Click here to access article by Aaron Kesel from We Are Change.
I believe that this is a very important article in order to raise the political consciousness from a sheeple-type consciousness that appears every four years when presidential elections are held and many "progressive" people rather suddenly become involved. Such people usually get involved behind a candidate (example, Bernie Sanders) that serves to shepherd progressive types into the slaughterhouse of the Democratic Party.
In between the quadrennial election circuses, most people watch corporate TV and involve themselves superficially in front organizations (like MoveOn.org) funded by the ruling rich to keep them diverted from the real issues of class war. (I simply do not believe polls which report low public credibility of news and opinion from corporate media.) Given this scenario it is no wonder that around election time, people get so excited about issues of social identity, multiculturalism, and social welfare.
Now before anyone gets their dander up over this criticism, I strongly support these issues. So much progress has been made over the past 50 years on social identity issues, and many of us have benefited. But issues of social identity and multiculturalism do not significantly interfere with the rule of the capitalist class which has so many deleterious effects on our lives. In fact, our masters often use social identity issues to manipulate us. Notice how our ruling capitalist masters used guilt over racism to push Obama into the White House. Obama's obvious African-American identity was literally only skin-deep.
To counter these manipulations by agents of the ruling capitalist class, genuine alternative websites are springing up all over the web, but at the same time the rich are funding many others to mislead the people. Whether the people or the rich ruling class wins this ideological battle will depend on efforts by the people to spend far more time educating themselves on political realities related to the ongoing class war: extreme inequality, poverty, crime, never-ending wars, and climate destabilization that is being accelerated by capitalism. This article serves as a very good beginning point for "progressives" to raise their political consciousness.
Others with a more advanced understanding of class war must become more involved in a collaborative way. This means that they must examine and discard many behaviors and attitudes promoted by the extreme individualism that is fostered by the capitalist system. It is good that so many independent voices are spreading their messages over websites, but it is far more important to join their voices and resources together to wage war more effectively over our common enemy.
Too many operate their websites like companies which compete with other companies (websites) for advertising dollars. The dependence on advertising dollars must be supplanted by reader donations and subscriptions, and we the people must support genuine independent websites as best we can. We also must drop our need to appear all knowing simply because no one has a monopoly on knowing. We must be willing to criticize the views and actions of other activists and analysts and accept such criticism in a collaborative spirit.
For example, I have run about a half dozen posts from ProPublica because the articles were were good on various issues. Fake progressive sites like ProPublica do this deliberately to bait and hook people on the left to their websites in order to ultimately lead them to dead-end activist projects. I erred in posting their articles, and no one brought this to my attention! I can't believe that none of the people who follow my website did not know about the backers of ProPublica as reported in this article.
While promoting this article, I do not endorse everything that is posted on the We Are Change website. For example, I condemn an article entitled "Top Scientist Resigns Admitting Man Made Global Warming Is A Big Scam" posted a year ago on their website. Well meaning people can always make mistakes, and I don't condemn their website because of this one post.
