--Thomas Jefferson
This journal will suggest, document and amplify the little-reported fact that the United States finds itself in a deliberately engineered 40-year crisis of deindustrialization. That this policy--pursued either as conspiracy, a convergence of self interest among the elites or simply flowing from the logic of misapplied economic theory--burdens, hobbles and is slowly destroying the broadest cross-section of the American workforce. And that this policy is, knowingly or unknowingly, aided, abetted and certified by what we have come to know as the mainstream media.
After World War II, a newly energized and hyper-industrialized United States adopted a strategy of reviving economies in Europe and Japan as bulwarks against the growing threat of the Soviet Union. The greater part of this effort involved a unilateral opening of the vast, emerging consumer market in the United States. This was never fully explained to the public, but in several important ways it paid off for Americans, helping to develop mature markets in other countries for U.S. exports and securing powerful allies in the Cold War.
As long as the Soviet threat remained a dominant concern, and as long as the two ideological opponents were feeling each other out, this arrangement worked. But as the struggle settled into a quieter phase in the 1970s, other players within the American system began to emerge. Over a short span of years, it was decided to open the American market not just to our recovering Cold War allies but also to the rest of the world. Although masked by nostrums and platitudes about creating a flat playing field for global capitalism, it was, in fact, a unilateral opening that could not fail to weaken, if not undermine, America's vital industrial base.
What would ultimately prove to be the ruinous financialization of the American economy and political system had begun.
How this came about, why it emerged largely in the shadows and without effective public debate, and how what has become known as the "mainstream media" contributed to the 40-year disaster will be among the principal subjects of this journal. But more importantly, we will suggest and promote structural ways to address and reverse these policies.
The editor of the Inland General is a former journalist, an editor at various times for several leading newspapers, all of which subscribed to the American journalistic standard of objectivity and balance.
But this will not be an objective publication. Very little that you read in the mainstream media is objective. Or fair and balanced. Far from it, as I can attest after more than 30 years working for such publications.
My convictions and biases will quickly become apparent as this journal progresses. I hope to persuade. This I openly acknowledge. Above all, I hope to persuade you to act, to take back your country, to recover the democratic republic that we were all taught was part of our heritage--and to make of it what you will.
