Filed under: Journal, Media Criticism, Politics | Tags: Activism, Civic Engagement, Debate, Democracy, Grassroots Actions
[This message is dedicated to my new myspace friend Becky from my high school, with whom I'd rarely ever spoken to until commenting on a bulletin she recently posted. In the last month we've been writing each other a lot about what's going on in the world, and her support of my writing is a big reason I'm now posting regularly to my blog. Thanks Dumpy!]
Becky wrote me a letter today expressing her appreciation and admiration for my writing, which was a first for me. As you can tell by my archives, I’ve only been doing this steadily for about one month, so I was quite taken aback. It was only recently I realized that I’ve very much been in the closet about my concerns for the health of this country. Oh sure, if you hang out with me long enough at a bar I’ll start spouting off about this issue or that, or every 6 months I’ve timidly fired off a somewhat passionate email to family and friends. But indignant speeches a dark bar and late night rants are a far cry from rallying cries for action in the sober light of day. Now as I said, part of the impetus for writing more in depth and personally about my views was her encouragement, but in recent days I’ve realized that it truly arises out of fear of allowing this country to slip out of our grasp.
Now if I’ve never I talked politics with you personally before, it’s important that you understand that I am not talking about partisanship, but merely our obligation as a free citizenry to hold our leaders accountable. It does not matter if a D or an R follows their name, the whole point of the Bill of Rights and our system of checks and balances was to ensure that power was dispersed. The United States was formed in order to throw off the bonds of a tyrannical and repressive system which allowed no means of criticizing its leaders. It was not formed to spread that democracy elsewhere, it was not formed to promote the will of God, it was merely a system by which ordinary people could decide if their leader was doing a good job or a bad job. The end is the means, and it in no way can come at the end of a spear.
So. That’s a shitload of lofty rhretoric, but it came out of me fairly effortlessly so I will let it stand. The reason that I can express myself so easily right now is because when Becky wrote me today to say how “lucky” I was that I could write the way I do, I was immediately compelled to call her and tell her that I’m not lucky, just scared out of my mind at what this country has become. Actually, what really scares me is that no one in the establishment media seems to be having a serious discussion about it. We have an executive branch that has made broad attempts to politicize the Justice Department, legalized torture, disabled Habeus Corpus, misled us into a war that has cost over 4,000 American lives not to mention untold Iraqis (estimates range from 100,000 to over 1 million, but our government can’t be bothered to count those brown fuckers), and the current cost is at $524,943,204,345 (at the moment of this posting, to find out what it is by the time you read this, click here), and oh by the way did you know that Bush can declare martial law at any time under the Defense Authorization of 2007?
Yeah, martial law fun conspiracy theory shit, right? This was an actual amendment to the Insurrection Act which gives the power of the president to federalize all troops. Here’s a fun key change in what can trigger this authority. Originally, the president could only enact martial law under these conditions:
insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy
natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition[emphasis mine. Yeah, that's not vague at all]
…but don’t worry, because this can only happen if:
domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.
[Hmmm, so like if all of the National Guard was stuck in Iraq this could happen, but then who would actually deal with this crisis? If only we had a privatized army run by a hardcore partisan Republican that was accountable to no one... Oh yeah, Blackwater! Whew!]
And here’s the key passage for me:
opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
Now as I’ve tried to explain, the whole problem here is that ALL KINDS OF TERRIBLE SHIT IS LEGAL! So am I technically an insurrectionist if I believe in organizing people to take action en masse to repeal the Military Commissions Act, or the PATRIOT ACT? After all those are laws. What if a natural disaster or epidemic breaks out, Bush declares Martial Law “to restore order”, only just like Iraq it turns out him and his crew are fucktards and no order gets restored, when do we get to say ENOUGH? I don’t know about you, but this fact alone will prevent me from getting a good night’s sleep until they are completely out of power.
So at this point I hope you are pissed off in some way. If you disagree with my interpretation of where we are at as a country, please tell me your reasons. If you’re pissed because you haven’t read this in the papers or in the media, you should be. My main impetus for writing this is because we have relegated the discussion of what is important in our lives to a professional class: the punditocracy and the career politicians. The only thing that fixes this is for all of us to start talking about it with each other. Given everything that you know about what this administration has done to subvert the rule of law and the sovereignty of the people, do you really expect them to give up their battle without a fight? I don’t, and I won’t breath a sigh of relief until they are out of office or held accountable, but I personally don’t understand how the two can be mutually exclusive.
Now, as you can tell by the title I’m a fan of democracy, and that’s what will save us in the end. We just have to remember that democracy is not voting once every couple years, it’s talking to each other about these issues, now more than ever. So here’s my suggestions for some critical, yet simple actions that we all can take to reinvigorate and strengthen our democracy:
- Fax your congressman and Senator often. Don’t call since there’s no paper trail and I dunno about you but I get nervous talking politics to total strangers. Letters get screened and usually unopened since the anthrax bullshit. I don’t care what the issue is, just fax them. Congress lives by the ratio of 1:13000, which means that for every 1 person who contacts them about an issue, they figure there are 12,999 more who care just as much but for various reasons can’t send the fax themselves. As we all know politicians are pretty spineless, the only problem is that right now we’re not the ones with our foots on their collective throat, the defense contractors are. Time to change that. If you’re really excited by this action item but don’t have a fax, try this out all you need to do is upload a PDF.
- Pimp the shit out of current.com to everyone you know, and encourage participation. Not a lot of people are aware that right now a cable news outlet exists which is devoid of mindless punditry and allows the community to vote and post stories. Since I’ve started using the site, I’ve had many of the stories and comments I’ve posted gain extremely favorable responses, and my very first video comment was picked for airing. This is people-powered media, and we need everyone to help ensure it’s viability. Even as an avid news reader, I’m amazed at the stories I’ve been exposed to since becoming active in the community that I hadn’t typically come across so easily. Plus everyone’s super nice, I’ve had more private correspondences with total strangers who appreciated my thoughts in 2 months on that site than in the 6 years I’ve been participating at dailykos.com
- Start blogging. Even if you’re just posting links and brief descriptions, it still gets it out there in the ether. The more links that point to an important article or posting the better. The unbiased popularity of the Internet may well be the only thing that saves us.
- On a similar note, If there’s one non-partisan and essential topic that I’d say you’re obligated to learn about and spread the word on, it’s the importance of network neutrality. http://www.savetheinternet.com Read up on that.
- Learn HTML. That’s just good advice. If the economy ever turns to complete shit, HTML will be the new factory job.
I just saw this posted on CurrentTV and it absolutely needs to be seen by everyone. This fits right in with the narrative that has arisen regarding the failure and interference of the corporate media. If there is one movie that will drive any sane person screaming from their couch watching cable news to the warm hills of the blogosphere and more people powered media.
Artist Brian Springer spent a year scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption. The result of his research is SPIN, one of the most insightful films ever made about the mechanics of how television is used as a tool of social control to distort and limit the American public’s perception of reality.
I implore you to watch the first 10 minutes and recommend as soon as your gag reflex fully kicks in. This just demonstrates that our press has been crippled by its own fascination with itself and has been abusing its power for decades now. Just a few gems to be found in this footage:
- Larry King tells Bill Clinton that Ted, his boss is a huge fan and could do a lot to help.
- Several phone callers issue heated criticisms to Pat Robertson, which he responds to with meaningless stories and platitudes. As soon as they cut away to other coverage, we get to watch Robertson proceed to declare everyone who criticized him “total homos”, or some other such juvenile nonsense.
- Footage demonstrating how Democratic candidate Larry Agran was rudely and completely snuffed out of the ‘92 race by the media’s circular logic of “you can’t have media coverage until you get some media coverage”
- During NBC’s 500th Anniversary Propaganza Spectacular Columbus day special, an actual Cherokee Nation history scholar’s tried to describe the 2 years of genocide committed by Columbus after his ‘discovery’ of America. This is then derided off camera by Katie Couric, saying: “They just you know think that he ruined paradise and had no respect for nature and treated the Indians like dog doo…” (did I mention that she’s talking about a quarter million dead by 1494 and a tyrant who decreed that all boys who couldn’t find gold lost their hand? dog doo??)
I was shocked that this film isn’t widely held up and distributed throughout the blogosphere. The ENTIRE documentary is press footage, indicting them with their own words and images. It is impeachable evidence of the traditional media’s bias and fealty towards established power and the status quo. Please show this to anyone you can to remind people that all of the issues brought up by McClellan are nothing new, they’re the same old game and it needs to change.
Filed under: Media Criticism, Politics | Tags: innovation, Network Neutrality, Telecom
As someone who has worked in the interactive industry for nearly a decade, I can say without a doubt that abolishing protections that keep the Internet free from corporate interference in the flow of information would be a major step backwards and diminish the United States’ in the global technology market.
Here’s how things work now, with net neutrality in tact. Let’s say that I wanna start producing hilarious cartoons or videos and build a website around them. I pay a hosting fee that is determined by how much storage space my website requires and how much traffic I expect to receive. But no matter how small or large my hosting package is, my site will be delivered to anyone who views it just as fast as Amazons, Comedy Central, ESPN, etc. If my cartoons are really popular, I have to buy a larger hosting package to accommodate my traffic, but that is my decision as the content provider.
Now let’s take away net neutrality from this scenario. Now my website can be moved into a ’slow lane’. For an additional fee on top of my hosting costs, I have to pay in order to get my site to go as fast as Amazon, Comedy Central, ESPN, etc. All who have way more money to outspend the average person, and thereby diminishing the quality of the internet for anyone who might not prefer to use the services of sites that can afford the ‘fast lane’.
The growth of YouTube and other broadband-intensive services is opening up vast new markets both in terms of economic expansion and personal expression. To abolish net neutrality would cease to give the consumers control of which services are successful, and place it in the hands of a few telecom companies that may not always have the consumers needs and interest ahead of short-term profits or stifling competition.
My entire career has been predicated on the technologies and trends that the openness of the Internet has fostered. The more control we give to private corporations over which trends and technologies will succeed, the less people like myself will be able to contribute to the market, ultimately stifling progress and possibly putting my economic stability at risk.
‘Nuff said, go sign the petition.
Filed under: Journal, Media Criticism, Politics | Tags: Current TV, Grassroots, People Powered Media, Video Activism
It’s not exactly a new topic, but I’ve reached the tipping point where I feel I must begin to participate in this movement and be an advocate for its legitimacy. I’m fed up with the traditional media doing nothing but chuckling over bowling scores and haircuts. I’m fed up with pundits pretending to speak for Americans, when the average American’s concerns are completely absent from the discussion. Most of all, I’m fed up with all the ridiculous crawls and graphics. Network and Cable news in its current form is officially a dinosaur and I believe we are the generation who will witness and participate in its extinction. Newspapers will change, but if I’m right it will be for the better as far as owners, journalists and the public are concerned.
Besides the fact that it so resembles a high school caste system, I’m also done waiting for the traditional media to start understanding how urgent an issue global warming. Sure the major science channels will do the occasional 1-2 hour ’scare the pants off you’ special, but no ongoing stories about what we can do on the local level. No ongoing stories of the people who want to spread the word about actions they’ve taken. And there’s very little coverage of actual local civic engagement. I have no clue what the hell is going on in my community.
While I am sure that a lot of issues are covered by my local paper, let’s face it, I don’t fall into a ‘reads the local paper’ demographic. Nor do I wish to. As i mentioned earlier, I believe that for newspapers to remain competitive, they will need to begin to invite and eventually rely on direct citizen contributions. If the success of YouTube and reality tv have taught me two things about the emerging populous it’s that 1.) they know how to work cameras and computers and 2.) reality is easy to produce. I can’t emphasize the second point enough. All the shittiest shows in TV land actually are harder to produce than quality documentary pieces because they need to trick you into thinking that shit is interesting or compelling. Case in point, Hell’s Kitchen:
Now as a counterbalance to what a solid people-powered media documentary takes to produce and have an impact, I give you this:
If you haven’t caught on by now, I’m a big fan of Current TV. I first heard of it due to Al Gore’s involvement and have been following it’s progress for a while now. It is essentially a media outlet that thrives on user participation. If you want the antithesis of what passes for news on other networks, I highly recommend CurrentTV if for no other reason than the fact that I want this news model to thrive.
So with relatively few resources, I am beginning this journey myself. I am going to participate in more community events, trying to connect with other concerned citizens and documenting as much of the process as I can. I don’t know if this will lead to participating in local politics, working in a community garden, or cataloging the timeliness of the subway on nights and weekends. All I know is that I’m excited about the outlets exist now for me to help create a more honest, legitimate and reflective media establishment. All I need to do now is wait for my new camera to arrive.
