TRC founder/editor Gabrielle Price

“Let each man say what he chooses; if because of this I am criticized by the ignorant, I shall not be chastised by the learned.” – Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605-15)

We’re approaching the end of election day here in the United States.  Whether we’re actually united or not is difficult to assess if we’re to rely on mainstream media as a snapshot of the public sentiment.  We can’t, of course, rely on status quo media when polls are skewed, numbers are fudged and the largest amount of money ever spent on an election is louder than the American public it claims to serve.

Money buys a lot of things – like the press.  Those who own the press control its message – which means there there are no checks and balances left in mainstream media.  They aren’t paid to protect the democratic process, they are paid to push political agendas.  Part of the reason this is the most expensive election in history, is because media monopoly has the ability to keep the cost of advertising so high that only candidates with the biggest corporate coffers [the 1%] are able to compete in their farce of a ‘public forum’.

The actual information that citizens require to make any informed decisions, is available online, if one is inclined to use it to its full advantage. I’m a firm believer that ignorance is a choice in the age of information.

I’ve been raised around computers and computer geeks my entire life, which made me savvier than most considering the advice was everywhere if I cared to ask for it.  When the internet first came into my abode – it was 1995 – and I was thrilled to dive in and surf the information waves on a piecemeal PC and slow as molasses dial up connection.

For an information junkie and avid reader – the thought of the ‘world wide web’ was exciting to me.  A new frontier that could be used for amazing applications toward the greater good.  My mind would spin at the idea of being able to connect to sites in Europe, to virtually tour museums and libraries, perhaps even read from the pages of a book older than the state I lived in – even a book older than my country.  One of the amazing things I’ve learned through this technological gift, was more about my family’s ancestry.  This was knowledge that had a profound effect on me personally and may never have come to light in my lifetime, if not for this technology.

Later in 1995, I decided I wanted to study programming, with the goal of aiding investigations of child predators online.  As much as I saw the internet as a wonderful tool for learning – I also saw the potential of it being misused in a very sinister way.  Little did I know…

Needless to say, my education took me in an entirely different direction than I’d set out on initially.  The internet evolved so quickly that the programming side seemed to make me feel ‘held back’ from riding the best part of the surf.  Programming made me feel like I would forever be paddling to reach the wave.

It’s been quite an experience since, especially with the advent of social media sites which started with Friendster for me [then Myspace…then Facebook].  The most interesting thing I see now, with the rise of groups like Occupy and especially Anonymous, is the internet almost ‘devolving’ [in a good way] back to its roots in programming language, most notably open source, which leaves me with a twinge of regret for not hitting those books just a little harder.  Now we have “For Dummies” books on everything from Linux to social media – marry that with the internet and it is like an underground college.  The best part is that this college is literally free.

And like free speech, I highly suggest we use it or lose it.

I personally look forward to something that competes with Facebook as a social hub in future, now that it has become a spying mechanism for corporate government.  The programming it takes to avoid the pitfalls of keeping the internet ‘free and open’ yet also secure, has been worked on in this ‘underground college’ for longer than you care to imagine.  I’m delighted about that.  You should be, too.  I find myself paddling to keep up yet again.

The most notable thing about open source is the vast amount of communal work that goes into building these secure infrastructures, yet many of these tools are absolutely free to use.  It’s almost always been this way.  The folks who do this work have truly developed a virtual gift economy that works, because they do the work out of a sheer love of the technology and respect for free speech – not to mention the privacy of anyone who wishes to exercise it without feeling exposed to a nosey narc of a co-worker or an authoritarian police presence. Let’s face it – the largest social media companies are getting worse.  The corporate monopoly is getting smaller every day.  And when you can’t tell the government apart from corporations, we’re deep in Orwellian territory.

Now we have a government that spends vast amounts of money on the largest security hammer and soon every voice of dissent against corporate rule will look like a nail.  The passage of the NDAA makes many who would normally speak out, cower and hide behind the pleasant visage of the current Big Brother.  Whatever happens today after the polls close is simply a continuation of Empire – a ‘changing of the guard’ tourist attraction outside the military industrial complex and nothing more.  America seems content to go through the motions, feeling that this is their only weapon in the fight against an evil ‘other’ – and this applies to both parties, by design.  It’s what Chomsky calls Manufactured Consent.

Corporations have spent historic amounts of money on this ‘pick the least annoying fascist’ election in particular. Of special note is the ballot initiative in California to label GMO foods – the level of disinformation to confuse voters on this issue was staggering.  Most would imagine that just labeling the damn food would be cheaper at this point.  The fact is that these food [and chemical] companies are well entrenched in government and have already spent obscene amounts lobbying to get exactly where they are.  But to avoid the simple act of labeling products when the majority of other countries already do should be enough to make anyone rethink what they’re eating, let alone who they vote for. To fight your customer base by spending AGAINST what they obviously want should be a huge warning flag. And it was – Monsanto and Obama failed to forget that we can Google that. Now we know who sits at the helm of the FDA and who put him there.

Propaganda is the tool of corporations – they call it PR. What it really amounts to is whitewashing, or the ability to hire high paid bullshitters to convince the public that they work in their best interests.  Meanwhile lobbyists are busy massaging the law to work for them by greasing every open palm in Washington to ensure those laws that result in the biggest profits or contracts are the ones that get passed.  The public ‘need to know’ and thus, the public good is secondary.  We don’t have lobbyists – and they think all we have is a vote.  They fail to see that the internet brought a different democratic process – one the public realized it had been missing for far too long.

This was globalization they never counted on – our voices and a free and open internet in which to address grievances, organize and mobilize.  The globalization of information also brought news of atrocities that our own country had wrought on other shores – some also happening here now – which are creating personal connections between all those effected.  We found common bonds with others around the world and realized we were not enemies…but that we shared a common enemy.

The day the SCOTUS opened the floodgates for more corporate money to flow uninhibited into what was left of the democratic process – was the day I saw democracy thrown overboard to drown in a sea of propaganda.  Both parties took on the same hue by equally [and shamelessly] kissing corporate backsides.  Many people have tried to revive democracy since the SCOTUS decision but it has since been waterboarded, wiretapped, pepper sprayed, irradiated, fracked, droned, drilled, foreclosed on and sold to the highest bidders – the disaster capitalists and the banking cartel who spent on BOTH candidates in this election and of course, Wall Street, the bookie who bets against this country because the house always wins.  It gets taxpayer bailouts and the country gets austerity…complete with mafia bully tactics if you dare to protest against your serfdom. [Sound familiar? See: Greece]

Realize this corrupt system isn’t too big to fail. In fact, ancient history, hubris and physics dictate that it must collapse.  Today, Americans decided who would be in charge of overseeing it.  I still contend that it is important to vote locally, where leadership will count the most as it will impact you where you live.  I’ll be watching the skewed poll numbers come in, making note of whether the Green Party made a dent in the race, if GMOs will be labeled despite the horrible disinfo campaign to stop it, still glad to have heard the third party debates delivered to my laptop [from foreign lands] and hoping that America starts thinking outside the idiot box and past the ballot box hangover tomorrow.  Free press needs your support more than ever.

When you hear it repeated by mainstream media that this is the most expensive election in history, please remember you live in a country where the Supreme Court says that money now equals speech. The media monopoly has simply insured that the biggest liars have to spend the most, which makes them easy to spot and keeps analyst-turned-journalists like me rather busy calling all the bullshit.*

contributor Tesha Miller

Where are the progressives in the US?  What has become of them?  We must consider these questions from a historical perspective to properly understand our current political bent toward far right policy and fascism.  The attacks made on news media should be recognized as one of the primary culprits in the decline of the effectiveness of the left.  The Fairness Doctrine, a policy which required the holders of broadcast licenses to present issues of public importance in a balanced manner, was eliminated in 1987.  This allowed news media to present the public with news stories told from a single perspective.

Even as the news messages were being manipulated, they were also being consolidated under fewer corporate umbrellas, too.  This was accomplished through the deregulation of media ownership in 1996 via the Telecommunications Act and the results were devastating to diversity in reporting.  By 2006, six corporations controlled nearly everything the US public viewed and heard and these media giants were vertically organized to control every aspect of production all the way to her distribution of information.

Is a liberal media message actually being delivered from such predatory corporations?  It would be far easier to discover a unicorn neighing from their microphones then to expect such an allowance to take place. The conflicts of interests between corporate media and progressive ideology abound: regulation, taxation, anti-capitalism and labor rights…to name a few; which would directly affect their continued economic domination and success.  The very idea that a major liberal news media exists is a fantastically preposterous notion.

Progressive viewpoints are currently lacking in the US news media, but the attacks on left ideology stem further back in time.

The gains made by the left during The Progressive Era, alongside the US alliance with Russia during World War I generated fears among capitalists.  The American people were becoming sympathetic, if not supportive, to the ideology of the far left.  Through continued class struggles, which were spearheaded by radicalized leftist, living and working conditions were starting to improve for a wider portion of the American population.  An emergent middle class was developing and a subtle form of economic democracy was taking shape, through the formation of strong workers unions.  These gains for labor were a direct affront to capital and measures to undermine them were sorely needed.

World War II provided the capitalists with the perfect situation to undermine the gains made by left ideology and action during The Progressive Era.  American corporations had profited off of their economic relationships with Germany during the war and afterward, two distinctive powers were structured.  The Western world was led by the US and created NATO and the communist world was led by the Soviet Union which created the Eastern Bloc.  Cold War policy was in full swing and anti-communist propaganda afforded US corporations and finance capital a two pronged attack upon the left: to rid itself of unwanted anti-capitalist sentiment among her citizenry and legitimize hegemony and empire as a means to protect her people.

The demonization of the left had begun and any viewpoints, outside of liberalism, were deemed Un-American and political parties or groups of the left: socialists, communists and anarchists were closely monitored and suppressed by the state and shunned by an unwitting public.  Liberalism, which in truth is the political moderate ideology, was erected as progressive ideology and became the acceptable form of left political expression; the Democratic Party, her platform within the political arena and crown jewel.

Third party political representations, which more closely resembled the values of progressives and not those of liberals, were undercut through the electoral laws established over time and especially those developed in the past 60 years such as: registration fees, petition requirements and individual state ballot laws.  These hurdles could be remedied by a simple national ballot access standard, but attempts to do so have so thus far failed to pass The House.

What does all of this mean for progressives and the country as a whole?  Firstly, it means that our supposed “representative” democracy would, by default, come to be non-representative of an entire class of her people, effectively disenfranchising any political threat to the established powers and their means of economic domination over labor, via capitalism.  It would effectively shut out all public debate about capitalism, hegemony, empire and class.  Finally, it would render the left a fractured population of outsiders unable to effectively challenge the powers within Federal government, outside of their own direct organization, acts of civil disobedience and dissent.

While it is true that progressives are learning the hard lesson of sectarianism, duopoly and political exile, it is also true that many more are relearning the power of organization and solidarity.  We must resist the urge to vote for lesser evil and be contented with the outcomes and instead redouble our efforts to reclaim local elections and create ports of refuge for progressive movements.  This will grant us the needed protections and time necessary for a broader community root to be established; one which would become effectual for establishing meaningful change.