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Toady Gonzales
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One Weird Week
Above is a cartoon of Gonzalez. He is the “Legal Eagle,” the Attorney General, the guy who defends our Constitution against all comers. He is the man Bush appointed to be the primary attorney of the land. Yes, the protector of our rights.
Wait a minute – Isn’t he the guy who called the Geneva Convention “quaint” and told the administration that torture is ok? I thought that violated the 5th Amendment.
But I am being naive, I guess, with respect to legal matters. After all, an attorney is supposed to consider whatever you got busted for legal (in your case) and defend you. So what’s the problem? The problem resides in who Gonzales considers his client – we the people or Georgie. I think I know the answer to that one. Well, at least he’s kept his mouth shut lately. Until this week.
For awhile, this week, I was wondering why I bothered to continue with these weekly things. It was almost a “What is the meaning of life” question, but then I can answer that easily since we are the only living species that bothers asking – the answer isn’t important.
Then I remembered starting this. Many of my friends simply did not have the time or resources to find non-mainstream material and the mainstream, well, Bill Moyers, below, has an excellent speech about that.
Some other Amendments are pretty much taken away as well. I remember the wonderful President Richard Nixon (who seems like a ‘liberal’ today) was the one who introduced me to the term “strict constructionist,” which seemed to mean interpretations of the constitution in sync with those of the founders. At the time, William O. Douglas turned to a fellow Supreme Court Justice and said, “He’s talking about us.” Douglas was right if we examine the Bill of Rights from a philological point of view, remembering that the writers were a part of a revolution against colonialist power and Diests who thought of God as someone who made the universe and then went on with his life.
Douglas always carried around his own copy of the Bill of Rights (saying he hadn’t memorized it). Once he was asked why he didn’t do so much research, he said “I look at what the Amendment says. It says ‘no law’, and what is so researchable about that?” In other words, what part of “NO” don’t you understand? To be honest about it, I see nothing against shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater with a strict constructionist stand. Of course, the rest of the crowd may get up and beat the crap out of you, but at least they’ll get some exercise out of it.
All the phone taps and intercepts, the internet scouring, looking at your bank records and reading your mail by the CIA and Pentagon – that’s something the fourth amendment addresses. Gonzales recently said “but we’ll get warrants” (from the special court that doesn’t refuse any requests). It is a secret court that issues secret warrants up to about 30 to 90 days after the eavesdropping occurred. But, at least its legal. All that is needed is for the administration to say so and so is a suspected terrorist. No probable cause needed.
What about all those people in Guantanamo? How do you define “due process” and what ever happened to the 6th Amendment? An administration spokesman recently said that corporations should boycott firms that represent those prisoners down there. Gonzales says that the reason there have been no trials or charges and that the prisoners have been locked up for fours years (“speedy trial?”) is that there are too many lawyers representing the prisoners. Really, I’m not making this up.
Even the second Amendment needs defense, especially if you don’t like it. Someone once wrote about gun control and all the domestic killings and the defense by the NRA that we may need to be armed if a burglar entered our home or if the commies (or terrorists) attacked. Well, ok, but what if I’m not a good shot? I used to be a very good shot with a rifle or pistol, but it has been quite awhile. Why can’t I have my own flame-thrower? Or if a burglar gets into my house, I’m sure I could hit him if I had a machine gun or maybe my own missile launcher could help deter terrorists? (I realize there is that pesky clause about a militia in the second amendment, but that’s the National Guard and it’s mainly in Iraq now, so that takes care of that).
Well, anyway, now is a good time to understand why facts are not being communicated. The same corporations that run this government also run the media.
* * *
The first article is by Bill Moyers. He covers net-neutrality as well as a slew of facts that are not mentioned in our media because of corporatization.
Following, #2 is by Ralph Nader on corporations and the constitution.
Number 3 is about the “Surge.” Apparently “Augmentation” never took hold as an alternative to “escalation,” but “Surge” is still going strong. It reminded me of the “Wave” that fans used to do at the ballpark, but Moyers thinks of it in electrical terms. Some die-hards are trying “reinforcements.”
Number 4 requires a warning and an understanding of a new definition. The definition is supplied as an Addendum to the Doublespeak Dictionary, South End Press, 1992: “ANTI-SEMITISM: Formerly, prejudice against Jews; currently, hostility to Israel, Israeli actions, and/or Israeli Leaders. In the modern world many who fit into the older version of anti-Semite are now very fond of Israel (e.g., Jerry Falwell) and hence are no longer anti-Semites.” -- Edward S. Herman
1) Bill Moyers. On Media
*BILL MOYERS: *Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.
‘Liberty,’ he said, ‘is a well-armed lamb, contesting the vote.’
1)
Bill Moyers
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 in America. I
salute the conviction that brought you here. I cherish the spirit that
fills this hall, and the comradery that we share here. All too often,
the greatest obstacle to reform is the reform movement itself. Factions
rise, fences are erected, jealousies mount, and the cause all of us
believe in is lost in the shattered fragments of what once was a clear
and compelling vision.
Reformers, in fact, often remind me of Baptists. I speak as a Baptist. I know whereof I speak. One of my favorite stories is of the fellow who was about to jump off a bridge, when another fellow ran up to him crying, ‘Stop, stop, don’t do it.’
The man on the bridge looks down and asks, ‘Why not’’
‘Well, there’s much to live for.’
‘What for’’
‘Well, your faith. Your religion.’
‘Yes’’
‘Are you religious’’
‘Yes.’
‘Me, too. Christian or Buddhist’’
‘Christian.’
‘Me, too. Are you Catholic or Protestant’’
‘Protestant.’
‘Me, too. Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian’’
‘Baptist.’
‘Me, too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Savior’’
‘Baptist Church of God.’
‘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 1879, or
Reform Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1917’’
‘1917.’
Whereupon, the second fellow turned red in the face and yelled, ‘Die, you heretic scum,’ and pushed him off the bridge.
Doesn’t that sound like a reform movement’ But by avoiding contentious factionalism, you have created a strong movement. And I will confess to you that I was skeptical when Bob McChesney and John Nichols first raised with me 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 any measurable force’ It seemed inexorable, because all over the previous decades, a series of megamedia mergers have swept the country, each deal bigger than the last. The lobby representing the broadcast, cable, and newspapers industry was 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 conglomerations in the world. Goliaths, whose handful of owners controlled, commodified, and monetized everyone and everything in sight. Call it ‘the plantation mentality.’
That’s what struck me as I flew into Memphis for this gathering. 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 ground-breaking legislation of the 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 people whose rights were still being trampled by an ownership class that had arranged the world for its own benefit. The plantation mentality is a phenomenon deeply insinuated in the American experience early on, and it has permeated and corrupted our course as a nation.
The journalist of the American Revolution, Thomas Payne, envisioned the new republic as a community of occupations, prospering by the aid with which each receives from the other and from the whole. But that vision was repeatedly betrayed, so that less than a century after Thomas Payne’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 line-up in this crisis is one that cuts deep to the foundations of democracy.’
‘Our democracy,’ he said, ‘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 property rights. The parting of the ways has come.’
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. Too 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 security for a lifetime’s work. We are racially segregated today in every meaningful sense, except for the letter of the law. And the 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 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 the power in favor of the powerful. In fact, nearly all the wealth America created over the past 25 years has been captured by the top 20% of households, and most of the gains went to the wealthiest. The top 1% of households captured more than 50% of all the gains in financial wealth, and these households now hold more than twice the share their predecessors held on the eve of the American revolution.
The anti-Federalist warning that government naturally works to fortify the conspiracies of the rich, proved prophetic. It’s the truth today, and America confronts a choice between two fundamentally different economic visions. As Norman Garfinkel writes in his marvelous new book, /The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth/, the historic vision of the American dream is that continuing economic growth and political stability can be achieved by supporting income growth and economic security of middle-class families, without restricting the ability of successful business men to gain wealth.
The counter-belief is that providing maximum financial rewards to the
most successful is the way to maintain high economic growth. The choice
cannot be avoided. What kind of economy do we seek, and what kind of
nation do we wish to be’ Do we want to be a country in which the rich
get richer and the poor get poorer, or do we want a country committed to
an economy that provides for the common good, offers upward mobility,
supports a middle class standard of living, and provides generous
opportunities for all’
In Garfinkel’s book, ‘When,’ Garfinkel says, ‘the richest nation in the world has to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay its bill, when its middle class citizens sit on a mountain of debt to maintain their living standards, when the nation’s economy has difficulty producing secure jobs, or enough jobs of any kind, something is amiss.’
You bet something is amiss, and it goes to the core of why we are here in Memphis. For this conference is about a force, the media, that cuts deep to the foundation of democracy. When Teddy Roosevelt dissected what he called ‘the real masters of the reactionary forces’ in his time, he concluded that indirectly or directly, they control the majority of the great newspapers that are against us. Those newspapers, the dominant media of the day, choked—his words—the channels of the information ordinary people needed to understand what was being done to them.
And today, two basic pillars of American society, shared economic prosperity and a public sector capable of serving the common good, are crumbling. The third pillar of American democracy, an independent press, is under sustained attack, and the channels of information are choked. A few huge corporations now dominate the media landscape in America. Almost all the networks carried by most cable systems are owned by one of the major media common conglomerates. Two thirds of today’s newspapers are monopolies.
As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and to shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to establishment views than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people.
What does today’s media system mean for the notion of an informed public cherished by democratic theory’ Quite literally, it means that virtually everything the average person sees or hears outside of her own personal communications, is determined by the interests of private, unaccountable executives and investors whose primary goal is increasing profits and raising the country’s share price. More insidiously, this small group of elites determine what ordinary people do not see or hear. In-depth coverage of anything, let alone the problems real people face day to day, is as scarce as sex, violence, and voyeurism are pervasive.
Successful business model or not, by democratic standards, this is censorship of knowledge by monopolization of the means of information. In its current form, which Barry Diller happily describes as ‘oligopoly,’ media growth has one clear consequence. There is more information and easier access to it, but it’s more narrow and homogenous in content and perspective, so that what we see from the couch is overwhelmingly a view from the top. The pioneering communications scholar, Mary Edelman, wrote that opinions about public policy do not spring immaculately or automatically into people’s minds. They are always placed there by the interpretations of those who most consistently get their claims and manufactured cues publicized widely.
For years, the media marketplace for opinions about public policy has been dominated by a highly disciplined, thoroughly networked, ideological noise machine, to use David Brock’s term. Permeated with slogans concocted by big corporations, their lobbyists, and their think tank subsidiaries, public discourse has effectively changed the meaning of American values. Day after day, the ideals of fairness and liberty and mutual responsibility have been stripped of their essential dignity and meaning in people’s lives. Day after day, the egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is trampled underfoot by hired experts and sloganeers, who speak of the ‘death tax,’ ‘the ownership society,’ ‘the culture of life,’ ‘the liberal assault on God and family,’ ‘compassionate conservatism,’ ‘weak on terrorism,’ ‘the end of history,’ ‘the clash of civilizations,’ ‘no child left behind.’ They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war into a ‘surge,’ as if it were a current of electricity through a wire, instead of blood spurting from the ruptured vein of a soldier.
The Orwellian filigree of a public sphere in which language conceals reality, and the pursuit of personal gain and partisan power is wrapped in rhetoric that turns truth to lies, and lies to truth, so it is that limited government has little to do with the Constitution or local economy anymore. Now it means corporate domination and the shifting of risk from government and business to struggling families and workers. Family values now mean imposing a sectarian definition of the family on everyone else. Religious freedom now means majoritarianism and public benefits for organized religion without any public burdens. And patriotism has come to mean blind support for failed leaders.
It’s what happens when an interlocking media system filters through commercial values or ideology, the information and moral viewpoints people consume in their daily lives. And by no stretch of the imagination can we say today that the dominant institutions of our media are guardians of democracy.
Despite the profusion of new information platforms on cable, on the Internet, on radio, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and MySpace, among others, the resources for solid, original journalistic work, both investigative and interpretative, are contracting, rather than expanding.
I’m an old-fashioned—I’m a fogy at this, I guess, a hangover from my days as a cub reporter and a newspaper publisher. But I agree with Michael Schudson, one of the leading scholars of communication in America, who writes in the current /Columbia Journalism Review/ that while all media matter, some matter more than others. And for the sake of democracy, print still counts most, especially print that devotes resources to gathering news.
‘Network TV matters,’ he said. ‘Cable TV matters,’ he said.
But when it comes to original investigation and reporting, newspapers are overwhelmingly the most important media.
But newspapers are purposely dumbing-down, ‘driven down,’ says Schudson, by Wall Street, whose collective devotion to an informed citizenry is nil and seems determined to eviscerate those papers.
Worrying about the loss of real news is not a romantic cliché of journalism. It’s been verified by history. From the days of royal absolutism to the present, the control of information and knowledge had been the first line of defense for failed regimes facing democratic unrest. The suppression of parliamentary dissent during Charles I’s eleven years of tyranny in England rested largely on government censorship, operating through strict licensing laws for the publication of books.
The Federalist infamous Sedition Act of 1798 in this country, likewise, sought to quell republican insurgency by making it a crime to publish false, scandalous, and malicious writing about the government or its officials. In those days, our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic information with the blunt instruments of the law: padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular war time exceptions, the courts and the Constitution have struck those weapons out of their hand.
But now they have found new methods in the name of national security and
even broader claims of executive privilege. The number of documents
stamped ‘Top Secret,’ ‘Secret,’ or ‘Confidential’ has accelerated
dramatically since 2001, including many formerly accessible documents
which are now reclassified as ‘Secret.’ Vice President Cheney’s office
refuses to disclose, in fact, what it is classifying. Even their secrecy
is being kept a secret. Beyond what is officially labeled
‘Secret’ or ‘privileged’ information, there hovers on the plantation a culture of selective official news implementation, working through favored media insiders to advance political agendas by leak and innuendo and spin, by outright propaganda mechanisms, such as the mis-named public information offices that churn out blizzards of factually selective releases on a daily basis, and even by directly paying pundits and journalists to write on subjects of mutual interest.
They needn’t have wasted the money. As we saw in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the plantation mentality that governs Washington turned the press corps into sitting ducks for the war party, for government, and neoconservative propaganda and manipulation. There were notable exceptions, Knight Ridder’s bureau, for example, but on the whole, all high-ranking officials had to do was say it, and the press repeated it until it became gospel. The height of myopia came with the admission—or was it bragging’—by one of the beltway’s most prominent anchors that his responsibility is to provide officials a forum to be heard, what they say more newsworthy than what they do.
The watchdog group FAIR found that during the three weeks leading up to the invasion, only 3% of U.S. sources on the evening news of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and PBS expressed skeptical opinions of the impending war, even though a quarter of the American people were against it. Not surprisingly, two years after 911, almost 70% of the public still thought it likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the terrorist attacks of that day.
One Indiana school teacher told the /Washington Post/, ‘From what we’ve heard from the media, it seems what they feel is that Saddam and the whole al-Qaeda thing are connected.’ Much to the advantage of the Bush administration, a large majority of the public shared this erroneous view during the build-up to the war, a propaganda feat that Saddam himself would have envied.
It is absolutely—I’m doing a documentary to air this spring called /Buying the War/ on this period, leading up to the invasion—it is absolutely stunning, frightening how the major media organizations were willing, even solicitous, hand puppets of a state propaganda campaign, cheered on by the partisan ideological press to go to war.
But there are many other ways the plantation mentality keeps the American people from confronting reality. Take the staggering growth of money in politics. Compared to the magnitude of the problem, what the average person knows about how money determines policy is negligible. In fact, in the abstract, the polls tell us, most people generally assume that money controls our political system. But people will rarely act on something they understand only in the abstract. It took a constant stream of images—water hoses, and dogs and churches ablaze—for the public at large finally to understand what was happening to black people in the south. It took repeated scenes of destruction in Vietnam before the majority of Americans saw how we were destroying the country in order to save it. And it took repeated crime scene images to maintain public support for many policing and sentencing policies.
Likewise, people have to see how money and politics actually worked and concretely grasped the consequences for their pocketbooks and their lives before they will act. But while media organizations supply a lot of news and commentary, they tell us almost nothing about who really wags the system and how.
When I watch one of those faux debates on a Washington public affairs
show, with one politician saying, ‘This is a bad bill,’ and the other
politician saying, ‘This is a good bill,’ I yearn to see the smiling,
nodding, beltway anchor suddenly interrupt and insist, ‘Good bill or bad
bill, this is a bought bill. Now, let’s cut to the chase. Whose
financial interests are you advancing with this bill’’
Then there’s the social cost of free trade. For over a decade, free trade has hovered over the political system like a biblical commandment striking down anything: trade unions, the environment, indigenous rights, even the constitutional standing of our own laws passed by our elected representative that gets in the way of unbridled greed. The broader negative consequences of this agenda, increasingly well-documented by scholars, gets virtually no attention in the dominant media. Instead of reality, we get optimistic, multicultural scenarios of coordinated global growth. And instead of substantive debate we get a stark formulated choice between free trade to help the world and gloomy-sounding protectionism that will set everyone back.
The degree to which this has become a purely ideological debate, devoid of any factual basis that people can weigh the gains and losses is reflected in Thomas Friedman’s astonishing claim, stated not long ago in a television interview, that he endorsed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) without even reading it. That is simply because it stood for ‘free trade.’
We have reached the stage when the Poo-bahs of punditry have only to declare that ‘the world is flat,’ for everyone to agree it is, without going to the edge and looking over themselves. It’s called reporting.
I think what’s happened is not indifference or laziness or incompetence,
but the fact that most journalists on the plantation have so
internalized conventional wisdom that they simply accept that the system
is working as it should. That documentary I told you about, /Buying the
War/, I can’t tell you again how many reporters have told me that it
just never occurred to them that high officials would manipulate
intelligence in order to go to war. Hello’
Similarly, the question of whether or not our economic system is truly just, is off the table for investigation and discussion, so that alternative ideas, alternative critiques, alternative visions never get a hearing. And these are but a few of the realities that are obscured.
What about this growing inequality’ What about the resegregation of our
public schools’ What about the devastating onward march of environmental
deregulation, all examples of what happens when independent sources of
knowledge and analysis are so few and far between on the plantation’
So if we need to know what is happening, and big media won’t tell us; if we need to know why it matters, and big media won’t tell us; if we need to know what to do about it, and big media won’t tell us, it’s clear what we have to do. We have to tell the story ourselves. And this is what the plantation owners feared most of all. Over all those decades here in the South, when they used human beings as chattel, and quoted scripture to justify it, property rights over human rights was God’s way, they secretly lived in fear that one day, instead of saying, ‘Yes, Massa,’ those gaunt, weary, sweat-soaked field hands, bending low over the cotton under the burning sun, would suddenly stand up straight, look around, see their sweltering and stooping kin and say, ‘This ain’t the product of intelligent design. The boss man in the big house has been lying to me. Something is wrong with this system.’ This is the moment freedom begins, the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story, and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
When the garbage workers struck here in 1968, and the walls of these buildings echoed with the cry, “I am a man,” they were writing this story. Martin Luther King came here to help them tell it, only to be shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The bullet killed him, but it couldn’t kill the story, because once the people start telling their story, you can’t kill it anymore.
So I’m back where I started with you, and where this movement is headed. The greatest challenge to the plantation mentality of the media giants is the innovation and expression made possible by the digital revolution. I may still prefer the newspaper for its investigative journalism and in-depth analysis, but we now have it in our means to tell a different story from big media, our story. The other story of America that says, free speech is not just corporate speech. That news is not just what officials tell us. And we are not just chattel in the fields living the boss man’s story. This is the great gift of the digital revolution, and you must never, never let them take it away from you. The Internet, cell phones and digital cameras that can transmit images over the Internet makes possible a nation of story tellers, every citizen a Tom Payne. Let the man in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue think that over, and the woman of the House on Capitol Hill. And the media moguls in their chalets at Sun Valley, gathered to review the plantation’s assets and multiply them, nail it to their door. They no longer own the copyright to America’s story. It’s not a top-down story anymore. Other folks are going to write this story from the ground up. And the truth will be out that the media plantation, like the cotton plantation of old, is not divinely sanctioned. It’s not the product of natural forces. The media system we have been living under for a long time now was created behind closed doors where the power brokers met to divvy up the spoils.
Bob McChesney has eloquently reminded us through the years how each medium—radio, television, and cable—was hailed as a technology that would give us greater diversity of voices, serious news, local programs, and lots of public service for the community. In each case, the advertisers took over.
Despite what I teasingly told you the last time we were together in St. Louis, the star that shines so brightly in the firmament the year I was born, 1934, did not, I regret to say, appear over that little house in Hugo, Oklahoma. It appeared over Washington when Congress enacted the 1934 Communications Act. One hundred times in that cornerstone of our communications policy, you will read the phrase ‘public interests, convenience, and necessity.’
I can’t tell you reading about those days: educators, union officials, religious leaders, parents were galvanized by the promise of radio as a classroom for the air, serving the life of the country and the life of the mind ‘ until the government cut a deal with the industry to make sure nothing would threaten the already vested interests of powerful radio networks and the advertising industry. And soon, the public largely forgot about radio’s promise, as we accepted the entertainment produced and controlled by Jell-O, Maxwell House, and Camel cigarettes. What happened to radio, happened to television, and then it happened to cable; and if we are not diligent, it will happen to the Internet. Powerful forces are at work now, determined to create our media future for the benefit of the plantation. Investors, advertisers, owners, and the parasites who depend on their indulgence, including many in the governing class.
Old media acquire new media and /vice versa/. Rupert Murdoch, forever savvy about the next key outlet that will attract eyeballs, purchased MySpace, spending nearly $600 million, so he could, in the language of Wall Street, monetize those eyeballs. Goggle became a partner in Time Warner, investing $1 billion in its AOL online service. And now Goggle has bought YouTube, so it would have a better vehicle for delivering interactive ads for Madison Avenue. Viacom, Microsoft, large ad agencies, and others have been buying up key media properties, many of them the leading online sites, with a result that will be a thoroughly commercialized environment, a media plantation for the 21st century, dominated by the same corporate and ideological forces that have produced the system we have lived under the last 50 years.
So what do we do’ Well, you’ve shown us what we have to do. And twice now, you have shown us what we can do. Four years ago, when FCC Commissioner Michael Powell and his ideological sidekicks decided it was ok for a single corporation to own a community’s major newspapers, three of its TV stations, eight radio stations, its cable TV system, and its major broadband Internet provider, you said ‘Enough’s enough!’ Free Press, Common Cause, Consumer’s Union, Media Access Project, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and others working closely with commissioners Adelstein and Copps, two of the most public, spirited members of that commission ever to sit there, you organized public hearings across the country where people spoke up deeply felt opinions about how poorly the media was serving their towns. You flooded Congress with petitions and you never let up. And when the court said Powell had to back off for then, the decision cited the importance of involving the public in these media decisions.
Incidentally, Powell not only backed off, he backed out. He left the commission to become senior advisor at a private investment firm specializing in equity investments in media companies around the world. And that firm, by the way, made a bid to take over both Tribune and Clear Channel, two media companies, that just a short time ago, were under the corporate-friendly purview of—you guessed it—Michael Powell. That whooshing sound you hear is Washington’s perpetually revolving door through which they come to serve the public and through which they leave to join the plantation.
You made a difference. You showed the public cares about media and democracy. You turned a little publicized vote, little publicized because big media didn’t want the people to know, a little publicized and seemingly arcane regulation into a big political fight and a public debate. Now it’s true, as commissioner Copps has reminded us, that since that battle three years ago, there have been more than 3, 300 TV and radio TV stations that have had their assignment and transfer grants approved, so that even under the old rules, consolidation grows, localism suffers, and diversity dwindles.
It’s also true that even as we speak, Michael Powell’s successor, Kevin Martin, put there by George W. Bush, is ready to take up where Powell left off and give the green light to more conglomeration. Get ready to fight.
But then you did it again more recently. You lit a fire under the people to put Washington on notice that it had to guarantee the Internet’s First Amendment protection in the $85 billion merger of AT&T and BellSouth. Because of you, the so-called Internet neutrality, I much prefer to call it the ‘equal-access provision of the Internet’— neutrality makes me think of Switzerland—the equal-access provision became a public issue that once again reminded the powers-that-be that people want the media to foster democracy not to quench it. This is crucial. This is crucial, because in a few years, virtually all media will be delivered by high-speed broadband. And without equality of access, the net can become just like cable television where the provider decides what you see and what you pay. After all, the Bush Department of Justice had blessed the deal last October without a single condition or statement of concern. But they hadn’t reckoned with Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, and they hadn’t reckoned with this movement. Free Press and SaveTheInternet.com <http://www.savetheinternet.com> orchestrated 800 organizations, a million and a half petitions, countless local events, legions of homemade videos, smart collaboration with allies and industry, and a top shelf communications campaign. Who would have imagined that sitting together in the same democratic broadband pew would be the Christian Coalition, Gun Owners of America, Common Cause, and MoveOn.org <http://www.moveon.org>‘ Who would have imagined that these would link arms with some of the powerful new media companies to fight for the Internet’s First Amendment’ We owe a tip of the hat, of course, to Republican commissioner Robert McDowell. Despite what must have been a great deal of pressure from his side, he did the honorable thing and recused himself from the proceedings because of a conflict of interest. He might well have heard the roar of the public that you helped to create.
So AT&T had to cry ‘uncle’ to Copps and Adelstein, with a ‘voluntary commitment to honor equal access for at least two years.’ The agreement marks the first time that the federal government has imposed true neutrality—oops, equality ‘ on an Internet access provider since the debate erupted almost two years ago. I believe you changed the terms of the debate. It is no longer about whether equality of access will govern the future of the Internet. It’s about when and how. It also signals a change from defense to offense for the backers of an open net. Arguably the biggest, most effective online organizing campaign ever conducted on a media issue, can now turn to passing good laws, rather than always having to fight to block bad ones. Just this week Senator Byron Dorgan, a Democrat, and Senator Olympia Snow, a Republican, introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2007 to require fair and equitable access to all content. And over in the House, that champion of the public interests, Ed Markey, is once again standing there waiting to press the battle.
But a caveat here. Those other folks don’t give up so easy. Remember, this agreement is only for two years, and they will be back with all the lobbyists money can hire. As the Washington Post follows George Bush into the black hole of Baghdad, the press in Washington won’t be covering many stories like this because of priorities.
Further caveat, consider what AT&T got in the bargain. For giving up on neutrality, it got the green light from government to dominate over 67 million phonelines in 22 states, almost 12 million broadband users, and total control over Cingular Wireless, the country’s largest mobile phone company with 58 million cell phone users. It’s as if China swallowed India.
I bring this up for a reason. Big media is ravenous. It never gets enough. Always wants more. And it will stop at nothing to get it. These conglomerates are an empire, and they are imperial. Last week on his website, MediaChannel.org <http://www.mediachannel.org>, Danny Schechter recalled how some years ago he marched with a band of media activists to the headquarters of all the big media companies concentrated in the Times Square area. Their formidable buildings strutted with logos and limos, and guarded by rent-a-cops, projected their power and prestige. Danny and his cohorts chanted and held up signs calling for honest news and an end to exploited programming. They called for diversity and access for more perspectives.
‘It felt good,’ Danny said, ‘but it seemed like a fool’s errand. We were ignored, patronized and marginalized. We couldn’t shake their edifices or influence their holy business models. We seemed to many like that lonely and forlorn nut in a /New Yorker/ cartoon carrying an ‘End of the World is Near’ placard.’
Well, yes, my friends, that is exactly how they want you to feel. As if media and democracy is a fool’s errand. To his credit, Danny didn’t give up. He’s never given up. Neither have the early pioneers of this movement: Andy Swartzman, Don Hazen, Jeff Chester. I confess that I came very close not to making this speech today, in favor of just getting up here and reading from this book, /Digital Destiny/, by my friend and co-conspirator, Jeff Chester. Take my word for it. Make this your bible, until McChesney’s new book comes out. As Don Hazen writes in his review in AlterNet this week, ‘It’s a terrific book. A respectful, loving, fresh, intimate conversation, comprehensive history of the struggles for a democratic media. The lost fights, the opportunities missed, and the small victories that have kept the corporate media system from having complete /carte blanche/ over the communication channels.’
It’s also a terrifying book, because Jeff describes how we are being
shadowed online by a slew of software digital gumshoes, working for
Madison Avenue. Our movements in cyberspace are closely tracked and
analyzed, and interactive advertising infiltrates our consciousness to
promote the brand-washing of America. Jeff asks the hard questions: Do
we really want television sets that monitor what we watch’ Or an
Internet that knows what sites we visit and reports back to advertising
companies’ Do we really want a media system designed mainly for Madison
Avenue’
But this is a hopeful book. ‘After scaring the bejeezus out of us,’ as one reviewer wrote, ‘Jeff offers a policy agenda for the broadband era.
Here is a man who practices what the Italian philosopher Gramsci called
the ‘pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will.’ He sees
the world as it is, without rose-colored glasses and tries to change it,
despite what he knows’
So you’ll find here the core of the movement’s mission. You’ll agree with much and disagree with some. But that’s what a reform movement is about. Media reform—yes. But the Project in Excellence concluded in its State of the Media Report for 2006, ‘At many old media companies, though not in all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over. The idealists have lost. The commercial networks are lost, too, lost to silliness, farce, cowardice, and ideology.’ Not much hope there. You can’t raise the dead.
Policy reform, yes. ‘But,’ says Jeff, ‘we will likely see more consolidation of ownership with newspapers, TV stations, and major online properties in fewer hands.’
‘So,’ he says, ‘we have to find other ways to ensure the public has access to diverse, independent, and credible sources of information.’ That means going to the market to find support for stronger independent media. Michael Moore and others have proven that progressivism doesn’t have to equal penury. It means helping protect news-gathering from predatory forces. It means fighting for more participatory media, hospitable to a full range of expression. It means building on Lawrence Lessig’s notion of the ‘creative common’ and Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archives with his philosophy of universal access to all knowledge.
It means bringing broadband service to those many millions of Americans too poor to participate so far in the digital revolution. It means ownership and participation for people of color and women. And let me tell you, it means reclaiming public broadcasting and restoring it to its original feisty, robust, fearless mission as an alternative to the dominant media, offering journalism you can afford and can trust, public affairs of which you are a part, and a wide range of civic and cultural discourse that leaves no one out.
You can have an impact here. For one thing, we need to remind people that the federal commitment to public broadcasting in this country is about $1.50 per capita, compared to $28 to $85 per capita in other democracies.
But there is something else I want you to think about. Something else you can do. And I’m going to let you in here on one of my fantasies.
Keep it to yourself, if you will, because fantasies are private matters,
and mine involves Amy Goodman. But I’ll just ask C-SPAN to bleep this
out and’ Oh, shucks, what’s the use. Here it is. In moments of revelry,
I imagine all of you returning home to organize a campaign to persuade
your local public television station to start airing /Democracy Now!/
I can’t think of a single act more likely to remind people of what public broadcasting should be, or that this media reform conference really means business. We’ve got to get alternative content out there to people, or this country is going to die of too many lies.
And the opening rundown of news on Amy’s daily show is like nothing else on any television, corporate or public. It’s as if you opened the window in the morning and a fresh breeze rolls over you from the ocean. Amy doesn’t practice trickle-down journalism. She goes where the silence is, and she breaks the sound barrier. She doesn’t buy the Washington protocol that says the truth lies somewhere in the spectrum of opinion between the Democrats and the Republicans.
On /Democracy Now!/ the truth lies where the facts are hidden, and Amy digs for them. And above all, she believes the media should be a sanctuary for dissent, the underground railroad, tunneling beneath the plantation. So go home and think about it. After all, you are the public in public broadcasting and not just during pledge breaks. You live there, and you can get the boss man at the big house to pay attention.
Meanwhile, be vigilant about the congressional rewrite of the Telecommunications Act that is beginning as we speak. Track it day by day and post what you learn far and wide, because the decisions made in this session of Congress will affect the future of all media, corporate and noncommercial, and if we lose the future now, we’ll never get it back.
So you have your work cut out for you. I’m glad you’re all younger than me and up to it. I’m glad so many funders are here, because while an army may move on its stomach, this movement requires hard, cold cash to compete with big media in getting the attention of Congress and the people.
I’ll try to do my part. Last time we were together, I said to you that I should put my detractors on notice. They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair. Well, in April, I will be back with a new weekly series called /Bill Moyers’ Journal/, thanks to some of the funders in this room. We’ll take no money from public broadcasting because it compromises you even when you don’t intend it to - or they don’t intend it to. I hope to complement the fine work of colleagues like David Brancaccio of /NOW/, and David Fanning of /Frontline/, who also go for the truth behind the news.
But I don’t want to tease you. I’m not coming back because of detractors. I wouldn’t torture them that way. I’ll leave that to Dick Cheney. I’m coming back, because it’s what I do best. Because I believe television can still signify, and I don’t want you to feel so alone. I’ll keep an eye on your work. You are to America what the Abolition Movement was, and the Suffragette Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. You touch the soul of democracy. It’s not assured you will succeed in this fight. The armies of the Lord are up against mighty hosts. But as the spiritual sojourner Thomas Merton wrote to an activist grown weary and discouraged, protesting the Vietnam War, “Do not depend on the hope of results. Concentrate on the value and the truth of the work itself.’
And in case you do get lonely, I’ll leave you with this. As my plane was circling Memphis the other day, I looked out across those vast miles of fertile soil that once were plantations, watered by the Mississippi River, and the sweat from the brow of countless men and women, who had been forced to live somebody else’s story. I thought about how in time, with a lot of martyrs, they rose up, one here, then two, then many, forging a great movement that awakened America’s conscience and brought us closer to the elusive but beautiful promise of the Declaration of Independence. As we made our last approach, the words of a Marge Piercy poem began to form in my head, and I remembered all over again why I was coming and why you were here:
/What can they do
to you’ Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t blame them
from doing. How can you stop
them’ Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
/
/But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.
/
/Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organisation. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more. /
Thank you.
ZNet | Economy
*The Boiling, Surging, Churning and Corporatizing Economy of the
United States *
2)
by Ralph Nader; Common Dreams; January 17, 2007
The boiling, surging, churning and corporatizing economy of the United States is racing far ahead of its being understood by political economists, economists, politicians and the polis itself. Tidbits from the past week add up to this view, to wit:
--The giant, shut-down Bethlehem steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania will soon become a $600 million casino and hotel complex. With tens of millions of Americans lacking the adequate necessities of food, fuel, shelter, health care and a sustaining job, this project is part of a 25 year trend by the economy, moving away from necessities and over to wants and whims. Among the fastest growing businesses for three decades in America are theme parks, gambling casinos and prisons.
--Our Constitution launched “we the people” to “establish justice, .promote the general welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves.” We’re losing ground year after year on all three accounts. Yet to what does Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. devote his /entire/ annual report on the federal judiciary this January 1, 2007? He called for a pay raise for judges, calling the current pay ranging from $165,200 to $212,000 (with a great retirement plan) a “constitutional crisis.”
--General Motor has introduced yet another prototype electric car-called the Chevrolet Volt-to distract attention from its ongoing engine stagnation and provide a little cover for its gas guzzling muscle cars displayed at the Detroit Auto Show. This procrastinatory tactic by GM has been going on since the 1939 New York World’s Fair to keep people looking far into the amorphous future so as to not focus on the dismal today year after year while gasoline prices sky rocket and oil imports swell. We’re still waiting for some of GM’s engineering prototypes from 1939 to hit the road in the 21^st century.
--Just as there are stirrings behind more shareholder rights over the companies they own and more disclosure by management of large corporations relating to executive pay and accounting information, the rapid rise of huge pools of capital controlled by private equity firms and Hedge Funds are buying larger and larger public companies and taking them out of the regulatory arenas into secrecy.
Corporate morphing to escape public accountability has been
going on for a long time. Note the coal corporations digging
deep under residential streets in Pennsylvania and other
neighboring states decades ago. As the homes began to cave in
(this is called ‘subsidence’), the coal companies disappeared by
collapsing themselves only to be succeeded by their next of
(corporate) kin.
Today, this corporate morphing is far more ranging and far larger in the economy, drawing trillions of dollars from pension funds and institutional investor firms which themselves are largely closed off from workers and small investors whose money they shuffle around. Corporate attorneys are super-experts in arranging ways for corporate capital to escape not just the tax laws of the U.S. but also the public regulatory frameworks of the Securities and Exchange Commission and other public “law and order” entities.
Independent and academic corporate analysts have barely begun to figure out the consequences of this seismic shift of capital structures.
--“Private Firms Lure C.E.O.’s With Top Pay” was the headline in the January 8^th edition of /The New York Times/. The subtitle was astonishingly worded as “Less Lavish Packages at Public Companies.” The reporters go on to say, in essence, if you think that Home Depot’s departed C.E.O., Robert L. Nardelli’s $200 million plus take home pay package was a lot, you haven’t seen what’s happening behind the curtains at the large private equity firms buying up ever bigger public companies. “Public company chieftains are deciding that they no longer want to be judged by their shareholders and regulators, and are going to work for businesses owned by private equity,” write the authors.
One such migrant executive, Henry Silverman, went from big
riches running the conglomerate Cendant, to making $135 million
just from selling one piece of Cendant, Realogy, to a private
equity firm. “There is no reason to be a public company
anymore,” said this happy corporate prophet.
Now go to the other side of the tracks. In the last quarter century the value of the U.S. corporations has risen 12-fold, according to /The Wall Street Journal. /C.E.O. pay has skyrocketed similarly. But workers today, on average, are still making less, in inflation adjusted dollars, than workers made in 1973-the high point of worker wages!
Citing data from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, /New York// Times’/ columnist, Bob Herbert, reports that between 2000 and 2006 the combined real annual earnings of 93 million American workers rose by $15.4 billion. That rise is “less than half of the combined bonuses awarded by the five Wall Street firms for just one year.”
Class warfare in reverse is what’s going on. The super rich and
their corporations against the workers, redistributing the
workers’ wealth into their own pockets and coffers. Mr. Herbert
frequently frets about no one in the political parties saying or
doing anything about this state of despair. He defines
“political parties” as the two major Parties, though knowing
full well that there are smaller parties and independent
candidates who have campaigned across the country trumpeting the
need for economic justice in very specific terms.
So long as most progressive writers ignore these people in the electoral arenas who are laboring to break down the barriers that keep these issues of economic justice over corporate power abuses from moving into elections and government, they will be bellowing in the wind.
Social justice movements in the United States have come from small starts that are duly recognized.
3)
ZNet | Iraq
Beyond the Surge: Demanding an End to Bush’s War
by Yifat Susskind; January 14, 2007
Wednesday night, Bush the Decider announced his intention to throw gasoline on the inferno he ignited in Iraq. He will send in another 21,500 US soldiers, who will kill and injure many more Iraqis and may be killed themselves. Bush’s move shows total contempt for the demands of public opinion and the better judgment of Congress, the Iraq Study Group, and his own top generals (two of whom had to be replaced in order to push the plan through). This decision is not just “stay the course.” It is speed up the course even though you’re headed straight off a cliff.
Bush warned in his speech that a US withdrawal from Iraq would
“tear that country apart” and result in “mass killings on an
unimaginable scale.” What does he think we’ve seen over the past
four years? He also spoke as if everybody in the Middle East is
watching with bated breath, praying for a US victory in Iraq.
Someone should tell him that many otherwise reasonable people in
the Middle East are now busy painting murals of Saddam Hussein.
Bush managed to turn the Iraqi dictator into a martyr by
delivering him to the sectarian lynch mob that he calls the
government of Iraq.
Most Democrats’ response to Bush’s speech was a chilling reminder of how far to the right the political center has lurched. Official Democratic opinion vacillated between two options. The first is to continue to “help the Iraqis.” So far US “help” has killed well over half a million people, destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, ignited a civil war, and transformed the country from a brutal, but highly functional, secular state into a brutal, totally dysfunctional Islamist theocracy.
The second option is to compel Iraqis to “take responsibility” for the lack of security, the marauding militias, and the crisis-level shortages of electricity, water, and housing that so many Iraqi families face. But all of these things are squarely the responsibility of the United States, which pummeled Iraq with 16 years of war and sanctions; propelled reactionary religious fanatics into power; and gave training, money, and weapons to the Shiite militias that are now prosecuting the civil war. The Democrats’ condescending admonitions to Iraqis to “take responsibility” are more accurately called blaming the victim.
What the Democrats should have been saying in response is that another 21,500 troops will not defeat the insurgency or quell the civil war. The “surge” will merely bring the total number of troops to about what it was last November—the single worst month for Iraqi fatalities. And they should have been saying that another $1 billion in reconstruction money won’t make any difference. Far too much of the first $18.4 billion is now lining the pockets of Dick Cheney’s friends at Halliburton. Besides, it’s hard to reconstruct when you’re being bombed and shot at by insurgents. If the Democrats were really doing their job last night, they would have refocused attention on the real issue, which is not tinkering with troop levels and reconstruction budgets, but ending US involvement in the war. Pursuing that goal, after all, is the reason they were elected in the first place.
So what now? We should demand that Congress take advantage of the hearings scheduled over the next few weeks to really interrogate Bush’s proposal. We should demand that they refuse Bush’s request (expected in February) for another $100 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we should forcefully remind them that it’s not nearly enough to say “no” to a troop increase. There are already 132,000 US soldiers in Iraq. A new Iraq policy must begin by bringing all of them home.
Yifat Susskind is the Communications Director of MADRE, an
international women’s human rights organization. Born in Israel,
and active in the Israeli women’s peace movement for several
years, she has written extensively on US foreign policy and
women’s human rights issues in the Middle East. Ms. Susskind has
been featured as a commentator on CNN, National Public Radio,
and BBC Radio and is the author of a report on US culpability
for violence against women in Iraq, forthcoming.* *
4)
ZNet | Israel/Palestine
*My Israel Question
Australian Jewish author tackles the hard questions*
by Tristan Ewins; January 15, 2007
Antony Loewenstein: My Israel Question, Melbourne University
Press, 2006, 340 pp, /rrp $AUS 32.95/
See: http://myisraelquestion.com
and
http://www.antonyloewenstein.com
In this determined and controversial critique of the role of
Zionist lobbyists in influencing the public sphere, and
exhaustive consideration of the Israeli occupation of the
Palestinian Territories, Antony Loewenstein can be credited with
having produced a truly ground-breaking work. Determined to
‘humanize’ the Palestinian people in the face of attempts to
deny them both sympathy and justice, Loewenstein rejects Zionism
as “an exclusionary and racist national ideology that has always
overlooked the rights of the Palestinians.” While fully
appreciating the anger such words of condemnation are certain to
evoke amongst his own Jewish community, the author is
uncompromising in his depiction of what he sees as a ruthless
and coordinated campaign to set limits upon, and determine the
language of debate surrounding the future of Israel and the
Occupied Territories. Rejecting claims he is a ‘self-hater’ or
apologist for terrorism, Loewenstein is insistent: “Zionism is
not Judaism. Deliberately associating the two is a dishonest
method of silencing anyone who may disagree with either.” He
continues: “Conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with
anti-Semitism...is a strategy intended to stifle criticism and
dissent.” This is an argument that the author maintains
throughout much of the book: an argument that is illuminated by
the stories of Israelis, Diaspora Jews and others who have dared
criticize the Jewish State – some of whom have faced a torrent
of vilification in response.
Recalling attempts by elements of the Zionist lobby to discredit Palestinian peace activist and political figure Hanan Ashrawi after she was awarded Sydney Peace Prize, Loewenstein details what he sees as a stifling and intimidating atmosphere created by the lobby in its attempt to limit debate over the future of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. After receiving tirades of abuse in response to his defense of Ashrawi against claims she was equivocal in the face of terrorism, Loewenstein’s resolve was hardened, and he determined to provide a thorough critique of the forces he saw as being arrayed against the causes of conciliation and peace. According to Loewenstein, Ahsrawi was targeted in a campaign of slander solely because she represented a creditable spokesperson for the Palestinian cause, and because she ardently maintained the right of an oppressed people “to resist occupation and injustice”. The author argues that, in the minds of her detractors, this stand was conflated with support for terrorism, even despite Ashrawi’s resolute condemnation of suicide bombing. Loewenstein’s critique of the ‘Ashrawi affair’ marks the starting point of a fruitful and expansive consideration of the influence of the Zionist lobby worldwide, and of the many varied views of policy makers and members of the world Jewish community both inside and outside of Israel and the Territories.
Perhaps one of the most telling chapters of this title comes
late in the second chapter where Sara Roy argues in quote
provided by Loewenstein,
“In the post-Holocaust world, Jewish memory has faltered – even failed – in one critical respect: it has excluded the reality of Palestinian suffering and Jewish culpability therein. As a people, we have been unable to link the creation of Israel with the displacement of the Palestinians. We have been unable to see, let alone remember, that finding our place meant the loss of theirs.”
In response to the plight of the Palestinians, Loewenstein refers to the notion held by some Israelis that there never was a historical Palestine and that, as a consequence, Palestinians are really “Hashemite Jordanians” – and thus that Palestinians should make their home in Jordan. What emerges is a picture where some on the Israeli right seek to provide a rationale for, or an excuse for policies which really cannot be seen as anything short of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
There were some for whom the choice confronting the Zionist movement was clear even well before the formation of the modern Israeli state. Loewenstein accredits the following quote to Y.Weitz, “head of the Jewish Agency’s colonization department” from 1940;
“Between ourselves it must be made clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country…there is no other way other than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, to transfer all of them: not one village, not one tribe, should be left.”
For Loewenstein, the logic of this statement remains in force
even today. As he argues, “Israel opposes a resolution to the
conflict because it opposes the presence of another people on
land it has claimed exclusively for Jews.” For both the Israeli
mainstream, and radical supporters of the settler movement,
support for expansionism and further disenfranchisement of the
Palestinian people is only marked by differences in degrees: by
disagreement over the extent of the expansion beyond the
pre-1967 borders necessary to build a ‘greater Israel’.
In response to this, there would by many who, as Loewenstein recognizes, would claim that in the 2000 peace talks, former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak offered Arafat ‘everything’ –and that his refusal demonstrated that there was ‘no partner for peace’. Refuting these claims, Loewenstein goes on to argue that the 2000 peace talks provided no resolution to the question of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, with Israel seeking instead to annex great swathes of territory while failing to provide “full legal rights to the annexed Palestinian residents.” Furthermore, Loewenstein maintains that, in the talks, Israel did not provide for East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, instead offering “the adjacent town of Abu-Dis”, and provided no resolution of the question of Palestinian refugees. Also, importantly, there was no recognition of Israeli responsibility for the displacement and suffering of said refugees in the first place: “a central demand of Arafat”. This stands in stark contrast to the treatment of the issue in much of the Western media: which portrayed Arafat as ‘an obstacle to peace’. Loewenstein asks the obvious question: “Why was Arafat’s rejection of the 2000 peace deal rarely presented as anything other than a refusal to accept peace?”.
Alongside his broader critique of the Israeli occupation, Loewenstein subjects the world Zionist lobby to searching criticism, pointing to instances where the lobby has targeted critical voices in the United States, in Britain and also in Australia, reprimanding media for ‘bias’ or, at worst, accusing critics of anti-Semitism. In particular, Loewenstein notes the power of the Zionist lobby in the United States in the form of the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). The situation in the United States, according to Loewenstein, is complex:
“Despite the power of the Zionist lobby, other factors also
shape US support for Israel. They include: the politics of oil;
the arms industry and its influence in Congress; the sentimental
attachment of US liberals to Israel’s internal democratic
institutions; the Christian Right’s messianic beliefs; racist
attitudes towards Arabs and Muslims; and the failure of
progressive movements to challenge US policy on Israel
successfully.”
Despite this complicated picture, however, the author clearly argues that the influence of the Zionist lobby is key, and weighs upon the minds of US policy-makers. In particular, Loewenstein notes how when Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney “questioned the occupation of Palestinian land, Jewish organizations, including the AIPAC, offered financial support to her rival, Denise Majette.”
By contrast with Britain, where critical voices remain prominent through publications such as the /Guardian/ and the /Independent/, Loewenstein sees the Australian public sphere as being closer to that of the US where, according to the /Guardian/, “[The] parameters for debate are relatively narrow compared with the rest of the western world.”
In particular, Loewenstein focuses on the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), which he describes as “the only well-funded Jewish group in the country, and the best organized.” As he argues, AIJAC “takes a high profile stand on many issues, yet is not accountable to the community through elections.” Loewenstein notes how AIJAC lobbied vociferously against the bestowing of the Sydney Peace Prize upon Hanan Ahshrawi. In the face of such lobbying, Loewenstein observes, every corporate sponsor ultimately abandoned the foundation. The author indicates: “the organizations were told their ‘client base’ would be affected if they continued their support”. The author also observes how AIJAC has pressured the Australian Labor Party to silence, or otherwise disassociate itself from dissenting Labor figures such as Julia Irwin, with other backbenchers, who “spoke out in favor of a Palestinian state and against the harshness of the occupation”. Irwin responded to this pressure arguing, “…The Israeli Labor Party tolerates more diverse views than some in the Australian Jewish community suggest the ALP should tolerate…”.
Loewenstein also associates AIJAC with attempts to influence programming of Australian public broadcasters such as the ABC and SBS. Specifically, the author observes a 2003 AIJAC report which objected to “SBS calling the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem ‘occupied Palestinian land.” In this, Loewenstein argues, AIJAC went directly against United Nations Resolution 242 “issued in November 1967, which stresses ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’.” AIJAC has also lobbied SBS to withdraw planned programming, including an attempt to bar the screening of John Pilger’s documentary, ‘Palestine is still the issue’. Furthermore, Loewenstein notes AIJAC’s objections to the screening of a program on the ABCs ‘Four Corners’ criticizing Ariel Sharon’s role “in the massacre in 1982 of more than 2000 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut.” As the author sees it, “In AIJAC’s opinion, any news story that portrays Israel in a critical light is biased, irresponsible and sign of anti-Semitism.”
The author also notes similar episodes in the United States. Apparently, “Robert Fisk revealed in 2001 that CNN, after constant lobbying by pro-settler groups, stopped referring to Gilo as a ‘Jewish settlement’, instead calling it a ‘Jewish neighborhood’. The fact that Gilo is a Jewish suburb illegally occupying land outside Jerusalem mattered little.”
Furthermore, Loewenstein notes a tendency amongst US news programs to refer to “Israeli violence as ‘retaliation’ almost nine times more often than Palestinian violence.” According to Loewenstein, “This disparity is meaningful. The term ‘retaliation’ suggests a defensive stance undertaken in response to someone else’s aggression. It also lays responsibility for the cycle of violence at the doorstep of the party being ‘retaliated’ against, since they presumably initiated the conflict… This inherent bias against the Palestinians, and the journalistic belief that the Israelis are fighting a war inflicted upon them, rather than one of their choosing, is critical to how the public views the conflict.”
By contrast, Loewenstein is supportive of efforts by some in the
media to represent Palestinian voices and perspectives. Against
charges of bias: of anything other than ‘50/50’ coverage of
perspectives, Loewenstein refers to a statement made by
journalist, Robert Fisk. Fisk had argued, “in the realm of warfare…you are morally bound as a journalist
to show eloquent compassion to the victims, to be unafraid to
name the murderers and you’re allowed to be angry…. [In] 1982,
in Sabra and Shatila, I wrote about the victims, the dead who I
physically climbed over and the survivors. I did not give 50
per cent to the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia who
massacred them nor to the Israeli army who watched the murders
and did nothing.”
Fisk’s musings are especially relevant in circumstances where “Mass confiscation of land, acts of collective punishment, arrest without trial and house demolitions [have become] the norm”.
Loewenstein criticizes the practice amongst some journalists of fending off criticism of bias by seeking some illusory ‘balance’ in the reporting of events. In particular he argues, “Too often…accepting ‘official sources’ as accurate, while dismissing dissenting perspectives as unreliable, results in disproportionate emphasis on an establishment perspective and in support for state power…”. Loewenstein’s criticisms and observations are especially poignant given efforts by the Howard Conservative government in Australia to ‘stack’ the ABC board with ultra-conservative political appointees, and its withdrawal of the right of ABC staff to appoint a representative of their own to the ABC board.
Perspectives including those favoring a Two State Solution, and
those favoring a One State or ‘bi-national’ solution, are
presented through the viewpoints of those concerned. One
individual featured in Loewenstein’s narrative: Tony Judt of the
Remarque Institute of New York University argues,
“The true alternative facing the Middle East in the coming years…will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single integrated bi-national state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.”
Unfortunately, though, such perspectives are not developed, nor does Loewenstein provide a broad assessment of competing claims for a Two-State and One-State, or ‘bi-national’ solution.
The ‘bi-national’ solution, here, envisages the creation of a federation, with Israeli and Palestinian republics as member states. Perhaps what many Zionists fear most of all, here, is not simply terrorism, but rather the rise of a peaceful liberal human rights movement in Israel and the Territories: one that demands equal rights of citizenship, and with the changing demographic make-up of the region, threatens the dominance of Jews in the very land they call their own. In particular, Loewenstein notes how, according to Rabin, “if Israel were to hold on to the West Bank permanently”:… if Palestinians were denied the vote “Israel would no longer be a democracy, but an apartheid state.” This is an angle the author appeals to regularly, citing the creation of ‘Jewish only roads’, checkpoints and the ‘security wall’ which he sees as a prelude to future Israeli expansionism. By contrast, should the bi-national movement succeed, it would end all hopes of Israel comprising a purely ‘Jewish state’.
Certainly, all the moral arguments remain on the side of those in favor of the bi-national approach. Envisaging peace and conciliation amongst Israelis and Palestinians, the proposal offers the hope of co-existence and mutual identification with the entire of the land formerly known as Palestine. Also, bi-nationalism offers the prospect of justice for Palestinian refugees.
Nevertheless, there are significant obstacles to such proposals. Most tellingly, Loewenstein notes that “since 1994 more than 700 Israelis have died in more than 120 suicide attacks.” Currently, Israeli hostility to the Palestinians is sharpened by the constant threat of terror attacks, and certainly Hamas still aims to eliminate the state of Israel: as opposed to entertaining notions of a bi-national federation. In order for the bi-national solution to gain greater credibility, therefore, there would need to be a veritable ‘sea change’ of public opinion in the Palestinian Territories: to a perspective that seriously entertained and, in fact, accepted the proposition of sharing the land of historical Palestine with Israel, on the basis of equal rights of citizenship for all. Such a ‘sea change’ of public consciousness would require years of hard work: including a number of good will gestures from the Israelis to show they were serious about a just peace. Dismantlement of the ‘security wall’ and a permanent halt to the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, as well as compensation for and recognition of the grievances of Palestinian refugees, and finally equal citizenship rights afforded to non-Jewish Israeli residents: this could mark the beginning of a protracted peace process which sought to radically change ‘hearts and minds’ on both sides of the Israel/Palestine divide.
It might also be noted that such views as Judt’s seem
unnecessarily dismissive of the prospects of a Two-State
solution which provides full citizenship rights to Palestinians
living within Israel, and recognizes the suffering of refugees,
offering compensation and recognition for those displaced after
the 1948. While a ‘bi-national’ solution may seem an ideal: an
ideal worth working for over the long term, the more immediately
realizable option of a ‘Two State Solution’ should not be ruled
out – especially if it addresses the core grievances of the
Palestinian people.
Importantly, though, should Palestinian recognition of Israel rest upon the acceptance of pre-1967 borders, recognition of the grievances of refugees and the affording of full citizenship rights to all residents of the state of Israel: then it is up to Israel to establish its legal and moral legitimacy in the face of the plight of those people whom it has displaced and dispossessed.
Unfortunately, Loewenstein’s outright rejection of Zionism is likely to alienate those who endure in their commitment to the cause of a Jewish National Home, while at the same time recognizing and addressing the grievances detailed in his book In an interview with refusnik (ie: a conscientious objector against compulsory Israeli military service), Martin Kaminer, Kaminer reflects on the changing definition of Zionism: “Noam Chomsky said the 50 years ago I was called a Zionist and now I’m called an anti-Zionist even though my views haven’t changed.” It is up to those on the Israel Left, and in the Left of the Jewish Diaspora – and all Jews of good conscience – to reject a definition of Zionism that goes beyond the original aim of providing a ‘Jewish National Home’ (which could be interpreted in terms of a bi-national state or otherwise a two state solution) instead embracing the notion of a ‘purely Jewish State’: a state which by its very definition discriminates against non-Jews. There are many in Israel, and around the world, who – already – have taken this step, and the Jewish Left remains a rich source of inspiration for those campaigning for justice. If anything, Israel: a society where “[A] quarter of Israelis now live below the poverty line, and more than half of the Arab households in Israel live in poverty and are discriminated against in their access to education, employment and infrastructure” – ought be seeing a resurgence of Leftist and progressive forces.
All in all, Antony Loewenstein has produced a work that penetrates to the very heart of the question of the Israeli occupation, drawing on a range of sources including interviews with a wide range of journalists, academics, refusniks, activists and other public figures to provide an impressive and critical consideration of the history and future of Israel, of Palestine and of the Zionist movement. For those wishing to come to grips with the issues surrounding the Israeli occupation, and the work of what Loewenstein calls the ‘Zionist lobby’ in framing, limiting and influencing debate on the Middle East, and the role of the United States and Israel in the region, this title makes essential and absorbing reading.
*Tristan Ewins *
/Tristan Ewins is a freelance writer, teacher and member of the
Socialist Left of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) /
