Interview with Abby Martin of Media Roots on Left/Right Paradigm by Media Roots
MEDIA ROOTS- Doug Mckenty from KZYX’s Thursday Morning Report conducts an hour interview with Bay Area artist and community activist Abby Martin of Media Roots, where she reports from “outside party lines”. They discuss the false left/right paradigm, the electability of non establishment candidates, the renaissance of citizen journalism, censorship in the corporate press and 9/11.
MEDIA ROOTS- Michelle Bachmann’s catapult to fame eerily resembles Sarah Palin’s rise to the top during the 2008 election circus. Both Bachmann and Palin are media made sensations whose extreme antics and shocking ignorance of basic civics have only garnered them more attention. One can’t help but wonder if the popularity of such inept candidates has been in part manufactured by the establishment to provide insurance for another Obama victory.
On a panel discussing Michelle Bachmann’s potential presidential run, Chris Matthews strangely admitted that Bachmann was “created here“– in reference to his MSNBC show Hardball. Was he insinuating that he was partly responsible for Bachmann’s recognition and success?
In 2008, Matthews excoriated Bachmann for her suggestion to catalog and investigate ‘dissenters’ in the House of Representatives, then proceeded to give her a platform to speak at length on his show. Bachmann’s empty rhetoric equating liberalism with anti-Americanism became a viral hit online.
Michelle Bachmann on Hardball with Chris Matthews
Later on Real Time with Bill Maher, Matthews repeats himself, adding gleefully that “Bachmann’s going to win the nomination.” Maybe Matthews is smiling because he is hoping for his Frankenstein-esque creation to fall on her own sword, creating an easy victory for Obama. Tricks or so called ‘dirty’ ones have always been a part of the election cycle. Matthews is an influential partisan talking head, who is experienced enough in the media world to know exactly what he’s doing.
In a recent Media Roots Interview, Cindy Sheehan said that Sarah Palin was picked as Mccain’s VP as “insurance” for an Obama victory. Whether or not that’s true, it’s undeniable that a large amount of Americans voted for Obama in 2008 solely because of how terrifying the prospect of a Mccain/Palin presidency was.
It’s a sad state of democracy when people are fear-mongered into voting against their own interests. As long as the media continues to prop up such extremist GOP candidates, people who identify themselves as liberal, green and libertarian will continue to knee jerkily vote for bought-and-paid for establishment candidates that will proceed the policies that have bankrupted and demoralized this nation.
Written by Abby Martin & Robbie Martin
Photo by flickr user Scott Spiegael
MEDIA ROOTS- Abby Martin from Media Roots co-hosts Project Censored’s special three and a half hour KPFA program “Costs of War.” At the beginning of each hour, there is an MR report on the economic, human and environmental costs of US wars in the Middle East. During the program multiple, multiple experts in different fields of study are interviewed on the show about their research for the extensive Brown University study Costs of War. The show focuses on on the socio-economic impacts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and related subjects from scholars worldwide. Listen to the show here or below.
Interview Schedule:
12:00-12:20 Catherine Lutz, Professor Anthro, Brown University, Project Director, Solders and Contractors: Recommendations and Neta Crawford, Professor Political Science at Brown University, Cost of War Project Director,
12:30-12:50 Norah Niland: Former Director Human Rights: United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Afghanistan, social change and women, and Matthew Evangelista, Professor of History and Political Science, Cornell University, Alternatives to War
1:00-1:20 Winslow Wheeler, of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information Washington DC. Department of Defense Budget, Military Cost of War
1:30-1:50 Dahr Jamail, Human Costs of War, Refugees, Life on the Ground and resistance in the military, Author: “The Will to Resist,”
2:00-2:20 John Tirman, MIT, Author of “The Deaths of Others” The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars, Topic: Civilian Civilan Deaths In War—
2:30-2:50 Linda Bilmes, Professor Public Policy Harvard Kennedy School, Topic: Costs of Veteran Care
3:00-3:20 John Pilger, Journalist and Film Producer, covering his new documentary, “The War We Don’t See”
Catherine Lutz, Director of Costs of War: Catherine Lutz on Why We Can’t Turn the Page on America’s Wars {Costs of War} from Watson Institute on Vimeo.
Visit www.CostsOfWar.org for more information
Abby Martin of Media Roots is featured in this RT article and video report.
RUSSIA TODAY– As the scandal over voicemail and phone-hacking by the Murdoch media empire rages, public and political fury has focused on ruthless tabloids out of control. But some say in this day and age, the whole concept of privacy is falling apart.
News International chairman James Murdoch has been accused of trying
to mislead British MPs by saying he was unaware of the true extent of
phone-hacking by reporters. His testimony was challenged by two former
executives, Colin Myler and Tom Crone, who say Murdoch was informed
three years ago that the illegal practice went beyond just one rogue
journalist.
And as the scandal continues to grow, critics believe
the issue is just the tip of the iceberg in a society that no longer
values the privacy of the people.
“Everybody just clicks
through, agreeing to the terms and conditions. Well those terms and
conditions are very, very heavily weighted against you and your privacy
interest,” says Dave Saldana, the communications director of Free Press.
“We
see breaches of privacy by corporations happening all across America,
all across the world really, in every sector. Surveillance is rampant.
But really this is all a microcosm of the biggest surveillor of all –
that is, the state,” journalist Abby Martin believes.
There
is little Americans can do with the state having sweeping access to
their private information – access that followed the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, under a new law known as the Patriot Act.
The privacy of
Hasan Elahi, who is an associate professor at the University of
Maryland, was taken away from him in 2002, when he was detained by the
FBI for absolutely no reason he says, and scrutinized for months,
without charge.
His response? For nine years he has voluntarily
documented nearly every waking hour of his life on the web. He has
subsequently even turned it into an art-form.
“These are all the toilets that I’ve used. You know that on Sunday, November, 24, 2007 I used this toilet, for example,” he explained pointing at a wall of pictures on his website.
He
posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he
bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his
real-time physical location on a map.
Hasan says his extraordinary abandonment of his own privacy stems from the ignorance of the authorities.
“In
fear they decided: ‘well that guy looks like an Arab, so he must be an
Arab. If he’s an Arab them he must have explosives, everyone knows
that.’ That’s the logic where we’re operating. You realize how
ridiculous that logic sounds. But when your own country takes that as
the basis for national policy… Ignorance as the basis of your national
policy is a pretty scary situation. And that’s how I got caught up in
it,” he told RT.
For Hasan, privacy has become a relic of
the past, and he says he’s not surprised that journalists or anyone else
really, would use the same surveillance tactics as the state.
In
that sense, it might be of no surprise that the chief architect of the
Patriot act, the lawyer who put it together, happens to be one of
Murdoch’s hand-picked News Corp board directors. Viet Dinh served as
assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, and was described
by some as the purveyor of the most sweeping curtailment of freedom in
the US since the McCarthy era.
At a time when corporations and
the government can easily hack into people’s private lives, it does not
come as a surprise when social networks give your personal information
to ad companies, or when other industries live off breaching people’s
privacy.
In the US it is so widespread, and people have gotten so
used to it, that Rupert Murdoch seems to be a perfect part of the
system rather than some special villain, whose corporation has been
undertaking some unique unlawful practices.
Because in America they are not so unique.
© 2011 RT
KPFA– Abby Martin co-hosts this edition of Project Censored radio with Peter Phillips for KPFA’s nationally syndicated show. This episode covers updates in the peace community, the Bohemian Grove’s exclusion of women, and whistleblowers who have put everything on the line.
Listen to Media Roots’s in depth update on US wars and empire at 8:00 or read the transcription below:
***
This is Abby Martin from Media Roots, reporting war and empire news & analysis for Project Censored.
A recent report from Global Research revealed that prisoners are making 23 cents an hour to manufacture weapons components for high tech missile systems for the US defense industry. The use of prison slave labor to increase profits for huge corporations, such as BP did in their clean-up efforts, is unfair to workers and is an egregious expansion of the corporate state.
In an article called The Military Industrial Complex: The Enemy from Within, John Whitehead writes:
“Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors and corrupt politicians, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe…In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.”
In his June 22nd speech, Obama cited the official cost of the Afghanistan & Iraq wars at 1 trillion dollars, but according to economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the US has spent well over $3 trillion dollars on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq– and that assessment is three years old.
The Iraq war is still going strong, even though we don’t hear about it much through the corporate press. June marked the deadliest month for the US military in the region since 2009. And still, the corporate media touts the official death toll for Iraqi civilians at approximately 100,000, despite a comprehensive 2008 survey from Opinion Research Business that placed the number of dead Iraqis well over one million. Again, this toll is from 2008 and does not account for the last three years of combat.
In an article written for The Nation, Jeremy Scahill reports:
“Under the terms of the Status of Forces agreement, all US forces are supposed to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Using private forces is a backdoor way of continuing a substantial US presence under the cover of “diplomatic security.” The kind of paramilitary force that Obama and Clinton are trying to build in Iraq is, in large part, a byproduct of the monstrous colonial fortress the United States calls its embassy in Baghdad and other facilities the US will maintain throughout Iraq after the “withdrawal.”
For Rebel Reports, Jeremy Scahill writes:
“According to recent Pentagon statistics, w/ Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan. Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the total military force, meaning there are a whopping 242,657 contractors left in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
About 46,000 US troops remain in Iraq, and there are negotiations to keep at least 10,000 troops there past the December 31st deadline. In protest to this inevitable expansion of the US occupation, 100 Iraqi lawmakers recently signed a document calling on the Iraqi government to demand departure of U.S. troops from the country as scheduled by the end of 2011 according to the Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
Earlier this year, the cost of the Afghanistan war started to outpace that of Iraq by ten billion dollars a month- 6.7 billion compared to Iraq’s 5.5 billion. Even though the rhetoric coming from the White House suggests that the Afghanistan war is getting scaled down- with reductions being carried out as planned- the amount of troops remaining in the country will actually still be more than there were before Obama’s 2009 military surge in the country and more than any time during Bush’s presidency.
On another front, the America’s secret war in Pakistan has drastically escalated under the Obama administration. Every month more innocent civilians are killed by drones, and there are US troops stationed in Pakistan performing covert CIA operations against alleged militants. On May 22, Seven thousand people in Karachi Pakistan protested America’s use of unmanned drones and demanded an immediate end to the missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Activists from the Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) participated in a two-day sit-in pleading the government to end its cooperation with America’s “war on terror.”
We are now coming up on the fourth month anniversary of the US-NATO’s bombing campaign in Libya, which costs US taxpayers approximately $40 million every month. Every missile being dropped costs one million dollars alone! The US is paying more than 75% of the defense budget for the 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Libya and by September the official cost of the Libyan invasion will total a whopping $844 million.
There are still covert wars and unmanned drone attacks happening in Yemen and Somalia too, which the empire rationalizes as mere police actions instead of aggressive acts of war. With all the talk about the federal deficit and the need to cut back on social programs and spending in this country, there is little discussed about cutting the Pentagon’s ever expanding annual military budget, which has more than doubled in the last decade. In 1995, when defense spending was a fraction of what it is now, a poll done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that a majority of Americans were “convinced that defense spending has weakened the US economy.”
Before any more bombs are dropped in our name, we must voice our opposition to end these unconstitutional wars. The American taxpayers’ hard earned money needs to be applied here at home and not to the expansion of the military industrial complex– it’s the only way this country can be saved.
This is Abby Martin from Media Roots reporting for Project Censored News & Analysis
