This is why it’s so difficult to get good people to run for political office

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Now Hiring U.S. Senators and Representatives

We are in desperate need for honest and intelligent citizens of the United States to apply for the jobs of Senators and Representatives as specified in Article I of the United States Constitution. Job Duty: To do anything necessary to keep getting re-elected. Job Requirements: - You must be willing to raise $1,000,000 every two years ($10,000/week for a Representative) or $6,000,000 every six years (about $20,000/week for Senator). To raise one million dollars, you can either convince 10,000 citizens to give you $100 each or you can make secret promises to a few hundred large corporations. It’s your choice. - You must be willing to vote to pass 2,000-page hyper-technical and incoherent bills that were drafted by corporate lobbyists. - You must spend most of your time on the job secretly promising favors to large companies and asking them for money, while simultaneously denying to your constituents that you’ve made secret promises. - You must be willing to expose yourself, your family and your friends to the constant risk of being shot by incoherent disgruntled people. - You must be willing to find a way to avoid spending time with lower-class and middle-class Americans. - You must be willing to expose yourself to constant ridicule and false charges trumped up by the media to sell advertisements. Everything embarrassing you’ve ever done will appear in national publications, especially if it is irrelevant to the issues facing this country. - Once you start campaigning for the very first time, you must agree to stop talking candidly about anything. - You must support America’s war-machine or else you will be called a traitor and run out of office. - You must be willing to expose your family and your closest friends to massive invasions of their privacy. - You must pretend to explain and solve complex social issues using only 8-second sound bites. - You must be willing to expose yourself to scandalous and false Swift-Boating attacks. - Your door must always be open to lobbyists for banks, insurance companies and telecoms. - To win re-election, you must get down in the dirt and personally hurl false charges against your opponent, because the ends will justify the means. - You must constantly speak of our duty to our children while simultaneously crushing the next generation with federal debt, and providing the nation's children with terrible educations.

Continue ReadingThis is why it’s so difficult to get good people to run for political office

More thoughts about Wikileaks and the First Amendment

Glenn Greenwald is one of my most trusted self-critical sources of information. He writes for Salon.com. Check out this post (and explore his other recent writings) and consider viewing the short video interview at CNN, and you’ll see why I’m so cynical about the mainstream media, including host Jessica Yellin of CNN (BTW, the ex-Bush adviser on this clip is really a piece of work). And then check out this post and the following comments, where Yellin tries to redeem herself: The following comment to the video sums up Yellin’s alleged even-handedness nicely:

Jesse Frederik December 28th, 2010 7:33 pm ET Compare the questioning of Fran Townsend: "[After showing a video of Joe Biden calling Assange a high-tech terrorist] Is it fair to call him a terrorist?" "Is there anything good that can come from what Assange is doing?" To the questioning of Glenn Greenwald: "Shouldn't he go to jail in defense of his beliefs?" "Any qualms about that he is essentially profiting of classified information?" [Bob Woodward anyone?] And do you see any irony in the fact that he's making money of a corporate publisher?' "What is his ultimate goal, beyond embarrassing and disrupting the US government? What good do his supporters hope will really come from everything he's doing?" "Do you think [the rape charges] are part of a smear campaign? And beyond that do you think it hurts his credibility?" Is the difference in the questioning not obvious?
My feelings about Wikileaks and the person(s) that leaked the most recent cables are inextricably woven with the many disturbing revelations disclosed by Wikileaks. This is not the sterilized slow drip of information that you get from the mainstream media, such that we only really learn what was going on 30 years after we could have done something about it. Wikileaks has enabled a torrent of important and often disturbing information and it is causing massive embarrassment to the elites that run this country, and they run it far too often in secret. Yes, I live in the U.S., but it is no longer my country. The leaders of the U.S. rarely speak for me anymore because they don’t treasure the First Amendment, they are crushing our children with debt and they are xenophobic and unapologetic warmongers and torturers. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingMore thoughts about Wikileaks and the First Amendment

Taking Cues

In the last post, I opined about the atmosphere in the country generated by overheated rhetoric and the irrationality that has resulted from seemingly intransigent positions. Some of the responses I received to that were of the “well, both sides do it” variety (which is true to an extent, but I think beside the point) and the “you can’t legislate civility or impose censorship” stripe. As it is developing, the young man who attempted to murder Representative Gifford—and succeeded in killing six others—appears to be not of sound mind. We’re getting a picture of a loner who made no friends and indulged in a distorted worldview tending toward the paranoid. How much of his actions can be laid on politics and how much on his own obsessions is debatable. Many commentators very quickly tried to label him a right-winger, based largely on the political climate in Arizona and that he targeted a moderate, “blue dog” Democrat. This in the context of years of shrill right-wing political rhetoric that fully employs a take-no-prisoner ethic, including comments from some Tea Party candidates about so-called Second Amendment solutions. It’s looking like trying to label this man’s politics will be next to impossible and, as I say, if he is mentally unbalanced, what real difference does that make? (Although to see some people say “Look, he’s a Lefty, one of his favorite books is Mein Kampf ” is in itself bizarre—how does anyone figure Mein Kampf indicates leftist political leanings? Because the Nazis were “National Socialists”? Please.) Whatever the determination of Mr. Loughner’s motives may turn out to be, his actions have forced the topic of political stupidity and slipshod rhetoric to the forefront, at least until Gabrielle Gifford is out of danger of dying. Regardless of his influences, in this instance he has served as the trigger for a debate we have been needing to have for decades. This time, hopefully, it won’t be shoved aside after a few well-meaning sound-bites from politicians wanting to appear sensitive and concerned, only to have everyone go right back to beating each other bloody with nouns and verbs. But while it may be fair to say that Mr. Loughner is unbalanced and might have gone off and shot anyone, the fact is he shot a politician, one who had been targeted by the Right. Perhaps the heated rhetoric did not make Mr. Loughner prone to violence, but what about his choice of victims? [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingTaking Cues

9/11 as an excuse to say stupid things.

I work in a big office building located in downtown St. Louis, the "Bank of America Plaza." Early this week, I was interviewed for a newspaper article, and I needed an updated photo of myself. A coworker offered to snap that photo using a small digital camera. We want down the elevator to the first floor public lobby of the building, at street level, where we found a large neutral colored wall that we could use as a backdrop for my photo. I stood in front of the wall and my coworker stood about 10 feet away from me. As she took a photo of me a security guard suddenly approached. Me: "In the lobby? In a public lobby?" Guard: "You may not take any pictures here. It’s because of 9/11 and homeland security." Me: "I understand that your employers have instructed you to say these sorts of things, but what you have just told me is about the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. My coworker is simply trying to take a picture of me in front of a wall." Guard: "Sir you cannot continue doing this. You will need to take pictures elsewhere." We left. Apparently, taking pictures of me threatens the United States. Or maybe the threat was taking a picture of the wall behind me. Certainly, the guard made it clear that the building owners prohibit any sort of photos in the lobby. We walked across the street and threatened the United States by taking my photo inside the lobby of a office building across the street, where friendly security guards don’t appreciate the risk of what we were doing. Instead, they naively laughed at our stories about security guards in my own office building.

Continue Reading9/11 as an excuse to say stupid things.

Substitute NYT for Wikileaks and substitute Iran for the United States

Wikileaks continues to be punished for being one of the few organizations brash enough to inform us what our governments are really doing and why. This is intolerable, of course, because the U.S. government is being run by big corporations and wealthy people who, for the most part, are driven by greed--so sorry to break this to the kids who are studying civics in grade school, where they don't tell you about armies of lobbyists, and they don't tell you that the banks own Congress. The true powers that be are running the federal government in secret and they are, regrettably, running it into the ground. That's what one should expect when there is no sunshine to keep powerful people accountable. What we have is a needlessly warmongering, debt-ridden secret and personally invasive brave new government.   I truly wish I didn't believe these things. Consider that our government first attacked Wikileaks by starving it financially, despite the lack of any charges filed against it. They did this by harassing Amazon and various financial organizations to make sure that Wikileaks had no funds to fight in Round II, which is underway. We now know that there are secret subpoenas being issued by the US, and thank goodness that Twitter had the decency to inform its users that their privacy is being invaded, unlike the big U.S. telecoms, who have a long documented track record for turning over our private information without informing us (encouraged very much by President Obama's agreement to grant them retroactive immunity for past invasions of our privacy.  Julian Assange sums up the current grand jury proceedings like this, and we know of this only because the U.K. Guardian has continually refused to be the lapdog of the U.S.:

The emergence of the Twitter subpoena – which was unsealed after a legal challenge by the company – was revealed after WikiLeaks announced it believed other US Internet companies had also been ordered to hand over information about its members' activities. WikiLeaks condemned the court order, saying it amounted to harassment. "If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," Assange said in a statement.
Glenn Greenwald comments further:
It's worth recalling -- and I hope journalists writing about this story remind themselves -- that all of this extraordinary probing and "criminal" investigating is stemming from WikiLeaks' doing nothing more than publishing classified information showing what the U.S. Government is doing: something investigative journalists, by definition, do all the time. And the key question now is this: did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply? It's difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue. But if other companies did receive and quietly comply with these orders, it will be a long time before we know, if we ever do, given the prohibition in these orders on disclosing even its existence to anyone. UPDATE III: Iceland's Interior Minister, Ögmundur Jónasson, described the DOJ's efforts to obtain the Twitter information of a member of that country's Parliament as "grave and odd." While suggesting some criticisms of WikiLeaks, he added: "if we manage to make government transparent and give all of us some insight into what is happening in countries involved in warfare it can only be for the good."

Continue ReadingSubstitute NYT for Wikileaks and substitute Iran for the United States