COMMUNITIES AGAINST CAPITALISM
 

Big Brother and Media Control
L. Moore
September 1, 2000

I can definitely feel something big about to happen in this country. People who have been fed up for years are finally finding an outlet through the aftermath of the [worldwide protests against globalization and corporate greed (this particular essay was written after the democratic and republican conventions)]. People who were involved witnessed the truth of our present reality. Some for the first time in years - some for the first time ever.  Whether or not we were there, we all watched our fellow brothers and sisters get harassed, arrested, assaulted, treated like terrorists – and now being shot with real bullets and even dying – all for being true citizens in their own right.  Even though "we the people" only referred to the privileged few in the beginning, that doesn't mean it still does or should.  The world has changed and the old way of doing things has to change as well.

I watch as the world around me slowly becomes a bad flashback from George Orwell's novel "1984".  I watch Big Brother become acceptable by the masses because it helps catch criminals but it has been well documented by sociologists that crime, the kind we are all familiar with on the evening news, is a product of poverty.  Rich people don't need to rob banks, liquor stores, or houses because they rob their employees of benefits and decent wages. 

Poverty is most often something one is born into and it is not easy to break out of the cycles, which keep people poor.  The laws (which are enforced more often on poor, young, minorities than on middle class, whites of any age) are actually set up to criminalize poverty because they protect the rich from the poor.  The poor are the scapegoat for the better off; they’ve become “stereotypically” everything we fear.  They’ll steal from you, rape you, kill you – because they are genetically flawed (and this only works because we’ve managed to keep more minorities poor, more minorities in jail, and more of them seen in these various negative roles.)  However, the reality is that there are just as many poor people in every ethnic group, there are just as many criminals in every ethnic group, because we’re all being attacked economically – we’re all being kept poor on purpose.  They like to blame minorities in order to set us against each other, even though middle class white males are statistically doing and selling more drugs, and white males are seen just as often as all minority males combined for murder, rape, and robbery.  They focus on the scary black man who could rape your daughter and what a horror that would be to have such a thorn in your family’s perfect bloodline, right?  Well, Fuck. That’s all I can really say about that.

This capitalist system has created a criminal class by keeping the majority of its people poor, which gives them a good reason for installing cameras everywhere, which watch everything, we do.  So people in general, who don't see the big picture, applaud this new war on crime, even though we are all losing our freedom by doing so.

The media, of course, makes everything worse. First of all, 90 percent of all media is corrupt because every year the number of corporations owning media gets smaller. Ownership of the 25,000 individual media companies went from fifty corporations in 1983 to twenty in 1992 –  its about 9 today – and the number of different viewpoints keep getting smaller as giants buy out their competitors. There have been several cases where journalists have been fired for refusing to report lies, because the truth would have made advertisers or business associates look bad. In other words, by this year, there are less than ten individuals who control most of what is in print, reported on the news, recorded, and documented. They might not be able to tell us how to think, but they can and do tell us what to think about.

Secondly, the content of most media isn't even intended to get you to think. Lately, I've noticed a trend where journalists don't understand the issues they're writing about. They observe a situation, like a protest against corporate greed, and instead of writing about the actual issues, which would educate people, they talk about materialistic things, which aren't important. I've seen this apathy among journalists who can't or don't want to open their eyes to the actual problems people are fighting to change. When there are thousands of people coming together to march, protest, or just rally behind an issue and all one reporter from the OC Register seemed to notice was how people dressed (he commented how most protesters were dirty or dressed in ways that would embarrass their parents), I think its safe to say that people just aren't getting it. And why then, are these people who don't have a clue about the issues getting paid to comment whatsoever? The truth is, they are just victims as well. Victims of a system set up to protect the rich from the poor. By this example, and others who attended the republicrat conferences and admitted they don't really care about the protests, its abundantly clear to me that we are not doing enough.

I don't have an answer, but somebody has to get the message up and out there - the real message - not what media gods and bored journalists want everyone to think. More people need to get involved, get educated, and get active. Don't be deceived. Someone in the world is paying the price for your comfortable existence. No one is free while others are oppressed. If you do nothing and lose what little freedom you have, you have no one to blame but yourself.