The international concentration of wealth and military power is endangering not only the personal freedoms and life chances of billions of people, but the potentiality for life on earth to simply exist. The US-NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in support of transnational corporations and the central banks primarily as the enforcer of International Monetary Fund/World Bank’s fiscal policies and the protector of transnational capital flow. The combination of empire enforcers—both public and private military/police—in partnership with the private owners of production and capital’s need for constant growth and profits is resulting in a tragic decline of humanity into a freedomless state of global corporate fascism.
We are not going to reform the empire of destruction globally through corrupt capital protecting legislative bodies controlled by millionaires and corporate money. We are not going to change the propaganda messages of corporate media—as they are deeply embedded in the destructive empire of power. Corporate media (singular) is the information control wing of the global power structure inside the transnational corporate class of the one percent. The corporate media systematically censors news stories that challenge the propaganda of empire. Specific mythologies of empire are that we live in a democratic societies with fair elections, that governments are primarily transparent and seek to protect the public, that evil lurks in the world waiting to challenge our freedoms, we fight fairly and morally while the others are evil terrorists, governments would never do anything to harm their own citizens, wealth trickles down, we are all trying to be green and capitalism will save us. Occupy challenges these myths of empire as lies and propaganda.
The time is for the Occupy democracy movement to build our own news, and our own systems of decision making from the bottom up. We no longer need a majority to make change inside the empire. We need only active informed populations in the 10-20% range of society to initiate change producing social movements of resistance and non-cooperation with empire.
Individually and collectively we can disconnect from employment that supports the empire of destruction, we can keep our work instead with community-based efforts at local sustainability, economic development, and caring. We can shop and bank locally and never enter the Wal Mart’s of empire. We can organize for resistance to counter the billions of dollars a year spent by the military to lie our children into serving the empire of destruction. We can turn off the corporate media filled with its propaganda and lies, and seek our own sources of news from within democracy movements worldwide.
Power to the people
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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