STELLA PAUL: INSIDE THE GOVERNMENT MATRIX
http://www.leebsmarketforecast.com/content/the_complete_investor/lavabit-founder-ladar-levison-plots-route
You come home from work, turn on the TV, and start chuckling at your favorite comedy. Everything feels normal, but it’s not. You’re inside the Government Matrix. No joke. You’re watching a show—and a captured operation.
The California Endowment, a private foundation spending millions on ads aimed at enrolling young adults and Hispanics in Obamacare, now also has granted $500,000 to educate TV writers and producers on Obamacare, and suggest ways to weave its many splendors into fictional prime-time shows.
“We know from research that when people watch entertainment television, even if they know it’s fiction, they tend to believe that the factual stuff is actually factual,” said grant recipient Martin Kaplan of the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center.
If your insurance is canceled, your new premium costs triple, and your doctor won’t see you, will you forgive all after seeing Modern Family’s hilarious episode on the glorious Affordable Care Act?
The California Endowment’s grant to “educate” television’s creative talent does not plop the government into the writers’ room, not directly anyway. But Endowment president Robert K. Ross, an active Obamacare advocate, also happens to sit on the board of Covered California, the official state-run insurance exchange set up by ObamaCare. That’s about as convincing a separation as Lucy and Desi’s twin beds on I Love Lucy.
I have a dream that some Hollywood big shot will shout, “I may be a second-rate hack, turning out third-rate entertainment, but I do have integrity. I won’t relinquish my show for government use as a deceptive propaganda tool.”
Considering Hollywood’s wholesale capitulation to China, that has as much chance of realization as does a Duck Dynasty star of winning an Academy Award. In 2012, China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin, bought the AMC movie theater chain for $2.6 billion, forging the world’s largest movie theater chain.
That acquisition represents only part of the Hollywood-China romance. In 2012, DreamWorks Animation, the powerhouse company co-founded by Steven Spielberg, created a $330-million joint venture with China named Oriental DreamWorks to churn out Chinese-focused family entertainment. More recently, Walt Disney Company China, Marvel Studios and DMG Entertainment of Beijing co-produced Iron Man 3 in China, where official Chinese film censors stayed on set, monitoring (and if necessary, ready to veto) all creative decisions.
If Hollywood meekly submits to censorship in Communist China, don’t expect resistance to the government line at home.
Flash forward to your relaxed enjoyment, from your Barcalounger, of the tuneful ObamaCare plotline on Glee. The show ends on a high note; then on comes the news. Again, everything seems normal, but it’s not. You’re still inside the Government Matrix, viewing yet another captured operation.
This time the Commonwealth Fund pulls the strings. On October 28th, this tax-exempt private foundation “working toward a high performance health system” sponsored a neutral-sounding two day “training” on “Business of Health Care” for reporters in the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW)—on how to give Obamacare the proper positive spin.
Except that Commonwealth is not neutral. Current president David Blumenthal served as a health care advisor to President Obama. Sherry Glied opened the symposium; she formerly worked at Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services. Recent past president Karen Davis bragged about the fund’s role in gaining passage of Obamacare: “The Commonwealth Fund marshaled its resources this year to produce timely and rigorous work that helped lay the ground work for the historic Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in March 2010.”
SABEW, a 3,200-member group that includes the entire business staff of major news organizations, maintains a Code of Ethics forbidding “any practice that might compromise or appear to compromise objectivity or fairness.” How does taking multiple Commonwealth Fund grants to train reporters to preach the administration line not “compromise objectivity or fairness”?
Once again, I dream: Somewhere, a reporter or editor protests, “My job is to tell people the facts. I won’t pretend, when Delaware spends $4 million to enroll 4 people in Obamacare, that the public got a bargain—even if former government officials have trained me.”
But to leave the Government Matrix takes courage. Those inside get goodies and praise and access. When they stray, they might encounter an experience like that of CNN Anchor Carol Costello: “…I felt it first hand when I was, you know, reporting on the presidential race. I mean President Obama’s people can be quite nasty. They don’t like you to say anything bad about their boss, and they’re not afraid to use whatever means they have at hand to stop you from doing that, including threatening your job.”
And, apparently, the Government Matrix has very large eyes and ears. A recent call to the 800 phone number for Obamacare landed Fox reporter Jim Angle on hold. Upon returning, the Obamacare worker said, “You appear to be in the media,” and refused to answer his questions. Angle called from an unlisted number and gave his personal cell number. How did Obamacare identify him as a journalist?
Possibly, its operators accessed the massive domestic surveillance apparatus of the National Security Agency. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt recently publicly protested alleged U.S. government spying on Google data centers.
“The NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be a risk. It’s just bad public policy…and perhaps illegal,” he said. If proven, Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal, government actions were “outrageous.”
The massive Government Matrix invasion of privacy only emphasizes the dramatic actions of 32-year-old Lavabit founder Ladar Levison. In August, rather than give the government the key to unlock the content of his 400,000 paying subscribers, Levison pulled the plug on the encrypted email service he spent ten years to build. “All this information is being compiled, archived, indexed and searched,” said Levison, noting that our tax dollars fund the surveillance.
Apparently, in its search for evidence on Edward Snowden, former NSA contractor and leaker of classified information exposing mass government surveillance, the government wanted Levison to hand over his encryption key. Levison said he had previously cooperated with multiple criminal probes and this time, offered to turn over Snowden’s information.
The government, however, insisted on obtaining total access. “…I had effectively lost the ability to control my own network, and as a network administrator, that just was a completely untenable position,” Levison said.
He suspended operations, and wrote on his website: “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.”
Now embroiled in his own court case, funded by donations to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund, Levison is using the Kickstarter social media site to capitalize Dark Mail Alliance, a next-generation encrypted private email service now in development with his partners at Silent Circle.
If Levison loses, he plans to turn over Lavabit “lock, stock, and barrel” to someone in a country with more privacy protection laws than the U.S., such as Iceland, Switzerland or the Bahamas.
Regardless of what happens, however, Levison intends to continue fighting the Government Matrix. “If there’s anyplace in the world where we should be able to communicate freely, it’s America,” Levison said.
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