`Indonesiagate': Obama's Historic U.S. Embassy Family Connection--Part 1

U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Member Barack Obama may not be very interested in pushing for a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the exact role that the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia played during the 1960s in Indonesian internal politics. One reason might be because Obama’s now-deceased mother, Ann Dunham, was employed by the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia following the U.S. Embassy-backed 1965 right-wing military coup in Indonesia.

If you ever saw the 1982 movie The Year Of Living Dangerously, you probably realize that more Indonesian civilians were apparently killed as a result of the U.S. Embassy-backed right-wing coup in Indonesia during the Democratic Johnson Administration than were killed as a result of the U.S. Embassy-backed 1973 right-wing coup in Chile during the Republican Nixon Administration. As the 2006 book by John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder, recalled:

“In one of the worst bloodbaths of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of individuals were massacred by the army-affiliated militias, largely in Central Java, East Java, and Bali, from late 1965 to mid-1966…

“Suharto’s army usually opted for mysterious disappearances rather than exemplary public executions. The army and its militias tended to commit large-scale massacres in secret: they took captives out of prison at night, trucked them to remote locations, executed them, and then buried the corpses in unmarked graves or threw them into rivers…

“The post-Suharto parliament has maintained the laws forbidding public discourse about Marxism-Leninism and the participation of ex-political prisoners (and their children and grandchildren) in political parties…

“…The U.S. government had been preparing the Indonesian army for a showdown with the PKI [The Communist Party of Indonesia] and a takeover of state power. From 1958 to 1965 the United States trained, funded, advised, and supplied the army precisely so that it could turn into a state within a state…

“In the NSC [National Security Council]’s assessment the PKI `would probably have emerged as the largest party in Indonesia,’ if Sukarno had not canceled the election scheduled for 1959…

“In accordance with the policy of building up the army as the bulwark against the PKI, the U.S. government trained army officers in the United States, donated and sold weapons, and provided financial aid…

“In August 1958 the United States began a military assistance program that supplied equipment to the military, especially the army, and trained officers in the United States. From 1958 to 1965 the United States annually spent between $10 million and $20 million on military assistance. The program for training Indonesian army officers in schools such as those at Fort Bragg and Fort Leavenworth was extensive. From 1950 to 1965 about twenty-eight hundred Indonesian Army officers were brought to the United States for training—most of them after 1958. That number represented about one-fifth to one quarter of all army officers. Through this training the United States was able to develop extensive contacts within the Indonesian army…”

Next: “Indonesiagate”: Obama’s Historic U.S. Embassy Family Connection—Part 2

`Ballad of John Garfield'

(chorus)
They crushed John Garfield because he wouldn’t inform
They drove him from the screen and he lost his livelihood.

(verses)
A funeral was held on the Upper West Side
Ten thousand people mourned and cried
An actor was gone at the age of 39
John Garfield of The Group Theatre had died.

He was born in 1913 on the Lower East Side
In a factory, his father worked all day
Paychecks were small and the tenement halls
Were filled with many worried souls. (chorus)

His mother passed away when he was just a child
And up to the Bronx, his father moved
He played hooky too much and got expelled from some schools
And he always seemed in a troubled mood.

But then he found a friend in the middle of the rules
A man named Angelo Patri
And Patri helped him out and he boxed and did act
And he hitchhiked across the country. (chorus)

And then the Thirties came and jobs were hard to find
And around The Group Theatre he hung
They taught him there his craft and he learnt some politics
And from their stage, he went to Hollywood.

His screen intensity caused him to steal the scenes
And he soon achieved great popularity
Among his movies: “They Made Me A Criminal”,
“Gentleman’s Agreement” and “Body and Soul.” (chorus)

Off-screen, he was restless and felt chained by his wife
And his family still left him unfulfilled
His rise up from the depths to fame and great success
Made some people nickname him “Prince Bart.”

His friends were on the Left who worked for peace and justice
So when the Red Scare came, they got repressed
And John had signed too much to protest Wall Street’s lust
And so his name got smeared by the blacklist. (chorus)

Although he was still young, his last eighteen months
They would not let him even make one film
To stifle all dissent, John Garfield, Wall Street crushed
For he symbolized resistance to their will. (chorus)

To listen to the Ballad of John Garfield, you can go to following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/Ballad+of+John+Garfield

The Ballad of John Garfield biographical protest folk song was written deep in the heart of Brooklyn during the early 1980s, after I read a biography of John Garfield.

To listen to some other biographical protest folk songs, you can check out the “Columbia Songs for a Democratic Society" site at the following link:

http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music

Next: “Indonesiagate”: Obama’s Historic U.S. Embassy Family Connection—Part 1

CNN's Historic Editorial Politics

(The following article first appeared in the February 2, 1994 issue of the now-defunct alternative newsweekly, Downtown, when CNN was still controlled by Ted Turner.)

With then-LBJ Foundation Chairman of the Board Tom Johnson, Billionaire Turner and representatives of companies like Time Warner and Tele-Communications Inc. sitting on the board of CNN’s parent company in the early 1990s, it wasn’t surprising that CNN didn’t devote much of its air-time each day to discussing who really was responsible for JFK’s elimination on November 22, 1963, during the early 1990s.

Ironically, a senior vice-president for CNN’s operations during the 1980s named Kitchell was a former director of NBC’s old Huntley-Brinkley Report who “had put NBC’s facilities and crews in action for coverage of the John F. Kennedy assassination” at the time the “Oswald as lone assassin” apparent cover-story was first disseminated by the Big Media, according to CNN: The Inside Story.

Nor was it surprising that some U.S. media critics in the early 1990s didn’t consider CNN’s editorial politics to be counter-cultural or alternative enough. As Jeff Cohen, the former executive director of F.A.I.R., told the authors of Unreliable Sources: A Guide To Detecting Bias In News Media:

“…There’s nothing original about CNN’s talkshow lineup. Opponents of the environmental and peace movements are everywhere on CNN, proponents nowhere…

“F.A.I.R.’s beef with CNN is not that there are too many rightists, but that there are no genuine left advocates…”

Former Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein also criticized Turner and his CNN “alternative media” operation during the 1980s, by writing the following:

“No one expects a cable TV mogul to be modest; but imagine the founders of a real network taking to the airwaves for personal publicity…It also suggests the distinction between Turner’s 24-hour Cable News Network and a major news operation.

“The difference has more to do with sensibility than scale. Even if CNN had a bureau in every bush, its approach to reporting would be provincial; Ted Turner’s New South values would pervade its coverage…Those values include a rigid optimism—the most ominous events are served sunny side up on CNN; a hurricane becomes a warning to wear your rubbers—and preoccupation with sex. It’s no accident that CNN’s most brutal error, broadcasting the name of a sexual assault victim, occurred in its haste to cover a notorious rape trial live. Though it feigns discretion, CNN thrives on the very prurience Turner condemns elsewhere on TV.”

Goldstein also accused Turner’s CNN “of `pilfering formats invented elsewhere,’ of seeing journalism as `a common carrier,’ `as the perfect format for elevators and waiting rooms: newzak,” according to The Sky Barons.

Asked by Downtown in early 1994 for CNN’s response to the criticism that CNN’s news coverage is politically biased and excludes genuinely alternative viewpoints from media access, then-CNN spokesperson Steven Hayworth answered:

“I would reject it out of hand. There are always a variety of viewpoints represented on CNN programs. As a news organization, we are second to none in the range of viewpoints we broadcast.”

Downtown then asked Hayworth how he would respond to the criticism that during the 1991 Gulf War I, U.S. pacifists were given less access to CNN’s airwaves than were pro-Pentagon spokespeople.

“I reject the criticism if it implied that we excluded antiwar viewpoints during the Gulf War. We took an incredible amount of heat for interviewing Ramsey Clark. But you can’t satisfy all the people all the time,” answered the then-CNN spokesperson in 1994.

Hayworth also rejected F.A.I.R.’s criticism of CNN for being politically biased, towards the right, in its programming by noting that CNN had programs in 1994 featuring Michael Kingsley and Jesse Jackson. When Downtown noted in 1994 that one of the criticisms of CNN was that it tended to also deny access to prominent dissident U.S. academics like Noam Chomsky, the then-CNN spokesperson insisted that “I can’t think of any faces that we exclude. We survey people. We look for experts who represent all points of view.”

Asked by Downtown in early 1994 if there was any truth to the charge that CNN wouldn’t let any dissident academic critics of Ted Turner’s business practices appear on its network in 1994, Hayworth replied:

“We report on Mr. Turner to the same degree or in a similar way to how we report on any other U.S. businessman.”

[Yet in 2008 CNN still seems reluctant to let U.S. alternative journalists, radicals and counter-cultural voices get on its screen for any length of time to provide genuinely alternative viewpoints on the news for those cable TV viewers who pay to watch CNN. And it’s still not too likely that Time Warner’s CNN subsidiary will ever broadcast many investigative reporting segments on the 1990s and 21st-century business practices of either the Time Warmer media conglomerate monopoly or U.S. billionaire “philanthropists” like Ted Turner or George Soros].

(Downtown 2/2/94)

Next: Ballad of John Garfield lyrics

CNN Founder Ted Turner's Personal Wealth In 1994

(The following article first appeared in the February 2, 1994 issue of the now-defunct alternative newsweekly, Downtown, when CNN was still controlled by Ted Turner.)

After he aligned himself with Time Warner, Tele-Communications Inc. and other cable company corporate interests in an organizational way, CNN Founder Ted Turner’s personal worth increased from about $535 million to over $3 billion by 1994. Among Billionaire Turner’s personal possessions in 1994 was a 130,000-acre ranch in Montana. He also owned in 1994 the 500 square-mile Ladder Ranch in New Mexico, which made him “one of the largest individual landowners in the West,” according to It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks. In addition, with his CNN/TBS profits, Turner provided each of his five children with a $2 million trust fund.

CNN Founder Turner also used his CNN/TBS profits to set up the Turner Family Foundation, on whose board of trustees sat his children and his then-wife in 1994—the former radical feminist, antiwar movie actress and aerobics instructor, Jane Fonda. After Billionaire Turner married Fonda in 1991, she was then “seen by some as a potential First Lady to a future President Turner,” according to The Sky Barons. The book It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks also stated the following in reference to Turner’s past U.S. presidential ambitions:

“`In 1980,’ recalls Irwin Maz, Turner’s first real business adviser, `Ted…said he was going to be this country’s wealthiest man. And…he told me he was going to be president of the United States.

“`I asked him how in hell he thought he could be president. You have no political base.’ `I’ve got the boob tube,’ he told me.’””

As chairman of the board and president of the CNN/TBS media conglomerate during the 1990s, Fonda’s then-billionaire husband during the 1990s also took home an annual salary that exceeded $676,000 in 1991. Downtown was unable to learn in 1994 whether Fonda ever had any plans to star in a 1990s movie, titled "How To Marry A Billionaire." But as part of Fonda’s pre-nuptial agreement with Turner, she received “a $10 million dowry of TBS stock,” according to It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks.

Even without the $10 million dowry of TBS stock she received in exchange for becoming Mrs. Turner during the 1990s, Fonda was no Cinderella before she married her billionaire ex-husband. As Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life of Jane Fonda by Christopher Andersen observed in 19990:

“In 1988, according to Forbes magazine, Jane made an estimated $20 million. As for her assets, they included Fonda Films (worth around $40 million in 1989), the…Santa Monica house ($2.5 million), a prize Arabian stallion, the Laurel Springs ranch and spa at Santa Barbara (another $8 million, not counting income from a spa operating on the property and charging clients $2,500 per week), and the fitness empire that netted $35 million annually from videos, books, audiotapes and records…

“…Her multimillion-dollar stock portfolio, if made public, might also have proven embarrassing…She reportedly has large holdings in such companies as DuPont and IBM…”

At the CNN Center in Atlanta, “a $3 million penthouse apartment” was “built into the top floor of this sprawling structure” which was “Ted Turner’s legal residence” in 1994, according to It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks. The same book also noted that in 1994 Turner’s 14th floor office at the CNN Center was “manned by a phalanx of security guards” and that the then-CNN/TBS Chairman of the Board Turner’s desk was “dominated by his personal mantra, `Lead, Follow or Get out of the way,’ which” appeared “on a miniature billboard.”

In addition to being in the global media business in the early 1990s Turner was then “the country’s largest commercial buffalo breeder and could account for nearly 10 percent of all the privately owned bison in the world,” according to It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks. The same book also noted that Turner had “reiterated his serious intention of making a business out of buffalo…’ and Turner had said “`I do think there’s going to be a bigger and bigger market for buffalo meat.’”

(Downtown 2/2/94)

Next: CNN’s Historic Editorial Politics

CNN/TBS's Historic 1988-1996 Profitability & Labor Record

(The following article first appeared in the February 2, 1994 issue of the now-defunct alternative newsweekly, Downtown, when CNN was still controlled by Ted Turner.)

After Billionaire Ted Turner decided to save his CNN/TBS media conglomerate from bankruptcy in the 1980s by sharing control of CNN/TBS with Time Warner, Tele-Communications Inc. and the other U.S. pay-TV cable operators, CNN’s profitability increased greatly. As Forbes (1/4/93) observed, CNN/TBS’s 1992 net income was “estimated at $105 million on revenues of $1.7 billion, more than double the revenue of 1988” and “in 1991 CNN alone earned more than any of the broadcast networks” (i.e. than CBS, NBC and ABC). By then, the CNN subsidiary produced about 30 percent of CNN/TBS’s annual revenues and by 1991 the CNN “alternative media” operation was valued at about $1.5 billion.

Between 1992 and 1996, CNN/TBS’s total worth was also expected to jump from $5 billion to $11 billion, while its net annual income was expected to increase from $105 million/year to $335 million/year. [So, not surprisingly, in October 1996 the Time Warner media conglomerate decided it would be profitable to fully acquire Turner’s CNN/TBS media conglomerate and add CNN to the Time Warner media monopoly’s stable of mainstream corporate media properties].

One additional reason CNN had become so profitable by the 1990s was that it had tended to reflect Ted Turner’s anti-labor political bias in its employment and business practices. As Through Jaundiced Eyes: How The Media View Organized Labor by William Puette noted, an American University graduate student study reported that interviews with then-AFL-CIO president Lane Kirland were “never granted to the nonunion Cable News Network, whose owner Ted Turner, has made clear his dislike for unions.” And as CNN: The Inside Story revealed:

“To get around unions in the bureaus, CNN had been using subcontractors who hired people to run cameras and crews—such as Mobile Video, run by Sheldon Levy, who had been CNN’s first subcontractor in Washington, D.C. If those employees voted for a union, then CNN could simply cancel its contract (which, eventually, was what happened in the case of Mobile Video) and go to another outfit.”

(Downtown 2/2/94)

Next: CNN Founder Ted Turner’s Personal Wealth In 1994

CNN/TBS's Historic `Godfather' & Corporate Connections

(The following article first appeared in the February 2, 1994 issue of the now-defunct alternative newsweekly, Downtown, when CNN was still controlled by Ted Turner.)

According to Contemporary Business Leaders, during the 1980s then CNN/TBS Director “Malone had quietly become the dominant force in the American cable industry, while Turner was noisily tilting at various windmills” and “often called the `Godfather of Cable,’ Malone had clearly become TBS’s godfather by 1988…” Malone graduated from Yale the same year that JFK was mysteriously eliminated and worked for Bell Telephone during the Vietnam War era, before becoming a Tele-Communications Inc. cable system company executive in the 1970s.

In the 1990s, the then-52-year-old Malone continued to sit on the board of directors of both the CNN/TBS company that profited from providing programs to cable systems and the Tele-Communications Inc. company that profited from providing cable system programs to pay-TV subscribers. In addition to being a CNN/TBS Director and a Tele-Communications Inc. Director in the early 1990s, Malone was also the chairman of the board of the Wyoming-based Liberty Media Corporation, which owned 50 percent of the American Movie Classics cable-TV programming company in partnership with NBC at that time [and currently owns the MacNeil-Lehrer Productions media firm that produces PBS’s evening NewsHour television show each night].

In 1994, then-CNN/TBS Director Malone’s Tele-Communications Inc. operated 629 cable systems in the U.S. for 7.7 million pay-TV cable system subscribers. In Northern New Jersey, its TCI of Northern New Jersey subsidiary, for example, provided pay-TV cable for a profit to about 194,000 subscribers in 1994. Another Tele-Communications board member at that time, Bob Magness, had also been a director of Republic Pictures, United Artist Communications, Community Tele-Communications and West Marc Communications. Not surprisingly, CNN has not become famous for providing its cable-TV viewers with much investigative reporting about the U.S. pay-TV cable industry or the extent to which cable-TV subscription prices are fixed at an artificially high rate for consumers.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, directors of Time-Warner, HBO, Continental Cablevision, Comcast Corporation, Whittle Communications, American Mobile Systems, United Cable Television, Fashion Channel, Air Atlantic, Frank B. Hall, National Security Bank of Chicago, WMS Industries, Metro Bank-Tech Center and the Cable Advertising Bureau also sat next to Billionaire Ted Turner on the CNN/TBS corporate board.

(Downtown 2/2/94)

Next: CNN/TBS’s Historic 1988-1996 Profitability & Labor Record

CNN's Historic & Current Time Warner Media Monopoly Connection

(The following article first appeared in the February 2, 1994 issue of the now-defunct alternative newsweekly, Downtown, when CNN was still controlled by Ted Turner.)

CNN/TBS’s 1986 purchase of MGM/UA left Ted Turner’s media conglomerate with so much debt--$1.4 billion—that in 1987 Turner was forced to sell 37 percent of his inheritance-based CNN/TBS media operation to “a group of 26 cable operators and Time Inc.” and “if the $525 million deal hadn’t gone through, Turner would have been out of cash,” according to CNN: The Inside Story. As a result, “Turner went from owning more than 80 percent of TBS stock to maintaining from 51 to 65 percent" and “the new stockholders, led by Time Inc. and Denver-based Tele-Communications Inc., immediately appointed seven directors to join Turner’s eight board members” who “would have a lot of power over big decisions in the future,” according to the same book.

In its 1990 edition, Everybody’s Business pointed out that “Tele-Communications, the nation’s largest operator of cable TV systems (and therefore an important Turner customer) “ then owned “38 percent” of CNN/TBS’s Class C shares. “Time-Warner, [then] the second largest operator of cable-TV systems and a major program supplier (and therefore both a customer and Turner competitor)” then owned “32 percent of these C shares, and another cable TV operator, United Cable,” owned “8.9 percent of them,” during the early 1990s.

According to the International Directory of Company Histories, “the backing of the cable industry virtually guarantees the success” of CNN/TBS on a financial level. Contemporary American Business Leaders also revealed that “besides the money,” in 1987 CNN/TBS “got access to a built-in market of more than half the 43 million cable subscribing American homes because of its alliance with John Malone, then-president of Tele-Communications Incorporated, and one of the leaders of the investment group.” CNN: The Inside Story also emphasized that “the investment in Turner Broadcasting by cable operators, who had bailed out Turner…had meant the difference.”

Coincidentally, the cable industry which bailed Turner out when he became “financially overextended in the mid-1980s" and which owned a huge chunk of Turner’s CNN/TBS in 1994 “practically deified Turner" in the early 1990s, according to New York magazine (2/1/92), after CNN/TBS started to become a money-making machine. And, also coincidentally, Time Warner’s Time magazine named Turner as its 1991 “Man of the Year”—at the same time Time-Warner owned 21.9 percent of all types of CNN/TBS stock.

[Subsequently, in October, 1996, CNN finally became a subsidiary division of the Time Warner media conglomerate, after the Democratic Clinton Administration allowed Time Warner to acquire and merge its media monopoly operation with Ted Turner’s Turner CNN/TBS media monopoly operation--despite the existence of U.S. anti-trust laws that prohibit the monopolization of the U.S. media industry by media conglomerates like Time Warner/CNN. And the CNN “alternative” news network, CNN, is still today little more than a TV variant of the Time Warner media conglomerate’s Time magazine culturally and politically straight mind-set; and just another propaganda tool of the Militaristic U.S. Establishment in the 21st-century.]

(Downtown 2/2/94)

Next: CNN/TBS’s Historic “Godfather” & Corporate Connections