Above are two short media-critical films from different filmmakers. At top, “Globalization and the Media” from the Media Education Foundation highlights the rise of independent and primarily internet-based journalism in recent years. (Many more excellent videos touching on various topics related to the media and society are available at the link.) At bottom, part three of “Who Really Owns the Mainstream Media” (parts one and two are unavailable) discusses the convergence of upper-class interests in the governance of American media. [END] Permalink: Globalization and the Media & Who Really Owns the Mainstream Media
Barrie Zwicker’s “The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw” is a nice overview of the reasons to doubt the official story of the 9/11 attacks. Here is some additional information on Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission and a member of the Clinton-Bush transition team. It should also be noted that 1998, the year that Zelikow’s “Catastrophic Terrorism” was published, was also the year that the neocons’ Project for the New American Century group was beginning its push on Bill Clinton to attack Iraq and essentially begin the so-called “War on Terror” at that time. [END] Permalink: The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw
“Enemy Image” is a history of the American media’s presentation of U. S. wars and the U. S. government and military’s fight to control that presentation, beginning with Vietnam and moving on through the 2003 war in Iraq. While early newsreels, with their patriotic narrative overdubs, presented a polished and sterile image of heroic troops bravely fighting like a well-oiled machine, the relatively unregulated television journalism of the later 1960s showed the common soldier up-close and personal, without the touch-ups of Hollywood. Although the film has a curious lack of mention of the late ’90s war in eastern Europe, it does a good job of comparing the Vietnam era to the much more heavily controlled time from the 1980s to today. “Everybody just wants to go home and go to school. [...] The whole thing stinks.” – U. S. soldier in Vietnam [END] Permalink: Enemy Image
Here, the CBC walks us through some of the many flaws in the casus belli that led to the U. S. military and the private mercenary firms that they contracted to aid them, and to share in the loot, both foreign and domestic, entering Iraq with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003. While some attention is given here to reporter Seymour Hirsch’s take on the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a “neoconservative” think-tank who have been credited as the authors of the plans for the war, as a group of utopian idealists, it ought to be considered that the PNAC plans revolve around the astoundingly violent concept of “full spectrum dominance” by the U. S. worldwide which includes even the will to deny other nations the use of outer space. Theirs is literally a proposal of world conquest. “Former” CIA operative Robert Baer also adds what should be the already obvious fact that there is “no evidence” that Saddam Hussein had any links to the 9/11 attacks, perhaps to imply the “Afghanistan-war-good, Iraq-war-bad” line of argument which has been taken up by many members of the Democratic Party. However, there is also questionable evidence at best that “Al Qaeda,” however that term may be defined, was linked in any way to the 9/11 attacks, itself, as FBI publicity chief Rex Tomb has told reporters that there is, quote, “no hard evidence” even that Osama bin Laden, when it gets right down to it, was responsible for 9/11. The current state of the Afghanistan war, ostensibly being fought against these same “Al Qaeda” terrorists, now nine years on with no end in sight and almost no “progress” of any kind by any definition having been made, except, perhaps, in the financial sense for those “in the club,” ought to speak to the intentions of those who originated these claims in the first place. [END] Permalink: Lies of the Iraq War
James Collier, author of Votescam: The Stealing of America (web site archived by the Wayback Machine here) discusses in the above interview from 1996 methods of vote rigging in U. S. elections which have been used since the 1970′s. James and his brother, Kenneth, discovered extensive electoral anomalies and high-level government corruption while doing research for a book they were writing about running for political office without spending money.
The 2000 election saw the installation of George W. Bush as U. S. President after hotly contested election results in Florida. “Unprecedented” details some of the processes by which many eligible Florida voters were wrongly purged from the voter rolls, by which many Florida voters’ ballots were discarded and by which post-election legal processes hampered the various recount initiatives which were undertaken, some automatic and some by request. This was election tampering of a highly visible sort which saw, among other things, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris in a massive conflict of interest, serving both as election overseer and as George Bush’s campaign manager.
Similar dynamics arose yet again in 2004, as documented in several features including Free for All and “Uncounted – The New Math of American Elections” and by more decentralized efforts such as Video the Vote. This time, the spotlight was on Ohio, where Secretary of State Ken Blackwell served as the head of George Bush’s reelection campaign. In the above lecture, NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000 – 2008, describes a broad range of tactics used to suppress Democratic votes in 2004, including vote machine shortages which created excessively long lines, sometimes with a two or more hour wait time, vote machines recording votes for Kerry as votes for Bush, and up to ten to twenty percent of Democratic voters being told at the door that they were not on the roster and therefore unable to vote. In many of these cases, voters were reduced to casting provisional ballots instead of a traditional ballot, many of which were not included in the final count. Many Americans put in a lot of effort to try to defeat Bush that election in the hope of putting America on at least a marginally less apocalyptic trajectory, holding their noses to vote for “the lesser of two evils” despite their conscience telling them that Kerry was simply, as the saying went, “Bush Lite,” and the Kerry team’s thanks was to roll over silently on November 3rd despite overwhelming evidence of a crooked election. According to the lecture above, John Kerry told Miller at a party that he agreed that there had probably been a misvote but that high-ranking Democrats including Christopher Dodd told him not to pursue the topic. (Incidentally, Miller also notes that “alternative left media” outlets including Mother Jones, The Nation and Salon all went out of their way to write against the possibility of election fraud. A similar situation was encountered by 9/11 skeptics with these same publications.)
A 2008 supplement to Crispin’s UC talk on Democracy Now! is above in which he discusses a legal case involving Republican computer guru Michael Connell, who had worked with both the George W. Bush and John McCain Presidential campaigns. Connell was subpoenaed in December 2008 with regard to the alleged vote fraud in Ohio but, like Iraq war opponent former Senator Paul Wellstone, met an untimely fate in a plane crash after only one deposition.
Here, in an interview with Velvet Revolution, Stephen Spoonamore, a computer security professional who is involved with the Ohio vote fraud case with which Connell had been connected, provides technical details about the situation. In the sense that Democratic Party leadership has not made electoral integrity much of a public issue, this is a non-partisan issue. However, as Spoonamore notes, the active conspirators in the above cases are all closely connected with the Republican Party. [END] Permalink: The Integrity of American Political Elections
Starting with Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and on through George W. Bush, “With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America” describes the influence of the Evangelical Christian movement on American politics and especially on the Republican Party. George W. Bush, here, is shown as the ultimate political puppet, a befuddled alcoholic and son of a CIA director duped into undertaking a Christian transformation, then run for President to woo the Christian right more effectively than his somewhat religiously inept father. “I think the prayers of a lot of people tipped that [2000 U. S. Presidential] election. I really believe that with all my heart. And I believe that five to four vote in the Supreme Court which could have gone the other way, I give God the credit, that he wasn’t finished with us yet.” – Jerry Falwell [END] Permalink: With God on Our Side
“Indictment: Inside the Oklahoma City Grand Jury – The Hoppy Heidelberg Story” highlights Oklahoma City Bombing Grand Juror Hoppy Heidelberg’s involvement with the effort to indict Timothy McVeigh for the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in April 1995. Heidelberg was unhappy with the way the prosecution tried to manhandle the jurors and limit their powers of inquiry and was eventually thrown off the jury for being too critical of the proceedings, which left many an important stone unturned. Like 9/11, like 7/7 and like many other high-profile acts of terrorism, the Oklahoma City Bombing has left many who’ve researched beyond the government’s convenient patsies and unlikely official version with many questions about who really committed the crime. [END] Permalink: Indictment – Inside the Oklahoma City Grand Jury – The Hoppy Heidelberg Story
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