20 June 2010

Glenn Greenwald interview in The Atlantic

I've cited the Salon columnist on numerous occasions because his viewpoints often match my own, and he is more knowledgeable, more eloquent (and more vehement) on the topics than I could ever be.
But what is clear is that, for a variety of reasons, the two-party system does not work in terms of providing clear choices. No matter who wins, the same permanent factions that control Washington continue to reign. That's true no matter which issues one considers most important. At some point, it's going to be necessary to sacrifice some short-term political interests for longer-term considerations about how this suffocating, two-party monster can be subverted...

That said, I think the citizenry is becoming less and less defined by loyalty to one of the two parties, and these partisan divisions are breaking down, becoming much less clean. We saw that with opposition to TARP, the general anger toward corporatist control of Washington, discomfort with our policy of endless wars, and the widespread disgust with incumbent power. Far more important than Right v. Left is insider v. outsider (or politically powerful v. powerless). That fact is becoming more crystallized, and the more that happens, the more the artificial barriers that divide citizens (Right and Left) will erode, the more apparent will be the commonalities. The political establishment (both parties) benefits from keeping citizens divided against one another based on trivial distractions and tribal loyalties, which has the effect of strengthening the political establishment. That's been the impediment to having citizens across the ideological spectrum join together to combat abuses of power in Washington, and I think it's eroding. That, I think, is what Washington elites fear most...

Journalists who work for the largest media outlets are nothing more than corporate employees -- no different than the Accounting Manager or Sales Representative in a non-media division. All people who work in large corporations know what is expected of them, know what can advance or undermine their careers. There's just no incentive for corporate journalists to be hostile or even adversarial to the powerful; the opposite is true: their career incentives are for them to be as friendly as possible...

One particularly harmful mis-impression comes from our media's refusal to report that we ourselves frequently do exactly that which we like to believe only the Bad, Tyrannical countries do. The American media incessantly highlights the bad acts of other governments (especially the ones the American government dislikes) while completely ignoring identical acts by our own government (one illustrative example was the melodramatic obsession over Iran's detention of Roxana Sabera, or North Korea's detention of Euna Lee and Laura Ling, while completely ignoring the far more severe detentions of Al Jazeera and other journalists for years by the U.S. Government without any charges whatsoever; that creates the severe mis-impression that detaining journalists is something only the Bad, Tyrannical countries do)...
More at The Atlantic.

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