As an elementary school student in a public school, I
attended Social Studies and Civics classes, where the system of checks and
balances was explained. You know it, I’m sure.
We have three branches of government so that
the executive, judicial and legislative branches would, out of
self-preservation if nothing else, monitor each other.
Each had a defined role to play in the
governance of the nation, but having checks and balances would keep them honest.
State governments, even municipalities, operate in much the same way. The results
haven’t been perfect, but concept works pretty well compared to other systems.
We also learned there was a fourth player essential to the
process. Citizen watchdogs — newspapers, radio, TV and now Internet-inspired news
media — are expected to monitor the folks who make, interpret and enforce the
laws of the country. Journalists are
supposed to expose bad acts that might affect the citizenry, warn against
threats of disease, war, and natural disaster. Most importantly when at any
level, any of the branches of our own government misbehaves, the reporters have
a responsibility to investigate and, when warranted, scream to high heavens.
Back in the “olden days,” what I’d call my parents’
references to the better, simpler times of their youth, television networks
paid for their access to the public airways by dedicating a small portion of
available airtime to public service.
That was the deal. A network
would include educational shows for children, cover health issues, provide safety
tips, explain government programs, etc.
Public service also included reporting the day’s important events.
National and local news were not sponsored programs, so there was no profit to
be lost or gained by competing for larger audiences. News was news. People watched it to keep up
with current affairs. If Kelloggs wanted to sell breakfast cereal, they would
buy airtime during Hopalong Cassidy on Saturday morning, not the six o’clock
news. For the most part this, unlike
just about anything else on earth, meant the news wasn’t for sale. Ratings were
far less important than adhering to the principles of journalism. That was the
intention, anyway.
No doubt even then there were reporters whose passion for
ideology was greater than their effort to gather facts and there were many
newspapers published by titans who had a point of view that overpowered any
temptation to be objective. Human nature
doesn’t change much. But our system has.
The “greed is good” mantra has always been embraced by some. But now it seems
to be an acceptable and accepted mission statement, and not just at Wall Street
firms. And because money has become the supreme
if not only measure of success, our always less-than perfect system has become
practically and ethically inoperable. All four estates — all our checks and
balances — have grievously let us down.
The Legislative
Branch — The Best Reps Money Can Buy
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| Indiana Senator Coats, Round Trip Through "K" Street |
At our founding, it was understood that members of congress
— farmers, merchants and other regular citizens would come to Washington for a
few weeks a year to take care of the nation’s business and then go home.
It wasn’t meant to be a full time job nor
certainly a career. The country grew.
Life became more complex.
Now a
senator or house rep moves to Washington, plans to stay forever. When you
figure that house members stand for reelection every two years and it takes
$1.5 million to reelect a rep from the smallest district, it is clear
fundraising, not managing the country’s business has become their primary goal.
Legislation they propose is often written,
not by staff, but by the lobbyists who, whether we agree with them or not,
often know more about the subject than any serving representative or member of
the staff. Many of our laws are written by private organizations that will gain
by their passage.
There is a group,
American Legislative Exchange Council (
ALEC), that pretty much takes over a
legislator’s office.
The legislator has
to do very little.
ALEC will supply all
the essential ingredients, supplies, arguments, even lobbying to get a bit of
legislation through the system. Good thing after all that fundraising the
biannual candidate has no time to write or even read the laws he or she
sponsors.
But even with ALEC doing the
rep’s day job, raising campaign funds is still hard to do. Is it done retail or
wholesale? If your time is limited and your goal is ambitious, whom do you pay
attention to, Mary and Joe on Maple Street or Bank of America? Why would anyone
work all that hard for a congressman’s $174,000 annual salary?
We shouldn’t forget a lifetime pension and
healthcare benefits.
Using that as a
foundation for a secure financial future, the politician will likely find a job
offer with stock options from a major private corporation or lobbyist firm,
paying for past cooperation as well as current contacts and influence.
It would be interesting to track how many
house reps and U.S. Senators have become multi-millionaires while holding
positions as servants of, or based upon their service to the “public.”
The Executive Branch
— I’ve Got My Eye On You, And You, And You
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| President Forgets Promises Of Transparency |
The FBI, NSA, CIA, U.S. Secret Service, Homeland
Security, the U.S. Attorney General, the entire military-industrial complex and who knows what other clandestine operations fall under this branch of
government. We don’t know because these are the folks who determine what is
secret.
And it’s a pretty wonderful
thing to be able to declare secrecy as an answer to what is perhaps only an
embarrassing question. As a matter of disclosure, I supported Barack Obama
before he ran for president, donated to his campaign to gain the nomination, and
to both presidential campaigns. I applaud the direction he’s taken on
healthcare, immigration and civil rights.
I am for withdrawal of U.S. forces in the Middle East. I’m not asking you
to agree with these views. I just wanted to demonstrate I’m not out to get the
President.
On the other hand, I do ask
you to consider something that shouldn’t be partisan.
Transparency. There is a gathering storm of
doubt about the President putting himself above the rights of citizens to know
what our government is doing. Because of the high-level of secrecy, I can only
say that there is increasing suspicion of an executive branch policy of
punishing whistleblowers, and that it has used its power to repress freedom of
speech, not only of individuals, but also of the press, a group that has a lot
to answer for as well. What is most telling is the administration’s oppressive
treatment and overkill prosecution of Manning, its obsessive, seemingly
orchestrated bad-mouthing of Snowden, its attempt to intimidate journalists who
inquire too deeply about what the government is up to, even
interfering in the
reporting that takes place in foreign countries – in other words, trying to
prevent journalists from doing their job. We know that the head of NSA lied to
congress without consequence. And the U.S. Attorney General has not proven to
be as independent as he is required to be.
By all objective reporting,
Snowden’s and Manning’s revelations have and will prove more embarrassing to
vested bureaucrats than dangerous to the lives of covert agents or to losing
the “war on terrorism” — an excuse-all-abuse phrase that is used to justify
imprisonment of uncharged people in GITMO, allows for rendition of suspects to
countries that have no problem with torture and kill innocents by drone, an
unfortunate happenstance they call “collateral damage."
Recently, Obama said we were at war with
“Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and
their associated forces.” Who are the associated forces? Well, that’s top secret. How about the
reporter who broke the Snowden story? Is
he an associated force? Do these associated forces know the U.S. is out to get
them? We may not know, but I bet they
do. Message to the public: You can’t handle the truth.
The Supreme Court —
Corporations Are People Too
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| "Money Is Speech," Don't You Know? |
One might be tempted to think of the Supreme Court as a
failsafe in the devolution of the democratic process. However the blatant corruption of our
government was enhanced by the Court’s stupid (or malicious) decision on
Citizen’s United, which equated the rights of corporations with the rights of
individual citizens and who defined money as “speech.” Their decision, which should have alarmed the
right, the middle, and the left, equally, makes it impossible for us and for
the media to determine the quid pro quo
that exists between international corporations (read foreign owned) and our
representatives, though the question of whom they truly represent is now in
question. That decision may be the most
monumental blunder (if you think it is a simply naïve conclusion) in the
history of the court. While I’m not
xenophobic and I heartily encourage diversity, I’m not sure we want Arab or
German or Russian or even the kindly Swiss backing presidential or
congressional candidates in U.S. elections with money from them filtered
through the “corporations are people too” approach to anonymous
fundraising. And for the king of
“original intent” interpretations of the constitution, Justice Scalia was at
the height of his voluminous hypocrisy when he placed corporations on equal
rights footing with individual citizens.
The Fourth Estate
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| Scandal-Sheet and WSJ Owner Rupert Murdoch |
The mistake we may make is to believe that the press is all
that different from the folks they cover.
The news is longer run by folks
who have a dedication to the precepts of professional journalism. And chances are the local daily newspaper is
not local. Same for radio and TV
stations. The fourth estate is run by
CEOs and CFOs from New York or London, the same kind of business-minded people
who run Goldman Sachs. CBS is owned by
Sumner Redstone, worth several billion dollars.
Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a British billionaire of often-questionable
ethics and Godfather of an international media empire. NBC, until recently, was owned by General
Electric, one of the largest corporations in the world with a serious stake in
military-industrial and health-related spending. And Disney no longer a kindly
little cartoon maker and amusement park operator owns ABC, the largest mass
media company in the world. These companies, their spinoffs (CNBC, for
example), radio conglomerates (Clear Channel, for example) and the various
newspaper chains (Gannett is the largest)) are mega-corporations. They are not as interested in news as news,
or journalism, but as products. Telling people what they need to know to be informed citizens of a successful democracy is
not nearly as important as marketing the product to faceless but fully analyzed
consumers. We should have known this was
coming because not so long ago network news divisions were transferred to the
intensely profit-oriented entertainment divisions. How likely are you going to air a negative
news story about a product produced by your own parent company or how does an
editor break the story of an ethical lapse of the company’s own CEO? What media company would be willing, if they
could avoid it, to piss off General Motors or General Mills or General Electric
if it jeopardized a media corporation’s advertising revenue? Why would
reporters who want to keep their jobs reveal the ugly underbelly of a proposed
law that would benefit big corporations they work for? Some do, of course, but
the-set up runs counter to the kind of altruistic devotion necessary to shine
the light into the dark holes of government secrecy and corporate malfeasance.
Getting To Know You —
Big Government, Big Money And Little Ole You
If you have any doubt about the stakes, consider what we’ve
just learned about our government’s ability to collect information about us. Consider the very real possibility that the
U.S. has or will forcibly deputize social media (Facebook) search engines and
email providers like Google and Yahoo to build profiles. What books have you read? What are your
political beliefs? Have you been vocal
on Facebook? What have you searched for
on Google? Add to that big businesses’ active gathering of demographics and
other information about their consumers, a common enough and smart marketing
practice, but one that can be exploited. We haven’t even talked about the
global corporations that have hired private security firms (read private armies
with their own intelligence gathering capability) to straighten out unpleasant
situations. The ability to combine and interpret the results with whatever
criteria someone chooses is here now. It exists. I apologize for reaching into
the jar of scary tactics to suggest you think about someone sitting in front of
a monitor in Iowa, someone who can send an armed drone anywhere in the world
with increasingly surgical accuracy. You
cannot compete. You haven’t the technical skill or the resources. You haven’t the money to buy a
politician. You don’t even have a lobbyist
on K Street.
Is Press Freedom An
Oxymoron? Ask Your Friendly Government,
The Media And The Corporations That Own Both
As you’ve no doubt gathered, I’m deeply disappointed in the
moneyed way our government functions, or doesn’t.
But I am even more disappointed in the state
of journalism.
In the hands of
profiteers rather than professionals, it has become toothless and
pandering.
How long must the day’s news
freeze in place while we watch the second-by-second, non-breaking update of the
eventual birth of a possible future, powerless king of a country in
Europe?
The Zimmerman trial was
understandably important but to the exclusion of everything else that happened on
the planet for days on end?
And when for
hours upon hours there was nothing new to say? Events were happening all around
the world, but ratings kept the cameras focused on the sensational rather than
the substantial.
How about a little
perspective? Investigative reporting is expensive and dangerous (see
Michael Hastings).
But that’s the job of the
Fourth Estate. To keep the news honest, there should be serious concern about
media ownership. It is already too highly concentrated in the hands of the few.
The fewer the players, the more limited the coverage, the narrower the focus.
We also need to pass a comprehensive
shield law to protect journalists from
government prosecution, to protect sources, to keep them from being wiretapped
or whatever we call the incredibly high-tech mega-surveillance capability the
authorities have at their disposal.
We
need to make sure whistleblowers, corporate or government, have
protections.
The most effective antidote
to this corruption is to eliminate the ability of powerful individuals and
corporations to buy our legislators through fund-raising donations or promises
of future lucrative jobs in their firms. It wasn’t so long ago we would
consider this kind of practice bribery, pure and simple. How do we not see
that?
Congress, reluctantly, it
seems, is taking up shield law legislation — that is putting in place
protection for the media that allows reporters to protect their sources and
ward off such charges as “espionage “if they reveal information the government
believes is secret. The U.S. Constitution provides for broad interpretations of
free speech, but also identifies the media as having a special role in the
checks and balances system to guard against a government or branch of government
that over reaches its charge.
