Assange wrote these things in 2006, and it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t have the Bush administration in mind. Certainly Bush was big on centralizing power, and wasn’t big on civil liberties, and sometimes he kept his infringements on our liberties secret. Assange is in this sense the anti-Bush, challenging secretive, centralized authority with a transparency that is highly decentralized. (His backers have created mirror Web sites to ensure access to the WikiLeaks documents, and Assange says that more than 100,000 people possess the whole archive in encrypted form.) Yet in one sense Assange is the anti-anti-Bush.
Category: Uncategorized
In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.
“I don’t care about racial profiling. You know, sometimes it is good we are racially profiled, because the God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics,” said Mateo, who is Hispanic and has a black father
Members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus may tout their commitment to cutting government spending now, but they used the 111th Congress to request hundreds of earmarks that, taken cumulatively, added more than $1 billion to the federal budget.
These leaks have been compared to the Pentagon papers. Which they are not. The Pentagon papers revealed that the U.S. engaged in a systematic campaign to deceive the world and the American people and that its private actions were often the opposite of its stated public policy. The WikiLeaks documents, by contrast, show Washington pursuing privately pretty much the policies it has articulated publicly. Whether on Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan or North Korea, the cables confirm what we know to be U.S. foreign policy. And often this foreign policy is concerned with broader regional security, not narrow American interests. Ambassadors are not caught pushing other countries in order to make deals secretly to strengthen the U.S., but rather to solve festering problems.
USA = king of banana republics
Nicholas Kristof argues that the U.S. is at the level of plutocratic banana republics:
CEOs of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
Step back and (for the moment) avoid passing judgment on whether this state of affairs is good or bad. What’s fascinating is that against this backdrop, last week’s election went to the Republicans, who admit that their top priority is passing large tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans. I know much has been written about this, but I think it defies easy explanation how economic policies that benefit so very few enjoy the support of so many.
The effects were not short-lived, either. When the volunteers whose performance improved was re-tested six months later, the benefits appear to have persisted.