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Hope is not history's Barcalounger, as is often thought: it requires you get back out there and protect that habitat or stop that war. It is not the same as optimism, the belief that everything will probably turn out all right despite your inactivity, the same kind of inactivity that despair begets. Hope involves a sense of possibility, but with it comes responsibility.
Rebecca Solnit
The swing to the extremist right in 90s and early 21st century was in many ways a response to the events of the sixties, an era in which Americans took the first steps toward reinventing themselves, much to the horror of the entrenched economic interests we refer to elsewhere at this site as the plutocracy.
As with the last catastrophic swing to the extremist right that the US experienced in the years leading up to the economic collapse following 1929, it is becoming increasingly apparent that absolutely nothing that George Bush or the Republican congress did was in any way of benefit to the citizens of the United States — and that, indeed, everything they did was actually toxic to the body politic . Fortunately, the appeal of the Newt Gingrich/Tom Delay/Dick Cheney/Karl Rove/George Bush agenda has wilted beyond revival — for now — as the utterly destructive nature of their agenda is written on every recent economic headline. And of course, the staggering incompetence of Bush himself, together with the glaring lack of appeal of such policy centerpieces as his Social Security deforms didn't help anything either.
However, this implosion through corruption, incompetence, and malfeasance doesn't of itself amount to a constructive agenda for the Obama years.
And that brings us to an important question. What does a constructive, alternative agenda look like? Obama has prioritized jobs creation and economic stimulus. But can these things occur within the plutocratic economic framework that is still firmly in place?
Unfortunately the answer to that is both certain and simple: no.
Perhaps the first part of a constructive agenda involves Americans rethinking themselves. Action always issues from thought, and thought centers on ideas. Unfortunately, most of the ideas that Americans have been exposed to have not issued from the cultural right or even from the cultural or economic left. They have instead issued from the self-interested plutocracy that owns the mass media through which Americans have developed their self-image and their understanding of the world. This is why political rhetoric still lags the best political and economic thought by half a century or more. It is also why political rhethoric has come almost completely unhinged from political and economic reality. To a large degree, we still live in an outright ideological time warp in which recycled doctrine from early in the Cold War still dominates the stage; and this doctrine, even when we hear it from the economic right, has absolutely no bearing upon the actions actually taken on a daily basis by the reigning plutocracy.
The contemporary plutocracy is global because the largest corporations are now global — and have been for 30 years or more . The doctrine they actually operate upon is known as "neoliberalism." Considered in light of its aims, and stated bluntly, neoliberalism is no-holds-barred warfare upon democracy by economic means. Its bones are the IMF, the World Bank, and trade accords like NAFTA and CAFTA. Its modus operandi is privatization and public indebtedness in the form of massive deficits, and its objective is nothing less than the global obliteration of civil society. Like the transnational corporations that are the disease vectors of neoliberalism, the transnational plutocracy knows no allegiance to law and no loyalty to any country (although it's quite good at pretending to patriotism).
Considered in this perspective the parochial political struggles between the "right" and the "left" pale in significance. They are, in fact, mere political stagecraft. Focused on the daily struggle for economic survival, Americans understandably identify jobs or the resolution of the war in Afghanistan as the burning issues of the day. But we should did deeper. The burning issue of the day, even under Obama, remains globalization and neoliberalism — in part because what has been happening with jobs and what happens with the war is largely a consequence of neoliberalism and globalization . And because globalization is the real burning issue of the day, the single most important practical item on the agenda is breaking the back of corporate influence in politics. This, in turn, means the elimination of corporate influence in the media. That means that the ownership of the mass media must be de-consolidated.
Today, just 10 conglomerates provide the vast majority of the "news" to Americans. Contrary to urban myth, none of them are in any meaningful way liberal, nor are they contributing anything to the quality of life of working conservatives. As global corporations themselves, all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, are cheerleaders for neoliberalism and globalization. And make no mistake: all of them must be broken up, or, where they are beyond the reach of American law, they must be barred from the US marketplace. To scrutinize the corporate makeup of this central nervous system of the plutocracy, you can follow this link:
http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html
But we can name the names here: AOL/Time Warner, AT&T corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric, Liberty Media Corporation, News Corporation, Sony, Viacom Inc., Vivendi Universal, Walt Disney Corporation.
So the very first item on a constructive agenda is media reform, and that means real reform, which includes real media democracy. The National Association of Broadcasters, or NAB, has been a primary force behind all of the media consolidation. That means that, contrary to all conventional wisdom, the NAB is the single most destructive force at work in the world today. It is, in fact, global public enemy number one.
The good news is that Americans across the political spectrum oppose further media consolidation. The bad news is that they haven't yet awakened to the importance of media de-consolidation and media democracy.
The tactics required to reform the media are two-fold: first, the corporate media empires must be broken up. This means supporting those organizations engaged in reform. Second, the few sources of media actually doing a good job must be supported.
To get an overall sense of who the good guys and who the bad guys are in this struggle, we recommend that you read The Nation's 12 step program for media democracy. It can be viewed at this link. A set of positive policy directions is spelled out here.
If you'd like to support organizations engaged in reform, we suggest that you have a look at the following websites:
http://www.democraticmedia.org/
http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/
Finally, we suggest that you support the existing news organizations doing the best job of getting the truth out. Our picks include the following:
Multinational Monitor: http://multinationalmonitor.org/monitor.html
Pacifica Radio: http://www.pacifica.org/
The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/
Z Magazine: http://www.zmag.org/
Other good media organizations can be found in our media resource.
Though it may be counter-intuitive, and although your support won't yield immediate results, these are the single most important steps you can take to preserve American democracy.
In the next editorial we'll have a look at tackling corporate reform head on.
(For related insights see also:the true political spectrum, class conflict, democracy, populism, plutocracy, oligarchy, and the links below.)
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