Jimmy Dore and Abby Martin Discuss Whether Rachel Maddow Is A Danger to Journalism: Part 1

It’s isn’t just Rachel Maddow. They go on to talk about how the whole of the American mainstream media, including MSNBC, has been corrupted by corporate power, and now reflects nothing but establishment propaganda. Just like the corporatist, Clintonite wing of the Democrats. They also talk about the terror Black and Latino neighbourhoods are living in, thanks to Trump, ICE and the anti-immigrant rhetoric. They conclude by discussing how whole neighbourhoods in Houston and elsewhere in Texas have been gutted by Hurricane Harvey, but aren’t receiving any help, because they’re working class areas and only the business and affluent centres are prioritised. And the immense environmental damage that has been caused by Big Oil, but which goes unchallenged and undocumented, because Big Oil owns everything in those areas, right down to schools and hospitals.

Abby Martin is the courageous and fiercely intelligent host of The Empire Files on TeleSur English and previously, RT. This series unflinchingly exposes what the American military-industrial complex is doing across the world through coups, ‘regime change’ and foreign wars and military interventions. Including the real situation in Israel, where the Israelis have subjected the indigenous Palestinians to nearly 70 years of massacres, brutality and ethnic cleansing.

She also shows how ordinary Americans are being exploited at home, as big business seeks to strip them of welfare, workers’ rights and shift the tax burden on to them, while further destroying any affordable healthcare provision and privatising the public schools. She was so much a threat to the American establishment, that half the report concocted to show that RT was just a propaganda operation being used by Putin to destabilise America was about Martin personally.

I’ve already put up a three-part blog post about a previous 30-minute long segment from the Jimmy Dore Show, in which he and Martin discuss her work and the crimes of American imperialism. I think this segment may have been part of the same interview, but the two have been edited and split into separate parts.

The two begin by discussing how MSNBC, the formerly liberal network, is now just the mirror image of the right-wing Fox Network. Martin is particularly unimpressed by the way MSNBC tried to discredit Bill Binney by calling him a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Bill Binney was the NSA official, who constructed the ‘Thin Spread’ mass surveillance software keeping tabs on people’s electronic information and communications. He’s been praised by Edward Snowden, one of the other whistleblowers on the use of mass surveillance software by the intelligence agencies. They then talk about the lies and propaganda about RT, and how the government is trying to shut it down by having it register as a foreign agent. Martin states that MSNBC is now just the other arm of Fox News, but just parrots Democrat propaganda.

As for Rachel Maddow, one of the lead presenters on MSNBC, and a staunch supporter of Killary and the corporatist Democrats, Martin states that she’s a careerist hack. However, she and the other hacks with her realised that they have to double down and try to explain away why Killary lost to Trump. But they’re so trapped in the elitist bubble, that they have absolutely no idea. One of the reasons Clinton lost was because she didn’t bother going to certain states, like Wisconsin. Martin and Dore joke about whether it was Putin, who stopped her going there. Did he steal her map, hack into her computer and wipe the entry for it?

They then move on to the question of the future of journalism. Martin states that journalism has always been antithetical to business, this is why it’s been corrupted by government and folded into big business conglomerates through mergers. It’s why Martin herself joined RT. She talks about how it was a long time before she realised how compromised journalism actually was, however. She talks about how she went on tour with John Kerry. But journalism hasn’t just been corrupted by the Democrats, nor the Republicans. She states that the future of journalism lies with us, referring to alternative media and the power of the internet. She states that now we don’t need to get a press handout from Monsanto to talk about what they’re doing, or get a statement from the government: they can just talk to the government’s victims.

She then goes on to talk about ‘fake news’, and how this is being hijacked by the establishment to close down alternative media. Bill Kristol, one of the founders of the Neocons and the head of the Project for the New American Century, has said that he’s going to set up a thinktank to combat ‘fake news’. She and Dore also talk about how the alternative media are being forced to brand themselves to survive, so they have to set up Patreon accounts so people can fund them. But she has a lot of hope for citizen journalism. There is just a need to invest in it, and to follow those journalists we admire. We have to create our own networks. The Intercept, which has done some good work, was forced to rely on a billionaire, and now they have to go begging for money.

Martin then turns to Project Censored, which she praises as a very good, worthwhile alternative to mainstream journalist training. She advises aspiring journos not to go to journalism school, as they will just get into debt up to their behinds, and will be hit over the head with how to be journalists. Only to get a job as an unpaid intern at the end of it. Project Censored, on the other hand, takes in anyone, and you can go in at different levels – as a researcher, or writer, for example. Every year they published the five most censored stories. One of these is that there are 3,000 towns in America, whose water has a higher lead content than that of Flint in Michigan. She and Dore then discuss the alternative, drinking bottled water. Martin refuses to drink most of these brands, because they’re all owned by Nestle. Nestle owns the majority of water bottling plants. They just suck out the aquifers of local towns, which get nothing in return, except for a councillor, who’s on their payroll. And this is apart from the slave labour involved in their chocolate. She states that there is now only one party, and that she has always advised against voting for the lesser of two evils.

Continued in Part 2.

Jimmy Dore and Abby Martin Discuss Whether Rachel Maddow Is A Danger to Journalism: Part 2

This is the second part of my article about the segment from the Jimmy Dore Show in which the comedian talks to Abby Martin, the uncompromising investigative reporter and presenter of The Empire Files, now on TeleSur English, but formerly on RT.

Dore and Martin talk about the accusations of misogyny that were thrown against anyone who dared not to vote for Killary. Martin jokes that she didn’t, and has been denounced as ‘treacherous’ because of this. She then describes how the Clinton camp tried to explain away the masses of women, who didn’t vote for Killary. Oh, they didn’t vote for her, because their boyfriends told them not to. She makes it clear that this explain also denigrates women because it denies them their own agency.

Martin and Dore talk about how someone can be right about the issues, but wrong on strategy. Bernie Sanders is one of these. He’s right politically, but wrong in continuing to support the Democrats. Martin points out that this happened a few years ago to Michael Moore with Ralph Nader, who ran as a third party candidate in a presidential election. Moore was originally a staunch supporter of Nader, attacking the corrupt Democrat establishment. Now he’s part of that establishment, and has been on his knees pleading with Nader not to run.

Martin then talks about the fear running through Black and Latino communities. Martin states that she doesn’t know about all of it, because she belongs to a more privileged group. But she has Mexican friends, who are now in hiding. Black people are being assaulted. She describes this as a mass psychosis. Undocumented immigrants are afraid of ICE and being deported. She states that this anti-immigrant hysteria has happened before, but it’s been ramped up by Trump. She doesn’t really believe very much in the view that the Deep State is deeply opposed to Trump. She just thinks that they hate him because he reveals the true reasons for the wars now being fought. As when he blandly stated that we should take their oil from those nations America is fighting. But she states that some wars are planned, and believes that if Gore had won, then Saddam Hussein would still have been overthrown. It’s questionable whether this would have been through a war, however.

She also goes on to make the point that many wars aren’t planned, and the current situation is very dangerous. For example, Iran never had a nuclear weapons programme, despite Trump putting them ‘on notice’ and imposing sanctions. She describes these sanctions – against Iran, against Maduro in Venezuela and against North Korea as an act of war. Dore reminds her that North Korea had actually stopped its nuclear weapons programme, in return for America not conducting war games on their borders. But Obama rejected this. And they resumed their nuclear programme when Bush declared they were part of the ‘Axis of Evil’.

Martin then goes on to discuss her investigative work amongst the towns devastated by Hurricane Harvey. One of these was Houston. It’s a town dominated by Big Oil, with absolutely no zoning laws whatsoever so people are living right next to big, highly polluting industrial complexes. They even built a school next to a chemical plant. The plant exploded, but under the counterterrorism laws the company doesn’t have to reveal what chemicals were released into the environment. At the same time, the oil companies don’t have to pay fines during start-ups, shut-downs or disasters. So they can pollute as much as they want, as they won’t have to pay for it.

She also talks about another town she visited, Lakewood, where weeks after Harvey people were left living in their gutted homes. They didn’t see any volunteers, no FEMA officials or anyone from the government. She states that this was an act of pure class war, as these areas were Black and Latino. Back to Houston, she remarks on how, in the aftermath of the hurricane, it was only the business districts and the affluent areas that were up and running within a few hours of the disaster. Volunteers were told not to go into the rougher neighbourhoods, as they would get shot. She and Dore make the point that everyone calls looting was, in the circumstances, just survival.

And Big Oil hides the extent of the problems it causes in these communities, because it owns schools and hospital wings. Thus it’s impossible to study cancer properly, because everything’s compartmentalised. And the doctors and scientists studying it can’t call out who’s responsible, because they’ll then lose their funding. Everyone in those towns works for the industry.

This is clearly an American programme, discussing American issues, but it also reflects the situation over here in Britain to a considerable extent. Journalism in Britain has also been corrupted by the merger of the newspaper companies into big industrial conglomerates, whose proprietors then decide what line their papers should follow and suppress awkward content. And just as Bernie Sanders was reviled by the Clintonite camp of the Democrats, and cheated of his nomination, so the so-called left-wing media over here demonised Jeremy Corbyn. They also lionised, and are still praising Killary to the rafters, and accused anyone, who didn’t support her as a ‘misogynist’. Just like they accused Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters.

The mainstream media over here is also corrupt. The BBC is overwhelmingly staffed at its management levels by very middle class, public school educated White men. It’s leading journalists, most notably ‘Goebbels’ Nick Robbinson and Laura ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg, are arch-Tories, who show their contempt for their audience by scarcely hiding their bias against Corbyn and the Labour party.

The establishment over here is also trying to destroy alternative media sources. We’ve seen the same lies about Russian propaganda levelled at RT by the Theresa May and the Tories. The same algorithms, that have been developed to lead people on the internet away from alternative news sites and the demonetisation campaigns against ‘controversial’ material on YouTube – all set up in the guise of protecting us from ‘fake news’ – are hitting alternative news blogs and vlogs over here.

And you can see the same kind of problems that America is experiencing through the acquisition of schools and hospitals by Big Oil happening over here. Academics have already complained about the way science departments have been shorn of their independence ever since Maggie Thatcher decided that they should work more closely with industry, to the point where many scientists feel that they are just working for their industrial sponsors and partners. So far the media over here has been free of some of the attempts of the media to pour scorn on climate change and discredit climate science, with the obvious exceptions of the Heil and some of the journos on the Telegraph or Times. But you can also see that coming too, especially if the government goes ahead with privatising the NHS and handing schools over to private academy chains, whose heads have their own bias towards promoting business.