Things Your Media Momma Didn't Tell You

Friday, June 15, 2007

FMNM

Free-Market News Network, Corp.

The fact that most Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and want the
president impeached, is testimony to the native intelligence and common
sense of the citizens of this nation.

It sure isn't thanks to the quality of the news we're getting here in America.!

Here are some of the things you don't know if you just depend on the corporate media for your information:

1. Most Americans would like to see this
   president and vice president impeached and removed from office.
   Newsweek magazine published a scientific poll last October showing that
   51 percent of us favor impeachment (including 29 percent of
   Republicans!), but the corporate media, which normally hasn't met a
   poll it won't publish, didn't publicize this one. And now, when the
   numbers supporting impeachment are surely even higher, you can't even
   pay a polling outfit to ask the question. No wonder most people who
   favor impeachment still think they're odd ducks.
2. There is a bill, filed in the House of Representatives on
   April 24 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), calling for the impeachment of
   Vice President Cheney. Since it was filed, it has gained six
   co-sponsors, including a member of the House Democratic leadership,
   Rep. Janice Shakowsky (D-IL). Most major media have ignored this
   important story completely. Most Americans also don't know that the
   Vermont State Senate voted overwhelmingly this spring to call on
   Congress to impeach the president.
3. The president has been declared a felon in federal court.
   Yet even after Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled last
   August that President Bush and the National Security Agency were
   committing serial Class A felonies and were violating both the First
   and Fourth Amendments by spying on Americans' communications without
   first obtaining warrants, Bush continued ordering the NSA to continue
   the patently illegal program for at least half a year. In reports on
   the spying program, the corporate media never mention that it has been
   declared a felonious activity by the federal court.
4. Fifteen Democratic Party state organizations have passed
   impeachment resolutions calling on Democrats in Congress to initiate
   impeachment proceedings against the president and vice president. The
   most recent of these, the Democratic Party of Oklahoma, passed its
   resolution at the party's annual convention on May 19. Other Democratic
   Party conventions, in states from Nevada and California to
   Massachusetts and North Carolina, have passed similar resolutions. Most
   have been ignored by the corporate media even in their own states.
5. Bush's so-called "coalition of the willing" is not so
   willing and is not really much of a coalition either. When's the last
   time you've heard how many countries are on board with the US in the
   war and occupation of Iraq? The reality? Britain, the only significant
   contributor of combat troops besides the U.S., is pulling out, as did
   Italy and Spain, and many other countries, like Denmark, Lithuania and
   others, plan to be out of Iraq by August or at the latest December. One
   indication of the seriousness of situation: The Pentagon no longer
   lists the countries that are members of the "coalition." The only
   mainstream report I've seen laying this out this collapse in
   international support for Bush's war was in USA Today last February.
6. The Homeland Security Department last year awarded
   Halliburton $385 million in a no-bid contract to construct prison camps
   designed to hold tens of thousands of unspecified prisoners in the
   event of domestic unrest. Meanwhile, President Bush has signed a bill
   altering the insurrection act so that he can declare martial rule and
   order active duty troops to take charge anywhere in the domestic US in
   the event of "public disorder." No one in the corporate media has
   reported on these developments or asked the White House to explain what
   it's all about.
7. There is evidence that Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, was a
   patron of the Washington Madam whose client book of high-class
   call-girls is causing many in Washington political circles-mostly
   Republicans it appears, who apparently need to pay for their sex-to
   sweat. So far no mention of the Cheney angle in the corporate media,
   though they've been having fun with the broader story of a political
   sex scandal. No mention either of how a brave West Point cadet refused
   to shake Cheney's hand on stage when the vice president was handing out
   this year's diplomas at the Army's premiere academy.
8. Among the "worst of the worst" of the "evildoers" captured
   and held as "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo were children, some of
   them preteens and kids who were under 15 when captured and brought to
   Cuba-so many in fact that the military had to set up a special
   facility, called Camp Iguana, just for adolescent and pre-pubescent
   "fighters." The corporate media have barely reported on this atrocity
   (the New York Times ran only one article mentioning child captives, in
   June 2005). The only wider coverage of this outrage came recently when
   the government tried to prosecute one such alleged child
   "terrorist"-Omar Khadr-only to have the military judge in charge toss
   his case out because the government had misclassified him. Khadr, we
   learned, was captured in 2001 in Afghanistan at the ripe age of 15,
   making him one of the older child captives brought to and interrogated
   at Guantanamo. Under international law, the U.S. was supposed to treat
   this and other child soldiers as victims, not as war criminals. Khadr,
   a Canadian by birth, instead has spent five years doing hard time in US
   captivity.
9. Well-researched reports on the rampant theft of both the
   2000 and 2004 elections, and on Republican plans for theft of the 2008
   election, such as Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again, have gone
   unmentioned in the corporate media. Books on the subject, like Miller's
   and like Greg Palast's best selling Armed Madhouse, have never been
   reviewed.
10. And of course, there's my own book. The Case for
    Impeachment, despite its having sold over 20,000 copies in hardcover,
    and despite its having now come out in a mass-market paperback edition,
    in both cases printed by a mainstream publisher, St. Martin's Press,
    has not received a single review in the corporate media. In this, my
    co-author Barbara Olshansky and I are not alone. None of the books on
    the impeachable crimes of this administration, including one by
    Nixon-era impeachment panelist and former congresswoman Elizabeth
    Holtzman, and one by Judiciary Chair Rep. John Conyers, has been
    reviewed by a mainstream media outlet.

What we're talking about here is a media blackout of important stories and news.

Thanks to the internet and to the grapevine, and thanks to their
basic native intelligence, most Americans seem to understand that we're
being lied to and cheated. What the media blackout of important news
does manage to do, however, is keep us all thinking that we are in a
minority in opposing things like illegal wars, a trampled Constitution,
and stolen elections.

In fact, however, we're actually the majority.

Once we realize this, maybe we will have a movement, instead of a just nation of isolated cynics and complainers.

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