What Happened to Free Speech?

The attack on free speech and a free and independent press has happened on multiple fronts.

On one front is the corporate mainstream media's loss of its "gatekeeper" function as the provider of news as the Internet has opened the way for non-traditional journalists to publish their opposing perspective.

On another front is the same profit driven corporate media that has fallen victim to commercialism. Huge multinational corporation control the media with their advertising dollars and as a result control most of the information that citizens rely upon for making informed choices.

And, yet another front is the Marxist inspired New World Order campaign for world domination.

"In March 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press ..They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers." - U.S. Congressman Oscar Callaway, 1917

Once confined to the educational establishment, political correctness has now broken out in the historical bastion of free speech - the press. Whatever the reason, the one-time rallying cry of the media, "free speech," is no longer found in mainstream America newsrooms. It has been replaced with "politically correct" speech disseminated by biased reporters who refuse to speak the truth while ignoring the evidence that our country is being plundered.

"Political Correctness is the communal tyranny that erupted in the 1980s. It was a spontaneous declaration that particular ideas, expressions and behavior, which were then legal, should be forbidden by law, and people who transgressed should be punished. It started with a few voices but grew in popularity until it became unwritten and written law within the community. With those who were publicly declared as being not politically correct becoming the object of persecution by the mob, if not prosecution of the state." -- Philip Atkinson

Perhaps the following quote from the preeminent New York journalist, John Swinton, made at a dinner for his peers will help answer the question, whatever happened to freedom of press?

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. "The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." [Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979, as cited on nexusmagazine.com

The Fourth Estate

The once great protector and defender of the First Amendment, the press, is now being transformed into an oppressor of free speech.

Over the past few decades we have witnessed the conglomeration of a once free press dedicated to telling the truth to the American public into a serpentine corporate homogeny where news is manufactured as a consumer commodity to be sold and controlled by the greed of corporate executives and stockholders.

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." – Richard Salant, former President of CBS News

Today, the mainstream corporate media has become the mouthpiece of a emerging socialist government and possesses an explicit capacity of advocacy and ability to frame political issues. And their agenda is to advance the New World Order message.

"Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent, while enhancing the power of the state and the privileged interests protected by it. Democracy without accountability creates the illusion of popular control, while offering ordinary Americans only cheap tickets to the balcony. Too far away to see that the public stage has become just a reality TV set." - Bill Moyers

As more Americans are dumbed-down by the onslaught of corporate driven messages disguised as "truth," they are being manipulated by the enemies of freedom and public opinion is swayed in favor of their deceitful agenda. When a dissenting voice is raised, unreported facts disclosed, or criticism is leveled, the press is quick to squelch that voice, fact, or criticism.

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

While there are numerous examples I could cite, one I've witnessed firsthand was the media manipulation of the 2008 Presidential campaign. How many Americans do you believe would be favorable to a message of freedom, sound money, non-interventionism, and free markets? Do you think Americans would support a candidate that believed in protecting our Constitution and getting rid of those things in our society that are unconstitutional? We've all heard the mantra of "change" spewed forth from nearly all the candidates, but how many of us know what that "change" entails?

Sadly, the word "change" is a euphemism for "more of the same."

"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic." - Dresden James

When a candidate talked about real change, they were marginalized by the corporate mainstream media and their message all-but censored from public discourse. The candidate I'm referring to is Ron Paul, and from the very beginnings of his campaign, the mainstream media had blacklisted his message of change. It simply was not the status quo message promoted by corporate America and Socialist government. His fellow candidates publicly laughed at his Constitutional message and he was blocked from sharing his message on the public airwaves. His primary results were either under-reported or not reported at all. The time he was given in the primary debates was only a fraction that given the corporate hand-picked candidates. As a result, few Americans even knew that he was a candidate for President of the United States, and fewer were given the priviledge of hearing what his platform was.

I believe if he had been given a fair opportunity to share his vision with the American people, there would be little doubt who our next President of the United States would be. I believe the grassroot American is a decent person that believes in the patriotic vision our Founders gave us in the Constitution. However, that's not the same vision held by the New World Order and their propagandists were obliged to shape public opinion to their mind-numbed interpretation of change.

Protecting the Criminals

On November 16, 2004, the U.S. Government sued Bill Benson to obtain an injunction to prohibit him from telling people that the 16th Amendment was not in fact ratified. Rather than deciding upon the facts of the case, the court instead refused to allow Bill to present facts of the case, thus nullifying his First Amendment right to free speech and Fifth and Fourteenth Ameendment right to the due process of law.

The court struck all of Bill’s facts from the record as irrelevant, and failed to address any of his other questions. On January 10, 2008, the court granted the government’s requested injunction. As of now, then, the government may prosecute you for lying and prevent you from presenting a defense. As of now, speaking about a political question is against the law. As of now, there is no due process of law. As of now, there is no First Amendment right to speak or to petition the government for redress of grievance. As of now, the words of the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison are like the words of the United States Constitution; mere words that have no meaning.

To ensure the silence of Americans, the argument that the Sixteenth Amendment was not ratified, and variations of this argument, have been officially identified as legally frivolous Federal tax return positions for purposes of the $5,000 frivolous tax return penalty imposed under Internal Revenue Code section 6702(a).

Exposing Corporate America

One purpose of the First Amendment was to protect the right of all citizens to freely speak their mind. Today, we see the First Amendment along with the rest of the Constitution being chipped away at by liberals and socialists in our society. They don't want you to know the truth ... unless it's "their truth."

We're told, for example, to cough up $4 plus for a gallon of gasoline because of "supply and demand" or because the price of a barrel of oil has been increased by Arab oil producers. We're not told how the Federal Reserve's devaluation of the dollar is impacting what you pay for that gallon of gas.

Or, we're told millions of Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure because they secured loans they could not afford to repay, so-called subprime mortgages. What we're not told about is how those banks that issued those loans repackaged them and sold them to larger investment banks such as Bear Stearns who leveraged that collateral to make bad investments in the unregulated credit derivatives market where they lost their shirts. We're not told how the Federal Reserve stepped in to cover Bear Stearns' bad investments with Billions of dollars paid for by the American taxpayer - many of whom were losing their homes in the scandal.

Wealthy people will always seek to influence politicians, because government unfortunately plays a very big role in determining who gets (and stays) rich in our country. They manipulate public opinion to elect government officials and garner support for unconstitutional laws. These laws are pushed and proposed by evil men whose only desire it is to undermine our liberty and freedom and wish to implement a socialist one-world plan. As a result, our federal government has become a taxing, spending, and regulating leviathan that controls every part of the economy.

Having rejected the notion of limited, constitutional government, we can hardly be surprised when corporate special interests use corrupting campaign money to influence the process! As long as we allow these special interests financial access to the government, we will continue to see their interests protected and the truth denied to the American public. We need to get money out of government; only then will money not be important in politics. Big government and big campaign money go hand-in-hand.

For example, in 1996 Monsanto was able to censor the Fox News organization (WTVT/Fox 13 in Tampa, Florida) from reporting on the harmful effects of BGH (bovine growth hormone) on humans. Monsanto markets a BGH product by the trade name of Posilac that is administered to cows by injection and used to increase milk production. In 2003, an appeals court reversed an earlier unanimous Florida court decision that determined that Fox "acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs' new reporting on BGH." The appeals court decision was on the basis that FCC policies on news agencies reporting the truth did not legally require the station to report the truth in a news story, as FCC policies are not law. Read that previous sentence again! The court ruled...

News agencies are NOT required to report the TRUTH in a news story.

That ruling should send chills down your spine!

Monsanto's product, Posilac, is illegal in virtually every developed country with the exception of the United States and is hidden in much of the milk sold.

Robert Lane is learning the price of exposing the dark secrets of corporate America. He posted on his web site, BlueOvalNews.com, documents about forthcoming Ford automobiles. The problem was the documents were not just outlining features of future products, but rather were detailing safety problems with the automobiles. The documents were obtained from Ford employees who wanted the truth about certain Ford products to be revealed, according to Lane.

Lane was accused of innappropriate use of the Ford logo and internal company documents and was sued by the Big Three auto makers. "The arguments Ford made today are that these were internal documents... and as a matter of law should not be published," said Ford spokesman Jim Cain. "It's not the fact that he was writing about Ford secrets, per se," Cain said. "We want him to stop breaking the law."

There seems to me to be a double standard here. Had the documents been from politically incorrect tobacco companies, Lane would be heralded a "hero" for bringing to the publics attention important information about public health. But, since the automobile industry is not currently on the governments "hit list" of politically incorrectness, Lane was branded a criminal.

Within days, Lane had been partially disarmed... the web site was disabled. So much for your right to know.

"To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." - George Mason.

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