Jan 23 2011

Editorial: Why Keith Olberman’s Ouster is Good for Progressives

Keith Olberman‘s ouster is Good for Progressives… This is what author Hadji Williams aka Black Cansenco notes in this editorial as he brings to light a stewing concern amongst many people of Color and their relationship with the Progressive Left. Are they really listening and should we continue to go along to get along?…This essay brings some heat and will make many feel angry or uncomfortable, but will be cheered and embraced by many more. -Davey D-

WHY KEITH OLBERMAN’S OUSTER IS GOOD FOR PROGRESSIVES

by Black Canseco

http://www.hustleknockin.com/hustleknockin/2011/01/down-for-the-count-olbermann-meant-so-much-to-progressives-and-thats-the-problem-blackcanseco-ive-seen-probabl.html

I’ve seen probably a terabyte’s worth of corporate layoffs and firings in my time—including a couple of my own. And the only time somebody gets shown the door in under a couple hours’ notice Keith Olbermann was is when it’s part of massive layoffs, outright firings due to insubordination, or to distance the company from impending illegal action or perceived emerging PR nightmare.

Now at this point, I’m not accusing Comcast or @KeithOlbermann of any of the above. In fact, I’m content to take the word of all involved that this is nothing more than a straightforward business decision—a numbers’ game (salary + ratings not adding up) and a mutual parting of the ways.

My real concern is the pitchforks ‘n’ torches mentality that mushroomed seconds after Olbermann’s final sign-off. Within hours, Twitter, Facebook and every left-wing online community was filled with OMGs , SMDH, *facepalms*, WTFs and F**k Comcast!… Online petitions to boycott Comcast and MSNBC and get Olbermann back on the air had hit my in-box by dinnertime Friday. Online groups and pages were formed to @draftOlbermann to run for US Senate out of Conneticut. (I’m sure the boys at Bristol would be his biggest campaign donors.) Folks are even being asked to pressure our congress reps to launch an investigation and to determine if Olbermann’s ouster is related to media monopolies or Net Neutrality. Folks are even wondering if Rupert Murdoch somehow cut a backroom deal with Comcast to get Olbermann canned. (Why else would Comcast merge with NBC Universal but to fire Olbermann?)

Are you effin’ kidding me?

I swear haven’t seen White Liberals this wound up since Conan left NBC. (Word to #teamcoco.)

Lookit: I’m an independent; but on most issues, I’m probably about as left as it gets. But now way in hell am I strapping on sandwich boards and cocking back my bullhorn just because a loud snarky white guy with a guaranteed $14 million salary for 2011 and more job offers than all the unemployed folk I know combined just lost his op-ed show.

And it’s not that I don’t care; it’s that I don’t care enough about one guy to canonize him as our Obi Wan Keith-nobi. (And for a guy not shy about his atheist leanings, Olbermann probably finds all this secular sainthooding thing we’re doing a little childish.) And this is a major problem with Dems and so-called Progressive Liberals. For all our self-sanctimony about big tents, inclusion, coalitions and dialogue, we actually idolize and demagogue way more than we educate and engage.

In the last five years, the Left’s increasingly myopic pedestal-erecting, starfucker mentality has reduced most discourse on our own side to only what the current holy trinity of Olbermann, Maddow and Jon Stewart acknowledge. And now that “they” “got” Olbermann, we’re in mourning like he caught a couple rounds while on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. (I guess you could sub Bill Maher for Keith, and add Stephen Colbert and Arianna Huffington or Joan Walsh to round out a Prog Fab Five.)

As someone whose family descends from slavery and knows the civil rights struggle fairly intimately, I (along with most African Americans) have long accepted something that very few White Liberals understand: “Never hitch everything you ride for on one horse—because sooner or later, they’ll (figuratively or literally) shoot that horse.”

Again, I’m not saying that anyone was out to get Olbermann. Not at all. What I am saying is this is a great opportunity for the Left to learn from the right and broaden the number and range of voices and views that we cleave to.

For example: when it comes to news sources, the Left is still way to myopic and homogenized—both ideologically and culturally. Short of Tamron Hall, MSNBC’s formula seems to be “White, snarky Liberal host + Favored Person Of Color Of The Moment as guest sidekick.”

Just because Obama’s in office and Oprah started a network doesn’t mean Black, Hispanics, Asian, and other People of Color should be relegated to playing rotating Robin’s to whichever White Liberal Batman (or Batgirl) the networks prop up.

But it’s not just MSNBC that’s guilty of this. All the major channels operate this way, with nary a peep of objection from the masses of White Liberal/Progessive Democrats.. And this blind spot extends online.

The great irony of social media’s explosion is how anti-social and homogenized the Left’s presence is. If your information or perspective isn’t co-signed by the likes of DaliyKos, HuffPo and Salon or even TPM, you have little or no voice among Progs/Democrats. And if you run a blog that seems to highlight issues disproportionately affecting Liberals of color—gentrification, inner city education, crime, prison reform, jobs, discrimination, lack of representation in Congress, etc.—White liberals tune you out. (It’s no secret that one of Obama’s biggest hurdles in a probably re-election bid his long-dwindling support among White self-identified Liberals and Independents.)

And before anyone pulls the “I Voted 4 Obama!” card, Obama is just one guy. That you helped elect him doesn’t mean you get to ignore the voices and issues relevant to over 100 million Americans of African-, Hispanic-, Asian-, Native-, and Middle Eastern descent. But with very few exceptions, this is exactly what the Left is doing and has been doing for a quite while now.

Until so-called Progressive and Liberal Democrats diversify our own range of voices, discussions, influencers and leadership at every level—politically, economically, digitally and journalistically, we’ll never be mobile enough, flexible enough, resilient enough to be effective in 2012, 2014 or any year any time soon.

Then again we could ignore all this and just focus on important questions like “How long before Maddow and Stewart get canned?” and “When will Obama get mad at the right instead of his base?”

Dec 21 2010

Here are the Civil Rights Orgs that Sold Out the People to the Big Telecoms on Net Neutrality

We were sold out to the telecoms by those who were supposed to protect us!

Below is a list Anti-Network Neutrality filings by Civil Rights groups and organizations of color that sold out the community and backed the big telecom companies..We included their letters to the FCC that were requested on behalf of the big telecom companies.. AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.. These telecom companies spent almost a billion dollars in lobbying efforts..

These groups encouraged the telecoms to create a situation where the internet will no longer be an even playing field, but now its those who are rich, well connected and have political priviledge will have complete access and fast speeds while the rest of us will not..

When cell phone bills go up and you find that you have to pay extra money for what used to be basic services, be sure to remember these groups that sold you out big time.. Know their names.. Send them your bills and mark this date December 21 2010.. This is the day that the people were ‘snookered’ by those who were supposed to look out for them..

Lastly words cannot began to express the profound disappointment with President Obama. He came out the box swinging on protecting Net Neutrality. H campaigned on protecting it.

One of the reasons he won was because he was able to use the internet and reach young voters in a skillful way.. He instructed his FCC chair to back off a bit because the telecoms were applying pressure. He basically sold us out big time and threw all those media advocates under the bus..

Just so there’s no confusion, which is the game that many of these groups like to play … Here’s the deal.. The FCC agreed to keep Net neutrality in place for regular computers.. They agreed to let the wireless world be a place that is unregulated and will no longer have Net neutrality protection.. Why is this a big deal? because most people and especially poor people are on wireless communications..Here’s an article that explains how African Americans use the Internet

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/07/pew_african_americans_wireless_webs_pace_setters.html

This means if I have a website and i wish to make it accesible to you on your cell phone.. I now have to pay each of these big telecom companies.. If you wish to use Facebook, Youtube or Twitter, they need to pay the telcoms and you the user needs to pay them.. It goes down hill from there..

Here’s a short video explaining Net Neutrality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9jHOn0EW8U

When reading these letters dont get fooled by the flowery talk about providing access for all.. That was the buzz word to stiffle opposition and keep people confused. Similar language was used in 1996 with the Telecom Bill when Big media companies wanted to consolidate.

They said it would be a good thing and make radio and TV more accessible? We all see that hasn’t happned.. With respect to the Internet the Real Accessibility is being able to obtain information from wide variety of sources.. Basically these Civil Rights Groups sold us out and said we’ll leave the sources of News and information to come from hand picked sources by the telecoms and maybe a few of these groups…Same deal was said about the Telcom Bill.. you see where that got us..

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Dec 20 2010

Mobile Carriers are Moving to Charge per page view as Net Neutrality Vote Awaits

For the past 5 years.. we’ve been relentless about getting information out to our community about Net Neutrality. We’ve written lots of articles and posted up lots of videos on the subject. We know it’s not a sexy subject and for many its hard to understand, yet it’s the most important thing effecting Free Speech. In a nutshell, large corporate interests are on a mission to suppress the flow of information from the masses.

The topic of Net Neutrality being confusing, boring and off-putting has been deliberate. There’s lots of money.. we’re talking billions of dollars if Net Neutrality is deaded. This is why the big telecoms like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have spent almost a billion dollars lobbying to get rid of it.

There’s also huge opportunity to make a small handful of anointed people and organizations gilded information gatekeepers or the beneficiaries of huge sponsorship for conventions and other projects provided they saddle up with the telecoms and use their political and social capital to make this a non issue, keep folks in the community confused or in some cases aggressively advocate.

For years one of the strongest supporters of Net Neutrality was Google.. They had promised to never be an ‘evil company’. A couple of months ago they stunned everyone when they sat down with Verizon, one of the strongest proponents of ending net neutrality.. The pair came up with a proposal to bring before the FCC in a last-minute attempt to scuttle a vote by congress on the issue.

In the proposal Google said it was important to keep Net Neutrality in place on PCs, but it was every man or this case every company for itself in the wireless world.. They proposed getting rid of this protection. Their proposal drew widespread criticism and set off a firestorm of protests including one that drew several hundred in front of their Mountainview Headquarters. Google insisted that their proposal would work great. Some wanted to believe.

Here we are the day before a historic vote by the FCC to decide whether or not to keep Net Neutrality and now the longer game plans of the telecoms are coming to light. They are already drawing up pricing schemes to start charging cell phone users usage by the page view and by the use of certain features like using Youtube, Twitter or Facebook. We’ve already seen companies saying they are dropping unlimited data packages. This is why.

The argument these telecoms have put forth has been too much bandwidth is being used.. Thats BS.. What’s their seeing is all these new , faster, more efficient applications being used and the potential for a handful of companies to score big..

we encourage everyone to check out this article laying out some of the details..from Wired Magazine

Sadly deading Net Neutrality goes beyond money. It’s also about maintaining power and influence which has led companies like Google to quietly do things like create a tier system for news and information. Long time Tech columnist Zennie Abraham of Zennie62.com pointed this out a few weeks ago when he pointed out that ‘legacy’ (corporate) news outlets were pressuring telecoms and companies like Google to separate their product from blogs who were beating them to the punch in covering and uncovering many stories.

Zennie pointed out that almost overnight thousands of blogs not only lost their traffic, but revenue as Google moved to place corporate backed news operations on the front page of their search engines and blogs and other entities in a another section not readily available or known to the general public. What’s crazy is that you cant even pull up the several columns that Zennie actually wrote on his own blog. It only shows up on outlets that picked up the story such as Seattle PI which links to this story.

Overnight you found topics that were almost exclusively driven by bloggers disappear only to see corporate back outlets take their place. So take a topic like ‘Oscar Grant‘. You look up his name in Google News and all you see are the mainstream media who was the subject of harsh criticism and even protests by community members for with holding crucial information, demonizing Oscar, being embedded with the police during protests and in recent days being a cheerleader for Johannes Mehserle, the former cop convicted of killing Grant. Almost overnight we no longer saw in Google search engines outlets like Indy Bay which was by far the most popular go to place for Grant information.

The Final Call which covered this extensively disappeared. My two sites disappeared as well as Youth Radio, Oakland Local, Oakland Seen, Block Report, Black Hour and about half-dozen other sites that were doing round the clock coverage. What get eliminated from the discussion is the investigative work by these independent journalist that discovered Mehserle’s violent past which was pretty much ignored by Mainstream Outlets. What was missing were the stories of innocent people arrested and roughed up by police who were out during the protests and were umbrelled as rowdy destructive people..

The blogs and independent stories told the harrowing stories experienced by people like Civil Rights attorney Walter Riley and community elder who was arrested in front of his office or Joseph Anderson a journalist who was recently arrested without warning while actually on the air reporting. Those and many other stories disappeared.

Suppression and omission of information is what’s going on as we move in a direction of deading Net Neutrality. If the FCC votes to give control to these corporate giants we can expect to see this increase even more. Today its the bloggers doing politics, but soon if not already it will be independent artists, whistleblowers and any number of folks who feel they need to get information out but find themselves handcuffed. This is happening now.. We hope folks pay attention to tomorrows vote there’s a lot at stake.

Be the first to know. The SavetheInternet.com Coalition has set up a streaming website where you can witness the vote as it happens, beginning at 10:30 a.m. ET, Tuesday, Dec. 21:

Watch the vote on Net Neutrality:www.SavetheInternet.com/FCCmtg

Join us online to watch the vote and connect with others. We’ll be hosting an online conversation with hundreds of other Net Neutrality supporters who are working together to protect the open Internet.

Let the FCC know that we’re watching: www.SavetheInternet.com/FCCmeeting

If you plan to be in Washington on Tuesday, you can come to witness the vote in person. It’s open to the public. I will be outside the meeting with other Free Press staffers to meet with Net Neutrality supporters and pass out information. Come see us and get an “I Support Net Neutrality” sticker to wear into the meeting:

What: FCC Meeting on the open Internet
Where: Room TW-C305
445 12th Street, S.W
Washington, D.C.
When: Tuesday, Dec. 21, 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time

(If you plan to attend in person, please come early. We expect a full room.)

More than 2 million people have urged the agency to create real and lasting Net Neutrality protections. We can’t let FCC commissioners turn their backs on us and vote with Comcast and AT&T.

written by Davey D

Davey D's Hip Hop Corner

The World from a Hip Hop Perspective

Tag Archives: Net Neutrality

Editorial: Why Keith Olberman’s Ouster is Good for Progressives

WHY KEITH OLBERMAN’S OUSTER IS GOOD FOR PROGRESSIVES

Here are the Civil Rights Orgs that Sold Out the People to the Big Telecoms on Net Neutrality

Mobile Carriers are Moving to Charge per page view as Net Neutrality Vote Awaits

WHY KEITH OLBERMAN’S OUSTER IS GOOD FOR PROGRESSIVES

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