The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (46 page)

W
ITH THE CORPORATE MASS
media centering their news programs on stories of fires, wrecks, murder, mayhem, and scandals, one must ask: Is there any good news?

Yes, there is.

A few thoughtful people believe the United States is undergoing an exciting, if uncomfortable, maturation. Although they admit that growth and change may be unsettling, some Americans feel current advances in technology and environmentalism will eventually lead to a brighter and more harmonious future replete with alternative fuels, engines that run on water, and natural energy sources such as solar, tidal, and geothermal.

But the public must be cautious. They have been bamboozled for too long by the plutocrats who dominate finance, corporate life, and the mass media. For many years, authors, filmmakers, radio and TV commentators, and even some street corner speakers have warned of a coming New World Order, that socialist globalization desired by a small group of plutocrats and their hirelings centered within secretive societies. In the past, these same types of harbingers have warned that there was no “light at the end of the tunnel” in the Vietnam War, that Nixon was a crook and shouldn’t serve out his term, that George H. W. Bush was lying when he said “Read my lips, no new taxes,” and that the events of Ruby Ridge and Waco were not just attacks on cult members, but upon the rights of all Americans.

In hindsight, the harbingers were right.

Today, the American public hears of untested vaccines, corporate drug companies influencing government policy, totalitarian martial law, and restrictions to liberties promised by the Constitution.

Perhaps it is time for the public to listen to the “conspiracy theorists” and the youthful activists. Andrew Gavin Marshall, a research associate with Canada’s Centre for Research on Globalization, asked, “In light of the ever-present and unyieldingly persistent exclamations of ‘an end’ to the recession, a ‘solution’ to the crisis, and a ‘recovery’ of the economy, we must remember that we are being told this by the very same people and institutions which told us, in years past, that there was ‘nothing to worry about,’ that ‘the fundamentals are fine,’ and that there was ‘no danger’ of an economic crisis. Why do we continue to believe the same people that have, in both statements and choices, been nothing but wrong?” Marshall’s question could be applied to many of the problems that exist in America. This, in turn, begs a larger question—why do we listen to anything these institutions say?

If America is to again experience the individual freedom and capitalist initiative that once brought this nation to new heights of technological and social success, it is obvious some things must change. Simply bouncing back and forth between conservative and liberal presidential administrations, both controlled from the shadows by the same globalists, will not do the job. Americans must unite, as during World War II.

But rather than uniting against a foreign enemy like Nazi Germany, today our enemy is domestic. This formidable enemy is one that tries to control the nation’s federal government, the financial system, the education system, and even the lifestyles of America’s citizens.

But the enemy force is few in number while Americans number nearly 304 million.

It is time for individual Americans to become proactive. It is time to remember the three boxes of freedom—the Soap Box, the Ballot Box, and the Ammo Box.

THE SOAP BOX

P
RESIDENT
J
OHN
F. K
ENNEDY
once said, “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

Today, freedom of speech is under attack by political correctness and even so-called hate speech legislation. To protect against these attacks, we must ensure a free and investigative news media, one that truly serves as the public “watchdog.”

AN UNFETTERED NEWS MEDIA

C
ORRUPTION AND TYRANNY HAVE
pervaded human history.

In the United States, governmental and corporate avarice has been combated historically by a free-ranging and unfettered investigative news media—media that once were privately owned. Yet today, the mass media are controlled by only a handful of multinational corporations. Furthermore, the federal government has continuously impeded incisive journalism by operating under secrecy and disregarding the Freedom of Information Act signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on September 6, 1966. The purpose of the law is to declassify governmental documents. It is also the subject of ongoing conflicts between government officials and both news organizations and private citizens. Various administrations have differed in their interpretations of the law, which also contains several specific exemptions.

It is especially troubling that media ownership is so concentrated when one considers that more than 98 percent of Americans have a television. Of that 98 percent, 82 percent watch prime-time TV and 71 percent watch cable programming in an average week. Additionally, 84 percent of Americans listen to radio regularly, while 79 percent are newspaper readers. Nearly half of the American population has access to the Internet, and certain demographic groups reach close to 70 percent. These totals suggest that most of America spends an inordinate amount of time staring at a screen, which might be bad enough. But when one realizes that everything these citizens see and hear emanates from a mere five major media corporations, the threat of potential propagandizing and mind control becomes clear.

In addition to broadcasting watered-down content because of corporate ownership, staffers at the White House and Pentagon manipulate the media through “perception management.” Although government propagandists cannot tell the audience how to think, they can tell them what to think about as they set the agenda and frame the arguments. They cleverly craft the perception. Too many news reporters simply regurgitate government press handouts. Washington-based investigative journalist Wayne Madsen pointed out that “It is not the job of a journalist to participate in propagandizing the news. Journalists report the basic facts of a story. The reality that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster is not the fault of the news media. The fact that the Iraq war has gone badly for the United States is news.”

Neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations have permitted news reports from Iraq to be aired before being filtered by officials. Additionally, the government has forced the media to “embed” reporters within U.S. and Iraqi military units, limiting their view of the hostilities and forging personal relationships within their assigned units that cannot fail but tinge their reporting. The government has also employed contractors like the Lincoln Group and the San Diego–based Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) to place pro-U.S. propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. Additionally, the Pentagon gave SYColeman Inc. contracts to develop slogans, advertisements, newspaper articles, radio spots, and television programs to promote support for U.S. policies overseas. Naturally, the head of SYColeman is a retired general who at one point was a top official in the Defense Department agency that gave SAIC its Iraqi media contract.

“The mainstream media should bolster their independent reporting of the Iraq war,” wrote Wayne Madsen in the
San Diego Union-Tribune
.

“They should reject the lies consistently fed to journalists in Baghdad and at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House. And editors must encourage journalists to publish ‘off-the-record’ interviews with U.S. military members,” advised Madsen. “This is contrary to the Pentagon’s media policy, but the military is not the final arbiter of First Amendment freedom of the press rights. The military is responsible for defending those rights.”

In July 2009, the PEN American Center, an eighty-seven-year-old organization dedicated to defending the freedom of writers around the world, joined the American Civil Liberties Union in court to challenge the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). Both PEN and the ACLU said the FAA greatly expanded the ability of the U.S. government to spy on Americans without a warrant and granted retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who aided in government spying on citizens.

“We are plaintiffs in this lawsuit first and foremost because we believe our own communications, which include sensitive phone calls and emails with writers facing persecution in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, are vulnerable under the program,” wrote Larry Siems, director of the PEN American Center’s Freedom to Write program, in the Huffington Post. “We know from the experiences of our colleagues in countries where governments had unchecked surveillance powers (including the United States as recently as the 1970s) that programs that allow governments to spy on their own citizens are often directed against writers and intellectuals, and that surveillance in general poses a serious threat to the intellectual and creative freedoms of all citizens.”

But there are organizations other than PEN and the ACLU fighting back. The World Press Freedom Committee is an international group composed of members from forty-five news organizations that have fought for more than thirty years against the licensing of journalists, mandatory codes of conduct, mandatory tasks for journalists, and other news controls. The World Press Freedom Committee created a Charter for a Free Press that lists ten principles to guarantee the “unfettered flow of news and information both within and across national borders.” The committee said such a charter deserves the support of “all those pledged to advance and protect democratic institutions.” The principles are as follows:

Censorship, direct or indirect, is unacceptable; thus laws and practices restricting the right of the news media freely to gather and distribute information must be abolished, and government authorities, national or local, must not interfere with the content of print or broadcast news, or restrict access to any news source.


Independent news media, both print and broadcast, must be allowed to emerge and operate freely in all countries.


There must be no discrimination by governments in their treatment, economic or otherwise, of the news media within a country. In those countries where government media also exist, the independent media must have the same free access as the official media have to all material and facilities necessary to their publishing or broadcasting operations.


States must not restrict access to newsprint, printing facilities and distribution systems, operation of news agencies, and availability of broadcast frequencies and facilities.


Legal, technical and tariff practices by communications authorities which inhibit the distribution of news and restrict the flow of information are condemned.


Government media must enjoy editorial independence and be open to a diversity of viewpoints. This should be affirmed in both law and practice.


There should be unrestricted access by the print and broadcast media within a country to outside news and information services, and the public should enjoy similar freedom to receive foreign publications and foreign broadcasts without interference.


National frontiers must be open to foreign journalists. Quotas must not apply, and applications for visas, press credentials and other documentation requisite for their work should be approved promptly. Foreign journalists should be allowed to travel freely within a country and have access to both official and unofficial news sources, and be allowed to import and export freely all necessary professional materials and equipment.


Restrictions on the free entry to the field of journalism or over its practice, through licensing or other certification procedures, must be eliminated.


Journalists, like all citizens, must be secure in their persons and be given full protection of law. Journalists working in war zones are recognized as civilians enjoying all rights and immunities accorded to other civilians.

Organizations other than the World Press Freedom Committee also have contributed to the establishment of a free and unfettered media. Phil Donahue, the talk-show host who lost his job shortly after questioning the official story of 9/11, urged the public to support “the
Los Angeles Times,
the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Press Club, and other organizations (not to mention the Framers of our Constitution) and help keep journalists free to be pushy, unpopular and inelegant—sticking a nose under the tent to learn what the righteous have decided is good for us.” Donohue rightly proclaims that “There is no substitute for free and unfettered news gathering. Journalists are not cops nor are they public relations people. They are reporters and there is no substitute for them.”

One of the largest problems affecting freedom of the press is the corporatization of the media, which dilutes news content in order to make it more appealing to larger audiences. Yet one organization, named the StopBigMedia.com Coalition, is attempting to halt this corporate takeover of an American tradition. The organization is composed of a number of politically diverse groups that have banded together without government or corporate funding to “stop the FCC from allowing a handful of giant corporations to dominate America’s media system.” According to information on its website, “Corporate media giants are silencing diverse voices, abandoning quality journalism and eliminating local content (we’ve got the evidence). Our democracy needs better media. Bad policies made in Washington could have a big impact on the news in your community.” Elsewhere, they state, “We believe that a free and vibrant media, full of diverse and competing voices, is the lifeblood of America’s democracy. We’re working together to see that our media system remains, in the words of the Supreme Court, ‘an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will prevail.’”