Glenn Greenwald

AP Photo/Vincent Yu

pointed out on HuffPo, isn’t Sorkin the guy who’s always bragging about how close he is to top bankers and parroting their views on things? This is a man who admitted, in print, that he only went down to Zucotti Park after a bank C.E.O. asked him, “Is this Occupy thing a big deal?”

Mega media turd Sorkin: he knows which side his bread is buttered and it’s not by serving the public.

(Sorkin’s reassuring response: “As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger . . .”)

And when Senator Carl Levin’s report about Goldman’s “Big Short” and deals like Abacus and Timberwolf came out, it was Sorkin who released a lengthy screed in Dealbook defending Goldman, one I instantly recognized as being nearly indistinguishable from the excuses I’d heard from Goldman’s own P.R. people.

But the biggest clue that Sorkin’s take on Greenwald was no accident came in the rest of that same Squawk Box appearance (emphasis mine):

I feel like, A, we‘ve screwed this up, even letting him get to Russia. B, clearly the Chinese hate us to even let him out of the country.

I would arrest him . . . and now I would almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who’s the journalist who seems to want to help him get to Ecuador.

We? Wow. That’s a scene straight out of Malcolm X. (“What’s the matter, boss, we sick?”) As a journalist, when you start speaking about political power in the first person plural, it’s pretty much glue-factory time.

The irony of all of this is that this whole discussion is taking place in a phony “debate” that’s now being cooked up about the legitimacy of advocacy journalism, which is exactly what Sorkin practices when he goes down to Zucotti Park on behalf of a bank CEO or when he talks about how “we” screwed up, letting Snowden out of the country. Preposterously, they’ve made the debate about Glenn Greenwald, who absolutely does practice advocacy journalism. But to pretend he’s the only one is lunacy.

All journalism is advocacy journalism. No matter how it’s presented, every report by every reporter advances someone’s point of view. The advocacy can be hidden, as it is in the monotone narration of a news anchor for a big network like CBS or NBC (where the biases of advertisers and corporate backers like GE are disguised in a thousand subtle ways), or it can be out in the open, as it proudly is with Greenwald, or graspingly with Sorkin, or institutionally with a company like Fox.

But to pretend there’s such a thing as journalism without advocacy is just silly; nobody in this business really takes that concept seriously. “Objectivity” is a fairy tale invented purely for the consumption of the credulous public, sort of like the Santa Claus myth. Obviously, journalists can strive to be balanced and objective, but that’s all it is, striving.

Try as hard as you want, a point of view will come forward in your story. Open any newspaper from the Thirties or Forties, check the sports page; the guy who wrote up the box score, did he have a political point of view? He probably didn’t think so. But viewed with 70 or 80 years of hindsight, covering a baseball game where blacks weren’t allowed to play without mentioning the fact, that’s apology and advocacy. Any journalist with half a brain knows that the biases of our time are always buried in our coverage.

Like many others, in my career I decided early on that I’d rather be out in the open about my opinions, and let readers know what my biases are to the extent that I can. I recognize, however, that there’s value in the other kind of reporting, where papers like the Times strive to take personal opinions out of the coverage and shoot for a “Just the facts, Ma’am” style. The value there is that people trust that approach, and readers implicitly enter into a contract with the newspaper or TV station that takes it, assuming that the organization will honestly try to show all points of view dispassionately.

Some organizations do a great job of that, but others often violate that contract, and carefully choose which “Just facts” to present and which ones to ignore, so as to put certain political or financial interests in a better light. But that doesn’t mean the approach per se is illegitimate. It’s just different.

What’s frightening now is that we suddenly have talk from people who ought to know better, not only advancing the childish lie that Glenn Greenwald and his ilk are the world’s only advocacy journalists, but also that the legitimacy of such journalists is even in question.

Gregory, I later found out, shamelessly went there in his exchange with Greenwald, saying, “Well, the question of who’s a journalist may be up to a debate with regards to what you’re doing.”

But even crazier was a subsequent Washington Post article, also cited by Cohen, entitled “On NSA disclosures, has Glenn Greenwald become something other than a reporter?” The article was unintentionally comic and surrealistic because despite writer Paul Farhi’s above-the-fray tone, the mere decision to write such a piece is a classic demonstration of the aforementioned brand of hidden-bias, non-advocacy advocacy.

I mean, why not write exactly the same piece, but ask whether Andrew Ross Sorkin or David Gregory in this scandal has become something other than a reporter? One could make exactly the same argument using the behaviors of those two as the hook. The editorial decision to make it about Glenn was therefore a major piece of advocacy, despite the “agnostic” language employed in the piece (straight-news editors love the term “agnostic” and hilariously often think it applies to them, when in fact they usually confine their doubts to permitted realms of thought).

The Post piece was full of the usual chin-scratching claptrap about whether it’s appropriate for journalists to have opinions, noting that “the line between journalism – traditionally, the dispassionate reporting of facts – and outright involvement in the news seems blurrier than ever.”

This is crazy – news organizations are always involved in the news. Just ask the citizens of Iraq, who wouldn’t have spent the last decade in a war zone had every TV network in America not credulously cheered the White House on when it blundered and bombed its way into Baghdad on bogus WMD claims. Ask Howard Dean, whom I watched being driven literally bonkers by the endless questions posed by “dispassionate” reporters about whether or not he was “too left” or “too strident” to be president, questions they were being spoon-fed in bars along the campaign trail late at night by Democratic Party hacks who resented the fact that Dean went through outside channels (i.e. the Internet) to get campaign funding, and in his speeches was calling out the Dems’ pathetic cave-in on the Iraq issue.

Even worse was this quote in the Post piece from a University professor:

Edward Wasserman, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school, said having a “social commitment” doesn’t disqualify anyone from being a journalist. But the public should remain skeptical of reporters who are also advocates. “Do we know if he’s pulling his punches or has his fingers on the scale because some information that he should be reporting doesn’t fit [with his cause]?” Wasserman asked in an interview. “If that’s the case, he should be castigated.”

Wasserman, the piece pointed out, noted that he hadn’t seen such cause for alarm in Greenwald’s case. But even so, his opinion is astonishing. We should be skeptical of reporters who are advocates, because they might be pulling punches to advance a cause?

Well . . . that’s true. But only if we’re talking about all reporters, because all reporters are advocates. If we’re only talking about people like Glenn Greenwald, who are open about their advocacy, that’s a crazy thing to say. People should be skeptical of everything they read. In fact, people should be more skeptical of reporters who claim not to be advocates, because those people are almost always lying, whether they know it or not.

The truly scary thing about all of this is that we’re living in an age where some very strange decisions are being made about who deserves rights, and who doesn’t. Someone shooting at an American soldier in Afghanistan (or who is even alleged to have done so) isn’t really a soldier, and therefore isn’t really protected by the Geneva Conventions, and therefore can be whisked away for life to some extralegal detention center. We can kill some Americans by drone attacks without trial because they’d ceased to have rights once they become enemy combatants, a determination made not collectively but by some Star Chamber somewhere.

Some people apparently get the full human-rights coverage; some people on the other end aren’t really 100 percent people, so they don’t.

That’s what makes this new debate about Greenwald and advocacy journalism so insidious. Journalists of all kinds have long enjoyed certain legal protections, and those protections are essential to a functioning free press. The easiest way around those protections is simply to declare some people “not journalists.” Ten years ago, I would have thought the idea is crazy, but now any journalist would be nuts not to worry about it. Who are these people to decide who’s a journalist and who isn’t? Is there anything more obnoxious than a priesthood?

_{MATT TAIBBI is the main reason for reading Rolling Stone.} 

SUGGESTED BY ROVING EDITOR GUI ROCHAT 

Gen. Smedley Butler (USMC).

U.S. military adventures have historically combined imperial ambition—the acquisition of territory and colonies, limiting the reach of competing empires and ‘acquiring’ economic resources—‘natural’ resources, existing economic infrastructure and labor, under advantageous terms. The U.S. orchestrated coup in Honduras was for United Fruit, in Chile for ITT, Kennecott and Anaconda Copper and the CIA’s ‘war of attrition’ against Nicaragua in the 1980s to undo the nationalization of Coca Cola facilities. The botched war on and occupation of Iraq was a continuation of imperial designs on Middle Eastern oil by the U.S. and Britain dating from the early twentieth century. All of these and many, many more conflated the economic interests of particular U.S. ‘based’ corporations with the ‘national interest.’

Selling wars of economic conquest as ‘democracy’ and / or ‘freedom’ was an open joke amongst Washington elites for the bulk of recent decades. Presidents hired advertising agencies to devise ‘marketing’ schemes to sell their wars. The visible idiocy of these schemes fed on the psychological trauma fear-mongering and regular mass slaughters in the ‘national interest’ caused the purposely-misinformed populace. The Cold War was perpetuated by successive administrations because the contrived bogeyman of ‘communism’ had been so effectively sold in support of Western economic predation.

By putting a ‘political’ patina on imperial wars the hoax / fallacy of political morality became a fundamental part of the American story. And the irony of cynical demagogues selling botched foreign policy as ‘they hate us for our freedoms’ meets its match in dim corporate-state fascists selling totalitarian surveillance to ‘protect’ us from the consequences of botched foreign policy.

[pullquote]

It is in this historical context [that] recent disclosures of ‘classified’ government documents led to charges of treason against those making them—Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and others, by ‘official’ Washington. Treason is yet another well-sold term popularly meaning the knowing betrayal of ‘the nation’ as legal construct, historical artifact and broad set of social relations. Those making the charge, President Obama and prominent Senators and Representatives, proclaim themselves empowered to make it as Marketers-in-Chief of imperial power. Deference to unity in ‘nation’ through the charge of treason is a sleight-of-hand to peel-off those the current chair-occupiers of empire wish to exile.

It is no accident the first line of attack against Mr. Snowden was to impugn his credibility by arguing he was a ‘high school dropout’ and a ‘lowly analyst.’ In the first place, this is irrelevant to the disclosures—they in no way depended on Mr. Snowden’s ‘credentials’ because if they did, and the official line was he lacked the credentials to be a credible ‘leaker,’ then he also lacked the credentials to be treasonous. (If what was leaked wasn’t credible then charges of treason are moot). The received wisdom in this attack was to diminish Mr. Snowden’s standing. But the more likely explanation was to separate the right to ‘treason’ into classes of those with and without the right. President Obama and Senator Diane Feinstein claim the right to create law at their whim, break existing laws at their whim and commit ‘treason’ at their whim and they don’t want ‘just anyone’ impinging on their territory.

The American public largely supports this view, but on what basis? Part is no doubt the inculcated premise America is classless, and therefore political-economic power accrues to those who ‘deserve’ it. But as the political and economic catastrophes of recent years amply illustrate—the war on and occupation of Iraq and the financial ‘crisis’ requiring trillions in public largesse to (faux) rectify, fools, liars and thieves are just as likely to inhabit the rarefied environs of power as those who ‘merit’ it. (That this leadership is largely inherited suggests societies ‘winners’ come from a decidedly pedestrian gene pool). And evolving from modern history, the notion of common interests in governance was always a play to American gullibility—Ms. Feinstein and Mr. Obama aren’t arguing they better serve the public interest through acting against the Constitution, they argue they have the power to do so and others (Snowden, Manning) don’t. Only the riff-raff need explain themselves goes the thinking.

The evidence of class bases for laws, policing and incarceration resides in plain sight here in the U.S. In addition to the history of U.S. military power being used in corporate interests, bankers and their representatives wrote the banking laws that led to recent catastrophe and they are writing the laws to ‘rectify’ the laws they previously wrote. The official rationale is they know best how to operate ‘their’ businesses despite the fact they still exist on the public dole from their last catastrophe. Several decades ago the policing of business and the rich was abandoned under ‘deregulation’ while the policing of the poor and social ‘out’ groups was militarized and made increasingly intrusive. And representation in the jails and prisons is overwhelmingly of social ‘out’ groups and those who can’t afford competent legal representation (a/k/a the poor). In claiming their right to decide their own laws and to stand outside of effective policing and incarceration, Barack Obama, Diane Feinstein et al are the political representatives of the ruling class.

So again, it isn’t ‘treason’ or ‘crimes’ Mr. Obama and Ms. Feinstein are reacting to—it is the impudence of ‘the help’ exposing the workings of the political-economic elite to those who might (correctly) see themselves on the other side of them. Mr. Obama’s and NSA chief Keith Alexander’s attempts to link illegal NSA spying on Americans to ‘thwarted’ terrorist attacks had no content behind them. They do however have the history of cynical insiders using contrived ‘others’ to sell their personal and class agendas behind them. This makes the ‘treason’ charged by official Washington acts against the ruling class, not against ‘the nation.’ To be clear, official Washington sees acts by political and economic elites against the rest of the citizenry—domestic spying, illegal murder of citizens and economic predation, being in the public interest and disclosure of those that might challenge ruling class power as against the ‘public’ interest.

NBC media turd David Gregory: Using the royal “we” to hide the ruling class interest.

Likewise, there appears eternal mystery on the part of the compassionate right—liberals and progressives, why the corporate media are tools of corporate leaders and their servants in government. It is no accident Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jeffrey Toobin and David Gregory use the royal ‘we’ to conflate their interests as rich, connected, white ‘journalists’ with those of Mr. Obama and Ms. Feinstein. The received wisdom is ‘access’ to elite sources behind the ‘affectation,’ but it is no affectation. The strategy to ‘universalize’ narrow interests through the use of totalizing language (‘we’) is class politics 101. These ‘journalists’ are responding to disclosure of class ‘secrets’ that threaten their privilege, not to acts against the public interest. (‘Access’ is to report what elites say, not what they do (a/k/a journalism) and these brave folk have a greater chance of dying from choking on Jell-O than from terrorist attacks).

Western economists and politicians have explained the past several decades in terms of economic policies as if these policies are disconnected from the architecture and actions of ‘government.’ The bank ‘bailouts’ are seen in isolation from the treatment bank ‘customers’ subsequently received through bank-friendly government policies. Much has been made of the vast quantities of public resources handed the banks without meaningful constraints while the astounding misery and economic harm fraudulent foreclosure ‘prevention’ programs (HAMP) caused ‘ordinary’ citizens are treated as accidents caused by poor management. And in fact, dim elites (Timothy Geithner) argued using bailout money to buy down the negative equity resulting from the housing crash risked ‘moral hazard’ while unconstrained handouts to bankers demonstrated to be corrupt and / or incompetent didn’t. The class bases for these claims couldn’t be more obvious.

Likewise, positioning the rich as ‘job creators’ places them as necessary to the functioning of ‘the economy’ just as Mr. Obama and Ms. Feinstein place their ‘right’ to murder citizens and illegally spy on us as in the public interest. In recent decades the rich—inherited wealth, corporate executives and financiers, have accrued great fortunes through ‘rentier’ income dependent on economically inefficient (in capitalist economics) market power. Market power is contrary to economic democracy the same way totalitarian government is to political democracy. However, as regressive tax cuts, bank bailouts and government policies to diminish the power of labor demonstrate, it is the rich who are driving government policy. This can be seen through the privatization of state functions—a transfer from public to private coffers, and through the merging of state and private law making (ALEC), policing and imprisonment.

Through his ‘Insider Threat’ program to force government workers to turn one another in for the ‘treason’ of unofficial disclosures President Barack Obama is proving himself the most cynical tool of corporate-state interests in recent history. The premise again is it is one’s position in the corporate-state bureaucracy that determines whether actions are in the public interest, not the actions themselves. The practical effect is to shove all power up the ‘chain of command’ because it is only the ruling class that has state sanction to ‘act in the public interest,’ meaning their own. Put another way, the policy is to redefine the public interest as what the ruling class says it is regardless of political-economic effect. L’etat, c’est moi is historically the realm of absolute monarchs and tyrants. I put this to his dwindling supporters where this leaves Mr. Obama (and the rest of imperial Washington).

But again, the government is but a tool of the rich. The anti-statists on the right have the relation of tyranny backwards—capitalism isn’t freedom from the state, it is the crafting of the state to work in ruling class interests. Barack Obama and Diane Feinstein aren’t calling Mitt Romney and Apple Computer treasonous because they avoid paying the taxes on which the government depends. They, like the angry rubes on the corporate-libertarian right, laud inherited wealth, corporate executives and financiers, and all of their actions are toward consolidating their wealth and power while diminishing that of the rest of us. Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning aren’t traitors; they are good citizens who assumed the social responsibility to act in the public interest against ruling class interests. The political framing of their actions as ‘treason’ is an effort at willful misdirection.

What the liberals and progressives still unsure of what to make of the disclosures of ‘kill lists’ and NSA spying on American citizens don’t appear to understand is if you aren’t clearly on the inside you’re on the outside– the declared enemies of Mr. Obama and Ms. Feinstein, through these programs. Cornel West frames it well as ‘we are all suspects now.’ You can blithely assume you have nothing to hide but that misses the purpose of the murder and spy programs—they are to create terror (and corporate profits), not to destroy it. If you don’t understand how pervasive, intrusive and insidious these programs are, yet still support ‘official’ Washington, you deserve what you get. The rest of us would benefit from joining with our comrades around the globe on the side of imperial power Washington and Wall Street has placed us on.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York. His book, Zen Economics, will be published by CP/AK Press in 2014.

Whether the desire for liberty exists in America remains to be seen. If Americans can overcome their gullibility, their lifelong brainwashing, their propensity to believe every lie that “their” government tells them, and if Americans can escape the Matrix in which they live, they can reestablish the morality, justice, peace, freedom, and liberty that “their” government has taken from them. It is not impossible for Americans to again stand with uplifted heads. They only have to recognize that “their” government is the enemy of truth, justice, human rights and life itself. Can mere ordinary Americans triumph over the evil that is “their” government without the aid of a superhero? If ideas are strong enough and Americans can comprehend them, good can prevail over the evil that is concentrated in Washington. What stands between the American people and their comprehension of evil is their gullibility. 

If good fails in its battle with Washington’s evil, our future is a boot stamping on the human face forever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKvvOFIHs4k&feature=youtu.be 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-gHVGOoE48 

If you, an American, living in superpower America lack the courage to stand up to the evil that is “your” government, perhaps the courage of Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and tiny Ecuador will give you heart.

A US senator from New Jersey, Robert Menendez, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the Ecuadoran government that he would block the import of vegetables and flowers from Ecuador if Ecuador gives asylum to Edward Snowden. The cost to Ecuador would be one billion dollars in lost revenues.

Menendez’s statement–”Our government will not reward countries for bad behavior”–is ironic. It equates bad behavior with protecting a truth-teller and good behavior with betraying a truth-teller. Menendez’s statement is also a lie. The US government only rewards bad behavior. The US government consistently rewards those who conspire against the elected governments of their own countries, setting them up as dictators when Washington overthrows the elected governments. 

Menendez’s threat did not work, but the senator did succeed in delivering yet another humiliating blow to Washington’s prestige. The Ecuadoran President, Rafael Correa, beat Menendez to the punch and cancelled the trade pact with the US on the grounds that the pact was a threat to the sovereignty of Ecuador and to moral principles and was being used by Washington to blackmail Ecuador. “Ecuador doesn’t accept pressure or threats from anyone,” added Communications Secretary Fernando Alvarado who then offered Washington foreign aid to provide human rights training to combat torture, illegal executions and attacks on peoples’ privacy. 

Washington, exposed with its hand in the cookie jar devouring the privacy of the entire world and prevented by its hubris from acknowledging its illegal behavior and apologizing, has so mishandled the Snowden affair that Washington has done far more damage to itself than occurred from Snowden’s revelations. Washington has proven conclusively that it has no respect for anyone’s human rights, that it has no respect for any country’s sovereignty, that it has no respect for any moral principles, especially those it most often mouths, and that it relies on coercion and violence alone. The rest of the world now knows who its enemy is.

Washington’s presstitutes, by helping Washington demonize Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Manning, Assange, and Ecuador, have demonstrated to the world that the US media is devoid of integrity and that nothing it reports can be believed. The US print and TV media and NPR comprise a ministry of propaganda for Washington’s immoral agendas. 

On June 24, the Stasi State’s favorite whore, the Washington Post, denounced three times democratically-elected Rafael Correa as “the autocratic leader of tiny, impoverished Ecuador,” without realizing that the editorial not only demonstrated the Washington Post’s lack of any ethics whatsoever but also showed the entire world that if “tiny, impoverished Ecuador” can stand up to Washington’s threats, so can the rest of the world.

President Correa replied that the Washington Post “managed to focus attention on Snowden and on the ‘wicked’ countries that support him, making us forget the terrible things against the US people and the whole world that he denounced.” Correa added that Washington’s “world order isn’t only unjust, it’s immoral.”

The reason Washington hates Correa has nothing to do with Snowden. That Ecuador is considering asylum for Snowden is just an excuse. Correa is hated, because in the second year of his first term he repudiated the $3 billion dollar foreign debt that corrupt and despotic prior regimes had been paid to contract with international finance. Correa’s default threat forced the international financial gangsters to write down the debt by 60 percent. 

Washington also hates Correa because he has been successful in reducing the high rates of poverty in Ecuador, thus building public support that makes if difficult for Washington to overthrow him from within. 

Yet another reason Washington hates Correa is because he took steps against the multinational oil companies’ exploitation of Ecuador’s oil resources and limited the amount of offshore deposits in the country’s banks in order to block Washington’s ability to destabilize Ecuador’s financial system.

Washington also hates Correa for refusing to renew Washington’s lease of the air base in Manta.

Essentially, Correa has fought to take control of Ecuador’s government, media and national resources out of Washington’s hands and the hands of the small rich elite allied with Washington. It is a David vs. Goliath story. 

In other words, Correa, like Venezuela’s Chevez, is the rare foreign leader who represents the interests of his own country instead of Washington’s interest. 

Washington uses the various corrupt NGOs and the puppet government in Colombia as weapons against Correa and the Ecuadoran government. Many believe that it is only a matter of time before Washington succeeds in assassinating Correa. 

American patriots, who feel that they should be on “their” government’s side regardless of the facts, would do well to remember what true patriotism is. For Americans, patriotism has always meant allegiance to the Constitution, not to the government. The oath is to defend the Constitution against enemies domestic and foreign. The Bush and Obama regimes have proven themselves to be the Constitution’s worst enemies. It is not possible for a true patriot to support a government that destroys the Constitution. The United States is the Constitution. Our country is not the Obama regime, the Bush regime, or some other administration. Our country is the Constitution. The Constitution is our country.

Beyond obligations to one’s own country, all humans have a responsibility to human life itself. Washington’s puppet states, such as the NATO countries, Japan, and Colombia, by providing cover and support for Washington’s aggression are enabling Washington to drive the world into World War III. 

The temptation of Washington’s money easily overwhelms weak characters such as Tony Blair and David Cameron. But the governments of NATO countries and other accommodating states are not only selling out their own peoples by supporting Washington’s wars of aggression, they are selling out humanity. Washington’s hubris and arrogance grow as Washington bumps off country after country. Sooner or later Russia and China, will realize that they themselves are targets and will draw firmer lines. Arrogance will prevent Washington from acknowledging the lines, and the final war will be launched.

Washington’s hegemonic impulse is driving the world to destruction. The peoples of the world should realize this and force their governments to stop enabling Washington’s aggression. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A former member of Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, a professor of economics, and an editor at major mainstream publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Paul Craig Roberts is today one of the most forceful voices for sanity, integrity and truth in the United States.