I started posting on HowieinSeattle in 11/04, following progressive American politics in the spirit of Howard Dean's effort to "Take Our Country Back." I decided to follow my heart and posted on seattleforbarackobama from 2/07 to 11/08.--"Howie Martin is the Abe Linkin' of progressive Seattle."--Michael Hood.
Showing posts with label glenn greenwald. Show all posts
Showing posts with label glenn greenwald. Show all posts
What is missing from America is a healthy fear in the hearts and minds of the most powerful political and financial factions of the consequences of their continued pilfering, corporatism, and corrupt crony capitalism, and only this sort of movement — untethered from the pacifying rules of our political and media institutions — can re-impose that healthy fear. When both parties are captive to the same factions, then — by design, as AIPAC has so effectively shown — one can’t subvert the agenda of those factions simply by voting for one party or the other. MORE...
At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky today says that while President Obama "hasn’t been much of a domestic-policy president from nearly anyone’s point of view" (he apparently hasn't read Steve Benen or Ezra Klein lately), the war in Libya highlights how "one can see how he might become not just a good but a great foreign-policy president." Tomasky's argument is somewhat cautious and expressly contingent on unknown, future events, but is nonetheless revealing -- both in what it says and what it omits -- about how some influential progressives conceive of the Obama presidency. MORE...
In summary, a number of these security firms pitched Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce a proposition in which they would smear the reputations and try to threaten the well-being of targeted private individuals, including journalists, activists and political groups. As Glenn puts it, “what made it such an important story is that the firms that were involved are serious legitimate players. These are not fly-by-night operations. These are big companies that do a lot of high level work for the government and for big corporations.” MORE...
Greenwald's commentary on the pushback against Wikileaks among our elite overlords is excellent and you should read the whole thing. Like him, the thing that leaves me the most gobsmacked is the media, which seems to be the most upset over the idea that the Government is having a hard time keeping its secrets. I think we can all see how odd that is --- journalism being a field which is ostensibly about speaking truth to power and all that drivel.
This may be the best illustration of the point, also courtesy of Greenwald, in which the "diplomat" is the one who argues for transparency while the "journalist" (the editor of the New York Times as it happens) defendsclearing their reporting with the government before reporting it:
If you find this subject intriguing, I would highly recommend that you read this mindblowing essay on Julian Assange's philosophy. Yes, he has one. And it's radical and it's interesting although nobody seems to be interested in it. All I hear is the argument about whether or not it's good for national security or whether it can be called real journalism. What I don't hear about is what it is Wikileaks is trying to accomplish. I suppose most of the interested parties who lead our conversation aren't comfortable with that. And you can understand why, when you read it. MORE...
In sum, I seriously question the judgment of anyone who -- in the face of the orgies of secrecy the U.S. Government enjoys and, more so, the abuses they have accomplished by operating behind it -- decides that the real threat is WikiLeaks for subverting that ability. That's why I said yesterday: one's reaction to Wikileaks is largely shaped by whether or not one, on balance, supports what the U.S. has been covertly doing in the world by virtue of operating in the dark. I concur wholeheartedly with Digby's superb commentary on this point yesterday:
My personal feeling is that any allegedly democratic government that is so hubristic that it will lie blatantly to the entire world in order to invade a country it has long wanted to invade probably needs a self-correcting mechanism. There are times when it's necessary that the powerful be shown that there are checks on its behavior, particularly when the systems normally designed to do that are breaking down. Now is one of those times. . . MORE...
"We were told as diplomats, 'Don't ever put anything in a cable you wouldn't want on the front page of a newspaper.' It shows that they're a lot of arrogant people, that the system itself wasn't checking itself," says Ann Wright, Retired United States Army Colonel and former State Department official, of the latest documents released from WikiLeaks.
I was nearly dozing off listening to the very end of Lawrence O'Donnell's 1-hour show "The Last Word" on Monday (Nov. 8), when his final words hit me in the face like a slap. O'Donnell spent the final minute announcing coming attractions for tomorrow night's show, including his guest Glenn Greenwald, who had argued forcefully and effectively with O'Donnell on "Morning Joe" a few days ago. One would expect some teaser, but O'Donnell instead lashed into his guest with insinuations that Greenwald was somehow not...American. MORE...
Lawrence O'Donnell and prominent blogger Glenn Greenwald engaged in a heated debate on Friday's "Morning Joe" about the political direction the Democratic Party should take in the wake of their midterm election losses.
Two days before he came on the MSNBC show, Greenwald had fired the first salvo in the debate. In a post on Wednesday, he singled out O'Donnell as an example of cable news pundits always advising Democrats to move to the right in order to win elections:
...Almost every time I had MNSBC on [during the coverage of the midterm elections], there was Lawrence O'Donnell trying to blame "the Left" and "liberalism" for the Democrats' political woes. Alan Grayson's loss was proof that outspoken liberalism fails. Blanche Lincoln's loss was the fault of the Left for mounting a serious primary challenge against her. Russ Feingold's defeat proved that voters reject liberalism in favor of conservatism, etc. etc. It sounded as though he was reading from some crusty script jointly prepared in 1995 by The New Republic, Lanny Davis and the DLC.
On Friday, O'Donnell seemed ready to respond. When Greenwald said that the notion that liberalism had suffered a defeat at the ballot box on Tuesday made no sense -- since nearly 95% of the Progressive Caucus in the House had been reelected, while the conservative Blue Dog Democrats had suffered massive losses -- O'Donnell leapt in.
"Glenn, Glenn, Glenn, Glenn, that's the silliest thing you can say," he told Greenwald. The liberal Representatives, he continued, lived in safe districts, whereas the Blue Dogs lived in tight swing districts. MORE...
Howie P.S.: If Lawrence is a socialist, he's a mighty thin-skinned one.
Earlier today I posted video of a Civil Liberties and Terrorism speech I gave last night at the University of Wisconsin, along with some notices of events and media appearances tomorrow, but I wanted to separately post this 13-minute discussion I had on MSNBC this afternoon with Dylan Ratigan and Cenk Uygur about the Obama presidency, progressives and the Democratic Party, because I thought the discussion was quite good and touched on some important issues.
There are multiple common threads here: the cavalier call for people's deaths, the demand for ultimate punishments without a shred of due process, the belief that the U.S. is entitled to do whatever it wants anywhere in the world without the slightest constraints, a wholesale rejection of basic Western liberties such as due process and a free press, the desire for the President to act as unconstrained monarch, and a bloodthirsty frenzy that has led all of them to cheerlead for brutal, criminal wars of aggression for a full decade without getting anywhere near the violence they cheer on, etc. But that's to be expected. We lived for eight years under a President who essentially asserted all of those powers and more, and now have a one who has embraced most of them and added some new ones, including the right to order even American citizens, far from any battlefield, assassinated without a shred of due process. Given that, it would be irrational to expect a citizenry other than the one that is being molded with this mentality.
* * * * *
One of the most progressive ads of the election cycle comes -- ironically, sadly, and revealingly enough -- from Alaska's GOP incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, against GOP nominee and tea party candidate Joe Miller:
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.
Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them. MORE...
That crisis presented a huge opportunity for Obama and the Democrats to bring about real change in Washington -- the central promise of his campaign -- by capitalizing on (and becoming the voice of) populist anger and using it to wrestle away control from Wall Street and other financial and corporate elites who control Washington. Had they done so, they would have been champions of populist rage rather than its prime targets. But, as John Judis argues in his excellent New Republic piece, they completely squandered that opportunity. Rather than emphatically stand up to the bankers and other oligarchical thieves, they coddled and served them, and thus became the face of the elite interests oppressing ordinary Americans rather than their foes. How can an administration represented by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers -- and which specializes in an endless stream of secret deals with corporate lobbyists and sustains itself with Wall Street funding -- possibly maintain any pretense of populist support or changing how Washington works? It can't. MORE...
Howie P.S.: My initial reaction was that Howard was "caving," but I am coming around to his point of view. Glenn Greenwald had a "video discussion" with Dean and his two part video is here.
The most consequential news item of the week will obviously be -- or at least should be -- the massive new leak by WikiLeaks of 90,000 pages of classified material chronicling the truth about the war in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2009. Those documents provide what The New York Times calls "an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal." The Guardian describes the documents as "a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency." MORE...
Britain, unlike the U.S., is currently in the process of Looking Backward, Not Forward, as they investigate both the events that led them to the attack on Iraq as well as their involvement in America's torture regime. (SNIP) British Muslims became "radicalized" and "swamped" that country with Terrorist plots only after watching the Government attack two separate Muslim nations. Add to that things like lawless detentions, Guantanamo, a torture regime, attacks in places like Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and others -- all on top of two occupations in the Muslim world that will extend for a full decade at least -- and only the densest among us (or those who actively desire high levels of Terrorism threats for their own interests) will fail to see how the very policies justified in the name of fighting Terrorism are the ones most exacerbating that problem. MORE...
It was Geithner who, as head of the New York Fed, presided over the $180 billion bailout of AIG, which, as revealed by the 500-page documented record of that travesty released last week by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, was a scam to pass taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs and the other large banks that had created the problem. And it was Summers who as President Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which guaranteed “legal certainty” for the toxic derivatives packages that Goldman and the others sold. At the time Summers assured Congress that “the parties to these kinds of contracts are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies. …”
For such not-so-prescient but very convenient insight, Goldman Sachs rewarded Summers with $200,000 for two speeches he gave to its executives while he was an adviser to candidate Obama. Not surprisingly, the new financial regulations proposed by this administration and soon to be signed into law let Goldman and the others so much at fault off the hook.
There is enormous and justifiable populist outrage out there over the antics of a runaway Wall Street that is not being held accountable. Obama could tap into that outrage by taking his cues from a true populist, Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. One of only eight senators to vote against the Clinton-backed 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had done so much to protect the economy, Feingold voted against the Bush bailout too and is now breaking with Obama on his so-called financial reform:
“The bill does not eliminate the risk to our economy posed by ‘too big to fail’ financial firms, nor does it restore the proven safeguards established after the Great Depression, which separated Main Street banks from big Wall Street firms and are essential to preventing another economic meltdown. The recent financial crisis triggered the nation’s worst recession since the Great Depression. The bill should have included reforms to prevent another such crisis. Regrettably, it did not.”
The president’s record on the economy is even worse than his performance in Afghanistan, and a reversal of course is much in order. If he doesn’t get the message now, the voters will give it to him loud and clear come the November midterm elections. MORE...
Howie P.S.: I find that Robert Scheer is usually more accurate in his judgments than I would prefer. Eliot Spitzer has reached the same conclusion and shared his thoughts with Stephen Colbert, video (06:09). Glenn Greenwald agrees and wrote about it in April. 2009.
Glenn Greenwald:
