Mic Check Radio

A look into the Commission on Presidential Debates and how they hijacked the presidential debates from the League of Women Voters and turned the whole circus into, well a more boring form of a circus. [Click to Listen]

We start off the show with some poetry:
Even When There's Little Choice, We Choose by Nicholas Gordon
For our In The News segment on this show we take our one and only looks at the Republican and Democrat primary season. We have a clip from each side that proves the two party political machine is still very much in control and knows what they are doing. If that isn't convincing enough, we also have an audio clip from Leslie Moonves, the president and CEO of CBS Corporation, explaining to shareholders how Donald Trump is great for business.
Next up we have a quick Activist Cinema segment looking at the #OscarsSoWhite "conversation" surrounding this years Academy Awards and why it's great to draw attention to the racism in the entertainment industry...but it's still and industry and the Oscars are just their Employee of the Year awards. So don't watch them. [Click to Listen]

We are all affected by it...call it advertising, propaganda, programming, social engineering, psychological operations, or whatever other term could be applied. The act of a force outside of your mind trying to convince you to do something. In the third episode we play a couple of clips of commercial radio from the 1940's, then we enter 'The Lab'. Once sound film is perfected (more or less), Hollywood productions are now the great laboratory of for propagandists experimentation. Any good propagandist would look at the sheer numbers, up to 90 million moviegoers each week, and start drooling at the possibilities. One homogenized audio/video message seen in just one week by 90 million people?! This had never been an option in all of human history before motion pictures with sound were invented. Brave new world. American politics took notice of the potential for reaching so many people with one homogenized message and took action. Those white men in power in Washington D.C. started hanging out with those other white men in power in Hollywood...a lot. This is the moment when American politics had to first, and evermore, deal with what they will look like to the public. People in politics/industry quickly figured out how to sell the image needed to get citizens/consumers to choose their product. Oh, and then WWII started and the Golden Age of Propaganda was about to begin. [Click to Listen]

Activist Cinema 11: We're trying something new with this episode of Activist Cinema...we're discussing a film that I hate. The term 'Citizen's United' is very familiar to most activists these days, but it's mainly due to the infamous Supreme Court case.
In the case the court decided:
"that the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation. The principles articulated by the Supreme Court in the case have also been extended to for-profit corporations, labor unions and other associations."
It's a landmark piece of law that has ruined the electoral process in the United States. However, Citizen's United is more than just a court case, it is a production company for political documentaries. In 2012, director Stephen K. Bannon teamed up with Andrew Breitbart (two darlings of the Corporate version of the Tea Party) and put together this documentary.
From the films website:
" The Occupy movement is sinister, violent, and organized with the purpose of destroying the American government. The film also discusses allegations of rape, drug use, and property destruction at the Occupy encampments."
I would suggest refreshing your memory by reading the brief Timeline of Occupy Wall Street over at Wikipedia (click here) before watching this film as the filmmakers go into quite a bit of detail about some of the events that may have faded from your memory. Then get ready to yell at your TV...a lot. [Click to Listen]

A quick history of Code Pink actions, including their interruption of Mitt Romney's coronation at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. [Click to Listen]