Advance true media democracy by creating your own local, noncorporate do-it-yourself newspaper.
Perhaps you’ve noticed from the shrinkage (or total elimination) of your local newspaper that this source of hometown journalism has become monopolized, nationalized and trivialized by conglomerate owners.
How uplifting, then, to see a national consortium of saviors rallying to reestablish a “thriving news media” for our democracy. How? Well, say the saviors, by promoting “brand stability” for potential advertisers. Huh? Who are these “saviors”? Unfortunately, they are predatory media giants such as the USA Today chain and other national news conglomerators and shrivelizers. Hello — they are the cause of the real instability in local news! These powers are using the people’s cry for media decentralization and localization as a ruse to goose up their own ad revenue, allowing them to further monopolize and trivialize print journalism.
But here’s a better idea: Advance true media democracy by creating your own local, noncorporate do-it-yourself newspaper. Ha, scoff the barons of Big Media, that’s impossible! But as an activist friend of mine puts it: “Those who say it can’t be done should not interrupt those who’re doing it.”
Across the country, communities are taking charge. Here in Texas, the Caldwell/Hays Examiner was launched in 2022, with a focus on rural issues up and down the I-35 corridor. In western Iowa, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Art Cullen has cofounded a nonprofit that supports local news efforts through grants. And in Colorado, a group of folks mobilized to buy a local newspaper chain before a hedge fund operation could sweep in and snatch it up.
This is Jim Hightower saying … To learn more about how you can rebuild your local news outlets, visit the Institute for Nonprofit News at inn.org.
Corporate Bosses Are Working-Class Heroes! And Other B.S.
Oh, swell — here it comes again.
It’s the “Great Man” theory of history, trotted out periodically by plutocrats, patricians, royalists and assorted other proponents of an elitist social order. They insist that great progress does not come from political movements, unions and other grassroots forces but from the genius and benevolence of individual, derring-do, capitalist innovators.
In a declaration this month, for example, a group of laissez-fairyland hucksters asserted that it wasn’t labor’s long bloody struggle that advanced worker rights, but industrial America’s generous bosses! These befuddled revisionists of corporate history proclaimed that “unions did not create weekends, the 8-hr work day (or) a ‘living wage.'” No? Who, then? “Henry Ford did (it) in 1926,” they say, adding emphatically that “CAPITALISM & COMPETITION creates higher wages and better working conditions.”
Excuse me, boss, but capitalism constantly tries to destroy any competitive market, and it thrives by holding down wages, repressing worker rights and eliminating jobs.
Forget the right wing’s cartoonish portrayal of Henry the Great as a working-class savior. He was a Nazi-admiring, antisemitic business magnate. Contrary to the revisionists, unions did indeed create their own progress, having fought for wage and hour protections since the 1860s. They rallied popular support with this slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”
This is Jim Hightower saying … And here’s an inconvenient fact that causes the hair of today’s corporate mythmakers to burst into flames: It was not some genius capitalist who first established the eight-hour day as our national standard — it was government! President Ulysses Grant instituted it for all federal workers in 1869 – over half a century before Ford finally trailed behind.
Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading the message of progressive populism all across the American grassroots.
He broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried in more than 150 commercial and public stations and on the web.
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