VOTING WITH YOUR MONEY

[© Copyright, 2002, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All rights reserved.
May be copied, distributed or posted on the Internet for non-profit purposes only.]

Invariably throughout this last year, I and FTW, when asked what people can do to fight back, have always made our first answer, "Vote with your money!"

Now we begin what will be a continuing effort to show people ways in which their financial decisions can have an effect in the boardrooms and financial centers that are driving the Empire's policies. One of the first priorities we have said was that people should stop giving their money to organizations that lie to them. Some of the chief offenders in this arena have been AOL-Time Warner, which owns and operates AOL, CompuServe, CNN and Time Magazine, and Microsoft which is the owner of MSN, Hotmail and MS-NBC along with General Electric.

We have noticed that many of our online subscribers are using email addresses ending in @aol.com or @msn.com or @hotmail.com or at @compuserve.com or @cs.com and we wonder why.

Not only have these organizations been guilty of providing the world with censored, pro-government and deceptive news, each of these Internet Service Providers are also entities that offer programming, news and information which creates an obvious conflict of interest. In addition, all of them have been extremely cooperative with the government insofar as the Patriot Act and the invasion of your personal privacy is concerned. Every penny you pay to them strengthens the power of the organizations that are eating away at your freedom.

There Is a Solution

FTW's service provider, Earthlink, is a large, efficient and fiercely independent ISP that has both resisted government intrusion and consistently refused to compromise its ethics by offering news or any other programming. Their battle cry is that those who own the pipeline should not also own the product that passes through it. In the wake of 9-11 they have taken a strong stand in support of the First Amendment privileges that other ISPs seemingly want to see disappear.

Beginning immediately FTW is offering a $5 discount for any new subscriber who switches away from AOL, MSN, Hotmail or CompuServe and signs up with Earthlink. For our current online subscribers we are offering the same $5 discount on your next annual renewal. We have made arrangements with Earthlink so that we will be notified of each switchover.

If you would like to take advantage of this offer and actually do something positive then please visit our website and be sure to use the special code that will identify you to Earthlink as a protestor against a controlled and pre-packaged Internet.

We also strongly suggest that you drop an email to your former ISP and let them know exactly why you have made the change.

With one simple act you can start something that may just catch fire in ways that we don't even know.

Mike Ruppert
Publisher/Editor
From The Wilderness
Dec. 30, 2002