Free Republic

But I’ve learned, by participating in over a decade of specific media struggles, that when you are in the short-term and you are fighting to win, sometimes you make tactical alliances. You don’t sacrifice your principles and embrace someone else’s lame political agenda. If you want to win public credibility and advance a progressive media agenda that actually has a broad impact, this is what you do. That is how politics works. Most progressives understand this. But there is always going to be those who say: “here is a checklist of seven-hundred points that we think reflect the ideological foundations...

RADFEST 2004: MIDWEST SOCIAL FORUM FRIDAY, JUNE 44:00-5:15 REGISTRATION Education Center5:15-6:30 DINNER Dining Hall6:45-9:00 PLENARY PANEL Education "LATINOS/AS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL, SOCIAL, AND ECONOMIC ABC JUSTICE" Christine Neumann-Ortiz , Voces de la Frontera, Milwaukee Teofilo Reyes, Labor Notes, Transnationals Information Exchange, Chicago Graciela Sánchez, Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, San Antonio Renée Saucedo, La Raza Centro Legal, San Francisco9:15-? Musical Entertainment Outdoor AmphitheatreThroughout "CORPORATE GLOBALIZATION VS. GLOBAL JUSTICE GUERRILLA PHOTO Conference EXHIBIT" Education Orin Langelle, Global Justice Ecology Project Building An evolving exhibit of photographs from the most recent mobilizations against corporate globalization. The exhibit includes photographs documenting...

A new video of Jeremiah Wright has surfaced, showing Barack Obama's pastor of 20 years praising Marxism and discussing his ties to communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the Libyan government. Equally important, Wright is being introduced in the video by Robert W. McChesney, co-founder of Free Press, an organization which has come under scrutiny for its links to the Obama Administration and dedication to the transformation and control of the private media in the U.S. In an article in the socialist Monthly Review, "Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle," McChesney declared, "Our job is to make media reform part...

First Amendment: Diversity czar Mark Lloyd's FCC votes Thursday on the issue of net neutrality. Advertised as providing access to all, it will do to the information superhighway what Lloyd proposed for talk radio. Not much was said when $7.2 billion was included in the stimulus bill "to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits." The administration has big plans for the Internet — like controlling it. Susan Crawford, the so-called Internet czar, told the Wall Street Journal in April that the broadband billions...

Bearing video cameras, laptops and cellphones, a small army of young activists flooded into a recent federal meeting in protest. Members of public-interest group Free Press weren't there to support a presidential candidate or decry global warming. The tech-savvy hundreds came to the Federal Communications Commission's hearing at Harvard Law School last month to push new rules for the Internet. For the first time, Congress and the FCC are debating wide-reaching Web regulations and policies that would determine how much control cable and telecommunications companies would have over the Internet. The issue has given rise to a new political constituency...

If you thought Washington—which already took over banking and autos, and is fast-tracking attempts to take over health care and energy—would leave the Internet alone, you were dead wrong. The Internet (perhaps our greatest free market success story in recent years) is squarely in the cross-hairs of the administration and it’s not waiting for Congress to act. The charge is being led by an eager, ideologically committed White House staffer named Susan Crawford. Officially, she is the Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. Wired Magazine calls her, “the most powerful geek close to the president.” In recent weeks,...

Some people accuse me of “red-baiting” or “McCarthyite” tactics when I use the “M-word” (Marxism) or the “S-Word” (socialism) to describe McChesney, the Free Press, and the movement they have spawned. But these are labels with real meaning and ones that McChesney himself embraces in his work. In his 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Media, he says that “Media reform cannot win without widespread support and such support needs to be organized as part of a broad anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement.” He casts everything in “social justice” terms and speaks of the need “to rip the veil off [corporate] power, and...