Where to get news

As I wrote before, my social circle tends to be people who call themselves liberal and vote Democratic. What is interesting is that although these people tend to be avid followers of news, they are often unaware of important information. They watch the ‘serious’ news programs such as the NewsHour on PBS, they listen to NPR, they watch the Sunday talk shows such as This Week, Meet the Press, and Face the Nation. They disdain Fox News and all its offerings. They subscribe to the New York Times.

How can they devote so much time to learn about the world and yet miss so much? This is an example of Will Rogers’ warning that it isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so, so I want to devote this post to point people to better sources of news.
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Saudi Arabia next?

Despite Mubarak being a strong ally of the US that has propped him up for three decades with money and weapons, there are no indications that the US government is planning to intervene militarily to support him. That is a good sign. It is annoying to hear the US government tell the people of Egypt what it would like to see happen there but that kind of patronizing interference is the norm these days and is on the scale of things a minor irritation. (You can imagine the outrage if the roles were reversed and the leader of some other country presumed to lecture the American people on what kind of government they should put in place.)

What is interesting to observe is to what extent these mass uprisings will spread to other countries. The president of Yemen, in response to planned protests against his three-decades long rule, has already said that he will not run for re-election in 2013 and will not pass on the leadership to his son. This practice of creating hereditary dictatorships is reprehensible and this move is to be welcomed though it is not clear if it will satisfy the anti-government demonstrators.

Meanwhile Jordan’s king has fired his cabinet in response to protests there.

But these are relatively unimportant countries from the point of view of US strategic interests. The real question is Saudi Arabia. If that long-time, oil-rich ally of the US, the key to its middle eastern strategy, becomes destabilized and its despotic regime of dynastic rulers is threatened, there is a real danger that the US will be tempted to prop it up militarily or support a pro-US military coup.

Elite views on religion and censorship

What is true about elite attitudes to WikiLeaks also applies to religion and censorship. I am pretty confident that many of the elites in society are convinced that there is no god and that religious books like the Bible are fiction. As James Mill said to his son John Stuart Mill, “There is no God, but it’s a family secret.” But they do not share this fact with ordinary people either because they think they cannot handle the truth or they think that religious belief is a good mechanism for social control.

Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate (2002, p. 131) quotes neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol on this firm belief amongst the elites that people should be shielded from the truth. Kristol said in an interview:

“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

In an interview with Humanist Network News (HNN), Pinker says that Kristol thought that atheism is true but should be kept a secret, reserved for just a few. These people even advocated ‘intelligent design’ as a strategy for keeping the atheistic implications evolution by natural selection at bay, even though they realized that it lacked any evidence in support.
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Mubarak speaks

Mubarak has just finished speaking to the nation and said that he will not run again for president but is not going to leave immediately. He tried to appease the protestors by saying that their genuine concerns had been exploited by criminal elements taking advantage of the situation. He was somewhat self-pitying, talking about how he had suffered to serve the country and had not sought power (Ha!).

The millions-strong crowds seem to have not been satisfied by the speech and the live Al Jazeera stream reports that the crowd heckled him and are now chanting “Leave! Leave!”

Turmoil in the Middle East

Like most people else, I have been observing events in Egypt and also Yemen with some interest, but since I have been traveling with sporadic internet access, I have not been able to follow it as closely as I would have liked.

Not that it makes much difference since I do not have an informed opinion to give. When events are unfolding rapidly and one has a massive uprising, it is hard enough for knowledgeable people within the country itself to know what is going on. Most observers in other countries will likely be clueless unless they have detailed knowledge based on long study of that region. This rules out almost all commentators in the mainstream media whose main focus (as always) is on whether these developments are good/bad for Obama/the US/Israel, as opposed to whether it is good or bad for the people of those countries.

Despite my ignorance about situation there, I must admit that I am glad to see brutal dictators like Mubarak in trouble. The US once again finds itself trying to distance itself from a brutal dictator that it coddled and supported for many years. Mubarak is following in the lines of Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Duvalier in Haiti, Pahlavi in Iran, Pinochet in Chile, Ben Ali in Tunisia, and countless other dictators in Central and South America. It does not help that Mubarak’s newly appointed vice-president Omar Suleiman has colluded with the US in torturing people.

The live stream from Al Jazeera seems to be the best source for news and it is reporting that Mubarak is due to make a statement shortly.

What one hopes for is that whatever government emerges in Egypt is one that seeks democratic rights and the welfare of its people and is not controlled by religious extremists. So far, things look hopeful on that front. The fear mongering about the Muslim Brotherhood, both in terms of its strength and its extremism, seems to be overstated.

The conceit and arrogance of the elite

One of the features of society is the profound contempt the elites have for ordinary people, as can be seen in three examples: WikiLeaks, religion, and censorship.

In each of these cases, what we see is worry that the gatekeepers of information are being bypassed and that ordinary people are being exposed to information that the elites feel should be reserved for them.

It is undoubtedly true that people who are not used to evaluating raw, unfiltered information may be unsettled by having access to it. But the solution is not to deny them access but to help them develop, over time, the ability to make sense of it.

Why WikiLeaks has given governments and the establishment media the vapors is not because it has leaked secrets. If all the leakers and recipients of secrets were prosecuted and jailed, hardly anyone in government and the media would be walking around free. Secrets are the lifeblood of the relationship between politicians and the media. Look closely at the number of ‘news’ stories in the mainstream media that begin with ‘High level sources within the government revealed today…” or “According to a leaked secret government report…” As D. D. Guttenplan writes:

Hillary Clinton may not like it, but when [I. F.] Stone observed “the State Dept. is constantly leaking material to favored reporters” back in 1945 (!) he wasn’t breaking news either. Reminding Nation readers that “letting ‘confidential’ information leak out” is “the favorite Washington pastime,” he cautioned: “If this is a crime, all but a hopelessly inefficient minority of Washington officials and newspapermen ought to be put in jail.”

Government officials leak selected information to advance their agenda (whether personal or political) to selected reporters whom they know will use it in the way they intended and even make the source look good. The reporters in turn know the rules of the game, which is that they advance that agenda in return for future access to more secrets. Practically all of Bob Woodward’s entire career is based on this practice. In this way, the hoi polloi only get to hear what the government–media gatekeepers want them to know.

By making secret documents publicly accessible, WikiLeaks has suddenly cut the umbilical cord that mutually nourishes establishment reporters and the government, which is why they are both thrashing around wildly, trying to stop the bleeding. Notice how the US government is trying to walk a fine line and find a way to create new laws or reinterpret old ones to prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange while not having those same laws be applicable to (say) the New York Times or Bob Woodward, although this effort is unlikely to succeed legally.

It also appears that the harsh treatment meted out to Bradley Manning is meant to (a) intimidate any other people who might be thinking of leaking documents and (b) cause him to break down and incriminate Assange in some way. When some of us pointed out that torture was abhorrent and that we should not condone its use just because it was used against foreigners because one day it could be used against anyone, that fear was ridiculed. And now we see an American soldier, no less, being tortured.

When high government and media officials sniff that the leaks reveal nothing that they did not know before, they are partly right but this is irrelevant. Establishment reporters are often told a lot of things as background on the condition that they keep it secret. This parasitic relationship has got so bad that some ‘reporters’ (I use the term loosely) like the late Tim Russert are quite comfortable saying that they simply assume that what they are told is secret to begin with. But the fact that a few reporters are given privileged access to information does not help the average citizen in the least.

You can also be sure that the very same people who are bemoaning most loudly the release of the WikiLeaks documents are the same ones who are voraciously reading them. If the leaks are so bad, why are they not refraining themselves? Why are they trying to deny access to other people? The reason should be obvious. They are fearful or losing their role as gatekeepers of information.

Next: The elite view on religion and censorship

“I’m a good Catholic girl”

I’m at a conference and the moderator at a session that I attended gave us an anecdote during which she said “I’m a good Catholic girl”. Was I offended at her injecting religion into a secular meeting? Of course not. She wasn’t preaching to us, it was just a passing comment, inserted for humorous purposes and we all laughed.

But what if she had said, “I’m a good atheist girl”? I bet you that that there would have been sharp intakes of breaths and some mutterings that she had delivered a gratuitous slap at religion. This is the protective shield that religion has built around itself that has to be dismantled.

Another path for the future

(For previous posts about the oligarchy, see here.)

If an economic calamity is to be averted in the US, it will require a popular revolt against the power of the oligarchy because the political leadership is not going to do take action against it.

The Democratic Party is unlikely to be the leader of a mass movement for change because its base is far too quick to capitulate to its party leadership. The party’s base seems to be always bewildered as to why their party does not follow through on its promises but as Glenn Greenwald points out, it is absurd for progressives to be puzzled by Obama’s willingness, even eagerness, to capitulate to his seeming political opponents, because it they who are enabling this very behavior. It is worth quoting him at length.

Why, angry progressives seem to be asking, would Obama ignore the views of his so-called “progressive base” while seeking to please those who are his political adversaries?

But it’s perfectly rational for Obama to do exactly that. There’s a fundamental distinction between progressives and groups that wield actual power in Washington: namely, the latter are willing (by definition) to use their resources and energies to punish politicians who do not accommodate their views, while the former unconditionally support the Democratic Party and their leaders no matter what they do. The groups which Obama cares about pleasing — Wall Street, corporate interests, conservative Democrats, the establishment media, independent voters — all have one thing in common: they will support only those politicians who advance their agenda, but will vigorously oppose those who do not. Similarly, the GOP began caring about the Tea Party only once that movement proved it will bring down GOP incumbents even if it means losing a few elections to Democrats.

That is exactly what progressives will never do. They do the opposite; they proudly announce: we’ll probably be angry a lot, and we’ll be over here doing a lot complaining, but don’t worry: no matter what, when you need us to stay in power (or to acquire it), we’re going to be there to give you our full and cheering support. That is the message conveyed over and over again by progressives, no more so than when much of the House Progressive Caucus vowed that they would never, ever support a health care bill that had no robust public option, only to turn around at the end and abandon that vow by dutifully voting for Obama’s public-option-free health care bill. That’s just a microcosm of what happens in the more general sense: progressives constantly object when their values and priorities are trampled upon, only to make clear that they will not only vote for, but work hard on behalf of and give their money to, the Democratic Party when election time comes around.

I’m not arguing here with that decision. Progressives who do this will tell you that this unconditional Party support is necessary and justifiable because no matter how bad Democrats are, the GOP is worse. That’s a different debate. The point here is that — whether justified or not — telling politicians that you will do everything possible to work for their re-election no matter how much they scorn you, ignore your political priorities, and trample on your political values is a guaranteed ticket to irrelevance and impotence. Any self-interested, rational politician — meaning one motivated by a desire to maintain power rather than by ideology or principle — will ignore those who behave this way every time and instead care only about those whose support is conditional. And they’re well-advised to do exactly that.

It is probably the case that a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Democratic base contributed to the Democrats’ defeat in the 2010 midterm election. But what Obama cares about is getting re-elected in 2012, and he knows full well that come March or April of that year — if not earlier — most of the progressives who are now continuously complaining about him will be at the front of the line waving their Obama banners, pulling out their checkbooks and whipping into line anyone who is not similarly supportive. By contrast, corporate institutions and Wall Street tycoons will pour their money into Obama’s defeat if he does not show them the proper level of deference and accommodate their policy demands, but will support him (as they did in 2008) if he pleases them. Resource disparities between those factions are significant, but it’s also due in part to their own choices that Wall Street is empowered, and progressives are irrelevant.

This is why the oligarchy is most successful in its attempts at squeezing the poor and the working and middle classes when Democrats are in power.

It is for this reason that I see the Republican Party’s base in the tea party, for all its manifest faults, as more likely to create the conditions for change than the Democratic Party’s base. The latter is still stuck in a passive mode that puts their faith in a leader. Some of them still see Obama as that savior while others are getting disillusioned and are seeking a new hero. Their desperate need for a noble standard bearer who will fight their battles for them is something that saps their energies. In the words of Galileo (put into his mouth by playwright Bertolt Brecht in his Life of Galileo), “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

At least the Republican base is wary and suspicious of their leadership. At least they realize that political leaders should fear them and that it is up to them to be vocal and active in putting pressure on them. Their growing suspicion that they are being manipulated by their political leadership at least provides some hope for a re-awakening and organizing.

What progressives need to do is develop a common agenda with those who are also disaffected with the power of the oligarchy. This will require a different attitude towards the Tea Party, paleo-conservatives, and libertarians. Rather than wholesale rejection of those groups, we should seek to form alliances on those issues that we can agree upon, and there are surprisingly many.

Next: A possible common agenda