Duty to Warn

March Madness comes once a year. Media Madness is year-round. What the mass media choose to cover and feature try to turn the priorities of any sane society upside down.

People of vice, war, money, spectator sports and business receive media attention – oftentimes ad nausem. People of virtue, peace, civics, health, labor and community engagement have to beg for media attention. Which of these two groups represents the most basic values of a civilized society that would restrain the excesses of the other group? You can guess!

There are many reasons for this chronic bias, beyond the power of commercial advertisers. The media believe that wrongdoing and greed and violence get readers and ratings while their opposites are dull soup.

But aren’t these opposites vital to the survival and well-being of a just society? Aren’t people who wage peace to prevent war, or demand health/safety over sickness/injury, more newsworthy when they expose people or companies that cause danger, damage and deaths?

In this election year, the most important companies to watch are two you've probably never heard of -- Smartech and Triad.

In the 2004 presidential election, Averbeck worked closely with the late Michael Connell, the CEO of New Media Communications. Connell was Karl Rove's IT guru before his untimely death in a suspicious plane crash. As the FreePress.org has previously reported, then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell contracted with Averbeck to provide back-up computer services to report Ohio's official election results.

Ohio Secretary of State's office claimed they were unable to tabulate Ohio's votes within the state in real time because their computers had a supposed "denial of service" attack in the wee hours of the morning after the 2004 Election Day. Vote tabulations were then shifted to the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee where Averbeck ran his internet service company Smartech. (See New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked)

The Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda has nothing on its website about using nonviolence, supporting nonviolence, or opposing violence.

The G8 and NATO Protest also has nothing like that, but does have this:

"As we plan our actions and tactics, we will take care to maintain appropriate separations of time and space btween divergent tactics."

A month ago I blogged that I would not endorse Occupy the RNC or DNC because both groups were refusing to state that they opposed violence.

Occupy the RNC has now put this on its website:

"We are not organizing actions, especially violent ones. That would just be stupid. We exist to provide information and facilitate logistics for people resisting the RNC."

Not how I would have put it. Nor would I have added:

"Don't fuck with us. We'll sue you."

But foreswearing violence and calling it stupid is enough for me. I wish Occupy DNC could bring itself to do as much. Better yet, just add "We oppose violence and will not use it."

That would be ideal, smart, strategic, and beneficial to the movement.

Believing in the classic American Dream that hard work will deliver prosperity is like believing that buying super lottery tickets is a smart way to become wealthy. Both are delusional beliefs because both are bets on incredible long shots that will disappoint nearly everyone who believes this garbage. The American Dream has been destroyed by a revolution from the top.

Americans have been watching authentic bottom-up revolutions in other countries but remain oblivious to a very different kind of revolution by elites that has been in progress for over three decades in the US. It has not destroyed the government or Constitution, merely bought control of both. Our government was not overthrown in a bloody revolution. It was purchased to win the class war against the 99 percent.

In the latest nail in the coffin of American liberty the people’s court of “last resort,” the U.S. Supreme Court, has confirmed that law abiding American Citizens (that means YOU, YOUR WIFE, and YOUR CHILDREN) traveling along any highway, breaking no law can now be arrested, handcuffed, hauled off to jail, mug shot, striped naked, and have your private parts gawked at or fondled by chuckling prison guards for the “crime” of -get this -a seven year old traffic ticket, that it turns out had been paid in full.

And this kind of treatment goes for old granny’s too -just keep your eyes wide open at the airports.

Now fellow Americans, if the thought of your wife or kids or grandma being treated like this does not get your blood pressure rising, then I can’t imagine what would.

And this president, who got himself elected on the promise of “Change” recently proved himself as phony as the last one by re-signing The Patriot Act into law -even though all President’s swear to “uphold and defend” the constitution. This doesn’t sound like change to me. But it’s all the proof anybody should need that they’re ALL a bunch of two faced liars.

Recently, Vice-President Biden came to Ohio in support of President Obama's efforts to make college tuition more affordable. Mr. Biden's visit a couple months back was reported in the January 13, 2012 issue of The Columbus Dispatch, in an article written by Joe Vardon, and headlined "Biden hits hot-button subject: college costs."

Having been an academic most of my life, I have had several experiences that bear upon Mr.Biden's "button."

Let me begin with a twist on an old saying, "no one ever won a horse race without a good horse." A small twist on that saying applies to global economic races: no one ever wins economic races without a well-educated workforce. And with this country's students ranking only 16th among industrialized nations, it's clear that we as a country have to work on more hot-button issues than just Mr. Biden's "cost."

There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice and Equality
by Philip F. Rubio
University of North Carolina Press

Obtaining a job at the post office was considered to be a quite a coup for blacks, especially black men. A full-time postal employee could count on steady work, a good salary, paid vacations, health benefits, and for those who stayed thirty years, a guaranteed pension. I can still hear my late Aunt Clara proudly describing the boyfriend of one of her daughters: “Honey he got a good job; he work at the post office.” The only thing that topped dating a postal employee was dating a doctor or lawyer. As one of the largest employers of blacks in America, postal work was also crucial in lifting hundreds of thousands of African Americans into the middle class.

Oil and gas corporations, their trade associations, mass media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, and numerous pundits continue to report there is a new day unfolding in the energy future of the U.S. Indeed, they sometimes say it is a revolution in the making. It's now feasible to mine hitherto unreachable or unprofitable sources of "unconventional" oil and gas. As a result, massive, environmentally-devastating mining of tar sands in Canada expands, with a proposed and controversial pipeline to carry the partly processed oil from Alberto to Texas. Drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the arctic, multiple off-shore locations drill ever-more deeply into the ocean floor and beneath it. As far as mining for shale gas and oil goes, the situation is described with words such as gushers, or bonanzas, or energy independence.

The only two US reactor projects now technically under construction are on the brink of death for financial reasons.

If they go under, there will almost certainly be no new reactors built here.

The much mythologized "nuclear renaissance" will be officially buried, and the US can take a definitive leap toward a green-powered future that will actually work and that won't threaten the continent with radioactive contamination.

As this drama unfolds, the collapse of global nuclear power continues, as two reactors proposed for Bulgaria have been cancelled, and just one of Japan's 54 licensed reactors is operating. That one may well close next month, leaving Japan without a single operating commercial nuke.

Georgia's double-reactor Vogtle project has been sold on the basis of federal loan guarantees. Last year President Obama promised the Southern Company, parent to Georgia Power, $8.33 billion in financing from an $18.5 billion fund that had been established at the Department of Energy by George W. Bush.