This is the day Americans celebrate the founding of our nation. i remember many Fourth of July celebrations when I thought more about hot dogs, ice cream, swimming and fireworks displays than about what "founding our nation" really meant. But the past ten years, since George W. Bush was elevated to the presidency by a oombination of clever propaganda, political dirty-tricks and flat-out cheating, the meaning and significance of our nation's founding has come to mean more to me than it ever did in the past.
It's not just George W. Bush's disastrous years in the White House that have made me so acutely aware of the meaning of the founding of the United States. Debilitating as those years were to the fabric of the country, they were merely part of a larger context, which has become more and more clear as the past few years have brought ever more evidence of the fruits of the efforts of the forces of the far right and corporate interests to hamstring the effective functioning of the election process, the courts . . . I could go on, but it would just be more painful . . .
I can't claim to be the most astute observer of the political scene, but it doesn't take a genius to see that the efforts of people like the Koch brothers and their fellow corporatists have been spectacularly successful to date in achieving enormous gains in their long-term campaign to confuse the electorate and strangle the flow of legislation that might hinder their accomplishment of their goals.
Undoubtedly a great deal of their success is the result of what some call the "right-wing echo chamber"-- the combination of conservative think-tank writers, columnists, commentators ec. in print and electronic media, and like-minded (or financially supported) legislators who agree with preternatural unanimity on talking points to shout across all media on a regular basis.
Another aid to their cause is the lack of real regulation of media by the FCC and other federal regulatory bodies. For example, if the FCC was really paying attention to its long-ago mandate, part of which was licensing of television and radio stations that "broadcast in the public interest"--then there could be no Fox News channel, for Fox quite demonstrably and even occasionally admittedly does not, strictly speaking, broadcast in the public interest. It has a very specific political agenda, set for it by its leadership, Rupert Murdoch and his primary architect of Fox News, Roger Ailes. The main interests Fox News seems to care about are those of the corporate right.
It would be naive to think that Fox News is the only station to have a political agenda. However, there was a time not that long ago, before Fox began its own news organization, when there was no national TV station that included the word "News" in its title, which so unrelentingly rooted for only one political viewpoint to the extreme extent that is displayed by "Fox News."
It saddens me to meet people who have been so confused and overwhelmed by the ceaseless barrage of disinformation by the "echo chamber" and Fox News (I realize that mentioning Fox news may be redundant in this context), that they have come to think that all news on television and other media is, like Fox News, merely propaganda and therefore they should trust none of the news they see, hear or read.
I can't argue that all the news one can glean from other sources is true. There will always be bias, and error. And some media are more reliable than others. But there is a palpable difference between Fox News and the others. The other media, especially those owned by large corporations, ie: CBS, ABC and NBC and CNN, are influenced by their ownership. But even these are not the complete tool of their corporate owners that Fox News represents.
And what makes it more difficult for people to sort out truth from fiction--and make no mistake, there is much more fiction on Fox News than one wants to belie--is the fact that when Fox News picks up a story, be it something a blogger posts or something one of its own people says on-air, all too often, that story will be picked up by other media . . . and thus, what Fox News asserts as fact gains credence and momentum in the news cycle by being repeated elsewhere.
This corruption of the news media has created a citizenry that doesn't know what to believe, and therefor distrusts anything that is disseminated by any of the major media. And this, in turn, enables Fox News, with their enormous advantage of the "echo chamber" of the extremely well organized corporatist right, to manage the news to its liking, while also helping to discredit any news that disagrees with Fox-and-allies' version of reality.
This right-wing news combine has enlarged its sphere of influence since the recent Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case that affirmed, by its twisted logic, the First Amendment right of free speech for corporations, thus freeing corporations to spend an unlimited amount of money on political advertising. Moreover, the decision made it possible to do this without divulging the source of the funding of such ads. The elections of 2010 were a terrifyingly powerful example of what such unlimited, anonymous corporate spending can accomplish.
So, we have been living in the land of what I can't help thinking of as fascism--government in the direct service of business. In state after state after state, and on the federal level as well, the past months have witnessed a vast number of laws that feather the nests of business and the very wealthy at the expense of the middle-class, the working class, and the poor. From tax breaks for business to cuts in basic public services and tax hikes for those with lower incomes, from privatizing of public agencies or services to the unilateral takeover of municipal governments by appointed officials, and in more ways than I can name without doing a lot of research, many of the governmental units that are under the control of Republican and/or right-wing factions have seized this moment to pass as much legislation favorable to their true base--the very wealthy and powerful--as they possibly can.
Living in Madison, Wisconsin I've seen first-hand and participated in the response to this legislative blitz by the oligarchy that is currently in control of government. It has been gratifying to see an enormous number of people standing up not only for their own rights, but also for the rights of others. Anyone following real news--say, Rachel Maddow, for my money, possibly the sharpest, most objective journalists working on TV today--has seen that hundreds of thousands of people in Wisconsin have been protested for months. Also encouraging is the fact that people have been so thoroughly motivated by what I can only characterize as a power grab that within the next month and a half there will be a number of elections to potentially recall as many as six Wisconsin state senators. There will also be three recall elections against Democratic state senators, but there seems quite clearly to be a huge disparity between the Republican and Democratic recall efforts, the latter being far more energetic and widely based.
The right-wing press has repeatedly contended that the great majority of people working for Republican recalls and protesting at the Wisconsin State Capitol have been from out of state. But having been there myself, I know that I've seen a great number of people I knew; moreover, I've seen a lot of other people from outside Madison who came in from elsewhere in the state. In addition, while the right-wing press contends that the protest and recall efforts have been orchestrated by out-of-state people, I know nobody has told me to protest. I've done it, and volunteered to phone-bank, and canvass, simply because the laws that Governor Scott Walker and the Republican majority in Wisconsin have proposed and now passed fly in the face of a government of, by and for the people--unless one considers only the very rich and powerful people. And in Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement that introduced such measures as child labor laws, the forty-hour work week, workers compensation and others, the current reactionary rollback of progressive laws in favor of laws that instead concentrate the wealth and power of a very small number of the power elite is particularly--and painfully--ironic.
The last time the disparity of distribution of wealth between the very rich and everyone else was this extreme in the United States was just before the Great Depression. If we can't soon reverse the course upon which the Right has been engaged, the consequences will be dire, not just for the general population of the U.S., but the world economy as well, in a worldwide economic crash.
The word "chutzpah" comes to mind when I think about the tactics the Republicans in Congress have been using to prevent the Obama administration from a number of sensible steps they have been trying to implement to ameliorate the current economic problems--ending the Bush tax cuts for the very rich, for starters. It is all too clear that the Republican leadership feels that by crippling the economy, they have a chance to win back the White House in 2012, and perhaps the Senate as well. What they don't seem to have considered in their strategy is that if they succeed as well as they want, there may not be much of a United States when the 2012 elections come around. There is a limit to how much squeezing the economy . . . and the people . . . can bear before things are so broken that they will take decades to fix.
Maybe I'm just an optimist, but seeing the outraged and yet very civilized response in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere to the draconian measures put in place by the right, I feel as if the Corporate Right may finally have overplayed its hand to the point of awakening the American people to the political reality that has been developing for the past several decades. I see people becoming politically active who have not been on the same side of political issues in a very, very long time. Call it populism; call it whatever you like. People are waking up to the fact that democracy only works if we all get involved.
As I have heard a number of people say in various ways, if you don't do politics, politics will be done to you. And we surely have had a lot of politics done to us lately. So on this anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I encourage everyone to pay attention to politics, vote in elections, and don't be silent if there's something going on that you don't like. Find out as much as you can from a variety of news sources, question anything that seems backwards--my favorite being the kind of rhetoric that just seems wrong, like "We need tax breaks for business to help create jobs." We've HAD tax breaks for business for the past ten years, the biggest business tax breaks in many decades. And it has not helped create jobs.
Things like that.
Happy Birthday, U.S.A. Celebrate our nation's birth of freedom by being part of the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment