Source: Lauraflanders.org
The answer to what happened in Washington last Wednesday is what happened in Georgia last Tuesday.
The answer to the yell and the noose of white macho supremacy is the slow, hard labor of making society democratic.
The debate over Amazon dropping Parler and Twitter and Facebook dropping Donald Trump misses the point. Megaphones for snake oil salesmen will exist for as long our media runs off snake oil sales. The answer to the mobster who riles up the lynch mob is media that’s moral, which ours is not. Our media is motivated by money, and money, as we also saw this week, has no morals.
The stock market’s boom has withstood a global pandemic, a worldwide recession, long bread lines, long voting lines, and a deadly display of white supremacy in the nation’s capital. The financial markets rose on all of it.
Which is why a society run for financial gain will never care that much about democracy; because that sort of society doesn’t care — except about profit. It has no morals.
Which takes us back to why we need to study Georgia. Arguably America’s most brutal slave state, enslaved African Americans in plantation Georgia built the modern United States, and much of the entire capitalist world, in the service of money, driven by rape and the whip, herded in coffles, and traded for cash.
The returns from cotton fueled the rest of the economy, the financial markets, and shaped every aspect of American society, our media, and our politics.
Just how did a majority of Georgians come together against that? Poor people mostly, led by African American women and the young — people long policed and written off. Over slow generations, they built a broad enough “we” and an effective bottom up force that formed not just a victorious voting block this year, but a caring community dedicated explicitly to dismantling white supremacy.
How did they do that? That’s what we need to know, and we need media that will tell that story.
Laura Flanders is the host of "RadioNation" heard on Air America Radio and syndicated to non-commercial affiliates nationwide. She is the author most recently, of Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (The Penguin Press, 2007) and also BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso, 2004), an investigation into the women in George W. Bush's Cabinet. Publisher's Weekly called Flanders' New York Times best-seller, "fierce, funny and intelligent."The W Effect: Sexual Politics in the Age of Bush, an essay collection compiled by Flanders, appeared in June, 2004 from the Feminist Press.Before joining Air America when it launched in March 2004, Laura hosted the award-winning " Your Call," Monday-Friday, on public radio, KALW, 91.7 fm in San Francisco.Flanders' TV appearances include "Lou Dobbs Tonight" and "Paula Zahn Now" as well as "The O'Reilly Factor," and "Hannity and Colmes," "Washington Journal," "Donahue," "Good Morning America" and the CBC news discussion program, "CounterSpin."Her writing appears in The Nation, Alternet, Ms. Magazine, and elsewhere and her op-ed pieces have appeared in papers including The San Francisco Chronicle.Flanders was founding director of the Women's Desk at the media watch group, FAIR and for more than ten years she produced and hosted CounterSpin, FAIR's nationally-syndicated radio program. Shie is also the author of Real Majority, Media Minority; the Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting (Common Courage Press, 1997) about which Susan Faludi wrote, "If only there were a hundred of her." Katha Pollitt called it "Funny, angry, factfilled and brilliant."
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