(cc photo: South Bend Voice)
It’s long been clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic climate disruption on a scale that threatens human civilization, we need to leave vast amounts of fossil fuels in the ground. Environmental writer Bill McKibben pointed out the math in a crucial 2012 article for Rolling Stone: To avoid disaster, 80 percent of the carbon already discovered by private and state-owned energy companies has to be left alone—to be treated as useless rock, not precious resources.
The problem is, the energy companies are some of the richest, most powerful entities on Earth. Corporations are designed to act like organisms with a single goal, maximizing profits. And the fossil fuel industry’s future profits—roughly 80 percent of them—depend on extracting that carbon and burning it, climate and civilization be damned. They have been using and will continue to use their vast influence to thwart any effort to avert that disaster.
Does humanity have the collective power to tell the current owners of carbon deposits that they no longer own them—that they don’t have the right to take them out of the ground and sell them as fuel? That’s the $640 trillion question. Doing so is essential to our future as a species—but a massive transfer of wealth of that kind isn’t like a revolution, it is a revolution, and a revolution on a scale history hasn’t seen before.
(cc photo: Michael Fleshman)
But climate isn’t the only crisis that requires a revolution. Healthcare provided by for-profit corporations inevitably tends towards more than we can afford to pay, as the demand for life-or-death products is infinite. Solving the problem of paying for medical care means telling medical corporations that they can no longer expect the hyper-profits that their market value is based on expecting.
And it’s increasingly evident that an entire sector of the healthcare industry—the purveyors of for-profit health insurance—needs to be eliminated in order to bring health costs under control. The insurance industry, though, has a special power in our economy: As its business model involves taking money from people and investing it, virtually every corporation on the stock exchange counts insurance companies among its owners. So taking on the insurance business, which is necessary to make healthcare affordable, means taking on all business. In other words, it means a revolution.
(cc photo: Jonathan McIntosh)
This conflict between the needs of the majority and the interests of the few runs throughout our economy. On a local level, many cities have serious shortages of housing that people can afford to live in, not because it costs so much to build and maintain housing, but because the real estate market sets prices that assume that landlords will maximize profits—and maximizing profits from a fixed supply of land leaves many tenants on the street. If cities want ordinary people to be able to afford to live in them, they will need to lower the value of their real estate—which would be a revolutionary reversal of priorities for most local governments.
These gaps between the status quo and our survival are why we need a new media system. Corporate media are really designed around preserving the status quo—unsurprisingly, because they are owned by the class of people who benefit from things staying the same. And they’re funded, through advertising, by the same corporations who are profiting from the disastrous course we’re on—with energy, healthcare and real estate among the most prominent industry sponsors. You will not learn from corporate media how much danger their advertisers are putting us in, or what we can do to stop them.
Revolutions need organizing, and organizing needs information. We need a revolution, and the place to begin is with the media.
Knowledge is power, and ignorance the currency with which it is purchased by the powerful
………..and then with cooperation of a complicit media who depend on the powerful to maintain power and a preferred ignorance of citizens.
Always important reporting from FAIR. I have a problem with the word system. I can see it applying to say the systematic rape of the Earth and its inhabitants by the Pentagon. But for something that is desirable no. Nietzsche wrote that a “will to a system is a lack of integrity.” Any other word in my estimation is better when talking about the need for a new way to deliver the mass media: model, paradigm, get out the thesaurus.
I’ve been reading FAIR long enough that I have abandoned any hope that we will get what we need from the mainstream media, for much the same reason that Jim outlined in this post. FAIR does good work, but it is time to stop framing that work as an effort to precipitate a new and improved MSM. It ain’t gonna happen. The MSM exists to serve the powerful. It will not stop doing that.
FAIR needs to start reviewing smaller media operations that don’t serve power and simultanously point out their superior qualities, help correct their much less egregious faults and help increase their readership or number of listeners/viewers.
It is getting to the point that if FAIR doesn’t do something of the sort then supporting FAIR will be of no value.
Failure to provide decent housing for everybody is a human wrong.
I’ve been building a database of nonprofit media, because getting the profit motive out of the news/information space is a necessary (not sufficient) place to start. You can find it here:
https://bit.ly/npo-media
All the ones that I’ve given positive reviews to are also in this Twitter list, for easy following:
https://twitter.com/xirzon/lists/quality-non-profit-media
The nonprofit media space is heavily dominated by wealthy philanthropies. That’s not inherently bad, but it creates a pretty heavy bias towards conventional wisdom, and some of the key figures in nonprofit media are hired straight from for-profit newsrooms, transporting ethics & practices. That said, even some nonprofit newsrooms started in this fashion have increasingly managed to get a broad base of support, ProPublica being a good example.
Reading this & want to help with the process of building this database? Ping me at eloquence AT gmail DOT com.
If a person looks at American history, it seems like all wars were lies with made up events ( Remember the Maine,: or real events but covered up as to the real attackers( see Bush/ Cheney./ Rumfilled people. I really have to read a lot of small presses to try to figure out, if i can figure out what really happened. I guess that the trouble with America’s democracy, is that we’ve never had a democracy yet.The NY Times, Amazon-.Washongton post and ABC, CBS, NBC, and too much big money in very small secret places makes it hard to know what is up. Maybe we will become separate nation states, because the whole is a big hole that is not working. Langston Hughes once wrote that someday America WILL be….. and I think he meant that for all people…… but we seem to be heading toward a dying planet very quickly————maybe Ray bradbury was right, the homo sapiens were really from Mars and after ruining that planet they came to Earth and got it wrong again. Those corporate people don;t need air water or food, it seems. Wondering, wondering, I am wondering what will become of us…..it is hard to be optimistic when all I cn see is swirling miasma. : (
FAIR should take up the issue of Google suppressing revolutionary (and other) search results.
See these articles and comments thereon:
Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms
By Andre Damon, 4 August 2017
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/04/goog-a04.html
Google’s new search protocol is restricting access to 13 leading socialist, progressive and anti-war web sites
RT interviews Andre Damon: Google becoming “censorship engine”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/02/pers-a02.html
RT interviews Andre Damon: Google becoming “censorship engine”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/01/inte-a01.html
I’ve been boycotting Google for years; ever since they started controlling search results. Now, their censorship and policing of “fake news” just reaffirms I made the right choice.
They think they’re so powerful. But as long as there are other search engines, email providers, mapping services, smartphone apps, etc, they can still be taken down… which is what needs to happen.