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Suppression/Oppression/Repression (SOR) In Bush's GOP America: Blackmail Iraq By Holding $50 Billion Financial Reserves "HOSTAGE" Forcing Acceptance Of Unending US Military/Mercenary Presence - RI10
Suppression,
Oppression &
Repression (SOR) In
Bush’s GOP America:
Blackmail Iraq By
Holding $50 Billion
Financial Reserves
“HOSTAGE” Forcing
Acceptance Of
Unending US Military
& Mercenary
Presence + Legal
Immunity! - RI10
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/6/headlines
Headlines for June 06, 2008
US Holds $50 Billion of Iraq’s Financial Reserves Hostage
The Independent of London reports the United States is holding hostage some $50 billion of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement to prolong the US occupation indefinitely. Patrick Cockburn reports the Federal Reserve continues to hold Iraq’s financial reserves as a legacy of the international sanctions against Saddam Hussein. US negotiators are threatening to remove tens of billions of dollars of Iraq’s money to settle outstanding court judgments dating back to the 1980s unless Iraq accepts the highly controversial military deal. The deal would allow the US to permanently keep more than fifty military bases in Iraq. American forces would also be able to continue to carry out arrests of Iraqi citizens and conduct military campaigns without consultation with the Iraqi government. American soldiers and contractors will enjoy legal immunity.
Senate Report: Bush Deliberately Distorted Pre-War Intelligence
In other Iraq news, a newly released Senate report has concluded President George Bush and his top policymakers deliberately distorted Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda and ignored doubts among intelligence agencies about Iraq’s arms programs as they made a case for war. Sen. John Rockefeller, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee said the report shows the administration “led the nation to war on false premises.”
Obama and Clinton Meet in Private
In campaign news, Senator Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton met for the first time last night since the end of the primary campaign. Obama’s spokesperson Robert Gibbs confirmed the meeting took place but released no details on what was discussed.
Robert Gibbs: “Senator Obama and Senator Clinton did have occasion to meet this evening. It’s the end of the primary process, and they wanted to talk about bringing these campaigns together in unity and bringing this party together, as we go forward in the fall.”
Hillary Clinton is expected to suspend her campaign on Saturday. Earlier on Thursday, more than 10,000 Obama supporters in Virginia attended his first major rally of the general campaign.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Arraigned for 9/11 Attacks
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others prisoners at Guantánamo were arraigned Thursday before a military commission. The arraignment was the first time the alleged 9/11 mastermind had been seen or heard publicly since he was captured in Pakistan in 2003. Mohammed refused legal representation and said he welcomed the death penalty. Defense lawyers said they will challenge any attempt to introduce evidence tainted by torture, but Army Major Jon Jackson said they may not get that chance if the defendants represent themselves.
Army Major Jon Jackson: “What you saw today in that courtroom, commission room, was not justice; it was ridiculous. And the reason I say that is because of what happened with my client, specifically.”
Prosecuting attorney Lawrence Morris praised the commission process.
Lawrence Morris: “As you continue to see, the military commission’s process is an orderly, fair, open legal system, remarkably similar to other trials in United States courts. The prosecution team will continue to work diligently to bring all cases to trial in a fair and expeditious manner consistent with the best practices in both civilian and military courts.”
Prosecutors want to start the trial on September 15, 2008, a date defense attorneys say was chosen to influence the November presidential election.
Nations Agree to Tackle Global Food Crisis
Governments at a UN food crisis summit have agreed on a declaration that the world must take urgent action to prevent soaring food prices pushing millions of people into hunger. But a group of Latin American nations accused the summit of misdiagnosing the problems threatening millions with starvation. Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba said the Rome summit catered to the world’s wealthiest nations by sidestepping key issues like grain-based biofuels advocated by the United States.
Gates Removes Top Air Force Leaders Following Nuclear Gaffes
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ousted the top military and civilian leaders at the Air Force after a classified Pentagon investigation found “a chain of failures” in the Air Force’s safeguarding of the US nuclear arsenal. Last year, a B-52 bomber mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles flew across the country. The Air Force also mistakenly shipped four Air Force electrical fuses for ballistic missile warheads to Taiwan.
Senate Considers $455 Billion in Nuclear Subsidies
The Senate is considering providing the nuclear industry with over $500 billion in subsidies for new nuclear power development. The subsidies are included in a much-touted bipartisan climate change bill. One aide to Senator Joseph Lieberman described the plan as “the most historic incentive for nuclear in the history of the United States”. John Passacantando of Greenpeace criticized the Senate for including the nuclear subsidies in a climate change bill. He said, “Nuclear power is a dirty and dangerous distraction from real global warming solutions”.
American Households Lose $1.7 Trillion in First Quarter
In economic news, a new report has revealed nearly ten percent of American mortgages were past due or in foreclosure at the end of March. During the first quarter of the year, homeowners lost their homes at a record rate. The Mortgage Bankers Association said nearly 450,000 loans fell into foreclosure between January and March. Nearly three million other homeowners are now behind on their monthly payments. Meanwhile, the amount of equity people have in their homes has fallen to the lowest level on record. Overall American households saw their net worth decline by $1.7 trillion in the first quarter of the year.
Chinese Parents Demand Probe of Collapsed Schools
In international news, grieving and angry parents who lost their children under collapsed schools during the Sichuan earthquake in China urged the government on Thursday to punish corrupt officials and incompetent teachers involved. The Chinese government says the earthquake killed 69,000 people, and another 18,000 are missing and likely dead. The dead include about 9,000 children who were killed in flimsy schools flattened during the quake. The loss of so many children is particularly painful in China, where the government’s family planning policies mean that most people have only one child.
Pi Shiqiu, grandmother of killed student: “Our child was the flower of the country, the future of our country. How could the Xinjian School just bury her like that? She would have been such a great talent for the country, and our whole family depended on her. The whole family! The children were all ‘the only child’ in the family.”
Jailed Afghan Journalist Sues US Over Detention
The family of an Afghan journalist has sued the Bush administration for illegally detaining him in Afghanistan for more than six months without charge. Jawed Ahmad is a cameraman for Canadian CTV. He has been detained at a NATO airbase since October. Since the recent release of Sami al-Haj and Bilal Hussein, Ahmad is the only known journalist being held by the US military.
Mexico Asks World Court to Block Executions in US
The Mexican government has asked the International Court of Justice in The Hague to block the executions of Mexicans on death row in the United States. Mexico has accused US officials of failing to comply with a judgment ordering a review of the trials.
Domestic Workers Gather in NYC
Domestic workers from around the country are gathering in New York for the first-ever National Domestic Workers Congress. The gathering is being organized by Domestic Workers United, a group that organizes New York nannies, housekeepers and elderly caregivers. Domestic Workers United is pushing New York lawmakers to sign a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. In most states, domestic workers have no right to overtime, sick time, vacation, healthcare and workers’ compensation.
D.C. Police Set Up Neighborhood Checkpoints
The Washington Examiner reports police in Washington, D.C. plan to begin sealing off entire neighborhoods, setting up checkpoints and kicking out strangers, under a new program to combat violence. Under a directive issued by Police Chief Cathy Lanier, officers will stop cars at the checkpoints, record all license plate numbers and ask drivers why they are visiting the neighborhood. The directive allows officers to turn away anyone who does not have a legitimate reason for entering the neighborhood. Motorists who resist answering questions from police officers will be arrested for failure to obey an officer. D.C. Councilman Harry Thomas said he is worried Washington, D.C. is “moving towards a police state."
Stuntman Scales NYT Building to Protest Global Warming
A French stuntman was arrested in New York Thursday after scaling the face of the New York Times building. After climbing fifty-two stories, Alain Robert released a banner that read "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week”.
Jury Awards Bush Protesters $750,000 for Illegal Strip Search
A jury in Iowa has awarded two protesters $750,000 for being inappropriately strip-searched after demonstrating at a President Bush campaign rally in 2004. The women were arrested by the Secret Service and then strip-searched at a county jail.
St. Paul Police Arrest Protester at Obama Rally for Leafleting
And in news from here in the Twin Cities, the St. Paul Police Department is coming under criticism for arresting an antiwar organizer outside the Barack Obama campaign rally on Tuesday. Fifty-year-old Mick Kelly was detained as he was handing out leaflets promoting a September 1 march on the Republican National Convention. The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota said Kelly’s arrest does not bode well for the way St. Paul authorities will treat protesters during this summer’s convention. St. Paul police say they plan to apologize to Kelly and dismiss the charges.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/6/robert_mcchesney_and_josh_silver_of
June 06, 2008
Robert McChesney and Josh Silver of Free Press on the National Conference on Media Reform
AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Minneapolis, Minnesota on the convention floor of the National Conference for Media Reform. I’m Amy Goodman. Nearly 3,000 people have come from across the nation for what’s become known as the most important gathering of the growing movement for media reform. Participants will hear lectures, take workshops, strategize on efforts to fight media consolidation and democratize the airwaves. Speakers will include Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, Arianna Huffington, Van Jones, Naomi Klein and dozens more. The media reform group Free Press formed six years ago. This is the fourth National Conference for Media Reform.
We’re beginning our coverage today with the two co-founders of Free Press. Josh Silver is the executive director of Free Press. Robert McChesney is a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and author of several books, including his latest, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. He’s widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost media historians.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Josh Silver, let’s begin with you. Talk about the conference.
JOSH SILVER: Well, the conference is an amazing coming together of people from across the country, who are really concerned about what’s happening with the media. I mean, we’ve got this problem where we see celebrity fluff, instead of hard news on the news programs on commercial media, sound bite election coverage. It’s all about the horserace analysis. There’s propaganda that we see in these pundits on the air, fake news releases posing as news (VNRs), the Pentagon spending millions to get seventy-five military analysts who are getting briefed by the Pentagon that you reported on. And people have had it, and they’ve started to realize more and more that there are ways that we can actually fix the system, not just stopping media consolidation, but actually taking control of the future of the Internet, which is increasingly going to be delivered through a high-speed Internet connection.
A lot of people don’t realize that all of television, radio, phone service, movies are all going to be delivered by high-speed Internet. So we have a moment right now in this country where the policies that are going to determine the future of virtually all media are being decided in Washington, and that’s going to be a big topic here this weekend.
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, you know, my work was always about, as a scholar: how did we end up with a media system like this? In a democratic society with a wonderful Constitution, with a great tradition of liberty, how did we end up with a media system that does all the stuff Josh was talking about? And it’s done it for a long time, which has denigrated local coverage, which has given us a lot of fluff and hyper-commercialism. How did we end up with a media system controlled by a handful of corporations driven by commercial values?
And when I started researching American history, it became clear this was not intended by the founders. There’s nothing in the Constitution authorizing this. And it’s not a free-market system. It was clear that it was a system set up by the government with direct and indirect subsidies made in the public’s name but without its consent, going back to the foundation of broadcasting, when really powerful interests pushed through the commercial system with very little public support.
And so, when you write research like that, people say, “Well, OK, it doesn’t have to be that way. What do we do now?” The problem is just as severe now. In fact, it’s getting worse. And that leads instantly for a professor to say, “Well, yeah, what do we do now?” And it’s really a wonderful opportunity for a scholar to take their research and have it then be applied and used. And so, I was very privileged to be at a moment in history where my work suddenly became relevant, and I’ve enjoyed it.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you say “communication revolution”?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, I think one of the reasons why Free Press and the media reform movement exploded in the last five years is that we’re in a unique period historically, one that doesn’t come along all the time, where we have a combination, a confluence, of two crucial events and possibly a third.
The first one is a technological revolution, that was just really changing the business pattern for all media industries. And because of that, a lot of the rules and regulations and the way industries are structured are up in the air, and we’re in a position now—we can change the rules and regulations to make our media system vastly better, or if we don’t do anything, the corporate community will do a good job to make sure it suits their interests in what emerges in the digital era.
Secondly, we’re in a period in which journalism, as we know it, is in freefall. It’s disintegrating. And people are aware of this. It’s not just the content of journalism, the fluff that we talk about, but it’s the actual resources that the corporate community is devoting to journalism. I mean, there’s been a sharp drop-off in the number of working journalists who cover communities in every community in this country. I mean, there are communities of decent size now that barely have any journalism covering them, so if you live in a town, you won’t know what’s going on there anymore. And you also see this in terms of foreign coverage in the United States, where despite the globalization, despite the US role in the world, there are far fewer reporters covering the world for the United States than there were twenty or twenty-five years ago.
This is a deep crisis, and Americans understand that this is not acceptable. So you put those two things together, and people say, “We’ve got to do something about it”. And that’s the basis of this movement.
AMY GOODMAN: There are many more public relations—people in public relations.
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, yeah. There’s no shortage of PR people, no shortage of spin-doctors, no shortage of BS artists, but that’s not journalism.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the policies of the current presidential candidates, Barack Obama, John McCain?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: John McCain, to his credit, in the 1990s earned sort of a reputation as being willing to go against dominant corporate lobbies. He voted against the terrible 1996 Telecommunications Act. He was a—
AMY GOODMAN: The one that President Clinton and Al Gore pushed through?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: That had bipartisan support, absolutely. And he was one of the handful of votes—five votes in the US Senate—that opposed it, along with Russ Feingold and a few others. And he also was in favor of Low Power FM radio, against the powerful commercial broadcasters’ lobby.
AMY GOODMAN: On what grounds did he oppose the Telecommunications Act?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: I think he opposed it on a number of grounds, but I think it was actually—from what we can tell, it was a principled opposition to the corruption of the giveaway to commercial broadcasters of spectrum.
And—but the problem is, if you stop there, he looks great, but his whole record, ironically, given all his talk about earmarks, when you actually study it closely, he’s more in bed with the lobbyists of these commercial broadcasters, and especially AT&T and—the phone company, than almost any senator, because he was the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, the relevant committee that works with the FCC, for—has been for the past decade. He’s had numerous opportunities to actually do something meaningful to address the problems he’s given lip service to ten years ago and done nothing. And in fact, instead, what we’ve seen routinely is a willingness to work behind closed doors to advance the interests of powerful commercial interests, especially AT&T, the phone company, but also of commercial broadcasters. So, you know, he’s been a disappointment, and I think that his record is one where the rhetoric does not match up with the reality at all. They’re completely the opposite ends of the spectrum.
Tabacco: John McCain is not above change or “flip-flopping”. Unfortunately all McCain’s “Flips” have been from Good to Bad, not the other way around.
Obama is a little less well known. What we do know about Obama is he’s put out extremely thoughtful, comprehensive position papers on the issues. If you go to his website, it’s really striking, the quality of the work. You know, he’s surrounded by—he’s voted the right way in the Senate on virtually every issue that’s come up, unlike McCain, who opposes like keeping the internet open and free, whereas Obama steadfastly supports not letting the phone and cable companies privatize it and select which websites can go through. Obama has voted the right way. He’s got great people around him.
But, you know, the problem—the concern with Obama—I wouldn’t say “problem”—is he’s a centrist Democrat, self-styled. And centrist Democrats, that gets translated into meaning you’re comfortable sort of selling out your voting base for the moneyed interests that bankroll the party. And the test is going to be whether the strong grassroots support for his campaign and the good advisers around him can overwhelm that strong pressure that Democrats traditionally have, if they’re in power, to cave into commercial interest. And so, that’s the battle we would have there.
AMY GOODMAN: Josh Silver, that point of keeping the internet open and free, the difference between McCain and Obama, explain exactly what that means.
JOSH SILVER: It’s an epic battle that’s happening right now, and essentially what it is is the cable and phone companies, they control 98 percent of internet connections in the country, high-speed. They are trying to pass legislation that would allow them to block content, so they can decide which websites move fast and which move slow. This actually really is the question of: will the Internet become like cable TV, where they, the phone and cable companies, determine what’s on, how fast it goes and how much it costs? Or will it be open and democratic, the way it is today? This is not a conspiracy theory. Comcast, the cable giant, was just recently caught blocking content of movie downloads that competed with their own products.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, wait. Explain. How did they do that?
JOSH SILVER: They actually were caught stopping their customers, their high-speed internet customers, from receiving downloads of movies with an application called BitTorrent, which not coincidentally is a product that competes with Comcast’s own service of movies.
But what’s really important, getting back to the bigger picture here, it’s millions and millions of people are understanding that these rather technical arcane issues are really about whether or not the American people are going to have access to the facts, whether they’re going to have access to critical journalism that they need to be participants in a democracy. So that’s, I think, why here in Memphis—Memphis, that was our last conference—Minneapolis, we’re seeing—
AMY GOODMAN: Welcome to Minneapolis, Josh.
JOSH SILVER: —thousands and thousands of people, and they are really jazzed, and they understand that whatever issue they care about, whether it’s the environment, healthcare, war and peace, if we don’t figure out this media problem and make it better, we are not going to advance any issue that we care about.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill O’Reilly called you guys the craziest of the crazy last night?
JOSH SILVER: He did. Last night on Fox, Bill O’Reilly said that Dan Rather was proving his liberal colors by coming out here and being with the craziest of the crazies, when one of the guests on the show said, “Well, actually, Bill, it’s a conference about media consolidation and the internet”. And he said, “Oh, no. They’re crazy”. So it just shows that, you know, he is a mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch. He’s a mouthpiece for the largest media corporations. And that kind of omnipotent power that these large networks have, taking control of that and taking that power back from them is what this conference is about.
AMY GOODMAN: And in terms of the corporations that are controlling a lot of—not the overall discussion, because media activists are doing a good job of inserting themselves into it, but the legislation, the writing of the legislation, how do you stop the corporations from writing the laws?
JOSH SILVER: Well, that’s what this is all about. I mean, it’s about getting the public a place at the table when those laws are being made. For the last eighty years, unfortunately, every time a major decision has been made about media in this country, it’s only been the corporations at the table. It’s only been in the last few years that the public has asserted itself at that table. And the only way we’re going to win is if we have millions of people continue to get involved, to raise their voices and to demand better media, because if we don’t, we’re going to lose, and the corporations will seize control of the Internet and the future of the media for generations.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/6/fcc_urged_to_probe_pentagon_propaganda
June 06, 2008
FCC Urged to Probe Pentagon Propaganda Program
Related Democracy Now! Stories
* Pentagon’s Pundits: A Look at the Defense Department’s Propaganda Program (4/22/2008)
AMY GOODMAN: Lawmakers are urging the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the Pentagon’s propaganda program to determine if the major TV networks or the Pentagon-backed analysts violated federal law. In April, the New York Times revealed the Pentagon recruited more than seventy-five retired military officers to appear on TV outlets as so-called military analysts ahead of the Iraq War. The so-called analysts were given classified Pentagon briefings, provided with Pentagon-approved talking points, given free trips to Iraq and other sites paid for by the Pentagon.
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps joins us now here in Minneapolis at the National Conference on Media Reform, along with Free Press co-founder Bob McChesney. He has served—Commissioner Copps has served on the FCC since 2001. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MICHAEL COPPS: Thank you for having me here.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s start with that issue of the so-called independent analysts in the lead-up to the invasion and after. What’s the FCC doing about it?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, the FCC has been requested by powerful members of Congress to conduct an investigation. A letter went to the FCC, and I don’t think they have received a response yet. You kind of sit and wonder, if Dwight Eisenhower was still alive, if he’d be warning us about the military-industrial-big-media complex.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about why this is so significant to you, what has been going on with these analysts who, among other things, we weren’t told, as a viewing audience, that, for example, when they worked for a military contractor—and here they had special access to the Pentagon, because they were getting their talking points—they were being great spokespeople for them.
MICHAEL COPPS: It’s part of this larger problem that you and Bob and Josh have been talking about, about too much power being concentrated in too few hands. So, if indeed this is going on and they only have to get a few people in to get the story on all these networks and all these stations, that’s what the American people hear. That’s the problem with big media, not just the homogenous and nationalized entertainment, but the dumbed-down civic dialogue, the inability to hear on the major networks a news report like you gave this morning, which really is a refreshing perspective on what’s going on in this country of ours.
My line on this—and I’m always so happy to be on Democracy Now! —I am here in Minnesota to get media democracy now, because I don’t think you can have one without the other. I don’t think you can have democracy unless you have a lot more in the way of media democracy in this country. And I think change is coming. I’m hopeful that change is coming. I’m hopeful that we will be able to address media in a comprehensive fashion.
But here’s what I want. I want, right off the bat, a down payment on media democracy, so that the message will go out that, number one, we’ve done something substantive and, number two, this is a big issue and it’s going to take a while to solve comprehensively, but there are some things we can do right now. And one of those—this is my down payment on media democracy proposal—is return to a broadcast licensing and re-licensing system for broadcasters that has some teeth in it, some public interest obligation, so you have local news, coverage of diversity, communities, all of those things that we’re lacking now, and, number two, would address not just the traditional media of broadcast, but the new media of the Internet. This is all of a piece. It’s all the same problem that we face. So what the FCC could do, right off the bat next year, would be to have a binding and forcible principle of network neutrality, nondiscrimination on the Internet. So I think if we could do those things, we’d have made some real progress, and we would have the message out in Washington and around the country that we were now going to get serious about comprehensive reform, working with Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: And again, explain what you mean by “net neutrality”.
MICHAEL COPPS: To guarantee the freedom and openness of this most dynamic and liberating technology probably since the printing press, or maybe even more than that. Here we have this wonderful opportunity to have a two-way dialogue in journalism, two-way news, real interchange between people and their leaders and people in the media. We cannot afford to go down the same road with new media that we’ve gone down with old, where you let a few people control the networks, control the distribution and control the content, conduit content. That’s a recipe for what? Monopoly or oligopoly, at best!
AMY GOODMAN: How does public access fit into this picture, these national treasures in every community, where people can make their own media?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, it’s the last—hopefully not the last gasp, but the last remnant of localism, of local communities, of diversity of broadcasting, of opposing antagonistic points of view sometimes. This is what we have to have, and they become more and more important. Public access, PEG channels, Low Power, all of these things, so much more important as we go down this road of consolidation. I mean, we’ve spent twenty-five years deregulating media, getting rid of all of the public interest obligations we had, and then allowing the tsunami of media consolidation. And we are paying a horrid price.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about what happened in December, a major victory for the media conglomerates. Your Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, approved a measure undoing the key barrier to media consolidation. The FCC voted three-to-two—you were in the minority—to ease the rules for companies seeking to own both a newspaper and television or radio station in the same city.
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, hopefully, we’re going to be able to reverse that. The Senate, under Senator Byron Dorgan’s leadership and others, has voted to reverse that. It will go to the House of Representatives. We’ll have to see what happens there. It will go to court.
We’ve been down this road before, in 2003, when Michael Powell was chairman of the FCC. He had proposals that he rammed through the FCC that had run roughshod over every media ownership rule that we had. You know what happened? He thought nothing would happen, because nobody was interested in this issue. Three million people contacted Congress and the FCC, about 99.9 percent against what Powell did. It was a grassroots movement. And the Senate voted to overturn it—the Congress, or the House part of it. And then it went to court, and the court sent them back to us. Citizen action, even in this great impersonal age and all the power the corporations have, citizen action still works. Citizen action is what’s going to get us democracy now and media democracy now.
AMY GOODMAN: Bob McChesney, this latest move in December, where do you see it headed right now?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, we won almost unanimously in the Senate rejection, really unprecedented, even compared to five years ago with the—where we were able to overturn a lot of what the FCC tried to do then. This is dramatic improvement, when you get a voice vote, basically, because people didn’t want to go on the record in favor of media consolidation. It’s in the House’s hands now. We’re optimistic.
And I think the tide is turning. I mean, I think this is where the grassroots pressure is really beginning to pay off, years of organizing. Politicians who want to get elected, on each side of the aisle, understand that people don’t like consolidated media. They don’t like one company owning all the media in their town. They don’t want company town media, one newsroom fitting all. And they oppose it, whatever their political views. That’s simply unacceptable. And politicians have routinely voted on behalf of the monopolists, because they didn’t think anyone was paying attention. Now they know millions of Americans are paying attention, and if they want to keep their jobs, they better get in line.
MICHAEL COPPS: Here’s a difference that change can make. We can stop playing defense. We’ve been playing defense for years and years and years to defeat these proposals that come from various chairmen of the FCC. We can go on the offense now. 3,000 people here in this city are ready to take this issue on the offense, talk to all the candidates, get them signed up on this media down payment and further reform. That’s what change means.
AMY GOODMAN: Commissioner Copps, I want to ask you about the FCC beginning an investigation into allegations that the Alabama TV station censored the transmission of a recent 60 Minutes expose about the state’s imprisoned former governor, Don Siegelman. The station was WHNT in Huntsville, went black during most of the segment. The station claims it was an equipment failure?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, they do claim that. And again, this is one of the things that the FCC is reportedly investigating, and I’m still waiting for the results of that investigation. We’ve got to be proactive on these things. We have to be proactive on complaints like that, on the Pentagon episode that you talked about before and on violations of this network neutrality. We’ve got to jump in when a complaint comes in and resolve it. We can’t just bury these things or deep-six them.
AMY GOODMAN: The media giant Comcast admitting to paying people to fill the seats at the government net neutrality hearing at Harvard University, which was organized by the FCC?
MICHAEL COPPS: It’s not a pretty story, is it?
AMY GOODMAN: What’s the story?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, if indeed that did take place—I think there’s probably some indication that it did—again, I don’t know that it’s a violation of any law, but it’s just a perfect manifestation of the excessive power of a few people to try to control the dialogue and try to control the business of the Commission.
AMY GOODMAN: So they paid people to pack the hearing at Harvard, which means the critics are kept out of the hearing. We went to the next site of the next hearing, which was at Stanford, and then the corporations didn’t even show up. Bob McChesney?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, you know, what’s happened is we’ve had now almost two dozen public hearings, official and unofficial, that Commissioner Copps and Commissioner Adelstein and sometimes the entire Commission have attended in the last four years, and what they’re finding at every single hearing is that the overwhelming majority of people at these hearings all across the country, whatever the community, really care about media, and they don’t like the status quo, and they want more community media, more nonprofit, noncommercial media, more local media ownership. And these companies were freaking out, because that’s the only—that’s what the people are saying in this country. So rather than trying to actually win our—a debate and argument on the surface and make coherent arguments, it’s easier for them to buy off people who need a job and send them in to fill the room, so that the people actually—citizens who care don’t even get a seat at the table, don’t even get a chance to talk. They make a mockery of these hearings.
AMY GOODMAN: Commissioner Copps, does the FCC play a role in the debates when a network decides who gets to debate? I mean, in Las Vegas, when Dennis Kucinich was not invited into the Democratic debate, the next day on Democracy Now!, we ran parts of the debate, and we inserted him into it. He could respond, as well. But these are the public airwaves. Why are these corporations getting to determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, people can bring complaints. I’m not going to guarantee that those complaints always have good outcomes at the Federal Communications Commission. But we are trying—I’m trying to push for, really, publication, when people—when complaints come in, so people know what the process is and who’s complaining and what’s the basis for a determination that the Commission makes.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, your last point on licensing—I don’t know if people fully understand what you’re saying, because it has become so automatic that they may not even understand how stations have licenses.
MICHAEL COPPS: It used to be that every three years a licensee had to come in, apply for an extension of their license and demonstrate that they were serving the public interest. And we had about fourteen different guidelines: are you running local news, covering community events, doing reports that are relevant to that community? That’s all gone now. And what we have is something called postcard renewal. Every eight years, they basically send in a postcard, and it’s not much more than that and a slam-dunk that they’re going to get their license renewed. We haven’t taken away a license on public interest grounds since I have been at the Commission.
So, I think if we do that, folks are going to understand real quick that their license is dependent upon this oversight. That’s one reason we had the Ed Murrow era of journalism and we had investigative journalism, because stations understood they needed to do this to keep their license. It doesn’t have to be micro-regulatory or burdensome, but it can be real, and that’s where we need to go.
And, you know, this issue is so important. You talked about so many issues at the top of the show, on the news, war, and educational challenges, the economy, equal opportunity. All of those are important, and one of those issues may be, to every listener in your audience, the most important by far to them. None of those issues are going to get resolved until we get hold of this media democracy, because all of those issues are increasingly funneled through the filter of big media, and that’s why I think our civic dialogue is in the state it’s in.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both very much for being with us. Bob McChesney, co-founder of Free Press, why we’re here today—we’ll be recording all that’s happening and bringing folks these speeches that will be taking place next week. Free Speech TV is going to be broadcasting this gavel-to-gavel. It starts today, on Friday, going right through to Sunday. We are in Minneapolis at the conference, at the convention center, where the National Conference for Media Reform is taking place. And Commissioner Michael Copps, thanks so much for being with us.
MICHAEL COPPS: Thank you.
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Thank you.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/6/adrienne_maree_brown_of_the_ruckus
June 06, 2008
Adrienne Maree Brown of the Ruckus Society on Media Justice, Election Protection and the Issue of Race in the 2008 Election
Guest:
Adrienne Maree Brown, Executive director of the Ruckus Society, which brings nonviolent direct action training and support to communities affected by economic, environmental and social oppression. She sits on the boards of Allied Media Project and WireTap magazine.
AMY GOODMAN: The National Conference for Media Reform isn’t just a gathering on media policy. It’s also an educational event for hands-on media activism and citizen journalism. Adrienne Maree Brown is the executive director of the Ruckus Society, which trains and supports social justice groups in nonviolent direct action. The Ruckus Society has worked with groups including Wal-Mart Watch, Greenpeace, United Students Against Sweatshops, the Student Farmworker Alliance. She joins me right here on the convention floor, as we’re on the road in Minneapolis. Welcome, Adrienne, to Democracy Now!
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. What’s the Ruckus Society?
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: So, the Ruckus Society is an organization that’s been around for twelve years, and we do just what you said. We train people in using nonviolent direct action tactics, on really—we think of it more as civic engagement. It’s just a different way of involving yourself as a citizen in shaping the decisions that impact your life. But it’s sort of like, if you need to go a hundred miles an hour in order to get where you’re going, a lot of the organizing that happens in the world takes you to about sixty miles an hour. And when Ruckus is needed is when it’s at sixty and nothing’s changing. We take you from sixty to a hundred, so we escalate it.
AMY GOODMAN: I’ll never forget, at the Philadelphia convention, the Republican convention, when the police swooped down on the then head of Ruckus Society, John Sellers.
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And he was charged with—I don’t know how many felonies. His weapon was his cell phone.
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s where he was organizing people who were demonstrating.
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Mm-hmm. It’s—I mean, it’s absolutely the case that it’s been very trumped-up charges against him. He had about $2 million bail, I think, set initially. And, you know, a lot of times the police are not quite sure how to respond to a nonviolent threat. And in this country, it’s actually been very, very politicized to engage in nonviolent direct action, especially since September 11. So stuff that we used to do very easily, dropping a banner off the side of a building or off the side of a bridge, now all the sudden it’s like, you know, possibly a terrorist attack or something. So we have to really be careful in how we train our organizers and our activists, so that they understand what the rules are, what the laws are. That’s a lot of the training that we do, but also making sure that people know that this is their right. It’s their right to have free speech. It’s their right to push the boundaries. It’s their right to directly communicate to their decision makers.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s media justice?
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: So, media justice is really the idea that the people can take media into their own hands and that everyone can have access to media, access to communicating their message and access to communicating their stories and hearing their stories. For us, a lot of it is about not just being in a place of information, right, which is wonderful—we want to have as much information as possible—but for those of us who are in a disenfranchised or disempowered communities, it’s about transformative media, being able to actually send messages in a way that changes the way people perceive stuff and helps to empower our communities. The term was coined five years ago at the Highlander Center in Tennessee.
AMY GOODMAN: Where Rosa Parks trained before she sat down on the bus?
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Where Rosa Parks trained, where Martin Luther King was. I mean, there’s so many great legends that were trained there. And, you know, sitting up on that hill, you know, sitting around in the little rocking chairs, that term was developed. And it was really the idea of not just media reform, not just changing exactly what it is, but really striving towards justice for communities through media.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you give an example of attaining something through media activism?
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: I think a really beautiful example right now is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who just celebrated a victory against Burger King. And that struggle is very much an organizing struggle. You know, we’ve definitely been involved in going and training that group over years. But they are brilliant organizers. And they were able to point out that Burger King had hired folks and that were spying on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as they were bringing their campaign against Burger King in order to raise the—
AMY GOODMAN: And explain who the Immokalee Workers are.
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: So the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is farm workers coming out of Florida, primarily, and they’re talking about their picking tomatoes, right? The tomatoes that go onto Burger King sandwiches. And they’re saying, “We want to be paid a little bit more,” right? Basically a penny more for each pound of tomatoes.
AMY GOODMAN: They won their campaign against Taco Bell.
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: They won their campaign against Taco Bell, and they just won their campaign against Burger King, right? But it was only because they were able to identify that Burger King had been spying on them, and they were able to spread that message, because they had brilliant media tools and let their community know that they weren’t going to—you know, Burger King would not be able to get away with this. That’s a beautiful campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: When you say, “spying”, you mean that there were infiltrators?
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: There were infiltrators. There were folks who were getting information about what the Immokalee Workers were trying to do and in ways to, you know, obviously to circumvent justice coming to bear.
AMY GOODMAN: And then they learned one of the vice presidents that was negotiating with them—
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: That was negotiating with them was also double-dealing with it. So—
AMY GOODMAN: —was using his own daughter, his high school kid’s account to send vicious email to the organizers at Immokalee Workers.
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you share your own biography, Adrienne?
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Yeah, I can. I am great. I used to work with a group called the League of Young Voters, which is a lot of why I’m still interested in what’s happening with the election and election protection, particularly this year. I came to Ruckus about two years ago. And as you said, John Sellers was the executive director then. The organization was founded mostly focusing on forest issues and, you know, really strictly environmental work and has grown and grown into focusing on human rights, social justice.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by “election protection” and the whole coming together of the election protection and media reform movement?
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: Well, I think that they’re deeply, deeply interwoven issues. I think these are two ways that our voices get heard, right, in this country. One is through these media outlets, and one is through our vote. And I think in both arenas we have seen deep and inexcusable disenfranchisement happening or on the verge of happening, right? And I think that the sort of consolidation that’s happening in the media world, which, you know, Commissioner Copps was speaking about, you know, just is like watching this happen very quickly. We’ve also watched, over the last several elections now, stolen elections or unfair elections, but we haven’t seen a media that was willing and able to in the moment step up to that story and really handle it.
And I don’t think that we’ve been able to galvanize the people of this country in the moment in a way that really says, you know, the entire world is deeply impacted, we as citizens are deeply impacted, we are being sent to war, we’re looking at climate change at unreasonable amounts. Why is this happening to us? Because our voices are not being heard in these two deep arenas. And I deeply feel that, you know, I’m here to talk to this group about what they’re going to do in this election season to make sure that doesn’t happen again, regardless of who the candidates are. And it is exciting right now. This is a very exciting time to be voting in this country. But regardless of who the candidates are, our system is so flawed, and it doesn’t need to be. We know what to do. So it’s just calling people into action around that.
AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts—and you’ve written about Barack Obama.
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: I have. Well, most recently I wrote a little piece that was—it was sort of half-silly, but coming from the heart of being an interracial child and watching this, you know, interracial man come into this space of being the president—potential president of this country, right? And everyone is just like, “He’s a black candidate. He’s a black candidate,” you know, which is the oversimplification that I think is necessary for this country and shows where we are, understanding race in this country. It’s like he must—he’s not white, he must be just black. But I think that there is a really interesting thing about him being mixed race.
AMY GOODMAN: You, too, have a white mother and a black father.
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: I certainly do, and I love them both. And I think there’s something very important about the kind of communication skills and the kind of bridge building and relationship building that’s needed that happens at the dinner table for those of us who grow up coming from two cultures, or more than two cultures, that I think is hard to pull off if you only come from one, right?
And I think, for this country right now, there’s a lot of healing needed. So many of the deep-seated issues we’re dealing with are grounded in race, not something else. You know, Katrina is not about anything but how do we look at race in this country. You know, how climate justice is happening in this country, it’s all about race. These are the lines that are separating. And with the election protection piece, if you overlap who’s impacted by climate injustice, who’s impacted by the war, who’s impacted by our economic policies, and then who’s being disenfranchised at election time, it’s the same lines.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, what message do you have for journalists who cover this issue, the presidential election, but who cover how Barack Obama is defined? What do you say to them?
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN: I feel that the important thing that a Barack Obama is saying to people is that it’s not him that is going to make this change. It’s not him that can suddenly revolutionize how this country is operating. It’s going to be all of these communities that are doing that. I feel like if journalists can find a story there, find all of these communities that are somehow galvanized maybe by the hope they’re getting from Obama or galvanized by this moment in history to make major changes, then that, to me, will be the powerful story that emerges, and that will be the way that we’ll come to the kind of justice we need in the election system, in our media systems, across the board in our policies. So we’re excited to see.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much, Adrienne, for being with us. Adrienne Maree Brown is executive director of the Ruckus Society. She’s here in Minneapolis for the National Conference for Media Reform and will be speaking this weekend.
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