< UPDATE: THE UNITED STATES OF WIKIDENIAL– CONGRESS SEES NO EVIL

UPDATE: THE UNITED STATES OF WIKIDENIAL– CONGRESS SEES NO EVIL

July 26th, 2010 - by: danny

UPDATE: THE UNITED STATES OF WIKIDENIAL– CONGRESS SEES NO EVIL

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WIKILEAKS BACKLASH UNDERWAY. Website accused of putting US informers and Afghan collabortors at risk. So far, the evidence in vague. Conservative Senators Want Prosecution of WikiLeaks Under Espionage Act. Problem: (among others), the threat to the first amendment. US Government “investigating.” Afghan Government denouncing. 15, 000 documents still to come. Wall Street Journal Reports that Afghanistan is awash in drugs, a slightly more serious problem.

Click Here For Latest WikiLeaks news on Google.

WEDNESDAY: THE UNITED STATES OF WIKIDENIAL

Congressman Alan Grayson has discovered the poet Yeats:


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Before his Second Coming, Yeats hung out up my street at the Hotel Chelsea and one wonders what the great Irish poet would have thunk about the dump of 92, 000 documents – most digital files – by WikiLeaks. He couldn’t help be amused by how quickly this sensational disclosure of the banality of killing and warfare – years of “incidents” that resulted in endless civilian death and the squandering of so many lives on all sides, not too mention trillions in national treasure.

Congress mostly saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke not much about evil as it rushed to pump billions more into the rat hole of Afghanistan even as another report found billions still unaccounted for “reconstruction” aid in Iraq, a still unreconstructed country.

No one commented on all the military contracts and jobs in all those Congressional districts intended to keep “our” representatives in line. The Repugs who have spent months crying about deficits, and couldn’t summon any compassion for the unemployed, led the charge to throw more good money after bad.

No sooner had the NY Times hit the stands, then the denial machine was in overdrive with smarmy “journalists” dismissing it all as nothing new, well before they even had a chance to read it or, heaven forbid, think about it. ‘Oh, we knew the war was not doing well. Didn’t you, you dummy’ And on and on, on channel after channel, op ed page after op-ed page as the Pentagon viewed criminal prosecutions and not of those who prosecute this carnahe, aand then President spun it all his political advantage while the punditocracy chewed it up and spit it out.

WikiLeaks wanted to show us the horror of war but there was no “stickiness” to that idea in our country, where much of our media which preferred to debate the role of Pakistan and heat-seeking missiles. Now you can see why so many soldiers are killing themselves because of despair over the folly they are serving and the crimes they are committing.

David Leigh, editor of the Guardian told Democracy Now

“Broadly, we see a similar picture in the three media. What we see is quite a different political perspective. From the New York Times’s point of view…it was interesting to see that the relationship with Pakistan was a political priority,” Leigh says. “With us, we’re more concerned about the casualties, I think. We’re troubled more, a European audience, by the toll this war is taking on innocent people.”

Our media is not troubled by that. They rationalize and celebrate it.

Headline: WikiLeaks Founder Says “Evidence of War Crimes” in Afghan War Logs, White House Downplays Leak, Claiming “No Broad New Revelations” No US media that I saw is pursuing the suggestion of war crimes

“(WikiLeaks Founder Mr Assange says he is a journalist, he he is not. He is an activist,” writes Andrew Exum, a non journalist flacking for the Center For A New American Security. And who Is Mr. Exum whose brilliant thoughts took over the Times Op Ed Page. His bio – not published in the newspaper-explains: “He led a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan in 2002 and a platoon of Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Most recently, Exum served as an advisor on the CENTCOM Assessment Team and as a civilian advisor to Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.” He is, of course, objective while Mr Assange is a dreaded activist.

Oh the Times, brave on Sunday when they were telling; back to selling by Monday,

There is more than one pattern here. Recall that after the Pentagon Papers appeared, the Vietnam war was escalated with the Xmas bombing of Hanoi etc. Nixon was the one then, and it went on for another four years, as will this one unless politicians have the guts to stop it.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports from Mr, Assange’s native Australia:

“Washington is sweating, because WikiLeaks is preparing another tranche of 15,000 documents for release that reportedly include up to 10,000 cable messages from US embassies around the world on fraught issues such as arms deals, trade talks, covert meetings and unvarnished assessments of governments.

…However, the logs’ greater service to disclosure and transparency is the extent to which they reveal how the governments with troops in Afghanistan sanitize their public account of how badly the war has been going.

These are the raw accounts, soaked in the blood and sweat of combat, before they have been prettied up by the triage teams in the Washington and allied PR clinics. We knew there were civilian casualties, but not this many; we had heard of the secret CIA ground missions to assassinate Taliban leaders, now it is confirmed; we have had guarded reports on the use of unmanned drone aircraft in attacks on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, now the picture is fleshed out.”

Even as these disclosure appear, the naysayers and downplayers are all over the media landscape as Michael Wolff explained:

“The Washington Post – its hurt status showing – went into contortions to minimize the effect of the report. Even its headline – “WikiLeaks documents cause little concern over public perception of war” – was willfully pretzel-like. So…the documents don’t make people concerned over people being concerned about the war?

“Lawmakers said that the trove of documents may harden opposition but is unlikely to suddenly alter impressions of a war that the administration had previously acknowledged is a tough slog amid declining public support.”

Or…in other words: Everybody is sick and tired of this war and believes it’s hopeless anyway, so what more could these documents possibly say to make people feel any more negative than they already feel?”

Stratfor.com echoes the pack consensus:

“Like the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks (as I will call them) elicited a great deal of feigned surprise, not real surprise. Apart from the charge that the Johnson administration contrived the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of what the Pentagon Papers contained was generally known. Most striking about the Pentagon Papers was not how much surprising material they contained, but how little. Certainly, they contradicted the official line on the war, but there were few, including supporters of the war, who were buying the official line anyway.

In the case of the WikiLeaks, what is revealed also is not far from what most people believed, although they provide enormous detail. Nor is it that far from what government and military officials are saying about the war. No one is saying the war is going well, though some say that given time it might go better.”

And so, the message is forgetaboutit, and look how quickly the media and the Congress is. Ho Hum. Forget the news; it’s back to snooze.

Let’s move on.

Tuesday, 28 July.

Watch: On RT Assessing The Impact of the WikiLeaks Disclosures

MEDIA WHORE ALERT: Leave it to TIME Magazine to spin the WikiLeaks disclosures into a ho-hummer, something we all knew before, no big deal, what me worry style report, that doesn’t touch the Obama Administration because it all happened before its “new” strategy was put in place. (Has it been put in place?)

WHITHER THE “ECONOMIC AGENDA?”

Unemployment is Worse Than We Know, The Recovery Challenge Harder Than We Think By Danny Schechter, Author of, ‘The Crime Of Our Time.’

As we move into the dog days of summer and a coming Congressional recess, the Obama Administration has shifted its focus back on to the economy and wants to convince one and all that an economic recovery is just around the corner.

In recent speeches, the President warns that the Republicans, if they take over, will support policies that will usher in a new recession, as if the current recession is over. “They are the same policies, ” he said, “that led us into this recession. They will take us backward at a time when we need to keep America moving forward.”

He wants to push “distractions” like the Shirley Sherrod affair and the BP spill out of media view so we can all get back to the economy.

Wake me up when reality intrudes into a “debate” that is flawed on all sides.

The “signs” of recovery, so breathlessly trumpeted by the politicians who want it to be true, is not generating the new jobs we need. The resumption of unemployment benefits will help those who were cut off but not all who need them. Foreclosures are rising, and government programs to stop them are not working.

It is unlikely that the current policies can remedy any of this and it is certain that extending tax cuts for the rich will not create jobs. There is no jobs bill about to be enacted. Many of the industries blue collar workers toiled in are going or gone. Bailed out General Motors just spent $3.5 Billion dollars to buy a new lending company to get those subprime loans restarted to move cars off the lot. Is this moving “backwards” or not?

Unemployment is worse than we know. The Daily Finance site reports that the firm TechnoMetrica which monitors the stats is finding the real figures shocking:

“The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who’s unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department’s jobless numbers.”

The site adds, “For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.

In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled “The Unemployment Myth,” that the government had “cooked the books” by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low.”

Those books are apparently still being cooked. The Administration now admits there will no movement in the rate until 2012.

What may be more serious is the erosion of the middle class that well underway, Business insider cites these statistics:

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

• 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

• 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.

• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975

While the middle class is shrinking, their wealth is being transferred to the rich. Senator Bernie Sanders has been livid in denouncing this:

“The 400 richest families in America, who saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion during the Bush years, have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth. Four hundred families! During the last 15 years, while these enormously rich people became much richer their effective tax rates were slashed almost in half. While the highest paid 400 Americans had an average income of $345 million in 2007, as a result of Bush tax policy they now pay an effective tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest on record. Last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers made a combined $25 billion but because of tax policy their lobbyists helped write, they pay a lower effective tax rate than many teachers, nurses, and police officers.” [More here →]

The words of Shirley Sherrod on our growing economic inequality are worth repeating in this context.

“Y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have, and they could be black; and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And that made me realize I needed to work to help poor people – those who don’t have access the way others have.”

Speaking of “access,” last week we learned that the bankers siphoned off $1.2 billion for their own bonuses from bailout funds. They were scolded but no one is demanding the money be paid back. We also learned that the total bailout for the banksters was not just $700 billion but a whopping $3.7 TRILLION once you factor in the Fed, et. al.

And on top of that, companies are making money, hoarding cash, but not creating jobs. The Times reports: “Among the S.& P. 500 companies that have reported second-quarter results, more than one in 10 had higher profits on lower sales, nearly twice the number in a typical quarter … while wages and salaries have barely budged from recession lows, profits have staged a vigorous recovery…” If new jobs are to be created, it looks like small businesses will have to do it.

In light of all this, with jobs known as a “lagging indicator” of economic recovery, how can we expect the Obama Administration to effectively mobilize political support from the millions of Americans who are struggling harder than ever to survive?

The President is right about the Republicans threatening to make things worse, but is he really making them any better? He seems to prefer shadow boxing than ripping into his opponents, being a mediator rather than a fighter. Already, he’s getting a lot of flack for being “anti-business.” Bizarro!

Truth to tell, can he do what needs doing at all, given the conservative orientation of our politricks, and the reality that what we are dealing with are structural and systemic problems that political rhetoric of any stripe cannot overcome? As The Economist assessed the “unprecedented rise in the rate of long term-unemployment,” it noted bluntly, “sadly, no quick fix is available.”

More fundamental changes are needed than those that currently top the Obama agenda.

News Dissector Danny Schechter directed Plunder The Crime Of Our Time, investigating crime as a cause of the financial crisis. Comments to: dissector@mediachannel.org

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