Thousands of Americans now reject the American experiment and are actively trying to tear the country apart. White nationalists have infiltrated just about every community, seriously armed, and can be found in towns and cities across the United Stares. Marianne discusses all of this with author Stephen Marche who details the problems we face in his frightening new book, "The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future." For more information visit MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com and StephenMarche.com.

For more information visit MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com

Democracy in Chains

MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com

To learn more visit MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com

When I was growing up, fair news reporting was not only appreciated; it was codified into law. A single company was not allowed to own a town’s TV station, radio station and newspaper, so much did we value diversification of opinion. There was a Fairness Doctrine that required balanced reporting. I remember when I was a child, my father explaining that the sales department in a newspaper building was on a different floor than the news department, that the two staffs were never supposed to communicate about what they were doing, and in some buildings the elevators wouldn’t even go to both floors.

Then all that when away.

The Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987. The 1996 Telecommunications Act gave huge conglomerates almost unlimited power to dominate news markets; the consolidation of corporate media power can be traced directly to that piece of legislation. At the time the legislation was passed, for instance, there were approximately 55 media companies while today there are 5. Local newspapers lost funding, then readership, then relevance in the life of the average American.

Fairness and independent reporting gave way to the demands of the market, as profit margins for huge corporations took precedence over balanced reporting and even truth itself. News became as much about entertainment as information, geared more toward getting people’s attention than creating informed citizens. Political programming based more on adrenaline-fueled opposition than intelligent debate became a sales technique (read Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc.), leading to the dumbing down of American discourse.

A reporter or editor telling too much truth ran the risk of angering the powers that be. Once the news became just another capitalist enterprise, a series of articles that might have gotten a newspaper reporter a Pulitzer Prize in years past now became as likely to get the reporter fired. This is why huge corporate monopolies having so much power in our lives is so destructive to society. Just think about it: A reporter wants to write about the factory downriver that is polluting the town’s water - but the company that owns the factory also owns the newspaper! One phone call saying “Kill the story,” and it’s done.

Anything that didn’t sell became less important than that which did. Things that we as citizens most need to know about are often the things we’re least informed about, as mainstream media bases its priorities more on stockholder value than on citizen edification. One of the most tragic consequences of this decline in responsible reporting has been the diminishment of resources allowed to foreign correspondents. When 9/11 happened, far too many Americans seemed completely unaware that anyone out there hated us! But people were curious; they wanted to know what events had led to the disaster. I remember, in the days right after the tragedy, how the news was filled with meaningful, intelligent conversation about foreign policy - correspondents, scholars and political experts were going deep with the truth - and people were eating it up. I also remember the day, a week or so later, when someone clearly put the kabash on all that and Americans were told to just go back to shopping.

But there has been a pushback to this overtaking of the news industry by an economic bottom line. It’s called Independent Media. My podcast interview this week is with one of the most important voices in independent media today, Jordan Chariton of Status Coup. From covering the Flint water crisis to last year’s re-emergence of a strong labor movement to Standing Rock to the BLM protests, Chariton has been on the front lines of some of the most important news stories of our time - stories too often given short shrift by the mainstream media, or even ignored completely.

Jordan’s story is an important look into the state of the American news media today, and not all of it is pretty. But the only way we will change direction in this or any other area is if all of us become more informed about what’s happening. In the meantime, great independent media - a lot of it on substack! - continues to arise. It’s an important force at this critical time and it needs our full support.

Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

One more thing: If you want a good look at the news from an independent media perspective, I highly recommend Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar. In my opinion it’s a regular dose of the news as the news should be reported.

Status Coup's Jordan Chariton can be found at some of the most important events of the last decade. His on-the-ground reporting from Flint, Standing Rock and the 2020 BLM protests among others brings us the in-depth coverage the corporate media ignores. So why is his material being suppressed? Jordan and Marianne sit-down to discuss the state of the news media, how big tech squashes independent outlets while propping up corporate behemoths and the importance of independent media.

Read more at MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com

Follow Jordan and Status Coup

Status Coup YouTube

Status Coup Membership

Status Coup Twitter

Status Coup Instagram

Status Coup Substack

According to journalist Andrew Cockburn in his latest book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine, our bloated $778 billion defense budget doesn't necessarily provide for our safety. Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper's, has spent decades covering the Pentagon and defense industry and says money and power - not legitimate security concerns - is what drives our ballooning military budget.

Our podcast conversation details how we got here. According to Cockburn, "The US defense complex is best thought of not as an organization, but as a living, insatiable, creature, dedicated only to its own defense and power."

With our government so held hostage by the defense industry, it's we the people who are going to have to change that.

Read more at MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com

One of America’s weaknesses is a tendency to move off a topic as soon as it becomes uncomfortable. We’re not known as a nation for deep reflection, often failing to learn the deeper lessons an experience affords and thus dooming ourselves to repeat it.

We’ve all heard a million times that we have “the most powerful military in the world.” We certainly have the largest. And the most expensive. But do we have the most powerful one, really? It’s painful but important to remind ourselves that we’ve now lost three wars in a row.

The war in Vietnam? It should never have been fought. The war in Iraq? It should never have been fought. The war in Afghanistan? A different story, because given 9/11 there was a reason to go in there originally. But the 20-year war we waged in Afghanistan turned out to be a spectacular failure, with the Taliban back in power within days of our departure. We are making a terrible mistake if we don’t at least try to understand what went wrong.

After the deaths of almost 2,500 American soldiers, thousands of coalition forces dead, thousands more Americans whose lives will forever be painfully affected, the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghans, and a cost of 2.3 trillion dollars (2 trillion of which went directly to defense contractors), surely we must ask, “What happened here?”

Yet who, exactly, is going to ask that? We shouldn’t leave the analysis of the war to the same people who did such a terrible job waging it. Yet that’s currently what’s happening. Congress is calling the military brass to Capitol Hill to explain what happened, but it’s largely the same performative exercise with which they provided so-called Congressional oversight of the war for the last 20 years.

On September 28th, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told Congress this about Afghanistan: “We built a state but we could not forge a nation.” That very sentence - so false, and so full of arrogance - encapsulates the ugliness of American hubris. No, we did not “build a state” in Afghanistan; we built and enabled a corrupt, undemocratic government there. And no, we didn’t need to “forge a nation;” Afghanistan has been a nation for thousands of years! Whatever clever wordsmith over at the Defense Department came up with that line for the Secretary’s speech should be ashamed.

So to expect any deep reflection, radical truth-telling or meaningful analysis from our war planners - military, Congressional or executive - is naive. If they even knew what really went wrong, they might have done things differently to begin with.

And if Congress was really interested in getting to the bottom of it? They would be calling George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump to come in and answer a few questions as well. But they won’t, of course, because to do so would disrupt the illusion that our government has control over our war machine. Sadly, it’s the other way around. Even after all the death, and all the horror, it’s essentially business as usual in Washington.

Routing the Taliban from Afghanistan originally was an exercise in brute force at which we succeeded. But keeping them out - and helping the Afghans keep them out - was something that required skills not currently in America’s tool box. If anything, we proved the ultimate futility of endless violence. We waged war, but we failed miserably at providing the conditions for a sustainable post-war state of peace. In the end, that means we failed completely.

Today’s podcast is called THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN: An Effort to More Deeply Understand. It is compiled from interviews I conducted over the last few weeks, with various voices providing meaningful reflections on the war.

On Afghanistan, as on so many issues, it’s imperative that we push against the grain of shallow and ultimately meaningless narrative that dominates our politics. I hope you’ll take the time to listen very carefully to this important podcast, produced brilliantly by Jon Ehrens. I’m grateful to Sarah Chayes, Laura Jedeed, Zainab Salbi, Tom Freston, Joe Cirincione, and Obaidullah Baheer for sharing their experiences and insights.

Let’s join in an effort to more deeply understand this American, and Afghan, tragedy. My greatest hope is that out of something truly terrible there will arise something truly wise.

Today’s post is Part 2 of the podcast. In Part 1 we discussed what has gone wrong with modern capitalism, and in Part 2 we seek answers as to what it will take to make it right.

Some say, “We need to get rid of capitalism entirely!” Some say, “We need conscious capitalism!” Some say, “We need socialism!” Some - myself among them - say genuine transformation will have less to do with the words we use and more to do with conceptualizing what a fair economy looks like. Transformation is more an evolutionary process than an on-off switch that applies more to theory than to practice.

All of our guests on today’s podcast - Sarah Jaffe, Nina Turner, Richard Wolff, Peter Joseph, Stephanie Kelton, Dan Price, Robert Kuttner, and Marshall Steinbaum - have important views on how to make such transformation occur.

In the words of economist Richard Wolff,

“I think we can save capitalism, if you like, although I'd prefer a different language. Go beyond capitalism. Thank you, capitalism, for what you achieved. You've had your chance. You've done your stuff. You've done a good job in some areas.

But it's time to take yourself seriously so that when you endorsed democracy rhetorically, we now have to bring it home and put it right inside your enterprise. And I believe and I think I can show you that if we really believe in democracy, if we're going to be honestly willing todo that, I think the decisions our businesses will make will be radically different from what we have seen. And that is, I think, our best hope to get beyond the failures of this system, holding on to its achievements, but saying goodbye to the things that have demonstrated now for quite some time, are obstacles to what we know the people as a whole need.”

Spirituality and politics are like Romeo and Juliet: their families want to keep them apart but actually they belong together. These two primary drivers of change – one internal and one external – form a powerful unit when working side by side. While many spiritual seekers underestimate the importance of political change, many political activists underestimate the value of spiritual change. Understanding where each one nourishes the other is a powerful contribution to our efforts to repair the world.

Just as I hope my more “political” readers will not pass over posts about meditation and forgiveness, I hope my more “spiritual” readers will not pass over posts about politics and economics. A deeper understanding of all of the above will empower us to make the world a better place.

Our first TRANSFORM podcast is called Transforming Capitalism. We must always remember that an economy is here to serve the people; people are not here to serve an economy. Yet modern capitalism has become an unregulated, hegemonic behemoth that functions in a way which damages the lives of many millions of people as well as the planet itself. The horrors of extreme climate change, the tragedy of Afghanistan, and extreme wealth inequality share a common denominator: the destructive force of economic principles when given precedence over humanitarian values.

If our democracy worked - if government did its job to balance individual liberty with care for the common good - then we would be okay. But we are not okay, for America’s democracy defers to capitalism and not the other way around. Underlying our political system today is an unholy alliance between the leaders of government and the captains of industry. Our government has become little more than a system of legalized bribery, as our elected officials in far too many cases are mere handmaidens to their corporate donors. People on both Left and Right are aware that the system has been rigged at their expense, and there is an increasing yearning among millions of Americans to rise up and do something about it.

America cannot transform until we’re willing to recognize the destructive influence that an unfair economic system has had upon our democracy, our people and our future. Over the last forty years, economic opportunity – real, meaningful and vibrant economic opportunity – has belonged to an ever-shrinking group of Americans. This has left tens of millions of our fellow citizens scrambling to even survive, much less actualize their full human and economic potential. From an inability to access higher education; to lack of health care; to an unfairly low minimum wage; to the crippling burden of college loan debt, far too many are left unable to achieve pinnacles of creativity and productivity that would otherwise be within their grasp.

None of that will transform until we’re willing to look honestly at the injustices built into our economy, and for that we must look more deeply at capitalism itself.

Transforming Capitalism is filled with the powerful voices of some of the best economic thinkers in America: Stephanie Kelton, Richard Wolff, Matt Stoller, Peter Joseph and more (their individual interviews will be posted next week).

In order to transform any system, we must look honestly at what is occurring now, and articulate clearly how we would like it to evolve. In Part 1 of Transforming Capitalism we take a brutally honest look at what is, and in Part 2 we look ahead to what’s possible. When humanitarian values form the organizing principle for our economy – for our democracy, our people and our planet – America will transform.