They Will Not Let the Sun Shine In

The sorry thing about the State Department v. Anderson Cooper fooferaw is that it's just one more symptom of the Obama Administration's obsession with operating in utter secrecy.

One of the many reasons not to vote for Obama is that, after promising transparency, his administration surpassed its predecessor as the most secretive in the nation's history.

Citizens are entitled to know what their government is doing and why.  Quit playing coy about your damned drones; this isn't a game.  You're killing civilian men, women and children by remote control.  The American people are entitled to know that and, if they choose, as they should, to demand that you tell them why you're doing it.

Quit playing coy about your spying on American citizens, poking into our telephone calls, e-mails, bank accounts and travels.  It's our law, our Constitution, you're trampling on.

Quit your pious warnings to other countries about violations of human rights and tend to the atrocities in your own back yard: torture, rendition, endless incarceration without charges.

Cooper dared to peel back a tiny piece of the black shroud behind which our government operates when CNN got hold of a personal journal written by the U.S. ambassador slain in a consulate in Libya. Of course CNN did what any news organization worth its salt would do before returning it to the victim's family: looked inside to see if there was anything newsworthy in there.

There was.  CNN again did what any news organization worth its salt would do: sent reporters to independently verify the news tips in the journal.  Then it reported truthfully on what its reporters learned.

Foggy Bottom went berserk. How dare a news organization actually report news about us!  What good Washington reporters are supposed to do is regurgitate the pabulum and propaganda we shovel out to them, no questions asked. Everybody inside the beltway knows that.

It's a sad state of affairs when a television performer like Cooper has to remind the mainstream media what real journalists are supposed to do.  Sadder still that it happens so seldom. 

When a government is as committed to secrecy and presidential power as this one is, and the free press reneges on its responsibilities, as today's media have, the people have two choices: accept  their slide toward virtual slavery, or rebel.

By militarizing the domestic branches of security and public safety, mostly in secret, the government has assured itself, according to a (secret, of course)  government study, that it is in a position to suppress by armed force any attempt at revolution by the people of the United States.

And if you think that's bad, wait till next year. The corporatocracy marches on.

I Am Not Going to Lose My Lunch Again

Against my better judgment, I clicked on an online clip of an encounter between Ted Koppel and Bill O'Reilly.  I had recently eaten lunch.

O'Reilly was challenging Koppel's characterization of what's broadcast by MSNBC (on the left) and Fox (on the right) as "bad for the Republic."

O'Reilly said Fox broadcasts eight hours of "hard news" a day.

O'Reilly said that he considers that what he, himself, does on Fox is "something noble."

I threw up.  Fortunately the carpet wasn't badly stained.

How can anyone take this guy seriously?  Before I finally lost my lunch there was some kind of banter about O'Reilly's viewership and the "free market place," with O'Reilly alleging that Fox's viewership numbers couldn't happen if the network were biased.

Something like that.

I believe it was O'Reilly's employer that pioneered a broadcasting concept called "reality shows," which in fact are obscene distortions of reality, but which also attract huge audiences, and which also should not be taken seriously.

The number of viewers attracted by television productions such as O'Reilly's, and the so-called "reality shows," suggests the answer to the question famously posed by a page one headline in a British tabloid the day after the 2004 U.S. presidential election: How can 50 million people be so stupid?

At least 50 million -- far more, probably -- go through life without ever dealing with anything real.  Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs drive to work listening to O'Reilly's soul-mates like Rush Limbaugh; on breaks and lunch hours they talk about the previous night's "reality shows" or the fictions they heard from Limbaugh or O'Reilly; after work they go home to watch/listen to more of the same. They are encapsulated in a nonsense world where America is great and good, its wars are fought by heroes to keep the world safe for democracy, dark-skinned people with rags on their heads hate us because we're free and a bunch of white guys in wigs wrote the Constitution so that we would always be a Christian nation.

In about 40 days millions of these people will cast ballots in another presidential election whose outcome will revalidate the British tab's question about mass stupidity.

I will not be among them.  I'm going to cast an early ballot, voting for either Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson (probably Stein) for president.  There are two other candidates on my ballot who are actually worthy of the offices they are seeking (a U.S. Senate seat and a local judgeship).  I'll vote for them, too.

Perhaps none of my candidates will be elected.

But I'll damn well keep my lunch down the day I vote for them.

Eleven Years Later, This Is What We Are

"A Nation Changed" was the headline in the local rag on one of the Eleventh Anniversary stories, loaded with the usual platitudes, patriotic chest-thumping and banal braggadocio.

Then came word of the tragic slaying of Americans in a consulate in Libya.

Willard Romney's sick, slimy, error-pocked statement about events in Egypt and Libya was simply one more manifestation of the utter lack of ethical leadership under which this country has operated since the September attacks more than a decade ago. 

We have become a nation fueled by hate and greed, a nation whose gross national product is war, a nation whose wealthiest few are giddily driving ever more Americans out work and into poverty with the connivance of an abjectly corrupt governmental and political system.

Throughout the Muslim world, rage continues to rise, ignited by an artistically starved amateur hate movie made in the U.S.A. that profanes the Muslim religious and cultural heritage. Even though the U.S. government rightly denounces it, the rest of the world sees it as another piece in the hegemonic American mosaic of dominion and hubris. More violence seems inevitable.

The American ruling class and the Israeli government continue hell-bent on open and unprovoked war against Iran, even as our CIA and assorted covert, private armies conduct stealth wars in a dozen other places around the globe.  They regard Iran as a nuclear threat even though it has yet to take one serious step toward developing nuclear weaponry, whereas Israel's big nuclear arsenal is the world's most poorly kept military secret but somehow is not construed as a threat to its neighbors in the Middle East. 

American drones continue to kill civilian men, women and children.  Only this week another innocent victim of our national policies of illegal detention and torture died in our black hole in Cuba.  Our president retains the dictatorial authority to declare any American citizen, here or abroad, a terrorist enemy and have that person jailed indefinitely or killed on the spot.

We have 46 million American citizens living in poverty while the richest few among us enjoy spiraling and largely untaxed wealth unprecedented in the history of the republic. At a recent post-golf beer session in a club for the merely very rich, the good ol' boys took turns boasting about the number of recent years in which they paid no taxes.  A retired physician among them, himself comfortably well off despite paying taxes every year, gave up golf rather than having to listen to this bilge several times a week.

We have nearly one in four Americans of working age out of work, and a national economy that  adds jobs at a rate that does not equal the number of new citizens entering the work force.  Virtually all the "new jobs" are minimum or low-wage service jobs.

American corporations have shipped all of their living wage jobs overseas where pay scales are much lower.  Corporate profits soar, corporate money is parked offshore and untaxed. They have plenty of cash to buy politicians who, when elected, do their bidding.

 Median income in the United States is eight percent less than it was before the Bush-Obama recession. A typical member of the wealthiest American one percent now is 288 times richer than the median U.S. wage earner.

Our "free" press has become part of a massive propaganda machine.  Our sources of "news" are mere shills for government and its corporate masters.  We have fewer and fewer places to go to find truth.

Yes, we are indeed "a nation changed."