Month: December 2010

Tom Tomorrow On Point

by tristero

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The Next Phase

by digby

Well there’s one good thing out of this day. The Villagers are confused and it’s always good for a laugh when they try to “explain” things in a way that fits their framework:

John King: Can the president complete the sale to members of his own party? Gloria Borger and Jessica Yellin with us.

I was told the White House meting you had a mix of anger and frustration from the Democrats.

Borger: Yeah, of course. Because you know, they understand, and the Democrats have a point here, the Democrats understand that the Republicans are having the democrats do their dirty work for them right now. They’re all at the buffet table. there’s something in this for everyone, get it done during the lame duck session, then the Republicans take over and guess what’s going to happen? They are suddenly going to talk about deficit reduction and they will nickel and dime Barack Obama on every single spending program because this isn’t about the deficit.

Yellin: And this is where we have a real responsibility to keep them honest. because as much as politicians are talking about paying for everything, none of this is paid for. Senator Barrasso was on saying that unemployment insurance isn’t paid for and that’s not the only part of it. how are the tax cuts paid for and where’s tht money going to come from? you heard Sherrod Brown there, saying it will come from China and uhm ..

King: It’s borrowed money …

Yellin: it’s borrowed money

Borger: … and we’ve just had a reality check. The deficit commission just came and said we have a huge problem we have now. Now I personally believe that Barack Obama can come out in the state of the union, call for a Deficit Summit call for reforming the tax codes, part of that perhaps being tax increases and calling the Republicans bluff but whether he does that or not …

Yellin: The problem he has is with the left flank of his own party who are basically stupefied that he has endorsed George W. Bush’s central economic policy.

King: And so the question is, has the president made the calculation that “the left might be mad at me, but they won’t desert me in 2012 and so I’m going to cut a deal with Republicans?” The question is, what’s the next step? As you said, does he say in the state of the union, “I’m going to embrace my deficit reduction commission and let’s raise the retirement age for social security and lets get some cuts in medicare and lets get cuts across the government? Is a Democratic president going to do that?

Borger: I think he might. Look, this is about leadership at this point. It’s not about his left flank. It’s about leading the country. And it’s about making sure that he’s not the one leading the country into the ditch he used to talk about in the last campaign. he’s got another ditch he’s got to dig out of. And I think that it requires him to actually lead.

I believe and he believes that the public will reward him for it in the long term and right now his Democrats are going to be angry about it because the Republicans are clever.

King: It is remarkable, I mean remarkable, the number of Democrats who use the word “spine” in that the Democrats say the president doesn’t have one. Now the president says he knows he was going to get criticised but he didn’t want working families to get a three or five thousand dollar tax increase next year.

Yellin: And as he said, that’s a real effect on real people. And the payroll tax holiday and the reduction in the payroll tax will be felt by millions of Americans and will make a real difference. The bottom line is that it’s still a long time for the re-elect and he can figure out how to shape a message and try to get people back on board.

Borger: This is a political deal.

King: I’m shocked that you would say that about Washington DC. [hearty laughter all around]

Borger: Everybody understands that this is a political deal that he had to make. But the next phase is one we really need to pay attention to, what he does in the state of the union.

King: Thanks very much. The next phase is important and the next couple of weeks as we see whether this good will on the deal from the Republican side gets the president anything else.

If you can make heads or tails out of that exchange, more power to you. The only theme that seemed to emerge was that now that the president has extended the tax cuts for millionaires he has to announce in the state of the union address that he’s seriously going to cut the deficit and I’d guess that’s probably what will happen.

Of course, as we all know, the only cuts that have bipartisan support is the cuts to social security. They won’t decrease the deficit, but as Gloria Borger says, those Republicans are clever.

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Let’s Make A Deal

by digby

So it’s done. Would it be unseemly for me to say I told you so? (My miscalculation was that they would also be able to hold unemployment insurance hostage along with the middle class tax cuts, which was really brilliant considering that it’s Christmas and they can all go home now warm in the knowledge that God blesses us one and all. Damn.)

Ezra sets forth what I would imagine is the thinking among Democratic insiders, namely that tax cuts for the rich are a form of stimulus and since we can’t get any kind of real stimulus, they have to extend them. The problem here is that while tax cuts are often used for stimulus, it doesn’t seem to have worked all that well in this recession, although it may have mitigated the worst of it at its depth. But tax cuts for the wealthy have been shown over and over again to be the least effective form of stimulus and coming as they are at a time when the wealthy have recovered very well and their investments are booming (while the rest of the country is still swimming in debt and suffering from lack of jobs, the housing slump and underemployment) they are likely to be even less stimulative than usual. I really don’t think even they believe this rationale.

So why? I think it’s a basic belief in “markets” as the savior of all economic problems and a broader fear of further angering the business community and the financial sector: they hear the threats loud and clear — “unless you give us our tax cuts, the country gets it.” The corporations and Wall Street are already sitting on a boatload of cash which they have no need to distribute as long as they are making big profits anyway. They simply do not believe they should have to pay higher taxes so they are holding a metaphorical gun to the head of the government and daring it to thwart them.

I’m not saying this to defend the administration. Indeed, I think capitulating to this is about as uncreative and lacking in seriousness as possible that I believe they are either clueless or cowardly for not doing the right thing on this. After all, if what really matters to the administration is that the economy recovers, then this is nothing more than a faith based premature capitulation to the business community. A business community which is not going to reward them even if they install a whole slew of Wall Street insiders like Roger Altman in the White House. The same Roger Altman who wrote this last summer:

JUST as Congress finally passed its sweeping financial reform bill last week, a chorus of high-profile chief executives and business lobbying groups were criticizing President Obama and what they see as a new era of big, stifling government and heavy regulation. Ivan Seidenberg, the chief executive of Verizon, delivered a particularly stinging rebuke: In remarks to the Economic Club of Washington, he blamed President Obama for “an increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation” and lambasted an administration that is “reaching into every sector of American life” and “making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses.”

After the United States Chamber of Commerce then complained that the administration “vilified industries,” the White House advisers Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett responded with a letter clearly meant for the business community as a whole. They wrote: “The stakes are far too high for us to be working against one another. That is why we were surprised and disappointed at the rhetoric we have heard from some in the business community — rhetoric that fails to acknowledge the important steps this administration has taken every single day to meet our shared objectives.”

Their letter is more than a defense of a president stung by the anti-business label. Given the latest data indicating weak growth and strikingly high unemployment, the administration is rightly concerned that business negativism is suppressing the confidence necessary for increased investment and job growth.

This poisonous dynamic between Washington and business must be fixed. Both sides should make adjustments, but the business community — of which I am a proud member — especially needs to make efforts to mend this relationship. Yes, the administration has made some mistakes. But, on balance, its actions have supported business.

[…]

What adjustments should President Obama make to repair ties with business? For starters, no important member of his administration has ever met a major payroll. Such an absence of business experience in a presidential administration is unique in recent decades and carries negative connotations; certainly, no other comparable interest group is so unrepresented. This could be remedied by recruiting a senior industry figure for one of the four or five key economic policy positions.

Beyond that, there is skepticism over the president’s commitment to reducing the huge and dangerous budget deficits which America now faces. A strong step toward deficit reduction next year — like undertaking the difficult task of trying to fix Social Security — would earn deeper credibility with business and with all Americans.

Another problem is that the administration’s rhetoric — which too often employs inflammatory words like “reckless” — has the effect of tarring all of business with the same brush. The White House might better distinguish between Wall Street, Big Oil and health insurers, which have all incurred public wrath, and the majority of businesses, which haven’t.

The tension between President Obama and the business community is hurting both sides and may hamper economic recovery. .

This view about Social Security is backed up by Peter Orszag, recently departed from the administration (and reportedly headed to Citi), Dick Durbin, the president’s proxy in the Senate, ex-labor leader Andy Stern along with numbers of Democratic Senators, signaling that Social Security really is on the menu.

And unbelievably, it’s already being sold as a way to pay for these tax cuts:

Lawmakers may embrace plans by President Barack Obama’s debt commission to curb the costs of Social Security and $1 trillion in tax breaks even as comprehensive deficit reduction hinges on whether both parties seek confrontation or accommodation. While the commission lacked the votes to send its proposal to Congress, bipartisan agreement on the panel will open a debate over the retirement system and the tax breaks, which include the home-mortgage deduction, several lawmakers and analysts said….
Obama thanked the panel for highlighting “the magnitude of the challenge facing us” without embracing specific proposals. White House Budget Director Jack Lew has invited commission members to meet.…
“It is difficult for the congressional leadership to drive two conflicting processes at once,” Crandall said. “Congress is probably going to have to take things one step at a time…
Peter Orszag, who was running the White House budget office when Obama formed the panel, said if Congress makes any progress on the debt-reduction proposal, it’s most likely to be on Social Security’s long-term financial challenges. “The most auspicious part of these proposals is in Social Security, where you need some tweaks to get bipartisan agreement, but they are tweaks,” said Orszag, who led the Congressional Budget Office before joining the Obama administration in 2009. That sentiment was echoed by panel members including Alice Rivlin, another former CBO director, and Andrew Stern, president emeritus of the Service Employees International Union, among the nation’s largest labor organizations. “Almost everybody mentioned it at some point in the deliberations,” said Rivlin. “Social Security can be done, I’m convinced now,” said Stern. Republicans signal they intend to make their first order of business federal programs directed at specific groups. Republicans “must immediately start a conversation with the nation about the kind of entitlement changes that are necessary,” Majority Leader-elect Eric Cantor said in a statement Dec. 3….
Now, Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, says: “If we want to come up with something bipartisan to work on together, Social Security is a good candidate.” Durbin also said in an interview that “this commission opened a door that nobody has looked behind a long time, and that’s tax expenditures.” Clearing out tax breaks appeals to Republicans looking to simplify the code and lower income tax rates. …
Democrats can be brought on board by making sure the plan helps lower-income earners, said Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat leading a bipartisan group of senators seeking common ground. [There’s your arm twist, right there.]…
It may take a fiscal shock, such as a drop of confidence in state or local bonds that spreads to the Treasury market, to spur action on the commission’s proposals, Orszag said. The commission has “put ideas back on the table that, if we do run into a fiscal tremor, can be picked up,” he said.

There you have it — a disaster capitalist blueprint for destroying Social Security. (Gosh, I sure hope we don’t have any of those “fiscal tremors” don’t you?) As anyone who pays attention to this knows, Social Security is not included in the deficit figures, so even putting the best face on it makes this whole exercise a phony issue designed to “reassure” some bond traders (who aren’t asking for reassurance) and convince David Broder that they are Very Serious People, which seems to be the extent of the Democratic economic bag of tricks.

And since they obviously know that they will not be reelected if this economy stays in the doldrums, they must also believe that their political opponents are going to be check-mated by this brilliant plan, which is almost as ridiculous as the plan itself. They seem to have some starry eyed dream that groups like American Crossroads and a thousand other secretive corporate fronts aren’t going to run ads against them accusing them of putting grandma on catfood and threatening to raise taxes on the “job creators” — as they just did during the last election. Evidently, they think that wealthy people and corporations are really Democrats at heart if only they can be assured that the government is serious about solving problems that don’t exist. It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying.

There is one thing that’s immensely clarifying about this whole thing. The Democrats in general and President Obama specifically, truly believe that the economy’s problems can only be solved by putting government in service of business and finance and giving them whatever they want. And they believe this even after the financial sector already blew up the economy and the government rescued it and asked nothing in return. After all, the White House is evidently on the verge of hiring Roger Altman, who wrote this in the pages of the New York Times:

Yes, business sees both the health reform and financial reform legislation as establishing burdensome regulatory structures. It is right in this regard. But financial reform was mandatory, and while some on Wall Street naturally don’t like it, most in our community view it as relatively harmless.

At this point the President, the Democratic moderates and the GOP are in agreement that tax cuts are the only way to stimulate the economy, that regulations are bad, that social security must be cut, and that the best way to fix the economy is to cater and pander to the wealthy, the corporations and Wall Street. I think we’ve finally achieved bipartisan heaven.

Since they are going to rip Barack Obama to shreds regardless, I hope for his sake that he really does believe this, because he’s going to be Wall Street’s living martyr for the cause. Too bad about all the people, who will have to suffer much harsher punishment.

Update: And by the way, Ezra and others continue to misunderstand what the Republicans were really after here. As I’ve said ad nauseum they want the tax cuts to be temporary because they want to have this fight over tax cuts to continue into the presidential campaign. If the President agreed to extend the tax cuts permanently, the issue would be off the table and that’s not to their advantage. (Believe me, the business community is not really *uncertain* about anything at this point.)

Yes, it’s better that they didn’t extend them permanently, but are liberals looking forward to this argument two years from now? (And will there ever be any circumstances that will make it easier for them to expire than there were in the spring of 2009?) It’s a missed opportunity, and one which I suspect was always planned to miss. The Bushies knew what they were doing when they rigged this one and it would have taken a Democratic party and a president much more brave and populist than the ones we have to undo it.

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Multiple Choice

by tristero

Which side will win when this case is decided by the Supreme Court?

A) Wal-Mart
B) Wal-Mart
C) Wal-Mart
D) All of the above

Answer: D

The Faces Of The Unemployed

by digby

Show Solidarity With The Long Term Unemployed

… it could be any of us.

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Getting The Story Straight

by digby

Greg Mitchell at The Nation has been blogging the Wikileaks story for the last week and it’s become the go-to place if you are looking for links or current information about it.I encourage you to at least skim all of his dispatches if you are looking for insight on what’s going on.

For instance, in the course of conversations both online and in the real world, I’ve become convinced that peple do not understand something very important about this last batch of documents and the press is simply not telling them. They were not just dumped on the internet willy nilly. Mitchell explains in this post:

German mag Der Spiegel out with its 2nd issue on its access to cables. A lot on Iraq. One headline: “US Diplomats Bewildered and Bamboozled in Baghdad.” Say its based on their reading of 5500 cables.

This raises key point: WikiLeaks itself has still posted less than 900 cables — due to relying on heavy redacting by its snew org partners. But the same partners do have the complete 250,000 cables. So they, not WikiLeaks, are the ones breaking news and quoting from — even if not postings — the cables.

This is just one of many, many midapprehensions that have been allowed to fester (if not actively disseminated)by the American news media and one that I would guess most people do not understand.

Wikileaks is working with partners in the press to release these documents, which are being reviewed and redacted before they are uploaded on to the web and published in newspapers. Right now the only people besides Wikileaks who have access to all the cables are the newspapers they’ve partnered with.

I imagine that many of the people who are threatening to imprison and assassinate Assange do know this and also understand that they are threatening not just him but the publishers of newspapers all over the world who also have these documents.

Is everyone comfortable with that?

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Taxing Problem

by digby

If I were you, I would print out this post by Felix Salmon and pull it out whenever you confront some bozo who’s railing about the deficit and insisting that we have to put old ladies on a cat food diet to fix the problem:

* Federal taxes are the lowest in 60 years, which gives you a pretty good idea of why America’s long-term debt ratios are a big problem. If the taxes reverted to somewhere near their historical mean, the problem would be solved at a stroke.

* Income taxes, in particular, both personal and corporate, are low and falling. That trend is not sustainable.

* Employment taxes, by contrast—the regressive bit of the fiscal structure—are bearing a large and increasing share of the brunt. Any time that somebody starts complaining about how the poor don’t pay income tax, point them to this chart. Income taxes are just one part of the pie, and everybody with a job pays employment taxes.

* There aren’t any wealth taxes, but the closest thing we’ve got—estate and gift taxes—have shrunk to zero, after contributing a non-negligible amount to the public fisc in earlier decades.

And, not incidentally, income tax revenue would go up and spending would decrease if unemployment went down.

These deficit liars are trying to get people to believe that the deficit is caused by massive increased spending (and the bad economy is therefore caused by the deficit) and it just ain’t true.

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Sore Knees On Forty Second St.

by tristero

In the entertainment biz, there is a technical term to describe this kind of fawning from a mainstream media outlet. It’s called a blow-job.

By far, the most important issue about “Ark Encounter” is not what the park will comprise, but that it is clearly a blatant assault on the Constitution perpetrated by well-known con artists and frauds. That it is also a disgraceful waste of taxpayers’ money which could be put to much better use providing the good children of Kentucky with a better education is another important story. But Ms. Goodstein seems not to care: arguments that this could be a violation of separation of church and state (you think?) are airily dismissed in paragraph 2 and not revisited until the end of a very long, very tedious article filled with such non-facts as the age of the animals on Noah’s Ark.

A-and, did you notice the nearly parenthetical, “I don’t believe in global warming?” Covering as many lunatic right-wing bases as the Times sees fit to print.

Disgraceful.

UPDATE: Several people in comments believe that I missed the subtle mockery of the Times article for the Noah’s Ark scam or that I overreacted. I responded in comments, but I’ll rephrase my responses here.

I did miss the subtle mockery because, if there was subtle mockery in the article, it was far too subtle for my subtlety meter, which is usually pretty acute. As for overreacting, I’d like to point to the first two paragraphs of the Times article:

Facing a rising tide of joblessness, the governor of Kentucky has found one solution: build an ark.

The state has promised generous tax incentives to a group of entrepreneurs who plan to construct a full-size replica of Noah’s ark, load it with animals and actors, and make it the centerpiece of a Bible-based tourist attraction called Ark Encounter.

These days, I suppose that the standards of journalism have become so debased that such a lede could be described as “objective reporting.” I would call it a “press release.”

Again, the major issue of primary importance to the public is that this stunt is clearly unconstitutional. That should have been the lede, as in:

“In a move that many constitutional experts believe is a blatant violation of the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, Kentucky’s Democratic governor has promised generous tax incentives to a group of creationists in order to build a ‘full-scale’ representation of Noah’s Ark as part of a biblically-themed amusement park.” *

The second most important issue in this story is that it is a complete waste of the Kentucky taxpayers’ money. A third is that the governor is clearly lying and evading – no real jobs will be created and this is clearly a sop to the most vociferous religious nuts in Kentucky

As I see it, the tack that the Times reporter took is closer to flacking than serious reporting. I stand by my original assessment. The Times wasn’t reporting, it was performing what the folks behind Ark Encounter would surely call an “unnatural act.”

*I suppose that lede could be called “subtle mockery” – the hick governor of a hick state turns to such a hick solution for economic woes. But I don’t have that kind of contempt for Kentucky, its government, or its citizens and so I missed the suble mockery.

Setting Up The Battle On Their Turf

by digby

Kagro X had a fascinating analysis of what the Republicans were up to in the tax cut votes yesterday. He surmises that they want the millionaires tax cut to expire so they can come in after January and reinstate them and be big heroes.

I’m not sure that will work. After all, the president could veto them then and they’d be well and truly gone. I continue to think they want the tax cuts extended temporarily so they can use them in the election as a rallying cry for the idiots who think hiking taxes on millionaires will hurt them. This was written by political scientist Larry Bartels just before the election:

Despite this sustained public support for the president’s position, Democratic leaders in Congress were unwilling to bring the issue to a vote before adjourning last month. Several moderate members of the Democratic caucus had already come out against letting the tax cuts for top-earners expire, and many more were said to be reluctant to cast votes on the issue in the run-up to the election. In light of the popular support for the president’s position, was that a political miscalculation?

Probably not. For one thing, likely voters in next week’s election are much more evenly divided in their views about the Bush tax cuts. The plurality favoring selective cuts going forward shrinks from 13 points in the general population to just 2 points among midterm voters. This difference is partly due to the much-noted “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans and Democrats. However, even among political independents projected turnout is more than 30 points higher among those who want the top-rate tax cuts renewed (73%) than among those who want them to expire (42%).

Even more importantly, the sizable minority of people who want the tax cuts for affluent taxpayers renewed seem to attach much more weight to this issue than the slim majority who want them to expire. In a statistical analysis taking separate account of prospective voters’ broader partisan attachments, those who support President Obama’s position on the tax cuts are only 6% more likely than those who are unsure about the issue to say they will vote for a Democratic House candidate. Even those who want to let all the tax cuts expire are only 9% more likely to vote Democratic. By comparison, those who want to keep the tax cuts for affluent taxpayers in place are 22% more likely to say they will vote for a Republican House candidate.

An even more lopsided difference appears in the impact of tax cut preferences on presidential approval. People who support President Obama’s position on this issue are only slightly more approving of his overall performance than those who are unsure, while those who want to renew all the tax cuts are moved about five times as far toward disapproving. Among political independents, a whopping 76% of those who want continued tax cuts for the rich say they strongly disapprove of the president’s performance; only 27% of those who support his proposal for selective extension of the tax cuts are equally disenchanted.

These differences in preference intensity cannot be explained in terms of simple self-interest. On average, the people who want to renew the tax cuts for top earners are somewhat more affluent than the population as a whole; but only 8% say they have household incomes of $150,000 or more—incomes that might put them within hailing distance of having their own taxes hiked. Half have household incomes of less than $50,000, and almost that many say they don’t even know anyone who earns more than $200,000 per year.

These results suggest that candidate Obama’s skillful-looking proposal to allow the tax cuts to expire only for the richest 2% of taxpayers has turned out to be very costly for President Obama and his party, despite its overall popularity. Of course, the president and his allies in Congress could still push to implement the proposal in a lame duck session. If they do, it will be a principled choice rather than a politically expedient one. For expedient politicians, an energized minority trumps a tepid majority every time.

I don’t know if the Republicans do this sort of analysis or simply have better instincts about how to motivate people, but this is why I think they want the issue out there for the next two years.. They believe this fight accrues to their benefit.

I also think the Democrats are idiots not to have dispensed with this issue early on. But I’m guessing they too think this issue isn’t a winner for them so they are always just planned to punt. But that raises the question again about the viability of the party. If they cannot even make a winning argument out of cutting taxes for 98% of the people then I’m not sure what they’re good for.

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“Precisely The Reason The First Amendment Was Invented”

by digby

Howie has a great post up about Wikileaks today and I urge you to read the whole thing. But I can’t resist this excerpt:

Rick Perlstein reports extensively on this sad chapter of American history in his brilliant book Nixonland and that’s where all the blockquotes below are coming from. The NYTimes began publishing excerpts from the 43 volumes Ellsberg gave them on June 13, 1971– Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing US Involvement. The papers showed without doubt that Vietnam was a wrongful war and, in Ellsberg’s own words, “demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates.”

Kissinger found it easy to manipulate the drug-addicted, alcoholic Nixon and he stoked a rage in the always paranoid president to go on a jihad against everyone and everything involved with the leak, even though Nixon’s first assessment was that it had nothing to do with him– it didn’t– and why should he even care. It went from that to injunctions and accusations of treason. Nixon’s attempts to force the Times and over a dozen other papers to stop publishing went to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that the papers could be published freely.

Justice Brennan’s decision argued that press reports that embarrass the government were precisely the reason the First Amendment was invented. Just Black concurred. “Every moment’s continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment… [F]or the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says.”

Just in case the court ruled the other way, the previous evening Mike Gravel, the forty-one-year-old senator from Alaska, had called an extraordinary two-man night “hearing” of his Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds. He began reading aloud from a four-thousand-page typescript– the historical narrative portion of the Pentagon Papers, provided to him by an anonymous source.

He started at 9:45 p.m. “The story is a terrible one,” Gravel warned. “It is replete with duplicity, connivance against the public. People, human beings, are being killed as I speak to you. Arms are being severed; metal is crashing through human bodies.” Then he began to weep.

He read for three hours and word spread throughout Capitol Hill and the hearing room was soon packed. He was able to introduce the entire document into the Congressional Record, thwarting Nixon and Kissinger. But they were on the warpath and Nixon seems to have snapped completely and never recovered. Kissinger had figured out that Ellsberg was the leaker within a couple of days and destroying him became a White House crusade. Remind anyone of Peter King, the demented Republican congressloon from Long Island?

He goes on to discuss the media at some length and the difference between then and now. I think America itself is different. We just aren’t surprised by this anymore and we have come to accept the government lying to the people as the price of being “free.”

Ellsberg comments on Wikileaks here.

Update: In yet another chapter in the saga of ongoing media failure, here’s Howard Kurtz and some journalists being mealy-mouthed and useless on the subject as Jeff Jarvis stood alone in pointing out that attacks against Wikileaks and threats to shut down the internet were attacks on publishing.

For an inspiring word from a real journalist read this essay from David Samuels in The Atlantic. This is the conclusion, but everything that comes before is important and correct:

Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press. The likely arrest of Assange in Britain on dubious Swedish sex crimes charges has nothing to do with the importance of the system he has built, and which the US government seems intent on destroying with tactics more appropriate to the Communist Party of China — pressuring Amazon to throw the site off their servers, and, one imagines by launching the powerful DDOS attacks that threatened to stop visitors from reading the pilfered cables.

In a memorandum entitled “Transparency and Open Government” addressed to the heads of Federal departments and agencies and posted on WhiteHouse.gov, President Obama instructed that “Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.” The Administration would be wise to heed his words — and to remember how badly the vindictive prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg ended for the Nixon Administration. And American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy.

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