Telesur, the Latin America-wide TV station that is scheduled to begin broadcasting on July 24 with start-up funds from the governments of Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay and Cuba, is already worrying the anti-democracy crowd in the region, including Human Rights Watch "Americas Director" José Miguel Vivanco.

According to today's Chicago Tribune, Vivanco is calling upon a higher power -- God herself! -- to help him in his battle to discredit a TV station that he has never even watched.

This same kind of Orwellian thinking is now being used as the philosophical framework for pulling the funding rug out from under public broadcasting in the USA. These anti-free-speech thinkers contend, in a hypocritical supposed purism, that the government should have no role in funding mass media, that the “invisible hand of the market” must be the only force at play in free speech.

That archaic rhetoric is dead. First, the public airwaves are just that, and why shouldn’t the people have access to those airwaves through the people’s democracy? That is a basic tenet of the “free marketplace of ideas.” What Vivanco and his lot are really advocating is protection of the exclusive power of a wealthy elite to thrust “their marketplace of ideas” upon the people. To them I say, “Move over!” The people are now speaking.

Not only is the view advanced by the “Human Rights Watch” Americas director decidedly undemocratic and in violation of the people’s human right to free speech, it also is decidedly unconstitutional, if our own U.S. Constitution is used as a barometer.

Not only did the founding fathers of the USA frame into perpetuity the freedom of the press through the First Amendment, they also established firmly the people’s right to maintain the infrastructure of a democratic mass media within the original language of the Constitution itself.

U.S. Constitution

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Section. 8.

Clause 7: The Congress shall have the power to establish Post Offices and Post Roads.

That’s right media barons of the world, the U.S. Constitution empowered the U.S. government – specifically, the people’s democratic front, the U.S. Congress -- to create this nation’s first mass communications system: the U.S. Mail.

So the whole argument that government can have no role in protecting and supporting the democratic infrastructure of the mass media in a free society kind of falls flat on its face in the face of that constitutional establishment clause.  In fact, it would be decidedly undemocratic for a society to allow only a few elite wealth-consolidators to acquire absolute control over access to the U.S. Mail – or the infrastructure of the mass communications in general.

The mass media, ultimately, belongs to the people, not the media barons, so get used to it. Vivanco’s letter to “God” voicing outrage with the whole notion of democracy and free speech has been returned to sender.

Ciao…..