CNN's Big Bank Connection

One reason Time-Warner's CNN cable news network subsidiary has been pushing to provide public "corporate welfare" funds for the super-rich Wall Street folks who control big banks like Citicorp may be because the the chairman of the board of Time-Warner/CNN, Richard Parsons, also sits on the board of directors of Citicorp.

Another member of the board of CNN's parent company, Time-Warner board member Herbert Allison, Jr., is also the president and CEO of Fannie Mae and a former chairman of Merrill Lynch--two other U.S. financial institutions which are receiving public "corporate welfare" hand-outs, despite being responsible (along with the failed Superior Bank of the Obama campaign's national finance chairperson, Penny Pritzker) for much of the sub-prime mortgage crisis which helped produce the recent collapse of U.S. imperialism's capitalist banking system.

Why Yippies & Abbie Protested At Democratic National Convention In '68

Lower East Side radicals have had a long history of protesting at Democratic National Conventions. As Living The Revolution by David Lewis Stein noted, “the Democratic Convention was the Yippie target right from the start, and the Lower East Side group sent out calls to other cities…”

The same book also recalled that on August 22, 1968, the now-deceased Yippie founder, Abbie Hoffman,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTJ6Jw63_hA

http://books.google.com/books?id=QcboRCmvuAEC&dq=Revolution+for+the+Hell+of+It&pg=PP1&ots=0wmQ8C7MLn&sig=koHqHM_IdkuG-WlwARL5fjxqUss&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

first read a Yippie platform which contained political demands [that are still more historically progressive than what the Democratic Obama Administration--which will also represent in D.C. the special political interests of Chicago’s corrupt Daley Machine--is proposing to do when it takes over the White House in 2009] like the following:

1. Withdrawal of all foreign-based troops;

2. End of cultural domination of minority groups;

3. Legalization of marijuana and all other psychedelic drugs;

4. Freeing of all prisoners currently in prison on narcotics charges;

5. Total disarmament of all the people, beginning with the police;

6. Abolition of pay housing, pay media, pay transportation, pay food, pay education, pay clothing, pay medical help, and pay toilets;

7. A country in which people are free from the drudgery of work;

8. A conservation program geared towards preserving our natural resources and committed to the elimination of pollution from our air and water;

9. A program of ecological development that will provide incentives for the decentralization of…crowded cities and encourage rural living;

10. Abortion when desired;

11. A restructured education system;

12. Open and free use of the media;

13. An end to all censorship; and

14. A program which encourages and promotes the arts…in a very real sense, we would have a society in which every man [and woman] could be an artist.

(Downtown 11/15/95)

In Run, Run, Run: The Lives Of Abbie Hoffman by Jack Hoffman and Daniel Simon, the brother of the now-deceased Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial Defendant indicated another reason Abbie decided to protest at the Democratic National Convention in 1968:

“As the Summer drew on, more and more of Abbie’s time was spent planning for the Festival of Life in Chicago, and with each passing week the plans seemed to grow larger, as events and the general mood of the country seemed almost to necessitate some kind of confrontation. The story Abbie liked to tell was that after his bags were packed, the last thing he did before leaving for Chicago was to call Ma in Florida.

“`Chicago? What are you going there for,’ she asked him. `To wreck the Democratic Party, Ma,’ Abbie answered.

“`Well, dress warm, it’s a windy city,’ Ma replied."

The same book also recalled that “near their apartment in Florida,” around the same time, Hoffman’s parents “were surprised one day by two FBI agents” of the Democratic Johnson Administration, “who jumped out of the bushes and started snapping pictures.”

(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 5/8/96)

Next: Because of summer travels, I won’t be blogging again until late in the Fall of 2008. Keep the Faith!

`Colombia Jail Journal': A Review

Colombia Jail Journal : A Review

James Monaghan, Dingle Co. Kerry, Ireland: Brandon Books (2007)

For nearly three years, Sinn Fein activist James Monaghan was held inside various Colombia jails, along with two other Sinn Fein supporters, and falsely charged by the Colombian army, the U.S. State Department and the British government with having spent his time in Colombia giving military training to FARC guerrillas. In Colombia Jail Journal Monaghan both tells what life was like for "The Colombia Three" inside Colombia's prisons and exposes how the Colombian government, the U.S. Embassy and the UK government fabricated their case against the three Irish Republicans, who were ultimately found innocent by a Colombia court judge of "training FARC guerrillas in Colombia."

In the prologue to his book, Monaghan admits that "The Colombia Three" were "traveling using passports in different people's names to hide our real identities" when they were arrested on August 11, 2001 by soldiers of the Colombian army at Bogota’s Airport. But in Chapter 1, Monaghan indicates that between the time he and the two other Irish Republicans--Niall Connolly and Martin McCauley--arrived in Colombia "towards the end of June 2001" and their August 11, 2001 arrest, all they ever did was visit the de-militarized zone where peace talks between FARC and the Colombian government were being held, and just discussed politics with senior FARC people (as did foreign visitors from countries other than Ireland). In addition, "when we were not involved in a discussion, which was a lot of the time, we explored the roads and forest," writes Monaghan.

So in Chapter 2, Monaghan describes how surprised he was when, after being taken to a Colombian Army Interrogation Center and given a fabricated forensic test by "an American expert from the Embassy," he, Connolly and McCauley were suddenly accused of being "top explosives experts from the IRA, in Colombia to train the FARC."

Having been falsely accused of training FARC members, the "Colombia Three" were then faced with the problem of surviving inside Colombia's prison system. Besides including imprisoned left-wing FARC guerrillas (who would likely try to protect the three Irish Republicans for internationalist solidarity reasons), Colombia's prison population also included many imprisoned members of the right-wing paramilitary death squads who might regard the "Colombia Three" as legitimate targets for assassination while they were imprisoned, because of the false "trainers of FARC" allegations. Much of the book includes a description of the various ways Monaghan, Connolly and McCauley and their supporters inside and outside the prison walls minimized the risk of them being killed in prison, while they were awaiting a trial that would clear their names.

Besides describing the hardships and human rights violations he experienced along with the other prisoners who are incarcerated within Colombia's high-security prisons (which are under the supervision of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons), Monaghan also describes the individual personalities, life histories and daily activities of the various imprisoned Colombians he encounters during his time in Colombia's jails. In addition, Monaghan mixes into the book some description of the historic and current political situation in Colombia and the anti-democratic role that the U.S. government has played in Colombia historically and currently, written from an anti-imperialist political perspective.

While inside Colombia's high-security jails, Monaghan also filled up his time prior to his trial by getting into painting and drawing. Interspersed throughout the book are sketches of scenes inside the Colombia prisons, portraits of visitors and some of the people with whom Monaghan was imprisoned, and images of some of the cards he painted while in prison.

If you don't know very much about how the political system and the U.S. Embassy in Colombia currently operates and want to learn what actually goes on inside the high-security prison walls of Colombia, you should definitely add James Monaghan's inspiring, exciting, and perceptively-written Colombia Jail Journal book to the Latin American section of your bookshelf.

Next: During July and early August 2008 of the summer vacation, I’ll only be blogging on this site about once a week. So the next post, “Why Yippies & Abbie Protested At Democratic National Convention In ‘68“, won’t be posted until August 7, 2008.

Australian Antiwar Activist Joan Coxsedge's Autobiography: A Review of `Cold Tea For Brandy'

In a book Joan Coxsedge co-authored in 1982, Rooted In Secrecy, the Australian antiwar activist--who was a member of Victoria’s Legislative Council between 1979 and 1992--described Australia’s hidden 20th-century history and revealed the role clandestine agencies play in Australian political life. And in her 1986 book, Thank God for the Revolution, Coxsedge exposed in vivid terms how U.S. imperialism’s intervention in Central America’s internal political affairs, historically and under the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, led to the massacres of thousands of civilians in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

But in her recently-published autobiography, Cold Tea For Brandy: A Tale of Protest, Painting and Politics (Balwyn North, Victoria, Australia: Vulcan Press, 2007), Coxsedge not only continues to reveal more of Australia’s hidden history and expose more about the crimes of U.S. imperialism around the globe. She also reveals how she came to be one of the great Australian anti-imperialist left-wing dissidents of the 20th century and exposes how difficult it is to radically democratize Australian society through parliamentary means alone. In addition, Coxsedge lets us know how it felt, personally, to be an antiwar activist, an anti-imperialist elected official and a politically-conscious painter for so many years since the early 1960s.

After opening her book with a poem, “The Grand Finale,” that concisely summarizes what she found, saw and did as an elected member of the Upper House of Victoria’s state parliament, Coxsedge recalls how surprised she was when she was first elected “against all the odds” and “with the narrowest of margins;” and how her legislative office “became a community resource for local campaigns and those of the global variety, involving people from the four corners of the earth.” Then Coxsedge, who was born in 1931, describes her working-class family background and what it was like growing up in Australia during the Great Depression and World War II.

Neither of Coxsedge’s parents were political activists, although her father, Roy Rochester, “voted Labor all his life.” So Coxsedge “had to find” her “own way through the political jungle.” Yet, ironically, the left-wing leader of the International Longshoreman and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU) during much of the 20th century, Harry Bridges, had grown up around the corner from where Coxsedge’s monarchist grandmother lived in inner Melbourne’s since-gentrified Kensington neighborhood.

Despite contracting a mild case of polio when she was six, Coxsedge soon recovered and, by the time she went to High School (unlike the majority of Australian working-class students before 1950), she participated actively in sports like hockey, tennis and swimming. Coxsedge also almost died at five years when a local incompetent doctor misdiagnosed her ruptured appendix.

Coxsedge next describes what it was like working as a probationary nurse in Melbourne after she graduated from high school in 1949. But after a learner car-driver rammed into her while she was riding her bicycle, Coxsedge was injured so badly that she no longer was able to lift heavy patients and had to give up her nursing job. Instead, she spent the early 1950s working as an assistant survey draftswoman for a state government agency that developed public housing projects, while taking art classes at night; until she met and married in 1953 an ex-British World War II veteran who had recently immigrated to Australia.

After briefly describing what it was like working as a paralegal for a left-liberal law firm in Australia and then raising a family of three in the 1950s and early 1960s, Coxsedge then takes her readers into the meat of her book, which is a kind of people’s history of the Australian left since the 1960s, as reflected in her own political and cultural activism and writing since the mid-1960s.

She takes her readers first inside the 1960s Australian antiwar movement during the Vietnam War Era and into the women’s prison where she was jailed for awhile for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. Then she takes you into the world of socialist left parliamentary politics, before recalling the experiences she had after she decided to start exposing in the 1970s the role that secret police and foreign intelligence agencies were playing in Australian domestic politics. Next Coxsedge provides her readers with a perceptive look at the development of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Australia during the 1970s, before describing in more detail her life as an elected state parliamentary representative.

In the final portion of her autobiography, Coxsedge describes her post-1980 journeys around the globe, impressions and experiences in places like the Cook Islands, Libya, Central America, Cuba, Mexico, South America, Europe, Malaysia and the USA. At the same time, Coxsedge also provides her readers with short, capsule political histories of some of the countries to which she has travelled.

As a bonus for the reader, Cold Tea For Brandy also includes images of Coxsedge’s sketches and paintings, as well as some photographs of her family members.

If you’re a U.S. antiwar reader who has never been “Down Under” and knows little about either Australian labor history or Australian antiwar movement history, then you’ll likely find Coxsedge’s autobiography—which is well-written in non-academic, jargon-free language—highly informative. And if the right-wing Australian-born global media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been the Australian historical figure you’ve been most familiar with since the 1970s, then you should definitely read Coxsedge’s politically inspirational autobiography. For Coxsedge has also been one of the Australian historical figure who has most courageously and consistently stood against the right-wing anti-democratic warmongering policies which Murdoch’s News Corporation/Fox News global media conglomerate has promoted in a journalistically unethical way for many years.

Next: During July and early August 2008 of the summer vacation, I’ll only be blogging on this site about once a week. So the next post, “Columbia Jail Journal: A Review“, won’t be posted until July 31, 2008.

Obama's Hearst/Oprah Winfrey Connection

One of the Obama presidential campaign’s most influential and wealthiest supporters within the U.S. corporate media world—billionaire television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey—is a business partner of the Hearst Corporation media conglomerate that has attempted to monopolize mass media power in the U.S. for many years. As the 2004 book by Helen Garson, Oprah Winfrey: A Biography, observed:

“…In her magazine O, which she started in 2000 with the partnership of the Hearst Corporation, she emphasizes the possibilities of change…

“…Oprah’s magazine has been…successful from the very beginning…

“One of the most prominent bookseller chains in the country, Border’s, features O so prominently it would be difficult to get through the purchasing line without seeing the magazine as a special display…

“Oprah’s magazine was described by writer Patricia Sellers of Fortune as `the most successful magazine launch ever.’ Although it first appeared on U.S. newsstands in July 2000, it was expanded within the year to an international edition in June 2001. That edition is as glossy as the U.S. one and almost as huge…O is published jointly by the Hearst Corporation and Winfrey’s Harpo Entertainment Group. Following its American inaugural issue of 322 pages of extremely large print with a run of 1.6 million copies, the magazine grew to a readership of two and a half million within a short period of time. With annual revenues topping $140 million, it is a considerable part of the Harpo empire…”
And, according to a July 7, 2008 press release that was recently posted on the Hearst Corporation web site:

“O, The Oprah Magazine..connects with more than 16 million readers every month…. O, The Oprah Magazine, which also publishes a South African edition, is a co-venture between Hearst Magazines, a unit of The Hearst Corporation, and Harpo Print, LLC. Hearst Magazines is a unit of Hearst Corporation and one of the world’s largest publishers of monthly magazines, with nearly 200 editions around the world, including 19 U.S. titles and 20 magazines in the United Kingdom, published through its wholly owned subsidiary, The National Magazine Company Limited. Hearst reaches more adults than any other publisher of monthly magazines (75.6 million total adults).”
The Hearst Corporation business partner and television talk show host who campaigned alongside Obama during the recent Democratic Party presidential primary season is, individually, now worth about $2.5 billion. And--unlike most people in the United States--Billionaire Winfrey has apparently not personally experienced much economic insecurity or economic hardship for many years. As Oprah Winfrey: A Biography by Helen Garson revealed in 2004:

“In 1971, during the Nixon administration, when two students from each state and from foreign countries were chosen to attend a White House Conference on Youth, Oprah was one of Tennessee’s representatives…

“She left college without her degree, moving on to another job in the media, becoming a…co-anchor of evening news at a Baltimore, Maryland, station. Although several biographies state that Oprah graduated from college in 1976, the fact is that she did not…

“The syndication of her show was the most significant step to stardom, because it made her a national and soon thereafter an international figure. Renaming the program as The Oprah Winfrey Show was the act of the King Brothers Corporation, a company owned by two very well-known distributors who had purchased the show in September 1986. They soon saw to it that the program was on 137 stations nationwide…

“The King Brothers, Robert and Michael, are white, middle-aged men…who inherited a…syndicate business when their father, Charlie King, died…Most of their clients have been…game shows…

“…Forbes listed her as being one of the wealthiest people in America, and in September 1993 tabulated her wealth as $98 million, higher than the $72 million of producer Steven Spielberg…Her wealth is also more than the $66 million of Bill Cosby…Ten years later, 2003, when Forbes ranked the 100 richest people in the world, Oprah made the list…

“By 1986 Oprah had enough money to buy…a penthouse condominium on the lakefront, with a view from the fifty-seventh floor…The apartment contains…crystal chandeliers…Her enjoyment of luxury also runs to a $100,000 BMW car…

“Today she owns three other homes; her home in Rolling Prairie, Indiana, is a 160-acre farm with a 40-acre meadow…and a $2 million house…There are thoroughbred horses on the farm; and an additional feature is a helicopter pad. A famed architect…designed the villa for her 85-acre ranch outside of Telluride, a Colorado ski area…A third house is a 42-acre, $50 million estate with a 23,000 square foot mansion in Montecito, California…Rumor suggests that Oprah paid for her California home with a personal check. She also owns several beachfront lots on the island of Maui in Hawaii…to get from one place to another easily, she bought a jet plane…

“Oprah’s growing wealth permitted her to make an even more important purchase. She acquired ownership and control of the Oprah Winfrey Show from the Chicago ABC-TV station WLS and formed the company Harpo, which she will not allow to go public…

“She is chairman and chief executive of the Harpo Entertainment Group…By the year 2002 Harpo was estimated by Fortune magazine to be worth $575 million, with Oprah as owner of 90 percent of the stock…

“…Barbra Streisand suggested that she have everyone who works for her sign privacy agreements…The result of following Streisand’s advice is that all information concerning Oprah’s operations is very limited and centrally controlled. Confidentiality is strongly pursued in all of Oprah’s undertakings. Even guests on her show or their families will not share information with outsiders, no matter how innocuous…”
After the Random House/Crown Publishers/Alfred Knopf subsidiary division of another media conglomerate, Germany’s Bertelsmann AG, gave Barack Obama a $1.7 million two-book contract following his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate, Winfrey also apparently used her television talk-show to help Obama market one of his new books. As Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell noted in his 2007 book Obama: From Promise To Power:

“In October 2006 came the…release of Obama’s second book…A major publicity campaign was undertaken, with Obama…appearing on seemingly every major network talk show, capped by an appearance with Michelle [Robinson-Obama] on Oprah. Book sales boomed…Obama’s book hit the top spot in sales…The day after the November [2006] election, in which the Democrats took control of Congress, Obama and his advisers began meeting in [Obama campaign media consultant David] Axelrod’s office…to discuss seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency…”

So, given the Obama presidential campaign’s apparent connection to the Hearst Dynasty’s media conglomerate and Billionaire Winfrey, don’t expect a Democratic Obama Administration to do very much to democratically redistribute the mass media power and the surplus wealth of the Hearst Dynasty and its billionaire business partners in 2009.

Next: During July and August 2008 of the summer vacation, I’ll only be blogging on this site about once a week. So the next post, “Australian Antiwar Activist Joan Coxsedge’s Autobiography:A Review of Cold Tea And Brandy” won’t be posted until July 24, 2008. On to Denver and St. Paul! Peace Now and Amnesty For All U.S. Political Prisoners in 2008!

Hearst's `Cosmopolitan' And The Politics Of Dynastic Media Monopolization

(The following article first appeared in the 9/9/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown.)

When it comes to editorial quality, Hearst’s Cosmopolitan may still not be too intellectually cosmopolitan these days. But when your magazine is chained to the Hearst Dynasty’s mass media chain, you’d better not be too intellectually cosmopolitan—or you might start wondering, in the interest of a healthy Democracy, why such a huge media company with all of the influence inherent to it, is still owned by just one small, extended family? Or you might wonder how democratic it is for someone like Patty “Tania” Hearst to still be slated to inherit over $100 million worth of Big Media stock in the 21st-Century?

But during the early 1990s, William Randolph Randolph Hearst Jr. seemed very pleased with his family’s position in the U.S. Big Media industry set-up. As he wrote in 1991:

“Every day millions of Americans read one of our many newspapers, magazines, other periodicals,…or books. They watch our TV stations and cable programming…Millions of others around the world read our overseas publications as well as view our broadcasters. Our comics and other features span the globe.”

Heil, Hearst!

(Downtown 9/9/92)

Next: Obama’s Hearst/Oprah Winfrey Connection

The Hearst Dynasty's Inherited Wealth In The 1990s

(The following article first appeared in the 9/9/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown.)

During the 1980s, the amount of inherited wealth that the Hearst media conglomerate continued to generate for the Hearst family continued to increase dramatically. In 1987, for example, the 40 or so living descendants of William Randolph Hearst I then divided up about $40 million it received from the Hearst Corporation’s barrel of net profits that year. As previously indicated, by the 1990s the Hearst Dynasty owned 100 percent of the Hearst Corporation’s stock and in 1991 William Randolph Jr. wrote that “I believe the company can remain intact and privately-owned for the next 30 years or so” and “our revenues and operating income are now triple what they were at the start of the 1980s.”

As a result of the Hearst media conglomerate’s expansion and increased profitability under Hearst Corporation’s then-President Frank Bennack’s management during the Reagan Era, by the 1990s Hearst family members were even much richer than they were at the time the SLA “arrested” Patty Hearst. As Downtown noted in its December 18, 1991 issue, Patty Hearst’s father, then-Hearst Corporation Chairman of the Board Randolph Hearst, was personally worth $875 million in 1991, as was Patty Hearst’s uncle, William Randolph Hearst Jr. Four other grandchildren of William Randolph Hearst I—David Whitmore Hearst Jr., Phoebe Hearst Jr., Millicent V. Baoudjakedji and George Randolph Hearst Jr.—were also each personally worth $440 million in 1991. [2008 update: Currently, William Randolph Hearst III is personally worth around $2.4 billion and David Hearst Jr., Phoebe Hearst Cook and George Hearst Jr. are now each personally worth around $2.1 billion.]

(Downtown 9/9/92)

Next: Hearst’s Cosmopolitan And The Politics Of Dynastic Media Monopolization