Chris Hedges fantastic article on propaganda, journalism and the collapse of the free market economy, "The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free", was highlighted by bobswern yesterday. The article is damn good, and deserves another look.
The battle ahead will be fought outside the journalistic mainstream, he said. The old forms of journalism are dying or have sold their soul to corporate manipulation and celebrity culture. We must now wed fact to rhetoric. We must appeal to reason and emotion. We must not be afraid to openly take sides, to speak, photograph or write on behalf of the disempowered. And, Ewen believes, we have a chance in the coming crisis to succeed.
"Pessimism is never useful," he said. "Realism is useful, understanding the forces that are at play. To quote Antonio Gramsci, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.' "
(emphasis mine)
In New Orleans we are continuing to mobilize for the dis-empowered. We have to. New Orleans, since Katrina, has the highest homeless rate per capita in the nation, and this has come about through a confluence of public/private forces that have taken advantage of this crisis to purposefully reduce the affordable housing in the city, and decimate public services. The goal: reduce the numbers of folks here from lower income brackets. Just read the introduction to Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". She focus's on New Orleans. She also wrote this article on December 21st, 2007, the day after the "riot" at City Hall:
Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city's public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.
The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.
- First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.
- Next came the "economic shock therapy": using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city's public services and spaces, most notably it's homes, schools and hospitals.
-Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.
Here in New Orleans, most of the public housing, built during the New Deal, has been demolished since Katrina, leaving a crisis shortage in affordable housing. Charters schools have replaced public schools, with secrecy as a policy, and "do not return" lists, and "acceptance criteria" for "applying" to attend elementary schools. Our public hospital, Charity Hospital, remains closed, while the state plans a "biomedical" district that will demolish whole neighborhoods for future earnings in that field. Meantime, those stressed by Katrina in need of mental health treatment wind up in Orleans Parish Prison by the dozens.
Urban planners by the dozens came to our city to make a career out of planned privatization. Meantime, people are still scattered all over the country. I've met folks who still have not found family members. The UN mandated Right of Return has been mocked by official policies and become a cruel joke: the right to return to no housing, no mental health care, crowded public health and fewer facilities, and the decimation of the public school system and the teacher's union.
On the Huffington Post today, there is an article on the fact that it is not only California: multiple states face financial collapse. Obama's own state of Illinois is in trouble. The federal response? If it will continue to be anything like the response to California, it is a kind of Katrina shock doctrine: let the chips fall where they may.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Legislators in more than a half-dozen states, their revenues evaporating in the recession, frantically worked to stave off government shutdowns and devastating service cuts. California failed to meet a midnight deadline and now may need to issue IOUs instead of paying bills.
Across the country, lawmakers were feeling the heat as their legislatures began the new fiscal year without a budget in place.
In Illinois, the sputtering drive to come up with a state budget broke down completely Tuesday, leaving the state without any plan for paying its employees or delivering government services. The session ended without any firm plans to return or even for Gov. Pat Quinn and legislative leaders to resume negotiations.
In Pennsylvania, talks between Gov. Ed Rendell and top legislators ended Tuesday night with no substantial progress, aides said. Rendell said he didn't think an agreement would come soon. The state faces the prospect of not being able to pay state employees if they cannot resolve an impasse.
What new forms of exploitation can we look forward to with wholesale collapse of states' economies?
Chris Hedges sees opportunity in this crisis, not the kind that the exploiters see, the practitioners of disaster capitalism. There is opportunity to counter the rhetoric, the propaganda, the lies, because they were never more evident. Certainly in New Orleans, by necessity, we've had a head start on this:
"Read ‘The Gettysburg Address,' " Ewen said. "Read Frederick Douglass' autobiography or his newspaper. Read ‘The Communist Manifesto.' Read Darwin's ‘Descent of Man.' All of these things are filled with an understanding that communicating ideas and producing forms of public communication that empower people, rather than disempowering people, relies on an integrated understanding of who the public is and what it might be. We have a lot to learn from the history of rhetoric. We need to think about where we are going. We need to think about what 21st century pamphleteering might be. We need to think about the ways in which the rediscovery of rhetoric-not lying, but rhetoric in its more conventional sense-can affect what we do. We need to look at those historical antecedents where interventions happened that stepped ahead of the news. And to some extent this is happening. We have the freest and most open public sphere since the village square."
Pamphleteering is an idea whose time has returned. The early American pamphleteers used it well in the creation of our country. Yes, blog online. But we've got to get out of our cyberspace and meet other folks face to face to really mobilize. I'm doing just that here with homeless folks, and hope to share some photos in the near future of our efforts. Thanks for reading.