Dennis Kucinich on A) Media Reform and B) How Bush is Scaring the Republicans

It wasn’t on the original schedule of the National Conference for Media Reform, but Dennis Kucinich agreed to hold a press conference tonight.  Kucinich ran for president of the United States in 2004.  He has indicated that he plans to run again in 2008.

I hadn’t ever before been to to a press conference of a presidential candidate.  I learned of it at the last minute.  I packed my press credentials (the media reform conference granted these to me on the basis of this blog), my video camera, a still camera, a pad of paper and a couple pens and dashed to the designated area.

In his prepared remarks, Kucinich pounced on the issue of media reform.  He demonstrated himself to be familiar with many aspects of media reform and the Internet.  In the not-too-distant future, he intends to hold Congressional hearings on media reform (“for an entire week, if necessary”).  He believes that media issues are among the most important issues facing this country today.  In response to a question I asked, Kucinich said he considers the media reform to be closely related to the possibility of campaign finance reform.  At the point when we have more of the former, he said, we will have the opportunity to implement the latter.  Campaign finance reform should take the form of public financing, he asserted.

He invited those attending to submit their ideas for issues to explore at his media reform hearings.  Foremost among those topics will be media ownership.  In …

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National Conference for Media Reform – Opening events and talks

I am currently attending the National Conference for Media Reform at the downtown convention center in Memphis.  It’s pretty amazing to see and feel all this energy everywhere I look.  There will be in excess of 100 presentations. This is still the first day of the 2 1/2 day conference, yet I have already learned more than I can meaningfully absorb.   For more on all the things going on out here, go to freepress.net.

Simply understanding concepts is not what this conference is really about.  It’s about putting this understanding into action.  The organizers chose the following quote of Dr. Martin Luther King for the first page of the conference guide: “And nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.” 

It is  media reform, in addition to being an important issue, an issue that inspires people to organize their strength into action?  Apparently so. This is the third time freepress.net has sponsored a national media conference.  The first conference drew 1,800 people to Madison, Wisconsin.  Last year, 2,200 people came to St. Louis.  This conference is being attended by the more than 3,000 people.  According to one of the speakers, the current issue of The Nation features an article advocating the reform of the corrupt mainstream media. You won’t find much about this conference or these topics in the mainstream media, however (correct me if I’m wrong).  That is not unexpected, given that the mainstream media is a constant target of criticism here. 

It’s …

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Eight ways to allow 3,000 people to die: a lesson in moral clarity

President Bush is going to send more than 20,000 more troops into Iraq and spend billions of more dollars to carry on a hideous war. Why?  To protect Americans from terrorists, he tells us.  Bush convinced Americans to invade Iraq by accusing Iraq of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 Americans.  This argument suggests that the deaths of 3,000 people is a horrible thing.

Whenever 3,000 people die, it is a horrible thing.  It might justify hundreds of billions of dollars, though certainly not the diversion of money from programs that save equal numbers of lives. 3,000 deaths justifies the deaths of more than 3,000 soldiers, we are told.  I don’t agree with this. The political party that argues that there are clear moral rules (the Republicans) isn’t convincing me.

Does it make a difference that 3,000 innocent Americans die on the same day rather than over the course of a year?  I wouldn’t think so.  A death is a death, in my opinion.  And 3,000 deaths are 3,000 deaths.

Therefore, shouldn’t the 16,000 murders that occur every year in the US require a response five times bigger than the invasion of Iraq?   That’s 3,000 every ten weeks.  Shouldn’t it require focused efforts to protect these victims?  Shouldn’t it require a revamping of our entire criminal justice system, especially our prison system, which so often trains criminals to be even more vicious, rather than preparing them for ready for release? Where is our war on criminal violence? …

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Gun control vs. invading Iraq

People who support the war in Iraq argue that the invasion (what George Bush euphemistically called "preemption") was necessary because Saddam might have become a terrorist threat; i.e., he might have acquired and used Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Similarly, people who support a ban on assault rifles argue that the…

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It’s not my fault.

Friday evening, I did something I rarely do: I watched one of those pseudo-news shows, the kind that generally focus on soft news that everybody but me seems to be interested in.  Generally it is some kind of pop culture junk like Brittany’s latest antic (WHO is Brittany anyway and why does everyone but me know her by first name?).  But a Friday night spent under a cozy quilt, nursing a slight malaise left from New Year’s, left me sprawled in a recliner with a TV remote and nothing worth watching.  I happened to catch Primetime, an ABC show that left me deeply disturbed.

The show was about the Milgram experiment conducted in the early 60s and a 2006 similar replication of the experiment.  In 1961, just a few months after the trial of Adolf Eichmann began, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began an experiment to test to what degree people would obey authority even when it was in direct conflict with their personal beliefs.

The subjects of the experiment were people like you and me.  They were asked to participate in experiment about whether pain assisted the learning process.  The second individual, complicit in the experiment, was set up in another room as the “student.”  The “teacher”, the actual subject of the experiment, was placed in front of a panel of switches labeled with increasing voltage.  Whenever the “student” missed a question, the teacher was directed to flip the next highest voltage switch, giving the student an apparent electric …

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