The skies are grey. Rain’s on the way. It’s about time to take the canoe off the Chevy van for the winter and remove the futon mattress from the back too.
But I’m not quite ready for that. There must be one more useful trip in the works before the holidays take over the news and the weather turns ugly.
Oh, wait. Checking my Facebook events, it appears the Occupy Birmingham group is planning a road trip protest on Dec. 3 to the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden where Alabama prison officials tend to hold all the alleged illegal immigrants before deporting them back to Central and South America. This might be a newsworthy trip.
The first I heard of the place was in an interview I did with Democratic Party chair Mark Kennedy recently at the AFL-CIO convention near Montgomery. In case you missed it, he referred to the place as a “gulag,” named after Gulag the government agency in Russia that administered Soviet forced labor camps.
Like I’ve been saying for years, just as unions must have a revival in American life to counter corporate dominance, we’ve got to build an alternative, independent Web Press to counter the corporate news media. There is no other way for democracy to survive. Without it, we will go back to becoming a mercantile empire of haves and have nots. This ain’t no joke, y’all…
Whether the news media covers them or we talk about them or not.
A Facebook friend shared this video with me this morning, and it reminded me of Spider Martin’s last words. To read the true story of Civil Rights Photographer Spider Martin’s death, and for a literary explanation of what this Website is all about, in case you missed it here’s the story:
The Communications Act of 1934 affirmed the principle that the ‘airwaves’ are owned by the people. That principle has been chipped away by GOP regimes primarily. Many large corporations benefited from so-called ‘de-regulation’ during the Reagan years.
Recent legislation has also taken its toll. Clear Channel Communications, for example, acquired more than 1,200 stations across the United States. Diversity of opinion and content is dead.
Thanks to the axis of GOP/right wing, the airwaves have been stolen. ‘Public ownership’ of the airwaves is under attack by GOP regimes primarily and the large corporations benefiting from so-called ‘de-regulation’ enacted during the Reagan years.
Broadcasting has become an oligopolistic industry to which public access that had been guaranteed by law is now restricted or non-existent.
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
- Benjamin Franklin
“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
- Paul Newman as Luke, in Cool Hand Luke
“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
- John Muir
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
LITTLE RIVER CANYON – Sitting as quietly and patently as could be expected on such a quick, short trip to the mountain waterfalls around Mentone, Alabama over the weekend, I gazed until I knew the sun would soon disappear from view behind the treetops at one of the Littler River Falls overlooks.
In this preserved idyllic setting, I thought about my Cherokee ancestors who lived here for hundreds of years before the United States of America was a gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye. I thought of the men who killed the Cherokee too, and connected the dots in my mind to understand the modern descendants of those killers.
Is it possible that a grudge could linger from a human gene, and not just pass down from one generation to another through the culture?
I thought about the social and political problems in the world today, chiefly focusing on this country — and my native state.
There in that muted fall beauty, as muddled as the world has become today, my thoughts also turned to the Scotsman John Muir, an early American botanist, one of the first American naturalists and nature writers to roam from the hills of Scotland to New England, through Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately California by way of South America.
MSNBC knows nothing of its obligation to shape the news towards its desired electoral goal, and Rick Sanchez receives a tweet from John Boehner? They should learn from Fox, Stewart points out.
But the truth is, MSNBC is owned by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the General Electric corporation, so they just let a few people play liberals on TeeVee. In the end, they too are the “corporate media.”
The President calls out Republicans for blocking campaign finance reforms that would address last year’s Supreme Court decision opening the floodgates of corporate money into elections.
MoveOn.Org‘s ad featuring a demonstration against Target due to the retail company’s campaign contributions mostly to Republicans was refused by MSNBC, which declined to air the ad. In the video, you can see it discusses the boycott on Target by gay marriage supporters.
So much for the idea that corporations would not abuse their new rights guaranteed by the Bush-Roberts Supreme Court to give unlimited amounts to conservative Republican political campaigns.
A few Target and Best Buy shareholders weighed in Thursday on the flap over the companies’ political donations in Minnesota, urging the boards of both retailers to increase their oversight of campaign contributions. Target gave $150,000 and Best Buy $100,000 to a business-focused political fund helping a conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota, triggering a national backlash from gay rights groups and liberals.
The companies made the donations after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling freed them to spend corporate funds on elections.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
