The contents of the speech will be familiar to the readers of this blog but it is well worth watching.

So, as I predicted, Barack Obama and the Democrats have, with much handwringing about how sad they are to do this but had no choice, given the oligarchy all that they want, and more.

Obama announced that he had agreed to:

1. Retain all the tax cuts given to the wealthy.
2. Exempt from the estate tax inheritances up to $5 million while cutting the rate heirs pay to 35 percent for amounts above that. In 2009 the exemption figure had been $3.5 million exemption with a 45 percent tax rate, and this had been ‘temporarily’ reduced to zero this year. But it was due to return in 2011 to the $1 million exemption level and a top rate of 55%. So the heirs of the oligarchs get to keep the money to themselves. Paris Hilton must be so pleased.
3. Keep taxes on unearned income low by having the top tax rate on capital gains and dividends (the source of much of the oligarchy’s wealth) be 15% for two years. In 2011 it had been due to become 20% for long term capital gains and 39.6% for short term.

In a gesture to unemployed, Obama extended the period of unemployment benefits but the oligarchy really does not care about a few crumbs tossed to the poor (or the deficit for that matter) as long as waves of money keep getting directed towards them.

In another gesture to the poor and middle class, Obama also cut the employee contribution to payroll (i.e., Social Security) taxes from 6.2% to 4.2%, so that their take home pay would increase. But being deeply suspicious as I am, I wonder if this alleged benefit also has an ulterior motive to favor the oligarchy. Remember that the oligarchy wants to raid the Social Security funds under the guise of ‘rescuing’ it from a crisis. But as has been repeatedly pointed out, there is no long-term Social Security crisis that cannot be solved with minor adjustments. Could this new move be a means of artificially creating a crisis, since revenues will now go down?

Obama is assuring everyone that the shortfall in Social Security revenues will be covered by general revenues. But that is not the point since the government was always obliged to cover the costs. The point is that as far as book-keeping goes, Social Security will now actually have a serious long-term deficit and this is what the raiders will point to down the road to argue that it needs rescuing.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow captures the essence of the charade that Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans have been playing on us, though he seems to fall into the common liberal trap of thinking that Obama is naïve and ingenuous, while I think he knows exactly what he is doing and for whose benefit. One thing that Tomorrow gets exactly right is that it is telling that Obama’s ingratiating and obsequious approach to the Republicans switches to becoming really animated and angry at the very people whose energy and support propelled him to office.

There will still be some Kabuki theater with some rank and file progressive Democrats trying to kill this deal But the fix was in a long time ago. I hope I am proved wrong on this but I am not optimistic.

Glenn Greenwald documents how critics of WikiLeaks are basing their arguments on a falsehood and squirming to find ways to just indict WikiLeaks while not targeting all the newspapers that published the same cables.

As Julian Assange says, “WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain’s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.”

So why is WikiLeaks being singled out? Because governments always target the powerless and want to teach a lesson to any upstart group that harbors similar ideas of openness.

As Assange says, “Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.”

Freedom-loving people have to fight the combination of secretive governments and their media allies who conspire to hide the fact that they exist just to serve the oligarchy. Transparency to them is like sunlight to a vampire.

Julian Assange has been arrested and denied bail in England.

Meanwhile he has an op-ed in an Australian newspaper.

As governments pressure their business and media lackeys to choke off WikiLeaks, internet activists are striking back.

WikiLeaks’ repeated release of secret documents has produced considerable collateral damage. No, I am not talking about the harm done to innocent people. While the government and its lackeys in the media have been howling that WikiLeaks’ has ‘blood on its hands’ (how they love that phrase!) because of its ‘irresponsibility’ in releasing could result in the deaths of those people who have helped the western occupying forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have been forced to concede that none of their fears have been realized. Actually, those ‘fears’ are better called ‘hopes’ because I think they wanted someone named in the documents to be killed so that it could be used to discredit WikiLeaks.

Of course, even the most cursory survey of recent history shows that the US government doesn’t give two cents about the lives of innocent people in the countries that it invades, killing hundreds of thousands of them in the pursuit of its geostrategic goals. All this squealing is because the documents have revealed the systemic lying and hypocrisy of the government. Barack Obama, who came to power promising to bring a new transparency and openness to government and to stop the abuses of his predecessor, is revealed (along with Hillary Clinton) to be one of the biggest hypocrites of them all because the distance between his words and actions is even greater than those of the appalling Bush-Cheney regime whose contempt for democracy and the rule of law was out in the open.

But the collateral damage in this case is the exposure of the ineffectual and servile nature of the media. What WikiLeaks is doing is revealing important stories that the media did not uncover, did not seek to uncover, or knew about and did not reveal to the public because of its desire to be in the good graces of the government. It is because the media have been stripped naked by WikiLeaks that they are the ones who are almost apoplectic in demanding that the government protect its secrets better. They know that if this continues, sooner-or-later even the most dim-witted observer of the national scene is going to start to wonder why it is that it is WikiLeaks that is breaking these major stories while the mainstream media is obsessed with Sarah Palin’s tweets.

Even former George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Dowd is appalled at the government and media response to the WikiLeaks release.

In Washington’s polarized political environment, Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on a few things: That the government, in the name of fighting terrorism, has the right to listen in on all of our phone conversations and read our e-mails, even if it has no compelling reason for doing so. That the government can use machines at the airport that basically conduct the equivalent of strip searches of every passenger. That the government, for as long as it wants, can withhold any information from the public that it decides is in the national interest and is classified. And that when someone reveals this information, they are reviled on all sides, with the press corps staying silent.
…
When did we decide that we trust the government more than its citizens? And that revealing the truth about the government is wrong? And why is the media complicit in this? Did we not learn anything from the run-up to the Iraq war when no one asked hard questions about the justifications for the war and when we accepted statements from government officials without proper pushback?
…
And shouldn’t news organizations be defending WikiLeaks and doing some soul-searching of their own about why they aren’t devoting more resources to the search for the truth? Why is it that the National Enquirer and Internet blogs sometimes seem better than they are at finding out what’s really going on?

Glenn Greenwald provides an example of the bipartisanship that Dowd refers to.

[T]he loathsome Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) — the National-Security-State-venerating Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who lives off her defense contractor-husband’s vast wealth — announced that she supports re-writing and expanding the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it easier to prosecute WikiLeaks and those like them; as always, Feinstein abuses her role as Chair of the “oversight” Committee not to scrutinize and limit the abuses of the intelligence community but to protect them at all costs, as that’s where her source of wealth and power lie. She was responding to yesterday’s announcement that Joe Lieberman — joined by GOP Senators Scott Brown and John Ensign — introduced a bill intended to make it easier to prosecute Assange. Exactly as Dowd says, when it comes to authoritarian punishments for those who dare to expose what the U.S. Government does, the mindset is entirely bipartisan.

Lieberman’s bill has the cute acronym that now seems to be obligatory for any draconian anti-democratic legislation (Remember the odious USA PATRIOT act?) and is called the SHIELD law (for Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination), “which would make it a crime to publish information that might harm U.S. agents or informants, or would otherwise be contrary to the national interest.” Such broad language seeks to totally gut the First Amendment.

The real target of such moves is, of course, not WikiLeaks alone but the media in general. It is a long-established practice of governments to use moments of intense crisis (9/11 and the Gulf of Tonkin are good examples) to ram through measures to increase their powers that they can then use against everyone. You can be sure that the US mainstream media, rather than fight such censorship efforts tooth and nail because it can so easily be turned against them in the future, will be cheering on this example of ‘responsible bipartisanship’, a great example of the ‘two parties working together for the nation’s good’, providing a welcome respite from the ‘partisan acrimony’ that they constantly bemoan.

Censorship and a free press are natural enemies. So why does the establishment media go against what should be their own interests? Because that is how the corporate media serves the interests of the oligarchic one-party state. Because they cannot openly say that they exist to serve the interests of the oligarchy, they have to instead say that they are ‘responsible’ and ‘law abiding’ and as such their hands are tied. So they willingly extend their hands to be tied, rather than accepting the gift that WikiLeaks has provided them with in the form of a treasure trove of information for use in their own reporting.

This is what WikiLeaks has exposed in releasing the documents and why the corporate media (apart from a few notable exceptions such as David Samuels who has a wonderful article in The Atlantic) hate WikiLeaks so much.

This is also why I support WikiLeaks with both words and money. It is easy to donate. The link on the right hand side navigation bar will take you to their home page.

When opinion polls are conducted and the results released, I always wonder at what level of support we should begin to take minority viewpoints seriously. I had arrived at a rough rule of thumb that, depending on the issue being polled (politics, religion, science, etc.), you could always find anywhere between 10-20% of the population willing to subscribe to whatever truly nutty option is offered to them, whether it is because they are truly believe in it or are answering at random or are just having fun at the pollsters’ expense. (Whenever polls survey young people about their beliefs and activities, I suspect that the last factor rises considerably.)

Back in 2005, Kung Fu Monkey was able to put a more precise figure on the nutty segment, at least when it comes to people’s preferences for political candidates: 27%.

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is —

Tyrone: 27%.

John: … you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

Makes sense to me. So when you find people like Sarah Palin polling in the mid-twenties as people’s choice for president, bear that in mind.

It’s a sign of how insane the current state of politics has become when David Stockman, the budget director for Ronald Reagan (who was considered a right wing extremist in those days), is advocating policies to curb the debt that would be considered far too progressive by even Obama and the Democrats .

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'David Stockman

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The latest WikiLeaks release, like the previous ones, have resulted in people taking two contradictory positions. On the one hand there are those who seek to minimize the importance of the release by focusing on the titillating bits of gossip conveyed by diplomatic cable and suggesting, in an oh-so-weary insider tone, that this is the normal business of governments. Such people say that the leaks reveal nothing of value. Glenn Greenwald points out that this is not true (He gives links to all the claims he makes):

In this latest WikiLeaks release — probably the least informative of them all, at least so far — we learned a great deal as well. Juan Cole today details the 10 most important revelations about the Middle East. Scott Horton examines the revelation that the State Department pressured and bullied Germany out of criminally investigating the CIA’s kidnapping of one of their citizens who turned out to be completely innocent. The head of the Bank of England got caught interfering in British politics to induce harsher austerity measures in violation of his duty to remain apolitical and removed from the political process, a scandal resulting in calls for his resignation. British officials, while pretending to conduct a sweeping investigation into the Iraq War, were privately pledging to protect Bush officials from embarrassing disclosures. Hillary Clinton’s State Department ordered U.N. diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data in order to spy on top U.N. officials and others, likely in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961 (see Articles 27 and 30; and, believe me, I know: it’s just “law,” nothing any Serious person believes should constrain our great leaders).

Then we have the other extreme, those who are actually calling for the murder of Julian Assange because of the supposedly serious damage he has done to the US, an odd charge if the release contains nothing of value. I find it chilling that we have reached the stage when it is considered perfectly acceptable for so called ‘respectable’ people to publicly call for the extra-judicial killing of those who have not been found guilty of any crime whatsoever. This kind of speech (“Kill Julian Assange! Hang Bradley Manning! Nuke North Korea! Bomb Iran!”) used to be the preserve of the recognizably lunatic fringe of society, the ravings of drunks and racists and bigots or the just plan stupid. But not anymore. People say these things on TV and in the newspapers and are treated as if they are serious commentators.

Greenwald also takes on those who try to straddle the issue, wanting to preserve their vaguely independent bona fides while still seeking to be seen as ‘respectable’ by the political and media establishment. These people pick on missteps by WikiLeaks to tut-tut about how they should have done it better.

One could respond that it’s good that we know these specific things, but not other things WikiLeaks has released. That’s all well and good; as I’ve said several times, there are reasonable concerns about some specific disclosures here. But in the real world, this ideal, perfectly calibrated subversion of the secrecy regime doesn’t exist. WikiLeaks is it. We have occasional investigative probes of isolated government secrets coming from establishment media outlets (the illegal NSA program, the CIA black sites, the Pentagon propaganda program), along with transparency groups such as the ACLU, CCR, EPIC and EFF valiantly battling through protracted litigation to uncover secrets. But nothing comes close to the blows WikiLeaks has struck in undermining that regime.

The real-world alternative to the current iteration of WikiLeaks is not The Perfect Wikileaks that makes perfect judgments about what should and should not be disclosed, but rather, the ongoing, essentially unchallenged hegemony of the permanent National Security State, for which secrecy is the first article of faith and prime weapon. (My emphasis)

Greenwald highlights the steady perversion of democracy that has happened right before our eyes.

Because we’re supposed to have an open government – a democracy – everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications. That’s not just some lofty, abstract theory; it’s central to having anything resembling “consent of the governed.”

But we have completely abandoned that principle; we’ve reversed it. Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public. That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive. That’s the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics – whether intended or not – are helping to preserve.

In this interview with NPR, Der Spiegel reporter Gregor Peter Schmitz, who has been one of those studying the recent WikiLeaks documents for months, says that upcoming reports will reveal a lot of important things and they are not just gossip meant to embarrass the US, as many have been quick to claim. He says, “If you read the whole coverage that is coming out over the next weeks or so, you will realize that this is about important global developments; it’s giving you an insight into, well, basically how the world is perceived and run from an American’s perspective, and I think that is something that the public has a right to know, yeah.”

As time goes by and independent analysts (i.e., people not concerned about being in the good graces of the government) have more opportunities to study the cables, other revelations will surely follow and I will highlight them as they emerge.

The legendary investigative journalist I. F. Stone said, “Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” WikiLeaks is striking a blow for openness and transparency, the very essence of democracy.

The critics of WikiLeaks seem to have forgotten what they are entitled to by being members of a democracy, and do not see that WikiLeaks is returning to them something precious that they have mindlessly given away. All those who value those things should support it.