You know, you either serve the emperor or you serve the empire, but you serve power. And if you don’t, you get tossed. You know, think about this, Into The Buzzsaw: it was one of the best books I ever read about journalism, because it was real cases of real journalists all across the nation who found out stuff and tried to report it, and, you know, collided with the economic and class interests of the bosses. These are the stories that were not told, you know. And the average media right now is talking about, you know, narco-terrorism and all that.
How hard was it for Gary Webb at Mercury News, a small little newspaper, to tell the story about the CIA working to bring drugs in — flood Black communities in California and across the country? He got battered by the big newspapers. Then he got battered by the state, right? A Pulitzer winning journalist, and he could not find a job because Mercury deep-sixed them and bounced them. Come on, man, come on. And he was telling a story, a true story, about what the empire does.
But here’s the point, this is a country that pushed drugs into the community and destroyed the lives of millions of people, talking about narcoterrorism, talking about drugs and stopping drugs. And here’s the other side of that. Let’s say they stop every drug from leaving Venezuela? What’s going to happen to the price of drugs in America? They’re going to go up because people in this country are addicted to drugs, and generations have fought for years in a drug war that they’ve lost. With love, not fear, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
