This is disturbing, but unfortunately not unexpected. Regardless of one’s perspectives on Oliver North, this is a real problem. What is ironic is North has consistently been a cheerleader and partisan flack for an ideology for which this is a real world result of it’s successful fruition.

The Enemy Within: Selling Alternative Reality to the American Public

Oliver North has a beef with the Smithsonian. The American institution, largely funded by public tax dollars, has decided what information it will allow him - or anyone - to present to the public. Recently Col. North, on behalf of his Fox News series “War Stories”, went to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to get footage of the Enola Gay - the WWII airplane that dropped the nuclear bomb on Japan. To his surprise, he and his crew ran into such resistance from the museum that, in the end, it was impossible to get the material they needed for their documentary; this, in spite of the fact that the Smithsonian exists to preserve American history for us all.

Col. North commented that he received better cooperation from the Vietnamese government and Ho Chi Minh’s protegees.

It turns out that the Smithsonian has entered into a “secret” business deal with Showtime/Viacom, which gives the media company exclusive control over film and photos of historical treasures (our historical treasures) in over 150 of its museums. Senator Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee (which oversees the Smithsonian), told Col. North, “This raises serious concerns about any contracts that the Smithsonian may have entered into that limit people’s contact with American treasures…”

Why should it matter that a media conglomerate controls access to the Smithsonian?

Find out Here

Naomi Klein sums it up pretty succinctly with her new book “The Shock Doctrine”, which exposes the lie that ‘free markets’ thrive on freedom, revealing the unpleasant and incontrovertible history of violence and exploitation behind the implementation of so-called ‘neo-liberal market economies’ around the world.

This article published in Britain (we probably won’t see a lot of discussion on this the Sunday morning talk shows or, say, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer) does a good job of detailing some of the meat behind this issue. The book is a must read, and in a better world would be required reading in Political Science, Economics and Communications courses around the country (and the world).

I started researching the free market’s dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington’s failed attempts to follow “shock and awe” with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering. Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. “When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself,” said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.

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As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of [Milton] Friedman’s movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. What was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.

Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical free-market “reforms”. In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights….

The bottom line is that, for economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint, some sort of additional collective trauma has always been required. Friedman’s economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy - the US under Reagan being the best example - but for the vision to be implemented in its complete form, authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian conditions are required.

Read the complete article in the Guardian UK

Purchase a copy of the book Here

The line between the power of corporations and that of the state is not just blurred anymore, it is simply no longer there.

Back in June, the Bush Administration invited one of AT&T’s key lobbyists, Ed Gillespie, to serve as White House counselor. A few weeks after that, BushCo expanded AT&T’s resident lobbyist’s role to include most of Karl Rove’s portfolio. Just days after Gillespie took over that role, the DOJ made an unusual intervention into the FCC’s request for comments on Net Neutrality, weighing against Net Neutrality.

Well today, one of AT&T’s former key attorneys, Peter Keisler, just took over the Department of Justice.

In the late 1990s, Keisler represented AT&T before SCOTUS in a case divvying up authority over how the 1996 Telecom Act would be implemented. He represented AT&T and other telecom companies fighting local ordinances limiting the acts of telecommuncation companies.

In early 2001, Keisler helped AT&T win the dismissal of a lawsuit that charged AT&T had illegally shared private information (a customer’s unlisted phone number) with AT&T’s credit division. The Second Circuit ruled that transfer of such personal information does not incur damages, and therefore private citizens cannot sue.

In June 2006, Keisler was one of a number of government lawyers arguing that New Jersey had no legal authority to subpoena documents relating to AT&T’s and other telecomm companies’ participation in the warrantless wiretapping program. Also in June 2006, Keisler invoked state secrets in Hepting v. AT&T, an attempt to scuttle the citizen lawsuits on the warrantless wiretap program.

In other words, both in and out of government, Keisler has represented AT&T’s interests masterfully.

It is worth noting that Ed Gillespie used to be the chief lobbyist for Enron before taking over as Chairman of the Republican Party, before moving from that job to his current position at AT&T. If one wanted to take the time, one would find a rather detailed circular wheel of connections between most of the names mentioned in this piece (and implied at with references to things like “Karl Rove’s portfolio”), their interrelationships between the Bush administration, the GOP, and the corporations which to all effective intents and purposes operate (and increasingly own) the our governance system.

Read the complete post Here on The Next Hurrah, complete with good links and references

When this effort begins to shift from ‘asking’ and ‘urging’ AT&T to ‘do the right thing’ and waiting for ‘assurances’ that they will fulfill policies and ‘regulatory guidelines’, to ‘insisting’ and ‘demanding’ that they stop interfering with the provision of fundamental rights of people to communicate, then these efforts will make great strides in becoming truly effective in achieving the goals they are dedicated to achieving. As uncomfortable as a process this is likely to be, I think it will become unavoidable in truly confronting the real nature of the problem being faced here.

For instance, whether the ‘company has in place adequate procedures to prevent unauthorized political censorship’ is in the end irrelevant. The petitioners behind this effort also claim that “To be meaningful, a policy that disallows political censorship must be combined with procedures that ensure compliance.”

Yes, and those procedures must include the foundational stone of core legal and civil rights which provide for the preeminent fundamental rights of human beings to communicate.

I readily admit such a statement can sound like fuzzily warm and flowery high minded rhetoric the state of which we may all want to assume to be a given. We can believe that these principles are already well understood and incorporated (no pun intended) in our legal and civic structures, especially with their pronounced reiteration in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 19), the declarations of the World Summit on the Information Society, even our own and increasingly maligned First Amendment. However, these rights cannot be supported only in the courts of public opinion as asked for by the people involved in the effort referred to here, but will need to be clearly defined, established and protected in the judicial courts of this nation (and the world) if we are to eventually have meaningful success in the endeavors envisioned here.

The unpleasant fact is that these rights do not really currently exist, or at least only to the degree that they are treated as being subservient to their usurpation by fictional entities of corporations, entities which are allowed to apply these laws protecting those very same human and civil rights and wield them for themselves. This will be legally justified by trumping human rights laws with property rights laws, which AT&T will continue to do here (and most likely effectively so, if past history is any indicator) in order to transcend any meaningful accountability to the goals being asked for by this public petition.

Don’t get me wrong. This is encouraging to see the shareholders of this corporation take this stand and work to change the decision making processes of this corporation and the roles it is playing and the effects it is having on the free flow of information and communication in our society. A heartening response.

My point, however, is that voluntary compliance or self-regulating mechanisms within these entities such as AT&T does not challenge the fundamental problem of these entities wielding any of these rights in the first place. The Civil Rights movement would not have been content to allow for ‘voluntary’ or ’shareholder’ policies that provided for equitable treatment of minorities, in which the ‘market’ will decide who is rewarded for providing for basic civil and human rights or not. That would seem laughable on the face of it in retrospect, yet that is the same attitude we take when we cede our society’s right to decide over the wielding and implementation of fundamental rights of information and communication to governing minorities hiding behind the edifices of corporate governance structures today. Why should AT&T have any more right to decide who can communicate what to whom or to serve as gatekeepers of this kind of civic process, than to be able to decide those same rights to these functions based on the color of a person’s skin?

Read the Open Letter to AT&T by Steve Lippman, Vice President, Social Research and Farnum Brown, Portfolio Manager of theTrillium Asset Management Corporation.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

Excellent and all-too-rare lucid commentary by Naomi Klein from a speech featured on Democracy Now! on the need for a truly effective democratic movement dedicated to more equitable global justice to have a strong sense of narrative envisioning a better future. This is well worth the read, as Klein provides both historical analysis and understanding as well as inspiration, describing why progressives today are overly and undeservedly demoralized by the current global political situation. She reiterates how the seeming defeats are not due to the vision being infeasible. The problem has been that those ideas and efforts have been repeatedly and violently crushed by reactionary opposition, such as we have seen in China, Pinochet’s Chile, today’s ‘war on terror’ repressions and elsewhere.

Read The Complete Transcript

This is one of the better editorial pieces I’ve seen in a major publication in awhile.

And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance. Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.

Good to see someone pointing out the fact that even though Marx and Marxist analysis is rather flawed in regards to some of its proposed remedies to the diseased social conditions that are, if not products of, then egregiously inflamed by the unbridled anarcho-capitalist system, he had some very important and prescient things to say in describing some of the more virulently negative aspects of that system.

…There is the inescapable dilemma that this planet cannot sustain six-and-a-half billion people living like today’s middle-class consumers in its rich north. In just a few decades, we would use up the fossil fuels that took some 400 million years to accrete - and change the earth’s climate as a result. Sustainability may be a grey and boring word, but it is the biggest single challenge to global capitalism today. However ingenious modern capitalists are at finding alternative technologies - and they will be very ingenious - somewhere down the line this is going to mean richer consumers settling for less rather than more.

Marx thought capitalism would have a problem finding consumers for the goods that improving techniques of production enabled it to churn out. Instead, it has become expert in a new branch of manufacturing: the manufacture of desires. The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what they want but that it makes them want what it has to give. It’s that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale. But are we prepared to abandon it? We may be happy to insulate our lofts, recycle our newspapers and cycle to work, but are we ready to settle for less so others can have more? Am I? Are you?

I would question the use of ‘capitalism’ at times here, whereas the more accurate term should be ‘consumerism’, or even perhaps ‘corporatism’, which to the article’s credit is pointed as well. The whole piece is a refreshingly lucid take on the fundamental problems facing our society today. The opening lines here may themselves qualify as the money shot lines in the whole article.

Our planet cannot long sustain the momentous worldwide embrace of the manufacture of desires.

Our multi-multi billions of dollars advertising industry at work.

Read The Full Article

Regardless of the seemingly provocative nature of the headline (after all, the Abolitionists and the Suffragists, for instance, were ‘defying’ the Constitution through their work as well), this is certainly one way of approaching the core issue of the complete corporatization of our politics and culture. Simply make the participation of these fictional entities in our politics illegal, just like the original American revolutionaries intended (and which was one of the major purposes of the American Revolution).

More than 100 largely Republican municipalities have passed laws to abolish the constitutional rights of corporations, inventing what some critics are calling a “radical” new kind of environmental activism. Led by the nonprofit Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, they are attempting to jumpstart a national movement, with CELDF chapters in at least 23 states actively promoting an agenda of “disobedient lawmaking.”

It would be more appropriate to refer to the actions of those described here in this article who are resisting corporate colonization of their communities as defying not so much the Constitution as much as the corporate-supported legal interpretations of the Constitution. After all, the word ‘corporation’ is not to be found anywhere in the text at all, yet a long history of the work of highly-paid lawyers serving these fictional entities seems to have been able to arrange for our modern legal system to behave like it was written entirely for their benefit.

A commentary posting to the article by David Lewit does a good job of making some important points along these lines as well….

Thanks, Channing, for writing up environmental defense with local folks taking responsibility to drive out the chief offenders—corporate dumpers. But aren’t you going a bit overboard by saying, in your opening line, that citizens are “declaring the Constitution null and void”? It was not the Constitution that gave corporations the rights of persons, but rather a clerk of the Supreme Court who in 1886 wrote the introduction to the Court’s ruling in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. He identified the Company as a legal person, and the Justices let that stand as they nullified a law that took corporate property without “due process of law”, as if the corporation were a person protected by the Fifth Amendment. And thereafter corporations used the “personhood” argument and courts thereby often ruled in their favor. The Constitution never defined “person” in that way, and never uses the concept or word “corporation”.

The money shot line from this piece, and from the whole thrust of the work of CELDF and all rights-based organizing, comes from historian Richard Grossman (who has a number of postings you can find here on USTV Media)….

Abolitionists in the early 19th century could “have ended up demanding a slavery protection agency ˜ you know, the equivalent of today’s Environmental Protection Agency ˜ to make slaves’ conditions a little less bad,” Mr. Grossman said in a 2000 speech comparing corporations to slave owners. Instead, “they denounced the Constitution” which permitted slavery at the time “and openly violated federal and state laws by aiding runaway slaves.”

Just as judges and juries slowly changed their minds about the slave trade, Mr. Grossman said, today’s public eventually will come to see corporations in a different light.

Through decades of work, abolitionists “built a political movement, with the clout to get their three constitutional amendments enacted,” he added, referring to the 13th through 15th amendments.

As someone who has participated in a number of the Democracy Schools, I highly recommend them for anyone and everyone interested in expanding one’s understanding of the situation we are confronting in the ongoing struggle for a more just and responsibly democratic world, and for providing a new range of insightful and necessary tactics in that struggle.

Read The Complete Article

Find out more about the work of CELDF and the Democracy Schools.

This article is rather good. A beginning of a broader public discussion, one would hope. The discussion of corporations as tools for minority rule must become as prevalent in society over the next decade or two as slavery and abolition (and I mean in the vein of Garrison’s “immediatism”) became before the US Civil War.

I think the discussion must become “popularized”, even in the corporate press, but by that I do not mean it will be at all helpful for it to become co-opted by “reformers” who think minority rule will be dealt with sufficiently by an amendment or two, or through “market campaigns” that have reformers negotiating concessions from corporate boards of directors “on behalf of the People.” Let us radicalize everything. That is, let us get to the “root” (the “radish” in “radical”) and define “democracy,” as this article nicely reports was done, as Rule by the People. To rule is not to vote. To rule is not to “regulate” what others have determined you must abide. To Rule is not to have anyone secretly negotiate concessions from corporate minorities, who will thence continue to Rule and Decide and Govern…and rescind concessions at-will. To Rule is to decide. To Rule in a democracy is to self-govern in a community of the living.

Hopefully there will be generated more valuable public conversations on very “radical” notions. The work ahead is massive. The opposition is powerful. The People are still drowsy with enculturated lethargy. The stakes are enormous.

- Posted by BenGPrice@aol.com, CELDF

Is there any space left which is left unaffected by the kudzu of advertising? This is par for the course in the continued de-evolution of our civic society from one of the public commons to that of the privatized corporate state, where everything (including the genetic code of life itself) is for sale.

Drivers crossing the George Washington Bridge must contend with 18-wheelers, infuriating delays and noxious exhaust. Soon, they will also have advertisements from Geico. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is expected to announce an arrangement with Geico, the auto insurance giant, that will include the posting of a huge billboard on top of the toll plaza in Fort Lee, N.J., that says “Geico Drive Safely.” Drivers will also see Geico signs with the company’s mascot, a gecko, on the tollbooths and electronic signs on the approach roads. Geico’s message will also be integrated into the Port Authority’s direct mailings and its Web site, and costumed gecko mascots will appear at Port Authority bus stations. . .

Geico is not the first company to think about buying a bridge - or at least the advertising rights to one. And other public agencies have been exploring unconventional ways to bring in more money, even if it means toying with long-held taboos about commercializing public spaces. The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, for instance, is exploring how to sell sponsorships in San Francisco. . .

“This is more than just eyeballs; it’s about reinforcing a message about a bridge that people have an endearing feeling to,” said Drew Sheinman, chief executive of Axcess Partners Worldwide, a marketing company hired by the Port Authority to develop new advertising. . .

The new signs could irritate drivers who view their cars as a refuge from media messages, as well as preservationists who see the bridge, a landmark, as unfit for commercial advertisements - even if they appear only on the tollbooths. . .

Read the rest of the article Here, originally published in The New York Times

Private capital using the power of the state in order to pursue it’s own business agenda. Though this crosses all political lines, it is an area where those on the right of the American political spectrum have been particularly misled. They have spent so many decades trumpeting private power over the role of the ‘evil government’, that so many of them (too many) are now at a loss as to how to deal with the fact that private power has now ascended to sovereign control over the government. A government that is supposed to be of, by and for the people, but is now of, by and for the governing minority elites, usually organized around wielding power through the dominate institutions of our time, the corporation. Private power now uses government in a way that is designed to do nothing but confer privilege on insiders. The very characteristic that was the prime animus behind the drive for the war of Independence in the 1770’s.

The U.S. Constitution states, “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The big bench wrongly ruled that “public use” could be whatever states want it to be — including private developments designed to expand the tax base. The ruling allowed the City of New London, Conn., to seize the land under Susette Kelo’s “little pink cottage” and hand it over to a private developer for a development featuring high-end waterfront homes.

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“The Kelo court said that any private use — like a hotel or big box store — that generates the public benefit of tax revenue could be a ‘public use,’ ” [Rep. Maxine] Waters noted. Like the Institute for Justice, she sees the unholy alliances that Kelo engenders — and the likelihood that tax-hungry governments will allow low-income homes to be leveled to make room for pricier projects.

As former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who dissented on Kelo, warned, “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.” Another dissenter, Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, “Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not.”

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No government should be able to take your land to give it to a corporation. As Susette Kelo noted Thursday, “Our federal tax dollars shouldn’t be used to take away our homes and businesses so that developers can build shopping malls and condominiums.”

Citizens have an interest in a system that allows governments to take property — at a just price — for public projects. But when states and cities, in search of a richer tax base, can take your land and give it to a private developer — they have license to trample on everyone’s rights. And no one, except the very rich, is safe.

Actually this is a melding of both the ignorance of the right and left, coming together in a witch’s stew of overreaching government authority combined with unaccountable private power.

Can anyone still question the reality that we live in a corporate state?

Read The Full Article from The San Francisco Chronicle