MEDIA ROOTS — The 2012 GOP primary debates have given people many things to make fun of—and worry about. Bill Maher, along with other comics, has poked fun at GOP candidates’ risky remarks regarding foreign policy. Abby Martin, of Media Roots, joins RT in their DC studio to discuss what this means for the U.S. people.
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Abby Martin is interviewed live in DC on RT TV
AM-
Great job in this interview, super focused and dialed in all with a smile that could launch a thousand ships. I am hooked…do you have a fan club or an Abby Martin action figure yet? Just kidding….Carry On!
Excellent to see a bit of reality based overview brought to bear on the wider media landscape. Kudos Abby.
I say “a bit”, because I look forward to the day when you take the gloves off. You are uniquely qualified to deliver a stronger brew of fact based assessment for viewers wake-up tonic. Or for those not still slumbering, a double shot of espresso for our awareness.
Know that I appreciate your position of wanting to find an effective position between mainstream acceptable and truthfully and appropriately (given our situation) radical, in defense of Liberty, Integrity and the survival of Freedom.
I applaud you; While encouraging you to not shy away from a more forthright assessment of these Crime Syndicate front men and their straight-up lies and deceit. IMHO, the very nature of the Covert Agenda they truly represent, along with the “Noble Lies & Strategic Deceptions” they employ routinely, are in dire need of being boldly exposed and thereby disabled. Sort of “The Truth, The WHOLE Truth, and Nothing But The Truth.” type of idea.
You have the ability, the platform, and the heart of gold to take it to the next level should you choose to. Regardless, you are a National Treasure and a blessing to our world. THANK YOU ABBY!
Cheers,
Stewart Howe
WHITE ROSE RESISTANCE.org
Great that you are on RT. Super.
You ponder here the question of how these horrible personalities such as Sarah Palin rise to such prominence, and it makes me reflect on how so much of this kind of propaganda has long been in use. Which seems to be suggested, to my ear, in the tone of your voice and the phrasing of your ideas.
These notions and techniques of propaganda have been around a very long time, amplifying ever more so as technologies (the technopolies) advance. So, the question then is not whether these propaganda techniques (of politicians as charismatic personalities, etc) are happening, but to what extent.
Chomsky, in his talk turned into a book called Media Control, sums it up this way:
“The role of the media in contemporary politics forces us to ask what kind of a world and what kind of a society we want to live in, and in particular in what sense of democracy do we want this to be a democratic society? Let me begin by counter-posing two different conceptions of democracy. One conception of democracy has it that a democratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free. If you look up democracy in the dictionary you’ll get a definition something like that. An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred from managing of their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled. That may sound like an odd conception of democracy, but it’s important to understand that it is the prevailing conception. In fact, it has long been, not just in operation, but even in theory. There’s a long history that goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolutions in seventeenth century England which largely expresses this point of view. I’m just going to keep to the modern period and say a few words about how that notion of democracy develops and why and how the problem of media and disinformation enters within that context.”
So…
< << Obama won Ad Age's "Marketer of the Year" award >>>
< << Village Voice reveals the fact that "Bush Ain't No Cowboy" >>>
…doesn’t it seem clear that it’s really all about FEIGNING concern and connection to the pubic, while in all actuality it’s patronizing the public on a grand scale?
Perhaps it’s The Power Elite that C. Wright Mills wrote so eloquently about (that Fraction Of The 1% Class; the “plutonomy” written about in Citigroup’s pathological memo) who, in Edward Bernays-ian style, have become so facile at political propagandizing that we are indeed in Kafka’s “Before The Law” scenario, unable to see the forest for the plastic trees and twinkling lights? Dazzled in the Empire of Illusion?
Or, as Arthur Jensen says in Network: “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do…”
We The People do indeed, at least on a good number of subconscious levels, feel there is cause to be mad as hell and to not take it any more. At a gut level we know we just can’t take it any more because industrial civilization is killing the planet.
“The apocalypse has already happened but the endgame is just beginning,” Adbusters writes. “A fight between the old world and the new.”
Old –> Hierarchical Competitive Capitalism and Waste
New –> Rhizomatic Cooperative Democracy and Sustainability
Is that how you would view it?
Keep on culture jammin it, Abby!
= )
Peter
(happypedro)
Great interview.