Truthout Statement | The Road Ahead

[WilliamPitt]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110404A.shtml

The Road Ahead
By Marc Ash
t r u t h o u t | Statement

Thursday 04 November 2004

As a non-profit publication, we were not able to endorse a candidate for president. However, had we been able to do so, we would not have endorsed George W. Bush. The divisive and reckless policies that have marked both Mr. Bush's rise to power and his successful bid to hold it are flatly un-American.

As Mr. Bush insists on squandering all of his own personal currency as well as the nation's on the pursuit of quick returns for his investors, it is inevitable that his problems will persist. The occupation of Iraq is a fundamentally flawed undertaking. None of what Mr. Bush claims will be the benefits of this excursion can be realized, because they do not exist. Ergo, a quagmire with longevity.

Four years ago, I started this project working from this chair, in this room, at this desk, on an old Macintosh computer with additional RAM taped to the hood for good luck. Today we have a staff of 15 dedicated Truth-Outers and reach an estimated 5 million visitors per month. Clearly there is an urgent need for journalistic integrity in the United States today, and our supporters are responding.

Our readers have sustained this publication from its inception, and it is to those readers that we re-dedicate our efforts. In the days, weeks, and months ahead we will continue to present concise, decisive analysis of the issues of greatest importance to the community. It is not enough to merely report or "dump data" into the public realm. True journalism requires both integrity and courage. You have to be prepared to call it one way or the other and accept the judgment of your readers as it results. We will continue that tradition.

For those who believe that education holds the key to social progress, this has been a disillusioning week. Nonetheless, the results of yesterday's balloting lead to the unavoidable conclusion that education, or the lack of it, has reached a crisis of life and death proportions in twenty-first century America. We continue with heavy hearts but clear eyes and strong shoulders.

Thank you, one and all,

Marc Ash, Executive Director - t r u t h o u t

[WilliamPitt]

1. .

[Terran]

2. Thank you, and best of luck.

Your insight and passion will be greatly needed.

[mdmc]

3. I'm at a loss of words

I keep thinking "Why not Kucinich?"

[JPJones]

4. Which red states would Kucinich have won? n/t

[candy331]

5. Seems Mr. electable Kerry and his Southern pick couldn't win

any either.

[WilliamPitt]

8. Can you name a single Democratic candidate who could have?

If you say 'Dean' I will laugh in your face. Not because of Dean, but because of your total lack of understanding of the Southern electoral fortress.

[JPJones]

9. Clark n/t

[Gregory Wonderwheel]

13. Exactly, the timidity of silence was deafening.

I felt Kerry was lost the moment he picked Edwards as his running mate.

His only chance was to do something REMARKABLE and UNEXPECTED and (dare I say it?) MORAL. That would have been to pick a woman for the VP or a non-European man like Congressman John Lewis. That is the *demonstration* of real leadership not just lip service. But instead Kerry chose what appeared to be the "safe" strategy of the "tried and true" two-white-men formula. "And away go ideals down the drain."

The Democrats will be a second rate party until a coherent idealism can be articulated to compete with the propaganda articulated by the Republicans. Bush can repeat his slogans over and over again to where it is more effective that people simply understand what he means rather than whether he is saying the truth or not. The lower class working masses who vote appreciate "understanding" what Bush said far more than they were at all concerned with whether what he said was true or not. "Flip-flop" was understandable and repeated enough so that whether it was true are not became irrelevant, it was understood as a charge against character. Kerry's inability to speak in plain colorful language and simple symbols and metaphors of daily life provided the hook for the flip-flop image to stick.

Since I don't think the Democratic party is redeemable from the corporate fascists, I suggest every progressive take their idealism and join the nearest Green Party or create one in your area if it doesn't know exist.

[mdmc]

6. we still lose the election

but we stand for something.

And Nader would have been on our side. :~)

[Sparkly]

7. Education

Just a couple of days ago, Tweety remarked with astonishment that 40% of B* voters think we found WMD in Iraq. "Maybe that could be interpreted to mean that we in the media haven't been doing our job," he said. Duh.

I don't know if it would have mattered or not, considering all the hoopla about "Moral Values" and the need for people to stop other people from doing things that actually have zero effect on them whatsoever. In light of that, who cares about a little war? :crazy:

And please post anything truthout gets ahold of from John Cory. I love his writing and hope to see what he's thinking about this disaster.

[Gregorian]

10. Thank you so much.

Can I say something that has been on my mind? It's just a concept that I feel may have some truth to it. Just my own observation.

I believe that the level of education goes hand in hand with the availability of energy. As we developed the internal combustion engine, we found our lives becoming easier. We also found that we didn't need our neighbors. Suddenly we were independent, as long as we had petroleum. But what I sense is that as our lives got easier, we got lazier. I don't think that throwing money at schools is the total solution to the problem of lack of education. As a lazy society, we have taken the easy way out, in every avenue. I feel that this election is the fruition of a society not only addicted to a petroleum lifestyle, but to one that has taken the easy way out when it comes to learning. Instead of finding out what is happening in the world, this group of people rely on the passive mode. The television. And by doing so, they have subjected themselves to the lowest common denominator of information. What could have been a powerful tool, became an extremely expensive, and profitable device. And the result is a society informed with nothing more than corporate sponsored propaganda. And they just decided that cheap gasoline is more important than dead Iraqi civilians. They just decided that what they had been told, was the truth. That the man in the White House was an honorable man. And the war in Iraq was justified, even though Saddams missiles couldn't fly further than 400 miles, even with nuclear warheads.
I just ran out of time. But that's the basic idea.

[calimary]

11. Thanks for this, Will. Glad you posted it.

Still rawther heavy-hearted tonight. Every bit of salve will help. Lotsa hurt. Lotsa fear.

[Gregory Wonderwheel]

12. It will be an endless cycle until we call it what it is: FASCISM.

The voters will never have a real choice until the corporate dominated government is called what it really is, a two-party dictatorship of corporate fascism.

The Democrats don't offer a real alternative, and until we "progressives" stop pussyfooting around we will be helpless to make any progress toward anything better.

We are in a situation analogous to Germany in 1934-1935 and we don't want to believe what is happening. We are in as much denial now as the Germans were then. No amount of pretending that the system that gave us Kerry isn't the problem will help us.

We are brainwashed into thinking that all fascism must be cut from the same cloth in the pattern of a Mussolini or a Hitler. But that is not true. In this day fascism is branded just like everything else and we are witnessing the American branding of fascism which is a kinder, gentler, brand of fascism that uses the distraction game of a two-party dictatorship to fool the people into thinking that there isn't a "dictator". But our American brand of fascism is just as much a cult of the leader as Germany and Italy were. If you can't see it then look at this election in which "character" of leadership was the primary issue and not the direction the leader was offering. The Democratic Convention was a pandering homage to fascist leadership worship. The Republican Convention was not even disguised fascism.

When the USA was revolting from Great Britain and the King, it took years for enough people to actually come to the realization that there was just no way to "fix" the problem with Parliament and the King wasn't going to come to their rescue, so they had to declare independence from the King even when they didn't really want to. This is what we are doing today in denying the true nature of our government as a fascist controlled pawn of corporate plutocrats who use deception and fear mongering in the most basic and elementary tradition of Hitlerian propaganda to convince Americans in the "heartland" that a vote for Bush is a vote *against* Wall Street in favor of Main Street.

This is fascism and if you don't call it by name then you will never understand it and you will continue to vote for corporate flunkies like Kerry and never see the light of political consciousness.

Venezuela is the shining example of true democracy in our time, and we must see that they were able to get people on the street who never voted before because they were able to offer a real program of reform and democratization that took away the power of the plutocrats.

Look how the Democrats and the Republicans JOINED together to defeat Amendment 36 in Colorado which would have created proportional representation in the distribution of electoral college votes. This was the single most important election reform measure in the last 84 years since women got the vote. Yet what did the Republicans and Democrats do? Instead of welcoming the opportunity to make every state a battleground state, they worked together to defeat this real election reform in order to maintain the two-party dictatorship and to continue to play the red-state-blue-state charade.

Come on and say it with me: T-W-O P-A-R-T-Y D-I-C-T-A-T-O-R-S-H-I-P.

One state, two state,
Red state, blue state.

We are talking Dr. Seuss when we need to be talking modern day abolition against corporate “personhood,” where is today’s John Brown, and the civil war against corporate fascism.

Look at the red states! They are the slave states!
Look at the blue states! They are the free states!

We are still fighting the Civil War as an echo of what the ideal of democracy is really all about. The Democrats have the ideal but let their leaders like Kerry totally bury their idealism in dreams of pragmatic appeal to the phantom "center." That is the same mistake that the accomodationist versions of abolition made in the prelude to the civil war. The Republicans know that they are fighting the civil war all over again in their attempt to repeal every political gain of the 20th Century. They have no interest in "working together" except where it will further their agenda of corporate fascism and turning the clock back to the 19th Century.

The rank and file Democrats are as brainwashed as the rank and file Republicans only in a different way. The rank and file Republicans have their logic totally upside down and believe that lying about going to war is "moral," that intolerance and discrimination against gays is "moral," that believing people deserve their poverty is "moral," that they are the really "humble" and "deserving" and "elect" who will be rewarded in heaven. Folks that is the core of fascism.

But the Democratic rank and file are just as brainwashed because they can't see that their party is controlled by the same corporate fascists who play a shell game with them and won't speak honestly about how they make laws and give the same kind of preferences to corporate lobbyists. A war mongering hypocritical Kerry was sold to the Democrats on the basis of being the "better" candidate with the "better" chance of beating Bush, and all Kerry could do with his campaign was to repeat the slogan "I'll do it better."

Well, any novice in political science should be able to tell you that when the people believe they are at war, they are not going to change "leaders" simply because the new guy repeats over and over "I have a better plan." In a time of fear the people will always stick with the leader they know even if obviously flawed rather then choose an unknown quantity. Kerry's only hope was to attack the foundation of that fear as a lie with every thing he had, but instead he reinforced the fear and merely said "I have a better plan" to deal with the fear. That is fascism too.

The only non-fascist plan is to expose the fear for the phantom limb phenomenon that it is, and to fight the use of propaganda by exposing it for what it is, not by engaging in counter-propaganda and simply trying to have "a better slogan."

[Nordic]

15. Good post. I agree with you

The GOP has become blatantly fascist, and the Democratic party has become nothing but a floor on which to bounce the ball.

I'm done with the Democratic party.

If they can't defeat a war criminal and a corporate gangster like this scumfucker, they can't beat ANYBODY.

ANYBODY.

They can't beat ANYBODY.

So to hell with them.

[Gregory Wonderwheel]

14. Well, Kerry didn't educate did he?

Marc Ash wrote: "For those who believe that education holds the key to social progress, this has been a disillusioning week."

Well, Marc, actually no. I believe that education holds the key and this week confirmed it. Kerry did nothing to educate the voters. He simply repeated with the lamest propaganda technique "I have a better plan." Democrats can't out-sloganeer, out-propagandize, or out-fascist the Republicans who are so well versed in it. It is the lame attempts of Kerry to do so that expose the complete paucity of Kerry as "educator."

For those who really believe that education holds the key to social progress, and don't just give lip service to education and pretend that Kerry made any attempt to educate, this week has been most educational. The fools' parade behind Kerry that pretended he was an educator was what was creating the illusion that this week may have disillusioned you about. That kind of illusion is good to be free of by disillusionment.

[Insider]

16. kick

:kick: