YOUR VIEWS

MR Original – Stop the Airport Body “Scammer” Racket

Posted on by
3

MEDIA ROOTS- Follow the money and you will always find the truth.

U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Butler, one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Medal of Honor, wrote War is a Racket in 1935:

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”

If General Butler were still alive, he would probably write, “The War on Terror is a Racket on Steroids.”

On Christmas Day in 2009, a young Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded Delta Airlines Flight 253 bound to Detroit from Amsterdam. During the flight, he was caught trying to detonate explosives that he’d hidden in his underwear. His photo and story was instant “breaking news” and was broadcasted worldwide over and over again.

The hysteria built up by the media was immediate and non-stop. They constantly parroted that “the system didn’t work,” “he slipped through the cracks,”  and “they didn’t’ connect the dots”.

Janet Napolitano, the present Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), attempted to quell the hysteria by stating on CNN that the system did work.  She was immediately ridiculed and wasn’t seen on TV again for weeks- but she was absolutely correct. The system did work. She apparently didn’t get the memo of what the “official” government story was supposed to be.

On Jan 27, 2010, there was a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing titled “Flight 253: Learning Lessons from an Averted Tragedy.”

During the hearing, Patrick F. Kennedy, Secretary Management of the Department of State, stated that “They had the individual under investigation and our revocation action would have disclosed the U.S. Governments interest in the individual and ended our colleagues’ ability to quietly pursue the case and identify terrorists’ plans and co-conspirators.”

According to a recent article, “The revelation that U.S. intelligence agencies made a deliberate decision to allow Abdulmutallab to board the commercial flight, without any special airport screening, has been buried in the media. ‘Revocation action would have disclosed what they were doing,’ Kennedy said in the testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep his visa increased the chances that federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he was accused of working with, ‘rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.'”

Additionally, there were eye witness reports from passengers on Flight 253 that the suspect was escorted onto the aircraft by a “sharp dressed man.” Why wasn’t this information breaking news like the original story was? The politicians and the media didn’t want it to be, because they wanted to use this event to justify the enforcement of the new body scanners.

Even though DHS Secretary Napolitano had been silenced, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff was featured on numerous news programs fear mongering the public into thinking that since the system failed, we now need these scanners to keep us safe.

One important thing he neglected to mention was that he works as a lobbyist for Rapiscan, the company that makes the body scanners.

The Washington Post reported that “Michael Chertoff, Former Department of Homeland Security, is the head of the Chertoff Group, the lead cheerleader for what is being called the Full Body Scanner Lobby.”

Furthermore, President Barack Obama recently handed Rapiscan a one billion dollar contract to deploy the scanners – no questions asked. On his recent trip to India, Obama traveled with Deepak Chopra, chairman and CEO of OSI Systems- the parent company of Rapiscan Systems. 

In the months leading up to Christmas of 2009, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) conveniently began removing the so-called “puffer machines” from U.S. airports at a cost of nearly one million dollars. Puffer machines are bomb detection machines that have been used for years, yet are suddenly now deemed unreliable. 

Thankfully, the American people are starting to wake up to these police state tactics and are now refusing to use these scanners. They are not yet mandatory, and you can still opt out of using them. But the TSA doesn’t advertise that little known fact.

Alarmingly, scientists are also warning that the full-body airport scanners pose serious health risks and could cause cancer.

On July 14, 2010,  two Senators proposed a bi-partisan bill, called “Securing Aircraft From Explosives Responsibly: Advanced Imaging Recognition, or the SAFER AIR Act”, which would make going through the scanners mandatory. The Democrats and Republicans can’t seem to agree on anything except forcing people to go through potentially cancer-causing X-ray machines in which the naked bodies of children and adults will be on display to everyone in the TSA.

Now, in a further attempt to intimidate flyers who refuse to submit to the scanners, the TSA has started a new much more invasive full body search much like the police do to criminals after arrest, which includes groping genitalia. However, flyers are reporting that even though they go through the scanners, they are still being subjected to physical “pat downs” as well.

In an attempt to dispel privacy fears, the TSA claimed that the scanners don’t and can’t store the naked body images. This is another lie. The simple fact is that the images are potential forensic evidence that must be kept and stored on record.

“The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said documents it has obtained from DHS show the machines used by the department’s Transportation Security Administration at some U.S. airports also can record and store images from the body scanners even though they are slightly different from the scanners used at federal courts. When asked if TSA has stored any images from passengers, EPIC staff counsel Ginger McCall said TSA claims it has not stored such images, but EPIC believes that statement is false. She said the airport body scanners are not secure enough and voiced concern that the images stored on them could be transferred to an external device such as a USB flash drive.”

In another alarming revelation, Forbes reports that the government is now deploying mobile full body scanners in vans that look like normal delivery trucks.  These vans have the capability to see through your clothes as you walk down the street, into your car and even your house!

I implore everyone to refuse to go through the scanners. Write and call your representatives in Congress to let them know you are against any mandatory body scanning, invasive body groping searches and mobile body scanners.

If you are on Facebook, there’s a body scanner protest page with over 14,200 members called Facebook Against Airport Full Body Scanners. I urge you to join it and spread the word.

If these violations are not stopped, I predict these mobile body scanners will soon be deployed at the mall, movie theaters, sporting events – everywhere.

The most important question we should be asking is: Why? Why are they deploying these police state devices and tactics? I don’t believe these scanners are being used for our safety, but for our control. We are now all assumed to be guilty until proven innocent.

General Butler would be absolutely horrified at the ultimate racket that is the “terror industrial complex” and the destruction of the U.S. Constitution because of it.

Written by Nick

Body Scanners: Just the Beginning?

What We Need for a Communication Revolution

Posted on by
Reply

MENTAL MUNITION– “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.” – Article 19, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.

When people talk about human rights, freedom inevitably dominates the conversation. Freedom from being restrained and beaten is a human right. Freedom from toiling under another without just compensation is a human right. So, too, is freedom from being held arbitrarily and indefinitely.

Human empathy makes those rights concrete. Sympathy allows us to understand why it’s important to be safe from beatings and slavery. Yet, there’s another kind of human right which is not understood as well, but is just as important.

In Burma, journalists face death for exposing the cruelty of the military junta, and pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi remains under a decades-long house arrest. In Sri Lanka, a news editor is assassinated and reporters receive death threats for uncovering war crimes. A young blogger in Egypt, known for revealing police corruption, is dragged out of an internet café and beaten to death. Iran holds 47 journalists in prisons, while it airs coerced confessions daily on state television. At last count, 136 journalists remain in jail across the globe. These actions block the flow of information and ideas and constitute a desecration of human rights.

Problems aren’t limited to the East. In the West, organizations can’t purchase equal time on the ostensibly public Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to air messages that challenge consumerism. Front-groups for major corporations manufacture propaganda to tilt elections. Media barons threaten to dismantle the beleaguered media system in the United States, cutting staff from already bare-bones newsrooms, pursuing maximum profit at the expense of public awareness. Public media is woefully underfunded and must routinely “pass the hat” to keep the lights on. And amidst a communications revolution, a handful of telecommunications giants plot to limit people’s access to information based on the contents of their wallets.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the most widely translated document in the world and is the basis for international law on human rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, who spearheaded the creation of the Declaration and later chaired the UN Human Rights Commission, in a speech following the vote that adopted the Declaration, said: “This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an event comparable to the proclamation of the Declaration of the Rights of the Man by the French people in 1789, the adoption of the Bill of Rights by the people of the United States, and the adoption of comparable declarations at different times in other countries.”

There are 30 articles that make up the Declaration. The first two articles form the basis for the rest, that human rights are equal to all people because of a shared humanity, and that these rights are endowed from birth. The Declaration has articles for the former kind of rights, relating to immediate, physical safety. It also has articles about the latter: the rights necessary for a fully-evolved, long-term, humanitarian civilization. Article 19 is of the second stripe; it recognizes the freedom to impart and obtain information as a necessary component of civilized life.

In his 2007 book “Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media,” media critical theorist Dr. Robert McChesney declared the world was entering a critical juncture, or “a period in which the old institutions and mores are collapsing,” a time in which the decisions we make “establish institutions and rules that likely put us on a course that will be difficult to change in any fundamental sense for decades or generations.”

This current communications revolution, brought about by a combination of technology that undermines existing systems, a crisis in journalism, economic upheaval and political strife, has tremendous stakes. “If fifteen or twenty years from now, the result of the communication revolution is merely technological wizardry or a testament to enhanced market opportunities for the world’s most privileged people, it will have been a failure,” McChesney wrote. “If in a generation social inequality has not begun to be dramatically reversed, democratic institutions are not considerably more vibrant, militarism and chauvinism have not been dealt a mighty blow, the environment has not been significantly repaired, then we will have had an unfulfilled communication revolution.”

Given that the right to communicate is inseparable from other human rights, and that the success of our critical moment hinges on the ability to communicate, a communication revolution requires a human rights revolution. That’s where CommunicationIsYourRight.org comes in.

CommunicationIsYourRight.org is a new initiative to call attention to Article 19, and educate the public about the importance of the right to communicate. It is an active, online petition to lobby the UN to bring the right to communicate to a debate. It is an initiative to pursue issues concerning the right to communicate, and to bring legislators, activists and citizens together to enact policies that strengthen the right to communicate. It also is a forum where people can exercise their right to communicate, by submitting all kinds of media, giving them an opportunity to express their perspective.

The freedom to communicate means the freedom to be part of a global conversation. It means giving the disenfranchised, the censored and the ignored equal footing in this ongoing communication revolution. It means giving all sides of an issue an even chance in the ecosystem of ideas. It means that even if all other human rights are stripped, the oppressed have the opportunity to declare “I am here, I am human.” Most importantly, it means giving people a role in the things that matter to them.

Written by Matthew Schroyer

MR Original – Journalistic Integrity

Posted on by
1



Laura NaderMEDIA ROOTS- While at UC Berkeley I took two anthropology courses taught by Dr. Laura Nader, which transformed my perspective and approach to the social and political issues that I intended to pursue as a journalist. In these classes I learned not only about studying other cultures, but about the vital importance of critically examining my own society, culture, beliefs and perceptions.

I was taught how to question the basic assumptions of my own, and of those around me. For instance, in the United States, the idea of “progress” commonly means expanding wealth, technological advancement, political power and perpetual abundance of good. But how are such ideas created and by whom? What are the implications of the thoughts and beliefs we hold? Are there alternatives, and do we seriously consider them?

Dr. Laura Nader, one of the world’s leading anthropologist of law, founded the study of controlling processes, or the mechanisms by which ideas become unquestioned assumptions or institutionalized belief systems that influence and persuade people to participate in their own manipulation. It is a field of analysis that spans across disciplines into every arena of life from the interpersonal realm to the professional, from business, to science and the state. The processes of control include, but are not limited to, law and conceptions of order, language, war, political power, trade, coercive persuasion, sex, and gender roles.

Studying methods of cultural control taught me that a journalist’s most important job is to make the connections that uncover these processes at play in our societies. Every day our lives are shaped by mechanisms of influence and control that we are often unaware of because the mainstream media fails to provide us with the information we, as citizens, need to adequately counteract such forces. Dr. Nader wrote that in the United States “a strong belief in free will often impedes understanding of how lives are changed by cultural practices that are external to the individual and intended to modify individual behavior, for example, through political propaganda or economic marketing.”

The mass media is society’s source of information and is a central means by which these behavior and perception altering practices permeate our lives. The media produces the material that shapes our judgments, actions, and expectations. This is illustrated in the use of the media to carry out psychological operations on the US population to boost support for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; or as the forum for relentless advertising, even to young children, that promotes a culture based in the perception of ever expanding ‘needs,’ and the binds of debt.

Identifying such mechanisms of influence and control requires taking an analytical approach to the world around you, an approach that is ethnographic, historical and reflexive.  Ethnography reveals the embedded customs that make control difficult to detect. For instance, our culture’s reverence for science leads many to defer to scientific experts as the ultimate bearers of truth without considering the political context or funding of such scientific work. History is important because it connects us with the past that shapes and gives context to our present experience. The political, economic and social structures of today’s society cannot be productively discussed without first understanding the history of industrialization and the shift from regional to corporate capitalism. Finally, the reflexive approach enables us to be aware of culturally dominant or ideologically tainted, perceptions and analysis. For example, our cultural views on breast implants provide the illusion of free choice but are instead the product of indoctrination to a specific beauty ideology and social imperative.

Various independent and alternative media sources offer a diversity of information and viewpoints that illuminate critical ethnographic and historical reflections on society. Conversely, the corporate controlled mainstream media does not provide enough context to allow for the development of independent, free thought. When General Electric, the owner of NBC Universal, is also the producer of weapons and aircraft engines for military contracts, the danger is that the news coverage on its networks will simplify, give little attention to, or omit information critical of war efforts. The end result is that people are inhibited from thinking critically. Tom Fenton, former CBS correspondent, highlights the media’s control over public thought in his admission that,

        “Americans are too broadly under-informed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world… Instead, news channels prefer to feed    Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don’t have to devote more airtime or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations… Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don’t believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees.”

Good journalism will not shy away from such complexity but work to understand it. The simplified information the mainstream media provides incessantly espouses the same set of basic principles as unquestionable truth; principles that further the status quo of a shattered society by promoting relentless excessive consumption, war as means to peace, and perpetual fear of the ‘other,’ whether its Arabs, immigrants or manifestations of “socialism.” This dogmatism, or adherence to a set of principals deemed by some authority as incontrovertibly true, is essential for any journalist or engaged citizen to reject. Dogmatism reinforces control by refusing to question its own basic assumptions and how they were created. There is no room for critical analysis, self-reflection or common sense in dogma’s narrow scope.

Refraining from dogmatism’s black and white framing of the world necessitates a humble recognition of the fact that the world is a complex set of systems in which different people operate daily bringing forward their own layered and diverse experience. Our knowledge and understanding of the world is always evolving whether about social issues, science, economics or politics. Believing that one set of principles holds the claim to ultimate truth is foolish and restricts a productive, open and thoughtful exchange of facts and ideas.

Bias, on the other hand, is essential to be aware of though impossible to fully eliminate because the human mind develops values and opinions that form the lenses through which we see the world. To minimize heavily biased reporting, journalists must carefully choose the language and tone they use to reiterate fact because language holds the tremendous power to influence. It is at the core of all manipulation. Just as words trigger thoughts and emotions, they can shape lasting impressions and judgments. As journalists we must be real and clear about the difference between a fact and our interpretation of it. Furthermore, we must be willing to ask questions and seek out information that challenges our bias, rather than avoiding or ignoring it.

Citizens and consumers are not passive actors. They must take into account who produces our knowledge, how, and to what benefit or interest. The few media corporations that control what is broadcast over the airwaves share many of the same members of their board of directors with a variety of other large corporations including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care and pharmaceutical companies and technology companies. This is significant because the role of a board member is to act in the best interest of the company it directs, setting its policies and objectives. They are, after all, held responsible for the company’s performance.

With this conflict of interest in mind, the organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has appropriately asked, would someone sitting on a media company’s board object to coverage that is damaging to another company that board member directs? As the highest management authority in a corporation, it is possible that the influential presence of specific board members would likely suffice to make media executives think twice about covering certain stories or reporting them honestly.

This is one example of important connections that the mainstream media doesn’t illuminate for its audience resulting in widespread ignorance among well-intentioned people of how the consolidation of the mainstream media greatly restricts, and otherwise discourages, independent and freethinking citizens. Only by seeking information from various sources, independent and mainstream, can the power dynamics and cultural controls in society be detected. Without taking an analytical approach emphasizing history and reflecting on the embedded customs and assumptions of society, we remain obliviously lost and misdirected due to manipulation by hidden patterns of control. Only by illuminating the different interests at play in the present, can we begin to see the full range of possibilities for the future.

Quite simply — information empowers. People will take different action based on what knowledge is made available to them. The media is a well-recognized mechanism of power and yet control through corporate media is a normalized, subtle means of control. Luckily, this is a pattern of control that we have the power to break from. As Noam Chomsky has said, it doesn’t require extraordinary skill or understanding to break the system of illusions and deceptions that conceals our understanding of reality. All it takes is the willingness to apply skepticism and the analytical skills that almost all people have.

Independent and alternative media sources provide an important break from the profit driven coverage of the mainstream media by giving voice to the interests and concerns of common people. These sources don’t hold the ultimate truth but many do add to the critical analysis of society required for understanding and reclaiming the mechanisms of control that shape our lives and the possibilities for our future. But the responsibility is not on journalists alone. Just as we must be honest in our bias and illuminate the connections and complexities of the world, it is the reciprocal job of citizens and consumers to critically think and engage with the world around them.

Written by Alicia

Photo of Laura Nader

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Reply
Page 16 of 16<<...1213141516