Radical Feminist Media Strategy Proposed By Class Workshop In 1970

As the radical feminist journal Women In Revolution reported in its Summer 1970 issue, the Class Workshop was formed “as a reaction to the oppression working class women experienced in the Movement” and proposed a radical feminist media strategy “in the interests of most women, not in the interests of the privileged few who want to make it on our backs.” Among the media strategy proposals made by the Class Workshop in 1970 were the following:

“Anyone who appears in the media is to be drawn by lot from her group. No one is to participate in the media alone…No member of a group can appear as an independent feminist…No individual or group can earn a living by writing or speaking about women’s liberation…Anyone who wants to write should write for the Movement.”
Next: Grit TV Host and Blue Grit Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 Downtown Interview—Part 3

U.S. Political Prisoner Marilyn Buck: A 1994 `Downtown' Interview--Part 2

Marilyn Buck is a former 1960s antiwar radical and 1970s and 1980s fugitive who is presently serving an 80-year sentence in a federal prison for women in Dublin, California. After the surrender of former 1960s radical and fugitive Kathy Power in 1993, Newsweek magazine published a cover story on Power’s odyssey. Following is the second part of a 1994 interview with Buck that appeared in the January 19, 1994 issue of Downtown in which she commented on the Newsweek article about Kathy Power.

Are there any similarities between Kathy Power’s life and yours?
Marilyn Buck: I am a woman who lived a number of years clandestinely. There are of course some similarities in our lives—being white, from the middle classes, having become political activists in the 1960s against the war in Vietnam and for Black liberation. And we both lived lives underground. For myself, I also know that becoming a politically active woman was not an overnight experience, that I was not misled by some charismatic character. It was a thoughtful process, an examination of what the nature of this system is, of my own role both as object and, more importantly, as subject to fight the oppression. I do not know Ms. Power’s history of politicization, but I definitely mistrust the media’s reductionist scenario of girl-meets-convict-and-is-manipulated.

I think the differences between our lives are more important. I did not feel it necessary to divorce myself from political struggle to survive; and, I did not surrender. I was captured—imprisoned without negotiation. There were no peace talks, no offers of plea.

Living underground is not a romantic endeavor or diversion, as Jane Alpert may have initially imagined it to be. It is difficult and personally heart-wrenching to be separated from one’s family, friends and one’s political cohorts. And yet people all over the world who have to struggle for survival and against grinding, brutal oppression lead lives of value, of resistance, no matter the deaths, the separations they endure. Being underground is not about escaping a life not liked or not fulfilling: Who one is does not rest on one’s name or birth date, but rather on how one lives and acts.

I remember a conversation I had with a comrade a number of years ago, at the time Bernardine Dohrn and her now-husband Bill Ayers, negotiated their own surrenders. The comrade sadly, and a bit angrily, stated that there was not one of us who were engaged in liberation struggle who would not wish to be home, but in Amerika not everyone can do that and live safely, secure from attack. I think that is true.

Certainly, it is much more possible for white people than for people from the oppressed nations to do so. I think of the Salvadoran FMLN comrades who have been assassinated after returning to public life from clandestinity, after all the agreements and international assurances. I wonder how many more will die at the hands of the death squads.

Being white gives one privilege, so the possibilities that exist to surrender are much greater. In this last decade many white people have retreated, either inured to the escalating racism and socioeconomic oppression, feeling they have done all they can, are not to blame, or are frightened at the possible consequences.

Ms. Power retired into the sanctuary of white Amerika. By that I mean that she, as a white woman, had the privilege of escaping notice by retiring into the expected “normal” white life. She did not have to fear being stopped by the police merely because she looked like a “suspicious person.” White people are not “suspicious,” unless they act suspicious or refuse to conform.

Certainly, in the first period of flight, there was danger because she was not “suspicious”—she was hunted! The full weight of the repressive apparatus was unleashed. Radical white women were under attack for having possibly supported her and Susan Saxe. However, after the threats and intimidation did not work in a number of radical women’s communities because of a refusal to collaborate with grand juries, the relentless hunt was thwarted, and the danger diminished.

The State was not prepared to terrorize white Amerika to capture Ms. Power, certainly not to the degree it did hunting Angela Davis or Assata Shakur in Black America. Once Ms. Power established a conforming identity she was relatively safe. But feeling safe and being safe are not always the same thing. One can be safe and not feel that. Conversely, one may feel relatively secure, believing that one has not betrayed oneself or been betrayed, and not be safe.

I can say this because I too was hunted. After the initial fear of being the fox before the hounds subsided, I found that it was relatively easy to be an unassuming, unnoticed white woman. It was assumed that I was a part of the white social consensus. My social credit was good. More than once, police even rushed to my aid—unrequested. The same police might then rush off to snarl at someone Black or Latino—ready to shoot to kill.

I was also able to continue being a political person. It did not stop me from challenging racism, or working in social programs. Not until I was discovered to be that traitor to the capitalist white supremacist consensus. Then my white skin lost its American Express creditability. The State’s agents went haywire. And here I am with a total of 80 years.

Why aren’t you in the radical gallery sidebar which Newsweek printed?
Buck: With the exception of Kathy Boudin [released on parole in 2003], none of the more than 100 political prisoners and P.O.W.s are mentioned in the “Revisiting the Radicals” sidebar. None of us have surrendered or repented. Ms. Boudin had been spectacularized in 1970 after the explosion of a townhouse in the Village, so she was “revisited.”

Very few of those of us now in prison were marketed by the media as “fame” commodities. We are buried as much as possible. Those political prisoners and POWs, such as Leonard Peltier or Geronimo jiJaga Pratt [now released], who are becoming better known, were not propelled by the press into “fame.” Rather, it is through the struggle of many people to bring attention to the reality that both these comrades were framed by the COINTELPRO agencies that they are known.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, MOVE supporter and a journalist sits on death row in Pennsylvania, framed by the State. He’s an established journalist, but neither Newsweek journalists, nor others in the establishment media, have yet [as of 1994], in more than 10 years, written an investigative piece about the fact that the government is marching him to the death chamber!

Newsweek did not write articles about the Tribunal held in 1991, in which charges were brought against the United States for its treatment and continuing detention of the political prisoners and POWs from the New Afrikan and Black, Puerto Rican, Native American, Hawaiian and Mexican national liberation movements, and the anti-imperialist and peace/antiwar movements. No establishment press wrote a major article on the Tribunal charging the U.S. with the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans and the colonialization of North America and the Caribbean held in San Francisco on the 500th anniversary of the European invasion of the Americas.

Political prisoners are definitely not in fashion. The same people that want us silenced, that continue to exact vengeance, certainly would not encourage its publicists and propagandists to bring any attention to who we are and why we are.

Has the Clinton Administration dealt adequately with issues of political prisoners in the 1990s, from your point of view?
Buck: No. Even those with the most clear-cut cases are being denied under this new administration. Comrades like the New York 3—Nuh Washington [who later died in prison of cancer in 2000], Herman Bell, and Jalil Muntaqin—have had legal efforts unjustly denied, even though the government misconduct was flagrant—disappearing evidence which would have undermined the state’s court case. Silvia Baraldini, an Italian citizen, has repeatedly been denied repatriation to serve her sentence in her homeland. Each time the Italian government has requested her transfer, the Justice Department has refused because she refuses to “cooperate”—that is, to disavow her political views as an anti-imperialist. [Some years later, Baraldini was finally repatriated to Italy.] There has been no attempt to resolve the demands for the release of the Puerto Rican POWs and political prisoners or for decolonization [until their release in late 1999].

Sundiata Acoli was refused parole this year, after more than 20 years in prison! Those comrades who have been released were released because there were no other legal ways to keep them locked up. They were not allowed to go to half-way houses at a time when the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been trying to send more people to half-way houses. Because they are “a danger to the community”! Teachers, writers, productive human beings—a danger?

Most other nations at some point have come to terms with political movements that have opposed or do oppose the State. Political prisoners have been released and given amnesty all over the world by state apparatuses that had reveled in brutality and torture. But nothing has changed in the U.S.

Everyone of us comes out of a movement that struggles for liberation, social justice and human dignity. Supporting us is a part of supporting these movements. Until the movements challenging U.S. state power regain strength and momentum, until there is a powerful voice raised by you who are concerned with human rights and justice, I do not think the government—no matter who is in the White House—will make any qualitative moves in the direction of justice. Free All Political Prisoners and POWs! (end of interview)

Marilyn Buck can be contacted at the following address: Marilyn Buck #00482-285, 5701 8th St. Camp Parks, Unit B, Dublin, California 94568, USA.

Next: Radical Feminist Media Strategy Proposed By Class Workshop In 1970

`Grit TV' Host and `Blue Grit' Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 `Downtown' Interview--Part 2

Before she began working as a Grit TV producer-host, Blue Grit author Laura Flanders used to co-produce and host a non-commercial daily alternative morning news show called Undercurrents with Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight of KPFA’s Flashpoints (http://www.flashpoints.net/) daily alternative evening news show. Following is the second part of a 1991 interview with Flanders that appeared in the June 26, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newsweekly Downtown.

Whenever Downtown has asked any of the Establishment media workers `Are you free to cover any story? Are the business interests controlling you? Is there censorship?’ all the broadcasting personnel, all the editors we’ve spoken to, say: `It’s like the separation between church and state. There’s a line in the sand drawn. We’re as free to do anything we want.’ And that there’s no need for any noncommercial programming like Undercurrents. How would you respond to people who are saying that?
Laura Flanders: Well, I think that you have to ask the very simple question, which is: if there’s really no restraint being exercised on reporters, why is it that there’s so little political variation in the mainstream reporting that we read and that we see on the television?

There is a kind of homogeneity about the vast majority of the reporting that we’re exposed to. And it seems to me that it’s because of a very deep sense of belonging on the part of those reporters. That they tend to express the attitude that they are a part of some kind of Establishment that they believe in, that has rules they believe in, that has a relationship with the economic system that they stand up for. And that their reporting takes place within that to try and keep some truth to the concept of a free speech amendment—or because they believe in informing people about their environment, not about changing it. I think we can get into what the mechanics of control are. But I think more than anything it’s the sense of being part of the status quo that most mainstream reporters exhibit, as far as I can see. And at Undercurrents we’re very clear we don’t have that sense of belonging. We have that sense of irreverence that comes with being placed and placing ourselves very strongly outside the Establishment.

How do you decide what topic to devote a show to?
Flanders: Well, Undercurrents is a news program. So we are on a day-to-day basis dominated by what’s the breaking news. We’re the first news program on WBAI’s morning program and we do have a responsibility to address the breaking news of the day. Sometimes we do that in headlines and then address continuing stories in the reports that are given the greatest focus. But more often than not we’re calling people at 12 at night and saying “sorry, we have to cancel the segment tomorrow because we have to do a show on Ethiopia” or a show on whatever is the breaking news—the assassination of Ranjiv Gandhi, for example.

But couldn’t you say the breaking news is in some ways determined by what the Establishment media says is the highlight of the day?
Flanders: Well, we try and balance that out. For example, we have a commitment to cover the situation in Central America. We have, I feel, a fairly loyal responsibility to maintain the profile of a country like Nicaragua or Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador in the public eye when the mainstream media is not paying any attention to that country—or South Africa.

So our overall agenda is to try and cover in a consistent way stories that are dropped in and out of the mainstream. But when Ranjiv Gandhi is assassinated it’s very important also to have an alternative perspective on what’s going on there. And right at the time when the mainstream is churning out its version of events. I feel we have a responsibility to challenge the version of events, the version of the truth that’s being handed out.

It’s like a tug of war, how much to kind of, in a dignified way, distance oneself from what the media is considering the important story. And how much to enter into the fray and provide the story.

How does your guest list compare with National Public Radio's guest list or Channel 13’s guest list on the MacNeil/Lehrer news program? And how would the work that Undercurrents is doing differ from the National Public Radio, which might make some of the same claims Undercurrents makes?
Flanders: As far as the guest list goes, I would say that in one area, in particular, we have surpassed every other mainstream, and even most of the alternative news programs, which is in the area of women reporters, women analysts, women commentators. I would say that we have, easily, 50 percent women staff. Easily. Which is unheard of. All the top guests—as has been documented by Mother Jones and F.A.I.R. and other places—of MacNeil/Lehrer and Nightline are white men.

With respect to the comparison to NPR, we have a very strong tradition of going in a country to an indigenous person of that country or somebody who’s lived for a long while in the country that we’re reporting on. So we have a lot of international voices, non-U.S. voices.

NPR, even during the Gulf War, focused mostly on analysts and commentators from the U.S.. So, just listening, you’d certainly hear more accents on Undercurrents. And that’s just a question of guest lists.

With respect to the content, NPR did a series of reports sort of summing up the Gulf Crisis. And the last episode was on their coverage and on the whole concept of “high-intensity warfare” and how the “military had a strategy of using the most power they could” and that “this would shorten the War.” They basically came down saying “Well, that was a legitimate policy and it did work.”

We would never be drawn that much into the Administration’s way of thinking about things.

You mentioned that you have had many more women analysts as guests than either National Public Radio or MacNeil/Lehrer or the networks. Why do you think there’s resistance in the mass media to having more women commentators, women broadcasters, on their news programs?
Flanders: I think they have women broadcasters who look like kind of propped-up dolls, as far as presenters go, with this kind of plastic look to them. And they’re seen as the kind of `pretty face of information.’

As far as using women as experts, I think that there is still resistance to having women speaking out on the concerns of the day: the geopolitical concerns, the international political concerns. You know, the “mega-issues.” Women are brought on to those talk shows that you mentioned, like the MacNeil/Lehrer for example, to discuss what the mainstream considers “women’s issues.” So, if you’re lucky, you get some women talking about abortion or about rape. And not even on those cases is it guaranteed.

But as far as having women speaking about international issues in foreign policy, how many women did you see during the Gulf War? Almost none. Barbara Ehrenreich was on a lot. Hannan Ashrani from Palestine.

How to explain that resistance?...You know, we never finished the feminist movement. We never ended the campaign against sexism in this country. It’s not over. And that’s a perfect example of it. (end of part 2)

Next: U.S. Political Prisoner Marilyn Buck: A 1994 Downtown Interview—Part 2

Hillary Clinton & Madison Guaranty S&L Scandal

While 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s husband was Arkansas’s governor in the 1980s, the Clintons’ Whitewater Development Corporation business partner, James McDougal, owned the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan bank in Arkansas. Yet, as the New York Times (1/6/96) recalled, “in response to a question about whether she had worked on Madison matters before state regulators appointed by her husband,” former Rose Law firm partner Hillary Clinton said in an April 23, 1994 press conference that “it was not an area that I practiced in, it was not an area that I really know anything, to speak of, about.” But according to the Times:

“The records show Mrs. Clinton billed for a wide range of legal services on behalf of Madison…They show that on April 29, 1985, the day before the Rose firm submitted a request for the state security commissioner to approve a financing plan for Madison, Mrs. Clinton had two telephone conferences totaling one hour. One was with the state securities commissioner who had been appointed three months earlier by then-Governor Clinton.”

In his book The Great Whitewater Fiasco, Martin Gross stated the following about Hillary’s apparent role in Arkansas’s Madison Guaranty S&L scandal:

“Almost immediately after his inauguration in January 1985, Governor Clinton replaced his Securities Department chief Lee Thalheimer…with a friend, Beverly Bassett. Ms. Bassett came from a law firm that has worked for Madison Guaranty. She was also the sister of Clinton’s campaign chief in Washington County…An assistant of Hillary’s…wrote Ms. Bassett at least two letters on behalf of Madison Guaranty…Clinton’s own banking chief had warned that Madison was making bad loans…Madison needed more capital to keep going. It also had to get the Arkansas Securities Department to be cooperative…Ms. Bassett quickly approved the plan…The great fiction of the whole operation was that Hillary was not involved…Nonsense.”
(Downtown 1/24/96)

Former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton’s liaison to banking and industrial development and Whitewater Development business partner, the now-deceased James McDougal, was convicted during the first Clinton Administration in the 1990s of 18 felony counts of fraud and other crimes in connection with the Arkansas operations of the Madison Guaranty S&L, whose special interests 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton apparently represented while her husband was governor.

According to Clinton Confidential: The Climb To Power by George Carpozi, Jr., in early 1986, “McDougal had asked [Dave] Hale for a $150,000 advance from Small Business Loan Administration funds,” although “the loan” was “perfectly illegal since McDougal was Big Business;” and on Feb. 28, 1986, outside the Arkansas statehouse, Hillary’s husband, the then-governor of Arkansas, nudged Hale “with a wink” and said “Whadd ya say, Dave o’pal, you’re a-gonna he’p out Jim McDougal, aren’t y’all?”

The same book also asserted that “not many days following” this Feb. 28, 1986 encounter, Hillary Clinton’s husband was in McDougal’s office when Hale was told the $150,000 loan was needed to help fund Bill Clinton’s 1986 re-election campaign. The Clintons’ convicted business partner also held a “fund-raiser at his Madison bank office in Little Rock” in Jan. 1985 to help “pay off [Bill] Clinton’s political debts, including unsecured personal loans from the Bank of Cherry Valley,” (which was owned by Bill Clinton aide Maurice Smith) which Hillary’s husband attended, according to First In His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton by David Maraniss.

Ironically, in their 1992 campaign book Putting People First: How We Can All Change America, Hillary’s husband and 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore charged that “Washington stood by while quick-buck artists brought down the savings-and-loan industry, leaving the rest of us with a $500 billion bill.” (Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 6/12/96)

Next: Grit TV Host and Blue Grit Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 Downtown Interview—Part 2

U.S. Political Prisoner Marilyn Buck: A 1994 "Downtown" Interview--Part 1

Marilyn Buck is a former 1960s antiwar radical and 1970s and 1980s fugitive who is presently serving an 80-year sentence in a federal prison for women in Dublin, California. Buck was targeted in the early 1970s by the FBI’s COINTELPRO because of her support for the Black liberation movement and in 1973 she received a 10-year sentence for buying two boxes of ammunition with false ID.

In 1977, after more than four years in prison, and repeated parole denial, she was granted a furlough from which she did not return. She remained a fugitive until being captured in 1985. She was then tried and convicted in Downtown Manhattan in 1987 for participating in several bank robberies and in the freeing of Assata Shakur, an African-American political prisoner. In the 1990s, additional time was added to her sentence after she and six other activists were charged in Washington, D.C. with conspiring to bomb the U.S. Capitol.

After the surrender of former 1960s radical and fugitive Kathy Power in 1993, Newsweek magazine published a cover story on Power’s odyssey. Following is the first part of a 1994 interview with Buck that appeared in the January 19, 1994 issue of Downtown in which she commented on the Newsweek article about Kathy Power.

Why do you think Newsweek chose to do the story on Kathy Power at this time?
Marilyn Buck: In a capitalist society, fame and recognition are commodities, usually with very short sales life. The moment is exploited for all its worth; often times by the individual or institution in the spotlight, but all the time by the media, the illusion makers. They create the saints and the demons.

Captures, particularly surrenders, are moments of celebration for the state—a chance to affirm its power, despite its being disavowed or challenged. Imagine challenging the power of the biggest, baddest, domestic and international military machine on the planet! How dare they, we, she…me! To psychologize, and label such behavior as deviant is imperative. Never again does the state want to see an uncontrollable or unpredictable rise of different sectors of the population against its policies and programs, or its existence as such. The U.S. incessantly broadcast that the bombing of Iraq and the supposed national consensus supporting that manufactured military maneuver has laid to rest the infamy of the defeat in Vietnam. It has a pathological fear of decolonialization and national self-determination. Standing in the ‘90s, the propaganda establishment seizes every opportunity to declare the ‘60s—that time of standing up for liberation, justice, self-determination, and against the status quo of white Amerika—dead, an aberration.

Kathy Power’s surrender was perfect for spectatularization. Her surrender was a perfect vehicle to reinforce—to use a psychological term—the `see-what-happens-when-you-stray-from-white-Amerika’ line. This is not the first time sensational stories have hit the press about the radical returned to the fold. Most recently, there was an interview in the New York Times Living Section with Bernardine Dohrn. There is a fascination with a woman who defied the system, who she is today; and a reassurance that she has been cured of `excessive opposition.’

How would you characterize Newsweek’s political and ideological slant on the Power article and the accompanying piece by Jane Alpert?
Buck: Newsweek fulfilled its ideological and political role in how it presented this story: Woman-in-misery-because-of-her-political-past. They would have liked to have squeezed out an admission of remorse, but an admission of depression was all they could get.

I think it’s interesting that the Newsweek article chose not to say anything substantial about her current political views. Is she still an antiracist, pro-Black, against U.S. imperialism? Her statement upon surrender is not reported in this article. Perhaps because she did not capitulate in her earlier beliefs that the war was wrong, that Black liberation was important to support?

Newsweek ignored what she said, and instead relied on a pseudo-psychological rendering—a focus on depression and the Betty Crocker lifestyle. Of course, they forget to cite any statistics on the prevalence of clinical depression in white middle-class women in their 40s.

By concentrating on the past, the `moment’ and the flight, as well as the reintegration into the safe white world, the media did not have to say a word about who Kathy Power is as a political person living in the world. Another reassurance to the readers. From reading Newsweek and other articles, I don’t have much of a clue as to who she is socially or politically. My first response was, `oh, the prodigal son/daughter line.’

If Kathy Power’s depression doesn’t provide an example of `divine punishment,’ then Jane’s middle Amerikan nightmare should flesh it out—struggle against the system is a childish illusion, a romantic diversion that turns out not to be such a lark after all. Jane’s piece is intended to say `resistance doesn’t pay,’ from one who can say she too challenged the state, but repented. Under the guise of feminism, Alpert continues to be quite a vocal mouthpiece for reconciliation with the system, patriarchal or not.

The actual intent of the Newsweek article, as well as the majority of the `establishment’ media is to continue to delegitimize resistance to U.S. imperialism and capitalism touted as `democracy.’ Despite its inherent weaknesses, the U.S. has emerged more predatory in the absence of any countervailing power. It is a warning…`Don’t even try it.’

Even the `Revisiting the Radicals’ gallery sidebar, while stating the bare facts, is designed to say, `see, it is only a phase, YOU CANNOT WIN!’

Why do you think Newsweek uses a lot of psychological jargon in this spread?
Buck: Newsweek uses a psychological format to examine `objects’ of its focus. Also to convince people they know what they are talking about.

The state is obsessed with trying to understand why white people would `drop out’ or challenge the system. They won’t admit that there is something seriously pathological in the system, so they seek to convince the public there is something wrong with those who opposed their system.

The expectations and heady sensation of change of the `60s and ‘70s may be overwhelmed by two decades of unrelenting conformism and systematic desensitization of political, social and moral consciences, but the reality of oppression, exploitation and social injustice is greater than ever. It will not disappear. Even now it is intolerable. Too much white supremacy, too much poverty, prison and social repression. Too little justice and too few jobs. The L.A. uprising was only one seismic shock to this structure. The demand for justice and national liberation has not subsided.

Here in the oppressor nation, there is still a segment of white youth who drop out, become antiestablishment punkers drawn to hip-hop and the rap of the besieged African-American youth, who are alienated and angry, sometimes not yet exactly sure why, but squatting, looking for new forms of protest, examining history, asking questions and rejecting a history of racism and genocide. Youth who are consciously, deliberately opposed to this system. There are still socialists, anarchists, antiracists, antifascists. There are thousands and thousands of women, lesbians who refuse to go back. The potential for struggle within this oppressor nation has not been crushed or thrown into the wastebin of history. (end of part 1).

Next: Hillary Clinton & Madison Guaranty S& L Scandal

Why Clintons' Blind Trust Should Have Been Blind

Any Clinton White House staff member reading Barron’s (6/25/90), Forbes (8/2/93), Pensions & Investment (9/6/93) or Money (11/93) magazine or telephoning CDA Spectrum in Rockville, MD during the 1990s could have obtained a list of specific stocks that 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s Blind Trust stock portfolio was likely to then include. Yet there were good reasons why the first Clinton Administration’s Office of Government Ethics should have insured that Bill and Hillary were actually blind to which stocks would likely be contained in their stock portfolio. As the Encyclopedia of Banking and Finance noted:

“An underlying concept is that if a government official does not know the identity of his…financial interests, his…official actions should not be subject to collateral attack by questions of conflict of interest or the appearance of such a conflict. In other words, if the government official does not know what he…owns, it is impossible for him…intentionally to take actions to benefit specifically his…own personal interests.

“Therefore, the general public policy goal to be achieved through the use of blind trusts is an actual `blindness’ or lack of knowledge by the government official with respect to the holdings held in trust…

“…The interested parties will have no knowledge of the trustee’s acquisitions; and thus the government official and the other interested parties will be truly blind with respect to these holdings…Every proposed trustee…must be approved by the Office of Government Ethics. This is essential so that the office can ensure…that the proposed trust arrangement satisfies the letter and spirit of the established standards.”
(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 11/13/96)

After it apparently rubber-stamped the Hillary Clinton’s choice of Essex Investment to begin managing her Blind Trust stock portfolio in July 1993, the Office of Government Ethics apparently talked numerous times by phone with Essex. But in 1996 it wasn’t willing to answer many specific questions from the press about the Clintons’ Blind Trust arrangement. An Official of Government Ethics spokesperson, Norman Smith, told Downtown/Aquarian at that time:

“We’d be happy to answer general questions about our Blind Trust program. But we don’t answer specific questions of the type you ask.”
(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 11/20/96)

After Hillary chose Joseph McNay’s Essex Investment Management firm to handle her “blind trust” in July 1993, Merrill Lynch & Company broker Robert Malloy told the New York Times (10/4/93) that Essex Investment head McNay “had 25 percent of his holdings in insurance stocks” in the early 1980s. The Times also reported that McNay “`still feels good’ about…insurance and reinsurance companies” and “is also interested in health care, especially health care management.” Coincidentally, during her husband’s first term in the White House, Hillary Clinton tried to sell us a health care reform plan that would have likely increased the value of Big Five insurance company stock (such as Prudential's stock) and health care management organization stock.

Besides apparently investing Clintons’ money in insurance company and health care management stock during the 1990s, McNay’s Essex Investment Management firm also managed a $34.8 million stock investment portfolio for Arkansas’s Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation in that decade. (Downtown 10/27/93)

The Blind Trust portfolio which Essex Investment managed for Hillary Clinton during the 1990s may also have contained Starbucks stock. When Boston Globe reporters asked Essex honcho Joe McNay “Where are you moving money right now?” in April 1996, the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate’s money manager replied:

“We continue to own…a wide variety of technology and communications stock, and a few highly specialized consumer stocks where there are strong franchises…A reasonable example of that would be Starbucks, where we think there is a strong franchise and good business.”

Next: U.S. Political Prisoner Marilyn Buck: A 1994 Downtown Interview—Part 1

"The Men of Murdoch"

See the men of Murdoch
Read how they do lie
See the men of Murdoch
See how white their minds
Enemies of the workers
Enemies of women
Censors of the Greens:
Boycott Murdoch’s men.

See the men of Murdoch
Defend the white gentry
See the men of Murdoch
Distort our history
Enemies of the ghetto
Enemies of the left
Censors of the Greens:
Boycott Murdoch’s press.

See the men of Murdoch
Lord over women
See the men of Murdoch
With liberal sexist heads
Enemies of the young
Enemies of the poor
Ripping off our culture:
Boycott Murdoch’s corps.

See the men of Murdoch
Remember their names well
`New York Times” castoffs
Versus Green people;
And when we make our move
Against the fascist dogs
All of Murdoch’s men
Won’t save him from our law.

Freedom of the press
Is just another myth
If all Murdoch papers
Exclude all women tough
Enemies of the people
Apologists for male pigs
Traitors to the Greens:
Murdoch’s loyal men.


To listen to "The Men of Murdoch" song, click on the following link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Protest+Folk+Songs/The+Men+of+Murdoch

The Men of Murdoch protest folk song was written during the early 1980s when the Australian global media baron still owned the Village Voice, hadn’t yet created his Fox News television network and was still not considered a serious political threat by most economically secure U.S. left activists.

When Murdoch’s global media empire was on the verge of financial bankruptcy in the early 1990s because of its $8.1 billion debt, Citibank apparently rushed to Murdoch’s financial aid, since “Citibank…had a large investment” in Murdoch’s company, according to Murdoch by William Shawcross. The same book also revealed the following about Citibank’s 1990s connection to Rupert Murdoch:

“Citibank, as News [Corporation]’s largest creditor, was charged with unraveling the mess and restructuring the company. The project, code-named `Dolphin,’ was put in the hands of a 34-year-old vice-president of the bank, Ann Lane. In the next few months Murdoch came to depend on Lane as he had on no one else in his life.

“Lane…attended Berkeley and then spent several years in finance before joining Citibank in 1982.

“She had spent the first part of 1990 restructuring Donald Trump’s company…Lane came to admire Murdoch and to like him…”

As a result, in October 1991, “Murdoch’s empire was saved by the combined efforts of Ann Lane, Dave DeVoe, Richard Searby and others…,” who sold Murdoch’s creditors on a $7.6 billion refinancing plan, according to the Murdoch book.

Although the FCC isn’t supposed to grant U.S. television broadcasting licenses to Australian businessmen who discriminate against women, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation media conglomerate was still licensed to operate the Fox Television network TV stations in the United States in the early 1990s. Yet, according to Murdoch by William Shawcross, “few women were promoted very high in the News Corp. army. (Even Murdoch’s closest admirers have acknowledged his difficulty in dealing with women as senior executives).” (Downtown 5/12/93)

Although the FCC’s cross-ownership rule used to ban one person from owning a TV station and a daily newspaper in the same city, during the early 1990s Rupert Murdoch was allowed to own both the WNYW-TV-Channel 5 station and the New York Post in Manhattan. But in its March 30, 1993 issue, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Rainbow Broadcasting Inc.—a group of Los Angeles-area Hispanic broadcasters and community leaders who have been fighting [Murdoch’s] Fox Television Stations Inc.’s application to renew its FCC license for KTTV-TV in Los Angeles since 1988—and the New York Chapter of the National Hispanic Media Coalition” were opposing Murdoch’s attempt to get the FCC to waive the media cross-ownership ban in Manhattan. The Wall Street Journal also noted that “the two groups—claim the lengthy litigation in the KTTV-TV case has shown a pattern of misconduct by Fox and Mr. Murdoch, and that joint ownership would lead to unjustifiable concentration of media ownership in the New York market.”

Under Murdoch’s ownership in the 1970s and early 1980s, the New York Post became the symbol of U.S. “gutter journalism.” (Downtown 4/14/93)

Coincidentally, Murdoch’s global media conglomerate has recently apparently been seeking to gain control over the Dow Jones Company that publishes the Wall Street Journal. And don’t be surprised if Murdoch ends up gaining control of the New York Times/Boston Globe media conglomerate in the 21st-century, in the same way that he gained control of The Times of London during the 20th century.

Next: Why Clintons’ Blind Trust Should Have Been Blind