As I write the Star Spangled Banner is being sung, awaiting Barack’s victory speech. I have just returned from working a dozen polling locations in central Los Angeles, documenting machine malfunctions, and first time voters forced to vote provisional for not being on the rolls — even when they had a sample ballot in hand, with their name on it, and had come to the correct precinct, here in one of the blu-est areas of one of the blue-est states.
So am I elated? No time for that, because this is not a victory, yet. It is said our nation was formed to be a nation of laws, not of men. Though we have been led for eight years by men who have done their best to destroy laws that were formed to make us one society, and now are poised to believe they have ultimately failed in this attempt, we are far from fulfilling this promise.
So to our leaders elect, this new Congress and administration, who have successfully performed the balancing act between the majority of the people and the wealthy powerful elites whose influence has put them on the stage before us, here then is the marching orders, my personal mandate, a reassessment of priorities on which I must be uncompromising:
Electoral reform:
—Instant Run-off Voting
—Proportional representation
—Elimination of the electoral college, to make one person one vote a reality
—remove our elections from the hands of unelected corporate partisans, and return to hand counted paper ballots
—elimination of the Presidential Debate Commission; why should partisans of the two major parties decide whose ideas are worthy of consideration by the public — is not a vigorous debate by all candidates the best avenue for voters to appraise the issues before us and determine the most appropriate reaction? Is this not what the founders of our nation intended?
Media reform:
—Divestiture of multinational corporations from ownership of the vast majority of what we see, hear, or read — return to local ownership. A population incapable of discerning truth from falsehood because the media only reflects the views of its billionaire owners can no longer be considered a democracy. Garbage in garbage out.
Economic reform:
—Withdrawal from the WTO
—Reigning in of those who would monopolize our food and water supply
—reinvest in infrastructure —rebuild America
Energy reform:
— regardless of what you have said on the campaign trail, “clean coal” and nuclear are no solution to the global energy crisis or global climate change. We need major investment in geothermal, tidal and wave power, in addition to wind and solar energy. The entry of many small players is healthier for the economy than a few major ones.
Reaffirmation of Civil Liberties:
— The act of a real patriot would be to ensure that our civil liberties are restored and apply to all this time; all classes, all colors, all races, all religions, all tribes, all gender definitions.
Pullback from empire:
— Okay, so the thirst for revenge on the part of American vanity will necessitate a pursuit of Ben Laden, but can we pull back from our global approach of world policeman, if for no other reason than we can no longer afford a thousand overseas bases and the military to keep the whole thing running. Our worst enemy in the world is ourselves.
President-elect Obama, I believe you understand this. From what you have said, I believe you know I must hold you and the new Congress accountable to this agenda, in order to give you the fortitude to push back against established interests that must sacrifice if the country and the world are to move in a positive direction. I believe you are counting on it.
I declare I will do my utmost to fulfill my end of the bargain called democracy. I hope I can count on you. For us to have small d democracy in a small r republic, it is essential that we all deliver. I believe this is what is meant by the expression “freedom isn’t free.”
Showing posts with label media ownership. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media ownership. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
No Truth Allowed
Why is it seemingly impossible for a viable candidate for the Presidency in the United States to tell the truth?
“A society that has lost the ability to discern truth from falsehood can no longer be considered democratic.”
— Chris Hedges, in conversation with Sonali Kohatkar
I watched the debate with a coterie of like-minded friends. While somewhat satisfied that our guy, to the extent that he was our guy, acquitted himself adequately against his opponent, there was an universal sense of anticlimax in the room, to which Keith Oberman as a neutered shadow of his former self, in conversation with Pat Buchanan in the post-debate spin, was merely the icing on the cake. The range of debate was more and more limited as the night wore on, with unchallenged lies falling on all sides, like ripe fruit in the fall.
Why is it necessary that Obama constantly reiterate his intention to uptick Afganistan; to kill, not capture, Ben Laden; to deal harshly with the supposed threat from Iran?
Obama mentioned the middle class several times, but the poor only once, and failed to point out that the earmarks McCain railed against amounts to one percent of GDP, as our economy melts down under the weight of a three trillion dollar unnecessary war (fifty times Rumsfeld’s estimate of 60 billion), and military expenses that exceed fifty percent, before the housing bubble burst, which is only one in the bottom row of this house of cards.
Clean coal and nuclear in your energy plan, Senator Obama? When you factor in the all costs of production, including the costs to society, nuclear is a net negative and ‘clean’ coal is a pipe dream compared to the same dollar invested in the true renewables of solar, wind, tidal, wave or geothermal.
Accept Georgia and Ukraine into NATO? Just how non-paranoid do you think you can require the Russians to be? Do you really want to re-start the cold war with a nation that has 10,000 nukes lying around, whose bordering states contain as would be buyers Islamic terrorists? Whose economy is depressed in part due to our economic policies, such that those who look after those nukes are probably hurting for a little more domestic income?
Ben Laden appears to have taken credit for the deaths of close to three thousand US citizens on September 11, 2001 (though this is not included in his FBI wanted file for lack of evidence), and many before in the bombings of the USNS Cole, and the two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Certainly that makes him a mass murderer, but there is obviously a method to his madness. Seriously asking the question “why they hate us” seems off the table, even if only to properly understand one’s enemy. Could it be the same reason he went to war against the Russians, which pleased us so much at the time that we helped him raise and train his army of mujahideen? That reason would be self-determination, what he sees as self-determination anyway, for the Islamic people (with himself as chief mullah no doubt), whose nations and resources have been preyed upon by Western governments and corporations since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.
Acknowledging this would take more than a thirty-second sound-bite, make Ben Laden look like something of a revolutionary, and probably not win any votes. It would however go a good way to explain why the more innocents we kill when we go after him with the heavy hand of our military, the more popular he becomes with people who would otherwise not care much for his ideological approach. Revolutionaries have always been viewed as terrorists by the established powers they oppose, and hailed as heroes by those who felt oppressed by those powers. This approach is pretty much guaranteed to loose the hearts and minds. Thus Ben Laden is now revered by many in the rugged terrain of Peshawar, an area that has not been successfully dominated since the time of Alexander the Great, who wisely protected his advance by marrying into a local royal family.
McCain alluded to this in his more cautious approach on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but his stay in Iraq for a hundred years and “bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb bomb Iran” will not win any friends either.
As mass murders go, we’ve killed more than Osama’s three thousand innocents in Afghanistan. If we turn our eyes to Iraq, a country we now generally acknowledge had nothing to do whatever with September 11th and posed us no threat, that number becomes closer to a million, and four million made refugees, breaking the support systems of neighboring governments still attempting to remain friendly to us.
Yet we remain, hesitant to leave before we have “stabilized” the nation, which translated from DC speak means insuring continued access to oil resources by western corporations on terms amounting to control. As much as we may value those lives lost on September 11th and consciously or unconsciously place them above the lives of those million others, we must allow that others value the lives of their loved ones as much. So where does that leave us in the eyes of the world, on the scale of justice? Our policies have served to impress on the world Ben Laden’s view of us. By this measure George Bush is Ben Laden’s biggest fan, and, unfortunately, neither the stated Middle East policies of Obama nor McCain will bring us the honor we seem to think we deserve and must find before we finally leave exhausted and bankrupt.
Our goals in the Middle East will not be realized by a “surge” in Afghanistan or “strategic strikes at high value targets” in Pakistan, as such will only impress further upon the majority of the population that we hold their lives of far less value than our own. They cannot be expected to fall in line with such a message. If we succeed in our goal to “kill” Ben Laden, ten more will arise in his place.
Surely, someone as bright as Obama knows this, just as he must know that the people of Iran should not be judged by a right-wing religious leader playing to his constituents. When our own nation and that of Israel have proven time and again we are willing to be the aggressor outside our national boundaries to ‘defend’ our ‘national interest,’ we only prove Ahmadinejad’s point when we proclaim him and Iran a threat for doing what they have every right under international law to do — which, rhetoric about the Zionist state aside, according to the IAEA, is all they are doing.
Those who do take a stab at telling the truth to the American people poll in the single digits, and are marginalized by the media, who owe their jobs to the military/government/media complex. Many in the public are becoming aware that the media are themselves mucking up the system in some way. From ferreting out the truth they’ve been reduced to funneling events to the public through the lens of their powerful owners, limiting the range of debate to that pitiful expanse we saw before us.
Perhaps if we are lucky survival will clue people in to paying attention to their own true interests before it is too late, rather than being stampeded out of fear into fascism.
Our guy encourages us to hope, and hope we must, that he has more integrity than he lets on and is smarter than the positions he takes, which I guess the polls inform him he must. At this point it’s a pretty slim hope.
“A society that has lost the ability to discern truth from falsehood can no longer be considered democratic.”
— Chris Hedges, in conversation with Sonali Kohatkar
I watched the debate with a coterie of like-minded friends. While somewhat satisfied that our guy, to the extent that he was our guy, acquitted himself adequately against his opponent, there was an universal sense of anticlimax in the room, to which Keith Oberman as a neutered shadow of his former self, in conversation with Pat Buchanan in the post-debate spin, was merely the icing on the cake. The range of debate was more and more limited as the night wore on, with unchallenged lies falling on all sides, like ripe fruit in the fall.
Why is it necessary that Obama constantly reiterate his intention to uptick Afganistan; to kill, not capture, Ben Laden; to deal harshly with the supposed threat from Iran?
Obama mentioned the middle class several times, but the poor only once, and failed to point out that the earmarks McCain railed against amounts to one percent of GDP, as our economy melts down under the weight of a three trillion dollar unnecessary war (fifty times Rumsfeld’s estimate of 60 billion), and military expenses that exceed fifty percent, before the housing bubble burst, which is only one in the bottom row of this house of cards.
Clean coal and nuclear in your energy plan, Senator Obama? When you factor in the all costs of production, including the costs to society, nuclear is a net negative and ‘clean’ coal is a pipe dream compared to the same dollar invested in the true renewables of solar, wind, tidal, wave or geothermal.
Accept Georgia and Ukraine into NATO? Just how non-paranoid do you think you can require the Russians to be? Do you really want to re-start the cold war with a nation that has 10,000 nukes lying around, whose bordering states contain as would be buyers Islamic terrorists? Whose economy is depressed in part due to our economic policies, such that those who look after those nukes are probably hurting for a little more domestic income?
Ben Laden appears to have taken credit for the deaths of close to three thousand US citizens on September 11, 2001 (though this is not included in his FBI wanted file for lack of evidence), and many before in the bombings of the USNS Cole, and the two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Certainly that makes him a mass murderer, but there is obviously a method to his madness. Seriously asking the question “why they hate us” seems off the table, even if only to properly understand one’s enemy. Could it be the same reason he went to war against the Russians, which pleased us so much at the time that we helped him raise and train his army of mujahideen? That reason would be self-determination, what he sees as self-determination anyway, for the Islamic people (with himself as chief mullah no doubt), whose nations and resources have been preyed upon by Western governments and corporations since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.
Acknowledging this would take more than a thirty-second sound-bite, make Ben Laden look like something of a revolutionary, and probably not win any votes. It would however go a good way to explain why the more innocents we kill when we go after him with the heavy hand of our military, the more popular he becomes with people who would otherwise not care much for his ideological approach. Revolutionaries have always been viewed as terrorists by the established powers they oppose, and hailed as heroes by those who felt oppressed by those powers. This approach is pretty much guaranteed to loose the hearts and minds. Thus Ben Laden is now revered by many in the rugged terrain of Peshawar, an area that has not been successfully dominated since the time of Alexander the Great, who wisely protected his advance by marrying into a local royal family.
McCain alluded to this in his more cautious approach on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but his stay in Iraq for a hundred years and “bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb bomb Iran” will not win any friends either.
As mass murders go, we’ve killed more than Osama’s three thousand innocents in Afghanistan. If we turn our eyes to Iraq, a country we now generally acknowledge had nothing to do whatever with September 11th and posed us no threat, that number becomes closer to a million, and four million made refugees, breaking the support systems of neighboring governments still attempting to remain friendly to us.
Yet we remain, hesitant to leave before we have “stabilized” the nation, which translated from DC speak means insuring continued access to oil resources by western corporations on terms amounting to control. As much as we may value those lives lost on September 11th and consciously or unconsciously place them above the lives of those million others, we must allow that others value the lives of their loved ones as much. So where does that leave us in the eyes of the world, on the scale of justice? Our policies have served to impress on the world Ben Laden’s view of us. By this measure George Bush is Ben Laden’s biggest fan, and, unfortunately, neither the stated Middle East policies of Obama nor McCain will bring us the honor we seem to think we deserve and must find before we finally leave exhausted and bankrupt.
Our goals in the Middle East will not be realized by a “surge” in Afghanistan or “strategic strikes at high value targets” in Pakistan, as such will only impress further upon the majority of the population that we hold their lives of far less value than our own. They cannot be expected to fall in line with such a message. If we succeed in our goal to “kill” Ben Laden, ten more will arise in his place.
Surely, someone as bright as Obama knows this, just as he must know that the people of Iran should not be judged by a right-wing religious leader playing to his constituents. When our own nation and that of Israel have proven time and again we are willing to be the aggressor outside our national boundaries to ‘defend’ our ‘national interest,’ we only prove Ahmadinejad’s point when we proclaim him and Iran a threat for doing what they have every right under international law to do — which, rhetoric about the Zionist state aside, according to the IAEA, is all they are doing.
Those who do take a stab at telling the truth to the American people poll in the single digits, and are marginalized by the media, who owe their jobs to the military/government/media complex. Many in the public are becoming aware that the media are themselves mucking up the system in some way. From ferreting out the truth they’ve been reduced to funneling events to the public through the lens of their powerful owners, limiting the range of debate to that pitiful expanse we saw before us.
Perhaps if we are lucky survival will clue people in to paying attention to their own true interests before it is too late, rather than being stampeded out of fear into fascism.
Our guy encourages us to hope, and hope we must, that he has more integrity than he lets on and is smarter than the positions he takes, which I guess the polls inform him he must. At this point it’s a pretty slim hope.
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