Picture Credit: Indypendent Magazine - AOC as FDR
Are we, the people, serious about power?
With every passing day, our situation, in America, seems to get worse; we are approaching a peak of our national coronavirus crisis. Medical workers on the front lines still do not have enough personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks and faceguards and are resorting to using bandanas and even their children’s plastic page sleeves to try and protect themselves while they are battling this virus on the frontlines. At this point, they are begging us all to stay home and to donate any PPE that we have to spare. I have to pile on the thanks for all of these actual superheroes who are risking their lives and health and that of their families. It’s also important to acknowledge those other essential workers who are running our public infrastructure, making our deliveries, and stocking our pharmacies and grocery stores; thank you.
As was expected, the economic metrics continue to defy our imagination. An additional 6.6 million people have filed for unemployment in the last week, bringing the already historic number up to 10 million people; on the graph with historical data, it is literally a continuously growing, towering vertical line. It seems we are headed to hit unemployment rates that will likely surpass the 10% peak of 2008 and might approach the numbers of the great depression in just a matter of weeks. We have never seen anything like this before. Even during the Spanish Flu, the world wasn’t as interconnected, and there was no global neo-liberal consensus that designed our supply chains and economies for perceived efficiency and cheap labor in different countries.
Our death toll is rising and we are starting to hear horrifying stories of overrun hospitals and households that are falling apart because of the economic shutdown. Certain areas of the country, particularly in the South, are learning the cost of responding late to a pandemic. The New York Times compiled data about travel patterns and social distancing in the midst of the pandemic, and many southern states were among the last to reduce their travel and implement restrictions on large gatherings and it seems as if that region could be on its way to a horrifying outcome, particularly given the disproportional poverty, incarceration, and inadequate healthcare in rural areas. It even looks like New Orleans could become a new global epicenter of the pandemic in no small part due to the Marti Gras festivities that went forward despite the growing threat of the virus; the city, state, and region that was most affected by Hurricane Katrina will now have to suffer through another crisis.
It can be discouraging and demoralizing to stay up to date with these metrics and stories from the front lines, but it is important to watch this unfold and keep our eyes wide open. When I am faced with this kind of bleak situation, I do my best to look for solutions. Last week, I talked a bit about Medicare for All and the Green New Deal through the lens of the transformative leadership of FDR. But that vision is really only a dream now given our corporatist representatives in government and the imbalance of power that currently exists.
In last weeks episode, I played a clip where Matt Stoller explained that it seems we populists don’t have the same intent to govern that Wall St does, and that we are stuck in our independent media. Those populist and populist-leaning representatives in congress (they are few and far between) still have not grown the courage to substantively oppose the powerful interests in this country.
The clearest example can be seen just a week ago with the stimulus bill. Ultimately, the question Matt, Krystal, and Saager were bringing to light is: why have these populists politicians, on the right and left, not come together and stand against the corporate bailouts?
In this case, Matt says, based on information from the insiders he was able to speak to, that this vote in the Senate came down to fear. McConnell and Schumer were able to control the organizing and negotiation, as well as the messaging. As I mentioned last week, even those who didn’t like the bill were cornered into voting for this stimulus package which brought the totals of monetary support to $4.5 trillion for big business, and just shy of $2 trillion for workers; this one metric says a lot about where our government’s priorities lie. Also remember, the House didn’t really even get to go on record to vote for or against this bill, as Nancy Pelosi instituted a ‘voice vote’ for the house after the bill passed the senate; so we have no way of holding anybody accountable even if we wanted to.
So it’s clear that in halls of Congress we’re not going to get much progress if we rely on the representatives that are currently there. Even AOC, who really is the only congressperson we have pushing for a vision closest to the one presented by FDR, was really only able to offer an impassioned speech on the floor of the house, and some messages on social media that were admittedly very fervent in demanding healthcare reform and particularly an immediate transition to Medicare for All. Substantively that didn’t really do much; it definitely provides a stark contrast to party leaders who already are scrambling to draft “phase 4” of the coronavirus response as they undoubtedly know what they passed was abysmal in the face of what could be one of the most damaging eras in American history.
So if we want something different, we’re going to need power. But where does the power truly lie today and who has it? What are they doing with that power? How do we, as citizens, approach obtaining it? And how will we use it to implement our agenda and bring sustainable programs to fruition?
There are a few key ways power manifests itself in our modern world; political power; control of technological infrastructure, information and media; and the bedrock of it all, financial consolidation and monetary wealth.
We know today that multinational corporations and financial institutions dictate most of our policy. Income inequality has hit historic heights as the world's 26 richest people own as much wealth as the poorest 50% and in America today "the top 1 percent of households own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.” The oligarchs who are hoarding that wealth, like Jeff Bezos, offer drops in the bucket like his recent $100 million donation to food banks (less than .1% of his current net worth) while his company not only continues to not pay taxes, but asks workers to donate their sick days to each other, and fires those laborers who object to the unsafe working conditions. And Elon Musk, who in March was still publicly underplaying the severity of the coming crisis saying in one tweet “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” has donated ventilators that we can’t even use on Covid-19 patients. Clearly we cannot trust benevolent philanthropists as their action and inaction have undermined our public infrastructure, and now that crisis hits, they can give us crumbs and stay safe in their ma g them instead of celebrating their philanthropy theatre.
Corporations also own most of our mainstream media a result of legislation like the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and their continuing and consistent drive for media mergers, and they own the vast majority of our politicians as Buckley vs Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010) opened the flood gates for the corporate influence of politicians by essentially granting them free speech rights equal to us individual citizens, in the form of unbounded campaign contributions, aka bribes.
Despite this power imbalance, average people have found ways to breakthrough in the last 5 years, namely by publishing our own independent media online to bypass the mainstream media that is rarely friendly to messages and ideas that affect their advertisers’ profits and using that media to help elect populist and progressive primary challengers like AOC, who are funded by the people and not corporate interests. Slowly this pattern will have to repeat and we will have to change the face of our congress to undo a lot of the damage done to our systems by corporate lobbyists over the last four decades and we will have to continue to build out our media infrastructure and learn how to force our way into the mainstream narrative.
AOC is a perfect symbol of the dilemma that we who want transformational structural change, are in. What we have learned from these last few election cycles is that real societal change is a consequence of the dance between insiders and outsiders. Those like AOC who make it into congress, inevitably become insiders, but history has made it clear that changing corrupt systems from the inside is difficult and in this case, I will argue, nearly impossible. Alexandria herself has evolved from the rabble-rouser revolutionary incumbent challenger from the outside to an insider with some influence; her tenure in congress by joining a Sunrise Movement protest in Nancy Pelosi’s office, and now seems to be shifting her strategy by opting to shy away from backing some of the Justice Democrat candidates in this cycle who are attempting to follow in her footsteps and even calling Nancy Pelosi the “mama bear” of the Democratic party.
Personally, I don’t necessarily agree with that shift in strategy as I think we need more and more incumbents to fall, like Joe Crowley fell to her, sooner rather than later. I also believe she should be opposing Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s way of running the party and insistence on offering corporate-centered solutions with the same vitriol we saw in that protest in her first year in Congress. I have yet to hear her public objections to mama bear’s brilliant next idea of reducing the cap on SALT deductions which would disproportionately help the wealthiest income earners. Those who hold the political power today are simply not helping working people, and calls for unity with them in this time of crisis I can understand because we all need to fight this pandemic together, but that civility and unity can be used to undermine our positions which party leaders and their allies in the media actively reject.
She came out and responded to the backlash on social media that she received from some in the progressive movement for seemingly complying with party leadership and remained confident in her positions. She definitely is an insider now and perhaps she does have a case to make internally to the party leadership that her massive following and base of young voters will be ready to come out against them if they don’t make concessions toward the progressive wing of the party. But she hasn’t really tried to mobilize that base since that first protest, and I’m skeptical that a case like that will do anything to convince these archaic leaders.
In the case of this corporate bailout, I think her statements have definitely been the boldest of anyone in congress, so I have to give her credit where it’s due; however, we knew this legislation was very likely to pass anyway, so why not be more aggressive and start to organize the populist representatives on the left and right to make demands and challenge McConnell, Schumer and Pelosi’s tactics in the public eye. She also could have actually called for us to mobilize against the bill (though the pandemic makes it impossible to physically protest), and generally, I think she needs to learn the same lessons Bernie needed to learn about using the media to influence the narrative consistently. There is pretty much nothing to admire about Trump, but we do need to be honest and recognize his uncanny ability to get earned media by creating a story the mainstream outlets can’t help but cover. AOC has an opportunity to use her stature to do the same and, in my opinion, she could whip up more support and political capital if she dared to continually and publicly call out congressional leaders and used our support to work from the outside.
All this being said, AOC is in a tough position. She is only one representative even though she has a lot of influence among young voters. It is a lot to ask of one person, especially one who is so young, to carry an entire movement on her shoulders. In our quest to reconnect with our New Deal roots she really is the figurehead, with due respect to Bernie, he’s 78 years old and the baton will have to be passed. She has helped push the movement forward and I’m proud to have her as a leader in congress representing a modern version of FDR’s legacy. I cannot imagine the weight of all of the activists, aspiring politicians, and young people she has taken on her shoulders in the last few years, but I will never hesitate to remind her that we are here for her, too.
So for those of us outsiders who haven’t made it to congress, what are we supposed to do? A number of working-class people have begun to run for office around the country, so that is a good start; bottom line is, we need more everyday working people in congress. Otherwise, all we really have is our time and voices, and maybe some money that can easily be dwarfed by the elites that already bought off our politicians.
I think we need to focus our efforts on the media and our civic habits to figure out how we can start to dictate the terms of the national debate. These new candidates need a fair media apparatus and the question that has come up in our independent media circles is: how do we go from responding to the narrative to setting the narrative?
Setting the Narrative
First and foremost it is important to acknowledge the state of the mainstream media today because they really are the ones dictating the narrative in America. Because of the telecommunications legislation, I mentioned earlier (thank you Bill Clinton), we have about 5 companies controlling most of our traditional media, Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Comcast and Viacom. These companies are all worth billions of dollars and they spend millions on lobbying to keep their media monopolies and allow further mergers. Effectively, we have allowed a handful of rich oligarchs to determine most of what goes on TV, and consequently, our news media has stopped scrutinizing the truly corrupt corporate sources of power and has simply joined them.
In the past, we have been able to see the influence of the military-industrial complex on our journalism as these organizations back in the early 2000s effectively silenced anti-war voices like Phil Donahue and Peter Arnett who were let go from MSNBC and CNN respectively because of their critical coverage of Bush’s war policy. We have also seen how pharmaceutical advertisements have gotten mainstream media pundits to continually question and malign public health solutions like Medicare for All; anytime it is covered or brought up in a debate it is approached with disingenuous right-wing framing. And generally, candidates pushing a socially-centered agenda, like Bernie Sanders, are ignored until they can’t be ignored anymore and when they are forced to cover them they are covered negatively. MSNBC even got rid of Ed Schultz allegedly because of his support for Bernie and his insistence on covering him in the 2016 primary. In a 2018 interview, Schultz recalled and recounted his time at MSNBC and the constraints that were put on him, as well as his opinion about the political bias of the network.
"There was more oversight and more direction given to me on content at MSNBC than there ever has been here at RT and I think that it's very sad that story is not getting out.”
“Many times I was told what to lead with on MSNBC, many times I was told what I was not going to do and I’ve got a story, that had I not been involved in it, I would’ve never believed it. And Phil Griffin [president of MSNBC], who I consider a friend until this day, was a watchdog.”
When asked if Griffin ever told him what to say or gave him an angle to take, Schultz answered without hesitation: “often.” This is truly a harrowing look into what Noam Chomsky famously referred to as “manufacturing consent” or the process by which traditional media has, for decades, meticulously controlled the messages coming out of their networks due to the “five filters of editorial bias.”
Size, ownership and profit orientation
The “advertising license to do business”
Sourcing mass media news
Flak (or negative responses to media statements) and enforcers
‘Anti-communism’ which today we can see as ‘anti-socialism.’
Media conglomerates are larger than ever, most media owned by large corporations and they chose to cover news like reality TV to keep ratings and profits up. Advertising continues to drive revenues for the largest networks and often indirectly influence coverage. Today mainstream news outlets are known for practicing ‘access journalism’ making sure they stay in good favor with high profile sources, instead of actually aggressively investigating them and holding them to account. Powerful interest groups today absolutely are able to deter reporting of specific facts knowing they can hurt networks with flak, their reputations with elites or revenues. And finally, if it wasn’t clear enough from Chris Matthew’s deranged rants about how he might be dragged into central park and murdered if Bernie and his socialist revolution won, our modern media wants nothing to do with socialism and public solutions. It’s all out here in the open on full display.
Because of this tight-knit control over the mainstream news, what the public is left with is not journalism, but talking heads who tow the line of whoever it is they want access to at the moment. Jon Stewart famously told Chris Wallace, almost a decade ago now, that his show existed and had credibility because of the disappointment the public had with the established news media. The analysis and coverage provided to us by the Rachel Maddows, Anderson Coopers, and Tucker Carlsons of the world is so empty and devoid of any integrity, that we often resort to finding our news from comedians like Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, or Jimmy Dore.
As a citizenry, one of the most effective tools that we traditionally have in our arsenal is the free press. The concept of a free press is inherently designed to provide us, the public, the service of holding power to account. Journalists and news commentators are tasked with filtering through information and looking for the truth. Now more than ever, that job is becoming more difficult given the inundation of information we now have access to in the palm of our hands. But clearly our corporatized media has done nothing short of an abysmal job in this regard for decades.
Luckily, the internet has matured to a point where independent media creators can now sustain themselves without massive monied interests dictating what they can and cannot say. New journalists and commentators have been able to launch YouTube channels, podcasts, and even full publications and get their own online subscribers. Journalists can now break stories and reveal truth and information to us directly on social media; a good example is a document from 2017 that Ken Klippenstein recently released of a military plan to deal with a coming threat they describe as a “novel respiratory disease” and they predicted “there will be a scarcity of … vaccines, antimicrobials … [and] ventilators and personal protective equipment such as face masks and gloves.” In short, they knew something like this was coming, but the administration still went ahead cut funding for pandemic fighting teams.
Some of my favorite independent shows that I referenced in the intro to the first episode of this podcast, like TYT, Secular Talk, Rising, TMBS, Intercepted etc, and publications like Current Affairs, The Intercept, Jacobin et, have seen steady growth in the last few years and have truly developed engaged audiences that do have a hunger for a new kind of conversation. This podcast is my attempt to enter that dialogue and produce more media in what I call, the ideological desert, that this hollow press has left for us. So we are taking decent strides by using the internet to spread our message which otherwise would not have spread, but still, most of our content is responding to the narrative being set by corporate media. We comment on their abysmal coverage, and we have to settle for their panels and their debate moderators, and we still do not have the attention of a lot of the people who are engaged in elections that are consequential to achieving the vision we’re all trying to offer. We are definitely still outsiders, and probably always should be.
We need to start to coordinate together in order to start setting our own narrative and develop strategies to work together to collectively grow the audience of independent media and elevate our ideas and candidates to create mainstream headlines. TYT has grown large enough that Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola have made it on to Chris Cuomo’s show on a few occasions. Krystal Ball and Saager Enjetti with their ties to traditional media and their polished and palatable show have been able to make more appearances on Fox, CNN, and even BBC, forcing their new media voices into the mainstream. This is all a great start to at least bring some balance to these panels if only for a few minutes.
Getting to a point where we set the narrative will take time and will be difficult to achieve, but if there has ever been a moment for us to seize the opportunity, it is now. The social programs that have been repeatedly undermined and torn away by the conservative elites are now being considered seriously because of how embarrassing our society’s response has been to this pandemic. We already saw direct cash payments proposed by republicans, Medicare for All approval has surged to a 9 month high, and even the Financial Times editorial board has begun to say that “policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.”
These are the moments where we have to challenge the credibility of the mainstream outlets who have been disingenuous about solutions to serious problems impacting average Americans. We have to expose the bias created by their financial interests and convince viewers to come to us for a dialogue that is honest and substantive. Getting access to corporate politicians will still be difficult, but we can provide an outlet for new candidates and encourage them to continue to make appearances without fear of creating headlines that snowball out of control, it’s okay if they snowball! We need more attention and we have the truth and reality on our side. Professor Harvey Kaye summarized this opportunity to build out labor-friendly independent media best on Rising about a week ago:
We’ve been developing an alternative media for a populist, progressive kind of action. We’ve got you guys [Rising on HillTV] in the morning, we’ve got folks like the Majority Report during the day, we’ve got the Young Turks at night, so we have the basis for, if you like, mobilizing.
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During the lead up to the war [WWII] there were efforts to mobilize people with shows. So why don’t progressive entertainers and others think about online YouTube shows with a progressive bend and are at the same time entertaining. I mean, this is the moment, this is the moment for action.
One place we could start is just bringing those creators together to discuss different ways we can coordinate to produce collective campaigns to mobilize our already tuned-in base, and target viewers of the mainstream media. We should coordinate with populist politicians and movements to amplify their message and mobilize workers and we can create ‘ads’ exposing the ridiculousness of mainstream coverage and directly push viewers to independent content. We can talk about how to leverage our networks in traditional media to get more independent voices that are critical of power into organizations that already have the reputations and perceived credibility; I’m sure all of those companies would love for the successful commentators to bring their audiences to their networks and papers.
We all also need to make civic engagement a more regular part of our lives. This is the moment to bring along friends and family who normally don’t pay attention to politics and public policy and encourage them to start to engage and become informed citizens and voters. We also need to continue to demonstrate, protest, petition and use social media to proliferate our message and create the digital paper trail of outrage. A major issue we have is that our culture has undermined civic life and public institutions for so long, that many people won’t vote and won’t engage in these topics and conversations, which made an unhealthy democracy and ushered in a plutocracy. We have to get people to see the value of having a good ‘media diet’ and thinking critically for themselves about the stories they read and the reports they see.
This is certainly no easy task as American corporate hegemony is deeply entrenched in our politics, culture, and mainstream media. In many ways, we live in a world where the Orwellian diad of citizen and TV screen with instructions is already here (in fact, it’s even worse, because the TV is in our pockets and can listen to everything we say, but I digress). The plutocrats have effectively suppressed 1/3 of the population so much that they don’t care, and got the other 2/3s of people focused on the spectator sport between the red team and blue team. To quote the brilliant Jon Stewart again “the bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict, and laziness.” I would prefer that our national narrative is set by a media based on integrity, truth, and accountability, and I think we can do it.
It’s time for our voices to be heard.