WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 16, 2008) — AT&T met with representatives of the Alliance for Community Media (ACM) on Thursday, July 8, to demonstrate the company’s U-Verse system. The demonstration confirmed multiple problems with U-Verse which were acknowledged by AT&T’s representative, Chris Boyer. These include a delay in accessing PEG programming, inferior picture quality, lack of DVR functionality, and no support for closed captioning or second audio programming.

As reported by blogger, Geoff Daily, Boyer “admitted that the reason all PEG channels are lumped under channel 99 is because of technical limitations.” ACM Board Chair, Matt Schuster states “The channel 99 limitation is a result of a business decision by the company, not because of technological limitations.” Schuster adds, “Instead of engaging in damage control after the fact, AT&T should have worked with community access stations prior to rollout. AT&T’s sub-par system makes it unnecessarily difficult to view local community programming.”

Cable systems both large and small have historically carried PEG channels in an equivalent manner with commercial and other non-commercial channels. As a new competitor to cable, Verizon has done the same. Only AT&T’s U-Verse system has failed to meet the needs of local programmers.

Schuster said, “This degradation of PEG services reduces the benefit to many communities of the diverse, local programming provided through PEG channels. That contradicts the 1984 Cable Act goals that franchises be responsive to the needs and interests of the local community.”

The Alliance for Community Media is a national membership organization representing more than 3,000 PEG access centers across the nation. Local PEG programmers produce 20,000 hours of new programs per week, and serve more than 250,000 organizations annually through the efforts of an estimated 1.2 million volunteers.

For more information visit the Alliance For Community Media

France’s right-wing President, Sarkozy proposes that public television be funded by private broadcasters and telecom firms.

“France needs a balance between public channels and private channels,” Sarkozy said in a speech…

He’d be accused of being a socialist here.

Read The Full Report Here

- Posted by Greg Boozell

Daniel Greenwood is a highly unusual law professor who writes academic articles with subtitles like “The Illegitimacy of Corporate Law” and “Why Corporate Speech is Not Free.” Strangely, his work has been strangely overlooked by the democracy/anti-corporate movement. That’s a shame because it’s great stuff and worth a close look.

Recently Professor Greenwood switched from University of Utah to Hofstra Law School, so he has a new web page with links to all his writings:

http://people.hofstra.edu/Daniel_J_Greenwood/

Sample article titles:

“Should Corporations Have First Amendment Rights?” (a classic)

“Democracy and Delaware: The Mysterious Race to the Top/Bottom”
From the abstract: Re-politicizing corporate law would allow us to see a series of difficult value choices that are currently concealed but ought to be the subject of political debate”

“Markets and Democracy: The Illegitimacy of Corporate Law”

“Introduction to the Metaphors of Corporate Law”

“First Amendment Imperialism”

“The Semi-Sovereign Corporation” (very good)

“Essential Speech: Why Corporate Speech is Not Free” (awesome article!!!)

- Posted by Ted Nace

Like a bad check, these clowns keep bouncing back, with the persistence of a nasty cold that just won’t ever seem to quite go away.

Guess we can’t be too surprised, though. Hopefully people won’t be nearly as prone to swallow the BS from them the way they have done in the past. I really like how the guy phrases it at the end that they just want to raise the focus on violent crime.

On a website he calls ExposeObama.com, Floyd G. Brown, the producer of the “Willie Horton” ad that helped defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, is preparing an encore.

Brown is raising money for a series of ads that he says will show Barack Obama to be out of touch on an issue of fundamental concern to voters: violent crime.

By “violent crime” does he mean the war in Iraq? Come to think of it, Floyd, I’m glad you’ve brought that up, since it does seem to be disappearing as an issue from the media landscape.

Brown and GOP strategists say such ads stimulate a debate on crime and punishment and may provide a window into the morality of a candidate.

As well as providing a window into the morality of those who willfully distort these subjects for partisan political gain. Hopefully this will indeed stimulate a debate on crime and punishment. How about a debate on the massive crimes of fraud and theft being waged against the American taxpayer by privileged ruling elites governing from Wall Street who use their position to bilk taxpayers of billions in their money raking pursuit of endless cash through the policy of perpetual war? That’s one debate I think we may be overdue in having, particularly via the platform of the corporate media.

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From Tom J’s letter to his friend and colleague James Madison, September 6, 1789. He seems to have been reading from another friend of his, Thomas Paine, as this reflects some points made by good ol Mr. Paine. Jefferson made repeated references throughout his life to the need for each generation to change the law according to their needs. He stated on more than one occassion that each generation should have its own constitutional convention. By this benchmark we are indeed LONG overdue.

From his Letter To Madison…

On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.

It may be said that the succeeding generation exercising in fact the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to 19 years only. In the first place, this objection admits the right, in proposing an equivalent. But the power of repeal is not an equivalent. It might be indeed if every form of government were so perfectly contrived that the will of the majority could always be obtained fairly and without impediment. But this is true of no form. The people cannot assemble themselves; their representation is unequal and vicious. Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils. Bribery corrupts them. Personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise so as to prove to every practical man that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal.

This principle that the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead is of very extensive application and consequences in every country, and most especially in France. It enters into the resolution of the questions Whether the nation may change the descent of lands holden in tail? Whether they may change the appropriation of lands given antiently to the church, to hospitals, colleges, orders of chivalry, and otherwise in perpetuity? whether they may abolish the charges and privileges attached on lands, including the whole catalogue ecclesiastical and feudal? it goes to hereditary offices, authorities and jurisdictions; to hereditary orders, distinctions and appellations; to perpetual monopolies in commerce, the arts or sciences; with a long train of et ceteras: and it renders the question of reimbursement a question of generosity and not of right. In all these cases the legislature of the day could authorize such appropriations and establishments for their own time, but no longer; and the present holders, even where they or their ancestors have purchased, are in the case of bona fide purchasers of what the seller had no right to convey.

Read a complete online copy of the note Here

This from Patricia Cohen writing for The New York Times touches on a sense of things that has bothered me for some time, but was not sure how much of it was simply my own limited perceptions. Unfortunately, the condition seems to have been noticed by others, as well.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she [Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason”] said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

We’re doomed.

Read The Complete Article

Rick Shenkman follows up with his report “How Ignorant Are We?”

Looks like the answer is unfortunately pretty ignorant.

Interesting overview of the modern history of the Supreme Court and of the members who make it up. It does help to explain some things. Most telling is the current court’s emphasis of exalting order over liberty, and institutional and governmental power over the individual.

In a 2006 opinion for a unanimous court written by Roberts, the former corporate litigator, the court told taxpayers they had no right to challenge the State of Ohio’s tax abatements and investment credits extended to DaimlerChrysler. Taxpayers had argued that they and their communities would sustain injury because the less money DaimlerChrysler paid, the less money the state would distribute mandated revenue to its cities.

But Roberts and his colleagues offered a short lesson in neoconservative, supply-side economics: “The very point of the tax benefits is to spur economic activity, which in turn increases government revenues.” Apparently, the conservative activists of the Bush-Roberts Court have rejected the observation of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that “A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory.”

When the DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno case is read together with Kelo v. City of New London (2005) - a controversial case permitting private homes to be condemned so that the land on which they sit can be transferred to a private developer - the result is a population stripped of all defenses against corporate power. Workers and taxpayers cannot fight against corporations that take property for the benefit of profit-making, and they are just as powerless to seek redress in court when a town’s officials give the store away to a corporation.

Read the complete article Here from In These Times

Good article touching on some forgotten history about the lineage of the whole ‘decency’ thing on the radio (and television), and the importance George Carlin held not only in the annals of comedy, but in our civic history as a society and what the value and role of speech is in our society. The article also features some comments by Tony Riddle, the former executive director of the Alliance for Community Media, a colleague and friend of mine, now serving as the general manager of WBAI radio in NYC.

As the encomiums for George Carlin have rolled in from stand-up legends, celebrities and scholars, his death at 71 has also been noted at a diminutive, iconic and iconoclastic radio station in Manhattan, WBAI-FM.

Its broadcast of the comedian’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” became a landmark moment in the history of free speech. In a 1978 milestone in the station’s contentious and unruly history, WBAI lost a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that to this day has defined the power of the government over broadcast material it calls indecent.

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Now, broadcasting the seven words „would cost us $360,000 per incident “so those seven words would cost us $2.5 million,” Mr. Riddle said, about equal to the station‚s annual budget. “Now we’d be severely limited in taking a chance on protecting people’s free-speech rights.”

————–

The station that for generations has spoken truth to power is incongruously situated on the 10th floor of 120 Wall Street, and smack in the middle of the FM dial, at 99.5. Now in its 48th year, WBAI was both an expression, and ringleader, of the counterculture during its peak in the mid-1960s through the Vietnam War.

Observers have said that in its heyday, its on-air personalities, like Mr. Josephson, Steve Post and Bob Fass, extended the popularity of FM radio and explored the possibilities of the medium.

————–

Mr. Riddle, who joined the station in February, said that “it’s always difficult to run a democracy,” adding that “a lot of people believe in the kind of radio we provide,” since the station does not accept advertising, underwriting or grants.

Read the Full Article

The switch to digital TV is essentially a $70 billion gift from taxpayers to broadcasters. So, what will we get in return?

On Feb. 17, 2009, a massive but so far little-noted corporate theft of the public airwaves will be consummated as U.S. analog TV stations switch to digital TV (DTV) broadcasting. Digital broadcast technology enables three, four and sometimes more separate channels to be compressed into the space formerly occupied by a single old-fashioned analog TV channel. So when the transition from analog to digital TV occurs nationwide, each of the nation’s more than 1,700 broadcast TV license holders will suddenly have two, three or more additional channels, a gift from the taxpayers worth an estimated $70 billion.

Back in the mid-1990s, the owners of TV stations promised Congress that the advent of DTV would bring with it a wide selection of new programming, educational and children’s shows, frequently updated local newscasts and interactive content, all free, over the new digital broadcast airwaves. Of course, they lied.

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That’s my recommendation.

If they are going to act like lemmings, then they should have the lemming for their symbol.

The Democrats should keep the jackass.

That’s my opinion.

- Stephen Bickford, East Hartford, CT