Jul 032012
 
 July 3, 2012  Posted by at 3:54 pm Finance

Flipping through the channels and browsing through the Internet, watching/reading the pundits on CNBC and Bloomberg and Fox and CNN and [insert your channel or website here]… I can’t help but think about how badly the mainstream media has failed us over the last 51 years. And not just because of the fact that 90%+ of it is owned and managed by a few megalithic corporations, but also because the journalists, reporters, analysts, columnists, editors, publishers, blog writers, etc. etc. have failed to venture outside of their comfort zone – to buck the Owners – in order to expose uncomfortable truths.

Granted, there have been a few courageous souls over these years that have stepped up to the plate and gone to bat for the American public and the world at large, but none of them have really managed to live up to the standards set forth by that one courageous soul of 1961; the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, who addressed the American Newspaper Publishers Association and made it clear that the Press was the ONLY institution that could keep the country and the world from running off the rails.

Yet the Press as an institution has clearly failed, and we have run off the rails in a major way. We see the evidence of this every day now as multinational corporations and governments across the world engage in accounting fraud, taxpayer fraud, embezzlement of client funds, insider trading, political subversion of “democratic” elections, undocumented expenditures, oppressive regulation, unauthorized wars and countless other injustices against the very idea of free and independent peoples, without any meaningful discussion of these injustices in the media.

When JFK was assassinated in 1963, the Western world lost whatever remaining shreds of transparent leadership it had managed to hold onto, and we wholly succumbed to a system run by shameless guerrillas launching attacks against everything free and fair and righteous in this world under the cover of night. In fact, there are not much more than one or two political or corporate or academic leaders in the world that I can think of who fail to fit that description like it was custom-made for them, and the most influential media outlets and journalists are no longer exceptions either.

Here is the text and the audio of a Speech that truly speaks for itself:

Address, “The President and the Press,” before the American Newspaper Publishers Association, 27 April 1961

 

“Ladies and gentlemen,

 

the very word secrecy is repugnant, in a free and open society, and we are as a people, inherently and historically, opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings.

 

We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweigh the dangers which are cited to justify it.

 

Even today there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating it’s arbitrary restrictions.

 

Even today there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation, if our traditions do not survive with it.

 

And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious who wish to expand it’s meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.

 

That I do not intend to permit, to the extent that it is in my control.

 

And no official of my administration whether his rank as high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight, as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes, or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

 

For we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy, that relies primarily on covet means for expanding it’s fear of influence,

 

on infiltration instead of invasion,

 

on subversion instead of elections,

 

on intimidation, instead of free choice,

 

on guerrillas by night, instead of armies by day,

 

It is a system which has conscripted, vast material and human resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.

 

Its preparations are concealed, not published.

 

It’s mistakes are buried, not headlined.

 

Its dissenters silenced, not praised.

 

No expenditure is questioned. No rumor is printed. No secret is revealed.

 

No president should fear public scrutiny of his program.

 

Because from that scrutiny comes understanding. And from that understanding comes support or opposition, and both are necessary.

 

I am not asking your newspaper to support an administration.. But I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people..

 

For I have complete confidence in the response and the dedication of our citizens when they are fully informed.

 

I not only could not stifle controversy from your readers I welcome it. This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, “an error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it”.

 

We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors and we expect you to point them out when we miss them. Without debate without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed. And no republic can survive.

 

That is why the Athenian law decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the first amendment, the only business in America specifically protected by the constitution,

 

not primarily to amuse or entertain,

 

not to emphasize the trivial and sentimental,

 

not to simply give the public what it wants,

 

but to inform, to arouse, and to reflect

 

to state our dangers and our opportunities,

 

to indicate our crises and our choices,

 

to lead, mould, and educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.

 

This means greater coverage and analysis of international news, for it is no longer far away and foreign, but close at hand and local.. it means greater attention to improved attention to greater understanding of the news, as well as improved transmission, and it means finally, the government at all levels, must meet its obligation, to provide you with it’s possible information, outside the narrowest limits of national security.

 

And so it is to the printing press, to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the carrier of his news, that we look for strength, and his assistance, confident that with your help, Man will be what he was born to be..

 

Free and independent.”

 


 

Those are my ruminations on JFK’s “Guerrillas by Night” – what are yours?

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  • #8481
    ashvin
    Participant

    Flipping through the channels and browsing through the Internet, watching/reading the pundits on CNBC and Bloomberg and Fox and CNN and [insert your c
    [See the full post at: Ruminations: Guerrillas by Night]

    #4436
    agelbert
    Member

    JFK’s speach is a model for all good governments and the press to follow. Unfortunately, even in 1961 the U.S. was not following it.
    [January
    Main article: January 1961
    January 3
    President Dwight Eisenhower announces that the United States has severed diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba.
    At the National Reactor Testing Station near Idaho Falls, Idaho, atomic reactor SL-1 explodes, killing 3 military technicians.]
    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961

    As we now know, the Kennedy brothers commenced a “murder incorporated” (LBJ’s characterization of RFK’s hit team) operation in Cuba that Robert continued after JFK’s death. This was all very secret, of course.

    I didn’t know a reactor had blown up that year, did you? Government media control, perhaps? Secrecy about all things that would put nuclear crap in a negative light, perhaps? The Kennedy administration refused to make public the horrors visited on the people of the Marshall islands by the U.S. (1945-1958) creating birth defects (fetuses that looked like a ball of grapes!) and rampant thyroid cancers. It wasn’t until a French study pointed this out many years later that the US vaguely admitted to it.

    “For the sake of comparison, it may be noted that from 1945 to 1988, the U.S. conducted a total of 930 known nuclear tests with a combined yield estimated to be 174 megatons. Approximately 137 megatons of that total was detonated in the atmosphere. In other words, while the number of tests conducted in the Marshall Islands represents only about 14% of all U.S. tests, the yield of the tests in the Marshalls comprised nearly 80% of the atmospheric total detonated by the U.S.”
    Source:https://www.nuclearclaimstribunal.com/testing.htm

    THIS is the way the U.S. looked like as to Cesium 137 deposition BEFORE Fukushima. I shudder to think what it looks like now.
    https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2002/02/csdepglo.pdf

    THIS is just from the Nevada tests:
    https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2002/02/csdepnts.pdf

    Also during this period the Navajo communities near Uranium mines were being afflicted with radiation poisoning from inhaled radioactive dust (NOT just the miners but the familes totally uninvolved with mining as well). This was kept secret from the American public, of course.
    Documentary here:
    https://www.downtheyellowcakeroad.org/

    When JFK was shot, I was presiding over a student council meeting as president in my senior year in high school. I went home and cried. Now I know that there was a LOT more to cry about than the death of a president; The power mad fly wing pullers in the pentagon and the CIA, drunk on the nuclear mushroom cloud, were busy destabilizing countries anywhere in the world that threatened predatory “capitalism” and poisoning the entire planet with fallout. We were in the grips of a criminally insane cabal and nothing has changed since then.

    All the secret conspiratorial activities described by JFK which are deleterious to free expression and responsible government and media are ALL now the zealously defended default position of the American Empire. As Tony Soprano once said in the popular mafia televison show when confronted with the evil of his activities and how he was ruining good people and their families, “THIS IS WHO I AM, THIS IS WHAT I DO!” So it is with our fascist corporatocracy disguised as a representative democracy.

    The wheels came off our government as a representative form of government when the cork was put in the maximum rep count in the House back in the early 20th century. When the republic began, one rep represented 30,000 to 60,000 population. Now it is about 700,000. This change was deliberate. This was to empower corporations and disempower the average voter. There is a very short distance in time from the moment the corporations hijacked the 14th Amendment in order to give big money a voice to the cork placed on the max rep count. This was the big move of the oligarchs at the end of the 19th and the early 20 century (gilded turd age) which included the fed central bank crooks in the package. In order to get the same weight in voting power now that a U.S. citizen had in 1790, you need to get 21 people to vote as you do.

    Consequently the loud braying about how we are a representative democracy and our representatives are elected is repeated over and over again to the populace by the plutocratic media. THAT LIE is the basis of our corporatocracy and must never be brought into question by the lumpen.

    If you can get the numbers in the Senate (even though it was originally set at two senators per state, with an increased House number you would have to increase the number of senators as well or do away with the plutocratic senate altogether) and the House to reflect the year 1790 proportions, there is hope. That means a House of Representatives (no cork on max count EVER) meeting electronically (nobody leaves their state) with about 9,700 representatives where all deliberation could be viewed through the internet.

    You would only achieve that over the dead bodies of the 1%, most of Wall Street and virtually every alphabet agency and “defense” contractor as well as most of the police in this country. IOW, it’s not going to happen even in an environmental collapse. They all might splinter into warlords but the fascism would just be a different flavor.

    The point is, human nature being what it is, the industrial revolution created monster pollution and tyranny as well but the atomic bomb made secrecy and the corruption and cruelty that grows unchecked by it to flourish in the USA.

    The bomb is killing us slowly through radiation and the nuclear poison power plants but the secrecy it engendered killed any vestiges of democracy long before that.

    #4441
    ashvin
    Participant

    AG,

    I believe you are absolutely right about these “guerrilla tactics” being well established in America by the 1960s, and arguably immediately after WWII. Some of the “experiments” we conducted with human beings ( as test subjects (and the aid of Nazi scientists) are absolutely horrific.

    To me, JFK sounded like a President that was already being cornered by external forces of all sorts that had been corrupting American society for many years, but also one who decided to respond in an honest and courageous manner. It was forceful plea to the one remaining set of institutions that potentially could help the American people confront these threats, the Newspaper Press, but we all know how that ended up just a few years later… all you have to do is watch the movie Network!

    #4448
    snuffy
    Participant

    I think JFK death was when TPTB decided that the best way to control was to let anyone in the presidents office know he could have his light snuffed out…as easy as as anyone walking the street at any time…
    The plutocrats who now own America inc will not give up control until it is wrest from their “cold dead fingers”.Any who believe else-wise have not looked at history much.
    G.Carlin had it down so well,I am amazed you can still see the most inflammatory ones on youtube.We all laugh…but we all know with a sick certainty he is dead nuts on..

    We are seeing things now….600+ major bankers “retired”last year,up from 12or15 last year….hmmmm

    Brits are talking of prosecution… Barclay former head says he will name names in the Libor scandal[wonder how long hes got to live]

    The world is broke[in so many ways],the bills are coming due,and there is nothing but spin,spin,spin on the news…

    Bee good,
    Bee careful

    snuffy

    #4451
    Golden Oxen
    Participant

    I had very high hopes for the internet solving the problem of what the Main street press and media have become. The pig men fooled me with the speed in which they took control of that hopeful venue with their usual tactics. We are in a terrible situation for sure.

    #4455
    agelbert
    Member

    Ashvin,
    I agree. JFK gave it the old college try. The office of the presidency, even during his day, was already a position where you did what TPTB wanted as their front man or you were shown the door or a pine box.

    #4547
    sharonsj
    Participant

    The internet cannot solve problems, only we can. However, the internet is where I get my news and information, as opposed to cable, which is pathetic.

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