If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Thomas Jefferson

I have been unable to figure out a more polite way of putting this, but instead I am going to just state the obvious: Our current batch of elected leaders, including Jay Inslee and Chris Reykdal, obviously never received a proper education.

They have made claim after claim not backed up by any scientific evidence. This is strong evidence that they were never trained in the basic processes of the scientific method. Science is not about listening to some expert (paid by Bill Gates) telling you what to do. Science is about demanding evidence – a lot of evidence – from lots of different sources. Science is also about being able to evaluate both evidence and claims being made about evidence. It is clear that we need to do a much better job of explaining these important processes in science classes in our public schools.

In addition, government officials seem to know nothing at all about the human immune system and how it relates to and is able to overcome viruses – and also why vaccines can not possible address the virus issue. We need to improve our health classes in our public schools so that kids who grow up to become government officials are not such gullible targets for the scam artists at drug companies looking to make a quick buck off of the tax payers. It is ridiculous to be paying these snake oil salesmen year after year for flu vaccines that never have worked and never will work.

Government officials also appear to know nothing about education or child development. If they did, they would not be advocating shutting down schools and replacing them with ineffective and “doomed to fail” online programs. We need to add child develop classes to our public schools and colleges so that kids who eventually become government officials better understand the difference between real public schools and online programs run by scam artists.

Finally, government officials seem to know nothing at all about how local small businesses work. If they did, they would not have even thought about shutting down any small business for even a day – much less several months.

In recognition of the major blunders that Inslee, Reykdal and others have inflicted on the children, parents, teachers and business owners here in Washington state, it is obvious that we need to make several improvements to the curriculum of our public schools.

#1 Better science classes – especially on the need to seek out actual evidence from real scientific studies and also how to tell real scientific studies from fake scientific studies.

#2 Better Health classes – focusing on how the human immune system works and what is needed to improve our immune system. Also how viruses work and why vaccines cannot possibly solve the virus problem.

#3 Additional classes on Child Development and Why Online Education will not work for many students.

#4 Additional classes in Economics – especially covering the devastation that is caused by shutting down local small businesses for months on end.

#5 Additional Courses in Problem Solving – especially helping students understand the importance of looking at the advantages and drawbacks of all options before choosing to shut down the entire economy because some nut in Great Britain wrote a fake study.

I realize our public schools are already overwhelmed with too many course requirements. I therefore propose removing existing course requirements in order to make room for these new requirements.

In particular, I recommend getting rid of the third year of math that was unwisely added to state graduation requirements in the past few years. Very few people can even pass these complex high level math courses. I doubt that either our governor, our State Superintendent or more than a handful of members of our state legislature could pass advanced math classes.

I therefore propose that all elected state officials including all members of the legislature be required to take any courses and pass any exams they they are requiring our students to take. Their scores should be posted on a public website so the public can see how well they did. If elected officials cannot pass these ridiculous exams, then our students should not be required to pass them either.

I also recommend getting rid of any tests that the Governor, Superintendent and legislators cannot pass. This should result in getting rid of all of these ridiculous tests and leave much more time for actual learning.

What’s Next?
Hopefully, this book has helped you get a better understanding of how badly we have been misinformed by the Mass Hysteria Media and by our government officials. I also hope you will not stop here. Our kids desperately need for us adults to get more involved in the political process.

One the following page is a series of links to other websites, books and courses I have written where you can learn more about taking back control over your own computer, starting your own websites, creating your own news channel and video channel and building your own community network.

Thank you for taking the time to read this book. If you found it useful, I hope you will share it with your friends and family members.

As always, I welcome your feedback and questions. Feel free to email me via spring for schools at gmail dot com.

Sincerely,

David Spring M. Ed.

 

We currently have an election system in which elections for public offices are often sold to the highest bidders

We all need to ask ourselves how we ever wound up with elected leaders with such poor judgment as to destroy our economy for no real reason. Some of the problem include being poorly informed by listening to the Mass Hysteria Media and relying on ineffective billionaire designed social organizing tools like Facebook. But what is really broken is our entire corrupt election process. We do not have a democracy. Instead our elections more resemble a bidding war between various groups of wealthy billionaires using bought off corrupt politicians. As long as they were not actually destroying the economy, such a corrupt system might be tolerated. But the day has arrived where this election fraud process cannot be ignored anymore. We are now at the crossroads of history. If our kids are to have any chance at a better future, we simply must reform the election process to give challengers at least some change of winning an election against a corrupt entrenched incumbent.

In this article, we will discuss options for reforming our elections.

Understanding the Problem
Sadly, we currently have an election system in which elections for public offices are often sold to the highest bidders – who then reward their campaign donors with an elaborate and illegal system of bribes and kickbacks. For example, in the last 5 years alone, the 200 most politically active companies in the US spent $5.8 billion influencing our government with lobbying and campaign contributions (aka bribes). Those same companies got $4.4 trillion in taxpayer kickbacks – a return of 750 dollars in kickbacks for every dollar spent bribing politicians.

There are national organizations trying to reform our broken political system by passing election reform laws. The most prominent of these is the excellent group Represent.Us. Here is a link to their website: https://represent.us/

While this is a worthy effort, it is very difficult to reform elections on a national level because the election laws and problems are different in each state. Also, Congress is perhaps the most corrupt of all branches of government.

I therefore do not think the election fraud problem can be solved on a national level until it is first solved on a local level.

The Solution is to Change Local and State Election Laws

Thankfully, we in Washington state have the power of initiative. This means that instead of trying to convince corrupt legislators to pass a law ending their gravy train, we can go around the legislature and directly to the people of Washington to pass an Initiative to reform our election system.

It is more important and effective to organize at the local level around local issues rather than the national level around national issues. Our energies and time are best spent organizing community groups in every city and every school district where we can meet directly with our neighbors to discuss our local problems and solutions. This is the best way to get around the current polarization of our two party system. This is particularly true here in Washington state where our current election system is clearly a violation of several sections of the Washington state constitution.

For example, Article I Section 19, FREEDOM OF ELECTIONS, states: “All Elections shall be free and equal.”

 

This means that all elections should be conducted in a free and equal manner. In addition, Article II, Section 28 states:

Here is another provision: SECTION 12 SPECIAL PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES PROHIBITED. No law shall be passed granting to any citizen, class of citizens, or corporation other than municipal, privileges or immunities which upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens or corporations.

This means that passing special laws giving tax breaks to wealthy multinational corporations is contrary to the Washington state constitution. Yet despite this fact, our legislature has passed nearly 700 tax breaks for wealthy corporations – totally about $30 billion per year – more than the rest of the state budget combined!

Here is another section of the Washington state constitution being violated by our current election bribery and kickback schemes.

Article 2, SECTION 30 BRIBERY OR CORRUPT SOLICITATION states:"The offense of corrupt solicitation of members of the legislature, or of public officers of the state or any municipal division thereof, and any occupation or practice of solicitation of such members or officers to influence their official action, shall be defined by law, and shall be punished by fine and imprisonment."

Here is another clause of the Washington State Constitution requiring a uniform system of state taxes. This is also being violated by the billions in tax breaks for the wealthy corporations that are currently buying and controlling our elections: Article 7, Section 1 of our state constitution states: "The power of taxation shall never be suspended, surrendered or contracted away. All taxes shall be uniform upon the same class of property within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax and shall be levied and collected for public purposes only."

Corporate lobbyists now control Olympia by offering bribes, called campaign contributions, to any legislator willing to pass laws to give their corporate masters special tax breaks. These bribes/ campaign contributions are all unconstitutional and the corporate lobbyists who are giving these bribes should all be put in jail.

Why Ending Corporate Welfare is Required by the Washington State Constitution
No other state in the nation grants tax breaks to wealthy corporations to the extent that the Washington legislature has granted tax breaks to wealthy corporations. The total is now more than $36 billion per year. In granting 700 tax exemptions, some of which apply to only a single corporation, such as Microsoft or Boeing, our state legislature has created laws that clearly violate the uniformity clause of Article 7, Section 1 of our State Constitution. Elections should not be about who can afford to hire the most campaign consultants but who has the best ideas.

How to Pass a Fair Elections Initiative in Washington State
Here is a five step plan:
Step 1: Increase Awareness of the Corruption Problem
Step 2: Organize groups of concerned citizens
Step 3: Develop Solutions
Step 4: Write A Restore Fair Elections Initiative
Step 5: Pass our Restore Fair Elections Initiative

In order to increase awareness of the broken election system in Washington state and organize a group of concerned citizens, we have started the following website: restorefairelections.org

We are just getting started, but we plan to build a version of “Our Community Network” on this website to help people reach out to other people in their local community to build support for a Fair Elections Initiative. To have a reasonable chance of passing such an initiative, we will need at least 10,000 active supporters from across Washington state.

Here are several specific election reform issues we want to address:
1. Restore the Secret Ballot
2. Stop Political Bribery..End corporations buying elections.
3. End Illegal Kickbacks (aka Corporate Welfare)
4. Bring back the Fairness Doctrine so all candidates are given equal space in any political articles published by the Mass Hysteria Media.
5. End Gerrymandering.
6. Stop rewarding politicians from lying about their opponents.
7. Eliminate barriers that make it all but impossible for a normal person to run and win an election. For example, PDC filing requirements need to be greatly reduced for minor campaigns.
8. Increase Voters guide statements for all state races to 500 words.
9. Require and promote public debates before primaries and general elections at every major high school in our state.
10. Split Legislative Districts into two Representative Districts (as required by our state constitution).

In fact, every one of these ideas is about restoring the original intent of the drafters of the Washington State Constitution that our government should consist of citizen legislators rather than full time politicians. It will likely take a great deal of time and effort to build a large enough coalition to put a Fair Election Initiative on the ballot. But the latest actions of crazy government officials will hopefully convince folks of the need to reform the election process here in Washington state. In the meantime, my advice is this: Stop voting for any incumbent politician who supported shutting down small businesses here in Washington state. This has never happened before in the history of our state and we need to take action to make sure it will never happen again.

What’s Next?
In the final section of our book, we will look at changes that need to be made to our education system so that future generations make better decisions than our current government officials have made.

Imagine if volunteers in your State were able to connect with all other volunteers in their zip code or legislative district based on interest.

Just as we need to create better alternatives to top down corporate controlled news websites, we also need to create better alternatives to top down billionaire controlled online social networks like Facebook and Twitter. I therefore have created a companion website to Create Your Own News Website. It is called Create Your Own Community Network. On this website, I explain step by step how to build a free open source tool called Our Community Network.

Never in the history of our nation has there been a greater need for independent people-oriented community organizing – social and political organizations empowered and built from the bottom up. For people to be able to join together, learn from each other and participate effectively in an independent bottom up political and/or social movement requires a well organized online structure. Having spent more than 30 years teaching courses in problem solving and team building, I understand the importance of building personal relationships in order to build trust and cooperation within any group. I have therefore created this tool for community organizing in order to help groups build and grow those important personal relationships. We call this tool Our Community Network.

As an example of how this tool works, I will be using Our Community Network to build a new kind of political network called the Common Sense Network. Instead of the old divide and control “Identity Based” politics of pitting Democrats against Republicans and Independents, while the billionaires control all three groups to rob us blind, the Common Sense Network will be organized in a bottom up fashion by local community members who want to organize around particular issues to solve or address problems that are facing their local community.

But if you have different concerns and want to start your own political movement, we will show you how to set up your own community organizing website on our website Create Your Own Community Network. One issue I think needs to be addressed before we can solve any of our political or economic or educational problems is to reform our election system. I discuss this issue more in the next section of this book. But before we discuss this issue, I want to explain what Our Community Network is and why it is better than Facebook.

Why Our Community Network is Better than Facebook
Many folks currently use Facebook pages for their online organizing and community building efforts. While Facebook can be an effective strategy initially and for very small groups, Our Community Network has several advantages over Facebook pages. Here we will describe just a few of these advantages.

#1 Secure Access Control System
The first advantage is that organizers have much more control over their web pages. For example, while Facebook often fails to share posts (unless you pay them money to promote the posts), with Our Community Network, everyone in every group always receives all of their messages and posts. Relying exclusively or primarily on Facebook for online organizing means that the owners of Facebook rather than the people themselves have control of the interface. At any time, the owners of Facebook can decide to limit the distribution of posts and how they are shared and with whom each group member's posts are shared.

#2 More Powerful Community Organization Tools
The second advantage of Our Community Network is that it gives organizers full access to the email addresses and all other important information of their group members -such as what topics each person is most interested in.

Facebook prohibits us from having access to the email addresses of our group members. One of the primary goals of a social or political network is to build an email list so that the group can communicate via direct email newsletters. So being able to gather and use this information is crucial for building an active community.

#3 Community Search and Common Interest Walls
Third, Our Community Network offers one of the most powerful Group Search and Organizing tools in existence. Community members can be organized by any of dozens of fields – including sorting by Zip Code, City, State or Issue. This organizing tool makes Our Community Network ideal for organizing a large group on a national level. Facebook does not offer any way to search and sort the full database of your group's registered members by location or interest. All one can do is enter names into the Facebook search box one at a time to send a message.

#4 Real Community Forums
Fourth, Our Community Network allows each group member to post full pages of content on their walls and profile pages rather than just a couple of sentences at a time. Facebook is designed to limit posts to just a couple of sentences. It is difficult to communicate complex issues in such a limited space. With Our Community Network, community members are free to post to their pages as much content as they like.

#5 Organize Events without Commercials
Fifth, with Our Community Network, there is no commercial advertising. Facebook posts commercial advertising on the Community Bulletin Board and on the Profile Pages of every Facebook page. These commercial ads are not only distracting – but they often promote messages that are the exact opposite of what our group is advocating for!

#6 You Control Your Own Network
Sixth, while Our Community Network allows members to set up their own Profile Pages and Group Pages, the owner of the Our Community Network website has full control over all pages and can thus encourage people to work together for the good of the entire movement. By contrast, with Facebook, the leaders of a political or social movement have no control over who creates pages for their movement. This leads to a confusing array of groups vying for the same readership.

#7 People are not forced to support Billionaires
Seventh, not all people like or use Facebook. If fact, most people do not use Facebook at all or rarely if ever log into Facebook. They are far more likely to visit a website that has a direct relationship to the issues they care most about.

#8 Our Community Network is a free open source tool. By contrast, Facebook is run by billionaires to maximize corporate profits. Billionaires then use the money they make from Facebook to elect corrupt politicians to office. Facebook is therefore part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The solution is to use free open source tools like Joomla and Our Community Network for political organizing rather than corporate for profit tools.

#9 A Community Topics Forum. While Our Community Network like Facebook has the option of allowing registered members to post to profile pages and share comments, Our Community Network also has the option of integrating with a community forum which allow users to post comments by topic rather than merely by people (similar to but better organized than a Facebook Group).

#10 Our Community Network integrates with free event and newsletter components to create a complete interactive network. While Facebook offers event pages, they have no newsletter component and thus members often never find out about important coming events.

Use Facebook to Direct Supporters to a Better Organizing Tool
It is useful for organizations to have a Facebook page. But the purpose of creating Facebook pages should be to reach out to folks who sign up to the group Facebook page and encourage them to set up a Profile Page on the groups own website to allow team members

Our goal is to help you create your own community network using Our Community Network… The Ultimate Online Organizing Tool!

It is this unique combination of more than 20 online web building tools that makes Our Community Network one of the most powerful online organizing tools that has ever been created.

Here is how you can create your own community network:

Begin with a Joomla foundation… Joomla is the only free open source web building platform that offers a process for building a complete and secure social network. Joomla makes large scale political organization possible because Joomla includes the ability to create Access Control Levels (ACL) allowing community members to be organized by categories within categories at many levels – all the way from local community organizers to state and national leaders – all on the same website! No other free web building tool offers this detailed ability to organize website participants.

Joomla can be duplicated by any campaign from running for the local school board to running for Congress. You can organize your own political and social campaigns in a low cost but extremely effective manner.

Joomla comes with many free tools that together can be used to create your own Community Network. One of the most important tools is called Community Builder which allows for custom registration of users and creates an automatic profile page for each user – allowing each user to play an active role in building the organization.

When a person first volunteers, they can be given the rank of Community Member with instructions on how to create their own page. As they create their page, they can enter their State, Zip Code and email address. As they volunteer for activities such as leading organizing events in their community, they can be given the rank of Community Organizer. As members help others learn how to lead events, they can be given the rank of Community Leader, City Leader, State Leader and/or National Leader.

Moreover, each member can not only post their own articles, images, documents and videos – but they can also form connections with other members of their community – much like Facebook. But better than Facebook, members of our Community Network can organize and reach out to other members of the community by searching fields of data entered by community members. For example, if there are one million members of the community, any member of the community can create a list of all of the members in their State, their City and/or their Zip Code. Members can also organize by topic or issue in addition to location allowing them to share data posted on their profile pages.

A second free tool, which integrates with Joomla and Community Builder is Kunena Forum – which allows groups to communicate with each other by location for community organizing and by topic for education and issue advocacy.

A third free tool is IddeIM which is a Private Messaging tool which integrates with Joomla, Kunena and Community Builder. A fourth free Joomla tool is ICagenda - a free events planner that allows the host to set a limit of event participants and allows participants to see who and how many have signed up for an event and how much space is left at the event.

A fifth free tool is a Newsletter – which integrates with the other Joomla tools to allow custom email newsletters to be sent to location groups or issue groups at the click of a button. Together, these five free web building tools are capable of empowering and expanding an entire social and/or political organization.

A sixth free tool called Wall Factory turns the website into a communication tool similar to Facebook – allowing individuals and groups to post to walls and share the posts of others from these walls. A seventh free tool we provide is an automated feedback system to insure that all comments to the website are answered in a timely fashion.

Together these seven tools, combined with the crucial Joomla Access Control system and numerous other tools, form a powerful community network that is actually superior to Facebook. Anyone who has used Facebook will have no problem at all learning how to post on their Community Builder profile page.

Feel free to set up your own profile page and use the Meet Team Members function and Connections function to see the possibilities of this revolutionary organizing tool.

The Importance of Organizing By Interest and Location
Here is just one example of how Our Community Network is different. Our Community Network offers the ability to build teams and allow team members to make connections in very powerful ways that are not possible with Wordpress, Facebook or any other web building platform.

For example, when a person registers with Our Community Network and becomes a member of the network, they and or other members (depending on permissions set by administrators) can search the entire community network to instantly find other members of the community that live near them and share their interests.

Below is a screen shot of the Community Network search tool in action. Members can filter by interest, city, state. Zip code, legislative district, congressional district – or any other field that an administrator wants to build into the system!

Imagine if volunteers in your State were able to connect with all other volunteers in their zip code or legislative district based on interest. They would not only be more successful but they would be able to continue these connections in their own communities to build a true local community organization for future events.

We have explained in detail what all of these changes are – as well as every step for creating your own community network on our website: “Create Your Own Community Network (dot) org.

If you are not comfortable making these changes yourself, you can hire us to build this system for you. Email us with a description of your project and we can set up a video conference to discuss how much it would cost to build the system you are interested in. We have built hundreds of Joomla websites for small business owners and non-profit communities. I am one of America's leading experts on building Joomla websites. I have also served on the international Joomla Certification Committee. I have also taught courses in HTML, CSS, Wordpress, Joomla, Dreamweaver and several other web building platforms during the past 20 years. Even with this level of experience, it takes me about one hundred hours to build a fully functioning community network.

What Our Community Network does not come with is an Online Store for selling products or a Donation System for raising funds. We describe how to set these systems up using free Joomla open source tools up in a different website – Create Your Own Online Store (dot) org. Nor does Our Community Network comes with a video channel or video conferencing system. We explain how to set these up using free open source tools on another website called Create Your Own Video Channel (dot) org.

What’s Next?
Having a news website and a community organizing tool are just the first steps in creating change. If our kids are going to have a better future, we need to change the way elections are run. That’s next.

The majority of the American people no longer trust the corporate media.

If our children are ever to have any chance at a better future, one of the first underlying problems we must address is to acknowledge that the way we get information is not accurate. It is basically a wave of corporate propaganda that has very little to do with what is actually happening in the world. Instead of informing us, our current corporate media is merely using fear to manipulate us. It is a sad fact that the Mass Hysteria Media has been completely taken over and bought out by billionaires like Bill Gates. In this chapter, we will look at where Americans are currently getting their news from and propose an alternative – more accurate - information gathering process.

21 Accurate Independent News Sources
These are several independent media websites that offer a variety of viewpoints. If you are looking for good alternatives to the main stream media, check out a few of these independent sources of information. They are listed in alphabetical order. 
#1 Black Agenda Report http://blackagendareport.com/
#2 Common Dreams http://commondreams.org/
#3: Consortium news https://consortiumnews.com/
#4: Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/
#5 Democracy at Work https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK-6FjMu9OI8i0Fo6bkW0VA

#6 Democracy Now https://www.democracynow.org/
#7 Global Research http://www.globalresearch.ca/
#8 Max Keiser on RT https://www.rt.com/shows/keiser-report/
#9 Naked Capitalism http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
#10 On Contact with Chris Hedges https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/

#11 Opednews http://www.opednews.com/

#12 The Duran

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdeMVChrumySxV9N1w0Au-w

#13 The Grayzone https://thegrayzone.com/

#14 The Hill https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPWXiRWZ29zrxPFIQT7eHSA

#15 The Intercept https://theintercept.com/
#16 The Jimmy Dore Show https://www.youtube.com/user/TYTComedy
#17 Truthdig http://www.truthdig.com/
#18 Truthout http://www.truth-out.org/
#19 USA Watchdog.com http://usawatchdog.com/
#20 Washingtonsblog http://www.washingtonsblog.com/
#21 Zerohedge http://www.zerohedge.com/

Would you like to start your own independent news channel? Let us show you how to do it!

Create Your Own News Website… How Each of Us Can Fight Back Against the Billionaire Controlled Media Monopoly
Never in our nation's history has there been as much of a need for independent sources of news as there is today. Nearly all of the traditional news sources from newspapers to radio to television have been bought out and taken over by wealthy multinational corporations. Our freedom of thought, our sources of news, our ability to communicate and even our democracy are all under attack by a small group of billionaires. Increasing control over public communications has led to an ever increasing concentration of wealth and power by a handful of billionaires. You can help change the course of history by starting your own independent news website. I have started a free website called Create Your Own News Website that shows you how to create your own news channel. This bottom up approach offers the rest of us a chance to change this billionaire domination of online news.

The Role of a Free and Independent Press

Throughout history, a free and independent press has been the key to overthrowing corrupt rulers. Our first national revolution began with the courage of newspaper writers such as Ben Franklin who understood the power of the press to persuade people to rise up against an unjust King. The printing press had just come into existence – much like websites have just come into existence today.

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the First Amendment to the US Constitution, also maintained that a free and independent press is the cornerstone of our Democracy.

On June 6 1903, Mahatma Gandhi started a small independent newspaper called the Indian Opinion which organized and rallied his people into eventually overthrowing the British Empire. His newspaper had a small team of writers nearly all of whom spent time in jail for their articles advocating defiance against unjust laws. The Indian Opinion was a very small newspaper which was often only published once per month. The paper lost a great deal of money and was often supported by Gandhi directly -who wrote nearly all of the articles for the paper. At the end of 1903, there were 887 subscribers and a staff of 13 people making the equivalent of a dollar a day which was a common wage at the time.

The original printer wanted to make a profit but could not. So Gandhi bought the paper in 1904 and managed it himself. The typesetting of the paper was done by hand and the press was often run by manual labor with Gandhi himself often putting “his shoulder to the wheel” cranking the handle of the press to turn out the paper.

At times, Gandhi devoted half of his wages to keeping the journal afloat – including all of his savings of 5,000 pounds – which today would be more than $150,000. The problem of breaking even was compounded by Gandhi's conviction that the newspaper should not sell advertisements. He wanted the paper to be educational and informative rather then merely commercial and entertainment. By 2014, when Gandhi left for India, the number of subscribers had grown to 3500 with 500 more free subscriptions. The charge for the paper was one penny per paper.

“In the very first month of Indian Opinion, I realized that the sole aim of journalism should be service...  One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects… I believe that a struggle which chiefly relies upon internal strength cannot be wholly carried on without a newspaper. It is also my experience that we could not have educated the local Indian community, nor kept Indians all over the world in touch with the course of events in South Africa in any other way, with the same ease and success as through the Indian Opinion, which therefore was certainly a most useful and potent weapon in our struggle." Gandhi , Hind Swaraj (his first book) 1909 http://gandhimuseum.org/MGM/INDIAN%20OPINION.htm

Throughout history, concentration of wealth has been the enemy of democracy. A free press has been the key to getting it back.

Today, we face the tyranny of a billionaire financed corporate empire that threatens to enslave us all. Yet many people remain blissfully unaware of the billionaire takeover of our media and our democracy. They fail to understand that nearly everything they see on TV News and nearly everything they read in corporate newspapers are carefully crafted lies. We are like fish swimming in increasingly polluted waters.

It is time for a new kind of independent media – one run not for pursuit of profit but for the pursuit of truth and the sharing of wisdom.

The Rise of Lies
It is no coincidence that the billionaire plan to take over our government and our economy began with the consolidation of the media and the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s. The Fairness Doctrine required major media sources to provide both sides of the debate on important public issues as a condition of getting their license to use the public airwaves. With the loss of the Fairness Doctrine, the American people were no longer allowed to hear or read debate from both sides on major issues. Instead, we are only allowed to hear one side, the billionaire side of the debate, filled with lies exactly as predicted by George Orwell in the book 1984.

Today, we are witnessing the results of decades of media domination by the billionaires. Currently wealth transfer is occurring at a record pace – with the greed of few billionaires robbing from the needs of poor and middle class working families. This robbery takes many hidden forms. Our money supply is controlled by a corrupt private Wall Street banking system that takes billions and even trillions of dollars from the tax payers using terms like Quantitative easing to continue gambling trillions of dollars in the rigged derivatives casino. Our elections have turned into a corrupt bribery and kickback scheme with fake billionaire sponsored politicians who claim to be on the side of the people but then write new laws to allow billionaires to take over everything from our public airwaves to our public schools.

We are forced to pay for an out of control war machine that costs ten times more than the military spending by all the other nations of the world combined. This is trillions of dollars that could have and should have been invested in our young adults to provide them with the education they need to compete in the global marketplace of ideas. Instead, our young adults who have the audacity to want to attend college are left with tens of thousands of dollars in debt – and almost no chance to pay off that debt by getting a good paying job when they get out of college because very few of them are able to find a good paying full time job.

Half of all Americans earn less than $30,000 a year, half of all students are eligible for free and reduced lunches, and a record 50 million Americans are on food stamps – all while billionaires are making record profits.

The reason there are so few good paying jobs in America anymore is because our crooked politicians pass trade agreements that allow billionaires to keep their ill-gotten gains in offshore tax havens as they transfer our jobs to unregulated sweat shops in China and India.

At the bottom of this entire corrupt rigged system is the billionaire controlled media – which has managed to keep the people of the world in the dark by diverting their attention away from this robbery and onto fake meaningless topics like the million dollar divorces of Hollywood movie stars. Never in our history has their been such a concentration of the media in the hands of a few corporations controlled by a few billionaires. Today, the majority of the public media is controlled by just 3 corporations: Comcast (NBC & CNN), Disney (ABC & ESPN) and News Corp (FOX NEWS). Together these three mega corporations account for $150 billion in annual revenue.

Here is a graph of America's most popular news sources:

It looks like there are a lot of choices. But what they all have in common is that they are owned by, funded by and or controlled by a few billionaires. Media researcher Ben Bagdikian, has written several editions of a book called The Media Monopoly about the danger of the media monopoly for the past three decades. Below is a graph of his analysis of the consolidation of the number of corporations controlling the majority of the media in the US.

Instead of having lots of choices, what people really wind up watching and reading are the same phony marketing slogans repeated over and over again.

Consolidation of the media in the hands of a few billionaires makes it impossible for the public to learn the truth about the corruption that destroys our economy and our political system.

Not only has the quantity of sources plunged, but the accuracy of reporting also dropped as experienced reporters were fired and replaced by “talking heads” that do little more than repeat the press releases issued by their corporate masters. The same powerful people who sit in the boards of the corporations of the military/industrial complex, the large banks, drug companies and oil companies also sit in the boards of the large media corporations. They have the power to hire editors and reporters who mislead the public and fire editors and reporters who tell the truth. Over time, this has led to the current culture of lies in the corporate news media.

It has also led to a huge rise in corporate profits.

Meanwhile, as corporate profits are skyrocketing, full time jobs are disappearing and real wages are at their lowest level in 50 years.

This concentration of of the news media is so complete than people who get their information from the billionaire controlled media become brainwashed into believing that the unemployment rate is only 5% and economic recovery is just around the corner – when in fact, the debt level in the world is at the highest level in history.

 

How Control of the Corporate Media Leads to Control of our Elections
In addition to having a toxic effect on our economy, corporate control of our media has had a toxic effect on our elections. The media no longer has to provide news coverage for the public to make a huge profit. Instead, they now make money by firing reporters and hiring marketing consultants.

“I was once told by Gen. Edward Lansdale, one of the pioneers of CIA psychological operations, that his preference always was to plant propaganda in news agencies that were perceived as objective, that way people were more believing.” Robert Perry October 2015

Manipulation of information about important events is a common occurrence in the corporate media. Yet many people continue to listen to corporate news as if it were a bad drug habit.

Control of Information Leads to Control of the People
We become what we watch, read and listen to. Social scientists have found that the strongest predictor of a voter’s decisions is no longer their economic status but what television stations a person watched and for how long. 

There are several good films worth watching that describe in vivid terms how the concentration of the media is able to brainwash people. One of the first was called Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. You can download or watch this 2 hour video for free at the following link: https://archive.org/details/dom-25409-manufacturingconsentnoamchomsk

There is also a 3 hour documentary made in 2003 called Orwell Rolls in his Grave which you can watch at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lYGyIaK80

You can also watch a short 24 minute 2012 video called Who Owns the Media at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ona0jYWa6s

In 2012, a 1 hour documentary called Shadows of Liberty was released. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYv5SGV9Nu8

A Ray of Hope… The American People are Starting to Wake Up!
Thankfully, the American people are starting to catch on to this scam. Gallup Polls used to show that two out of three people trusted the corporate media to tell the truth. Now, after decades of lying to the public, the majority of the American people no longer trust the corporate media. http://www.gallup.com/poll/185927/americans-trust-media-remains-historical-low.aspx

Ironically, even though the corporate media tends to use conservative corporate sources over progressive sources by a margin of more than two to one, Republicans are much more likely to distrust the media. While only one in four Republicans trust corporate news, half of all Democrats still trust the corporate media! What is most encouraging is that only one in three younger Americans between the ages of 18 to 49 trust the corporate media. This means two out of three younger Americans are seeking alternative sources of information. These sources of information and new media are increasingly from independent online news websites. While the majority of Americans still get their news from television, in the past 10 years, Internet news websites have passed news papers as the Number Two source of news and information.

How We the People Can Reclaim the Media
It used to be that to create a fully functioning online news website (as opposed to posting a simple blog) required a team of computer programmers to hand code the website on a daily basis. This is actually how nearly all corporate news websites are still built and maintained. However, thanks to recent improvements in a web building content management system called Joomla, it is now possible for each of us to create and maintain our own online news website without any knowledge of computer programming – at a cost of only a few dollars per month! Each of us can offer the public an alternative to corporate controlled news.

There are already hundreds of news websites run by individuals and small groups of people. However, many of these websites are using outdated tools that eventually turn the website into a mess. If you are going to take the time and effort to build your own news website, you should first take the time and effort to learn how to do it right. In this course, we will show you how to create your own regional, national or international alternative news website the right way – using the Joomla content management system.

This course is part of our series of courses on using free open source tools to share knowledge and information. For information on our other courses, visit: http://collegeintheclouds.org/

While it is not necessary that you have read our previous books, courses and websites in order to build your own alternative website, if you have the time, it would be useful to start at the beginning and complete our previous courses before creating your own news website. With our books and courses, we show you how to have full control over the appearance, content and function of your website – without computer programming – simply by clicking on a series of buttons! With our courses, you will be able to create your own interactive website to bring in new customers now and expand to accommodate growth in the future.

What’s Next?
In our next article, we will review the drawbacks of trying to interact with each other through the current billionaire controlled social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. We will then provide an alternative platform that allows you to create your own local community network.