I can be most easily reached through the following email address for suggesting new additions to the subscription list or to cancel your subscription to the Bi-Weekly:
The Blog Address for the Bi-Weekly is: http://jvlbiweekly.blogspot.com
Please forward the Blog address for the Bi-Weekly to any who might be interested
Saturday, May 31st, 2008
Volume 7, No. 9
6 Articles, 14 Pages
1. So Just Where Does The Madness End?
2. Bush and EPA Wage War On Science
3. Demand Immediate Action On A Bill of Impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney
and Other Civil officers of The United States
4. Ralph Nader Calls for Bush Cheney Impeachment
5. Carter Urges 'Supine" Europe to Break with US over Gaza Blockade
6. Democracy in America Is A Series of Narrow Escapes and We May Be Running Out of Luck
1. SO JUST WHERE DOES THE MADNESS END?
(All the monsters buried in the mass graves of the civil war have been dug up)
BY
ROBERT FISK
I am not sure what was the worse part of this week. Living in Lebanon? Or reading the outrageous words of George Bush? Several times, I have asked myself this question: have words lost their meaning?
So let’s start with lunch at the Cocteau restaurant in Beirut. Yes, it’s named after Jean Cocteau, and it is one of the chicest places in town. Magnificent flowers on the table, impeccable service, wonderful food. Yes, there was shooting at Sodeco — 20 yards away — the day before; yes, we were already worried about the virtual collapse of the Lebanese government, the humiliation of Sunni Muslims (and the Saudis) in the face of what we must acknowledge as a Hizbollah victory (don’t expect George Bush to understand this) and the danger of more street shooting. But I brought up the tiny matter of the little massacre in northern Lebanon in which 10 or 12 militiamen were captured and then murdered before being handed over to the Lebanese army. Their bodies were — I fear this is correct — mutilated after death.
“They deserved it,” the elegant woman on my left said. I was appalled, overwhelmed, disgusted, deeply saddened. How could she say such a thing? But this is Lebanon and a huge number of people — 62 by my count — have been killed in the past few days and all the monsters buried in the mass graves of the civil war have been dug up.
I chose escalope du veau at the Cocteau — I am sickened by how quickly I decided on it — and tried to explain to my dear Lebanese friends (and they are all dear to me) how much fury I have witnessed in Lebanon.
When Abed drove me up to the north of the country three days ago, bullets were spitting off the walls of Tripoli and one of the customs officials at the Syrian border asked me to stay with him and his friends because they were frightened. I did. They are OK.
But being from the wrong religion is suddenly crucial again. Who your driver is, what is the religion of your landlord, is suddenly a matter of immense importance.
Yesterday morning (and here I will spoil the story by telling the end of it), the schools reopened round my seafront apartment and I saw a woman in a hijab riding a bicycle down the Corniche and I took a call from my travel agent about my next trip to Europe — Beirut airport reopened — and I realised that Lebanon had “returned to normal”.
The roads were open again; the hooded gunmen had disappeared; the government had abandoned its confrontation with Hizbollah — the suspension of the Shia Muslim security chief at the airport (who bought me a bottle of champagne a year ago, I seem to remember — some Hizbollah “agent” he!) and the abandonment of the government’s demand to dismantle Hizbollah’s secret telecommunication system was a final seal of its failure — and I opened my newspaper and what did I read?
That George Bush declared in Jerusalem that “al-Qa’ida, Hizbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognise the emptiness of the terrorists’ vision and the injustice of their cause”.
Where does the madness end? Where do words lose their meaning? Al-Qa’ida is not being defeated. Hizbollah has just won a domestic war in Lebanon, as total as Hamas’s war in Gaza. Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza are hell disasters — I need no apology to quote Churchill’s description of 1948 Palestine yet again — and this foolish, stupid, vicious man is lying to the world yet again.
He holds a “closed door” meeting with Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara — a man stupendously unfit to run any Middle East “peace”, which is presumably why the meeting had to be “closed door” — but tells the world of the blessings of Israeli democracy. As if the Palestinians benefit from a democracy which is continuing to take from them the land which they have owned for generations.
Do we really have to accept this? Bush tells us that “we consider it a source of shame that the United Nations routinely passes more human rights resolutions against the freest democracy in the Middle East than any other nation in the world”.
The truth is that it is a source of shame that the United States continues to give unfettered permission to Israel to steal Palestinian land — which is why it should be a source of shame (to Washington) that the UN passes human rights resolutions against America’s only real ally in the region.
And what is Washington doing in the country where I live? It has sent one of its top generals to see the Lebanese army commander, signaling — a growing Fisk suspicion, this — that it has abandoned its support for the Lebanese government. The Americans promise more equipment for the Lebanese army.
Yes, always more equipment, more guns, more bullets to the Middle Eastern armies though — I have to say yet again (and I repeat that I do not like armies) — the Lebanese army saved us all this week. Its commander-in-chief, General Michel Sleiman, will become the next president and the Americans will support him and feel safe, as they always do, with a general in charge. “Chehabism”, as the Lebanese would say, has returned.
But I am not so sure. Sleiman gets on well with Damascus. He is not going to lead his soldiers into a pro-American war against Hizbollah. And the Lebanese are not going to join Bush’s insane “jihad” against the “world terror”.
There was a lovely moment in northern Lebanon this week - and here a big cheer for my brave friend Abed — when a Lebanese soldier at a checkpoint spotted me in our car and ran into the road.
“You are Mr Robert!” he shouted. “I have seen you on television! I read your book!” And he gave the thumbs-up sign. And I had to like this man. And I think he will fight for Lebanon. But I do not think he will fight for the Americans.
2. BUSH AND EPA WAGE WAR ON SCIENCE
Editorial
(author unknown)
A child’s biopsy shows early-stage cancer, with a high survival rate if treated in time. But his parents secretly pressure the doctor to alter the results because they don’t want to pay the medical bills.
Criminal? Immoral? It’s not so different from what’s been happening at the Environmental Protection Agency these days. Except that the health of all of us, as well as our planet, is at stake.
Evidence has been mounting for some time of growing dangers to our environment from ozone, mercury, carcinogens, and, the most cataclysmic of all, global warming. But the EPA has been pressuring its scientists to withhold inconvenient truths, and thus the need to do something about them.
The list of alleged falsehoods and manipulations is long and outrageous. Here are some lowlights listed by U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., before Senate hearings held last week:
* The EPA “falsified data and fabricated results” about the safety of the air around Ground Zero in New York City following the Sept. 11 attacks.
* The EPA edited reports on climate change, including a 2003 report on the environment, to counteract scientific data confirming the reality of global warming.
* EPA has “hidden, delayed, or suppressed” scientific findings that displeased certain industries. For example, it sat for nine months on a 2002 report on the effects of mercury on children’s health — and then released it only after it was leaked to the media.
The Bush War on Science has been overt for years now, and a survey released last month by the Union of Concerned Scientists provides more evidence of how deeply corrupt EPA has become.
In a questionnaire sent to more than 5,000 EPA scientists last summer, 889 of them — about 60 percent of those who responded — said they had personally experienced political pressure geared to favor government policy rather than the facts.
Government officials publicly misrepresented their findings, the scientists said. Information was used selectively to justify less-stringent regulations. Scientists were pressured to alter or exclude information from scientific documents.
Nearly 500 scientists said they fear retaliation if they express concern about what’s happening within the agency.
Many also faced difficulty sharing their findings with other scientists or publishing them in scientific journals, let alone speaking out publicly to the news media.
The situation has deteriorated in recent years because the Bush administration — as part of its claim to “unitary executive” power that trumps that of Congress and the courts — has allowed the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make environmental regulations. Time after time, scientists say, the OMB has ignored the data to favor private industry. Congress needs to ensure that the politicization of EPA doesn’t continue beyond January 2009. The first step is to re-assert its power to delegate work to federal agencies without White House interference.
Another safeguard: Include federal scientists in whistle-blower-protection legislation now in conference. If, in 1970, the government had pressured scientists to downplay the danger from unhealthy air quality, Congress might never have passed the Clean Air Act. The effect would have been catastrophic: the Union of Concerned Scientists says 200,000 more people would have died prematurely and millions more cases of respiratory and cardiovascular disease would have developed over the next two decades. Oh, to again have a president with the ethical compass of Richard Nixon!
3. DEMAND IMMEDIATE ACTION ON A BILL OF IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT BUSH AND VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY AND OTHER CIVIL OFFICERS OF THE UNIVED STATES
(Demand that your congressional representative
pressure John Conyers and the House Judiciary Committee)
A MESSAGE FROM RAMSEY CLARK
George Bush has brought the American People in eight months short of eight years:
n wars he initiated and accelerated in Afghanistan and Iraq that have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, including thousands of U.S. soldiers killed and tens of thousands disabled for life with no intention and little prospect of ending direct U.S. military involvement half a world away in the next eight years;
-- vast increases in military expenditures, erosion of the planets environment, greater global warming, and a staggering National Debt;
-- pervasive violations of the Bill or Rights, civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens and human rights of foreigners including summary executions, torture, kidnapping, prolonged secret detention, and massive invasions of privacy;
-- corruption of justice by pursuing political and selective prosecutions, false charges and national, ethnic, racial and religious persecution and profiling;
-- tax cuts for the rich, neglect of the poor, $4 a gallon gasoline, high prices for food and other necessities, mortgage foreclosures on the homes of tens of thousands of American families, a pattern of policies intended to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor in the U.S. and abroad.
President Bush has concealed, misrepresented and falsified facts essential to governance in a free society to mislead the Congress, the Judiciary and the people.
In his remaining eight months, President Bush will continue to threaten other nations in violation of international law and clearly intends to commit new aggressions in his belligerent presidency. If not stopped by impeachment he may strike Iran’s nuclear projects and immerse the United States in avoidable war for a generation far more exhausting than any we have known.
Seeking to prevent anyone from daring to even talk with empires, or peoples he proclaims “evil”, Bush invokes “appeasement” of the Nazis, as he condemns “...the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history” to prevent any communication with enemies he selects. Yet he knows that not only Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter have proposed meetings with Iran, Syria, North Korea, Hamas, Hezbollah and others to resolve conflicts, but that his own Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, and Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, Admiral William J. Fallon, immediate past commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and his predecessor General John P. Abizaid, among many other U.S. leaders, have urged dialogue with Bush defined evil empires, as a means of reducing tension and avoiding war.
George Bush knows only force. When he speaks of freedom as his purpose, he intends force as his means. Freedom from the barrel of the gun. He believes torture, kidnapping, secret detention are the way to freedom.
Above all he uses deliberate deception, concealment of facts and outright lies to the American people and the world as the way to start the wars he begins, but fails to end.
Completely arrogant, he built a $700 million dollar U.S. Embassy, the largest and most expensive in history, in the heart of Baghdad in the midst of a half decade bloody occupation of all Iraq, his Imperial Capitol in the Emerald City, exposed to daily mortar attacks. And a major new $60 million dollar U.S. prison away from home just north of Kabul, an Afghan Guantanamo, surely good for the recruitment of 25,000 Muslims from around the world who cannot bear to see a new alien torture factory on Muslim soil.
In the final eight months of his presidency George Bush has made it clear he will be the decider of the next eight years and more. What else can he mean when he lectures the Israeli Knesset telling it “...Israel’s population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil you are 307 million strong because America stands with you.”, and in the same breath proclaims that letting Iran acquire nuclear weapons would be an “unforgivable betrayal of future generations ... America stands firmly with you in opposing Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.” And that immediately after both Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and major opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, whose address immediately preceded Bush’s, called for harsh action to be taken against Iran’s nuclear development.
Of course, Iran like the rest of the world knows both the U.S. and Israel have nuclear warheads capable of obliterating whole nations and major new nuclear arms programs, all in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Threatened nations may believe possession of nuclear weapons is the only deterrent to U.S. aggression.
While President Bush continues his quest for a “peace” agreement between Israel and Palestine, he arms and incites Palestine to civil war, condones ever expanding Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and proclaims the U.S. as “proud to be Israel’s closest ally and best friend” in a rare moment of truthfulness, hardly reassuring Palestinians that he can be an honest broker and enraging Arab peoples who have suffered with Palestine for sixty years.
After praising Israel, which has brought Palestine to tenuous conditions of impoverishment and sudden death, Bush, who has reduced the population of Iraq to the most miserable and endangered on earth with one in five in internal, or external exile, lectures “nations across the Middle East” to “...treat their people with the dignity and respect they deserve.”
There has been no greater failure in the history of the Congress and the American people than our present failure to proceed with impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others for these long near eight years of high crimes and misdemeanors, trashing our most precious principles by torture, aggression, and lies, making America the enemy of humanity in many eyes. Our failure to act now may expose America and the world to years of war, impoverishment, environmental degradation and suffering.
The Constitution is far more explicit about the importance and procedure for impeachment than any other power vested in the Congress.
It provides in Article II, Section 4, that “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” and in Article I, Section 2, that “The House of Representatives ... shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”
A Bill of Impeachment filed in the House of Representatives is referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. The Judiciary Committee has the primary responsibility for initiating and receiving all Bills of Impeachment, investigating, conducting hearings, voting on and sending those Bills of Impeachment to the House of Representatives for final determination. Its faithful performance of this awesome duty is essential to the integrity, honor and survival itself of Constitutional government in the United States.
The Judiciary Committee and its Chairman have failed to act in the face of overwhelming evidence of the most grievous high Crimes and Misdemeanors ever to imperil our nation and its place among nations.
It is imperative that We, the People of the United States, demand of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives and its Chairman John Conyers that they immediately commence consideration of the many allegations of impeachable offenses by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other civil Officers of the Untied States and present a comprehensive Bill of Impeachment for Committee consideration by July 4, 2008.
I ask every American who cares about the integrity of our government and the welfare of our People and those we assault to immediately demand Chairman John Conyers and the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives commence hearings on a Bill of Impeachment of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others by July 4, 2008.
4. RALPH NADER CALLS FOR BUSH-CHENEY IMPEACHMENT
BY
YUNJI DE NIES
Independent presidential hopeful Ralph Nader spoke outside the White House Friday, calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Nader said the President has, “dishonored the White House and brought a pattern of waste.”
“A wasteful defense is a weak defense and a weak defense, inspires waste,” Nader said.
Surrounded by a handful of supporters, holding signs which read “From Katrina to Iraq, Colossal Failure,” and “Resign Bush-Cheney, Like Nixon-Agnew,” Nader charged that the President and Vice President are currently committing five impeachable offenses, on a daily basis, including: criminal use of offense against Iraq; condoned and approved systematic torture; arresting thousands of Americans — denying them habeas corpus and violating attorney/client privilege; signing 800 signing statements, precluding the president from actually having to follow the laws he signs; and systematic spying on Americans without judicial approval.
Nader also had criticism for the 2008 Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, calling Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., the “corporate candidates.”
Nader, 73, announced in February, 2008 that he is running for president again.
“If Democrats can’t landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form,” he said at the time, arguing that as president he would take on the “bloated military budget,” reform labor laws, repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, and target corporate crime.
5. CARTER URGES 'SUPINE' EUROPE TO BREAK WITH US OVER GAZA BLOCKADE
(Ex-president says EU is colluding in a human rights crime)
BY
JONATHAN STEELE AND JONATHAN FREEDLAND
Britain and other European governments should break from the US over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian yesterday. Carter, visiting the Welsh border town of Hay for the Guardian literary festival, described the EU's position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as "supine" and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as "embarrassing".
Referring to the possibility of Europe breaking with the US in an interview with the Guardian, he said: "Why not? They're not our vassals. They occupy an equal position with the US."
The blockade on Hamas-ruled Gaza, imposed by the US, EU, UN and Russia - the so-called Quartet - after the organisation's election victory in 2006, was "one of the greatest human rights crimes on Earth," since it meant the "imprisonment of 1.6 million people, 1 million of whom are refugees". "Most families in Gaza are eating only one meal per day. To see Europeans going along with this is embarrassing," Carter said.
He called on the EU to reassess its stance if Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. "Let the Europeans lift the embargo and say we will protect the rights of Palestinians in Gaza, and even send observers to Rafah gate [Gaza's crossing into Egypt] to ensure the Palestinians don't violate it."
Although it is 27 years since he left the White House, Carter recently met Hamas leaders in Damascus. He declared a breakthrough in persuading the organisation to offer a Gaza ceasefire and a halt to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel if Israel stopped its air and ground strikes on the territory.
Carter described western governments' self-imposed ban on talking to Hamas as unrealistic and said everyone knew Israel was negotiating with the organisation through an Egyptian mediator, Omar Suleiman. Suleiman took the Hamas ceasefire offer to Jerusalem last week.
Israel was still hesitating over the ceasefire, Carter confirmed yesterday. "I talked to Mr Suleiman the day before yesterday. I hope the Israelis will accept," he said.
While being scrupulously polite to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who represent the Fatah movement, he was scathing about their exclusion of Hamas. He described the Fatah-only government as a "subterfuge" aimed at getting round Hamas's election victory two years ago. "The top opinion pollster in Ramallah told me the other day that opinion on the West Bank is shifting to Hamas, because people believe Fatah has sold out to Israel and the US," he said.
Carter said the Quartet's policy of not talking to Hamas unless it recognised Israel and fulfilled two other conditions had been drafted by Elliot Abrams, an official in the national security council at the White House. He called Abrams "a very militant supporter of Israel". The ex-president, whose election-monitoring Carter Centre had just certified Hamas's election victory as free and fair, addressed the Quartet for 12 minutes at its session in London in 2006. He urged it to talk to Hamas, which had offered to form a unity government with Fatah, the losers.
"The Quartet's final document had been drafted in Washington in advance, and not a line was changed," he said.
Earlier, Carter, told Sky News that Hillary Clinton should abandon her battle to become Democratic presidential candidate after the last round of primaries in early June. Like many super delegates, he has yet to declare his support for either Clinton or Barack Obama, but he suggested the outcome of the race was a foregone conclusion. "I think that a lot of us super delegates will make a decision ... quite rapidly, after the final primary on June 3," he said. "I think at that point it will be time for her to give it up."
Last night, before a packed crowd at Hay, Carter spoke of his "horror" at America's involvement in torturing prisoners, saying he wanted the next US president to promise never to do so again.
He left an intriguing hint that George Bush might even face prosecution on war crimes charges once he left office.
When pressed by Philippe Sands QC on Bush's recent admission that he had authorised interrogation procedures widely seen as amounting to torture, Carter replied that he was sure Bush would be able to live a peaceful, "productive life - in our country".
Sands, an international legal expert, said afterwards that he understood that to be "clear confirmation" that while Bush would face no challenge in his own country, "what happened outside the country was another matter entirely".
6. DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA IS A SERIES OF NARROW ESCAPES AND WE MAY BE RUNNING OUT OF LUCK
BY
BILL MOYERS
(The following is an excerpt from Bill Moyers’ new book, “Moyers on Democracy“.)
Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is “better” than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, “The system works.”
Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country — a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as “believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but not believing it privately.” We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges.
Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.
The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn’t necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam’s palace grounds wailing “The Greeks are coming.” Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what’s happening to our democracy.
I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft’s essential imperatives: connect the dots.
The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments — genuine savings — in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.
And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek “bundlers” who turn the spigots of cash on and off.
The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. “Money rules Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.” Those words were spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Constitution was signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.
Then I draw a line to the statistics that show real wages lagging behind prices, the compensation of corporate barons soaring to heights unequaled anywhere among industrialized democracies, the relentless cheeseparing of federal funds devoted to public schools, to retraining for workers whose jobs have been exported, and to programs of food assistance and health care for poor children, all of which snatch away the ladder by which Americans with scant means but willing hands and hearts could work and save their way upward to middle-class independence. And I connect those numbers to our triumphant reactionaries’ campaigns against labor unions and higher minimum wages, and to their success in reframing the tax codes so as to strip them of their progressive character, laying the burdens of Atlas on a shrinking middle class awash in credit card debt as wage earners struggle to keep up with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable housing — while huge inheritances go untouched, tax shelters abroad are legalized, rates on capital gains are slashed, and the rich get richer and with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence over those who make and those who carry out the laws.
Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists: “No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” Here is my bias: extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely democratic politics. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln’s sacred belief in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”; mocks the democratic notion of government as “a voluntary union for the common good” embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that “freedom” simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege — the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs — is as subversive as Benedict Arnold’s betrayal of the Revolution he had once served. Again, Mary Lease: “The great evils which are cursing American society and undermining the foundations of the republic flow not from the legitimate operation of the great human government which our fathers gave us, but they come from tramping its plain provisions underfoot.”
Our democracy has prospered most when it was firmly anchored in the idea that “We the People” — not just a favored few — would identify and remedy common distempers and dilemmas and win the gamble our forebears undertook when they espoused the radical idea that people could govern themselves wisely. Whatever and whoever tries to supplant that with notions of a wholly privatized society of competitive consumers undermines a country that, as Gordon S. Wood puts it in his landmark book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness” — a democracy that changed the lives of “hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.”
I wish I could say that journalists in general are showing the same interest in uncovering the dangerous linkages thwarting this democracy. It is not for lack of honest and courageous individuals who would risk their careers to speak truth to power — a modest risk compared to those of some journalists in authoritarian countries who have been jailed or murdered for the identical “crime.” But our journalists are not in control of the instruments they play. As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of corporate effort, news organizations — particularly in television — are folded into entertainment divisions. The “news hole” in the print media shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment rights.
