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Written by Ann Shibler
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Monday, 30 March 2009 09:52 |
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 For decades, major newspapers in the U.S. have been the mouthpieces for the liberal agenda, so why not make it official, bail out the practically extinct dinosaurs, nationalize them, and and create a media system openly controlled by government?
Many major newspapers are facing financial woes, either due to poor management or the current economic squeeze. Ad revenues have fallen dramatically. Some are shedding staff; others reducing services in an effort to make ends meet.
Gannett, publishers of USA Today and hundreds of small-town papers, forced their employees into taking a week-long furlough, saving millions. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a Hearst corporation holding, stopped printing and went with an online edition only just this month. The San Francisco Chronicle says they might have to shut down. And the Tribune Company which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, and others filed for bankruptcy last December, and on and on it goes.
In the nationalization spirit of the day, this has sparked Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland to introduce legislation to bail out privately owned, for-profit U.S. newspapers. "We are losing our newspaper industry," Cardin was quoted as saying. "The economy has caused an immediate problem, but the business model for newspapers, based on circulation and advertising revenue, is broken, and that is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy."
Cardin is hopeful that these once private enterprises will operate as non-profits, just like public television. His Newspaper Revitalization Act [PDF Download], currently before the Senate Finance Committee, would allow newspaper companies to report on all issues including political issues, but the endorsement of political candidates would be disallowed.
For years Americans have sneered at the Russians for their state-controlled media. But that’s exactly what we’ll have if this passes, to a much greater extent than we now have. Just think, the New York Times could soon officially be the equivalent of Pravda.
It’s almost laughable to hear the liberals citing Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy on a free press, twisting and spinning it away from it’s original meaning. Jefferson knew that over time principles are corrupted, warning us to ever be on guard against such corruption and the tyranny that follows.
Tom Fiedler, the former executive editor of the Miami Herald and current dean of Boston University’s College of Communication, quipped: "I truly believe that no democracy can remain healthy without an equally healthy press. Thus it is in democracy's interest to support the press in the same sense that the human being doesn't hesitate to take medicine when his or her health is threatened."
That was echoed by Cardin while bemoaning the death of newspapers when he said it “is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy."
The worst is from Robert Schlesinger who has the audacity to blog under the name of Thomas Jefferson. He praised the fourth estate’s role, supposedly unbiased, in presenting to Americans the news of the day saying, “The media plays a key role not only on informing the citizenry in terms of literally reporting the day’s events, but also in getting behind them and and in watch-dogging the institutions and people who have huge power over our lives -- be they public officials, corporate titans, other journalists and so fourth.” And then he added, “Maybe it’s time for local governments to declare eminent domain and start making the local papers public property.” (There’s an understanding of constitutional principles, goodness!)
In actuality, Jefferson understood that a free press, not a nationalized, government-controlled press, was necessary to a free nation. He was the ultimate believer in the free exchange of ideas where truth would eventually triumph. Here’s just a few of his quotations:
[This is] a country which is afraid to read nothing, and which may be trusted with anything, so long as its reason remains unfettered by law. --Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Milligan, 1816
Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe. --Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816
I am... for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents. --Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1799
Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it. --Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786
The materials now bearing on the public mind will infallibly restore it to its republican soundness... if the knowledge of facts can only be disseminated among the people. --Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1799
And while championing a free press, Jefferson also knew to what extent the press could fail in it’s duties to the country by becoming a voice for propaganda.
The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper. --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807
The Chief Magistrate cannot enter the arena of the newspapers. --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1811
It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807.
Read them and weep. |
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Written by Jim Capo
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Monday, 01 June 2009 01:29 |
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 June 1 was the day passports, passport cards or Real ID/WHTI complaint (RFID "enhanced") driver licenses began to be required for citizens of the United States who re-enter the country from Canada at land crossings. Before June, any driver's license or birth certificate would have worked for you.
The requirement is part of the State Department's Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) that is being rolled out across Canada and the United States (and eventually Mexico). This is Real ID by another name. WHTI compliant means RFID enhanced cards. Your driver's license will still have a pretty state logo wrapper, but be clear: This is now your electronically trackable national identification card.
If unresisted, mission creep will be the means for the presentation of this card becoming more and more a part of our monitored daily lives.
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Written by Becky Akers
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Tuesday, 07 April 2009 08:35 |
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 Without a warrant, probable cause or even the faintest suspicion, US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) may decide to search your computer and all its files, your cell phone, and iPod when you return home from abroad. It offers the usual excuse for eviscerating the Fourth Amendment: “Our ability to inspect what is coming into the United States is central to keeping dangerous people and things from entering the country and harming the American people.” Actually, its ability to inspect is harming the American people since Customs’ warrantless rummaging sends some victims to prison.
Just as the Constitution prohibits the government from such generalized searches, so it nowhere establishes a customs office. That required an act of Congress in 1789 because, as CBP itself admits, the new central State “had one overriding concern...money: where to find it, how to collect it [sic for ‘steal it’], how to keep it rolling in.” Talk about your naked greed.
Two hundred years later, the Feds still have the same overriding concern. But CBP no longer confines itself to robbing folks on the Feds’ behalf. It now also “protects” Americans – or at least the American IP lobby.
IP stands for “intellectual property.” It refers to ideas and inventions as well as the process of copyrighting or patenting them. But it’s a loaded term that disguises an enormous philosophical debate and even bigger power-grab.
Let’s say you’ve just invented an engine that runs on saltwater, not gasoline. Or your lazy, no-account son-in-law who calls strumming a guitar “work” composes a song. I wrote this article.
These creations are essentially ideas; are they “property” as well? If so, do each of us own what we’ve produced? To what extent? Can you prevent another inventor’s adapting your engine to fresh water? Can Mr. Composer stop Team Obama from using his music in a re-election campaign? If you copy this article and sell my priceless prose, do I receive a cut of the proceeds?
Some folks answer “no” to the above. They reason that a finite number of people can use tangible property at one time while ideas suffer no such limits. Only you can wear your shirt at this moment; only you and a few friends can sit together on your sofa. But theoretically, at least, everyone worldwide can simultaneously think about Rudyard Kipling’s “If.”
Others say ideas are indeed property. People who work with them should reap the fruits of their labor. Just as customers pay a manufacturer for his widgets, so they should pay Kipling for his poem. Consumers of ideas should compensate the writers, composers, and inventors who deal in them.
Wherever you land in this debate, we who distrust Leviathan can all agree that private systems would best protect IP. After all, that’s how we secure physical property like our homes or cars (locks and keys; smoke detectors; burglar alarms) and virtual property (passwords on email accounts).
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution does authorize Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Earlier Americans spoke of this “exclusive Right” as a “monopoly,” prompting the question of whether anyone, even its creator, can monopolize an idea. No wonder people with financial interests in patenting replaced “monopoly” with the friendlier “intellectual property” in the late twentieth century.
But the Founding Fathers, for all their brilliance, were fallible; we need not leave Article 1, Section 8 to find more mistakes, such as empowering the Feds to “coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof” as well as “to establish” – and thereby control – a Post Office. Allowing government to meddle with IP is as disastrous as allowing it to regulate money.
Managing IP increases the State's power. For example, America’s new national government granted monopolies on “useful” inventions – as politicians defined that: applicants actually appeared before the Secretaries of State and War as well as the Attorney General to persuade them of said “usefulness.” Today, inventors often work for corporations that own hundreds of patents and field lobbyists to mold legislation in their favor; ditto for associations of writers and composers. That means the State not only doles out patents and copyrights, it also polices consumers, such as those who download “ illegally distributed” files from the internet. Introducing laws and compulsion inevitably pits citizens against one another as legislators crown some folks victors and everyone else losers. In IP’s case, the winner varies according to time and country. Some governments want IP’s chief beneficiary to be “society” rather than the inventor, especially when their nations are poor and developing. They generally offer only crude legal monopolies on ideas; they may even actively encourage native sons to swipe inventions and discoveries from other nations. Indeed, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans copied – and often improved on – gadgets like the steam engine from such places as England. As peoples grow wealthier, however, full-fledged inventors replace the thieves, and they now clamor for IP to protect their profits. That’s particularly true in sophisticated countries like the US.
Obviously, such protection extends only as far as a particular government’s muscle does. But the rise of superpowers in the twentieth century and the explosive growth of IP law have foisted a new danger on us: international agreements that force the desires of IP lobbies in richer nations on everyone else. That includes not only larcenous “inventors” in poor countries but even consumers back home.
Which brings us to the infamous Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement (ACTA), a series of negotiations conducted intermittently since 2007. Among the participants are the US as well as the 27 members of the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia, and even Switzerland and New Zealand. Their politicians are writing regulations to control all of us; later signatories will have no input on the provisions, even if the poor people who want progress in their countries outnumber the inventors who want protection. Such are the perils of one-world government. Leaked papers from ACTA’s negotiations are indeed nasty. They propose to criminalize “peer-to-peer file-sharing,” or, as the Recording Industry Association of America puts it, “Policy makers and law enforcement authorities must…recognize that Internet-based infringement, even when done without a profit motive, takes place on a commercial scale and has the same impact on copyright owners as for-profit piracy. It is essential…to criminalize such conduct, even though the individual actor may not be acting with any profit incentive, or possess what one would ordinarily think of as 'criminal intent.'" In other words, if you patronize Youtube, MySpace, or Facebook, which feature “ unauthorized use of content on the[ir] platforms,” or if your briefcase holds Xeroxes of copyrighted articles, you’re a criminal. How would “authorities” enforce the law? ACTA proposes to draft your Internet Service Provider (ISP) as cop: ISPs will spy on your surfing and downloads, just as laws against drunk driving force bartenders to monitor patrons. And just as bartenders must cut off tipsy customers, so ISPs will cut off customers after their third “offense.”
Horrific and intrusive as a private company’s surveillance may be, it gets worse. ACTA also urges customs officers worldwide to follow the US’s example and search computers, iPods, cell phones, etc. Other governments may not give lip-service to freedom, but they also neglect to rifle guests’ electronics as they enter the country. The Feds seek to change that through ACTA, compelling those countries to match American tyranny and thereby please the IP lobby. Rather than liberty, we now export chains.
Becky Akers, an expert on the American Revolution, writes frequently about issues related to security and privacy. Her articles and columns have been published by Lewrockwell.com, The Freeman, Military History Magazine, American History Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Post, and other publications.
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Written by Jim Capo
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Wednesday, 18 March 2009 07:44 |
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 Recently, the Missouri State Police put out a report warning police officers in the state about militia and terrorist threats coming from people who like the Constitution, may have supported Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin, or who doubt that the Federal Reserve is a valuable institution.
This, however, is not a Missouri specific issue. The Missouri outfit is part of a network of DHS "Fusion Centers" around the country. One of their primary "deliverables" is to share their work with each other. It is quite possible that this same report, ones based off it, or similar ones are being distributed in other states.
Individuals in any state with a fusion center should be working up a formal request to their state police or other appropriate office to seek equal time for a professional presentation of a patriotic, pro-freedom, pro-Constitution position on this to the same law enforcement professionals who got this report or any one like it. The thrust of such a presentation should be that patriotic citizens are on the side of the rule of law and those who defend it. A person who demands an audit of the FED or displays concern about our country following the path of the EU should not be profiled by law enforcement officers as a potential terrorist.
In 2007, USA Today provided a partial list of Department of Homeland Security Fusion Centers by state and organization name. This list is a good starting point for those at the local level who wish to begin working with law enforcement in their states to emphasize to them that we are working on the same side regarding defense of the rule of law.
One state not in the USA Today list was North Carolina. However, valuable contact information for that state can be found in a 2006 press release on NC's fusion center from the Attorney General's office. Similar public information likely exists for the more than two dozen fusion centers across the country.
Please work with the JBS staff coordinator for your state to pursue contacts with fusion centers. We need to work in a concerted fashsion to emphasize the professional approach we are taking to the issue of fusion center profiling of potential terrorist threats. |
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My son is innocent...and he's a victim of the Patriot Act!