Muncie, IN – We’re reaching the point now where both corporations and governments have more rights than the individual. Senator Bernie Sanders recently said that Congress literally asks Wall Street permission to regulate it, and TPP trade agreement is a secretive trade pact our so-called “progressive” president is trying to approve for global corporations giving them powers which exceed governments where they do business.
When corporations and governments work together to clamp down on personal rights, it’s called corporate fascism.
We’re witnessing the United States’ NSA and the British GCHQ crackdown on journalists and now Egypt has joined the war against journalists.
All over the globe, we are seeing people protesting oppressive governments. North Korea is committing unspeakable crimes against humanity, Syria, South Africa, Ukraine, Egypt, Israel-Palestine, etc.
Governments and corporations are working together to stamp out the rights of the individual, but attempting to quash the human spirit is a futile exercise and they’ll lose.
As we mentioned on Facebook, the financial and government corruption journalist from the Rolling Stones Mag, Matt Taibbi, is joining First Look Media and Glenn Greenwald. This will give Matt much more latitude in holding Wall Street accountable and their puppets in Washington. As I’ve said before, journalism has been pushed around by its corporate bosses for nearly 4 decades, and I project 2014 will be the year it fights back.
In global surveillance circles, journalism has already been fighting back as Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian scored the Edward Snowden documents obtained from the NSA. These documents show the spying activities of both the USA and British government. If you remember, the premise for expanding their surveillance was to help in fighting the war on terrorists. However, they secretly expanded their mission from “potential terrorists” to collecting meta data on all citizens.
And, what we’ve learned this week is “terrorists” can be anyone our state feels threatened by. Remember, we told you the Koch brothers and their corporate partners referred to journalists who exposed animal cruelty within confined animal feed operations (CAFO’s) as “eco-terrorists”, and wanted state governments, including Indiana, to prosecute offenders as terrorists.
While Greenwald was hammering the U.S. and British governments in his articles and on the television, the British government was spying on Greenwald, his partner David Miranda, and co-journalist Laura Poitras. When they learned Miranda was flying into Heathrow airport, they decided to detain him for nine hours trying to extract the Snowden documents. Miranda filed a lawsuit against the British government, and this week, a lower court ruled.
The UK Government expressly argued that the release of the Snowden documents (which the free world calls “award–winning journalism“) is actually tantamount to “terrorism”, the same theory now being used by the Egyptian military regime to prosecute Al Jazeera journalists as terrorists. Congratulations to the UK government on the illustrious company it is once again keeping. British officials have also repeatedly threatened criminal prosecution of everyone involved in this reporting, including Guardian journalists and editors.
Greenwald goes on to discuss the history of the U.K. clamping down on press freedom. Unlike America, the U.K. doesn’t grant the press freedom of speech. They are a monarchy as opposed to our democratic republic. Our founders knew a strong functioning democracy required transparency and government representatives who were accountable to the people.
This is why all of spying and harassing journalists around the globe is alarming since it is the first steps in closing down a society. If you think that America stands behind the freedom of the press, you’d also be wrong. The U.S. is listed as 32nd of all countries for press freedom. Not what you would expect from a country who considers itself a free and open democracy.
The social unrest across the globe is directly linked to this oppression. Groups are gathering all across the U.S. and abroad to push back against the corporate/state rule. In the U.K’s case, Greenwald captures this sentiment perfectly in his closing by writing,
In summary, the UK Government wants to stop disclosure of its mass surveillance activities not because it fears terrorism or harm to national security but because it fears public debate, legal challenges and accountability. That is why the UK government considers this journalism to be “terrorism”: because it undermines the interests and power of British political officials, not the safety of the citizenry. I’ve spent years arguing that the word “terrorism” in the hands of western governments has been deprived of all consistent meaning other than “that which challenges our interests”, and I never imagined that we would be gifted with such a perfectly compelling example of this proposition.
We expect that Greenwald and Miranda will appeal the lower courts ruling in the U.K., but don’t expect the war with words slowing down. From our vantage point, First Look Media has the upper hand. The corporate/state does not want its power checked by any journalists and this is why you will not find reporting of this on the corporate owned media or public relations firms. You can trust the American media and BBC about as much as you can trust Wall Street Banksters and the politicians they own.
