-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> <FONT COLOR="#000099">eGroups eLerts It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free! </FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/9698/6/_/1406/_/972795035/"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------_-> Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com Fri, 27 Oct Alexandra Bruce <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Dear Robert, I just wrote a chapter for a book that's coming out on Dandelion Press early next year, "The Universal Seduction". I would realy like for you to take a look at it, especially in the face of the "Pale Hoax" dossier headlining Disinfo today and the sidebar referring to 4 years I spent in "another dimension". I just saw that today and I'm fuming! I never said that I spent 4 years in another dimension! I said that certain Montaukians who I interviewed told me that about myself - but unless you have hours of free time in your life to download a RealTV blotchfest, you won't know that - you'll probably think that I'm Bill Cooper, Jr. The whole conundrum is the issue of BELIEF, itself. If one is even SUSPECTED of harboring beliefs that are out of step with convention, one is ripe for a high-tech lynching, such as that occurring with ol' Bill Cooper on Disinfo today (not that he didn't ask for it) - and to a milder extent, with myself on the same page. BELIEF just spawns wars, witch hunts and a slew of stupidity. Belief is a construct that needs to be examined more closely and that's what this piece is about. Thanks, Chica ***** 'Daisy' Ad Disinformation Fri, 27 Oct 2000 consortiumnews.com <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> consortiumnews.com - http://www.consortiumnews.com A new ad by an obscure conservative group tries to pin the blame on the Clinton-Gore administration for China's success in stealing U.S. nuclear secrets. But the clear evidence now points to the Reagan-Bush administration as the culprits in letting communist China obtain key U.S. nuclear secrets in the 1980s. The ad, a remake of the infamous 1964 "daisy" commercial, accuses President Clinton and Vice President Gore of selling the nuclear secrets to China, for campaign cash in 1996. But documents now being reviewed by federal authorities make clear that the Chinese got the secrets in the 1980s, when they were secretly collaborating with Ronald Reagan's White House on the clandestine operation to arm Nicaraguan contra rebels. For the full story, go to Consortiumnews.com at http://www.consortiumnews.com ***** POGO in Contempt? No, it's the rights of the US citizens they hold in contempt Robert - these folks have been on the take so long - they have TOTALLY forgotten who they work for!!!! OCTOBER 27, 02:48 EDT House Mulls Rare Contempt Citation By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite the rush toward adjournment, the House is pressing ahead on criminal contempt charges against a small, private watchdog group called POGO — the first such proceeding in nearly two decades. Capitol Hill supporters of the group, the Project on Government Oversight, maintain the contempt citation was retribution by some lawmakers for POGO's campaign against major oil companies that have been accused of shortchanging the government of millions of dollars in royalty payments. The contempt case has been pursued most vigorously by two oil-state lawmakers — Republican Reps. Don Young of Alaska and Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. They denied any retribution and said POGO's executive director and a board member were being charged with contempt of Congress because they refused to answer several questions at a hearing earlier this year on the group's involvement in the oil royalty cases. If found in contempt, the two officials — Danielle Brian and Henry Banta — could face up to a year in prison and a stiff fine, although the decision would be subject to appeal in the courts. Some Democrats accused Young of pursuing the case as a favor to the oil companies stung by POGO's successful pursuit of the royalty underpayments. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said Thursday that while Young has aggressively pursued POGO, the his House Resources Committee has held no hearings on the oil royalty abuses themselves. Instead, Miller, the committee's senior Democrat, said Republicans were seeking to ``punish a small nonprofit organization for exposing illegal actions.'' ``It's revenge on this government watchdog that had the nerve to stand up and make Big Oil pay,'' said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who has been among the most vocal critics of the federal royalty payment system. Republican House leaders decided Thursday to bring the contempt resolution up for a floor vote Friday on what could well be the last day of the 106th Congress. The last criminal contempt resolution to be brought to the House floor occurred in 1983. Its target was Rita Lavelle, then head of the Superfund program at the Environmental Protection Agency, who had refused to appear before a House committee. In 1997, POGO joined a Texas lawsuit against nearly a dozen major oil companies accused of underpaying the government on royalties. The case has produced nearly $500 million in settlements. POGO did not benefit from most of those settlements, but was awarded $1.2 million from one of the earlier cases. When the group decided to share $700,000 of the money with two government workers who had been trying to correct the royalty abuses it caught the attention of Republican lawmakers. The House Resources Committee that Young chairs began an investigation into whether there was an improper payoff. No evidence of such has surfaced, although the Justice Department continues to investigate. In an interview, Brian said she and Banta had answered questions about the settlement but that the committee sought details about the litigation still under way in Texas against the oil companies. ``They started asking questions that had nothing to do with our decision to turn money over to the whistleblowers,'' she said Thursday. ***** Michael Novick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> One Down, Who's Next? AP Bolivia Correspondent Resigns Following NarcoNews.com Expos� http://www.drcnet.org/wol/157.html#onedown The Associated Press's long-time Bolivian correspondent, Peter McFarren, has resigned in the wake of a detailed expos� of his attempts to lobby the Bolivian government on behalf of the Bolivian Hydro-Resources Corporation for a $78 million water project. McFarren will quit effective November 1st. McFarren, 45, was born in Bolivia and holds dual US citizenship. He has been the AP's man in Bolivia since 1983. Water, as McFarren must know, is an especially sensitive issue in Bolivia these days. In April, Bolivian government efforts to privatize the water utilities provoked a mass insurrection. The Banzer regime had to resort to a state of emergency before backing away from the water plan. Protestors organized around the water fight also joined the nationwide wave of strikes, demonstrations, and blockades that shook the country in recent weeks. As reported by Narco News' Al Giordano, who broke the story on his web site (http://www.narconews.com/mcfarrenstory1.html) on October 6th, the lobbying effort was only the most blatant example of McFarren's journalistic conflicts of interest and biased reporting. In the first of two reports on McFarren by Narco News, Giordano wrote that McFarren "is so deeply in the tank with an interlocking set of governmental and business interests that his coverage... cannot possibly be considered fair or impartial." Giordano described the AP reporter as "a near mythical player in the highest levels of Bolivian society. It is not unusual for him to be the subject of press coverage himself as he rubs elbows socially with the Divine Caste of La Paz." The Narco News series offers specific examples of McFarren's "promotional" work for the Bolivian government. In e-mail correspondence with DRCNet, Giordano singled out McFarren's smiley-face dispatches from the country's conflicted coca-growing regions. "As recently as January and April of this year," Giordano told DRCNet, "McFarren tried to assure the world that drug interdiction was working, that the peasants were happy to grow bananas instead of coca, that the drug war had been won." Those dispatches, which touted the success of Banzer's US-backed coca-eradication scheme, came only a few months before angry coca-growing peasants brought the country to a standstill. They were picked up by newspapers in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Little Rock, among others, and ran under headlines such as "Bolivian Coca Farmers are Going Bananas -- And Straight." For Giordano, McFarren is representative of a systemic problem with US reporting on Latin America. "The central office at AP, at the New York Times, at too many US media outlets, wants the news covered from Washington's point of view," he told DRCNet. "If Washington backs a regime, the reporter is expected to get quotes and have access to members of that regime." "At the same time Bolivia was swept up in revolt, the same thing was happening in Yugoslavia. Compare the two types of press coverage and then try to say there is not a double standard in international reporting," argued Giordano. American news consumers need not be at the mercy of the major media outlets, Giordano told DRCNet. "Believe less of what is in the commercial mainstream press and look more to alternate sources of information," he suggested. "There are too many people who wait until something appears in the LA Times or Washington Post before they take a story seriously." McFarren's conflicts of interest are only the first part of this story. The reaction of his employer, the Associated Press, is the other part. When Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR -- http://www.fair.org), a liberal media watchdog group, approached AP, the organization's only response was to say that McFarren would resign November 1st. According to a FAIR press release from October 23rd, when the group asked whether AP intended to investigate McFarren's conflicts of interest and inform readers and subscribing media outlets of the results, AP spokesman Jack Stokes replied, "We don't usually do that." According to the AP's code of ethics, however, a subscribing media outlet should "report matters regarding itself or its personnel with the same vigor and candor as it would other institutions or individuals." After consulting with FAIR, who picked up the story thanks to Danny Schechter (http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/), Giordano pitched the story to Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. Kurtz ran it on Tuesday (10/24). A full accounting by the AP would involve not only McFarren's conflicts of interest, but also the failure of AP editors to question stories that fly in the face of longstanding reports of conflict and human rights abuses in Bolivia's eradication policies. Human Rights Watch, for example, has reported on incidents for at least the past five years, and DRCNet has been dealing with this issue for at least three and a half years. DRCNet coverage of this issue predating the recent tumults includes the following: * Alert: Human Rights Abuses in Bolivian Drug War (4/23/97) http://www.drcnet.org/rapid/1997/4-23-1.html * Bolivian Anti-Drug Squadron Eats Disabled Peasant's Fruit Crop, Leaving Her Without Income (5/22/98) http://www.drcnet.org/wol/043.html#bolivia * Alert from the Andean Information Network (9/25/98) http://www.drcnet.org/wol/060.html#ain * Latin Leaders Call Drug War a Failure (11/5/99) http://www.drcnet.org/wol/115.html#latinleaders * Reformers Express Concern to Bolivian Government Over Illegal Arrest of Leonilda Zurita (11/19/99) http://www.drcnet.org/wol/116.html#bolivialetter Clearly, McFarren must have realized his Bolivia reporting failed to tell the whole story. Giordano was pleased to see the mainstream media respond to and report on the McFarren episode -- or, as he put it, "victories like this threaten my innate pessimism." But he was careful to point out that he only reports the news other people make. "The real credit for McFarren's downfall belong to the Bolivian social movements who rose up, blockaded, and paralyzed the country for much of September and October. They, more than Narco News, deserve the credit for making McFarren out to be a liar." Giordano is hopeful for the future of the region: "Watch the social movements in Latin America. As with McFarren, they are about to make liars out of many of these 'parajournalists' -- US correspondents who are paramilitaries with press passes." Visit http://www.narconews.com for unique updates on the Latin American scene, and visit http://www.egroups.com/group/narconews/ to subscribe to NarcoNews e-mail bulletins. ================ In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. Join the "stop police abuse" list at <http://www.egroups.com/group/stop-polabuse> People Against Racist Terror (PART), PO Box 1055, Culver City, CA 90232 Tel.: 310-495-0299 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> URL: <http://people.we.mediaone.net/part2001/index.html> Send for a sample of our quarterly print publication: "Turning The Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education" Mumia Must Live! End the racist death penalty! Free Leonard Peltier, Linda Evans, Mutulu Shakur, Oscar Lopez and all political prisoners and P.O.W.'s in U.S. prisons! 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