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Hollywood myths harming the whole world: Ken O’Keefe

Press TV – February 3, 2013

A prominent human rights activist says Hollywood films and other media portray a false account of US history, perpetuating great harm to Americans and the rest of the world.

On the latest episode of Press TV’s Cinepolitics, panelists discuss Hollywood’s impact on global politics and society, with a particular examination of Steven Spielberg’s use of psychological manipulation and disinformation in his recent film “Lincoln”.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Ken O’Keefe, human rights activist, to further discuss the issue. O’Keefe is joined by Maria Duarte, a film critic with The Morning Star. The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How accurate was this portrayal?

O’Keefe: It was another nauseating example of Hollywood propaganda and it really has no resemblance to the truth.

In fact, there was another Lincoln movie that came out earlier that year, Lincoln the Vampire Slayer, and I reckon that there was just about as much – I’m not kidding when I say there’s just about as much evidence to support Lincoln as a vampire slayer as there is about him wanting the end of slavery and freeing black people. There’s no historical truth to that whatsoever.

Lincoln’s life is a testament to the fact that he was a man of his time. He used the word n***** repeatedly in his life. He never had any kind of an epiphany and changed his perspective. He never cared anything about freeing the slaves.

This was all about concentrating power, maintaining the union and concentrating more power in the Federal government.

The implications of that bloody war, Civil War, and concentration of power into the Federal government, we see to this very day. That’s why I’m not going to forgive Spielberg or the propagandists of Hollywood for this kind of junk because it perpetuates myths that cause great harm in this world.

Press TV: I have a letter from president [Lincoln] himself to Horace Greeley where he says, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union; it is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” He goes on to say, “What I do about slavery and the colored race I do because I believe it helps to save this union.”

…Do you think that this Lincoln movie corrects his image? -Because historically, I believe that he was shown as a villain.

O’Keefe: Well, there’s no question that in America there’s a cult surrounding the mythological Lincoln and it protects him very, very well.

I suppose there are many important reasons why the powers that be want to maintain this myth because the American people in general don’t want to face many facts about their country. Hell, they’re not even able to understand the fact that it’s not actually a democracy; it’s a republic.

Under a republic, the states are supposed to have rights.

In fact, the Federal government – the original founding fathers envisioned the United States of America, i.e. nation states of America, was that the states would be able to determine their own political reality and that the Federal government would only have so much power as would be required for it to maintain certain duties.

Instead, what we have, and that’s where the implications of this film are quite so profound, is the beginning of the concentration of power to the point that we see the American empire now at this point in time running roughshod over the world.

If that Federal government had been kept in check and the states had been allowed to make up their own minds and decisions, slavery would have ended. Let us not mistake the fact that America’s the only nation in the world that had a bloody civil war that had to deal with slavery.

Every other country in the world managed to do this without such a bloody war. They did it before the United States, as well.

Lincoln was not this great emancipator.

In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves at all. It only provided the means for slaves in the South that were rebelling against the Union because they were trying to increase taxes and so on and so forth. That’s the only people that it dealt with.

It didn’t do anything to free the slaves up North, and there were slaves there as well.

Really, there’s just so many myths. Again, the implications of maintaining these myths is that the American people and others around the world continue to be in the dark about the real reality of American history. I think that’s an important subject for us to be aware of.

Press TV: Ken, what do you think about that scene [in the beginning of the movie]?

O’Keefe: It was a noxious scene, and it was the first scene in the film.

There is simply no way that black men would have had an audience with the president in that kind of context and actually been affectively sort-of chastising Lincoln for more equality not coming that much quicker. It’s ridiculous!

I can see how it would work on much of the American population because it’s been so dumbed down that most people will swallow whatever is put into their mouths no matter how much rubbish it is. That was an absolutely ridiculous scene. There’s more such scenes like that later on in the film.

Press TV: Ken, what do you think [of the relationship between Lincoln and his wife]?

O’Keefe: Wherever it can take liberty with issues that we can’t possibly know the real details, it does. And where it comes to historical realities, it just blatantly, intentionally, willfully deceives the viewers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if these kind of exchanges are so far from the truth that it bears no resemblance to anything that actually happened. At the same time, I don’t know enough about their personal relationship to say it’s accurate or not.

Press TV: In the House of Representatives there’s obviously a lot of interaction – the Republicans and Democrats are actually at each other’s throats. How do you think they’ve been portrayed? Was it accurate, their view towards slavery?

O’Keefe: Party politics obviously was a factor then as it is now. So, that was definitely somewhat accurate, I would say.

The truth of the matter is that the abolitionists were clearly in the minority. This idea that all the Republicans were very much in agreement about freeing slaves and what not is again completely ridiculous.

Again, when we see these sort of debates and the idea that Republicans are for this and the Democrats are against it, that’s simply not true.

The abolitionists – if you want to give credit to anyone in America for actually helping to bring about the end of slavery or at least get that issue to the floor, it is a very small minority of abolitionists who really did stand for that. It certainly wasn’t Lincoln, that’s for sure.

Press TV: Somebody, I think a historian, accused the film of exaggerating the possibility that by January the war might have ended with slavery still intact. Do you think that’s an accurate statement to make?

O’Keefe: It’s true but the fact is that slavery would have ended one way or the other. In fact, it was becoming quite unprofitable.

The Civil War was really sort of a tax revolt. The union, the Federal government, was exercising powers that were being abused and those abusive powers were translating into higher taxes for the Southerners. This was making life too difficult for them. That is why, ultimately, they revolted. That’s really what this is about.

Press TV: And the wealth was actually in the South, the cotton mills, the plantations…

Do you think that Spielberg is guilty of presenting possibly a utopian vision of the US?

O’Keefe: Yeah, it’s perpetuating the myth. The myth of America is freedom and democracy and so on and so forth. In fact, it’s an empire. It’s the latest empire. Like all other empires, it’s falling and it’s going to continue to go down.

Also, in that scene it shows another one of those lies, that Lincoln was somehow a most adored and loved president. Actually, he was probably one of the most hated, certainly one of the most hated.

Press TV: Mary says this on the film. His wife, she says you’re one of the most loved.

O’Keefe: Yeah, that’s not true at all. Only after he was killed did we find some sympathy for him. Actually, many people in America, in facts large numbers of people would have celebrated his death. He was in fact one of the most hated presidents.

This is just another blatant lie. You cannot say that that is an accident. It’s intentional. It’s a willful intent to deceive the audience.

Press TV: I read an academic online. She said she was going to be using this film as part of an aid in her history classrooms. I thought, is this the version of events that’s being presented to future generation in textbooks?

O’Keefe: I think there are some good teachers out there who will teach in a more accurate understanding.

But largely there is a cult protecting the myth of not only Lincoln but of the US as a whole. Of course, it would be no surprise at all that students are being cheated out of a real understanding of history and ultimately being told this sort of rubbish. This will help perpetuate that kind of misunderstanding.

Press TV: You’ve mentioned something earlier. Yes, the acting was superb but if you’d done it with the accurate facts, it would have made it all the more better.

O’Keefe: With that kind of resource, you know, that kind of acting talent, the producers, everything that’s involved in a movie of that magnitude, if it were done accurately, it would have been a hugely important and beautiful film. I’ll agree, the acting, it’s incredible.

But if you had given the actors a real script that reflected an honest understanding of what had really happened, then it would have been a magnificent film.

Of course, Spielberg is not in the business of making historically accurate films. He’s in the business of propaganda and he’s done it well once again.

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February 3, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Argo and the Iranian savage – A film review

By Sarah Gillespie | November 27th, 2012

It is a rather curious time for Hollywood to launch a blockbuster movie based on the worst US-Iranian diplomatic fallout in history. Currently Iran is threatened with attack from the West almost on a daily basis, and sanctions have devastated the rial, plunging millions into poverty for the crime of (allegedly) developing the same weapons that Iran’s agitators enjoy without reprisal. Meanwhile, in the fantasy emporiums of high street cinemas, millions of moviegoers across the world are invited to imagine the opposite scenario, a tale in which the innocent Western subject is faced with extinction at the whim of an Iranian aggressor.

Ben Affleck’s Argo is a nail-biting thriller based on the incredible true story of the CIA operation that rescued 6 American diplomats from the turmoil of a revolutionary Iran. Conspicuously, the film barely touches on the central humiliating debacle of the Iranian hostage crisis in which 52 Americans were held for 15 months and 8 American servicemen were killed during a fiasco of a ‘rescue mission’, commonly blamed for costing Carter the 1980 election. Instead, the narrative depicts a parallel, minor side-story of an America that duped the Persians with lashings of moral superiority and Machiavellian cunning. Indeed, an uninitiated Western audience would almost certainly leave the cinema with the firm impression that the Iranian hostage crisis was one of the most triumphant episodes of US history – instead of one of the most embarrassing.

Ben Affleck’s film goes out of its way to deflect the kind of criticism I offer here. He begins the movie with a quick narrated round-up of Iran’s pre-revolutionary history, including a confession of the CIA-MI5 coup that replaced the democratically elected Mosaddegh with the universally despised Shar. In one scene, an Iranian mocks our heroic CIA protagonist with dialogue straight out of Edward Said’s Orientalism, accusing the American of seeking “snake charmers and flying carpets”.

Affleck is clearly well-versed in standard post-colonial discourse. His film delivers its main points with a disingenuous candour that enables the audience to feel superior without feeling like a supremacist. But the pseudo Western self-criticism is undercut by the fact that, aside from one traitor, there is not one single Iranian who is remotely likeable in the entire film. The Iranians in Argo are essentially a screaming, braying mass of hysterical mobs. They bang on cars, smash buildings, exploit children, torch flags and torment innocent people. They are scary, suspicious, and innately violent.

Most harrowing of all, their streets are peppered with cranes hung with the corpses of collaborators. For the audience, it is almost impossible to root for any character that acquiesces in such a harrowing spectacle. And yet, for some reason, the fact that the American Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by firing squad in the state of Utah in 2010 never made it into a Hollywood movie. Gardner’s death wouldn’t seem too pretty in HD surround-sound either. In short, Argo ultimately reinforces the binary opposition of a civilized West and a savage Iran. We hear a lot of Farsi in the movie, but only when Farsi is spoken by a Western character is the dialogue given subtitles. Farsi spoken by Iranian characters in the film is merely incomprehensible noise. Here the film accurately mirrors our contemporary reality, in which we inflict our discourse on Iranians, but are incapable of listening to theirs.

We all know that in Hollywood, narratives are applauded for their appeal, not their accuracy. Fictional reconstructions of past events do not claim to ask questions about history. What they do provide are parables loaded with collective wishes, hopes, fears and unarticulated anxieties. In this movie (and in real life) the Americans escape Iran by pretending to be a Canadian film crew with a real, bona fide Jewish Hollywood producer, LA studio backing, reviews in the Californian press, posters, merchandise and a genuine commissioned script about alien invaders taking over the planet. It is this movie within a movie that makes Argo a complex example of the power of fiction, to not only tell a story, but also to shape reality. Both espionage and film making rely on telling complicated lies that people need, not necessary to believe in, but to suspend our disbelief. As such, Argo provides a respite from America’s encroaching anxiety surrounding its own impotence at a time when it was locked in conflict with an enemy it failed to conquer in the past. It retells the tale of the worst fiasco in US/Iranian history as if the West had triumphed. But the West didn’t triumph then, and it may not triumph now. The film implores us to differentiate between what we know and what we believe. It tells us that if we all invest in the myth of Western omnipotence the West might prevail. Let’s see if it works.

Visit Sarah’s website.

December 1, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

House Quietly Reintroduces a Piece of SOPA

By Adi Kamdar | EFF | July 11, 2012

Even after millions rallied against the passage of SOPA/PIPA, the House is still quietly trying to pass a related bill that would give the entertainment industry more permanent, government-funded spokespeople. The Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing on Lamar Smith’s IP Attaché Act (PDF), a bill that increases intellectual property policing around the world. The Act would create an Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, as well as broaden the use of IP attachés in particular U.S. embassies. (The attachés were notably present in Sec. 205 of SOPA—which was also introduced by Smith.)

The major issue with this bill—and all similar bills—is that the commissioning of people in the executive branch who are solely dedicated to “intellectual property enforcement” caters to Big Content. The IP attachés are charged with “reducing intellectual property infringement” and “advancing intellectual property rights” around the world, but not to critically engage IP complexities and limitations. From our perspective, this bill is nothing more than the government giving Hollywood traveling foot soldiers.

The presence of people with such a narrow cause as “intellectual property enforcement” fosters a single perspective in the federal government. In an environment where the deep-pocketed copyright lobby is pushing through favorable legislation on both a domestic and international level, this is the last thing we need. As Techdirt and Public Knowledge rightly state: trying to squeeze bits of SOPA past the people—the same people who rejected the bill earlier this year—is an awful idea.

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July 11, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

On History and Intellectual Courage

Empire Strikes Black | July 6, 2012

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I want to talk about something which is taboo yet cliche. It is widely accepted yet universally denied. Those who talk about this are ridiculed as conspiracy theorists and racists. On the other hand, many people freely admit this reality but dismiss it as inconsequential and ‘the way it is’.

Jews dominate Hollywood, the global news media, and the global financial system. By extension it is often argued that ‘Jews run the world’. Essentially, one group of people with a unifying ideology and vested interest, is controlling the institutions by which we receive news. In addition to this, the film industry and cinematic media is something which we develop a very profound emotional attachment to and identify with closely. In other words, we are talking about an instrument of brainwashing. Is this not something we should talk about? If, for example, Hollywood, the global news media, and our ‘fiat money’ financial institutions were dominated by Arab Muslims, would we perceive this as a problem?

Of course we would, and rightly so. But this is not the case currently – we are afraid of speaking out and tackling this. Why?

What other group would be capable of attacking the world’s most powerful superpower, killing thousands in a sophisticated terror attack, and get away with it, blaming it on someone else? 9/11 is but one example, the USS Liberty is another. Most Americans have not even heard about the Liberty – a false flag attack designed to draw the USA into nuclear war with Soviet Russia.

The truth of the matter is, Jews are largely exempted from criticism in the West, and this runs much much deeper than any of us care to admit. Most people reading this are subconsciously thinking: ‘He just hates Jews because he’s Muslim’, ‘He’s a conspiracy theorist and he’s got nothing better to do’. Well, no I don’t hate Jews. No I’m not Muslim. No I’m not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ either; I am merely trying to exercise intellectual courage. We are constantly singing the praises of freedom, liberalism and democracy, but we are nothing more than a servile herd of cattle when it comes to being intellectually courageous. Our claims of love for democracy and freedom are utterly hollow without this.

Even the more ‘enlightened’ activists and bloggers (no point talking about the bought-and-paid-for mainstreamers) are more obsessed with catering to their readers’ ignorance and stroking their own ego, than performing an honest appraisal of these issues. Let’s be honest – it’s nice to get lots of ‘likes’ and to be patted on the back by your nodding, agreeing peers. To paraphrase Mark Twain, if you find yourself on the side of the majority, then it’s time to check yourself.

It is clear – talking about this issue makes one severely unpopular. This fact alone is a startling clue as to the underlying truths. Those who discuss this topic are stigmatized and ostracized, and it would be silly to think that there is no reason for this.

On a not unrelated note, I want you to help me with something. The popular reading of history portrays Jewish people as perennial victims who are persecuted anywhere they go for no reason other than that they are Jews, and irrational ‘anti-Semites’ hate them. The ‘holocaust’ is a paradigmatic example of this, and this is another issue which cannot be discussed in an open forum (so much for democracy). What I would like help with is this: history is replete with massacres, murders, torture, wars, and a myriad of different crimes that have been perpetrated by everybody from the Romans to the Americans; can you name a single historical event wherein, in the popular reading of history, Jews are portrayed as the aggressors and criminals?

Perhaps Jews really are perennial victims and have never done anything wrong. Or perhaps our reading of history is manipulated, censored, and reconstructed to convey a certain narrative? We often repeat the adage: history is written by the victor. Is there some truth in the idea that history is written by the powerful? If so, are we not being subjected to what is essentially mind control, whereby we harbor a completely incorrect interpretation of history? And is it not time that we started to put all historical events, especially those which we are told not to question, under the microscope?

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July 6, 2012 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | 8 Comments

New Movie Glamorizes CIA in Iran

By Danny Schechter* | Consortium News | June 19, 2012

Earlier this year, I was in Tehran for a conference on Hollywood’s power and impact. It was called “Hollywoodism,” featuring many scholars and critics of the values and political ideologies featured in many major movies with a focus on the way Israel (a.k.a., “the Zionists”) are continually portrayed as if they do no wrong.

What we didn’t know then while we were debating these issues was that some of Hollywood’s biggest stars were at that very moment making a movie that will certainly be perceived as hostile to Iran, if not part of the undeclared war that Israel and the United States are waging with crippling economic sanctions and malicious cyber viruses.

The movie is “Argo,” and the hype for it has already begun. In a business driven by formula, a “hostage thriller” must have been irresistible to an industry always more consumed by itself and its own frames of reference than anything happening in the real world.

An NBC entertainment site explains:

“At the height of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the CIA smuggled six Americans out of Tehran in a plot that was a movie maker’s dream. So naturally, Hollywood’s gonna make a movie out of it.

“Superstar Ben Affleck directed ‘Argo,’ a film being produced by George Clooney, about former CIA Master of Disguise Tony Mendez and his most daring operation. … Mendez smuggled six American’s out of Tehran in 1979 by concocting a fake movie production, called ‘Argo.’”

Predictably, the background and context of these events is conspicuous by its absence, as are the reasons for the Iranian revolution and the role played by the United States in working with the British in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government and support for the despotic Shah.

“It’s not political,” a movie industry insider told me. A film set in the Iranian revolution, that most political of events of an era, “not political?” That’s Hollywood for you!

Hollywood movies want to be seen only as exercises in dramatic storytelling, so their focus is always on characters and action. As Wired Magazine described what happened in a 2007 story based on the book that led to the film:

“November 4, 1979, began like any other day at the US embassy in Tehran. The staff filtered in under gray skies, the marines manned their posts, and the daily crush of anti-American protestors massed outside the gate chanting, ‘Allahu akbar! Marg bar Amrika!’

“Mark and Cora Lijek, a young couple serving in their first foreign service post, knew the slogans — ‘God is great! Death to America!’ — and had learned to ignore the din as they went about their duties. But today, the protest sounded louder than usual. And when some of the local employees came in and said there was ‘a problem at the gate,’ they knew this morning would be different… ”

The larger confrontation also served as the basis for a long-running TV news series, ABC’s “America Held Hostage,” treating those Americans as victims of a crime, but never Iran as the scene of a larger crime, a country held hostage for years by a U.S.-backed secret police and military that crushed freedom of expression, repressed religion, and enabled the CIA to manipulate Iran’s politics while U.S. companies plundered Iran’s resources [the Shah, though an oil price hawk within OPEC, recycled petrodollars for U.S. weapons].

One-sided news programming was far more effective than Hollywood movie making as a tool for mobilizing Americans against Iran. The coverage was always unbalanced. I called it “A.A.U.” — All About Us!

Now, this new movie will likely add to the propaganda even as many Americans are speaking out against a war on Iran while Washington is clearly planning one. It will bring back all the old anti-Iranian feelings and stereotypes while progressive U.S. actors glamorize a CIA agent, even though the actual movie makes the events seem absurd and at times reportedly even makes fun of the U.S. government in 1970s’ movie-making style.

I haven’t seen the film but judging from the slick trailer I saw in my neighborhood theater, it’s about clever Americans outsmarting Iranians who look robotic.

Here’s the context as Wired reports:

“The Iran hostage crisis, which would go on for 444 days, shaking America’s confidence and sinking President Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign, had begun.  … Everyone remembers the 52 Americans trapped at the embassy and the failed rescue attempt a few months later that ended with a disastrous Army helicopter crash in the Iranian desert. But not many know the long- classified details of the CIA’s involvement in the escape of the other group — thrust into a hostile city in the throes of revolution.”

In the “not many know” department, there is no reference here either about how the Reagan campaign secretly negotiated to hold back the hostages until Carter was out of office, or the illegal Iran-Contra arms deals that followed.

This tale of escape also is not a “new” story – it was told years ago in books and magazines – but “Argo” is retelling as if it is new. It is, as you would expect, all about our brilliance and their stupidity, our good guys against their bad guys – all classic “Made in the USA” commercial movie formula.

Will this thriller contribute to a deeper understanding between our two countries? Will it help us find a way of resolving our differences? I doubt it.

As it happens, when I was in Tehran, I visited the former U.S. Embassy and wrote about my impressions in a new book, Blogothon  (Cosimo). The embassy is now a museum with a well-preserved group of offices, safeguarding the equipment used by the CIA for surveillance and espionage.

The Iranians had denounced the building as a “spy nest” well before the students took it over but even they didn’t know how right they were or its real covert action focus until they saw it for themselves.

U.S. Embassy security tried to destroy all its secret documents by shredding them, but the students, over months, patiently sewed the bits and pieces together and published them, exposing their nefarious tactics in books that U.S. Customs would not allow Americans to see. (Friends of mine had their copies seized when they returned from a reporting trip to Iran in that period.)

There is a reference to the recovery of some of this information in “Argo,” but not much about what was in those documents.  … Full article

~

* Dr. Danny Schechter is listed on the 8,000 ’Self-Hating, Israel-Threatening Jews’ – S.H.I.T. list.

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June 20, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hollywood’s Trolls

By Mitch Stoltz | EFF | May 1, 2012

Our movie industry has created some memorable monsters on screen. But Hollywood, and the major music labels, also helped create a very real kind of monster – copyright trolls who coerce settlements from Internet subscribers using intimidation and our out-of-whack copyright laws. Last Friday, EFF Senior Staff Technologist Seth Schoen took the witness stand in AF Holdings v. Does to explain to a federal judge why BitTorrent users should be able to hold on to their constitutional rights when targeted by trolls. Although some courts have put the brakes on the trolls’ schemes, there’s no Hollywood ending in sight yet.  As the entertainment industries continue to push for ever-stronger copyright through treaties, private agreements, Congress and state legislatures, it’s time to ask – how will Hollywood help protect us from the trolls?

The current crop of copyright trolls sue anywhere from 20 to 5,000 “John Doe” defendants in a single lawsuit, pinned to a list of Internet Protocol addresses that they claim to have seen downloading copyrighted movies using BitTorrent. Then, with the courts’ permission, they send subpoenas to Internet service providers for the names and addresses of subscribers.  The trolls then send threatening letters, demanding settlement payments to “make this go away” or face being dragged into court – often in a faraway state. Over 200,000 U.S. residents have been caught up in these suits, with many undoubtedly settling simply to end the harassment.

The trolls are, of course, following a trail blazed by the major music labels through the Recording Industry Association of America.  Beginning around 2003, they sued about 35,000 people, using the courts’ subpoena powers as a private investigation service to find names and addresses.  The RIAA ended its lawsuit campaign in 2008, apparently realizing the damage that suing its own fans had done to the industry’s image.

It was perhaps inevitable that the vacuum would be filled by opportunists with no public image to protect.  Since 2008, troll lawyers have sued about six times more people than the RIAA ever did, and pursued them even more aggressively, probably netting millions in settlements. Some have faced court settlements for cutting corners in court procedure, and one was even caught practicing law without a license. But this scheme wouldn’t be a viable business model without the draconian imbalances of U.S. copyright law and legal precedent that the entertainment industries and their lobbyists have pushed through Congress and the courts.

For starters, the statutory penalty for sharing even one copyrighted work – say one song – is as much as $150,000. It’s no surprise that many people choose to settle for several thousand dollars rather than risk a bankrupting court judgment – even if they broke no law. The entertainment industries insist that we need these gargantuan penalties to deter infringement, but the same “statutory damages” provisions are the knobby club in the hands of the trolls.

Then there’s the legal doctrine of “secondary liability.” The movie and recording industries are constantly pressing for broader liability for intermediaries, Internet sites and services, and makers of tools and software.  Copyright trolls use these concepts to disregard actual copyright infringers and instead go after the owners of Internet accounts, who are often easier to find. The trolls suggest, using the rhetoric of secondary liability, that merely allowing others to use one’s Internet connection, or operating an open Wi-Fi node, makes one liable for any copyright infringement. This isn’t the law, but the trolls don’t warn their marks about that. Often, even those who understand secondary liability, or can afford hiring a lawyer, choose to pay a settlement for someone else’s alleged infringement rather than risk a lengthy and expensive trial, even if they would prevail.

Then there’s the very concept of lawsuits aimed at dozens or thousands of “John Doe” Internet account holders. Plaintiffs in these suits often group together Internet users from all over the country and obtain their identities from ISPs by court order. Doing this requires trampling on jurisdiction rules that keep people from being unfairly forced to defend themselves far from home, joinder rules that guarantee every defendant is treated as an individual, and the First Amendment, which gives us a right to communicate anonymously.  The RIAA’s lawsuit campaign also disregarded these legal safeguards. After the RIAA opened this door, the trolls lumbered in.

Finally, the entertainment industries have spent decades, and millions of lobbying and advertising dollars, to promote the simple but flawed idea that if copyright law promotes creativity, then ever-more-extreme copyright law will promote even more. According to this philosophy, the importance of preventing even the most inconsequential copyright infringement justifies chilling free speech, unmasking anonymous Internet users, wholesale regulation of the Internet … and setting loose the trolls. This worldview was on full display at a hearing last week in the D.C. federal district court, when ISPs, assisted by the EFF, tried to quash subpoenas for Internet users’ identities. EFF’s Seth Schoen matched wits with pornography financier AF Holdings’s expert on the workings of BitTorrent and Internet forensics, and the plaintiff’s attorney defended his litigation tactics as an acceptable way to “stop piracy.”

Although there will always be people willing to use the legal system as part of a shakedown, copyright trolls are a monster created in Hollywood. Naturally, the entertainment industry’s spokespeople, lobbyists, and other mouthpieces don’t discuss how the laws, treaties, court precedents, and private enforcement agreements they spend millions to promote will be misused by opportunists. But when the next SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TPP, graduated response agreement, or state-level copyright bill comes along, let’s ask Hollywood and its allies how they plan to keep trolls confined to the big screen.

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May 2, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | 1 Comment

LA protesters rally against tax dodgers

Press TV – January 26, 2012

Hundreds of protesters in Los Angeles have taken out to the streets of Hollywood to rally against loopholes in legislation on corporate tax in the United States, Press TV reports.

The protesters, including unemployed workers, members of labor unions and “Occupy LA” activists, staged the rally to show their anger at a recent report showing that 249 of the country’s largest and most profitable corporations paid less than the US corporate tax rate.

The protesters said local communities are unable to afford vital public services such as health care and services provided by police officers, fire fighters due to the failure of these rich corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.

Demonstrators occupied one of Hollywood’s busiest intersections, forcing police to order them to disperse. Protesters say the display was necessary to make sure people understand what is going on in the US.

Jacob Hay, one of the organizers of the rally, told Press TV that the protest is targeting companies such as shipping giant FedEx, which he says is one of the largest corporate tax dodgers in America.

“Over the last few years they paid less than one percent in federal taxes despite earning 5.2 billion (dollars),” Hay said.

Between 2008 and 2010, FedEx spent USD 46,000 a day lobbying in the Congress, which is about USD 14 million more than it paid in taxes, Hay added.

Protesters say FedEx is just one of the hundreds of corporations that are taking advantage of Americans.

A recent study, conducted by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, shows that 30 US companies are paying no federal taxes at all.

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January 26, 2012 Posted by | Corruption, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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