Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

Once upon a time in America, young people, workers, and fighters for social justice coined a phrase, “speak truth to power”. Most of us have settled for the media’s insistence that we now “speak only power to truth” or no truth at all. From the so-called energy crisis which was a Dick Cheney-Enron-induced cataclysm from which California has yet to recover, to the so-called mortgage meltdown, we have accepted lies and bullshit in place of research and another 60’s throwback, telling it like it is. Since those tumultuous days (lots of young people look back nostalgically to that time. Fear not, they are returning but with facebook, vimeo and all the repression, violence and STDs of that period) right wing think tanks have spent lots of their largess redefining the terms of our society and dictating them to the 90% of us who don’t control the wealth of our corporatocracy. These think tanks have developed the terms which define and then limit the debate to fighting a rear-actio...