I would like to pass along my own public declaration of gratitude and appreciation for Denis’ work with Democracy Now! all of these years, My personal association with Denis goes back a number of years through a whole host of cooperative efforts (including bringing Democracy Now! to the Dayton region) and affiliated organizations, and I wish him the very best of happiness and success in continuing his work for building a more democratic media system with his new endeavors at Free Speech TV.

Democracy Now! Bids Farewell to Denis Moynihan, Now CEO of Free Speech TV

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

For those trying to figure out what the deal is in regards to state video franchising and why these bills are of such concern, this posting is one you may want to read. It is one of the better and more concise descriptions of the cause and purpose of these destructive bills sweeping the nation, state by state. This is in reference to the Louisiana situation, but much of the information is applicable to the laws being established everywhere, including Ohio.

It was no accident that Cox Communications announced its latest rate increase just as the Legislature was heading into its Regular Session. That enabled the various astroturf movements to begin flooding newspaper editorial pages with letters to the editor, condemning the cable companies and singing the praises of competition. Think of this as a choreographed fight for the benefit of the viewing audience, rather than a brawl. The cable companies and AT&T are partners in this dance. Cox stepped on a lot of consumer toes in order to make them receptive to the competition paeans that the phone company allies would produce.

That ability to selectively deploy new network technology is the heart of the issue. How do I know this? Because John and I sat in on the 2006 negotiations on that year’s version of these bills when the phone company (still called BellSouth at the time) flatly refused to deal on offers that did not free them from community-wide build-out obligations.

Read the Complete Post Here

Lafayetteprofiber.com has a good follow up posting, doing a clear and concise job in deconstructing the ramifications of this whole issue and the effects on both your cable service and the public communications infrastructure.

This clever dance that these two corporate giants are staging for us is an elaborate flim-flam. The fact is that this legislation will not bring new competition to Louisiana. How do we know this? Because similar legislation has not brought competition to Texas, North Carolina or Ohio.

But, the Louisiana version of this legislation will do long term damage to at least the 55 communities with franchise agreements by allowing companies like Cox and AT&T to discriminate against low- and middle-income neighborhoods in the delivery of modern network services. For that reason it is particularly disheartening to see the head of the Louisiana chapter of the NAACP fall for the competition scam at the heart of this legislation.

The Louisiana Legislature is being bamboozled by AT&T and the big cable companies which are acting in concert to get legal permission to leave significant portions of this state on the far side of the digital divide. “Competition” is a sirens’ call that is only being used to convince our tech-illiterate legislators to sell out the hopes and aspirations of Louisiana citizens and communities to become full participants in the network-dependent global economy.

This legislation serves no other interests but those of the phone and cable companies. It is terrible policy for Louisiana citizens, consumers and communities. Rate relief will not come, but a widened gap between the tech haves and have-nots will.

Count on it.

Read The Complete Post Here

I don’t really follow the actions of folks who are often derided as ‘actorvists’, but this speech by Tim Robbins is not only laced with spot on acidic humor, but climaxes with some really serious and salient analysis of the current state of our media, the responsibility it holds in our society and the ethical call to action that we all must insist on in transforming our society to truly confront the real problems we face today. This is the kind of speech that a few short years ago would have never been provided for at an event like this. I guess reality is starting to sink in to a number of people. A highly recommended listen (and/or read).

The following is my opening keynote speech for the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas, which I delivered Monday night.

Hello, I’m Tim Robbins. I’d like to thank you for the invitation to address you here at the National Association of Broadcasters. When I first received the invitation I was a little confused because the last time I had contact with the national media I seem to remember them telling me to shut the hell up.

I would like to start with an apology. To Rush and Sean, and Billo and Savage and Laura what’s-her-name. A few years ago they told America that because I had different opinions on the wisdom of going to war that I was a traitor, a Saddam lover, a terrorist supporter, undermining the troops. I was appealing at the time for the inspectors to have more time to find those weapons of mass destruction. I was a naïve dupe of left wing appeasement. And how right they were. If I had known then what I know now, if I had seen the festive and appreciative faces on the streets of Baghdad today, if I had known then what a robust economy we would be in, the unity of our people, the wildfire of democracy that has spread across the Mideast, I would never have said those traitorous, unfounded and irresponsible things. I stand chastened in the face of the wisdom of the talk radio geniuses, and I apologize for standing in the way of freedom.

So when they asked me to come speak to you I said, “Are you sure? Me?” And they said, “Yes.” And I said, “You know, I have a tendency to say things that I believe at the time to be well-intentioned but that are actually traitorous.” And they said, “Sure, cool.” And then I read the press release and it said, “Mr. Robbins will be speaking about the challenges of new media and delivery systems.” Oh, OK. But I just want you to know I’m not sure I know what that f**king means. But it is an honor to be speaking to you here at this years National Association Broadcasting convention even if I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

Something that Edward R. Murrow would probably give an approving nod to.

Read/Listen to the complete speech at The Huffington Post

It is also posted with additional comments at AlterNet

This is an interesting article. I still find it disturbingly amusing to watch the high priests of our corporate capitalist religion continue to cling to their dogmatic faith, even in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence of disaster. But then, it has nothing to do with ‘rationality’ or any kind of economic logic. It is just the age old human spiritual and psychological sickness of clinging and grasping to greed and ego gratification at the expense of the ‘other’, and capitalism in it’s most virulent form seems to have attained the distinction of being the finest, most effective ideology in propagandizing the morality play of transforming the notion of private vice into a public virtue.

The foolishness which continues to preach the wonders of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market place, leaves people never bothering to notice that the ‘invisible hand’ has been busy picking our pockets.

When CNBC abandoned infomercials in favor of programming from its international affiliate on Sunday night, it merely confirmed that much of the world now holds Wall Street in about the same regard as a Nigerian email scam or an Albanian pyramid scheme. The anchors and guests with the funny accents were quick to note the dollar’s decline and the general instability of the American financial system.

So while it’s good that Washington has finally woken up to the historic financial crisis on its hands, it still hasn’t confronted the ideological emergency. There’s more at stake here than just next quarter’s write-offs or next year’s growth rate. Laissez-faire capitalism has run headlong into a massive credibility problem.

And it’s really as simple as the difference between $84 and $2 per share. Efficient markets are those that can tell what something is worth. Ours can no longer make that claim, whether in regard to financial stocks or, by extension, about the much larger pool of private debt. The numbers Bear Stearns posted last year, the numbers it clung to until the bubble finally burst, proved in the end not to be worth the recycled paper they were printed on. Just like the mortgage debt that had been rated AAA but ended up at the bottom of the junk pile. Invest in America, where the numbers can be anything you want.

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It’s also an attempt to obscure the connection between costly crises and bailouts and vast private profits that have flowed to those who never really shouldered proportional risk. If our dynamic global marketplace is going to require taxpayer bailouts every decade or so, perhaps that ought to be taken into account when dividing the spoils from its lucky streaks.

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Poor Chinese, who discarded Soviet-style central planning for the market mechanisms beloved by us all. Now they sit on a powder keg of a stock-market bubble while contemplating belatedly that incompetent central planners could at least be shot, while even incompetent investment bankers get to keep their Bentleys.

Read The Complete Article

This is both darkly humorous and rather telling…

State Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, has been a strong advocate of giving consumers a choice besides cable for television service. But his letter inviting constituents to an AT&T-sponsored event Friday celebrating its new U-verse TV service may have gone too far, some critics say. A letter sent by Fonfara on April 1 to residents on several streets in Hartford’s Behind the Rocks neighborhood encouraged them to attend the event marking the local U-verse launch.

The mailing, paid for with state money and printed on official Senate letterhead, described U-verse as an “exciting new technology” and listed a website for potential customers to check for availability. Fonfara, co-chairman of the legislative committee that deals with cable and telephone regulation, said the letter was meant to highlight a cable TV alternative. “I am promoting the fact there’s competition coming to my district, where so many people said it would never happen ,” Fonfara said at the event at Rocky Ridge Park.

Fonfara’s decision to highlight U-verse in official state correspondence crossed the line, said state Rep. Christopher Caruso, D-Bridgeport, co-chairman of the government administration and elections committee, which writes and oversees ethics law. Caruso said the letter doesn’t violate state ethics laws or legislative mailing rules, but mailings discussing the advantages of a new product should be sent out by the company, not legislators. “That is a promo piece,” Caruso said. “John is a good friend of mine, but I won’t have written the letter.” The letter was also criticized by Edwin Vargas Jr., a former Democratic town committee chairman who is considering challenging Fonfara for the party nomination this year for the 1st Senate District, which includes parts of Hartford and Wethersfield.

Fonfara “may have gone too far”? He “crossed the line”?

There is no line left to cross here, folks. The so-called ‘line’ between the power of the corporation and that of the state has long been obliterated. Fonfara’s real transgression wasn’t that he turned his public office into an advertising division of AT&T, it was that his clumsy actions (clumsy from a power management perspective) simply made that condition more readily visible to the normally unobservant eye of the general public.

Read The Full Article

There’s more on Mr. Fonfara’s ‘gaffe’ Here from The Hartford Courant

Does Big Media’s One-Two Punch Knock Out the Internet?
Jonathan Rintels
SavetheInternet.com

Last week saw Big Media deliver a powerful one-two combination of punches that may knock out today’s wide open Internet. First, in a speech delivered by Motion Picture Association of America President Dan Glickman, the nation’s media conglomerates vowed to fight increasingly vocal calls from policymakers and the public for “network neutrality”, a requirement that broadband Internet consumers be permitted to access the lawful content of their choice.

That’s hardly a revolutionary concept, unless you’re a broadband gatekeeper like Comcast that makes its customers‚ choices for them by discriminating against some websites and favoring others.

To justify allying with Comcast, ATT, and their ilk in a mega-million dollar lobbying campaign to beat back government action that might prevent such anti-competitive, anti-consumer discrimination, the media congloms cited the need to combat piracy of their valuable content over broadband networks.

But as much as we also support fighting piracy, the MPAA’s invoking that fight here is a diversionary smoke screen for what’s really going on. The existing FCC policy principles that call for network neutrality, as well as every proposal to turn those principles into enforceable rules, speak to ensuring that broadband providers allow consumers “to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.”

By definition, pirated content is not “lawful content.” Big Media’s claim that Net Neutrality rules will prevent it from combating piracy goes way too far, as evidenced by Comcast’s recent blocking and slowing of its customers‚ access to content distributed by BitTorrent. In kneecapping BitTorrent, Comcast didn’t just block pirated content, but all BitTorrent content, including legitimate un-pirated content such as a file containing the text of the King James Bible, and video that BitTorrent was distributing on behalf of its clients Fox, Time Warner, and Viacom - all card-carrying members of the MPAA!…

Read The Rest of Report

(This isn’t so much an issue of government control of agriculture as it is of business’s control of our government - USTV Media)

My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
By Jack Hedin
Rushford, Minn.
New York Times Contributor
March 1, 2008

If you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.

But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables - if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 - for one season alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might be much worse in the future.

In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.

Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.

That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.

Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced - for example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.

Who pays the price for this senselessness? Certainly I do, as a Midwestern vegetable farmer. But anyone trying to do what I do on, say, wheat acreage in the Dakotas, or rice acreage in Arkansas would face the same penalties. Local and regional fruit and vegetable production will languish anywhere that the commodity program has influence.

Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price for this - whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have to charge to absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less access to the kind of fresh, local produce that the country is crying out for.

Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and consumers need more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to meet increasing demand from local markets - without the federal government actively discouraging them.

Jack Hedin is a farmer.

One of the better missives from a veteran on the current corrupting policies of the whole misbegotten venture in Iraq, and for pursuing a different course for our society.

My respect for the military convinces me that the lives and well-being of our young men and women are not automatically forfeit upon enlistment, relegating them to the status of cannon fodder. Sending inadequately prepared National Guard troops into combat and then failing to provide them with body and vehicle armor is unconscionable and criminally negligent. Repeated combat tours and insufficient time for rest and rehabilitation between deployments increase the likelihood and inevitability of psychological, emotional and moral injury that is devastating and life-altering. Finally, the “stop-loss” provision that prevents our servicemen and women from leaving the military once their term of service has been completed is disingenuous and a violation of contract. I am pro military. I support the troops.

It is apparent that the burden of this war is not being shared fairly by all Americans. Only a fraction of our citizenry is directly affected, while the vast majority go about their consumption-driven lives as usual, oblivious to the sacrifices of our soldiers, sailors and Marines and to the death and destruction being prosecuted in their names. It is not support, therefore, nor is it patriotic, to remain silent when our troops are placed in harm’s way unnecessarily, to kill and be killed subject to the whims and ineptitudes of our political leaders.”

War is over (If you want it).

Read The Full Essay

Good analysis on the whole cause, nature and recommended course of action regarding the present American economic meltdown, posted on The Oil Drum, a site dedicated to discussion about energy and our future.

I never tire of posting this graph of the “W economy”, because it summarizes in a nutshell what happened: growth happened, but was not shared widely. Thanks to wage stagnation, made possible by the threats of outsourcing and offshorization, and by consistent policies over the last 30 years to deregulate and liberalise markets, starting with labor markets), the fruits of growth have to a large extent been captured by a very few - but this has been hidden because consumption was propped up by readily available debt and the apparently growing virtual wealth of homeowners.

The problem is that, while a lot of that growth was illusory (and is now unraveling), the wealth re-allocation that took place thanks to it was very real, and, in particular, the mechanisms ensuring that an ever grower share of the pie get into a few privileged hands are still in place, and will bite even more harshly as the pie shrinks.

Read The Complete Post

An interesting review of a book about the founders of America. Lord knows there is a huge amount of attention given to these people, often through a mythological filter (thus the deification of the by referring to them in capitals like “Founding Fathers”) in order to serve modern manifestations of fundamentalist nationalism, rather than through a sober historical one (which would better serve as a beacon of guidance for transcending and continuing the work, rather than simply trying to replicate and live in the world like it was still 1787).

Joseph J. Ellis has penned this book, “American Creation”, which puts some healthy new perspective on what the real value of the American story is to our current and future generations. The key point is in the way the original creators of this nation saw their work as only a step in a process, not a definitive declaration of the end all and be all of political wisdom. It helps to belie the absurdity of those who claim to be ‘originalists’ and who worship the constitution like it was holy writ, unchangeable and untouchable, contradicting the very nature and purpose of the political society the Revolution meant to establish in this country.

If at this point I were to note the familiar contradictions of the birth of the nation — chiefly the triumph of liberty, but only for propertied white men — and say that Ellis has written an entertaining account of, as his subtitle has it, the “triumphs and tragedies” of the founding, there would not be much new for me to say, or for you to read, either in this review or in Ellis’s book. It is difficult to imagine an educated American who does not know that the Revolution was selective and that the Revolutionaries, many of them slaveholders who were complicit in the bloodthirsty treatment of Indians, were flawed and imperfect.

But Ellis rescues his enterprise by going beyond the familiar critique of the founding to explore a point that remains underappreciated: that America was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.

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For the new American Republic, Ellis writes, “government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated.”

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In a way, the fragmentary nature of the book mirrors one of Ellis’s key points. The past itself is fragmentary, and the fundamental task for any generation at any given moment is to bring order to intrinsically chaotic forces and events. History is messy because life is messy, and politics is provisional because life is provisional. Ellis shares the founders’ tragic sensibility, finding redemption in seeking the good rather than in achieving the perfect. The wisdom of the American founding lies in the recognition that the former is possible, and the latter is not.

“Unlike mathematics, in politics there was no agreed-upon solution reached by sheer brainpower and logic,” Ellis writes, “but rather an ongoing and never-ending struggle between contested versions of the truth.” Making it up as one goes along, then, is in the best tradition of the American Revolution.

As the decades passed and the founders died off, John Adams grew amused — in a John Adams kind of way — by the deification of the Revolutionary generation. “I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers” he wrote an admiring younger correspondent, “but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe that we were better than you are.” Perhaps so, but what Adams’s generation did with its moment was to create the means by which subsequent generations, including our own, could argue about ends in a largely peaceable way. “It was patched and piebald then,” Adams said of the founding, “as it is now, ever was and ever will be, world without end.”

Read the complete text of this insightful review from The New York Times Here