Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Hidden History: The War on Poverty at 50

Despite mass media attention to the War on Poverty at 50, its centerpiece, the Community Action Program, is ignored. Thus an important story - how the poor were empowered then cast aside - is lost.
Who controls the past controls the future;
who controls the present controls the past.
 - George Orwell, 1984
In the totalitarian world of 1984, Winston Smith was assigned the job of changing news accounts of past events so the total rule of the Party could never be challenged by facts that contradicted Big Brother's propaganda. Control of the past isn't quite so total in the United States, but to read about the 50th anniversary of the "War on Poverty" in the American press is to appreciate how significantly history is rewritten in this country, how information that doesn't square with the interests and propaganda of elites has disappeared down the "black hole" of memory.

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty" in his first State of the Union address. The centerpiece of the poverty program was passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, which featured most prominently the Community Action Program (CAP) and the Job Corps. The long-invisible history of empowerment, struggle and ultimately defeat and abandonment of America's poor under CAP contains powerful lessons of hope and despair that Americans need to understand. That hidden history holds important lessons about both the possibility and erosion of democracy in America.

Continued Reading at Truthout

How Mass Media Distort Social Change: From the 1960s to Occupy and Beyond [longer essay]



© Edward P. Morgan


          For a time at least, 2011 seemed one of those historic turning points when grass-roots struggles ignite and spread throughout much of the world.  From Arab Spring to the Wisconsin protests to anti-austerity campaigns in Europe and South America to the rapid spread of Occupy Wall Street, the groundswell of sustained protest demonstrated that much of the world’s population was no longer willing to put up with the destructiveness of the neo-liberal world order or the autocratic regimes tied in to that system.  The tensions that came to the surface continue to fester.
          While the initial occupation phase of the Occupy movement ended, participants in Occupy have continued to organize and carry out a range of political actions, largely under the radar of mainstream mass media.  At the same time, of course, activists continue to mobilize against manifestations of the planet’s deepening ecological deterioration produced by world capitalism, and there is growing public opposition to the latest expansion of American militarism, drone warfare.  It remains to be seen if these movements can converge in a mass movement capable of effectively challenging both the ideology and reality of the world historic system we live in while ushering in a far more democratic future.