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Far beyond the moral law, they've been operating as a free-wheeling crowd of thugs trumpeting the will of the rabid, greedy, ruthless few owning most of the country. I'm posting this simplified look at the events for anyone who hasn't taken the time to consider just how much power these "journalists" were actually wielding over the daily lives and perceptions of the citizens. If they can be checked, maybe there's hope something can be done to reinstate our own "fairness doctrine" which was gleefully stripped away during the Reagan Presidency: Venezuela's Media: Free or Footloose?
by Juan Pérez Cabral
APRIL 21, 2002. Imagine the owners of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN meeting at the home of Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. with the head of the Joints Chiefs of Staff and assorted military top brass to plot to bring down U.S. President John Doe, a blowhard populist who has been elected by a landslide.
The plan is wickedly simple. Organize a massive march to the Washington, D.C. headquarters of Omnicom, the behemoth conglomerate that generates most of the country's riches, ostensibly to show support for their valiant struggle against the meddlesome, regulation-crazy Doe. Then, suddenly, turn the march around and head to the White House, which, your military co-conspirators tell you, will be left unguarded, to demand that Doe resign, or else ...
Marchers will be recruited among the wealthiest 20 percent of the population, including members of Jimmy Hoffa's new AFL-CIO, which only unionizes top wage earners. Hoffa, however, will be dumped the moment Doe is removed from the White House. He knows about the coup to dump Doe, but not about the coup within the coup now being hatched in Sulzberger's parlor to disband Congress, suspend the Constitution, fire all Supreme Court judges, kick out all state governors, and dismantle not just the entire Doe administration, but any and all aspects of the federal and state government structure the conspirators dislike.
The day before the march, the networks and hundreds of radio stations the conspiring media barons control, broadcast free ads for the march every 10 minutes. The march itself gets lavish live media coverage. So does the coup, er ... the democratic action by civil society. And the coup within the coup (which, officially, doesn't even exist).
One highlight is the live coverage of the arrest and near-lynching of a Doe cabinet member by angry 20 percenters. The whole country also sees and hears a Sulzberger minion, who also happens to be the Fortune 400 association's boss of bosses, proclaim himself interim President and destroy the U.S. constitutional structure with the stroke of a pen, to the thundering applause of a bunch of billionaires and four-star generals jockeying to get in the picture with him.
All this, naturally, creates a bad impression among the remaining 80 percent of Americans, who are abjectly poor and who voted overwhelmingly for President Doe. They take to the streets as well. When the coup begins to unravel, the networks enact a total, self-imposed news blackout. As poor Americans march in turn to the White House demanding, and finally getting, the imprisoned Doe's return, the networks broadcast reruns of "Pretty Woman" and cartoons, or show over and over footage of Doe's ouster and advise people to stay home.
(snip/...) http://www.thegully.com/essays/venezuela/020421_venezuel_media_coup.htmlThe guy referred to in the article as the "Jimmy Hoffa" figure is Carlos Ortega, who currently lives in Miami, I believe, among his "homies" (other slimes who took off after the failed coup).  Here's their union boss they used successfully to pull off the "strike" initiated by wealthy Venezuelan businesses. He has been a recipient of American funding through resources like N.E.D., USAID, etc. LaborTalk for March 17, 2004
Is AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center Serving as a Channel
For Bush's Plan for Regime Change in Venezuela?
By Harry Kelber
Hardly any union member knows anything about the AFL-CIO's American Center for International Labor Solidarity, because it operates largely as a clandestine organization. It was established in 1997 to replace the four regional organizations under former AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, whose staffs had worked with CIA agents to destabilize democratically-elected governments in the Dominican Republic, Guyana and Chile and to undermine governments that were either friendly to the then Soviet Union or hostile to American business interests.
Solidarity Center was going to be decidedly different, we were told. Its mission statement said: "The Center provides workers and their unions with information about internationally-recognized worker rights and basic union skills training in education and organizing. We're raising public awareness of the abuses and exploitation of the world's most vulnerable workers. We're promoting democracy and freedom and respect for workers' rights in global trade, investment and development policies and in the lending practices of international financial institutions. Above all, we're giving the world's workers a chance for a voice in the global economy and in the future." (Well, anyway, if you're curious, or possibly skeptical, to know how the Center does what it says it does, they're not about to tell you.)
Solidarity Center gets three-quarters of its budget from government sources, with annual grants from the State Department, the Agency for International Development, the Labor Department and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The AFL-CIO also donates a significant amount to the Center. Repeated attempts to get a complete list of donors and the amount of their contributions have been rebuffed. The Center's director is Harry Kamberis, a former State Department employee, who had also been a staff member of Kirkland's American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) during the period of AFL-CIO's covert operations abroad.
Like Kirkland's "world empire," Solidarity Center maintains offices and staffs in at least 26 countries. They include Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Croatia, Paraguay, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. It's not clear how Solidarity Center's operations in these countries have any relevance to the problems of American workers and their unions. But they do have importance for the U.S. State Department and President Bush's foreign policy advisers by providing them with channels to U.S.-financed labor movements in countries around the world.
Solidarity Center was thrust into an embarrassing limelight by an article that appeared in the New York Times on April 25, 2002 under the headline, "U.S. Bankrolling Is Under Scrutiny for Ties to Chavez Ouster." The article by Times writer Christopher Marquis listed numerous grants by the National Endowment for Democracy to various pro-coup groups in Venezuela, prior to the April 11 coup against the democratically-elected president, Hugo Chavez.
(snip/...) http://www.laboreducator.org/aflven.htm |
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