me. Money does NOT give anyone more right to free speech than anyone else, nor ANY right to monopolize the public TV/radio airwaves.
The broadcast airwaves are a powerful tool for propaganda, and even our corporate-run government, political leaders and media, back in the 1950s and 1960s, recognized what a dangerous tool it could be, and passed laws--among them, the "Fairness Doctrine"--
requiring diversity, balanced political opinion, and public service, as conditions for receiving a broadcast license, and reserved portions of the airwaves for public access. Today I would include cable under the "Fairness Doctrine." No billionaire CEO should have control of any medium that reaches into everybody's homes.
The Reaganites got rid of the "Fairness Doctrine," and deregulation has done the rest, to turn U.S. broadcast media into an intense, 24/7, rightwing, corpo/fascist propaganda machine.
The potential for abuse
has been realized. The same is true on many issues--including gross abuse of the financial system, looting of the public treasury, hijacking of the US military for a corporate resource war, loss of product safety and environmental protection, massive outsourcing of jobs to cheap labor markets, and on and on--into a corpo/fascist state, the one we are living in--including one item that I think sums it all up, and is the worst and most dangerous of all: the corporate privatization of our vote counting system, with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls,in all voting systems throughout the United States.
But, along with 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting (now monopolized by one corporation with hair-raising rightwing connections*), the OTHER most dangerous development of the corpo/fascist state is this distortion of the spectrum of political discussion so far to the right that hate speech and absurdly fascist opinions (advocating torture, for godssakes!) are being treated as respectable viewpoints, rarely receiving rebuttal, and dominating the airwaves, and their opposite, mere assertion of the rule of law, is treated as some kind of "liberal" whackoism.
This is the result of the loss of the "Fairness Doctrine" and failure to enforce laws against media monopolies. I don't think we'll be able to solve this problem until we solve the first problem--'TRADE SECRET' vote counting--but it's good to remind ourselves what is good, what is in the public interest and what we once had, so that we aim high in our goals, even if we have a long way to go.
Thank you, Argentina, for reminding us of this pro-democracy goal!
:bounce: :applause: :bounce:
--------------------------------
*(ES&S, which just bought-out Diebold (aka, 'Premier'), and now controls 75% of US voting systems. See the map, third article down the page at
http://www.bradblog.com. ES&S has, as its initial funder and major investor, rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals (among other things).
That's who controls our voting results--a nutcase, foaming-at-the-mouth, far rightwing billionaire! You wonder how anti-gay and anti-women's rights initiatives get passed in our progressive country? Or perhaps you have been brainwashed into thinking that we are not a progressive country. Wrong! We are--though you wouldn't know it from the rancid corpo/fascist media! They reinforce each other. You wonder how an asshole like Jim DeMint can possibly be holding public office in this country? You wonder how the Evil Triumvirate of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld could have been 're-elected'? This is how--extremely riggable voting systems, owned and controlled by a handful of truly evil corporate fascists. And the same is true of all major news/opinion sources in the country.)
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