Fidel Castro’s example, as more and more people in more and more Latin American countries, have fought to move themselves into the anti-capitalist camp headed by Fidel.

Centuries of ‘free enterprise’ have brought lives of poverty and disease to most throughout Latin America. Beat down with truncheons of the police, military, and death squads, now the people have begun to find the beginnings of an opening to rebel once again, and seek another road. The Left throughout South America has begun to rise, and as they have, they have gravitated toward the example that Fidel Castro and Cuba have shown them.

At the beginning, Fidel Castro was a doctor who actually cared about the health of the people he was trained to treat. Throughout, his political guidance has strongly tried to incorporate medicine and medical care for people in the policies he fought for. He was a doctor who cared for his patients, and not for his stock portfolio.

He is a great man, and once again we find ourselves with a leader whose life example was built on armed struggle, and not just pacifist liberal mouthings by some guru or another. He has more in common with George Washington, than with Martin Luther King. He is more John Brown, than Gandhi. He led, but his message was that one must physically resist oppression, and not just turn the other cheek.

So what happens after Fidel Castro dies? Check out this yahoo article to find out how the situation is actually currently unfolding.

Obama outta my face

Posted on by
3

Barack Obobblehead
Democrats are storming Congress, threatening the Neocon oligarchy, and the MSM directs its spotlights to a sideshow: Obama! Do you worry about who’s running for president in 2008? There’s supposed to be plenty change afoot right now in the center ring.
 
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

And please do not choose the 2008 straw men for us. Do not tell voters that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the Democrats’ best offerings. Obama is an impressive individual, certainly a non-commital politician, so let’s give him a few years to prove his effectiveness. He only became a senator in 2004. As yet we only know he’s qualified for the Tony Robbins circuit. Let’s let Obama look us up in 2016. Until then we’ve got to pick someone electible, not someone the GOP/media wants to sell us as our Last White Hope.

George Bush’s latest sales pitch to the American public highlighted for me the extreme entrenchment of corporate media. They ran nothing but interference for Bush, prepping their audiences to receive Dubya’s message well lubed. It didn’t work, and I hope the networks’ glad-handling showed.

The will of the people is overtaking congress and the land, and the media are going to proclaim otherwise until we pry the microphones from their cold dead buttholes.

The Silent Death

Posted on by
1

Malachi Ritscher 1954-2006, his own obituaryI have tried to write this commentary all day, yet each time I began, depression overtook me. On November 3, less than 3 weeks ago, a man set himself ablaze in Chicago to protest the US government’s wars. In effect, he was protesting against the American people too, for allowing these wars to be continued over and over again.
 
At age 52, Malachi Ritscher certainly had seen his country repeatedly ignore the suffering that its politicians and generals were inflicting on the other peoples of the world. He had been an antiwar protester for years, and yet the American people seemed little to have changed during his lifetime.

He hoped to help change all that with the dramatic sacrifice of his life. That decision and action, as gruesome and horrible as his death certainly was, is not alone what has me depressed though. It is simply that we have failed him once again, even though through his efforts he hardly could be said to have failed others, as he tried repeatedly to change the horrible society we live in through less dramatic means.

So why have we not hear about this courageous and totally desperate act? That is quite simple. The corporate media decided to keep it secret from us. Yet word begins to leak out, and IndyMedia is now helping inform people about what was done by Malachi to try to move us out of our pathetic cynicism and apathy. Word is being whispered here and there about what Malachi did, and the secret will come back to haunt those who kept it silent.

What was the media’s excuse to hide this man’s sacrifice away from us all? Simple. They treated his protest of our society’s war making and criminality, as if it was merely the action of a suicidal madman killing himself because of personal depression. No protest there, doesn’t mean anything what he did! How sorry are they, these assholes, to decide for us the meaning of this man’s actions! How much more does it say about their own motivations, than about Malachi Ritscher’s? How sick and controlled we have become for this silence and censorship to be let stand? How sad, that even this act of setting oneself on fire, fails to move us. Or at least to move those in the corporate world that control information flow and news.

It makes me yet more ill to think that the decision to keep this man’s protest hidden from us, was made principally to not effect the US mid-term elections that were to be happening a couple of days later. How petty, how disgraceful, the real reasons and real motivation of the US media to not broadcast news of what Malachi had done to himself. Malachi took his final action out of self sacrifice, and his drive to make a statement, simply in order to try to move our country into action to stop the Iraqi madness. Keep it local, keep the meaning of it distorted, all so that Bush and his minions might fare better at the polls! That was the counter response from the media. Make Malachi look sick and deranged, instead of a very decent human being. That’s what makes me so very depressed. I’m depressed because the US seems so hopeless, and this sad event just goes to underline our societal decay, yet once again.

Malachi Ritscher posterHis friends have organized a campaign to get news of his death out to the press. Write to the local rags and see if it helps since all we can do is keep trying? It is a shame that with Malachi Ritscher gone, we have one activist less. We have one genuine human being less. We have one less person who cares about others. He tried to change things, and many of us do care. It’s just that neither our press, nor our politicians, nor our economic elites care. It is common folk like Malachi Ritscher that actually do concern themselves most often about others in the world and not just themselves. And they desperately try to find ways to make a change possible. They are the true patriots, not the war mongers.

Discovery Channel editorial interest

Posted on by
Reply

My first brush with the Discovery Channel came when contemplating which cable stations would be considered kid suitable. The Discovery Channel seemed one of the few obvious shoe-ins. Along with Disney…
 
I remember looking over the kids’ shoulders at some of the Discovery programming. Not necessarily for kids, and not necessarily informative. Make-over shows? Decorating? Are they interested in the Discovery of everything? Crown molding?

After Disney’s Corporation’s unwavering support for the yellow GOP Path to 9/11, it became time to question what Disney is doing, and what might they be feeding our kids?

Remember the disquieting implication of Lion King? Monarchy (and monotheism) as the natural order? Now that odd acculturation is not looking very haphazard.

Running opposite Path to 9/11 was Koppel on Discovery: the Price of Security. If absent the anti-Democrat partisanship, its tone was still very pro-establishment. Marvel at the pyrotechnics, question nothing. Discovery (Only four letters of separation from Disney) is corporate media, after all, and like National Geographic and Disney, considered subliminally above reproach.

Then I saw the new Discovery documentary about Waco. Not the city formally known as Waco, the Mount Carmel inferno now known as “Waco.” This time, Discover the truth: Assault on Waco with everything learned post-1993 reclassified. What up Discovery?

As if the media had not sufficiently contained the story while it happened, soon after they fixed it from any further development with the official verson Ambush in Waco.

After Branch Davidian survivors made their individual ways across the university lecture circuit, another side of the story began to emerge. Incredible government lies were exposed in the 1997 award-winning documentary Waco: the Rules of Engagement. Further disturbing revelations emerged in the 1999 Waco, a New Revelation.

Thirteen years later, under a new administration, with a madman of another sort in Waco, under “the shadow of 9/11” and rationalizations being made for an authoritarian federal dictatorship, the folks at Discovery Channel want to exculpate the original feds-gone-wild? Now that we have an executive branch breaking the law, Discovery Channel wants to revisit past transgressions and make them right?
 
What next? Ruby Ridge: ballistic foster-child making? The Philadelphia Move: fiery urban renewal? Vietnam: should we have killed more of them? Elections 2000-04: benevolent despotism in action? 		  When citizens still thought the media could be on their side

The dark side of white music

Posted on by
Reply

What’s insidious about Country & Western Music? I’ll tell you. I thought I was just incensed at its hypocrisy because it rewards multimillionaire entertainers for talking like hicks. Country singers pretend to be simpleton hillbillies, possessed maybe with down-home smarts, but really they are finely-honed corporate media assets.

That used to just burn me up. The lying tight-jeaned shits, selling America on poverty vices like alcohol, tobacco and firearms while appearing to champion the little man. Honoring the blue-collar joe while keeping him down.

The worse consequence of Country Music has not shown itself until recent times, now that we have conservative hayseeds -or appear to have- good ol’ boys in charge of everything. Pretty abruptly we can see the danger of idolizing dim-witted cowpokes.

Country Music elevates and ascribes a kind of wisdom to dumb in-bred kids who eschew school lernin. To them it’s all about thinking from your gut, hell, thinking while drunk. It’s drinking wisdom, commonsensical wisdom, the wisdom of seeing no further than your own holler, of black and white issues and ass-kicking diplomacy.

That’s the damn insidious result of worshiping a west that never was, and a motto that is not real. That’s the uncomplicated, eternally pubescent world of Country Music.

America is a nation dominated by a low common denominator. It gets lower every day as people grow dumber from pellagra malnutrition and being left behind by our education system. That denominator has an anthem: Country & Western Music.

It’s the same melody, the same guitar riff, the same build, the same harmony. You can hum it the first time you hear it because it’s the same song. And it always says:

I’m proud to be a [dumbshit],
Where at least I know [what do I know?]
Bla bla bla [we’ll shit on whoever we please],
Bla bla bla God Bless the [arian nation of dumbfucks]!

Bush the yapping idiot

Posted on by
Reply

Gotta get Hezbolla to stop this shitIn Al Gore’s film AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, much is made of Gore’s new found demeanor. Yes he’s a lot smoother and passionate. It helps that the camera captures him more intimately, and that he had directorial control over how he is portrayed. Contrast this to a hostile media determined in 2000 to make Gore look as bad as possible. Corporate media made Gore’s I-discovered-Love-Canal, I-invented-the-Internet, and Love-Story-was-written-about-me remarks look buffoonish instead of the remarkable half-truths they really were.
 
Juxtapose Gore’s role with George W’s microphone gaff at the G-8.

Not just his expletive, not just his eating with his mouth open and talking with his mouth full, but the inanity of his statements. “Syria has got to get Hezbolla to stop this shit” duh. (See a GREAT musical lampoon at the Huffington Post!)
 
What about his earlier observation: “Russia’s big. So’s China.” Wow.

Our media made hay with Bush’s expletive. The world press came to the bigger conclusion. Idiot. The British saw and heard their Tony Blair, normally of impeccable intellect, play lap dog to a yapping idiot.

To compare Bush and Gore reminds me of the 2000 presidential debates when it was clear as day that Bush was Edward E. Neuman to Gore’s everyman. Bush was Lilliputian.

Yet when the cameras went out to “spin alley” to consult the pundits, wee conservative dweebs told us giddily that Bush had won.

A Freudian mixed metaphor for the GOP

Posted on by
Reply

elephant gorillaI’ve read it several times now, the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room. This would seem to confuse 1) the proverbial 600-900 lb primate (gorillas not named Kong seldom excede 400 lbs) who outclasses everyone else in size and power, for 2) the pachyderm in the room whose relative mass overwhelms our capacity to ignore it, though we try.
 
In this corporate age of Darwinian monopolies, maybe the de facto brutality of alpha-male corporate monopoly has become something the corporate media mouthpieces won’t let us talk about. There’s an elephant in the room, and the three hundred pound gorilla won’t let us talk about it.
 
The gorilla is the elephant is the new metaphor for the GOP.

Dear members of the A. C. L. U.

Posted on by
Reply

(I was asked to make a pitch to the local ACLU for the upcoming community forum about media reform. Here’s my letter. Could this not be addressed to any number of civic organisations? Meanwhile, you can find a plea to non-organizations at myKRCC.org. )

Hello dear cherished and tireless members of [fill-in-the-blank]. Thank you for giving me the chance to address you on a topic that concerns us all. I’m talking about the need to reclaim the American media from corporations. Locally one such effort involves trying to influence our public radio station, NPR affiliate KRCC, to adopt more objective programming.

Since I know your time is short, I’ll come to the point. Please lend the name of your organization to the list of co-sponsors of the upcoming February 20 public forum meeting. The more weight and respectability we can bring to the gathering, the more influential will be our voice.

Second, please plan on attending the meeting yourselves. Your opinions will add depth and diversity and ensure that KRCC and Colorado College will respond affirmatively.

If you are in accord, and are willing to give your consent on both points, that’s all I have to say. Thank you! If you question whether this effort falls within the purview of the ACLU, I need to go on.

The anti-trust battle may not necessarily be for the ACLU. But the result of having a local media which is more open to the public will benefit the ACLU completely. Would it not be fair to say that the greatest challenge facing any reform (and protecting our civil liberties has become, alas, reform) is an American public which is being consistently misinformed? ACLU membership, donations, and most importantly consensus, hinge on being able to take the case to the American public. If you elect not to join this effort to reclaim the media, you elect to fight that media at every turn on your own. Is that the mission of the ACLU?

Let me leave you to discuss that question among yourselves. If you question the urgency or validity of my characterization of KRCC, NPR and the corporate media, please seek out someone among you who can elucidate better than I. Refer to countless well-respected sources online such as F.A.I.R. (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) or contact Pikes Peak Media Alliance for more information.

Please join this fight. As you can see, I am the least persuasive representative of what is an earnest cause. That’s the most obvious reason why I need your help. With your voices no doubt we can reach others and unite our respective efforts. Thank you!

Outing the media

Posted on by
Reply

Girlfriend

Tom Cruise is gay. John Travolta is gay. Vin Diesel is gay. I don’t care if you think they are too cute, or have that special tu-ne-sais-quoi that only a heterosexual could exude. They’re actors! And they’re gay!

(If you Google “Vin Diesel”, you’ll see that blog entries abound by guys who’ve hooked up with him at clubs.)

(John Travolta is always the not-easily-placated queen of whichever movie set he’s working on. Ask anyone who works in the entertainment industry.)

(Tom Cruise’s pecadilos stay just outside of the gossip columns. Since the 80s! And so what? It’s fine! He’s gay!)

They’re gay. Nothing wrong with being gay. Nothing wrong with jumping unto a couch proclaiming your love for Katie Holmes. Nothing wrong with staying in the closet…

Unless you are serving a corporate mouthpiece that is simultaneously denying gays equal benefits and human rights, or a corporate media that is advocating homogeneous marriage (pun rejected) and religious worship.

There is something wrong with a media which covers up the normalcy of homosexuality at the same time that it holds gay rights under full frontal attack.

This isn’t about whether Tom Cruise wants to come out or not, it’s whether the media machine which is Tom Cruise the bankable property wants to come out. Very plainly it doesn’t.

Do you care if the media doesn’t want to be outed?

The fight over gay marriage is not about parenting rights or hospital visitation rights, although those are no small things. It’s about benefits, primarily health insurance benefits. If roughly 10% of human males are gay, that’s the percentage of the significant other population which the insurance industry doesn’t want to cover. That’s a lot of money. And outside of the walls of the beancounters in the huge insurance buildings, sitting in Emergicare waiting rooms, or sitting at home because they don’t have a doctor, that’s a lot of people.

If we live in a time when it can be admitted that Alexander the Great was gay, then Tom Cruise can be gay. Perhaps a gay Tom Cruise would still be bankable. Probably not in Asia. Well tough titties.

He can go on boffing Indoneasian hotel stewards to his heart’s content. We just don’t need to see his proto-hetero hystrionics on national TV which the networks use to force-feed white bread religion and marriage down our throats.

When you see such glee on the face of an actress like Katie Holmes, you see her happiness at having signed a fixed term contract to be Tom Cruise’s beard in exchange for the visibility of being the chief accessory to the world’s most bankable star. Tom Cruise is introducing Katie Holmes to Scientology. Could be, he’s not screwing her. Tom Cruise and Co simply set up a contract with the next actress who wishes to take centerstage with him, with specific guidelines and for a specific time period. Nicole Kidman, Mimi Rogers, et al, chose not to renew their options, or vice versa. Nothing wrong with that.

But there is something wrong, Tom, with being used as a tool to oppress others like yourself who do not have the financial resources you have.

And there is something wrong with a media perpetuating myth.

Human rights during wartime

Posted on by
Reply

The following is a public service message for Human Rights Day, received by Resistance in Brooklyn from political prisoner Jaan Laaman.

Human Rights During Wartime
By Jaan Laaman, Ohio 7 anti-imperialist political prisoner

The struggle for Human, civil and legal rights is always so important, but particularly now in this time of war and increasing repression. Even as they expand this ridiculous war in Afghanistan, Bush and his government are laying plans to spread imperialist war to other countries. Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan have all been singled out. Threats have been made against Liberation movements in Columbia, the Philippines and Nepal, as well as against popular leaders and governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Palestine and Libya. With no sense of shame or even irony, Bush threatens war against countries who may have some weapons of mass destruction. This from a country that without question has the largest stockpile of every form of weapon of mass destruction known to modern civilization, and a long historic record of using them against civilian populations around the world!

Domestically, with this so-called Homeland Defense, creepy and fascist sounding as that is, we’ve seen the corporate media totally cave, becoming the new cheerleaders for each new police state law and measure. The recent quickly passed federal anti-terror legislation, allowing seven-day police detention and other repressive measures, is almost certainly unconstitutional. Even more dangerous are the slew of executive branch orders enacted by Bush, Ashcroft and Ridge. Secret military tribunals, over 1100 people from across the country (including citizens and legal residents, not just overseas visitors), snatched up and detained incommunicado in federal custody, countless roadblocks and searches of vehicles, Muslim men across America being profiled and harassed, government agents and soldiers all over the place, etc., etc. Congress has NOT declared a State of War. There is no state of martial law existing anywhere in the U.S. As powerful as the presidency is, Bush and his executive department people have authority only under the Constitution and federal laws. Secret tribunals, disappearing people, warrentless searches, etc., are gross violations of American law. The corporate press may be silent about all this, but the people should not.

It isn’t overblown rhetoric to say that there is a more massive assault on Human and civil rights happening in the U.S. today than anytime since the founding of Human Rights Day over fifty years ago. Under a blizzard of waving flags, frequent “terror” and anthrax alerts to keep the public panicky, and an expanding war, a real police state apparatus is being laid down in the United States today.

Under the rubric of 9/11 and safety for the American people, rights are being stripped away across the board. For example, here in Massachusetts prisons, a new legal mail policy was just established, “due to recent national events.” Previously and based on court rulings, all legal mail was only opened in front of the prisoner, checked for contraband but not read. Now under the new policy, all legal mail is delivered to us already opened and censored, along with our regular mail. Various government agencies are jumping on the bandwagon to enact measures not even remotely related to 9/11.

As often happens, many political prisoners have been singled out and further victimized since September 11. Just hours after the plane attacks, most political prisoners in the federal system were snatched from their work assignments and thrown into extreme segregation. Many were held incommunicado for weeks and only recently have been able to contact their lawyers. People like Sundiata Acoli, Marilyn Buck, Father Phil Berrigan, Carlos Alberto Torres and Richard Williams; people who have been in captivity since the 70’s and 80’s and who don’t share bin Laden’s politics or have any connections with him, were opportunistically locked down. Some, like my comrade Richard Williams, are still in segregation in Lompoc penitentiary.

The need to powerfully proclaim support for Human Rights for all of us, in and out of prisons here in the U.S., as well as Human Rights for Afghani mothers and children and men, along with all the people of this planet is crucial. Probably most critical is the need to support all those people and nations under physical and verbal attack by the U.S. government. I wholeheartedly join with you in this, as well as salute you and your work. The struggle for Human Rights is never easy, but always so necessary.

For Peace and Justice!

12/10/01

Jaan Laaman (W41514)
Box 100
South Walpole, MA 02071