Journalists such as former New York Times reporter-turned-independent Chris Hedges helped drive home the broad message of the recent Independent National Convention (INC) in Austin, Texas.
That message being that the Democrat-Republican duopoly keeps society feuding, which does little to diffuse the warfare state or make other changes on broad issues over which large cross sections of Americans—who usually are at odds with one another rather than uniting to take on the apolitical plutocracy—can often agree.
The 2023 INC event that I was able to attend carried the seemingly incongruent official theme: “Our independence is what unites us.” Many there agreed that re-building the world under such a concept necessarily includes constructing an effective independent media that sidesteps and eventually surpasses the mainstream “legacy” media. The new media, for example, could help neutralize duopoly-born ballot-access laws that stifle alternative-party and non-party candidates.
According to former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, during her April 4 INC keynote address, the words “We, the people” are supposed to be indicative of self-governance “but that only works when we lift our voices,” something that’s blocked by the media cartel. She also criticized the big media for “selling the pro-war narrative, whatever that may be on any given day.” Gabbard, who has served in the military and takes a keen interest in foreign policy, added of the media: “They’re well in bed with the think tanks and the defense industry.”
She added:
“We have politicians [including President Biden and many from both parties] who sell these wars in a few different ways—under the guise of humanitarianism—we have to go bomb [so and so] country in order to help the people in that country. Or, we have to topple this dictator but we have to … destroy the country in the process. … Biden’s entire foreign policy is centered on this division in the world of democracies and autocracies, and he’s going to convene the democracies to defeat the autocracies [e.g., helping Ukraine take on Russia]. Yet never once being honest or transparent … about how these very policies are undermining our own democracy …”
Chris Hedges, during his INC keynote, proposed that the “one weapon” that the working class/middle class possesses—the strike—be wielded against the “economic and political power of the mega-rich oligarchs” who run the government and society—although Hedges added: “Only 10.1% of the workforce is unionized as of Jan. 2022 … yet 71% of U.S. workers say they would like to belong to a union, the highest in nearly six decades, and up from 48% in 2009, according to a Gallup poll.”
“If we are to wrest our power back from corporations and the billionaire class, who’ve carried out this corporate coup de ‘etat in slow motion, as well as prevent the rise of neo-fascism, we must raise a left-right coalition, free of the moral absolutism of woke zealots,” Hedges said.
“When the Taft-Hartley Act was passed”—one of several anti-union measures that Hedges scoured—“about a third of the workforce was unionized, peaking in 1954 at 34.8%; the act is a frontal-assault on unions, “ he said, saying that it prohibits not only all types of effective strikes but also requires that employees of companies attend anti-union training sessions “as Amazon does with its workers.” He concluded, however: “The right to strike in the U.S. barely exists.”
Former Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, also speaking on the INC main stage, made several calls for much greater transparency in government, while stressing, in this 60th year since the JFK shooting in Dallas, the need to finally release all of the remaining JFK documentation.
“There’s things behind the scenes we don’t know about, and we have the sense that we’re being fed a party line,” Kucinich elaborated. Kucinich also recalled that in 2011 he introduced H.R. 2990, that would place the private Federal Reserve under Treasury, end the Fed’s interest-bearing debt notes and re-introduce debt-free official United States currency, amid job-creating, debt-eliminating measures that could foundationally cure the country of many of its ills.
Mark Anderson is a journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2023
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