Image by Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr
with Abby Martin
teleSUR English on Jul 26, 2016
***
Abby Martin Discusses Her Arrest At The DNC
The Ring of Fire on Jul 26, 2016
The official line from the police is that “no one has been arrested” at the Democratic National Convention, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Protestors and journalists are being rounded up, handcuffed, booked, and cited all over the city of Philadelphia, and Empire Files host Abby Martin was one of the victims. We were lucky enough to speak with her about her experience.
see also:
teleSUR Host Abby Martin Released After Violent Arrest at DNC
from the archives:
Rev. Chris Hedges: We Do Not Live In A Functioning Democracy + Jill Stein’s Speech
Rev. Chris Hedges: Take Down This Discredited System! + Bernie Booed + Thousands Protesting at DNC
Hillary Clinton: A Threat to All Humanity
Cornel West: Hillary Clinton is a Militarist and a Neoliberal Disaster
Chris Hedges: Protesting the DNC
What Will Many Bernie Sanders Voters Do After July? by Ralph Nader
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These cops will get away with their criminality. That’s because they’re gatekeepers. And they are important gatekeepers, as are soldiers, army officers, judges and other ‘professionals’.
There are two types of gatekeepers, namely the self-appointed and the appointed. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. The goal/utility/function of gatekeepers is to serve as a wall between the abusive 1% and the deciders in society and the abused people. Gatekeepers, the opposite of principled whistleblowers, have the task of hindering those with the ‘wrong’ political views. That’s all. And that’s all that’s necessary. A self-appointed gatekeeper can be anyone at all, from a homeless alcoholic to a rich person with a mansion. All that’s required is their willingness to do what they believe they can get away with to make life miserable for those who they have decided have the ‘wrong’ political views. And for that reason, they enjoy a great deal of freedom, even to the extent that – as we’ve seen in the case of murderous police officers – they can get away with criminality that those who they dislike cannot. That hindering can be as mild as a discouraging frown from someone who hears, or has heard, your views or as extreme as murder.
Then there’s the appointed gatekeepers – judges, politicians, mainstream media figures, police chiefs, generals – who understand that they have their positions precisely because they are ready, willing and able to serve power, which in this dark world invariably means abusive power. The only capitalism happening now, as Chomsky and others will tell you, is neoliberal capitalism. At the heart of it is inequality, which hardly needs explaining. Who can’t understand deficit terrorism in which the politicians, in cahoots with the private sector, manufacture deficits that they blame on the people (and social spending that makes society civilized) and they use as an excuse to allow their friends in the private sector to steal publicly funded assets that we can no longer afford. Susan Clark of the Transnational Institute referred to that constant politician aided and abetted pilfering of public assets as perhaps the greatest threat in human history.
Those are high ‘real’ interest rates, which mean the ‘real’ return on investment. The real interest rate equals the interest rate minus the inflation rate, which is why capitalists (who own capital) like low inflation, although the methods to get low inflation do more harm to non financial business than the financial industry. Creditors do quite well. Debtors not so much. Hight real interest rates plus inflation hammer the debtors (who are not benifitted by this regime through savings, as some biz commentators suggest).
Anyway, Neoliberalism – complete freedom from social obligations and reasonable regulation – together with neoconservatism (which basically posits that darkness is light) has contributed to a robust corporatocracy in which we are all cogs. But as individuals, We can either go along in order to ‘possibly’ survive or we can resist, however much, because we don’t believe in inquality and dog eat dog. This dark world’s paradigm, or operation principle, is ‘riches for the strongest’. The problem with that, from the standpoint of those who have no self-modified themselves to reflect the image of this vicious wild beast of corporatocracy, is that with that game, there always has to be losers. Sadly, Many victims of neolib/neocon policies still try to win playing the 1%’s game, when what is needed is for all victims to recognize that that game is the problem.
The system, I believe, is too big and powerful for any individual or group to beat. That will take a higher power, which many, like Chomsky, don’t believe in, forcing such ones to look to other imperfect humans to save us. Then you get into pragmatic, as opposed to principled, politics. You get into lesser evilism. I’m not saying that those people are bad. But I am saying that they – and all of us in different ways – will one day be corrected, dramatically.
For a good introductory book on neoconservatism, See Shadia Drury’s “Leo Strauss And The American Right.”
My quote was from Tony Clarke’s “Silent Coup – Confronting The Big Business Takeover Of Canada.”
Thanks for your commentary, Arrby.
Crude, rude, murderously cruel, authoritarian, violent, psychotic, brash, deafening and vulgar. That’s the US of America the world witnesses now in unprecedented graphic detail.
Mind you, I’m not sure it wasn’t always like this; arguably, even worse.
It’s hard to say if it’s worse now or just that we know more when it happens and gets put up on Youtube, etc. This was police brutality and police-state mentality with the police not even calling these unconstitutional detentions arrests. I’m sorry this happened to Abby Martin, one of our favorite journalists. I liked her last statement saying that because of this horrible experience she won’t back down in the future. Good for her on having that attitude. She’s strong. I’m not in favor of suing usually, but I do think she has a just case for unlawful detention and physical abuse.
I also understand her outrage at being forcefully detained all the while she was doing as another policeman directed as it happened to me several years ago.
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