Maireid Sullivan sent us this
piece:
FIVE STAR PIECE: Corporations
Have Chokehold on U.S. Media, Rep. Bernie Sanders
-- June 24,
2002
Suzanne's comments: Here's another tell-it-like-it-is bottom liner, this one about the
stranglehold that just a few giant conglomerates have on our media so that we
are not seeing a reflection of reality that could help us address the problems
with the status quo. Pay attention here also to author Bernie Sanders, a name
all liberals should know. He's the only person in the House who ran as an
independent, and when you hear him talk you know we would be well taken care of
if all legislators were like him. "The essential problem with television is not
just a right-wing bias in news and programming, or the transformation of
politics and government into entertainment and sensationalism. Nor is it just
the constant bombardment of advertising, much of it directed at children. It's
that the most important issues facing the middle-class and working people of our
country are rarely
discussed."
Other quotes
drawn from the piece:
Whether it is television, radio, newspapers,
magazines, books or the Internet, a few giant conglomerates are determining what
we see, hear and read. And the situation is likely to become much worse as a
result of radical deregulation efforts by the Bush administration and some
horrendous court decisions...
If television largely ignores the reality
of life for the majority of Americans, corporate radio is just plain overt in
its right-wing bias. In a nation that cast a few million more votes for Al Gore
and Ralph Nader than for George W. Bush and Pat Buchanan, there are dozens of
right-wing talk show programs.
FIVE
STAR PIECE: Flavors of Fraud, Paul Krugman -- June 28,
2002
Suzanne's comments: Paul Krugman and
I are on the same page. He says, "Six months ago, in a widely denounced column,
I suggested that in the end the Enron scandal would mark a bigger turning point
for America's perception of itself than Sept. 11 did." This is a short sweet
piece by one of our smart watchdogs that puts the schemes of recent corporate
perpetrators into lay language, so we get a sense of the breadth of creative
accounting that has been going on. The complicity of so many executives in these
companies is what knocks me out -- that thievery in high places has become such
an acceptable standard. "...each of the major business scandals to emerge so far
involved a different scam. So there's no comfort in saying that few other
companies could have employed the same tricks used by Enron or WorldCom — surely
other companies found other tricks. Second, the scams shouldn't have been all
that hard to spot. For example, WorldCom now says that 40 percent of its
investment last year was bogus, that it was really operating expenses. How could
the people who should have been alert to the possibility of corporate fraud —
auditors, banks and government regulators — miss something that
big?"
Other
quote drawn from the piece:
Auditors
weren't interested in giving a hard time to companies that gave them lots of
consulting income; bank executives weren't interested in giving a hard time to
companies that, as we've learned in the Enron case, let them in on some of those
lucrative side deals. And elected officials, kept compliant by campaign
contributions and other inducements, kept the regulators from doing their job —
starving their agencies for funds, creating regulatory "black holes" in which
shady practices could flourish.
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FIVE STAR PIECE: The Corporate Abuse-reform Cycle, Edward
Herman -- June 29, 2002
Suzanne's comments:
A great history lesson about capitalism and the market -- you really get the historical moment we're in and
that in spite of the outrages making headlines, nothing much figures to change
in the stranglehold our corporate culture has us
in. A very informative
piece by a listmember, who is long-term pre-eminent voice speaking for how our
American culture, as a model, should be. "The needed reforms enumerated by
'Business Week,' suggested by the New York Stock Exchange, Business Roundtable,
and various business reformers, are exceedingly modest, and the reformers are
perfectly frank that the important thing is 'renewing confidence' rather than
doing much of substance."
Other quotes drawn from the
piece:
We are at the peak of the latest corporate abuse-reform cycle in
which business abuses have been so severe, and their effects so conspicuous,
that their low-key treatment and normalization by the mainstream media has been
unsustainable...
This was the same problem that faced the business
community during the Great Depression. Business abuses of majestic proportions
in the 1920s had helped inflate the stock market with borrowed money and unload
on the public vast quantities of sure-fire dogs issued in the United States and
abroad. The Great Depression collapsed these junkpiles and uncovered massive
fraud in security markets and banking alike...Business had a huge public
relations problem on its hands, which also provided an environment in which REAL
reform could take place...These real reforms of the 1930s were fought bitterly
by the bulk of the business community, although an important segment did support
them, considering them needed to make capitalism viable. The reforms were
softened and weakened in these struggles, but were unstoppable at that time. It
is therefore of great interest that as the business community has gained
political and media muscle over the last two decades it has succeeded in
steadily eroding those earlier REAL reforms...
If all politically viable
politicians are on the corporate take, this helps explain why the Enron
phenomenon could happen...
...managements have shown great ingenuity in
finding new modes of self-aggrandizement when old ones suffer from adverse
publicity.
...market ideology reigns supreme despite the growing
evidence of deregulation's failures; and the corporate community is well on its
way to riding out this new crisis with the most nominal reforms, if any at
all.
FIVE STAR PIECE: A Conversation with Justin Podur in
Gaza, Justin Podur and Cynthia Peters -- July 1,
2002
Other quotes drawn from the
piece:
Gaza is completely fenced in. It's like the world's largest
prison. To the west is the sea. To the north, south and east are electric
fences. Palestinians are not allowed to leave. You know that famous quote that
says, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer"?
Well, here, they've locked up more than a million innocent people....as many
military experts acknowledge, these security measures do very little to prevent
bombings. What we do know about these security measures, however, is that they
prevent people from creating art, from going to school, from living their
lives...
The economy of Gaza is a disaster. Most Israelis commute
elsewhere to work. But the Palestinians can't move around. Their unemployment
rate is 67%. People have been living off of mutual aid, hospitality, donations
and savings, and there is some agriculture, but that can only go on for so long.
It's been two years now since Gazans have had to function in this prison...
The question is, how would [a two-state solution] work? What happens to
Gaza? Are Gazans going to be able to go back and forth to the West Bank? Would
there be some sort of bridge or tunnel? Who will control access? From what I've
seen, people not being able to move around is the root of so many problems.
Without open passage between the two land areas that would make up Palestine,
daily life would still be pretty miserable. You can't construct two of the
world's largest prisons and then call it a state, and expect that it has
anything to do with peace or justice for Palestinians...
What Israelis
have to worry about is not what's being done to them, but what they're doing.