MEDIA ROOTS – The criminal trial for my alleged resisting arrest was again delayed this morning after prosecutors demanded access to a video that captured the aftermath of the March 25 detainment when I defied an unlawful order by a US Park Police offcier to put away my video camera. The trial showed increased public interest with several additional pedicab operators in attendance in court this morning for the outcome of the trial will heavily influence the future of this green mode of transport on the National Mall.

Citizen journalists, while lawfully protected by the Constitution, continue to be harassed – and occasionally detained – by many officers of the law for recording them during their duties. I was fortunate enough to be invited to the studios of Russia Today yesterday to discuss how citizen journalists’ rights continue to be marginalized yet how affective their work is at holding law enforcement accountable.

Oskar Mosco

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Liz Wahl and Oskar Mosco discuss the plight of citizen journalists.

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MEDIA ROOTS- Abby Martin, founder of Media Roots, speaks to students at San Francisco State University about the landscape of media censorship, the formation of her citizen journalism project Media Roots and why she is collaborating her efforts with Project Censored.

Abby Martin of Media Roots speaks with students at SFSU

Check out an hour interview with Abby for KZYX radio about the left/right paradigm and media censorship.

MEDIA ROOTS – You there.  Let’s talk Facebook.

Had I not deactivated my Facebook account just last week I would soon celebrate 26 years as a human, a full 7 of which FB would have been a part of.  More than one-quarter of my earthly life. 

In the beginning I held out as long as I could, until the pressure of being the only kid in college without an account eventually drilled through my defenses.  At first it was not all bad.  Heck, I used it to meet a girl at my school whom I otherwise would have never known, and we fell ridiculously in love.  Amazingly, disgustingly in love.  She eventually left me for another young stud and moved to the east coast.  Life! But I digress.

I quit Facebook.  If you’ve ever clicked the “deactivate account” button, the ensuing screen guilt-trips you with photos of your friends who “will miss you” if you leave.  Then you are instructed to explain why are pulling the plug and, if you make it THAT far, Facebook insinuates that you are weak of character by keeping your old email and password information warm for you, should you decide to come crawling back.  As if we can’t function without it.

I’m here to tell you that you life goes on.  Only after letting go do you realize your individual level of dependency.  One thing I’ve asked myself in my newfound post-FB world is ‘how did being a part of this for so many years make me a stronger, better person?’

Suppose I spent just 10 minutes a day on Facebook every single day for 7 years, or 2,555 days. This comes out to something like 425 hours.  425 hours is more than 17 full days.  17 full days spent on the computer posting photos, poking people, and sending messages.  

Did I make a difference in my community in those 17 days? No.  Did I make a new best friend? No.  Did I find out something that changed my life? No.  Did I learn a valuable new skill? No.  

So, why…?

Facebook is an escape to a land of safety and relative predictability but it doesn’t really matter because everybody looks good and sometimes they entertain you.  It’s reality TV with your Facebook friends as the actors.  I knew when I logged on I could expect Jen to post yet another video of her dog, Brian to rant about the Chargers and their losing ways, and Terrance to complain about college.  My friends played their parts with no major deviation from the script.  And it was this total absence of anything vaguely resembling the exchange of critical, analytical thinking that wore me down.    

The news feed makes the absolute vast majority of my friends appear one-dimensional, self-absorbed, and shallow.  My buddy Terrance is actually a deep thinker, but he doesn’t share that side of himself on Facebook (after all, what is the incentive?). Thus, I am deprived of the true essence of his person on a daily basis. I have surrounded myself with a world of make-believe and dehumanization by extending this behavioral phenomenon to the hundreds of my other intelligent, capable friends and acquaintances who post junk on the news feed. 

Look, if Facebook works for you, stick with it.  Maybe you know how to fully harness its potential to enrich your life. But do understand that you can never be 1,000,000% certain that your privacy is secure online.  And try spending as much time on Facebook as you do actually picking up the phone and calling the people you care about or, better yet, seeing them in person.  There will never be a substitution for the real experiences in life.                         
            
Writing by Jerry Miller

Photograph by Rick Pickett   

MEDIA ROOTS– Every issue around the world can only be truly communicated with unfettered access to media sources. Without an informed citizenry on the issues that impact our lives, there can be no true representation for the people. I believe communication is a human right, which is why I am organizing for a campaign called Communication is Your Right!, an advocacy campaign based on Article 19 of the United Declaration of Human Rights. 

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” 

On December 10, 1948 the United Nations adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today in 2010, more than 60 years later, entire groups of people still don’t have access to factual news and information in order to better their lives, community and country and make a positive impact in this world.  

I speak with Larry Cox, the executive director of Amnesty International USA about Article 19 and why the human right to communicate is so essential in the fight for human rights.

I speak with Denis Moynihan from Democracy Now! about Article 19 and the current media landscape.

GLOBALVOICES– Communication is Your Right! recently interviewed Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, who said that freedom of expression is central to the fight for human rights. “People need to understand that communication is a right, and it’s a right that is not being fulfilled at all,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about, because if people can’t express themselves, they can’t protest any issues that are going on.”

Communication is Your Right! is a platform for media makers, human rights advocates, and citizens around the globe to speak their truths. 

“When people are trying to use power in the wrong way the first people they go after are journalists,” Cox said. More than 267 cases of journalists being threatened, arrested, killed, or disappeared are tracked on Global Voices Project Threatened Voices, which states “Never before have so many bloggers been imprisoned.” These numbers are unacceptable- not only because being able to communicate is vital to changing our lives and community- but because it is a human right.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the human right to communicate, makes threatening and silencing citizens for communicating their thoughts a human rights violation. Article 19 reads, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

On the front page of our site is a petition demanding that the United Nations take the Human Right to Communicate seriously. “With the profound changes happening in the way people connect and share information, now more than ever it’s important to protect that right to connect and share,” explains Matthew Schroyer, a journalist  from www.MentalMunition.com and Communications is Your Right! organizer. “If you can’t protect that right, then you can’t protect a democracy.”

The Communication is Your Right! petition also states that the consolidation of media companies is damaging to universal communication and without stronger UN support global communication rights none of their Millennium Goals will be achieved.

We urge people to exercise their right to communicate with a blog, podcast or video and submit your work to this campaign. We would like citizens around the world to reflect on why they haven’t been heard by their larger community. Does corporate media allow you a platform? How is government control and media policy stifling free speech in your community? These questions need reflection and we must act together to create solutions.

We are building a decentralized campaign of media makers, media reformers and human rights advocates that are working together to network with organizations, speak with our communities, and create media about Article 19. “We need a communication revolution in order to have a human rights revolution,” says Abby Martin, founder of www.MediaRoots.org and Communications is Your Right! organizer.

To join our mission to advocate for people around the world to openly and fully communicate, visit our “Organizing Together” page to learn how to become an organizer and share this campaign’s message.

Written by Abby Martin, Mera Szendro Bok and Matthey Schroyer from www.CommunicationisYourRight.org

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – Action of Second Continental Congress, July 4, 1776 The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

MEDIA ROOTS- We have major challenges ahead that are unlike anything the average American today can imagine- challenges that the next 20 years of presidential regimes can’t solve. There isn’t a chirp in the trees, and the stillness in the air is just enough to hear a storm rumbling on the horizon.

It’s time to confront the fact that we have forgotten what freedom is. Do we even remember what being free means?

Freedom is not licensing, it’s not a social security number, and it’s not welfare. It’s neither Medicaid nor Medicare. It is not the CPS, the IRS, the FDA, the Department of Indoctrination (Education), and certainly not bailouts. Freedom is not any of the 90+ taxes created that didn’t exist less than a hundred years ago.

Now let’s talk about what freedom is. It is your sheriff, your city council, and your place of worship – even if that place is simply around your dinner table with your family. It is failure when your ideas don’t work. It is helping others when their farm burns down. It is the right to contract freely, pay what you feel is fair, and charge what you know is right. It is to walk, drive, fly, or slide wherever your heart desires, and without a license. Of course with this freedom comes accountability to the equal rights of others.

Freedom is the feeling that you get when you look your family, friends, and neighbors in the eye, and know you can really trust each other, because of the time you spent together backing each other up and making things happen for yourselves. So how did we wind up here, so far from this?

We’ve been sold the idea of a massive social empire, rather than separate sovereign states. Washington is too out of touch with the problems of average Americans to make effective decisions with our money, and they are too far out of reach to be accountable to the taxpayers. This is why the founders designed mechanisms to prevent an insidious development of a coercive Empire into the founding documents. They knew Washington D.C. would inevitably seek to throne itself, promising heaven on earth if we agreed to sign on the dotted “taxation without representation” line.  The founders believed that you were naturally only subject to your need for food, water, shelter, defense, and personal accountability. 

How free are we without having control over the means of food production? How free can we be if the material essential to our existence come from China, er Wal-mart?  Even the currency in our monetary system is legally counterfeited – it subjects you to the will of a select few, making you dependent as any slave ever was.

Stalin’s 5 year plans; Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”; grand ideas of collectivization resulted in the death of 120 million farmers. Never before in history had so many locally self sufficient people found an early grave at the hands of so few. It was made possible by them subscribing to the myth of a utopia and voluntarily surrendering their means of production. Now we’ve done the same.

What techniques did Hitler, Stalin, and Mao implement to affect the totalitarianism described in our history books? If those at the top are to bring about a massive social state, how on earth do they affect the thinking of millions to agree with a group of central planners? 

In order to bypass free expression, societies indoctrinate their population. Step one in the United States is to subvert the first amendment, which was ratified to protect the ideas despised most. History has shown us time and time again that we must subject ourselves to a polarization of opinion. 

Woodrow Wilson campaigned to steer us clear of the war in Europe. At the same time, the German embassy had placed ads in papers throughout the US, including the New York Times, urging the US to steer clear of the dangerous waters surrounding Britain. Then the ammo laden ocean cruise-ship Lusitania sunk, and over one thousand civilian passengers died. Americans seethed while Germans state-side experienced persecution like never before. Lynching became common-place as Americans sent 100,000 sons to their deaths in Europe.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign rhetoric assured America that, “If we face the choice – the choice of profit or peace – this nation will answer, this nation must answer. We choose peace.” 

After he took office, FDR immediately initiated a policy to starve the Japanese of oil. Admiral Richardson begged to bring his fleet in Hawaii back home to San Diego, claiming that they were undermanned, and over-exposed.  He was fired. Ten months later, 3,000 Americans are slaughtered at Pearl Harbor in “a day that will live in infamy,” 150,000 Japanese-Americans are jailed in internment camps, and American parents send 400,000 sons to die in the Second World War.

Is it adding up yet? War promotes and sensationalizes the myth that our individual safety is dependent upon a larger government. War centralizes people around a leader. The bigger the threat, the more they centralize. In order to convince a country to mobilize for such hell, governments must stifle polarizing opinions, and promise heaven will follow. 

The Constitution provides Washington the ability to act as a conduit for the states to rally together in the face of a threat too large for any one; the states have strength in numbers for national self-defense while maintaining freedom for their individuals. Why haven’t we managed to do this? How have we come to accept warrantless wiretappings, unreasonable searches, and incarcerations?

As Habeas Corpus and Posse Comitatus melt in the face of judicial review, we have to ask: what are we getting ready for? Why have we surrendered integral freedoms in the pursuit of defense? 

The answer is that we are not defending freedom. Instead, we’re picking a fight with an individual decision to experience terror, a war within our own minds.

Right now we have cartels over running the southwest, ranchers getting killed, Iraqi veteran sheriffs with bounties on their heads, and states being sued by the Federal government. Meanwhile you and your spouse are working your asses off, your kids are never home, your extended family is spread all over the globe, your television continuously lies to you, and you barely have time to mow the lawn you should be cultivating. No wonder we feel so powerless.

We let this happen. We’ve subjected ourselves to unconstitutional taxing, banking, currency, corporations, welfare programs, military growth, and imperial expansion. We’ve outsourced labor and material from tyrannical third world nations, and have bought into an education system that requires us to incur massive personal debt for a degree no one needs. Yet we’re looking around, confused? 

We have sold ourselves out!  We abandoned the belief in our own communities, the true source of our wealth, and traded it for the scraps of Washington’s printing press.  Are you going to throw your sons and daughters into the infernos of the next Great War based on promises from congressional critters?  Do you have any idea how far down this road we’ve gone? 

This country is about to drive off a cliff, and this is our last chance to put the brakes on before there is no avoiding the freefall into the jagged ravine below.  The wealthiest are jumping ship and dealing with the scraps they get as Washington taxes 70 plus percent of their transfers to the far-east. All of this is happening as you continue to struggle daily to make ends meet. Still think everything’s going to work itself out after these next elections? 

The time has passed to be able to affect change in our federal government. It’s over. Let all the unscrupulous history go. Forget about trying to understand “the issues”. You’ll never understand 2000 pages of unconstitutional healthcare reform. 

If you really want your life, your street, and your town to be better, it starts by understanding that you are the answer! Whoever is seated in the Presidential throne isn’t supposed to matter, but whoever holds your sheriff’s position does. Those who represent your state in the federal seat of government have failed you. The system is not working right now. On the other hand, your city council can work for you.  Every time you vote for a president you get screwed. You don’t need to understand everything to know things are fucked up. So what can “We the People” do about it? 

Rally. Find your neighbors. Have BBQs. Talk about things. Make it normal to have serious conversations.

I will get out there and say “no John, I’m not saying collectivism is bad. It’s just as natural as individualism, but there’s a time for both. No one argues against helping those who can’t help themselves. The real question is at what level do we collectivize to do so? For what reasons should we mobilize to deal with challenges? Shouldn’t we have the right to abstain from a collective effort if we don’t support? Whether we rally around Washington, our state capital, our town, or this grill, a government isn’t of the people through involuntary servitude.” 

Having a government of the people is not a spectator sport. It’s a contact sport. If you’re retired, get off the golf course. We need you. If you’ve lost your job, or can’t find one, then regroup with your family, and look for a leader.  If you can’t find one guess what? It’s you. I know…. scary, huh? The founders felt the same way. No one in their right mind should seek out public service. What I’m describing is exactly what happened in 1776, only they had something we don’t- the ability to survive locally. Chances are, you don’t have this ability. But you have something they didn’t, something they thought worth fighting for, worth dying for: The Constitution of the Republic of the United States of America. And they certainly paid for it.

So what can this document do for us legally? It can fix everything almost immediately. In the face of recent armed raids on organic food stores, illegal federal searches of political activists’ homes, unconstitutional firearms regulations, taxes levied for enumerated powers, random IRS audits, we can re-assume the state sovereignty that is articulated in the 10^th Amendment, and we can reclaim the natural rights implied by the 9^th Amendment by demanding that your sheriff, your city council, and your town justice serve you by keeping their word to be American and to follow the Constitution!

If you don’t care about your natural rights, your local sovereignty, and the radically liberating ideas upon which our Republic was founded, then clearly America is over. However if you do care, and haven’t learned what these documents can do for you and your family, it’s less than 20 pages long – read it while it’s still here. You will quickly see how these ideas have led us to be the most industrious, most innovative, most charitable culture in human history since July 4^th, 1776 – in spite of the constant attacks on our civil liberties from within since day one.  This has been a 234 year civil rights revolution, and for it to survive and thrive it must be firmly planted in a fertile mind, a mind that truly believes in itself.  Please spend time with your wonderful neighbors around the grill, peacefully rally for sovereignty, and find the answers to heaven on earth closer to home.

“I, state your name, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice; So help me God.”

“Oath of enlistment into the United States Armed Forces,” Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962

“I, state your name, hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

“Oath of Allegiance,” 8 C.F.R. Part 337 (2008), taken by all immigrants who wish to become United States citizens

Yossarian.

Photo by Beverly & Pack