All across America, the Occupy Wall Street movement has galvanized the long-abused American people. Now the movement is going beyond simply protesting the financial industry’s massive theft. People are taking concrete steps to reverse the historic shift of wealth to the 1 percent. Organizations like MoveOn deserve credit for kickstarting Bank Transfer Day, by declaring that “it’s time to make Wall Street pay in our communities,” and calling for a big day of protests outside local branches of Wall Street banks.

This is a good start. Now we need to extend the Bank Transfer idea, disinvesting not only from oppressive financial institutions, but from corporate politics and corporate media. American democracy has become thoroughly corrupted by the flood of corporate dollars and influence. Propelled by the obscene Supreme Court ruling on corporate campaign financing, spending during the 2012 campaign year will likely double over 2010 expenditures, skyrocketing to nearly $8 billion. The Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the 1 percent. And the Democrats are close behind, with President Obama charging close to $40,000 a plate on the campaign dinner trail. Real campaign finance reform is impossible, with corporate-controlled politicians in both parties blocking any substantive legislative efforts to clean up the system.

The 99 percent need to counter this deep corruption by withdrawing their campaign dollars from bought-and-paid-for politicians, and channeling these donations to new leaders who pledge to support the new declarations of independence that are now being put forward by the movement. We have seen the power of digital democracy and grass-roots fundraising. A full quarter of Obama’s campaign contributions in 2008 came from small donors. We’re the 99 percent. We need to harness our collective power. We can use this financial clout to punish candidates who are working against our interests, and to reward those who are fighting for us. When a political leader like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo spits in the faces of the working people, students and Democratic activists who mobilized to elect him by opposing extension of the state’s millionaires’ tax — and has the utter gall to declare it a principled decision — we need to defund him. Our hard-earned money should go instead to those elected officials who regard the 99 percent as their constituency, not the Kochs and Trumps.

Those who want deep change in America also need to support the media organizations that are speaking truth to power and fairly covering the new social movements. Fox News is not the only media mouthpiece that has declared war on OWS. As Salon contributor Gary Kamiya recently pointed out, the daily newspaper in liberal San Francisco, of all places, has also been pounding out a relentless drumbeat of criticism against the Occupy movement. The San Francisco Chronicle has called for the mayors of San Francisco and Oakland to unleash the police against protesters, and when they wisely did not comply, the newspaper’s editorial page prayed for rain to wash out the tenacious encampments in those cities. The Hearst-owned Chronicle has no appreciation for the way real democracy functions. Democracy in the streets can be rough and dirty sometimes. But at long last it’s real. The mainstream media prefers the smooth-oiled machine of corporate-funded bipartisanship. But the times demand rougher strife. The 99 percent are not in a position to fly their congressional representatives to lobbyist-funded junkets in the Bahamas, so we must rely on a scruffier form of free speech to get Washington’s attention.

And now for the shameless self-promotion. Instead of subscribing to newspapers like the Chronicle that are dedicated to snuffing out this exciting experiment in democracy, citizens who want real change should consider subscribing to media like Salon — which demonstrated where its heart was recently by hooking up the OWS site in San Francisco to the Internet. Or donating to web sites like AlterNet, which did the same for OWS in New York. Or contributing to nonprofit online dailies like the Bay Citizen, if you’re looking for a wide and balanced spectrum of OWS coverage in the San Francisco area.

As Salon staff writer Andrew Leonard observed, we are witnessing the birth of an alternative America, with our own new financing mechanisms. We must also find ways to support a thriving independent media, because the fight for a new America will not just be won in the streets or in legislative halls — it will happen in the media clouds, where the battle for hearts and minds clangs loudly every day.

You can make sure that the voices of real democracy are heard. If you appreciate the powerful commentary of Glenn Greenwald and the street reporting of Justin Elliott and the many other columnists, reporters and editors who work hard to bring you Salon each day, then put your money where your heart is. Please join Salon Core today.

Now, six years after leaving Salon, I’ve decided to return as CEO, because I think the country needs a fighting, independent media more than ever.

Americans are deeply worried and dispirited. Three years ago, as the country slid into a bottomless recession, we rallied around a presidential candidate who promised real change, only to see him fall captive to the same forces of greed and endless war that have brought us to ruin. The alternatives presented by the Republican Party would only accelerate this national decline. We’re faced on the one side by a well-meaning but ineffectual leader who has waited far too late in his presidency to rally the people around the powerful themes of jobs and economic justice — and on the other side by GOP leaders who are competing to see how quickly they can dismantle the last decent vestiges of public life in America.

We can no longer wait for the country’s corporate-dominated political system to solve our problems. All of us know friends and family members who are in dire straits; many of us are barely clinging on, struggling to pay the bills and raise our children, while trying to give them a sense of hope for the future. The richest get even richer, the rest of us get poorer. The gap between the powerful and the powerless in America grows wider than ever.

In these increasingly hard times, Salon is dedicating itself to an American revival. Our editorial mission will become more explicitly and aggressively populist. We will be publishing more investigative pieces, exposing the shadow dance of power. And both Democratic and Republican targets will be fair game, since both parties are increasingly under the control of the same corporate forces.

Americans are in desperate need of a true crusader for their interests — not a phony Tea Party. Salon will fight tooth and claw for the beleaguered majority, exposing the machinations of oligarchy with rigorously reported, deep journalism.

For just two examples of this renewed Salon commitment to essential, original journalism, please see Mark Hertsgaard’s “Hellfire!” — on Rick Perry’s faith-based reaction to the inferno that is sweeping his state – and Brad Friedman’s “The $10.50 Voting Machine Hack” – on the frightening security gaps that could corrupt our electoral process.

Salon’s coverage will not be all gloom and doom. We will cover the people who are rebuilding America from the ground up — taking over their local schools, creating community gardens and food barter networks, launching green start-ups.

We’re inspired by Robert Kennedy, who — after failing to convince President Johnson to end the war in Vietnam — came back to his Senate office in a mood of dark despair about the fate of America. “Oh, to hell with it,” RFK told his young staff, with a new fire in his voice. “Let’s start our own country.”

It’s time to start our own country.

Last week I visited the young people who were camped out near the New York Stock Exchange, in protest against Wall Street’s reign of greed. They told me they had little to look forward to in today’s America. No jobs, a crushing load of student debt, and a political system that seems completely rigged against people like themselves. But they had not given up hope. Inspired by the social upheavals in the Arab world and the protests in Europe against rapacious financial elites, these young Americans are calling for their own “American Spring.”

Salon wholeheartedly embraces this process of national renewal. In coming months, we plan to hold a series of American Spring public events in cities near you, to discuss the future of our country. Our goal is nothing less than changing the conversation in America, which is now stuck in endless replay mode between cautious Democrats and zealous Republicans. There is nothing for us in the droning presidential debates and pre-packaged political chatter on TV. Real life is elsewhere. By changing the channel, Salon hopes to finally begin moving the country forward.

We can’t do this without you. To accomplish our mission, we need you to join our revived membership program. We know that the Salon community is the core of our strength. That’s why we will soon be relaunching our membership program as Salon Core.

In coming days, we will announce a compelling package of benefits for our new Salon Core members — as well as our loyal Salon Premium members. You can show your support right now by signing up here to get more information about Salon Core as soon as it’s available.

With your support, Salon will expand its hard-hitting coverage. We will also introduce new creative dimensions like Salon Studio, featuring original video portraits of life in America that you can’t see anywhere else. And next week, Salon E-Books will publish its first offering, the hilarious “A Tea People’s History,” by our own Alex Pareene. By the end of the year, Salon will look and feel like a much more dynamic creature, with a new burst of enterprising journalism as well as an exciting schedule of video and music programs — all offered on the Web and on various mobile platforms.

I look forward to working with you in the weeks and months to come. I know that together we can make a difference.

“This country is in decline,” said Jack Laxson, an 18-year-old Hampshire College student who was carrying a sign that read, “Corporations Run This Country — Let’s Do Something About It.”

“Even with a good education, you don’t have much to look forward to. No jobs, lots of debt.”

Like many of the protestors, Laxson expressed strong disappointment with President Obama, but said the Republican presidential field was even more demoralizing. “They’re a social psych experiment,” he said.

Matt Rosen, a protestor standing next to Laxson, agreed. “Obama’s not on our side — he’s George W. Bush Part Two. And the only Republican candidate who speaks any sense is Ron Paul, and he doesn’t stand a chance because the media have blacked him out.”

Rosen, a 36-year-old swimming pool contractor from New Jersey, said the bad economy is killing his business. He spent the night in Zuccotti Park, sleeping on a swimming pool cover, because, “If people don’t get off the couch, nothing will get done.”

“We are mad as hell that the world is as fucked up as it is by corporations,” read a leaflet passed out by protesters. “The few who control wealth have bought off our democratically elected leadership.” But the mood of the crowd was genial and upbeat.

“Optimism — that’s what brought us down here,” said 40-year-old Dan Bryk, who was carrying his eight-month-old son, Henry, in a snuggly while holding a sign saying, “Oligarchy Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.”

“There’s a delightful naivete to this crowd,” added Bryk.

“Like everyone our age, we’re overeducated and unemployed,” said Patrick Bruner, a 23-year-old native of Tucson, Arizona who recently migrated to Brooklyn. Bruner said that he and his fellow protestors were prepared to hold the Wall Street square for a long time.

Nearby, volunteers made stacks of peanut butter sandwiches and distributed slices of pizza donated by people who visited the Occupy Wall Street web page. The demonstration had a spontaneous feeling, but underlying it was an extensive social media network. “This is more than just a feel-good rally,” said a young man who declined to give his name, as he made cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches. “We’re digging in for a long-term occupation.”

The first Camelot drama out of the chute is “The Kennedys,” the controversial miniseries that was canceled by the History Channel under pressure from Carolyn Kennedy and historians, who argued that the channel should at least make some effort to root the story in, well, history. This was a quaint argument, since the History Channel abandoned history long ago in favor of ice-road truckers, gator wrestlers and other reality sideshows. But the network owners were sufficiently embarrassed by the ruckus to dump the series. “The Kennedys” then took a long, downward trip through television’s alimentary canal, ending up in some dark cavity called the Reelz Channel. The six-episode series begins plopping out on Sunday.

“The Kennedys” is a hatchet job pure and simple. The saga is produced by Joel Surnow, which is sort of like Mel Gibson making “The Anne Frank Story.” Surnow is the right-wing, Dick Cheney fluff boy who brought us “24,” the show that told America not to adjust its dials, that the Constitution was now obsolete. The Camelot noir miniseries, which wallows in mobsters, mistresses and self-medication, is basically the Kennedys as Sopranos, minus the good writing and direction. The early reviews have not been kind, even in the normally charitable Hollywood trade press. “The whole thing,” Variety gagged, “plays like a bad telenovela filtered through a ‘History for Dummies’ text.”

All right, I admit, I’m a little bitter. I had a dog in this fight, a rival Hollywood project. I’m the author of a 2007 bestseller about the Kennedy brothers that tells the story of Robert Kennedy’s secret quest to solve JFK’s murder. My book, “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” focuses on the brothers’ heroic struggle with the national security state to ease America away from the nuclear brink and end the Cold War. I show that Bobby Kennedy became the country’s first conspiracy theorist after his brother’s assassination, immediately suspecting that the same CIA and Pentagon officials with whom they had bitterly dueled were behind JFK’s murder. Bobby realized that he couldn’t bring President Kennedy’s killers to justice unless he fought his way back to the White House. RFK’s presidential campaign in 1968 was not only a fight for the soul of America — a country poisoned by war and racial strife — it was a breathtakingly bold, and ultimately fatal, confrontation with his brother’s assassins.

This, to me, is the most dramatic story to tell about the Kennedys. They tried to save America, and they were killed by the Saurons who have kept our country in a permanent state of fear and war for the past half-century — virtually my entire life. It’s a grand epic, as old as ancient Rome, as beautiful and horrible as Shakespeare.

The executives at Lionsgate, one of the bigger independent studios in Hollywood, saw it the same way and they optioned my book for a TV miniseries in 2008. They treated “Brothers” as a hot property, the ultimate political thriller. Joining forces with a high-profile producer — Sid Ganis, then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — and an A-list TV writer, the studio began aggressively pitching “Brothers” to TV networks. Jon Hamm — the star of Lionsgate’s hit series “Mad Men” — was chatted up as the perfect JFK. No wardrobe changes necessary.

The traveling “Brothers” road show roamed all over the entertainment capital. Because of the industry names attached to the project, we got high-level meetings at HBO, Showtime, ABC and Starz, among other stations of the Hollywood cross. At one point, Todd Haynes was interested in directing, before peeling away to do “Mildred Pierce.”

There was buzz, there was excitement, there was love in the room. And then nothing. Chris Albrecht — the programming wizard who had made HBO not just television (“The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” etc.) and then resurfaced at Starz — talked about making “Brothers” the centerpiece of his first season at his new network home. Albrecht was all Roy Cohn, hooded-eye intensity, and fuck-’em-let’s-do-this swagger. And then, he had a sudden change of heart. The fearless TV mogul didn’t want to compete with the Joel Surnow miniseries, or at least that was the explanation. In Hollywood there are always murky back stories.

Yes, I know — “It’s Chinatown, Jake” — get over it. There are a million sad stories in Naked Hollywood. But something seemed rigged here, as one network after the next turned down “Brothers” — something political under the surface. Oliver Stone, whom I met somewhere along the way, told me in a matter-of-fact tone, “‘Brothers’ will never get made in this town.” Stone knew something about the subject. His “JFK,” released back in 1991, was the last movie to offer a deep and brave interpretation of the Kennedy tragedy. For his efforts, Stone was so savagely pilloried, he still hasn’t fully recovered his reputation or — it seems to me — his political self-confidence.

Apparently, Stone knew what he was talking about. Now, three years after Lionsgate bought the rights to “Brothers,” my book is an orphan in Hollywood, owned by nobody but me. Meanwhile, a slew of other Kennedy projects have rushed forward. A low point in my Hollywood tragicomedy came when the screenwriter of the widely reviled Surnow miniseries, a man named Stephen Kronish, tried to defend himself against the rising chorus of criticism by citing “Brothers” as one of his sources. This is the very definition of adding insult to injury.

Now, in addition to Surnow’s “The Kennedys,” Matt Damon is preparing to play Bobby in yet another bland biopic; Leonardo DiCaprio is working on a Kennedy conspiracy movie based on Lamar Waldron’s books — heavy tomes that propose such a convoluted explanation for the JFK assassination that they make “Inception” look linear in comparison; and, worst of all, Tom Hanks’ Playtone company is preparing an assassination miniseries for HBO based on celebrity prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s massive phone book, “Reclaiming History,” which took a whopping 1,648 pages to argue that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all by himself, and was still unconvincing.

For the past 50 years, every Kennedy drama except Oliver Stone’s has fallen into the same predictable categories. They are either safe — i.e., weepy valentines to the suffering, stoic family — or sleazy (see Surnow above). When filmmakers do screw up their courage to dig a little deeper, they invariably end up blaming the Mafia for killing Jack and changing American history. Yes, the mob played a role in Dallas. But the crime lords never participated in anything this epic without their overlords — the CIA, their longtime partners in crime.

Here’s my advice to the viewing public as the Kennedy mudslide begins. Run, and don’t look back. There is nothing you need in these movies and TV “events” to understand the true Kennedy story.

This is all you need to know. The Kennedys died for a reason. They died because they told America that our enemies were human, like us, and loved their children too. They died because they vowed to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces, and because they told the generals who wanted to launch a nuclear war over Cuba that they were mad. While Barack Obama outsources his presidency to Wall Street, the Pentagon and the CIA, John Kennedy tried to tell his fellow citizens that we must no longer dominate the world.

This is what you need to know. The Kennedys died for America’s sins.

AIP chairwoman Lynette Clark told me recently that Sarah Palin is her kind of gal. “She’s Alaskan to the bone … she sounds just like Joe Vogler.”

So who are these America-haters that the Palins are pallin’ around with?

Before his strange murder in 1993, party founder Vogler preached armed insurrection against the United States of America. Vogler, who always carried a Magnum with him, was fond of saying, “When the [federal] bureaucrats come after me, I suggest they wear red coats. They make better targets. In the federal government are the biggest liars in the United States, and I hate them with a passion. They think they own [Alaska]. There comes a time when people will choose to die with honor rather than live with dishonor. That time may be coming here. Our goal is ultimate independence by peaceful means under a minimal government fully responsive to the people. I hope we don’t have to take human life, but if they go on tramping on our property rights, look out, we’re ready to die.”

This quote is from “Coming Into the Country,” by John McPhee, who traipsed around Alaska’s remote gold mining country with Vogler for his 1991 book. The violent-tempered secessionist vowed to McPhee that if any federal official tried to stop him from polluting Alaska’s rivers with his earth-moving equipment, he would “run over him with a Cat and turn mosquitoes loose on him while he dies.”

Vogler wasn’t just a blowhard either. He put his secessionist ideas into action, working to build AIP membership to 20,000 — an impressive figure by Alaska standards — and to elect party member Walter Hickel as governor in 1990.

Vogler’s greatest moment of glory was to be his 1993 appearance before the United Nations to denounce United States “tyranny” before the entire world and to demand Alaska’s freedom. The Alaska secessionist had persuaded the government of Iran to sponsor his anti-American harangue.

That’s right … Iran. The Islamic dictatorship. The taker of American hostages. The rogue nation that McCain and Palin have excoriated Obama for suggesting we diplomatically engage. That Iran.

AIP leaders allege that Vogler, who was murdered that year by a fellow secessionist, was taken out by powerful forces in the U.S. before he could reach his U.N. platform. “The United States government would have been deeply embarrassed,” by Vogler’s U.N. speech, darkly suggests Clark. “And we can’t have that, can we?”

The Republican ticket is working hard this week to make Barack Obama’s tenuous connection to graying, ’60s revolutionary Bill Ayers a major campaign issue. But the Palins’ connection to anti-American extremism is much more central to their political biographies.

Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause? The Obama campaign would probably not have survived such an explosive revelation. Particularly if Barack Obama himself was videotaped giving the anti-American secessionists his wholehearted support just months ago.

Where’s the outrage, Sarah Palin has been asking this week, in her attacks on Obama’s fuzzy ties to Ayers? The question is more appropriate when applied to her own disturbing associations.