My Day On The Hill Or Dissecting In The Land Of Our Legislative “Representatives”

April 16th, 2008 - by: danny

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This blog offers a “dissections” on the daily news, calls attention to information from a variety of sources, and chronicles the life, thoughts and times of one independent media maker/journalist. It is written by Danny Schechter, who is responsible etc. for views expressed and errors that go uncorrected in the usual rush of its daily creation. It is posted on Mediachannel.org the night before it is distributed by email to subscribers. You can sign up to received this blog for free on Mediachannel.org. You can post comments on the issues raised online or through emails to dissector@mediachannel.org. Whew!

MR DISSECTOR GOES TO WASHINGTON
THE RALLY FOR RON PAUL
DAN KENNEDY ON DS IN BEAN TOWN

Here’s the quote of the day, from inside one of those Chinese restaurant fortune cookies: “An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.”

I picked up this commentary as we raced to DC’s Chinatown to catch the Eastern Shuttle bus ($35, RT) to return to New York after my quickie visit to Washington to screen In Debt We Trust at an event organized by Chairman John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee in the heart of the Rayburn office building. (Anyone old enough to remember “Mr. Sam?” (D-Texas)–once thought of as the Congressional Suprimo for Life?)

I wasn’t sure if this aphorism was somehow linked to the food crisis. But that was on the minds of some in the room because of the crisis in Haiti. Some Congress Members, led by Maxine Waters, are trying to get food aid there in the aftermath of reports of starvation and riots but apparently the Port of Miami is not in a rush and some food is reportedly rotting on ships off the Floriduh coast that are now slow boats not rushing anywhere. It is faster to ship, believe it or not, through the port of Wilmington. Huh? Meanwhile, people are fuming there and everywhere as food prices rise.

Some members of Congress may soon be heading to Haiti, a course that Jesse Jackson and members of the Black caucus are advocating. There is going to be a special briefing Friday in the very room where my film screened on a big new laser TV wall unit.

I did raise the question of whether there is some link between the credit collapse and the food crisis that followed so quickly on its tail. When I publicly wondered if investors had moved their money from the collapsing housing market where prices are falling to the burgeoning commodities market where prices are rising, I was told I was being conspiratorial (but told that with a wink!)

I am going to look into this. Articles anyone?

I was happy that Josh Nassar, a lobbyist with the respected National Center For Responsible Lending and who is in my film turned up and helped me with questions. He was not enthusiastic about the Congresssional response to the housing/lending crisis. The audience seemed to appreciate the film and my comments

The progressive Congressman Maurice Hinchey who was in my WMD film came to the event as did a number of staffers and even a reader of this blog from Chicago who happened to be in town and read about it right here yesterday morning.

Well, that’s one person, anyway, and as they say every journey starts with a small step.

I have been on this journey for awhile and I wish I could report that the men and women on the hill are jumping up and down with anger as much as I think they should to investigate the orchestrated crisis that is bringing down our economy. I did meet a very well informed Conyers staffer working on the critical medical debt issue from which people are literally dying. Thats a story that has to be told!

The Capitol seemed to be buzzing yesterday. I arrived in time for a Ron Paul Rally outside on the lawn. Some of the participants were wearing Revolutionary war hats with “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and others had jackets saying Tyranny Demolition Team. There were a lot of men who looked like they were once bikers but an earnestness and dedication was evident along with signs denouncing the Federal Reserve Bank.

I was sorry to have missed Representative Paul’s always stimulating comments which I was told they included a condemnation of all the money being wasted on the war.

When I left the rally, there was a band playing reminding me of anti-war and anti-apartheid rallies I attended years ago in the same spot outside the Capitol. In those years, the grounds were not patrolled by men with automatic weapons. Somehow that didn’t make me feel very secure when I spoke later.

When I first passed through security I literally ran into a high level NYPD commander/leader – sorry, I can’t tell you who he was who had been at a hearing. I asked if he had heard if there was any outcome in the Sean Bell case – the trial of cops charged with killing Bell with some 50 bullets last year that just went to the judge. The NYPD man muttered that he didn’t know and was glad to be out of town.

So much for the wall of blue.

(Also buried in the NY Times was a report of an NYPD cop caught robbing a bank in Pennslyvania. While there was one photo of a Hedge Fund exec in handcuffs in the paper of record today, there wasn’t enough of how the banks are now doing the robbing.” Actually, today there is a story of how Hedge Fund hustlers are brining home BILLION dollar paydays: “Hedge fund managers are making money on a scale that once seemed unimaginable.”)

I ricocheted from that encounter in the halls to entering the Judiciary Committee offices where a few minutes later I was staring at a CSPAN broadcast of a hearing about the lack of oversight of the FBI in national security matters. It was clear from just a few minutes of watching men uttering convoluted lawyerspeak about exogenous or was it endogenous criteria and articulation standards that this whole issue is out of control with the Feds running amok by opening terrorist investigations with little real evidence behind but with laws that allow them incredible latitude to do what they want all in the name of protecting us. Scary. I don’t know how the Congress members can do this with straight faces when they see what a charade it is. (Sorry for my naievte!)

This is the kind of hither to sacrosanct subject that only now, with Bushworld descending, can even be raised. The rubber stamps have been put away for now, thanks in part to the shift in the control of Congress.

What a wacko world of legalistic acrobats who know exactly how to conceal what they really mean. Thank you Jerry Nadler – my Congressman by the way – for leading this fight.

I later learned that bills to limit subprime abuses are being ground up this same way with a fusillade of fear mongering and abstract avoidance. (See The New York Times today for a report on how lobbyists have influenced Senators to add breaks for business in a new bill that supposedly was written to help homeowners facing foreclosure. This is really so typical and shocking giving the severity of the crisis. The House is likely to modify the final version.

With all its protocol, rules, genteel politeness and arcane procedures, you can see why nothing gets done on the Hill of substance and why the Congress is held in such low repute despite the sometimes heroic attempts by leaders like John Conyers who at a dapper 79 is often still marching to his own drum and concerns about the plight of working people. He seems still fired up with the passion for change and sense of irony that led him into politics in Detroit in an earlier era.

(He is the second longest serving Member, and I do draw a distinction about someone who works as hard as he does for the public interest and the flp and insincere way I saw some Congressman patronize men and women in uniform with a cheery, “Thank You For Your Service.” )

It was an honor to be asked to speak but all I can hope is that it leads somewhere. This crusade of mine on the debt issue is on the verge of getting me deeper in debt. Unless some funding materializes, I am going to have to deep six the effort.

Anyone know Pete Peterson who just committed a billion bucks to educating the people about financial issues?

I am writing all this on the bus when I should be sleeping. Tomorrow I have to write the speech I am going to giving at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston. My verbal “spring offensive” continues next week when I head off – get this – to a forum in Borat land, the very real Republic of Kazakhstan.

(I recently leaned that a member of my own family, a brother of my grandma Bessie Schechter, (Look her up on Google) died of hunger in the land of the Kazahks while escaping the holocaust during World War Two.)

BACK IN BOSTON TOMORROW

Here’s Dan Kennedy’s piece in the Boston Phoenix about my speechifying tomorrow at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston’s historic Old South Street Meeting house:

A year after releasing his remarkably prescient film on the then-nascent financial crisis, In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts, veteran progressive journalist Danny Schechter finally made it onto CNBC. A CNBC reporter is trying to interview activists protesting the bailout of Bear Stearns. She’s not having much luck. Suddenly Schechter moves into the frame.

“My hunch is what I’m saying now will never make air on CNBC because you’re only interested, you’re only really interested, in the people at the top, which is your elite audience,” Schechter tells her. “You’re not interested in the people who are actually suffering in this story.”

Schechter was wrong. He says he later saw a few clips of the confrontation on CNBC’s midday show, Power Lunch. So has he been invited on to talk about his film? Well, no. “It’s very frustrating, because you become like Chicken Little, or the little boy who cried wolf. ‘The sky is falling.’ People think you’re a nut,” he says. “And then the sky starts falling.”

Although these days Schechter may find it easier to speak his mind on the BBC and Iranian television (The Kazakhstan Forum with Borat, he jokes) than in the American media, he will have a chance to get his message out in Boston next Thursday during an appearance at the Ford Hall Forum.

“Basically what I want to try to do is assess,” says Schechter. “We’re in the middle of an election, we’re in the middle of a war, we’re in the middle of an economic crisis. Kind of a trifecta of disaster.”

For Schechter, a New York—based filmmaker, author, and blogger, this will be something of a homecoming. He got his start here as the “News Dissector” on the old WBCN Radio (104.1 FM) back in the ’70s, when the station was an independent outlet that celebrated radical politics along with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

“I’m still going, I’m still trying,” he says. “Either because I’m insane and can’t read the writing on the wall, or I don’t want to.”

Danny Schechter’s Ford Hall Forum talk, “News Dissecting from Boston to a Global Stage: A Multimedia Pioneer Challenges His Profession and Calls for Media Reform,” will take place on Thursday, April 17, from 6:30 to 8 pm at the Old South Meeting House, 310 Washington Street. For more information, go to fordhallforum.org.

Please come if you are in Boston. And just in case you don’t know, and haven’t been watching JOHN ADAMS on HBO:

“Since the 1773 mass protest meetings that led to the Boston Tea Party, Old South Meeting House has served as a gathering place for discussion and celebration and a haven for free speech.”

WORTH READING

Niemanwatchdog.org reports:

… Mark Schapiro, Rick Rodriguez, Brant Houston, Danny Schechter and numerous others – more than 40 in all – contributed essays or book reviews to a special edition oif Nieman Reports published at Harvard called “What the future holds for investigative reporting.”

MEDIA NEWS: CHINA DENOUNCES CNN

BEIJING (Reuters) – China on Tuesday demanded that television news channel CNN apologize after one of its commentators said the Chinese were “goons” and that their products were “junk”.

Jack Cafferty made the comments earlier this month on CNN’s political program, The Situation Room.
“We are shocked at and strongly condemn the evil attack by the CNN anchor on the Chinese people,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news conference.

“Cafferty used the microphone in his hand to slander China and the Chinese people, and seriously violated reporting ethics.”

Cafferty said the United States imported Chinese-made “junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food”, adding: “They’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years,” according to a copy of his comments carried on YouTube.

China came under international scrutiny following a series of food and product health scares last year. It says the vast majority of its products are safe and has accused Western media of over-hyping the problem.
“We solemnly demand that CNN and Cafferty retract their evil words and apologize to the whole Chinese people,” Jiang added.

CNN’s Hong Kong bureau, one of its main reporting bases in Asia, said it had no immediate comment.

China has lashed out at Western media organizations, including CNN in recent weeks following unrest in Tibet….”

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