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Mainstream Media

October 11, 2002 - 12:16pm -- jim
News
Mainstream Media

"After Sept. 11, CIA Becomes a Growing Force on Campus"

"Agency Finds It Needs Experts From Academia And Colleges Pressed for Cash Like the Revenue"

Wall Street Journal, Oct. 4, 2002

"But by and large, these CIA guys are people whose primary goal is to keep the rest of us safe." — Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Physics Prof. Ryne Raffaelle

"We may have to suspend some freedoms for a little while."
— RIT President Albert J. Simone

Henrietta, N.Y. -- John Phillips has some daunting assignments for seniors at the Rochester Institute of Technology. To graduate, some of them will tackle any of a half-dozen science projects he's dreamed up at RIT's request. For instance: how to identify a terrorist in disguise based on bone structure, and how to bend light rays to keep a spy in the shadows. "Make me invisible," the 6-foot-3, 250-pound Mr. Phillips exhorted researchers during an August visit to the 15,300-student university in this Rochester suburb. Mr. Phillips takes more than an academic interest in these questions. As chief scientist for the Central Intelligence Agency, he's looking for creative ways -- and minds -- to protect American operatives and track down enemies.

October 11, 2002 - 8:50am -- jim
News
Mainstream Media

Harvard Role in Harken Called Deeper

Group Says Partnership Kept Bush Firm Afloat

By Michael Kranish, Boston Globe, October 9 2002

WASHINGTON — Harvard University's financial relationship with President
Bush's former oil company was deeper than previously understood, with the
university's management fund creating a separate ''off the books''
partnership with Harken Energy Corp. that helped keep afloat the financially
troubled company, according to a report to be released today.

HarvardWatch, a student-alumni group that monitors the school's investments,
plans to issue the report and say that it has analyzed documents showing
that the Harvard fund, an independent entity that manages the university's
endowment, formed a partnership in 1990 with Bush's oil firm called the
Harken Anadarko Partnership. The partnership effectively removed $20 million
of debt from Harken's books, relieving the Texas company's short-term
financial problems.

September 26, 2002 - 9:45am -- jim
News
Mainstream Media

Christopher Hitchens Quits The Nation

By Lloyd Grove, Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, September 26, 2002; Page C03

After two decades at the Nation magazine, toiling with increasing alienation and discomfort in the vineyards of the Left, Washington-based Brit journalist Christopher Hitchens is giving up his biweekly column, "Minority Report," and quitting the paleoliberal journal of opinion.

September 13, 2002 - 12:25pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"Bush and the Wall Street Journal"

Sean O'Torain

It is very difficult to have a proper view of the policies of the US
capitalist class without reading the Wall Street Journal. This publication is
aimed at the capitalists, not in a passive manner, but in order to stiffen
their backbone, to unify them behind specific objectives and to conduct a
struggle with them when they are missing what is in their own fundamental
interests. And to conduct a struggle with them when they are not ambitious
enough. Such as over the past years for example. Since the collapse of
stalinism the US is absolutely dominant militarily, econonically and
technologically on the world arena. The Wall Street Journal strategists have
a simple conclusion that they draw from this. Go out there and dominate. The
world is ours nobody can stand in our way. Go out there and take over and not
only that but deliberately do it openly to drive the lesson home to all. What
drove them wild about Clinton was that he was always consulting and dealing
and talking and trying to get agreement for US foreign policies.

August 29, 2002 - 2:54am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

hydrarchist writes "

Talking bull




In the fallout from the current US stock market crash, plenty of people are taking a hammering, from corporate titans to Wall Street whizz kids. But one class stands aloof, untouched by blame: the media pundits and business gurus who have been so recklessly hyping the New Economy for a decade. Why, asks Thomas Frank, are they still riding high, seeking out scapegoats for the collapse instead of taking a long, critical look at the almighty market itself From
The Guardian




Two years of stock market collapse have done much to transform public opinion in America. The crash has rudely discredited the nation's chief executives, the heroes of the decade past. It has smashed the reputation of the accounting industry, and it has ruined the image of the superstar stock analysts, all those who worked so desperately a few years ago to invent new methods of valuing valueless companies. It has brought on one of the most severe - most well-deserved - corporate crises since the 1930s. But nothing touches the public intellectuals of the bull market. Most of the other 90s types have passed from the scene: the swashbuckling dotcom entrepreneurs have moved back in with mom, the rule-breaking CEOs are being hauled before Congress for a tongue-lashing, the day-trading pensioners who were supposed to "beat the pros" are thanking God that Social Security still exists. But many of the ones who wrote the Dow-worshipping books and who handed down all those daring pronunciamentos from the silicon heights are still cruising from one posh gig to the next.

August 8, 2002 - 1:26pm -- Stenglander
News
Mainstream Media

Anonymous Comrade writes "salon.com is reporting that rats eager to snitch on their fellow citizens through the U.S. Government's Operation TIPS program are now being forwarded to Fox Broadcasting's 'America's Most Wanted' television program."

The story is at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/08/06/tips/ index_np.html.

March 20, 2002 - 1:10pm -- nomadlab
Reviews
Mainstream Media

"Let's Talk Class Again"

Thomas Frank


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n06/fran2406.htm

London Review of Books, 21 March 2002

Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes how the Media Distort the
News by Bernard Goldberg. | Regnery, 234pp., US $27.95,
11 December 2001


You will probably be surprised to learn of the massive
and virtually unchecked power that the Left holds in
the United States. After all, you'll say, aren't the
key American institutions -- the Presidency, the
Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the
corporations -- run by determined right-wingers or weak-
kneed centrists? And didn't American thinkers recently
proclaim the dawn of a capitalist millennium, a 'New
Economy' in which privatisation, deregulation and lower
taxes were taken to be their own justification, while
American CEOs mounted the heights of Davos and
instructed the world in the timeless principles of the
free market, as handed down by Milton Friedman, Ronald
Reagan and the prophets of Silicon Valley?

March 14, 2002 - 12:47pm -- Uncle Fluffy
News
Mainstream Media

Take a look at this Fortune magazine story, for how the Carlyle Group conspiracy theory is getting spun in mainstream American capitalist media.

http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol .jhtml&doc_id=20
6684
The Big Guys Work For the Carlyle Group
What exactly does it do? To find out, we peeked down the rabbit
hole.
FORTUNE
Monday, March 18, 2002
By Melanie Warner

Send to a Friend Print Subscribe to Fortune

Are you the sort of person who believes in conspiracies--the
Trilateral Commission secretly runs the world, that sort of thing?
Well, then, here's a company for you. The Carlyle Group, a
Washington, D.C., buyout firm, is one of the nation's largest
defense contractors. It has billions of dollars at its disposal
and employs a few important people. Maybe you've heard of them:
former Secretary of State Jim Baker, former Secretary of Defense
Frank Carlucci, and former White House budget director Dick
Darman. Wait, we're just getting warmed up. William Kennard, who
recently headed the FCC, and Arthur Levitt, who just left the SEC,
also work for Carlyle. As do former British Prime Minister John
Major and former Philippines President Fidel Ramos. Let's see, are
we forgetting anyone? Oh, right, former President George Herbert
Walker Bush is on the payroll too.

The firm also has about a dozen investors from Saudi Arabia,
including, until recently, the bin Laden family. Yes, those bin
Ladens. Is it any wonder that Internet sites with names like
paranoiamagazine.com are rife with stories about Carlyle's
shadowy, corrupt global network? And it's not just wackos. "Be
careful," a tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley wrote in an e-mail
when he learned I was doing a story on Carlyle. "The rabbit hole
runs really deep on this one.''

March 1, 2002 - 2:38pm -- nomadlab
News
Mainstream Media

Phuq Hedd writes "Frank Dorrell is a well-known Los Angeles anti-war activist. I think, from looking at his video "What I've Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy", that he may be some sort of buddy of Ramsey Clarke. However it's a pretty good short summary of some recent U.S. interventions. It is reported that his Hotmail account has been terminated because the Terms of Use deem that sending "offensive material" to other customers is grounds for termination of service.

Seems like dollars and control get to determine Free $peech yet again. On the positive side perhaps this will discourage people from using Hotmail (as if the problem of having to configure Getmail to pull mails off their POP server wasn't enough! If you must use one of the big free services then Yahoo is much friendlier to *NIX clients)"

November 28, 2001 - 6:45am -- Stenglander
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

hydrarchist writes: "This story is taken from the site Not Bored, and is published in the most recent issue of the 'zine of the same name."

On 3 October 1992, the Irish rock singer Sinead O'Connor was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. For her first song, Sinead performed the title track from her most recent album, Am I Not Your Girl? with a full backing band. For her second, she went with "War," a song by Bob Marley that had once been banned for its apparent advocacy of violence. In a very risky move, musically speaking, Sinead performed the song a capella. Dressed all in white, surrounded by candles and (as usual) shaven-headed, she was a riveting sight. With NBC-TV's cameras focused in-tight on her, Sinead ended her "War" by crying for another one to begin. "Fight the real enemy!" she called, and, out of nowhere, produced a copy of a photograph of Pope John Paul II, which she ripped into pieces. There was stunned silence, and then the station went to a commercial.

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