During the 80 years following 1789 that it took for the French Revolution to acheive its aims as the Third Republic, the people of the third estate (that is neither church nor noble) launched many newspapers and founded many societies where they could meet and discuss matters.
We are embedding this show because it is educational. Mike Papantonio invites lawyers on each week to discuss major public interest cases, most of which have international impact. In this episode, Mike Papantonio reminds us of how media once had many diverse owners and actually sought to inform us. He and Holland Cooke discuss the looming mega-merger between media giants AT&T and Time Warner, which even the pro-business President Donald Trump has warned could be dangerous. Mike then talks with Brigida Santos about how some states are using artificial intelligence against criminals during sentencing. Then Farron Cousins, Executive Editor of the Trial Lawyer magazine, tells Mike about how Grubhub, along with other app-based companies, argue in court that the people whom they hire are not employees. The show was first published on November 9, 2017 at https://www.rt.com/shows/americas-lawyer/
In Syrian Girl's Facebook Ban Linked to Russia-gate Twitter Purge? - an Exclusive Interview (30/9/17) | Russia Insider, Charles Bausman reported that Facebook had blocked SyrianGirl's account after she had criticised Kurds.
Syrian Girl, the Australian activist, Youtuber, and social media powerhouse, tweeted on Thursday evening (EST) that her Facebook account has been blocked for her exposure of fraud during the Kurdistan referendum. She had 75,000 followers.
She also has 70,000 followers on Twitter, and 75,000 subscribers to her excellent Youtube channel.
She gave Russia Insider (RI) an exclusive interview on Friday, explaining that Facebook acted without warning, (which is unusual - usually they give people a chance to correct whatever is upsetting the censors), and so far have not responded to emails.
She speculated that perhaps her page had been caught up in the anti-Russian Twitter / Facebook purge currently unfolding. (Twitter removed 200 Russian accounts that targeted Facebook during election - USA Today)
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This of course follows the evidence-free beat-up that alleged Russian interference somehow caused American voters to elect Russia's allegedly favourite candidate Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton the chosen favourite of the American corporate elite, including Zuckerberg himself.
As revealed by Julian Assange of Wikileaks, "Zuckerberg Colluded with Hillary Clinton Campaign":
Mark Zuckerberg's claims this week that Facebook was fair to Donald Trump during the 2016 election just took another serious blow.
The Facebook founder and CEO personally met with Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta a year before the 2016 election, according to an email released by Wikileaks.
The news comes a day after Wikileaks' Julian Assange dropped a bomb onto the heads of Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, alleging they colluded with Hillary Clinton's 2016 election campaign.
Assange Tweeted Thursday, linking the emails sent back and forth between John Podesta and Sandberg which reveal Sandberg wanted Clinton to win "badly." Assange said the women met privately numerous times during Clinton's campaign.
Assange included one email from Sandberg to Podesta, Clinton's campaign manager, which is particularly damaging in which the Facebook executive pledged to help elect Clinton.
This outrageous attempt at thought control and censoring of political information by Zuckerberg, as well as Google, YouTube and Twitter, shows that in a true democracy, the news media upon which we all depend, must be taken out of the hands of the corporate owners and placed in the hands of the people.
Alternatively, rival newsmedia and social media that are run transparently, and with a charter to promote a free contest of ideas, should be established.
This could easily be done with public funds and with popular support within purportedly democratic countries like Australia, France, Germany and the UK. Should this not occur, then alternatives could be set up. One such alternative is the community-owned minds.com.
Another alternative is for sovereign countries like Russia and Iran, which are independent of United States' hegemony, set up their own alternatives to Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. If they were also run transparently and with a charter to promote a free contest of ideas, they would very quickly draw away much of the current audiences of Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Such an initiative would surely cost those countries only a fraction of what they are currently obliged to spend on defence.
In fact, Russia has already set up Yandex an alternative to Google. Hopfeully, Yandex will soon be expanded to include more in English. Hopefully, also, other alternatives to Google, Facebook, and Twitter will soon be established.
Over time their need for defence expenditure would be greatly reduced as more and more people in Western countries are able to see through the lies of the corporate newsmedia. We could well see the end of war altogether.
See also: "Russia Threatens to Ban Facebook" (2/10/17) | Russia Insider by Tyler Durden – Russia demands data of Russian citizens be kept on servers physically located in Russia, @caityjohnstone/the-push-to-fight-foreign-propaganda-is-the-same-as-government-book-burning-bba16a128835">"The push to 'Fight Foreign Propaganda' is the same as government book burning" (28/9/17) | Medium by Caitlin Johnstone.
If you were an African-American, who would you trust? Would you trust your local trigger-happy police? Would you trust the haters who demand that the Confederate flag, clearly used by them as a symbol of racism, be flown over your state capitol? According at a recent civil rights report published in China, "Cops killing African-Americans is practically a norm in the US". And then also add no jobs, sub-par schools and extensive social ostracization to that toxic mix. Trust results from all this? Highly unlikely.
For Fathers Day, I wanted to take my son to see "Inside Out," a new animated movie by Pixar, but he ended up seeing "The Wolfpack" instead -- a film about a whole different style of fathering altogether.
But I still wanna go see "Inside Out". Its main plot revolves around meeting some of the various emotions that live inside of our brains, such as "Anger" and "Sadness".
But according to a book I'm currently reading by anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, one of our most important human emotions is trust. I wish that Pixar had introduced us to "Trust" as well. "If a small baby doesn't feel that it can trust, specifically that it can trust having some modicum of control over its own situation, then it might even die," to paraphrase Bateson. Along with the ability to learn to walk and talk and develop teeth, apparently babies also need to learn to develop trust too -- and if they don't, life can become unbearable for them. And we adults also need to learn to meet "Trust" as well.
But how in the world do we actually go about meeting this actual "Trust" person ourselves? We do it by putting ourselves into trusting situations and then taking careful notes on who passes our trust tests -- and who fails.
For instance, would you ever trust a mother who, like that bizarre mom in "Game of Thrones," stood by and watched her own daughter getting burned at the stake -- only protesting when it was obviously Too Late?
And would you ever trust a government that continually sells out "We the people" to Wall Street and War Street at every chance that it gets? When it comes to trusting our government's current warriors and cavaliers in DC, I would much sooner trust Lebron James and Seth Curry. http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/30876-focus-climate-change-is-a-crisis-we-can-only-solve-togethe
If you were an African-American, who would you trust? Would you trust your local trigger-happy police? Would you trust the haters who demand that the Confederate flag, clearly used by them as a symbol of racism, be flown over your state capitol? http://gawker.com/unarmed-people-of-color-killed-by-police-1999-2014-1666672349 According at a recent civil rights report published in China, "Cops killing African-Americans is practically a norm in the US". And then also add no jobs, sub-par schools and extensive social ostracization to that toxic mix. Trust results from all this? Highly unlikely.
Will Americans ever again be able trust our mainstream media to tell the truth after WikiLeaks just exposed that Saudi Arabia has been slipping them payola for years now in order to get the MSM to leave the House of Saud's name out of the news, including but not limited to its major role in such events as 9-11, the war on Iraq and creating ISIS -- as well as the celebration of its 100th beheading this year? https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/press
Would you ever be able to trust Congress and Obama again after they worked so hard to shove that horrendous TTP trade agreement down our throats like some porn movie featurette -- just to make corporate billionaires get even richer than they are right now? http://www.thenation.com/article/206409/damage
How can we possibly trust Monsanto after it has blatantly chosen profits from GMO-bred Frankenstein plants and animals over us -- like we were some orphan step-child they are forced to put up with?
And how can we even think about ever trusting Israel, our government's major ally in the Middle East, when all that the neo-colonialists who run Israel with an iron hand want to do is to stir up trouble in the region so that we taxpayers can come to their rescue? I was in Sweida, in Syria, last year and, trust me, the Syrians trust President Assad a lot more than they trust ISIS's BFF Israel. http://www.globalresearch.ca/syrian-druze-fighting-israeli-backed-al-qaeda/5455651
And what about our very own Supreme Court? Anton Scalia? We are supposed to actually trust this man? Hardly. Not after he gleefully sold out American voters in favor of huge corporations with regard to Citizens United. Seth and Lebron have much better judgment than Scalia does. Heck, even Curry's two-year-old daughter would have better judgment than that.
Trusting that climate change isn't really real, are we? Good luck with that one. With American war hawks all practically wetting their pants at a chance to attack Russia through Ukraine, and with Turkey, the Saudis, Israel and the US neo-colonialists just dying to do to Syria and Yemen what they did to Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, then there is only one thing we can truly trust in here -- that "war" is gonna release so much carbon dioxide that it's gonna cause climate change on steroids. And that we're soon gonna meet a whole new kind of "I can't breathe." http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2015/06/22/nato-russia-collision-ahead/
And can we even trust the Rule of Law here in America? Or the FBI or the IRS or even the freaking building codes after that balcony in a relatively new building here in Berkeley just fell down?
Modern American government has no transparency these days. No one knows where our money goes. The CIA is a black hole and so is the Pentagon, NSA, NATO, Congress, etc. And who even knows what the White House is up to, let alone the Federal Reserve. Countries that have no transparency are clearly on the road to dictatorship -- and who the freak can trust dictators? Talk about your lack of control!
The moral here? That Americans also need to develop trust in their government if we are ever going to grow up and "meet Trust" in ourselves. And our government needs to start acting a hecka lot more trustworthy too.
PS: And speaking of books, I'd like to recommend one. Along with all the usual murder mysteries that I love such as Last of the Independents and As the Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, my summer reading also includes a book called Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor's Tales of Life in Galilee.
"Chief Complaint" is a wonderful compilation of what small-town life was like in Palestine both before and after Israeli neo-colonialists killed off thousands of Palestinians, forced a million of them off their land, seized their property and lost their trust. It's a delightful read, a true anthropology of what village life was and is like for Palestinians in Galilee -- with all its warts and merits included. http://justworldbooks.com/chief-complaint/
Photo is of me and Ghost back in 1963, back when I still had a little bit of trust left (as much trust as a Beatnik could have that is -- after Hiroshima, HUAC and the beginnings of Vietnam where my neighbor's son was an "adviser" even back then.)
Originally published on Jane Stillwater's blog
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