IX. A Final Word
1.
For
purposes of rounding off the book, I shall treat the US as a representative
arena, since it figures most extensively in my social, political, and economic
data; and since it has reached its most radical polarisation between top and
bottom, with impending repercussions throughout the world-wide ‘globalised’
society. This polarisation is all too clearly
recapitulated in the spread of discursive themes. If you survey discourses of
social responsibility and human concern, you read and hear about how the human
rights of ordinary citizens near the bottom, the workers, farmers, children,
elderly, immigrants, and minorities — are being eroded, down to the basic
rights to be alive and well, to be fed and clothed, to work and live decent and
dignified lives. But if you consume the standard media discourse, along with the
spin, the punditry, the official press releases, and public relations, you read
and hear about how great things are at the top, e.g., in pronouncements like ‘The economy has never been
better’ (Ohio Governor George Voinovich), ‘Blue skies ahead for the economy’ (GVA Grimley),
‘Everyone is getting rich’ (Money magazine) or ‘How Long Can Americans Keep
Splurging? (Business Week). Citizens who speak out or mobilise against
this rosy disinformation campaign will be relentlessly smeared by the ‘New
Rant’ attack machine
as wimpy whiners, wild-eyed
alarmists, slanderous sleazemongers, or — just maybe — domestic terrorists
and enemy combatants.
2.
Perhaps the phoney good news is swallowed just because the public recoils from
acknowledging the authentic bad news. As of this
writing, the come-smashin'-it ‘conservatives’ control the ‘White House’
and its ‘Cabinet’ of Somnambulist Horrors that would scare the, erm,
wits even out of Dr Calagari, plus both Houses of
Congress, the Supreme Court and much of the Judiciary, all centred around
[2362] an administration that will let its special interests
— particularly its high-rolling campaign contributors and its noisiest theocrats of the right — have
veto power over public safety, public health, and economic prudence in war no
less than in peacetime (Frank Rich in the New York Times)
[2363]
This band of mean-spirited, greedy, determined power-seekers ran roughshod over
the Constitution, the institutions of democracy, over real and imagined
‘enemies’ abroad. […]. It was full speed ahead in enacting long-range tax
cuts for the wealthy, ignoring Congress, making secret anything that might prove
embarrassing or potentially criminal, freezing out Democrats, retrenching on
environmental progress, behaving like a rampaging cowboy in foreign affairs…
(Bernard Weiner at CommonDreams)www
Finding
all this unbearable confront as daily reality, ordinary citizens may be lured or
at least deflected by the soothing unreality the ‘conservative’ media
disgorge.1
3. Though the evidence I have collected has thoroughly convinced me of this ugly reality, I still find it incomprehensible in the most basic human terms. How can un-president Bush expect anyone to believe that he is helping ordinary citizens ‘put food on their families’ (who gratefully lick it off again) by destroying millions of jobs and by ramming through binge after binge of ‘tax relief’ for the very rich; or that he is protecting consumers, workers, and environment by slashing every regulation he can reach? How can the Rant-a-Rants like David Horowitz, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, or Dinesh D’Souza shut out the awareness of how false, unfair, crude, and cruel their screechy diatribes are? How do ‘advocates’ like Eugene Scalia or Steven Molloy block out mental images of the violent deaths, crippling injuries, and loathsome diseases masked by their sulfurous smokescreens as mere 'scares'? In short, how much mungy money and flatulent flattery does it take to anaesthetise human intellect, courtesy, and decency to such an extent? (Somebody help me here, I’m lost.)
4. Some of the worst news is in fact not news at all for the major media. Perhaps you might try a little discursive test yourself. Here are ten stories from recent years which deserved to be major news but which were reported only marginally if at all in the media.2 How many can you say you really knew about?
[2264] The
executive director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration reports
that at least 100,000 workers die each year, and three or four times that number
are disabled, as a result of occupational diseases (The Progressive).
[2365]
According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), up to 500,000 different
non-prescription remedies generate $3.5 billion in sales every year, [but] at
least half the drugs are worthless or of dubious value, […] advertised with
bold lies (New Times).
[2366]
Some 500,000 people, the majority in Third World countries, are poisoned yearly
by banned pesticides and drugs (Rolling Stone). Pesticides and chemical
exports are suspected of
causing birth
defects, reduced fertility, genetic mutations, cancer, and bone marrow,
blood, and respiratory changes […] The FDA allows US drug manufacturers to
export banned drugs, stale out-dated drugs, and unapproved new drugs (Mother
Jones).
[2367]
In 1977, the Zenith Radio Corporation’s Chicago plant eliminated 5,000 US jobs
which paid an average of $5.25 and hour. […] Workers in Taiwan now produce the
same circuit boards for Zenith for an average wage of 36¢ an hour (The
Nation)
[2368]
When you pull into a gas station, you could be filling your tank with a deadly
mixture of toxic waste solvents, and gasoline. The GAO, the EPA, and the FBI are
investigating sophisticated ‘waste laundering’ schemes [with] connections to
organised crime (Common Cause). In 1990, a Tacoma recycling firm was
caught […] selling fuel oil mixed with pesticide and other toxic chemicals (Seattle
Times).
[2369]
In July 1979, the largest radioactive spill on US history took place at United
Nuclear Mill at Church Rock, New Mexico. 100,000,000 gallons of radioactive
water contaminated the drinking water of more than 1700 Navajo. The company
refused to supply emergency food and water. (Irish Times) Samples of the
river water indicated radioactivity 6,600 times the maximum standard. [The
rivers eventually empty] into Lake Mead, which supplies the drinking water for
Los Angeles and Southern California. (Greenpeace Chronicles)
[2370]
Theoretically, one pound of plutonium, uniformly distributed, has the potential
to give everyone on the planet a fatal case of lung cancer (Helen Caldicott,
Founder of the Physicians for Social Responsibility) (The Nation). NASA
is scheduled to launch the Cassini space probe to Saturn in October 1997 with
72.3 pounds of plutonium. […] The probe will be launched on top of a
Lockheed-Martin-built Titan IV rocket — a number of which have exploded in the
atmosphere. (Progressive Media Network)
[2371]
From the 1940s until the 1970s, federal agencies conducted heinous radiation
exposure experiments on hundreds of human being around the country. […] In
Oregon, 14 subjects were immersed in radioactive water, or given the material to
drink. (New York Times) […] In August 1986, the Veteran’s
Administration was caught red-handed shredding thousands of case records of
contested radiation injury claims (VVA Veteran)
[2372]
Potentially 44,000 to 98,000 people die each year as a result of medical errors
in hospitals (Harvard Institute of Medicine).3
Physicians and hospitals are suddenly viewed in this report as more deadly than
combined deaths from highway accidents, breast cancer and AIDS.4
[2373]
[In] the Clandestine Service of the CIA, […] hundreds of employees on a daily
basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in countries around the world
[…] — easily 100,000 times a year. (House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence) […] Government documents, including CIA reports, show
that the CIA’s crimes include terrorism, assassination, torture, and
systematic violations of human rights. […]
The Committee expressed no legal or ethical
concerns about these crimes, […] because they were laws of other countries.
[Instead], a bill passed Congress […] immunizing CIA offenders who violate
treaties and international agreements while following orders.5
How
did you score? Until I ferreted them out for this book, mostly with the aid of
Project Censored, I didn’t know any.
5.
At this point in history, the vital obligation for anyone committed to authentic
democracy is to re-awaken its original and most vital function: to mount people
power against money power, the latter being ‘more despotic than monarchy, more
insolent than aristocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy’; ‘it denounces, as
public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light on its abuses’
(Abraham Lincoln). The beginning step would logically be to assess the current
political and economic situation from discursive sources both inside and (far
more) outside the control of corporate interests and party lines. The
‘ecologist’ study of text and discourse outlined in this Introduction
could, I profoundly hope, contribute to this large-scale knowledge-gathering
process by applying our explicit discursivist and deconstructive strategies of
discourse and counter-discourse with all the sensitive awareness we can muster
from our own pursuit of a genuine dialectic between theory and practice
(II.172).
6.
Much counter-discourse that you could hardly find in the major media can be
surfed at progressive or investigative websites like Center
for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org), Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org),
Center for Science in the Public Interest (www.cspinet.org), Citizens’ Network
on Essential Services (ServicesForAll.org), Progressive
Populist
(www.populist.com), Media
Transparency (www.mediatransparency.org), People for the American Way (www.pfaw.org),
Public Power Now (www.publicpowernow.org), Common Cause (www.commoncause.org),
BuzzFlash (www.buzzflash.com), CounterPunch
(www. counterpunch.org), Mother Jones (www.motherjones.com),
and Alternative Press Review (www.altpr.org). Many of these have links to
numerous other websites. And aside from a few tony outfits like Lexis-Nexis, the
content is all free.
7.
Also, rich counter-discourse is in progressive books, thoroughly researched and
abundantly documented. Here are the most recent ones I found highly informative,
and generally quite entertaining too, while writing my own book:
Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? (New York: Basic
Books, 2003)
Paul Begala, It’s Still the Economy, Stupid!
(New
York:
Simon
&
Schuster,
2003)
Kristina Borjesson (ed.), Into the
Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus, 2002).
Nancy Chan, Silencing Political
Dissent (New York: Seven Stories, 2002)
Joe Conason, Big Lies: The Right Wing
Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (New York: Thomas Dunne,
2003)
David Corn, The Lies of George W.
Bush: The Politics of Deception. (New York: Crown, 2003)
Al Franken, The Lies and the Lying
Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the New Right (New York:
Dutton, 2003)
Jim Hightower, There’s Nothing in
the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos (New York:
Harper Collins, 1997); If the Gods Had Wanted Us to Vote They’d Have
Given Us Candidates (New York: Harper Collins, 2001); and Thieves in High
Places (New York: Penguin, 2003)
Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Bushwhacked
(New York: Random House, 2003)
Carl Jensen, 20 Years of Censored News (New
York: Seven Stories, 1997)
Paul Krugman, The Great Unravelling
(New York: Norton, 2003)
Mark Crispin Miller, The Bush
Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (New York: Norton, 2002)
Russel Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Corporate
Predators (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1999)
Greg
Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. (New York: Plume, 2003)
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good
for You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry (Monroe, ME:
Common Courage, 1995); and Trust Us, We’re Experts: How Industry
Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future (New York: Tarcher/Putnam,
2001)
Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its
Discontents. (New York: Norton, 2002)
Gore
Vidal, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002)
Any
one of these is refreshingly honest and enlightening in the current flood of
fibspeak and fraudspeak; and many of the authors have their own websites, where
you can blag some choice quotes. If you must read just one, then you’d do well
with Best Democracy, since Palast himself leads the investigative pack in
rooting out uncomfortable truths on the right and the left. When read in
combination, these books can deliver the substantive ‘critical mass’ for the
discursive and intellectual resistance to the agents of disempowerment.
8.
The next step is: get involved! Start
your own chatsite or blog6
and get your voice out where at least it can be heard and read.
Contribute what you can where it’s needed. I myself have given free lectures and workshops on progressive education
and language learning in various countries at institutions that couldn’t pay
travel or honoraria.7
I myself have spent every day for seven months (our University went on strike)
making my own books available anywhere for free – surely the finest thing
I’ve done in my peripatetic life. Just in the first few days after upload, I
have had e-mails of gratitude, some quite moving, from Argentina, Australia,
Brazil, Britain, Colombia. Finland, France, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Portugal,
Russia, Senegal, Slovenia, Spain, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Makes my
whole life’s work really worth having done it.
9.
If the major national parties in your country are sold out to special interests,
then go organise at local levels and in alternative parties around the issues
that affect the lives of ordinary citizens Maybe you think big money can’t be
beaten? Wrong. Here are ten more stories [2374-83], this time on the bright
side, that have hardly gotten more attention from the major media than the
stories of malfeasance on the dark side [2364-73], though for entirely different
reasons.
[2374] Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine and Arizona passed initiatives
providing for public financing of their legislative and statewide elections.
[…] Regular people can run for office again, [such as] Marilyn Canavan, 68, a
longtime advocate of campaign reform [who] defeated Republican and party rivals
financed by special interests. ‘It is a good feeling I don’t owe anything to
anybody except my constituents’, she beamed.9 59% percent of Maine’s and 36%
of Arizona’s current legislators successfully ran as publicly financed
candidates in the 2002 election. In Arizona, [such] candidates
won seven of the nine available sets in races for statewide offices, including
governor.10
[2375] When Kathleen Lewis […] learned in 2001 that her community of
Glendale, Arizona was about to be Wal-Marted [with] a Supercenter of 222,000
square feet, [she] and other mad-as-hellers organised the Glendale Rebellion
[…] until the city council withdrew its zoning approval. [Wal-Mart] called for
a city-wide referendum on the project, hired a lobbyist to direct its campaign,
and proceeded to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into slick ads. […]
Against this show of corporate firepower the Glendale group had only $8,600 to
spend, but it mustered a wealth of people power and democratic determination,
engaging thousand of families in front-porch conversations. […] Glendale voted
60-40 against being Wal-Marted. More stunning was that this was the tenth time
in three years that local coalitions had come together in Arizona cities and
stopped new Wal-Mart stores.11
[2376] The launch of the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union, a
novel use of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), quietly marked an
extraordinary shift in political power from boardrooms to the public power.
[…] Activists armed with the CRA are holding mega-mergers hostage until banks
cough up millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars for loan funds pledged to
low-income borrowers. […] CRA has helped boost the total of home mortgages for
Black Americans by 72% in its first four years on the books.12
[2377] The Living Wage Campaign [is] a grass roots movement of America’s
low-wage workers […] taking matters into their own hands, getting organised
and defeating the formidable power structure of city after city [by] pushing
through various initiatives and ordinances requiring that corporate contractors
and recipients of corporate subsidies pay a wage a family can live on. […] As
the movement has gathered experience and strength, more of the ordinances also
require health care benefits and some paid vacation time.9 […] By a stunning 66%
margin, the electorate in Washington State said YES! to a Living Wage
initiative. 13
[2378]
Through the 1990s in Little Rock, the New Party steadily transformed support in
low- and moderate-income city neighborhoods into local government power. […]
Core issues for the Little Rock party include development, urban sprawl and
annexation policies, housing, schools, campaign finance reform, police
accountability, and a higher minimum wage. […] Along the way, the New Party
directors have mussed the pompadours of city leaders accustomed to following the
business community’s lead on policy. […] The New Party proudly points to
footholds in Chicago, suburban Washington, DC, Minneapolis, Portland, Madison,
and Missoula. But nowhere has the party been as successful as in Little Rock. (Arkansas
Times)14
[2379]
ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is the
nation's largest community organization of low and moderate-income families,
with over 150,000 member families [in] more than 60 cities across the
country. […] ACORN
members in Bay Point, CA, won improvements in safety conditions [by]
successfully pressuring the Bay Point school district to commit to funding for a
crossing guard program for the one junior high and three elementary schools —
all of which are located on busy streets and attended by over 600 children each.
(www.acorn.org)
[2380]
Tenants of the Baybrook Apartments in Baltimore have won major improvements [by]
organizing and direct actions throughout this summer and fall. Residents were
living without heat and facing massive rodent infestation. Maryland ACORN’s
Environmental Justice Program also conducted lead testing in several apartments
and found chipping, flaking and peeling lead-based paint – putting children at
high risk for lead poisoning. ACORN members have utilized a number of strategies
to pressure the landlord to improve conditions at the complex, including forcing
him to comply with environmental regulations to address lead hazards in the
building, taking him to rent court, and direct action. […]
Tenants have won new heating units in all apartments, replacement of all
windows and window frames, and new front doors. (same)
[2381]
Billionaire JimBob Moffett [wanted] a few ‘little ol’ technical approvals’
to build 2,500 of those high-end designer houses and 1,900 upscale apartments
[plus] 3,000,000 feet of office and shopping space […] right up against
Barton Creek, [whose] cold
crystalline waters re-emerge as Barton
Springs, […] the spiritual heart of Austin. […] His lobbyists
reportedly had lined up 4 sure votes on the 7-member council. […] Then the
people took over. Neighborhood and environmental groups began to walk and talk,
[and] non-activists were suddenly, spontaneously on the phones, absolutely
aghast that the nation’s number one polluter was going to be allowed anywhere
near hallowed waters. [At the hearing] 900 people signed in to speak their
3-minute pieces. […] ‘One by one, using logic, research, emotion, humour,
and ridicule, the people of Austin tore the development apart. [They] spoke of
childhood memories, sacred places, departed loved ones. Eloquence was on
parade.’ (Austin Chronicle) […] Finally at 6.a.m, the vote was called. 7 to 0 for Barton
Springs.15
[2382]
In Seattle, in a hard-hit neighborhood that has long been notorious for drug
dealing and street crime, at about 1. a.m. […], Marcus Brown […] heard what
sounded like heavy construction, so he went to the window. There was a group of
a dozen men and women […] wielding blowtorches, bolts, heavy sheet metals, and
tools. […] They moved efficiently and professionally, building a metal
structure on the sidewalk. What quickly emerged was a sturdy but stylishly
modern table. A flower vase was bolted to the top and 4 heavy metal and wood
seats were built around the table and linked to it with heavy chains. One of the
seats was a metal replica of a suitcase, which opened to reveal an electronic
board game and a set of vintage playing cards. The table was built outside a
coffee shop, Café Stellina. […] The people of the neighborhood, who have not
seen
a
lot
of
beauty
or
philanthropy
in
these
rough
city
blocks,
have
been
gathering
around the table at all hours, even when the café is closed — and keeping the
vase filled with flowers […] This is the true spirit of America, the public
spirit that the rest of the world rarely glimpses — and that we’re rarely
shown by our own media and political powers.
The
spirit
we
must
highlight,
tap
into…
and
build
our
democratic
future
on.11
And
that is my final word too.
Notes to Ch. IX
1
Mark C. Miller, in The Bush Dyslexicon
(cited in IX.7), cogently argues that the US public is like a dyslexic who
cannot decode what is blatantly shown in the media by the Bush regime, and
especially its jaw-droppingly incompetent ‘leader’.
2
These were principally contacted via Jensen’s invaluable Censored News (cited in IX.7) at the following
page numbers [2364] 83; [2365] 43f; [2366] 37, 78; [2367] 82; [2368] 243f;
[2369] 84f; [2370] 215, 198; [2371] 195f.
3
Linda T. Kohn, Janet M. Corrigan, and Molla S.
Donaldson (eds.), To Err is Human:
Building a Safer Health System. (Washington, DC: National Academy Press,
2000). And compare Lawrence L. Leape, ‘Institute of Medicine medical error
figures are not exaggerated’, Journal of
the American Medical Association 284/1,
95-97.
4
William C. Deskin and Robert E. Hoye,
‘Another Look At Medical Error’, posted at the website of the American
Medical Association aameda.org/MemberServices/Exec/ Articles/sum02/ Medical%20
ErrorDeskin.pdf.
5
Quoted in John Kelley, ‘Crimes and
silence: The CIA’s criminal acts and the media’s silence’, in Borjesson (ed.) (Note 124 to Ch. VII), p. 311-14.
6
‘Short
for Web log, a blog is a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible
personal journal for an individual; typically updated daily, blogs reflect the
personality of the author’ (Webopedia). The ‘Blogger’ website at www.blogger.com sets them up free.
7
Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Colombia,
Croatia, Cuba, China,
Egypt, Hungary, Israel,
Jamaica, Jordan, Latvia,
Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria,
Philippines, Poland, Portugal,
Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia,
South Africa, Ukraine, Venezuela.
8
Right Livelihood Honour Roll at
www.rightlivelihood.se/recip/van-rensburg.htm.
9
Hightower, Gods
(cited in IX.9), pp. 191f; pp. 245f and 140f.
10
Early Experiences of Two States That Offer Full Public Funding for
Political Candidates (Washington, DC:
General Accounting Office, 1991).
11
Hightower, Thieves
(cited in IX.9), pp. 178f; pp.163ff.
12
Palast, Democracy
(cited in IX.9), pp. 336ff.
13
See David Reynolds, Living Wage Campaigns: An Activist’s Guide to Building the Movement
for Economic Justice, posted at www.laborstudies.wayne.edu/Resources/
Living_Wage_Guide.html.
14
Michael Haddigan, ‘Run right at the bastards’ [quote from Hightower]: Little Rock is progressive New Party’s success story’, Arkansas
Times, 16/06/ 2000.
15
Hightower,
Yellow Stripes (cited in IX.9), pp.
277-80.