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.As each ad closes you see in the lower right-hand corner, in very small letters, API, the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group for ExxonMobil and all the other big oil companies.For the average viewer there is nothing in the ad to indicate this is being produced by the oil industry.The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true.And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying, and control of traditional sources of information.We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video, and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism.The distinctions among artists, social activists, and journalists have to be erased.These distinctions diminish the power of reform, justice, and an understanding of the truth.And it is for this purpose that these distinctions are there.“As a writer, part of what you are aiming for is to present things in ways that will resonate with people, which will give voice to feelings and concerns, feelings that may not be fully verbalized,” Ewen said.“You can’t do that simply by providing them with data.One of the major problems of the present is that those structures designed to promote a progressive agenda are antediluvian.”Corporate ideology, embodied in neoconservatism, has seeped into the attitudes of most self-described liberals.It champions unfettered capitalism and globalization as eternal.This is the classic tactic power elites use to maintain themselves.The loss of historical memory, which “balanced and objective” journalism promotes, has only contributed to this fantasy.But the fantasy, despite the desperate raiding of taxpayer funds to keep the corporate system alive, is now coming undone.The lie is being exposed.And the corporate state is running scared.“It is very important for people like us to think about ways to present the issues, whether we are talking about the banking crisis, health care, or housing and homelessness,” Ewen said:We have to think about presenting these issues in ways that are two steps ahead of the media rather than two steps behind.That is not something we should view as an impossible task.It is a very possible task.There is evidence of how possible that task is, especially if you look at the development of the underground press in the 1960s.The underground press, which started cropping up all over the country, was not a marginal phenomenon.It leeched into the society.It developed an approach to news and communication that was ten steps ahead of the mainstream media.The proof is that even as it declined, so many structures that were innovated by the underground press, things like the Whole Earth Catalog, began to affect and inform the stylistic presentation of mainstream media.“I am not a prophet,” Ewen said.“All I can do is look at historical precedence and figure out the extent we can learn from it”: This is not about looking backwards.If you can’t see the past you can’t see the future.If you can’t see the relationship between the present and the past, you can’t understand where the present might go.Who controls the past controls the present, who controls the present controls the future, as George Orwell said.This is a succinct explanation of the ways in which power functions.“Read The Gettysburg Address,” Ewen said:Read Frederick Douglass’s 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 twenty-first-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.The battle ahead will be fought outside the journalistic mainstream, he said.The old forms of journalism are dying or have sold their souls 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.’”The Crooks Get the Cash While the Poor Get ScrewedJULY 6, 2009Tearyan Brown became a father when he was sixteen.He did what a lot of inner-city kids desperate to make money do.He sold drugs.He was arrested and sent to jail three years later for dealing marijuana and PCP on the streets of Trenton, New Jersey, mostly to white kids driving in from the suburbs.It was a job that saw him robbed at gunpoint and stabbed in the chest.But it made him about $1,400 a week.Brown, when he got out after three and a half years, was done with street life.He got a job as a security guard and then as a fork lift operator.He eventually made about $30,000 a year.He shepherded his son through high school, then college and a master’s degree
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