Stephen Moore Suggests Liberals Are Reprehensible For Regarding Assange A Hero
by David VanThournout
Wednesday, December 4th, 2010
Stephen Moore, economist writing for the wall street journal said on MSNBC recently that he thinks “the few” people on the left that regard Julian Assange of wikileaks as a hero are reprehensible.
I have to say Stephen, what’s reprehensible is you coming on television claiming to be an economist. People don’t want employment checks indeed. Try spending a little time unemployed before you suggest such silly things.
Lets get one thing as clear as possible, while we the people have worked away at our lives doing the best we could at making the American dream real, we’ve been sold out by people like Stephen Moore who as an economist should know that stopping unemployment benefits for 2 million people will negatively effect the recovery essentially slowing it by one half a percent. According to the U.S. Dept. of Labor at the peak of the great recession unemployment benefits actually protected 1.8 million jobs from being shed by the private sector. In other words, unemployment benefits are directly a stimulus upon the economy as virtually none of the finds find their way into savings accounts.
Enough about that (and more later I’m sure) the thing I really want to say is that whistle blowers are patriots and heroes. It was a whistle blower, Daniel Ellsberg, that revealed a document (the pentagon papers they later came to be called) to congress and the American people that ultimately is credited with toppling the Nixon administration and ending the Vietnam war.
As for the transparency and accountability that may result from Wikileaks revealing various uncomfortable facts well, this is merely the lifeblood of a true democracy. The fact that the state dept. has become just another arm of the CIA, our military venture in Afghanistan is now certifiably unwinnable, and now perhaps a “few bad apples” in the financial industry might find their assets hanging in the wind are the kinds of things we need to know in order for our society to actually be a democracy.
Stephen said something to the effect that our secrets are no longer sacred or some such drivel. We the people own those secrets Stephen! We paid (and are still paying) for them with blood sweat and tears and we want them to be revealed so that our republic can survive. You see Stephen, a democracy thrives on truth and justice not lies. Only empires need to protect secrets. It’s not that great nations don’t have them, or protect them, just that when they are revealed, great nations are not destroyed by the revelation. The revealing of these secrets are the best thing to happen to this nation in a long time. Our nation has been waging an aggressive war against the world as an empire for a very long time. It is time it stops. We are about to lose something very real. We have already lost our standing in the world as an empire. It is now imperative that we, as Chalmers Johnson strongly suggests, begin dismantling the massive US empire and its military presence, the 737 bases world wide. By the way, Nick Turce estimates that we could make $4.8 billion by selling Guantanamo Bay ($2.2) and the Diego Garcia ($2.6) base in the Indian ocean. Think of how much of that we could use to pay for unemployment checks, college degrees, bailed out homeowners and lots of community development here at home and abroad stimulating small businesses and real democracy.
Now Mr. Moore is worried because Wikileaks is taking a shot at the banksters. Everyone loves anyone that does that. I say more power to them.
So let’s look at the facts:
No innocent people have been hurt by the revelations in wikileaks to date.
What we have gained from wikileaks:
1. America’s Wars Front And Center, Are we winning? Is It popular? When will the killing stop?
2. Is the state Dept. engaged in diplomacy or are they just another branch of the CIA?
3. What did “some large financial institution” do recently that might put a bankster in jail?
So, Stephen, these are the secrets you speak of wanting to keep hidden?
- That our troops have killed reporters and that the Afghan government is so corrupt that the war in Afghanistan is certifiably un-winnable?
- Our state dept. has been critically compromised by its own policies and can no longer really be taken very seriously in the world and so is unable to really do it’s job?
- And some powerful people in major (too big to fail) financial institutions are now perhaps facing actual investigations and jail time for inappropriate financial behavior?
America the Republic has been built upon truth and justice not lies. Wikileaks is nothing less than a shot in the arm for a nearly fatally wounded democracy. Only the America the Empire need fear the truth. The foundations of our nation run deeper than our wallets and will perhaps shake but they will not fall.
Here’s what Daniel Ellsberg, one of America’s truth telling heroes said to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now in 2006:
More lives are at stake today so lets get this straight:
Truth justice and democracy?
or lies, “American interests”, and empire?
We owe it to our children fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan to hear the truth and find it within ourselves to fight for the justice we know will come from the truth telling.
Put the liars in prison not the truth telling heroes.
I noticed that the House committee spokesman person has said that we have a great problem with illegal leaks, in commenting on these cases. I would say the problem for us in the United States is the illegal actions that only these leaks will expose and possibly stop. After all, the lie detector tests given to Mary McCarthy and to others in the C.I.A. are, after all, designed to find out who leaked the fact that the C.I.A. is indulging in criminal activity, violating the Geneva Conventions, probably violating the U.S Anti-Torture Act of 1996. They’re acting really like the Mafia, cracking down on somebody who is squealing to the press. Now, the Mafia doesn’t use lie detectors, they use the torture that the C.I.A. is using. It’s not as though there’s a great distinction between the Mafia approach and the C.I.A. approach, though the C.I.A. isn’t yet torturing its own people.
He continues:
Harry Truman claims, in a number of times, that he got the Russians out of northern Iran, Azerbaijan, in 1946, by threatening to use an atomic bomb on it. They didn’t. If correct—and he said it four times—that would be the first use of our using nuclear weapons since Nagasaki, and that was in Iran, which is on the border of Russia and has oil fields. We don’t—we never wanted to go to Russia, and now we don’t want to be under the control of Iranians who are not friendly to us.
So, I’m saying that right now we need leaks of documents on these threats and these plans. I think the sources to Sy Hersh in his April 17th New Yorker article should be considering going beyond the oral testimony they gave and anonymous testimony they gave to Sy Hersh and risk their clearances and their careers and risk going to prison to prevent the U.S. from initiating nuclear war over Iran. The people who spoke to Hersh said, some of them said—or reported about others, they are considering resigning. Resigning is not an effective action here. Revealing what they know would be a catastrophic move to the American public and to the Congress, and not only to the Congress, because Congress is—I wasted 22 months on that. Congress is now—even when the Democrats were in the majority. Now, the investigative committees don’t exist. They’re not pursuing any investigation. They should be giving documents to the press and to Congress right now, revealing their reasons for resigning, and they should show the civil courage to be—consider at least to go beyond losing their jobs and going to prison, if necessary. An enormous number of lives are at stake.