If information is power, then the average citizen is indeed powerless. We are spoon fed by the corporate media some version of the news giving it the slant the power elite desires for us. We are served a limited kind of reality rolled in lies and deep fried in innuendo.
Even those labeled progressive who profess to want change seem to be only capable of speaking in sound bites and catchy slogans. There is no depth, no real understanding of the issues offered for public consumption.
For example, the version of the SOPA controversy we are offered is that the bill is meant to address internet piracy but simply goes too far and may restrict the free flow of information on the web. That it borders on censorship. And while this is true, it is by no stretch of the imagination the full story. The amount of money claimed to be lost because of internet piracy is considered to be greatly exaggerated. The numbers at best are based on faulty logic and at worst are a purposeful attempt to deceive the public in an effort to convince everyone that these restrictive types of legislation are necessary. In reality the anti-piracy campaign is to a great extent about stunting the growth of legitimate online distribution because smaller companies are coming up with new and cheaper streaming alternatives. We are told the bill has been tabled and for now the internet is currently safe from this threat of censorship. But I know this is not true simply because sites I use, such as Mega Video (Megaupload) were shut down yesterday. No one talks about the bullying being done by international corporations to coerce countries around the world to adopt these so called security measures in order to censor the web globally as well as end the opportunity for cheaper but legitimate streaming alternatives.
Another example is the housing crisis. It doesn’t matter how illogical it is to believe that people who accepted mortgages over their budgets are the cause of a global economic crisis. The reality is that people do believe it. Apparently, if you have control of the media and get it to repeat something often enough no matter how ludicrous, it will become truth. The truth of what happened and continues to happen is available but the information is not easily understood so it is power we aren’t able to harness. Hedge funds, derivatives, especially credit derivatives and a particularly toxic one called credit default swaps are the means to financial armageddon. Yet the how and why of this, this extremely powerful yet available information, still eludes most of us. And without it we are powerless to ask the right questions and to make the right demands. The information and understanding that would allow us to stop this economic destruction and financial terrorism remains just out of reach. We continue to blame people for buying houses they couldn’t afford and countries like Greece for living beyond their means. And the masters of the financial universe twirl their handlebar moustaches and cackle wildly at our stupidity.
My final example of misunderstanding an issue because of a lack of enough information will lead to the reason for this post (yes, there actually is a reason.) ‘Corporations are not people' and ‘money is not speech’ sounds good and fits nicely on cardboard signs but are much too simplistic and as slogans make an issue of infinite depth seem easy to comprehend. We need to understand this issue much better than we do before we can come up with a plan to fix it that will actually do what we need it to do. Here is a rather long but in informative and marginally in depth article about what we need to understand to fix corporate control of our elections and our country.
http://www.alternet.org/news/153814/...s/?page=entire