Los Angeles Indymedia : Activist News

One of the many important issues that have been beaten off the front pages by the drums of war is welfare reauthorization. On Monday, September 30, welfare reform expired. With much of Congress busy figuring out how to sit on the fence about Iraq, they didn‚t take action on the really vicious House bill, or a less bad Senate version. So they've passed a three month extension, with Republicans hoping to sneak in something awful by Christmas. Many people who are on welfare right now will reach their welfare time limits by then, and the folks with the least ability to make it on their own will be without any support at all. Why aren't the mainstream and alternative media paying attention?

The upcoming Break the Media Blackout Conference in Philadelphia declares "The increasing concentration of corporate ownership of our media not only threatens democracy, it also threatens the very survival of poor people in the US and globally. The media isolation of the poor has virtually disappeared large segments of the population." This conference, supported by the kick-ass Kensington Welfare Rights Union aims to think about new strategies to address and reveal poverty through media.

Other advocacy groups, from the grassroots Every Mother is a Working Mother, ACORN, to the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support are organizing poor people to stand up for their rights. They are supported by a network of policy-oriented groups, from the Oakland-based National Economic Development and Law Center to DC-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. There's not a lack of information out there, it's a lack of interest.

From the newswire, local activist and writer c.j. macq addresses the abilty for poor people to get representation in "The Left". He evaluates in essays 1, and 2 the ways poor and non-PHD'd class are disenfranchised through unspoken elitisms of most institutions, alternative and mainstream. His ideas, in line with the McLuhan statement that the medium is the message, goes deep to critique local leftist media relationships to the hopefully more than passive audience. He asks ontological questions to media and policy makers about how they can know poverty if they don't trust and deal with poor and uneducated's cogent voices. He calls for a revival with poor and left activists nailing non-profits, corporations and government on constitutionally given equal access laws to both courts and media.