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Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?

Corporate media colludes with democracy’s demise

Without a free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy

I heard this story a long time ago, growing up in Choctaw County in Oklahoma before my family moved to Texas. A tribal elder was telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, “It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf won?”
The old Cherokee replied simply, “The one I feed.”
Democracy is that way. The wolf that wins is the one we feed. And in our society, media provides the fodder.
Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. To put it another way, corporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force. It robs people of their voice in public affairs and pollutes the political culture. And it turns the debates about profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.
Our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders.
These organizations’ self-styled mandate is not to hold public and private power accountable, but to aggregate their interlocking interests. Their reward is not to help fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of “We, the people,” but to manufacture news and information as profitable consumer commodities.
Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of the state and the privileged interests that the state protects. And nothing characterizes corporate media today more than its disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and its indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people.
Let’s look at what is happening with the Internet. This spring the cable giant Comcast tried to pack a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hearing on network neutrality by hiring strangers off the street to ensure that advocates of net neutrality would not be able to get a seat in the hearing room.
SaveTheInternet.com — a bipartisan coalition — and its supporters helped expose the ruse. Soon after, there was a new hearing, this time without the gerrymandering seating by opponents of an open Internet.
Now Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has introduced a bill to advance network neutrality, and it has become an issue in the presidential campaign.
We must be vigilant. The fate of the cyber-commons — the future of the mobile Web and the benefits of the Internet as open architecture — is up for grabs. And the only antidote to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people at the net roots.
When Verizon tried to censor NARAL’s (National Abortion Rights Action League) use of text messaging last year, it was quick action by Save the Internet that led the company to reverse its position. Those efforts also led to an FCC proceeding on this issue.
Wherever the Internet flows — on PCs, cell phones, mobile devices and, very soon, new digital television sets — we must ensure that it remains an open and nondiscriminatory medium of expression.
By 2011, the market analysts tell us, the Internet will surpass newspapers in advertising revenues. With MySpace and Dow Jones controlled by News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft determined to acquire Yahoo!, and with advertisers already telling some bloggers, “Your content is unacceptable,” we could potentially lose what’s now considered an unstoppable long tail of content offering abundant, new, credible and sustainable sources of news and information.
So, what will happen to news in the future, as the already tattered boundaries between journalism and advertising is dispensed with entirely and as content programming, commerce and online communities are rolled into one profitably attractive package?
Last year, the investment firm of Piper Jaffray predicted that much of the business model for new media would be just that kind of hybrid. They called it “communitainment.” (Oh, George Orwell, where are you now that we need you?)
Across the media landscape, the health of our democracy is imperiled. Buffeted by gale force winds of technological, political and demographic forces, without a truly free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy.
Mergers and buyouts change both old and new media. They bring a frenzied focus on cost-cutting, while fattening the pockets of the new owners and their investors. The result: journalism is degraded through the layoffs and buyouts of legions of reporters and editors.
Advertising Age reports that U.S. media employment has fallen to a 15-year low. The Los Angeles Times alone has experienced a withering series of resignations by editors who refused to turn a red pencil into an editorial scalpel.
The new owner of the Tribune Company, real estate mogul Sam Zell, recently toured his new property Los Angeles Times, telling employees in the newsroom that the challenge is this: How do we get somebody 126 years old to get it up? “Well,” said Zell, “I’m your Viagra.”
He told his journalists that he didn’t have an editorial agenda or a perspective about newspapers’ roles as civic institutions. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “All what matters in the end is the bottom line.”
Zell then told Wall Street analysts that to save money he intends to eliminate 500 pages of news a week across all of the Tribune Company’s 12 papers. That can mean eliminating some 82 editorial pages every week just from the Los Angeles Times. What will he use to replace reporters and editors? He says to the Wall Street analysts, “I’ll use maps, graphics, lists, rankings and stats.” Sounds as if Zell has confused Viagra with Lunesta.
Former Baltimore Sun journalist and creator of HBO’s The Wire, David Simon, chronicled the effect that crosscutting and consolidation has had in media businesses and on the communities where those businesses have made so much money. He wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “I did not encounter a sustained period in which anyone endeavored to spend what it would actually cost to make the Baltimore Sun the most essential and deep-thinking and well-written account of life in central Maryland. The people you needed to gather for that kind of storytelling were ushered out the door, buyout after buyout.”
Or as journalist Eric Alterman recently wrote in the New Yorker: “It is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.”
For example, we needed to know the truth about Iraq. The truth could have spared that country from rack and ruin, saved thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and freed hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in the American economy and infrastructure.
But as reporters at Knight Ridder — one of the few organizations that systematically and independently set out to challenge the claims of the administration — told us at the time, and as my colleagues and I reported in our PBS documentary Buying the War, and as Scott McClellan has now confessed, and as the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed in June, the Bush administration deceived Americans into supporting an unprovoked war on another country. And it did so using erroneous and misleading intelligence — and with the complicity of the dominant media. It has led to a conflict that, instead of being over quickly and bloodlessly as predicted, continues to this day into its sixth year.
We now know that a neoconservative is an arsonist who sets a house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out. You couldn’t find a more revealing measure of the state of the dominant media today than the continuing ubiquitous presence on the air and in print of the very pundits and experts, self-selected message multipliers of a disastrous foreign policy, who got it all wrong in the first place. It just goes to show, when the bar is low enough, you can never be too wrong.
The dominant media remains in denial about their role in passing on the government’s unverified claims as facts. That’s the great danger. It’s not simply that they dominate the story we tell ourselves publicly every day. It’s that they don’t allow other alternative competing narratives to emerge, against which the people could measure the veracity of all the claims.
Now the dominant media is saying, “Well, we did ask. We did do our job by asking tough questions during the run-up to the war.”
But I’ve been through the transcripts. And I’ll tell you, you will find very few tough questions. And if you come across them, you will discover that they were asked of the wrong people.
John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for McClatchy, formerly Knight Ridder, recently said of his colleagues in the dominant media, “They asked a lot of questions, but they asked even the right questions of the wrong people.” They were asked of the sources who had cooked the intelligence books in the first place or who had memorized the White House talking points and were prepared to answer every tough question with a soft evasion or an easy lie, swallowed by a gullible questioner.
Following the March 2003 invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney dropped into a media dinner to thank the guests for their all-the-war-all-the-time coverage of the contrived and manufactured war.
Sadly, in many respects, the Fourth Estate has become the fifth column of democracy, colluding with the powers that be in a culture of deception that subverts the thing most necessary to freedom, and that is the truth.
But we’re not alone and we know what we need to say. So let us all go tell it on the mountains and in the cities. From our websites and laptops, the street corners and coffeehouses, the delis and diners, the factory floors and the bookstores. On campus, at the mall, the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque, let’s tell it where we can, when we can and while we still can.
Democracy only works when ordinary people claim it as their own.
This article was adapted from Bill Moyers’ keynote address at the National Conference for Media Reform Conference in Minneapolis on June 7. You can read and respond to the full speech at http://www.pbs.org/moyers.
Bill Moyers is the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.More information about Bill Moyers

Report: Emirates calls on GCC countries to depeg currencies from US dollar to curb inflation

The Associated Press
Sunday, July 6, 2008

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates: A newspaper in the United Arab Emirates says the tiny Gulf state's government is lobbying neighboring countries to depeg their currencies from the U.S. dollar to curb inflation.

The National, which is owned by the Abu Dhabi ruling family, reported Sunday that the UAE is calling on all six Gulf Cooperation Council member states to "rethink" their monetary policy amid soaring inflation in the oil-rich region.

It cited an internal report by Abu Dhabi's Department of Planning and Economy.

The GCC members are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman. All of their currencies are pegged to the dollar except Kuwait, which depegged its currency, the dinar, from the dollar in May 2007 in favor of a basket of currencies.

The Energy Non Crisis

The Energy Non Crisis

Big Pharma Is in a Frenzy to Bring Cannabis-Based Medicines to Market

By Paul Armentano, AlterNetPosted on July 5, 2008, Printed on July 6, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/90469/
The US government's longstanding denial of medical marijuana research and use is an irrational and morally bankrupt public policy. On this point, few Americans disagree. As for the question of "why" federal officials maintain this inflexible and inhumane policy, well that's another story
One of the more popular theories seeking to explain the Feds' seemingly inexplicable ban on medical pot goes like this: Neither the US government nor the pharmaceutical industry will allow for the use of medical marijuana because they can't patent it or profit from it.
It's an appealing theory, yet I've found it to be neither accurate nor persuasive. Here's why.
First, let me state the obvious. Big Pharma is busily applying for -- and has already received -- multiple patents for the medical properties of pot. These include patents for synthetic pot derivatives (such as the oral THC pill Marinol), cannabinoid agonists (synthetic agents that bind to the brain's endocannabinoid receptors) like HU-210 and cannabis antagonists such as Rimonabant. This trend was most recently summarized in the NIH paper (pdf), "The endocannabinoid system as an emerging target of pharmacotherapy," which concluded, "The growing interest in the underlying science has been matched by a growth in the number of cannabinoid drugs in pharmaceutical development from two in 1995 to 27 in 2004." In other words, at the same time the American Medical Association is proclaiming that pot has no medical value, Big Pharma is in a frenzy to bring dozens of new, cannabis-based medicines to market.
Not all of these medicines will be synthetic pills either. Most notably, GW Pharmaceutical's oral marijuana spray, Sativex, is a patented standardized dose of natural cannabis extracts. (The extracts, primarily THC and the non-psychoactive, anxiolytic compound CBD, are taken directly from marijuana plants grown at an undisclosed, company warehouse.)
Does Big Pharma's sudden and growing interest in the research and development of pot-based medicines mean that the industry is proactively supporting marijuana prohibition? Not if they know what's good for them. Let me explain.
First, any and all cannabis-based medicines must be granted approval from federal regulatory bodies such as the US Food and Drug Administration -- a process that remains as much based on politics as it is on scientific merit. Chances are that a government that is unreasonably hostile toward the marijuana plant will also be unreasonably hostile toward sanctioning cannabis-based pharmaceuticals.
A recent example of this may be found in the Medicine and Health Products Regulatory Agency's recent denial of Sativex as a prescription drug in the United Kingdom. (Sativex's parent company, GW Pharmaceuticals, is based in London.) In recent years, British politicians have taken an atypically hard-line against the recreational use of marijuana -- culminating in Prime Minister Gordon Brown's declaration that today's pot is now of "lethal quality." (Shortly thereafter, Parliament elected to stiffen criminal penalties on the possession of the drug from a verbal warning to up to five years in jail.) In such an environment is it any wonder that British regulators have steadfastly refused to legalize a pot-based medicine, even one with an impeccable safety record like Sativex? Conversely, Canadian health regulators -- who take a much more liberal view toward the use of natural cannabis and oversee its distribution to authorized patients -- recently approved Sativex as a prescription drug.
Of course, gaining regulatory approval is only half the battle. The real hurdle for Big Pharma is finding customers for its product. Here again, a culture that is familiar with and educated to the use therapeutic cannabis is likely going to be far more open to the use of pot-based medicines than a population still stuck in the grip of "Reefer Madness."
Will those patients who already have first-hand experience with the use of medical pot switch to a cannabis-based pharmaceutical if one becomes legally available? Maybe not, but these individuals comprise only a fraction of the US population. Certainly many others will -- including many older patients who would never the desire to try or the access to obtain natural cannabis. Bottom line: regardless of whether pot is legal or not, cannabis-based pharmaceuticals will no doubt have a broad appeal.
But wouldn't the legal availability of pot encourage patients to use fewer pharmaceuticals overall? Perhaps, though likely not to any degree that adversely impacts Big Pharma's bottom line. Certainly most individuals in the Netherlands, Canada, and in California -- three regions where medical pot is both legal and easily accessible on the open market -- use prescription drugs, not cannabis for their ailments. Further, despite the availability of numerous legal healing herbs and traditional medicines such as Echinacea, Witch Hazel, and Eastern hemlock most Americans continue to turn to pharmaceutical preparations as their remedies of choice.
Should the advent of legal, alternative pot-based medicines ever warrant or justify the criminalization of patients who find superior relief from natural cannabis? Certainly not. But, as the private sector continues to move forward with research into the safety and efficacy of marijuana-based pharmaceuticals, it will become harder and harder for the government and law enforcement to maintain their absurd and illogical policy of total pot prohibition.
Of course, were it not for advocates having worked for four decades to legalize medical cannabis, it's unlikely that anyone -- most especially the pharmaceutical industry -- would be turning their attention toward the development and marketing of cannabis-based therapeutics. That said, I won't be holding my breath waiting for any royalty checks.
Oh yeah, and as for those who claim that the US government can't patent medical pot, check out the assignee for US Patent #6630507.

Paul Armentano is the senior policy analyst for the NORML Foundation in Washington, DC.

Independence Day

Independence DayJuly 4, 2008 — crescentandcross
Independence Day

“I have to get home to my mother, she will be so worried if I am not back soon.”

9 year-old Mona clutched at the gaping hole in her stomach, blood pouring out of her as if someone had turned on a faucet. There was something so terribly and indescribably out of place in her frail words, the colliding of two disparate worlds, that of a mother’s child, and that of a little girl facing down the ugliest of what life and humanity had to offer.
The man kneeling at her side however knew better. He was a trained medical professional, and in a war zone known as Gaza of all places. He had seen this scenario a thousand times before, and a thousand times too many as far as he was concerned. This child would not be going home, at least not her earthly home, given the fact that she had just been shot in the stomach at close range by a soldier wielding a machine gun, the bullets from which produced exit wounds on her tiny body that were as large as golf balls. Had she known that her insides had just been turned to mush, it is highly unlikely that she would have been as composed as she was at this moment.
Her gesture in worrying about her mother, about not wanting to cause a beloved parent any grief was partly genuine, and partly an attempt to distract herself from the fact that she knew something terrible had just happened to her. Indeed a child’s sweetness knows no bounds, irrespective of where such a child can be found in the world. As she lie in a bath of her own warm blood that increased with each passing second, while frantic adults attempt to effect that which they know is futile, all she can think is that her mother must be worried, and how she wishes she could be home with her now, if only for enough time to give her one final embrace, tell her of a daughter’s love, and to say goodbye.
In the end, it all came down to sweets, an indispensable part of any child’s life, even in places that have been torn apart by warfare for the last century such as this. Today, little Mona, despite having grown up in a world of bullets and mortars, allowed the carelessness of her childhood to overpower her reason just enough to persuade her towards venturing forth into that deadly world of never ending violence to buy some cookies at the corner store. The fact that Israeli soldiers were busy with their latest masterpiece in butchery nearby did not seem to arouse her concern. After all, when all things were considered, this was just another day in the life of someone who knew she had been born under a sentence of death and who had developed an intimacy of sorts with this fact as if it had been her own skin.
On her way back, humming something sweet and armed with nothing more dangerous than the cookies in her hand, she was indiscriminately shot by an Israeli soldier, who, like all the rest of his ilk, had been told by both political and spiritual leaders that it is the religious duty of all good Zionists, a mitzvah, to cleanse the promised land of any impurities that may be infecting it, a process of sterilization which included, if it can be imagined, slaughtering helpless Arab children. And so, this courageous and obedient soldier from among a group of people who fancy themselves as being a light among nations, without the slightest hesitation pulled the trigger, simultaneously swatting away at the shred of what remained of his conscience as if it were some species of annoying insect.
For little Mona, it merely felt like a lit match touching her insides momentarily, and it was not until she began to feel the sensation of warm wetness on her dress that she began to panic. Her first instinct was that she might get into trouble for having gotten her new dress dirty, since the last thing her mother told her before leaving the house was to make sure not to get it messy.
Thus is the mind of a child, even when facing the awfulness of eternity that their thoughts are always to be found firmly rooted in something trivial and sweet. Perhaps it was the panic stricken appearances on the faces of those around her who were trying to help that caused her to realize the seriousness of what it was that she was facing, or perhaps it was the unseen whisper into her soul from some divine messenger telling her to hurry up, since time was running out. Either way, no one really knows.
And so in that fifteen seconds before her spirit was liberated from the hellish existence that had been imposed upon her and upon the rest of the inhabitants of the Holy Land by the self-described ‘chosen people’, the little Palestinian child of 9 years forgot all about her cookies, as well as about every other item of what encompasses a child’s existence, grew up quickly, remembered everything she had been taught during the religion classes she had taken throughout her life, and made her last statement of faith. In her last words, there was no malice, no pulsa de nura–the infamous curses that rabbis and Orthodox Jews hurl daily at passing Christians or Muslims in Israel, no condemnations, no vows of revenge. Her composure, as she lie there in a pool of her own blood, was as graceful and as dignified as was that of any patriot or saint who has secured a rightly earned place in mankind’s memory as a result of having had his or her life cut short by the actions of men hell-bent upon doing evil to others. For Mona, it would be one simple statement, without any fanfare or drama, final words that will probably be remembered by few, short of those who loved her more than they loved themselves.
The little girl whose life had been snuffed out like a candle, the last fragrance of this little Palestinian flower who had been cut down by the hatchet of Jewish supremacism had nothing more spiteful in her final curtain call other than “God is great.”
From a bird’s eye view, this was but one of several tragic scenes taking place on that day. A few miles away, a family of seven had just barely made it out of their home when the bulldozer crashed through where the living room was. There were no warnings that this demolition process was about to take place, and had it not been for the fact that 14 year-old Ismail went to the window to see what the noise was that was coming from outside, the entire family would most likely have been buried beneath the rubble. This was a common occurrence these days, of not ordering the evacuation of a home to be demolished, since the Israelis cared nothing about the lives of the filthy Arabs who were polluting their sacred land, and thus preferred that the entire mess be hauled away, home and dwellers included. Under the gaze of 3 armed-to-the-teeth Israeli soldiers, the family stood by and watched helplessly as everything that encompassed their lives was reduced to rubble within a few minutes.
There was nothing left of the meager example of their family’s security and order now, and even though what they had called a life had been a miserable existence anyway, at least they had had a place to call home where they could eat, sleep, and find refuge from the rain. This home, which had literally stood for centuries, was just one of thousands in recent years that has been bulldozed in order to make way for a new apartment complex for “better people,” the Zionists, who, if you were to ask them, were a race apart and chosen by God to be the bringers of enlightenment, peace and righteousness to the rest of humanity.
Perhaps it was the colors of it that caught his eye, the green, black, brown and white that contrasted with the sand-colored rubble of his former home’s exterior. Ismail went over to where his bedroom used to be and found it jutting forth from the rubble, the Palestinian flag he cherished and which he had used to adorn his room on the same wall upon which he hung the photos of friends and family members who had died fighting to liberate their land of its oppressors. He carefully pulled it out from the rubble, paying the same respect to his country’s colors that is paid by other citizens around the world to their respective countries, and forgetting where he was, or possibly, because of remembering where he was, draped the flag over the rubble in what was the only act of defiance he cold muster at this moment. 14 year-old Ismail turned and stared at his oppressors with a controlled yet determined stare. The three armed Israeli soldiers, recently arrived from the former Soviet Union and not able to speak even one word of the same Aramaic that was the language of the Biblical ancestors from whom they claimed to be descendents, finally got what they had been hoping for that day. After all, what good were guns for anyway if they remained cold and unfired? Was there no truth to the old saying that a weapon unused was a useless weapon? Therefore, without any concern paid for what might be future consequences, one from among them chuckled, lifted the American-made rifle that had been gifted to him by virtue of his ethnic superiority from a nation that dares to calls itself Christian, aimed its sights squarely between the boy’s eyes, and in the plain sight of all who were present, launched one of his .22 caliber missiles traveling at 3,300 feet per second through the boy’s head, resulting in a spray of pink mist that left the smell of human blood in the air.
Even before the echoes of the gunshot had died, the family was screaming in agony and running to the spot where Ismail lie as motionless as a child’s doll. His last act of defiance, of simply saluting the flag and of swearing loyalty to the land that his forefathers had inhabited for over a thousand years resulted in the execution of a death sentence under which he had lived from the moment he was born. And as the family members hold him in their arms, watching as his life flows out of him in rivers of red, wailing towards heaven and begging the Almighty who created him to spare his life, those who were responsible for authoring this misery-laden event simply walk away snickering, thinking to themselves that they are now one step closer to having finished the business of exterminating Amalek, the people whom their ancestors were commanded to eradicate in cleansing the promised land, Eretz Y’Israel and of making it racially and spiritually pure. Later that evening, there would be drinks and discussions of what kind of medals would be forthcoming as a result of the day’s hard work…
…And these were just some of the thoughts going through his mind as he looked out the window that evening, watching the night sky as its darkness was interrupted every few seconds by brilliant displays of light. It was July 4’th, 2004; Independence Day in America, but his thoughts could hardly be focused on the festivities that were supposed to mark this event. Not now, and not anytime soon. His eyes had been opened to something so horrible that precluded celebrating anything, much less the freedom that he was supposed to have as an American. It must have been quite a scene down there in town where all the fireworks were taking place. Over-sized Americans stuffed into under-sized clothing, beer in one hand and something to shove into their mouths in the other, congregating for the purpose of celebrating something that in reality they no longer possessed. Waddling around like penguins and peppering their base and trivial discussions with language that one would hear in an x-rated film, they had painted themselves into the ultimate picture of black humor, and had it not been for the fact that such terrible consequences were attached to this situation, one could have been moved towards laughing at all of it.
But laughing was out of the question now, for to do so would have been as vulgar as telling dirty jokes at a funeral. The tragedy was too great, too monstrous, too serious. Besides the fact that it was the ultimate in contrasting images, as well it was all taking place in the midst of unimaginable suffering for millions of others around the globe. Just imagining the audacity of it all made the bile in his throat rise and caused his brain to scream out loud in pain. They were like a group of individuals who had inherited a great fortune generations past, but who today, unbeknownst to them were as penniless as street bums, and all of this the result of their having allowed shyster lawyers to administer their estate and bleed it dry of all its wealth. Tonight as they celebrate their perceived fortunes and congratulate themselves for having inherited them, that which they do not realize is that fact that they are bankrupt, busted, broke, and even now, as they drink and mingle with each other, laughing and talking as foolish heirs often do, the paperwork is being signed in remote places wherein their foreclosure and eviction is being planned and implemented. It had become the ultimate contradiction of themes, Independence Day in America, as much so as if there had been something known as Virtuousness Day in the ancient city of Sodom thousands of years ago.
Our spiritually ex-patriate American, watching all of this from a distance remembered reading something once in a medical journal about schizophrenia and about how one of the telltale signs of this condition’s presence was found in an individual’s ability to simultaneously hold two completely contradictory ideas, and if this wasn’t a description of what had happened to this country, he didn’t know what could be. They had become a nation of madmen, wild beasts who couldn’t think for themselves outside of the parameters that had been constructed for them by overlords who were capable of doing nothing but evil. Here they were, celebrating their freedom in an age where their lives had been reduced to that of mice within a cage, and they were too stupid to realize it. A corporate police state had been constructed around them, and their country resembled the land of their forefathers as much as a swine resembles a ballerina, and yet they were too blind to see it.
But yet, as if on Pavlovian clue, here they were, shouting and hollering like a bunch of maniacs about how wonderful all of it was and how proud they were to be Americans, the freest people on the planet, how much God loved them and blah, blah, blah. He swallowed hard in contemplating these realities, and having ingested this nauseating gruel of clashing images, felt the beginnings of a sickness in his stomach that was not going to be chased away by anything over-the-counter.
For whatever reason, he had not been infected with this virus that had gripped millions of his countrymen on September 11 2001, and in the interests of maintaining his as well as his family’s intellectual and spiritual health, he had imposed upon himself and upon those who were under his charge a strict quarantine from his countrymen since that fateful day. Over the course of the following 3 years, from a safe distance he watched in horror as his nation slowly but surely came down with this plague of intellectual and spiritual paralysis, watched as his former countrymen marched uninterruptedly towards their own oblivion without so much as a trace of resistance.
And so, in maintaining this agenda of keeping his loved ones off of the political version of the Titanic, on this night our American friend was at home with his family instead of participating in the mass-suicide that was taking place down in town.
When the first “boom” had gone off, he and his wife had looked at each other simultaneously, each bearing a face that revealed the underlying sense of puzzlement mixed with a small amount of concern that each felt. It was followed by another distant “boom” and then another, and then both of them, remembering what day it was, nodded their heads and said in unison “July the 4th.”
The event shouldn’t have taken them by such surprise, particularly since they had spent a good part of that evening watching Independence Day, that not-so-subtle piece of propaganda released upon the American people just prior to initiating the wars to save Israel. Talk about blatant, this unashamed effort of pumping up the American people into supporting what was to be the biggest bloodbath in history, theirs or anyone else’s for that matter. A storyline wherein the planet is suddenly threatened with complete annihilation from hostile, fanatical un-humans bent upon the destruction of everyone who is not like them, an extra-terrestrial jihad which is defeated by the combined efforts of Jewish brains and American brawn. The only thing that could have made the film more obvious would have been bearded aliens dressed in sheets and quoting verses from some religious book that inspired them to do what it was that they were doing.
We should suppose though that our couple should be given some slack for having forgotten where they were and in what time period they were living, since the events of the last 2 years in America have been a whirlwind of sorts that should have left anyone with half an ounce of sense somewhat senseless.
It was only a few minutes of these distant festivities going on before there was heard the sound of small footsteps coming down the stairs. In single file, beginning with the youngest (who we can suppose were the most frightened by the noise and thus wanted to get to Mom and Dad as quickly as possible) up to the oldest came the 5 children who were suddenly awakened by what sounded like strange thunder. They made a beeline for the couch where Mom and Dad were seated, asking what all the noise was about, huddling in closely as children are biologically programmed to do. When “fireworks” came the answer, all the children turned their heads towards the window to see for themselves, relieved somewhat that there was no storm, or worse, that there was no new war that had just begun in their vicinity, a reality of present day life that they had come to understand better during the course of the last two years. The oldest boy, who by then had begun to feel the stirrings of his masculine nature already, was the first to recognize the light show for how it appeared, and walking towards the window to get a better gaze, said ominously “It looks like Iraq.”
Out of the mouths of babes, as the saying has always gone.
It certainly did look like Iraq, at least that version of it that had been presented to Americans in the opening moments of the war, wherein the night sky in Baghdad was illuminated in dizzying displays of light that resembled any night in
America on July the 4th. Perhaps this was how the puppet masters in Washington and Tel Aviv wanted it to be seen, this “shock and awe” as they characterized it, in trying to get the “freest” people in the world to acquiesce to the agenda of murdering 1.5 billion Muslims for Israel’s benefit. The other children, understanding the importance found in the oldest boy’s words, also walked towards the window to get a better view. They stood there, saying nothing, although everyone in the room knew what was on each other’s mind. They winced at each flash, recoiled a bit, not displaying the ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ that children would normally exhibit at such a performance. The light show, paired with its distant booms and crackles was just one of several obscene spectacles that their young eyes had witnessed since the beginning of the present war to erect the Israeli empire. Prior to this were the images of the little Iraqi boy whose arms had been completely blown off of his body when the Americans dropped a bomb directly on his home, killing his entire family. And as sickening as this was–the image of this boy fighting to keep himself from succumbing to utter despair, the spectacle which followed was even worse; that of the American soldiers loading him onto a military transport to take him to a medical facility and cheering as he went on his way, a grandiose attempt by the Zionist media to gloss over this tragedy that had somehow slipped past the censors and made its way before the eyes of the American people.
Of course, there were as well many other scenes that these children witnessed which brought the reality of this war to their eyes and which made them smarter than the average American as to what it was all about—the women and children of Palestine who were being shot and blown up on a daily basis for the last century by those who fancied themselves as the apple of God’s eye–America’s only allies in the Middle East, the Israelis, not to mention the daily destruction of all those monuments that have stood for thousands of years and which are considered sacred to billions of Christians and Muslims around the world. And so, what had taken place over the course of the last two years of watching the war on television and of discussing its awful realities with Mom and Dad is that these children had been robbed of their youth and their innocence. They understood life and the ugly side of human nature much better than children should, and this was the reason why there was no excitement in their eyes tonight while watching the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air. Rather, they looked upon the images as any decent individual with open eyes should in America of 2004; a disgusting display of patriotic pornography that was a bringer of disease and death. It was pure smut, a way of defiling what would normally have been the beautiful act of expressing one’s love for the country in a wholesome, healthy way and of replacing it with a whorish, cheap, and sterile performance for lustful spectators. Worse yet is the fact that the national life and vitality that should have been produced by the consummation of this political marriage was (just as had been taking place in the literal sense over 4,000 times a day during the course of the last 30 years) torn to pieces by the political and cultural abortionists in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, leaving in their wake a trail of death and destruction for hundreds of millions. And so, having had their fill of these ugly scenes and of being scandalized in such a frightful way, all went upstairs in single file as they had come down, a silent march, that, although not uttering a word, yet spoke volumes.
Having had enough of it herself, his wife followed suit and went to bed, leaving our friend in solitude to ponder other thoughts that refused to be chased away the night on which Americans were busy celebrating their freedom, Independence Day.…
The phone ringing at 3 am in the morning could never be a good thing. It was either bad news or a prank. For this particular individual, a phone call at 3 am to this number was particularly worrisome, since, being the most popular actor in the world, he had only given it out to a handful of friends and relatives. He heard his wife and the youngest of their seven children stir as the rings continued.
“Hello?” he answered, expecting to hear the voice of his father or someone else from the family with some kind of important news. “You think you’re pretty smart don’t you?” taunted the voice on the other line. It was a man’s voice, menacing, with a thick Brooklyn accent. The actor had heard the voice before, since this was not the first time he had been called in this manner. The voice continued. “You made me and my friends really mad, and we’re going to make sure that you pay for your crimes, you and your entire family. Think about that when you’re trying to get back to sleep.” The actor started to say something, displaying that angry, determined look on his face that he had famously worn in his movies and which had been seen before by millions of people around the world, but before he could get a word out, the line went dead.
“How did they get this number?”
His crime, the thing that had outraged this tiny minority of tyrants and which had driven them to the brink of madness was his decision to make a movie about the one man who was the most revered by the world’s 1 billion Christians and 1.5 billion Muslims, Jesus of Nazareth. In the months leading up to the release of the movie, the Zionist organizations had gone ballistic and had pulled the levers on every machine upon which they held sway in trying to destroy this man and his project. Under their direction, every newspaper, magazine, radio and television program had devoted a considerable amount of their attention to the campaign of smearing him and of making a mockery of his film. Some of these groups, the less cautious, actually petitioned the US government to have this man and his associates arrested as terrorists under the provisions of the Patriot Act.
It was July the 4th, Independence Day in America, and not only his life, but the lives of those whom he loved had just been threatened, again, something that had become a regular event now for over a year as a result of his daring to exercise his freedom of speech and religion. He had gone to the police, the FBI of all people, but nothing was done short of periodic assurances by agency spokesmen that “they were looking into it.”
Our American actor should have known better than to call them, since after all it was this same agency that had allowed over 200 spies who had been directly involved in the attacks of September 11th to be sent back to Israel immediately following what took place on that fateful day. Added to this, the fact that the Zionist group that was responsible for making such a fuss about his movie, the ADL, was a known yet unregistered agency of the Israeli government and the fact that it had enjoyed a love affair with the FBI over the course of the last 5 decades should have signaled to him whose priorities were going to take precedence in this matter.
And if these two items weren’t enough, then that which should have brought his expectations into proper alignment with reality was the fact that the individual who was responsible for overseeing much of the FBI’s investigations held dual citizenship in America and in Israel, and this fact, more than anything else should have underscored for him just how ridiculous the business of contacting them over this matter really was. In all fairness to our naïve American actor though, what else could he do? He had a family whose safety he was responsible for securing, and he still, foolishly, believed in the system, at least somewhat.
Tonight, the same people who flocked to see his famous movie in droves will don their baseball hats, their t-shirts emblazoned with such recently resurrected and popularized slogans as “United We Stand” and “God Bless America” and who, while clutching in their hands the millions of miniature American flags specially made for this event will celebrate their enslavement to the very same jackals who made the threatening phone call tonight, although none among the sheep will recognize this as being the case. They will nostalgically and schizophrenically lump the triumph of this man’s movie and the war in the Middle East together as being two sides of the same coin–2 fronts in the war to save Christianity and its civilization–two battles being fought in defense of the faith and freedom, refusing to see that the very same people who were responsible for running this man’s life through the meat grinder are the very same who are sending America’s sons and daughters off to die in the Middle East for the benefit of a foreign power who is, despite all the propagandizing that has taken place, no friend. And while all this is taking place, in the very land where a war of liberation was waged by a peasant carpenter from Nazareth against the descendents of those who made the threatening phone call tonight a continuation of this war is raging at full throttle. At this moment, the gangsters who put to death the main character in the same film which Christians in America stampeded like buffalo to go see in 2004 have returned after being chased out in 70 AD and are attempting to impose upon the world the very same nightmare that the Palestinian carpenter-turned-revolutionary tried to prevent.
Tonight, all the spots that commemorate the great events of this carpenter’s life and which have stood as some of the greatest monuments to the development of Western Civilization are being bulldozed and blown up by Jewish supremacist tyrants, while a group of Arab peasants attempt to prevent this disaster from taking place, even with their life’s blood. Tonight, as Americans celebrate the memories of those who gave their lives for the liberation of their own country from a foreign invader, will at the same time curse and castigate those who are attempting to do the same in the lands of Palestine and Iraq. Tonight, “cowards” and “terrorists,” as they have been called by the President of the United States and by his Zionist overlords, are fighting with every ounce of their beings to liberate their respective countries from the foreigners who have invaded their lands and who are slaughtering their women and children in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Adults, not having the sophisticated weaponry that is used against them by their oppressors will strap themselves with explosives and blow themselves up in order to take out the assassins within the Israeli military machine and their hired mercenaries from America who murder women and children on a daily basis. Children, in what is but a modern day repeat of the battle fought between David vs. Goliath will bravely go up against tanks and machine guns, often armed with nothing more than rocks and sticks and will fight this enemy with every ounce of their beings, knowing beforehand that they stand a good chance of losing arms and legs and even their lives. These “cowards” and “terrorists” will do so for exactly the same reasons and in exactly the same manner as was done by those rare Americans who, over 200 years previously, drove out foreign invaders who were bent upon enslaving them and of robbing them of their own destinies. Every man, woman, and child in Iraq, Palestine and every other place where the beast of Jewish supremacism is on the rampage, are–whether donning a rifle, grenade launcher, bomb vest, or a vehicle laden with explosives–brilliant reincarnations of the patriots of 1776 who refused to go down without a fight, who refused to go quietly into the night, freedom fighters whose existence today has been reduced to one agenda that is beyond negotiation or surrender, which is simply, “give us liberty or give us death.” Of course we will not find an ounce of this awareness among those Americans who have chosen to tempt the patience of fate on this night, July 4th, Independence Day. As they foolishly wave their flags, put their hands over the hearts and sing with a quivering voice the national anthem with tears welling up in their eyes, what they have chosen to do is to participate in an obscene display of hypocrisy and contempt for that gem of incalculable value known as freedom, as well as for the justice that must accompany its existence if it is to remain a viable entity. The contempt that they maintain for those who are paying with their life’s blood so that they themselves may experience just a tasting of the same freedom that Americans presume to be celebrating on this night has become a perfect representation of the two minute’s hate of George Orwell’s nightmarish novel 1984. Tonight, as it will be for many future nights in the coming years, the cursing that the Americans will display against those in the Middle East for daring to defend their beloved homelands and families from foreign assassins has become the chanting of the contradictions in that infamous, prophetic piece of fiction turned-into-non-fiction which predicted a future state of madness for humanity: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and by such, has now become the process of spitting on the graves of those who gave their lives before them in the noble cause of freedom. What they are doing in effect by championing the war against Israel’s enemies, in cheering like the mob at the coliseum for the hellish precepts of the Jewish supremacist agenda is to hold in contempt the war for freedom that their forefathers waged centuries past, although today, most of them are too stupid to recognize this as being the case. For in reality, what are they daring to celebrate this night? Freedom? They are as bankrupt of this currency as some indigent, homeless hobo on the street begging for food. Justice? Their political and cultural system is as anemic of this life-sustaining element to the point of near death. Truth? The fools who tonight are championing the slaughter of the last remaining impediment to the enslavement of the Jewish supremacist agenda stagger around aimlessly, inebriated on the drug of duplicity that they ingest on a daily basis by a government media complex furthering the cause of Zionist tyranny. Decency? Their society has become like a leper colony full of dying individuals who are rotting away from the corrosive effects of the plague, a plague that has resulted from poisons that have been deliberately poured into the wellspring of their culture by the very same assassins who bow at the feet of the Israeli agenda. After all, what is the event being remembered this evening, and for which all of this energy and effort is being expended? The day when a group of rugged individuals refused to be enslaved by a man named George who was a puppet to the business interests and corporations that controlled him? The day in which patriots stood up to the most powerful political, economic, and military power in the world at that time for the chance to run their lives free of those who would be their overlords? The day in which they fought back against an invasion initiated by foreign powers that threatened the peace and prosperity of their lives and the lives of those whom they loved? Please…no more.
It is something that, out of respect for the dead, should be put on hold for a while, this celebration of Independence Day in America. Not only out of respect for those who gave their lives fighting for this thing known as freedom 200 years ago in America, but more importantly, out of respect for those who are fighting for it today and who are being rewarded with nothing but scorn and derision by Americans for their efforts. The honor that is due to the minutemen at Lexington Bridge who were killed by the British is shamed and tarnished when remembering the event in which 35 of America’s young men were deliberately murdered by the Israelis in 1967 when the ship that carried them, the USS Liberty, was torpedoed, napalmed and machine-gunned for almost 2 hours with the quiet complicity of the American government. The outrage with which Americans recall the unsuccessful assassination attempt on George Washington’s life by the British is irredeemably defiled when paired next to what was successfully realized by a nuclear weapons-hungry Israel against the same John F. Kennedy who stood in her way of getting the bomb. The disdain that Benedict Arnold has suffered for 2 centuries now and counting as a result of his treachery in turning coat and siding with America’s enemy at that time is but a grain of sand placed alongside a mountain when considering the manner in which today all the elected members of the American government have unflinchingly cast their lots with the worst enemy that America has ever had. Here they were this night, standing solidly behind the man who lied to them about the reasons for America’s entry into the present war being fought in erecting the Israeli empire, King George, the man responsible for the deaths of thousands of sons and daughters serving in the American military and who has promised to send even more to die in the coming years, and they cheer. This man and his coterie who silently sent back to Israel the nest of spies, 200 or more, who played an indispensable role in the deaths of 3,000 Americans on September 11th sits atop his throne receiving the adulations of a compliant and conquered American people. They hoop and holler over their ancestors having thrown off the shackles of a foreign power 2 centuries past, and yet drink themselves silly over the fact that they have become the useful idiots of a foreign power whose thirst for supremacy and blood makes what was ‘British tyranny’ in 1776 look like paradise. Even now, as the next terrible event is being planned that will dwarf what took place on 9/11, these individuals who today inform on their friends and family to the Zionist thought police and who would have been the hated loyalists in America’s war against Great Britain 200 years ago refuse to see the obvious for what it is. And it is in this light therefore that our American friend, watching from a distance as the fires of duplicity and treachery consume the land that he used to love becomes a refugee, a wanderer without a home and without a country to which he can swear his allegiance. He sees the circus in town for what it really is, a farce of unprecedented historical outrage that should be an abomination in the eyes of every decent human being on the planet. The presence of these individuals tonight at what should be the solemn ceremony of celebrating freedom and of commemorating the sacrifices made by selfless individuals for their beloved country is as appropriate as would be a whore clad in a red dress at someone’s first communion ceremony.
In the meantime, our friend must do the unthinkable, something that he never would have imagined doing in a million years, which is to find an escape route out of this ‘land of freedom’ before this beast that is on the rampage snatches his own children and drags them off to fight and die for the benefit of a hostile, maniacal foreign power. He must begin preparations to flee, while there is time, to some safe haven lest the storm that is gathering comes and destroys everything that has given his life meaning. As a descendant of those who came to America looking for freedom from their respective countries, he must reverse these events and bring the family name to distant shores, someplace where his children will be safe–not only from being physically kidnapped and dragged off to die in order to serve the beast of the Zionist agenda, but as well from the highly contagious and deadly mental illness that has destroyed their countrymen.
And as he looks out the window, wincing as the mid-air explosions and percussions–meant as a celebration of this thing called independence, punctuate what would ordinarily have been a peaceful night, he thinks to himself, “If I could be president for a day, the things I would do.” In his meanderings, he envisions what would take place in a world where freedom and liberty are celebrated and honored in the spirit of true justice, where vice and bloodthirstiness are contained and then, even if only temporarily, terminated instead of celebrated. And he concludes his thoughts by saying something that he always remembered hearing his grandfather solemnly say when speaking of future events, a man who was born in the same Holy Land where today’s true patriots are fighting and who understood where life’s importance lie; “Yom Yommi”, which, when translated from the same Aramaic tongue spoken by the freedom fighters of Palestine 2,000 years ago against the beast of Jewish Supremacism simply means “the day will come.”
The day will come wherein Independence Day, on whatever date it falls, will be a day celebrated by all the world’s peoples, not just by those in America. It will be a day commemorating the event wherein mankind fought and achieved its independence from the beast of the Jewish supremacist agenda, and wherein a wooden stake was driven through the heart of a vampire that terrorized the world in such an unimaginable and unprecedented way. It will be remembered as the day wherein those who were tyrannized in such a brutal manner by the descendents of Cain rose up and finally cast into the lake of fire this animal that has prowled about humanity’s homestead and who has snatched the helpless, dragged them off towards oblivion and devoured them without any mercy. It will be the day wherein from the heavens, children like Mona and Ismail and all the others who were cut down by Hell’s assassins are remembered and enshrined as some of the best individuals that humanity had to offer as a result of their having given their lives in fighting for the taste of freedom. It will be celebrated as the day in which the beast and his 2,000-year agenda was finally put to the torch, and permanently made a thing of the past, never to be resurrected again. And, with these last thoughts, our American friend turns from the shock and awe, walks towards where his wife and baby lie sleeping, thinking of the heroes whose exploits would one day tell the story of freedom and justice for all mankind…
And it was July 4th, 2004, Independence Day in America.
‘Independence Day’ is an excerpt of Mark Glenn’s book No Beauty in the Beast…Israel Without Her Mascara which can be accessed by going to www.crescentandcross.com. The author can be reached at


he thought in disbelief. It was a brand new number, and only about 5 people had it. The only way possible was to break into the phone company’s computer banks and retrieve it, which would have required the resources of a government or at the very least, its passive cooperation. mailto:crescentandcross@gmail.com

U.S. Funding Terror Attacks In Iran

WTF, I thought that they were the ones that were...............

By Sherwood Ross

The recent surge of terrorist violence in Iran likely is being funded in part by the Bush administration with the support of Congress.
According to a report in the July 7-14 issue of The New Yorker magazine, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says the U.S. reportedly has been funding the Iranian dissident terrorist group Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or M.E.K.; the Kurdish separatist Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK; and, according to some sources, the Jundallah, or Iranian People’s Resistance Movement.

“Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere,” retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner is quoted by Hersh as stating. “There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.” Gardiner has taught strategy at the National War College and is monitoring the violence in Iran.
The bloodshed in Iran likely has been underwritten by the U.S. Congress which last year acceded to a request from Bush “to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran,” Hersh writes, “designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.” Bush asked for $400 million for the work.
“The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Ara and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations,” Hersh added, noting that “Clandestine operations against Iran are not new” and U.S. Special Operations Forces “have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year.”
Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, Hersh noted, and the Iranian government conceded an explosion in the southern city of Shiraz had been a terrorist act. That blast killed a dozen people and injured more than 200. Hersh said it could not be learned if there was any specific U.S. involvement in that incident.
However, the M.E.K., which has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, in recent years “has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States,” Hersh writes, and some of the newly authorized covert fund money may well flow into their coffers. A Pentagon consultant who was not named told Hersh, “The (Bush) Administration is desperate for results.”
As for the Kurdish PJAK, reportedly getting U.S. covert funding, Hersh quotes Gardiner as noting there has been a marked increase in the number of their armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. PJAK fighters last May attacked Revolutionary Guards and in June attacked Iranian border guards.
A former senior intelligence official indicated to Hersh that Vice President Cheney’s office “set up priorities for categories of targets (in Iran) and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”
The official added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates.”
The official was also quoted as saying there had been a meeting in Cheney’s office and “The subject was how to create a casus belli (an event to justify a declaration of war) between Tehran and Washington.”
Hersh also wrote that Admiral William Fallon, who until recently headed the U.S. Central Command with oversight for Iraq and Afghanistan, “resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran.”
Retired Marine General John Sheehan, formerly commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, told Hersh that when Fallon “tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”
Hersh quoted a Pentagon consultant as stating, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”
In sum, while the Bush regime claims the Iranians are behind attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, (an assertion fraught with what the New York Times delicately called “significant uncertainties,”) there is no longer any question Bush is doing just that inside Iran; that Cheney is looking for a cause to start a war; and that the White House will fire any flag officer that dares to stand in its way. #

(Sherwood Ross is a resident of Miami, Fla., who writes on military and political subjects. He has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and for wire services. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com).Authors Bio: Sherwood Ross has worked as a publicist for the City of Chicago and as a public relations consultant to New York City. He worked as news director for the National Urban League; as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and a workplace columnist for Reuters. He has also been a media consultant to colleges, universities, law schools and more than 100 national magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Business Week, and Foreign Policy. Ross also was a talk show host at WOL Radio, Washington, D.C., and holds an award for "best spot news coverage" for Chicago radio stations. He is the author "Gruening of Alaska,"(Best)and several plays, including "Baron Jiro," produced at Live Arts Theatre, Charlottesville, Va., and "Yamamoto's Decision," read at the National Press Club, where he is a member. His favorite quotations are from the Sermon on The Mount.