Citizen A: Martyn Bradbury, Chris Trotter & Selwyn Manning on Key’s Spy Bills + Dying Cities + Aaron Gilmore

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On Citizen A this week Martyn Bradbury, Chris Trotter and Selwyn Manning debate the following issues:

Issue 1: Should we be concerned with John Key’s new GCSB laws?

Issue 2: Is Wellington dying and who will lead Auckland?

Issue 3: Aaron Gilmore – who cares?

Citizen A broadcasts weekly on FaceTV and webcasts on The Daily Blog.

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11 COMMENTS

  1. I think we should be concerned about the fact that humans are killing the planet we live on.

    All the trivial stuff that most people focus their attention on is just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

    • The guy’s a nut (Icke). There was an amusing episode of Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura (Season 3 [2012]) focussing on him, you can find it on YouTube. Amazing how he makes millions of dollars speaking nonsense worldwide, also amusing how he was accused of being an anti-Semite by protestors in Canada. Protestors claimed his lizard people alluded to imagery used in anti-Jewish propaganda over history – but no, the nut believes in shape-shifting lizard people from outer space whose descendants are world leaders.

  5. If you will pardon the length of this post, but I think it important in light of GCSB law change, the TPP and this conversation.

    It is a quote from an interview from the only man ever to bring a prosecution against the ACTUAL killers of John F Kennedy. The investigative DA of New Orleans Jim Garrison
    As a man who had fought Nazi first hand, and who considered the American way above reproach, to confront the fascist deep state and present evidence of its terrible and secretive duplicity, is a lesson to us in defining our present.
    This is what he said.

    “What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it’s based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we’ve built since 1945, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we’ve seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution.

    In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn’t the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was uphysically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.

    I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I’ve always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government’s basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I’ve come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.”

  6. Great quote and the votes show it is well appreciated Remo.

    But is that it?

    Are we going to stop there?

    Or are writers going to articulate action plans appropriate to the threat this country is facing/enduring?

    Tom

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