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William Rivers Pitt | Winning the Outside Chance

All we won on Tuesday night was the outside chance of not losing. What is made of that very slim margin is entirely up to you.

The most expensive election in the history of money is now in the books, and for the moment, the lesson is plain: money cannot, in fact, buy you love. Mitt Romney, the Republican Party, and the awesomely powerful dark-money barons backing them up – the guys you’ll never meet who have no problem writing checks with eight zeroes to the left of the decimal – failed to deliver the goods … and there will be hell to pay because of it.

I won’t lie: the pyrotechnical display of rage, recrimination and ridiculousness that is about to explode on the right flank of American politics is something I plan to enjoy to the fullest possible extent. The Big Money boys who invested in scaring voters about Brown People will blame the Useful Idiots they themselves created, you know, the ones who think Medicare isn’t a government program and have poorly-lettered signs to prove it, and those people will blame the Party for failing to properly support candidates like Akin and Mourdock because Akin and Mourdock made the mistake of saying out loud what they actually think about, well, everything … and the chickens will all come home to roost. The party that has spent the last forty years building a base of voters who think dinosaurs aren’t real because they aren’t mentioned in the Bible just got kneecapped by their own grand plan…and the truth of it, as it unspools, will be something I intend to revel in.

For a little while, anyway. The sad fact is that the GOP, in its desire to remain relevant at all costs, has fostered a voting base that believes anyone who isn’t in line with their way of thinking is un-American, and dangerous … which is why so many of them apparently had no qualms about stealing the right to vote from their fellow citizens in states all across the land. Why not? It’s a matter of National Security for them, or so they’ve been told. Those un-Christian terrorist liberals aren’t real Americans, so it isn’t actually a crime against the country and the Constitution to take from them their most basic right … because they don’t have rights … right?

That’s what they believe, what they have to believe in order to justify disenfranchising so many people. I’ll bet most of the folks who got their hands dirty “safeguarding” the ballot from The Enemy Within are probably good and decent people, in the main. They think they’re doing The Lord’s Work, because that’s what they’ve been told: from the church pulpit, from the bully pulpit, by their pastors and their leaders, for years on end. The lesson stuck, and here we are, smack dab in the middle of a country torn in half by design, because it’s the easy way to win.

Oh, P.S., something like two billion dollars got spent seeing this jangled carnival to a conclusion, a fact you should retain and redeploy the next time you hear some austerity-loving benefit-slashing politician try to tell you America is too broke to take care of its own. For the record, the tab for Tuesday night ran nine zeroes to the left of the decimal, which tells you everything you need to know about where we’ve set our priorities.

That is the country right now, and all the bunting and balloons in the wide world can’t pretty it up.

Mr. Obama gets four more years, which was the best possible outcome given the choice at hand. Mr. Romney gets shame and ignominy, likely in large doses after the simmering GOP civil war breaks wide open in the aftermath of all this. In the meantime, all the huge, bleeding problems we had on Monday remain with us. Afghanistan grinds on, the drones are still killing children, the dark-money barons still hold sway despite this setback, and while Mr. Obama got a nice cheer for mentioning “our warming planet” during his victory speech, the fact remains that a very large clock is ticking down to a very present deadline regarding our ability to survive the ravaged environment we have unleashed on ourselves.

Don’t be smug. All we won on Tuesday night was the outside chance of not losing. What is made of that very slim margin is entirely up to you.

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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