Why We Need Wikileaks - Pt. 2

Because Matt Taibbi has found the real budget, and we need to know about this steady, continual, corrosive looting of public wealth before the fact, not after.

Why We Need Wikileaks - Pt. 1

Jan 2010: It's almost impossible to know the truth.

One day on the web, one of the Australian sites – I think it was the SMH – had an article about the collapse of the climate talks in Copenhagen late last year. The writer said he'd been in a closed-door session and that the talks collapsed because (impossible to say in the "left-dominated" discourse of mass-media) they were torpedoed by third-world countries – India and China – and not by the wicked imperialists. He went on to say that India and China do not want severe carbon emissions controls because they want a Western standard of living and are using coal-fired power-plants to get it. In this version, India and China calculated that, if the talks collapsed, Obama would be blamed.

Two days later, on the web, I read an article by George Monbiot – the BBC? New Matilda? – saying that he, too, was at the Copenhagen talks and behind closed doors (in a position to know what happened there). Monbiot said the talks collapsed because Obama gave China no option but to walk out. The proposal Obama put, Monbiot said, would have caused China grave loss of face, had been calculated beforehand to cause the walkout, and so to cause the climate talks to fail.

Who am I to believe? How on earth am I to judge between these two diametrically opposed insider reports?

So much of my world is like that. I've lost track of how many times a day I say "I don't know." The public wants to know why "my computer is doing […]." I want to know why management is doing […]. I don't know why General Motors isn't building electric cars, why Obama is raising troop levels in Afghanistan, why Guantánamo and Bagram haven't been closed, why our Central Asia policy and our green energy policy aren't the same policy, why car-repair costs so much, why offices aren't routinely equipped with full-spectrum lighting.

I had some idea of industrial processes from working in a steel-town once and then teaching technical report-writing for several years; I had some idea of farming from working in a dairy-farming district once and having distant relatives who were farmers. But at this point I seem to have very little idea about anything at all – and I'm well-educated, literate, book-reading, and, by most standards, well-informed. I join the dots about current western / global circumstances much better than my colleagues. And yet my ignorance about how the world around me functions is staggering. This is no way to run an adulthood, let alone a democracy.

At the same time I'm aware that steel production has been offshored, that farming is now a corporate mega-enterprise, and so is government. I'm aware that a vast mechanism for obscuring and obliterating the truth now exists: paid proselytizers, presented on the news as independent observers and commentators; corporate mainstream media determination not to report on its own funding of legislation; corporate mainstream media determination to maximize profit / audience by substituting staged and vicious games for investigation of news, politics, education, world affairs, local government, the environment, the climate talks in Copenhagen.

Because corporations now do almost everything that genetic people used to do, the details of almost every process that feeds, transports, houses, and employs us, have become commercial, proprietary information.

I shouldn't be puzzled at my inability to know what's going on. The world, all of it, even the undiscovered creatures at the bottom of the sea, even the things We the People are supposed to own – is now topper than top secret.

It's trade secret.

Bradley Manning's Legal Defence Fund

Can be contributed to, here.

He's U.S. Army private who gave the Apache helicopter gunship attack footage to WikiLeaks. He has been held in solitary confinement for 7 months altogether, without having been convicted; the conditions of his imprisonment constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and are likely to result in long-term psychological injury.

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.