MEDIA ROULETTE
December 3i, 2003
The Last Night of the Year
The little old ladies at the Wall Street Journals really got their knickers in knots yesterday over George Soros, the billionaire who is funding anti-Bush organizations. The idea that someone could use capital for political power does not sit well at all with the venerable institution -- and to not even be a Republican! The idea of anyone lifting a finger toward unseating this fine prince who is taking such good care of the rich and restoring the Old Order, is a betrayal of class. If you have money, it is your duty to stand with the moneyed classes, those who oppress the poor and do everything they can to maintain a position of superiority, with as much space between themselves and the commoners as possible.You can't read the WSJ Soros tantrum unless you are a subscriber. It's classified, as it were, eyes only. But I'll share with you a sample. "The press corps is finally giving billionaire George Soros the attention he deserves as the new Daddy Warbucks of the Democratic Party," sniffles an indignant Journal editor. "Mr. Soros has responded that all he's doing is exercising his own Constitutional right to free speech. We'd agree, except for the detail that the world's 38th richest man (according to Forbes) is using his money to restrict everyone else's freedom."
Imagine that! I wonder what side numbers 1-37 are donating their riches too, and 39-100 too. No doubt most of them are putting their money on the right side of things, the Republican side, as is the Journal.
How, you may ask, does Soros "restrict everyone else's freedom"? The Journal helpfully gives examples. Soros has given to organizations like the Media Access Project, the Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Center for Media Education...." But don't be fooled by their "consumer friendly names," the Journal warns. These fiendish organizations are actually "mouthpieces of liberal wing of the Democratic Party." Oh my God.
He said the L word!
And what have they done to earn this label that is synonymous with Satan in American corporate media folklore? The Media Access Project, for example, tried to "sink FCC Chairman Michael Powell's rules raising ownership caps for broadcasters. How heinously radical! That means they tried to prevent people like Australian Ruppert Murdoch from singlehandedly owning the majority of media a given market, with some other good Republican owning the rest.
Obviously even real conservatives -- fiscal conservatives -- are getting fed up with Bush's colossal mismanagement of the economy. And that is big trouble for the radical right, the corporate elite represented by Bush.
Anyway, tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999, those glorious days before the Bush II nightmare was steamrolled over America and the world. Some other interesting bits that came up today...
Fiscal conservatives are running out of patience with mad dog Bush Washington Times Krugman: "Our So-Called Boom". New York Times Ashcroft recused his own self from the Plame leak investigation. Took him months to get things in order before he could turn the thing over to an underling and make sure all the evidence was well covered. But check this out: In the Washington Post article, Joseph C. Wilson IV is identified as "a prominent critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policies who concluded during a 2002 mission to Africa that there was little evidence that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium there." That makes it sound like he was some critic of Bush who just happened to take this trip to Africa. He went for the CIA at the request of Dick Cheney. Then when he reported back to both the CIA and to the State Department, the Bush administration pretended it never heard his report. Why does the Post soften the report to make it less ugly for the Bush administration? Bush's worst enemy -- Joseph Wilson? Or the truth? Bush is the author of a dark chapter for America. See The Toronto Star. "Much as political analysts and Coalition leaders themselves have warned, the resistance is not likely to ebb any time soon. The question today, however, is whether the resistance will in fact become even more intractable."The resistance will never end," [an insurgent leader] warned confidently. Iraq Today The Way We Live Now -- A man was rescued from being trapped for two days under books and papers in his apartment. Yahoo
January 2, 2004
Willie Nelson wrote a song that challenges Bush: "What Ever Happened To Peace On Earth?" There's so many things going on in the world
Babies dying
Mothers crying
How much oil is one human life worth?
And what ever happened to peace on earth?...And the bewildered herd is still believing
Everything we've been told from our birth
Hell they won't lie to me
Not on my own damn TV
But how much is a liar's word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth?
Read the Reuters report. Read the lyrics on the Dennis Kucinich Web site.
Mark Crispin Miller's new book "Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order" is out.
John Buchanan is a Republican running against Bush for president. His campaign is based on breaking 911 \open. He has scheduled forums and debates in New Hampshire for the next three weeks. His e-mail address is jtwg@bellsouth.net and his phone number is 305.535.9606. Click here for an explanation of SourDove who claims to have predicted 9/11/01 in July 1999 as the date for the catastrophic event that would be used as a pretext for the inevitable oil war. Fascinating reading. Here's a snippet: "I knew in 1980 that some voters recognized the imminence of peak oil and that even teenage voters at the time were aware of Brzezinski's ambitions for global hegemony. After the energy crisis under Carter, millions of young men around the country saw how inevitable a war for oil was becoming, and friends and I used to speculate on how the government could invent a pretext for one. I was told in 1980 that there was a plan for a Bush dynasty... The plan was detailed and feasible, and it made me realize that there are always people looking for the weak points in their own political system, not to fix them but to exploit them. As a result I had twenty years to watch and wonder, before that day in July 1999..." And farther down: "If you had known in 1999 what I knew then, and I had asked you to pick a number with emotional resonance for most U.S. citizens, regardless of age, class, or ethnicity, you wouldn't have many to choose from. Innumeracy is rampant. Cashiers at McDonald's don't count change. Numerology is so Seventies. This leaves you with two numbers that mean something to everyone in the U.S. Y2K was announced a year early, but history will see 2001 as the first year of the millennium, and we need a number with symbolism that lasts. Being the first year of the Bush dynasty, it would likely see damaging revelations about the election, massive looting of the Treasury (remember Silverado!), and a buildup to war in the nations with oil *and geostrategic value*. Between the "Vietnam syndrome" and a healthy suspicion of oil barons who control armies, one hell of a pretext would be called for."
9-11 Relative Sues Bush For Failure To Deport Illegal Aliens and Seal U.S. Borders. tomflocco.com
See MilitaryCity.com for the faces and names of the Americans who have died in Iraq. As my friend Jackie says, "These are the ones whose caskets arrive home in the dark of night, unseen by the public, per the policy of the administration." ROAD DIARY
January 3, 2004
Media DeTox
I spent two days in virtual isolation from the major media. There was no TV, no newpsapers, no Internet. There was a radio. It was a tremendous relief. I listened to a great New Hampshire oldies station with great music, great fidelity, pleasant DJs who actually knew something about the music they played. The only drawback was a few of the ads. Most of the ads were normal local radio ads, but there were a lot of military ads, and they kept playing a really offensive spot featuring Laura Bush.She was doing her First Lady bit, the obligatory act of First Ladies taking up some cause, and the cause she was speaking of was hunger. She was talking about hungry children in America, and was saying that no child should experience hunger, which is all just fine as far as it goes, like motherhood and apple pie. But there was something particularly insidious about her talking about it when her husband's policies have pushed so many Americans into poverty (see MSNBC or BBC), and then for her to offer nothing to solve the problem but an invitation to Americans to volunteer to help out the less fortunate.
Volunteerism is great. It is a powerful force and it can make a lot of difference. But the hypocrisy is that her husband and her cronies are robbing the American people blind with all their war profiteering and "tax cuts" that are really gifts to large corporations that the American taxpayer will have to pay off in years to come.
The other disturbing ads were those ads designed to lure young people to join the reserves. They talk about the reserves in terms of "humanitarian efforts", saving civilians against natural disasters, and then as an afterthought, "defending freedom wherever in the world it's threatened." The pitch is for career training, of course, and it feeds on the same poverty that Bush's policies create. And that is no coincidence. But the invasion of Iraq isn't defending anyone's freedom, except that of the neocons and oil barons.
When I stopped into a convenience store at a Mobil station I got a glimpse of the local newspapers with big headlines like "Terror Fear Grips Nation" and it seemed like just more noise generated by the White House to keep the attention of the media off the crisis the Bush regime is pushing the country into farther and farther every day.
Now back at the computer, here are some good links I've come across:
Three stories posted on Truthout begin to approach the human tragedy of the Americans who are dying in Iraq. The internet is boiling with analyses of the 9/11 event, says the New York Press in "Nine hundred and Eleven Missing Pieces -- What don’t we know, and why don’t we know it?"