Big Media’s monopolistic cravings lead to more corruption at the FCC

If this Common Dreams report on FCC corruption doesn’t make you angry, no media issue will:

Last week, Sen. Barbara Boxer rocked the re-confirmation hearings for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin when she released a suppressed FCC study from 2004 – leaked to her by an FCC whistleblower – that indicated locally owned television stations did far more local news programming than TV stations owned by big conglomerates. A former FCC lawyer acknowledged that agency officials ordered the report and all supporting material be destroyed.

Martin, who was on the FCC in 2004 but not yet its Chairman, said he had no idea the report had been done in the first place and knew nothing about its disappearance. Then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell also claims he knew nothing about it, and, in classic Bush-era fashion, he took no responsibility for what transpired under his command.

In their minds, this was some sort of clerical error — and the sooner everyone forgot about it, the better. The FCC could go back to its time-honored job of doling out tens of billions of dollars in monopoly privileges to massive media and communication firms in relative anonymity.

That PR approach collapsed this week on Monday, Sept. 18, when another repressed FCC study was leaked to Senator Boxer by an FCC whistleblower. This study demonstrated that independent radio ownership plummeted after the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, even though the number of commercial radio stations actually increased. As with the first study, by

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They rule. Really.

To say that the corrupted interests of massive corporations have twisted and perverted the social and political system into a flimsy chessboard sounds, of course, paranoid and highly cynical. No wonder then that casual observers of the democratic process scoff at claims of widespread corporate corruption as an outlandish conspiracy…

Continue ReadingThey rule. Really.

After All We’ve Done For Them, Why Do They Hate Us?

A follow up, answer, another viewpoint…

The title is somewhat rhetorical. Hate–in its undiluted, culturally-disseminated form has only one reason–the perpetuation of local power–for the individual, the power to insist that he/she is right and refuses to countenance criticism, implicit or otherwise; for the state, the power to maintain power in the face of outside insistence on change. . If those against whom the hatred is directed are unfortunate enough not to see how they play into it, then the issue becomes complicated. What we now see in the Middle East and many other parts of the world is a hatred based on local potentates (single rulers, committees, vested interests, or cultural hegemons) desire, need, hunger to maintain a privileged position in their section of the world, something that became more and more untenable int he aftermath of World War ll.

Can that really be? After the decades of beating ourselves (namely, the West, which includes Europe, North America, and certain isolated pockets here and there and may now, paradoxically, include Japan, but certainly includes Australia, and may in time include India…) for our “responsibilities” in causing global problems (such self-recrimination soundly based on the legacies of a colonialist past), maybe it’s time to revisit some of that surplus self-loathing and see where the responsibilities actually lie.

The current exacerbating events of the current mess are all from the same source–the end of the second world war and the onset of the Cold War. Lest we forget, WW ll was …

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U.S. govt again caught journalist-pimping.

Letting the media just do its job just isn't enough for the Bush administration.  It's hard enough to find honest aggressive media when only FIVE corporations now control the majority of all forms of the media in this country (this includes ALL the media: TV, movies, music, newspapers, magazines). So…

Continue ReadingU.S. govt again caught journalist-pimping.

Iraq: the Democrats don’t have a plan or a clue

What does it meant to “lead”?  According to dictionary.com, to “lead” means “to go before or with to show the way; conduct or escort: to lead a group on a cross-country hike.” 

Based on this criterion, the websites of prominent Democrats display a stark lack of leadership on Iraq.  A review of the websites of these Democrat “leaders” shows that they have no plan for dealing with the current occupation of Iraq. 

I’ll cut to the chase.  It seems as though we are headed for a repeat performance of the November 2004 election, where the plan of Democrats was to attack Bush as incompetent.  That strategy will work even less in 2006 than 2004, because Bush is a lame duck, already thinking about packing his cowboy boots to retire to Crawford.  Who cares about your concerns about a guy who is already on the way out?

The Democrats have certainly had lots of time to develop a plan on Iraq. After all, the war has been going as long as WWII, as indicated by this article from the Chicago Tribune:  

The United States has been fighting in Iraq since March 19, 2003, when President Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom with air strikes against Baghdad. Monday marks the 1,245th day of the Iraqi conflict. By that reckoning, Americans troops will have fought in Iraq for as long as they fought Germany in World War II.

But back to the failure of prominent Democrats to develop any plan.  A “plan”…

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