Chronciles of Dissent
The "Concision" Technique of U.S. Media
p.243-246.
David Barsamian: I'm interested that you've said that commercial radio is less ideological than public radio.

Chomsky: That's been my experience. Here I'd want to be a little more cautious. Public radio out in the sticks, in my experience, is pretty open. So when I go to Wyoming or Iowa I'm on public radio, for longer discussions. That would be very hard to imagine in Boston or Washington. Occasionally you might get on with somebody else to balance you for three minutes, in which there are three sentences for each person. But anything that would be more in depth would be very difficult. It's worth bearing in mind that the U.S. communications system has devised a very effective structural technique to prevent dissidence. This comes out very clearly sometimes. The United States is about the only country I know where anywhere near the mainstream you've got to be extremely concise in what you say, because if you ever get access, it's two minutes between commercials. That's not true in other countries. It's not true outside of the mainstream either. You can get maybe ten or fifteen minutes, you can develop a thought. If you can get on a U.S. mainstream program, NPR, Ted Koppel, it's a couple of sentences. They're very well aware of it. Do you know Jeff Hansen?

DB: He's at WORT, Madison.

Last time I was out there, he wanted to arrange an interview when I was in the area giving some talks on the media. He started by playing a tape that he had that you've probably heard where he had interviewed Jeff Greenfield, some mucky-muck with Nightline. He asked Greenfield, How come you never have Chomsky on? Greenfield starts with a kind of tirade about how tins guy's a wacko from Neptune. After he calmed down and stopped foaming at the mouth, he then said something which was quite right: Look, he probably "lacks concision." We need the kind of people who can say something in a few brief sentences. Maybe the best expert on some topic is from Turkey and speaks only Turkish. That's no good for us. We've got to get somebody who can. say something with concision, and this guy Chomsky just rants on and on. There's something to that.

Take a look at the February/March 1990 Mother Jones. There's an interesting article by Marc Cooper in which he does an analysis of the main people who appear as experts on shows. Of course, they're all skewed to the right, and the same people appear over and over. But the commentary is interesting. He talks to media people about this and they say, These are people who know how to make their thoughts concise and simple and straightforward and they can make those brief two-sentence statements between commercials. That's quite significant. Because if you're constrained to producing two sentences between commercials, or 700 words in an op-ed piece, you can do nothing but express conventional thoughts. If you express conventional thoughts, you don't need any basis for it or any background, or any arguments. If you try to express something that's somewhat unconventional, people will rightly ask why you're saying that. They're right. If I refer to the United States invasion of South Vietnam, people will ask, "What are you talking about? I never heard of that." And they're right. They've never heard about it. So I'd have to explain what I mean.

Or suppose I'm talking about international terrorism, and I say that we ought to stop it in Washington, winch is a major center of it. People back off, "What do you mean, Washington's a major center of it?" Then you have to explain. You have to give some background. That's exactly what Jeff Greenfield is talking about. You don't want people who have to give background, because that would allow critical thought. What you want is completely conformist ideas. You want just repetition of the propaganda line, the party line. For that you need "concision." I could do it too. I could say what I think in three sentences, too. But it would just sound as if it was off the wall, because there's no basis laid for it. If you come from the American Enterprise Institute and you say it in three sentences, yes, people hear it every day, so what's the big deal? Yeah, sure, Qaddafi's the biggest monster in the world, and the Russians are conquering the world, and this and that, Noriega's the worst gangster since so-and-so. For that kind of thing you don't need any background. You just rehash the thoughts that everybody's always expressed and that you hear from Dan Rather and every-one else. That's a structural technique that's very valuable. In fact, in my view, if people like Ted Koppel were smarter, they would allow more dissidents on, because they would just make fools of themselves. Either you would sell out and repeat what everybody else is saying because it's the only way to sound sane, or else you would say what you think, in which case you'd sound like a madman, even if what you think is absolutely true and easily supportable. The reason is that the whole system so completely excludes it. It’ll sound crazy, rightly, from their point of view. And since you have to have "concision," as Jeff Greenfield says, you don't have time to explain it. That's a marvelous structural technique of propaganda. They do the same thing in Japan, I'm told. Most of the world still hasn't reached that level of sophistication. You can go on Belgian national radio or the BBC and actually say what you mean. That's very hard in the United States.

Bush administration to keep control of internet's central computers
Gary Younge in New York and agencies
Saturday July 2, 2005
The Guardian

The Bush administration has decided to retain control over the principal computers which control internet traffic in a move likely to prompt global opposition, it was claimed yesterday.

The US had pledged to turn control of the 13 computers known as root servers - which inform web browsers and email programs how to direct internet traffic - over to a private, international body.

But on Thursday the US reversed its position, announcing that it will maintain control of the computers because of growing security threats and the increased reliance on the internet for global communications. A Japanese government official yesterday criticised the move, claiming it will lend momentum to the debate about who controls the information flow online.

"When the internet is being increasingly utilised for private use, by business and so forth, there is a societal debate about whether it's befitting to have one country maintaining checks on that ... It's likely to fuel that debate," said Masahiko Fujimoto, of the ministry of internal affairs and communications' data communications division.

The computers serve as master directories that contain government-approved lists of the roughly 260 suffices used, such as .com or .co.uk. Anyone who uses the web interacts with them every day. But a policy decision by the US could, at a stroke, make all sites ending in a certain suffix unreachable.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1519539,00.html

"Recovering Rights"
A Crooked Path
excerpted from the book
Rogue States
The Rule of Force in World Affairs
by Noam chomsky
2000
p119. Source
The Right to Information

The immortal collectivist persons are easily able to dominate information and doctrinal systems. Their wealth and power allow them to set the framework within which the political system functions, but these controls have become still more direct under recent Supreme Court rulings defining money as a form of speech. The 1998 election is an illustration. About 95 percent of winning candidates outspent their competitors. Business contributions exceeded those of labor by 12 to 1; individual contributions are sharply skewed. By such means, a tiny fraction of the population effectively selects candidates. These developments are surely not unrelated to the increasing cynicism about government and unwillingness even to vote. It should be noted that these consequences are fostered and welcomed by the immortal persons, their media, and their other agents, who have dedicated enormous efforts to instill the belief that the government is an enemy to be hated and feared, not a potential instrument of popular sovereignty.

The realization of the UD [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] depends crucially on the rights articulated in Articles 19 and 21: to "receive and impart information and ideas through any media" and to take part in "genuine elections" that ensure that "the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government." The importance of restricting the rights of free speech and democratic participation has been well understood by the powerful. There is a rich history, but the problems gained heightened significance in this century as "the masses promised to become king," a dangerous tendency that could be reversed, it was argued, by new methods of propaganda that enable the "intelligent minorities ... to mold the mind of the masses, ... regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers." I happen to be quoting a founder of the modern public relations industry, the respected New Deal liberal Edward Bernays, but the perception is standard, and clearly articulated by leading progressive public intellectuals and academics, along with business leaders.

For such reasons, the media and educational systems are a constant terrain of struggle. It has long been recognized that state power is not the only form of interference with the fundamental right to "receive and impart information and ideas," and in the industrial democracies, it is far from the most important one-matters discussed by John Dewey and George Orwell, to mention two notable examples. In 1946, the prestigious Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press warned that "private agencies controlling the great mass media" constitute a fundamental threat to freedom of the press with their ability to impose "an environment of vested beliefs" and "bias as a commercial enterprise" under the influence of advertisers and owners. The European Commission of Human Rights has recognized "excessive concentration of the press" as an infringement of the rights guaranteed by Article 19, calling on states to prevent these abuses, a position recently endorsed by Human Rights Watch.

For the same reasons, the business world has sought to ensure that private agencies will control the media and thus be able to restrict thought to "vested beliefs." They seek further to "nullify the customs of ages" by creating "new conceptions of individual attainment and community desire," business leaders explain, "civilizing" people to perceive their needs in terms of consumption of goods rather than quality of life and work, and to abandon any thought of a "share in the decisions which often profoundly modify their way of life," as called for by Vatican extremists. Control of media by a few megacorporations is a contribution to this end. Concentration has accelerated, thanks in part to recent deregulation that also eliminates even residual protection of public interest

Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, And Why Corporate News Censored the Story

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

The days are now numbered for surfing an uncensored, open-access Internet, using your favorite search engine to search a bottomless cyber-sea of information in the grandest democratic forum ever conceived by humankind. Instead you can look forward to Googling about on a walled-off, carefully selected corpus of government propaganda and sanitized information "safe" for public consumption. Indoctrinated and sealed off from the outer world, you will inhabit a matrix where every ounce of creative, independent thinking that challenges government policies and values will be squelched. Just a wild conspiracy theory, you say? No longer can this be rationally maintained.

Federal government--from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to the White House--and corporate mainstream media have worked cooperatively to quietly block open access to cyberspace. Seizing its infrastructure, corporate mainstream media have censored and covered up its logistical moves—including lobbies in Congress and the FCC, the filing of suits in state and federal courts, and quid pro quo with the highest government officials--to commandeer, monopolize, and turn the Internet into an extension of itself. From Fox News to CNN, there has been dead silence as the greatest bastion of democracy in history is being torn down and resurrected in its own image. Now, as the corporate newsrooms remain mum, it has gotten the green light from the highest federal court in the land.

On June 27, 2005, in a 6 to 3 decision (National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services) the United States Supreme Court ruled that giant cable companies like Comcast and Verizon are not required to share their cables with other Internet service providers (ISPs). The Court opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, was fashioned to serve corporate interests. Instead of taking up the question of whether corporate monopolies would destroy the open-access architecture of the Internet, it used sophistry and legally- suspect arguments to obscure its constitutional duty to protect media diversity, free speech, and the public interest.

The Court accepted the FCC's conclusion reached in 2002 that cable companies don't "offer" telecommunication services according to the meaning of the 1996 Telecommunication Act, which defines telecommunication purely in terms of transmission of information among or between users. According to the FCC, cable modem service is not a telecommunications offering because consumers always use high speed wire transmission as a necessary part of other services like browsing the web and sending and receiving e-mail messages. The FCC maintained that these offerings are information services, which manipulate and transform data instead of merely transmitting them. Since the Act only requires companies offering telecommunication services to share their lines with other ISPs (the so-called "common carriage" requirement), the FCC concluded that cable companies are exempt from this requirement.

However, the FCC's conceptual basis for classifying cable modem services as informational was groundless. Not even the FCC could deny that people use their cable modems to transmit information from one point to another over a wire, regardless of whatever else they use them for. The FCC's classification could not possibly have provided a reasonable interpretation of the 1996 Telecommunication Act since it was inconsistent with it. Section 706 © (1) of this Act defines "advanced telecommunications capability"

without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.

Broadband cable Internet offers "advanced telecommunications capability" since it clearly fits this legal definition. Therefore, cable modem service must legally be regarded as telecommunications service.

To classify it as an information service is instead to treat high-speed broadband Internet as though it were similar to cable services such as Fox News and CNN. These networks send information down a one-way pipe unlike Internet transmissions, which, in contrast, are interactive, two-way exchanges resembling telephone conversations. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made this quite clear in its decision in AT&T v. Portland:

Accessing Web pages, navigating the Web's hypertext links, corresponding via e-mail, and participating in live chat groups involve two-way communication and information exchange unmatched by the act of electing to receive a one-way transmission of cable or pay-per-view television programming. And unlike transmission of a cable television signal, communication with a Web site involves a series of connections involving two-way information exchange and storage, even when a user views seemingly static content. Thus, the communication concepts are distinct in both a practical and a technical sense. Surfing cable channels is one thing; surfing the Internet over a cable broadband connection is quite another.

The Supreme Court had to strain to find some alleged legal basis to defer to the FCC's classification of high-speed Internet as an information service. So it put the entire weight of its argument on the FCC's claim that cable companies do not "offer" the telecommunication aspects of its services to consumers. Instead, it "offers end users information-service capabilities inextricably intertwined with data transport." Justice Scalia, writing the minority opinion in Brand X, analogized, you might as well say that a pizza service doesn't deliver pizzas because it also bakes them! Countering with its own analogy, the majority rationalized that you might as well say that a car dealership "offers" engines to consumers because it offers them cars. According to the majority's perspective, since the finished product is the car and not the engine, it makes more sense to say they offer consumers cars rather than engines. Similarly, it argued, the finished product that cable modem customers seek is Internet services such as being able to surf the net, not simply a transmission over a wire.

The Court's claim is makeshift and oversimplified. It obscures the scope of consumer motivation by assuming that consumers have just one broad perspective that defines what a company "offers" them. Realistically, consumers are also interested in the quality of the engines they get when they purchase cars (whether it's a V-8, V-6, 3.8 liter, 2.0 liter, etc). From this consumer perspective, the car dealer is indeed "offering" engines to consumers (and bucket seats, antilock breaks, dual air bags and all other components that determine the car's drivability, safety, comfort, design, durability, speed, and so forth). Similarly, from the perspective of average cable Internet consumers who care about how reliable and fast the cable connection they purchase is, the cable company can, in a very practical sense, be said to be "offering" a telecommunication service. The FCC's distinction that cable modem data transmission service is inextricably bound up with information services--just as an engine is inextricably bound up with a car—is, in this instance, a distinction without a difference.

In the end, the Court retreated to the claim that the Telecommunication Act was ambiguous. So why did it side with the FCC's interpretation even though there was clear, prior legal precedent for classifying cable modem services as telecommunication offerings (AT&T Corporation vs. Portland)?

Citing its own decision in Chevron U.S.A. Inc v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Court maintained that "if a statute is ambiguous, and if the implementing agency's construction is reasonable, … a federal court [is required] to accept the agency's construction of the statute, even if the agency's reading differs from what the court believes is the best statutory interpretation." Therefore, it argued, since the FCC's construction is reasonable it should determine what counts as "offering" telecommunication services.

In the first place, the Court provided no legitimate legal, moral or conceptual basis to think the FCC's construction was reasonable. If it really cared about what consumers wanted, it would have determined what was reasonable for purposes of regulating competition of an Internet that was designed to provide free, unfettered access to information in a democratic society. Instead, the Court rested its substantive case on a specious argument advanced by the FCC:

The Commission concluded that ...broadband services should exist in a minimal regulatory environment that promotes investment and innovation in a competitive market.... This, the Commission reasoned, warranted treating cable companies unlike the facilities-based enhanced-service providers of the past….We find nothing arbitrary about the Commission's providing a fresh analysis of the problem as applied to the cable industry, which it has never subjected to these rules. This is adequate rational justification for the Commission's conclusions.

What "rational justification" is the Court talking about? The FCC made an unsupported claim that giving cable companies monopolies on broadband Internet cable service, thereby doing away with open access, will spawn more competition. Where is the empirical evidence that would justify the claim? In reality, such deregulation portends less competition, not more, from independent service providers.

Even if giving giant cable corporations monopolies on cable modem service could encourage more investment in relevant technologies, not all "innovations" are worth having and some may be grotesquely anti-democratic, for example, using innovative filtering technologies to build a wall around the Internet, and increasing the speed and efficiency by which government propaganda reaches consumers. The Court's decision simply covered up the fact that there was in fact no justified defense given by the FCC for its construction. The more plausible explanation (not at all a justification) is this: by giving big cable business what it wants (namely, big money), big government will get what it wants in return: control over what people are permitted to know.

By deferring to the FCC instead of exercising its own judicial discretion in determining what really was reasonable, the Court mooted the point of having an independent, ultimate court of appeals in the first place. This is to provide checks and balances on the activities of the other two branches of government, and to settle controversial, politically significant cases with far-reaching social consequences. Instead, it abandoned its constitutional charge to protect the First Amendment right of all Americans to freedom of speech in cyberspace from encroachment by big business acting in tandem with federal government.

In the second place, the Court's appeal to Chevron may not have been lawful by its own admission. Said the Court:

A court's prior judicial construction of a statute trumps an agency construction otherwise entitled to Chevron deference only if the prior court decision holds that its construction follows from the unambiguous terms of the statute and thus leaves no room for agency discretion. This principle follows from Chevron itself.

In 1999, before the FCC rendered its construction in 2002, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in AT&T v. Portland, held that its construction of the 1996 Telecommunication Act followed from the unambiguous terms of the statute:

Under the Communications Act, this principle of telecommunications common carriage governs cable broadband as it does other means of Internet transmission such as telephone service and DSL, "regardless of the facilities used." 47 U.S.C. S 153(46). The Internet's protocols themselves manifest a related principle called "end-to-end": control lies at the ends of the network where the users are, leaving a simple network that is neutral with respect to the data it transmits, like any common carrier. On this rule of the Internet, the codes of the legislator and the programmer agree.

Here the 9th Circuit Court was quite clear that there was no ambiguity about whether cable broadband must be regarded as a telecommunications service and hence subject to common carriage. It stated that "the codes of legislator and the programmer agree." The only one who claimed any ambiguity was the Court.

According to Chevron, agencies' constructions are "given controlling weight unless they are arbitrary, capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute." As you can see, the FCC's construction is all of these things. As a result, giant cable companies can now enjoy a monopoly on high-speed, cable Internet. Not only are these monoliths poised to noncompetitively control the price of their services, thereby preventing poorer citizens from broadband access, they are now able to monitor and control the content of information that can be accessed by millions of American through these pipes.

The main alternative to high speed Internet (broadband) via cable is presently slower modem connectivity via Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service over telephone lines. Telephone companies have traditionally been required by government to share their lines with other ISPs, thereby assuring greater competition and diversity in content. But the Court has now given the FCC the right to abandon this common carriage requirement to render it consistent with the broadband cable industry; and, as FCC Chair Kevin Martin has already given the nod to the telephone companies, it should only be a matter of time before the telephone lines are also deregulated and alternative, independent commercial ISPs are banished altogether from cyberspace.

Broadband and DSL are therefore on their way to becoming extensions of corporate mainstream media. In fact, the companies that have taken control of the Internet are themselves part of an intricate web of corporate media ownership. For example, Time Warner and Comcast, have recently purchased Adelphia. Moreover, companies such as Google are in a strategic position to become front men for mainstream corporate Internet. This financially prosperous dot com, which now rivals Time Warner in net worth, has advertising relations with Verizon and partnerships with companies such as News Corp. There have also been a number of documented instances in which Google has engaged in questionable censorship practices. It is therefore no stretch to imagine this company taking its place as gatekeeper of a government-friendly mainstream corporate Internet.

The logistics of this well organized assault on American democracy by corporate mainstream media can be summed up in this one simple principle: Whoever controls the conduit controls the content. Media broadcast corporations like CBS, ABC, and NBC control the spectrum that carries their broadcasts; they are therefore able to determine the content of their programming. Cable TV news networks like News Corp's Fox News and Time-Warner's CNN own the cables that carry their news shows, and therefore can control what passes as "news." Gigantic radio empires like Clear Channel and Infinity have crowded out the smaller broadcasters and now determine the content of mainstream radio. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, now on a campaign to restrict "liberal" programming, controls National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Colossal media corporations like Time Warner, which also own mainstream movie distribution companies, also control the content of the movies most Americans watch. Publishers of books are also part of this intricate corporate media web. For example, News Corp. owns Harper-Collins.

All of these companies have interconnected corporate boards with a relatively small number of officers. And they have well entrenched business relationships with the government, for example, dependence on government officialdom for the content of their news reports; enormous financial incentives to receive government contracts (for example, General Electric's NBC has interests in military contracts to produce jet engines); interests in government deregulation of media ownership caps and cross-market ownership, and lucrative tax incentives. As a result of this intricate web of quid pro quo, the mainstream media is to America what Pravda used to be for the now defunct Soviet Union: disseminators of an array of government-friendly, self-censored, whitewashed propaganda.

When the London Times leaked the so called "Downing Street Memo," the Internet buzzed with how Americans were deceived and lied to about the Bush Administration's reasons for going to war in Iraq. While at first, the mainstream media gave scant attention to this memo, the shockwaves sent out from the Internet were simply too strong to be ignored indefinitely. Even so, the mainstream broadcast media, from NBC's Chris Matthews to Fox's O'Reilly, still ignored the substance of the memo (namely that "the facts" about the threat to U.S. security posed by Saddam Hussein were being "fixed" to fit a policy of preemptive war). Instead, it focused on peripheral issues (such as whether the Bush Administration had an exit plan) and it largely dismissed the memo as "nothing new."

So what if the Internet blogs were themselves walled off and thereby prevented from sounding the alarm in the first place? No American would then have even been aware of the memo's existence! And the Bush Administration would have avoided being placed in the position of answering to the American people. Without a free Internet, Americans are therefore vulnerable with no defense against media and government propaganda. The government is protected against the people instead of conversely. Walled off from a free Internet, America is walled off from the truth, and there is no longer freedom in America.

The mainstream media have systematically played down the Supreme Court's decision to deregulate broadband cable Internet just as it has ignored the Downing Street Memo. The decision was not even mentioned by cable TV networks like Fox and CNN. The New York Times covered it only on the bottom of C1 of the business section while the details of the BTK killer got front page press along with other decisions handed down by the Supreme Court on June 27 (including the Grokster file sharing case). The Palm Beach Post, which is published by Cox--another mainstream media company in the cable business--didn't cover it at all. Censoring stories that have potential to subvert corporate and government interests has already become the rule in this brave new world of corporate media coverage. And with open-access Internet now on its last leg, things promise to get even worse. Unless we are prepared to do something about it before it's too late!

What can we, the people, do to save the Internet from becoming the latest casualty of the corporate mainstream media?

Americans can no longer afford to sit back and permit others to defend freedom of speech for them. We are all the victims of the same concerted effort by the corporate political establishment to amass power and wealth for the few at the expense of the many. We can no longer afford to wait until all of our outlets of free speech have been shut down. The collective American voice can be a powerful one. There is great strength in numbers.

This power can be harnessed if we all take the time to write letters to our congress persons, letting them know our opposition to corporate monopolistic control of the Internet. History has shown that these protests can produce change. In 2003, when it was deluged with millions of letters from constituents protesting the FCC's deregulation of corporate media ownership rules, Congress responded by legislatively reducing the FCC's proposed market ownership cap. Now, with the demise of open-access Internet hanging in the balance, this problem of media consolidation is more crucial than ever. By our collective efforts, we can make a difference.

You should also send e-mail messages, including chain messages, to friends and associates alerting and educating them about the attack on the free architecture of the Internet. You can also join organized efforts such as the Center for Digital Democracy's Digital Destiny Campaign, a grass roots effort to protect Internet freedom and diversity. Other organizations like the Free Press have well organized and successful outlets for making your voice heard in Washington.

While they last, you should support diversity in search engines by using alternative independent, search engines. Google is not the only comprehensive search engine, and by supporting alternatives, we make it harder for one search engine to usurp the authority of others. Given that there are biases internal to the selection criteria of search engines, reliance on one engine to the exclusion of all others renders us more vulnerable to organized attempts at censorship, propagandizing, and control over what we can know.

You should also contact your federal, state and municipal leaders and let them know that you are concerned about the effects of corporate media consolidation of the Internet and that you would like to see municipal Internet service ensuring access for all residents of your community. Dominant cable and telephone companies have successfully lobbied state legislatures to forbid such competition and there have been at least fourteen states that have already banned or restricted municipal telecommunications utilities, and bills are presently being introduced in other states outlawing the offering of free or discounted access to Internet service by municipalities. A bill has also been introduced in the House that would prohibit such community and municipal services. You can join the Free Press initiative against it. On the other hand, the Community Broadband Act has been introduced in the Senate that would protect the right of communities to offer affordable broadband access.

Defenders of deregulation of corporate media have always pointed to alternative technologies in order to justify further deregulation. Before the present deregulation of Internet, the FCC pointed to the Internet to justify further deregulation of commercial broadcast TV and radio. Now the friends of deregulation, including the Supreme Court itself in the Brand X decision, are claiming that there are other platforms like wireless terrestrial and satellite as well as municipal Internet. But if the future resembles the past, these too will fall under corporate control with the help of the federal government. To see this you need only consider who now owns the satellites and controls the spectrum for wireless Internet and how vigilant mainstream corporate media have been in attempting to thwart the development of municipal and community Internet. It is therefore essential that we stand firm in our conviction and not fall for the old line. Affordable, uncensored Internet for all Americans is presently in danger of becoming a pipe dream. Unless we act now, the outlook for survival of democracy in cyberspace is dismal, and it grows dimmer with each successive conquest by mainstream corporate media.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. His most recent book on the dangers of corporate media is News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy (Prometheus Books, March 2005).

Chronciles of Dissent
p.341-344.
David Barsamian:Polls show that people strongly supported these controls on the media. It doesn't take a genius to know that there's a palpable public hostility toward the media. How do you account for that?

Chomsky:The kind of hostility that you have in this country is interesting. There's hostility toward the media, toward Congress, toward just about every institution except one, namely the corporate system. No hostility toward that. That tells you exactly who runs the country. It's perfectly OK to criticize the media, Congressmen, the courts, and the cops. You can say the President's a clown. You can do anything except criticize the actual center of power. You're not even allowed to know that it exists. It's invisible.

It was very striking in the Orwellian terminology that was designed in the 1980s how special interests are talked about, which we've discussed in a previous interview. Just to recap, the Democrats are always being accused of being a party of special interests, meaning labor, women, youth, the elderly, everybody. But if you check back you find one striking omission from special interests: never anything about corporate power, business power. That's not a special interest. That doesn't exist.

The omission seems true of scholarship, too. Some years ago, in the 1970s, there was a very rare academic study of corporations and foreign policy. The person wrote an article, a standard mainstream political scientist, in one of those journals. He started by reviewing standard
works looking at this question. He took the two hundred leading works in international affairs and foreign policy to see what they had to say about corporations and foreign policy. He discovered, to his amazement because he was pretty naive, that they avoided the topic. He said 95 percent of the studies never mentioned corporations and foreign policy. Five percent gave it passing mention. There was plenty of talk about women, clergy and foreign policy, but somehow nobody ever talked about corporations and foreign policy. He went on to speculate as to this strange oversight. He concludes that if scholars start looking at corporations and foreign policy they'll probably find that there's some influence there.

That shows the discipline of the scholarly profession. You want to make sure that you never study what's important. It would be much too dangerous. The field of diplomatic history, which is an interesting field, spends an awful lot of time on personalities. I've been in debates about this with radical historians who strongly disagree with what I'm saying here. But in my view the concern about the personal decisions and the personalities of the leadership is about as interesting as discussion of the personalities of the Chairman of the Board of General Motors. Undoubtedly it has some hundredth order effect on the decision being made, but the overwhelming effects are institutional, having to do with the institutional structure in which he's working. Whether George Bush believes what he's saying, or did Ronald Reagan remember this, who was the particular advisor who said this, what did he have for breakfast that morning—yes, these are all hundredth order questions, about as interesting as the personalities of these people, which are not very gripping. But they tell you very little about policy. However, that's the way the academic professions have to work, all the way over to the radical critics for the most part, not entirely, but very far over.

You get it in the general public. If Massachusetts has a serious economic crisis, who do people hate? Take a look at this morning's Boston Globe. It talks about the popularity of the governor after his cutback of services. Why? Because he's attacking the people who everyone hates most, namely state employees and the poor. That's who everybody hates. Are they the cause of economic problems? Or is there some other factor involved in what happens in the New England economy besides the poor and state employees? Of course, people hate the media, too. You're allowed to hate them. In fact, you're allowed to hate everyone except the people who don't exist, namely the ones who in fact run the show, the ones who have concentrated decision making power, who make investment decisions, who set the framework within which the government operates, who own the media, control them and set the conditions under which they work. Those institutions you're not allowed to hate, or even know of their existence.

In fact, part of the propaganda system promotes the idea corporations are comprised of people just like us. There's "us" on the one hand, going from the corporate executive to the honest sober worker to the housewife and so on. That's all us. And then there's "them," the state employees, the poor, the Congress and all these bad guys who are trying to make life tough for us. That's the picture. It is not painted that way by accident. There has been an enormous effort made, probably a billion dollars a year spent on advertising, public relations in the broadest sense, to try to create these images on movies, sitcoms, outright propaganda, scholarship, all framed in these terms, and pretty consciously. People in the public relations industry know what they're doing, and they wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't carry this out.

Al Gore vs. Media
By Robert Parry

To read the major newspapers and to watch the TV pundit shows, one can't avoid the impression that many in the national press corps have decided that Vice President Al Gore is unfit to be elected the next president of the United States.

Across the board -- from The Washington Post to The Washington Times, from The New York Times to the New York Post, from NBC's cable networks to the traveling campaign press corps -- journalists don't even bother to disguise their contempt for Gore anymore.

At one early Democratic debate, a gathering of about 300 reporters in a nearby press room hissed and hooted at Gore's answers. Meanwhile, every perceived Gore misstep, including his choice of clothing, is treated as a new excuse to put him on a psychiatrist's couch and find him wanting.

Journalists freely call him "delusional," "a liar" and "Zelig." Yet, to back up these sweeping denunciations, the media has relied on a series of distorted quotes and tendentious interpretations of his words, at times following scripts written by the national Republican leadership.

In December, for instance, the news media generated dozens of stories about Gore's supposed claim that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump. "I was the one that started it all," he was quoted as saying. This "gaffe" then was used to recycle other situations in which Gore allegedly exaggerated his role or, as some writers put it, told "bold-faced lies."

But behind these examples of Gore's "lies" was some very sloppy journalism. The Love Canal flap started when The Washington Post and The New York Times misquoted Gore on a key point and cropped out the context of another sentence to give readers a false impression of what he meant.

The error was then exploited by national Republicans and amplified endlessly by the rest of the news media, even after the Post and Times grudgingly filed corrections.

Almost as remarkable, though, is how the two newspapers finally agreed to run corrections. They were effectively shamed into doing so by high school students in New Hampshire and by an Internet site called The Daily Howler, edited by a stand-up comic named Bob Somerby. [http://www.dailyhowler.com/]

Though the major media often portrays the Internet as a bastion for crazed conspiracy theories, the nation's prestige newspapers appeared to have sunk into their own pattern of reckless journalism.

The Love Canal quote controversy began on Nov. 30 when Gore was speaking to a group of high school students in Concord, N.H. He was exhorting the students to reject cynicism and to recognize that individual citizens can effect important changes.

As an example, he cited a high school girl from Toone, Tenn., a town that had experienced problems with toxic waste. She brought the issue to the attention of Gore's congressional office in the late 1970s.

"I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee -- that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

After the hearings, Gore said, "we passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country. We've still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And it all happened because one high school student got involved."

The context of Gore's comment was clear. What sparked his interest in the toxic-waste issue was the situation in Toone -- "that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

After learning about the Toone situation, Gore looked for other examples and "found" a similar case at Love Canal. He was not claiming to have been the first one to discover Love Canal, which already had been evacuated. He simply needed other case studies for the hearings.

The next day, The Washington Post stripped Gore's comments of their context and gave them a negative twist. "Gore boasted about his efforts in Congress 20 years ago to publicize the dangers of toxic waste," the Post reported. "'I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal,' he said, referring to the Niagara homes evacuated in August 1978 because of chemical contamination. 'I had the first hearing on this issue.' … Gore said his efforts made a lasting impact. 'I was the one that started it all,' he said." [WP, Dec. 1, 1999]

The New York Times ran a slightly less contentious story with the same false quote: "I was the one that started it all."

The Republican National Committee spotted Gore's alleged boast and was quick to fax around its own take. "Al Gore is simply unbelievable -- in the most literal sense of that term," declared Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. "It's a pattern of phoniness -- and it would be funny if it weren't also a little scary."

The GOP release then doctored Gore's quote a bit more. After all, it would be grammatically incorrect to have said, "I was the one that started it all." So, the Republican handout fixed Gore's grammar to say, "I was the one who started it all."

In just one day, the key quote had transformed from "that was the one that started it all" to "I was the one that started it all" to "I was the one who started it all."

Instead of taking the offensive against these misquotes, Gore tried to head off the controversy by clarifying his meaning and apologizing if anyone got the wrong impression. But the fun was just beginning.

The national pundit shows quickly picked up the story of Gore's new exaggeration.

"Let's talk about the 'love' factor here," chortled Chris Matthews of CNBC's Hardball. "Here's the guy who said he was the character Ryan O'Neal was based on in ‘Love Story.’ … It seems to me … he's now the guy who created the Love Canal [case]. I mean, isn't this getting ridiculous? … Isn't it getting to be delusionary?"

Matthews turned to his baffled guest, Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal resident who is widely credited with bringing the issue to public attention. She sounded confused about why Gore would claim credit for discovering Love Canal, but defended Gore's hard work on the issue.

"I actually think he's done a great job," Gibbs said. "I mean, he really did work, when nobody else was working, on trying to define what the hazards were in this country and how to clean it up and helping with the Superfund and other legislation." [CNBC's Hardball, Dec. 1, 1999]

The next morning, Post political writer Ceci Connolly highlighted Gore's boast and placed it in his alleged pattern of falsehoods. "Add Love Canal to the list of verbal missteps by Vice President Gore," she wrote. "The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie 'Love Story' and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site." [WP, Dec. 2, 1999]

That night, CNBC's Hardball returned to Gore's Love Canal quote by playing the actual clip but altering the context by starting Gore's comments with the words, "I found a little town…"

"It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the Red Baron," laughed Chris Matthews. "I mean how did he get this idea? Now you've seen Al Gore in action. I know you didn't know that he was the prototype for Ryan O'Neal's character in ‘Love Story’ or that he invented the Internet. He now is the guy who discovered Love Canal."

Matthews compared the vice president to "Zelig," the Woody Allen character whose face appeared at an unlikely procession of historic events. "What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, 'I was the main character in ‘Love Story.’ I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal."

Former secretary of labor Robert Reich, who favors Gore's rival, former Sen. Bill Bradley, added, "I don't know why he feels that he has to exaggerate and make some of this stuff up."

The following day, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post elaborated on Gore's pathology of deception. "Again, Al Gore has told a whopper," the Post wrote. "Again, he's been caught red-handed and again, he has been left sputtering and apologizing. This time, he falsely took credit for breaking the Love Canal story. … Yep, another Al Gore bold-faced lie."

The editorial continued: "Al Gore appears to have as much difficulty telling the truth as his boss, Bill Clinton. But Gore's lies are not just false, they're outrageously, stupidly false. It's so easy to determine that he's lying, you have to wonder if he wants to be found out.

"Does he enjoy the embarrassment? Is he hell-bent on destroying his own campaign? … Of course, if Al Gore is determined to turn himself into a national laughingstock, who are we to stand in his way?"

On ABC's "This Week" pundit show, there was head-shaking amazement about Gore's supposed Love Canal lie.

"Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem," declared former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos. "Says he was the model for 'Love Story,' created the Internet. And this time, he sort of discovered Love Canal."

A bemused Cokie Roberts chimed in, "Isn't he saying that he really discovered Love Canal when he had hearings on it after people had been evacuated?"

"Yeah," added Bill Kristol, editor of Murdoch's Weekly Standard. Kristol then read Gore's supposed quote: "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I was the one that started it all." [ABC’s This Week, Dec. 5, 1999]

The Love Canal controversy soon moved beyond the Washington-New York power axis.

On Dec. 6, The Buffalo News ran an editorial entitled, "Al Gore in Fantasyland," that echoed the words of RNC chief Nicholson. It stated, "Never mind that he didn't invent the Internet, serve as the model for 'Love Story' or blow the whistle on Love Canal. All of this would be funny if it weren't so disturbing."

The next day, the right-wing Washington Times judged Gore crazy. "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore's increasingly bizarre utterings," the Times wrote. "Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'delusional' thusly: 'The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is actually not present … a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.'"

The editorial denounced Gore as "a politician who not only manufactures gross, obvious lies about himself and his achievements but appears to actually believe these confabulations."

But The Washington Times' own credibility was shaky. For its editorial attack on Gore, the newspaper not only printed the bogus quote, "I was the one that started it all," but attributed the quote to The Associated Press, which had actually quoted Gore correctly, ("That was the one...").

The Washington Times' challenge to Gore's sanity also was reminiscent of its 1988 publication of false rumors that Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis had undergone psychiatric treatment. [As for the Times' insinuations about Gore's "delusional" behavior, it might be noted that the newspaper's founder and financial backer, South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon, considers himself the Messiah.]

Yet, while the national media was excoriating Gore, the Concord students were learning more than they had expected about how media and politics work in modern America.

For days, the students pressed for a correction from The Washington Post and The New York Times. But the prestige papers balked, insisting that the error was insignificant.

"The part that bugs me is the way they nit pick," said Tara Baker, a Concord High junior. "[But] they should at least get it right." [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

When the David Letterman show made Love Canal the jumping off point for a joke list: "Top 10 Achievements Claimed by Al Gore," the students responded with a press release entitled "Top 10 Reasons Why Many Concord High Students Feel Betrayed by Some of the Media Coverage of Al Gore's Visit to Their School." [Boston Globe, Dec. 26, 1999]

The Web site, The Daily Howler, also was hectoring what it termed a "grumbling editor" at the Post to correct the error.

Finally, on Dec. 7, a week after Gore's comment, the Post published a partial correction, tucked away as the last item in a corrections box. But the Post still misled readers about what Gore actually said.

The Post correction read: "In fact, Gore said, 'That was the one that started it all,' referring to the congressional hearings on the subject that he called."

The revision fit with the Post's insistence that the two quotes meant pretty much the same thing, but again, the newspaper was distorting Gore's clear intent by attaching "that" to the wrong antecedent. From the full quote, it's obvious the "that" refers to the Toone toxic waste case, not to Gore's hearings.

Three days later, The New York Times followed suit with a correction of its own, but again without fully explaining Gore's position. "They fixed how they misquoted him, but they didn't tell the whole story," commented Lindsey Roy, another Concord High junior.

While the students voiced disillusionment, the two reporters involved showed no remorse for their mistake. "I really do think that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion," said Katharine Seelye of the Times. "It was one word."

The Post's Ceci Connolly even defended her inaccurate rendition of Gore's quote as something of a journalistic duty. "We have an obligation to our readers to alert them [that] this [Gore's false boasting] continues to be something of a habit," she said. [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

The half-hearted corrections also did not stop newspapers around the country from continuing to use the bogus quote.

A Dec. 9 editorial in the Lancaster [Pa.] New Era even published the polished misquote that the Republican National Committee had stuck in a press release: "I was the one who started it all."

The New Era then went on to psychoanalyze Gore. "Maybe the lying is a symptom of a more deeply-rooted problem: Al Gore doesn't know who he is," the editorial stated. "The vice president is a serial prevaricator."

In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, writer Michael Ruby concluded that "the Gore of '99" was full of lies. He "suddenly discovers elastic properties in the truth," Ruby declared. "He invents the Internet, inspires the fictional hero of 'Love Story,' blows the whistle on Love Canal. Except he didn't really do any of those things." [Dec. 12, 1999]

The National Journal's Stuart Taylor Jr. cited the Love Canal case as proof that President Clinton was a kind of political toxic waste contaminant. The problem was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain. Gore -- self-described inspiration for the novel Love Story, discoverer of Love Canal, co-creator of the Internet," Taylor wrote. [National Journal, Dec. 18, 1999]

On Dec. 19, GOP chairman Nicholson was back on the offensive. Far from apologizing for the RNC's misquotes, Nicholson was reprising the allegations of Gore's falsehoods that had been repeated so often that they had taken on the color of truth: "Remember, too, that this is the same guy who says he invented the Internet, inspired Love Story and discovered Love Canal."

More than two weeks after the Post correction, the bogus quote was still spreading. The Providence Journal lashed out at Gore in an editorial that reminded readers that Gore had said about Love Canal, "I was the one that started it all." The editorial then turned to the bigger picture:

"This is the third time in the last few months that Mr. Gore has made a categorical assertion that is -- well, untrue. … There is an audacity about Mr. Gore's howlers that is stunning. … Perhaps it is time to wonder what it is that impels Vice President Gore to make such preposterous claims, time and again." [Providence Journal, Dec. 23, 1999]

On New Year's Eve, a column in The Washington Times returned again to the theme of Gore's pathological lies.

Entitled "Liar, Liar; Gore's Pants on Fire," the column by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder concluded that "when Al Gore lies, it's without any apparent reason. Mr. Gore had already established his credits on environmental issues, for better or worse, and had even been anointed 'Mr. Ozone.' So why did he have to tell students in Concord, New Hampshire, ‘I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on the issue. I was the one that started it all.'" [WT, Dec. 31, 1999]

The characterization of Gore as a clumsy liar continued into the new year. Again in The Washington Times, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. put Gore's falsehoods in the context of a sinister strategy:

"Deposit so many deceits and falsehoods on the public record that the public and the press simply lose interest in the truth. This, the Democrats thought, was the method behind Mr. Gore's many brilliantly conceived little lies. Except that Mr. Gore's lies are not brilliantly conceived. In fact, they are stupid. He gets caught every time … Just last month, Mr. Gore got caught claiming … to have been the whistle-blower for 'discovering Love Canal.'" [WT, Jan. 7, 2000]

It was unclear where Tyrrell got the quote, "discovering Love Canal," since not even the false quotes had put those words in Gore's mouth. But Tyrrell's description of what he perceived as Gore's strategy of flooding the public debate with "deceits and falsehoods" might fit better with what the news media and the Republicans had been doing to Gore.

Beyond Love Canal, the other prime examples of Gore's "lies" -- inspiring the male lead in Love Story and working to create the Internet -- also stemmed from a quarrelsome reading of his words, followed by exaggeration and ridicule rather than a fair assessment of how his comments and the truth matched up.

The earliest of these Gore "lies," dating back to 1997, was Gore's expressed belief that he and his wife Tipper had served as models for the lead characters in the sentimental bestseller and movie, Love Story.

When the author, Erich Segal, was asked about Gore's impression, he stated that the preppy hockey-playing male lead, Oliver Barrett IV, indeed was modeled after Gore and Gore's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones. But Segal said the female lead, Jenny, was not modeled after Tipper Gore. [NYT, Dec. 14, 1997]

Rather than treating this distinction as a minor point of legitimate confusion, the news media concluded that Gore had willfully lied. The media made the case an indictment against Gore’s honesty.

In doing so, however, the media repeatedly misstated the facts, insisting that Segal had denied that Gore was the model for the lead male character. In reality, Segal had confirmed that Gore was, at least partly, the inspiration for the character, Barrett, played by Ryan O'Neal.

Some journalists seemed to understand the nuance but still could not resist denigrating Gore's honesty.

For instance, in its attack on Gore over the Love Canal quote, the Boston Herald conceded that Gore "did provide material" for Segal's book, but the newspaper added that it was "for a minor character." [Boston Herald, Dec. 5, 1999] That, of course, was untrue, since the Barrett character was one of Love Story's two principal characters

The media's treatment of the Internet comment followed a similar course. Gore's statement may have been poorly phrased, but its intent was clear: he was trying to say that he worked in Congress to help develop the Internet. Gore wasn’t claiming to have "invented" the Internet or to have been the "father of the Internet," as many journalists have asserted.

Gore's actual comment, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that aired on March 9, 1999, was as follows: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Republicans quickly went to work on Gore's statement. In press releases, they noted that the precursor of the Internet, called ARPANET, existed in 1971, a half dozen years before Gore entered Congress. But ARPANET was a tiny networking of about 30 universities, a far cry from today's "information superhighway," ironically a phrase widely credited to Gore.

As the media clamor arose about Gore's supposed claim that he had invented the Internet, Gore's spokesman Chris Lehane tried to explain. He noted that Gore "was the leader in Congress on the connections between data transmission and computing power, what we call information technology. And those efforts helped to create the Internet that we know today." [AP, March 11, 1999]

There was no disputing Lehane's description of Gore's lead congressional role in developing today's Internet. But the media was off and running.

Routinely, the reporters lopped off the introductory clause "during my service in the United States Congress" or simply jumped to word substitutions, asserting that Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet which carried the notion of a hands-on computer engineer.

Whatever imprecision may have existed in Gore's original comment, it paled beside the distortions of what Gore clearly meant. While excoriating Gore's phrasing as an exaggeration, the media engaged in its own exaggeration.

Yet, faced with the national media putting a hostile cast on his Internet statement -- that he was willfully lying -- Gore chose again to express his regret at his choice of words.

Now, with the Love Canal controversy, this media pattern of distortion has returned with a vengeance. The national news media has put a false quote into Gore's mouth and then extrapolated from it to the point of questioning his sanity. Even after the quote was acknowledged to be wrong, the words continued to be repeated, again becoming part of Gore's record.

From the media’s hostile tone, one might conclude that reporters have reached a collective decision that Gore should be disqualified from the campaign.

At times, the media has jettisoned any pretext of objectivity. According to various accounts of the first Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H., reporters openly mocked Gore as they sat in a nearby press room and watched the debate on television.

Several journalists later described the incident, but without overt criticism of their colleagues. As The Daily Howler observed, Time's Eric Pooley cited the reporters' reaction only to underscore how Gore was failing in his "frenzied attempt to connect."


"The ache was unmistakable -- and even touching -- but the 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it," Pooley wrote. "Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd."

Hotline's Howard Mortman described the same behavior as the reporters "groaned, laughed and howled" at Gore's comments.

Later, during an appearance on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Salon's Jake Tapper cited the Hanover incident, too. "I can tell you that the only media bias I have detected in terms of a group media bias was, at the first debate between Bill Bradley and Al Gore, there was hissing for Gore in the media room up at Dartmouth College. The reporters were hissing Gore, and that's the only time I've ever heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any party at any event." [See The Daily Howler, http://www.dailyhowler.com/, Dec. 14, 1999]

Traditionally, journalists pride themselves in maintaining deadpan expressions in such public settings, at most chuckling at a comment or raising an eyebrow, but never demonstrating derision for a public figure.

Reasons for this widespread media contempt for Gore vary. Conservative outlets, such as Rev. Moon's Washington Times and Murdoch's media empire, clearly want to ensure the election of a Republican conservative to the White House. They are always eager to advance that cause.

In the mainstream press, many reporters may feel that savaging Gore protects them from the "liberal" label that can so damage a reporter's career. Others simply might be venting residual anger over President Clinton's survival of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. They might believe that Gore's political destruction would be a fitting end to the Clinton administration.

Reporters apparently sense, too, that there is no career danger in showing open hostility toward Clinton's vice president.

Yet, the national media's prejudice against Gore -- now including fabrication of damaging quotes and misrepresentation of his meaning -- raises a troubling question about this year's election and the future health of American democracy:

How can voters have any hope of expressing an informed judgment when the media intervenes to transform one of the principal candidates -- an individual who, by all accounts, is a well-qualified public official and a decent family man -- into a national laughingstock?

What hope does American democracy have when the media can misrepresent a candidate’s words so thoroughly that they become an argument for his mental instability -- and all the candidate feels he can do about the misquotes is to apologize?

As The Daily Howler's Somerby observes, the concern about deception and its corrosive effect on democracy dates back to the ancient Greeks.

"Democracy won't work, the great Socrates cried, because sophists will create mass confusion," Somerby recalled at his Web site. "Here in our exciting, much-hyped new millennium, the Great Greek's vision remains crystal clear." [The Daily Howler, Jan. 13, 2000]

Dan crashes - Bush flies high
The power and the pay-off
By Greg Palast
Gregpalst.com

They finally put Dan Rather out of his misery. Today, CBS finally terminated him and sent him to the electronic glue factory — all for reporting the truth. But not all of it.

Rather’s “unsubstantiated story of Bush’s military service” (says USA Today) got him canned. Yet, all the poor man did was repeat a story we put on BBC Television a year earlier — that Poppy Bush put in the fix to get his son out of ‘Nam and into the Texas Air Guard, spending his war years guarding Houston from Viet Cong attack.

But Dan never reported this: the documentation from inside the US Department of Justice detailing the fix. Why not? Because it opened up a far more serious charge: that those who kept Little George out of war’s way ended up very well rewarded. We ran that full story — from the evidence of the fix to the evidence of the lucrative pay-backs — on the world’s biggest network, BBC, and we’ve never retracted a comma of it. Nor, by the way, has the White House denied our accusations despite our repeated offers to respond.

George’s slithering out of combat turned into big pay-days for those in on the fix and its cover-up: Harriett Miers (remember her?), Karen Hughes and Texas lobbyists.

For the complete story, read, “The Necklace-ing of Dan Rather” in Armed Madhouse. Read below for a piece of the puzzle — Excerpted from Armed Madhouse, the new book by Greg Palast. Order your copy here or from your local bookstore.

The Necklace-ing of Dan Rather

You aren’t stupid, they just talk to you that way. It’s 2004. Falluja’s on fire, your pension’s burning away, the last General Motors worker is turning out the lights in Detroit — and the biggest issue of the election, aside from Christians who don’t want homosexuals to have families, was whether some elderly news celebrity, Dan Rather, had besmirched the reputation of our President, a former Naval Aviator. They can’t get you to ignore that man behind the curtain, Dorothy, unless there’s a fascinating show on stage to distract you. And, for the final days of the presidential campaign, they gave us the lynching of Dan Rather.

We know George Bush was a Naval Aviator because it says so right on his toy box. Actually, he never was a Naval Aviator and never once landed a plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier. During the Vietnam War, our future President flew in the Texas Air National Guard protecting Houston from Viet Cong attack. Our President obtained that job the same way he got the current one: The fix was in.

Congressman Poppy Bush, said Rather, put in the fix for his son, despite Junior’s too-dumb-to-fly test scores, by putting in a call to the head of the Texas Air Guard via Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes. That’s what Dan Rather reported on 60 Minutes, that Bush Jr. got the Texas top gun post, and thereby dodged the draft and the bullets of Vietnam. It was a hell of a scoop and his network rewarded him and his producer, Mary Mapes, by firing their sorry asses. That wasn’t enough.

The president of CBS, Leslie Moonves, bullwhipped his network’s stars and, with his own spit, polished the soiled war record of our President, declaring that Rather’s producer: …ignored information that cast doubt on the story she had set out to report — that President Bush had received special treatment thirty years ago, getting to the Guard ahead of many other applicants.
Really? Well, Mr. Moonves, look at this evidence: “His [George W. Bush’s] dad called then - Lt. Gov. Barnes to ask for his help to get his son not just in the Guard, but to get one of the coveted pilot slots which were extremely hard to get. [Barnes, through a “cut-out,” a third party,] contacted General Rose at the Guard and took care of it.
George Bush was placed ahead of thousands of young men, some of whom died in Vietnam.”

This is from a letter which had remained locked for years in the file cabinets of the U.S. Justice Department prosecutor in Austin, Texas. How I got it does not matter. Our War President has not challenged authenticity. And its contents, Mr. Moonves, were confirmed by the “cut-out” himself, the man who made the call to the Texas Air Guard for young George. (Would the cut-out, a major figure in the Lone Star State, allow BBC to film his statement? He said, “Do I look like the dumbest Texan on the prairie?”) But you knew that, if you’re not American. At the Guardian and on BBC we also reported, before the presidential election, that Lt. Governor Barnes had put in the fix for George Jr. at the Air Guard. We reported that in 1999, before Bush’s first run for office.

Justice for Miers

But there’s much, much more to the story than Rather had cojones to report. Barnes had two tasks — one, to get little George into the Air Guard and the other was to shut up about it. Keep it quiet. Barnes’s good deeds and long silence were, indeed, well rewarded.

Barnes, who left office under a cloud of impropriety, stayed on in Austin as a big-fee lobbyist. And the biggest fee he received, maybe the biggest ever in the history of the lobbying art, was at least $23 million for representing a company called GTech when it got the contract to operate the Texas lottery. GTech’s creepy ways of doing business caught up with it in 1997, when, after questionable payments to the Texas lottery director’s boyfriend were exposed, GTech lost its contract by order of the new, uncorrupted, lottery director. The lottery work was put up for bid and GTech’s replacement chosen.


But then something quite extraordinary happened: The new state lottery director was fired, the bids tossed out and GTech given back the lottery work — no bidding required. The governor at the time: George W. Bush. Now, let’s go back to the letter buried at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Austin: Governor Bush through [another cut-out] made a deal with Ben Barnes not to re-bid because Barnes could confirm that Bush had lied during the ‘94 campaign. During that campaign [for Governor of Texas], Bush was asked if his father…had helped him get in the National Guard. Bush said no he had not, but the fact is his dad called then - Lt. Gov. Barnes…. Silence has a price and Barnes, the letter says, got his: safety for his client GTech, with whom he maintained hidden ties. I can’t imagine that Barnes would make such a raw demand on Bush.
But the war hero Governor’s team made damn sure that no harm came to Barnes and his business associates. The Governor talked to the chair of the lottery two days later and she then agreed to support letting GTech keep the contract without a bid. Did Governor Bush put in the fix for GTech as alleged?

I wasn’t on the phone when he spoke to the lottery board Chairwoman. Maybe they talked about their newfound faith in the Lord, which they both discovered together at the same time. The Chairwoman? Harriet Miers. We don’t know if Miers gave the overpriced GTech its contract back to help the governor keep his Air Guard secret a secret or simply because she liked GTech’s record of high costs and corruption.

In 2005, George W. Bush’s attempted appointment of Miers to the United States Supreme Court surprised the U.S. media and even the President’s own supporters. But I wasn’t surprised at all.

Silence of the Media Lambs

In 2004, he knew exactly what would happen when he finally asked those questions. He had already delivered his own eulogy.

On June 6, 2002 on the program I report for, BBC Newsnight, Rather said:

“It’s an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tyres around people’s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I’m humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.”

see the video here | read transcript here

The lynching of Dan Rather is a cautionary tale of how news is made in the USA — and unmade — and topics permissible during an election. The story that cannot be reported is not about George Bush’s special treatment but about the special treatment of the specially privileged.

The real story, for me, is that Little George was just one of a dozen privileged princelings saved from the dangers of their powerful daddies’ wars. Barnes did not give help to Bushes only. The man who actually made the call to the Air Guard for Little George at Barnes’ request also confirmed that at Barnes’ request, he also put in the fix for sons of Democratic big-wigs, Governor John Connally and Congressman, later Senator, Lloyd Bentsen.

Vietnam was one front in a class war, and only one class was sent to fight it. I don’t blame Congressmen Bush Sr. or Bentsen for keeping their sons out of Vietnam. I do blame them for sending other men’s sons in their place.- - - -
Read the entire story, The Necklace-ing of Dan Rather, in Armed Madhouse - the new book by Greg Palast.

Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War. Order your copy today or get it from your local book store.

Web 'fuelling crisis in politics'
By Brian Wheeler
Political reporter, BBC News

Tony Blair's outgoing chief strategy adviser fears the internet could be fuelling a "crisis" in the relationship between politicians and voters.

Matthew Taylor - who stressed he was speaking as a "citizen" not a government spokesman - said the web could be "fantastic" for democracy.

But it was too often used to encourage the "shrill discourse of demands" that dominated modern politics.

He was speaking on the day Mr Blair carried out an online interview.

Mr Taylor said Mr Blair's online grilling from voters - and other initiatives such as environment secretary David Miliband's blog and Downing Street's new online petition service - showed the government was making good progress in using the internet to become more open and accountable.

But he said more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to "solve problems" rather than simply abuse politicians or make "incommensurate" demands on them.

'Teenagers'

Speaking at an e-democracy conference in central London, he said modern politics was all about "quality of life" and that voters had a "very complex set of needs".

The end of deference, the rapid pace of social change and growing diversity were all good things, he argued, but they also meant governments found it increasingly difficult to govern.

"We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government," Mr Taylor told the audience.

Like "teenagers", people were demanding, but "conflicted" about what they actually wanted, he argued.

They wanted "sustainability", for example, but not higher fuel prices, affordable homes for their children but not new housing developments in their town or village.

'Impoverished relationship'

But rather than work out these dilemmas in partnership with their elected leaders, they were encouraged to regard all politicians as corrupt or "mendacious" by the media, which he described as "a conspiracy to maintain the population in a perpetual state of self-righteous rage".

Whether media was left wing or right wing, the message was always that "leaders are out there to shaft you".

He went on: "At a time at which we need a richer relationship between politicians and citizens than we have ever had, to confront the shared challenges we face, arguably we have a more impoverished relationship between politicians and citizens than we have ever had.

"It seems to me this is something which is worth calling a crisis."

Blogs

The internet, he told the conference, was part of that "crisis".

"The internet has immense potential but we face a real problem if the main way in which that potential expresses itself is through allowing citizens to participate in a shrill discourse of demands.

"If you look at the way in which citizens are using technology and the way that is growing up, there are worrying signs that that is the case.

"What is the big breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years? It's basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking, basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are.

"The internet is being used as a tool of mobilisation, which is fantastic, but it only adds to the growing, incommensurate nature of the demands being made on government."

He challenged the online community to provide more opportunities for "people to try to understand the real trade-offs that politicians face and the real dilemmas that citizens face".

'Anti-establishment'

"I want people to have more power, but I want them to have more power in the context of a more mature discourse about the responsibilities of government and the responsibilities of citizens," Mr Taylor told delegates.

Part of the problem, he added, was the "net-head" culture itself, which was rooted in libertarianism and "anti-establishment" attitudes.

He told delegates: "You have to be part of changing that culture. It's important for people who understand technology, to move from that frame of mind, which is about attacking the establishment into one which is about problem-solving and social enterprise."

Technology should be used to encourage elected representatives to communicate better with voters, he told delegates.

Government also needed to "develop new forms of consultation and engagement that are deliberative in their form and trust citizens to get to the heart of the difficult trade-offs involved."

And there should be more effort to make communities "work together to solve problems," said Mr Taylor.

Mr Taylor is Tony Blair's chief adviser on political strategy and the former head of the centre left think tank the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR).

He is leaving Downing Street next week, after three years, to become the chief executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts (RSA).

War Protestor's Public Suicide in Chicago Went Unnoticed by Media
.editorandpublisher.com

November 26, 2006 5:30 PM ET

CHICAGO Malachi Ritscher envisioned his death as one full of purpose. He carefully planned the details, mailed a copy of his apartment key to a friend, created to-do lists for his family. On his Web site, the 52-year-old experimental musician who'd fought with depression even penned his obituary.

At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 -- four days before an election caused a seismic shift in Washington politics-- Ritscher, a frequent anti-war protester, stood by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago near a statue of a giant flame, set up a video camera, doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire.

Aglow for the crush of morning commuters, his flaming body was supposed to be a call to the nation, a symbol of his rage and discontent with the U.S. war in Iraq.

"Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country," he wrote in his suicide note. "... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country."

There was only one problem: No one was listening.

It took five days for the Cook County medical examiner to identify the charred-beyond-recognition corpse. Meanwhile, Ritscher's suicide went largely unnoticed. It wasn't until a reporter for an alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, pieced the facts together that word began to spread.

Soon, tributes -- and questions -- poured in to the paper's blogs.

Was this a man consumed by mental illness? Or was Ritscher a martyr driven by rage over what he saw as an unjust war? Was he a convenient symbol for an anti-war movement or was there more to his message?

"This man killed himself in such a painful way, specifically to get our attention on these things," said Jennifer Diaz, a 28-year-old graduate student who never met him but has been researching his life. Now, she is organizing protests and vigils in his name. "I'm not going to sit by and I can't sit by and let this go unheard."

Mental health experts say virtually no suicides occur without some kind of a diagnosable mental illness. But Ritscher's family disagrees about whether he had severe mental problems.

In a statement, Ritscher's parents and siblings called him an intellectually gifted man who suffered from bouts of depression. They stopped short of saying he'd ever received a clinical diagnosis of mental illness.

"He believed in his actions, however extreme they were," his younger brother, Paul Ritscher, wrote online. "He believed they could help to open eyes, ears and hearts and to show everyone that a single man's actions, by taking such extreme personal responsibility, can perhaps affect change in the world."

His son, who shares the same name as his father, said his father was trying to cope with mental illness. Suicide seemed to be the next step, and the war was a way to give his death meaning.

"He was different people at different instances and so, so erratic. I loved him no doubt, but he was a very lonely and tragic man," said Ritscher, 35, who is estranged from the rest of the family. "The idea of being a martyr I'm sure was attractive. He could literally go out in a blaze of glory."

Born in Dickinson, N.D., with the name Mark David, Ritscher dropped out of high school, married at 17 and divorced 10 years later. Eventually, he would change his name to match his son's and, coincidentally, a world-famous prophet. At the end, he worked in building maintenance and was a fixture in Chicago's experimental music scene.

He described himself as a renaissance man who'd amassed a collection of more than 2,000 musical recordings from clubs in Chicago. He was a writer, philosopher and photographer. He was an alcoholic who collected fossils, glass eyes, light bulbs and snare drums. He paid $25 to become an ordained minister with the Missionaries of the New Truth and operated a handful of Web sites protesting the Iraq war.

A member of Mensa who claimed to be able to recite the infinite number Pi to more than 1,000 decimal places, he titled his obituary "Out of Time." Friends, who seemed surprised about his death, found themselves searching for answers. Ritscher's death became even more enigmatic than his life.

Perhaps the most famous self-immolation occurred in 1963, when Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burned himself at a Saigon intersection in protest against the south Vietnamese regime. Another activist, Kathy Change, lit fire to herself in 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania to protest the government and the country's economic system.

Ritscher's death brought back memories for Anita King, a 48-year-old artist from West Philadelphia who was Change's best friend.

"I think both of them, they just felt like their death could be the last drop of blood shed," King said. "It was too hard for them. They had too much of a conscious connection to the struggle to go on in their lives."

In the end, only Ritscher knew the motivations for his suicide. There is little doubt, though, that he was satisfied with his choice.

"Without fear I go now to God," Ritscher wrote in the last sentence of his suicide note. "Your future is what you will choose today."

Man sets himself on fire on Kennedy
suntimes.com
November 4, 2006

BY ANNIE SWEENEY Staff Reporter

As horrified Friday-morning commuters watched, a man apparently doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire along the Kennedy Expy. near a 25-foot-tall Loop sculpture titled "Flame of the Millennium."

A homemade sign was found near his charred body that read, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," said State Police Lt. Lincoln Hampton. Police are reviewing a videotape that also was found near the body.

The death of the man, whose identity has not been released, was being treated as a suicide, authorities said.

Witnesses told police they saw the man ignite himself just before 7 a.m. near the southbound Kennedy's Ohio Street exit, Hampton said.

The Chicago Fire Department was called to the scene to help extinguish the fire, which was set at the base of the seven-ton sculpture along the Kennedy.

An Illinois Department of Transportation worker was among those to witness the incident, according to a preliminary report.

A can of clear liquid smelling like gasoline also was recovered, the report said.

asweeney@suntimes.com

Malachi Ritscher (born Mark David Ritscher on January 13, 1954 in Dickinson, North Dakota; died November 3, 2006) was a musician, recording engineer, and anti-war protester.


Ritscher earned notoriety after he committed suicide by self-immolation on the side of the Kennedy Expressway near downtown Chicago during the morning rush hour of Friday November 3, 2006, apparently as a protest against the Iraq war and more generally "for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country". Ritscher's suicide is one of only nine reported incidents of self-immolation performed as an act of protest in American history.

Biography

Born Mark David Ritscher, he married at age 17, but divorced after about ten years. He had one son. In 1981 Ritscher started using his son's name, "Malachi". In later years, Ritscher became a fixture on the Chicago jazz and experimental music scene, attending and recording many performances. Saxophonist Dave Rempis said that he would see Ritscher at concerts "five nights a week."[1]

A few days after Ritscher's death, Bruno Johnson, the owner of Chicago's OkkaDisk Records, received a package in the mail containing Ritscher's will, the keys to his house, and instructions for dispersal of his belongings.

Death

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper expressed sympathy for Ritscher's friends and relatives, but criticized his action, saying "...with all great respect, if he thought setting himself on fire and ending his life in Chicago would change anyone's mind about the war in Iraq, his last gesture on this planet was his saddest and his most futile."[1]

Lamenting what he saw as a moral vacuousness in American culture, Ritscher felt that Americans are "...more concerned with sports on television and ring-tones on cell-phones than the future of the world." He saw the problem as being due to a gross deficiency of personal responsibility in American culture, and offered his self-immolation in a spirit of unified atonement.

"My position is that I only get one death, I want it to be a good one. Wouldn't it be better to stand for something or make a statement, rather than a fiery collision with some drunk driver? Are not smokers choosing death by lung cancer? Where is the dignity there? Are not the people the people [sic] who disregard the environment killing themselves and future generations?"

Ritscher confessed in his self-penned obituary that he felt guilt for not killing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he had the chance. He thought that Rumsfeld's death would save countless thousands and stated that not killing him was his only regret.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malachi_Ritscher

-passive resistance to fulfilling social and occupational tasks through procrastination and inefficiency;
-complaints of being misunderstood, unappreciated, and victimized by others;
-sullenness, irritability, and argumentativeness in response to expectations;
-angry and pessimistic attitudes toward a variety of events;
-unreasonable criticism and scorn toward those in authority;
-envy and resentment toward those who are more fortunate;
-self-definition as luckless in life and an inclination to whine and grumble about being jinxed;
-alternating behavior between hostile assertion of personal autonomy and dependent contrition (Millon & Radovanov, Livesley, ed., 1995, p. 321).

The passive-aggressive personality disorder was first introduced in a U.S. War Department technical bulletin in 1945. The term was coined by wartime psychiatrists who found themselves dealing with reluctant and uncooperative soldiers who followed orders with chronic, veiled hostility and smoldering resentment. Their style was a mixture of passive resistance and grumbling compliance (Stone, 1993, p. 361).
http://www.toad.net/~arcturus/dd/ddhome.htm

His problems started when he asked the agency to look into the activities of an employee he thought might be engaged in espionage. Instead, the NSA called him in for an emergency psychological evaluation, one of the usual procedures in blackballing an employee. He was duly determined to be crazy and put on administrative leave. Tice was later assigned to unload furniture from trucks at a warehouse, where he hurt his back. He also served an eight-month tour of duty in the NSA motor pool, where the analyst worked at maintaining the agency’s fleet of vehicles, gassing them up, cleaning them and checking the fluids, and driving NSA big shots around town.

Tice had done intelligence work for nearly 20 years with the Air Force, with Navy intelligence, and with the Defense Intelligence Agency, before landing at the NSA. He has conducted intelligence missions related to Kosovo, Afghanistan, the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, and the Iraq war. Most recently he was nominated for an award for outstanding service because of his work on Iraq. It has since been withdrawn, along with the security clearance. Source

A National Guard commander told a mental health counselor to change an evaluation to show that a serviceman who accused fellow soldiers of abusing Iraqi prisoners was mentally unfit, another soldier says.

The commander has refused to comment on the allegation. And it is not clear whether the evaluation was, in fact, changed.

Sgt. Greg Ford of the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion has said he was stripped of his duties and ordered to see combat-stress counselors after reporting that three fellow soldiers in the California National Guard unit brazenly abused Iraqi detainees during interrogations in Samarra last year. He said the soldiers choked detainees, threatened them with guns and stuck lit cigarettes in their ears.

Ford was placed under the supervision of Sgt. 1st Class Michael Marciello, a team leader in the battalion. In an interview this week, Marciello said he was ordered to watch Ford's behavior at all times.

He said unit commanders believed something must have been wrong with Ford for making such "wild" claims against his fellow soldiers.

Marciello said that after a mental health evaluation came back saying Ford was OK, he witnessed a company commander in the 223rd, Capt. Vic Artiga, ask a counselor to change her evaluation.

"The company commander requested that this woman reconsider the end result of her analysis," Marciello said.

He said he did not know what the final report said.

"Something happened for them to take Greg away," Marciello said. "After a short discussion, they agreed to refer him to Germany for further evaluation. Then the following day, Greg was gone."

Ford has said that he underwent psychiatric evaluations at military installations in Germany and San Antonio, Texas, and that those evaluations found nothing wrong with him.
Source

In 1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a prominent Louisiana physician and one of the leading authorities in his time on the medical care of Negroes, identified two mental disorders peculiar to slaves. Drapetomia, or the disease causing Negroes to run away, was noted as a condition, "unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers. " Dr. Cartwright observed, "The cause in most cases, that induces the Negro to run away from service, is such a disease of the mind as in any other species of alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule. " Cartwright was so helpful as to identify preventive measures for dealing with potential cases of drapetomania. Slaves showing incipient drapetomania, reflected in sulky and dissatisfied behavior should be whipped-strictly as a therapeutic early intervention. Planter and overseers were encouraged to utilize whipping as the primary intervention once the disease had progressed to the stage of actually running away. Overall, Cartwright suggested that Negroes should be kept in a submissive state and treated like children, with "care, kindness, attention and humanity, to prevent and cure them from running away. "
http://academic.udayton.edu/health/01status/mental01.htm

From Norman Morrison to Malachi Ritscher:Self-Immolation as Anti-War Protest
counterpunch.org
By JOE DeRAYMOND

November 29, 2006

"When you own a big chunk of the bloody third world, dead babies just come with the scenery"

Chrissie Hynde, from "Middle of the Road", by The Pretenders

In November of 2005, the United States used white phosphorus munitions against the people of Fallujah, Iraq. Jeff Englehart, a former marine who spent two days in Fallujah during the battle, said he heard the order go out over military communication that WP was to be dropped. Mr Englehart, now an outspoken critic of the war, says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete ... Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children." (as reported by Andrew Buncombe and Solomon Hughes: 15 November 2005, The Independent)

On November 3, 2006, on an off-ramp during rush hour in Chicago, Malachi Ritscher immolated himself. News reports have made much of the fact that his death had no immediate impact, since he was not identified for many days, and because the national news did not pick it up for several weeks. He is characterized as a troubled man. These are the words he left behind in his suicide note: "Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country."

In March of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized the use of napalm against the people of Vietnam. Napalm is a burning gel that sticks to the skin, and made flame throwers and incendiary explosives a staple of the US arsenal against Vietnam. A Business Week article (February 10, 1969) termed the chemical "the fiery essence of all that is horrible about the war in Vietnam."

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison immolated himself within sight of Robert McNamara's window at the Pentagon, to protest the war in Vietnam. Norman did not leave a suicide note. His friend John Roemer described his action as follows, "I don't know. I don't know. He fought the war more and more deeply. I mean, when are you one of the Germans?...You have to be mentally different to fly in the face of received wisdom in this country. He played it out in his mind, I think, in terms of being a moral witness", and, "In a society where it is normal for human beings to drop bombs on human targets, where it is normal to spend 50 percent of the individual's tax dollar on war, where it is normal...to have twelve times overkill capacity, Norman Morrison was not normal. He said, 'Let it stop' ".

The Vietnamese canonized Norman Morrison. Streets were named after him, a postage stamp was printed with his image, poems were written in his memory. The most quoted, by To Huu, includes this stanza:

McNamara!
Where are you hiding? In the graveyard
Of your five-cornered house
Each corner a continent.
You hide yourself
From the flaming world
As an ostrich hides its head in the
burning sand.

Norman was one of several people who chose to become a victim of the fire of the Vietnam War. Others include Vietnamese Buddhist monks, Quang Duc, June 1963, in Saigon; an unnamed monk in Phanthiet, August, 1963; Thich Nu Thanh Quang, in Hue, 1966. Each death galvanized opinion and resistance to the war within Vietnam. On March 16, 1965, Alice Herz, an 82 year old pacifist, immolated herself on a Detroit street corner. She stated in her suicide note, that she was protesting "the use of high office by our President, L.B.J., in trying to wipe out small nations." And "I wanted to call attention to this problem by choosing the illuminating death of a Buddhist." A week after Norman Morrison's death, Roger LaPorte burned himself in protest in front of the United Nations in New York. In May of 1970, George Winne, Jr., burned himself in protest of the Vietnam War on the University of California campus in San Diego. (See Frances Farmer's Revenge.)

Coverage of the sacrifice of Malachi Ritscher has been obsessively concerned with his sanity. The AP article on his death includes this conclusion, "Mental health experts say virtually no suicides occur without some kind of a diagnosable mental illness." Our government and its experts expect that rational citizens living rational United States lives understand that the burning of civilians is just part of the scenery, a necessary element of foreign policy. A person who actually takes responsibility for the purposes to which his/her tax monies are being devoted is by definition insane. It is a world turned upside down, in which torture, napalm and white phosphorus are "legal", and peaceful protest criminal. It is no mystery to me that there are human souls who cannot bear the light of truth, and choose to join the victims of our culture's madness.

Joe DeRaymond lives in Freemansburg, PA. He can be reached at: jderaymond@rcn.com

Keeping Iraq attack numbers under wraps.
TheCarpetbaggerreport.com
December 16, 2006

As Justin Rood noted, this chart, produced by the Government Accountability Office, tracks the number of per-months attacks in Iraq, based on Pentagon data.
attacks



A close look at the chart, however, notes that a few details are missing — specifically, the number of attacks in September, October, and November of this year, despite the fact that the report having been produced in December.

So, where are those numbers? Rood called Joseph Christoff, the GAO official who produced the document, who said he had all of the data, but had to leave the report incomplete because the Pentagon classified the numbers.

The number of attacks from August 2006, and every month prior, are publicly available, but the fall of 2006 has to remain classified? Without explanation?

Of course, this does fit nicely into the Bush administration’s m.o. — when data is inconvenient, hide it.

* In March, the administration announced it would no longer produce the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which identifies which programs best assist low-income families, while also tracking health insurance coverage and child support.

* In 2005, after a government report showed an increase in terrorism around the world, the administration announced it would stop publishing its annual report on international terrorism.

* After the Bureau of Labor Statistics uncovered discouraging data about factory closings in the U.S., the administration announced it would stop publishing information about factory closings.

* When an annual report called “Budget Information for States” showed the federal government shortchanging states in the midst of fiscal crises, Bush’s Office of Management and Budget announced it was discontinuing the report, which some said was the only source for comprehensive data on state funding from the federal government.

* When Bush’s Department of Education found that charter schools were underperforming, the administration said it would sharply cut back on the information it collects about charter schools.

When government reports conflict with the White House’s, the Bush gang has a choice — deal with the problem or change the reports. Guess which course they prefer?

Governors Told Not To Ask Questions About Iraq Troop Withdrawal
The Huffington Post
February 27, 2007

Before their Iraq briefing at the White House yesterday, the nation's governors were instructed that they were not to ask any pesky questions about a timetable for bringing the troops home.

So by the time California's Arnold Schwarzenegger was on his third question about a timetable for bringing the troops home, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace was just the tiniest bit out of patience -- just as some of the governors were with what one observer described as the strangely Soviet-style Q&A. ...

Life on the Plantation
By Bill Moyers
t r u t h o u t | Address

Friday 12 January 2007

Address to the National Conference for Media, Memphis, Tennessee - as prepared for delivery.

It has long been said (ostensibly by Benjamin Franklin, but we can't be sure) that "democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

My fellow lambs:

It's good to be in Memphis and find you well-armed with passion for democracy, readiness for action, and courage for the next round in the fight for a free and independent press.

I salute the conviction that brought you here. I cherish the spirit that fills this hall and the camaraderie we share today. All too often the greatest obstacle to reform is the reform movement itself. Factions rise, fences are built, jealousies mount - and the cause all believe in is lost in the shattered fragments of what was once a clear and compelling vision.

Reformers, in fact, too often remind me of Baptists. I speak as a Baptist. I know Baptists.

One of my favorite stories is of the fellow who was about to jump off a bridge when another fellow runs up to him, crying: "Stop. Stop. Stop. Don't do it."

The man on the bridge looks down and asks, "Why not?"

"Well, there's much to live for."

"Like what?"

"Well, your faith. Are you religious?"

"Yes."

"Me, too. Christian or Buddhist?"

"Christian."

"Me, too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?"

"Protestant."

"Me, too. Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist?"

"Baptist."

"Me, too. Are you original Baptist Church of God or Reformed Baptist Church of God?"

"Reformed Baptist Church of God."

"Me, too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1820, or Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1912?"

"1912."

Whereupon the second fellow turned red in the face, shouted, "Die, you heretic scum," and pushed him off the bridge.

That sounds like reformers, doesn't it?

By avoiding contentious factionalism, you have created a strong movement. I will confess to you that I was skeptical when Bob McChesney and John Nichols first raised the issue of media consolidation a few years ago. I was sympathetic but skeptical. The challenge of actually doing something about this issue - beyond simply bemoaning its impact on democracy - was daunting. How could we hope to come up with an effective response to an inexorable force?

It seemed inexorable because over the previous two decades a series of mega-media mergers had swept the country, each deal even bigger than the last. The lobby representing the broadcast, cable, and newspaper industry is extremely powerful, with an iron grip on lawmakers and regulators alike. Both parties bowed to their will when the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That monstrous assault on democracy, with malignant consequences for journalism, was nothing but a welfare giveaway to the largest, richest and most powerful media conglomerates in the world - Goliaths whose handful of owners controlled, commodified and monetized everyone, and everything, in sight.

Call it the "plantation mentality" in its modern incarnation. Here in Memphis they know all about that mentality. Even in 1968, the Civil Rights movement was still battling the plantation mentality based on race, gender, and power that permeated Southern culture long before and even after the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. When Martin Luther King came to Memphis to join the strike of garbage workers in 1968, the cry from every striker's heart - "I am a man" - voiced the long-suppressed outrage of a people whose rights were still being trampled by an ownership class that had arranged the world for its own benefit. The plantation mentality was a phenomenon deeply insulated in the American experience early on, and has it permeated and corrupted our course as a nation. The journalist of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, had envisioned this new republic as "a community of occupations," prospering "by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole." But that vision was repeatedly betrayed, so that less than a century after Thomas Paine's death, Theodore Roosevelt, bolting a Republican party whose bosses had stolen the nomination from him, declared:

It is not to be wondered at that our opponents have been very bitter, for the lineup in this crisis is one that cuts deep to the foundations of government. Our democracy is now put to a vital test, for the conflict is between human rights on the one side and on the other, special privilege asserted as a property right.

Today, a hundred years after Teddy Roosevelt's death, those words ring just as true. America is socially divided and politically benighted. Inequality and poverty grow steadily, along with risk and debt. Many working families cannot make ends meet with two people working, let alone if one stays home to care for children or aging parents. Young people without privilege and wealth struggle to get a footing. Seniors enjoy less and less security for a lifetime's work. We are racially segregated in every meaningful sense except the letter of the law. And survivors of segregation and immigration toil for pennies on the dollar compared to those they serve.

None of this is accidental. Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow - not someone known for extreme political statements - characterizes what is happening as nothing less than elite plunder: "the redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful." Indeed, nearly all of the wealth America created over the past 25 years has been captured by the top 20 percent of households, and most of the gains went to the wealthiest. The top one percent of households captured more than 50 percent of all gains in financial wealth. These households hold more than twice the share their predecessors held on the eve of the American Revolution. Of the early American democratic creeds, the anti-Federalist warning that government naturally works to "fortify the conspiracies of the rich" has proved especially prophetic. So it is this that we confront today.

America confronts a choice between two fundamentally different economic visions. As Norton Garfinkle writes in