Statement of Chellie Pingree, President and CEO, Common Cause On 527 Hearing of the Committee on House Administration We are concerned that House Administration Committee Chairman Bob Ney (R-OH) appears to be holding a hearing more focused on undoing the substantive reforms of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002 than examining ways to curb some of the abuses of 527 organizations. Nevertheless, we hope that Chairman Ney keeps an open mind as he hears the testimony of Reps. Chris Shays (R-CT) and Marty Meehan (D-MA), the sponsors of HR 513, the 527 Reform Act of 2005, which we believe is the only true 527 reform legislation before the House at this time. This legislation is aimed at ensuring that 527 groups do not become soft money conduits for the political parties.  This strongly bipartisan legislation, whose sponsors in the Senate include not only Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Russell Feingold (D-WI) but also Sens. Trent Lott (R-MS) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), will not harm the legitimate advocacy work of nonprofit groups, and will do much to ensure that the substantive reforms of BCRA are not eroded. Eye on Iraq Common Cause remains focused on the situation in Iraq, especially the reconstruction. We continue to monitor the spending and accounting of reconstruction money and the contracts companies have won to rebuild Iraq's beleaguered infrastructure. So far, the administration's stewardship of the billions in reconstruction money has been marked by negligence and allegations of favoritism for companies like Halliburton, which Vice President Dick Cheney headed. Common Cause has called for the creation of a special investigative committee to centralize the disparate inquiries and audits of the reconstruction spending in Iraq.  Based on the highly successful Truman Committee during World War II, the special committee would provide valuable insight that would likely save the American government billions of dollars, just as the Truman Committee did 60 years ago. Starting with the Civil War, practically every major American conflict has seen the establishment of a special commission to oversee defense contracts. In 1934, the Nye committee, headed by Senator Gerald Nye, investigated the role of U.S. banks and corporations in financing World War I through their support for the war prior to formal U.S. involvement. During World War II, Harry S. Truman turned a tiny committee with an initial budget of $15,000 into one of the most beneficial investigations in history. The National Archives describes the Truman Committee like this: "The Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program was created on March 1, 1941, to study and investigate procurement and manufacture or construction of articles and facilities needed for national defense. The committee was specifically directed to investigate the terms of defense-related contracts, the methods of awarding them, the utilization of small business concerns, the geographic distribution of contracts and facilities, and the effect on labor, as well as other matters. Truman served as the first chairman of the committee, which is commonly known as the Truman Committee. "The committee earned a high reputation for thoroughness and efficiency. From its creation in 1941 until its expiration in 1948, the committee held 432 public hearings and 300 executive sessions, went on hundreds of field trips, and issued 51 reports. Throughout World War II, the committee was principally concerned with monitoring and improving production programs, contract procedures, and, eventually, reconversion plans. Much of the committee's work involved the discovery and exposure of corruption and mismanagement in the wartime production program. After the end of the war, the committee turned its attention to an analysis of wartime experiences in order to make recommendations that would improve postwar and future national defense programs. "The media showered the committee with favorable publicity. Especially notable was the national attention brought to its first chairman, resulting in his selection as the running mate of President Roosevelt in 1944 and his subsequent succession to the Presidency." There is little doubt that a committee similar to the Truman Committee is not only appropriate for the current conflict in Iraq given the nature of the problems we have seen so far, but that it would save our government far more money than it would cost.  Please visit our blog, and give us your feedbacks and comments on our efforts to hold the administration accountable for its stewardship of reconstruction in Iraq.  You can also sign up for CauseNet to receive our most up to date information about our efforts concerning the situation in Iraq. Inaction is Intolerable Hastert Must Restore Order April 14, 2005:  Common Cause is calling on House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) to restore order in the House, where allegations regarding the conduct of the majority leader and others, combined with a gutted ethics process, have created a dark cloud over the chamber. "Mr. Speaker, we remind you that you have significant responsibility to protect the integrity of all House members, as well as uphold the integrity of the House as an institution," Common Cause President Chellie Pingree wrote in a letter hand-delivered to Hastert's office Thursday. "By allowing the House to function with no ethics oversight, by fueling rumor and speculation with your silence and inaction, you are doing neither." The letter notes that Speaker Hastert appears to have taken extraordinary steps in recent months to protect his embattled majority leader, Rep. Tom DeLay  (R-TX), such as forcing rule changes on a party line vote that gutted the ethics process, firing the ethics chairman for leading investigations critical of DeLay and replacing two other ethics members with party loyalists who have given money to DeLay's legal defense fund, yet may have to sit in judgment of him. "Rep. DeLay and others may or may not be guilty of one or more of the allegations that have been raised," the letter said. "We will not know until ethics standards and a credible review process are restored in the House. Common Cause and its nearly 300,000 members and supporters are asking Speaker Hastert to allow the House an up or down vote on the on a measure that would roll back the changes to ethics rules forced on Members at the start of the new Congress. "This is the first step.  Once that is done, the House must, in an open and bipartisan process, review and overhaul the now discredited way of enforcing ethics standards in the House," Pingree wrote. Redistricting The dominant system allowing Congressional and legislative districts to be drawn by state legislatures does more to protect the interests of incumbents than serve voters.    For decades partisan wrangling has led to gerrymandered redistricting maps, collusion among the major political parties to create safe Congressional and state legislative districts, and the packing and splitting of concentrations of voters to weaken or strengthen their influence to gain partisan advantage.  In recent years, advances in information and mapping technology has enabled a level of precision in district drawing that in effect, enables legislators to choose the voters they wish to represent and makes it difficult for voters to hold their elected officials accountable. The 2004 races for the U.S. House of Representatives are illustrative of these problems: •        More than 85 percent of House incumbents won by landslide majorities of more than 60 percent. •        Only seven incumbents, of 399 running, lost their seats.  That’s a 98.2% re-election rate. •        Outside of Texas, where a mid-cycle Republican redistricting effort led to the defeat of four targeted incumbent Democrats, only three incumbents lost their seats -- a greater than 99 percent incumbent re- election rate for House members in 49 states. The Solution In order to make American’s votes truly count in legislative and congressional elections, to create more accountability among elected officials and to put citizens, not elected officials, in charge of who gets elected, we must remove redistricting decisions from the purview of partisan legislators and establish fair criteria that guide the development of state and congressional districting plans.  By taking these steps to achieve a process based on fairness, not on the struggle for partisan advantage, Americans will see the benefit of better representation at the state and federal level. The Goal To take the redistricting process out of the hands of partisan politicians and to establish fair criteria to guide the redistricting process, Common Cause is pushing to reform the redistricting process in states across the nation.  In this effort, our goal is to create legislative and congressional districts that are representative of the population and districting plans that result in more competitive congressional and legislative districts. A Campaign for Fair Redistricting Common Cause is launching a nationwide campaign to reform how state legislative and Congressional districts are drawn.  This long-term, multi-state effort will take advantage of existing opportunities in several states where the shortcomings of currently accepted redistricting practices have recently come to light.  In several states, we have near term opportunities to change the redistricting process through citizen initiative.  In other states we will pursue initiative and legislative strategies to establish independent commissions and to create competitive elections. Common Cause, whose state organizations have a track record of passing reforms by both initiative and in state legislatures across the nation, is uniquely positioned to pass redistricting reform in the states.   Common Cause has not only the experience and history of passing these reforms, but an on the ground grassroots presence, including professional staff, seasoned volunteers and new activists, that have been newly energized by a compelling and proactive agenda, new organizing tools and capacity and increased investment of resources from our national organization.  These factors leave Common Cause poised to win both short and long-term victories at the state level. Beginning in January of 2005 Common Cause will launch its nationwide redistricting plan by working in multiple states to build statewide coalitions to develop state redistricting plans.  This first step in the campaign will pave the way for collaboration at the state level to reform how legislative and congressional districts are drawn.  The campaign has already begun in Massachusetts, where Common Cause qualified advisory questions in 15 legislative districts (all passed overwhelmingly) and in Colorado, where Common Cause has led the effort to bring together government reform groups, civil rights organizations, environmental organizations and other organizations representing Colorado voters. Your Feedback For the sake of our democracy, it is imperative we strive to create legislative and congressional districts that are representative of the population and districting plans that result in more competitive congressional and legislative elections.  So, we hope you will join us and support our effort in the coming months when as we push for independent commissions and other steps necessary to ensure that the redistricting process is fair. Meanwhile, please share with us your thoughts, feedback, and suggestions on our blog concerning our efforts to fix this broken system.  We want to hear from you.  We will be reading all of your questions, comments, suggestions, and suggestions.  Your feedback will enable us to better focus our advocacy efforts on redistricting this year and beyond. Sending a Message On Reconstruction of Iraq … August 31, 2004 Contact: Mary Boyle 202.736.5770 Over the next few weeks and months, Common Cause will report on the administration's contracting procedures for the reconstruction of Iraq. The reports will be a continuation of our Holding Power Accountable series, which is designed to draw attention to the misuse of power at the highest levels of government in Washington. Mainstream media is focused on the fighting in Iraq, but neglecting the critical stories about the reconstruction efforts.  Did you know that more than 100 members of Congress asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the administration’s contracting procedures in Iraq, and the agency plans a major series of reports on the issue.  In fact, the GAO has already released its initial findings, but you probably haven’t heard about them because most newspapers and television networks have given the report short shrift. Common Cause is working to bring these and other important investigations to your attention.  We will be sending out reports highlighting what’s in the GAO reports. We also  continue to work with Members of Congress and other organizations on ways to reform the contracting process. Here are some of the disturbing findings from GAO: • U.S .auditors found that money generated from the sale of Iraqi oil was used to award contracts to American companies without the knowledge of Congress or the Iraqi people. Almost all the Iraqi money has gone to American companies, and many of the companies, including Halliburton, did not have to compete for the work. • On Aug.  18, Halliburton received its third extension from the Army to provide documentation for its expenses. A Pentagon audit found that Halliburton  could not document its work in Iraq and Kuwait under an Army contract worth more than $1.8 billion, and that its system for estimating costs of specific tasks was "inadequate." There have been at least eight spending audits done in Iraq that have been critical of Halliburton, which has more than $8 billion in contracts in Iraq. • Auditors also found that "contracting officers in Iraq did not always ensure that contract prices were fair and reasonable, contractors were capable of meeting delivery schedules, and payments were made in accordance with contract requirements." [See GAO reports on Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General audits] Some of these findings are  incredible!  The Inspector General in Iraq found that payments to U.S. companies in Iraq were routinely switched from U.S. tax dollars to the less-regulated Iraqi money without the knowledge of Congress.  In some cases, the shift appears to have been an effort to avoid Congressional scrutiny.  For example, shortly after the U.S. Army canceled a $327 million contract with the politically well-connected Nour USA under a cloud of suspicion, the company landed a smaller contract paid with Iraqi money.  A Florida company, Harris Corp., was criticized for chartering a jet to fly a Hummer H2 to Iraq for one of its managers, at taxpayers’ expense. The company was later awarded a $48 million contract with Iraqi oil money. With your help, we must spread the word  on these types of abuses in Iraq.  We have been pushing for more transparency and accountability in Iraq from the beginning.  Remember, some members of Congress opposed the creation of the inspector general position in Iraq, but we helped make it happen. And with your support, we are going to make sure everyone in America knows about these abuses of power in Iraq, and – more importantly – how we can stop them. We are heartened by your overwhelming response to our plea.  We feel your outrage about this issue and understand you are eager  to do something about it.  Let’s smash our goal of $21,000 and help us continue to tackle this issue.  Please click here (or click on the following link – this reference to the 2nd link seems unnecessary, but it’s your call) to make your contribution to Common Cause today.  And please share the link by forwarding this to family and friends: http://www.commoncause.org/support/ Thank you again. Sincerely, Chellie Pingree President, Common Cause WASHINGTON DC -- Common Cause President Chellie Pingree testified Monday before the Commission on Federal Election Reform, a nonpartisan, bipartisan panel co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III examining the state of the U.S. electoral process. "Voting is the one tangible link that most Americans have with their government," Pingree said, urging the panel to recommend and work for reforms for improving our flawed voting system. "They may never speak to an elected representative or visit the U.S. Capitol. Yet in November, they evoke a solemn agreement between the people and their government. It is crucial that the singular act of voting be worthy of people's trust." Pingree noted that Common Cause played a major role in monitoring the 2004 presidential election, co- sponsoring a hotline that took in more than 210,000 calls nationwide from voters who wanted to make a comment, find their polling place or be connected to their local elections office. In addition, the organization did on-the-ground monitoring in several states. Combined, the efforts resulted in the collection of an unprecedented amount of nonpartisan voter data. "The presidential election did not go smoothly," Pingree said. "Voters waited in line for hours, were confronted by malfunctioning voting equipment, faced arbitrary ID requirements, and found they had been inexplicably deleted from the voter rolls. More than 50,000 voters requested absentee ballots that were never delivered. These hurdles are just as large impediments to voting as hanging chads, and must be addressed." Common Cause urges reforms that include: easing barriers to voting, an administration designed to serve voters' needs, transparency, while honoring voters' privacy, ensuring security and accuracy of the vote through a voter verifiable paper ballot, nonpartisan supervision of elections and ending corporate vendors' major role in administering elections and better education of voters and better training and recruitment of poll workers. Pingree's testimony before the commission, which was organized and hosted by American University's Center for Democracy and Election Management, marked the first of several hearings scheduled as the panel develops recommendations for improving the electoral process. The next hearing is to be held June 30 in Houston, Texas. Statement of Common Cause President Chellie Pingree on the Abrupt Departure of Kathleen Cox as President And CEO, Corporation for Public Broadcasting We are very troubled by the abrupt departure of Kathleen Cox.  The fact that Ken Ferree, named just weeks ago to the post of chief operating officer of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, now assumes at least for the interim, the position of President and CEO, raises some serious concerns. These staff changes are being played out in what appears to be an increasingly politically charged environment for public broadcasting, roiled by recent Administration and congressional criticisms of certain of its programming decisions.  And we have questions about Mr. Ferree's qualifications to serve as interim president of CPB.  In his capacity as Michael Powell's chief of the FCC's media bureau, Mr. Ferree seemed dismissive of the public interest obligations of broadcasters.  He served an agency that was largely unresponsive to views of the public on media issues. He seems an unlikely choice to steer CPB in a way that would protect public broadcasting's editorial independence and that would ensure that no political or partisan interference mars its deeply important mission of providing substantive news and information to the American public. Statement of Common Cause President Chellie Pingree, kicking off an April 6 rally on Capitol Hill to oppose changing Senate rules to prohibit filibusters Common Cause President Chellie Pingree kicked off a major Capital Hill rally today in protest of changing Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster. Common Cause was part of a coalition presenting to Senate leaders more than 1 million petition signatures of Americans who oppose ending the longstanding Senate practice designed to protect the rights of the minority. "I am here today not only representing the Coalition for Fair and Independent Judiciary, but the 1 million Americans who have made it clear that they support the right to have their voices heard, even if they are in the minority," Pingree told hundreds of lunchtime protestors gathered in front of the Supreme Court. The Senate has long prided itself as the world's greatest deliberative body, and the rules and procedures of the chamber anchor that tradition. Removing the filibuster, which has been in place in various forms since the 1790s and used by both parties, is anathema to our democracy. "A longtime Senate procedure should not be scrapped simply because it is inconvenient to the goals of one political interest," Chellie said. "It's an abuse of power to strip the Senate minority of a tool designed to protect its rights - rights both parties have defended throughout the Senate's history." Common Cause has been fighting for political reform of many kinds for nearly 35 years. Chellie told of how in the late 1980s, as the organization was pushing for campaign finance reforms in the Senate, opponents fought reform by using the filibuster. "We didn't respond by saying the filibuster should be eliminated," Chellie said. "We recognized that our work was not done and that we needed to make a stronger case to the American people and the senators who represent them." Chellie was followed at the podium by Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), the civil rights leader, Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Corey Rowley of Harrisburg, PA, an American with a disability who presented the petitions to Reid, saying that the filibuster protects those who need it most. Common Cause, League of Women Voters Join Sen. Lowenthal to Urge Passage Of Redistricting Reform Legislation New Report Release Thursday: Analysis Shows Political Redistricting Reduced Competitive Districts In California By More Than 50% SACRAMENTO -- California Common Cause, the League of Women Voters of California and Senator Alan Lowenthal (D-27) gathered today at a press event to urge Assembly and Senate leaders to move redistricting reform legislation forward.  Both organizations have endorsed Sen. Lowenthal's bill, SCA 3, which would create an independent redistricting commission to implement redistricting once a decade. At the event, Common Cause released a new study "Designer Districts: Safe Seats Tailor Made For Incumbents", that compared California's experience with redistricting carried out by the legislature in 1980 and 2000 with that carried out by an outside body in 1990.  The report demonstrates that redistricting done by an independent panel improves democracy by drawing districts that respect communities of interest and more that are competitive. "Our report shows that competitive electoral races dropped in California by more than 50% because of redistricting by politicians," said Kathay Feng, executive director of California Common Cause. "Instead of voters choosing politicians, it's the other way around and that's a threat to democracy. That's why we are standing here today with the League of Women Voters supporting Senator Lowenthal's redistricting reform legislation.  The task of drawing political districts should be taken out of the hands of incumbent politicians and given to an independent commission operating under full public oversight." Stated Roy Ulrich, California Common Cause boardmember, "Sen. Lowenthal's bill has Common Cause's support because it would allow persons from all walks of life to serve on the panel.  At the same time, SCA 3 prevents persons with political self-interest from drawing the maps.  Additionally, SCA 3 would provide for redistricting to occur only once a decade, after new Census numbers are released." The report shows: During the 1990 cycle, when an independent panel redrew the lines, the number of competitive races increased by more than 50 percent. During the 2000 cycle, when the legislature drew the lines, the number of competitive races decreased by more than 55 percent. In fact, no incumbents lost in either election, and in the 2004 elections, not one seat in the state legislature changed parties. The 1990 process increased competitive races by 43 percent in the U.S. House and by 59 percent in the state legislative races. After the 2000 redistricting round, there was a 77 percent decrease in competitive races for the California congressional delegation and a 47 percent decrease in competitive races for the state legislature. Common Cause is pushing for reforms that will: 1) create an independent and representative redistricting commission, 2) set fair criteria for congressional and legislative districts, and 3) ensure public participation and transparency. Statement of Common Cause President Chellie Pingree on White House Selection of Kevin Martin as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Martin must ensure that public’s concern about media get full attention of FCC Common Cause urges Kevin Martin, who will succeed Michael Powell as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to work to ensure that the public’s concerns about media get a full and serious hearing at the FCC. For too long, the public has played second fiddle to industry concerns at this agency, whose chairman displayed little patience with the notion that the opinions of average Americans counted in making media policy. We hope that Chairman Martin will understand that the more than 2 million messages from Americans opposing the FCC’s media ownership rules in 2003 were a signal indicating widespread unease about media concentration that crosses ideological and party boundaries. The groups were as disparate at the National Rifle Association, the Parents Television Council, and the National Organization for Women, along with Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Consumers Union, and the United Church of Christ. We hope that Chairman Martin will keep his door open, and urge his staff to meet with, groups such as ours that represent the public interest And, as the FCC grapples with new media ownership rules, and other major media policies this year, we hope that Chairman Martin travels the country to hear for himself the views of average Americans on whether our mass media serves their needs and helps them to participate in their democracy. Statement of the Congressional Ethics Coalition A series of steps taken by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (D-IL) and other House Republican leaders to weaken the ethics oversight process reached their logical conclusion late last week: the Ethics Committee effectively ceased to exist. Democrats on the panel, led by Ranking Democrat Alan Mollohan (D-WV), rightly refused to accept a series of recent House rules changes that would severely undermine the Committee's ability to pursue ethics violators.  The Committee's members were therefore unable to agree on a set of operating rules, and as a result, the panel is unable to conduct any business whatsoever. Further, under House Rule 11, Section 2(a)(2), any House committee that is unable to agree on operating rules within thirty days of the date on which the panel's members are appointed is considered officially "defunct." The Committee is now completely unable to act on the long list of ethics matters now pending, or that should be pending, before it.   Beyond that, the panel cannot conduct even its most basic functions, including providing day-to-day advice to members about ethics issues. Speaker Hastert and the Republican leadership put the chamber on this disastrous course at the beginning of the 109th Congress.  In direct reaction to the panel's admonishing House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for ethical misconduct on three separate instances in the last session, the Speaker took a number of steps designed to guarantee that the panel would be unable to do its job in the future. First, the Speaker pushed through a package of rules changes, including provisions requiring a majority vote of the panel before an ethics investigation can begin and a measure under which complaints are automatically dropped if the panel does not act on them after a period as short as 45 days.  The changes were plainly designed to provide the leadership with a way of killing ethics complaints without leaving fingerprints. In addition, the Speaker sought to punish Ethics Committee members for doing their jobs by removing the former chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley, and two other Republican members who had voted to admonish Mr. DeLay.  In their place, he installed a new chairman and two new members.  Press reports have revealed that two of the new members - Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) - have personally contributed money to Rep. DeLay's legal defense fund.  In addition, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, Rep. Smith hosted a fundraiser for TRMPAC, the DeLay fundraising committee that is now the subject of a Texas criminal probe.  The TRMPAC matter remains on the Ethics Committee's agenda, awaiting resolution of the state case.   Finally, the panel's new chair, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), fired the Committee's two top staff members as one of his first official acts. The leadership's actions have effectively eliminated any ethics oversight in the House.  That result is intolerable, and can only lead to further diminished public faith in Congress - both the institution and individual members. Today we call on Congress to take immediate steps to bring the ethics process back to life. First, we urge all members to support the resolution being circulated by Rep. Mollohan that would roll back some - but not all - of the most egregious changes to House ethics rules. Second, we urge Speaker Hastert to schedule immediate House debate, and an up-or-down vote, on the Mollohan proposal.  The ethics rules implicate the reputation and integrity of every member of Congress, and of the House itself.   Members have the right and responsibility to directly address these issues. Third, if the Speaker refuses to let members vote on the Mollohan proposal, we call on all members to sign a discharge petition to bypass the Republican leadership and place the matter on the congressional agenda. We believe these steps must be taken immediately to jump start the now-defunct ethics process.  However, it is also clear that these steps are not enough to truly fix a fundamentally flawed system.  While these issues must be resolved immediately, there remains an urgent need for a comprehensive overhaul of a system whose credibility is seriously damaged.  Among the issues that such an overhaul should address is the 1997 rule that forbids outside groups and citizens from filing ethics complaints.  This rule has been a major factor in emasculating ethics enforcement and should be repealed.  We call on every Member of the House to join as a sponsor of Rep. Mollohan's efforts and to support efforts to address these issues before the House leaves for its Easter recess. Campaign Legal Center Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Common Cause Democracy 21 Judicial Watch Public Campaign Statement by Common Cause President Chellie Pingree At Congressional Ethics Coalition press conference Today as we stand here, the integrity of the House of Representatives lies in tatters on the House floor. The ethics committee is stalled and unable to take action, and allegations of ethical misconduct are piling up by the day. Common Cause is calling on all House members to support a resolution by Congressman Alan Mollohan that would repeal or modify some of the ethics rules changes passed by the House at the beginning of the 109th Congress.  Those rules changes significantly undermined the already weak ethics process in the House. The House of Representatives is a critical institution in our democracy. Its Members pride themselves on being directly accountable to the American people. They even call the chamber the "People's House." Forty years ago, Democrats decried the unethical behavior of the Watergate scandal and swept into the House in record numbers.  Ten years ago, Republicans, campaigning on House ethics problems, took control of the House for the first time in decades.  Now is the time for both parties to join together to put the ethics of the House back in order. The first step is to bring Congressman Mollohan's resolution to the floor and pass it. The resolution would: Repeal the "bipartisan protection act," worst of the new ethics rules, which allows either party to block an investigation by voting along party lines. Do away with the "45 day rule" which automatically ends a case if the ethics committee takes no action in that amount of time. Repeal the "collusion" rule, which allows a single lawyer to represent more than one individual involved in an ethics investigation, preventing the ethics committee from corroborating their stories independently. Passing this resolution and reversing the rules changes is critical to the integrity and credibility of the House. But it is only a first step. The House must come together and re-invent the way it polices itself.  There must be a bipartisan process for reforming the system.  As you know, Joel Hefley, the discarded chairman of the ethics committee, said that any meaningful ethics reform must be genuinely bipartisan, and he is right. Reforming the system also requires that the House do so in an open, accountable manner.  The last time a bipartisan panel studied and recommended changes to the ethics process, in 1997, the proceedings were virtually all behind closed doors and the recommendations of that task force reflected an insular view of the institution. Finally, while it appears that much of the ethics process and the ethics committee itself have been eviscerated to protect the majority leader, this issue is not just about the troubles of Congressman Tom Delay. The allegations about Rep. Delay must be fully investigated, but if Delay were gone tomorrow, it would not mean the House has solved its ethics problems. The House must restore some accountability to the ethics process and begin addressing the allegations that have been raised in recent weeks regarding Tom DeLay and others, both Democrats and Republican. Voting in support of Congressman Mollohan's proposal is a first step in that direction. Supersized Comcast and Time Warner Cable Dangerous to Health of America's Democracy and Culture Public interest groups vow to block purchase of Adelphia by cable giants WASHINGTON, D.C.   In a strongly worded letter to key parties in the potential Adelphia sale to Comcast and/or Time Warner Cable, five public interest groups -- the Center for Creative Voices in Media, Center for Digital Democracy, Common Cause, the Media Access Project and Free Press  -- stated that they strongly oppose this deal. The groups' concern centers on the potential sale's creation of a media monolith so large it will have unprecedented power to control what Americans see and hear on cable, and will impact their access to the Internet. Comcast and Time Warner are now, respectively, the country's two largest owners of cable systems, choosing programs for tens of millions of American cable viewers. To enlarge that power through the purchase of all or part of Adelphia's cable systems, would make it even more difficult for diverse points of view, religious programs, or programs geared to ethnic or minority audiences ever to get the opportunity to be aired on cable television.   Reports of this potential deal should sound alarm bells with every local franchising authority and federal regulator who must review the purchase, the groups stated. "To protect the public's rights, we would demand the strictest legal and regulatory scrutiny of a sale of all or part of Adelphia to Comcast and Time Warner Cable, challenging it in the strongest possible terms at the federal and state levels, as well as with Local Franchising Authorities  (LFA's) in each of the Adelphia markets transferred to one of these two cable, media, and Internet goliaths.  Today, we are calling on LFA's to join us in opposing such a sale and potential transfer of control," the groups stated. The groups pointed out that a sale of Adelphia to Comcast and Time Warner Cable would not only significantly harm the public interest, it would also harm Adelphia and not be in the long-term best interests of the company, its shareholders, debt holders, or creditors.  The critical question of whether such a transaction could ultimately receive necessary government approvals would most certainly cause considerable uncertainty for a prolonged period.  A deal that, after possibly years of regulatory and legal scrutiny, could not be consummated would not be in Adelphia's interest.  Instead, Adelphia should either sell itself to another party or continue to operate independently. Independent Redistricting Commissions Give Voters the True Power to Choose - California Common Cause announces support of reform legislation Stating that the public interest is best served when electoral districts are drawn by a panel of independent individuals not incumbents, California Common Cause joined with its national organization and Gov. Schwarzenegger today in announcing support for redistricting reform legislation that would create an independent redistricting commission and an open, participatory redistricting process. California Common Cause joins many organizations, such as the League of Women Voters of California, Center for Governmental Studies, Demos, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and others to advocate that the essential components for a truly independent and effective redistricting process include: An independent redistricting panel selected from a diverse pool of individuals who do not have direct ties to politicians, lobbyists or directly interested groups and who are selected through a process that involves the legislature in narrowing the pool, and provides for partisan representation.   A redistricting panel and criteria that prioritizes California's racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity. Fair criteria for drawing the state and congressional district lines that include an emphasis on the Voting Rights Act, communities of interest, and competitiveness, as well traditional criteria such as equal population, and contiguity. Transparent and open deliberations that include public hearings, publication of all maps, transcripts and materials, involvement of expert review, and a ban on ex parte communications. A requirement that redistricting take place once a decade, following the release of Census data. "The current redistricting process in California is democracy turned on its head.  It is a broken system when politicians choose the voters they want instead of the voters choosing their representatives," stated Roy Ulrich of California Common Cause. Ulrich continued, "There are two legislative vehicles, Asm. McCarthy's ACAX1 3, with agreed upon amendments, and Sen. Lowenthal's SCA 3.  California Common Cause has endorsed both because they capture the basic principles of a representative independent panel, a clear and fair set of mapping criteria, and a transparent public process.  We restate our preference that redistricting should take place once a decade."  California Common Cause has not taken a position on any of the proposed ballot propositions. A report, "Drawing Lines: A Public Interest Guide to Real Redistricting Reform" will be released by the Center for Governmental Studies and Demos, detailing the above components.  The report is available at: www.cgs.org and www. demos-usa.org and www.commoncause.org/california.  A press conference on February 23 in Sacramento will be held to discuss the report and recommendations in greater depth. Statement of Chellie Pingree, President, Common Cause On Redistricting in California February 17:  2005 In California and around the country we have a broken system where elected officials are choosing the voters they want to represent instead of the other way around.  We need to put the power to draw political lines in the hands of independent, nonpartisan commissions and we need strong and fair criteria for drawing the districts.  This will put the power back in the hands of the voters.   For decades partisan wrangling has led to gerrymandered redistricting maps and collusion among the major political parties.  That system does more to protect the interests of incumbents than to serve the voters.  The end result is that voters in California effectively have little choice in who they elect to office. It's time to put an end to this rotten system.  That's why we join Governor Schwarzenegger today in calling on the California legislature to pass meaningful redistricting reform.  We agree that we must have a truly independent commission responsible for drawing district lines.  We agree that that we have to have strong and fair criteria that protect the interest of voters.  The amendments we have agreed, if passed by the legislature and accepted by the people, would make the California redistricting process one of the strongest, fairest and most independent in the nation.   We urge the California Legislature to do the people's business, to get beyond partisanship and narrow self-interest, and to refer this measure to the people of California. Common Cause has been pushing for 30 years to establish independent commissions with fair and clear criteria to do the work of redistricting.  The time is ripe to redouble our efforts, to work with fair-minded Republicans, Democrats and others to fix this problem.  It is too important to wait any longer.  We need to put the power to draw political lines in California, and across the country (in Florida, and in Texas), in the hands of truly independent commissions and we need to put the power of the vote back in the hands of the voter.  We are glad to be here today, standing with Governor Schwarzenegger to launch this effort as part of our multi-state campaign to reform how state legislative and Congressional districts are drawn. Common Cause, Gov. Schwarzenegger join forces to fix a broken system Common Cause and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) announced today that they are joining forces to put an end to California's failed system for drawing congressional and state legislative boundaries, a process known as redistricting. Common Cause President Chellie Pingree and Gov. Schwarzeneggar called on California legislators to support legislation to establish an independent redistricting panel of nonpartisan judges and to create fair criteria to draw district boundaries that will lead to more electoral competition and accountability to the voters. "In California and around the country, we have a broken system where elected officials are choosing the voters they want to represent, instead of the other way around," Pingree said. "We need to put the power to draw political lines in the hands of independent, non-partisan commissions and we need strong and fair criteria for drawing the districts. This will put the power back in the hands of the voter." Gov. Schwarzenegger argued that California voters have little ability to hold their elected officials accountable. "In the November elections, 153 California Congressional and Legislative seats were up for grabs, and not one changed parties, that is not a democracy," said Governor Schwarzenegger. "It is time to make our representatives more responsive to the people who elect them. I welcome the support of Common Cause and look forward to working with them to put trust and fairness back into our elections." For Common Cause, the partnership with Gov. Schwarzenegger and the California reform effort mark the beginning of a national campaign to take the redistricting process out of the hands of state legislators and to entrust independent commissions with the task. Common Cause is aggressively pushing for reform in several states in addition to California, including, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Texas. "We have been pushing for redistricting for many years," said Pingree. "In the past couple of years it has become increasingly apparent that the current system just doesn't work.  We see it that way, Gov. Schwarzenegger sees it that way, and the voters see it that way. We share the belief that it is time for change." Mutual funds’ silence on disclosure means public and shareholders suffer New report examines industry’s reluctance to embrace transparency effort In a unique effort to shine light on corporate America’s vast influence on the political process, Common Cause is teaming with a new ally to urge Fortune 500 companies to voluntarily disclose all their political contributions. To support this work, Common Cause today is also releasing a new report examining the importance of the mutual fund industry to this effort, and its reluctance so far to embrace it. Common Cause and the Center for Political Accountability will ask corporate giants such as General Electric to publicly detail their corporate political giving and a rationale for each contribution. The Center, a non- partisan organization working for greater transparency in corporate political giving, has coordinated the filing of shareholder resolutions at 33 major Fortune 500 companies. Common Cause is urging investors, specifically large mutual fund companies, to support these resolutions at 2005 annual shareholder meetings. The support of mutual fund companies is key to this effort, as they own more than 22 percent of U.S. corporate stocks. And since nearly 50 percent of all U.S. households own mutual funds, shareholders have a stake in the matter as well. “Everyone benefits, the public and shareholders, when corporations make their political contributions transparent,” said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree. “It’s time for mutual fund companies – which represent the investments of millions of Americans  – to wake up and support this very basic disclosure.” The report, “Mutual Protection:  Why the Mutual Fund Industry Should Embrace Disclosure of Political Contributions,” covers the following: How both the public and shareholders benefit when corporate contributions are made transparently. Efforts underway to encourage companies to do a better job of disclosing political contributions A Common Cause survey last year of the 10 biggest mutual fund corporations found that all voted against or abstained from voting on the shareholder resolutions requesting improved disclosure of political contributions, revealing a systemic reluctance to use shareholder clout to obtain better disclosure. The equity ownership of these 10 largest mutual fund companies could have translated into influence.  Had the 10 mutual fund companies supported the resolution, the vote for the resolution would have topped 25 percent at almost half of the companies. Future mutual fund support for shareholder resolutions requesting disclosure of political contributions could have a strong impact. The top 30 mutual fund companies own on average about 20 percent of the outstanding shares of each of the Fortune 500 companies that will face shareholder resolutions requesting disclosure this year. Millions of Americans invest in mutual funds for their retirement or savings and therefore have a stake in urging more disclosure. As of 2004, nearly 54 million households -- more than 48 percent of all U.S. households -- invested in mutual funds. Common Cause will take the following actions: Urge its nearly 300,000 members and supporters who own stock on these major corporations to vote for these shareholder resolutions in the 2005 proxy season. Urge mutual fund investors to contact fund CEOs to ask that their funds cast proxies for the Center’s political contribution disclosure resolutions of 2005. Write letters to the CEOs of the 30 major mutual fund families requesting that these fund families support shareholder resolutions that ask for disclosure of political contributions. “We want our members to say to their mutual funds, ‘Are you going to support this important disclosure, or are you going to continue to be silent?’” Pingree said. Common Cause has long been concerned about the corrupting influence of corporate money in the electoral and legislative processes. The organization spearheaded efforts in 2002 to pass the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, which banned soft money to political parties on the federal level. Statement of Chellie Pingree, President of Common Cause, in support of the Count Every Vote Act of 2005 Common Cause congratulates Senators Clinton and Boxer for standing up for American voters and challenging Congress with this ambitious agenda for fixing the badly broken system of voting in our country. The election of 2004 made it clear that  we have not yet resolved the problems that came to the nation's - and the world's - attention in November 2000.  Whatever you think of the outcome of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, it is not credible to say that everything went fine. Countless voters did not have an equal opportunity to register and vote and have their vote counted. Just because we did not have an election decided in the courts or have a Ukrainian-style uprising does not mean we can be satisfied with how the system worked.  We do not want to go through another election marked by long lines, lost registrations, lost absentee ballots, capricious decisions by partisan elections officials, and millions of voters continuing to lose confidence in this most basic right of our democracy. Common Cause and other nonprofits have gathered a mountain of information through our phone hotlines about what went wrong on and before Election Day.  Those calls told us that there is a need for the reforms contained in this legislation, including a provision that will require elections agencies to gather data themselves, something now too often left to outside groups. This legislation is a challenge to all of us.  Just as we know that enacting this bill into law is essential to our democracy, we also know it will be an uphill battle with resistance from many quarters: those incumbent officials who do not want to enfranchise too many new voters, those elections officials who deny their responsibility for this broken system and resist change, those who tell us that preventing fraud is a more important goal than ensuring that all Americans can exercise their right to vote, and those who are happy with the election results and want to avoid admitting that problems exist. Both Republicans and Democrats should embrace these reforms - it should be the most nonpartisan of issues: Help America Vote. Common Cause, with our hundreds of thousands of members from coast to coast, will work hard to support the reform measures contained in this bill. We welcome the opportunity to champion such a comprehensive approach to the most basic building blocks of democracy, voting and elections.   Filibuster shouldn't be tossed aside to convenience Senate Majority Common Cause strongly opposes any effort by Senate leaders to outlaw filibusters of judicial nominees to silence a vigorous debate about the qualifications of these nominees, short-circuiting the Senate’s historic role in the nomination approval process. “The filibuster shouldn't be jettisoned simply because it's inconvenient to the majority party's goals," said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree. "That's abuse of power." Senate leaders are reportedly threatening to change Senate rules to bar filibusters of judicial nominees, including those to the Supreme Court. Common Cause on Monday launched an online petition in opposition to banning the filibuster and collected about 20,000 signatures in less than 48 hours. "It's clear that many Americans believe that the right of the minority party to dissent must be maintained," Pingree said. "It's important to the integrity of the Senate." Equally important is the right of the public to have their elected officials engage in a debate and evaluation of these judicial nominees. Our judges, particularly our Supreme Court judges, have an enormous impact on the lives of all Americans. Under what has become known as the "nuclear option," Vice President Dick Cheney, who serves as the Senate's presiding officer, would have the power to declare unconstitutional the use of filibusters in judicial nominations. The change would allow a simple majority of 51 votes, rather than 60 votes, to affirm judges for lifetime appointments.  The Senate minority - the Democrats - would not be able to filibuster Cheney's rulings under this option. But this change contrasts sharply with the Senate tradition of deliberative debate. Both parties have vociferously defended use of the filibuster throughout the Senate's history. "To remove a long-standing parliamentary maneuver to serve immediate partisan goals violates core democratic values and is an anathema to the Senate's long standing commitment to consensus and a bipartisan deliberative process," the Common Cause petition read. Toward a Democratic Media from the book Triumph of the Market by Edward S. Herman published by South End Press, 1995 A democratic media is a primary condition of popular rule, hence of a genuine political democracy. Where the media are controlled by a powerful and privileged elite, whether of government leaders and bureaucrats or those from the private sector, democratic political forms and some kind of limited political democracy may exist, but not genuine democracy. The public will not be participants in the media, and therefore in public life, they will be consumers of facts and opinions distributed to them from above. The media will, of structural necessity, select news and organize debate supportive of agendas and programs of the privileged. They will not provide the unbiased information and opinion that would permit the public to make choices in accord with its own best interests. Their job will be to show that what's good for the elites is good for everybody, and that other options are either bad or do not exist. Media Sovereignty and Freedom of Choice Economists have long distinguished between "consumer sovereignty" and "freedom of consumer choice." The former requires that consumers participate in deciding what is to be offered in the first place; the latter is satisfied if consumers are free to select among the options chosen for them by producers. Freedom of choice is better than no freedom of choice, and the market may provide a substantial array of options. But it may not. Before the foreign-car invasion in the 1960s, U.S. car manufacturers chose not to offer small cars because the profit margin on small cars is small. It was better to have choices among four or five manufacturers than one, but the options were constrained by producer interest. Only the entry of foreign competition made small cars available to U.S. buyers. Freedom of choice prevailed in both cases, but consumer sovereignty did not. The cost of producer sovereignty was also manifest in the policy of General Motors Corporation, in cahoots with rubber and oil interests, of buying up public transit lines and converting them to GM buses or liquidating them. ~ The consumers of transportation services, if fully informed, might well have chosen to preserve and subsidize the electric transit option, but this sovereign decision was not open to them. This distinction between sovereignty and free choice has important applications in both national politics and the mass media. In each case, the general population has some kind of free choice, but lacks sovereignty. The public goes to the polls every few years to pull a lever for slates of candidates chosen for them by political parties heavily dependent on funding by powerful elite interests. The public has "freedom of choice" only among a very restricted set of what we might call "effective" candidates, effectiveness being defined by their ability to attract the funding necessary to make a credible showing. At the level of mass communication as well, the dominant media with large audiences are owned by an overlapping set of powerful elite interests. There is a fringe media with very limited outreach that might support "ineffective" candidates, but because of their marginal status they and the candidates they support can be easily ignored. As with the candidates, the populace has "freedom of choice" among the dominant set of mainstream media, but it lacks sovereignty except in a legalistic and formal sense (we are each legally free to start our own newspaper or buy our own paper or TV network). The elite-dominated mass media, not surprisingly, find the political system admirable, and while sometimes expressing regret at the quality of candidates, never seriously question the absence of citizen sovereignty regarding decisions about the effective options. Naturally, also, the mass media hardly mention the undemocratic underpinnings of the political process in the media itself. In fact, one of the most disquieting features of the propaganda systems of advanced capitalism's constrained democracies is that the consolidation of mass media power has closed down discussion of the need for radical restructuring of the media. It has also pushed such changes off the political agenda. As the "gatekeepers," the mass media have been in the enviable position of being able to protect themselves from debate or political acts that threaten their interests, which illustrates the deeply undemocratic character of their role. Occasionally, issues like TV violence have aroused public opinion and caused Congress to hold hearings and assail the TV networks, but the whole business has always been settled by appeals to corporate responsibility and self-regulation, and the assurance by the media barons of their deepest concern and commitment to rectifying the situation. In 1977, however, an unusually aggressive and naive House subcommittee actually drafted a report calling for investigation of the structure of the television industry as a necessary step to attacking the violence problem at its source. As George Gerbner described the sequel: When the draft mentioning industry structure was leaked to the networks, all hell broke loose. Members of the subcommittee told me that they had never before been subject to such relentless lobbying and pressure. campaign contributors were contacted. The report was delayed for months. The subcommittee staffer who wrote the draft was summarily fired. The day before the final vote was to be taken, a new version drafted by a broadcast lobbyist was substituted. It ignored the evidence of the hearings and gutted the report, shifting the source of the problem from network structure to the parents of America. When the network-dictated draft came to a vote, members of the full committee (including those who had never attended hearings) were mobilized, and the watered down version won by one vote. In short, the power of the "actual existing" highly undemocratic mass media is enormous. What Would A Democratic Media Look Like? A democratic media can be identified by its structure and functions. In terms of structure, it would be organized and controlled by ordinary citizens or their grassroots organizations. This could involve individuals or bodies serving local or larger political, minority, or other groups in the social and political arena. Media fitting these structural conditions would be bound to articulate demands of the general population because they are either part of it or instruments created to serve its needs. In the mainstream system, the mass media are large organizations owned by other large organizations or shareholders and controlled by members of a privileged business elite. The ownership structure puts them at a distance from ordinary people. They are funded by advertising, and advertisers have to be convinced that the programs meet their needs. Thus in terms of fundamental structure the mainstream media are not agents serving the general public: the first responsibility of their managers is by law to stockholders seeking profits; and as advertisers are the principal source of revenue, their needs come second. There is no legal responsibility to audiences at all; these must be persuaded to watch or buy, but by any means the gatekeeper chooses, within the limits of law and conventional standards of morality. As regards function, a democratic media will aim first and foremost at serving the informational, cultural, and other communications needs of the members of the public which the media institutions comprise or represent. The users would determine their own needs and fix the menu of choices either directly or through their closely controlled agents, and debate would not be limited to select voices chosen by corporate or governmental gatekeepers. The sovereign listeners would not only participate in choosing programs and issues to be addressed they would be the voices heard, and they would be involved in continuous interchanges with other listeners. There would be a horizontal flow of communication, in both directions, instead of a vertical and downward flow from officials and experts to the passive population of consumers. A democratic media would encourage people to know and understand their neighbors and to participate in social and political life. This is likely to occur where media structures are democratic, as such media will be open to neighbors who want to communicate views on problems and their possible communal resolution. At the same time, a democratic media would recognize and encourage diversity. It would allow and encourage minorities to express their views and build their own communities' solidarity within the larger community. This would follow from the democratic idea of recognizing and encouraging individual differences and letting all such flowers bloom irrespective of financial capability and institutional power. This is also consistent with the ideal of pluralism, part of mainstream orthodox doctrine but poorly realized in mainstream practice. The commercial media serve minority constituencies badly, tending toward the repetition of homogenizing mainstream cultural market themes and ignoring the group entirely when it is really poor. In Hungary, for example, the new commercial media, "have a radio program for tourists from German-speaking countries, but none for hundreds of thousands of gypsies living in Hungary (7 percent of the population)." The same criticism often applies to state-controlled media. Talk Shows: Phoney Populism, Phoney Democracy The talk show radio and TV "revolution" in the United States offers the facade of something democratic, but not the substance. The interaction of talk-show hosts with the public is usually carefully controlled by screening out undesired questions, and there are very limited exchanges between hosts and a "statistically insignificant" proportion of the listening audience. Rush Limbaugh, for example, has a sizable audience of proudly self-styled "ditto heads," but they are entertained in pseudo-post modern monologues with a minimum of genuine interaction. There is a kind of quasi-community built among the followers, who listen, meet together, buy and discuss the master's (and other recommended) books, but the community has a cultish quality, and the master's discourse is no more democratic than was Father Charles Coughlin's radio talk show back in the 1930s. The community is led by a leader who possesses, and guides the followers to, the truth. As is well known, many of the talk-show hosts are right-wing populists, who claim concern over the distress of ordinary citizens, but never succeed in finding the sources of that distress in the workings of corporate capital and its impact on politics, unemployment, wage levels, and economic insecurity. They focus on symptoms and scapegoats, like crime, Black welfare mothers, environmental extremists and "family values" issues. Their service is comparable to that of the Nazi movement during the Weimar Republic years in Germany in the 1920s, diverting attention from real causes of distress and weakening any threat of meaningful organization and protest from below by obfuscating issues and stirring up the forces of irrationality. Routes to Democratizing the Media There are two main routes to democratizing the media. One is to try to influence the mainstream media to give more room to now excluded ideas and groups. This could be done by persuasion, pressure or by legislation compelling greater access. The second route is to create and support an alternative structure of media closer to ordinary people and grassroots organizations that would replace, or at least offer an important alternative to, the mainstream media. This could be done in principle, by private and popular initiative, by legislative action, or by a combination of the two. The first route is of limited value as a long-run solution to the problem, precisely because it fails to attack the structural roots of the media's lack of democracy. If function follows from structure, the gains from pursuit of the first route are likely to be modest and transitory. These small gains may also lead both activists and ordinary citizens to conclude that the mainstream media are really open to dissent, when in fact dissent is securely kept in a non-threatening position. And it may divert energy from building an alternative media. On the other hand the limited access obtained by pursuit of the first route may have disproportionate and catalyzing effects on elite opinion. This route may also be the only one that appeals to many media activists, and there is no assurance that the long-run strategy of pursuing structural change will work. The second route to democratization of the media is the only one that can yield a truly democratic media, and it is this route that I will discuss in greater detail. Without a democratic structure, the media will serve a democratic function inadequately at best, and very possibly even perversely, working as agents of the real (dominant corporate) "special interests" to confuse and divert the public. The struggle for a democratic media structure is also of increasing urgency, because the media have become less democratic in recent decades with the decline in relative importance of the public and nonprofit broadcasting spheres, increased commercialization and integration of the mass media into the market, conglomeration, and internationalization. In important respects the main ongoing struggle has been to prevent further attrition of democratic elements in the media. This has been very evident in Western Europe where powerful systems of public broadcasting, as well as nonprofit local radio stations, have been under relentless attack by commercial and conservative political interests increasingly influential in state policy. These changes have threatened diversity, quality, and relatively democratic organizational arrangements. In the former Soviet bloc, where state-controlled media institutions are being rapidly dismantled, there is a dire threat that an undemocratic system of government control will be replaced by an equally undemocratic system of commercial domination. The same is true of the Third World which, while presenting a mixed picture of government, private/commercial, and a sometimes important civic sector, has been increasingly brought within the orbit of a globalizing commercial media. It is obvious that a thoroughgoing democratization of the media can only occur in connection with a drastic alteration in the structure of power and political revolution. Democratizing a national media would be very difficult in a large and complex society like the United States even with unlimited structural options, just as organizing a democratic polity here would be a bit more tricky than in a tiny Greek city-state or autonomous New England town. An important step toward a democratic media would be a move back to the Articles of Confederation, and beyond-to really small units where people can interact on a personal level. For larger political units personal interaction is more difficult; efficiency and market considerations make for a centralization of national and international news gathering, processing, and distribution, and of cultural- entertainment productions as well. Funding would have to be insulated from business and government, but it could not be completely insulated from democratic decision processes. Maintaining involvement and control by ordinary citizens, while allowing a necessary degree of specialization and centralization, and permitting artistic autonomy as well, would present a serious challenge to democratic organization. As this is not on the immediate agenda, however, I am not going to try to spell out here the machinery and arrangements whereby these conflicting ends can be accomplished. Some partial guidelines for the pursuit of democratic structural change in the media here can be derived from the current debates and struggles in Europe, where the democratic forces are trying to hold the line (in Western Europe) and prevent wholesale commercialization (in the East). The democrats have stressed the deadly effects of privatization and commercialization on a democratic polity and culture, and have urged the importance of preserving and enlarging the public and civic spheres of the media. The public sphere is the government-sponsored sector, which is far more important in Western Europe than in this country. It is funded by direct governmental grants, license fees and to an increasing but controlled extent, advertising. This sphere is designed and responsible for serving the public interest in news, public affairs, educational, children's, and much cultural programming. It is assumed in Europe that the commercial sphere will pursue large audiences with entertainment (movies, sitcoms, cowboy-crime stories) and that its long-term trend toward abandonment of non-entertainment values will continue. The civic sector comprises all the media that are non-commercial but not government sponsored, and which arise by individual or grassroots initiatives. This would include some mainly local newspapers and journals, independent movie and TV producers, and radio broadcasters. The civic sector has virtually no TV presence in Europe, but radio broadcasting by nonprofit organizations is still fairly important, sufficiently so to have produced a European Federation of Community Radios (FERL) to exchange ideas and coordinate educational and lobbying efforts to advance their ideals and protect their interests. FERL has been lobbying throughout Europe for explicit recognition of the important role of the non- commercial-and especially the civic-sector in governmental and inter-governmental policy decisions. It has urged the preservation and enlargement of this sector by policy choice. In France, the civic sector actually gets some funding from the state via a tax on commercial advertising revenues. This is a model that could be emulated elsewhere. It should be noted, however, that in the conservative political environment of the past half dozen years, the policies of the French regulatory authority, the Higher Broadcasting Council, has reduced the number of nonprofit radio stations from 1,000 to under 300, and discriminated heavily in favor of religious and right-wing broadcasters as well. Democratizing the U.S. Media Democratizing the U.S. media is an even more formidable task than that faced by Europeans. In Western Europe, public broadcasting is important, even if under siege, and community radio is a more important force than in the United States. In Eastern Europe the old government-dominated systems are crumbling, so that there are options and an ongoing struggle for control. In the United States, commercial systems are more powerfully entrenched, the public sector is weak and has been subject to steady right-wing attack for years, and the civic sphere, while alive and bustling, is small, mainly local, and undernourished. The question is, what is to be done? Funding An extremely important problem for democratization is that the commercial sector is self-financing, with large resources from advertising, whereas the public and civic sectors are chronically starved. This gives the commercial media an overwhelming advantage in technical quality and polish, price, publicity, and distribution. An important part of a democratic media strategy must consist of figuring out how to obtain sizable and more stable resources for the public and civic sectors. The two promising sources are taxes on commercial media revenues and direct government grants. Commercial radio and television are getting the free use of the spectrum and satellite paths-which are a public resource-to turn a private profit, and there is an important record of commercial broadcasting and FCC commitments to public service made in 1934 and 1946 that have been quietly sloughed off. These considerations make a franchise or spectrum use tax, with the revenues turned over to the public and civic sectors that have taken on those abandoned responsibilities, completely justifiable. We could also properly extend a tax on spectrum-use to cellular and other telephone transmission, which also use public airwaves, possibly placing the tax revenue into a fund to help extend telephone service as well as other communications infrastructure to Third World areas at home and abroad. The funding of the public and civic sectors from general tax revenues and/or license fees on receiving sets is also easily defended, given the great importance of these sectors in educational, children's, minority group and public affairs programming. These services are important for democratic citizenship, among other aims. In sum, local, regional, and national groups interested in democratizing the media should give high priority to organization, education, and lobbying designed to sharply increase and stabilize the funding of the financially strapped public and civic sectors. Success in these endeavors is going to depend in large measure on the general political climate. The Commercial Sector The commercial sector of the media does provide some small degree of diversity, insofar as individual proprietors may allow it and advertisers can be mobilized in niche markets of liberal and progressive bent (The New Yorker, Village Voice, urban alternative press). But this diversity is within narrow bounds, and rarely if ever extends to support for policies involving fundamental change. Furthermore, the main drift of commercial markets is absolutely antithetical to democratic media service, and while we may welcome the offbeat and progressive commercial media institutions, we should recognize the inherent tendencies of the commercial media. It will still be desirable to oppose further consolidation, conglomeration, cross-ownership of the mainstream media, and discriminatory exclusions of outsiders, not only because they make the media less democratic, but also because they help further centralize power and make progressive change in the media and elsewhere more difficult. I also favor "fairness doctrine" and quantitative requirements for local public affairs, and children's programs for commercial radio and TV broadcasters. Part of the reason for this is straightforward: it is an outrage that they have abandoned public service in their quest for profit. A more devious reason is this: pressing the commercial broadcasters, and describing in detail how they have abandoned children and public service for "light fare," will help make the case for taxing them and funding the public and civic sectors. In Europe, commercial broadcasters are sometimes obligated by law, or by contract arrangements made when spectrum rights were given, to provide a certain amount of time to quality children's programs at prime hours, or to give blocks of broadcasting time to various groups like labor organizations, church groups, and political parties in proportion to their membership size (not their money). In Europe and elsewhere as well, broadcasters are obligated to give significant blocks of free time to political parties and candidates in election periods. These are all desirable, and should be on the agenda here. They are not being considered because the media would suffer economic costs, so that the public isn't even allowed to know about and debate these options. Various groups have been formed in this country to lobby and threaten the media, the most important and effective regrettably being those of the Right. Notable among those representing a broader public interest was Action For Children's Television (ACT), organized in 1968 to fight the commercial media's degradation of children's programming. Also worthy of special mention is Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media monitoring group that has published numerous special studies of media bias as well as an ongoing monitoring review, EXTRA! FAIR also produces a weekly half-hour radio program, "Counterspin," heard on over 80 (mostly public, community and college) stations, which provides media criticism and alternative news analysis. The Public Sector The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was brought into existence in 1967, with the acquiescence of the commercial broadcasters, who were pleased to transfer public-interest responsibilities elsewhere as long as these were funded by the taxpayer. Over the years, public radio and television have been more open to dissent and minority voices than the commercial broadcasting media, partly as a result of original design, but also because, despite their ties to government, they have proven to be somewhat more independent of government and tolerant of controversy than the commercial broadcasters (which shows how awful the latter have been). The independence and quality of the public sector depends heavily on the political environment. As long as it is kept on a short financial leash, underfunded, and worried mainly about attacks from the Right, it will feature a William Buckley and McLaughlin, with McNeil-Lehrer on "the Left," and offer mainly bland and cautious news and commentary plus uncontroversial and cultural events. Not surprisingly, it went into serious decline in the Reagan-Bush years. It needs a lot more money, longer funding periods, more autonomy, and less threatening pressure from the right wing to perform well. There is an important role for the public sector in a system of democratic media, and its rehabilitation should definitely be on the democratic media agenda. The Civic Sector For real progress in democratizing the media, a much larger place must be carved out for the civic sector. This is the nonprofit sector organized by individuals or grassroots organizations to serve the communications interests and needs of the general population (as opposed to the corporate community and government). The building of a media civic sector is important as part of community building and the democratic process itself. Democratic media analysts stress that ordinary citizens must participate in the media, which is part of the public sphere in which public opinion is formed, to be genuine members of a political community. Alternative press. There is an alternative local press in many cities in the United States, usually distributed without charge and funded by advertising, but catering to a somewhat offbeat audience and providing an opening for dissent and debate, within limits. This alternative press has a national Association of Alternative News Weeklies with 95 members and claims a readership of some 5.5 million. Its performance is spotty and often unimpressive, but it is a small force for diversity. It is possible to depend on advertising and to maintain alternative press substance. The costs of serious dissent may be heavy, however, and compromises are endemic. The Village Voice has provided significant dissent in the huge market of New York City. Even more interesting is the Anderson Valley Advertiser of Boonville, California, a local paper which has survived in a small town despite the radical perspectives of its editor. It has been subjected to advertising boycotts and is avoided regularly by some advertisers on political grounds, but its advertising penalties are partially offset by a wider readership generated by its exciting quality and vigor. AVA covers local news well and its exceptional openness to letters and petitions, and the continuous and sometimes furious debates among readers and between readers and editors constitute a kind of town meeting in print. The paper addresses a host of local issues, and the columns and letters debate national and global issues, though no attempt is made to provide national or international news coverage. A thousand papers like AVA would make this a more democratic country. With the demise of the New York Guardian in 1992, the only national alternative newspaper is the bi-weekly In These Times, with a circulation of only 25,000, despite its high quality and avoidance of the doctrinaire. Even this one publication struggles each year for greater circulation and other funding to keep afloat. It deserves support; helping it continue to exist and grow, and supplementing its coverage with other national papers, is important in a democratic media project. Alternative journals. There are a fair number of liberal and left alternative journals in the United States, including The Nation, Z Magazine, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Dollars & Sense, Monthly Review, Ms. Magazine, The Texas Observer, Covert Action Quarterly, EXTRA.', and others. Apart from Mother Jones, which has sometimes crossed the quarter-million mark in circulation, based on large promotional campaigns, The Nation has the largest readership, with about 100,000. Most of the alternative journals have circulations between 2,000 and 30,000, and experience chronic financial problems. By contrast, Time has a circulation of 5.6 million (4.4 million in North America) and Reader's Digest 29.6 million (16.7 in North America). Some of the alternative journals could expand circulation with aggressive and large-scale publicity and higher quality copy, but this would cost a lot of money. Not many of the 78 U.S. billionaires are inclined to set up trust funds to help enlarge the circulation of alternative journals. Advertisers are also not bending over backwards to throw business their way. Alternative Radio. Radio may promise more for the growth and greater outreach of alternative media than does print media. More people are prone to listen to the radio and watch television than read journals, or even newspapers, which are also harder to get into the hands of audiences. And radio broadcasting facilities are not expensive. Community radio made a large growth spurt in the early 1970s, then tapered off, in part as a result of the shortage of additional frequencies in the larger markets. Of the roughly 1,500 non- commercial radio licenses outstanding, half are held by religious broadcasters. Many of the remaining 750 are college- and university-linked, and perhaps 250 are licensed to community organizations. Many of the community stations have languished for want of continuity of programming and spotty quality. Discrete and sporadic programs do not command large audiences; building substantial audiences requires that many people know that particular types of programs are going to be there, day after day, at a certain time period. (This is why stations become "all news," or have talk shows all morning and rock music all afternoon.) There are also the usual problems of funding, as well as threats to licenses by more powerful commercial interests seeking to enlarge their domains. Nonetheless, these stations are precious for their pluralism in programming and diversity among staff and volunteers, and they meet the democratic standard of community involvement and serious public debate. Noam Chomsky "has observed that when he speaks in a town or city that has an alternative radio station, people tend to be more informed and aware of what is going on. Pacifica's five-station network and News Service have done yeoman work in providing alternative and high- quality radio programming and in developing a sizable and loyal listenership. Under constant right-wing attack and threat, it deserves strong support and emulation. Radio Zinzine in Forcalquier, a small town of Upper Provence in France, also provides an important model of constructive radio use. Organized by the members of the progressive cooperative Longo Mai, Radio Zinzine has given the local farmers and townspeople a more vigorous and action oriented form of local news (as well as broader news coverage and entertainment), but also an avenue for communication among formerly isolated and consequently somewhat apathetic people. It has energized the local population, encouraged its participation, and made it more of a genuine community. In a dramatic example of how democratic media come into existence out of the needs of ordinary people who want to speak and encourage others to communicate, M'Banna Kantako, a 31-year-old Black, blind, unemployed public-housing resident in Springfield, Illinois organized Black Liberation Radio in 1986 out of frustration with the failure of the major media to provide news and entertainment of interest to the Black community. Operating illegally on a one-watt transmitter with a range of one mile, Kantako provides a genuine alternative to the Black community. Kantako was ignored by the FCC and dominant media until he broadcast a series of interviews with Blacks who had been brutalized by the local police. Soon thereafter the FCC tried to get him off the air, and a court order was issued to close him down, but it remains unenforced. Undefended by the local media, Kantako has gotten considerable national publicity and support. Grassroots organizers and student groups from practically every state and a number of foreign countries have contacted him, and numerous other similar "micro-radio" stations have gone on the air. This is genuinely democratic media: may it spread widely. David Barsamian's Alternative Radio is another important model; it has produced and distributed a weekly one-hour public affairs program since 1986, using rented space on a satellite channel to provide U.S. stations solid alternative programming. Alternative Radio, using both taped speeches and a one-on-one interview format, has focused on "the media, U.S. foreign policy, racism, the environment NAFTA/GATT and economic issues and other topics," with guests like Elaine Bernard (Canadian labor activist, on Creating a New Party),Juliet Schor (Overworked American), Ali Mazrui (Afrocentricity and Multiculturalism), Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent), and Herbert Chao Gunther (GATT). These are quality offerings of unusual depth and commentators of high merit rarely encountered in the mainstream media. Some 400 stations are able to receive Alternative Radio's offerings; foreign stations in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere can send for the show on tape. Alternative TV: In the 1980s, the mainstreaming and commercialization of public television led to the emergence of several new public television stations designed to serve the public-interest function abandoned by the dominant PBS stations. In an embarrassing episode for PBS, an internal PBS research study found that the new entrants would not compete much with the older stations, as the latter had moved to serve an upscale audience. Meanwhile, the older stations have lobbied aggressively to prevent the new ones from sharing in government funding slotted for public television stations. It goes without saying that the new stations deserve support as a democratizing force, although the older ones should not be written off-rather, they need reorganization and regeneration to allow them to throw off the Reagan-Bush era incubus and better serve a public function. The growth of cable opened up democratic options, partly in the greater numbers of channels and potentially enlarged diversity of commercial cable, but more importantly in the frequent obligation of cable systems to provide public-access channels and facilities. First imposed as a requirement by the FCC in 1972, partly as an impediment to cable growth by an FCC still serving the commercial broadcasters' interests, the move was eventually institutionalized as part of negotiated agreements between cable companies seeking franchises and community negotiators. In many cases the contracts require cable companies to provide facilities and training to access users, and in some instances require that a percentage of cable revenues (1 to 5 percent) be set aside to fund the access operations. This important development offers a resource and opportunity that demands far more attention from media activists than it has gotten. Spokespersons for the public-access movement call attention to the fact that there are some 1,000 sites where public-access TV production takes place and over 2,000 public-access facilities, and that more than 15,000 hours of original material are transmitted over public-access channels per week to an unknown but probably fairly sizable audience. The problems here, as with community radio, lie in the spotty quality of original programming, the frequent absence of the continuity that makes for regular watching, and the lack of promotional resources. The existing levels of participation are worthy, but public-access remains marginal and has been under increasing attack from cable owners who no longer need public-access supporters as allies and have been trying hard to throw off any responsibility to their host communities. Along with community radio, this is democratic media, but public access is under threat; the relevant cable contracts are up for renewal over the next few years and cable access needs to be protected from attrition as well as used and enlarged. A strenuous effort has been made by some media democrats to fill the TV programming gap with centrally assembled or produced materials, made available through network pools of videotapes and by transmission of fresh materials through satellites. Paper Tiger TV has been providing weekly programs on Manhattan Cable for years, and making these programs available to public-access stations and movement groups wanting to use them in meetings. An affiliated organization, Deep Dish Network, has tried to provide something like a mainstream TV network equivalent for public-access stations, assembling and producing quality programs that are publicized in advance and transmitted via satellite to alerted individual dish owners, groups, and university and public-access stations able to downlink the programs. There are some 3 million home satellite dish owners in North America who can receive Deep Dish offerings, and it is programmed on more than 300 cable systems as well as by many individual TV stations. In addition to a notable 10-part Gulf Project series, which provided an alternative to mainstream TV's promotional coverage of the Gulf War, Deep Dish has had a six-part program on Latino issues (immigration, work exploitation and struggles, history, etc.), a major series on the Reagan-Bush era attacks on civil liberties, and during 1992, counter-celebratory programs on Columbus' conquest of the a New World." On December 1, 1991, it transmitted an hour-long live program by Kitchen Center professional artists in conjunction with Visual AIDS, entitled "Day Without Art," as part of a day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. Performed in New York City there were live audiences receiving the program in eight cities, and a much wider audience call-in operation organized as part of the program. Group viewings and cable showings were encouraged in advance. More recently Deep Dish had a program on "Staking a Claim in Cyberspace," and a 12-part series on the U.S. health-care system in 1994 entitled "Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired." Deep Dish has tried to use its productions as an organizing tool working with community groups to help them tell their stories and getting them to mobilize their constituencies to become aware of access and other media issues. This is extremely valuable, but Deep Dish suffers from the sporadic nature of its offerings, which harks back to the basic problem of funding. An excellent case can be made for funding Deep Dish and similar services to the civic sector out of franchise taxes on the commercial stations or general tax revenues. Internet. The Internet affords a new mode of communication that opens some possibilities for democratizing communications. It allows very rapid communication locally, nationally, and internationally, it is relatively cheap to send messages to a potentially wide audience, and up to this point it has not fallen under the control of advertisers, governments, or any other establishment institutions. This was important in the Chiapas revolt in Mexico and its aftermath, allowing the Zapatista rebels to get out their messages at home and abroad quickly and interfering with government attempts to crush the rebellion quietly, in the traditional manner. This caused Rand Corporation analyst David Ronfeldt to speak of "netwar" and a prospective problem of "ungovernability" in Mexico flowing in part from an uncontrollable media. This recalls Samuel Huntington's and the Trilateral Commission's fears of ungovernability in the United States and other Western countries based on the loss of apathy of the unimportant people in the 1960s. In short, the new media-based "threat" of ungovernability is establishment code language for an inability of government to manipulate and repress at will, or an increase in democracy. However, it is important to recognize the limitations of Internet as a form of democratic media, currently and in the more uncertain future. As noted in Chapter One, access to the Internet is not free, it requires a powerful computer, programs, the price of access, and some moderate degree of technical know-how. Business interests are also making rapid advances into the Internet, so that problems of more difficult and expensive access, and domination and saturation by an advertising-linked system is a real possibility. Furthermore, the Internet ~s an individualized system, with connections between individuals requiring prior knowledge of common interests, direct and indirect routes to interchanges and shared information, and the buildup of information pools. It is well-geared to efficient communication among knowledgeable and sophisticated elites and elite groups, but its potential for reaching mass audiences seems unpromising. This is extremely important, as producing ungovernability is not likely to have positive consequences unless supported by a mass movement, some rational understanding of social forces, and a coherent vision of an alternative set of institutions and policies. Otherwise, those in command of access to mass audiences (and military forces) will eventually restore "law and order" in a more repressive environment, with business institutions and priorities intact. Technological Change. More generally, the sharp reductions in price and increased availability of VCRs, camcorders, fax machines, computers, modems, E-mail, Internet, and desktop computer-publishing have made possible easier communication among individuals, lower cost production of journals and books, and new possibilities for TV production and programming. Of course, the telephone, mimeograph, offset printing and Xerox machines had the same potential earlier and were put to good use, but they never put the establishment up against the wall. Those with money and power tend to guide innovation and put technologies to use first, and frequently have moved on to something better by the time citizens gain access to these things. Camcorders do not solve the problem of producing really attractive TV programs, let alone getting them widely distributed and shown. While books may be produced more cheaply with new desktop facilities, changes in commercial distribution-blockbusters, saturation advertising, deals with the increasingly concentrated distribution networks-may easily keep dissident books as marginalized as ever. It remains to be seen whether the Internet will prove an exception to this tradition of commercial domination. In perhaps the most dramatic illustration of the problem of catch-up, the new communications technologies in the possession of the Pentagon and mainstream media during the Persian Gulf War-video, satellite, and computer-conferred a new and enormous power to mold images, block out history and context, and make instant history. John M. Phelan entitles his analysis of the new, centrally controlled communications technology, "Image Industry Erodes Political Space." And George Gerbner points out that "past, present, and future can now be packaged, witnessed, and frozen into memorable moving imagery of instant history- scripted, directed, and produced by the winners." The point is that it is important for democratic media advancement that democratic participants be alert to and take advantage of every technological innovation. The growth of common dissident carriers like EcoNet, LBBS, and PeaceNet has been important in providing tools for education, research, and a means of communication among activists. But the problems of reaching large audiences, as opposed to democratic activists being able to communicate more efficiently within and between small groups, remain challenging and severe. Concluding Note The trend of media evolution is paradoxical: On the one hand there is an ongoing main drift in the West toward increasing media centralization and commercialization and a corresponding weakening of the public sector. On the other hand, the civic sphere of nongovernmental and non-commercial media and computer networks linked to grassroots organizations and minority groups has displayed considerable vitality; and even though it has been pressed to defend its relative position overall, it has a greater potential than ever for coordinating actions and keeping activists at home and abroad informed. It has been argued in this chapter that the civic sector is the locus of the truly democratic media and that genuine democratization in Western societies is going to be contingent on its great enlargement. Those actively seeking the democratization of the media should seek first to enlarge the civic sphere by every possible avenue, to strengthen the public sector by increasing its autonomy and funding, and lastly to contain or shrink the commercial sector and try to tap it for revenue for the civic sector. Funding this sector properly is going to require government intervention. Media democrats should be preparing the moral and political environment for such financial support, while doing their utmost to advance the cause of existing democratic media. Z Papers, January 1992 The Unfree Flow of Information excerpted from the book Beyond Hypocrisy by Edward S. Herman published by South End Press, 1992 Limits on Free Speech Free speech in the United States certainly exists in the sense that dissent can usually be voiced without threat of violent reprisal by the state, at least in "normal" times. For communities of color, however, the threshold of the normal has been low and the mildest dissent or even attempts to assert citizens' rights have often been met with savage repression in the domestic application of the "mere gook rule. " More generally, freedom of speech has been limited by the fact that the state does engage in systematic disruption, harassment, and violent repression when dissent is seen as threatening, as in the Civil Rights/Vietnam war era's "COINTELPRO" and other programs, and in the frequent and sometimes large scale attacks on ethnic, labor, and radical leaders and organizations over the years. Deployment of the local, state and federal police, and national guard to quell labor activism and impede labor organization was an outstanding feature of the U.S. economic and political landscape from the 1860s to the Second World War. Official and police opposition to labor organization was closely tied to restrictions on freedom of speech. Contrary to ongoing mythology, the First Amendment was largely inoperative and offered little or no protection to dissidents threatening the established order for roughly a century and a half after its incorporation into the Constitution. The Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime to utter or publish anything that brought high officials "into contempt or disrepute. " The Sedition Act was never repealed and was only overturned by the Supreme Court in 1964. Before 1860, statutes in every southern state forbade speech or writing condemning slavery, and these "were uniformly enforced by the courts." In the post-Civil War era, the labor movement quickly focused on gaining the right to free speech as "peaceful labor demonstrations were regularly and often violently broken up by the police." Harassment, arrests, fines and imprisonments by local and state officials, and the use of police-protected vigilantes as enforcers were common responses to labor organizing and dissident speech. Advocates of women's right to vote, let alone birth-control, were regularly attacked by local and federal officials with no obstruction from the courts. In the early 1900s, Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman were frequency arrested and sometimes fined or imprisoned for distributing leaflets with information on birth control. Newspapers that offended the postmaster would include almost anything on the subject of sex of women-were denied the use of the mails. In 1917, women picketing the White House or protesting in a nearby park seeking support for a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, were arrested and jailed for obstructing traffic or disorderly conduct. The Espionage Act of 1917, an extraordinarily repressive piece of legislation that literally outlawed criticism of World War I, resulted in over 2,000 criminal prosecutions. Despite challenges, none were reversed by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. This almost completely repressive history began to change only in 1919, improving slightly over the next 40 years, and then more rapidly from the early 1960s. Progress came from energetic efforts to expand the scope of civil liberties by social movements, especially during periods of mass mobilization like the 1930s and 1960s. Predictably, these enlargements of democracy were described as "crises of democracy" by spokespersons of the permanent interests. Even in the improved free speech environment of the post-World War II era, however, there were important regressions, most notably in the Truman-McCarthy years, when a new Red Scare caused a quick retreat from the advances of the preceding decades. An important accomplishment of this Red Scare was the purging of many progressives from the communications system and the frightening of those that remained into quiescence or noisy anticommunism. This helped set the stage for global expansion in the name of "anticommunism" and "containment". The COINTELPRO activity during the Civil Rights/Vietnam war era and the Reagan administration's multi- leveled "secret war" of "low grade domestic terrorism" against the opposition to its Central American policy showed the continuing ease with which the government can threaten and undermine free speech. Arguably, freedom of speech and organization conditioned on its not being perceived as a threat by the establishment is a very constrained kind of freedom. We are not talking about minor constraints either: the steady attacks on the free speech of labor organizers and striking workers from 1865-1960 had a profound effect on the activities, growth, and ultimate character of unions. Numerous labor organizations were destroyed through state actions and connivance with employers. Many newspapers, journals, and movement organizations were eliminated by advertiser boycotts, by government, or government-supported vigilante intimidation and attacks. The FBI's long and systematic efforts to disrupt and destroy both the civil rights movement" and black community activism took a heavy toll: Dr. James Tumer of Comell University and the African Heritage Studies Association stated in 1974 that the FBI's programs had "serious long-term consequences for black Americans,. . .[having] created in blacks a sense of depression and hopelessness." The COINTELPRO campaigns and the covert war against the Central America antiwar movement were also substantial operations. As Donna Demac observed in regard to the 1960s, "The social movements that arose during the period, which sought to make fundamental changes in American society, were not allowed to develop naturally; instead, many either died prematurely or were subverted by infiltrators and provocateurs whose corrupting influence succeeded in discrediting them in the eyes of the public. As a consequence, it is impossible to know in what direction these movements might have gone or what they might have achieved without secret government intervention." The tendency to stifle serious dissent has been aggravated by a dominant U.S. culture that has never been tolerant of "deviance," as De Tocqueville pointed out back in the early nineteenth century. This gives the state a freedom to repress upon slight and / or fabricated provocation. It means also that informal and less severe forms of reprisal can constrain dissent. Many Americans believe in free speech as a principle, but deeply resent its application in practice; after all, while the Soviet people have had reason to complain, why should we who live in the land of the free and the home of the brave? And as one respondent told the New York Times, explaining his shift to Bush (Sept. 20, 1988): "Freedom of speech is very important to me: we should be very proud of this pledge [to the flag], as a nation, and able to take every opportunity to say the pledge." Presumably anybody who doesn't want to make frequent pledges to the flag doesn't believe in freedom of speech. Dissidents who use freedom are abusing freedom. The Market Another very important and greatly underrated constraint on freedom of speech is dissenters' lack of access to the mass media, and thus to the general public. Their freedom is in an important sense only a personal freedom with limited public and social significance. Dissenters may have something important to say that the public would find enlightening, but the "gatekeepers" are free to keep them effectively silent. Of course, they are legally free to start their own newspaper or to buy a TV network as the General Electric Company did in 1985, and it is always possible (and occasionally happens) that a major newspaper or TV station will give oppositional viewpoints fleeting access. But an important feature of the U.S. system of f free speech is the powerful structural limits to access to mass media. In this market system of control, ownership is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy and the agents of the corporate establishment-the gatekeepers. Gatekeeper biases are reinforced by the preferences and biases of advertisers, ~s their natural gravitation to convenient and official sources like the White House, Pentagon, and State Department, and their f ear of negative feedback (flak) from bodies and groups that might threaten their position.' Dissenters are excluded in the normal sourcing and processing of news, so that freedom of speech is perfectly compatible with systematic barriers to views that jar and threaten. Reporters are forced to work within the limits imposed by the market system in order to survive and prosper in the media organizations. The market also works in other ways to assure that only proper views can be heard. The General Electric Company not only owns a television network, it funds and promotes a The McLaughlin Group" of dominantly right-wing commentators on the Public Broadcasting System, complementing other monied groups' funding of William Buckley's "Firing Line," thus buying access to their preferred views on a nominally independent network. GE, other corporations, and related foundations also fund the American Enterprise Institute, the Georgetown Center For Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and scores of other allegedly "non-partisan" but ideologically directed research institutes, who finance and publicize the work of approved "experts. Accredited through these institutional affiliations, these experts can then meet the demands of the media for "non-partisan" and independent sources on subjects like tax policy, poverty, the military budget and arms race, terrorism, and the problems of building democracy in Central America, just as the Advertising Council has provided Public Service ads to fill the gap for mandated "public service" programming on TV with ads nicely fitted to the demands of the powerful. Market marginalization of dissent has been strengthened by the increased centralization and commercialization of the mass media. The rise of national TV markedly increased mass media concentration, and the almost complete dependence of commercial TV on advertising and its resultant extreme sensitivity to advertiser interests (and the closely related growth and "quality" of audiences and audience expectations) shaped it into an instrument readily mobilized by government propaganda and virtually closed to dissent by the defunding of public radio and TV forced much of this small sector into the commercial nexus and further narrowed avenues of access. Despite these structural facts, it is frequently asserted and has become a conservative cliché that the mass media, especially network TV and the leading establishment dailies, are both "liberal" and "adversarial" to established authority. To a considerable extent this reflects infighting between the various wings of the establishment, with the hard-line right resenting any f actual presentations inconvenient to established authority and policy (unless liberals are in power end making gestures toward peaceful accommodation, in which case we are confronted with "subversion" in government rather than in the media and are witnessing "appeasement.") The business community also generally wants system-supportive materials in the media and business "news" that amounts to press handouts of the relevant business firms. The Pentagon, White House, State Department, local police departments, and conservatives also went the media to serve simply as conduits for government officials. Neo-conservative Michael Ledeen has complained: "Most journalists these days consider it beneath their dignity to simply report the words of government officials and let it go at that. Ledeen is wrong: most are quite content to serve as a conduit, but his statement illuminates the neoconservative view of the role of the press in a free society! Others, like Reed Irvine, openly demand that f acts which do not serve their cause be suppressed. During the Gulf war of 1991, Irvine complained bitterly that the media were not serving the Pentagon 100 percent and were reporting facts that while true, were inconvenient to the war effort. Ledeen and Irvine uphold the tradition of Peter Braestrup's Freedom House study of Vietnam war coverage, which castigated the media for failing to be sufficiently upbeat whatever the facts. It is interesting to note that in early 1988 the Soviet press was assailed by Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov for disclosing negative facts about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which he claimed "played into the hands of the West". The Ledeen-Irvine-Braestrup equivalents in the Soviet Union would surely have supported Yazov's claim that the Soviet press was too liberal and "adversary", as his criticisms of the Soviet press fit their own for the U.S. media with precision. But the "adversary" Soviet press followed the party line on all essentials in 1985, just as the U.S. mass media did in accepting that the United States sought "democracy" in Nicaragua in the 1980s and that it entered a war in the Gulf in 1991 to fight for the principle of non- aggression. The Bush administration wanted to censor the media during the Gulf war, not because they are adversaries, but for the reason implicit in Yazov's critique of the Soviet media: namely, a greedy desire to avoid anything inconvenient or negative. The attacks leveled against the media as liberal and adversary, although often expressing the true beliefs of the business-neocon assailants, have the important effect of driving the media even more closely toward the state party line and away from facts and analyses that would call it into question. Claire Sterling may put forward rhetorical, implausible, and untrue statements on terrorism and the Bulgarian-KGB connection to the plot to shoot the Pope in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and CBS, but neither Reed Irvine nor government officials will utter a peep of complaint. An Elliott Abrams on Nicaragua, although representing a party line and a confirmed liar, is safe. Dissidents such as Eqbal Ahmad, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Diana Johnstone or Jane Hunterwould elicit cries of outrage on the right; therefore, they are rare participants in public discussions. At the same time, the continual outcry that the media are liberal and adversarial establishes the claim as fact, so that the very process that constrains the media further gives them added (and totally unjustified) credibility as unbiased. The Power Laws The structure of power that shapes media choices and determines who gains access also affects truthfulness in the mass media. Those who have assured access can lie; the more powerful they are, the more easily they can lie and the less likely it is that their lies will be corrected. The higher the rank the more "credible" the statement; the more credible the speaker, the greater the freedom to lie. This can be formulated in two laws: a "power law of access" and an "inverse power law of truthfulness." The first law says that the greater your economic and political clout, the easier your access to the mass media; the less your power, the more difficult the access. At a certain point on the declining power scale, access falls to zero. The fall to zero is accelerated if the message is discordant and would offend the powerful. The second law says that the greater your economic and political power-hence, access. The greater your freedom to lie; the smaller your power, the less your freedom to prevaricate. The second law follows in part from the first, as those who would be most eager to refute the lies of the powerful are weak and have limited access, further reduced by their discordant messages. Their messages can be ignored without cost to the mass media (whose biases would incline them toward avoidance anyway). The media's gullibility and groveling before the powerful occurs despite recognition by media personnel, in principle, that governments lie. But in practice, when dealing with their own government, especially in the area of foreign policy and the military-industrial-complex,. media personnel abandon or shy away from critical analysis and, frequently, common sense. Propaganda Campaigns Structurally-based bias and the power laws make the mass media extremely serviceable f or system- supportive propaganda campaigns. This all works very naturally as the proprietors, advertisers, and government usually have parallel biases, and their experts and flak machines combine to push the media in the same direction. Thus the great Red Scare of 1919-1920 helped thwart a threatening unionization of major industries; the Red Scare of the years (1948 1955) served to liquidate the old New Deal coalition end clear the ground for an aggressive pursuit of U.S. global interests under the guise of "containment" and protecting "national security; and the Soviet Threat could be rehabilitated to provide the rationale for the Reagan era stoking of the arms race and a cover for the upward redistribution of income. In the latter period, the terrorist threat, Kadaffi, the KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope, and the "barbaric" Soviet shooting down of Korean airliner 007 in 1983 could all be brought on line in propaganda campaigns to reinforce the demands of the state. In all of these cases the mass media collaborated with the government to help engineer consent by means of propaganda outbursts that were built, in whole or in part, on lies. They were also built on Orwellian processes of doublethink: only selected incidents that served the state were subject to propaganda campaigns (Libya end Abu Nidal, not South Africa, Guatemala, Orlando Bosch, or Luis Posada); only politically useful shootdowns of airliners aroused indignation and stimulated concentrated media coverage; and only selected cases of torture, murder, and aggression aroused concern. Crucial to the process was the reliance on the powerful and their accredited experts for information, and the exclusion of contesting viewpoints by p dissidents and unaccredited experts. UNESCO and the "Free Flow of Information" In 1984 the United States withdrew from United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), on the ground (among others) of its alleged threat to the "free flow of information." In the standard formulation in the U.S. press, UNESCO was said to be in favor of a New World Information Order (NWIO) whose essence was "government control of the media" and the "licensing of journalists"; whereas the United States and its media were dedicated to unconditional freedom of communications as a matter of high principle. This formulation, a caricature of the real positions of the contending parties, reflected an undisclosed conflict of interest on the part of the western media, as well as remarkable hypocrisy. For many years western media end news agencies have dominated the international flow of news. Third World spokespersons have long protested the biased portrayals of their countries in western news and called for a two-way and balanced news flow. A more basic Third World concern is the threat to cultural integrity and sovereignty from the flood of western advertising messages and other cultural products, as well as news. A number of Third World (and sympathetic western) analysts contended that true independence and popular mobilization for development are impossible without independent national communications systems. Such concerns were accentuated in the 1960s with the development of satellite communications and remote sensing technologies. The former allows western programmers to transmit news, ads, and entertainment entirely outside the control of national governments. Remote sensing allows western states to survey the mineral and other resources of lesser powers, again resulting in a loss in control, power, and independence. The official U.S. position, followed consistently in the U.S. mass media, was that the only issues raised by a NW were "freedom of the press" versus "government control. Freedom of the press meant a commercial press funded by advertising. Might an advertising-based press display a systematic bias based on its restricted revenue source? Might it be affected by proprietary wealth and interest? Might it reflect the national and corporate interests of the home country and its leading multinational organizations? How concentrated could the media become before it should be regarded as "unfree"? These questions were never raised in the U.S. mass media in their frequent reports and discussions of the withdrawal. A media worried about the effects of the NWIO on the free flow of information should also be deeply concerned about constraints on free flow on their own western turf. It is one of the ironies of the U.S. and British withdrawals from UNESCO, however, that they were engineered by governments notable for increased secrecy, the curtailment of access to information, covert operations, deception, and manipulation of the press. Demac points out that "From its beginnings, the Reagan administration made little attempt to disguise its preference for operating outside congressional and public scrutiny; it quickly adopted an array of secrecy regulations that reached far beyond those of previous administrations." In addition to major restrictions on the free speech rights of government workers and a sharp increase in the surveillance and harassment of those opposed to government polices, the new administration greatly expanded the classification and destruction of documents it deemed sensitive. It even began the reclassification of documents already in the public domain, a policy worthy of a Ministry of Truth and consistent with its systematic lying and rewriting of history. Demac also notes the increased restrictions on foreign travel of Americans and visits by politically deviant foreigners to the United States, plus substantial efforts to control the flow of messages, electronic and printed, to and from Cuba and other states. Canadian films on acid rain and the effects of nuclear war were forced to bear the label "propaganda." Fulbright fellowships were cut back and politicized, the reduced funds redistributed to straightforward government propaganda. Constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams remarked that the Reagan administration "acts as if information were in the nature of a potentially disabling disease which must be feared, controlled, and ultimately quarantined." The Thatcher government was equally or more aggressive in attacking dissident media and whistleblowers. Her movement's attitude toward the free flow of information within Britain was described in an off-the-record briefing to U.S. correspondents on Dec. 3, 1986 by Bernard Ingham, the Prime Minister's press spokesman: "There is no freedom of information in this country; there's no public right to know. There's a commonsense idea of how to run a country and Britain is full of commonsense people... Bugger the public's right to know. The game is the security of the state-not the public's right to know." The U.S. mass media were never very disturbed by the Reagan-Thatcher encroachments on free flow at home, nor did they ever point out during the period of withdrawal from UNESCO the huge contradiction between the Reagan-Thatcher devotion to free flow in UNESCO-related areas and their antithetical policies at home. Another oddity that might have struck an observer not well indoctrinated with U.S. conceptions of freedom was the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. sphere of influence over the past several decades. Attacks on the media in these countries went well beyond "licensing" and other alleged evils of the NWIO, and were received by the mass media with virtual silence and lack of indignation. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 94 journalists "disappeared" or were murdered in Argentina from 1976-1982,21 were killed in El Salvador between 1980 and 1984, and 48 were killed in Guatemala between 1978 and 1982, almost all by governments supported by the United States.. Numerous papers were closed in these countries, and those that remained open learned a lesson in free flow from the murders. Similar developments occurred in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and other states in Latin America in the period coincident with the rising media concern over a NWIO (1973-84). On the basis of principled concern over a free press and free flow of information, it is hard to explain why the media would be passionately concerned over "licensing" in a NWIO that did not exist, but failed to rouse themselves over the murder of scores of journalists in U.S. client states in the Third World. The apparent contradiction is resolvable, however, if it is recognized that repressive governments in Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala serve a larger transnational corporate interest and do not interfere with Associated Press and New York Times operations and material interests. Thus, what appears to be an unaccountable inconsistency can be explained, but the relevant principle is corporate access and profit, not freedom of information. ***** -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The End of Democracy ? from the book Triumph of the Market by Edward S. Herman published by South End Press, 1995 Democracy is under siege throughout the globe, including in the United States. This of course runs exactly counter to the forecasts of the ideologues of Western triumphalism, who predicted a fairly rapid universalization of democracy in the post-Cold War era. But these analysts overrated the importance of elections as the basis (and proof) of democracy, and underrated the ability of dominant market forces to drain elections of democratic substance Elections may be occurring more widely, but even more consistently than in the past they now have material consequences only when they serve the dominant interests of the global market. When they fail to do this, there is a policy stalemate, unless the newly elected leaders "see the light" (i.e., sell out), or until a new election brings "realists" to power. When voters reject a treaty supported by the dominant interests, a second vote may be taken. Thus, when the Maastricht agreement was defeated in Denmark in 1992, a further vote was held following an intensive "educational" campaign to bring the Danes around. It is interesting that nobody is suggesting another vote to see whether the Danes, upon further reflection and experience with the European Community's (EC's) failure to cope with the growing crisis of unemployment, might have changed their minds once more. Voting ended when the proper response was forthcoming. "Realists" find no insurmountable obstacles to getting things done-tax changes advantageous to business and the wealthy can be enacted, public property can be sold off, labor unions can be dismantled or weakened, large-scale unemployment produced and maintained, and treaties can be passed that compromise the national sovereignty-irrespective of public opinion. In the United States and Great Britain, Reagan and Thatcher were able to carry out right-wing and business-supported agendas that involved drastic changes in income distribution, national spending priorities, and the role of central and local governments. Thatcher could "Break the Nation" with electoral minority support (41 percent). Following her rule, labor costs in Great Britain are now 25 percent lower than the EC average and only just above Spain and Ireland" (Financial Times, July 8, 1993). In Canada, Brian Mulroney was able to carry out regressive economic policies and get treaties enacted even when his public approval rating had dipped below 10 percent. The Wall Street Journal reported that at the moment the Tory-dominated Canadian Senate voted approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in dune 1993, by 47 to 30, the public opposed its enactment by 58 to 39. The dominant Canadian media, closely attuned to the preferences of the national financial and business elite, supported the treaty. By contrast, Bob Rae, head of the liberal-left New Democratic Party (NDP) in Ontario, Canada, failed to implement most of his promised economic and social reforms following his electoral triumph in 1990. This was partly a result of political cowardice and failure to mobilize the social movements that had supported his candidacy to help him carry out reforms opposed by the powerful. But it was also a consequence of the fact that the corporate and media opposition "mounted an incredibly intemperate and even hysterical campaign" against labor and fiscal reforms, steadily assailing the government for increasing the deficit," and eventually cowing it into focusing on expenditure cuts and deficit control and largely abandoning its social democratic reform program. Bill Clinton, also, entering office in the United States with a painfully inadequate program of renewal, was under immediate business/media attack for fiscal extravagance, and quickly began a retreat toward conservative orthodoxy and dedication to deficit control. Here, as in Ontario, cowardice and a failure to mobilize a supportive popular constituency were conspicuous, but these seemingly regular failures and retreats are grounded in something deeper than personality defects. When elected or revolutionary leaders in the Third World threaten to serve local majority interests, as in Jamaica in the first Manley term, Guatemala under Arbenz in the early 1950s, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and Haiti under Aristide, the governments may be subjected to simple economic warfare (Jamaica), foreign-organized terrorism (Nicaragua), proxy army invasion (Guatemala), or indigenous military coups and brutal repression carried out by U.S. trained security forces (Haiti). These interventions instruct Third World populations that reforms they may want are not permissible, according to higher authority, and that efforts to put them into practice even by democratic elections may be dangerous to their health and welfare (see further the discussion of Nicaragua and Haiti under "Elections in the Provinces," below). Institutional Weakening of Democracy Democracy is being weakened on a global scale by the strengthening of market forces and market interests. These have damaged the institutional basis of democracy and made elections and traditional political pressures incapable of meeting the demands of ordinary citizens. Greater size, diversification, and mobility and geographic spread of business firms has drastically altered the balance of power between capital and labor and increased capital's leverage over government. Corporations, now often global entities, can shift production rapidly to the most hospitable investment climes, and they have been able to make union members compete with one another even within a single country. This has been a cumulative and self- reinforcing process-as unions become less powerful they are less attractive to workers; their decline in membership (in the United States, by 25 percent in the 1980s alone) has weakened them in both the market and political arenas. Meanwhile governments, under increasing business influence, have stripped away union defenses against strike-breaking, organizational harassment, and decertification. This decline, rooted in the structural conditions of an evolving global market, represents a serious weakening of pluralism; the: primary organized oppositional barrier to capital's complete domination is receding into the shadows and shows no sign of imminent recovery. The growth of global money and capital markets has also weakened democracy in that money capital "votes" with its movements into and out of countries, based on fears and hopes of being badly or well treated. If there is a threat of higher taxes on capital or increased benefits to poor and middle-class people, money flees and interest rates tend to rise. This "natural" process sustained Reaganism and constrains those trying to serve ordinary citizens. The slackened rate of economic growth, intensified global competition, and associated "restructuring" (local firings and speedup) and "delocalization" (plant and production relocations) has also had a devastating effect on government budgets. On the one hand, it has pressed governments to keep business and "investor" (i.e., wealthy people) taxes and inflation low to remain "competitive" with those in other areas trying to attract business; on the other hand, the increase in unemployment resulting from anti-inflation policies, business's actions, and unrelenting demands for government services to meet infrastructure needs and cope with environmental damage have enlarged government outlays. The fiscal crunch and deficits have, of course, made it difficult to meet the needs of ordinary citizens. The irony is that business policies, and tax benefits to the elite provided by governments super friendly to business, are major causes of the fiscal crisis, but in accord with market necessities the solution must still come out of the hides of ordinary citizens. Thus throughout the West the pressure is on to reduce outlays for the unemployed and disadvantaged, as there is No Other Option in a market dominated system; "we" must all sacrifice in order that "we" can be "competitive." One temporary expedient that fits well the market's imperatives is "privatization," which generates sales commissions for the business elite and allows them to acquire public property at bargain prices, while it provides revenue to government without tax increases. It will reduce government income in the future, but that is hardly the concern of private parties striving to increase their net worth right now. Privatization also has the merit of reducing the government's power, simultaneously enhancing the power of the private sector. This is a plus for those who fear the power of government to serve a democratic constituency, although these same "anti-government" forces are not averse to the opportunistic mobilization of government for elite service in military boondoggles, nuclear energy subsidies, forcing open markets abroad, etc. The market and its government agents have also erected an institutional apparatus of supra-governmental bodies, such as the IMF and World Bank with powers that go beyond and sometimes supersede those of elected governments. By attaching rules and conditions to their loans, these bodies are able to impose policy regimes on the borrowers that conform to the interests of the transnational corporate community. EC, GATT, Maastricht, the Canadian-U.S. trade agreement of 1988, and the NAFTA treaty are high-level arrangements with associated bureaucratic structures that negotiate economic policy over the heads of the voters. These accords permit the overriding of economic and environmental decisions of national and local authorities. These institutions and agreements thus provide a kind of international government representing the interests of the truly elect-namely, the leaders of the global corporations-whose aims they can pursue without having to undergo any electoral test. Electoral Processes in the Developed Countries In the economically developed countries, with the increased cost and importance of TV and other mass media, money has assumed overwhelming importance in electoral campaigns. The decline of organized labor has added to the financial dominance of property interests in elections. Parties and candidates must appeal to "investors" for campaign sustenance-mainly business leaders, the wealthy, and political action committees closely related to them-so that deals, promises and commitments to election funders preclude social democratic (let alone socialist) programs. The "left wing" of the property party will make vague promises of service to the majority during the election campaign, and even the purer business party will speak of "bringing us together" in a "kinder, gentler" country. But these promises will not be kept-partly because of the contrary commitments to the funder-investors, but also because the monied interests can make any attempts to serve the majority very costly. They have the power to stalemate programs by mobilizing friendly legislators to obstruct, lobbyists to bargain and threaten, the corporate mass media to denigrate, and the financial markets to punish deviations from their interests. When elections bring in nominally populist governments, they will be prevented from taking any significant actions; they will be quickly discredited as having "veered to the left" and created an atmosphere discouraging to business. They will have to reassure capital that they are investor friendly and that they understand that, in an age of deficits and austerity, social spending must be constrained and investment encouraged. If a leader decided to resist-to tell capital to go to hell-and to carry out vigorous expansionary and redistributive policies, he or she would run into a firestorm of opposition and would almost surely not be able to implement such policies in the existing political economy. For this reason political leaders not only will not embark on such bold ventures, they even announce in advance policies designed to placate capital-which contradict their promises of renewal and service to their democratic constituencies. Clinton's 1992 deficit reduction-plus-stimulus plan, even if fully enacted, would have had a net deflationary impact on the stagnant U.S. economy; his proposed welfare-workfare approach was little improvement over Reagan- Bush policies; and his tax reforms-his most progressive endeavor-were only a very partial offset to the Reagan-Bush era redistribution upward. In brief, markets, money, and the media now work in tandem to allow substantial change in institutional arrangements and policies only where this will serve the larger corporate interest (now called the "national interest"), but quickly quash threats to those interests posed by political leaders responsive to popular demands (i.e., the "special interests"). A massive propaganda campaign has successfully inculcated the idea that Big Government is the source of our problems, with spending for social reform a pernicious manifestation of out-of-control government-an ideological/propaganda coup that discredits government actions that benefit ordinary citizens. With reform, let alone necessary radical change, stalemated ideologically and in electoral political processes, ordinary citizens will gradually lose interest in the election game, cynically write off politics and politicians, and withdraw from the political arena. They are disillusioned and angry, but they seem to have lost in a fair electoral fight (at least this is the impression conveyed by the mainstream media). Thus, although ordinary citizens exit because of the absence of real options, this has no political consequence in constructive action. Real options not being mentioned let alone debated, do not enter public consciousness. And with the elite beneficiaries of the existing system disproportionately finding political participation worthwhile, the power of capital in election processes is further enhanced. Elections in the Provinces Third World elections have become even more grotesque parodies of democratic order than those in the technologically advanced states. For one thing, inequalities tend to be greater in the less developed countries, increasing the bias in favor of property interests stemming from differential resources and media control. Second, the great powers and global market forces and institutions have a very potent impact on Third World countries because of their poverty and financial dependence. Caught in the web of the international financial system, the poor countries depend on borrowing from private commercial banks, the IMF and World Bank, and on aid money from the rich countries. They have No Other Option than to comply with their lenders' demands on budget and monetary policy, and their people are not "free to choose." As a recent illustration, Ramiro de Leon Carpio, the former human rights ombudsman of Guatemala, who became president in June 1993 following the failed coup of Serrano, initially promised to give top priority to overcoming the poverty that afflicts 87 percent of the Guatemalan people. Within a month, de Leon had shunted this objective into the background in the face of IMF demands for austerity, stating that Guatemala's macro-economic policy "has complied with IMF demands, and we need to continue that way, otherwise we'll destabilize the country and cause a loss of confidence. But we need to give it a human face wherever possible." The "market" does not like anything approaching real democracy, which invariably imposes higher taxes on those who can afford to pay and supports worker rights and benefits, and thus threatens profitability (but is euphemistically said to jeopardize "competitiveness," the "climate of investment," or "stability"). The historic record points quite clearly to the market preference for authoritarian government in the Third World, and it is sometimes acknowledged by bankers and the media. Morgan Stanley and Company managing director Madhav Dhar told Business Week (April 23, 1993) that "there is a saying on Wall Street that you buy when there is blood on the streets" (the article was about India's instability and its effects on financial market attitudes); and the Wall Street Journal ran an article shortly thereafter entitled "Why Global Investors Bet on Autocrats, Not Democrats" (Jan. 12, 1993). But such facts are not allowed to interfere with the ideological truth that the West supports democracy everywhere. In a number of Third World countries "demonstration elections" have been staged by the United States to put a positive gloss on terror regimes and justify U.S. aid, as in Vietnam in 1966-67 and El Salvador in 1982 and 1984. Although none of the basic conditions of a free election were met in these cases, the U.S. mass media found them legitimating. Salinas's electoral victories in Mexico have been characterized by blatant fraud, serious human rights violations, and attacks on oppositional forces, as well as vast electoral corruption in using state money and business kickbacks to finance electoral campaigns. Salinas even won in 1988 on a semi-populist program, which he immediately abandoned. But because he is the perfect Third World comprador-politician, servant of the global corporate order, and sellout of his own majority, the U.S. mainstream media have generously overlooked or downplayed his violations of the democratic rules of the game. He is a statesman and leader by rule of comprador service. In contrast with these approved elections, which ratify rule by those who will pursue policies serviceable to the truly elect, are elections won by governments threatening to provide unnecessary food, medical care, and education to the human "oxen" (Somoza). Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and Aristide's election victory and ouster in Haiti provide instructive examples. Somoza's rule in Nicaragua had been accepted and treated kindly by the United States for decades, despite its rapaciously undemocratic character. Even before the Sandinistas took power, the Carter government was bargaining hard to keep in place the murderous National Guard, which would presumably have served to preserve "Western values" from the Somoza era. U. S. hostility to the new government was immediate, and Nicaragua was under armed attack by the United States from 1981 until the Sandinista ouster in 1990. Their election victory in 1984 did them no good. Only an election that they lost ended subversion and terror designed to overturn them by any available means. They did not meet the U.S. and market standard of legitimacy, which called for subservience and the pursuit of the "logic of the minority." In the case of Haiti, Aristide, like the Sandinistas, represented the majority of unimportant people and threatened to pursue their interests. Although he won a crushing electoral victory in 1991 with 67 percent of the vote, his ouster by the notoriously corrupt and brutal military, followed by a reign of terror unleashed against his supporters, did not cause the United States to view the matter as urgent and calling for decisive action (not even an early freezing of the assets of the government and elite, or imposing a rigorous blockade, let alone sponsoring a proxy army, as with Nicaragua). U.S. officials even expressed concern over Aristide's human rights abuses, and they negotiated for Aristide's return with the military establishment still in place (reminiscent of Carter's effort to keep the Nicaraguan National Guard intact). There was also a call for Aristide to "broaden his base" (67 percent did not suffice) and to choose a "moderate" for Prime Minister (i.e., someone who will oppose his reforms that serve ordinary citizens). The contrast with Nicaragua is enlightening: after Chamorro's 1990 victory the United States pressured her to exclude the Sandinistas entirely from government and to try to undermine their power base by actions that threatened civil war, although the Sandinistas had received 41 percent of the vote (in an election held under U.S. blackmail threat and direct intervention). The United States also pressed the government to dismantle the Sandinista army, although it was not a thoroughly corrupt and murderous one like the Haitian. The lack of respect for democratic processes where they threaten to serve ordinary citizens rather than the elite and market could hardly be more obvious. In a number of Latin American states, including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, elections were held after a period of army rule during which many left and social democratic leaders were tortured and murdered, labor and peasant groups destroyed or weakened, and the economy restructured and opened up in ways favored by the IMF and global rulers. The armies that carried out these terrorist operations were built up and trained by the United States to serve larger (i.e., U.S. and market) interests, and they did this with energy during the periods of direct military rule. With the fall of the military regimes, the murderers and torturers were never punished and were allowed to remain in place as enforcers in case social democratic forces pursuing the logic of the majority" get out of hand once again. Although this immunity from the rule of law and the very presence and threat of these armies badly compromises the democratic integrity of the new "democracies," U.S. pressure to demobilize Latin armed forces has been confined to Nicaragua. The Prospect Before Us Back in the 1970s, when the Brazilian military was dismantling the protective institutions of the majority, representatives of the Catholic Church repeatedly and bitterly complained that the New Order was deliberately atomizing the population in the service of the transnational corporation (TNC - one document was entitled "The Marginalization of the People." The Church contended that the National Security State and its use of terror were integral to the new corporate order, as its economic and social policies "in effect provoke a revolution that did not exist." The intensified exploitation would have led to a quick removal of the government under democratic conditions. Only the army could enforce the new economic order, as was openly acknowledged in 1976 by Martinez de Hoz, the top financial administrator of the Argentine military government: "We enjoy the economic stability that the Armed Forces guarantee us. This plan can be fulfilled despite its lack of popular support. It has sufficient political support...that provided by the Armed Forces." In the New World Order taking shape today we can see the same economic forces described by the Brazilian Bishops at work on a global scale. It is the very purpose and historic role of the TNC to take advantage of its new global mobility to engage in an arbitrage that depresses wages, working conditions, and benefits toward a lowest common global denominator. In the advanced countries, there is a steady migration of firms to jurisdictions that have low wages and benefits and few environmental restrictions. Unions have been weakened and destroyed by market forces and complementary state action in a further atomization process. Structural unemployment and part-time and temporary work have risen steadily and wage and benefit concessions have been exacted from the work force. Social programs that have protected the majority are under increasing pressure, with John Major and "socialist" Felipe Gonzalez of Spain urging further European moves toward a "deregulated labor market" (i.e., a removal of support for unions and collective bargaining and reduced unemployment benefits). In short, the rulers of the world, the TNCs and the leaders of the dominant states and new supra-national organizations, have successfully achieved the goal of limiting the organizational and policy options of the world's leaders and peoples to a private enterprise system and actions that serve its interests. To paraphrase the sardonic remark of Canadian economist Mel Watkins: in the West we have "freedom of choice" among 51 lite beers, but only one choice in the way we can organize our economic life. As Bernard Cassen has pointed out, however, the rules of international behavior and policy under EC, GATT, and IMF don't pretend to serve a human community (despite the phrase European "Community"); a human community has complex and variable human needs, whereas the new arrangements are confined to mechanical rules for serving an economic model and an ideology of the powerful, a sure recipe for disaster. Z magazine, September 1993 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Triumph of the Market The Global Empire from the book Triumph of the Market by Edward S. Herman published by South End Press, 1995 Freedom as the Recognition of Necessity During the years of disintegration of the Soviet bloc, numerous articles in the mainstream media referred to the ongoing collapse of the Soviet "empire." The same media have never applied the word empire to the world of U.S. (or other Western dominated) client states. By ideological premise these are Free, and at most temporarily advised, aided, threatened, and occupied until the natives are ready for self-rule and responsible leaders are in place. But this self-serving usage is deceptive. The New World Order (NWO) gives daily manifestations that a more sophisticated phase of imperialism has evolved in which trade, aid, loans, debt management, proxy armies, techno-wars, and international "law" are deployed to keep Third World countries in a dependent status. Free World imperialism has been extended to a virtually global regime with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, opening up a vast new area for exploitation, removing a major obstacle to the First World's use of force against the Third World, and making the UN system once again serviceable in the cause of Freedom. In short, a higher stage of "the highest stage" of capitalism has been reached. The new system is now working very well to quash or prevent the emergence of Third World leaders and movements that might embark on an independent course of development. Michael Manley, recently retired from office in Jamaica, has pointed out that social reform has become impractical, with Jamaica desperate for foreign exchange and "strapped up to its eyeballs, totally dependent on an IMF that's more powerful than ever." His own earlier experiment in reform was undermined by Reagan policies as well as normal market forces, and the more mature Manley, returning to office in 1989, opted to accept the constraints of the NWO and eschew any attempt at progressive politics. He now not only regards these constraints as inescapable, he has surrendered spiritually as well as in practice to the new realism. The new Manley contends that "the market is the guarantee that you will attain the necessary level of competitive efficiency to be able to survive in a world market. " Freedom in the NWO thus has two aspects: economic freedom to invest, sell, and repatriate profits, which is fundamental; and the derivative freedom of leaders of weaker countries to carry out policies within the constraints of imperial reality. The latter freedom harks back to the Spinozan concept of freedom as the recognition of necessity. Let us review briefly the main elements and bases of the New Freedom of the Manleys, Ortegas, and their ilk. The Imperialism of Free Trade A notable article by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson entitled "The Imperialism of Free Trade" (Economic History Review, 1953) stressed the importance of "economic dependence and mutual good-feeling" as the basis for domination of less developed countries (LDCs) by imperial powers. Trade, loans, dependence on ports and markets, and investment in and control over railroads and other forms of communication produced an "informal paramountcy" over LDCs. This was frequently confirmed by a "treaty of free trade and friendship made or imposed upon a weaker state," which was perhaps "the most common political technique of British empire." Technical, marketing, and financial dependency were supplemented by the political influence of local comprador elements. Once the LDC's economy became dependent on foreign trade, the classes whose prosperity was drawn from the trade normally worked themselves in local politics to preserve the local political conditions needed for it. Gallagher and Robinson emphasized that intervention was only a supplement to a dominant influence that normally flowed from free-market forces. The imperial power would have to use military force only when local polities "fail to provide satisfactory conditions for commercial or strategic integration." Subsequent analyses have added the consideration that economic penetration and marketing connections have brought LDC elites into a new social nexus, including acculturation to the advanced consumerism of the First World. "Denationalization" of elites in Latin America thus took the twofold form of working for foreigners, and representing their interests, and absorbing their culture and repudiating one's own. The so- called "international demonstration effect" followed from the latter, and was characterized by a gradual shift of elite purchases from local goods to high-style foreign imports. This weakened domestic industry and, via the increasing imports, made for balance-of-payments difficulties, enlarged debt, and greater dependency. Some analysts have pointed to the contrast between the Latin American and Japanese elites in this respect: for many decades the latter rejected denationalization in both its aspects. This helped preserve Japanese economic and cultural autonomy and contributed to their ability to take off into sustained economic growth. "Managed" Trade The United States and other great powers also "manage" trade, via tariffs, quotas, subsidies, harassment and seizures of imports, threats of retaliation, and boycotts. Much of this management is done under the guise of combating somebody else's "unfair trade." Thus, beyond the power stemming from the dependency relations of normal trade flows, the great powers manipulate the trade environment with "bilateral initiatives based on bullying smaller trading partners." The Aid System Government aid has long been deployed to supplement private trade and financing. In the post-World War II era this was improved and given international sanction by the creation of major international lending institutions, including the IMF, World Bank, and InterAmerican Development Bank, all dominated by the United States. Given U.S. power, U.S. hostility to a small country has traditionally resulted not only in the cutoff of direct U.S. aid, but defunding on the part of the "international" institutions, and then by private finance. When added to "managed trade" attacks, the pressures on small countries through these economic channels can be very severe. On the other hand, states meeting U.S.-IMF-World Bank standards are treated generously. The criteria of acceptability are a suitable degree of political subservience, and policy choices that, as Gallagher and Robinson described in connection with imperial policy in general, "provide satisfactory conditions for commercial or strategic integration." Such policies-namely, establishment of an open economy, privatization, a stress on raw materials exports, protection of the rights of foreign investors, cutbacks in social budgets, and devotion to inflation control-are the elements of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) implemented by the IMF enforcers and missionaries. Games Morgan, an economics correspondent for BBC World Services compares SAP to the "word of God" dispensed by missionaries going out from Western Europe to visit the barbarians in the Middle Ages.) SAPs have often been implemented by terror states that were the ultimate in non-democracy. But aid and bank funding flowed their way. Nicaragua, pursuing the logic of the majority" in the early 1980s, was quickly defunded and even put on a Free World hit list; Argentina under military rule from 1976 to 1983 murdered thousands, but received lots of Free World money. Marcos, Mobutu, Suharto, Pinochet, end the Brazilian generals after the 1964 coup met the twofold criteria of freedom noted above: economic freedom and adherence to the proper rules of behavior in Third World countries. The needs and demands of the local majority have been irrelevant in this system, and in fact a "courageous" willingness to resist demands for relief in the face of mass suffering is a key characteristic of qualified leaders. In this framework, we can see that Yeltsin is now the IMF's and the West's "hit man" who inflicts pain on the general population as required by the imposed model-as Pinochet and Marcos did before him-with much of his power now resulting from the fact that the aid is contingent on Yeltsin's retaining authority and thus preserving the West's "confidence" in Russia's pursuit of a SAP. Structural "reform" funded by "aid" can move only in one direction; if any reforms designed to advance social democracy were attempted, confidence would sag, funding would dry up, and the leaders pursuing such outlandish ends would become demagogues and perhaps even qualify for destabilization. The Subversion System Subversion is an invidious word that the mainstream media and intelligentsia rarely if ever apply to their own government's actions, and acts by the United States that would be gross subversion if done by others are normalized in the U.S. media. Most notable was the arming, training, and brainwashing of Latin American police and military establishments from the 1950s onward, to reorient them to U.S. needs and provide a counterweight to populist and radical movements at home. This was followed by the rapid proliferation of military dictatorships, death squads, torture, and disappearances on a continent-wide basis in our most closely watched sphere of influence. Brazil in the early 1960s is a classic case (and the classic exposition is in Jan Black's United States Penetration of Brazil), where the United States operated as a quasi-occupying power in this supposedly sovereign country, the largest in Latin America. The U.S. Embassy expected to be consulted on major decisions. The United States subsidized hundreds of politicians, intellectuals and journalists, organized think-tanks, bought space in newspapers, penetrated and tried to disrupt labor and peasant organizations, and established close relations with a significant segment of the military establishment and other security forces. It was a virtual partner in the 1964 coup, wrote the justifying White Paper (unattributed), and the ruling generals expressed their deep appreciation and loyalty to the Godfather in the years that followed. In lesser client states, U.S. intervention in policymaking and manipulation of the political environment is equally or more blatant, but it is treated with brevity and understanding in the mainstream media. For example, while U.S. law prohibits foreigners from funding and organizing our elections, major U.S. intrusions in the Nicaraguan elections of 1984 and 1990 were taken as perfectly legitimate in the U.S. mainstream media. An imperial double standard was completely internalized. This is plausible-the normalization of our own subversion is obviously necessary to maintain subversion as a viable instrument of imperial policy. The Proxy Army System In addition to subversion by the provision of "military aid and training, " proxy forces may be organized and funded to attack a target country whose military forces are not easily won over to counterrevolution. This was the case in Nicaragua after July 19,1979, where the United States had to make do with Somoza National Guard remnants in Honduras, supplemented by mercenary recruitment, just as it used the Chinese Nationalist Army remnants in Burma after 1949 to harass China, and the Khmer Rouge and its allies in Thailand to attack Cambodia (and by this route, Vietnam) after 1979. As is well known, U.S. support automatically makes these proxies "freedom fighters," as opposed to terrorists. It is also clear that any ruling by the World Court declaring the proxy army system illegal in a particular case (now unlikely in the NWO) would render the Court momentarily a "hostile forum" that can be reasonably and safely ignored. The Techno-War Option Panama in 1989 and Iraq in 1991 demonstrated the efficacy of a short, capital-intensive assault as a useful imperial option for displacing a disobedient leader (Panama) or returning to the stone age the society of a disobedient and threatening one (Iraq). The option was made more viable by the disappearance of the Soviet Threat (i.e., Soviet constraint), the associated return of the UN system from demagoguery to reasonableness and utility, and mastery of the art of the short war that minimizes U.S. casualties while providing the media and public with a modern version of the Roman circus (with bombs dropped on "mere gooks," Arabs, etc., instead of barbarians or Christians being fed to lions). The New Legality A crowning touch to the new imperial system has been its refurbished base and legitimation in imperial law. First, there was the reconquest of the Security Council, with the demise of the Soviet Union eliminating the threat of a veto, and the virtual dependency status of the members assuring a majority vote in favor of proposals by the United States and its eager British Tory ally. Iraq can be devastated and starved by the United States under UN auspices. At the same time the United States can protect its Israeli client from enforcement of a long-standing Security Council resolution (242) condemning Israel's illegal occupation of territory, and can veto or simply ignore a Security Council vote condemning its own invasion and occupation of Panama. In a further development of imperialist legality, the World Court, which challenged U.S. direct and sponsored terrorism against Nicaragua in 1986 (albeit without effect), dismissed Libya's appeal to international law which, according to the Montreal Convention of 1971, appeared to give Libya certain options in handling the case of its two citizens accused of involvement in the Pan Am 103 bombing. The World Court now declares that a Security Council resolution supersedes international law! This rounds out the legal system of the NWO nicely. The law is what the Godfather decides. The Imperial Hierarchy In sum, the global imperial order has been strengthened by the Soviet collapse and Chinese counter- revolution. It has been weakened somewhat by the economic disabilities of the United States and the rise in economic strength of Japan and Germany. But the United States is still far and away the largest and most diversified economy, has the largest aid budget, dominates the international lending institutions, and its huge investment in military power, and the relatively small Japanese and German military establishments continue to give the United States preeminent power and considerable discretion in dealing with Third World countries. The Gulf War displayed the structure of power: Germany and Japan were compelled to support and even help fund U.S. actions damaging to their own interests. But while the imperial hierarchy has been strengthened vis-a-vis Second and Third World countries, the increased size and mobility of the transnational corporations (TNCs) (including the global private financial institutions) has weakened the power of individual states, including those at the peak of the hierarchy. Their capacity to run independent monetary and fiscal policies has been reduced and their freedom of action in general is to a great extent contingent on their serving the TNC and banker interest. In the age of the triumph of the market the dominant colossi that stand astride the world are the major TNCs and banks; nations are free to serve these rulers of the world. Z magazine, July/August 1992 The Banality of Evil from the book Triumph of the Market by Edward S. Herman published by South End Press, 1995 The concept of the banality of evil came into prominence following the publication of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was based on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt's thesis was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats. Normalizing the Unthinkable Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. The late Herman Kahn spent a lifetime making nuclear war palatable (On Thermonuclear War, Thinking About the Unthinkable), and this strangelovian phoney got very good press. ~ In an excellent article entitled "Normalizing the unthinkable," in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of March 1984, Lisa Peattie described how in the Nazi death camps work was "normalized" for the long- term prisoners as well as regular personnel: "[P]rison plumbers laid the water pipe in the crematorium and prison electricians wired the fences. The camp managers maintained standards and orderly process. The cobblestones which paved the crematorium yard at Auschwitz had to be perfectly scrubbed." Peattie focused on the parallel between routinization in the death camps and the preparations for nuclear war, where the "unthinkable" is organized and prepared for in a division of labor participated in by people at many levels. Distance from execution helps render responsibility hazy. "Adolph Eichmann was a thoroughly responsible person, according to his understanding of responsibility. For him, it was clear that the heads of state set policy. His role was to implement, and fortunately, he felt, it was never part of his job actually to have to kill anyone." Peattie noted that the head of MlT's main military research lab in the 1960s argued that "their concern was development, not use, of technology." Just as in the death camps, in weapons labs and production facilities, resources are allocated on the basis of effective participation in the larger system, workers derive support from interactions with others in the mutual effort, and complicity is obscured by the routineness of the work, interdependence, and distance from the results. Peattie also pointed out how, given the unparalleled disaster that would follow nuclear war, "resort is made to rendering the system playfully, via models and games." There is also a vocabulary developed to help render the unthinkable palatable: "incidents," "vulnerability indexes," "weapons impacts," and "resource availability." She doesn't mention it, but our old friend "collateral damage," used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, came out of the nukespeak tradition. Slavery and Racism as Routine When I was a boy, and an ardent baseball fan, I never questioned, or even noticed, that there were no Black baseball players in the big leagues. That was the way it was; racism was so routine that it took years of incidents, movement actions, reading, and real-world traumas to overturn my own deeply imbedded bias. Historically, this was a country in which human slavery was firmly institutionalized and routinized, with abolitionists in the pre-civil war years looked upon as violent extremists by the dominant elites and masses alike in the North. The rationalizations for slavery were remarkable. A set of intellectuals arose in the South before 1860 that not only defended slavery, but argued its moral superiority on the grounds of its service to the slaves, to the disadvantage of the enslaving Whites! Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, ... is a superb account of how U.S. science at the highest levels constructed and maintained a "scientific" case for racism over many decades by mainly innocent and not consciously contrived scientific charlataury. The ability to put aside cultural blinders is rare. And it appears that what money and power demand, science and technology will provide, however outrageous the end. Mainstream history has also successfully put Black slavery and oppression in a tolerable light. A powerful article by the late Nathan I. Huggins, "The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of American History, " in the Winter 1991 issue of the Radical History Review, shows well how the "master narrative" in historiography has normalized Black slavery and post- 1865 racism. Slavery was a "tragic error" (like the Vietnam War), rather than a rational and institutional choice; it has been marginalized as an aside or tangent, rather than recognized as a central and integral feature of U.S. history; and it has been portrayed as an error in process of rectification in a progressive evolution, rather than a terrible permanent scar that helps explain the Southern Strategy, the current attack on affirmative action, and the enlarging Black ghetto disaster of today. Profits end Jobs in Death Normalization of the unthinkable comes easily when money, status, power, and jobs are at stake. Companies and workers can always be found to manufacture poison gases, napalm, or instruments of torture, and intellectuals will be dredged up to justify their production and use. The rationalizations are hoary with age: government knows best, ours is a strictly defensive effort, or, if it wasn't me somebody else would do it. There is also the retreat to ignorance, real, cultivated, or feigned. Consumer ignorance of process is important. Dr. Samuel Johnson avowed that we would kill a cow rather than forego eating meat, but visits to slaughterhouses have made quite a few people into vegetarians. A cover story of Newsweek some years ago, illustrating U.S. consumption of meat by showing livestock walking into a human mouth, elicited many protests-people don't like to be reminded that steaks are obtained from slaughtered animals; they like to imagine that they are manufactured in factories, possibly out of biomass. The bureaucratization of the use of animals for human ends is a large and controversial subject, but the potential for abuse is continuously realized as stock raisers, slaughterhouses, trappers, the Pentagon, the Animal Damage Control Agency, chemical, medical and cosmetic researchers, and academic entrepreneurs search for ways to improve the bottom line or fill in niches of "knowledge" that somebody will pay for. At the University of Pennsylvania a few years ago there was a Head Injury Lab, funded by the government, in which baboons were subjected to head injuries in the alleged interest of helping us (i.e., creatures with souls, the culmination of the evolutionary process, and the realization of the purpose of the cosmos). The lab was invaded by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who among other things took away some records and films. The documentary which PETA made out of these materials, which showed these intelligent creatures having their heads smashed and rendered into zombies, also gave clear evidence that official rules of treatment of lab animals were violated, and, most important, that the participants' attitudes toward the animals were insensitive and ugly. It was not hard to think of death camps watching the documentary of this lab in action. Yet the scientific community at Penn not only defends the use of animals against outside critics with passion and apparent unanimity, but has never to my knowledge admitted in public that the Head Injury Lab got out of hand. In building weapons, contractors and the Pentagon have become quite sophisticated in spreading business over many states, to reach a critical mass of jobs, profits and legislators/media by congressional district to maximize the lobbying base for funding. Jobs are jobs, whether building schools or Peacekeeper Missiles or cutting down thousand-year-old redwood trees. I was slightly nauseated during the Vietnam War era by Boeing ads soliciting workers for its helicopter plant, touting itself as an "equal opportunity employer (EOE)." Maybe the Dachau camp management was also an EOE, for jobs that needed to be done and for which there was an effective demand. Normalizing Shooting Human Fish in the Persian Gulf Barrel In the Persian Gulf War of 1991 Uncle Sam was an EOE, and our boys and girls over there were doing their assigned jobs, repelling naked aggression in another Operation Just Cause. The war was forced upon us by Saddam Hussein's rejection of the UN's and "allies" insistence that he disgorge Kuwait, much as Bush "plainly" did not want war (Anthony Lewis). Having made it Operation Just Cause No. 17, and a game with winners and losers, we could reasonably root for us-the moral force-to win. We were also defending Kuwait, and if once again the party being "saved" was "destroyed," well, this was not our fault. Besides, there is the "principle," of non-aggression, to which we are utterly devoted. The media could thus focus on our brave boys, girls, generals, and officials to tell us all about their plans, moves, reactions, and miscellaneous thoughts. We could watch them in action as they took off, landed, ate, joked, and expressed their feelings on the enemy, weather, and folks back home in the Big PX. They were part of an extended family, doing a dirty job, but with clean bombs and with the moral certainty of a just cause. The point was not often made that the enemy was relatively defenseless, and in somewhat the same position as the "natives" colonized, exterminated, and enslaved by the West in past centuries by virtue of muskets and machine guns ... Our technical superiority reflected our moral superiority. If it all seemed like shooting human fish in a barrel, one must keep in mind that we were dealing with lesser creatures (grasshoppers, two-legged animals, cockroaches), people who don't value life as much as we do, who allowed "another Hitler" to rule over them, and who stood in our way. One of the effects of high-tech warfare, as well as the exclusive focus on "our" casualties, plus censorship (official and self), is that the public is spared the sight of burning flesh. That enemy casualties were given great prominence during the Vietnam War is one of the great, and now institutionalized, myths of that era. Morley Safer's showing a GI applying a cigarette lighter to a Vietnamese thatched hut is used and referred to repeatedly as illustrating media boldness at that time because other cases would be hard to find. It caused CBS and Safer a lot of trouble (and he has been trying to make up for this sin ever since). Enormous government pressure and flak from other sources caused the media to provide grisly photos of enemy victims only with the greatest caution, and very infrequently, especially in light of the grisly reality. Capital intensive warfare in itself makes for distancing the public from the slaughter of mere gooks and Arabs. This is helpful in normalizing the unspeakable and unthinkable. On February 5, 1991, the Philadelphia Inquirer carried an Associated Press dispatch by Alexander Higgins, "Marriage finds new expression in gulf: Honey, pass the bombs." It is a little romance of a newly married couple, located at an air base in Saudi Arabia-and therefore regrettably obliged to sleep in separate tents-whose function is to load bombs on A-10 attack jets. It is a personal interest story, of two people and their relationship, with a job to do, in an unromantic setting. A fine study in the routinization of violence, of the banality of evil and the ways it is impressed on the public. Z magazine, April 1991

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