Can Democracy Survive The Media? Is Ours Done? Are We?
May 27th, 2010 - by: danny
DeWitt C: Where It Began
Tonight is a special night for me. Just as the sun seems to be setting on my media career as I have known it, I will be getting together with the crew of the very first media institution I worked for and then edited: The CLINTON NEWS, the student newspaper at DeWitt Clinton Height School in the Bronx, an award winning newspaper with many prominent alums in the news biz. It was my training ground in journalism. We are having a reunion in the boogie down Bronx, of course, and I will tell you all about it on the morrow.
I will be hosting News Dissector Radio on ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com 10 AM to 11 AM EDT.
HOW DO WE ARREST THE DECLINE IN OUR DEMOCRACY?
BOMBING OIL WITH MUD
THE CIA’S GAY PORN TAPE
With only two News Dissector blogs to go, I will, eventually, begin this one with a quote from Sam Smith’s Progressive Review on the decline in our democracy as the elites that rule us and strategize about how to impose their agendas.
A useful metaphor might be the term “TOP KILL,” which is the strategy the geniuses at BP deployed today to bomb the ongoing oil leak with thousands of barrels of MUD. They call it “mud” but it is really a heavy oil they use in the drilling process. Problem is, no one is sure if it will work, and if it doesn’t, it could make things worse by leading to more cracks in the reservoir and more gushers. This “leak” could go on FOR YEARS.
Mud is, also, another metaphor of relevance. In a law suit against subprime lenders in the Wells Fargo bank, documents were put in evidence showing that these scammers referred to their customers i. e., victims, in communities of color as “Mud People.”
Honest, they did.
Meanwhile, in Haiti, children without food are eating “mud Pies” for what little nutrition they can squeeze from the earth. ”
• NY Times: Days before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, BP officials chose a type of casing for the well that it knew was the riskier of two options, according to a BP documents. [More here →]
An announcement this morning:
• WP: President Barack Obama plans to announce at a midday news conference–His first in months (DS) Thursday that a moratorium on new deepwater oil drilling permits will be continued for six months while a presidential commission investigates, a White House aide said.
Controversial lease sales off the coast of Alaska will be delayed pending the results of the commission’s investigation, and lease sales planned in the Western Gulf and off the coast of Virginia will be canceled, the aide said.
President Obama heads to Louisiana on Friday but many say he is very late in showing up at the scene of the catastrophe. This disaster is being called his Katrina. The Administration’s response is not exactly awe-inspiring. See items below:
• HuffPo: James Carville To Obama: Tell BP ‘I’m Your Daddy’ And Take The Lead In Response
• Politico.com: Ken Salazar backs continued drilling
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar plans to reiterate his support for continued offshore drilling Wednesday on Capitol Hill, while defending the administration’s response to the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in front of increasingly skeptical lawmakers. [More here →]
• FoxNews.com: Interior Secretary Takes Fire From Congress Over Agency’s Criminal Offenses
As members of the agency that oversees offshore drilling confront a potential criminal prosecution for a variety of offenses ranging from lax enforcement to watching porn and coming to work high, the administration official charged with its oversight faced a barrage of criticism on Capitol Hill Wednesday. [More here →]
• DailyKos: Interior: Fire Salazar, Clear Out ex-lobbyists and GOP
Secretary Ken Salazar has shown himself to be a friend to the oil and gas industry by some of his votes: 2005, voting against fuel efficiency standards in cars and against removing tax breaks for oil companies; 2006 voting to support removing protections against drilling off the Florida coast. But what is most disturbing is how he has simply been hands off in office allowing Bush era regulations to stand and in the current crisis over the BP drilling catastrophe, he has allowed BP to call the shots on everything from how to deal with the problem to access to information. Obama must show that he is going to not only protect the environment but to use law that dates back to Nixon to enforce standards of practice and the right to know of citizens. [More here →]
Blast From The Past:
The Death Penalty for Corporations Comes of Age by Russell Mokhiber, Business Ethics
In two surprising recent cases, a law school professor and a circuit court judge seek to revoke the charters of corporate lawbreakers. We know what the death penalty for individuals means: Commit an egregious crime, die at the hands of the state. What does it mean to talk about the ”death penalty” for corporations? Simply this: Commit an egregious wrong, and have your charter revoked. In other words, lose the state’s permission to exist. It’s an intriguing concept, because most of us never think about corporations needing anyone’s permission to exist. But they do.
Throughout the nation’s history, the states have had — and still have — the authority to give birth to a corporation, by granting a corporate charter, and to impose the death penalty on a corporate wrongdoer by revoking its charter. Activist-author Richard Grossman points out that in 1890, for example, New York’s highest court revoked the charter of the North River Sugar Refining Corporation — referring to the judgment explicitly as one of ”corporate death.” It was once widely understood that the states had this power. ”New York, Ohio, Michigan and Nebraska revoked the charters of oil, match, sugar and whiskey trusts” in the 1800s, Grossman wrote in the pamphlet, ”Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation,” co-authored with Frank Adams.
For many decades now, this vital power has lain dormant in the public mind. But a small group of activists led by Grossman is hoping to resurrect it. They believe that to stem the tide of growing and unaccountable corporate power, it’s not enough to rely on regulation, litigation, legislation, and law enforcement. Grossman and his Cambridge-based Project on Corporations, Law and Democracy want citizens to reclaim the power to put corporations to death. Although Grossman has written and lectured extensively on the topic, few have taken him seriously. In an interview recently, he admitted to having only eleven citizen activists in his group.
Enter Loyola Law School professor Robert Benson. Benson had never heard about the corporate death penalty until he read Grossman’s work. Then, a few years ago, Benson invited Grossman to Los Angeles to speak before the law school, and afterward the two struck up a conversation. Benson was looking for a way to bring corporate wrongdoers into line, and charter revocation struck him as something that might work. He decided to try it — in a big way.
On September 10, he and a coalition of more than 30 public interest organizations filed a petition calling on the attorney general (AG) of California to revoke the charter of Union Oil of California (Unocal). In social responsibility circles, Unocal is best (or perhaps worst) known for its controversial Burma pipeline, being built by a consortium co-owned in part by Unocal and the outlaw military regime there. [More here →]
Now, back to that quote:
WHEN THE TOP CAVES IN by Sam Smith
“What corporate America wanted was nothing less than the Third Worlding of the US, a collapse of both present reality and future expectations. The closer the life and wages of our citizens could come to those of less developed nations, the happier the huge stateless multinationals would be. Then, as they said in the boardrooms and at the White House, the global playing field would be leveled.
Once having capitulated on economic matters, Americans would be taught to accept a similar diminution of social programs, civil liberties, democracy, and even some of the most basic governmental services. Free of being the agent of our collective will, government could then concentrate on the real business of a corporatist state, such as reinforcing the military, subsidizing selected industry, and strengthening police control over what would inevitably be an increasingly alienated and fractured electorate.”
And alienated and apathetic many of us have, indeed, become. How else to explain the lack of a mass response to the worse economic crisis since the Depression! OMG!
Here’s a press release that came to the Dissector’s inbox in line with this suggestion that democracy is on the way out, no doubt from a group on the right:
Voter Apathy and Disinterest — Is the Media to Blame?
As widely reported, a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that only 22% of American citizens trust their government. What’s missing from these reports, however, is any mention of how the issue of government accountability is impacting voter turnout. Over the past 40 years, research shows that members of Congress are elected by a mere 22% of the eligible voters in each district or state. The media seems hesitant to show how distrust in government impacts voter participation — many eligible voters simply shrug their shoulders and say “why bother?” when queried on why they choose not to vote.
The problem stems from the media being at odds with the structure of the Constitution, which gives power to the people first, representatives second, and the president last. Instead, the media places an inordinate amount of importance on the role of the president that many of the electorate feel the only important vote is cast in presidential election years. In fact, the media goes even further by referring to members of Congress as “lawmakers” or “leaders” instead of, more correctly, as state and local representatives beholden to the people.
The press, embraced in the Constitution as the unofficial fourth branch of government, is failing in its job. The media today fails to fully inform the public, fails to regard the proper structure of the U.S. Constitution, and utterly fails to treat the turnout problem as the crisis it is. With the people continuing to receive irresponsible information at the local level during election time — or no information at all in many cases — how long can the United States remain a free, functioning constitutional republic?
Good question.
We are in an age of manipulated information, which is why we started Mediachannel.org in the first play in an attempt to sound the alarm. But today, the real news is happening behind the scenes, often inside the media itself. Check this story out about the company I once worked for —before its death by Disneyization.
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–The insider trading scandal that erupted at The Walt Disney Co. (DIS) on Wednesday led to more speculation that the media giant is considering a sale of its ABC broadcast network, although the company denied that negotiations are taking place.
Shares of Disney rose 2.3% to $33.07 Wednesday after reports that Bonnie Hoxie, administrative assistant to Zenia Mucha, the company’s head of communications, was arrested in Los Angeles along with her boyfriend, Yonni Sebbag. The two were charged with trying to sell insider information …”
No wonder news organizations have so little respect. And please don’t tell me all of this is “ok” because we now have social media Read this and weep:
LOS ANGELES and LONDON: Edelman’s fourth annual “Trust in the Entertainment Industry” survey shows the majority of respondents view social networks as a “source of entertainment,” with a stronger value proposition than television.”
RELATED:
Pew Knew: Mainstream Media Drives Social News by Melinda Gipson
More than 80 percent of news that’s shared in the blogosphere and on social sites derives from a handful of news sites — the BBC, CNN, NYTimes.com and the Washington Post — reports Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism annual tracking study. In fact, more than 99 percent of news-related stories linked from blogs came from “legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks.”
It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that at a time when relative upstarts like John Battelle’s Federated Media celebrate its five-year anniversary by banking “high eight figures” in annual revenue through social conversation, that the very news organizations from which the conversational fodder derives still find it hard to fully monetize this traffic? [More here →]
So many media soldiers – like us, by the way—are down if not out. Along with the economy, I might add:
Headline: Dow closes below 10,000 as late-day slump takes stocks into red. And while that was happening, progressives are trying to assure an open and accountable process in Congress so that what remains of value in the Financial Reform Bill is not gutted completely in meetings behind closed doors.
Progressives Demand: No Behind-Closed-Doors Deals On Wall Street Reform
The industry is working overtime to dilute bill in the reconciliation process. It is even generating studies to tell us that that is what we want with studies like this. It was no surprise that they would not tell me who financed the “study.”
NEARLY HALF OF AMERICANS PREFER LESS GOVERNMENT INVOLVEMENT IN THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY REPORTS NEW GfK SURVEY — Study reveals current opinions break away from political stereotypes
NEW YORK, May 26 2010 — GfK Financial Services, a division of GfK Custom Research North America, today announced highlights from a new OmniWeb survey that reveals almost half of Americans (42%) prefer the government take a less significant role in the financial services industry. Comparatively, only 26% of respondents say they’d like to see more government involvement.
This study seems to me to be total propaganda, given that an earlier survey found 82% of the American people want a crackdown on Wall Steet.
HOW THE ADMINISTRATION SNEAKILY USED ANTI-POPULISM TO PLEASE WALL STREET
James Kwak writes on BaselineScenario.com:
“That’s one passage from John Heileman’s juicy article in New York Magazine. It provides a lot of background support for what many of us have been thinking for a while: the administration is happy with the financial reform bill roughly as it turned out, and it got there by taking up an anti-Wall Street tone (e.g., the Volcker Rule), riding a wave of populist anger to the point where the bill was sure of passing, and then quietly pruning back its most far-reaching components. If anything, that’s a testament to the political skill of the White House and, yes, Tim Geithner as well.”
He then argues that the Wall Street CEO’s are NUTS:
“Forget the whole issue of whether they should be grateful to Obama for first saving their banks from collapse and then toning down the reform bill so it (a) doesn’t break up their banks, (b) doesn’t meaningfully prevent them from engaging in proprietary trading, (c) says nothing of substance about compensation, (d) doesn’t set any hard capital requirements, (e) . . . The fact that they can see the policies this administration is pursuing and somehow think they are “anti-wealth” or “anti-capitalist” is as close to proof as you will find that they are deeply stupid, blinded by their self-interest, or both.”
HuffPo: Obama Deficit Commission Member Calls For Pentagon Audit
A leading Republican on the president’s deficit commission has called, informally, for an audit of the Department of Defense, arguing that without a true sense of what is being spent and where, it will be impossible to achieve significant budget savings
In a detailed, wonkish and occasionally fascinating 10-page letter sent to commission Chairmen Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles on Wednesday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okl.) laid out a host of areas where the Pentagon’s fat could be trimmed.
“The single most important step,” however, he concluded, “is to better understand how the Pentagon spends its money.” [More here →]
Now, on to some world news of note.
InformationClearingHouse.info: Why Did North Korea Do It? by Kevin Drum
May 26, 2010 “Mother Jones” – -I haven’t been posting about the North Korean situation, but I’ve been following it with considerable interest ever since the start. And the biggest question all along has been: Why? Even by North Korean standards, torpedoing a South Korean ship is nuts. What on earth were they thinking?
US Special Forces Pave the Way for a Military Strike on Iran By Giles Whittell and Michael Evans
Such plans “are always going to be under serious consideration,” Anthony Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said, “because you are dealing with a serious threat”
What Iran’s Press TV Is Saying—and What I Am Dissecting on its Fine Print program.
CBC: Nuremberg: It’s Lessons For Today! The Film The Pentagon Doesn’t Want You To See!
Warning – These videos may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war/violence and should only be viewed by a mature audience.
Now, consider this letter. All may not be as bleak as it seems:
Peggy Luhrs writes from Burlington:
Dear Danny,
I have enjoyed, if one can say that about learning more about disasters, your news dissector blog and much of the work you do. But I write today because of the talk of apathy and lack of organizing in the letters section.I read so much on progressive blogs about what the right is saying an doing. The major media has figured out the best way to quash the left is to disappear them, one wonders when the left will catch on to this tactic.
There is, in June, a US Social Forum in Detroit. I went to their web page and found well over a hundred pages of workshops at least a dozen to the page. This is over a thousand excellent workshops on topics relevant to unions, workers, people of all colors, women, the lgbtq community and more. So thousands of activists are coming to Detroit. Lets focus a bit more and give some publicity to what is happening. It might just catch on. Are we just afraid of the disappointment of connecting and the realities of face to face relationships?
There are people organizing and doing, not enough yet, but if we keep our eyes on the bad guys all the time we lose sight of the prize as the relevant song says. I think we are all getting pretty clear that those running the show don’t know what they are doing except grabbing up as much of the loot as possible but we need some focus on where we’re going, how to get there and what we are doing now that works. Media seems to grab everyone up in this trap of focusing on the spectacle. We need to undo the spectacle and bring people back to reality. Can’t eat money, breathe money or plant in it. Draw the connections between the banks and the wars and the oil. But lets see more of what people are doing to supplant and oppose it.
And, then, there’s this, from the late, great Flo Kenedy: “If you think there is too much apathy, you’re probably sitting on it.”
Today’s advice from DXM:
as you all are pulling together the mediachannel website (format), you might find a way to post a link to David DeGraw’s AmpedStatus. while I claim no expertise on aggregated news sites, David’s is closer to what I imagine the best to be than anyone else’s. I only wish he could make it into a daily (update) of the top headline or two of interest to me. Of course News Dissector, Juan Cole and Tom Engelhardt are must read sites. You will do your mediachannel readers a great service to heed this unsolicited advice
The veteran Radio Talk show star Jay Diamond has a kind word: “Been meaning to wrote for awhile, to tell you how much I regret your closing the office for awhile.
I hope we can stay in touch because you’ve been an inspiration and model that has helped me grow.”
Stephen Goldstein writes from Boston:
Danny:
I haven’t written in a while, though I follow daily the slow dissolution of Media Channel office and closing of the office. I am terribly sorry this is happening. The blog and Media Channel is a vital life line for information and dialogue and simply finding reassurance we are all not crazy while watching every nightmare we predicted 30 years ago, and ecological disasters we never imagined unfold or unfold again and again.
Today, James Carville, of all people, is saying what is on a lot of minds. Where is the ‘Agent of Change’ when a leader is need to intervene in a disaster?
I want to make a donation today to the News Dissector and Paypal would only allow a $5 monthly donation. I wanted to send $50. as a lump sum. Should I do it to Media Channel or News Dissector and, if the latter, how do I?
You and everyone else can donate to The Global Center. Mark “Mediachannel.org” on your check. Send it to: Global Center 575 8th Avenue New York, New York 10018. It will be forwarded. Globalvision is not gone, just our office is going. Once we get all our tapes and equipment out of the dust bowl our office has become, we can focus on what we can do next. Thanks to all who have written or called to wish us well.
Your help, ideas, and support are still welcome.
YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS SHIT UP DEPARTMENT!
Guardian: CIA’s secret Iraq weapon revealed: a Saddam gay sex tape
Bizarre US plots included exploding cigars to kill Fidel Castro and fake video of Osama bin Laden’s campfire drinking.
“In their time, America’s secret agencies have tried some outlandish schemes to attack their country’s enemies, including, most famously, an attempt to do away with Cuba’s Fidel Castro by using an exploding cigar. But in a scenario more the preserve of careless Hollywood starlets such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, the CIA appears to have plotted to undermine Saddam Hussein with a gay sex tape.
According to the Washington Post’s security blog, some of America’s spooks believed that shooting a fake video of Saddam cavorting with a teenage boy might destabilise his regime in the runup to the US-led invasion in 2003. “It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera. Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session,” the Washington Post quoted one former CIA official as saying. [More here →]
OUR NEW MAILING ADDRESS:
Globalvision is going virtual. We are closing our offices at 575 8th Avenue at the end of this month. Our new postal address will be: P.O. Box 677, New York, NY 10035. Our company started operating in a shared space in Soho in l987, then opened what was described as a “loft-hovel” in Little Italy, then moved to classier digs near Union Square. From there, it was up to a real HQ in the heart of Times Square, and then, after our building was gentrified into posh condos, to this outpost in the noisy belly of the Garment District. Soon, in our latest incarnation, we will receive mail in Harlem and then go covert, perhaps to one of those secret locations Dick Cheney boasted about.
Yes, we have, for decades, been globalvisioning downtown, uptown and midtown—all around the town (and world) really. Now, we enter the “post office” and postoffice phase in a new zip code.
Follow me on Twitter (Dissectorevents) and Facebook. We also have a PLUNDER movie page on Facebook and a new Globalvision.org website. This blog will continue for this merry month of May. And then? Write: dissector@mediachannel.org
Tomorrow , the News Dissector blog bids adieu for awhile. Call it a hiatus. Your thoughts about the future are welcome just as is my gratitude in the present to Cherie Welch, David DeGraw, and our co-founder, Rory O’ Connor, who worked with us on a regular basis as well as to all of our contributors and supporters the world over. May the mannah fall and morning come. We haven’t found a merger partner yet but we may …
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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