The Liberty Voice — April Edition Has Been Released!
We are so excited to bring you this edition. We are featuring not only informative articles about our criminal justice system, including “Jury Nullification: The Right of Free Americans” and “The American [In]justice System” by Paul Craig Roberts, we also have in depth insights about our current bailout situation: “Bailouts Are Taxation Without Representation” by “George Washington blog”, “GM — The New Government Motors” and “Meet the Old Boss, Same as the Old Boss.”
More disturbing articles include one about FEMA camps in America called, “Preparing for Civil Unrest in America” by Michel Chossuvsky (Global Research) and other trends like “The New Terrorists — Use U.S. Constitution as Manual” and “Bailout for Mainstream Media May Be Next.”
Other articles include a 1978 speech by Ronald Reagan called, “Hmmm…Was Reagan a Terrorist?”, “Beware Obama’s Road to Serfdom,” “545 People vs 300 Million,” “Obamavilles and Hoovervilles — TARPtown, USA,” “Ron Paul: Culprits of Financial Collapse Should Be Arrested” and a transcript of Jon Stewart’s Epic Rant against CNBC called, “CNBC:’Information and Experience you Need*’ But Won’t Get.”
All of these stories are now easy to read in our new, larger broadsheet format. We are now officially the “biggest, thinnest, most powerful paper” in Ohio!
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To view the pdf online, click here:The Liberty Voice –April 2009
Real Journalism Versus “Professional Journalism”
hat tip: George Washington‘s blog
Sunday, March 29, 2009
If Jon Stewart walked out of his studio with his camera crew, went to where establishment figures were speaking, and threw tough questions at them, you’d get something like We Are Change.
The We Are Change reporters have asked the tough questions – a la Stewart (well, minus the comedy) – to former presidents, secretaries of defense, leading Neocons and Iraq war architects, and many other establishment figures.
So their interviews are syndicated nationally and they’ve all received Pulitzer prizes, right?
Not exactly . . .
We Are Change founder Luke Rudkowski was arrested for trying to ask New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg about his refusal to pay for the health care of 9/11 first responders.
The charges? “Impersonating a member of the press” and trespassing.
Professional Journalism
Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, created the concept of “professional journalism”. What is professional journalism, you may ask?
Renowned veteran journalist John Pilger summarizes it as follows:
Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called “professional journalism” was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment-objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, “entirely bogus”.
Obamavilles and Hoovervilles — TARPtown, USA
Webster Tarpley
In the 1930s, a shanty town was a “Hooverville.” In this depression, the wretched victims of foreclosure live and die in OBAMAVILLES.
Obama is presiding over a $10 trillion bank bailout, all money down a rat hole. Meanwhile, Obama’s so-called anti-foreclosure program is an incentive payment bonanza for predatory subprime lenders — who sold subprime Adjustable Rate Mortgages which should have been illegal all along.
Want to stop foreclosures? It’s easy: pass a law making foreclosure on any primary residence, family farm, or business a federal crime — for five years, or for the duration of the depression, whichever is longer. Put a family out on the street, shut down a farm, close a factory, and the banker goes to Leavenworth. Start with the great foreclosers — Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, Vikram Pandit [the Bandit] of Citibank, Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America and Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. Don’t let them destroy Detroit, Toledo, Stockton, or any other American city.
The American Criminal [In]Justice System
Paul Craig Roberts
Ronald Cotton spent 11 years in prison because Jennifer Thompson provided eyewitness testimony that he was the person who raped her. On March 9, National Public Radio revisited the story.
It turned out that Thompson was completely wrong, DNA evidence indicated that it was not Cotton but another man who had bragged about the rape.
Thompson asked Cotton for forgive-ness, and he gave it. The two became friends and collaborated on a book. On NPR, Thompson said that eyewitness testimony is incorrect 70 percent of the time.
I am familiar with psychological studies that conclude that eye witness accounts are wrong half of the time. That is enough to discredit eye witness testimony as evidence; yet, police and juries always bank on it.
Rape victims tend to be angry, and they want someone to pay. When shown a lineup, they tend to pick someone, naively believing that if it is the wrong person the police investigation will clear them.
Witnesses to crimes who are not themselves victims want to be helpful to the police. Consequently, they also tend to deliver up the innocent to justice.
And then there is the purchased “witness” testimony that prosecutors pay for with money and dropped charges in order to close a case. A favorite trick is to put a “snitch” in the cell with a defendant. The snitch then comes forward and reports that the defendant confessed.
Law and order conservatives think that the only miscarriages of justice are effected by liberal judges and liberal parole boards who can’t wait to release dangerous criminals to prey on the public.
The absurd idea that the justice system doesn’t make mistakes about those it convicts, except when they are let off by liberals, has made it impossible for innocent people wrongfully convicted to be paroled.
Jury Nullification: The Right of Free Americans
by sherry clark
I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I should do and, with the help of God, I will do!
Everet Hale
The last refuge of freedom — our great experiment– has turned its back on the very thing that made this country great–our Constitution. Where the “rule of law” was once king, we see everywhere its desecration. What then can the people actually do about it? One word: Nullify.
“I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1789 letter to Thomas Paine
Jury nullification is an act by a jury through its verdict to make an official rule, especially a statute, void in the context of a particular case. In other words, it is the process whereby a jury in a criminal case effectively nullifies a law by acquitting a defendant regardless of the weight of evidence against him or her. This is done when the individuals serving on a jury, either by reason of their conscious or moral grounding believe that a law is immoral or that a sentence is unjust. As the 12th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Harlan F. Stone put it, “The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.” Jury nullification is thus a means for the people to express opposition to an unconstitutional, immoral or unjust legislative enactment.
John F. Kennedy: The President and the Press
Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association
President John F. Kennedy
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel
New York City, April 27, 1961
LEAD STORY EXCERPT:
I ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country’s peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of “clear and present danger,” the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public’s need for national security.
Today no war has been declared–and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.
If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of “clear and present danger,” then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.
It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions–by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.
Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D) PA, 11th District, Capital Markets Subcommittee Chair
The Liberty Voice Transcript Service
C-SPAN January 27, 2009
“I was there when the Secretary [Paulson] and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve came and talked with members of Congress about what was going on. … Here’s the facts. We don’t even talk about these things. … On Thursday [9/18] at about 11 o’clock in the morning, the Federal Reserve noticed the tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the United States to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in a matter of an hour or two. … We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account [to reduce panic]. If they had not done that, their estimation was that by 2 o’clock that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system which would have collapsed the entire US economy, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic and political system as we know it.”
The February/March Edition is Released!
See all the pages on pdf here.
For the first time, The Liberty Voice included a color spread in its printed version! Pick up your copy of The Liberty Voice to see this dramatic photo-journalism piece (hat-tip Norman Finkelstein) on the tragedy currently befalling Palestinians.
Newspapers are available at all these fine locations.
The Liberty Voice Receives International Coverage
sherry clark
Paul Craig Roberts, a syndicated columnist who has been featured in The Liberty Voice since the paper’s launch in November 2007 mentions the publication in his article, “The Difficulty of Being an Informed American.” Roberts said that, “the end of American reporting” occurred “when the Democratic regime of President Clinton allowed Murdoch and a small handful of moguls to concentrate the American media in a few corporate hands.”
Roberts, former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal assessed that, “The American print and TV media have never been very good,” and that “These days it is horrible. If a person intends to be informed, he must turn to foreign news broadcasts, to Internet sites, to foreign newspapers available on the Internet, or to alternative newspapers that are springing up in various cities. A person who sits in front of Murdoch’s Fox ‘News’ or CNN or who reads the New York Times is simply being brainwashed with propaganda.
“Before conservatives nod their heads in agreement, I’m not referring to ‘the liberal media.’ I mean the propaganda that issues from the US government and the Israel Lobby.”
He goes on further to state, “Today reporters write the stories that their masters want to hear, or they are out. The function of editors is to make certain that no uncomfortable information reaches the public.” As to the state of print media, Roberts said, “The public is slowly catching on, and the print media is slowly dying. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times are all on the ropes,” and that in order for Americans to get reliable information, their goal cannot be reached without their commitment of time. He suggests that those who have access to television services that provide English language foreign broadcasts, such as Iran’s Press TV, Russia Today, or Al Jazeera, can get news and insights from those parts of the world, although those sources are often “demonized by the US media.”
More States Reclaiming Sovereignty
Lead Story in February/March edition of The Liberty Voice.
Obama’s $1 trillion deficit-spending ‘stimulus plan’ seen as last straw
February 06, 2009
Jerome R. Corsi
As the Obama administration attempts to push through Congress a nearly $1 trillion deficit spending plan that is weighted heavily toward advancing typically Democratic-supported social welfare programs, a rebellion against the growing dominance of federal control is beginning to spread at the state level.
So far, eight states have introduced resolutions declaring state sovereignty under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution, including Arizona, Hawaii, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington.