Until the Obama people shut it down, it is still possible to make contributions to Wikileaks via Xipwire.
Said co-founder Sibyl Lindsay today,
“We do think people should be able to make their own decisions as to who they donate to. The fact that people can’t donate to where they’d like to and make that decision for themselves does bother us.
The company has offered to process all contributions to Wikileaks free of fees. I just made a donation, and (hee-hee), charged it to my MasterCard.
Taking his cue from Chinese dictators, Senator Joe Lieberman is said to have immediately called for Lindsay’s arrest. There is also talk that she might be hauled up on a jaywalking charge in Milwaukee from 2003 – city authorities there, who say it is entirely coincidental that the matter is coming up now, have issued arrest warrants for her in Federal District Court. Attorney General Holder is said to have taken an interest in the case, saying “far too often scofflaws are allowed to walk free. I only want to see our sacred laws upheld.” Conviction could involve time at Guantanamo, and torture.
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” (Thomas Jefferson)
Wow – have you ever seen such a flexing of fascist muscle as with Assange and the Wikileaks affair? Imagine what is going on behind the scenes – death threats, trumped up “rape” charges, arrested in London, and Amazon.com, PayPal, and now VISA* trying to shut down his cash flow. Assange is fighting extradition to Sweden, as he believes that that country is merely acting as an intermediary for the Obama Administration, which wants to bring him here and imprison him. Said Assange’s attorney, Mark Stephens,
‘It doesn’t escape me that Sweden was one of those lick-spittle states which used its resources and facilities for rendition flights.
And I say “fascist” not because I like to hurl epithets, but rather because we are witnessing the results of the “marriage of corporation and state, ” Mussolini’s definition of that benign form of governance. Assange exposed state secrets that should not be secret, and the government is hounding him, including the “black-ops” people who are slamming his websites. And now come the corporations, as if they and government are the same entity. (They are, Benito. They are.)
Did any in the mainstream media take note that Obama’s recent Asian trip included forty aircraft, six armored vehicles, and 200 corporate executives? If indeed the junket did cost $200 million a day, it’s just another subsidy.
If Wikileaks achieves nothing else, it is the exposure of this unholy inbreeding that has always been going on, but has happened in spades during the last thirty years. We all know now that the corporations and the state act as one to shut down freedom of speech, because the former now controls the latter. And for that we can thank the soon-to-be-imprisoned Assange.
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Just to toss in a little optimistic news, there are cyberhacks all over the globe, and the best that can happen with the current Obama crackdown on Wikileaks is to enrage them, to organize them. “I am Wikileaks” is encouraging people all over the globe to stand up and be counted. (Will Facebook take them down?)
Raw Story has revealed that one of Assange’s accusers in the Swedish case has CIA connections. (He is not accused of rape, but rather, for failure to use a condom, a unique Swedish interpretation of rape).
The web is a cranky beast, hard to cage. In the United States, net neutrality is a dead letter. Corporations cannot shut down annoying websites due to the first amendment, which still has window-dressing force. But they can marginalize them. And that has been the whole battle – an equal playing field … you know, liberty and justice for all. Quaint.
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*VISA went after Ralph Nader in 2000, forcing him to take down an effective TV ad that portrayed Bush and Gore as part of the same apparatus. He used VISA”s word, “priceless,” and laughed afterward at the high absurdity of suing over ownership of that word.
And then, there’s this: Operation Payback threatens to hack any company’s website that acts against Wikileaks, and has already shut down the Swiss bank PostFinance, which froze Wikileaks funds. They are threatening to go after PayPal as well. Can’t wait.
The Swiss government is resisting pressure from Obama and the French government to shut down the Wikileaks.ch site running in that country. Perhaps they have leverage via their banking laws by which so many American criminals hold secret accounts there.
The website of the Swedish prosecutor’s who is going after Assange was taken down today. Too funny.
Cartoon from circa 1991, the first attack on IraqI thought he had vanished form the scene, and had long since packed away his other works too. But Noam Chomsky is still alive and hard at work. His recently published Hopes and Prospects is, like his other works, a collection of essays that are continually updated.
I first ran across Chomsky in 1988 – I’ve run across many, many authors, but this guy has the ability to reach across the divide. I was then a right-winger, but one in turmoil, as things didn’t seem right to me. He said things that others don’t say, and they resonated. I suspect that power is a good part of the reason for keeping him out of view in American media.
And probably for that reason too, he is reviled in proper circles, as the Georgetown cocktail circuit, but especially in the economics profession. The reason why is easily seen in the words that follow, from pages 75-76 of this most recent work.
Whether neoliberalism is the enemy of development is debatable, for a simple reason: the economy – particularly the international economy – is so poorly understood and involves so many variables that even when close correlations are found, one cannot be confident about whether there are causal relations, or if so, in which direction. Robert SolowThe founder of the modern theory of economic growth, Nobel laureate Robert Solow, commented that despite the enormous accumulation of data since his pioneering work half a century ago, “the direction of causality” is unknown. It is not clear, he concludes, whether capital investments causes productivity, or productivity leads to capital investment; whether openness to trade improves economic growth, or growth leads to trade; and the same problems arise in other dimensions. One prominent economic historian, Paul Bairoch, argues that protectionism, paradoxically, has commonly increased trade. Ha-Joon ChangThe reason, he suggests, is that protectionism tends to stimulate growth, and growth leads to trade; while imposed liberalization, since the eighteenth century, has fairly consistently had harmful economic effects. The historical record provides substantial evidence that “historically, trade liberalization has been the outcome rather than the cause of economic development” (Ha-Joon Chang), apart from the “development” of narrow sectors of great wealth and privilege who benefit from resource extraction.
From an extensive review, Bairock concludes that “It is difficult to find another case where the facts so contradict the dominant theory [as the theory] concerning the negative impact of protectionism.” The conclusion holds into the twentieth century, when other forms of market interference become more prominent …
The “dominant theory” is that of the rich and powerful, who have regularly advocated liberalization for others, and sometimes for themselves as well, once they have achieved a dominant position and hence are willing to face competition on a “level playing field” – that is, one sharply tilted in their favor. This stand is sometimes called “kicking away the ladder” by economic historians: first we violate the rules to climb to the top, then we kick away the ladder so that you cannot follow us, and we righteously proclaim: Let’s play fair, on a level playing field.”*[emphasis added]
Even as an amateur observer, I cannot help but notice that proponents of “free markets” don’t know anything. Things don’t work they way they say. Their results are always theoretical, and years away, but sure to work if only given a chance. But markets are like fire, which can keep us warm, or burn our house down – as seen in the most recent collapse.
There are “free markets” indeed, but they are not at all what proponents say they are. Sweatshop laborers are subject to the whims of markets, as are all common laborers not protected by unions. Generally speaking, the less powerful one is, the more exposed one is to market forces. And those forces are devastating, which is why most large and “successful” business enterprises have found ways to insulate themselves (protectionism, incorporation, tax shelters, monopoly/oligopoly, preferred tax status, protective regulations, access to the commons, and control of government itself).
Twenty years [after the Kennedy tax cuts], when tax rates were cut even more under Ronald Reagan, federal tax revenues again soared with the “rich” paying an increasingly greater share of the income tax burden. Since it was now a Republican initiating this policy, Democrats branded it “Reaganomics” and mocked it as half-baked, “trickle-down” economics.
The problem: It’s not true. Federal tax revenues did not “soar” after the Reagan tax cuts. They shrank, precipitously, and then headed up on the same incline as before. Federal tax revenues after the Bush tax cuts exhibited the same behavior. But this is standard right-wing talking-the-talk: merely to assert that which is false to be true, without evidence. Rosen has access to the public via a large-city newspaper, and never has to document a goddammed word of what he says.
And that is true of right wing economics in general – as Chomsky notes, where relationships exist, it is hard to define causality, and where causality seems to be indicated, it is in the exact opposite direction as wealth-financed economists say. So those countries that avoid neoliberalism (or colonialism, as it was once called) tend to develop (the United States, Japan, China, the Asian rim), and those who stick to the resource/cheap-labor export model (Latin America, Africa, India) experience massive poverty and violence, and never quite seem to develop.
And this is what initially attracted me to Chomsky – in 1988, I was in limbo, trying to understand events in Nicaragua and El Salvador, among other things going on then, and along he came laying out a completely different framework than official truth laid out for us. And his version of events had explanatory power that the others lacked.
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[Chomsky foonote]: *Solow, “Interview,” Challenge, January-February 2000. Bairoch, Economics and World History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder. See also, Shahid Alam, Poverty from the Wealth of Nations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). An enduring classic is Frederick Clairmonte, Economic Liberalization and Underdeveloped (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1960).
Julian Assange participated in an on-line interview that I found gripping. I don’t mean to lionize the man, but he has become the face of Wikileaks, which is the work of over a hundred thousand people*, many of whom are risking their lives, fortunes and our sacred honor.
The organization offers hope that democratic governance can reassert itself due to the Internet. Obviously the U.S. government wants to shut it down and murder Assange, but he seems to have anticipated this, and more encouragingly, says that the organization will go on without him should be be imprisoned or killed.
Read and judge for yourself, of course. Here are a few snippets that gave me that surge of warmth in my belly as I read:
tburgi: Western governments lay claim to moral authority in part from having legal guarantees for a free press. Threats of legal sanction against Wikileaks and yourself seem to weaken this claim. (What press needs to be protected except that which is unpopular to the State? If being state-sanctioned is the test for being a media organization, and therefore able to claim rights to press freedom, the situation appears to be the same in authoritarian regimes and the west.) Do you agree that western governments risk losing moral authority by attacking Wikileaks? Do you believe western governments have any moral authority to begin with? Thanks, Tim Burgi Vancouver, Canada.
Julian Assange: The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be “free” because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.
In hiding ... Indeed, we should look to states like Ecuador, Turkey, or Venezuela for our modern-day examples of free speech and voting actually impacting the behavior of governments. The word “freedom” has been debased in this country. It has no substance or meaning. People who talk about it have no clue what it really means.
When speech matters, power tries to suppress it. Wikileaks matters, and accordingly, the U.S. government wants it shut down.
rszopa: Annoying as it may be, the DDoS seems to be good publicity (if anything, it adds to your credibility). So is getting kicked out of AWS. Do you agree with this statement? Were you planning for it? Thank you for doing what you are doing.
Julian Assange: Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit in order to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases.
See how it works? Amazon.com kicked Wikileaks off its servers at the behest of the U.S. government. The company seems to exist in a free speech environment, but when some meaningful free speech actually broke out, Amazon.com shitcanned it.
Finally, this:
distrot: The State Dept is mulling over the issue of whether you are a journalist or not. Are you a journalist? As far as delivering information that someone [anyone] does not want seen is concerned, does it matter if you are a ‘journalist’ or not?
Julian Assange: I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time. However, it is not necessary to debate whether I am a journalist, or how our people mysteriously are alleged to cease to be journalists when they start writing for our organisaiton. Although I still write, research and investigate my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists.
This is perhaps the most exemplary Orwellian exchange I have read in all of the days since I first learned how to use the word “Orwellian.”
Assange is 28 years old. How does a man become so world-wise at such a young age? I wonder, if Alexis de Tocqueville were to re-visit America in 2010, what he might call his book.
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*Various cables heretofore unreleased are in the hands of this many people, and will be released if the bodies of people like Assange or others turn up in a gutter one morning. It’s an insurance policy, but the U.S. is very powerful, so it is at best weak protection.
PS: Amazon.com is now joined by PayPal in cooperating with the U.S. Government in shutting down Wikileaks. I don’t do business with the former, and just canceled by PayPal account. I’m nobody, but principles matter.
For those with any interest in the subject, I mentioned below that we cannot make jumps in understanding, that we have to progress along natural lines. I think that this applies to religion as well, and offer up five levels of passage into and through and then back to religion. No doubt others have described this better than me. But I’ll give it a shot anyway. It goes like this:
Level one: The words of holy texts are accepted as true without question, and the mythology, no matter how bizarre, accepted as reality. This is childish religious belief, or in adults, a kind of fundamentalism. It offers great comfort.
Level two, Path A: Cynical non-believers see the vulnerability of children and fundamentalists, and exploit them for financial gain. These are people like Pat Robertson, Swaggart, Haggard and Roberts and all the others. The low-hanging fruit is irresistible.
Level two, Path B: A less cynical setting aside of childhood fantasies without further research or wonder. Most people who call themselves religious are really in arrested development, having stopped believing, but also, sadly, having stopped wondering as well. People in arrested development often still feel a need for religious belief in others, for all our good. This is the stage where Catholic parents, for instance, send their kids to Catholic schools, even though they are too sophisticated to accept Catholic teaching for themselves.
Level three: Complete rejection of religious belief. For those like me, deeply indoctrinated in religion as a child when I was too young to reason, this rejection can be coupled with condescension and antagonism towards those who have faith, and especially towards those who who did the indoctrinating. (The “recovering Catholic.”) This is where we find Richard Dawkins and Sam Smith.
Level four: Reaching an understanding that people who are not fundamentalist and yet religious are as smart and thoughtful as non-religious ones, and perhaps even know a thing or two that non-religious people do not. This creates cognitive dissonance.
Level five: Resolution of dissonance, reaching an understanding that the search for truth has many forms, and that science is only one.
The progression through the levels ends with the elimination of antagonism between science and religion. Each is a search for truth. The scientific method is one way to advance knowledge, but mythology is also a vessel that carries important truths.
For myself, I cannot dwell in mythology, just as I cannot read fiction. I cannot be religious in that sense, and I like my Sundays too much anyway. But I do accept that those who are religious may well know more about life and living than my sterile science will ever give me.
There seems to be no bottom to the well of Democratic stupidity. I hear it every day, from otherwise smart people like Thom Hartmann*, who continually implores Obama to find his “inner FDR,” to bloggers like JC, also a smart guy, who apparently thinks there is a fight going on over extending the Bush tax cuts, rather than mere stage play.
Here’s Doug Coffin, apparently a real person (remember “John Firehammer”?), writing at Left in the West , who says the following regarding the pay freeze on federal employees:
In doing so, the President is guilty of a rookie mistake from a collective bargaining perspective i.e. he continually bargains against himself. He did the same thing with health care when he took “single payer” and then the “public option” off the table for nothing in return.
No doubt that he’s expecting the GOP to respond in-kind by agreeing to pass the much needed unemployment extension or giving in on extending tax cuts for the wealthy. They won’t…. and he’ll be stuck screwing his constituents one more time. It looks more and more difficult for him to rebuild the coalition that got him elected. He’s angered teachers, labor and now federal employees.
He’s not expecting anything of the kind. Again with the misunderestimation! He knows what the Republicans will do, and welcomes it. The machinations are there merely to befuddle the [rank and file] Democrats.
We are traveling to the People’s Republic of Boulder today, so I have to sum this up succinctly.
Ah, screw that. It’s takes less time to be verbose than succinct.
Obama was a brand. The powers behind the façade of two parties realized that people were fed up with Bush and company, and so knew that they had to pitch idealism to salve the wounds of eight years of Bush cynicism. Obama is no Lincoln – he did not rise up from obscurity based on intelligence and political skill. He was spotted … he spoke at the Democratic convention in 2004, and power brokers saw potential. He was run up the flag pole, along with many others, and found to have some real possibility. He was staffed, an advertising campaign was created, speeches were written, a book or two … and art became reality. Obama the image became Obama the president.
The president could well have been Hillary Clinton, or even Tom Vilsac. That’s not important. It would not change anything.
But he’s not in charge. He’s not bargaining behind the scenes, making “rookie mistakes.” He’s acting on a stage, reading scripted words to reinforce the illusion of two parties.
There’s no hope in two-party politics. Change has to come from without, and against amazing odds. It has happened before – slavery did end, FDR did allow social reforms (there were powerful social movements at that time, but not now), women got the vote and the 14th amendment passed. But rights are not given, and words have no power if not backed by people fighting for those rights. Our first amendment, or fourteenth, mean exactly nothing without fighters.
Obama’s election means nothing. The power brokers may have already abandoned him, as he doesn’t even seem to be trying to assuage his base these days. He’s looking like a one-termer. He probably had no concern over the election losses, as he’s not staked in any ideology. He’s merely depending on the bottomless well of Democratic stupidity to hold on the the presidency for four years beyond his allotted four.
He’s an actor on a stage. He, unlike George W. Bush, might actually understand that. He is smart.
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*Hartmann went to far as to suggest, in a recent interview with author Chris Hedges, that Obama might not be a liberal, but rather (gasp!), a “moderate.” He holds this view in the face of Obama’s conntinued out-rightwinging the right wingers, making bigger defense budgets, more war, and carrying forward with terror and torture just as before. The power of perception management extends right into the brain of this jabbering but otherwise intelligent radio host.
A third-rate man schools a second-rate man on the riseThere’s a nice little discussion going on under a post by Duganz at 4&20. It’s the kind of thing that I love – intrigue. Duganz starts out wondering why he cannot get either of Montana’s senators, Jon Tester or Max Baucus, to answer the simple question, “Why are we fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?”
Duganz says in the post
I remember sitting in my high school computer lab when we started shocking and awing Iraqi civilians, and soldiers into oblivion. Some of my classmates were cheering.
This would have to be the 2003 shock and awe attack. There was another attack in 1991, equally as barbaric, but not called “shock and awe.” If he was 18 in 2003, he is now 25. That’s young. At that age I could hardly tie my shoes. So he is attaining some wisdom at an early age, and I hope the process goes forward.
I have learned, at age 60, that people must come into wisdom on their own. Simply imparting it upon them has no effect, as we are all caught up in our own moment and self-assured that we have some understanding of events. So when Duganz wonders why he cannot get a straight answer out of his elected representatives, it does no good to say what I said – that they are mostly powerless and have to go along with these things merely to stay in office. That’s why politics attracts second and third-rate people. They are at best poseurs.
That is too big a jump – one cannot go from 3 to 6 without first going through 4 and 5.
I simply encourage Duganz to keep asking those questions. The one about why United States senators cannot give a straight answer about our involvement in foreign wars is a good one, and once answered will lead to a new level of knowledge. And so forth and so forth. I did not get started until I was almost 40. He’s got a huge jump on things.
The FBI saved us from a terrorist attack that was planned by … the FBI. Nice work, fellas!
Here’s what happened, as I understand it: Mohamed Osman Mohamud was hanging out with bad people, having communications with unsavory sorts. His Dad, a westernized Muslim, was deeply concerned, and approached the FBI with this information, asking for their help in setting the kid straight.
The FBI instead enticed the kid into a sting operation, one that will probably not stand if he gets his day in court. (That’s why people in power do not like habeas corpus. They’d rather just put people away without trial.) Mohamud has pleaded innocent.
Anything else? Probably. The FBI seems anxious to produce a thwarted terror incident – all these months and years without one makes for a poor scare campaign. So manufacturing one seems a nice solution to that problem.
But what about the kid? Why is he pissed at the U.S.? It beats me why all of these “terrorists” happen to come from countries where the U.S. happens to have troops on the ground and where our bloody covert ops are being carried out.
Wikileaks is stirring it up again, and getting bolder as they go. Julian Assange has become a celebrity, but I am guessing he is smart enough to make a network that functions without him. The Pentagon wants him either dead or imprisoned. That group is pretty good at getting their man.
It occurs to me, and many others too, that what Assange and Wikileaks are doing is both strange and unrecognizable … but then like a flashback we realize that it is called journalism. Good journalists are not liked or admired by people in power. Quite the opposite. Real journalists don’t get invited to parties or get called upon to question politicians in phony debates or do talking-head interviews. Real journalists piss powerful people off. That’s dangerous to livelihood, and for Assange, perhaps even his life.
Real journalists find out what powerful people are doing, and report back to us. Right now it seems as if Wiki is teasing, embarrassing people, tantalizing power. That is fascinating. They are even threatening to go after a Wall Street bank, where real power resides. Banksters could force Elliot Spitzer out of office, but Assange and Wikileaks are an international operation, and mere bad press won’t harm them.
Like I said, it’s either prison or murder for Assange. He’s toying with real power, real killers.
__________ Footnote: I feel Lily Tomlin’s pain. She said “”No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” The tentacles of U.S. power reach into Sweden, which has issued a warrant for Assange’s arrest, and now to Interpol, which is likely conducting a global manhunt. The man is dangerous, as seen in this Mother Jones discovery – that none other than the Obama Administration saw fit to pressure Spain to back off of investigation of Bush Administration crimes – right off the bat. There was never any prospect of Obama offering anything remotely resembling “change.”
Piece of Mindful 