I am very concerned that many of my friends and people in my circle of influence don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation that we are facing in the nation.
I started to talk about white supremacy and unbridled greed right after the 2000 election fiasco (in reality that was a soft right-wing coup), but that fiasco helped shape our future. Stealing elections have consequences and they are done for a purpose. We saw the culmination of that purpose in the “ Great Recession .” And the recovery from that economic disaster started on the wrong foot bailing out banks and other financial institutions but leaving many regular common folks to sink or swim. Many sunk.
Today, 14 years later the economy is supposedly doing good. I say “ supposedly ” because many Americans will not agree with that perception. Look around you and notice the number of sons and daughters that are coming back to live with their parents because they can’t afford to live independently in a “ safe ” neighborhood.
What’s happening right now in my household? Today 10/26/2022 a 13-year-old classmate of my granddaughter is being looked for by the police because she is a suspect in selling weed. Knowing the economic difficulties that many families are going through, no wonder we have so many people dying from drug overdoses. We live in a system that ceased to aspire to be fair and goes contrary to the values that many were raised with.
We are living in an explosive situation. A powder keg. For many years I have also been saying that we have never concluded the Civil War. Well, we might be about to see the conclusion. Stephen Berry , the Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia, in a magnificent article “ Confederates Take the Capitol ” published in the October 3-10/22 edition of the Nation magazine mentions that today 66 percent of Southern Republicans support seceding from the Union. In his article Berry also mentions that the Civil War was initiated when one side refused to recognize the legitimacy of an election , the one of Abraham Lincoln . History repeats itself.
The Washington Post in its 10/6/22 edition mentions that of the 419 Republican nominees for the U.S. House, 230 or 55 percent, are election deniers. Stephen Harper , a Law Professor at Northwestern University, in a 10/24 article in the digital magazine Common Dreams titled “ Don’t call them Election Deniers. Call them Election Liars. ” says:
“Thomas Jefferson warned that an informed citizenry would be crucial to the survival of democracy. In pursuit of that mission today, words matter, and the media bear a special responsibility to get them right. When they don’t, democracy itself can become the ultimate victim. That’s happening now.”
I subscribe to this idea. And I also believe that we are in worst shape than in the FDR years and that’s because in those years there was an organized left that communicated daily with the working-class interpreting issues from a working-class perspective. Our mainstream press is corporate-controlled, and it reflects what corporate leaders want our minds to digest. The Fetterman-Oz debate in Pennsylvania is a case in point. If you have a middle/working class perspective Fetterman won the debate. If you have a perspective favoring the 1% of course Oz won the debate.
Harper says about our corporate press “ Election “denier ” is tailor-made for today’s “ bothsidesism ” press. It implies the existence of two defensible but competing positions on President Joseph Biden’s unambiguous victory. It allows the media to straddle both sides of a polarized electorate without the risk of alienating those offended by the plain truth . Clarity yields to the chase for subscribers, viewers, and online clicks. This approach neuters people. It makes them unable to feel the sanitizing rage that is needed to defend a position with conviction. People become defenseless to slick interpretations of reality.
Those Republican candidates that are actually “ denying ” the results of the 2020 presidential election are doing it without any trace of evidence. There have been many Republican accusations but not a single proof. After a costly and time-consuming investigation in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the result was that Biden was shortchanged in his victory there. The whole nation is aware of Trump’s attempt to subvert the election in Georgia. A blatant attempt of lying with the purpose of stealing the election. You hear Democrats and truth-respecting independents say this, but we don’t hear many statements like this in the mainstream press, their statements are sprinkled with “ bothsidesism ”.
Take the issue of crime. The mainstream press “ unknowingly ” assists the right-wing rhetoric that crime is mainly a blue-state occurrence when the facts say the opposite. Take, for example, Oklahoma’s murder rate was 50 percent higher than California’s and almost double than New York’s in 2020 but still subconsciously most Americans think that the Red States are the champions of Law and Order. Our mainstream press’s main responsibility is to drive through the viewpoint of their corporate owners . Our Fifth Estate is like the other four controlled or heavily influenced by corporate donors.
The vision of our society is shaped by what the mainstream press instills in us. For example, in a recent AP-NORC poll voters expressed they trust Republicans to do a better job handling the economy by 39 percent to 29 percent. Can you believe that voters will be trusting the Party that their policies led us to the Great Depression, the Great Recession and the highest income inequality in the history of our nation is the best for economic policies?
A Party that wants to keep compounding its mistakes by clamoring for even more tax cuts for the uber-wealthy. It’s amazing how our mainstream press has failed to connect the dots between Republican economic policies with the proposed policies of Liz Truss in the UK that led to the revolt to depose her thanks to the UK Parliamentarian system.
The combination of white supremacy and unbridled greed has Fascism knocking at our door. The Nazis had an easy ride taking people to the incinerators , I promise it won’t be so easy here.
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Lorenzo Canizares is the Labor-Community Alliance of South Florida Co-Coordinator
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