According to a Washington Post news item of May 4, 2007, it appears that President Bush’s Justice Department is writing legislation to immunize the phone companies from lawsuits stemming from post-9/11 surveillance.

‘The proposal states that “no action shall lie . . . in any court, and no penalty . . . shall be imposed . . . against any person” for giving the government information, including customer records, in connection with alleged intelligence activity the attorney general certifies “is, was, would be or would have been” intended to protect the United States from terrorist attack. The measure, which has not yet been filed, is contained in a proposed amendment to the fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization bill.’ read the full story…

Surely this must be another form of Corporate Welfare. If phone companies broke the law, and cooperated with a portion of the government illegally, then shouldn’t they be held both financially and criminally liable? The Executive Branch doesn’t play legislative interference when a person has shoplifted by declaring there should be no penalty for having doing so; by similar logic, why should telephone corporations be granted special legal exemption from laws they were supposed to follow?

On January 17, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote a letter stating that, in the future, all intelligence gathering of targeted communications will be conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (PDF link via Wikipedia). Unfortunately, the story detailed by the Washington Post news item referenced above, if true, shows that the Executive Branch wishes to excuse the past illegalities of its co-conspirators.

Why is it constitutional for the Justice Department, which is under the Executive Branch, to write legislation, when Article 1 of the Constitution grants legislative authority to the Legislative Branch, otherwise known as Congress?

It appears that phone companies that may have illegally complied with past Executive Branch requests for intelligence on phone conversations have left the companies with a rather large legal liability. In turn, the Executive Branch appears to be attempting to mitigate these liabilities by legislating retroactively. If it was illegal then, then why declare that no penalties or punishments can be assigned for those acts?

This appears to me to be ultimately all about money, and the ability of certain wealthy entities to be above law in effect at the time. In order to achieve this the Executive Branch simply attempts to change the law for the benefit of very few. Shouldn’t there be a penalty for breaking the law?

As usual, citizens lose when the government doesn’t advocate for them, but instead for a few wealthy entities that have interests that oppose the Constitution and the law. Congress needs to severely limit the power of the Executive Branch to legislate.

A good first step would be to impeach the current occupants of the White House.

Dave Pollard at How to Save the World¹ writes a post questioning society’s attraction to violent entertainment media, he asks:

“What’s going on here? Why, when we could be going to movies or plunking down in front of the TV to laugh with people, to be charmed and delighted by funny characters delivering clever lines, are we instead going to laugh at people who behave offensively, who act ridiculously, and who insult and demean others? Why, when we could be uplifted by stories of courage and indomitable human spirit, do we instead choose to see stories of unimaginable brutality, anguish, relentless horror and suffering, often without resolution or redemption? Why, rather than piquing our imaginations with what they don’t show, do today’s popular films use grisly hyper-realistic graphics and special effects that leave nothing to the imagination? We’re still coy about the depiction of sex in films, so why are we so blatant and vulgar in the depiction of extreme violence?”

I presume the attraction of violent entertainment is simply as a metaphor for our lives. The metaphor speaks to the non-physically violent raping that all of our minds have been subjected to year in and year out, from birth to death, by powerful corporatists intent on subjecting us to: their minds and their rule and their daily pick-pocketing; surely a kinder and gentler form of warfare.

While we may not have been violently murdered, the invisible butterfly wings we were all given at birth, and for some of us which were eloquently described in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, particularly the phrase about the un-alienability of each of our respective pursuits of Happiness, have been sliced away from many of us in a way similar to a violent murder, and arguably more cruelly than to simply have killed us quickly and to have been done with the matter.

Since great masses of people are hosts to a few powerful parasites, and since killing the hosts typically kills the parasites, the parasites seek the opposite, extending our lives so they can continue in their ways. Like the metaphor of vampire, the parasite seeks to suck our blood without actually killing us — but altering us — so that they can receive sustenance from each of us everyday, and so they can live their powerful lives of darkness and power, an ability which is multiplied exponentially with more hosts.

When one thinks about the metaphor of violence with this pattern, one may realize that coyness surrounding sex in movies serves the same metaphor. Sex, as fundamentally a reproductive act when performed between heterosexuals, simply perpetuates the aforementioned parasite-host relationship from one generation to the next, so coyness regarding sex could be reflective of a communal sub-conscious desire to not reproduce, even when, at the individual level, one’s own body signals powerful reinforcements and one’s mind rationalizes that it is only through reproduction that survival is guaranteed. But that guarantee is really nothing more than a promise to the potential child-to-be that they, too, will be subjected to the same, or perhaps improved, parasitical methods that ultimately lead to a denial of Happiness, and therefore reproduction represents little more than a passing of parasite-host misery from one generation to the next.

I presume that a population that loves violent metaphors has experienced great psychological warfare wreaked against it. As metaphor, it is familiar.

Bibliography 1. http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/10/03.html#a1663

AT&T is in the news, this time they are alleged to have updated their privacy policy to include language that grants them ownership over customers’ data according to an article by David Lazarus of the San Franscisco Chronicle. Yesterday, the Associated Press wrote about how police agencies across the country have been using private data brokers to bypass privacy laws that prevent the police from legally obtaining that information without a warrant.

It seems that our 4th Amendment guarantee to be safe in “persons … papers, and effects” has been shredded (read more . . . )

Most all of us who have watched television cannot miss the flood of commercials that, we have often been told, help support the artists creating the entertainment as well as the corporate distribution network that brings the shows to us. It seems to me that the time granted to commercials on television versus the time granted to the show itself is a growing ratio—commercials are much more preponderant than they were 20- or even 5-years ago—and at the same time costs for viewers to purchase programming have increased far in excess of the rate of inflation for some number of years now.

If one has subscribed to a premium movie channel, the viewer will see fewer commercials, but this is not the only way to decrease commercial content. Technologies such as VCRs and Tivo have apparently turned the advertisers’ television model on its head, as viewers using these devices can skip through the commercial onslaught.

TV advertisers claim they aren’t getting the market saturation they feel they have paid for and claim they are entitled to, so they are increasingly demanding that screenwriters include more product placements within the body of the show itself. The Writer’s Guild of America claims the increasing frequency of this is unfair, perhaps even deceptive, and is fighting back. From an article authored by David Cohn (his weblog), and published by Wired News:

“While the WGA hasn’t filed a FCC petition, they have drawn up a list of demands. These demands include a full disclosure of all advertisers, strict limits on products placed in children’s programming and a collective voice for writers on how products can be incorporated into story lines.”

While I’m absolutely certain that the majority of writers are underpaid (I know well more than one novelist that claims this), and I fully support the rights of groups of people to gather together in peaceful dissent and to petition for higher wages, I have to ask, where is the concern for the average entertainment viewer?

Has the purchaser of cable TV or satellite programming simply been relegated to consumer status?

If one watches over-the-air broadcasts, or even subscribes to basic cable or satellite programming, but doesn’t routinely record shows using a VCR or Tivo for the purpose of commercial free television viewing, then increasing the amount of product placements written into the body of entertainment itself further increase the commercial onslaught that this subset of viewers watch.

If one is paying for a premium movie channel, for advertisement-free viewing, and advertisements are increasingly included in the script as product placements, then are premium-channel purchasers getting the same level of service they received in the past? If one buys DVDs to watch instead of subscribing to a premium movie channel, and advertisements are written into the movie script, then has the retail cost of DVDs gone down as a result of this advertiser subsidy?

If the Television Networks don’t watch out, they’ll find the insatiable greed of their advertisers causes even more people to turn off the TV, more than those who already have. If average television viewers are going to be watching only commercial content, both in the obvious commercial slots as well as the increasing amounts of advertisements within the body of the show itself, advertisements that are not obvious and have an intent other than telling the screenwriter’s story, then shouldn’t those viewers be paid to watch TV?

Yesterday, Time Magazine online published an article regarding the airport shooting on Flight 924 by federal air marshals which contradicted what had been characterized by television news reports, as the incident unfolded, of a man with a bomb who threatened to blow up the plane. TIME reported in part that a passenger by the name of John McAlhany disputed earlier reports that Alpizar, the man shot dead by federal air marshals, claimed to have had a bomb:

“I never heard the word ‘bomb’ on the plane,” McAlhany told TIME in a telephone interview. “I never heard the word bomb until the FBI asked me did you hear the word bomb. That is ridiculous.” Even the authorities didn’t come out and say bomb, McAlhany says. “They asked, ‘Did you hear anything about the b-word?’” he says. “That’s what they called it.” http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1138965,00.html

This morning, KGTV10 San Diego claims “passengers” confirm that Alpizar said “bomb”:

But passengers of American Airlines flight 924 saw a much different behavior. They say Alpizar claimed to have a bomb in carry-on luggage and ran towad the cockpit. His wife ran after him. “She was crying, ‘my husband my husband’ when he ran up there. I know there was a scuttlebutt, some kind of intensity happening in the front and those poor people in first class saw everything. There were children there and I know that was horrifying for them,” said witness Mary Gardner. http://www.10news.com/news/5496761/detail.html

KGTV’s article has no reporter or author attribution that I can find right now. Further, the paragraph that claims passengers said Alpizar had a bomb doesn’t include witness names or their direct quotes. KGTV then follows the first paragraph quoted above with another one that might imply or suggest that witness Mary Gardner said it. But did she?

According to Curt Anderson, Associated Press writer:

Added another passenger, Mary Gardner: “I did not hear him say that he had a bomb.” http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3514066.html

Further, AP reporter Anderson writes that police held guns to other passengers on the plane after passenger Alpizar was shot and killed.

I remember having the TV on while the incident unfolded, and it distracted me for a time from some other tasks. Not once did I see any video of Alpizar acting agitated, or saying he was going to blow up the plane, or any video of him in the alleged incident whatsoever, but an audible narrative was fed to the viewer that claimed those facts. All I could see was a plane parked on the tarmac, and over time, a growing presence of emergency vehicles surrounding it. Who fed the alleged facts to the broadcasters on the day of the shooting? Who fed this morning’s story to KGTV that the dead man, Alpizar, claimed to have a bomb?

In the same way there’s been a saying, “buyer beware,” perhaps news viewers should repeat to themselves, “viewer beware.”

With the buyer beware warning, one at least knows that the seller is going to benefit from a transaction and what the seller tells us prior to then is likely biased by the profit motive: what is sometimes in question is how much the purchaser will benefit from what is purchased.

However, with viewer beware, we can only wonder who and in what ways some shadowy, and what appears deliberately-obfuscated, entity benefits. Viewers en-masse likely come away with widely divergent views depending upon which version of the story they heard or read. Perhaps it is precisely this effect the shadowy entity desires—to keep us arguing amongst ourselves—and so wrapped up in current serial crises, that we don’t look up and see the bigger, long-term picture.

Last night, a measure authored by Duncan Hunter which called for the immediate termination of U.S. forces in Iraq, was voted on twice by the House of Representatives and was soundly defeated on the second vote. Hunter was apparently inspired to author the bill after hearing of a speech given by Representative Murtha.
(read more . . . )