My advice as part the everyone's New Year's resolutions should be to watch this video, share it with everyone you know, and do not stay silent about the slanted reporting and commentary that is Fox.
Whether you love him, hate him, or are ambivalent about Julian Assange, my support is growing for him, Bradley Manning, and the value of leaked information in holding our elected officials and their appointed representatives accountable to us.
The more I learn about Assange, Manning and people like them, the more they appear to me to be the modern equivalents of Bob Woodward and Daniel Ellsberg. Assange and Manning have brought varying degrees of secrets out into the open, and they are being attacked by people who are threatened by such exposure in very much the same way that Woodward and Ellsberg were attacked 40 years ago.
It makes me wonder, are our collective memories really that short? Are we really this collectively poor at knowing, understanding, and learning from history which for many of us is actual, living memory?
Here's an interview, Frost over the World - Julian Assange, of Assange by al Jazeera and offered by The Real News Network. I suspect that the vast majority of Americans will never even know this interview exists, let alone see it for themselves. I think it's well worth the 24 minutes. Assange answers questions and discusses who he is, what his organization is all about, how it operates, and what his extradition might mean.
Here are some other insightful sources of information about the man, the organization, and some of the absolutely unbelievable reactions they have generated.
Fox commentators are calling for Assange's execution; even an illegal assassination or drone strikes?!?
Is this just pathetic hyperbole meant to drive ratings, or are they serious? Where's the outrage by mainstream media and citizens like us? When are criminal charges going to be filed against Huckabee, Beckel, and all the other fomenters of violence and assassination?
It appears to me that these leaks reveal a great deal about just how stupid, petty, and sinister government officials can be. In a Michael Moore interview by Rachel Maddow, Moore talks about leaked cables and Guardian articles that lie about Sicko being banned in Cuba, as well as threatening cables to New Zealand government officials about hosting a screening of Fahrenheit 911. At first these kinds of cables may seem simply to be stupid and petty. After all, such revelations certainly cannot be characterized as threatening to national security, can they?
But do they also signal something more sinister? Is this evidence of modern day McCarthyism that attempts to stifle truth and dissent?
Moore also makes the point in the interview that the Nuremberg Trials taught us that it's not an acceptable defense to simply claim that one was only following orders. It taught us that, as human beings, we have a moral obligation and responsibility to do whatever we can to stop people - and especially people in government and the military - when they create and perpetuate injustice or act criminally. I agree completely.
It's why the more I think about it the more I applaud, respect, and admire people with the courage to step forward. People like Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning if he (Manning) was, indeed, the one who leaked to Assange.
It's important to understand, too, that we still don't know with certainty if it was Manning and if he acted alone. Who knows if and when we will ever know for sure? He's reportedly being held in solitary confinement in a military prison.
We seem to be living in an age and in a so-called democracy where "extraordinary rendition" has not only become acceptable, it's policy. We now live in a democracy where habeas corpus has been indefinitely suspended for anyone our government decides to classify as a so-called enemy combatant. Even sadder, none of this has changed even with elections that changed the Presidency and at least for a little while, Congress. Guantanamo remains open for business, and we have no idea how many people are being held in other places.
Maybe if we're lucky more light will be shed on these issues from among the 250,000 documents recently released.
If it was Manning, then I consider him to be a hero. He is, in my opinion, a modern day Daniel Ellsberg, and Assange is equivalent to Bob Woodward.
It's why I'm finding myself more and more a supporter of Assange and WikiLeaks. It's why I thought sharing interviews of the man himself was worth doing. Let him speak. Let him tell his side with his own voice.
WikiLeaks as I see it isn't about Moore's movies or Qadhafi's nurse or the no-surprise-at-all embarrassment of diplomats saying one thing publicly and then mocking their hosts privately. It's about having the courage to speak truth to power and to shining the bright light of truth in places and on people who work for and represent us. It's about videos of helicopters firing on civilians and holding people accountable for such atrocities.
And now it's about the fear-mongering and not-so-borderline incitements to criminal actions by some in the media and in government.
It's also about the lessons we should have learned from Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg trials.
Lesson 1: Elected officials work for us, not the other way around, and they are a reflection of who we are and what we value. Much to my chagrin, most of these last 10 years and even the last 2 years have been terribly disappointing. We and our elected officials are even meaner, more hateful, more fearful, and more xenophobic than I ever thought possible. Worse, we seem to revel in being intentionally ignorant and proudly stupid, and that's all a manipulative and malevolent ruling class needs to get away with whatever they like.
Lesson 2: The end never justifies the means. That's true even in a dangerous world where 18 unassuming, middle class Saudis and one Egyptian can commit a heinous crime - not an act of war by a sovereign nation, but a terrible crime. We allowed ourselves to be duped by the lies of the Bush administration and plunged into a constant state of panic, fear and hatred. We seem nowadays to be eager to give our fears and our hatreds full throat. What other explanation can there be when so-called news outlets like Fox hire "pundits" who are intellectual midgets and political neophytes like Palin? We have empowered the already-powerful with all the excuse they need to keep telling us lies we want to hear about what is required to achieve security; launching and sustaining us on an amoral, illegal and dangerous military campaign of empire expansion throughout the Islamic world that will only serve to ensure the next 2 or 3 generations of terrorists intent on leaving their middle class lives and Hamburg apartments to do us harm.
Lesson 3: Simply following orders is not a defense Sometimes being patriotic means resisting the will of government and the majority. It is our responsibility, whether we are in uniform or civilians, to hold those in power accountable. It seems reasonable that that will entail revealing information that the powerful would rather not be made public. It also includes holding former presidents accountable who not only lie to us about the reasons for invading other countries but who have spoken out publicly and in print about condoning and approving torture. I wonder if we will ever see justice done for those crimes, and if we will ever collectively understand how much more egregious state-sanctioned torture is compared with leaked diplomatic cables?
Without the Ellsbergs, Woodwards, Mannings, and Assanges of the world, how can we ever expect the people we put into power to ever feel they need to worry about being held to account for their decisions and their actions?
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"For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic." John F. Kennedy, Yale Commencement address, 1962
The piece ends with the following claim: "Sources in Dearborn say privately that this is the sort of facility Ford would love to build in the U.S. if only the UAW, historically adverse to this sort of supplier integration, would allow it."
Let me begin by saying that I've never worked in the automobile industry, although very close friends have. I've never been a member of the UAW, nor any other labor union.
That said, I have to wonder about the kind of thinking and reporting that leaves the viewer with the unchallenged conclusion that it is labor's fault that good paying, middle class jobs like building cars goes overseas because the UAW won't "allow" modern plants in America.
The auto industry is clearly one of the central pillars of our economy, and the web of dependencies that has been created seems completely entrenched and undoable. The reason it will be almost - not quite, but almost - impossible to change any of that and build a broader, more sustainable, diverse, and healthier economy is simple.
Money.
And who controls the money?
This report says it's the unions. Has to be them, right? I mean, the piece ends by saying that Ford supposedly wants to build plants like the one in Brazil in America with automation and JIT suppliers integrated inside and all that but the unions won't allow it.
Really? Unions? Are they the people who decide where to invest capital to build plants? Seriously? Is that really the reason Ford doesn't build plants like that in America?
Or is it possible that it might be because the Brazilian factory worker lives in a country where the minimum wage is less than $300 a month (http://tinyurl.com/24v5l8k)?
Ford's employees in Brazil probably have no health care or other benefits, and while they may be "middle class" in Brazil I'm willing to bet just about everything I have left that they can't even afford to buy one of the cars they make.
This is the kind of bullshit news reporting that really pisses me off, mostly because too many Americans are gullible enough - especially my friends on the right - to believe it. They buy this line of thinking that those poor bastards in the boardrooms and corner offices of corporate America are being held back by labor and government. All those magnanimous and benevolent capitalists want to do is invest more money into more businesses to create more jobs, but labor and the big bad government are keeping them from doing that. What a crock of shit!
It comes down to money. Yes, organized labor has money and power but make no mistake, dear reader. The money that matters and that makes these decisions is the real money - the richest 2% kind of money. GOP kind of money. It's why I'll never understand how middle-class Americans could ever, ever, EVER vote Republican. They're voting against their own economic self-interest. The trickle-down, Randian economic model that was sold by Alan Greenspan and bought hook-line-and-sinker by that moronic B-movie actor and GOP god, Ronny, and his minions in the GOP has proven not to work.
None of those facts seem to matter, though, to the latest crop of defenders of the wealthy and so-called free markets; the tea baggers, the Boehner/McConnell crowd, and the real whack jobs like Rand Paul and his Libertarians. Less regulation, more wealth protection, and even tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans has become religion for them, and that belief system has been perpetuated by liars and haters like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and others so much so that uninformed and easily-duped Americans actually believe in the magnanimity of the rich, and worse, the fallacy of the American Dream that they, too, can someday be rich.
Devotion, admiration, and even worship for wealth, the wealthy, and the so-called captains of industry is how we got to the sorry-ass state we're in now. Maintaining that devotion and electing devotees of Ayn Rand and Ronny Reagan to high office is how we'll go over the cliff for good, too.
But, hey, not to worry. Our children, grand children, and great grand children will have it better. Unregulated, unfettered, and under-taxed free markets and the absurdly wealthy who run it are making sure that we're going to be a big part of the third world by the end of the century - maybe sooner. Then maybe all those middle class jobs will come back.
How, you ask?
Because we'll be the nation of poor, desperate people willing to do anything for a few bucks an hour.
