A Labor wipeout in NSW – cause for celebration? by Tim Anderson

The Australian Labor Party is about to be wiped out in the March NSW elections and an important question for people with a social conscience is – does it matter?

Isn’t there cause to celebrate the popular rejection of a party which pretends social democratic values yet, in government, has collaborated in virtually the entire oligarchic agenda - multiple wars, privatisations, massive corporate subsidies, unsustainable industries and open racism?

Not all will see it that way. Conventional wisdom amongst the Australian left has been that Labor deserves to be punished but “a Liberal-National Coalition government … will be worse”. On this basis, many left groups (though not the Greens) will preference Labor.

There are some difficult assumptions behind this idea, which I would like to question.

First, ‘the conservatives will be worse’. Really? We know they represent the big corporations; it is written all over their policies and corporate dinners – just like Labor, but a bit more open. Of course they will try to slash social programs, to privilege investors and to extend privatisations – just like Labor. And we will have to oppose them. But acting on behalf of a tiny group of investors does not look good in public, so they will bullshit and duck and weave, just like Labor.

Second, there is the idea that Labor’s institutional links to many trade unions means that those who want to empower working people must focus on this relationship. This is a little like saying that anyone with a moral sense must carry out moral debates within the Catholic Church.

That idea is linked to the third assumption – there is no possible restructuring of political forces within Australia. In other words, the left can only look forward to a return to a Labor administration or some sort of Labor-led coalition with the Greens and/or other left parties.

None of these assumptions seem sound. Structural change does take place within electoral politics. Ireland has just seen the collapse of its pseudo-social-democrat Party, Fianna Fáil (along with the Irish Greens) because of that party’s failed neoliberal project. In Australia we saw the complete collapse of a ‘watchdog’ party, the Australian Democrats. Several Latin American countries now have progressive governments led by parties which emerged from the ashes of old, discredited two party systems. Sound familiar?

For at least a generation Labor has adopted a strategy of seeking office which entails close collaboration with the Australian financial-mining-media oligarchy. In recent years this has been called the ‘low profile’ approach – promise little, do not offend the ‘markets’ and sneak into power. Labor leaders have no will to engage in any sort of struggle with the big powers – hence the ongoing collaboration in war and privatisation.

Yet because Labor still presents as a branch based party with some social policies, and because people have been trained to think there is no alternative, illusions about Labor persist.

The fall of ‘Kevin 07’ shows that illusions about Labor are rife within as well as without the party. It was a perfectly reasonable proposition to raise taxes on mining companies in the midst of a minerals boom; reasonable, but suffering from the bureaucratic illusion that government rules in Australia.

Within a short space of time, the mining companies and their mates in the media monopolies were able to portray a tax rise as a threatening move. If there had been a campaign to educate people on the move, to mobilise public support, it could have been a very popular policy. But Kevin thought he was in charge.

An oligarchy rules in Australia – a tiny cabal of mining, banking, media and investment companies – and the politically conscious need to recognise this. They allow some second order debate in their media monopolies, but they also have lines that cannot be crossed, without a fight.

Who is prepared for such a fight? Not the Labor party leaders, who are focused on securing the benefits of office. They are aware of the consequences of losing such fights, even over quite modest reforms, as with the Whitlam government in 1975.

After the 1975 coup against Whitlam, a new era of Labor coordination with the oligarchy began. The NSW Wran government in 1976 and the Hawke federal government in 1983 tied their agendas tightly to corporate ambitions.

Take Labor’s 1983 election promise to introduce a national Aboriginal land rights regime. This came about after many years of indigenous rights campaigning. Even after being elected, the Hawke government spelt out plans for the most comprehensive program ever to recognise indigenous dispossession. Yet the mining companies along with WA Labor mobilised and, within a few months, the Hawke regime reneged on its promises. It all came to nothing.

This history of this betrayal has been buried. Nearly a decade later the High Court’s Mabo decision forced on Labor what seemed a very limited and discriminatory recognition of land rights. In fact it was worse than this. The great evil of the Native Title Act was that it pretended to legitimise ‘extinguishment’ of land rights for the great majority of Aboriginal people.

Since that great betrayal, Labor has played on tokenism. Keating recognised the genocide, in the Redfern Park Speech of 1992. Then his adviser Don Watson helped promote the myth that Keating had actually done something for Aboriginal rights. This might have seemed credible in the face of Howard’s refusal to apologise to the stolen children. Yet Kevin Rudd’s subsequent apology added little of substance.

We must remember that it was Labor that gave the banks control of their interest rates and fees in the mid 1980s, removing social requirements (home lending, small business) that had been attached to volumes of lending and to interest rates. This helped build the ‘financialisation’ of our economy, where financial companies (‘markets’) rule, speculators rob people in real economies and property inflation makes home ownership a remote dream for younger generations.

It was Labor too - in league with the oligarchy in the 1980s and 1990s - that abolished award wages, abolished the link between wages and price increases (‘indexation’), and began the process of replacing public pensions with private superannuation. Just a few years after introducing the Sex Discrimination Act, this was the greatest blow to women’s rights in decades. Women suffer much more than men from the joint abolition of award wages and public pensions. Labor too led the charge on privatisations (as also on the ‘competition policy’ that legitimises further privatisations) in the early 1990s.

Yet after a decade of Howard government, illusions in Labor re-emerged. Young people had not see Labor in action and people simply didn’t read their history. Howard didn’t become PM out of personal charisma. He was the little grey man who gave the oligarchy all they wanted. Labor would sugar coat the pill, but were not prepared for a fight. They are simply not prepared to confront policies of war and privatisation, nor the new bubble market scams.

Labor MPs (including a raft of ex-union leaders) now sit in parliaments across the country, speaking and voting for things many privately disagree with and which their constituents hate - wars, racism and privatisations - yet they are too weak and too scared of losing their jobs to speak out. A number of British Labour MPs resigned over the Iraq war; not one Australian Labor MP did so.

Those in Labor Party branches, in their turn, fondly imagine that theirs is a democratic institution and that their policy proposals mean something. Union leaders either see no option or are looking for their own superannuation, as Labor MPs.

The late George Petersen, a NSW Labor MP for 20 years, said that the Labor Party was the greatest obstacle to progress in the country. He was right, precisely because the hypocrisy of Labor inspires ongoing illusions.

Perhaps a more complete electoral demolition of Labor might be just what is needed to shatter these illusions? A split in a devastated party could liberate progressive elements from the party to join new electoral coalitions, and leave the careerists with the rump of a party that is long past its ‘use by date’.

from Online Opinion

John Pilger, Andrew Wilkie and Julian Burnside Defending Julian Assange at Sydney Town Hall

Click on this to see John Pilger, Andrew Wilkie and Julian Burnside speak defending Julian Assange at Sydney Town Hall 16-3-11.

Noam Chomsky talks about Libya and Obama on the BBC

This interview with Noam Chomsky (linguist, philosopher and activist) was conducted by Jeremy Paxman during Newsnight (BBC2) on 8 March, 2011. Click here to see interview.

How the so-called guardians of free speech are silencing the messenger by John Pilger

As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gaddafi is “delusional” and “blood-drenched” while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of “stability”.

But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that “people must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other”. Paine’s The Rights of Man was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with “a dangerous and treasonable conspiracy”. Wisely, he sought refuge in France.

The ordeal and courage of Tom Paine is cited by the Sydney Peace Foundation in its award of Australia’s human rights Gold Medal to Julian Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in England but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ alleged whistleblower, of a capital crime.

Should Assange’s current British appeal fail against his extradition to Sweden, he will probably, once charged, be denied bail and held incommunicado until his trial in secret. The case against him has already been dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm and given new life only when a right-wing politician, Claes Borgstrom, intervened and made public statements about Assange’s “guilt”. Borgstrom, a lawyer, now represents the two women involved. His law partner is Thomas Bodstrom, who as Sweden’s minister for justice in 2001, was implicated in the handover of two innocent Egyptian refugees to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport. Sweden later awarded them damages for their torture.

These facts were documented in an Australian parliamentary briefing in Canberra on 2 March. Outlining an epic miscarriage of justice threatening Assange, the enquiry heard expert evidence that, under international standards of justice, the behavior of certain officials in Sweden would be considered “highly improper and reprehensible [and] preclude a fair trial”. A former senior Australian diplomat, Tony Kevin, described the close ties between the Swedish prime minister Frederic Reinheldt, and the Republican right in the US. “Reinfeldt and [George W] Bush are friends,” he said. Reinhaldt has attacked Assange publicly and hired Karl Rove, the former Bush crony, to advise him. The implications for Assange’s extraidition to the US from Sweden are dire.

The Australian enquiry was ignored in the UK, where black farce is currently preferred. On 3 March, the Guardian announced that Stephen Spielberg’s Dream Works was to make “an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President’s Men” out of its book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. I asked David Leigh, who wrote the book with Luke Harding, how much Spielberg had paid the Guardian for the screen rights and what he expected to make personally. “No idea,” was the puzzling reply of the Guardian’s “investigations editor”. The Guardian paid WikiLeaks nothing for its treasure trove of leaks. Assange and WikiLeaks -- not Leigh or Harding -- are responsible for what the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, calls “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”.

The Guardian has made clear it has no further use for Assange. He is a loose cannon who did not fit Guardianworld, who proved a tough, unclubbable negotiator. And brave. In the Guardian’s self-regarding book, Assange’s extraordinary bravery is excised. He becomes a figure of petty bemusement, an “unusual Australian” with a “frizzy-haired” mother, gratuitously abused as “callous” and a “damaged personality” that was “on the autistic spectrum”. How will Speilberg deal with this childish character assassination? e

On the BBC’s Panorama, Leigh indulged hearsay about Assange not caring about the lives of those named in the leaks. As for the claim that Assange had complained of a “Jewish conspiracy”, which follows a torrent of internet nonsense that he is an evil agent of Mossad, Assange rejected this as “completely false, in spirit and word”.

It is difficult to describe, let alone imagine, the sense of isolation and state of siege of Julian Assange, who in one form or another is paying for tearing aside the façade of rapacious power. The canker here is not the far right but the paper-thin liberalism of those who guard the limits of free speech. The New York Times has distinguished itself by spinning and censoring the WikiLeaks material. “We are taking all [the] cables to the administration,” said Bill Keller, the editor, “They’ve convinced us that redacting certain information would be wise.” In an article by Keller, Assange is personally abused. At the Columbia School of Journalism on 3 February, Keller said, in effect, that the public could not be trusted with the release of further cables. This might cause a “cacophony”. The gatekeeper has spoken.

The heroic Bradley Manning is kept naked under lights and cameras 24 hours a day. Greg Barns, director of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, says the fears that Julian Assange will “end up being tortured in a high security American prison” are justified. Who will share responsibility for such a crime?

Mark Steel: I know, let's sell weapons to a lunatic

The Western leaders now condemning Colonel Gaddafi as a madman must be perplexed as to what's gone wrong with him, because up until a month ago they obviously thought he was perfectly sane and well-balanced – otherwise they wouldn't have sold him all those tanks. They must wonder if the stress of being a dictator has got to him, and if he'd had a fortnight off and started yoga all this trouble could have been avoided.

So maybe the best way to intervene is to send him a good shrink. Then they could make a report for the UN that went: "His desire to refer to his fellow Libyans as 'Cockroaches' who must be killed suggests the patient is experiencing the trauma of feeling he's a woman trapped in a Colonel's body. And the need to make speeches while under an umbrella is a classic symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so maybe we shouldn't send him any tanks for at least three weeks, until he's better."

They should have been prepared for this, because they all said he was mad for 30 years, then suddenly decided he was rational about 10 years ago, by coincidence around the time he announced he'd back the West in the war on terror. To be fair, some of those who embraced him at this time are impressively unrepentant. For example, Peter Mandelson insists when Gaddafi renounced his desire for weapons of mass destruction we had to "bring him into the fold" with deals for oil and arms.

Because when a dictator tells you he no longer wants destructive weapons, what else can you do but welcome his change of heart, by selling him a desertful of destructive weapons? It's like wandering up to someone at Alcoholics Anonymous and saying: "Congratulations on finally renouncing drink. Now to celebrate let's go and get pissed."

Blair told us in 2007 "the commercial relationship between Britain and Libya is going from strength to strength". So everything was ideal, we could let a dictator sell us oil and buy our arms because he'd backed our war against a dictator, who used to sell us oil and buy our arms. If Saddam had said in 2001 he was willing to back our war against Gaddafi we'd have got so confused we'd have declared war on ourselves.

The people who defend the befriending of Gaddafi, such as Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, insist he promised he wouldn't use weapons such as tear gas "against his own people", which seems a liberal attitude towards someone you've derided as a madman for 30 years. Presumably Blair said to him: "Now I'm trusting you here, so if you DO open fire on thousands of protesters demanding a minimum wage, you'll not just be letting me down, you'll be letting yourself down."

In any case, who did we imagine Gaddafi might use this tear gas against? Perhaps he said: "Ah Mister Blair, I fear at any moment we might be invaded by a nation of badgers."

So now we expect the rebels to be grateful if we offer them our services, because when Britain wants to help by sending an army into an Arab country, what could possibly go wrong? It's like the builder who burned your house down ringing to say: "I hear you need your house rebuilt. We can offer very reasonable rates."

So the rebels seem to be aware that while the West can offer expert advice on the weaponry they're up against, seeing as it was the West that made it, on the other hand being supported by the British and American army won't help their aim of winning mass popularity amongst the Libyan people.

Because British and American leaders spent weekends with Gaddafi and arranged trade deals and hugged him for the press, and yet at no time did anyone spot he was in any way the sort of character you shouldn't send weapons to. And, in fact, even if he'd announced he had a split personality and then started talking in a high pitched voice insisting he was Sandra from Wolverhampton, Blair would have thought: "This is excellent news. We can sell tanks to both of them."

Mark Steel: The caring, sharing way to bad times

Mark Steel

The first troubling side to the Big Society is no one can explain what it means. You might not agree with them, but at least policy initiatives such as the Five-Year Plan, Thousand-Year Reich or Holy Jihad were clear and got their point across. But ministers explain the Big Society with statements such as, "It's a brave optimism vision that instead of statedom fills a voluntary doingness not interferencing and oooh it will be so BIG and, 'Neighbours, [sings] everybody needs good neighbours', and I'm excited let's deliver more chickens to old people."

They might as well say "David Cameron has always believed passionately in his vision of a Giant Whatnot. And believe me, once you see doings, all our lives will be transformed by that whatnot." But it is used to justify their cuts. So they're not just shutting things down to save money, they're helping us out. Now instead of being stifled by the state providing services, we can have all the fun of volunteering to run them ourselves in our spare time.

Libraries, for example, must be one of the best examples of society, paid for communally, in which everyone has access to books, newspapers and computers. So a Big Society would surely build more of them; but instead it's shutting hundreds down, presumably because we're all sick of the stifling nannying ways of the library service.

All you get from them is, "Borrow this, look up that", but at last that dictatorship is coming to an end, to be replaced with a voluntary system in which people will ask a neighbour for a book about the local canal system in 1817, and when told they haven't got it, they'll be free to give up.

And this system can be applied everywhere. If we have a heart attack, we won't rely on the bureaucratic NHS as the cardiac unit will have been sold off for flats, so we'll enjoy the voluntary aid of a local Methodist who can pray for us, or, if we're not religious, get the man over the road to rub ointment on our chest. Yesterday, as the Big Society was being paraded by the Government, Manchester Council announced that its £109m cut will force it to close down nurseries, youth centres, sports halls and every public toilet except for one.

Instead the Big Society will cover all that, I suppose. Nurseries will be replaced by volunteers who say, "You don't know me, but I'll take your toddlers off yer hands. Now then, who likes having fun with fire?"

Zoos and city farms will be freed from Government funding, and replaced by a scheme called "Wild Animals in the Community". This voluntary initiative will mean children can view beasts every day, as lions sit under a cashpoint machine going, "Excuse me mate, you got a spare zebra?"

But if Cameron really believes the voluntary Big Society provides better services, then why doesn't he apply it to Government institutions he doesn't want to cut, such as the Army? If he's right, then the defence budget should be halved, and regiments in Afghanistan replaced by volunteers in yellow jackets, wandering through Helmand province saying, "Now then you holy warriors, instead of blowing yourselves up at a police station let's see you tidy up a few of these roadside bombs, then we can sit down with a Thermos for some well earned tea and muffins." 

And yet the idea of every citizen helping each other in their community does seem to be on the increase as a result of the Big Society campaign.

For example, last Saturday was Save Our Libraries day, when every threatened library was packed with hundreds of people protesting against the closures. There were kids carrying placards, mums making speeches, and residents who've never done such a thing before pledging to defend the community. Cameron must be delighted, as presumably this is exactly the sort of voluntary neighbourly action he had in mind. 

The Independent Wednesday, 9 February 2011

The Great Fascist’s last groupie by Tim Anderson

Forty-five years ago - in the middle of a bloody war that would go on to cost more than two million lives - an Australian Prime Minister declared undying loyalty to Washington. Conservative Prime Minister Harold Holt said he would go ‘all the way’ with the then US President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Today - with most of Asia, almost all of Latin America and most of the Arab world seeking to break free from US domination - a Labor woman Prime Minister repeats the same line. We are ‘great mates’ Julia Gillard said, reaffirming her commitment to the hopeless Afghan war. ‘We have no stronger ally than Australia’ beamed President Barrack Obama.

Having betrayed his own people and lost control of Congress, Obama is rather keen on allies. He was unable to introduce a public health system, or to withdraw from Afghanistan (instead escalating the conflict), or to close the notorious torture centre at Guantanamo. After a brief ‘honeymoon’, Obama is now despised in Latin America and the Middle East. In 2009, 45% of Arabs had a positive view of Obama; in 2010 it was down to 20%. He is steering a ‘ship’ which is really run by a vicious military-financial clique.

There is no greater disgrace for Australians than to be seen, across the world, as the Great Fascist’s last groupie. After the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan, we are about to be drawn into new wars in Egypt and Libya. During Gillard’s visit Obama announced that the US and NATO were considering military strikes against Libya. Meantime, Obama was reported as seeking Gillard’s support for some sort of ‘action’ in Egypt.

All this, of course, is done in the name of support for ‘democracy, rights and freedoms’. Never mind that the US has long supported the greatest anti-theses of democracy in the region: Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. Never mind also that polls of Arab people show very clearly that the US and Israel are seen as the greatest threats. Yet the Australian corporate media repeats the lies about ‘democracy, rights and freedoms’, without restraint.

In Latin America the same voracious war machine is at work. The Obama administration backed the 2009 military coup and subsequent fake election in Honduras, increased the military bases in Colombia and sent the fourth fleet down to intimidate the more independent Latin American countries. Only imbeciles imagine these manoeuvres have anything to do with ‘democracy, rights and freedoms’.

Gillard and Labor, for their part, have done their best to please the tiny Australian oligarchy of miners, bankers and media barons; but at great popular cost. The privatisations, corruption and imperial toady-ism have alienated millions. ‘Free market’ and ‘market mechanism’ policies have been exposed as useless and dangerous. Federal Labor’s popular support is down to 30%. Labor candidates for election do everything they can to hide the word ‘Labor’ on their propaganda.

Obama and Gillard share this: representing a pseudo-social democracy they spout the same lies, betray their followers, lose credibility and pave the way for a vicious right wing resurgence. Their toady-ism has endeared them to no-one. Neither will be re-elected. Meanwhile, we Australians have been made the laughing stock of the world, barracking for the schoolyard bully as he goes down. Who will respect or protect us then?

U.S. Savage Imperialism, Part 4, The U.S., the Mideast, and the world, part four of a talk at Z The U.S., the Mideast, and the world, part four of a talk at Z By Noam Chomsky

 Noam Chomsky

This series began with the December 2010 issue of Z Magazine. Parts one and two featured the text of Chomsky's talk; parts three and four are transcriptions of the Q&A that followed.

ZMI STUDENT: Do you think there should be a call for a national mobilization to fight climate change?

CHOMSKY: The climate change issue is a striking demonstration of the lethal effects of markets. Markets have certain properties. We don't actually have a market society. It's kind of a semi-market society, for one reason because the corporate sector knows it can appeal to the state and the state will come along and save it when it gets into trouble. So it's a state capitalist economy, with functioning market principles. Suppose you're the CEO of an energy corporation—or in the Chamber of Commerce, the big business lobby—you have certain interests as part of your institutional role in a market system. You have to maximize short term profit. You don't have any choice. That means you have to ignore what economists call externalities—that is, the effect of a transaction on others.

The externalities in the case of the financial system are called systemic risk. If Goldman Sachs makes a transaction, assuming they're well-managed, they have to take into account their own welfare. What they don't and cannot take into account is the risk that the whole system will collapse. That's a virtual guarantee of financial crises. That's why they keep repeating over and over again and getting worse and worse. It's not a big secret. You learn it in the first term of Economics 101. In the case of systemic risk, it's not an overwhelming problem because the powerful state will step in and rescue you and you'll end up being richer than before, as we've just seen.

Let's take climate change. The CEOs of corporations must follow the policy of ignoring externalities, which in this case happen to be the fate of the species. Not surprisingly, the people making those decisions are running huge propaganda campaigns to try to convince Americans that it's all a liberal hoax. They're trying to beat back any legislation that might do anything about it. Those same people know that it's a serious risk, that it might destroy what they own and the lives of their grandchildren or maybe great-grandchildren. As human beings they know that, but as CEOs they have to forget it and keep to the market principle of ignoring externalities—in this case, the fate of the species.

That's what we're facing. That's why there isn't any legislation and there isn't any national campaign—and there won't be as long as we permit this element of the market system to function.

It seems to be getting more and more difficult to have any kind of resistance against Israel's policies. Do you think organized protests here are the best way to go?

Protests, yes. But there are other actions being taken beyond protests—for example, a boycott of production from the Occupied Territories, and a lot of people are doing that. But there's more that can be done. There is an international solidarity movement. There's a lot of very good, courageous people participating in it. Also, as you may know, Amnesty International, during the Gaza attack, came out with a report calling on the U.S. to terminate all arms shipments to Israel because they're illegal under international law. They could have added that they're illegal under U.S. law as well. You cannot provide arms to a country except for defensive purposes. As I mentioned earlier, these were not defensive purposes—therefore, U.S. arms to Israel are illegal under international and U.S. law. The solidarity movement could pick that up and call for an arms embargo in obedience to U.S. law. That would be pretty serious for Israel. It would also be pretty serious for U.S. business—Lockheed Martin and the rest of them. One of the reasons they love Israel is because, whenever the U.S. provides $3 billion in military aid to Israel, it goes into their pockets. Also, when they sell Israel advanced weaponry the rulers of the Gulf States say, "we want some too." It's like a teaser in a department store. Then Lockheed can send a huge amount of second rate military equipment to Saudi Arabia, which they can't do anything with. That's a lot of money coming back to U.S. businesses.

Calling an arms embargo against Israel—and Egypt, the second largest recipient of U.S. aid—makes a lot of sense.

How resistant is the U.S. to a nuclear weapons-free zone?

One of the main things that came out of the non-proliferation treaty conference in May was an international call for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. If the U.S. had any interest in ending nuclear proliferation, if Obama believed a word he was saying, he would be calling for a nuclear weapons-free zone all over the world. It's not a complete solution to nuclear proliferation, but it's a pretty significant step.

Instead, the U.S. is doing the exact opposite. In this case, the Administration was caught. It couldn't come out openly and say, "No, we don't want a nuclear weapons-free zone." So what they did was agree with the world and say, "Yes, we want a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, but it has to wait until there's a comprehensive peace treaty." Okay, that means, until the Messiah comes because the U.S. can block a comprehensive peace treaty as it has been doing for the last 35 years. The U.S. further stated that it's not going to institute anything that either restricts Israel's nuclear activities or that calls upon major powers—meaning the U.S.—to reveal what they know about Israeli nuclear facilities.

It's worth bearing in mind that the U.S. and Britain have a unique commitment to a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East—for reasons that apparently can't be articulated. When the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq, they tried to construct a thin legal cover by appealing to a UN Security Council Resolution from 1991—Resolution 687—which calls on Saddam Hussein to eliminate his weapons of mass destruction programs. That was the pretext for the invasion, which was pretty well exploded. What is of interest is that Article 14 of that resolution commits the signers to establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. That means the U.S. and Britain, over all other countries, are formally committed to this. But they can get away with ignoring this because the media and the educated classes keep quiet. But that doesn't mean we have to keep quiet. We can say, "You are committed to a nuclear weapons-free zone and your efforts to evade it cannot be tolerated."

If it was instituted, it would mitigate and perhaps even eliminate any possible threat that Iran might pose—not much of a threat, as I mentioned earlier. That would be a very positive step, but the U.S. is blocking it.

Remember that the Obama administration is blocking other nuclear weapons-free zones at the same time. This also doesn't get reported, but it's very important. Take Africa, for example. After many years of negotiations, it finally reached an agreement on a nuclear weapons-free zone. There's only one hang up. The U.S. won't allow it. Africa includes an island in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia. It was a British territory. On U.S. orders, the British expelled the population and turned it into one of the main U.S. military bases. It's a military base the U.S. uses to bomb the Middle East and Central Asia. The U.S. stores nuclear weapons there, which will increase under the Obama administration. In fact, in December the Navy announced that it was sending a submarine tender to Diego Garcia to accommodate nuclear submarines with nuclear tipped missiles. Also, Obama announced that he is sending what are called bunker busters—the most lethal weapon in the arsenal of short-range nuclear weapons—designed for attacking Iran.

So the U.S. will not allow the African nuclear weapons-free zone because it wants to use it for nuclear weapons. The same thing is happening in the South Pacific. The South Pacific countries also reached an agreement on a nuclear weapons-free zone. At first it was blocked by France because it wanted to use its island possessions for testing nuclear weapons. After the French carried out those tests, the U.S. blocked it because the U.S. island possessions are being used for storing nuclear weapons for submarines.

The most important nuclear weapons-free zone is the Middle East and it's a major issue. There was a call after a non-proliferation treaty conference in May for a follow-up conference in 2012, I think, to focus on the issue. At that time, the U.S. is going to be in a bind because the entire world will be calling for a nuclear weapons-free zone, which would not only include Israel, but U.S. forces deployed to the region. Obama's new strategic posture, if you read it carefully, says the U.S. won't use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states—with an exception: Iran or anybody else in our way.

This is a major issue. Those who want to do something about nuclear proliferation should be focusing on this.

Do you support cultural and academic boycotts?

Only under special circumstances, for example, adherence to apartheid (in South Africa) or institutional participation in the occupation (by Israeli universities). In the case of Israel, there is also a serious tactical question. If you want to be serious about any action, you first have to ask yourself, "Am I carrying this out because I want to feel good or because I care about the victims?" Maybe the Weathermen in the 1960s felt good breaking windows, but that wasn't helping the Vietnamese. In fact, the Vietnamese didn't like it. What they wanted was peaceful demonstrations. But it felt good to break windows; it felt like they were doing something.

The same thing is true of this—forgetting all questions of principle. If you decide to boycott Tel Aviv University, why not boycott Harvard or MIT? They are guilty of far worse crimes. The hypocrisy is so blatant that it easily turns into a weapon for the most hard line elements—as has happened. If you're serious about activism, then you have to think seriously about tactics. You can't just follow them because they make you feel good, you have to follow them because it's going to help the victims, not harm them.

You've touched on environmental catastrophe. People are wondering what to do. Is it a technical problem that we need to solve or is it a social problem?

It's both. The details you can argue about, but there's hardly any serious doubt that anthropogenic climate change is taking place and that it could have a very serious effect. Probably the most far reaching technical problem is to find ways to use solar energy—the one ultimate renewable resource for energy on earth. I'm not technically competent to judge the specific ideas that are being developed about it, but I know people in the engineering department at MIT who are serious scientists who think, for example, that it's feasible to put receptors in space that can provide solar energy without interference from the earth's atmosphere and to use microwaves and other techniques to get it to earth and distribute it. That, or something like it, will have to be part of the solution.

On the other hand, there are serious social problems. In the U.S., particularly, it's worth remembering that there have been massive social engineering projects since WWII to drive the economy toward inefficient use of fossil fuels. In fact, some major corporations were brought to court and fined for conspiracy.

The U.S. used to have a pretty efficient electrical rail system. You used to be able to get around New England, for example, by electric rail. Los Angeles, which is now a transportation monstrosity, had a very efficient electric rail system. All of these things were destroyed by very conscious state-corporate programs to drive the economy toward wasteful use of fossil fuels.

Another massive social engineering project was to drive the population out of the cities into the suburbs. I don't object to living in the suburbs, In fact, I do. But from the point of view of the economy, it's just crazy as it's now organized. You can't live in the suburbs without having two cars in a family.

There are also racist issues. For example, there was a proposal in the 1970s to extend the subway system out to the western suburbs of Boston where I live. This would have saved people a couple of hours of commuting time every day. But people—fairly progressive—apparently preferred to spend two hours fighting traffic jams rather than face the threat that some black kid from Dorchester might walk around their town center. So no subway. These social problems exist all over the country and they have to be dealt with. You cannot have a society geared to the maximum waste of fossil fuels and expect it to survive.

Is there any value in continuing convergence activism at the G-20 gathering and others like it?

I think it could be used to educate about what's called globalization. Globalization is an ideological notion not a descriptive one. The term means "international integration." The strongest proponents of international integration are the people who meet at the World Social Forum. These are people from all over the world from all walks of life who are interested in international integration.

They're called "anti-globalization." The reason is the terminology has been appropriated by the powerful. So for them globalization means investor rights agreements—NAFTA, for example. But we don't have to accept that. We should say, "We're the ones who favor globalization. We think international integration is a great thing, but it should be in the interest of people, not investors." I think G-20 demonstrations can press that message. It means attacking the propaganda system right at its core.

Could you speak a bit about the racist laws inside Israel?

That's a very interesting topic. The most extreme of them are the land laws inside Israel, which, in various ways, place about 90 percent of the country in the hands of an organization which is by law and by its contract with the State of Israel required to act solely in the interests of people "of Jewish race, religion, and origin." The organization, the Jewish National Front, is a tax-free institution in the U.S. No one's supposed to talk about this, but it's totally outrageous.

There is a civil libertarian movement in Israel, which finally, in 2000, managed to get the High Court in Israel to consider these laws. The Court concluded that they are untenable because you can't have a law that blocks 90 percent of the land from Arab and non-Jewish citizens. So they struck it down. It was in reference to a particular case where a middle class Arab family wanted to move into a Jewish town and the town rejected their application on the grounds of the land laws. Six years after the court decision, the family was allowed to move in. That's the only case I know of when the law's been applied.

The question of apartheid arises often in talking about the Occupied Territories. I don't think it's the right term because it's much worse than apartheid. As I described at the beginning of my talk, they don't want Bantustans, they want people out. It's settler colonialism, getting rid of the indigenous population. The U.S. is the prime settler colonial society. Australia's another. Most imperialist countries leave the population there and try to rule over them and exploit them. Settler colonialism, the most savage kind, exterminates them.

Z

Noam Chomsky is professor of linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT and author of dozens of books and articles, mainly focused on U.S. foreign policy, as well as linguistics. His most recent books include: Failed States (Owl Books, 2007) and Hopes and Prospects (Haymarket Books, 2010).

Robert Fisk: The Tunisian whose jihad was for the people, not God

The second Arab awakening of modern history – the first was the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire – requires some new definitions, perhaps even some new words in at least the English language.

And some new calculator that will instantly register the old age of dictators and the growing army of the young. If you survive into senility, you can enter the category of great political criminals of contemporary history.

My Maghreb colleague Béchir Ben Yahmed has pointed out that after 42 years in power, Muammar Gaddafi is up there with the worst of them. Kim Il-Sung registered 46 years, Saddam a mere 35 years. Mubarak scored 32 years in the dictatorship stakes, Sékou Touré of Guinea 26 years, Franco of Spain and Salazar of Portugal, the same number. On this scale, Tony Blair's puny 10-years-plus substantially reduces his status as a war criminal, a man who might be allowed – instead of arraignment for the illegal invasion of Iraq – a lavish villa in Sharm el-Sheikh (where, after all, Cherie used to like to stay at the Mubarak government's expense).

Ben Yahmed suggests that in the violent case of Libya, we are dealing not so much with a revolution as with "revolutionary anarchism on the basis of tribalism", since Libya may be in the process of breaking apart. I'm not sure I agree – although the people of Benghazi will want Tripolitanians to know that they were their liberators. Gaddafi, indeed, has become a kind of "recidivist" although, even if the opposition has cried victory too soon, Gaddafi is now ruling only a "half-Gaddafi" state which can only be temporary.

And we will, I feel sure, have to redefine the nature of the act which lit the proverbial – and the real – match: the immolation by fire of Mohamed Bouazizi who, crushed by both the state and its corruption and then slapped by a policewoman, chose death to the continuation of qahr – which in English might be translated as "total powerlessness". He preferred, as Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama has remarked, "annihilation over a life of nothingness". Bouazizi, however, will not join the list of al-Qa'ida's favourite martyrs. He took no enemy lives with him; his jihad was one of despair, which is certainly not encouraged by the Koran. He provided proof that a suicider can unwittingly produce a revolution and become a martyr for an oppressed people rather than for God. His death – though I know I will be told that this decision is up to a Higher Authority – gave him no assurance of paradise; thus his act must be regarded as politically more important than that of the suicide bomber. He was, in fact, an "anti-kamikaze".

In a year in which the very last "Rue Pétain" has been deleted in rural France – Beirut replaced its own in 1941 with the downfall of the Vichy regime – it's only fair to say that an awful lot of Gaddafi's fawning tributes are going to have to be torn down in his rump state once it falls. Green Book museums – even, perhaps, the wreckage of his home pulverised by American bombs in 1986 – will eventually meet their fiery end. Staff at the Marriott Hotel in Zamalek slunk off with Mubarak's portrait before midnight on the day of his overthrow; future guests will notice the faintly disturbing square of unusually light wallpaper to the left of the reception desk.

And there are plenty of Mubarak Streets, Mubarak Stadiums and Mubarak Hospitals to be renamed. Economist Mohamed el-Dahshan has referred to the "demubarakisation" of Egypt; I suppose all the Mubarak Streets must now become "The Street of 25th January" – the start of the latest Egyptian revolution – and I fear that if the 80 per cent Shias of Bahrain one day govern their country, there will have to be quite a lot of dekhalifaisation. And in Aden, desalehisation. And in Libya, deghadaffiisation has already begun.

But while the Egyptian revolution is – barring a counter-coup by Mubarak's old apparatchiks – the happiest story I have ever covered in the Middle East, I still fear much of this will end in tears, new "democracies" ending up much like previous regimes. Saudi Arabia remains the dark knight on my chessboard. Let's see what happens next Friday...

But I hope the new revolutionaries of the Arab world don't start, in their fervour, erasing the identity of whole cities. Benghazi should not become "The City of Eleven Martyrs" – as Stalingrad became the pathetic Volgograd – nor Tobruk retitled. The Tunisians adopted Carthage as the nom de plume of Tunis. Indeed, it is worth remembering the more recent history of the lands which we journalists are now racing across in our 4x4s. My colleagues travelling to Libya from the east swept past El-Alamein and on to Tobruk. Last week, I drove by night from Tunis in the west, my headlights glinting off signposts to the Kasserine Pass – where the Americans thought they would give Rommel a bloody nose but got a bloodier one themselves, courtesy of the Afrika Korps – and Mareth of "Mareth Line" fame. My own late foreign editor of The Times, Louis Heren, was "brewed up" in his tank outside Benghazi, and survived.

Oddly, everyone came to grief between Tobruk and Tunisia in the Second World War. Tobruk fell to the British in January 1941, was besieged by the Afrika Korps for 200 days, relieved by General Cunningham in November, captured by Erwin Rommel in June 1942 – "a disaster", Churchill muttered when he heard the news on a visit to the White House – but recaptured by the Allies five months later. Now it is the first city to be liberated by the anti-Gaddafi opposition. The French screenwriter Michel Audiard, who wrote the script for the Desert Fox movie Taxi for Tobruk, said that, in his opinion, "the only pleasant thing in war is the victory parade – everything before is shit!".

Who can disagree – providing, of course, the right people claim the victory? Recidivists? Anti-kamikazis? "Half-Gaddafi" states, revolutions, rebellions, insurrections, Arab awakenings; they are usually a bloody business. Yet I have to say that my favourite redefinition appeared in a wonderful cartoon in the Tunisian daily La Presse this week, after Beji Caid Essebsi was named prime minister. "In my opinion," says the cartoon Tunisian, "our real prime minister is called Facebook!"

The Independent Saturday, 5 March 2011

All Australians Deserve Free Health Care by Catherine Deveny

Catherine Deveny

HOW can anyone not agree with free universal high-quality health care? How can anyone think that our current public/private marriage of political convenience is beneficial to all Australians both now and in the future? How can anyone think that our nation is getting value for money? It's not.

Private health insurance is a rip-off. Public health needs the $3 billion government subsidy that is propping up the private health insurance industry. And a truck-load more. People don't need a 30 per cent rebate on their private health insurance premiums. They need not to feel terrified into having to pay the premiums in the first place.

My solution? Make it mandatory that politicians and their families are forced to use only the public health system.

Government subsidy of private health is theft from the public health system. It's a disgrace. Where is the choice if you are on benefits or a low income and you can't afford private health insurance? "Chicken or beef, sir?" That's a choice.

Having private health insurance is not a choice. The poor, the old and the vulnerable wait in pain. The rest get served first. Why is pain and loss of quality of life not as important if the person is old, poor or on benefits? It's discrimination. It's an economically adjusted pain scale. "They're doing it tough so a bit more pain won't hurt 'em."

Last week I found myself on the Medi-Go-Round. It was one of those "it's probably nothing, it's probably nothing, it's probably nothing, maybe it's cancer" scenarios. After six months of niggles that had grown to excruciating discomfort, I was off to the doctor. There was talk of having something removed. I don't have private health insurance. I've never had it. I'm politically and philosophically opposed to it.

But I also have the confidence of my convictions to tell you that if I was facing six months on a waiting list or six months of misery, I was happy to pay out of my own pocket and jump the queue. It's not fair that I can do that. I want my taxes used efficiently, or to pay more tax so that we can all be treated in order of need and not of wealth.

Start talking to people about why they have private health insurance and you'll realise that hospital waiting lists are the best advertisement and incentive for private health insurance there is. The Government has no interest in reducing the waiting lists because the waiting lists are saving them money that they can spend on important things, such as the parliamentary super fund, $9000-a-roll silk wallpaper for the Prime Minister's plane and more defence toys and war bling.

People will tell you that they have private health insurance because they were sucked in by the fear of waiting lists, getting into "the breeding zone", the 2000 run-for-cover campaign or simply "because my accountant told me to". None of them will tell you that they think it's value for money. Most of them are opposed to it. Necessary evil. They will tell you that they don't notice the payments and any rebate feels like a bonus.

If negative optimism is "it won't happen to me" then positive optimism must be "maybe it will". Once people sign up to private health insurance they are reluctant to pull out because: "What if I get hit by a car tomorrow?" And for the people who convince themselves that having private health insurance is taking pressure off public hospitals, it's not. It's making the situation worse.

It's clever how the Government is taking away with one hand and giving back with the other. "Oh look at what a mess the public health system is in! Whoever did that should be smacked. And look at the Medicare levy surcharge. Outrageous! Here's a rebate on your private health insurance and a lovely safety net. What did you say? A safety net will only encourage the increase of fees and not benefit the public in any way shape or form? Don't be so cynical. We're your Government and we love you." It's all smoke and mirrors, ladies and gentlemen.

I pay the Medicare levy surcharge and I want it to go to Medicare. At present, it doesn't. It probably goes to pay for John Howard's nose-hair clippers, or some more taxpayer-funded government advertising.
Tomorrow Michael Moore's documentary on the US health system, Sicko, opens in cinemas around Australia. When you watch this movie think of it as "here's one we prepared earlier".

There is a proverb: "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." With free high-quality universal health care there will be shade for our children. With the increase of private health there will be no shade because there will be no trees.
I love a good rant. I feel better now.

P.S. One day I will write something asking why dental is not covered under Medicare. Why is the mouth separate?

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Catherine Deveny 's Website 

Micah Sifry: WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency/Interview with Laura Flanders

"Wikileaks is a symptom of a much larger change, an age when information can be moved into the public arena by all kinds of people," says Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum.  Bradley Manning, the accused leaker of the "Collateral Murder" video aired on WikiLeaks, faces 22 new charges from the government, including "Aiding the Enemy." But which enemy is he aiding, Micah asks? Is it us?

Micah is the author of a new book from OR Books (the publisher of At The Tea Party), WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, and he joins Laura in studio for a conversation about the way transparency and freedom of information are changing our world, from military policy at home to revolution abroad.

Click on the link below to view interview

http://grittv.org/2011/03/04/micah-sifry-wikileaks-and-the-age-of-transparency/

In the Age of WikiLeaks, the End of Secrecy? by Micah L. Sifry

“In one direction we can reach out and touch the time when the leaders of the Soviet Union thought that the explosion at the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl could be kept secret from the rest of the world. In the other direction we can see a time—already upon us—when fourteen-year-old hackers in Australia or Newfoundland can make their way into the most sensitive areas of national security or international finance. The central concern of government in the future will not be information, but analysis. We need government agencies staffed with argumentative people who can live with ambiguity and look upon secrecy as a sign of insecurity

——Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan,  

Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, 1997

 

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

—Benjamin Franklin         

For some time now, our leaders have been saying that they understand—nay, that they embrace—the disruptive potential of the Internet. Take President Obama, who used networked technology so adroitly in his 2008 election campaign. Here he is talking about the power of the Internet at a town hall meeting with students in Shanghai in 2009, where he memorably declared:

Stranded in Europe, I don't feel like a displaced person. I'm buoyed by an invisible network of friends and strangers all connected by social media.

This essay is adapted from Micah Sifry’s new book, WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency.

I am a big believer in technology, and I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity.

Obama added, “The truth is that because in the United States information is free…I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me. I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger, and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

Or take Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. No American official has been more eloquent in expressing support for the power of the Internet than Clinton, who gave a highly visible speech on “Internet freedom” on January 21, 2010, in Washington, where she waxed poetic about how “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet,” adding:

The Internet is a network that magnifies the power and potential of all others. And that’s why we believe it’s critical that its users are assured certain basic freedoms. Freedom of expression is first among them. This freedom is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. Blogs, e-mails, social networks and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas, and created new targets for censorship….

Now, ultimately, this issue isn’t just about information freedom; it is about what kind of world we want and what kind of world we will inhabit. It’s about whether we live on a planet with one Internet, one global community and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors.

The words are nice, but unfortunately theirs has been a kind of bloodless embrace, a rhetorical gesture to a changing culture without any real content and certainly no loss of control. Yes, as a candidate Obama allowed his supporters to use his online social network, my.BarackObama.com, to organize a 20,000-strong petition objecting to his flip-flopping on the issue of warrantless wiretapping. But after an e-mail response and a few hours of question-deflecting by his advisers on his blog, the issue was dropped. Most politicians, including Obama, have used the Internet to consolidate their power, not to empower others for any other purpose.

To be sure, they’ve been fascinated by the Internet’s potential to challenge the status quo elsewhere. President Obama deftly used YouTube to address the Iranian people directly at the beginning of his administration, posting a message of friendship at the time of the Nowruz (springtime) celebrations that, according to YouTube’s open tracking analytics, was indeed widely watched inside Iran. And administration officials like Clinton have spoken out often in defense of bloggers’ free speech rights, and condemned countries like China, Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Vietnam for clamping down on the Internet and cracking down on human rights activists using online social network platforms.

But the reason the recent confrontation between WikiLeaks and the US government is a pivotal event is that, unlike these other applications of technology to politics, this time the free flow of information is threatening the establishment with difficult questions. And not by embarrassing one politician or bureaucrat but by exposing systemic details of how America conducts its foreign and military policies. Or, as writer Bruce Sterling memorably put it, “Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.” The result is a series of deeply uncomfortable contradictions.

The idea that the wondrous “new nervous system” for the planet that Clinton saw being created by all this online freedom might want to turn its attention to the most powerful country on the planet shouldn’t be a shock to leaders like her. But when the State Department cables started to leak, she fell back on a much older way of seeing the world. “The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information,” she said in her prepared statement the day the news broke. “It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.” She added later, “Disclosures like these tear at the fabric of the proper function of responsible government.” The notion that lying to the American public, or the world, about the conduct of foreign or military policy might be more damaging to the fabric of international relations or to the functioning of responsible government was not addressed.

‘You Can’t Handle the Truth’?

Here is Clinton’s problem: in the networked age, when the watched can also be the watchers, nothing less than the credibility of authority itself is at stake. Western governments presumably rest on the consent of the governed, but only if the governed trust the word of those who would govern them. In this changed environment, the people formerly known as the authorities can re-earn that trust only by being more transparent, and by eliminating the contradictions between what they say and what they do. Compounding this challenge, today when a crisis strikes, information moves faster than the “authorities” can know using their own, slower methods. WikiLeaks, and other channels for the unauthorized release and spread of information, are symptoms of this change, not its cause.

Unfortunately there is a large gap between what American officials have told the public about their actions and what they have actually done. Transparency may be the best medicine for a healthy democracy, but from the government’s perspective, the problem with the WikiLeaks revelations from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, plus the State Department cables, may well be that they expose too much. Not in the sense of giving away military secrets that endanger troops in the field or human rights workers; so far both the Pentagon and the State Department have explicitly admitted that no such harm has occurred (though the original release of the Afghanistan war records may have placed some civilian informants in danger from the Taliban).

Rather, the war logs and diplomatic cables show that the nine-year war in Afghanistan is doomed. And this is not something the governments fighting that war want to tell their public. As Javier Moreno, editor of El País, wrote in a long essay explaining why his paper decided to work with WikiLeaks in publishing the State Department cables,

Tens of thousands of soldiers are fighting a war in Afghanistan that their respective leaders know is not winnable. Tens of thousands of soldiers are shoring up a government known around the world to be corrupt, but which is tolerated by those who sent the soldiers there in the first place. The WikiLeaks cables show that none of the Western powers believes that Afghanistan can become a credible nation in the medium term, and much less become a viable democracy, despite the stated aims of those whose soldiers are fighting and dying there. Few people have been surprised to learn that the Afghan president has been salting away millions of dollars in overseas aid in foreign bank accounts with the full cognizance of his patrons.

He added, “We may have suspected our governments of underhand dealings, but we did not have the proof that WikiLeaks has provided. We now know that our governments were aware of the situations mentioned above, and, what is more, they have hidden the facts from us.”

Instead of an honest discussion about what the war logs and cables tell us in toto, we have been treated to a bizarre and contradictory set of responses. Sometimes, what Julian Assange has done is portrayed as worse than what Al Qaeda has done. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich: “He should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.” And other times, we are told that the so-called revelations are actually pretty humdrum. Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest.” Nothing to see here; move along please.

There is only one way to reconcile these seemingly contradictory messages coming from the government and its allies in Congress and the media. At some fundamental level, they probably understand that the conditions for maintaining their monopoly on critical information have been broken. But they apparently still hope that the next Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker, will be dissuaded from an act of conscience if he believes either that the personal cost will be too high or that his actions won’t make a difference. Of course, neither approach will work, as long as millions of other government employees have access to the information the government is trying to hide. The Age of Transparency is here not because of one transnational online network dedicated to open information and whistleblowing named WikiLeaks but because the knowledge of how to build and maintain such networks is widespread.

The End of Secrecy

Let’s posit that what Assange is doing is “radical transparency,” i.e., publishing everything he can get his hands on. He has not, in fact, been doing that, though he is obviously publishing a great deal of raw material. Given that the Internet is a realm of abundance—not scarcity, like the old ink- and airtime-based media—this is a feature, not a bug. Raw-data dumps of previously private or secret information are now part of the media landscape. As Max Frankel, former executive editor of the New York Times, recently put it, “The threat of massive leaks will persist so long as there are massive secrets.”

Security expert Bruce Schneier makes a similar point. “Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them,” he wrote on his blog a few weeks after Cablegate erupted. “The more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to be made public.” Somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 military and diplomatic personnel had access to the SIPRNet system that Bradley Manning is alleged to have tapped. The government doesn’t know precisely how many people overall have security clearances to classified information. Based on reporting from the Government Accountability Office, Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert, estimates that this number is 2.5 million.

In other words, since this kind of “radical transparency” is technologically feasible, like it or not, it is a given. Efforts to stop it will fail, just as efforts to stop file-sharing by killing Napster failed. As Schneier sagely points out, “Just as the music and movie industries are going to have to change their business models for the Internet era, governments are going to have to change their secrecy models. I don’t know what those new models will be, but they will be different.”

Fourteen years ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan led the bipartisan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Its recommendations are worth revisiting in light of WikiLeaks. “It is time for a new way of thinking about secrecy,” the commission’s report began. “Secrecy is a form of government regulation. Americans are familiar with the tendency to over-regulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.” The Moynihan Commission was examining a condition not unlike that of the present day, where millions of people had security clearances and hundreds of thousands of new “top secret” documents, whose disclosure could presumably cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security,” were created each year. But the commission was convinced that the culture of secrecy was out of control and hurting the country:

Excessive secrecy has significant consequences for the national interest when, as a result, policymakers are not fully informed, government is not held accountable for its actions, and the public cannot engage in informed debate. This remains a dangerous world; some secrecy is vital to save lives, bring miscreants to justice, protect national security, and engage in effective diplomacy. Yet as Justice Potter Stewart noted in his opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, when everything is secret, nothing is secret. Even as billions of dollars are spent each year on government secrecy, the classification and personnel security systems have not always succeeded at their core task of protecting those secrets most critical to the national security. The classification system, for example, is used too often to deny the public an understanding of the policymaking process, rather than for the necessary protection of intelligence activities and other highly sensitive matters.

Well before Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and thumb-size memory sticks, Moynihan foresaw that the information age would make the culture of government secrecy untenable, even picturing a time “when fourteen-year-old hackers in Australia or Newfoundland” could penetrate the government’s most sensitive secrets. With his commission, mandated by an act of Congress, he tried to turn the paradigm on its head. “The great discovery of Western science, somewhere in the seventeenth century,” he wrote, “was the principle of openness. A scientist who judged he had discovered something, published it. Often to great controversy, leading to rejection, acceptance, modification, whatever. Which is to say, to knowledge. In this setting science advanced, as nowhere else and never before.”

It is long past time for governments to embrace this paradigm. “Where you’re open, things will not be WikiLeaked,” says Christopher Graham, Britain’s information minister. “Quite a lot of this is only exciting because we didn’t know it.” He adds, “The best form of defense is transparency—much more proactive publication of what organizations do. It’s an attitude of, ‘OK. You want to know? Here it is.’” Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York Journalism School, argues that government should be transparent by default, and have to justify when it chooses to make something secret, not the reverse. And he, too, sees something positive in the impact of WikiLeaks. “Perhaps the lesson of WikiLeaks should be that the open air is less fearsome than we’d thought,” he blogged. “That should lead to less secrecy. After all, the only sure defense against leaks is transparency.”

People who think more transparency will lead only to the hiding of secrets deeper in the bureaucracy, or that it will prevent government officials from conducting any kind of meaningful business, and that as a result we will know less, not more, about the workings of government or the powerful should think again. By that logic, we should require less public disclosure, not more. Why ask campaign contributors or lobbyists to disclose any of their activities? In fact, when people think what they’re doing is subject to public view, their behavior generally changes for the better. Thus Cablegate—which exposed many sovereign powers to a new level of public scrutiny, warning them that more such scrutiny is always a possibility in the future—should, on balance, lead to better behavior. Why? Because the cost of maintaining the contradictions between what you say in public and what you do really has just gone up another notch.

Carne Ross is a British diplomat who resigned his post at the United Nations over the dissimulation that his government practiced during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “From now on, it will be ever more difficult for governments to claim one thing and do another,” says Ross. “For in making such claims, they are making themselves vulnerable to WikiLeaks of their own.” If all it takes is one person with a USB drive, the “least trusted person” whose conscience may be pricked by a contradiction in his or her government’s behavior, that information can move into public view more easily than ever before. That is the reality of the twenty-first century. It would be far better for all of us if our governments and other powerful institutions got with the business of accepting that transparency will be a new fact of life, and take steps to align their words with their deeds. In that respect, Hillary Clinton should thank Julian Assange rather than apologize to world leaders for what he did.

Judging from another “Internet freedom” speech Clinton gave in the wake of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, a new era of openness and candor is not upon us. She declared America’s support for the “freedom to connect” online “to solve shared problems and expose public corruption,” and she insisted that “governments also have a duty to be transparent,” but insisted that WikiLeaks could somehow be walled off from these principles because it “began with an act of theft.” “Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase,” she declared, as if that meant the information in those documents was somehow unfit for public consumption or discussion simply because they weren’t leaked in the proper way, say to Bob Woodward. For someone who has tried to be an Internet progressive, it was a singularly ostrichlike move. And unfortunately for Clinton and all the other world leaders, burying your head in the sand doesn’t make bottom-up transparency disappear.

Two, Three, Many Leaks

That’s because the genie has escaped from the bottle. Whatever else you may say about Assange, his greatest contribution to global enlightenment is the idea of a viable “stateless news organization,” to use Jay Rosen’s phrase, beholden to no country’s laws and dedicated to bringing government information into public view. Even if Assange—who has just lost round one of his fight to avoid extradition to Sweden to face rape charges—goes to jail and WikiLeaks is somehow shut down, others are already following in his footsteps. Or as futurist Mark Pesce nicely put it, “The failures of WikiLeaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it.”

Since Cablegate, several independent WikiLeaks-style projects have announced themselves, including: BrusselsLeaks.com (focused on the European Union); BalkanLeaks.eu (the Balkan countries); Indoleaks.org (Indonesia); Rospil.info (Russia); two competing environmental efforts, each claiming the name GreenLeaks; and the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit, which in January began publishing (with the Guardian) a cache of documents from inside the Palestinian Authority that exposed the minutes of high-level PA negotiating sessions with Israel and the United States. Some recent graduates of the CUNY Journalism School launched a simple tool, Localeaks, for publishers interested in attracting whistleblowers. And even the New York Times announced it may create a special portal for would-be leakers.

Perhaps the most important of these fledgling efforts is OpenLeaks.org, which is being built by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Herbert Snorrason and other former WikiLeaks associates. Of all these efforts, OpenLeaks is most likely to have the technological and cryptographic skills needed to succeed in a world filled with shady actors opposed to transparency. And unlike WikiLeaks, it is designed to be decentralized.

In mid-December, Domscheit-Berg told me that OpenLeaks was trying to correct mistakes in the WikiLeaks approach. “I am not into being a leader, and I don’t trust the whole concept of leaders either,” he said, adding, “If you follow the debate around why we left the WL [WikiLeaks] project, you will find that a strikingly important detail.” He described OpenLeaks as more of a technological service provider to many media organizations, as well as others with an interest in opening up information, like NGOs and labor unions. Instead of acting as a central hub for leaks, it will provide a dedicated website for handling leaks to each entity. In his view, this approach has several advantages:

Firstly, the system will scale better with each new participant. Secondly, the source is the one that will have a say in who should exclusively be granted first access to material, while also ensuring that material will be distributed to others in the system after a period of exclusive access. Thirdly, we will make use of existing resources, experience, manpower etc [to] deal with submissions more efficiently. Fourthly, we will be able to deliver information more directly to where it matters and will be used, while remaining a neutral service ourselves. And last but not least, this approach will create a large union of shared interests in the defense of the rights to run an anonymous post-drop in the digital world.

Of course, we can’t take for granted that the powers that be will let this happen without a fight. In that respect, the battle over WikiLeaks has had another salutary effect: it has delivered a wake-up call to everyone who thought the free and open Internet was a settled fact. Freedom of the press is no longer the exclusive province of those who own one, but while the Internet has drastically lowered the barriers to entry into the public sphere, it has not eliminated them. Right now, unpopular or disruptive speech online will probably exist in a twilight zone, semi-free, sometimes capable of threatening powerful institutions and other times subject to their whims. What’s needed is much more robust discussion of how the Internet can become a genuinely free public arena, a global town square where anyone can speak. Or, to be more precise, an Internet whose underlying architecture is really free of government or corporate control, as decentralized and uncontrollable as life itself.

This essay is adapted from Micah Sifry’s new book, WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency.

March 3, 2011   |    This article appeared in the March 21, 2011 edition of The Nation.

About the Author

Micah L. Sifry

Micah L. Sifry, a former Nation associate editor, is co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, editor of its...

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