Government Covid Policies Are Doing A Great Job of Dividing The “Progressive” Left, Making It The “Anti-vaxers” vs. The “Faithful Pfizerite Fauci Followers.”

Maybe you’ve been noticing this too?: How vaccination mandates and government Covid policy, accompanied by barbs all over the place about “misinformation,” is doing a great job of dividing what we’ve considered the progressive left.  Now what we get is the so-called “Anti-vaxers” vs. the “Faithful Pfizerite Fauci Followers,” even though most who are “anti-mandate” or even who have questions about these particular (EUA- “Emergency Use Authorization”) vaccines aren’t exactly always 100% “anti-vax,” and even though the “Fauci Followers” of the left, however faithful they are at the moment, usually distrust Big Pharma and official government information.  Whew!

Why is the left always so good at getting divided and conquered?  Or maybe it’s just that there are people out there who are more intent on seeing that kind of division get done to the left than to any other group!  Basically, if you’re paying attention, dividing and conquering the public is a long-standing tradition in this country.  Those who have an interest in doing so can best be described as the power elite.  Oh yes, and if you want to know where the power is, money is pretty measure of where it resides.

The potent presence of this new fracturing force (is there no end to Covid’s ills?) really hit home for me when I heard about how government policy over mandates is probably going to break up New York State’s Green Party this year, perhaps pretty much wipe it out of existence- We’ll see. Will that “third” party fade so entirely in New York so as to become just a ghostly relic of an alternative to the corporate duopoly that people once held significant hope for?  

But then, after thinking about the Green Party, I realized that we are seeing this fracturing in various ways all over what has been traditionally been considered the progressive left.  Did you think that the way that people were holing up and sequestering during Covid was anti-social enough?; well now people are walking away from age-old relationships over this.  In some cases, it’s like they don’t even recognize the very basic principles that once steadfastly connected them.

What, no possibility for a united middle ground here if the two sides were dialoguing?

Maybe not.  If not, the issues of government handling of Covid and the corporate media blasting those polices non-stop into the culture are doing a truly superb job of weakening and annihilating coalitions that were already comparatively weak, poorly populated, and ineffective in trying to deal with the pervasive corporatism dominating society.

I could observe that between these two sides, one side might be a little more open minded and have a better, more tolerant understanding of the other’s point of view and its origins, while saying, conversely, that other side may be more prone to shutting down dialogue and information exchange, and it may be a side much more prone to argue for or to demand censorship and to advocate for a totalitarian treatment of others.  One side in this debate is anti-authoritarian, the other is not. . .  With the split, both sides are going to try to claim the mantel of “true left,” “true progressive” thinking.–

– One of the sides in this split will claim that mantel by saying that it is anti-social for those on the other side to “downplay” the menace of Covid by questioning whether the public’s fear is proportional to the illness's actual threat, and anti-social if those on the other side “gullibly” wonder if, in fact, there might be measures and treatments going unadvertised and unpromoted that could ward off illness, fortify healthy resistance and that could treat Covid in ways that diminish the terribleness of what we've been worrying about 24/7 non-stop– (Shouldn't we rest assured that the health industry has always acted in the best interests of the public?)  That side will think that those who make arguments for personal freedoms or who venture to explore ideas that might diminish the perceived peril of Covid and the prescribed vigilance it certainly requires are selfish violators of the Star Trek principle of needed self-sacrifice we heard enunciated in that once climactic exchange between Kirk and Spock: “It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, . . . or the one.”

While the left further fractures into the splintered shards of increasingly small, self-contained, self- referential bubbles (as is the problem with the country in general). . .  (Sorry that’s not an internally consistent metaphor) . . . . Something else interesting is happening. . .

Anti-authoritarian sentiment and a belief in personal freedoms is uniting one side of this split left with people on the right, with libertarians, with independents, definitely with lots of varieties of anti-corporatists, even with people across the spectrum who may consider themselves to have no basic political philosophy, only perhaps to have pragmatic instincts about things they feel are askew.  Maybe, like Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party, who concurred on this, they are against what they view as the corruption and crony capitalism that occurs when corporations capture the government.

Is the broad spectrum uniting of all these elements in what may be termed the “Medical Freedom Movement” frightening to those in power?  It’s suggested that it is and that an example of the growth of these new alliances that could be troubling to them was the recent anti-mandate rally in January in Washington D.C..  The anti-mandate event in D.C. was just days after another rally by the D.C. mall’s monuments.  The earlier event was a “March for Life” anti-abortion rally, greatly diminished in attendance from prior years.  That rally from several days before, made the front page of the New York Times above the fold.  The anti-mandate event at the Lincoln Memorial did not get such conspicuous coverage by the Times.

Time Magazine, not downplaying or disparaging the anti-mandate rally the same way the Times did, choose to admonish and forebodingly scold that this coming together of folk of different political stripes under an anti-mandate banner represented something in the nature of Svengali-like hypnotism.  Their January 26 headline was: “How the Anti-Vax Movement Is Taking Over the Right.”  I don’t know what the photo they used to underscore their headline was actually intended to illustrate: Right-wingers being taken over, or the “anti-vaxxers” who are taking over the right. . .

.. .  I feel that it is usually destructive to pigeonhole people, but, for the sake of de-pigeonholing those featured in the photo Time chose, I can assure you that the group depicted, including the woman putting her hands together in a prayer clasp, were a group of non-corporatist, left-of-democratic-party-mainstream Democrats (or at least recent Democrats), including, if you look, one who wore a big “Black Lives Matters” button.  If you know what I look like, you’ll know why I can speak with authority on that subject.

This coming together of people from different walks of political life could have long-range significance; not just on this single issue, but only multiple issues of utmost concern.  As I have written about before, there is a long list issues of foremost concern to Americans that supermajorities merging both left and right agree on, more than a score.  While those are things the vast majority of Americans want and that we, as a country, could easily have, the political establishment is not willing to provide them. Collusively, the corporate media downplays them all and does its best to instead divide us with Red Team/Blue Team squabbles about things that are generally far less important.

I’ve also written about how we have to get away from the “Red Team/Blue Team” divisions, since both the Republican and the Democrat parties are controlled by corporatist money and interests; viewed with the slightest bit of perspective, the two parties can be seen to work more like a tag team pursuing the same goals than anything else. 

I wrote about how we need a new political “color.”  Unfortunately, “purple” has already been grabbed by the “Purple Project,” which while purporting to be a populist styled erasure of Red/Blue differences, is actually just more top-down corporatism for those realizing that the “Red Team/Blue Team” stuff is total mishegoss.  I wrote then that “green” with its connotations of environmentalism wasn’t the best choice because it was already taken by the Green Party. Now if the Green Party is one more of those groups going to further fracture its pursuit of principles in the face of the Covid policies coming from government and Big Pharma, that just confirms the need for a new color for new emerging alliances.

PS: Here is the Monday, December 13, 2021 statement of the National Black Caucus of the Green Party, “We Say No To Mandates,” that explains the political stance and direction they are taking.  I am unaware that the Greens in New York State on the other side of this split have articulated their position or the ways in which they disagree and can’t go along with what the Black Caucus expressed here.

On The Political Spectrum, We Are Told That We Are All “Red” or “Blue,” Or Maybe That We should be “Purple”– If All Those Colors Are Taken, And They All Mean “Corporatist” Plus Spending More On War, Maybe We Need A New Color!

Relentlessly "Red" or "Blue"? Aren't there other colors in the political spectrum that don't mean "corporatism"?

If anything should convince us faster of how completely we are coaxed to relentlessly play the “Red Team/Blue Team” game of politics, it probably should be the way that we don’t talk in terms of any other colors to describe the political spectrum.  Matt Taibbi is one of our political observers who notes the that the “Red Team/Blue Team” divisions are designed to encourage the kind of knee-jerk rooting for your chosen “team” that turns off critical thinking and escalates the kind of passions that obscure and interfere with the ability to discern and build upon common interests.  In fact, the cover of Taibbi’s new book, “Hate Inc.,” about how the corporate mass media routinely fuels anger and division in this country confirms the importance of the Red/Blue color meme representing division in half red and half blue.

More honestly, as I have been writing about here in National Notice, the bigger truth is that the public is largely united on most of the most important issues, with huge supermajorities of the public agreeing on what they want for country on a score of those most important issues even while elected officials refuse to provide those things and the corporate press backs those electeds up by relentlessly messaging that these are things that the public can’t expect to have.

Notwithstanding these commonalities, we are being sold the notion that we are divided.  Right after the 2016 election, on the eve of the presidential inauguration, PBS’s seemingly sober and authoritative Frontline rushed in to explain to us that we were in turmoil was because we are a divided nation, broadcasting its “Divided States of America” on January 17, 2017.  More recently, Frontline is back again with more of the same, broadcasting a few weeks ago, “America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump,” January 14, 2020.  Not only are we being sold on the idea of these false divides, we are being sold on the idea that the divide is between, and must be thought about in terms of, “red” and “blue,” or “Republican” versus “Democrat.”

Meanwhile, some observers whom I consider more astute because they are thinking the way I do (how is that for my own personal confirmation bias?) are not seeing the poles of the political spectrum in those terms at all.  They see the ranging of opinions in terms of populism versus corporatism, or populism/Democratic Socialism versus corporatist/Neoliberalism. On this spectrum, Trump was elected delivering faux populist promises and, with a switcheroo that he vaguely still tries to deflect attention from, has delivered corporatist crony capitalism, kleptocracy, and more neoliberalism.  Bernie Sanders can, in this light, be seen as a candidate that has more in common with Trump for what Trump initially promised, which explains the attraction of Sanders for so many who once voted for Trump.

Seeing the spectrum this way, both the Republicans and the Nancy Pelosi/Hillary Clinton Democrats represent the corporations and the wealthy global cooperate elite, and both “red” and “blue” are colors that stand for the pursuit of cooperate interests adverse to the general public.  In the case of climate change catastrophe chaos and militarism, these interest are very likely even completely adverse to the continuing survival of mankind and life on this planet.

If we can only now be politically defined in terms of those two pre-selected colors, I think we need some new colors.  Occasionally, when we are not being told how hopelessly divided we are as a country when we are actually not, we are paternalistically told that, rather than being so extreme, we should migrate to somewhere in the political spectrum that’s between, to the color “purple,” viewed as somehow moderate, or maybe even “independent” thinking.  That’s what’s going on with the Purple Project for Democracy.  It has a catchy slogan, “We The Purple,” conveying that it somehow reflects populism, and it bills itself as a “strictly non-partisan, apolitical effort,” but it is a top-down oriented plan for a corporate media coalition to start dictating what should be considered reliable theoretically middle of the road media.  In other words, it is an effort by entities such as The Washington Post, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hearst newspapers, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, NPR to speak with a more unified and authoritative voice to marginalize the noncorporate reporting and viewpoints that compete with their own.

If “red” represents corporatism and “blue” represents corporatism, then “purple” is just more corporatism that is theoretically peacefully without the “Red Team/Blue Team” squabbling and hate that the media typically conjures up.  A sort of spiritual “corporatism”?  Purple has long been a color identified with spiritualism.  The “purple” they want to sell us instead represents more efforts to separate us from any genuine populism-building narratives.

We obviously need a new color, or new colors.  I should note that one color, green, has already been taken by an alternative party, the Green Party, with a strong identification with, and platform built on, environmentalism.  Rather than just suggest that this is the answer, although the green party has important answers, I’d rather suggest that we go with something not quite so predefined and perhaps not so automatically associated with the environment. "Yellow" might have negative connotations when the path needs to be courageous.  Perhaps, the hard to define color of "teal"?

One other thing we need to change, along with the introduction of new colors, is the way that we hold our elections.  The way that we hold our elections is part of the reason that we only hear about “red” and “blue.”  The way that we currently hold our elections locks us into the rigid constriction of the  duopoly and ensures that it is easy for the corporations to buy off the only two parties who are only theoretically competing. Along with a new political color or colors, we need to be instituting changes that give third parties, parties like the Green Party, a change to rise, strengthen, and become truly competitive when they have valid and important ideas. . .  very likely the ideas that reflect the reasonably longings of huge supermajorities of the population-- That means changes like instant runoff elections, and proportional representation.

How To Listen To “Democracy Now”- A Mind Boggling List of Possibilities For A Program That Was Incubated By Terrestrial Radio In NYC: Plus, Part II, A Few Cautions About Internet “Generosity”

How to listen to Democracy Now? The options that are multiplying make it complicated, but we are about to tell you.

Democracy Now is a very good place to get a lot of news.  You’ll get a get dense, comprehensive, very intelligently compiled overview of most world and national events every week day.  It's an hour broadcast every day.  The fast paced headline coverage that starts the program generally runs from about 12 to 19 minutes, depending on what's happened.  (Appropriately, there's usually more to catch up with on the Monday mornings that follow the weekend .)

Democracy Now covers news and issues that corporate media typically shuns such as the climate chaos catastrophe (including how mankind and the fossil fuel industry are causing it), corporate malfeasance in general (its coverage of the Boing 737 max crashes was better than anywhere else), misadventures of the U.S. military, and U.S. meddling in the affairs of other countries.  Democracy Now will not shy away from telling you about the plight of disadvantaged members of our society whose rights are being ignored and abused.  It will tell you what the powerful are tying to get away with.  Their coverage of issues such as the recent Supreme Court nominees under consideration (Kavanaugh and Gorsuch) sets standards that, by contrast, made clear how embarrassingly inadequate coverage by NPR and the New York Times is. It almost seemed that the NPR and the Times, with a modicum of objection, were smoothing the way for eventual acceptance of bad outcomes.

I generally recommend Democracy Now as a good starting place where you can get about 85% of the important national news, versus the maybe the 20% and inevitably misleading stuff you may get if, for instance, you watch NBC's nightly half hour of advertising-interspersed national news.  Democracy Now's hour is free of commercial interruptions.  It runs on listener support.

I say you can get about "85%" of the news from Democracy Now, because, valiant and comprehensive as it is, there is some news that Democracy Now seems to treat as off limits.  (For instance, there was one significant story involving the Kennedy, King and Macolm X families joining with a number of respected notables that was- perhaps oddly?- covered in January, very thoroughly and respectfully by the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post, but Democracy Now never mentioned or reported it at all.  Of course Democracy Now wasn't alone, NPR didn't report on it and it went unreported just about everywhere else as well. . .  And Washington Post Coverage didn't provoke the New York Times or anyone else to follow in its footsteps.  .  .

 . . . To be fair, perhaps once upon a time (and just once), Democracy Now, way back in 1997, did previously report one aspect of that particular story-- There's a link extant for some June 18, 1997 coverage!-- Ah!  The internet giveth!  Isn't the internet amazing with respect to what it can do?-  It can take you all the way back to 1997!   However, if you click on the Democracy Now video link to hear and see the video link reporting of that story, the link is broken.  Yikes! The Democracy Now reporting is not there to be found (frown).  The internet taketh away!

How do you get news from Democracy Now?  There are lots of ways and this article will fill you in.  Following that instruction we have a few cautions to offer about the future.  Those cautions concern the internet.

Democracy Now began with WBAI radio.  WBAI is the New York City Pacifica Network radio station that once was a home to Amy Goodman, Democracy Now's principal host, and it is the home out of which Democracy Now was incubated and able to emerge.  WBAI is still a way to listen to Democracy Now.  Here, starting with WBAI, are the ways you can plan to be informed by getting the comprehensive news Democracy Now furnishes.

Tune in and listen on WBAI FM radio, where it all began, where the show was incubated.

1.    Listen to a terrestrial broadcast of WBAI radio in New York weekdays at 8:00 AM as Democracy Now is first being broadcast.  WBAI radio has a strong signal so you can listen up in Westchester and New Jersey, all the environs immediately surrounding the greater NYC metropolitan area.

2.    Listen to WBAI’s live internet stream station broadcast.  Like most radio stations these days, WBAI also streams its broadcasts on the internet.  The internet giveth!

The internet live stream straight from Democracy Now's website is an interesting alternative, and there is video to provide a visual, but you may find the live stream cuts out (the faltering is very trying during election night coverage).

3.    Listen, or even watch, directly at 8:00 AM ET on the internet by going to the Democracy Now website, where you can get both an audio and a video stream of the show.  Plus you can get special Democracy Now broadcasts like election night coverage.  It’s almost like TV, you know the kind when you cut the cable?  The internet giveth!  The vexing problem with the live video stream however is that the video often cuts out.  In our household, the cutting out of the video stream was especially pronounced one night when we were trying to watch the 2016 election night coverage.  Otherwise, Democracy Now would have been almost as convenient as watching any of the major corporate network coverage that night.  I am told that, since, in Brooklyn Heights, we sit atop a Spectrum (formerly TimeWarner) trunk line, internet bandwidth should not have been a problem and should not have been causing the halting of the stream.   The internet taketh away!

There are others now following in the footsteps of Democracy Now to launch, using the internet, what are essentially their own television broadcasts.  Mid-July (July 12, 2019) the alternative website Consortium News launched CN Live to start such video broadcasting.   It's an appealing idea, being able broadcast video over the internet that could be as satisfying in quality to the viewer as anything the major networks put out over cable or the airwaves.  The internet giveth!  Just as it launched its CN Live broadcasts, Consortium News tweeted (July 15, 2019) "Our website is completely down. Our media host said we have been attacked by malware. . .  Every article published since 2011 now gets a 404 Not Found. They are working on it. Problem started slowly on Friday first day of CN Live!"  . . . Oh my!: The internet taketh away!

Pacifica Radio app

4.    Listen to WBAI at 8:00 AM using the Pacifica Radio app that plays an internet live stream of all five Pacifica Network Stations (WBAI from NYC, KPFA from Berkley, California, KPFK from Los Angeles, KPFT from Houston, WPFW from Washington D.C.) plus one Pacifica affiliate station, WQRT from Madison, Wisconsin.  Since KPFT, the Houston station, broadcasts a second signal using its HD capacity (high definition radio), the Pacifica app actually affords a choice of seven streams to listen to Pacifica Network content.  The app can play on your phone or can play of your iPad tablet. The internet giveth!

Democracy Now phone app- It used to work on an iPad too, but doesn't now.

5.    Listen to or watch a Democracy Now live internet stream on your phone via the Democracy Now phone app.  Listening live, the same cautions apply about how the show may cut out as you listen because there isn’t enough bandwidth.  The Democracy Now app also once worked on the similar Apple iPad Operating systems– That was until Apple introduced a new operating system.  Now the app still works on iPhones, but not on the iPads any longer.  The internet taketh away!

6.    Now it’s 9:00 AM ET and Democracy Now has finished its one hour weekday morning broadcasts.  What if you missed it?  You can listen via the Pacifica App and hear it broadcast again on KPFA from Berkley. (It’s 6:00 AM California time!)  The Democracy Now show always begins with host and anchor Amy Goodman reading the headlines, which, will, as noted, in ten minutes or perhaps just under twenty, cover about three times as much news as the corporate networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, etc.) cover in their half hour evening news broadcasts.  It means Amy is speaking very fast.  If you are not fully awake, there is no quick rewind.  It's best to be fully awake when you listen.  Maybe that's what some Californians thought--  Pacifica’s KPFK from Los Angeles just moved Democracy Now from a 6:00 AM California time slot to an 8:00 AM California time slot which means you can hear it again in New York at 11:00 AM ET.  All the Pacifica stations carry Democracy Now and the twin Houston stations carry it differing times.  So there are lots of options using the Pacifica app.   The internet giveth!

For a while, after the 9:00 AM hour, the only way to listen is WBAI's archive

7.    But what if its after 9:00 AM ET and, hungry to catch up on the news (particularly the headlines?), you’ve missed the beginning of Democracy Now?  Anytime after 9:00 AM you can go to the WBAI archive and listen to the previous broadcasts of Democracy Now.  In fact, for a while, after 9:00 AM that’s the only way you can listen to it.  The internet giveth!

8.    Still later in the day (it could be as late or later than 11:00 AM ET), Democracy Now will make its program available on demand on the internet.  At that time, it will be available for listening or watching from Democracy Now from its website or, alternatively through its Democracy Now app.  Plus, the broadcast Democracy Now show is an hour; but, on the internet, Democracy Now posts extra “web exclusives,” extensions of on-air interviews if you are interested in hearing more and going into greater depth on the subjects covered.  The internet giveth!

Two day's Democracy Now Show segments

9.    Still later in the day, Democracy Now will start dividing its broadcast up into different segments, so you can pick and choose portions of the show to listen to specifically.  And you will be able to share links to specific content that way too.  The internet giveth!

When the text transcript of show content like this goes up like this, it is more likely that Google will, for example, help you find out that an unusually long lasting sustained drought in Honduras is one of the things driving refugees away from their homes (that is if Google's algorithms are in the mood to let you know).

10.     Eventually, later in the day, there is another way to take in Democracy Now.  That’s when the text of the segments for the day get written up and posted.  That also makes the content searchable on Google.  The internet giveth!  But has Google been adjusting its algorithms to make Democracy Now content harder to find, the way that Google has been spiking the algorithms of many alternative news sites?  You will probably find that Democracy Now content does not Google as high as it should . . . The internet taketh away!  But if Democracy Now behaves . .?

Amazon’s Alexa

11.    At some point during the day it has become possible to ask Amazon’s Alexa to play that day’s Democracy Now program.  Command "Alexa: Play Democracy Now," and the show starts!  For now, without looking into it, we’ll assume things work much the same way with Siri alternatives that listen to your home commands: Google Assistant, Cortana, Mycroft, whatever.  The internet giveth!  (if you want these kinds of things in your home.)  Asking a willing Alexa to play Democracy Now was, we observed, possible for a number or weeks. . .  For a number of weeks, that is just up until recently: Now, if you ask Alexa to play Democracy Now it has found a substitute program to play.  Alexa now refuses to play Democracy Now.  The internet taketh away!

Democracy Now on cable TV via the CUNY station in New York

12.    Want to watch Democracy Now as good old fashioned cable television?  In New York City, wait until 6:00 PM and you will find it broadcast on the local city university CUNY station.  However, if you want to capture it reliably for time shifting on your Tivo, you will have to deal with the fact that CUNY TV and Tivo haven’t been coordinating on exchanging programming information the usual way so you will have to set up a specified word “wish list” program to capture the show rather than a Tivo "season pass." These electronics are all so reliably smart and dependable, until they are not.

13.    Don’t like old fashioned cable television?  Do you think that YouTube is the answer?  Democracy Now also goes up on YouTube, which allows you to subscribe to it there.  The internet giveth!  One thing we must note, however, about content that is put up and made available on YouTube: Sometimes it gets taken down by YouTube for reasons that seem totally inexplicable, or, if those reasons are explicable, then for reasons that are downright scary.  (Ditto Facebook.) 
The internet taketh away!
  

14.    You can also listen or watch Democracy Now in Spanish because it gets translated.

The iTunes audio Podcast

15.    Prefer everything via podcasts?  You can get podcasts of the audio through iTunes
Google Play, and Spotify.  And iTunes also has podcasts of the video too.

PART II: A Few Cautions About The Internet

With such a mind boggling multiplicity of options, it certainly seems like there is cornucopic wealth to the variety of ways in which you can access the news that Democracy Now will provide. The internet giveth!  However, the illusion fades when you realize that almost all of these options that seem to afford such liberating choice come through just one spigot: the internet.  There are hands ready to turn the handle on that spigot.  They could turn it off entirely, or just adjust the flow.

The Federal Communications Commission under Trump appointed chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer and telecommunications industry corporate lobbyist, is determinedly doing away with net neutrality.  Net neutrality is the principle that lets Democracy Now and others compete with the conglomerate telecommunication giants that consistently stream government friendly news-- even when those telecommunication giants don't want that competition.

The elimination of net neutrality isn't the result of democracy.  Quite the opposite- "poll after poll after poll shows that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or any other party: Overwhelming majorities of people in the United States support net neutrality rules."  So it is not as if democracy can be counted on to protect us from this change.  Instead, with 83%, perhaps more of the public, wanting net neutrality, the FCC's elimination of it is just one of the most extreme examples of how on issue and after issue democracy is being overridden to give corporate and moneyed interests and other powers in charge the things they want instead of the things that the vast majority of the public, supermajorities, want and should by all reason be allowed to have.  The internet taketh away!

There are all sorts of ways that the internet can take things away: Things can disappear, they can just get lost or buried, they can become unfindable, the enabling technology by which they are accessed might not keep up to date or it may fail, tech product interfaces foe accessing content can be withdrawn, you can be steered or warned away from things, or things can be censored.  From early on, the model of the internet has been to lure people in by offering up things seemingly for free.  The internet giveth! But that doesn't mean those things will stick around or are that they are actually free. 
The internet taketh away!

I was one of the many who was heavily solicited by Google to become a trend-setting first adopter of Google+ when Google launched Google+ as an alternative, perhaps preferable in certain ways, to Facebook.   Google shut down Google+ this past April deleting all its users' accounts and posts.  Google+ was a favorite means of sharing information and content of Yoko Ono.  I could show you what I mean by linking to her posts, but they have all been deleted.  In a sense, these deletions were also a re-erasure of John Lennon's presence in our lives, assassinated in 1980-- many of Yoko's posts were about John.  The internet taketh away!  Google announced its plans to end the Google+ (originally launched in June of 2011) in October.

Google's October announcement of the Google+ withdrawal was contemporaneous with Facebook's October shutdown of more than 800 mostly anti-war, anti-authoritarian pages, including things like popular Black Lives Matters and police watchdog sites.  The October Facebook shutdowns occurred during the run up to the mid-term elections and involved coordinated action with other social media giants like Twitter.

Scary?  Wondering why this is something that people know so little about?  Here is something scarier.  When this was breaking as news, in a brilliant bit of nonreporting and disinformation the New York Times ran a contemporaneous story about the Facebook deletions that made you complacently think you knew what was going on.  The Time story communicated `not to worry . . . everything is under control.'   The report of the Facebook take downs was hidden, Purloined Letter fashion, on the paper's front page.  The Times article made it seem like mainly that Facebook was taking down pernicious, maliciously motivated  right wing disinformation sites.   The article's headline?: Made in U.S.: Untruths Infest Social Websites- The Right and the Left Try Russia’s Methods, By Sheera Frenkel, October 11, 2018.

The Times October 12, 2018 front page from the internet (The internet giveth!): Prominently displayed, but escaping notice, an article about how Facebook took down more than 800 web page sites, mostly anti-authoritarian and anti-war.

The main example the Times article led with and gave considerable focus to was what it described as a sketchy conservative right wing blogger publishing “several false stories” about Christine Blasey Ford as she was accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.  Eliminating such “false stories” doesn’t seem like it would be upsetting to Times readers.  The sketchy blogger's "Right Wing News" site gets a total of 19 mentions of it by its full name in the Times article.
        
Or maybe the front page Times article successfully escaped much notice because readers were turned off and very bored, and didn't read the damned thing because it sounded so much like just another of the endless run of Times' articles harping on "Russiagate."  . . . The article simply characterized the rest of Facebook take downs being about another manifestation of the conspiracy theory that "state-backed Russian operatives" swung the 2016 election to Trump, albeit that in this case the Times pontificated that we were dealing with the "spreading of disinformation started by Americans, for Americans . .   emulating the Russian strategy of 2016."  "Americans, for Americans"?  The article said that "such influence campaigns are increasingly a domestic phenomenon fomented by Americans on the left and the right."

If you are trying to go back in time find the Times article about the Facebook take downs without knowing exactly what you are looking for, it is very hard to find because the online headline for the article makes the article sound even more like it is just another Russiagate story: Facebook Tackles Rising Threat: Americans Aping Russian Schemes to Deceive.  (The Times frequently uses different headlines for its web edition than it uses for its print edition- It's one of the vagaries of what we think the internet documents and preserves for posterity.)
        
The Times article quotes two seemingly impartial third parties for perspective.  One of them is presented as "Ryan Fox, a co-founder of New Knowledge, a firm that tracks disinformation" who assures that the Facebook take downs don't present a worrisome free speech issue with these words: “These networks are trying to manipulate people by manufacturing consensus — that’s crossing the line over free speech.”  You might catch in that statement something altogether too coy: "manufacturing consensus."  It's a virtually and obviously synonymous with "Manufacturing Consent" or "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media."   That is the seminal and now key reference book written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988 that explains the propaganda model by which the government and those in power in our society manipulate and control public opinion in a "democracy."

The Times does not explain that Ryan Fox was at "New Knowledge" (does "New Knowledge" sound Orwellian?) having just come from the National Security Agency where he was  an “Intel Analyst,” nor does the Times indicate how that probably also tells you a lot about "New Knowledge."  On his LinkedIn profile Ryan says the New Knowledge mission is "to secure the integrity of public discourse."  For good measure, please know that Facebook is partnering with the Atlantic Council to determine which web pages it will censor.  The internet taketh away!  That is not mentioned by the Times article.

Ryan Fox's LinkedIn info and more information (The internet giveth!): "Ryan spent 15 years at the NSA championing next-generation SIGINT solutions, driven to support national security interests. Prior to his civilian roles as a Counter Terrorism Fellow and NSA Representative European SIGINT partners, he served under U.S. Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC), as a CNO Analyst for the U.S. Army."

To be clear, the Atlantic Council has been described by Peter Phillips as the unofficial policy-making and consensus-building arm for the transnational corporate elite as they seek to protect their interconnected capital investments throughout the world.  Phillips is the author of the new reference book "Giants - The Global Power Elite," that, identifies, boiling down to a very few people, about 300, controlling most of the world's wealth.  He furnishes the bios of 199 directors of seventeen global financial Giants controlling $50 trillion of the world's wealth- $41 trillion in 2017.  He furnishes estimates that overall world wealth is about $255 trillion two-thirds of which is U.S. and European.

As noted, while the prevailing model of the internet is to lure you in for free, much of it is here today, and (The internet taketh away!) gone tomorrow.   My central storage hard drive device came with the option of using a free program that allowed me (my family too) to stream and listen anywhere to any of the music I had stored on my computer, a large music collection.  Did that console me for the fact that my once upon a time "lifetime" purchase of the Music Match music player meant the "lifetime" was only that of the corporation owning Music Match, not my own?   Eventually, my ability to stream and listen to my music collection anywhere via the program from my hard drive device maker simply ended as well without warning or fanfare.  Now, I think we are all supposed to be uploading our music collections to the Amazon cloud, or using streaming services like Spotify where the security of my being able to access that music in the future is dependent upon my ability to pay future rent.

Much of the fitful starting and stopping with which the lure of free internet convenience has proved undependable has to with the acquisition and consolidation of the internet companies into increasingly few giant tech monopolies.  Music Match was subsumed into Yahoo.  Yahoo faded, pushed aside by the dominance of other fast growing companies.  Eventually, Yahoo's remnants were picked up by Verizon to be administered alongside Verizon's previously acquired AOL so that the AOL and Yahoo email services became clones, both subject to new simultaneously implemented restrictions on promulgation of information through email distribution lists.

While the lure of the internet may often be things that seem to be free, the provision of those things is far from free at all: The other recognized key to the standard model of internet provided services is the prevalence of data scraping.  Would I have a right to expect that, with the internet music services I just mentioned, those services will not be tracking and collecting data about my music preferences, listening and buying habits?  When was the last time you read or bothered to understand the "terms of service" agreement according to which you got a computer or internet program?

Of course we all know how some of that generally expected data scraping results in our being micro-targeted with advertisements tailored very specifically to us after we looked into the availability of a product.  Or did I express interest in that product writing in an email or mention it on a Facebook post?  Even if I disregard or chose to like this volunteered assistance from the internet, including the way it reduces my need to think, in other contexts it can be creepier.  What if what this kind of surveillance notes that I seem to be paying a lot of attention to stories on Democracy Now about mistreatment of immigrants and asylum seekers at the boarder?  About ICE misconduct?  And what if the follow up to that is that someone micro-targets me with links to stories that convey a mistaken impression that immigration at the border involves a flood of immigrants at unprecedented levels and an insoluble crisis?  Or what if the follow up is simply to ramp up the distractions being offered with more Russiagate conspiracy theories?

You may put yourself at ease by saying to yourself that no one is likely to want to pay attention to your little needle in the big haystack out there, and you may virtuously feel that to the extent you get fed distracting or misleading stories you have the strength of mind and mental acuity to think for yourself no matter what.  If so, you'd be right be right in one respect: Most of the surveillance methods sweeping up data tend not to focus on the individual; they focus broadly on interconnections and relationships throughout cyberspace.

If your emerging individual political predilections were lonely and aberrant they'd hardly be a concern for those seeking to maintain power and control.  What is more to be worried about is something the internet and the data collection surveillance systems are designed to do very well: Keep track of where groups of people and their ideas are swarming.  So when you and your neighbors in your extended political community all start paying attention to, for example, certain Democracy Now stories and reports, you may find that you and your neighbors all get headed off and deflected in similar ways.  Algorithms may do a lot of the work and those algorithms again may smartly incorporate informed instincts of what is the best and most tailored way of deflecting you and like-minded neighbors to other modes of thought.

Would any of the big internet monopolies take actions that steer public discourse (the way that their sister corporate media giants do)?  Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has been doing very well recently despite the way that the corporate media has been working to shut out her anti-war themed campaign.  Right now Gabbard is suing Google for halting and refusing to accept her campaign advertisements.  Is she likely to win?

Nor is it necessarily good when we teeter on the brink as politicians finding fault with the biases of Facebook, et al. threaten to regulate the internet giants as common carriers (the giants assuredly control what has become the public square) without actually doing so. . .  Because then those ongoing unconsummated threats become a vehicle for coercing political favors and bias that could not be demanded of entities that were actually, in fact, regulated by the government.

The internet, created by the U.S. government, was privatized in the mid 1980's without fanfare and with virtually no discussion about that privatization as Yasha Levine notes in his book “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.”  Also as Levine notes, the original purpose of the internet when the government created it had a lot to do with surveillance and information control.  Lawrence Preston Gise, the mentor and maternal grandfather of Amazon's Jeff Bezos was involved was involved with DARPA (originally ARPA- which he helped set up and he worked)  in setting up the internet.
 
The privatizing of the internet is an interesting thing.  Legal distinctions of what is permissible mean that those who control the internet privately have not been subject to the same restrictions on surveillance to which the government itself was theoretically subject. But the convenience of that distinction does not prevent data collected by private firms from being sold to politically active individuals (where is the dividing line really?), nor, probably, at least as a practical matter, to private firms hired to work for the government.

As noted, almost every way to get the news from Democracy Now involves information that flows through the interruptible spigot of the internet.  The two exceptions are the evening CUNY cable television broadcast and listening to Democracy Now via terrestrial radio such as the broadcasting of the WBAI NYC radio station that helped incubate and give birth to the Democracy Now program.

It is nice to think about cable as affording one of the backstopping alternatives to the internet, but the cable services owned by private communication conglomerates like TimeWarner (Spectrum) and Verizon can’t be relied upon for secure access to information either.  Just as internet access to content and ideas can be choked off, so can access through cable.  The Supreme Court, in the very recently decided DeeDee Halleck (Manhattan Neighborhood Network) case written by new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ruled that cable TV companies, even in the case of channels regulated for the purpose of providing “public access,” are not subject to  First Amendment free speech constraints and requirements and that the cable companies as private entities can censor and deny transmission to whomever they want.  So for instance, as with Halleck, they can cut you off if you raise questions about broadcasting access or the economics affecting the content provided by the public access channels.

If internet access to information and content is choked off more in the United States than it is now (and other countries like China provide examples of just how choked off it can be), would we be able to rely on Newspapers for more robust information flow as once was the case?  Newspapers once wielded the power of printing press production linked with their own channels of very effective distribution.  It was a huge, very powerful physical infrastructure for information delivery that, now supplanted by the internet, is getting dismantled.

The internet has given us ready access to information like we once got from newspapers, including information from the remaining newspapers that still survive (The internet giveth!), but, disruptively, the internet has largely demonetized the newspaper business. That demonetization includes the advent of services like Craigslist, which has diverted all of the classified advertising revenue that previously supported those papers.  The internet taketh away!

The demonetized newspapers can now be bought up for a pittance by wealthy individuals (like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post) interested in their propaganda value.  That's what will generally happen with the legacy papers whose great names still afford branding value for propaganda.  The lesser papers are simply going out of existence-- or maybe they become meaningless by just simply republishing corporate press releases.  The internet has worked brilliantly as a disruptive force to slice and dice things in a way that the production of content, going every which way, has become untethered from monetary streams.

Unless you have independent resources, monetization and access to monetization is obviously important.  Because there are also controls and levers with respect to monetization on the internet it is another way that content on the internet can be regulated and controlled.  YouTube, owned by Google under its Alphabet umbrella, demonetized The Jimmy Dore Show videos when The Jimmy Dore Show was putting out facts about how reports of chemical attacks attributed to Assad's government in Syria were probably false and designed to draw the Unites States into further conflict there. In retrospect, as opposed to the uniform and unquestioning incendiary reports of the corporate media, it appears clear that Dore, while suffering this kind of censorship, was correct. . . 

. . . This is why the model of donor-supported news production is becoming increasingly critical.  Among other things, speaking in old fashioned terms, it eliminates one of the "filters" that Herman and Chomsky identified in  "Manufacturing Consent" as a hurdle blocking the content reaching the public: Advertising and sponsorship.  The Jimmy Dore Show now supports itself through donor support from the show's fans coming in via Patreon.  Like Democracy Now, the radio show version of the Jimmy Dore Show plays on the Pacifica Network radio stations, including WBAI in New York.

With cable being unreliable, if the internet damps down to throttle a news broadcasting show like Democracy Now, the terra firma that remains to which Democracy Now could return will consist only of publicly owned independent terrestrial radio stations like Pacific Network stations, a fittingly poetic homecoming to its origins.

How firm is that terra firma?  Would Democracy Now continue in such a future and is it assured that WBAI would still be broadcasting in New York, able to provide Democracy Now with a future within its embrace?   As is obvious from the production values when you watch Democracy Now, it is a show with ample resources and very well funded.  In fact, its budget may now dwarf the entire budget of WBAI radio.

It should also be noted that a good number of all of the internet options for watching Democracy Now that were described at the beginning of this article involve mechanisms (accompanied by appeals) by which those watching and listening to Democracy Now can support the program by donating directly to it.  The internet giveth!  At the same time, all of the separate multiple ways the internet furnishes for donating directly to Democracy Now represents ways in which supporting Democracy Now and other shows on Pacfica radio stations like WBAI that also have alternate incarnations on the internet (The Jimmy Dore Show is another example) have become untethered from supporting the terra firma of terrestrial radio.  The internet taketh away!

Stations like WBAI and the other Pacifica network stations rely on listener donations just does.  Thus, in a sense, the stations are almost being asked to compete with shows like Democracy Now for donations.  Much like the untetherings that the internet caused to occur in the newspaper industry, that untethering of the stations from shows that are spread through the internet is weakening the guarantee of terrestrial radio as an alternative and backstop that may be turned to if the increasingly few hands controlling the internet spigot impede further information that threatens existing power structures.

If the information traveling through the internet that is critical of power is further damped down in the future, maybe Democracy Now will still be around because it will continue to broadcasts via terrestrial radio.  Or maybe Democracy Now will adapt and mange to stay around because it will simply broadcast less of the news than it currently does.  Nevertheless, Democracy Now, broadcasting over the internet, might even position itself as being still nominally critical of the government.

Does Democracy Now already pull any of its punches with respect to what it reports? 

Democracy Now covered the issue of Facebook censorship, albeit, somewhat gingerly, in September 2018, when the website ThinkProgress (which is somewhat middle-of-the-road politically despite its name) was peculiarly censored by Facebook for reporting about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's position with respect to overturning Roe v. Wade (yes evidence is Kavanaugh has such instincts).  That September 17, 2018 Democracy Now reporting was just weeks before Facebook’s massive censorship take down of more than 800 pages, but Democracy Now never followed up that ThinkProgess story to report on Facebook’s subsequent big take down.

Facebook censors a story about Brett Kanaugh's Roe v. Wade position-  Are there any other stories that relate to this?:  Only a 2012 story about the effect of media consolidation on journalism?

If you go to the Democracy Now page reporting the censorship of ThinkProgress's reporting of Kavanaugh's Roe v. Wade position, Democracy Now offers up as “related” a soon-to-be-vintage January 12, 2012 story: Ex-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps on Media Consolidation, Broadband Expansion, Threats to Journalism. . . . . Not linked to on their site was a more confusing pre-Facebook-take-down August 1, 2018 Democracy Now story that was even somewhat sympathetic to Facebook. It was about how Facebook was then taking down just a few sites that Facebook said had “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to “undermine democracy.” 

If you'd absorbed that August 1st Democracy Now story beforehand, it probably would not have prepped you to be alarmed when reading the New York Times front page story published in October.

. . .  As we noted, Democracy Now is a good place to get about 85% of your news, not a full 100%. 

PS (8/11/2019): After this article was written and posted, there was this breaking (August 9, 2019) news- “leaked documents show the White House is planning an executive order that would put Ajit Pai in charge of policing free speech online and allow government censorship of the Internet.”