For the past two years, I’ve boycotted Wal-Mart.  If you’ve paid attention to everything they’ve done, you already know why.  If you haven’t, wake up!

Since I started my boycott, I’ve been trying to convince my mother to join me.  But those low, low prices continued to seduce her, despite my continual explanations about how those obscene prices affected the local economy, which in turn affects us; about how Wal-Mart employees had little-to-no benefits; how Wal-Mart would crush any attempts they made to form a union.  The list goes on and on.

I can understand how important saving money is.  Every penny counts.  But sometimes saving money comes at a greater cost, and this is one of them.  Yet I could not convince my mother that the price she paid was greater than just the money coming out of her bank account.

Yesterday, my mother saw Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person” award go to Wal-Mart for suing a now ex-employee who’d been so severely injured in an accident that she [the employee] can’t remember that her son was killed in Iraq.  She can’t remember that, so she keeps asking about him, and she keeps having to relive learning that her son is dead.  Wal-Mart sued her for $470,000 to recover their costs for providing her medical care because it’s one of the clauses in the employee contract.  She only had $417,000 in a trust fund.  Wal-Mart sued her for everything she had, and they won.

Today, my mother told me she won’t go to Wal-Mart anymore.  She’s going to drop her Sam’s Club membership.  She told me this story is what finally did it for her.

It makes me think: never give up.  You never know what straw will be the last.

The internet, primarily through blogs, has brought about a communications revolution. Yet the traditional media has maintained their position as information gatekeepers, and they won’t let you hear us.

We can’t bring about change when the media ignores us. We can’t rely on politicians to fix things for us. So we’re through playing nice. We’re done begging for attention. We’re bypassing the media and coming direct to you.

We can solve our problems if we work together. We can make things better when all of us try. All we’re asking for is your help. So we can generate a little Feedback.

Welcome to the first call for article submissions for Feedback!

If you already have an idea of what this is all about and want to get started writing, scroll down to our Guidelines section.  And don’t forget to subscribe for the weekly release if you haven’t done so already.  Just send an email to feedback.news.report{at}gmail.com with “subscribe” in the subject line.

If this is all new to you, or you just feel like refreshing your memory, start from the beginning and work your way through.  It’s not as long as it looks.  You can also check out our latest issue online.

(Cross-posted at EENR blog and Daily Kos.)

We’ve started something new on this blog.  We’re calling it Feedback.  It’s a newsletter, but we aren’t doing it the traditional way.  You can see the evolution of this project here.

Here’s the short explanation which will be found in every issue we publish:

(what is this?) The internet, primarily through blogs, has brought about a communications revolution. Yet the traditional media has maintained their position as information gatekeepers, and they won’t let you hear us.

We can’t bring about change when the media ignores us. We can’t rely on politicians to fix things for us. So we’re through playing nice. We’re done begging for attention. We’re bypassing the media and coming direct to you.

We can solve our problems if we work together. We can make things better when all of us try. All we’re asking for is your help. So we can generate a little Feedback.

While this will normally be a weekly publication, due to our various schedules, we realized we had to delay our official launch for a couple weeks.  Despite that, we were determined to have something ready for this week, and somehow, we’ve managed just that.

Now we need your help.

Hey all!

First off, my personal apologies for not being around the last couple days.  I’m actually in the midst of starting two projects including this one.  The other could make me financially independent, and this week is proving to be a good week for advancing it.  I consider both projects to be very important, so my time is going to them rather than to reading/commenting here.  Again, my apologies.

Second, we’re almost ready to move to the next stage of the GMW project.  If this is new to you, follow that link which will start you in the right direction.  (I’m feeling too lazy to link all the essays.)  Or you can read this really, really short version (pending final approval):

(what is this?) The internet, primarily through blogs, has brought about a communications revolution. Yet the traditional media has maintained their position as information gatekeepers, and they won’t let you hear us.

We can’t bring about change when the media ignores us. We can’t rely on politicians to fix things for us. So we’re through playing nice. We’re done begging for attention. We’re bypassing the media and coming direct to you.

We can solve our problems if we work together. We can make things better when all of us try. All we’re asking for is your help. So we can generate a little Feedback.

Third, yes, we’ve finally got a name!  Feedback.  We think it fits pretty well.

Fourth…the meat.

For those who missed the first two essays on this, see Guerrilla Media Warfare and Guerrilla Media Warfare: Redux.

Here’s the short version for those of you just tuning in.

Blogs are great, but a large number of people don’t read them.  We need to get the information we have out to them.  We need to talk to them where they are.  On their level.  Stop talking around them and over them.  We aren’t better than they are.  We have to reach them.

Since we haven’t the resources to do traditional publishing, we’re starting a newsletter that can be printed from home and passed out on the street.  We’re looking at between 4-8 pages (depends on a few factors that haven’t all clicked in place, yet), and each article will be short.  This will be published weekly.  We take submissions and choose the ones that best fill a set of criteria.  Anyone can submit their work.  Multiple articles if they choose.

What follows is the status of our project so far.

This essay is to consolidate suggestions and comments from my previous essay on the subject.  I’m going to keep this to the point, partly because I’m in a rush since I won’t be around tomorrow (Thursday…wait, that’s today), but mostly because it doesn’t need much more.  Please reference the last essay for the idea as originally outlined.  I’ll be back late in the evening to see what else has developed.  If anyone wants to contact me directly, that information is available on my profile.

I want to start off by stating something obvious.  The corporate media has a massive amount of power when it comes to information access.  Until the internet became popular, we had no effective alternative form of mass communication and information distribution.  But with widespread access to the internet (or at least widespread enough) came new tools for spreading information.  One of those tools is the blog, which has become one of the most popular methods of sharing information.

Unfortunately, the blog is a “pull” medium.  By that I mean the only people who read a blog are those who’ve heard about it elsewhere.  And even if you have heard about it, you have to go searching it out, which can be a chore for the less technically savvy.  The vast majority of blogs are small fish in an interstellar ocean.  Even the big blogs are not well known.  Furthermore, what you read (or hear or watch) on blogs (and other online news sources) often requires following links to further information sources to fully comprehend what was originally posted.  This requires the reader to be willing to take even more time, and so the original article must find a way to pique the interest of the reader.  In other words, the article has to “pull” the reader in and make them want to learn more.  No easy feat.

Traditional media is a “push” medium.  You sit and watch TV or listen to the radio.  The newspaper can be delivered direct to your doorstep.  And what you get is supposed to be trustworthy.  Unbiased.  Truthful.  So you shouldn’t have to think about it.  Just let them tell you what’s going on.  They push their memes into you.  Brainwashing.  (Don’t kid yourself thinking it’s not.)  Day after day after day.  Sometimes even hour after hour, if it’s cable news.  The only way to tune it out is to turn it all off.  But then you have no info at all.

A couple recent essays discuss the problem in more depth.  EENR for Progress: Corporate Media and the Progressive Movement and Wither the Fourth Estate?  I also wrote a diary along similar lines about a year ago.  (Not as well written, and rather rambling, but I think I still made the point.)  My original intent in this essay was to discuss these issues a little further before moving to the potential solution you’re about to read, but I think this is long enough as is.  So instead, I just recommend that you follow those links and read so that you have a clearer understanding of the issues I’m addressing here.  (See!  There’s that blog “pull” I was talking about.)

Not long after the 2006 election, I came to the realization that the Republican party needed to go, and so I wrote a piece explaining my reasoning and an overview of how I thought it could be accomplished.  But for various reasons (primarily I still lacked the self-confidence), I never posted it anywhere and eventually forgot about it completely.

Then buhdy posted his essay Good Thing They Don’t Believe In Evolution and I saw this line:

DESTROY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

“Holy shit,” I thought!  “I wrote something saying exactly that about a year ago!  Wonder if I ever finished it….”  So I went off in search of it, and lo and behold, there it was, still sitting on my hard drive.  And it was completed, too!

I wasn’t sure if I should post it in it’s original form or edit it to reflect my current outlook.  I was naive enough at the time to believe the Dems might actually start working for us, and I had done very little research into voting systems, laws, etc.  I might also have worded some parts a bit differently, now.  But after looking at it and wavering back and forth, I finally decided to leave it as is.  (Okay, I admit laziness played a part.  I don’t feel like rewriting it.)

I wrote this a little over half a year after I beat my depression.  (Took me about 15 years to do it, and it’s been about two years since, but that’s another essay.)  In a comment I wrote, I said that it can take me a long time to decide on something, but once I decide, I don’t mess around.  This is a case in point.  Once I decided to become politically engaged (around mid to late summer in ’06, I think; first comment I ever made on DK was in August), from that point to when I wrote this piece, I went from being completely clueless about politics to someone who was engaged and actually knew more in some cases than the rest of my immediate family (who aren’t exactly political slouches).  I became the family political geek.  So for me, this is not just an essay about destroying the Republican party, it’s also a look back at a milestone in my personal growth.

The only editing I’ve done is some formatting so it looks perty.