Media

By David Swanson

What it would have cost us to publicly fund independent media that would have prevented the invasion of Iraq wouldn't amount, in a year, to what we spend on a month of occupying that country.

Diverting the cost of a month of war to a year of giving substance to our "freedom of the press" would mean that the last time someone asked you about the Teabaggers' genius in being smart enough to talk dumb enough to persuade everyone to be racists would, in fact, be the LAST time anyone would ask you how a creation of the corporate media manages to get coverage from the corporate media.

Every election cycle, the labor movement alone dumps enough money into the corporate media through the campaigns and PACs that it could have instead created a new television network that would actually report the news all year long through every future election cycle.  Rather than threatening to possibly not succeed in persuading working people to vote for corporate candidates, Trumka should threaten to defund the corporate media election bonanza and give us real news.

From Dec 28th 2009, Brad Parker hosts this Connect the Dots. Our guests are David Swanson, Marcy Winograd and Wayne Williams. We will be discussing Progressive Peace Plans, Progressive Candidate Messaging and the Fair Elections Act on the June 2010 ballot in Cali. Join us or get the podcast at http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive

LISTEN HERE.

The ColdType
Reader
(Scroll page for issues - latest at top)

Issue 41

64 Pages: WHAT WOULD MUHAMMAD ALI SAY ABOUT OBAMA’S WAR? Dave Zirin has the answer. Plus: Writing history in the streets; a tale of two wall; two book excerpts; Tony Blair: war criminal; unchecked globalisation and its threat to culture; are Israelis spies infiltrating your airport?; why Benjamin Dangl will never buy a Kindle. And much more

Contributors this month are Rebecca Solnit, David Pratt, David Swanson, Richard Kim & Betsy Reed, Benjamin Dangl, John Pilger, Sherwood Ross, Chris Hedges, Ramzy Baroud, Rory O’Connor, Jonathan Cook, Norman Solomon, Mark Hurwitt, David Michael Green, Khalil Bendib, Fred Reed and William Blum

This month’s READER EXTRA is The Lockdown, an excerpt from the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

Click here or on image above to download The Reader

Click here or on image above to download The Reader Extra

We need your organization to sign onto StopTheChamber.com and spread the word. To do so, Email us.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is behind the worst of U.S. policies, from blocking the right to organize to impeding healthcare reform, from increasing global warming to arguing in favor of the Supreme Court's impending decision to allow no limits on corporate funding of elections, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the enemy of the public will.

StopTheChamber.com is encouraging corporations to drop their memberships and having some success.

We've also offered a $200,000 reward for information leading to the criminal conviction of Chamber CEO Tom Donohue. This has resulted in vicious attacks from Fox News viewers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce supporters, including hundreds of death threats which StopTheChamber.com has reported to the FBI.

We need your help to advance our efforts against increasing odds. Won't you read more and sign on?

I'll be on tonight with Karen Kwiatkowski.

Listen live at http://afreeradio.com/listen_live.html

Call in at 512-879-3805

Archives here:
http://www.americanfreedomradio.com/American_Forum_09.html

http://www.RadioIslam.com

A certain progressive website that will go nameless posted an article with my name and headline on it, but someone else's article on a different topic. I agreed to a live TV interview about the article, assuming it was one I'd written. The host assumed I'd written the one she'd read. Oops. This was the result:

By David Swanson

As someone who believes the producers of Fox News should be behind bars for promoting illegal wars and instigating domestic violence, and as someone who advocates never watching it, I feel compelled to speak up against the notion that Fox News is not a news outlet.

Now, Fox News does little investigative reporting. Mostly it chitters and chatters and re-processes. Nor does it stick with reliable information. It intentionally lies and distorts. It also screams and yells, demonizes and infantilizes. But these behaviors just make Fox News a small-time and untrustworthy news outlet that degrades the content and the form of our public discourse. These are not the reasons being widely offered for the declaration that Fox is not a news outlet at all.

I'll be on these shows:

Salute America, 8 pm ET October 21st.

Radio Or Not with Nicole Sandler on Air America, 11:15 to Midnight ET October 21st.

Swami Beyondananda's show (if you can find link you're a better googler than I) at 3 pm ET October 22nd.

Coy Barefoot's Charlottesville Right Now 4:30 to 4:55 pm ET October 22nd.

Watch this http://tr.im/Cxh3

Today at: http://www.theurbanjournal.org

Seg. 1 Former Defense Secretary William Cohen
Seg. 2 David Cho, Washington Post
Seg. 3 David Swanson, author/activist author of "Daybreak"
Seg. 4 Kevin Muhammad (encore)

Greener Times
Maryrose Asher is a former Chair of the Green Party of Washington State and a tireless activist of many causes.

The co-founder of the After Downing Street Coalition, David Swanson, has just written a book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, which I will review for next week’s column. Swanson uses a reference to a Yes! Magazine article, “Our Own Agenda to Policies for a Better America” by Sarah van Gelder (August 2008), and, for this week’s column, I thought it would be encouraging to report on the compilation of several polls as reported in Gelder’s article.

Below is a list of progressive policies favored by the majority of Americans:

• 67% favor public works projects to create jobs.
• 73% say corporations don’t pay a fair share of taxes.
• 76% support tax cuts for lower- and middle-income people.
• 80% support increasing the federal minimum wage.
• 70% support habeas corpus rights for detainees at Guantanamo.
• 58% believe a court warrant should be required to listen to telephone calls.
• 68% believe a president should not act alone to fight terrorism without checks and balances of courts and Congress
• 79% favor mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions.
• 90%  favor higher auto fuel efficiency standards.
• 75%  favor clean electricity, even with higher rates.
• 72% support more funding for mass transit.
• 64% believe the government should provide national health insurance coverage for all, even if it would raise taxes.
• 73% favor abolishing nuclear weapons, with verification.
• 80% favor banning weapons in space.
• 81% oppose torture and support following the Geneva conventions.
• 85% say the United States should not initiate military action without support from allies.
• 79% say the United Nations should be strengthened.
• 63% wanted US forces home from Iraq within a year.
• 7% [not a typo, just 7%] favor military action against Iran
• 69%  favor using diplomatic and economic means to fight terrorism, not the military.
• 86% say big companies have too much power.
• 74% favor voluntary public financing of campaigns.
• 66% believe intentional acts are likely to cause significant voting machine errors.
• 80% say ex-felons should have their voting rights restored.
• 65% believe attacking social problems is a better cure for crime than more law enforcement.
• 87% support rehabilitation rather than a “punishment-only” system.
• 80% favor allowing undocumented immigrants living in the United States to stay and apply for citizenship if they have a job and pay back taxes.

Clearly, the President and Congress are out of touch with what Americans want.

However, this raises the question as to why the Progressive Movement cannot get more Americans involved in confronting current government policies which clearly are in opposition to the policies the majority of Americans would like to see implemented.

Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the media paints a picture of a very conservative America. In addition, this era of political “bipartisanship” is also a ploy used by the corporate political parties as a way to convince Americans that only “centrist” or what we know to be “right-of-centrist” policies have any possibility of getting enough votes to pass.

Although many in the Progressive Movement feel the fight is an uphill battle, with no significant “wins” of late, the data above should give hope that left-of-center policies are alive and well.

The challenge for the Progressives Movement is to find a way to connect to the majority of Americans and bridge the differences in order to demand a change, a real change, in the way our country is being run and who is running it.

Resources
Our Own Agenda: An Economy Policy for a Better America

Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, by David Swanson, Seven Stories Press, NY, 2009.

From Lila Garrett:

Monday morning at 7 I'll be back on CONNECT THE DOTS offering the following premiums:

Daybreak By David Swanson 342 pp. Book $100
True Compass Ted Kennedy memoir 532 pp... Book $180
Lila’s interview with Ted Kennedy CD $35
Lila’s Pack All of it $275

By David Swanson, http://dontattackiran.org

The New York Times doesn't mention the pivotal role it played in lying us into a war in Iraq, but it doesn't have to. Everybody knows. On Wednesday, the Times put this article on its front page, and I highly recommend it as an ideal liner for bird cages:

In Dispute With Iran, Path to Iraq Is in Spotlight
By SCOTT SHANE, New York Times

Tonight I'll be on...

6:10-6:40 pm ET Paul Berenson Show.

7:00-8:00 pm ET Truth Hurts.

9:00-9:30 pm ET Between the Lines.

Residents to Protest City's Failure to Address Unsafe Traffic
Aug 1, 2002

Over 100 Accidents in Past 5 Years in West Oak Cliff, But Dept. of Traffic and Public Works Refuses to Act
WHAT: Crowd of residents to protest in the street with signs, banners, chants
WHEN: 6:30 p.m. Monday Aug. 5
WHERE: Intersection of Cockrell Hill Avenue and Falls Drive

By David Swanson

Fox News screaming head Glenn Beck now tells President Obama to fire White House employees, and Obama obeys. While Obama presumably believes obedience will cause Beck to like him and begin praising him, Beck is building a list of additional people whose heads he will demand and denouncing Obama as hiding vast secrets by having complied with the demand to fire Van Jones.