Media Watch
In our second hour, we are joined by ALAN MINSKY, JAN GOODMAN and MYLA RESON for a deep dive into the anti-democracy crisis now threatening the future of the PACIFICA RADIO NETWORK. That full hour of detailed discussion can be found at https://youtu.be/keAkQycl7Bg?t=3865
Video starts at the beginning of the segment. If it does not, move your cursor to 1:05:08 for the Pacifica start point.
A few months ago a Facebook advertisement piqued my interest about how the company was leveraging my user data to target ads in my feed. What began as a passing curiosity about how the company targets advertising, turned into a deep dive at big tech's hidden and unregulated practices. The research led me to construct an experiment that exposed not only a deep level of corporate surveillance into our everyday lives, but also a cross-platform and cross-company effort to integrate our personal data, and use it to manipulate user behavior.
"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine," Peter Sondergaard of Research at Gartner, Inc, said back in 2011. By 2017 this was true, as data surpassed oil as the world's top commodity. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-r…
By World BEYOND War, October 8, 2019
The fourth annual conference of World BEYOND War, which was held on October 4th and 5th in Limerick, Ireland, produced this letter, which is being delivered to Julian Assange.
We are grateful to you for the work you have done exposing criminal activities and abuses of power by militaries and governments. We believe that governments’ (monstrous and criminal) behavior should not be secret. People should know what their government is doing, and what a powerful foreign government is doing to their own countries. The actual results of the work of WikiLeaks have been hugely beneficial.
It is outrageous that you are behind bars for exposing actions far more serious than a recent phone call between Donald Trump and the President of Ukraine, which has political opponents of Trump suddenly claiming to support whistleblowers.
Progressive Radio Network, September 18, 2018
https://thegarynullshow.podbean.com/mf/play/x83zf3/Gary_091818.mp3
The Columbus Free Press joins many others worldwide in condemning the killing of 10 journalists in Afghanistan on Monday, April 30. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports: "At least nine journalists were among at least 25 people killed in a double suicide bomb attack carried out in the capital by the militant group Islamic State, according to media reports. A spokesperson for Kabul police said that about 30 minutes after the first attack, a bomber disguised as a member of the media set off his explosives among a group of journalists who had arrived to cover the earlier blast, Agence France-Presse reported."
The Drug War has been a forty-year lynching….
…the corporate/GOP response to the peace and civil rights movements.
It’s used the Drug Enforcement Administration and other policing operations as a high-tech Ku Klux Klan, meant to gut America’s communities of youth and color.
It has never been about suppressing drugs. Quite the opposite.
And now that it may be winding down, the focus on suppressing minority votes will shift even stronger to electronic election theft.
The Drug War was officially born June 17, 1971, (http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war) when Richard Nixon pronounced drugs to be “Public Enemy Number One.” In a nation wracked by poverty, racial tension, injustice, civil strife, ecological disaster, corporate domination, a hated Vietnam War and much more, drugs seemed an odd choice.
In fact, the Drug War’s primary target was black and young voters.
What does it mean to be a ‘liberal Arab’? Even in the West, definitions of the ‘liberal’ vary.
In the American context, the demarcation of the ‘liberal’ overlaps cultural and political lines. Republicans use the term in a derogatory way to describe their opponents. Watch ‘Fox News’ to understand. (On second thought, please do not watch Fox News!). Europeans are hardly keen on the term altogether. Many often use the term ‘progressive’ to liberate the ‘liberal’ from its political baggage and imprecise cultural insinuations.
So when the newly-launched Huffington Post Arabi – the Arabic edition of the news and entertainment portal Huffington Post – was fiercely attacked for not being ‘liberal’ enough to match the ‘liberal left’ views of the mother portal, it left me puzzled.
Three years after Ecuador’s government granted political asylum to Julian Assange in its small ground-floor London embassy, the founder of WikiLeaks is still there -- beyond the reach of the government whose vice president, Joe Biden, has labeled him “a digital terrorist." The Obama administration wants Assange in a U.S. prison, so that the only mouse he might ever see would be scurrying across the floor of a solitary-confinement cell.
Above and beyond Assange’s personal freedom, what’s at stake includes the impunity of the United States and its allies to relegate transparency to a mythical concept, with democracy more rhetoric than reality. From the Vietnam War era to today -- from aerial bombing and torture to ecological disasters and financial scams moving billions of dollars into private pockets -- the high-up secrecy hiding key realities from the public has done vast damage. No wonder economic and political elites despise WikiLeaks for its disclosures.
A powerful new film on what's wrong with the U.S. media is now being screened around the country. It's called Shadows of Liberty and you can set up a screening of it as part of an upcoming international week of actions for whistleblowers called Stand Up For Truth. Or you can buy the DVD or catch it on Link TV. (Here in Charlottesville I'll be speaking at the event, May 19, 7 p.m. at The Bridge.)
Judith Miller is on a rehabilitative book tour; the Washington Post recently reported that a victim of Baltimore police murder broke his own spine; and recently leaked emails from the State Department asked Sony to entertain us into proper war support. The proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner was just blocked, for now, but the existence of those mega-monopolies in their current form is at the root of the problem, according to Shadows of Liberty.
April 13, 2015, WASHINGTON — On Monday, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia introduced a resolution of disapproval to overrule the FCC's Net Neutrality order. Thirteen other Republican members of Congress joined Collins on the resolution.
Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress can review new rules issued by federal agencies. The rules are invalidated if both houses adopt a joint "resolution of disapproval” and it’s signed by the president. Congress has 60 legislative days from the date of the rules' publication in the Federal Register to pass the resolution.
Free Press Action Fund Policy Director Matt Wood made the following statement: