Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.
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
A terrifying moment. We appeal for your support.
In the last weeks, we have witnessed an authoritarian assault on communities in Minnesota and across the nation.
The need for truthful, grassroots reporting is urgent at this cataclysmic historical moment. Yet, Trump-aligned billionaires and other allies have taken over many legacy media outlets — the culmination of a decades-long campaign to place control of the narrative into the hands of the political right.
We refuse to let Trump’s blatant propaganda machine go unchecked. Untethered to corporate ownership or advertisers, Truthout remains fearless in our reporting and our determination to use journalism as a tool for justice.
But we need your help just to fund our basic expenses. Over 80 percent of Truthout’s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors.
Truthout has launched a fundraiser, and we have a goal to add 273 new monthly donors in the next 72 hours. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger one-time gift, Truthout only works with your support.