Is it only a coincidence that Cuba and Venezuela simultaneously offered Russia military access to their homelands? Or did they?
There have been a few news articles recently concerning the possible use of Cuban and Venezuelan territory for the construction of Russian military bases. The New York Times noted:President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela said his country would be willing to host Russian bases there, the Russian news agency Interfax reported. “Russia has enough resources to secure its presence in different parts of the world. If Russian armed forces would like to be present in Venezuela, they will be welcomed warmly,” Mr. Chávez told reporters on Tuesday, in response to a question about whether Russia could put bases in Venezuela. “We will raise flags, beat drums and sing songs, because our allies will come, with whom we have a common worldview,” said Mr. Chávez, who was in Moscow for talks with President Dmitri A. Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.According to an article by the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, which cites Reuters: the offer of a "warm welcome" was made in response to a question from a journalist at a press conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.…
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— go to most recent comments76 - Joaquin
Correction to above: "The only exceptions in the hemisphere after 1865 were Cuba (1896 during the fight with Spain for independence) and Brazil 1889).
Cheers! ;-)
77 - Clavos
Historically the forces for social change and social justice have always preferrred to work peacefully and openly. It is only the violence and repression visited upon them by the ruling status quos that obligate the progressive forces to turn to clandestinity and armed struggle. The violence of a country's revolutionary forces is the mirror-index of the violence of its existing status quo.
Ah, J, you are nothing if not a skilled and slick propagandist; but what you spout so well is just that and nothing more: pure fiction--propaganda composed to convince the gullible that black is white. A house of cards in which the chief cards are deceit and obfuscation; both traps laid for the unsophisticated.
Unfortunately for you and your fellow travelers, modern communications have spread the truth much more efficiently, and the peasants are not nearly so easy to deceive anymore.
The failure of communism is known and observed by the entire world, which is why it is rejected, unless applied by the use of repression. Interesting that, except by force, it has never even taken root, much less flourished, in a free, sophisticated society.
78 - Franco
Spoke for truth Clavos.
79 - Joaquin
".Unfortunately for you and your fellow travelers, modern communications have spread the truth much more efficiently, and the peasants are not nearly so easy to deceive anymore."
How true this is, Clavos. It's thanks to the still unprivatized internet that people are better able to democratically organize and mobilize at a moment's notice. A couple of salient examples:
In the late 1990's, the largest multinationals of the then-G7 in league with teh World Trade Organization (WTO) had been SECRETLY negotiating teh Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) Treaty which, if implemented wouuld have addtionally empowered the multinationals (MN's) at the expense of national governments and AGAINST the larger interests of much of he world's people those governments are charged to protect. One description called it "a NAFTA on steroids." Luckily for the world's people, the treaty and its contents were somhow leaked onto the French Internet (the Europeans, particularly the French, always seem to be leagues ahead of us Americans when it comes to these things)> In a matter of hours and days, enough folks were mobilized around the world, and the MAI was stopped cold in its tracks. And later, when the WTO, the G7 and co. tried to secretly institute the content of that monster-agreement in a secret and remote location (it escapes me at this moment), again, the world's people mobilized and pressed the government of India which quashed the effort.
A second example is in Venezuela: One of the results of Mr. Chavez policies and his cointry's oil income is that no matetr how poor, the average Venezulan in urban barrios has a computer. Thanks to this, Vezuelans were abe to likewise organize and mobilize quickly to crush the would-be Carmona coup against Mr. Chavez in April 2002. Since then, they've continued to likewise keep informed and be ready to organize and mobilize against the US and oligarchy-sponsored efforts to subvert their government and defend it.
Thanks for pointing this out, Clavos.
J ;-)
80 - Clavos
A second example is in Venezuela: One of the results of Mr. Chavez policies and his cointry's oil income is that no matetr how poor, the average Venezulan in urban barrios has a computer. Thanks to this, Vezuelans were abe to likewise organize and mobilize quickly to crush the would-be Carmona coup against Mr. Chavez in April 2002.
Only to find out to their horror that Chavez, who is all talk, smoke and mirrors, is destroying their country right before their very eyes and hungry stomachs, in the time-honored and grand tradition of all "socialist" despots.
81 - Franco
Clavos, I sware, I'm still cleaning coffee off the monitor and keyboard.
82 - Joaquin
"Only to find out to their horror that Chavez, who is all talk, smoke and mirrors, is destroying their country right before their very eyes and hungry stomachs, in the time-honored and grand tradition of all "socialist" despots."
If that;s so, Clavos, then how do you explain the 2006 elections' results, 4 years later, and Mr. Chavez's overall electoral record? In 2006, Mr. Chavez was challenged by the Zulia state governor Manuel Rosales, backed by a kitty of opposition political parties, "civil society" organizations,business associations, mass media, and the Catholic Church hierarchy, but Chavez STILL WON by the landslide of 64% of a vote that had the highest turnout by the eligible electorate in the history of the country. Not to mention that Mr. Chavez also had 3 previous electoral victories, in 1998, 1999, and 2004, "each garnering a larger majority of votes and voter participation" (Eva Golinger). I might add that each of these elections was minutely scrutinized by independent outside overseers and agencies in a way that elections elsewhere in the hemisphere, particularly among US "friends and allies" are not, and each time, the international observers have given them A CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH and confirmed their authenticity. Contrast that with the recent erections ... er, excuse me, elections in Mexico where the notoriously corrupt Mexican govt. didn't even allow international observers and overseers, including the Carter Center in to monitor and verify the elections. EVERYONE in Mexico knows that Calderon DIDN'T win that election, just as Chupacabras, .. er, excuse me, Carlos Salinas also didn't win the election in 1988.
J. ;-)
83 - Les Slater
One must not forget that the 'Cuban Missile Crisis' started with the U.S. deploying 15 Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Turkey in 1961, aimed at cities in the USSR, including Moscow. In part of the resolution the missiles were removed from Turkey.
84 - Joaquin
Just as today the US has been encircling Russia more than ever before, but seems it's not yet satisfied and wants more ....
85 - Clavos
J,
Tell us about the most recent Venezuelan election...
Oh, and BTW, J, if you're such a fervent commie, and a Colombiano, why are you living here, in the belly of the beast? Why aren't you home, helping the campesinos overthrow the "corrupt" Uribe regime, or at least, living in a good socialist state like Cuba, where I'm sure you'd be comfortable among friends?
Rigged elections in Mexico? You're surprised? That's a nearly century-old tradition.
Everything in Mexico is rigged--everything.
Corruption is the first thing Mexicans learn at their mothers' breast. La mordida is practically written into the constitution.
And where in this discussion have I held up Mexico as a paragon of virtue?
86 - troll
Joaquin - do you have a source for further info on the penetration of computers in the V barrios - ?
87 - Joaquin
Hello Troll:
As for exact info, this will take some time as my archiving is a bit messy at the moment (I did an unsuccessful initial search through my files here at home last night). However, you might find the following sites/key words interesting as well:
VenezeulAnanylis
specifically: this.
Stockholm Challenge.
Fabian Rodriguez.
The specifics I'm looking for here, and which you requested are in a couple of issues of The Nation magazine. Meanwhile, until I locate the hard copies I KNOW I HAVE SOMEPLACE, I refer you to their site - you might need to do some poking around, however.
In the meantime, I will continue looking for the hard copies I know I have here at home or in my office.
Now Clavos:
"...if you're such a fervent commie, and a Colombiano, why are you living here, in the belly of the beast?"
I'm very glad you ask. Indeed, I've been waiting for that question, either from you or Franco. I will just preface my answer with the obsevation (from Dr. Johnson I believe):
"'patriotism' is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings."
With that, I will begin answering your question. I was born and raised in Colombia but came with my family to the US 44 years ago (most of my that time here in California, but lived long enough in Colombia to remember have the culture embedded in me, and thenks to my mother (my late father was from Mexico City) I've kept contact with it and the particularly Bogotano Spanish as well. Having been here for 44 years (more tan 4/5 of my life), however, I"m also very North American as well. I'm particularly reminded of this everytime I travel abroad, which is quite often, particularly on working tours where I might spend 3-4 months at a time living and working in a foreign country. I grew up with the Beatles and the Stones (yes, I know they're Brits)but also Bob Dylan, the Byrds, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, etc. I also grew up digging American cars, especially Chevy and Ford muscle cars from the 1950's, '60's, and '70's, you know, back when American brand cars were GOOD - that is BEFORE GM, Ford, and Chrysler decided to do the "patriotic" capitalist thing and close down their factories here in the USA - and thus putting many US workers out of work and thus stripping them of their livelihoods, only to ship them off to the countries of the 3rd world, among them Latin America (pursuant to "free trade" agreements like NAFTA, etc.) to pay workers there a fraction of a fraction of what they formerly paid US workers, only to ship hese cars back to the US to be sold AT FIRST WORLD PRICES, you know, when American cars were actually made HERE by American workers who were getting paid well enough to be able to actually afford these cars. But in myriad other ways, I assimiated rather thoroughly to my American environment, in ways that, as I came to learn during my graduate studies, gusanos - be it from WHEREVER in Latin America - generally do NOT. Recognizing notable exceptions of course, I learned that a good part of the wealthy, white anti-Castro Cubans in Miami did not, and still have not bothered to adopt US citizenship, which I DID, and when they do, many do not bother to vote or otherwise participate in the US political process (all the while whining about what a "dictatorship" revolutionary Cuba is); I DO participate in that process and vote every election, frustrating as it may often be, particularly since 2000 thanks to Diebold and other "vote equipment" companies in league with our neaderthal-in-chief and his party. Nor do I cloister myself only among Latinos - as the aforementioned gusanos also tend to, but I like to mingle with the whole glorious mix that comprises the American population. And in instances where they have bothered to get out from the all-Cuban, all-Latino cloister, they have also adopted the more socially retrograde aspects of American life - like confederate flags, extreme right wing politics, etc. All this has been amply (if perhaps indiscreetly) recorded and documented by (interestingly) one of their number themselves, one Gustavo Perez Firmat in his book "Next Year in Havana" a rather very good and engaging book, I might say. The Cubans who HAVE adopted US citizenship and DO participate in the mainstream of US are generally either those who have also taken a more moderate or even a progressive position on revolutionary Cuba and the other Latin American revolutions, or those who have also organized the Cuban mafias ... er, excuse me, lobbies like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) that today buy and sell our politicians in Washington of BOTH major parties and who've been organizing the terrorist bands and expeditions that have been perpetrating crimes in revolutionary Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America where revolutionary governments have taken power. Unfortunately the latter category have been the far more visible of the two.
I am NOT anti-US or anti-American - hey I AM one, as is my son (natural-born) also, as are also many people I love, like, and care for - but I AM anti-imperialist. I am not even totally anti-capitalist, but I AM a revolutionary socialist (Marxist Leninist) as well as an internationalist. I also am a post-Bolivarian in that while I adhere to the Bolivarian vision of Messrs. Chavez, Morales, Ortega, etc., I also like to include the workers and socially progressive of the US, Canada, and the rest of non-Spanish speaking America in the larger vision of a revolutionary progressive united America.
But I am ALSO very Colombian. I will never concede either Colombian or (and especially)North American nationality to be the exclusive preserve of right wing, redneck, flag-waving, homophobic, puritanical, and misogynist assholes. They are no more "American" or "Colombian" than me, in fact they are less so.
As for your: "Why aren't you home, helping the campesinos overthrow the "corrupt" Uribe regime, or at least, living in a good socialist state like Cuba, where I'm sure you'd be comfortable among friends?" and particularly your "why are you living here, in the belly of the beast?"
I will respond by paraphrasing a point Ernesto "Che" Guevara made: Every effort you make to liberate and transform a country under whose flag you were not born will unltimately be reckoned toward the liberation of your native country.
Now, your: "Everything in Mexico is rigged--everything.
Corruption is the first thing Mexicans learn at their mothers' breast. La mordida is practically written into the constitution."
in particular: "Corruption is the first thing Mexicans learn at their mothers' breast."
Whoa!!! Did I accidentally strike a raw nerve here, or what? Two possibilities here: Either you are one hell of an anti-Mexican bigot, or (as seems likely from the tone and content) you are Mexican but with a hopelessly jaundiced view of your mother culture. Such bitterness will inevitably cloud and distort a person's view and interpretation of EVERYTHING, including humanity and even life themselves.
J.
88 - Clavos
I learned that a good part of the wealthy, white anti-Castro Cubans in Miami did not, and still have not bothered to adopt US citizenship, which I DID, and when they do, many do not bother to vote or otherwise participate in the US political process (all the while whining about what a "dictatorship" revolutionary Cuba is)...
You should seek out more sources than just one man's book, Joaquin; aside from the above being totally wrong, you're taking one man's word (One man who obviously has an axe to grind) to form an opinion of how an entire group thinks and acts.
According to the US Census Bureau, 31.5%of the Cubans in the US are born here. 41.4% were born in Cuba, and are naturalized US citizens. Only 27.1% are Cuban-born and not US citizens. And though the Census doesn't tabulate it, it's highly likely that the vast majority of those are only recently arrived.
Some facts: exactly half of the six person Miami-Dade congressional delegation is Cuban. The other half consists of two american Blacks, and one white person. The state legislature delegates consist of 7 Cubans, 4 Blacks and 2 anglos. The mayor and 3/4 of the city commission is Cuban. You must be a US citizen before you can be a Congressman. Who do you think votes for these Cuban pols? Not the gringos, they all left years ago (according to the Census Bureau, the Anglo population of Miami-Dade is approximately 12%), while 67% is Latino, and 18% american Black (as opposed to Latino Blacks, which are included by the census in the "Hispanic" population).
The Cubans who HAVE adopted US citizenship and DO participate in the mainstream of US are generally either those who have also taken a more moderate or even a progressive position on revolutionary Cuba...
Wrong again. It is not a coincidence that all three of the Cuban Congressmen and our Cuban Senator are Republicans.
So, Joaquin try investigating more than one source before you draw conclusions about people.
Nor do I cloister myself only among Latinos...
Congratulations. How progressive and egalitarian of you. Of course, if you lived here, that would be just a bit more difficult - like living in Bogota and not hanging around with Latinos.
I am NOT anti-US or anti-American - hey I AM one...
Plenty of americans are anti-american; especially among the "progressives," and even more so among the (as you call yourself) " revolutionary socialist (Marxist Leninist) as well as an internationalist."
Marxist-Leninism is hardly compatible with the quintessentially capitalist american economic model.
You say:
...in particular: "Corruption is the first thing Mexicans learn at their mothers' breast."
Whoa!!! Did I accidentally strike a raw nerve here, or what?
Nope, no raw nerves, just recognition of a historical fact. Anything is obtainable by bribery in Mexico. Any candid mexican will tell you so. Have you ever read Octavio Paz's El Laberinto de La Soledad? No bitterness either, J, It is what it is. Why is Pemex (por ejemplo) losing money amid record prices for oil?
And please, if you're trying to convince me of the validity of your point of view, don't try to do so by quoting a murdering thug like Che Guevara, it does nothing for your cause.
89 - Christopher Rose
JOAQUIN: As you are becoming a regular debater here, I need you to start formatting links to other sites correctly, as I have done for you in your comment #87 above.
If you are not sure how to do this, there are many places you can learn how. One such place is HTML Code Tutorial where you can learn many things, including how to format links correctly.
Thanks in advance.
Christopher Rose
Blogcritics Comments Editor
90 - Joaquin
Thanks Christopher. I will find the advice useful in other areas as well.
Cheers! :-)
J.
91 - Joaquin
Hey Clavos again,
First, I did NOT rely just on Perz Firmat's book. The latter was only one source I consulted to get a look at the Florida Cuban community, which itself was only a part of a larger reseach project on the US Latino community for a Chicano/Latino Studies seminar. Where I do concede is that, being my very first such research project, my data is old and likely obsolete (late 1980's-early 1990's); second, for the same reason my research methods were admittedly a mite bit raw and in need of refinement; finally, it was no a quantitative study, but in that vein, thanks for the updated quantitative data on Miami-Dade County and the US Census info on the Cuban community, I will certainly check it out.
That being said, I'm still basically on targer when I said:
"The Cubans who HAVE adopted US citizenship and DO participate in the mainstream of US are generally either those who have also taken a more moderate or even a progressive position on revolutionary Cuba ..., or those who have also organized the Cuban mafias ... lobbies like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) that today buy and sell our politicians in Washington of BOTH major parties and who've been organizing the terrorist bands and expeditions ...[to which I add, 'and many of those supporting the latter']... Unfortunately the latter category [I amend, 'of Cubans in the US'] have been the far more visible of the two."
In line with some of the data you gave me, yes, there are those of the Ileana Ros Lehtinen, Mairo and Lincoln Diaz-Balarts (the two "Cuban Kennedys", and ironically relatives of Fidel and Raul Castro, who have effectively taken lead in the US Cuban community at the political level, and who've unfortunately also contributed to steering US policy and politics further to the right on both US-Cuba relatyions and more generally. There are also, however, the Orlando Bosch's and the Jose Posada Carriles's (the latter two who perp[etrated the terrorist murder of 73 passangers aboard a Cubana flight from Barbados to Havana in October 1976), and the Alpha 66 and 2506 Brigader variety who have captured the limelight. so again:
"Unfortunately the latter category [I amend, 'of Cubans in the US'] have been the far more visible of the two."
In this vein, my apologies to those decent, conscientious, and honest Cubans, ncluding conservative ones. It was not my intention to over-generalize.
As to your:
"Plenty of americans are anti-american; especially among the "progressives," and even more so among the (as you call yourself) " revolutionary socialist (Marxist Leninist) as well as an internationalist."
Marxist-Leninism is hardly compatible with the quintessentially capitalist american economic model."
First, I reiterate that I do not - nor should I or anyone else - concede to having American nationality and American-ness be confined to the narrow right wing parameters you apparently hold.There are and have been MANY Americans of left-of-center to radical left convictons who are integral part of US history and heritage, and who've contributed mightily to bettering the US as a country and a society, some recognizable perhaps as all-American icons: Eugene V. Debs and his Socialist Party of America, Helen Keller (all too-often known just as the deaf-mute-and-blind girl/woman who "overcame all her challenges" by "pulling up on her individual bootstraps" in reality she was not only a radical socialist and feminist, but also joined the Industrial Worker of the World [IWW]) and also Mark Twain - again, all-too-often know as just a wonderful writer of Americana, but was also a most acerbic and keenly aware social and politial critic, with whose words I will close as I have to go a la chamba (to work):
"My kind of loyalty is loyalty to one's country, not its institutions or its officeholders.
The country is the substantial thing ... the thing to watch over and care for, and be loyal to.
Its institutions are extraneous, ...its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die (or kill) for rags, that's the loyalty of unreason."
So don't throw your rednecked asshole right-wing pajarilla (tripe) at me to denigrate my American-ness!
As Arnold Schwarzenegger wouls say, I'll be back!
J.
92 - troll
(btw Joaquin - thanks for your efforts and links...it is hard to get a sense of 'the situation on the ground' in Venezuela/Iraq/Georgia/etc (even given our blessed www) that is trustworthy
I regret that the 'bloggers on the scene' in Venezuela who have dropped by BC on occasion have not chosen to become more involved here)
93 - Dan Miller
Troll,
Here is a link to what I find to be a pretty good blog in Venezuela. It provides current news and analysis, generally anti-Chavez.
Dan
94 - troll
thanks for the link Dan - I've been through lots of the political blogs coming out of the area...most of them read like propaganda rags
hopefully this one will be different
95 - Clavos
...rednecked asshole right-wing...
That's me.
And proud of it.
96 - troll
'pride precedes the fall' or some such shit
97 - Clavos
Oh, and BTW, J. I'm not denigrating your "american-ness," just your economic ideas.
As a dual citizenship american myself, I couldn't care less about your (or anybody's) "american-nes."
I do commend you, however, for citing (and apparently admiring) Twain. In that, you are rather rare among left-wingers these days, most of whom (mistakenly) condemn Twain as a racist, specifically for his greatest book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, little realizing that Huck Finn is a treatise against racism.
Others hold Twain up as a paragon of anti-capitalism; again ignoring (or, more likely, misinterpreting) his writing.
However, Twain was actually a firm believer in Capitalism, which he explored in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
As Dr.Jack Cashill, professor and literary critic notes, in an essay originally published in Fortune magazine:
98 - Clavos
'pride precedes the fall' or some such shit
"Pride goeth before a fall." From the bible. (I think).
And I've fallen frequently in my life.
It's a big deal only if you don't get up and move on.
99 - Joaquin
Hello Troll,
In between tasks and deadlines, I've been looking for the Nation issue where I found the info about the dissemination of computers in Venezuela. Alas, still to no avail, so now I go to stage 2 of my search. In the process, however, I did find another Nation issue, this one from December 4, 2006 which included the article "Letter from venezuela: The Land of Chavismo" by Chesa Boudin.
The article discusses a series of social programs initiated in Venezuela in the wake of the April 2002 coup attempt and the Winter 2002-2003 64-day lockout in which bosses and capitalists namely in the oil industry, in concert with elements of the Bush Administration, shut everything down, and which, like similar US- and opposition-fomented actions in Salvador Allende's Chile in 1972-1973, had been intended to foment a popular rebellion to overthrow Pres. Chavez. While they failed in that objective, they did succeed in inflicting $10 billion in damages to the economy, including the drop of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by more than 20%, and a rise in unemployment upwards of 25% - the rate it was in the US in 1933 during the depth of the Great Depression! These actions on the part of these upper middle and upper class Venezuelans also succeeded in inflicting lots of misery on the rest of the population, particularly the poorer population constituting 70% of all Venezuelans. These social programs, undertaken initially, and ingood part to counter-act the political fallout of the aforementioned opposition actions, were established as "las misiones" or missions, largely funded from oil revenues, and which tackled several key areas.
These areas include the following. First, they included education: One of these, the Mision Robinson has virtually eradicated illiteracy in their area of charge in a little over one year, a success paralleling similar educational campaigns in Nicaragua in 1979-1982 and in Cuba in 1960-1962. The success of all three has been recognized by UNESCO. Other misiones enjoying similar success included Negra Hipólita, Sucre, and Ribas. The latter has enabled more that 500,000 to earn a high school diploma, while Sucre is currently helping 458,000 students to pursue university studies in 24 fields.
Other misiones tackled health care, job training, and food programs, including MERCAL and PDVAL which have benefited over 12 million. The Misiones also carried out other social services, and in the 2003-2008 period, visible gains were made, not only in terms of betterment of material conditions, but perhaps more notably, in politically empowering the histoically excluded poor majority population through grass-roots oriented participatory democracy as embodied in the oft-maligned (by the Venezuelan oligarchs and Western circles)Bolivarian circles, foloowing the historical examples of Cuba's CDR's (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution), the Sandinista Nicaraguan CDS's (Comites de Defensa Sandinista) and all their forerunner, the Zapatista committees set up by Emiliano Zapata's forces in teh Mexican state of Morelos in 1914-1916. as one of those served by the misiones and teh Bolivarian circles put it, "Under Chavez we have gotten a taste of what it is like to run the country ..." and again, "That feeling of empowerment is not something people in the barrios will easily give up." These sentiments are the BACKBONE REASON why the 2002 coup failed, or more accurately why so many Venezuelans stopped it.
But as I remember, you were interested in being as "close to the ground" as possible, and you along with others may ask why I'm bringing up this subject matter from late 2006? Well, it's STILL relevant and VERY MUCH ON THE GROUND, as the decision has just been taken (June-July 2008)by the Venezuelan government not only to keep these misiones - which were originally intended to be temporary and provisional measures - on a PERMANENT basis, but also to expand their reach beyond the 70% poor population to include broader layers and sectors of Venezuelans. While it was cerrtainly correct to prioritize the most vulnerable and historically excluded majority, the misiones are being expanded to reach out to the needs and concerns of the middle and upper classes as well. Even while these latter efforts are still in their infancy, the particular interests and concerns of these upper and middle sectors (security, freedom from crime, improvement of "unsightly" areas and elimination of other blights particularly offensive to middle and upper class sensibilities) are even now being served, and have indeed been served in that, as one observer noted, "a more educated and cultured people, with more employment and better nutrition, with greater access to sports and recreation, will be less violent and happier," and thus such a course will ultimately benefit ALL the population, including the bourgeoisie. That is unless that same bourgeoisie persists in undermining these very programs and misiones.
One last observation. Just FYI, I did in the meantime check out that site referred to you by Dan Miller. My own impression of it was, well, so-and-so ....
In the meantime, I'll keep looking for my/our original target, I'm finding interesting things in the process!
Regards
Joaquin
100 - Clavos
Joaquin sez:
...the misiones are being expanded to reach out to the needs and concerns of the middle and upper classes as well. Even while these latter efforts are still in their infancy, the particular interests and concerns of these upper and middle sectors (security, freedom from crime, improvement of "unsightly" areas and elimination of other blights particularly offensive to middle and upper class sensibilities) are even now being served...
And yet, middle and upper class Venezuelans continue to leave the country by the thousands, as this recent news article in the NYT describes:
Apparently, the better educated Venezuelans are able to see through El Caudillo Chavez's propaganda; they see the proverbial man behind the curtain, and, in the words of one Venezuelan now living and working in Miami, they have good reasons to leave:
101 - Joaquin
Well Clavos, good to hear from you so soon.
You were next on my "to do" list. However, rather than waste my (lately quite expended) energy on your latest semi-effort, I will focus my reply to your more civilized and intelligent August 13, 2008, 12PM posting. And what a day you chose to communicate in such an intelligent manner - Fidel's 82nd birthday!
Yes, you are certainly correct in pointing out, as I already have long known, that Mark Twain was a firm advocate of free market capitalism. And yes, I do hold him in high esteem as one of the best personifications of what it means to be an American. I sdimilarly hold other similar famous Americans in equally high regard, including H.L. Menken and Gore Vidal, all of whom had rather caustic words against socialism. But Twain also kept close company with those of socialist peruasion, such as Helen Keller, with whom he was quite close. What these folks share in common, and what distinguishes them from many less-informed people on both the left as well as the right is that they recognized the historical significance and value and significance of capitalism,or at least its basic rudiments. They, along with many many others righly recognize that historically speaking, trade and markets, along with the other rudiments of what is commonly known as today's capitalism has been one of the foremost civilizing influences. It was after all the Phoenicians, perhaps the world's first great commercial people, who pioneered not only the skills and practices associated with major commerce, but they also pioneered and developed those key and indispensable auxiliary skills such as diplomacy. And Dr. Cashill along with Twain et al are certainly right in comparing favorably the socially, cul;turally and politically liberating influence of bourgeois capitalism to the stultifying influences of pre-capitalist feudalism and the catholicism that underpinned it. In relation to virtually all the pre-capitalist forms of socio-political organization, bourgeois capitalism certainly represented a definite forward mach of progress.
There are others who understood all this even better than Twain, Vidal, Mencken, Drs. Cashill and Cox, and I might add, than even many leftists. Foremost among these were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as anyone who reads their Communist Manifesto with a modicum of an open mind will readily see:
"The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.... [It] cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.... The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has theough its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country."
They go on by saying that thanks to the bourgeoisie:
"In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, ... The boureoisie ... draws all, even the most backward nations into civilization ... The bourgeoisie has subjected rural areas to the rule of the cities ... and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."
Finally:
"The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarcely 100 years, has created moe massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together."
So I couldn't agree with you more.
By way of addressing, at least in cursory fashion, the "data" you presented in your last quasi-effort, I will simply note along with the Russian revolutionary Lev Davidovich Trotsky that since the capitalist bourgeoisie presently has all the weapons in its hands - factories, banks, newspapers, universities, scshools, the army, the police - waht the bourgeoisie calls "democracy" works perfectly for its interests.
Haasta Luego!
J.
102 - Ruvy
Joaquin,
I was looking at your reference to Trotsky in the comment above. You do know I'm sure, that Lev Davidovich Trotsky was originally named Lev Bronshtein, and when they called him up for his bar mitzva, I'm willing to bet they called him Aryeh-Lev ben Dovid.
Anyway, I just wanted to make this point to you. We Jews have a number of sayings about revolution; after all, the idea of One G-d was pretty revolutionary back 3,300 years ago, and the idea that a man could argue with G-d, like Moses did - and win yet - was even more revolutionary. Jews tend to be revolutionaries, when they're not oppressing their brother Jews. Give us a messiah to follow - a man of war, not some cheek-turning shmendrik - or give them us revolution. We'll drink it up like Sabbath wine.
Anyway, one of those sayings goes this way:
Haim: Come the revolution, everybody will have peaches and cream.
Yankel: What if I don't like peaches and cream?
Haim: Come the revolution, you'll like peaches and cream.
So much for individual liberties under the revolutionary regime.
"You vill be happy, ja, und if you are not, ve send you to ze firing sqvad! Now ,b>SMILE!
Just something to think about, Joaquin....
103 - Joaquin
Oh, there's more Clavos:
"Apparently, the better educated Venezuelans are able to see through El Caudillo Chavez's propaganda; they see the proverbial man behind the curtain, and, in the words of one Venezuelan now living and working in Miami, they have good reasons to leave:
"The principle reason is fear of change of daily life, said Mr. Corao, who relocated permanently from Venezuela in 1996 and runs Venezuela al Dia, a thrice-monthly tabloid with offices in Doral, a Miami suburb where Venezuelans have settled."
Very well.
Yes, "middle and upper class Venezuelans continue to leave the country by the thousands," and Im certain they'll continue leaving, no matter how many conciliatory steps the Chavez government takes towards them. That is one of the unfortunate realities every major social revolution faces, the loss of badly needed educated and trained human talent. But as Marx and Engels also noted:
"The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."
As noted in the Boudin article I cited for Troll, as well as by others like the noted scholar and lecturer Tariq Ali, "Racism is never far from the surface in Venezuela," and now in Venezuelan politics as well. This has certainly proven true with the "sambo"(mix of indigenous American and African)Chavez and the historically excluded overwhelmingly majority colored population in power. One of the reasons Mr. Chavez is so deeply hated is this racism so deeply imbedded in the overwhelmingly criollo (White European-descended American-born) Latin American middle and upper classes. The same was (and is) true of Cuba, and now also in Bolivia, where the latter classes have been, with the help of US government agencies and NGO's, attempting to break away the largely criollo eastern province of Santa Cruz.
But other "ruling class ideas" in question are of course of a more material-social nature as well, pricipally that of, "the loss of private property, loss of independence from the government, fear of the loss of constitutional rights and individual liberties."
Again Marx and Engels:
"By [what the middle and upper classes generally mean by] freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying."
As to "individual freedom" as conceived by these same classes:
"You must ... confess that by 'individual' you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class [and now upper-class as well] owner of property,"
and of course the form of property in question here is CAPITAL first and foremost. But the conflation and identification of capital-property with individual personhood is itself an illusion, for:
"Capital is a collective product," it is the collective product of the human labor expended to produce it, not by the criollo middle and upper class property owners but by the laborers they exploit .... "Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a SOCIAL power."
So when Marxists are accused of "depriving freedom" or being "dictatorial" it is generally meant in regard to this form of property. As to our allegedly seeking to "abolish the right to acquire property as the fruit of a person's own labor," again Marx and Engels:
"There is no need to abolish that; the development of [modern capitalist] industry HAS ALREADY DESTROYED IT, and is still destroying it daily" for the overwhelming majority of historically excluded masses.
Again:
"But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates CAPITAL, i.e., THAT KIND OF PROPERTY THAT EXPLOITS WAGE LABOR." Again, "We by no means intend to abolish [the] personal appropriation of the products of labor ... [which] leaves no surplus with which to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, UNDER WHICH THE LABORER LIVES MERELY TO INCREASE CAPITAL, AND IS ALLOWED TO LIVE ONLY IN SO FAR AS THE INTEREST OF THE [CAPITALIST] RULING CLASS REQUIRES IT."
And finally:
"Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation."
It is this latter "freedom" that many, though certainly to be fair, not all, of those Venezuelans - and more formerly, Nicaraguans, Chileans, and Cubans - flowing into South Florida now lament having "lost."
BTW, I hope all is well with you. My understanding is that you live in South Florida, which is being hit or at least rubbed by yet another tropical storm.
Hasta la otra,
J.
104 - Joaquin
Hello Ruvy,
Thank you very much for your additional tidbits about Lev Davidovich Bronstein, as "Trosky" has long been one focus of very deep interest for me, both as a revolutinary and as a Jew. And as you would say, anything additional on him that comes my way I "drink up like Sabbath wine."
And yes, I do appreciate your appeal for a salutary pause, as I certainly do not deny that in the history of the socialist revolutionary experience not only have egregious mistakes been made but, particularly true of Stalin, serious outright crimes were committed. And Trotsky himself was guilty of both. In regard to Stalin, the all-too-oft cited "example" of the evils of socialist revolution, the ironic thing is that if anything he in fact took the Soviet revolution, at most critical levels, politically TO THE RIGHT of what it had been under Lenin and Trotsky.
In this vein, again Marx and Engels:
"Of course, in the beginning (and historically socialist revolution is still in its beginning, as compared to the 800 year history of capitalist development) [socialist revolution] cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; [or] by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable ...."
And as one colleague has pointed out, revolutionary change hurts, but to not change and to continue present conditions withou challenge hurts even more.
Shalom,
J.
105 - Joaquin
Oh yes Ruvy,
I almost forgot to refer you to 2 good books on the Russian Revolution in this vein:
"The Bolsheviks in Power: The first Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd" by Alexander Rabinowtch,
and
"Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in 20th Century Rissia" by Sheila Fitzpatrick.
J.
106 - Clavos
Thank you for your kind wishes, Joaquin. TS Fay, as such storms go, was largely a matter of blustery winds and a large amount of rain, resulting in some flooding, particularly in east central Florida. Not a big problem, and the heavy rains, especially on Lake Okeechobee, South Florida's primary water source, were welcome.
Since your ultimate source for justification of your philosophy are the writings and ideas of Marx and Engels, which, in view of the failure of those ideas in the various countries which have adopted them in the 20th century (Russia, the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, etc.), I totally reject. I see no point in my further participation in the discussion.
You embrace Communism, I do not.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
107 - Joaquin
As I said Clavos, I am a Marxist Leninist. Anyway, it was stimulating while it lasted. Thanks for engaging me as long and as doggedly as you did.
Best wishes!
J.
108 - Dave Nalle
As I said Clavos, I am a Marxist Leninist.
Fascinating. Are they keeping you in a museum or a zoo? What are they doing to assure that the rare breed doesn't die out? Do they let you engage in the traditional entertainments of the breed, standing in long bread lines and informing on your neighbors?
Dave
109 - Joaquin
Dave, long time no hear from you on this blog!
I see that you regularly inhabit other parts of BC, and have even written a few articles here and there. This, I suppose, makes you a "media person," certainly here and now. So let's get to it.
Your remark of August 21, 2008 @ 17:13 PM, as well as the bulk of your other remarks to various others and to myself on this blog clearly prove a 3-fold point of mine: First, that the greater bulk of the Western media, not only is controlled and serves the dominant corporate interests, but is itself a key part of that corporate capitalist establishment itself; second, how effectively they've brainwashed a good part of the Western world's population, most especially, it seems, the US population: third, among the above, the most brainwashed appear to be the establishment and pro-establishment "media people" themselves.
Let’s begin with the actual content of your remarks: “Do they let you engage in the traditional entertainments of the breed, standing in long bread lines and informing on your neighbors?”
Let’s take the “long breadlines” bit first. Surely you must know that breadlines in Russia go back way before the Soviet period to tsarist times. Indeed, it was bread riots in St. Petersburg, in March of 1917 that triggered the Russian Revolution itself. They have also been part of Latin American history as well. They certainly weren’t the unique invention of Russian or Latin American socialist governments. And they continue to be seen elsewhere today.
Now, for the bit on: “informing on your neighbors?”
Again, that is not unique to socialist governments like East Germany and its Stasi. A cursory review of recent history and actuality will tell you this right away: Anastasio Somoza’s pre-Sandinista Nicaragua, Batista’s Cuba, “our firm allies” Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship, and above all Uribe’s Colombia (where people are daily dispatched in the most brutal of ways for not informing!), and let’s not forget our own “land of the free, home of the brave” here in “God’s country”: the snitchings during World War I and the accompanying “slacker raids” of 1917-1919 and “Palmer raids” of 1919-1921, the forced “naming of names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947-1954 and McCarthy hearings of 1950-1954, not to mention the latest post-9/11 TIPS program and the goings on at Abu Grahib and Guantanamo " and the US list here is NOT exhaustive!
But the above sub-remarks need to be addressed at a still deeper, and more fundamental level. You, along with many others have been " to a great extent correctly " pointing out some of the negative practices and the failures of several of the recent socialist governments (however, without acknowledging, let alone mentioning their positive practices and successes) as if they represented and embodied the WHOLE experience and meaning of socialism, and more specifically, of the entire corpus of Marxism Leninism, that is the WHOLE extent of its theory and practice. This is most false! First, what we have seen of the world’s revolutionary states since 1917 - both the positive as well as the negative - represents but a mere sliver of the entire Marxist Leninist (henceforth ML) cosmology (i.e. world view and practice). Secondly, the negative features you and others repeatedly cite, while true, merely tell us that these socialist experiments themselves are but early, and very rough first drafts of a larger, more progressive vision. In this vein, I’d like to point out that for the most part " though admittedly not always, and there have been several very notorious exceptions ! " the tendency has been that each succeeding revolutionary experiment has tended to have less of the more “dictatorial” and “totalitarian” features of their earlier predecessors. This has been particularly true in Latin America: The Cuban revolution did indeed in this vein borrow a great deal from the Soviet rough first draft, including its more ineffective and negative features; the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution, while taking significant lead from its Cuban predecessor, carried less of these “Soviet-like” features; and finally, the Venezuelan Bolivarian revolution carries even less of them. Finally, the analysis of the remarks goes yet deeper. Again, what has been so far seen in the Marxist Leninist experiments up date is but merely the physical and temporal manifestation, by way of trial and error, of a much larger and more coherent weltanschauung (i.e. world view and practice). Perhaps the best practical metaphor I can use to illustrate this is the fact that of all Marxist Leninist literature, only about 30% attempts to map out what an idealized future socialist society would look like in all its particular details, at best a dubious enterprise. The remaining 70%, however, and the greater bulk, consists of a critical analysis of actually existing modern industrial capitalism, and based on this analysis, also tries to map out a praxis for socialist transformation of society. Perhaps we ML’s should spend more effort mapping out the details of a future socialist society, fore as history shows, very often our practice has gone ahead of our theory. But as all of the above should indicate, ML is far from being the irrelevant “museum piece” you allege.
The point, once again, appears to be: “"The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."
Now to other matters.
Dave, you’ve done me, and perhaps others out there as well, the favor of providing me the occasion to return our focus to the original matter that triggered this whole debate to begin with: the allegations by the US and Western media that the Russians are being invited by the Cubans and the Venezuelans to set up their military bases in these two countries. Let me begin first by reiterating, with some abridging, an earlier posting of mine regarding this. Earlier I’d posted that:
“I ran into another item on this subject of the putative - and now more apparently prematurely assumed - prospect of Russian bases in Venezuela, an article by Daniel Cancel on Boomber.com of July 28, 2008: "Chavez said if Russian navy ships were to arrive in Venezuelan ports they would be welcome, and said the reactivation of the U.S. Navy's Fourth Fleet to patrol the Caribbean is a threat to Venezuela and the region… The second, and most immediately important point in this on-going conversation is in the first part of the sentence, namely: "Chavez said if Russian navy ships were to arrive in Venezuelan ports they would be welcome,...." Mr. Chavez said ONLY that Russian navy ships would be welcome should they call on Venezuelan ports, just as British or Canadian ships would surely be welcomed in US ports should they need to call on them. There is NOTHING here about bases! Neither in, nor behind, nor in front of, above, or below that key phrase. This seems to reinforce the thesis put forth by several contributors, and which I myself hold, that Dan Miller's article - at least its title, [along with other similar articles in the Western press] [are] at least obliquely intended to lead the reading public to jump to paranoiac conclusions of a Russo-Venezuelan threat to US national security.”
I was recently able to get what Mr. Chavez actually said in that speech, verbatim:
“I believe that Russia has sufficient capacity for mobilization, aircraft and boats to appear in any part of the world; if they appeared in Venezuela, that wouldn’t be a strange thing. Let them visit the seas of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, if they go to Venezuela they will be welcome, because we’re not talking about the (US) Fourth Fleet here. The Fourth Fleet [which not only would “patrol” the seas surrounding all South America but also go inland into its rivers to “patrol”] is a threat to us, and not just to Venezuela, [but] to all of Latin America. If some day, a Russian fleet should arrive in the Caribbean, we will hoist the flags, play drums and put on the Venezuelan and Russian national anthems, because it would be the arrival of a friend, arriving to hold out her hand; it would be the arrival of our ally. ….”
First, being “welcome” obviously doesn’t imply Russia would actually stay in Venezuela. Indeed, not only has the Venezuelan Ministry of Communication and Information officially denied the possibility of Russian bases in Venezuela, but such is also prohibited by Article 13 of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Constitution, promoted by Mr. Chavez himself.
The fantastic notion of Russian military bases in Venezuela is perfectly in line with the on-going US agenda of presenting Mr. Chavez and his government as a danger to “regional stability” as well as to the “security of the US.”
J.
110 - Dave Nalle
Well, Joaquin. While I find your Marxism quaint and amusing, you seem not to entirely grasp the environment in which your comments appear to others.
You rant about the 'corporate controlled media' without seeming to grasp that with the advent of the internet and even cable television there is such an overwhelming diversity in media in the US and other free nations that the idea of a unified corporate media viewpoint is positively laughable. This is not Venezuela where Chavez can shut down the independent media on any ridiculous pretext. We have every kind of fool and idiot on the air on major networks and minor saying things which are alternately wise, foolish and positively insane. The main role the corporate media plays in this is that they go out of their way to get people who are controversial and whose ideas are challenging onto their shows because that draws viewers. They do this because that is how they make money, and there is no purer and more innocent motive than that.
As for Russia's involvement in Cuba or Venezuela, I don't see your point. Your last post seems to confirm that Chavez would be perfectly happy to have a Russian presence in his country. Certainly it would help with his effort to subvert the governments of the countries around him and bring them into his Bolivarian Empire in waiting.
But please, show me where i the western media anyone takes a Venezuelan or even a Russian/Venezuelan threat to the United States seriously. Not a threat to other countries in Venezuela's geographic region - where there is general concern - but an actual threat to the US? The truth is that this is NOT what people in America or in our media are concerned about. We're perfectly aware the Venezuela is a minimal threat to the US. But that doesn't mean we want to stand by and watch them oppress nations which we have relationships with and where representative government and capitalism are growing.
On all of these issues your viewpoint seems to be dogmatic and shaped by a very limited perception of the realities of life in the free world. I wonder why you would choose not to see the reality around you and live in an ideological bubble. Is it comforting in some way?
Dave
111 - Jordan Richardson
Dave,
In terms of media, there certainly are some issues in the United States worth looking at. While I agree with you that the internet has been increasingly hard to chop up and regulate, the "old-fashioned" information highways have not been.
When CBS refuses to air an ad criticizing the growing federal budget during Super Bowl XXXVIII, but does air a sport celebrating the drug policy of the government, something starts to smell funny. There are numerous cases of news outlets, especially at the local levels, being forced to squash completely factual and legitimate stories because of sponsor demands. These media outlets have more loyalty to sponsors and governments than they do to the public trust and this generates multiple problems, providing less diverse opinions and less actual information.
So while one might say that Venezuela features more media censorship than the United States, to suggest that American owns a wholly free press operating in the public trust - as it should be - is not true. Americans shouldn't strive to have media that is "better than China," they should struggle to have media that serves the public. When a story about BGH is squashed for fear of offending a sponsor, there's a problem with the free flow of information.
In 2003, the FCC changed how media ownership took place in America. Michael Powell permitted more single-company market share in any given market (45% is possible now), removed restrictions on companies that owned newspapers and TV media in the same market (Rupert Murdoch loves that one), and halted the renewal of license reviews (this was done to see if the media outlets were serving the public trust). In 2007, the FCC voted to relax media ownership laws further.
So when you've got Disney, Viacom, TimeWarner, NewsCorporation, General Electric, and Bertelsmann AG owning 90% or more of all media in the United States, you can see how people would reach the conclusion that the "free press" in the United States refers more to a freedom to serve the corporate trust and not the public trust.
The main role the corporate media plays in this is that they go out of their way to get people who are controversial and whose ideas are challenging onto their shows because that draws viewers.
The likes Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Keith Olbermann are not "controversial" in terms of legitimate discourse. They are controversial only in that they play to their particular base and fritter about on both sides of the same ugly coin. I fail to see how these corporate groups "go out of their way" to do this, seeing as how it virtually IS their way to operate in this fashion.
Point is that the media in America is supposed to serve the public trust and more people are sceptical of it than ever, causing a run to the internet and to the so-called "citizen journalists" who have now become more trustworthy to the average person than "The Most Trusted Name in News." The people are waking up and most use schlock like O'Reilly, FOX, and MSNBC as entertainment more than anything. Hell, is it any small wonder that most people are getting their "news" from The Daily Show?
112 - Jordan Richardson
When CBS refuses to air an ad criticizing the growing federal budget during Super Bowl XXXVIII, but does air a sport celebrating the drug policy of the government
That should say "does air a spot," although the slip-up is funnier.
113 - Dave Nalle
When CBS refuses to air an ad criticizing the growing federal budget during Super Bowl XXXVIII, but does air a sport celebrating the drug policy of the government, something starts to smell funny.
As I recall they didn't refuse to air the ad, they determined that it didn't qualify for a discounted rate as a PSA. Not the same thing. And just as you and I may think that budget controls are more important than drug policy, CBS is entitled to believe the opposite.
There are numerous cases of news outlets, especially at the local levels, being forced to squash completely factual and legitimate stories because of sponsor demands. These media outlets have more loyalty to sponsors and governments than they do to the public trust and this generates multiple problems, providing less diverse opinions and less actual information.
So your answer would be to nationalize all media? It's easy to object to commercial media, but where do you go from there? What do you have to offer that's a better and more equitable alternative?
So while one might say that Venezuela features more media censorship than the United States, to suggest that American owns a wholly free press operating in the public trust - as it should be - is not true.
America has a commercial press which operates in its own interest. I have yet to see anyone offer better alternatives.
Americans shouldn't strive to have media that is "better than China," they should struggle to have media that serves the public. When a story about BGH is squashed for fear of offending a sponsor, there's a problem with the free flow of information.
I've seen reports on BGH in the national media. I see little evidence that they have been suppressed. The milk council has influence, but thye don't advertise on every station or have enough influence to cover every possible local and national network. Plus their influence is counter-balanced by the very well funded and effective environmental and consumer lobbying groups which oppose them and have just as much ability to influence the media.
In 2003, the FCC changed how media ownership took place in America. Michael Powell permitted more single-company market share in any given market (45% is possible now), removed restrictions on companies that owned newspapers and TV media in the same market (Rupert Murdoch loves that one), and halted the renewal of license reviews (this was done to see if the media outlets were serving the public trust). In 2007, the FCC voted to relax media ownership laws further.
So? Has this made smaller outlets disappear? Not in any noticable way. There are more sources for news and entertainment today than there were 4 years ago.
So when you've got Disney, Viacom, TimeWarner, NewsCorporation, General Electric, and Bertelsmann AG owning 90% or more of all media in the United States, you can see how people would reach the conclusion that the "free press" in the United States refers more to a freedom to serve the corporate trust and not the public trust.
That's SIX different outlets, all competing with each other for audience, and they hardly have the same political allegiances, plus most of them let their local affiliates have enormous latitude in what they cover and do very little to control even what goes on their national news outlets.
The likes Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Keith Olbermann are not "controversial" in terms of legitimate discourse. They are controversial only in that they play to their particular base and fritter about on both sides of the same ugly coin. I fail to see how these corporate groups "go out of their way" to do this, seeing as how it virtually IS their way to operate in this fashion.
I wasn't actually talking about the show hosts. They are by their nature going to be relatively under control. But look at the guests these people have on. In a given day you'll see scores of people on their shows from every possible political perspective, including people way outside of the mainstream.
Point is that the media in America is supposed to serve the public trust
Who says? The media is not a public institution. It's not some sort of public service organization. It's a business, just as it was when all we had were newspapers.
and more people are sceptical of it than ever, causing a run to the internet and to the so-called "citizen journalists" who have now become more trustworthy to the average person than "The Most Trusted Name in News."
And that's a good thing. More diversity, more news on demand, more people doing their own research. Fantastic. And all made possible because of minimal regulation.
The people are waking up and most use schlock like O'Reilly, FOX, and MSNBC as entertainment more than anything. Hell, is it any small wonder that most people are getting their "news" from The Daily Show?
Which is also a commercial show on a commercial network.
Dave
114 - Franco
"On all of these issues your viewpoint seems to be dogmatic and shaped by a very limited perception of the realities of life in the free world. I wonder why you would choose not to see the reality around you and live in an ideological bubble. Is it comforting in some way?"
Very well put Dave. The telling dysfunction is in his absolutes, which he uses to base the framing of his arguments. It’s a faults premise.
He was obviously taught by someone using the same faults premise of absolutes and it is the only learned ability he has to apply when re-expressing them outward. In other words, he has not started thinking for himself yet nor developed the confidence to do so outside of his ideological bubble. This dogged adhesion to absolutes denies him sight of the forest for the trees. And he calls the West brainwashed?
115 - Jordan Richardson
So your answer would be to nationalize all media? It's easy to object to commercial media, but where do you go from there? What do you have to offer that's a better and more equitable alternative?
When the media is designed to serve the public trust and it winds up serving the corporate trust instead, there's a problem. I'll readily admit to not having many options and will vehemently support going online and to alternative news sources (with rigorous fact checking whenever possible) as the place to "go from there." I think society is naturally moving in that direction. Media should be for the people, by the people.
116 - Dave Nalle
But the media is NOT designed to serve the public trust. It's a business. Media is for the MARKET, so the people have to determine what they want and will watch and pay for, which is ultimately a much better system than someone in a government office trying to guess what the people need and forcing commercial media to provide it.
Dave
117 - Clavos
Now that the technology of communications has advanced to the degree it has (and who knows what marvels the future will bring?), I suspect that we will never again see one outlet, or even a single medium which will be able to appeal to a broad, "umbrella" segment of the public.
Instead, as we are beginning to experience even now, we will have narrowly segmented, niche-driven outlets, and some entire mediums, wherein the majority of consumers of a certain demography, whether it be age or interests, income or geographical location, etc., will dominate the demand for content.
118 - troll
Joaquin - thanks for your efforts searching and for the link
that said -
...again Marx and Engels:
"Of course, in the beginning (and historically socialist revolution is still in its beginning, as compared to the 800 year history of capitalist development) [socialist revolution] cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; [or] by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable ...."
to me this sums up the moral bankruptcy of the ML project
...save the proletariat of the world from further dictatorships of its bloodthirsty collective id
119 - Joaquin
Franco, Dave Nalle, Troll, et al.
"On all of these issues your viewpoint seems to be dogmatic and shaped by a very limited perception of the realities of life in the free world. I wonder why you would choose not to see the reality around you and live in an ideological bubble. Is it comforting in some way?"
”Very well put Dave. The telling dysfunction is in his absolutes, which he uses to base the framing of his arguments. It's a faults premise.
He was obviously taught by someone using the same faults premise of absolutes and it is the only learned ability he has to apply when re-expressing them outward. In other words, he has not started thinking for himself yet nor developed the confidence to do so outside of his ideological bubble. This dogged adhesion to absolutes denies him sight of the forest for the trees. And he calls the West brainwashed?”
“you seem not to entirely grasp the environment in which your comments appear to others.”
“You rant about the 'corporate controlled media' without seeming to grasp that with the advent of the internet and even cable television there is such an overwhelming diversity in media in the US and other free nations that the idea of a unified corporate media viewpoint is positively laughable. This is not Venezuela where Chavez can shut down the independent media on any ridiculous pretext.”
Very well.
First, I arrived at my perspectives independently and in fact facing very strong counter-influences and counter-currents, some relatively benign, others less so. But the cardinal underlying factor in coming to my conclusions was nothing less, and nothing more, than my own unobstructed observations of life in advanced industrial capitalist society itself, news accounts of events elsewhere, however filtered or cooked they may have been, and how they all interrelated together as I began seeing them since the age of 16. I never joined a Marxist party, for one. But in this vein, I have also quoted Marx and Engels extensively in this blog, but in the same way I would quote anyone who puts things according to reality, or conversely, to illustrate important points by way of negative example; if someone else who sees what I see puts it well, I see no need to “use my own words” if that someone else already says it adequately. Conversely, if someone reveals the folly of their misinformed position, well, let them. And by the way Franco, (tsk, tsk) I really hate to harp on the same old theme … but your repeated use of the word “faults” should really read “false.” I would’ve let this slip, except that you made the same old lapse repeatedly, not only in your latest message, but in previous messages as well. I thus concluded that, unlike the many lapses you previously cited on my part (touché, I must admit!), your lapses here were not a question of typing in a hurry, as was my case, but were lapses in basic conception of syntax itself.
Now, I will address matters of more substance such as the bit on “This is not Venezuela where Chavez can shut down the independent media on any ridiculous pretext.”
For your information, Dave, the bulk of Venezuela’s media is not only privately owned, but is in fact anti-Chavez. Here are a few observations by someone who has been very “close to the ground” in Venezuela for quite some time:
“In Venezuela, 5 major private television networks control at least 90% of the market and smaller private stations control another 5%. This 95% of the broadcast market began to outwardly (without major impediments from the Chavez administration) express its opposition … as early as 1999.”
“For several decades, commercial television in Venezuela has belonged to just 2 families: the Cisneros, who own Venevision (the largest station in the country), and the Bottome & Granier Group …. This same small group of media owners … also own advertising and public relations agencies … as well as record labels and other cultural industries ….”
In this vein, the Cisneros empire also owns the Los Leones baseball team of Caracas as well as the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant.
To go on:
“ Print media (in Venezuela) are similarly concentrated in the hands of just a few wealthy families …” including, “9 out of the 10 major national newspapers ….”
On the government’s side, by contrast:
“There is only one (1) public television station with a national broadcasting frequency, Venezolana de Television” a.k.a. “Channel 8.”
Source: Eva Golinger, “The Chavez Code” 2006.
Ms. Golinger also found that the private media contributed mightily to the 64-day “strike” or more accurately, bosses’ lockdown in 2002-2003: The Cisneros’s, for example, “ordered the closure of [their] beverage and food product distribution companies so that no commodities were available in markets” during this hard period. Furthermore, “At [the] Cisneros’s milk farm in the state of Merida, witnesses saw workers pouring milk into the rivers instead of bottling it for sale.” Thus, “[the Cisneros’s] had decided that depriving Venezuelan children (from the 70% or so poor majority, of course) of (very badly needed) milk was fair game to get rid of Chavez.”
Ms. Golinger further notes that this same private media:
“… snatched up the opportunity to launch the most massive information war ever experienced in modern times.” (I myself would beg to differ here, though it certainly was one of the most massive such campaigns.)
During that 64-day 2002-2003 lockout:
“No less than 4 television channels [not to mention radio and print media] joined together 24 hours a day … and broadcast 17,600 propaganda announcements against the government, dedicating all their programming, without a second of rest, to denigrate the government … to cause all classes of alarm and rumors to invoke terror, precisely.” This, according to media expert Luis Britto Garcia.
And, as Golinger further noted:
“In the end [during those 64 days], Venezuelans were left with a government denied access to media and a private media functioning as a de facto government.”
Lastly, and most egregious of all, was:
“… the broadcast of violent images and opposition propaganda by all private stations DURING CHILDREN’S VIEWING HOURS, IN EXPLICIT VIOLATION OF VENEZUELAN LAW.” (The organic law protecting the child and the adolescent Articles 38, 32, 63, 65, 71, and 74, among others.)
The net effect of this was indeed that many children were effectively frightened to the point of having nightmares as well exhibiting the physical symptoms of such fright such as cold sweat, hyperventilating, breathing problems, sleeplessness, etc. This was nothing less than political child abuse on the part of the Venezuelan right, much of it funded by US taxpayer dollars, by the way.
Note that the Venezuelan government did not shut any of these private media outlets, but during the short-lived Carmona coup of April 2002, the coup leaders did storm Channel 8 and shut it down.
Well, so much for Venezuela.
Now to other matters.
“...again Marx and Engels:
"Of course, in the beginning (and historically socialist revolution is still in its beginning, as compared to the 800 year history of capitalist development) [socialist revolution] cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; [or] by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable ...."
to me this sums up the moral bankruptcy of the ML project”
Troll, while it is certainly not my intention here to try and “convert” you to the ML position, at best a most dubious enterprise, I do, however, see the need to clarify further both the actual meaning of the above Marx-Engels quote and also it’s understanding by myself, other ML’s, and other non-Marxist progressives. The key phrase here, to which I now need to correct an accidental remission, is: “[socialist transformation, or even reform] cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” The key lies in the “despotic inroads on the rights of property,” that is, by a government taking policy actions concerning property, particularly capitalist property, that are seen, interpreted, and naturally very deeply resented by the owners of capitalist property (for this refer to my Marx-Engels entries on what capital and capitalist property mean in that same blog) as “despotic” of “dictatorial” measures, when the measures are merely correctives to address poverty, fiscal deficit, inequities in wages, working conditions, etc. taken by governments, and not always by Marxist Leninist or even socialist governments. Such actions are also almost always resented " with particularly intense vitriol - by the capital-owning classes when taken even by “democratic” governments in capitalist Western nations as well. If you read a lot of 19th century writing, and Marx was particularly prone to this, you will note that to convey important but often highly nuanced realities, notions, or concepts, it was usual to resort to using terms and words that were highly charged, and unfortunately for that very reason also often reductive as a consequence, to convey an important point. Thus the terminology “despotic inroads” is used.
The best example that comes to mind is the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act by the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, perhaps the best president this country’s ever had. This act of Congress, which provided for the national minimum wage, the abolition of child labor (under 16 years old), and the 40-hour work week (translated into the 8-hour day: time and a half overtime pay after 8 hours, double-time after 12) that we take for granted today, and which have been under steady attack by the US right, was one of the most highly controversial bills ever introduced. So controversial and polemic was this bill that it took over one year to pass, and along the way it met strong opposition, not just the expected Republican opposition, but also from Democrats. It was even denounced at one point as “un-American” and “subversive”, not by a Republican but by a Democrat. Once it was passed, after such a long and acrimonious fight, the Southern Democrats broke with their Northern liberal colleagues and joined forces with the Republicans to oppose all future New Deal reforms by FDR, and it seems they were successful. In other words, even the prospect of paying workers a decent living wage; of keeping children out of the labor force so they can go to school, and so as to keep children from overflowing the surplus labor pool and thereby driving wages down for the entire workforce; and of setting working hours to the humanly decent number of 8 hours (as opposed to the pre-1938 10, 12,or even 14-16 hour shifts that were the norm, with no overtime!), and providing for just compensation for hours worked beyond that number; all of these " and many others - were regarded by the capital-owning classes as “despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.”
Just had to clarify that.
Next, to address several of the messages of 8/22/08 on the subject of media, I am enclosing the thoughts, findings, and observations of one leading media expert and long-time practitioner, Mr. Ben Bagdikian, professional journalist since 1941, a former editor at the Washington Post, dean emeritus at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Mr. Bagdikian is perhaps best noted as having published a definitive work on the US and Western media, “The Media Monopoly,” originally published in 1983, now in its 7th edition. When the Media Monopoly was first published in 1983, the number of private corporations controlling a majority of US media " including newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, music, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies " was 50. In 1987, the number had shrunk to 26; by 1992, down to 14; by 2000, down to 6; and as of 2004, it’s down to 5.
The excerpt is from the preface to the book’s 5th edition. The following quotes from 8/22 seemed like apt openers:
“you seem not to entirely grasp the environment in which your comments appear to others.”
“So when you've got Disney, Viacom, TimeWarner, NewsCorporation, General Electric, and Bertelsmann AG owning 90% or more of all media in the United States, you can see how people would reach the conclusion that the "free press" in the United States refers more to a freedom to serve the corporate trust and not the public trust.
That's SIX different outlets, all competing with each other for audience, and they hardly have the same political allegiances, plus most of them let their local affiliates have enormous latitude in what they cover and do very little to control even what goes on their national news outlets.”
“Point is that the media in America is supposed to serve the public trust
Who says? The media is not a public institution. It's not some sort of public service organization. It's a business, just as it was when all we had were newspapers.
“But the media is NOT designed to serve the public trust. It's a business. Media is for the MARKET, so the people have to determine what they want and will watch and pay for, which is ultimately a much better system than someone in a government office trying to guess what the people need and forcing commercial media to provide it.”
(emphases added)
“In the last 5 years, a small number of the country's largest industrial corporations has acquired more public communications power-including ownership of the news-than any private businesses have ever before possessed in world history.
“... At issue is the possession of power to surround almost every man, woman, and child in the country with controlled images and words, to socialize each new generation of Americans, to alter the political agenda of the country. And with that power comes the ability to exert influence that in many ways is greater than that of schools, religion, parents, and even government itself.
“Aided by the digital revolution and the acquisition of subsidiaries that operate at every step in the mass communications process, from the creation of content to its delivery into the home, the communications cartel has exercised stunning influence over national legislation and government agencies, an influence whose scope and power would have been considered scandalous or illegal twenty years ago.
“The new communications cartel has been made possible by the withdrawal of earlier government intervention that once aspired to protect consumers and move toward the ideal of diversity of content and ownership in the mass media. Government's passivity has emboldened the new giants to boast openly of monopoly and their ability to project news, commercial messages, and graphic images into the consciousness and subconscious of almost every American.”
*****
“Because each of the dominant firms has adopted a strategy of creating its own closed system of control over every step in the national media process, from creation of content to its delivery, no content-news, entertainment, or other public messages-will reach the public unless a handful of corporate decision-makers decide that it will. Smaller independents have always helped provide an alternative and still do, but they have become ever more vulnerable to the power of the supergiants. As the size and financial power of the new dominant firms have escalated, so has their coercive power to offer a bothersome smaller competitor a choice of either selling out at once or slowly facing ruin as the larger firm uses its greater financial resources to undercut the independent competitor on price and motion. In the process, consumers have become less influential than ever.”
*****
“Perhaps the most troubling power of the new cartel is its control of the main body of news and public affairs information. The reporting of news has always been a commercial enterprise and this has always created conflicts of interest. But the behavior of the new corporate controllers of public information has produced a higher level of manipulation of news to pursue the owners' other financial and political goals. In the process, there has been a parallel shrinkage of any sense of obligation to serve the non-commercial information needs of public citizenship.
“The idea of government interceding to protect consumers is contrary to the ideology of most of the media cartel's leaders, who with few exceptions, pursue the conservative political and economic notion of an uninhibited free market that operates without social or moral obligations.”
*****
“... earlier, it was possible to describe the dominant firms in each separate medium-daily newspapers, magazines, radio, television, books, and movies. With each passing year ... the number of controlling firms in all these media has shrunk: from fifty corporations in 1984 to twenty-six in 1987, followed by twenty-three in l990, and then, as the borders between the different media began to blur, to less than twenty in 1993. In 1996 the number of media corporations with dominant power in society is closer to ten. In terms of media possessions and resources, the newest dominant ten are Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation Limited (Murdoch), Sony, Tele-Communications, Inc., Seagram (TV, movies, cable, books, music), Westinghouse, Gannett, and General Electric.”
*****
“A prime exhibit of the cartel's new political power is the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This act was billed as a transformation of sixty-two years of federal communications law for the purpose of "increasing competition." It was, with some exceptions, largely described as such by most of the major news media. But its most dramatic immediate result has been to reduce competition and open the path to cooperation [or cartelization] among the giants.
“The Telecommunications Act of 1996 swept away even the minimal consumer and diversity protections of the 1934 act that preceded it. Though this was an intricate bill of 280 pages that would transform the American media landscape, its preparation and passage did not meet the standards of study and public participation that ordinarily would precede an historic transformation of a major influence on society.”
*****
“Almost all of the media leaders, possibly excepting Ted Turner of Turner Broadcasting, are political conservatives, a factor in the drastic shift in the entire spectrum of national politics to a brand of conservatism once thought of as ‘extreme.’”
*****
“... most conservatives consider news bias to be any news that departs from the promotion of conservatism and corporate values.”
*****
“Domination of corporate values lies behind another profound imbalance in the news. Almost every metropolitan paper in the country has a whole section devoted to "Business," which, with rare exceptions, combines service to financiers and investors with presentation of corporate leaders as heroes or exciting combatants. There is no such systematic section for consumers, though most of the country's readers are not investors but consumers.”
… in this vein, Bagdikian goes on:
“Another zone of near silence has led to ominous signs in the economy and a threat to social peace. In the United States, maldistribution of income-the growing gap between rich and non-rich-is among the worst among developed countries. Years of systematic silence on the matter in the news media has permitted an accumulation of public distrust, anger, and frustration.
“Economist Lester Thurow has said of the widening gap, ‘Probably no country has ever had as large a shift in the distribution of wealth without having gone through a revolution or losing a major war.’" But the minimal appearance in the news during the years when this maldistribution was clearly developing has kept both its cause and possible solutions largely invisible - and therefore out of the political arena. As always, the public's lack of good information during a time of duress has led to finding scapegoats, and to increasing domestic right-wing terrorism of a sort once thought limited to the Third World.”
*****
“The role of children in modern commercial television is that of targets-targets for commercials that sell snacks, soft drinks, fashionable clothes, and toys. The idea of the child as future responsible citizen seems not to exist on commercial TV. That role seems to be left to public television, whose appropriations conservatives and commercial interests have done their best to kill, and which in response has itself become dependent upon corporate advertising.
“In the reign of the new media cartel, the integrity of much of the country's professional news has become more ambiguous than ever. The role of journalists within news companies has always been an inherent dilemma for reporters and editors. Reporters are expected by the public and by reportorial standards to act like independent, fair-minded professionals. But reporters are also employees of corporations that control their hiring, firing, and daily management- what stories they will cover and what part of their coverage will be used or discarded. It is a harsh newsroom reality that never seems to cause conservative critics to speculate why their corporate colleagues who own the news and have total control over both their reporters' careers and the news that gets into their papers would somehow delight in producing "liberal bias."
[Here I interject to cite the case of Raymond Bonner, former El Salvador correspondent for the New York Times. In January 1982, Bonner, along with fellow correspondent Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post uncovered the El Mozote Massacre of December 11, 1981, in the village of El Mozote, El Salvador where the Salvadoran army massacred some 1,000 villagers, men women, children, an old people. On January 27, 1982 their story was simultaneously published in both papers. In the aftermath, the Wall Street Journal, Accuracy In Media (about one of the most grossly misnamed right wing media watch dog organization in the US!), and the Reagan Administration all strongly criticized the New York Times for publishing the story, and as a result of their pressure, the NYT’s editor-in-chief Abe Rosenthal pulled Bonner from the Central America desk and reassigned to the paper’s Business desk. Shortly thereafter Bonner resigned. Why the concerted pressure, and why the NYT’s cave-in? Because at the time of the massacre and its uncovering, the Reagan Administration had been hyping and pimping the “success of ‘democracy’” in El Salvador, and the government of then-president Napoleon Duarte as “compliant with human rights” requirements, both conditions being required for continued US military aid to El Salvador. The Bonner-Guillermoprieto story, however, exposed all this hyping as one big lie! Eventually, however, the details of the Bonner-Guillermoprieto story were verified as true.]
“Seeing their journalists as obedient workers on an assembly
line has produced a growing incidence of news corporations demanding unethical acts. There are more instances than ever of management contempt and cruelty toward their journalists.”
*****
“… the daily newspaper business ... remains one of the most profitable in the country. Profit level of daily newspapers is two to three times higher than average profits of the Fortune 500 top corporations, according to John Morton of Morton Research, an authoritative source on newspaper economics. According to Standard and Poor's Media Industry Survey, in 1994, not a banner year in the news industry, the average profit for publicly traded news companies was 20 percent.”
*****
“In 1987, cancellation of the Fairness Doctrine made another new antidemocratic phenomenon almost predictable. Talk radio has become an overwhelming ultraconservative political propaganda - machine. The most influential propagandist, Rush Limbaugh, has nineteen million listeners, and there is no right of reply to his extra- I ordinary record of lies, libels, and damaging fantasies.
*****
“Point is that the media in America is supposed to serve the public trust
Who says? The media is not a public institution. It's not some sort of public service organization. It's a business, just as it was when all we had were newspapers.
“But the media is NOT designed to serve the public trust. It's a business. Media is for the MARKET, so the people have to determine what they want and will watch and pay for, which is ultimately a much better system than someone in a government office trying to guess what the people need and forcing commercial media to provide it.”
“you seem not to entirely grasp the environment in which your comments appear to others.”
In this vein, continues Bagdikian:
“Almost from the start, national communications law has been based on the concept that the public owns the airwaves. For their part, broadcasters insist on government policing and penalties to prevent unlicensed operators from willingly or unwillingly jamming the frequencies of established stations; otherwise there would be a chaos of static on radio and screens full of "snow" on television. But federal law also mandates that those who hold licenses must maintain local studios and operate "in the public interest ' which, given the local nature of studios, has meant significant access to the airwaves by community groups. Holders of broadcast licenses have no right to licenses beyond their term limits and presumably may renew them only if they have fulfilled their community obligations.”
*****
“There are basic measures to be taken if the public is to regain access to its own media and guarantee choices that have some relationship to the varying needs and tastes of the population. Many of these will require mandatory actions: the broadcast industry has an almost unrelieved history of cynicism and evasion in its promises of self-reform.”
[Oh, oh! Does this mean “despotic inroads on the rights of property?”]
*****
[Proposals]
* “The Telecommunications Act of 1996 needs to be replaced by a new law that can begin to break up the most egregious conglomerates, reinstate mandatory local community access, and put teeth in the requirement that stations demonstrate their record of public interest programming when they apply for renewal of their licenses. License challenge procedures have to be made more accessible to civic groups dissatisfied with their local radio and TV broadcast stations. (Networks are not regulated, but their local affiliates are.)”
* “Public broadcasting must be financed through a new, nonpolitical system, as is done for the best systems in other democracies. Today, non-commercial broadcasting depends on appropriations by federal and state legislatures that themselves are heavily beholden to corporate interests. A small surtax on all consumer electronic equipment-computers, VCRs, TV and radio sets, and the like-is minuscule at the individual retail level but could provide funding for a full-fledged multi-channel radio and TV non-commercial system, and for a substantial national broadcast news and documentary operation.”
* “The Federal Communications Commission has succumbed to what seems to be the natural history of too many consumer protection agencies, which over time has been to shift from their original purpose of protecting consumers against unfair or dangerous industry behavior to an opposite role of protecting industries from their consumers…”
* “The Fairness Doctrine and equal time provisions rdesperately need to be restored. In 1987 broadcasters promised that their repeal would increase serious public affairs programming. In fact, that kind of programming has been largely abandoned in favor of more advertising and violence. The answer to the Rush Limbaughs is not censorship but a restoration of the public right of timely reply on the stations and at the times the Limbaughs and others now broadcast.
“From the inception of commercially licensed broadcasting in 1927, the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to devote a reasonable amount of time to discussion of controversial issues of public importance, and to permit reasonable opportunities for opposing views to be heard. It included special provisions to oblige stations to provide reasonable time for response by those attacked in discussions. Beginning in 1979 and continuing through the deregulation campaign of President Reagan in the early 1980s, broadcasters pushed for repeal of these regulations, and for all practical purposes the broadcasters won. An equal time provision in essence said that in the forty-five days before an election, stations must make time available to opposing candidates on roughly the same basis, whether for paid time or public service campaign discussions.”
* “The country needs easy, inexpensive licensing of low-power, city- and neighborhood-range radio and TV stations. Japan has them and so can the United States. As it is, local communities and ordinary local businesses have been effectively excluded from the air by national broadcasters and advertisers.
* Paid political advertising should be banned from American broadcasting, as it is in most democracies. In the two months before elections, every station should be required to provide prime time hours for local and national candidates, with fifteen-minute minimums for presentations to avoid the slick sound biter without content that now dominate broadcast election campaigns.
* Teach serious media literacy in the schools, using independently created curricula. Some already are available and others are being developed. The average American child will spend more time in front of a TV set than in front of a teacher. The young are targets for slick materialism. They need to know how this important element in their lives operates and how it can be analyzed.
* More citizens need to join and contribute to the various media reform groups like the Cultural Environment Movement, the Center for Media Education, FAIR, and the Institute for Alternative Journalism. There are other groups, but these can lead interested citizens to specific action and to other action groups.
The domination of private money in public politics, which has subverted so much public policy, also prevents legal solutions to problems in the mass media. Most media proprietors show little or no evidence in their programming of any sense of obligation to treat the American audience as citizens of a democracy. Campaign finance reform and media reform are directed at the same societal sickness- the influence of private money that improperly negates civic need and public choice. Linked to the same problem, they have become linked in the ultimate remedy. At stake is the-accountability of politics and with it the media's socialization of American children and the nation's culture.”
Regards,
J.
120 - Dave Nalle
I didn't know you could make a comment that long. It seems to have caused some sort of meltdown of the site. Weird gray blocks all over the place.
Dave
121 - Joaquin
It came through clearly on my end.
122 - troll
Joaquin - the 'actual meaning' of the quote is better clarified in the practice of ML despots than in the enactment of those fascist worker protections that you cite
(POUM Forever - !)
I watch Chavez' results as closely as I can in the hope that Venezuelan workers will be sparred the pleasure of being liberated from their liberties by the 'cadre' in order to liberate them as usually has been the case
123 - Joaquin
I see you're an anarchist, Troll.
I can certainly understand your avresion to the modern nation-state, which was after all, at least initially, the creation of the rising bourgeoisie. But over the pat 150 years, here in the US since the Civil War, the state has become a bulwark to safeguard the citizen's rights and interests from the growing power of industrial and financial capital. The anarchist position in a figure of speech throws out the baby with the dirty bathwater. This is graphically illustrated in your referring to these long-overdue, and still in some ways insufficient pro-worker New Deal reforms and protections as "fascist", measures that were enacted in the US at precisely the time they were being violently doen away with in the REAL facsist regimes in Italy, Germany, Austria, etc.
J.
124 - troll
fascism - the political system under which capitalist production relations and class structure are guaranteed by the State which 'reigns in' the excesses of capitalists and suppresses the excesses of workers - won the world wars in the West
if you would like to come up with some other word to denote this production for profit under an 'all powerful' State that doesn't carry emotional baggage I'm for it
seems to me that we are stuck here with our social contradictions until we de-fang the State so that the classes can deal with each other directly
125 - Joaquin
I would like, first, if you gave the source for this definition of fascism.