Here is the second part of Paul Jay’s talk with journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media.
Cohen here goes into much more depth about the history and the evolution of the corporate influences that took took both Democrats and Republicans to the far right in a long attempt beginning in the late 1960’s and 70’s at taking over the Republican Party, at marginalizing the left, the antiwar movement, and progressives, and then a corporate movement beginning in the 80’s to coopt the Democratic Party, and how we got into the current political situation.
Real News Network – February 3, 2010
Part 1 of this interview is here.
Part 3 is still to come…
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is going to come from you. Not from Obama or the Democrats.
analysis of the actual situation in terms of power relations. The left in this country has spent little time trying to come to agreement on the matter of who has the power by, for example, refusing to look into deep politics. There was, a few years ago, a wholesale and concerted and organized effort on the part of the left to utterly discredit 9/11 truth. That fact in itself doomed the left to becoming, essentially, the Stasi left (as I’ve said often here), in other words a fake left dominated by intel operatives.
Now, our situation is very, very different from East Germany’s situation and I’m not sure people like Markos or Alex Cockburn are gov’t agents — I actually don’t think they are but things don’t work in neat packages the way they did in Germany or even in the U.S. in the post-WWII era until the Church Committee hearings which caused a decentralization and privatization black-ops. So there are all kinds of more nebulous forces at work some private some connected with the government.
Thus the right-wing Democrats who at least understand power have a distinct advantage of leftists who have their heads in the clouds and no theory or narrative. War is bad, single-payer good, tea-party bad (ha hahha see how stupid they are) and so on all without a connect-the-dots theory or narrative that competes with the constantly re-enforced media Narrative that keeps reason and facts in the basement.
The problem is not Wall Street’s domination of the Democratic Party the problem is the left’s utter capitulation to the mainstream Narrative where, by definition the left must always be ignored and is the home of people even crazier than the right-wingers. It doesn’t matter how polite or mainstream progressives on GOS are they will be ignored and used like whores by the operatives that dominate that site. All they have to do is say “Sarah Palin” and the progressive left stands at attention and agrees to any absurdity — like the current HCR package in Congress or torture and wider war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen even Iran I’ll bet. It’s wrong but… they’ll say.
their genitals! This says that they all feel threatened and/or they have something to hide or reason for their need to protect their family jewels. Those that don’t are, generally, more either more sure of their position or their crotch is not visible to the camera. Obama is turned to the side which means what? I don’t think he feels he’s part of this group — he seem to be moving to block out Biden. A real leader will find a way of embracing the group. This picture tells me that they are not collegial.