This is such a blatant display collusion between the Corporate Media & those who can afford access (The Elite Ruling Class). It just confirms that we've officially lost our fourth estate/fifth column.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24496.html
Access scandal echoes beyond Post
By: Michael Calderone and Andy Barr
July 3, 2009 02:29 PM EST

For embarrassed Washington Post executives — reeling from what the paper's own ombudsman called a public relations "disaster" over a flier promoting a "salon" for lobbyists to mingle with prominent newsmakers — there must be a sense of "Why us?"

The fact is the Post's clumsy effort to make money on its brand name and market its access to the powerful was a belated effort to follow in the steps of at least two other prominent news organizations: The Wall Street Journal and the Economist magazine.

The Journal, for instance, is charging a $7,500 for its two-day CEO Council in November, an elite gathering that will include the paper's top editors and high-profile speakers like Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. And for a few thousand dollars, The Economist can open the door to intimate off-the-record meet-and-greets with world leaders.

These events illustrate how the basic transaction — charging big fees to special interests to arrange private, special-access encounters with powerful people — that caused the Post this week to be excoriated is a more endemic practice than many people in political and media circles realize. Some watchdogs hope this week’s Post scandal will help put an end to a hard-to-defend practice by revenue-hungry news organizations.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism, said he thought the Post flier raised a red flag for news organizations to be wary of entering into a financial arrangement with people that you're covering.

"One has to ask," Rosenstiel said, "Is the amount of money you might generate from this worth damaging that bond with your readers?"

While the speakers at the Journal conference this November will be on the record, with ostensible benefits for Journal readers, Rosenstiel said the bigger problem is when newsmakers and top editorial staffers are offered up to guests with no press access whatsoever, as the Post was originally planning. By doing so, he said, news organizations are "encouraging the notion in the readers mind that [they're] part of some insider establishment that it considers more important than public knowledge."

The Journal arguably crossed that line in March, when the paper agreed to allow National Economic Adviser Larry Summers to conduct his talk, during a $5,000-a-head conference, as closed to press. All the other speakers at the Future of Finance Initiative conference, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, spoke on the record. But when it came time for Summers talk, Journal deputy managing editor Alan Murray, who's instrumental in organizing the paper's executive conferences, instructed attendees (and not reporters) to get in cars headed for White House. (The Journal declined to comment on this arrangement).

Changing the Summers talk from on to off the record and whisking executives over to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. came up late in the process at the Journal. By contrast, The Economist, the British publication that has developed considerable readership on this side of the Atlantic, makes it clear from the start what the ground rules are for its conferences. And those have nothing to do with informing average readers.

The Economist has scheduled two off-the-record summits this year bringing together government officials and business leaders together in Mexico and Brazil. The magazine's website lists three aims for the summits, one of which is to foster an off-the-record, high-level debate between Mexican business leaders and key ministers on the policies and strategies of the current government. The price for the Mexico and Brazil summits are not listed, but prices for other events run anywhere from a few hundred dollars to nearly $4,000.

"The events are off the record because we have found it is the best way for our delegates and host governments to get value from the discussion," an Economist spokesperson wrote in an e-mail. “It also explicitly means that the event will not be covered by The Economist.

"We host events because they are a natural extension of the debate initiated by the magazine," the spokesperson added.

Rarely has a prestigious news organization found itself so much on the defensive about the practice as the Post was on Thursday following POLITICO's report on a marketing flier sent to lobbyists that offered exclusive, off-the-record access to the top of the Post's masthead, congressional leaders, Obama administration officials, and the paper's health care reporters in exchange for fees ranging from $25,000 for one event to $250,000 for ten.

Post executives — Katharine Weymouth and executive editor Marcus Brauchli — focused on the flier, which in particularly over-the top language promised a corporations a “seat at the table” with policymakers for a dinner that would have a certain type of mood. “Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it."

Weymouth and Brauchli said the flier not been vetted, adding that the newsroom would never have taken part in a pay-to-play scheme as described. But Weymouth did not repudiate the concept of charging corporate sponsors for off-the-record dinners and insisted that "there is a viable way to expand our expertise into live conferences and events."

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, said on POLITICO's Arena that the bottom line for the Post brass was money, "and when people start thinking money, they tend to forget to think about anything else."

"Let's hope that the Chinese wall between the news side and the business side doesn't crumble under current intense financial pressure as the industry transforms," Kanter said. "The bottom line, so to speak, is not what was said on the fliers about paying big bucks and getting a seat at Weymouth's dinner table. It is that the fliers were honest about the nature of the offering: contacts for cash."

For the Post, facing steep losses this year, such events have been part of a revenue-generating strategy for some time. As Weymouth told staffers in a memo last December, "to expand our revenue base and diversify our business model, we must look for opportunities to create new products, especially in the areas where business and policy intersect." One idea, she wrote at the time, was "hosting of specialized conferences for business decision makers with a stake in Washington policymaking."

Perhaps no one has perfected the art of bringing together ideas and debate in the public sphere while generating profits and prestige as Atlantic Media owner David Bradley. Microsoft has teamed up with National Journal for private dinners, and Bradley's annual schmoozefest, the Aspen Ideas Festival, brought together over one hundred speakers with leading positions in government, business, journalism, advocacy and the arts this past week.

Sponsored by the Aspen Institute and Atlantic, along with corporate support, the festival also features Cabinet members, the top editors and writers from Bradley's magazines, and a sundry media all-stars. (As coincidence would have it, Weymouth sat on a future of journalism panel in Aspen titled "What's the News Worth to You?")

The Atlantic editor James Bennet said that "the whole idea of the [festival] is to be on-the-record and in open conversation."

According to Bennet, "sponsors of the session here go to events and have the same opportunities to ask questions as everybody else." But the Atlantic, like other news organizations, charges big money for such gatherings, though anyone can head to the website for regular festival dispatches or clips of panels and interviews.

POLITICO has also collaborated with sponsors such as the ACLU and Yahoo in holding public events. But each has been open to the public and press — a critical distinction according to John F. Harris, POLITICO's editor-in-chief.

"My view is that it is the job of news organizations to illuminate public issues, and do so in a public way," Harris wrote in an e-mail. "Sponsored events, in which editors set the agenda and the proceedings are transparent, can do this effectively. It is not our job to serve as a kind of escort service to facilitate private encounters between special interests and public officials."

"Publisher Robert Allbritton agrees with this and has directed us to avoid events that revolve around these kind of transactions," Harris added.

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

Whose Country is it anyway? A political-economic oligarchy has taken over the United States of America

By Prof. John Kozy

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14226

After listening to the rebroadcast last Friday of “Rev.” Ken Pagano’s shibboleth about the “open-carry day” at his so-called church, another reason why it is so baffling is that while Kentucky has passed laws banning guns in school, bars and other public places, it never occurred to lawmakers to include churches, until this “God, Guns and Patriotism” harebrained character came along. Although “pioneers” may have brought their guns to church, Pagano didn’t follow the guidelines of his “forbears” who required parishioners to offload their arms in gun racks in the back.

This event, and the pronunciations of “national security” paranoids like Michael Scheuer who would invite an attack on the U.S. as a “wake-up” call, should remind us that whenever Americans—or more properly their leaders—during times of stress or national malaise “regenerate” themselves by finding enemies, usually dark-skinned peoples, or so posits Richard Slotkyn in his book “Regeneration Through Violence.” The U.S. “character” has in large part been built on a mountain of human bones—the bones of Native Americans, of African slaves, of Mexicans, of Moro Indians in the Philippines, of Central Americans, of Koreans, of Vietnamese, of Arabs. Unlike conflicts against the British, Germans and the Japanese, we had no legitimate reason for going to war and killing these people.

As a culture, America revels in violence as much as it condemns it. We see it in film and on TV; even shows like “Law and Order” manipulates viewers’ emotions with an exploitive fascination with violence, particularly gender-related. The American inclination to glorify violence is a matter of record and of history; those who do so in defense of “defense” are as guilty as the murderous psychopath. Those who defend most violently their so-called Second Amendment rights are perhaps the people most to be feared, since they not only oppose any regulation on weapons of any sort, but they are more likely to “prove” why it is “necessary” to own guns. In my view, guns are more an invitation to trouble than in preventing it.

can a class action suit be brought against goldman sach for the buble they created with the rising gas prices last year. because of goldman sach we all paid more at the pump

Obama is looking more and more like a Clintonian corporate democrat. **sigh** I just need to move to Sweden because change is never going to come fast enough or be significant enough to catch up with European socialist democracies which are 30+ years ahead of us in developing a healthy society.

The Crooks Get Cash While the Poor Get Screwed
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090706_the_crooks_get_cash_while_t...
Posted on Jul 6, 2009
By Chris Hedges

Tearyan Brown became a father when he was 16. He did what a lot of inner-city kids desperate to make money do. He sold drugs. He was arrested and sent to jail three years later for dealing marijuana and PCP on the streets of Trenton, N.J., mostly to white kids driving in from the suburbs. It was a job which saw him robbed at gunpoint and stabbed in the chest. But it made him about $1,400 a week.

Brown, when he got out after three and a half years, was done with street life. He got a job as a security guard and then as a fork lift operator. He eventually made about $30,000 a year. He shepherded his son through high school, then college and a master’s degree. His boy, now 24, is a high school teacher in Texas. Brown would not leave the streets of Trenton but his son would. It made him proud. It gave him hope.

And then one morning in 2005 when he was visiting his mother’s house the cops showed up. He saw the cruiser and the officers standing on his mother’s porch. He hurried down the block toward the home to see what was wrong. What was wrong was him. On the basis of a police photograph, he had been identified by an 82-year-old woman as the man who had robbed her of $9 at gunpoint a few hours earlier. The only other witness to the crime insisted the elderly victim was confused. The witness told the police Brown was innocent. Brown’s friends said Brown was with them when the robbery took place.

“Why would I rob a woman for $9” he asks me. “I had been paid the day before. I had not committed a crime in 20 years. It didn’t make any sense.”

He was again sent to jail. But this time he was charged with armed robbery. If convicted, he would be locked away for many years. His grown son and his three young boys would live, as he had, without the presence of a father. The little ones—11-year-old twins and a 10-year-old—would be adults when he got out. When he met with his state-appointed attorney, the lawyer, like most state-appointed attorneys, pushed for accepting a plea bargain, one that would see him behind bars for at least the next decade. Brown pulled the pictures of his children out of his wallet, laid the pictures carefully on the table in front of the lawyer, looked at the faces of his children and broke down in tears. He shook and sobbed. It was a hard thing to do for a man who stands nearly 6 feet tall and weights 210 pounds and has coped with a lot in his life.

“I didn’t do nothing,’ ” he choked out to the lawyer.

He refused the plea bargain offer. He sat in jail for the next two years before getting a trial. It was a time of deep despair. Jail had changed since he had last been incarcerated. The facilities were overcrowded, with inmates sleeping in corridors and on the floor. The gangs taunted those who, like Brown, were not affiliated with a gang. Gang members knocked trays of food to the floor. They pissed on mattresses. They stole canteen items and commissary orders. And there was nothing the victims could do about it.

“See this,” he says to me in a dimly lit coffee shop in downtown Trenton as he rolls up the right sleeve of his T-shirt. “It’s the grim reaper. I got it in jail. I was so scared. I was scared I wouldn’t get out this time. I was scared I would not see my kids grow up. They make their own tattoo guns in jail with a toothbrush, a staple and the motor of a Walkman. It cost me $15, well, not really dollars. I had to give him about 10 soups and a package of cigarettes. On the street this would be three or four hundred dollars.”

Under the tattoo of the scythe-wielding, hooded figure are the words “Death Awaits.”

He had a trial after two years in jail and was found not guilty. The sheriff’s deputies in the courtroom said as he was walking out that they “had never seen anything like this.” He reaches into his baggy jeans and pulls out his thin brown wallet. He opens it to show me a folded piece of paper. The paper says, “Verdict: Defendant found not guilty on all charges.” It is dated Jan. 31, 2008.

But innocence and guilt are funny things in America. If you are rich and guilty, if you have defrauded banks and customers and investment firms of billions of dollars, as AIG or Citibank has, if you wear fancy suits and have degrees from elite universities that cost more per year than Brown used to make, you get taxpayer money. You get lots of it. You maintain the lavish lifestyle of jets and spas and million-dollar bonuses. You live a life of unchecked greed and have too much in a world where most have too little. If you are moral scum in America we take care of you. But if you are poor, if you are, say, Tearyan Brown and African-American and 39 years old with four kids and no job and you live in the inner city, you are in trouble. No one comes to help you. You don’t get a second chance. This is what being poor means.

Brown found that life had changed when he got out. He had lost his job as a fork lift operator. And there were no new jobs to be found. He had faithfully paid child support until his arrest but, with no income, he could not pay from jail and now he was being hauled into court by the state every few weeks for being in arrears for $13,000. The mother of his three youngest boys goes to court with him. She explains that he paid regularly while he had work. She explains that when she works on the weekends Brown takes the kids. She asks that he be forgiven until he can get a job and begin paying again. But there are no jobs.

“I would not be in arrears in child support if I had not been incarcerated for something I didn’t do,” he says. “I will never get above ground owing $13,000. How can I pay $120 a week when I don’t have a job?”

Brown lives on $200 a month in food stamps and $40 in cash. Welfare will pay his apartment for another four months. He is barely making it. I ask him what he will do when he loses the rent subsidy.

“I’ll be homeless,” he says.

“My son says come down to Texas,” he adds. “Start a new life with me. But what about my three little boys? I can’t leave them. I can’t leave them in Trenton. They need a father.”

Brown works out every day. He does calisthenics. He is a vegetarian. He volunteers at a food pantry. He attends the Jerusalem Baptist Church with his little boys. “They are church kids,” he tells me proudly. “They are pretty much raised by the church.”

He is trying to keep himself together. But he lives in a world that is falling apart. The gangs on the streets of Trenton carry Glock 9-millimeter pistols and AK-47 assault rifles. When the Trenton police stop a car or raid a house filled with suspected gang members they approach with loaded M-16s. A local newspaper, The Trentonian, reports the daily chronicle of crime, decay and neglect. The lead story in the day’s paper, which Brown has with him, is about a young man named James Deonte James, whose street name is “Lurch.” James was charged in the death of a 13-year-old girl during a gang shooting. He is reputed to be a “five star general in the Sex Money Murder set of the Bloods street gang.” In another story an ex-con and reputed mobster, Michael “Mickey Rome” Dimattia, was arrested in his car after a woman behind the wheel was seen driving erratically. “Mickey Rome,” dressed in a black bathrobe with a red scarf around his neck, was found to be wearing a bulletproof vest, with three guns stuck in his waistband, and had a crack pipe, crack cocaine and prescription pills in his pockets. He had been convicted in 1990 of killing a 17-year-old boy with a shotgun blast to the head. He served less than three years for the murder. A feature story on Page 4 of the paper is about a man with AIDS who raped his girlfriend’s son 55 times and infected the boy with the virus. The boy was 9 when the rapes took place.

“There are thousands more guns out there than when I was on the street,” Brown says. “It is easier to buy a gun than get liquor from a liquor store.”

He says he rarely goes out at night, even to the corner store. It is too dangerous.

The desperation is palpable. People don’t know where to turn. Benefits are running out. More and more people are out of work.

“You see things getting worse and worse,” he says. “You see people who wonder how they are going to eat and take care of themselves and their kids. You see people starting to do anything to get food, to hustle or rob, to go back to doing things they do not want to do. Good people start doin’ bad things. People are getting eviler.”

He pauses.

“All things are better with God,” he says softly, looking down at the tabletop.

He is reading a book about the Bible. It is about Jesus and God. It is about learning to trust in God’s help. In America that is about all the poor have left. And when God fails them, they are on their own.

I don't have the numbers to be sure that I am right, but I have a gut feeling that if everyone who now has health insurance would pay their premiums to the federal government it would be more than enough to provide comprehensive health care for everyone in the United States.

Mark S,

You are right! We pay twice as much as other industrialized countries (who have single-payer healthcare or similar program) and have worse outcomes:

http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm

HELLO? Anyone have a source of the JFK SPEECH on PEACE Thom played between second segment of the first hour? Thanks!

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

The Post Office is SNAFUd financially cuz a group of folks with R's after their names threw a war against folk that did not care that we were on the face of the planet just to drive up the price margins on oil AND refused to let them rise rates until they could squelch fourth class media mail to level the playing field for TIME Magazine and other Corporate Media outlets.

@Quark: I agree... week after week... she sits in Austria pumping out the same talking points.

An additional segment of Berlosconi-Watch would be more informative.

I have yet to meet an 'Independent Woman' that knows or agrees with the IWF.

Palin is working to avoid the FBI by bailing . . .

Thom,

Sean Hannity isn't known as "Mr. Mensa," yet he's worth over $100 million:

http://wonkette.com/401283/sean-hannity-becomes-a-hundred-millionaire

A PALIN THEORY INVOLVING THE DOMINIONISTS

I have a Palin theory: Could the Dominionists be putting her out there as a possibility for the first woman president? Remember, it didn't matter that Bush II was stupid, a dry drunk and went AWOL; the media backed the team behind Bush. SO WHO IS THE TEAM SARAH REPRESENTS? Is it the Dominionists? I think it would fit if the Dominionists put a woman's face on their anti-woman, supremacist , pro-slavery, 'crusading' theocratic team!

I have an epitaph for for Robert MacNamara it is from Henry V:
But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all,"We died at such a place"; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it;

May he burn in hell
The son of a Vietnam veteran