News of the Month

November 9, 2002

Of course, the biggest news of the month in the political arena is the results of last Tuesday’s general elections, both in Texas and around the country. Who are the winners? Well, of course, the results are clear: the winners are … the ad agencies and the television stations! I mean, where else could you run a business, and have people come to you, begging you to take millions of dollars from them, in return for showing their ads instead of ads for junk food, junk cars, and junk “personal care products” that you usually run? And charge them a premium for doing it?

But, cynicism aside, we all know that the … ill-named “Republican” wing of the Republicrat Party beat the so-called “Democratic” wing six ways from Sunday. The Libertarians – and the Greens? We pulled in our usual pittance of voters who are sick enough of the whole system to start thinking of alternatives. Me? I’m even sicker than I have been up to now! Why? Because the very air of Texas is dirtier since last Tuesday. Think about it – with one exception (Mr. Barrientos’ state Senate seat), the candidate who threw the most dirt won! (Which is the second worst thing about last Tuesday.) They say that the dirtier the campaign, the more the yokels come out to vote. Well, the yokels came out, and they shouted their ignorance and stupidity loud and clear.

OK; lets review the important races. For Governor, we had a rich, corrupt white man defeating a rich, corrupt Hispanic-surnamed man. (I can’t call him a Latino; he’s really no more Latino than I am.) Governor Goodhair wins again! The man whose sole claim to competence is that he vetoed a whole bunch of bills so late in the last legislative session that the Ledge didn’t have time to come back and even try to override the vetoes. Then, for Lieutenant Governor, which – because of the way the state Constitution is written – is actually the most powerful office in the state, we get a man who’s so stupid that he can’t tell the difference between a US Army officer and a German Army officer! “Well, duhhh; I keep getting’ them 2 countries confused – I know the US is in Europe … or is that Germany?” Yuck!

For US Senator, we replace Phil Brain-weight with a John Cornyn. Until I actually saw it, I wouldn’t have believed that anybody else could copy Phil’s stupid, vacuous, “duhhh” grin. So much for that. Oh – “brain-weight?” you ask; Phil’s the only person in the US Congress whose name describes the weight of his brain. Gramm. Of course, ol’ Phil’s got it made – after 18 years of kowtowing to his massas in the banking industry, he got a job … guess where? In the banking industry, of course! “They hired me for what I know, not who I know,” he says. More like what he knows about whom.

Nationwide, it seems to be an overwhelming Republican sweep. Of course, King Georgie-poo (emphasis on the “Poo”) can’t wait to climb on the nearest orange crate and tell everyone that now he has a “mandate” to take our war of terrorism against the people of Iraq to the next level, especially since he’s been able to bend, twist, and otherwise pressure France into backing his little imperial incursion. We’ve been killing sick people and children for a decade, by bombing their sanitary infrastructure and denying them needed life-saving drugs. Now we can start killing men, women, and children on the street again with our Tomahawk cruise missiles. And that’s the worst thing about last Tuesday.

And I’m not even going to go into the countless “voting irregularities” of the past few weeks. From the electronic voting machines in Dallas that registered Democratic votes as being for the Republican candidate, to the fact that Jeb Bush – if anything, more corrupt than his stupider brother George – is still using that criminally flawed “felons list” that he used to help Georgie-poo steal the Presidential election from the man who won it, to illegal restrictions nationwide on voting by black, Hispanic, and Native American citizens, to …. The list of shame goes on and on. I think it was Emma Goldman who said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” And it was Joseph Stalin who said, “It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes.”

You know, I’ve never been more ashamed to be a Texan – on an American – than right now. After World War II, when the people of the United States began seeing the pictures of the survivors of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and the like, everyone asked, “Where were the good Germans?” Surely there must have been Germans who realized that their nation’s course was evil, and tried to do something about it! Well, I sit here tonight, wondering, “Where are the good Americans?” Where are the people who are sick, tired, and ashamed of the degradation that the Bush/Clinton/Bush hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege have dragged us into? Where are the people who are willing to get out and put themselves on the line, to object with every means at their disposal to the evil, sick path our nation is being dragged down?

OK; enough of that.

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We’ve been telling you for a while now that the only really unbiased news to be found on TV these days is the kind of show you’re watching now, on public access TV. Even PBS, that supposed bastion of independence and fairness, has to kowtow to the nation’s bosses, rather than telling the truth. For example, we’ve learned of a decision by PBS to refuse to transmit the investigative report, “Counting on Democracy” to its member stations for airing. The 57-minute documentary follows BBC television reporter Greg Palast as he discovers how Katherine Harris removed up to 57,000 legal voters– most black – from Florida registries five months before the 2000 election. This documentary is directed by Emmy-award winner Danny Schechter and narrated by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.

Despite PBS’s repressive decision, 20 of the nation’s top PBS stations independently broadcast the exposé shortly before the mid-term elections. Was KLRU among these courageous 20? Hah! You’ve got to be kidding. Of course not! KLRU is owned by Enormous State University, and guess where ESU gets its bucks? Oh – you don’t have to guess? Well, you’re right – the same big-money, big-power plutocrats that are currently in charge of the country.

And while we’re on the topic of the unreliability of the media in the United States today, here’s a list of questions to consider when you’re thinking about it:

· Why did US media completely (except for San Francisco Examiner) suppress the story of four hundred 9/11 victims’ family members suing Bush for $7 billion for knowingly allowing 9/11 to occur for political gain?

· Why has the US media never examined the “insider stock trading” the week before 9/11 that shorted AA and United Airlines stocks? That story, by the way, led to the A. B. Brown Trust, a CIA-connected institution which the now-Executive Director of the CIA, Buzzy Krongard, chaired until his induction into the CIA, and whose current head quietly resigned on 9/11, and where $2.5 million of the “winnings” are still unclaimed?

· Why has the US media never scrutinized the now well-known Bush - Bin Laden family connections, and the fact that Bush allowed Bin Laden family members to quietly leave the US after 9/11, without being questioned?

· Why did the US media not say word one about the hundreds of thousands of people who demonstrated in the streets of Britain and Italy against the upcoming Oil War II?

News? You want news? Did you see the coverage of the enormous anti-Oil War II rallies held in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Austin? You didn’t? No surprise there – there was no coverage. None of the major corporate-owned news media (except for the local newspapers in each of those cities) reported that 100,000 people demonstrated against the war in DC, 50,000 in San Francisco, and about 1,000 even made it out in the rain in Austin to show their outrage at King George II’s latest bit of imperial insanity.

Or how about the non-coverage of the recent appearance in Austin by Dr. Noam Chomsky, who is arguably the most respected and quoted person living in the United States today. They filled a 1,000-seat auditorium an hour before the speech was to start; then they filled a 600-seat overflow hall with a video feed almost immediately after that; then they set up audio so that the people out in the hallways could hear; then they had to set up speakers outside the building to accommodate the over-over-over-overflow crowds who had come to hear Dr. Chomsky. Coverage? Don’t look to our corporate-owned media for that; if you want to know what happened, you’ll have to read the Chronicle – or watch public access TV.

The media did cover the tragic death of one of America’s true populist heroes, Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. Hmph! They had to. Hmmm. Isn’t it just a bit too convenient that this man, the one member of the US Congress most hated by the Bush junta, just happens to die under strange circumstances only two weeks before the election that could shift the balance of power in the Senate? Think I’m being an alarmist? Listen to this excerpt from an article in The Nation on May 9 of this year:

“Paul Wellstone is a hunted man. Minnesota’s senior senator is not just another Democrat on White House political czar Karl Rove’s target list, in an election year when the Senate balance of power could be decided by the voters of a single state. Rather, getting rid of Wellstone is a passion for Rove, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and the special-interest lobbies that fund the most sophisticated political operation ever assembled by a presidential administration. ‘There are people in the White House who wake up in the morning thinking about how they will defeat Paul Wellstone,’ a senior Republican aide confides. ‘This one is political and personal for them.’ ”

Face it, my friends: we are being ruled by an illegal junta that will stop at nothing to secure its hold on power in this country – and, if the signs are any indication, in the world. Was there anything “funny” about Senator Wellstone’s death? And if there were, do you think the National Transportation Safety Board, all of whose top managers serve at the pleasure of the president, would say so? Hah!

Remember, it hasn’t been that long since the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under General Lymon Lemnitzer, created Operation Northwoods. James Bamford, in his book Body of Secrets, describes that abomination this way: “Code named Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, DC, Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.”

When you live in the number 1 international terrorist nation in the world – as we do – you’ve got to expect all sorts of strange happenings. An administration that thinks nothing of killing thousands of innocent civilians, in country after country after country, can’t have much scruple about killing a few people within its own borders. And regarding that one, I’m not just talking about King Georgie-Poo. When Bill Clinton was president, this nation destroyed one-half the medicinal drug manufacturing capability of the nation of Sudan with one well- … excuse me, mistakenly-aimed Tomahawk cruise missile. Oops! Our fault; we were aiming at something else. Did we take steps to – or even offer to – backstop that small, poor nation to prevent thousands of its citizens from dying of otherwise treatable illnesses? Of course not! What do those people matter? You get the picture.

What can we do? We, who are – if you believe the election results of earlier this week – in a definite minority in this country right now? What can we do to make a difference in this vast sea of indifference, carefully cultivated by our mega-corporations and their toy politicians? The very best thing you can do is to spread the word. Raise people’s awareness of what’s going on out there. Every person whose eyes we can open to the truth is one more person who will stand with us when things get bad, and one more person who can spread the word to yet others. We the people really are powerful. All we have to do is refuse to believe the media spinners when they try to tell us we aren’t, and refuse to sit down and shut up when they try to tell us our opinions don’t count any more.