Updated on 12/4/10
The people who keep the secrets always want them to stay secret and always insist it's a matter of life and death and not a way to cover for their corruption, duplicity and incompetence. So once again the latest disclosure of secret US government documents by WikiLeaks on Monday has been greeted by condemnation from top US officials who insist that national security and lives are being compromised by the disclosures.
They know whats best for us. Whether it's top government officials huffing and puffing about WikiLeaks or the local bureaucrats and cops I've dealt with as a journalist refusing to release public documents. And the American people are always the last to know what is being done in their name and with their tax dollars.
The latest condemnations about Monday's leaks were more ludicrous than the assertions made about the leaked documents in June and October concerning the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. WikiLeaks didn't redact names of Afghan collaborators, but did so for Iraq collaborators. A legitimate case could be made that Afghanis were potentially endangered although the Pentagon admits there is no evidence of anyone being killed due to the leaks http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/28/104404/officials-may-be-overstating-the.html
But the latest leaks concern the US State Department and rather than endanger lives the documents confirm the hypocrisy of our leaders and our allies and the mainstream media that covers them. Former ambassadors Christopher Hill and Ronald Neumann spoke on National Public Radio about how the publicity makes their jobs harder.
Neumann laughably asserted that Pakistan's refusal to release nuclear fuel to the US was due to fears of publicity. As if Pakistan, which covertly developed nuclear weapons and created and continues to fund the Taliban doesn't regularly defy the US.
Hill pooh-poohed documents showing how State Department diplomats were ordered to act as spies recording personal information about foreign diplomats and officials. The kind of actions that if done by foreign diplomats in the US would lead to them being kicked out of the country.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted the leaks threaten national security. Clinton should know about making threats.
This is the same woman who as a presidential candidate in the 2008 presidential debates talked about nuking Iran if it attacked Israel. Israel which refuses to admit it has over 100 nuclear weapons and unlike Iran, refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treat (NPT).
Clinton even went farther than existing US policy by talking about extending a "nuclear umbrella" over Middle Eastern countries which would expand the number of countries the US would nuke Iran for attacking. Imagine the reaction if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ever discussed nuking the US. The bombs would start raining down on Iran before he finished his sentence.
The New York Times, which checked with government officials before deciding which documents to publish, focused much of their coverage on lots of fretting about Iran getting one nuclear weapon. As opposed to the approximately 5,500 tactical and nuclear warheads the US has.
Little mention is made of Saudi Arabian donors supplying al-Qaeda in Iraq which has targeted for death US soliders and Iraqis who cooperated with them. The same Saudi Arabia that was the birthplace of Osama Bin Laden and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. The same Saudi Arabia that just received $60 billion in US arms http://www.thetakeaway.org/2010/nov/19/us-60-billion-arms-deal-saudis-going-through-tonight/ to help protect it from the bogeyman in Iran that King Abdullah, the Saudi dictator, called on the US to attack, according to the documents.
And not much mention of Yemen's dictator President Ali Abdullah Saleh falsely taking credit for US drone strikes. Of course the families of the civilians murdered in the notoriously inaccurate drone strikes know the US was behind them, but the American people footing the bill for them didn't.
Government officials attacking WikiLeaks is to be expected given that they're protecting their turf. And in a way so are the media kingpins who did the same.
Perhaps the biggest hypocrite is Bob Woodward who tried to have it both ways on Larry King Live on Monday night http://www.livedash.com/transcript/larry_king_live/49/CNN/Monday_November_29_2010/525600/
Woodward said Wiki Leaks needed to check with government sources before publishing documents to make sure lives or secret operations weren't jeoparadized. But any cub reporter, much less the man who broke the Watergate scandal knows government officials will always insist that information needs to be kept secret because revealing it would endanger lives or national security. Whether it's the State Department or the local cop shop, standard operating procedure is almost always to give the media as little info as possible and use safety as the catch-all excuse.
After saying Wiki Leaks needed to essentially get government permission to leak the documents, Woodward then said, "We need to make the government more transparent, but to -- you know, you need to step back from this." That sounds a lot like the argument against releasing the Nixon tapes. We need to be transparent, but not if transparency jeopardizes national security, with the people behind the veil getting to decide what gets kept secret.
Woodward who has made a career out of quoting anonymous sources and trusting their recollection of prior conversations and events says that it's bad to let the public see actual documents quoting people by name.
When someone anonymously leaks to Woodward for one of his books that come out to late to change events, that's O.K.
But real time leaks of documents with real names on them that could could actually change events, not O.K. Just as the people who keep the secrets want to maintain control, so do those who selectively reveal them with permission of their keepers.
Update 1: So much for WikiLeaks' release of State Department documents compromising national security and endangering lives. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - who should be given credit for his honesty- called condemnation of the leaks "overwrought" and consequences for US policy "fairly modest." http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/gates-on-leaks-wiki-and-otherwise/
But don't you just know media and government opponents of WikiLeaks will ignore Gates' comments and continue their kneejerk fearmongering. As if the opinion of the Secretary of Defense, a former CIA chief with some 40 years as a Cold Warrior, counts for nothing.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Benton Harbor Blues
Next week I leave Southwest Michigan due to unemployment. I'm living in St. Joseph a nearly all white, wealthy and touristy town of about 10,000 with a spectacular view of Lake Michigan. As a reporter I covered neighboring Benton Harbor, a poor, nearly all black town of 10,000 with a spectacular view of Lake Michigan. And I confess to some hypocrisy for not moving to the town I was covering for fear of blight and crime.
While St. Joseph has been able to prosper and capitalize on its location, Benton Harbor has struggled with one of the highest crime and poverty rates in Michigan for a community its size. In April, the state financially took it over after decades of money mismanagement and incompetence by city officials. Now the state-appointed financial manager who doesn't answer to local residents is drastically cutting the limited city services provided including closing the fire department and cutting police officers and other city workers. The short-term savings will be offset in the long term by the cost of foreclosures and welfare and unemployment benefits to those laid off.
There's plenty of blame to go around locally. Corrupt and incompetent local officials protecting their turf - the city has had about 18 city managers in 22 years - many apathetic citizens who don't vote or turn out to city council meetings to grandstand during public comments to city commissioners. And a sometimes racist us against them mentality in which all outsiders are seen as carpetbaggers, the black ones labeled Uncle Toms.
But there are many decent people, some of whom I got to meet in my seven months covering Benton Harbor. Like Dr. Charles Tynes, a physician who treats poor people in the community and disdains the nation's for-profit medical care system. Commissioner Duane L. Seats II, an outspoken new city commissioner who usually backs up his criticism with facts. Police Chief Roger Lange who visited Newark, N.J. on his own dime to see how the city's community policing could be incorporated in Benton Harbor and is trying to make his officers more compassionate in their dealings with residents. The young music promoter who organized an Easter Egg hunt in a local park and the woman trying to build a community garden.
Benton Harbor is unusual in the level of problems for a small community, but it is not unique and there will be many more Benton Harbors in the coming years as the nation's massive redistribution of wealth to the superrich takes its toll on the rest of us. More government services we counted on will be eliminated or privatized.
Things used to be different. Like many other Midwestern communities, Benton Harbor once had a solid manufacturing base.
Whirlpool Corp., the $17 billion per year company whose headquarters are based in Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, sent most of the manufacturing jobs to Mexico in the 1980s and later to China. While closing its last manufacturing plant in Benton Harbor this year, it announced to much fanfare that it was building a new corporate headquarters in Benton Harbor, an $85 million investment. The deal included $12.7 million in state tax breaks and about $3.8 million in local tax breaks, according to The Herald-Palladium, my old employer. The newspaper that fired me because they said I was "overly aggressive" in covering Benton Harbor politics and Whirlpool.
The Whirlpool deal was a classic case of a corporation maximizing its profits by forcing a state that has been one of the hardest hit by the recession and a destitute city to provide tax breaks or risk the corporation leaving town. Whirlpool also got millions in state tax breaks to build the Harbor Shores Golf Course which will be a destination sight for the superrich who can afford the $150 per day greens fees and the $200,000 second homes in the Harbor Shores Development by the course.
These are the kind of folks who weren't hurt much by the Great Recession that they caused thanks to taxpayer bailouts. And maybe Benton Harbor residents who a generation ago might have gotten a decent factory job at Whirlpool can land a job as a caddy or parking attendant or housekeeper if a hotel opens up for the tourists who come in to see the PGA Tour Senior Open at the golf course in a couple of years.
The people of Benton Harbor deserve better. And so do the rest of us.
While St. Joseph has been able to prosper and capitalize on its location, Benton Harbor has struggled with one of the highest crime and poverty rates in Michigan for a community its size. In April, the state financially took it over after decades of money mismanagement and incompetence by city officials. Now the state-appointed financial manager who doesn't answer to local residents is drastically cutting the limited city services provided including closing the fire department and cutting police officers and other city workers. The short-term savings will be offset in the long term by the cost of foreclosures and welfare and unemployment benefits to those laid off.
There's plenty of blame to go around locally. Corrupt and incompetent local officials protecting their turf - the city has had about 18 city managers in 22 years - many apathetic citizens who don't vote or turn out to city council meetings to grandstand during public comments to city commissioners. And a sometimes racist us against them mentality in which all outsiders are seen as carpetbaggers, the black ones labeled Uncle Toms.
But there are many decent people, some of whom I got to meet in my seven months covering Benton Harbor. Like Dr. Charles Tynes, a physician who treats poor people in the community and disdains the nation's for-profit medical care system. Commissioner Duane L. Seats II, an outspoken new city commissioner who usually backs up his criticism with facts. Police Chief Roger Lange who visited Newark, N.J. on his own dime to see how the city's community policing could be incorporated in Benton Harbor and is trying to make his officers more compassionate in their dealings with residents. The young music promoter who organized an Easter Egg hunt in a local park and the woman trying to build a community garden.
Benton Harbor is unusual in the level of problems for a small community, but it is not unique and there will be many more Benton Harbors in the coming years as the nation's massive redistribution of wealth to the superrich takes its toll on the rest of us. More government services we counted on will be eliminated or privatized.
Things used to be different. Like many other Midwestern communities, Benton Harbor once had a solid manufacturing base.
Whirlpool Corp., the $17 billion per year company whose headquarters are based in Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, sent most of the manufacturing jobs to Mexico in the 1980s and later to China. While closing its last manufacturing plant in Benton Harbor this year, it announced to much fanfare that it was building a new corporate headquarters in Benton Harbor, an $85 million investment. The deal included $12.7 million in state tax breaks and about $3.8 million in local tax breaks, according to The Herald-Palladium, my old employer. The newspaper that fired me because they said I was "overly aggressive" in covering Benton Harbor politics and Whirlpool.
The Whirlpool deal was a classic case of a corporation maximizing its profits by forcing a state that has been one of the hardest hit by the recession and a destitute city to provide tax breaks or risk the corporation leaving town. Whirlpool also got millions in state tax breaks to build the Harbor Shores Golf Course which will be a destination sight for the superrich who can afford the $150 per day greens fees and the $200,000 second homes in the Harbor Shores Development by the course.
These are the kind of folks who weren't hurt much by the Great Recession that they caused thanks to taxpayer bailouts. And maybe Benton Harbor residents who a generation ago might have gotten a decent factory job at Whirlpool can land a job as a caddy or parking attendant or housekeeper if a hotel opens up for the tourists who come in to see the PGA Tour Senior Open at the golf course in a couple of years.
The people of Benton Harbor deserve better. And so do the rest of us.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Frisks and Risks
To those incensed about the idea of being frisked or scanned before boarding an airplane this Thanksgiving weekend, where where was your outrage over warantless wiretapping, kidnapping, torture and the ordered assassination of American citizens in the name of national security? The protests reek of hypocrisy and most of the people who're indignant would be the same ones screaming bloody murder if someone sneaked a bomb aboard a jetliner and blew it up.
And they're the first to accuse flaming liberals like me of being soft on terrorism when we question the effectiveness and morality of depriving Americans and foreigners of civil liberties and human rights in the name of an endless "war on terror." Of course we can never be 100 percent safe and some security measures are overly intrusive - I would not advocate body cavity searches if terrorists sucessfully smuggled explosives aboard by stashing it in their anuses the way drugs are often smuggled into prisons - but frisking or body screens are reasonable security precautions given the alternative.
The odds of your plane being blown up by a terrorist are infinitesimal, and passengers are far more likely to die in a plane crash due to a lack of maintenance of planes and poorly trained pilots because of profit-hungry airline companies and an appalling lack of goverment oversight due to deregulation that dates back to the 1970s. But there are fanatics who are intent on killing us something I have some small personal perspective on.
While a reporter in Connecticut, Jan and Matt Coyle were gracious enough to allow me to repeatedly interview them about their daughter Tricia, one of 270 people killed in the bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. In the Lockerbie case, the bomb was aboard baggage and revealed an appalling lack of airport security which obviously didn't improve enough before 9/11.
Besides the occasional airport indignities, as a journalist, I've been subjected to daily metal detector checks and frisking before entering courthouses. It was often annoying, humiliating and time consuming. But as long as the object of the guards was to prevent me from bringing a weapon into court (courtrooms are often volatile places like when child molesters or murderers face their victims or victim's families) and not just to stop me from setting off the metal detector due to coins and keys, it made sense.
What we need are decently paid Transportation Security Administration personnel who are well trained and sensitive to the dignity and privacy concerns of travelers along with well trained air marshals. Combine that with intelligence agencies that coordinate instead of engaging the the turf battles that allowed the 9/11 hijackings so the terrorists don't get to the airport. And if they do, include reasonable profiling such as singling out citizens from countries like Saudia Arabia where 15 of the 19 hijackers came from for additional questioning, but not harassment.
But those steps would cost more money. It would mean higher airfares and taxes. And the same people bellyaching about a minor inconvenience would be complaining about higher costs.
Maybe the solution is to offer the option of a "no-frills, no-frisks" airline for those who want to save time and money, but are willing to risk life and limb. You take your ticket and take your chances.
.
I
And they're the first to accuse flaming liberals like me of being soft on terrorism when we question the effectiveness and morality of depriving Americans and foreigners of civil liberties and human rights in the name of an endless "war on terror." Of course we can never be 100 percent safe and some security measures are overly intrusive - I would not advocate body cavity searches if terrorists sucessfully smuggled explosives aboard by stashing it in their anuses the way drugs are often smuggled into prisons - but frisking or body screens are reasonable security precautions given the alternative.
The odds of your plane being blown up by a terrorist are infinitesimal, and passengers are far more likely to die in a plane crash due to a lack of maintenance of planes and poorly trained pilots because of profit-hungry airline companies and an appalling lack of goverment oversight due to deregulation that dates back to the 1970s. But there are fanatics who are intent on killing us something I have some small personal perspective on.
While a reporter in Connecticut, Jan and Matt Coyle were gracious enough to allow me to repeatedly interview them about their daughter Tricia, one of 270 people killed in the bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. In the Lockerbie case, the bomb was aboard baggage and revealed an appalling lack of airport security which obviously didn't improve enough before 9/11.
Besides the occasional airport indignities, as a journalist, I've been subjected to daily metal detector checks and frisking before entering courthouses. It was often annoying, humiliating and time consuming. But as long as the object of the guards was to prevent me from bringing a weapon into court (courtrooms are often volatile places like when child molesters or murderers face their victims or victim's families) and not just to stop me from setting off the metal detector due to coins and keys, it made sense.
What we need are decently paid Transportation Security Administration personnel who are well trained and sensitive to the dignity and privacy concerns of travelers along with well trained air marshals. Combine that with intelligence agencies that coordinate instead of engaging the the turf battles that allowed the 9/11 hijackings so the terrorists don't get to the airport. And if they do, include reasonable profiling such as singling out citizens from countries like Saudia Arabia where 15 of the 19 hijackers came from for additional questioning, but not harassment.
But those steps would cost more money. It would mean higher airfares and taxes. And the same people bellyaching about a minor inconvenience would be complaining about higher costs.
Maybe the solution is to offer the option of a "no-frills, no-frisks" airline for those who want to save time and money, but are willing to risk life and limb. You take your ticket and take your chances.
.
I
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Benefits of Unemployment
(Updated on Nov. 22)
Nearly everyday I head down to the jobs center where I sip champagne and sample caviar with my fellow unemployed people and we chuckle about all those taxpaying working rubes who are footing the bill for our overly generous unemployment benefits. You can really live the high life on the $276 per week I get and I plan to ride the gravy train for as long as I can rather than try to get another job.
That outlook isn't much of an exaggeration from that of Republicans who on Thursday blocked a vote on extending unemployment benefits. This year Republican leaders have repeatedly said that unemployment benefits give the jobless an excuse not to find work as if we would prefer to remain unemployed.
It's true that after 20 years as a journalist, I have primarily sought work in what is admittedly a dying industry although I have applied for non-journalism jobs such as a security guard, a job counselor and in public relations. I haven't sought the kind of minimum wage jobs I worked when I was a teenager because they wouldn't pay much more than my unemployment benefits and wouldn't allow me much time to apply for jobs.
Perhaps it's a rationalization, but after years of contributing to unemployment benefits through my paycheck, I think I'm entitled to them especially since, like most unemployed people, I didn't choose to be out of work, I had the rug pulled out from under me by my boss. Forget the daily humiliation and depression of being unemployed and the fear of being destitute and thrown out on the street, unemployment benefits actually stimulate the economy. Unlike the billionaire hedge funders who the Republicans want to give a tax break to, unemployed people don't save money or invest it offshore, we spend it creating an economic ripple effect. For ever $1 of benefits, $1.61 of spending is created: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2010-07-15-unemployment15_CV_N.htm
But according to the Republicans and their supporters, my unwillingness to seek minimum wage jobs makes me a deadbeat. Among those blocking the vote on the extension were my congressman Republican Rep. Fred Upton. Upton, who is from St. Joseph, MI., is the grandson of the founder of the Whirlpool Corp. the $17 billion dollar corporation whose headquarters are in neighboring Benton Harbor although much of their manufacturing jobs have been shipped to China and Mexico.
Upton, whose personal wealth is about $32 billion, is a country club Republican who has been in Congress since 1987 and is a supporter of the widely discredited "trickledown economic" theory that says tax cuts for the rich will make them invest and spend with the benefits eventually trickling down to people like me. The theory is the equivalent of someone pissing down your back and telling you it's spring rain.
Upton's rationale for blocking benefits is that they would increase the deficit which he helped create by turning a $260 billion surplus left by President Clinton into a $1.3 trillion deficit left by President George W. Bush. Upton voted for the Bush tax cuts which largely benefitted the wealthiest Americans, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Medicare Part D Plan which was resulted in windfall profits for the pharmeceutical industry. Those votes and the Great Recession - largely due to a lack of financial policing of Wall Street during the Bush era - are the primary reasons for the deficit, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
Upton is an affable guy who've I've enjoyed interviewing as a journalist, but I won't get the chance to anymore. Or play a $150 round of golf next summer with him at the new Harbor Shores Golf Club that was largely built with taxpayer dollars and that is Whirlpool's plan to revive the local economy that they shipped hundreds of decent paying jobs out of. I'll be moving out of St. Joseph at the end of the month because I can't afford to pay my rent. You never know where life on Easy Street will take you.
Nearly everyday I head down to the jobs center where I sip champagne and sample caviar with my fellow unemployed people and we chuckle about all those taxpaying working rubes who are footing the bill for our overly generous unemployment benefits. You can really live the high life on the $276 per week I get and I plan to ride the gravy train for as long as I can rather than try to get another job.
That outlook isn't much of an exaggeration from that of Republicans who on Thursday blocked a vote on extending unemployment benefits. This year Republican leaders have repeatedly said that unemployment benefits give the jobless an excuse not to find work as if we would prefer to remain unemployed.
It's true that after 20 years as a journalist, I have primarily sought work in what is admittedly a dying industry although I have applied for non-journalism jobs such as a security guard, a job counselor and in public relations. I haven't sought the kind of minimum wage jobs I worked when I was a teenager because they wouldn't pay much more than my unemployment benefits and wouldn't allow me much time to apply for jobs.
Perhaps it's a rationalization, but after years of contributing to unemployment benefits through my paycheck, I think I'm entitled to them especially since, like most unemployed people, I didn't choose to be out of work, I had the rug pulled out from under me by my boss. Forget the daily humiliation and depression of being unemployed and the fear of being destitute and thrown out on the street, unemployment benefits actually stimulate the economy. Unlike the billionaire hedge funders who the Republicans want to give a tax break to, unemployed people don't save money or invest it offshore, we spend it creating an economic ripple effect. For ever $1 of benefits, $1.61 of spending is created: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2010-07-15-unemployment15_CV_N.htm
But according to the Republicans and their supporters, my unwillingness to seek minimum wage jobs makes me a deadbeat. Among those blocking the vote on the extension were my congressman Republican Rep. Fred Upton. Upton, who is from St. Joseph, MI., is the grandson of the founder of the Whirlpool Corp. the $17 billion dollar corporation whose headquarters are in neighboring Benton Harbor although much of their manufacturing jobs have been shipped to China and Mexico.
Upton, whose personal wealth is about $32 billion, is a country club Republican who has been in Congress since 1987 and is a supporter of the widely discredited "trickledown economic" theory that says tax cuts for the rich will make them invest and spend with the benefits eventually trickling down to people like me. The theory is the equivalent of someone pissing down your back and telling you it's spring rain.
Upton's rationale for blocking benefits is that they would increase the deficit which he helped create by turning a $260 billion surplus left by President Clinton into a $1.3 trillion deficit left by President George W. Bush. Upton voted for the Bush tax cuts which largely benefitted the wealthiest Americans, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Medicare Part D Plan which was resulted in windfall profits for the pharmeceutical industry. Those votes and the Great Recession - largely due to a lack of financial policing of Wall Street during the Bush era - are the primary reasons for the deficit, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
Upton is an affable guy who've I've enjoyed interviewing as a journalist, but I won't get the chance to anymore. Or play a $150 round of golf next summer with him at the new Harbor Shores Golf Club that was largely built with taxpayer dollars and that is Whirlpool's plan to revive the local economy that they shipped hundreds of decent paying jobs out of. I'll be moving out of St. Joseph at the end of the month because I can't afford to pay my rent. You never know where life on Easy Street will take you.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Military Madness
As even Republicans this week talked about small cuts to the $720 billion military budget in the wake of President Obama's deficit commission recommending $100 million in cuts, I'm reminded that the most honest comment I ever heard about military spending in this country came from a Republican. The remark came from then-Indiana Rep. Mark Souder prior to his resigning over an affair with a staffer.
Souder was one of the most reprehensible politicians I've ever interviewed in my approximately 20 years as a reporter. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he had no problem supporting the Iraq War which involved others doing the fighting and dying. And making money off of his stock in the Lockheed Corp. which manufactures the F-16s Souder voted we send to Israel. But I had to give him some small credit in 2008 when I interviewed him for a story I was writing about the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.
"Do you know how many people would be out of a job in this district if the war ended tommorrow?" he asked me when I questioned him on the cost of the war which was then approaching $700 billion. There was the ugly truth no matter how immoral it is: war or the threat of war is a jobs program in this country. Our nation is the largest arms dealer in the world and we do not build weapons to keep ourselves or others safe, we do it to make money and keep people employed
It is probably always been true, but it seemed more admirable in World War II when the nation was cranking out weapons to defeat Germany and Japan even though many of our prominent businessmen - including the raging anti-Semite Henry Ford, author of The International Jew - admired Nazi Germany and did business with it. My grandfather was part of the "military-industrial complex" during World War II before President Eisenhower coined the term in his 1960 presidential farewell speech. An engineer and 1916 Yale University graduate, my grandfather could only climb the company ladder so far at Winchester Arms because he was a Jew, but it was a good job.
After World War II, the rationalization for working in the "defense industry" was that you were helping keep America safe from communism although we now know President Truman, whose Truman Doctrine made the US the world's police officer, exaggerated the communist threat to justify the enormous spending needed for massive arms buildup. This has created a permanent state of emergency and endless war and caused our nation to support some of the most ruthless dictators in the world including Saddam Hussein until he became a threat to other dictatorships and arms customers we cared more about in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
The Department of Defense - whose original name was the more honest Department of War - spread the money around the nation in a form of economic blackmail. While our infrastructure, educational system and healthcare standards crumbled, what politician would dare call for cutting military spending when it would cost him or her jobs in their districts and re-election. This included my home state of Connecticut where Electric Boat of Groton kept building nuclear submarines even after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In 2001, I remember questioning Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro about her support for the U.S. sending Blackhawk helicopters to the Colombian government to fight "the drug war" despite our own State Department acknowledging Colombia's atrocious human rights record. In the 1980s DeLauro had been a critic of President Ronald Reagan - now known as Saint Reagan to the right - supporting death squads in Central American countries like Colombia. But those helicopters were made by Sikorsky Aircraft in DeLauro's district and now she supported the sale and assured me the choppers would only be used for drug enforcement not butchering civilians caught in the crossfire.
The US leads the world in miltary spending, outspending Russia, it's closest competitor, by 800 percent and the 2011 budget of $720 million is 67 percent higher than the 2001 budget of $432 billion adjusted for inflation, according to a Thursday news release from the nonpartisan Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. http://jnoubiyeh.com/2010/05/us-military-spending-far-outpaces-rest.html
Military madness corrupts all of us from the pols to the people who build the bombs and rationalize that what they're doing makes us safer. At best, there will be token cuts in the military in the future used to justify far deeper cuts to social services in what remains of our shredded safety net. The quagmire in Afghanistan will continue for years until a new one starts somewhere else. The only thing that will stop substantial military spending is if we run out of customers or finish shipping all the defense industry jobs overseas.
Eisenhower presided over the military buildup which makes him a hypocrite, but perhaps the 50 million dead in World War II made him aware of the immorality of it all and gave him a guilty conscience. In that article in 2008 I included a 1953 quote from Eisenhower that remains timeless: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
Souder was one of the most reprehensible politicians I've ever interviewed in my approximately 20 years as a reporter. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he had no problem supporting the Iraq War which involved others doing the fighting and dying. And making money off of his stock in the Lockheed Corp. which manufactures the F-16s Souder voted we send to Israel. But I had to give him some small credit in 2008 when I interviewed him for a story I was writing about the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.
"Do you know how many people would be out of a job in this district if the war ended tommorrow?" he asked me when I questioned him on the cost of the war which was then approaching $700 billion. There was the ugly truth no matter how immoral it is: war or the threat of war is a jobs program in this country. Our nation is the largest arms dealer in the world and we do not build weapons to keep ourselves or others safe, we do it to make money and keep people employed
It is probably always been true, but it seemed more admirable in World War II when the nation was cranking out weapons to defeat Germany and Japan even though many of our prominent businessmen - including the raging anti-Semite Henry Ford, author of The International Jew - admired Nazi Germany and did business with it. My grandfather was part of the "military-industrial complex" during World War II before President Eisenhower coined the term in his 1960 presidential farewell speech. An engineer and 1916 Yale University graduate, my grandfather could only climb the company ladder so far at Winchester Arms because he was a Jew, but it was a good job.
After World War II, the rationalization for working in the "defense industry" was that you were helping keep America safe from communism although we now know President Truman, whose Truman Doctrine made the US the world's police officer, exaggerated the communist threat to justify the enormous spending needed for massive arms buildup. This has created a permanent state of emergency and endless war and caused our nation to support some of the most ruthless dictators in the world including Saddam Hussein until he became a threat to other dictatorships and arms customers we cared more about in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
The Department of Defense - whose original name was the more honest Department of War - spread the money around the nation in a form of economic blackmail. While our infrastructure, educational system and healthcare standards crumbled, what politician would dare call for cutting military spending when it would cost him or her jobs in their districts and re-election. This included my home state of Connecticut where Electric Boat of Groton kept building nuclear submarines even after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In 2001, I remember questioning Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro about her support for the U.S. sending Blackhawk helicopters to the Colombian government to fight "the drug war" despite our own State Department acknowledging Colombia's atrocious human rights record. In the 1980s DeLauro had been a critic of President Ronald Reagan - now known as Saint Reagan to the right - supporting death squads in Central American countries like Colombia. But those helicopters were made by Sikorsky Aircraft in DeLauro's district and now she supported the sale and assured me the choppers would only be used for drug enforcement not butchering civilians caught in the crossfire.
The US leads the world in miltary spending, outspending Russia, it's closest competitor, by 800 percent and the 2011 budget of $720 million is 67 percent higher than the 2001 budget of $432 billion adjusted for inflation, according to a Thursday news release from the nonpartisan Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. http://jnoubiyeh.com/2010/05/us-military-spending-far-outpaces-rest.html
Military madness corrupts all of us from the pols to the people who build the bombs and rationalize that what they're doing makes us safer. At best, there will be token cuts in the military in the future used to justify far deeper cuts to social services in what remains of our shredded safety net. The quagmire in Afghanistan will continue for years until a new one starts somewhere else. The only thing that will stop substantial military spending is if we run out of customers or finish shipping all the defense industry jobs overseas.
Eisenhower presided over the military buildup which makes him a hypocrite, but perhaps the 50 million dead in World War II made him aware of the immorality of it all and gave him a guilty conscience. In that article in 2008 I included a 1953 quote from Eisenhower that remains timeless: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Ted Koppel's Hypocrisy
Listening to Ted Koppel's regular appearances on National Public Radio forces me to stifle the urge to scream at his arrogance and sloppy analysis, but Sunday's Washington Post Op-ed by Koppel takes the cake. Koppel took Keith Olbermann to task for a lack of objectivity in the wake of Olbermann's contributions to three Democractic candidates and subsequent suspension from MSNBC earlier this month. Koppel equates Olbermann and other MSNBC commentators with reactionary bomb throwers at Fox News like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.
Never mind as Olbermann noted in his Monday night special comment rebuking Koppel that he has probably criticized President Obama more in the last couple weeks than Fox criticized George W. Bush in the last eight years and MSNBC's lineup includes conservative former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough who's on for three hours during morning drive. To Koppel both networks are the same and their viewers are being told what they want to hear, not the hard truths they may not want to hear, but need to know.
"We are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers," Koppel wrote.
In one nonsensical passage Koppel blames credit card debt, the national debt, the housing collapse and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on the "dangers of entitlement run rampant." So if you ran up credit card debt and took out a second mortage on your house to pay your bills, it's your fault, not the Wall Street corporations that profited off of it. And when Bush invaded Afghanistan and and Iraq and gave tax cuts to the superrich turning a surplus into a deficit, that was due to your sense of entitlement.
Koppel also goes on the praise the work of his generation of broadcasters "the trusted gatekeepers" who cut their teeth during the Vietnam War and calls for more fact-based journalism and "willingness to present those facts without fear or favor." Koppel's Nightline was often must see television and he deserves credit for tackling issues in depth, including topics that T.V. journalism often just scratched the surface of.
But Koppel is the last guy to lecture about objectivity and the need for more fact-based journalists. As author Eric Boehlert details in his book Lapdogs: How the Rolled Over for Bush, http://www.amazon.com/Lapdogs-Press-Rolled-Over-Bush/dp/0743289315, former Secretary of State Colin Powell is such good friends with Koppel that he joked in a speech about how he stopped by Koppel's house to take one of Koppel's muscle cars for a test drive.
Powell is the guy who held up the fake vials of anthrax in making the case for the Iraq invasion to the United Nations. Powell later admitted in his biography http://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Colin-Powell-Karen-DeYoung/dp/1400041708 that he had serious doubts about the case for war before the speech. The truth was Powell got to have it both ways: If the invasion led to finding weapons of mass destruction he was the guy who sounded the alarm and if it it didn't, he was the good soldier who made the speech out of loyalty to Bush.
But Boehlert notes that when Powell did three sit down interviews with Koppel a year after the U.N. speech, his old buddy Koppel never asked him about it. When Koppel took heat from reactionaries for reading the names of soldiers killed in Iraq, he said those who believed he read the names because he was against the war were wrong. Koppel told Democracy Now host Amy Goodman he supported the invasion because he believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
In Ted Koppel's world, that's objective, fact-based journalism. If Iraq has WMD, there's no debate on whether the U.S. has the right to invade a sovereign nation. A case can be made that Pakistan, with over 100 nuclear weapons an al-Qaeda presence and a population increasingly angry at the U.S. due to it's killing of civilians in drone strikes, is far more dangerous than Saddam's Iraq was, but Pakistan is an ally and you won't hear Koppel defending an invasion there.
Besides lacking objectivity, Koppel is also short on facts. On NPR this year Koppel absurdly asserted the U.S. built bases in Japan after World War II to keep Japan from developing nuclear weapons when the idea of developing nukes was obscene to a generation of Japanese people after the nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truth was the bases were for keeping soldiers who could be quickly dispatched to Korea or Vietnam and as a deterrent to Chinese expansion.
Koppel also asserted this year on NPR that the Obama's Deficit Commission members were all former politicians who could make politically unfeasible recommendations because they no longer had to be elected. He had to be embarrassingly corrected on the air by commission co-chairman Alan Simpson who noted that some members are elected officials.
Despite Koppel's yearning for more fact-based journalists, the truth is he wasn't very big on them himself. Like brushing up on the policies of the men who sought to become the leader of the most powerful nation of the world before they debated.
"Honestly, it turns my brains to mush," Koppel said on Larry King Live after moderating the first 2000 Bush-Al Gore debate in which Gore said Bush's tax plan didn't add up. " I can't pretend for a minute that I'm really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it I haven't a clue to what they're talking about."
It's not the only thing Koppel is clueless about.
Never mind as Olbermann noted in his Monday night special comment rebuking Koppel that he has probably criticized President Obama more in the last couple weeks than Fox criticized George W. Bush in the last eight years and MSNBC's lineup includes conservative former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough who's on for three hours during morning drive. To Koppel both networks are the same and their viewers are being told what they want to hear, not the hard truths they may not want to hear, but need to know.
"We are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers," Koppel wrote.
In one nonsensical passage Koppel blames credit card debt, the national debt, the housing collapse and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on the "dangers of entitlement run rampant." So if you ran up credit card debt and took out a second mortage on your house to pay your bills, it's your fault, not the Wall Street corporations that profited off of it. And when Bush invaded Afghanistan and and Iraq and gave tax cuts to the superrich turning a surplus into a deficit, that was due to your sense of entitlement.
Koppel also goes on the praise the work of his generation of broadcasters "the trusted gatekeepers" who cut their teeth during the Vietnam War and calls for more fact-based journalism and "willingness to present those facts without fear or favor." Koppel's Nightline was often must see television and he deserves credit for tackling issues in depth, including topics that T.V. journalism often just scratched the surface of.
But Koppel is the last guy to lecture about objectivity and the need for more fact-based journalists. As author Eric Boehlert details in his book Lapdogs: How the Rolled Over for Bush, http://www.amazon.com/Lapdogs-Press-Rolled-Over-Bush/dp/0743289315, former Secretary of State Colin Powell is such good friends with Koppel that he joked in a speech about how he stopped by Koppel's house to take one of Koppel's muscle cars for a test drive.
Powell is the guy who held up the fake vials of anthrax in making the case for the Iraq invasion to the United Nations. Powell later admitted in his biography http://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Colin-Powell-Karen-DeYoung/dp/1400041708 that he had serious doubts about the case for war before the speech. The truth was Powell got to have it both ways: If the invasion led to finding weapons of mass destruction he was the guy who sounded the alarm and if it it didn't, he was the good soldier who made the speech out of loyalty to Bush.
But Boehlert notes that when Powell did three sit down interviews with Koppel a year after the U.N. speech, his old buddy Koppel never asked him about it. When Koppel took heat from reactionaries for reading the names of soldiers killed in Iraq, he said those who believed he read the names because he was against the war were wrong. Koppel told Democracy Now host Amy Goodman he supported the invasion because he believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
In Ted Koppel's world, that's objective, fact-based journalism. If Iraq has WMD, there's no debate on whether the U.S. has the right to invade a sovereign nation. A case can be made that Pakistan, with over 100 nuclear weapons an al-Qaeda presence and a population increasingly angry at the U.S. due to it's killing of civilians in drone strikes, is far more dangerous than Saddam's Iraq was, but Pakistan is an ally and you won't hear Koppel defending an invasion there.
Besides lacking objectivity, Koppel is also short on facts. On NPR this year Koppel absurdly asserted the U.S. built bases in Japan after World War II to keep Japan from developing nuclear weapons when the idea of developing nukes was obscene to a generation of Japanese people after the nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truth was the bases were for keeping soldiers who could be quickly dispatched to Korea or Vietnam and as a deterrent to Chinese expansion.
Koppel also asserted this year on NPR that the Obama's Deficit Commission members were all former politicians who could make politically unfeasible recommendations because they no longer had to be elected. He had to be embarrassingly corrected on the air by commission co-chairman Alan Simpson who noted that some members are elected officials.
Despite Koppel's yearning for more fact-based journalists, the truth is he wasn't very big on them himself. Like brushing up on the policies of the men who sought to become the leader of the most powerful nation of the world before they debated.
"Honestly, it turns my brains to mush," Koppel said on Larry King Live after moderating the first 2000 Bush-Al Gore debate in which Gore said Bush's tax plan didn't add up. " I can't pretend for a minute that I'm really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it I haven't a clue to what they're talking about."
It's not the only thing Koppel is clueless about.
Monday, November 15, 2010
The New Deal to The Old Steal
Unemployment is forcing me to move in with my girlfriend and her family in Ohio in December, but while I don't have a job, I have unemployment benefits. It's part of my personal connection to the much maligned "big government." Big government to me is also the food stamps my widowed mother briefly received after my father died and the free school lunches I received.
Things improved after my mother landed a temporary job funded through the Comprehensive Training and Employment Act, a now defunct federal government program tied to The New Deal-era Works Progress Administration. Later she landed a local government job in my hometown of New Haven, CT as a metermaid. It was a thankless job, but she was a member of the American Federation of State, Council and Municipal Employees and received decent pay and benefits that allowed us to live relatively comfortable.
This was in in the 1970s during the administration of then President Jimmy Carter, remembered as the last truly liberal president. Actually, that title probably belongs to Lyndon Johnson, according to a new and excellent book I'm reading. Winner-Take-All Polititics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, dates the beginning of the dismantling of The New Deal to what I call The Old Steal to the Carter-era. It partially blames it on Carter and the Democrats - who had a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate - for their reluctance to support unions like the one my mother belonged to as well as private sector unions.
The book documents how the richest 1 percent earned about 8 percent of all income in the Carter era and now earn about 23.5 percent and how their income grew 256 percent during that time while the middle fifth of the country - working class folks like my mother - increased only about 20 percent. Much of this was due in the 1980s to President Ronald Reagan - Saint Reagan as he is now portrayed by reactionaries - who proudly proclaimed, "Government isn't the solution to our problems, government is the problem."
Never mind that Reagan exploded deficits and actually expanded the size of government. Reagan made demonizing government and making it seem bloated and inept the status quo for politicians. By 1996, centrist Democratic President Bill Clinton was declaring, "the era of big government is over." Fortunately for her, my mother was dead of cancer by then having gotten the kind of humane and enormously expensive hospice care in her last days that those 46 million of us without healthcare could never dream of these days.
As Hacker and Pierson detail, the American idea of rugged individualism that most Americans embrace is a myth. Even the pioneers benefitted from The US Army, the Lewis and Clark expedition and land grants. And corporations have suceeded thanks to government grants, innovation developed at public universities and both business-friendly tax laws and antiunion laws.
Contrary to what most Republican pols say and what most Americans foolishly buy into, big government isn't just bureaucrats enforcing pesky laws, but the people who enforce, or at least to occasionally enforce, workplace safety as well as clean air, food and water laws. It's cops, firefighters, postal workers and soldiers. Government is people and is supposed to be by the people and for the people as Lincoln said.
All that is ending now as what's left of the social safety net is shredded thanks to Republicans and mostly spineless Democrats like President Barack Obama AKA The Great Capitulator who won't even draw a line in the sand about letting tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans expire at the end of the year. Medicare and Social Security will likely be further diluted and possibly privatized in the coming years in one of the last remaining windfalls for Wall Street. The race to the bottom has turned a democracy into an oligarchy.
Meanwhile, my unemployment benefits expire in January when Republicans assume control of the House after their midterm landslide earlier this month. The odds of my finding another journalism job are the only thing higher than the odds on my benefits being renewed.
Things improved after my mother landed a temporary job funded through the Comprehensive Training and Employment Act, a now defunct federal government program tied to The New Deal-era Works Progress Administration. Later she landed a local government job in my hometown of New Haven, CT as a metermaid. It was a thankless job, but she was a member of the American Federation of State, Council and Municipal Employees and received decent pay and benefits that allowed us to live relatively comfortable.
This was in in the 1970s during the administration of then President Jimmy Carter, remembered as the last truly liberal president. Actually, that title probably belongs to Lyndon Johnson, according to a new and excellent book I'm reading. Winner-Take-All Polititics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, dates the beginning of the dismantling of The New Deal to what I call The Old Steal to the Carter-era. It partially blames it on Carter and the Democrats - who had a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate - for their reluctance to support unions like the one my mother belonged to as well as private sector unions.
The book documents how the richest 1 percent earned about 8 percent of all income in the Carter era and now earn about 23.5 percent and how their income grew 256 percent during that time while the middle fifth of the country - working class folks like my mother - increased only about 20 percent. Much of this was due in the 1980s to President Ronald Reagan - Saint Reagan as he is now portrayed by reactionaries - who proudly proclaimed, "Government isn't the solution to our problems, government is the problem."
Never mind that Reagan exploded deficits and actually expanded the size of government. Reagan made demonizing government and making it seem bloated and inept the status quo for politicians. By 1996, centrist Democratic President Bill Clinton was declaring, "the era of big government is over." Fortunately for her, my mother was dead of cancer by then having gotten the kind of humane and enormously expensive hospice care in her last days that those 46 million of us without healthcare could never dream of these days.
As Hacker and Pierson detail, the American idea of rugged individualism that most Americans embrace is a myth. Even the pioneers benefitted from The US Army, the Lewis and Clark expedition and land grants. And corporations have suceeded thanks to government grants, innovation developed at public universities and both business-friendly tax laws and antiunion laws.
Contrary to what most Republican pols say and what most Americans foolishly buy into, big government isn't just bureaucrats enforcing pesky laws, but the people who enforce, or at least to occasionally enforce, workplace safety as well as clean air, food and water laws. It's cops, firefighters, postal workers and soldiers. Government is people and is supposed to be by the people and for the people as Lincoln said.
All that is ending now as what's left of the social safety net is shredded thanks to Republicans and mostly spineless Democrats like President Barack Obama AKA The Great Capitulator who won't even draw a line in the sand about letting tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans expire at the end of the year. Medicare and Social Security will likely be further diluted and possibly privatized in the coming years in one of the last remaining windfalls for Wall Street. The race to the bottom has turned a democracy into an oligarchy.
Meanwhile, my unemployment benefits expire in January when Republicans assume control of the House after their midterm landslide earlier this month. The odds of my finding another journalism job are the only thing higher than the odds on my benefits being renewed.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
The Decider Versus The Great Capitulator
While I deplore what he accomplished, there can be no argument that George W. Bush got things done as president. The results were 4,400 Americans and at least 125,000 Iraqis dead thanks to an unprovoked war of choice, an economic meltdown due to Wall Street foxes being allowed to guard the henhouse, a surplus turned into a massive deficit largely due to tax cuts for the rich, environmental rape and the shredding of the Constitution and subsequent loss of civil and human rights.
But Bush, the self-proclaimed "decider" who has been defiantly defending his policies this week as he promotes his book, believed in things and accomplished them: tax cuts for the rich, less government regulation, an imperial presidency. When he and the master puppeter Dick Cheney decided to do something, they didn't worry about being bipartisan or about the polls, they did it. They operated from a position of strength.
By contrast, Barack Obama, who I call the "The Great Capitulator" has displayed nothing but weakness since taking office. Unlike many liberals, I had low expectations for Obama who, to his credit, campaigned as a centrist and has governed as one. But those who operate in the middle of the road get crushed as last week's Republican landslide in the midterms illustrates.
Sure, Obama was left a colossal mess by Bush, but where was the boldness of the guy who wrote a book titled "The Audacity of Hope"? Instead of trying for a $2 trillion or $3 trillion stimulus during his brief honeymoon when he had political capital, he listened to his ex-Clinton D.C. beltway advisors and settled for a too small $800 billion stimulus which didn't create or retain enough jobs to reduce unemployment and led to the midterm massacre.
As reprehensible as invading Iraq was, it was a bold move by Bush. The kind of boldness it would've taken Obama to de-escalate the Afghanistan War which anyone with any common sense can see is a quagmire destined to drain us of blood and treasure for years to come. Instead Obama escalated the war while making a nonsensical promise to begin withdrawing troops in July of 2011, a pledge his administration and the military are rapidly retreating from.
And now comes word that Obama will give in on his pledge to let the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire while his deficit commission calls for cuts in Medicare and Social Security and more tax cuts for the rich. This on the heels of an embarrassing 60 Minutes interview Sunday when Obama spoke of compromising with Republicans. As if after their success in obstructionism for the last 21 months, there is any reason for them to compromise with Obama. This is a guy who they know can be rolled because he has no backbone.
I suspect Obama will be a one-term president and have no one to blame, but himself. If you're going to go down, at least go down fighting for something you believe in. Sadly, Bush understands that more than Obama ever will.
But Bush, the self-proclaimed "decider" who has been defiantly defending his policies this week as he promotes his book, believed in things and accomplished them: tax cuts for the rich, less government regulation, an imperial presidency. When he and the master puppeter Dick Cheney decided to do something, they didn't worry about being bipartisan or about the polls, they did it. They operated from a position of strength.
By contrast, Barack Obama, who I call the "The Great Capitulator" has displayed nothing but weakness since taking office. Unlike many liberals, I had low expectations for Obama who, to his credit, campaigned as a centrist and has governed as one. But those who operate in the middle of the road get crushed as last week's Republican landslide in the midterms illustrates.
Sure, Obama was left a colossal mess by Bush, but where was the boldness of the guy who wrote a book titled "The Audacity of Hope"? Instead of trying for a $2 trillion or $3 trillion stimulus during his brief honeymoon when he had political capital, he listened to his ex-Clinton D.C. beltway advisors and settled for a too small $800 billion stimulus which didn't create or retain enough jobs to reduce unemployment and led to the midterm massacre.
As reprehensible as invading Iraq was, it was a bold move by Bush. The kind of boldness it would've taken Obama to de-escalate the Afghanistan War which anyone with any common sense can see is a quagmire destined to drain us of blood and treasure for years to come. Instead Obama escalated the war while making a nonsensical promise to begin withdrawing troops in July of 2011, a pledge his administration and the military are rapidly retreating from.
And now comes word that Obama will give in on his pledge to let the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire while his deficit commission calls for cuts in Medicare and Social Security and more tax cuts for the rich. This on the heels of an embarrassing 60 Minutes interview Sunday when Obama spoke of compromising with Republicans. As if after their success in obstructionism for the last 21 months, there is any reason for them to compromise with Obama. This is a guy who they know can be rolled because he has no backbone.
I suspect Obama will be a one-term president and have no one to blame, but himself. If you're going to go down, at least go down fighting for something you believe in. Sadly, Bush understands that more than Obama ever will.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Wiki Leaker Letter
With news that supporters of US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning are being harassed - a supporter this week said FBI agents interrogated him and confiscated his laptop at O'Hare Airport in Chicago - I decided to write this letter to Manning, the alleged source of the voluminous documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq published by Wiki Leaks and the source of the Collateral Murder video. While I don't relish the possibility of opening myself up to being spied on our harassed by the government, I felt it was the least I could do given that Manning has been imprisoned indefinitely with no trial date.
11-10-10
Evan Goodenow
3001 Lakeshore Drive
Apt. 343
St. Joseph, MI. 49085
Pfc. Bradley Manning
c/o Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA. 94610
Dear Bradley,
I can’t imagine what you’re going through, but I wanted you to know I salute your courage in letting the American people know what is being done by their military in their names and with their taxes.
It is ironic that the soldiers who killed and wounded Iraqis and journalists who posed no threat to them in the Collateral Murder video released by Wiki Leaks face no penalties while you have been imprisoned for allegedly leaking it. As disgusting as what the video shows, it is by all accounts of soldiers who have had the courage to speak out, typical of the shoot first, ask questions later procedure U.S. military commanders allow and encourage in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The fact that no one in the helicopter that opened fire in the video was ever disciplined is proof of that. Of course it is easy for me as a civilian to second guess, but even in war there are rules and that is what separates a soldier from a murderer. You don’t shoot people who pose no threat to you and expose innocent civilians to death because some of them might be armed.
If you are responsible for leaking the video and the Afghanistan War and Iraq War documents to Wiki Leaks, you should be praised rather than condemned and punished. You are a hero for letting Americans know what their military is doing. It is the people carrying out the torture and murder described in the documents who are the real criminals.
The real traitors are those that keep the truth secret and lie that revealing it would endanger soldiers and their allies. Secrecy corrodes democracy and covers up corruption, incompetence and evil. Any dangers the leaks pose are far less serious than the danger of secrecy.
I have enclosed a $20 donation to your legal defense fund. If I weren’t unemployed I would give more. It is sad that many Americans are in such denial about what our soldiers do in our name that they condemn you, but there are some of us who understand that what you are alleged to have done exemplifies what a true soldier and patriot is. One who resists illegal or immoral actions that defile the true American and human values of freedom, liberty and self-determination.
Be strong and be true to yourself.
Sincerely,
Evan Goodenow
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Advertising Our Indifference
While television advertising is designed to sell ideas or products it also reflects how we think. I find three recent ads particularly troubling for what they say about Americans. The first features actress Ellen Page for Cisco Systems. Page visits a small town and the mayor shows her into a room where a police officers is watching surveillance camera monitors of the town. Page sees her car being ticketed and runs out.
The chilling idea that even in small town America the police are watching our every move is played for laughs. And because video surveillance has become so ubquitous and people of Page's 20-something generation are numb to it having been spied on their entire life beginning in school, the outrageous invasion of privacy is marketed as something cute.
The second ad is for On Demand NFL football and features a police officer shocking a man with his Taser. The victim and the cop are in a Fantasy Football league and the cop is mad about the victim having On Demand games. When police first began using Tasers they were sold as a "less lethal" alternative to shooting people. Obviously, it's better to be shocked by a 50,000 volts of electricity for a few seconds than being shot and you're likely to survive being tasered unless you have a heart condition, hence the "less lethal" rather than non-lethal description. But police now routinely use Tasers to in non-life threatening situations and the public has become so accustomed to what is a form of torture that it can be played for laughs on television.
The third ad is for a World of Warcraft video game and shows actors dressed as everyday people and athletes like Kobe Bryant and celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel in combat with semiautomatic rifles and rocket launchers. Unlike real combat in Afghanistan which the commercial resembles, nobody gets killed. As a kid I played with water pistols and played Army much to the chagrin of my antiwar mother. But the idea that adults would get their kicks playing war games while fellow Americans are killing and being killed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq is really warped.
What these ads show is a country numb to the loss of its freedoms and oblivious to the real cost of war. The jokes in the ads are on us.
The chilling idea that even in small town America the police are watching our every move is played for laughs. And because video surveillance has become so ubquitous and people of Page's 20-something generation are numb to it having been spied on their entire life beginning in school, the outrageous invasion of privacy is marketed as something cute.
The second ad is for On Demand NFL football and features a police officer shocking a man with his Taser. The victim and the cop are in a Fantasy Football league and the cop is mad about the victim having On Demand games. When police first began using Tasers they were sold as a "less lethal" alternative to shooting people. Obviously, it's better to be shocked by a 50,000 volts of electricity for a few seconds than being shot and you're likely to survive being tasered unless you have a heart condition, hence the "less lethal" rather than non-lethal description. But police now routinely use Tasers to in non-life threatening situations and the public has become so accustomed to what is a form of torture that it can be played for laughs on television.
The third ad is for a World of Warcraft video game and shows actors dressed as everyday people and athletes like Kobe Bryant and celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel in combat with semiautomatic rifles and rocket launchers. Unlike real combat in Afghanistan which the commercial resembles, nobody gets killed. As a kid I played with water pistols and played Army much to the chagrin of my antiwar mother. But the idea that adults would get their kicks playing war games while fellow Americans are killing and being killed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq is really warped.
What these ads show is a country numb to the loss of its freedoms and oblivious to the real cost of war. The jokes in the ads are on us.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Belated Introduction
Everybody has a blog nowadays and as a journalist, I've resisted the temptation to express my political views in a blog form because of concerns that I would be accused of liberal bias. But while I am a flaming liberal, I've always gone out of my way to be fair to people I personally disagreed with while not going soft on those I agreed with. That's a basic tenet of journalism and the idea that journalists don't have biases or opinions like everybody else is absurd.
I never graduated from college, but I've tried to self-educate myself. The more I learn the truth about this nation's bloody history as opposed to the conventional wisdom I learned as a kid and young man, the more I've become radicalized politically. This country has a history of oppressing other nations abroad and screwing over poor and working class Americans to benefit the rich. And since WWII we've become a national security state with an economy based on producing weapons of war and therefore dependent on war or the threat of it.
But a nation based on those principles cannot survive. As our economy collapses due to cannabalistic capitalism and our environment dies due to the climate change we've largely caused and willfully ignored, I've become increasingly despondent about our future and my own. As a citizen, I've done little other than an occasional protest and a check sent to civil and human rights organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International. As a reporter, I've tried to do stories that illustrated the growing gap between the rich and poor, tell the stories of the victims of violence and challenge those in power to be accountable.
Of course my efforts have been miniscule and done little to change things for the better although I think I have occasionally opened some eyes and made some small positive difference. However, when you stand up to those in power, be prepared to get knocked down. I know that some of my firings from newspapers are largely based on my rocking the boat. That's supposed to be an obligation of journalists - afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted - but most editors don't want to rock the boat lest they upset advertisers or local powerbrokers. So I have lost a lot of jobs the last six years and will probably never have job security if I'm lucky enough to find another job.
This blog is an attempt to express my frustration in the way things are and try to occasionally offer solutions. I don't expect it will do any good, but I've always believed in lost causes a catergory that I suppose I should include myself in.
I never graduated from college, but I've tried to self-educate myself. The more I learn the truth about this nation's bloody history as opposed to the conventional wisdom I learned as a kid and young man, the more I've become radicalized politically. This country has a history of oppressing other nations abroad and screwing over poor and working class Americans to benefit the rich. And since WWII we've become a national security state with an economy based on producing weapons of war and therefore dependent on war or the threat of it.
But a nation based on those principles cannot survive. As our economy collapses due to cannabalistic capitalism and our environment dies due to the climate change we've largely caused and willfully ignored, I've become increasingly despondent about our future and my own. As a citizen, I've done little other than an occasional protest and a check sent to civil and human rights organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International. As a reporter, I've tried to do stories that illustrated the growing gap between the rich and poor, tell the stories of the victims of violence and challenge those in power to be accountable.
Of course my efforts have been miniscule and done little to change things for the better although I think I have occasionally opened some eyes and made some small positive difference. However, when you stand up to those in power, be prepared to get knocked down. I know that some of my firings from newspapers are largely based on my rocking the boat. That's supposed to be an obligation of journalists - afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted - but most editors don't want to rock the boat lest they upset advertisers or local powerbrokers. So I have lost a lot of jobs the last six years and will probably never have job security if I'm lucky enough to find another job.
This blog is an attempt to express my frustration in the way things are and try to occasionally offer solutions. I don't expect it will do any good, but I've always believed in lost causes a catergory that I suppose I should include myself in.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Countdown to Keith's Objectivity
Keith Olbermann has a reputation of being difficult to work with, but in my brief encounters with him when we worked together at ESPN in 1995 he was gracious to me. As the liaison in Bristol, CT. for the New Jersey-based SportsTicker bureau which helped provide ESPN with scores and statistics, I had to meet with Olbermann after SportsTicker provided incorrect statistics that he read on the air while co-anchoring SportsCenter. He stressed how the mistake hurt ESPN's credibility especially because it involved the University of Connecticut Huskies women's basketball team and ESPN is based in Connecticut, but he never took out his frustration on me which I appreciated.
In 2003, he took a gutsy stand against President George W. Bush and the unprovoked invasion of Iraq on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. In subsequent years Olbermann made eloquent criticisms of the illegal war and the Bush administrations use of torture and warrantless wiretapping. While being accused of liberal bias, Olbermann also ripped President Obama to task for not prosecuting Bush for war crimes, continuing the use of the Bush state secrets defense and escalating the war in Afghanistan.
So I was saddened about Olbermann's Friday suspension from MSNBC for making contributions to three Democratic candidates without network approval. As Olbermann colleague and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, the suspension highlights the difference between MSNBC and Fox News where hosts donate to and shill for Republican candidates. But I feel conflicted. Does anyone really believe Olbermann doesn't have strong opinions about politicians whether he contributes to them or not?
The suspension also brings into question whether we journalists should give up our rights as citizens. If we can't donate to candidates should we also not be allowed to vote? Obviously we can't work for a candidate, but if we donate to them or vote for them does that mean we've lost our objectivity and will go easy on them in interviews or stories about them? Not me.
An editor once told me I needed to go into a story without an opinion. I told him I had an obligation to be fair, but everyone brings bias and opinions to stories. If I go to cover a KKK rally am I not expected to have a strong opinion about the Klan? Or about covering the sentencing of a convicted child molester?
I'm a flaming liberal, but if anything, that has made me tougher on liberal candidates than conservative ones. Reporters have a responsibility to hold people in power accountable, but we don't forfeit our right to political beliefs or to exercise them judiciously. We should take it on a case by case basis and avoid conflicts of interests of the appearance of them, but I'd prefer journalists with strong political opinions who try to be fair rather than blank slates who use objectivity as an excuse not to educate themselves on politics.
As Dante said, "The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, remain neutral."
In 2003, he took a gutsy stand against President George W. Bush and the unprovoked invasion of Iraq on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. In subsequent years Olbermann made eloquent criticisms of the illegal war and the Bush administrations use of torture and warrantless wiretapping. While being accused of liberal bias, Olbermann also ripped President Obama to task for not prosecuting Bush for war crimes, continuing the use of the Bush state secrets defense and escalating the war in Afghanistan.
So I was saddened about Olbermann's Friday suspension from MSNBC for making contributions to three Democratic candidates without network approval. As Olbermann colleague and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, the suspension highlights the difference between MSNBC and Fox News where hosts donate to and shill for Republican candidates. But I feel conflicted. Does anyone really believe Olbermann doesn't have strong opinions about politicians whether he contributes to them or not?
The suspension also brings into question whether we journalists should give up our rights as citizens. If we can't donate to candidates should we also not be allowed to vote? Obviously we can't work for a candidate, but if we donate to them or vote for them does that mean we've lost our objectivity and will go easy on them in interviews or stories about them? Not me.
An editor once told me I needed to go into a story without an opinion. I told him I had an obligation to be fair, but everyone brings bias and opinions to stories. If I go to cover a KKK rally am I not expected to have a strong opinion about the Klan? Or about covering the sentencing of a convicted child molester?
I'm a flaming liberal, but if anything, that has made me tougher on liberal candidates than conservative ones. Reporters have a responsibility to hold people in power accountable, but we don't forfeit our right to political beliefs or to exercise them judiciously. We should take it on a case by case basis and avoid conflicts of interests of the appearance of them, but I'd prefer journalists with strong political opinions who try to be fair rather than blank slates who use objectivity as an excuse not to educate themselves on politics.
As Dante said, "The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, remain neutral."
After the Landslide
As an unemployed journalist desperately hoping to find work in a comatose economy and dying newspaper industry, the Republican landslide (60 seats gained in the House of Representatives and 6 in the Senate ) means its likely my unemployment benefits won't be extended before I find a new job if I can ever find one. Leading Republicans have implied that people like me are deadbeats who would rather collect benefits than work as if I could survive on $276 a week.
I guess they think that I should take a minimum wage job with a name tag rather than continue to seek work as a reporter, the only thing I've ever been any good at in a profession that doesn't pay much more than minimum wage. I guess they'll force my hand soon enough.
These are the same folks whose idea of creating jobs is to call for a hiring freeze on hiring federal workers and to call for tax cuts for the rich which will lead cities and states to layoff workers. And now they're in charge of the House and will continue to frame the agenda for our spineless president and most of the Democrats.
Instead of debating the worthiness of tax cuts given the lack of federal revenue, the debate is how much taxes to cut. And instead of spending money to create jobs and prevent another Great Depression, there will be spending cuts to because of phony deficit scares. It's like conserving water when your house is on fire, but the people calling the shots never get burned.
I guess they think that I should take a minimum wage job with a name tag rather than continue to seek work as a reporter, the only thing I've ever been any good at in a profession that doesn't pay much more than minimum wage. I guess they'll force my hand soon enough.
These are the same folks whose idea of creating jobs is to call for a hiring freeze on hiring federal workers and to call for tax cuts for the rich which will lead cities and states to layoff workers. And now they're in charge of the House and will continue to frame the agenda for our spineless president and most of the Democrats.
Instead of debating the worthiness of tax cuts given the lack of federal revenue, the debate is how much taxes to cut. And instead of spending money to create jobs and prevent another Great Depression, there will be spending cuts to because of phony deficit scares. It's like conserving water when your house is on fire, but the people calling the shots never get burned.
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