Now this is a truly amazing and revolutionary development in making progress towards providing for true accountably amongst power, here and throughout the world.

On June 15th, Icelandic Parliamentarians unanimously approved a resolution that contains some of the strongest protection for freedom of speech and freedom of information in the world. The reforms will most likely take effect sometime in 2011, when a revision of the country’s relevant laws and regulations is expected to be completed and approved by Parliament.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative ( IMMI ), as the proposal is known, has been welcomed by most Icelanders, who are weary of institutional furtiveness; in April, a special Parliamentary report concluded that the country’s spectacular financial collapse of 2008 would not have been possible without a culture of secrecy that afforded bankers and politicians little oversight. By strengthening protections for whistleblowers and journalists’ sources, and by reforming the judicial system to minimize the abuse of libel law, those behind IMMI are hoping to foster a much more open society on the island.

Nor would we likely have had the clusterf**k of a war in Iraq if we had the same protections and provisions in our media back during the orchestrated run up to that crime back in 2002-03 in America, to name just one of numerous potential examples of power being checked by transparent accountability. Accountability made possible only through the protection of those who serve to provide needed information for informed, rational public discourse and debate.

More here, too, on the brazen hypocrisy and slavish service to empire that is Obama administration…

“If any nation should stand up for [IMMI], it is the US,” she said.

Jónsdóttir does, however, realize that getting the American government to warm to the initiative may be tricky. Despite President Obama’s campaign promises to protect whistleblowers , his administration has decided instead to slap them with criminal charges ; Bradley Manning, the alleged source of Collateral Murder , Shamai Leibovitz, an FBI translator, and Thomas Drake, an NSA contractor, are all examples of whistleblowers who may or may not feel like they’ve been backstabbed by the President ; Drake even faces trumped-up charges of Espionage. Not even George W. Bush threatened whistleblowers with prison throughout his Imperial Presidency.

But it isn’t just President Obama’s betrayal of his campaign promises and the clandestine ways of the US government that bothers Jónsdóttir; she sees the President’s vendetta against whistleblowers as a pointless exercise for a government that trumpets itself as a shining beacon of democracy.

Read The Complete Report

An interesting blurb recently reported by The New York Times: News Corp. Donates $1 Million to GOP Governors

As John Fund, former Bush speechwriter recently stated:

“…While we thought that Fox News worked for the Republican party, it appears that the Republican party actually works for Fox News.”

Read The Report (and reader comments)

A near perfect analysis by Andrew Bacevich regarding one’s coming to terms with the real nature of American power. Lots of similarities with how my own journey of intellectual understanding has traversed through the decades. As an avid Cold Warrior myself, the fall of the Berlin Wall also marked the final collapse of whatever prior illusions I may have had about the true nature of those who are the predominate architects of the use of American power. Rarely has someone described the coming to awareness of our own nation’s own betrayal of it’s purported principles with as much clarity and honesty as with this. Highly recommended, particularly for former (or current) military personnel.

Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.

My own education did not commence until I had reached middle age. I can fix its start date with precision: for me, education began in Berlin, on a winter’s evening, at the Brandenburg Gate, not long after the Berlin Wall had fallen.

As an officer in the U.S. Army I had spent considerable time in Germany. Until that moment, however, my family and I had never had occasion to visit this most famous of German cities, still littered with artifacts of a deeply repellent history. At the end of a long day of exploration, we found ourselves in what had, until just months before, been the communist East.

————

By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had become a deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly, to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high — whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops — is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor.

I came to these obvious points embarrassingly late in life. “Nothing is so astonishing in education,” the historian Henry Adams once wrote, “as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Until that moment I had too often confused education with accumulating and cataloging facts. In Berlin, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, I began to realize that I had been a naïf. And so, at age 41, I set out, in a halting and haphazard fashion, to acquire a genuine education.

————

These visits to Jena and Berlin offered glimpses of a reality radically at odds with my most fundamental assumptions. Uninvited and unexpected, subversive forces had begun to infiltrate my consciousness. Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble.

That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation’s enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not — to me, at least — in any way contradict America’s aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United States had amassed an arsenal of over 31,000 nuclear weapons, some small number of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with our belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats to life and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an arsenal and maintain it in readiness for instant use.

I was not so naïve as to believe that the American record had been without flaws. Yet I assured myself that any errors or misjudgments had been committed in good faith. Furthermore, circumstances permitted little real choice. In Southeast Asia as in Western Europe, in the Persian Gulf as in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had simply done what needed doing. Viable alternatives did not exist. To consent to any dilution of American power would be to forfeit global leadership, thereby putting at risk safety, prosperity, and freedom, not only our own but also that of our friends and allies.

————

Doing so meant shedding habits of conformity acquired over decades. All of my adult life I had been a company man, only dimly aware of the extent to which institutional loyalties induce myopia. Asserting independence required first recognizing the extent to which I had been socialized to accept certain things as unimpeachable. Here then were the preliminary steps essential to making education accessible. Over a period of years, a considerable store of debris had piled up. Now, it all had to go. Belatedly, I learned that more often than not what passes for conventional wisdom is simply wrong. Adopting fashionable attitudes to demonstrate one’s trustworthiness — the world of politics is flush with such people hoping thereby to qualify for inclusion in some inner circle — is akin to engaging in prostitution in exchange for promissory notes. It’s not only demeaning but downright foolhardy.

————

With regard to means, that tradition has emphasized activism over example, hard power over soft, and coercion (often styled “negotiating from a position of strength”) over suasion. Above all, the exercise of global leadership as prescribed by the credo obliges the United States to maintain military capabilities staggeringly in excess of those required for self-defense. Prior to World War II, Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In the wake of World War II, that changed. An affinity for military might emerged as central to the American identity.

————

Washington is less a geographic expression than a set of interlocking institutions headed by people who, whether acting officially or unofficially, are able to put a thumb on the helm of state. Washington, in this sense, includes the upper echelons of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government. It encompasses the principal components of the national security state — the departments of Defense, State, and, more recently, Homeland Security, along with various agencies comprising the intelligence and federal law enforcement communities. Its ranks extend to select think tanks and interest groups. Lawyers, lobbyists, fixers, former officials, and retired military officers who still enjoy access are members in good standing. Yet Washington also reaches beyond the Beltway to include big banks and other financial institutions, defense contractors and major corporations, television networks and elite publications like the New York Times, even quasi-academic entities like the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. With rare exceptions, acceptance of the Washington rules forms a prerequisite for entry into this world.

————

The persistence of these rules has also provided an excuse to avoid serious self-engagement. From this perspective, confidence that the credo and the trinity will oblige others to accommodate themselves to America’s needs or desires — whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods — has allowed Washington to postpone or ignore problems demanding attention here at home. Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit. Purporting to support the troops in their crusade to free the world obviates any obligation to assess the implications of how Americans themselves choose to exercise freedom.

When Americans demonstrate a willingness to engage seriously with others, combined with the courage to engage seriously with themselves, then real education just might begin.

Read more from this excerpt from Andrew Bacevich’s book How Washington Rules on TomDispatch.com

A must-read expose’ for anyone interested in the future of an open and democratically-viable internet. From Bruce Kushnick of the New Networks Institute, who is once-again spot-on (as he often is).

Google is not going to be a force that will protect the public interest from the controllers of the wires, who are now engaged in serious anti-trust games. Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are now lobbying, funding astroturf groups, (fake consumer groups), a horde of paid-off minority groups, not to mention corporate-funded think tanks, state and federal Congressmen and Senators — all to make sure that the wires are private property for their use, with walled-in ghettos of influence and control.

————–

Why is Net Neutrality not the issue? Because if there was serious competition, when someone was blocked, degraded or had other problems, the customer could simply take their business elsewhere. Instead, through consolidation and mergers (and more mergers to come, such as Comcast-GE-NBC), AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast’s money and power — working together — is creating a climate where the owners of the wires are now allowed to take over the entire wire for all services, including phone, broadband, Internet and cable, as if it was their own property for personal use.

So what if America paid for these wires and upgrades including wireline, cable and even wireless services. (told in an upcoming story). So what if the phone companies have stolen the utilities, the “Public Switched Telephone Networks”, or that the cable companies now forget there’s something called a ‘franchise’.

They will say “regulation blocks investment”. What planet are they on? Since the 1990’s deregulation has given AT&T and Verizon over $320 billion to do upgrades of the Public Switched Telephone Networks, the utilities. They took the money and ran. We’re 15th in the world in broadband, proving that point.

————–

And talk about anti-trust? If both wires are asking for the same thing, to be walled-in ghettos who control all services, and both collude through major price increases, blocking competition and controlling the deployment of broadband throughout the US —acting as essentially one lobbying group — isn’t that a cartel? The only connections into the home are controlled by one group of companies?

————–

And in terms of US economic growth, fueled by these mostly small companies delivering Internet service to new customers, America’s telecommunications had the largest growth in history — hypergrowth, to be exact, in the number of lines, minutes, revenues, and even profits. It was the small competitors, not now-AT&T, Verizon et al who brought America’s customers to in the Internet — a fact regulators seem to ignore.

————–

Since that time, the only competition in most of America has been a duopoly at best. The cable companies — the other wire into the home — only have 20% of the local phone residential market. The local telcos, Verizon et al, can still raise rates whenever they want because there is no competition to drive down prices. And cable competition? AT&T and Verizon have about 5 million upgraded-fiber-cable households out of over 120 million; there is no serious direct cable competition in most markets.

————–

Forget all the rhetoric, press releases, statements, etc. Google needs wires and doesn’t have them, so instead of confronting the network providers they will simply go to bed with them.

But here’s the problem: The Public Interest. Google was one of the few companies left standing who could be a counter-balance to the ‘force’. Since the wire companies are in cahoots and are now lobbying, campaign-financing, minority-co-opting, astroturfing together, who’s going to be the balance in the force?

But the most important — the corporate controls will be so overwhelming that the story will not be told on TV or other major media. That’s right. Today, Verizon and AT&T spend enormous sums of money on advertising. Do you think any station who receives the money will do a feature on the corporate controls, much less other indiscretions?

And when the Comcast and NBC merger goes through, it eliminates major networks, from NBC and CNBC to Telemundo, from doing investigative stories about the cable companies, much less their buddies who spend so much money on advertising.

So, Google and Verizon? This does not bode well dear reader.

Read the full report and pass it along to any friends and colleagues who are interested in the future of the internet.

Many of you have probably been seeing the headlines recently echoing the Obama administration’s triumphant declarations regarding the withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq. This ranks as possibly the greatest line of PR spin since “Mission Accomplished” was declared 7 years ago. Actually, this is worse, since then at least Bush could claim the pretense of actually believing that to be the case. In this situation, Obama has no excuse for not understanding the depth of his own duplicity.

Seamus Milne of the Guardian U.K. does a good job here in succinctly dismantling the BS behind the recent Orwellian Newspeak headlines. And, oh yeah, it is all about the oil, and foreign corporate control of it. Back to the future. The 1950’s all over again.

The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all; it’s rebranding the occupation. Just as George Bush’s war on terror was retitled “overseas contingency operations” when Obama became president, US “combat operations” will be rebadged from next month as “stability operations”.

But as Major General Stephen Lanza, the US military spokesman in Iraq, told the New York Times: “In practical terms, nothing will change”. After this month’s withdrawal, there will still be 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, “advising” and training the Iraqi army, “providing security” and carrying out “counter-terrorism” missions. In US military speak, that covers pretty well everything they might want to do.

—————-

Meanwhile, the US government isn’t just rebranding the occupation, it’s also privatising it. There are around 100,000 private contractors working for the occupying forces, of whom more than 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly “third country nationals”, typically from the developing world. One Peruvian and two Ugandan security contractors were killed in a rocket attack on the Green Zone only a fortnight ago.

I thought we were attempting to rid Iraq of the presence of ‘foreign fighters,’ not hire them. But then, American troops are the most predominate source of ‘foreign fighters’ in Iraq, one of those obvious points which seemed to escape the previous administration when it used to lecture about its goal of eliminating such fighters from the country.

Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000, to be based in five “enduring presence posts” across Iraq.

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What is abundantly clear is that the US, whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City, has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon. One reason for that can be found in the dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq’s biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies, including three of the Anglo-American oil majors that exploited Iraqi oil under British control before 1958.

The dubious legality of these deals has held back some US companies, but as Greg Muttitt, author of a forthcoming book on the subject, argues, the prize for the US is bigger than the contracts themselves, which put 60% of Iraq’s reserves under long-term foreign corporate control.

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The Iraq war has been a historic political and strategic failure for the US. It was unable to impose a military solution, let alone turn the country into a beacon of western values or regional policeman. But by playing the sectarian and ethnic cards, it also prevented the emergence of a national resistance movement and a humiliating Vietnam-style pullout. The signs are it wants to create a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region. The struggle to regain Iraq’s independence has only just begun.

Read The Complete Article

TED (Ideas Worth Spreading) presents this excellent interview with Julian Assange of the increasingly famous organization WikiLeaks (or infamous, depending on what side of the disinformation wall you are standing on, and whether one is trying to scale that wall or garrison it). In it Assange discusses why their work is necessary in helping to provide the information that is important to the world. He elaborates on how information which organizations spend large amounts of time and money on keeping hidden gets out, and the hope that its exposure can do some good.

Making The Injustice Visible
By Andy Valeri

Communication is arguably the most important process involved in defining our humanity, the way in which we experience the fundamental value and meaning of our own lives and those whom we share them with. It is why its deprivation through such means as prolonged solitary confinement is often considered one of the worst forms of imprisonment and torturous abuse man can inflict upon his fellow beings. It is this essential role that communication plays in making us human that underlies its internationally-recognized status as a fundamental right in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Community media advocates have long been active contributors towards the advancement of human rights, providing people of all socio-economic strata and cultural backgrounds the capabilities and opportunities to participate in the shared dialogue of their society using modern communication technologies. For if human rights are to be truly protected and to flourish, one must provide for a society which functions upon democratic principles and accountability, particularly in regards to those pertaining to the rights of free speech and a free press.

Such efforts to expand democratic access to effective means of communication serve as yet another step forward in what has been an ongoing evolutionary endeavor since the days of Protagoras, the rhetorician of Greek democracy who along with his fellow sophists, built a working democracy by teaching the common people how to speak in the agora as equals of the aristocrats. Two millennia later John Dewey, one of America’s most noted social and educational theorists, insisted that modern democracy had to be firmly grounded upon the twin pillars of communicated social knowledge and local, neighborly associations. For Dewey, it was through grassroots, participatory communication that publics could effectively organize themselves to generate meaningful social change.

This is what community-based media has been actively doing for decades now, whether those changes being generated entail confronting state violence in Oaxaca or citizens debating zoning ordinances in Massachusetts. It is one of the primary objectives for addressing this topic within the pages (and now web postings) of the CMR. In the face of the flood of daily tasks and seemingly never-ending policy struggles the access community is consistently challenged with, particularly in regards to the battles over video franchising legislation, we risk losing sight of the deeper purpose of our work and the larger frame that it exists within. This includes its importance not just for our own communities, but for those throughout the world (a point which is illuminated within the articles featured in this issue and by exploring additional resources made available online at ).

It was Gandhi who understood that the key to confronting injustice was not to attack it (and thus risk becoming complicit in it), but to expose it. His entire strategy was based upon the principle that the essential element of non-violent movements for equality and human rights was to “make the injustice visible.”

This is what media producers have been doing all over the world since the very advent of accessible modern communication technologies. The empowerment of every day citizens to document the conditions of political injustice and social inequalities in which they live, allow them to serve as meaningful participants in movements towards effectively responding to and transforming those conditions.

The work of groups such as WITNESS and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem are just some of the examples of
citizen-produced media working on the front lines of the struggle for the protection of human rights. B’Tselem, through their “Shooting Back” program, helps defend the rights of Palestinians by arming them with cameras-not with guns and bombs-in order to document the injustices they experience. The Oscar-nominated film Burma VJ, about the courageous work of underground video journalists documenting the violent oppression by the Burmese military government, provides another moving example of the power that grassroots media production can have on political affairs. A similar role has been played by citizen media activists in Iran during the recent government crackdowns there.

Of course, working under the threat of physical danger is not a requirement for involvement in human rights-supporting media. The empowering work of Video Volunteers in the slums of India and Brazil and the Main Street Project’s efforts to ensure universal broadband access to all Americans are just two of the innumerably diverse initiatives currently under way which lay within the scope of human rights advocacy.

Additionally, understanding grassroots-generated media not just as a tool in the service of human rights, but as a specific expression of a fundamental human right in and of itself, has profound implications for how we approach the ongoing efforts to sustain and expand universal access to its use. For rights-based struggles are not so much about policies, but about principles.

Fighting for the right to do something, and not just the ability to do it, is a more far-reaching and transformative endeavor, whose results are much more permanently embedded into the social and political fabric of civic society. Those participating in the lunch counter sit-ins during the civil rights movement were doing so not because they wanted a sandwich, but rather to assert their very right to be there, and to have equal access to the same dignity and opportunity of all citizens. By the same token, do we in the community media movement see our efforts as directed towards providing people access to the means of communication, or to the right to such access? Understanding the distinction between the two frames has proven an essential factor in the success of the great rights-based movements throughout history.

I hope this issue of the CMR can help serve to expand our collective field of vision as to the deeper meaning and important real-world implications inherent in our work. As the community media movement continues the fight to “keep it local,” we know that the real strength of such localism is only derived when it keeps us connected through a civic globalism, one that binds us together through the mutual recognition of universally shared human values. It is our common efforts towards providing for access to communication for all that inalienably unites us together as central participants in the movement for the advancement of human rights.

Andy Valeri is a long-time veteran of community media, having worked in access television for well over two decades, producing hundreds of hours of programming of various genres, including the television series and online political forum UnCommon Sense TV Media. He has a lengthy involvement in media issues, including as an activist and local columnist. Having worked as a music producer and publisher operating his own record label, he also serves as an occasional guest host on a popular local public radio program. Valeri is currently engaged in an interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Dayton in Media, Communications and Human Rights, which seeks to reframe our approach to media issues as one fundamentally of human rights. He serves on the editorial board of the Community Media Review, and can be contacted at andy@ustvmedia.org.

(This essay was originally published in an issue of the Community Media Review on Community Media and Human Rights, on the use of citizen-based media in support of human rights, as well as the recognition of the very process of communication as as a fundamental human right.)

This is a wonderful initiative from the human rights organization WITNESS. The Hub is a new website for anyone, anywhere in the world to upload, view, share, discuss and take action on human-rights related media. Part curated, part grassroots-driven, it brings under-reported and urgent human rights issues to a broad audience to inspire and catalyze action.

(Please read the important update on this program from WITNESS provided in the ‘Comments’ section below)

In regards to the national efforts to preserve access [such as via The CAP Act], here’s an idea:

“Go back to Public Access Roots” legally, and expose the FCC “sell out”.

How about using the very “tool” that is endangered by “producing a show” with the original concepts of “cable television.”

Originally “Cable (aka paid TV) was not and did not have ads. That was the selling point. The cable companies were using “public air space” which belongs to all the people.

Now there is equal time of programming as is ads. Also public access stations could not in any way ask for money.

There was competition from several cable companies to “win the franchise”. Now it is a monopoly on the airwaves.

(There should have been a protection of preventing local franchise governments selling out public access) Many local areas “sold out public access in order to “pocket the money cable companies had to give to support local public access by NOT REQUIRING the cable company to provide the: studio, training, equipment for public access; therefore endangering Public Access )

Now the media wants to put up Microwaves which may be unhealthy to the community, yet Public Access is endangered.

So perhaps what might be a talking point is “Cable TV can’t have ads” unless they supply a good public access in each community; that local governments many not receive any monies for a franchise in that area unless the station provides public access that is accessible to the public.

Revisit: Monopolies unlawful.

- A USTV Media Viewer/Reader

This seems to be a very cool project. I look forward to its completion and as widespread distribution as possible.

On October 10th, 2010, thousands of people from every nation around the world will film their perspective and contribute their voice to the largest participatory media event in history. The event will result in a feature documentary and dynamic video archive. Through an open forum of diverse perspectives, our community will reveal the basic human struggles and triumphs that unite us. We anticipate that this new understanding of the shared human condition will foster a greater sense of global empathy and interconnectedness, and ultimately, action towards a more sustainable and equitable planet.

Find out more at One Day On Earth. If you have any material you may want to submit yourself, email Gina Nemirofsky.