Vagabond Journalist

The Pentagon Vs. Free Expression

editor@humboldtsentinel.com (Charles Douglas) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:29:00 +0000

Wikileaks scandal exposes anti-American agenda of the police state

By Charles Douglas
Humboldt Sentinel

This is Charles Douglas from HumboldtSentinel.com with a special commentary for Access Humboldt viewers on Freedom of Information Day.

This day, of course, was chosen to coincide with the birthday of James Madison, widely regarded as the father of the Constitution. While Madison deserves credit for establishing the separation of powers essential to our system of limited government, one quote from his voluminous writing does stand out: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.”

So when we talk about freedom of information, just like when we talk about freedom of the press, we must realize that this freedom is exercised primarily by those who own the means of production. In other words, your access to information is very dependent on your government watchdogs and your media institutions doing their job, not just to act independent but to be independent.

But have you heard of the Copley decision? Not if you rely on the local establishment media for your news. It was right here in California, and in it the court stated that the public does not have the ability to learn about misconduct committed by individual police officers. This effectively guts the ability of citizen police review boards to actually uncover the abuses they were established to combat.

How about Fusion Centers, have you ever heard of them? Again, not if you rely on the local establishment media for your news. Just so you know, we have one in this state, down in Sacramento, and in fact they’ve been established all across the country, thanks to one of the first pieces of legislation adopted by Congress after it was captured by representatives of the Democratic Party. These fusion centers turn every state police trooper and every local beat cop into intelligence gatherers for Homeland Security. Every contact, every arrest, every factoid gathered is fed into this federal matrix; what’s more, the FBI is signing agreements with the various states to exempt these intelligence gathering networks from the public records access laws.

The Internet revolution is breaking down the walls of censorship and bias built up by the establishment media, and toppling the domination of our information systems by what again our founding father James Madison called the “minority of the opulent.” So I’m sure many of you have heard of Wikileaks, which has disclosed countless secret government documents from many local, state and national governments. Well, the Army Counterintelligence Center has heard of it too.

In a recent report, ironically leaked on Wikileaks.org, they characterize Wikileaks as “a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security and information security threat to the US Army….such information could be of value to foreign insurgents and foreign terrorist groups for collecting information or for planning attacks against US forces.” The US Army report goes on to call for wiping out the rights of individual citizens (you and me) to provide information to Wikileaks, and to go further, to hunt us down and to prosecute us for revealing state secrets.

The Pentagon considers the Internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system. That’s not my opinion, that’s from another declassified document released to the National Security Archive at George Washington University under the Freedom of Information Act. And you know what, maybe they’re right. The Internet presents a grave and dire threat to the monopoly of the establishment media, and the rise of community media like Access Humboldt, of independent websites like HumboldtSentinel.com and of international new media phenomena like WikiLeaks presents the growing menace of exposure for the war profiteers, the bailed-out banksters and the rest of the culture of corruption suffocating the freedoms of the American people and of people worldwide.

On this Freedom of Information Day, I urge you to support your alternative media locally and globally and to support Access Humboldt in its mission of empowering this community with the means to create its own authentic and local culture of honesty and free expression.

In the stir for breathing air

editor@humboldtsentinel.com (Charles Douglas) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:42:00 +0000

Tad Robinson presents a case study in Humboldt County’s government-by-fear

“Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight. Without liberty, man is in a syncope.”

-Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts

Sitting in Courtroom 5 this Monday watching homeless agitator Tad Robinson get his thirty-days-for-thirty-seconds violation of the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors’ oft-unenforced three minute speaking rule (a dictum which, sadly, is seldom applied against their sycophants), I was reminded of my days in Arcata watching another local government ratcheting up the mania in increasingly desperate attempts to make the poor sit down and shut up.

In Arcata City Hall, just as in Supervisors’ Chambers, the progression of rich man’s inhumanity to poor man eventually involved the armed forces being called in to forcibly remove people who exceed the paltry three-minute rule, a rule these self-same elected officials would find it impossible to obey themselves. Needless to say, the so-called Greens like Harmony Groves left their commitment to “grassroots democracy” at the door and sat silently as a homeless man back in 2006 was drug out by the gendarmeries for violating the inviolable terms of local government -- namely that money talks (and for as long as it likes) and the penniless are right-less when it comes to any of their pathetic attempts to influence public policy away from putative revenge fantasies against the least among us.

When the blatantly ridiculous claims of Arcata’s liberality are voiced in my presence, I only need remind them of how the “Green majority” allowed the press box at Arcata City Council meetings to be removed, without notice, to be replaced by an armed police officer, hand on holster, seated and staring at the public address podium situated two feet away, an obvious display of state authority and local officials’ willingness to resort to violence (or the threat of such) to compel consent.

The press table turned goon squad guard post is still there to this day, a testament to how “progressive” Arcata is ruled by fear, and how the high ideals of the Green Party were absolutely polluted and perverted by the very same officials who still claim to have accomplished something. It’s just the sort of self-aggrandizement still practiced by the aforementioned ex-Mayor, since absconded to San Francisco with another content-free notch in her belt to brag about, regardless of how little her one-term-and-out service actually did to help the working people of her short-lived constituency. As with so many of the self-styled “successful activists” turn out, it’s the window dressing on their resumes that count with them, on-the-ground evidence be damned.

Throughout history as in the present day, the real activists take on the longshot or “impossible” causes, and get fined, jailed, beaten and killed for their efforts. Such is the case with Tad, someone I’ve had no shortage of head-shaking moments in relation to – sometimes even I find him to be strident and doctrinaire in his efforts to humanize the homeless. His past and mine aside, his actions in this case are indisputable: He was interrupted repeatedly by elected officials who didn’t like what he had to say in relation to a child labor camp (an incredibly creepy outfit the county contracts with), he went a half-minute over his time limit trying to finish his interrupted statement, and he had already sat down when the goon squad came to grab him. The idea that the meeting was interrupted shock-and-awe style, complete with Lady Liberty weeping tears of blood and American flags spontaneously combusting, doesn’t stand up to the evidence as witnessed by the non-government shills present, who clearly noted that the next speaker strode up to the podium and proceeded to address the Supervisors normally (and for over five minutes, a blatant example of selective enforcement).

I’ve wanted Tad to shut up myself once or twice (I’m sure he’s thought the same of me), but it’s never crossed my mind that he should be fined and thrown in jail for the offense of annoying me or anybody else. For the stupor-inducing Supervisors to conspire with Humboldt County’s bureaucracy, bailiffs and judiciary to make this sick joke come true -- it's enough to make Kafka blush. I can already envision a “Free Tad” benefit concert with a local John Lennon aspirant or two singing a takeoff of “Ten For Two” to decry the treatment of this John Sinclairesque poster boy for open government.

Any amount of peace poor old Jimmy Smith thinks he will spare for his fellow nest feather collectors will be far exceeded by the echo this will send to local activists of every stripe -- at least the ones who claim to care about free speech. The decent, who I’d add include conservative or libertarian types like Rose Welsh, Tom Frederickson and Jeff Lytle, not to mention others more akin to my sort of radical journalist like John Osborn, are suitably outraged by this government-run abuse of the justice system. The authoritarians among us are mostly clustered amongst the fake left pseudo-liberals, who are uniform in their cowardly use of psudeonyms such as Humbug, Not A Native and so forth. Somehow this doesn’t seem to be a coincidence.

Years ago, when I still thought people in Arcata might care about having a decent local government, I proposed an initiative seeking the usual populist political reforms like term limits, public election of the Mayor and Vice Mayor, and access to time on the City Council agenda by any of its members. There was also a provision which doubled the three-minute limit on speaking time, and applied it to the politicians and bureaucrats equally. If it’s good enough for the rest of us, it’s good enough for them, my thinking was. While there’s enough on my plate to preclude the hatching of ballot initiatives these days, perhaps some other idealist out there might consider a little restorative justice for our power-mad Humboldt County Supervisors.

“It ain't fair, John Sinclair
In the stir for breathing air
Won't you care for John Sinclair?
In the stir for breathing air
Let him be, set him free
Let him be like you and me

They gave him ten for two
What else can the judges do?
Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta set him free

If he'd been a soldier man
Shooting gooks in Vietnam
If he was the CIA
Selling dope and making hay
He'd be free, they'd let him be
Breathing air, like you and me

They gave him ten for two
What else can the judges do?
Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta set him free

They gave him ten for two
They got Ali Otis too.
Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta set him free

Was he jailed for what he done?
Or representing everyone
Free John now, if we can
From the clutches of the man
Let him be, lift the lid
Bring him to his wife and kids

They gave him ten for two
What else can the bastards do?
Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
gotta, gotta, gotta set him free.”

-John Lennon, Ten For Two (John Sinclair)

Is Obama's Romp A Little Too LBJ?

editor@humboldtsentinel.com (Charles Douglas) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:54:00 +0000

President-elect drops hints of austerity measures, foreign adventures ahead

On retreat in the wild woods surrounding the populated areas of Humboldt County this Election Day, my enjoyment of four days straight of torrential rain was mitigated with the soothing knowledge that I had at least taken the time to cast my absentee ballot weeks ago in a ritual taking all of two minutes. (A few seconds of scribbling were saved this time around as I didn’t have to cast a write-in vote in this presidential election, unlike in 2004 where David Cobb engaged in an anti-democratic conspiracy to exclude the rightful nominee, Ralph Nader, from the California ballot.) I spun a laptop amongst the stats with one hand and cycled through the television channels with the other to bear witness to history. And yes, I am not such a rank partisan so as to not admit the historic landslide the evening resulted in for Barack Obama, who can fairly be called President-Elect, no matter how this might upset Dave Berman and other hardcore election reformers who think we need to wait for a month after the election to consider who might have won.

On the big night, BBC America had the most well-rounded coverage, with analysts (including Christopher Hitchens, appearing less bloated than usual) who packed more venomous wit into a few minutes than anything managed by the plodding Dems on MSNBC. It was pained grins all around on Fox News, where that irracible racist Karl Rove held court, mooing over the post-racial age we have all been living in, evidently, since the Cosby Show aired in the 1980s.

Gore Vidal had great fun taunting the prim and proper BBC host and excoriating the defeated Republicans: “They love war, they love money. They want to hang on to power however they can.” The old man seemed almost disappointed that more dirty tricks weren’t employed -- although Mark Crispin Miller was already on Democracy Now! arguing that West Virginia might have been stolen for McCain due to touch-screen voting machines flipping votes. Incidentally, Miller mentioned to Amy Goodman the other day a report that some machines down South during early voting had been flipping Obama choices to fringe candidate Cynthia McKinney, which would surely skew her results several orders of magnitude beyond their true insignificance.

BBC also gets props for actually interviewing a pre-selected voter in New York’s Times Square who somehow broke conditioning and declared Obama’s win as revenge for the stolen 2000 election in Florida -- a nakedly partisan sentiment eviscerating the conciliatory happy-talk with what is probably the real reason for the raucous celebrations taking place at various televised locales. Well, at least he didn’t behave like an idiot and blame third party candidates for Gore’s inept defense of his own ballot box victory.

As usual, Mark Shields over on PBS gushed about a return of optimism, apparently unaware that the worst of our blossoming economic depression is yet to come. Once more we can count on the leading channel for gimmickry, as CNN took the prize for most distracting and utterly useless graphical devices, with Obi-Wan-style holograms of various, mostly irrelevant guests who had little to say -- but who cares, they’re so shiny and neat-o!

An honorable mention should go to CSPAN-2 for piping in coverage from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., who actually read viewer comments on air -- imagine that, getting random people’s opinions about an election! CBC flashed a few shots of Rev. Jesse Jackson in tears -- whether in wont of what he might have had if the Democratic Party hadn’t have been so hostile to his more progressive challenge in ’84 and ’88 or not, it’s difficult to say. His wistfulness is probably mitigated by the fact that his son will in all probability be appointed to Obama’s seat in the Senate.

McCain is going to be in the Senate as long as his health allows (see Counterpunch for the controversy concerning that subject), despite his somewhat shaky showing tonight in his home state. Thus it was little wonder that he attempted to strike a subdued tone, although it must be admitted that he looked a bit shaky himself, clutching the podium and fighting back coughs and tears. Oddly enough, one hardly knew Sarah Palin was on stage until McCain threw in a last minute thanks, praising her as a “new voice” in his now-withered party. She said nothing, as was probably appropriate considering what impact she actually had on the Republican ticket.

I actually found Obama’s speech to be pretty flat, well-rehearsed to the extent of draining any of the passion evident in his speechifying during the campaign. Above all, it indicated his hastening momentum towards the center-right, established as he adjusted from his anti-war, anti-illegal surveillance positions during the primary to his pro-war, pro-spying positions taken during the summer and fall. The entire tone of it spoke of incrementalism, how he would accomplish less than expected during his first year, and, in a presumptuous stroke, during his first term. Even Chris Matthews was already talking about a “bipartisan cabinet” being rounded up by Clintion’s henchman, John Podesta, leading the transition team -- the same Podesta who had his faux-progressive think tank publish a study calling for the expansion of the U.S. Army by another 100,000 troops, identical to the position taken by the neocon Project for a New American Century.

As others have explained in greater detail, an Obama administration is set to result in a change in public relations more than in policy, the military budget set to engulf even more of our debt-ridden government’s declining resources. The comparison with Dr. Martin Luther King, heard almost right away from the president of his alma mater, seemed out of place, as King’s call for uncompromising justice and lasting peace hardly matches Obama’s hints at austerity measures to come. Even Keith Olbermann said the Obama speech “bookended McCain’s speech” before making dire warnings of anger “or worse” from disaffected McCain boosters, in a seemingly reverse fear-mongering of the kind Keith used to critique the crestfallen Bush bunch for.

I can give Obama enough credit to say: “This victory alone is not the change we speak.” No kidding. The defeat of the Bush legacy does not erase the decline in living standards, the dismantling of financial regulations and the embracing of megacorp-friendly systems of trade designed to undermine local and state laws protecting workers, consumers, unions and the ecosystem, all of which were Bill Clinton’s true legacy and Hillary Clinton’s true agenda.

Real wages have been declining since before Carter, before Ford. In terms of the electoral mandate provided with a similar landslide for the Democrats in Congress, parallels have already been drawn between Obama’s win and the 1964 election of LBJ over Goldwater (the only other Arizona Republican to go anywhere). But his Great Society agenda stalled short of plans for full employment, which has always been the concept most hated by exploitive industries who depend on destitution to squeeze employees without mercy. This agenda was sacrificed, along with President Johnson's second full term, on the altar of bloodshed in Vietnam.

Even with a lapdog establishment media in his corner, will war in Central Asia swallow up any chances for Obama to finish what LBJ started?

215 Time For Iraq Vets?

editor@humboldtsentinel.com (Charles Douglas) — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:12:00 +0000

More often then the expert-worshiping pooh-bahs of local establishment media would like to believe, wisdom truly does fall from the mouths of the meek here on the streets of Eureka:

(click here to leave a comment directly on the clip)

A surprisingly lucid Bruce Ogata makes a valid point (despite a valiant attempt at comic relief from Jumbo Nolan), especially given how one of the local dailies practically celebrated the hiring of an Iraq War vet by the EPD, not to mention the other vets going through the CR Police Academy. Given the paltry, if not laughable, local standards for education and training (six months as opposed to the college degrees required of officers in many central and southern California law enforcement agencies), it begs the question: How long until Fallujah-style tactics are deployed here on the streets of Humboldt County, especially with the multi-agency SWAT Team planwaiting in the wings?

This is especially troubling given the true butcher's bill of casualties from the war the press just can't stop pimping itself for. As revealed in another excellent excoriation of the prevailing "4,000" myth by Alex Cockburn, the true toll of American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan is 655,000 dead and injured, as detailed in a report from those flaming radicals at the RAND think tank. That's an estimated 320,000 returning soldiers suffering from brain injuries and another 300,000 psychologically wounded with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which just might have something to do with the estimated 1,000 suicide attempts per month among Iraq War vets).

But no, if one were to rely on the local establishment rags for all their information, they would think our local vets get a pat on the back, a medal, and a job running around Eureka with a gun, with no further attention required. Of course there aren't any homeless veterans around here, or anywhere in the U.S., if you were ignorant enough to trust the word of The Eureka Reporter's favored bloviator, Bill O'Reilly.

As with almost every subject in Humboldt County, the topic inevitably returns to the local economic engine, medical marijuana. Given the needs of returning vets for palliative remedies which don't turn them into lithium zombies or crazed prozac patients, does the decision by Arcata's City Council to pull the plug on the already-constructed and permitted Humboldt Medical Supply facility appear not just as part of the increasing tide of Yuppiecrat intolerance, but as a cruel revenge against suffering, stressed-out ex-soldiers who doubtlessly qualify under California Health & Safety Code 11362.5? Does Arcata care more about civil certificates for its well-off lesbians than about the imploding vets out there on the streets? The Eye might think so, but as for what the people will actually put up with, time will tell.

Employment Market Headaches? Blame The Employees.

editor@humboldtsentinel.com (Charles Douglas) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:26:00 +0000

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics enough to bury us in misinformation on nearly any given subject, but this particular set of data is pretty difficult to twist, although as David Johnston suggests in today's New York Times, the real picture is likely even more grim for the vast majority of Americans:

As Johnston notes, the cuts in education and health care benefits mostly enjoyed by the "90 percent" also factor in, as do the massive under-reporting in capital gains and business income. Since corporate earnings are approaching 15% of total GDP, one-and-a-half times their usual share of national income, we can see how the cuts in capital gains, corporate and banking taxes on the state and federal level (and yes, that was the "liberal Democrat" Davis administration in California as much as Wilson) have aggravated this imbalance. If the current rate of income growth for the super-rich and stagnation for the rest of us continues for just two more years, the United States will break its own record and leave 90% of the country with less than half the income. In terms of aggregated wealth, the picture looks nearly as stark, with the top 1% owning 38% of all net assets, and over half if you don't count primary residences.

So why does this matter and how does this apply to Humboldt County? Economics professor Edward Wolff put it this way:

Typically when countries are more equal, educational achievement and benefits are more equally distributed in the country. In a country like the United States, there are still huge disparities in resources going to education, so quality of schooling and schooling performance are unequal. If you have a society with large concentrations of poor families, average school achievement is usually a lot lower than where you have a much more homogeneous middle class population, as you find in most Western European countries. So schooling suffers in this country, and, as a result, you get a labor force that is less well educated on average than in a country like the Netherlands, Germany or even France. So the high level of inequality results in less human capital being developed in this country, which ultimately affects economic performance.

We don't need no stinking pie charts, but merely a glance out the window to see the concentration of poor families in Humboldt County, the ones who are considered "undereducated, lazy, whacked-out, shiftless pack of scoundrels" in the typically pithy, pro-bourgeois manner of a North Coast Journal which is, after all, published by a Fieldbrook winery operator. Evidently there aren't enough local boys and girls willing to live in migrant worker shantytowns out at Sun Valley Floral Farms to enjoy those deep breaths of methyl bromide, a toxic pesticide which the Journal's friend Congressman Thompson is responsible for the continued use of in this state.

Well golly, if we should all be quitting our dream jobs to go make beds in Benbow for near-minimum wage, why isn't the Journal among those businesses suffering from a labor shortage? Heidi Walters begins to hint at some more reality-based analysis when noting the dire lack of affordable and available housing in Southern Humboldt, before falling back on that old reliable bigotry of how all those damned hippie liberal kids are "lazy," "don't want to work," "lazy," "don't want to work," usually stoned and laughing at ceilings, oh and of course "lazy" again. While looking down their noses at their peers seems to be what most of these pro-Establishment writers excel at, it was a real shame for the Journal not to exercise that biting wit in a more constructive direction and connect the lack of housing, the dearth of educational opportunities for families trapped in truly grinding poverty, and that 25 percent decline in the key 30-39 age group.

Instead of digging into this cycle of poverty and maleducation well-matched by often-brutal law enforcement agencies and always callous criminal justice systems, Walters laments the plight of the bosses and can only ask the workers whether they are "good enough" for their betters. Class consciousness, anyone? These same journalists wonder why the public considers the media to be so completely unworthy of respect, worse than even politicians, cops and lawyers. Reporters, as Ronnie Dugger once told me on his last visit to Humboldt County, used to be cut from the same cloth as the Average Joe they were targeting with their words. Now that gritty apprenticeships have been replaced by sterile academic hoop-jumping, the craft has become a profession and self-respecting members of the Forth Estate enjoy hobnobbing with the very creatures of power they supposedly hold accountable. It's just so incredible to think an everyday Humboldter would consider the exploitation of foreign migrant workers as necessary or even beneficial.

The old codger-type banter about those darned brats wanting to "create their own hours?" These self-professed cutting edge types at the Journal might want to take their own advice and look around at the market. As Ryan Blitstein reports in the San Jose Mercury News in a jot on the corporate culture over at Netflix, "Flexible schedules are now available to 28 percent of full-time U.S. workers, almost twice the number in 1991, according to the non-profit advocacy group Corporate Voices for Working Families... Employees [at Netflix] schedule time off within the rhythm of their jobs." Anyone willing to be the one dumb enough to suggest how lazy those Netflix people are when their business stands to break $1 billion in sales this year?

I can't claim with any credulity to have the one true and holy answer to meet the needs and ends of local labor, but whatever that answer is, it won't be discovered with crotchety finger-pointing at 'those damned kids.' Though I can't buy Shawn Warford's cabal theory of all local media as Arkley's puppets, the Journal's inane blamecasting towards the poor, as if they should be ashamed of their own poverty and subsequent lack of marketable skills (key word there being 'market') is surely worthy of Robin Arkley Sr. Nine years on and I still remember walking out of an exciting convention at the Arcata Vet's Hall and reading clearly his hand-made signs warning of "Communism" should ideals of environmental and social justice finally take root in Humboldt County. The local landed gentry grip tightly to these fears if Hodgson's latest cover story is any indication, and their hired guns are all to happy to ignore half the pertinent facts in order to spread their view of Humboldt County's poor and unemployed as untermenchen to be swept aside.

What News Can You Trust?

editor@humboldtsentinel.com (Charles Douglas) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:01:00 +0000

If truth is the first casualty in war, then in these days of embedded reporters and government secrecy, our media's ability to accurately portray this war has suffered from shock and awe tactics of the worst variety. Never before have hundreds of honored dead been snuck back into this country in the dead of night to an Air Force base where cameras are kept away from, nor have documents previously made available to the public become "re-classified" in order to obstruct even historians from understanding these events.

I watch the reports and sometimes I can't quite even remember which set of insurgents we are supposed to be fighting, as each different day seems to bring alternating raids by US forces on communities held by Sunni and Shia militias. There hardly seems to be much of a story left to keep straight as Iraq falls into unprecedented chaos, yet we still hear the lies everyday about conflicts both engaged in and yet to come. Just last weekend from ABC comes the "fact" of 60,000 war dead in Iraq, when, as FAIR notes yesterday, the scientific consensus points to a figure between 500,000 and 900,000. Even Debra Saunders is still trying to resurrect the WMD bugaboo of imminent danger from those massive stockpiles of chemical weapons we never found, not to mention those nuclear weapons just around the corner, produced in reactors so well-hidden that four years of occupation has yet to turn them up.

While I appreciate the direction its given us technologically, I don't find Digg to be as effective a tool as it could be, simply because there is nothing to safeguard against malicious "bury" votes on individual stories or videos simply due to personal bias. Thanks to "Media Dissector" Danny Schechter I stumbled upon a new system still in its beta stage, NewsTrust, which like Digg feeds the most popular clips up front by combining up and down votes. Yet unlike Digg, this service rates the raters based on their validation as real persons and not anonymous robots, and gives their vote different weight based on their professional experience in the media, education levels, participation and so on. Readers can give more complete reviews with up to six different variables to calculate their ratings, as well as leave written comments.

While Schechter calls this the "Web 2.0 game" we're jumping into, I think it's a bit more profound than that. We now have the beginnings of an infrastructure to develop real-time accountability for journalists, to each other and to media consumers. The next step is to take the focus of the site on international and national news and make room for competing visions of local events. In our big comeback issue for the Sentinel we intend to have NewsTrust buttons on each of our news articles so that the readers (real, not anonymous) can make their input count.

To Blog Without Blather

editor@humboldtsentinel.com (Charles Douglas) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:15:00 +0000

Although I'm sure an endless trickle of disdain will rain down over this decision, it's 2007 and I feel its time for me to enter what Humboldt County's own Alexander Cockburn rightly characterizes as the "blathersphere" in his Counterpunch piece on June 19 of the year recently expired:

"In political terms the blogosphere is like white noise, insistent and meaningless, like the wash of Pacific surf I can hear most days. But MoveOn.Org and Daily Kos have been hailed as the emergent form of modern politics, the target of excited articles in the New York Review of Books.

Beyond raising money swiftly handed over to the gratified veterans of the election industry both MoveOn and Daily Kos have had zero political effect, except as a demobilizing force."

In fact it was shown last year how many bloggers, both Democrat and Republican-leaning, are getting paid off by the same burghermeisters funding both political machines, taking 'pay-for-play' to a whole new realm of technological communication. Cockburn rightly skewers the inane ramblings of those such as Daily Kos who obsess over trivia and deflect energies from a more holistic analysis of the mess we're in and how both major political parties have put us here.

Take yesterday's protest, for example, with both daily newspapers, the Times-Standard and The Eureka Reporter posting decent enough photos for both -- no surprise there since both publications have excellent photographers.

Yet check out the articles beneath these images. Is something missing here, such as who the target of this protest was? I certainly doubt these activists were expecting President Bush to suddenly change his mind and forget the whole project of Iraqi occupation. While there was no shortage of invective for a man one protester thought should be "imprisoned for life," every last person I spoke with at this protest expressed their dissatisfaction with Congressman Mike Thompson. Although he's part of a House majority for the first time as he enters his fifth term in office, he continues to refuse to join the Out Of Iraq Caucus, to co-sponsor Rep. Jack Murtha's immediate withdrawal proposal or to pledge a cut-off in funding of the war.

Admittedly the Times-Standard ran a companion piece citing Thompson's statement promising "intense scrutiny" of funding the escalation of troop levels in Iraq promised by the Administration this week. Yet those of us all too familiar with politician-speak know, that's not the same thing as a promise to use the only real power Congress has, the purse strings.

I don't blame Mr. Faulk or Ms. Bender for failing to pick up on the weasel words involved here, as I'm sure any other staffers at either paper would have done a similar job. I'm questioning the institutional bias of playing into the two-party, left-right, Democrats vs. Bush game which gets us no closer to the truth than the day before. Nothing is more demobilizing than being left with the option of praying for an old Blue Dog Democrat to learn new tricks, and in neither paper are local citizens of conscience going to find an institutional analysis of why this is the case.

If there a real change of foreign policy being fought over here, it's not going to happen with the same politicians putting new window dressing over the perpetuation of the same imperial system we've had for as long as I've been alive and for decades prior. Either way, this change won't get the kind of coverage from the local mass media that it deserves. That's why I started the Humboldt Sentinel, and that's why I started this blog today.

Or as Lewis Stevens put it in his Thoughts On Slavery:

America, how lost thy fame!
How stain’d they glory, vile thy name!
Thy crimes are crimes of deepest dye,
Thy proud profession is a lie!

Such villanies can ne’er be blest,
On them our hopes should never rest,
They soon will bring our glory low,
And whelm our land in waves of woe.

If we would be the nations light,
We must regard all human right,
Do right to each do right to all,
Do right although the heavens fall.