A general forum for serious discussion of events in the news. Reasonable leeway for all points of view will be tolerated but malicious or purposely disruptive posts will be deleted without notice. John Swinton of the NY Times, at his 1953 retirement dinner at the NY Press Club, gave the reason for the need of forums such as this in his following speech: "There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours my occupation would be gone. The business of a journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

-- Ed (ed@lizzardranch.com), January 09, 2000

Answers

Ed,

What a stunning speech! I suspect this might have been at the end of the McCarthy era ...

Do you have a link, or a source, where we could find this?

"Intellectual prostitutes" ... I'll keep that in mind the next time a media reporter starts badgering me...

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), January 09, 2000.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

-- Lobo (atthelair@yahoo.com), January 09, 2000.

"There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state." -- Alexander Cockburn, journalist

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." -- John Swinton, Chief of Staff, New York Times (in 1953!)

"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology." -- Michael Parenti, political scientist and author

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist

"As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist

"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change." -- David Barsamian, journalist and publisher

-- Infidel (Barbarians@thegate.net), January 09, 2000.

Ed Yourdon,

The link to above statement by reporter

This links to The Spotlight site. The reporters speech has been widely quoted by many and is probably on many web sites. Perhaps someone else on this forum can point you to a more complete source document. RC maybe you can help here.

Here is another quote although I don't have a link. In I believe 1988, shortly after Regan's return from his trip to Russia I was watching TV one evening and the quest being interviewed was Peter Jennings. At one point Peter stated and I quote, "My job is not so much to report the news, but rather to mould public opinion.".

Best wishes Ed and for your family. New Mexico is a great place. Next to Lizzard Ranch it would be at the top of my list of places to live.

-- Ed (ed@lizzardranch.com), January 09, 2000.

Oops sorry about the bad link. Spotlight home page

Go to forums and select the first forum.

-- Ed (ed@lizzardranch.com), January 09, 2000.

As a long-time trade press journalist, I agree. Only in the trade press, it's not quite the same thing, although the idea is to present a certain, pre-appointed sense of things...

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), January 09, 2000.

A few years back, we presented the press in a nearby Metropolitan city with a story about how a certain set of laws/regulations was about to swiftly devour another community's economy, spirit and rights. We had examples of how the same laws/regulations had literally already created several ghost communities in our county.

The mainstream press wanted no part of the story unless we could drum up some "militia" types to threated to blow a dam or block off the interstate. The story wasn't dramatic enough or violent enough to justify print space. The poverty, fractured families, disolusionment, betrayal was not enough.

We fought internally against those who felt that we had to do something distructive to get attention. Finaly, we drew upon an action of re-enactment of a past protest in order to provide the necessary attention getter.

We had the journalist interested, it was his editor who required the drama/violence. The story took 9 months before it came out in print.

What is wrong with this picture is what was (is) wrong with the y2k story and why we will hwar little more about it unless something blows up.

-- marsh (armstrng@sisqtel.net), January 09, 2000.

Thanks Ed for the fine post and links.

-- PA Engineer (PA Engineer@longtimelurker.com), January 09, 2000.

And people don't think there are "hidden" agendas out there.

For some eye opening quotes about the Federal Reserve:

Woodrow Wilson after he signed the Federal Reserve Act to stated:

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

And Congressman McFadden, at the height of the Great Depression, when calling for criminal investigations into the Federal Reserve (and remember he served 12 years as chair of the Committee on Banking and Currency so was obviously more in the know than most about what was/(is) going on at the Fed) stated:

"One of the greatest battles for the preservation of this Republic was fought out here in [President] Jackson's day, when the Second Bank of the United Sates -- which was founded upon the same false principles as those which are exemplified in the Federal Reserve Act -- was hurled out of existence.

"Before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, while the Federal Reserve Bill was under discussion, Mr. Crozier, of Cincinnati, said:

'In other words, the imperial power of elasticity of the public currency is wielded exclusively by these central corporations owned by the banks.'

"This is a life and death power over ALL local banks AND ALL BUSINESS. It can be used to create or destroy prosperity, to ward off or cause stringencies or panics.

"Every effort has been made by the Federal Reserve Board to conceal its power. But the truth is that the Federal Reserve Board has usurped the government of the United States.

"It controls everything here; and it controls our foreign relations. It makes or breaks governments at will."

Following Jackson's victory over the Second Bank of the United States, the bankers were back again and within 10-15 short years (starting on July 11, 1862) got all the essential legislation passed that laid the foundation for the Federal Reserve. The actual passage of the Federal Reserve act was merely the final act in a long play.

The first crucial bill passed on July 11, 1862 made US issued treasury notes (greenbacks as they were called) illegal for the payment of interest on government bonds and import duties - these had to be paid in gold. And so the US government had essentially stated to the world, that its currency is not good enough for it to pay its own interest on bonds that were paid with the very same currency, and that it will not accept its own currency from its own citizens for its own duties and taxes. It doesn't take much to realize that the US government thus undermined the saftey and credibility of its own currency in the world and shortly thereafter it was withdrawn from circulation when the National Banking system (as it largely exits today) was set up.

During the debate for the act passed on July 11, 1862, the following was said by those in opposition to the bill:

In referring to the grand struggle made by Hon. Thaddeus Stevens for full legal tender currency [i.e. not a currency that can't be used for some payements: namely bond interest and import duties), Judge Kelley said:

"I remember the grand old Commoner [as Stevens was called by his friends] with his hat in his hand and his cane under his arm, when he returned to the House from the final conference, shedding bitter tears over the result. 'Yes,' said he, we have had to yield. The Senate was stubborn. We did not yield until we found that the country must be lost or the banks be gratified; and we have sought to save the country in spite of the cupidity of its wealthiest citizens.' "

The bankers thus succeeded in limiting the legal tender power of the Treasury note, or as it is commonly called, the greenback, and from this time on the bankers, brokers, and speculators have, with few exceptions, dictated the financial legislation in the United States.

For those who'd like to read about all this first hand please see:

McFaddeen speech to House of Representatives

The Comming Battle

Book written in 1899 documenting from irrefutable congressional records and laws passed the first 3 attempts to set up central banks since the time of Jefferson and shows the power wielded by the European Banker Families. As I said, makes a Tom Clancy novel read like a kindergarten story.

President Jackson's veto message for the United States Bank

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 09, 2000.

Interested Spectator, Loved the addendum to Ed's post. Most appropo. The central bank issue has been of concern for the last few years for us as we were playing with long wave analysis and decided to apply it to the 'implementation of the concept of central banking'. We tracked through several saeculuae and it appears that a convergence of the start of the trough is beginning. Funny that this co-incides both with the Y2K wave starting up and the projected market drop of this next week.

Doesn't mean bollocks though...just playing with numbers and historical records...

nice to hear from a few fellow travelers.

-- pliney the younger (pliney@puget.sound.rainey&snowy), January 09, 2000.

Pliney:

Here are a couple of links to my earlier posts and predictions. Since y2k didn't turn out to be the bomb we expected, what I predicted didn't happen, but it makes no difference as the as long as the Fed exists the game is afoot waiting for the right trigger at which time the sheeple will be appropriately hypnotized by the media into agreeing whatever TPTB decide to do is the best course of action.

Has anyone else thought this explains all the terrorism/hacker warning?

OT?IF Y2k is such a threat why is gold/silver so cheap

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 09, 2000.

Sheesh. 66 years ago, a politician was trying to blame the depression on the opposing party. Dog bites man. And even today, the lunatic fringe finds his speech among their chief weapons against a system that has contributed to bringing them wealth undreamed of at the time. What an odd little fixation.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 09, 2000.

Thanks Ed at the lizard ranch, that speech is a real treasure, I'm keeping a copy of that one! Contrary to what the blind sheeple like Flint think, I know that what we read in the media is not always truth. Like any business, their product has to be designed to fulfill the needs of the business first, and the customer second, otherwise they would never stay in business. It's nice to see that someone in the industry had the courage to tell it like it is, though apparently he had to wait until he retired, otherwise his career would have quickly ended.

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), January 09, 2000.

Flint:

Excuse me but just what wealth are you referring to? That of the common man? I don't think so.

Let me see now, my grandfather could afford to pay for a house and support his family of 8 (six children, his wife and himself) from a rather modest salary from a modest job. They all had a standard of living that would allow them to not be deprived of much of what they wished in terms of material goods. Today with my ability to work as a CIO and my wife as a highly paid professional, we are barely able to maintain the same standard of living that they enjoyed when we make serious comparisons.

Its not what you make its what you keep (i.e. after taxes), and after taking into account inflation I'm stilling looking for my undreamt of wealth. Do you know where it is?

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 09, 2000.

Just to clarify my last post, that I have two kids and it is with 2 salaries I can just afford to barely give them the quality of life that my grandfather was able to give to his family (although my wife and I don't have the same quality of life as my grandparents, as my wife and I *both* have to earn and and look after the family whereas my grandparents each only had one task and were therefore considerably less stressed).

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 09, 2000.

Ed:

Just a short exerpt that helps support the quote you posted. Following is from LINK

The comments of Bagdikian regarding the growing concentration of media ownership summarize the matter well:

When 50 men and women, chiefs of their corporations, control more than half the information and ideas that reach 249 million Americans, it is time for Americans to examine the institutions from which they receive their daily picture of the world.

The United States has an impressive array of mass communications. There are 1,700 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 9,000 radio and 1,000 television stations, 2,500 book publishers and seven movie studios. If each of these were operated by a different owner there would be 25,000 individual media voices in the country . . .

And far from opening their systems to journalists, authors, dramatists, musicians and citizen groups, the big corporations are working to close them off to idiosyncratic outsiders and ideas. Theirs is a strategy of total control. They buy every possible means of delivery (print, broadcast, films, etc). They strive to use their own rather than independently produced material. Then they convert it to as many forms of media as they control. Even the world's scholarly, scientific and technical journals are now largely controlled by the big media barons . . .

(snip)

Today there are nine major corporations dominating the global media (al though, as we shall see, two of the nine are actually controlled by one family). The nine major global media giants today are:

TIME WARNER. The biggest by far, Time Warner, the largest media corporation in terms of annual revenues, is 50 times larger in terms of annual sales than the world's 50th largest media firm.

Once the fiefdom of American media icon Henry Luce, founder of the Time-Life publishing empire, this global media conglomerate is dominated by Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress and heir to the Seagram's Liquor fortune of his late father, ex-bootlegger Sam Bronfman, a top-level figure in the international crime syndicate dominated by the late Meyer Lansky. Admirers and detractors alike have been known to call Bronfman "The King of the World."

The merger in the 1980s of the former "Lucepress" (as it was known in its heyday) with Warner Communications set the stage for expansive growth of this massive worldwide empire, which has more than 200 subsidiaries.

Although Bronfman's Seagram Company did not purchase a controlling interest in Time-Warner until 1993, longtime Bronfman associates had already established themselves in this once eminently American media empire.

(snip)

Considering all of this, it was probably inevitable that the Bronfmans (moving from their organized crime antecedents into the world of "legitimacy") would emerge as key players in the Time Warner empire.

What follows is a representative (al though far from complete) list of the more eminent holdings in the Time Warner octopus:

 Home Video: Time-Life Video; HBO Home Video; Warner Home Video;

 Cable Franchises reaching 11.7 million subscribers;

 Turner Broadcasting, including all of the CNN holdings, including TBS Superstation, CNN International, CNN radio, Head line News;

 Magazines: Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Life, Fortune, Money, Vibe, In Style, Parenting, Baby Talk, Martha Stewart Living, Sunset, Health, Hippocrates, Asia Week, President, Who, Entertainment Week ly, Cooking Light, Southern Living, DC Comics (50 percent holdings), American Lawyer (83.25 percent holdings) and Dancyu; and,

 Book Publishing: Oxmoor House, Sun set Books, Little, Brown & Co., Time-Life Books, Warner Books, Book-of-the-Month Club.

SEAGRAMS. Although Time Warner is very much a Bronfman family-dominated operation through the Time Warner shares held by the Seagram company, Seagram is one of the major media conglomerates on its own part. Edgar Bronfman's son, Edgar Bronfman Jr., operates Seagram as his personal plaything, controlling Universal Music Group, the largest recorded-music firm in the world, along with Polygram, a major music company, as well as Universal Studios and TV channels throughout Europe and Latin America.

NEWS CORPORATION. This is the empire of Rupert Murdoch, whose flagship newspaper, the "conservative" New York Post, and his "conservative" Weekly Standard magazine (edited by Bilderberg figure William Kristol) are among the most powerful voices for the Israeli lobby in America. Murdoch's sleazy Fox Television reaches 40 percent of the American viewing public. Murdoch also controls substantial media properties in Asia and Latin America.

DISNEY. Now tightly run by Michael Eisner, this global giant has assumed control of ABC television and radio, Hyperion Books, Chilton Publications (a variety of trade publications), Fairchild Publications (Women's Wear Daily), the Arts & Entertainment Network, the Lifetime Network and ESPN, along with the following newspapers: Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Kansas City Star; St. Louis Daily Record; Narragansett Times; Oakland Press and Reminder (Pontiac, Mich.); County Press (Lapeer, Mich.); Times-Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Penn.); Belle ville News-Democrat (Ill.); Albany Democrat (Ore.); Daily Tidings (Ashland, Ore.).

GENERAL ELECTRIC. Formerly "the light bulb company," this corporate giant controls NBC television and radio, CNBC and the Bravo cable channel and has shares in Arts & Entertainment, the History Channel and Court TV.

AT&T/LIBERTY MEDIA. For merly "the telephone company," this media giant has holdings in Time Warner, News Corporation, CNBC and Sprint PCS Group, along with substantial holdings in South America and Asia in cable, satellite and broadcast television.

SONY. Controlled by Japanese billionaire Noboyuki Idei (who has been accused of being a "front" for the Rockefeller family which bought up substantial interests in Japanese corporations following World War II), Sony produces films in Europe and Asia and television programming on five continents, not to mention its lucrative music empire that reaches round the world. The "inside joke" is that the name "Sony" is a clever acronym that really means "Standard Oil of New York," the firm that established the Rockefeller billions.

VIACOM. Headed by Sumner Redstone, another powerful figure who is a devout supporter of Israel but who is little known to the American public, this firm owns Paramount Pictures, MTV and the Blockbuster video chain. Redstone is moving to purchase CBS radio and television, which is owned by Westinghouse.

BERTELSMANN. Established in Germany in 1835, this is the largest TV and radio firm in Europe and owns the U.S-based Random House Publishing, which critics have called "the CIA's favorite publishing company." Random House subsidiaries include such well-known book publishers as Alfred A. Knopf, Ballantine Books, Beginner Books, Crown Publishers, Fawcett Books, Fodor's Travel Publications, Modern Library, Orion, Pantheon Books, Times Books and Vintage Books. This German company has publishing enterprises in Germany, Britain and Argentina.

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 09, 2000.

For those who wish to understand about the 3 organizations (The Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve) that run America and control most of what happens in the world see the following thread:

A simple question for the conspiracy-minded

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 10, 2000.

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for day. Teach a man to lie and he'll do just fine, from then on."

-- Joseph Almond (sa2000@webtv.net), January 13, 2000.