If you are a regular reader of my blog posts, then you will know how I love to talk about how people around the world has a false notion of democracy & think that voting is democracy. Here, in the first part of this interview, the investigative reporter, Mr. David Johnston, talks about how instead of "one-man, one-vote" concept of a true democracy, the whole governmental system is rigged in such a way that the concept of democracy actually becomes "more wealth, more votes."
The naive, or perhaps, ignorant, public thinks that their vote matters. Before every election, the public is cajoled by the media to get out & vote because "your vote matters." Heck, I also vote in every federal & provincial elections in Canada, but I also keep in mind that my vote won't have much of an effect on the final outcome because the system has already decided who will be the next "puppet" or public "face" of the government. Most importantly, the policies of the government never change, or at least, not materially enough, to help make life any better for the poor & stricken public. The rich keep getting richer regardless of who comes in the powerhouse.
Another interesting thing to think, coming out from the interview, is how our education system churns out people who cannot think critically about their surroundings. They only care about their next paycheque. They don't care, or perhaps, trained to think about their own lives only. They are put into such a financial position that they are running from one errand to next, without ever having enough time to sit down calmly & think critically about their situation & the world around them. That's what the governments around the world want their citizenry to be & do; be a compliant little worker, who works like a machine, devoid of any critical thoughts.
One other thing Mr. Johnston briefly touched upon is that the people around the world equate wealth with virtue. Somehow, we still think that if someone is wealthy, then they must be pious & virtuous. Even most Muslims around the world incorrectly assume that if their fellow Muslim is wealthy, then he/she must be a pious person. Why? How so? Most wealthy people nowadays become wealthy by wrong means; be it morally wrong or legally wrong. They try to influence the economic & political policies of the government in their favour. They think that their wealth let them wield more power & votes over the government & the poor masses. Although, those poor masses are the ones who made them that wealth. Consequently, the poor masses stay poor, wealthy keep politicians in their pockets, & the political establishment keeps a facade of democracy on the actual face of oligarchy.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: What does that do to your vision of America?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER: Well, it's very troubling, largely because it's not seen by most people and it's not held to any kind of account. And one of the flaws in our notion that we live in a democracy is that a very narrow group of people select who we get to vote for. Someone like Dennis Kucinich might have a lot of popular appeal, but he will never be a serious candidate for president, because those people who have a lot of money in this country are going to use the system to make sure he isn't there.
JAY: And the media.
JOHNSTON: That's right. President Obama--look at how closely he's identified with Wall Street. I chuckle every time somebody says he hates white people. Almost everybody on the staff is white in the White House--overwhelmingly white. He's an enemy of Wall Street. Really? Really? Zero prosecutions of the big bankers for what are well-documented frauds, including by the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission, whose report Congress paid for and then threw in the round file 'cause they didn't want to look at it?
JAY: Yeah, African Americans may have voted for him, but he is the Wall Street candidate.
JOHNSTON: He absolutely is. And everybody who gets to run is the Wall Street candidate.
And so the fundamental problem we have is, look, most people want to live their lives, and if they can have a reasonably decent place to live and a car that'll start in the morning and a job with a reliable income and they can have a dog if they want one, they're pretty much happy. Part of that is because our education system is designed to make sure that we produce nice, compliant factory and office workers. You can have a better conversation about politics, sociology, wealth, culture with the average waiter in rural Ontario or rural Hungary or rural France than with the average MBA in a suit sitting in the first-class section of an American airplane. Trust me, I've tested this. Alright? And so we live in a society where we just put blinders on to these things we don't want to see.
I mean, think for a moment about this use of drones to take out people who I have no doubt are serious enemies of the United States, but which also have taken out wedding parties and children. Just imagine (and this, I think, can happen with the technology): somebody puts a drone up and they want to take out me because I'm seen as a horrible person, and in the process they take out a whole bunch of children who happen to be standing nearby. Do you think that we would react to that by saying, oh, well, that's just casualty of war? So we aren't thinking very carefully and deeply about the long run.
And, Paul, the biggest observation that all this has made me come to is if you look at our policies in America today, whether they're economic policies, political or diplomatic policies, if you believe, as James Watt, Ronald Reagan's interior secretary, said, that we'd better use up all the resources quickly, because Jesus is coming back and he'll be really ticked off, all of our policies make sense. But if you believe human beings are going to be here for way beyond any period of time they've already been here, our policies don't make any sense at all. We need to be thinking about the fact that we're just stewards for the time that we're here, and we should be thinking about the great-great-great-great grandchildren none of us alive today will ever see.
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JOHNSTON: And we also have this ideology that if you're wealthy, somehow that's virtuous.
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JOHNSTON: ... So within this sphere there are fractious elements, different elements, people who have different and contending interests, people who have no interest in this but care a lot about that.
But nonetheless, yes, there is a power elite, as C. Wright Mills called it. It operates on its own interests and behalf. And it certainly doesn't like people like journalists.
So what do you see has been going on now since the beginning of the age of Reagan? Bumper stickers: "I don't trust liberal media". Really? You're going to trust Fox News, where I can document to you beyond question they just make things up, and they don't correct when they're wrong, and they knowingly mislead? I mean, I've made mistakes. Journalists make mistakes. When journalist make mistakes, we not only run corrections, but the Jayson Blair episode at The New York Times, where this sociopath got loose in the newsroom, 90 percent of what he did was inconsequential stuff, didn't cause any damage--lying, but inconsequential--Times ran a 14,000 word Sunday front page self-exposé. When The Philadelphia Inquirer found out its star political reporter was the mistress of the Democratic political boss of South Philly, they ran--I think it was 32,000 words exposing how they had missed this and not seen it. You ever seen that on Fox News? And yet they tell lies all the time.
And so you understand that an important element of the wealthiest class in America maintaining its position is making sure that most Americans do not think critically about these things, that we have two-income families who are having trouble getting by, so that they are devoted entirely to trying to hold their family together and they don't have the ability to be involved in political activities, to then make it hard to vote, to reduce the number of voting machines, to challenge people's right to vote, to make these robo calls, if you go to the polls and you don't have your ID, you'll be arrested sort of stuff that is nonsense, but people who don't know better are afraid. And it's very, very troubling. And, by the way, many of the very, very wealthy people that I know in this country--and I know lots of them--they are as troubled as you and I are about this. They're just not going to assault it frontally.
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