Julian Assange of Wikileaks, who is involved in a Kafkaesque ordeal, made the following statement on December 16, 2010:
It's rather amazing how this interviewer doesn't want to understand the situation. Maybe she would get it if she had been accused of a terrible crime by the corporate news media, and her name had been smeared across the Internet despite the fact that the prosecutor never actually brought any charges or produced evidence of any crime. Maybe then she would get it. The interviewer also can't seem to wrap her head around the fact that Assange is likely being smeared by those countries and corporations that are being embarrassed by his devastating leaks of authentic documents.
This is nothing short of Kafkaesque.
For the past few years, I've looked to Matt Taibbi for powerful ways to express, simultaneously emotionally and intellectually, the current national mess we're in. He recently wrote of his admiration for Bernie Sanders at Rolling Stone:
While everyone else in Washington was debating the political efficacy of the deal . . . Sanders blew all of that off and just looked at the deal’s moral implications. Which are these: this tax deal, frankly and unequivocally, is the result of a relatively small group of already-filthy rich people successfully lobbying an even smaller group of morally spineless politicians to shift an ever-bigger share of society’s burdens to the lower and (what’s left of the) middle classes. This is people who already have lots of shit just demanding more shit, for the sheer rotten sake of it. . . I contrast this now to the behavior of Barack Obama. I can’t even count how many times I listened to Barack Obama on the campaign trail talk about how, as president, he would rescind the Bush tax cuts as soon as he had the chance. He stood up and he said over and over again – I can still hear him saying “Let me be clear!” with that Great Statesman voice of his, before he went into this routine – that the Bush tax cuts were wrong and immoral. He said more than once that they “offended his conscience." Then, just as he did with drug re-importation and Guantanamo and bulk Medicare negotiations for pharmaceuticals and the issue of whether or not he would bring registered lobbyists into his White House and a host of other promises, he tossed his campaign “convictions” in the toilet and changed his mind once he was more accountable to lobbyists than primary voters.
I’m finished watching the first thirty minutes of this talk by Chris Hedges, and much of it is resonating with me. Here are a few of the early points made by Hedges:
Those who have been hurt the most by corporate profiteering have been rendered invisible by the corporate media.
The corporate media has imposed “a bland uniformity of opinion” upon us.
Those who are the most powerful are not those who hold formal titles; It’s our job to make the powerful frightened of us. The question isn’t how to get “good people” into power. It’s how we can limit the damage done to us by people in power.
Liberals have lost all credibility. We now have a bankrupt liberal class – one that is nihilist. They “refuse to confront the permanent war economy.”
The up and coming fascist movements in America have tapped into the rage of ordinary American because liberals failed to seize the opportunity. We will now increasingly have to deal with politicians whose aim is totalitarianism. They will find scapegoats to blame for America’s woes, and they will not serve as legitimate rulers. Rather, they will, as George Orwell predicted, “cling to power by force and fraud.”
We now have “inverted totalitarianism.” It has not been built around a demagogue; rather, it is "expressed in the anonymity of the corporate state." Citizens are utterly impotent within the current system.
The next chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama has been quoted saying lawmakers and regulators should "serve" Wall Street. Speaking to the Birmingham News, Bauchus said, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks." Shortly before the midterm elections that propelled him into the committee chairmanship, Bachus urged a gathering of financial industry lobbyists to donate heavily to Republicans in response to the Democrats’ overhaul of financial regulation.
Ron Paul gave a brief speech in the House Thursday, December 9th about Wikileaks. You can watch the YouTube embedded in this post, or read Paul's remarks here.
Paul ended his remarks with the following nine questions:
1. Do the American people deserve to know the truth regarding the ongoing war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
2. Could a larger question be: how can an Army Private gain access to so much secret material?
3. Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not our government’s failure to protect classified information?
4. Are we getting our money’s worth from the $80 billion per year we spend on our intelligence agencies?
5. Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths; lying us into war, or WikiLeaks’ revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
6. If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information, that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the internet?
7. Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
8. Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in the time of a declared war—which is treason—and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death, and corruption?
9. Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it’s wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised: “Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.”
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