A great interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, which essentially, supports what I have been saying, in my blogs here, for a while, now, that real democracy does not exist in the world. Everyone likes to talk about it but the general public does not know what real democracy is or how or what should it be? Should it be like what happens in the Western countries; America, Canada, UK, Australia etc.?
Problem is that the general public falsely thinks that as long as the elections are free & fair (that's an assumption in itself), & as long as the general public is getting out to vote & elect the person that they think is the right person to lead them and their country on the international stage, then it must be democracy. That's NOT Democracy.
Democracy is when makes every decision, or at least, major decisions, with the approval of the general public. After all, the general public is the real guardian of the country. It is akin to shareholders being the real owners of public corporation, & the directors of the company calling emergency meetings or the shareholders to vote on the major issues that company is facing. For instance, a country like, America, would've chosen to ask the citizens about invading their privacy before actually doing it, but as we all know, that's not how that issue played out in real life.
As Larry Wilkerson & Paul Jay discussed in the interview, that the democracy has become a charade in North America & other countries as well. The people in politics are all one & the same. Their political issues do not differ too much from each other. Only the faces change every few years but the major issues of the country never change or get resolved. This in turn has turned off the general public from taking part in electing their leaders, & only less than half of the general population actually votes.
Media, of course, has dumbed down the general public even further. It has played its hand in destroying the democracy very beautifully & to its full advantage. However, I will blame the public, here. Media is a business & will always provide what is in demand, & stupidity is in high demand. Public does not want to see or hear anything which would make them think critically. Of course, that just makes the corrupt politicians of the world do whatever they want to do. Hence, the drama of democracy keeps playing out where the victims don't know that they are the victims, the powerful keeps becoming powerful, & everyone thinks they they are living in a democratic country.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... I think American electoral politics and much electoral politics in many countries is much like that. It's mostly theater. There's a war of rhetoric, a war of election campaign ads, and the media treats the theater as if it's real. And it's not just the campaigning. It's while Congress and others are governing. The reality of power, the real interest beneath the politics, is rarely revealed in the media, and the media loves the partisan theater. Why? Because they make money out of it. 80% of campaign donations apparently are going to buy television ads, so it's not in television's interest to pierce the veil of this theater.
... it's very much the same thing in politics. It's got nothing to do [with] whether you know anything or not about the issues. Can you make the crowd pop? Can you make people vote for you?
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I think your metaphor, Paul, is absolutely spot on. It is theater. The real manipulation of power, the real abuse of power, the real use of power takes place behind this charade that is the--you might call it the charade of democracy. That's essentially what we've made it. Elections, of course, are the least important aspect of democracy. The institutions, the culture, the society, the people, they're the important aspects of democracy. But elections are something that we hype all the time, whether it's in this country or other countries. We send observers and so forth. But I agree with that overall metaphor, that it's mostly theater. And in this country, we do Shakespearean theater, if you will, because it's true theater in this country.
JAY: So, while what's being said in the campaigns are mostly just messaging and trying to come up with little catchy phrases and pick some wedge issue that will get people excited, I mean, very little to do with public policy and what real solutions are, that being said, it's not that it's theater without consequences. It does have some consequence who happens to win. So let's get a bit into that. I mean, assuming the Republicans do take the Senate--and as we do the interview, it looks like they're going to--does it matter?
WILKERSON: It's a part of our system. ...
JAY: If you go back to when President Obama was elected and the real disgrace of the Bush-Cheney administration in every level, from foreign policy to economics, I mean, foreign policy leaving a complete disaster of the Iraq War, and on economics, certainly playing a big part in the crash of '07 and '08--of course, Bill Clinton helped contribute to that, but it was a total runaway train in terms of what elites in banking and so on could get away with with Bush-Cheney. Does it somewhat shock you, if you put your mind back then, that we're in a place where the Republicans could actually control both houses?
WILKERSON: It does, because, as Gore Vidal said very eloquently at one point in his life, we're the United States of amnesia. We don't have any memory. We don't have any retrospective look. Very few of us do, anyway. Most people do what they do, whether it's vote or go to work or whatever, based on a very immediate, local set of circumstances. And going back to--.
JAY: But a lot of that has to do with the media. The media has to have a lot to do with that.
WILKERSON: Well, a lot of it does have to do with the media. It does have to do with the media. And when you have a media that is captured, basically, by the corporate interests in this country, then that media is not going to tell you much except that which keeps you in your somnolent state. And that's really what our media does. It keeps us in an apathetic, somnolent state. The media has no interest in sparking real issues, in debating those issues, in discussing those issues, in parsing those issues so that you can see the meat and the blood and the bones of those issues. They don't want to do that. My god, that might excite someone to actually become smart.
JAY: Yeah. It's also like you take, like, the NBA or any of the professional sports leagues, where they do what they can to kind of even out the teams, because if the teams aren't competitive, who wants to go pay money to go see basketball or football? I mean, the media has the same interest. If they don't keep the Republicans and Democrats competitive, then who needs to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertising? So it's in their interest to rehabilitate a party and not let it collapse completely.
WILKERSON: Absolutely. You just put your finger on the heart of things, too. One of my students asked me the other day: do you really think there's that much difference in foreign-policy formulation between the Republicans and the Democrats? And, of course, my answer was no, there's not. There's hardly any distance between them. Oh, you can pick an issue here and an issue there ... but you're not going to find that big a divergence between either party. And I would even submit you're not going to find that big a divergence with regard to what corporate interests dictate those politicians do between either party either. You're going to find that there's just as much responsibility, as you just pointed out, for the current economic problems in this country belonging to the Democrats ... who engineered the disassembling of FDR's protections during the Great Depression and afterwards, as there is amongst the Republicans, who were so explicit, if you will, in the way they fought war at the same time they didn't raise any taxes and things like that. But they're both complicit in the same kind of maneuvers, in the same kind of abuse of power for their own interest, for their very parochial, narrow individual interest, and for the larger and grander interests of the corporate interests whom they represent--big pharmacy, big food, big energy, and so forth.
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