Media

Roger Leisner sent us this report on Chomsky and Zinn speaking in Boston, activities sponsored by the Coalition for Social Justice:

In a way, I'm lucky. I get to record and listen to speakers that make me think and question. And that was definitely the case when I hopped on a bus to record Chomsky and Zinn in Boston last week.

Tuesday-November 10
Took the MBTA to Kenmore Square, grabbed a bowl of soup, stopped next to an empty MIT cop car to grab a bowl of Maine green, walked past the Stata Center (Chomsky's office is now located in this maintenance nightmare building) and strolled into the Compton Labs building where Noam Chomsky was scheduled to speak about Human Rights in Iran. Besides myself, C Way from Boston and O Field from Corinna, Maine, were videotaping. David Barsamian of Alternative Radio arrived with Chomsky. Speaking to 400 people in a room that could hold 600 plus, Chomsky's talk was only 30 minutes and to the point, sort of like an alternative State Department briefing. All four alternative media agreed that it was an excellent talk, because Chomsky makes you think and question. The only bummer was the failure of my fairly new Canon Digital Rebel still camera. Since then, I have learned that the camera will be replaced.

I have always been in need of places to stay when I'm recording, and as such, many fine people have come through over the past two decades of Radio Free Maine. This time, I stayed at the collective home of Susan McLucas, just off of Davis Square in Somerville. Ms. McLucas is the "Bicycle Lady of Boston", in that she runs a bicycle riding school for children and adults. Plus, she is director of Healthy Tomorrow-Sini Sanuman which is dedicated to stopping female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as excision, in Mali and world-wide. Ms. McLucas will be speaking on this subject at an International Conference in the Hague next week. I'm so lucky to have friends who not only do good deeds, but know how to party.

Media Disseminated Myths about Obamacare
By Stephen Lendman

Pro or con, major media spin distorts, exaggerates, and lies to avoid key truths on this critically important issue. After the House passed HR 3962: Affordable Health Care for America Act, a November 11 Nation magazine editorial (likely by editor, publisher, and part-owner Katrina vanden Heuvel) admitted the bill's faults, yet praised it saying:

"something remarkable happened on November 7 when the House voted 220-215 for legislation that the Congressional Budget Office says will extend insurance coverage to 36 million uncovered Americans....in the House bill there is certainly something to work with, and something to fight for."

Earlier on MSNBC's Morning Joe, she hailed the moment as "a historic day....a victory in Congress....this is the most important piece of legislation we've seen in decades."

On Healthcare, Don't Follow the Money
WaPo's new rule of journalism?

The Washington Post's Shailagh Murray (11/17/09) wrote a profile of Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D.-Ark.) as one of the Democratic senators most likely to break with the rest of the party on healthcare reform. The article seemed to invert the advice Deep Throat once gave to the Post's Woodward and Bernstein into a new rule: Don't follow the money.

Headlined "A Centrist in Healthcare Debate, Lincoln Hears It From All Sides," the piece presented Lincoln's stance as something of a puzzle: "Hundreds of thousands of Lincoln's constituents are low-income and lack insurance, the very kind of voters expected to benefit under the Senate bill."

Murray described the senator as facing a dilemma:

The low-profile centrist is being pressed by both sides. Democratic activists are incensed that she has turned against the public option, an idea she once supported. Republicans are casting her cautious approach to the healthcare debate in starkly political terms, saying that she is unwilling to put local interests above those of a president who lost the state by a resounding 20 percentage points.

She even acknowledged the forces lining up against the politician:

In the process, Lincoln has riled liberal groups including MoveOn.org, which is targeting her with radio ads, direct mail and rallies outside two of her Arkansas offices. Perhaps more ominously, MoveOn--working with the liberal group Democracy for America--has amassed $3.5 million in pledges to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who sides with Republicans to block an up-or-down vote on a bill with a public option.

That would seem to raise another question: Who's keeping her IN power? The Center for Responsive Politics has some background on that from the second quarter of this year--information the Post apparently doesn't consider important:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has brought in the most from the health sector so far this year at $394,400, followed by Senate Finance Committee member Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), who collected $324,350, and former Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), who brought in $266,100. All three senators are up for re-election in 2010.

The Struggle for Net Neutrality
By Stephen Lendman

During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama promised to "Support the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet."

Perhaps not given a worse record than his fiercest critics feared, worse than George Bush, across the board on both domestic and foreign policies, including:

• failing to deliver promised change;
• being the standard bearer for the corrupted political/business elite;
• governing like a crime boss in league with Wall Street;
• disdaining democratic rights, freedoms, and the rule of law;
• betraying working Americans;
• proposing social services cuts instead of increasing them when they're most needed;
• denying budget-strapped states vitally needed aid;
• ignoring growing poverty, hunger, homelessness and despair;
• expanding militarism, imperial wars, and state-sponsored terrorism;
• violating human rights and civil liberties; and
• providing open-ended banker bailouts, an array of pro-business measures, and the greatest ever amounts of military spending at a time America has no enemies.

Will Net Neutrality fare better?

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian style control over information.

Last year Pacifica listeners sponsored over 783 schools nationwide with educational packages from The Pacifica Radio Archives. This year the annual marathon broadcast fund drive premiers the Campus Campaign 2.0

From the Vault to the Classroom: Providing a new generation with a sound education

The Campus Campaign is a new initiative to bring the historic recordings of Pacifica Radio to the classroom...grassroots style...one school at a time.

On Monday and Tuesday, November 16th and 17th, Pacifica listeners will be treated to a day-long broadcast featuring powerful sounds from the archives collection AND get the chance to select an educational package of From the Vault, like the Civil Rights pack featuring 10 hours of carefully selected audio, and sponsor a school of their choice with a duplicate of their selection. Volume 1 includes: Civil Rights, Malcolm X, U.S. History, Women’s Studies, Environment, 1968 in review, Studs Terkel and Noam Chomsky.

Volume 2 premiers expanded collections in Civil Rights, US History and Arts and Literature. New compilations include Latino/Chicano studies, LGBT studies, Native American studies and Pacifica's Great Voices. Join our facebook fan page and keep updated on the fund drive broadcast here.

Ted Rall makes wonderful cartoons:

 
And columns. (Go read some.)

And videos:

And, now, books:

This is a very strange book, at least for someone who doesn't tend to read serious stories written as comic strips, or anything else written as comic strips.  It's growing on me, and I think I'll enjoy reading it again, but I think I would have enjoyed the first reading more had the author not recounted almost the whole plot in the foreword.  So, I won't say much about the plot here, and I recommend treating the foreword as an afterword.

Then I recommend imagining you had never read a novel before or heard a song before or watched a movie before.  In other words, try to be more open than I was at first to all things being done in an odd medium, so that the seriousness works as well as the funny parts.

You can read this in the time it takes to watch a television program, in which -- of course -- nothing works at all.

Fort Hood Tragedy Sparks Islamophobic Response
By Stephen Lendman

A personal note. This writer was stationed at Fort Hood in summer 1956, a quiet time, post-Korea and pre-Vietnam, when terrorism and Islamophbia weren't issues, and shooting only happened on firing ranges to learn and improve marksmanship.

On November 5, The New Times headlined, "Mass Shooting at Fort Hood, saying:

"the Army confirms that the gunman (thought to be killed) was Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan. Reports said 12 were dead (raised to 13, including one civilian) and 31 others wounded from an incident at the base Readiness Processing Center where troops prepare for deployment. Two other soldiers were detained as suspects. Another was believed at large. The shooting began about 1:30PM after which Fort Hood was locked down."

The University of Virginia, to the shame of us alumni, contracts with the Pentagon, builds a research park nextdoor to a military spying center, employs the guy in charge of derailing the 9-11 commission, and now proposes to record the oral history of George W. Bush's misleadership.

If they were to obtain audio recordings of the prompts given him during debates at which he wore an ear piece, or English translations of his more comical utterances, I could see a limited value. But recording the imperial glory of a major war criminal, with the obvious intention of brushing over that matter, is simply shameful. Record his crimes or nothing at all.

Here's the press release:

How many times does he have to get these stories wrong before ABC News cans their hapless and constantly wrong "investigative correspondent" Brian Ross?

We suspect he'll be allowed to keep screwing up, again and again and again, so long as his screw-ups result in lots of media attention. Little wonder Ross is one of the only broadcast network news stooges invited on Bill O'Reilly's show, again and again and again.

Gawker's John Cook takes apart Ross' big "scoop" yesterday, which swept both the wingnut and non-wingnut media alike --- cooking up the alleged Fort Hood shooter Army Major Nidal Malik "Hasan's Contacts with al Qaeda".

READ MORE AT BRAD BLOG.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The ColdType
Reader
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Issue 41

62 Pages: Want to know why the world’s most expensive army can’t beat a few angry tribesmen? We have the answer. Plus: Why conservatives fear Big Government; excerpts from new books by Amy Goodman and Ramzy Baroud; did US politicians read the Goldstone Report before rejecting it?; the wars on postal workers and on Twitter; a British torture cover-up; broken capitalism; five hidden facts about cannabis; waging war, winning the Nobel Peace Prize; and much, much more. Contributors this month are Paul Armentano, Joe Bageant, Paul J. Balles, Ramzy Baroud, William Blum, Jo Comerford, Shamus Cooke, Amy Goodman, David Michael Green, Mark Hurwitt, Dave Lindorff, Ray McGovern, George Monbiot, Michael I. Niman, Greg Palast, John Pilger, Fred Reed, Sherwood Ross, Norman Solomon, Stephen Zunes

This month’s READER EXTRA is The Madoff Moment, an excerpt from the new book, The Crime Of Our Time, by Danny Schechter

Click here or on image above to download The Reader

Click here or on image above to download The Reader Extra

NEW - Click here to read The Reader in Flash format

NEW - Click here to read The Reader Extra in Flash format

Here's Paul Krugman cheering for Pelosi passing a healthcare bill, any healthcare bill. And he advertises that he has a conscience. But Josh Mitteldorf recently sent me this collection of Krugman columns reminding me that Krugman had all the right concerns about the theft of the 2004 presidential election right up until the moment it was stolen and then went silent. Why would that be?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/23/opinion/democracy-at-risk.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/opinion/27krug.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/opinion/saving-the-vote.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/opinion/15krugman.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/opinion/22krugman.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/opinion/26krugman.html

... with no evidence.

Paid Lying: What Passes for Major Media Journalism
By Stephen Lendman

Today's major media journalism is biased, irresponsible, sensationalist reporting that distorts, exaggerates or misstates the truth. It's misinformation or agitprop disinformation masquerading as fact to boost circulation, readership, viewers, or listeners, and on vital issues lie about or suppress uncomfortable truths to provide unqualified support for state and/or corporate interests - to the detriment of the greater good that's always sacrificed for profits and imperial aims.

As a result, major media sources produce a daily propaganda diet and what Project Censored calls "junk food news," and get most people to believe it. In their landmark book, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explained the "propaganda model" that controls the public message by "filter(ing)" disturbing truths, "leaving (behind) only the cleansed residue fit to print" or air.