I am in favour of Wikileaks.

Thomas Jefferson imagined a democracy of yeoman farmers informed of the affairs of their state and government. A full elementary school education of the late C19th was designed, when you look at the tests, to enable a farmer or small business-owner (the stock and seed store, the hardware store) to converse and put a point of view equally well to his neighbour and his senator.

By the end of the first decade of the C21st, we have a governement operating in almost total secrecy, and journalism as sycophantic, self-interested and uninvestigative as Pravda. After 40 years of consolidation every newpaper is owned by a corporation totally dependent on the Federal goverment for its powers and profit: Fox News and the rest depend on broadcast licences controlled by the FCC (buy those Commissioners!); the other networks, owned by comglometates which are ultimately heavy weapons-systems manufacturers, utterly dependent on Pentagon contracts.

Such confluences of interest do not make for transparency; political donations and spin in return for money is too simple and compelling an equation in a culture where the quarterly profit-sheet is literally the most important thing on earth.

Most large corporations pay no income tax: the profits are in off-shore tax-havens. The electorate has to be kept in the dark about the spin, about the bank-government financial deals, about the significance of the congressman-senator/congressional aide / lobbyist revolving door and what it costs (health-care, education, infrastructure). Because the electorate pays for it all. And because it pays for it all, he electorate has to be told that the war, the privation, the lack of education, health-care, infrastructure, housing, retirement, pensions – are all for its own dire and immediate good; belt-tightening for the war on drugs, the war on terror, the children, the troops, the flag, freedom, the continuance of the American way in the greatest nation in history. There is no heavy engineering here except for weapons-manufacture – aerospace companies, helicopter gunships, smart bombs, stealth bombers, military space-shuttles. The bridges need repair? The States and Counties don’t have the money, even if the original engineering firms still exist. The too big to fail banks have that money, because Congress and a President gave it to them, against the will of the people, and another President surrounded by bankers goes on giving it to them.

Frontline reveals to us that our tax-dollars pay for baka bazi boys for the Afghanis we need on our side: sex-slavery and gang-rape of minors. Baka bazi’s been a Central Asian custom for at least two thousand years. Well, we are great respecters of custom, here: secret and undeclared war is a custom; dropping drone-bombs on wedding-parties is a custom; training the military and police for South American dictators is a custom; indefinite detention is a custom; rendition is a custom; torture is a custom; bailing out billionaire bankers is a custom; shooting and killing old women after breaking down their doors because the FBI had the wrong address for a drug-bust is a custom; arresting and killing people for driving while black or hispanic is a custom; death in custody is a custom; promoting the killer cop is a custom; generating homelessness through catastrophic illness is a custom; homelessness by fraudulent mortgage is a custom; death by denial of medical insurance and care is a custom.

The U.S. government has become an outrage against its own citizens and everybody else.

Wikileaks is an extreme reaction to an extreme situation, a perfect case of Yin and Yang.

The leakers are not spies. They have not sold secrets, in secret, to a foreign power. Bradley Manning is in jail. His target was the electorate, the people who pay and do not know what they are paying for, and how. The leakers are employees of the institutions they disclose from; in the military they are often from military families, brought up on the sacredness of the flag. If these are the people disgusted, in my book that adds up to the standard of “the reasonable person”.

Leakers are not spies; they are whistleblowers. Assange is not a spy; he’s a publisher. His target is the electorate. He’s absolutely correct in characterizing the U.S. government as a conspiracy. The essence of conspiracy is concealment. The only counter to that is publication.