The Collapse of Globalization

AP / Jacques Brinon

Demonstrators carry an effigy of Ronald McDonald.

By Chris Hedges

The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.

We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.

Adequate food, clean water and basic security are already beyond the reach of perhaps half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of 5 percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be inevitable. But it will not necessarily mean more democracy.

The refusal by all of our liberal institutions, including the press, universities, labor and the Democratic Party, to challenge the utopian assumptions that the marketplace should determine human behavior permits corporations and investment firms to continue their assault, including speculating on commodities to drive up food prices. It permits coal, oil and natural gas corporations to stymie alternative energy and emit deadly levels of greenhouse gases. It permits agribusinesses to divert corn and soybeans to ethanol production and crush systems of local, sustainable agriculture. It permits the war industry to drain half of all state expenditures, generate trillions in deficits, and profit from conflicts in the Middle East we have no chance of winning. It permits corporations to evade the most basic controls and regulations to cement into place a global neo-feudalism. The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the Democratic Party, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear—fear of secular humanism or fear of Christian fascists—to turn the population into passive accomplices. As long as we remain afraid nothing will change.

Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, two of the major architects for unregulated capitalism, should never have been taken seriously. But the wonders of corporate propaganda and corporate funding turned these fringe figures into revered prophets in our universities, think tanks, the press, legislative bodies, courts and corporate boardrooms. We still endure the cant of their discredited economic theories even as Wall Street sucks the U.S. Treasury dry and engages once again in the speculation that has to date evaporated some $40 trillion in global wealth. We are taught by all systems of information to chant the mantra that the market knows best.

It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has became concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent—from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—are banished as heretics.

The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.

The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.

The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations. But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs. This idea comes from a former hedge fund manager whose personal fortune was amassed largely by firing workers, and only illustrates how rational political discourse has descended into mindless sound bites.

We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore.”

The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.

The propagandists for globalism are the natural outgrowth of this image-based and culturally illiterate world. They speak about economic and political theory in empty clichés. They cater to our subliminal and irrational desires. They select a few facts and isolated data and use them to dismiss historical, economic, political and cultural realities. They tell us what we want to believe about ourselves. They assure us that we are exceptional as individuals and as a nation. They champion our ignorance as knowledge. They tell us that there is no reason to investigate other ways of organizing and governing our society. Our way of life is the best. Capitalism has made us great. They peddle the self-delusional dream of inevitable human progress. They assure us we will be saved by science, technology and rationality and that humanity is moving inexorably forward.

None of this is true. It is a message that defies human nature and human history. But it is what many desperately want to believe. And until we awake from our collective self-delusion, until we carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the corporate state and sever ourselves from the liberal institutions that serve the corporate juggernaut—especially the Democratic Party—we will continue to be rocketed toward a global catastrophe.

Chris Hedges’ column appears every Monday at Truthdig. Hedges, a fellow at The Nation Institute and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of “Death of the Liberal Class.”

Paglia on Taylor: "A luscious, opulent, ripe fruit!"

Camille Paglia considers the "volcanic" Elizabeth Taylor -- and all the unworthy starlets who could never match up

By Salon Staff

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Elizabeth Taylor in "Butterfield 8"

When news broke that Elizabeth Taylor had died at 79, we immediately reached out to founding Salon contributor and lifelong Taylor obsessive Camille Paglia for her thoughts. We found her in a Philadelphia research library researching her new visual arts book for Pantheon, but she diligently trekked outside in the rain to speak to Salon editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman by telephone under a portico, as the wind howled around her.

I remember reading your essay on Elizabeth Taylor from Penthouse in 1992 (it appeared in the collection "Sex, Art, and American Culture"), where you called her "a pre-feminist woman." You said: "She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm."

Exactly. At that time, you have to realize, Elizabeth Taylor was still being underestimated as an actress. No one took her seriously -- she would even make jokes about it in public. And when I wrote that piece, Meryl Streep was constantly being touted as the greatest actress who ever lived. I was in total revolt against that and launched this protest because I think that Elizabeth Taylor is actually a greater actress than Meryl Streep, despite Streep's command of a certain kind of technical skill.

As the '90s went on and Turner Classic Movies increasingly became a national institution, people had a chance to see Taylor's old films on a regular rotation, so they came around to her. And then the extent of her power as an actress, and the enormity of her achievement in her whole body of films, became evident. As time went on, but obviously past her professional peak, she finally obtained universal respect.

To me, Elizabeth Taylor's importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality -- the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct. Let me give you an example. Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids Are All Right" is a truly wonderful film, but Julianne Moore and Annette Bening -- who is fabulous in it and should have won the Oscar for her portrayal of a prototypical contemporary American career woman -- were painfully scrawny to look at on the screen. This is the standard starvation look that is now projected by Hollywood women stars -- a skeletal, Pilates-honed, anorexic silhouette, which has nothing to do with females as most of the world understands them. There's something almost android about the depictions of women currently being projected by Hollywood.

This was something you've written a lot about, the skinny starlets, the Gwyneth Paltrows ...

If Gwyneth Paltrow were growing up in the 1930s, she would have been treated as a hopelessly gawky wallflower who would be mortified by her lanky figure. But everything about her is being pushed on to American young women as the ultimate ideal. And it's even more unpalatable to me now because I've been spending the last few years speaking in Brazil, and I'm fascinated by Brazilian women -- their humor, energy and openness and the way they express their sexuality so naturally and beautifully. I love it because it's so much like the old Hollywood style. Now Elizabeth Taylor's persona was at first a continuation of Ava Gardner's. They had a natural lustiness and spontaneity, an animal magnetism, though both Ava and Elizabeth at the beginning of their careers didn't have command of basic technical skills, particularly dialogue. That's what people laud Meryl Streep for -- "Oh, her accents are so great; oh, her articulation is so perfect." But she doesn't really live in her characters, she merely costumes them. Meryl Streep is always doing drag. But it's so superficial. It all comes from the brain, not the heart or body.

Richard Burton, who was supposed to become the next great Shakespearean actor after Laurence Olivier, used to say how much he had learned from Elizabeth about how to work with the camera. Cinematic acting is extremely understated. The slightest little flick of an eyelid says an enormous amount, and that's where Elizabeth Taylor was far superior to Meryl Streep. Streep is always cranking it and cranking it, working it and working it, demanding that the audience bow down and "See what I"m going through! See what I'm doing for you!" Streep is an intelligent, good actress, but she doesn't come anywhere near Elizabeth Taylor on the screen. Because she wasn't a trained stage actress like Streep, Taylor has vocal weaknesses -- at high pitch, she can get a bit screechy -- which is perfect for Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" but not so good for Cleopatra. But she was like a luscious, opulent, ripe fruit. She enjoyed life to the max. She loved to eat and drink, she loved baubles, and she had a terrific sense of humor -- people would say they could hear her raucously laughing from a mile away. She was a basic, down-to-earth gal who could play queens when she had to. The performances she gave were indelible -- for example, that long, long take at the end of "Suddenly, Last Summer" as Catherine finally recalls the way her gay cousin Sebastian was slaughtered and cannibalized by a pack of boys he was trying to pick up!

Your early obsession with Taylor is well-documented.

Elizabeth Taylor has been a colossal pagan goddess to me since I was 11 or 12. I was so lucky to have seen her at her height. And my sensibility as a culture critic and as a feminist was deeply formed by her. In the U.S. in the 1950s, blondes were the ultimate Aryan ideal. Perky blondes like Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee ruled the roost! And then there was Elizabeth Taylor with that gorgeous, brunette, ethnic look. She looked Jewish, Italian, Spanish, even Moorish! She was truly transcultural -- it was a radical resistance to the dominance of the blond sorority queens and cheerleaders. And then her open sexuality in that puritanical period! It was so daring. She picked up one man after another. The tragedy of Mike Todd being killed in a plane crash -- then her stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds. There's no way to describe the joy I felt at the enormous embarrassment she handed to Debbie Reynolds! I've since come to respect both Debbie Reynolds and Doris Day for what fine comedic actresses they were. But at the time, I couldn't stand them! They represented the saccharine, good-girl style that was being forced on me and my generation by our parents and teachers and every voice in the culture, which was telling us to be like them. Elizabeth Taylor was bad! She was a bad girl! I loved it.

But there were always flickers of strength about her. She wasn't the exaggerated, vulnerable icon Marilyn Monroe was.

That's right. There was a robustness about Elizabeth Taylor, compared to the vulnerability and emotional train wrecks that were Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. Hayworth also projected a wonderful, melting womanliness on-screen, but Taylor was a tough broad. She had survival instincts. And that's another thing about her, the way she could bounce back from all her tragedies and near-death experiences and draw on her suffering in her acting. Who could forget when she was near death from pneumonia in London in 1961? There were dramatic pictures of her being carried out on a stretcher, when she had an emergency tracheotomy. Then she bounces right back and gets the Oscar! That was one of the great television nights of my entire life, as I watched the Academy Awards and was praying and praying she would win. Then she goes up to the podium with her bosom exposed and her throat bare, with no bandages, not even a band-aid, so everyone could see the scar, and says in a frail, breathy voice, "Thank you so much." I was delirious! I could barely focus the entire next day at school. And then the glorious color photos in Look magazine of her sitting serenely with her Oscar at the after-party -- stunning!

She won for "Butterfield 8."

"Butterfield 8" was my Bible. She didn't want to make that film. She hated it her whole life. But "Butterfield 8" meant everything to me as an adolescent. It formed so many of my ideas about the pagan tradition descending to us from Babylon and surviving the Christian onslaught of the Middle Ages. The first time you see her in the film, in that tight, white, sewed-on slip, it's so amazing. Her dress is ripped on the floor, she brushes her teeth with scotch, and she goes up to the mirror and angrily writes "No sale!" on it in lipstick! To me she represented the ultimate power of the sexual woman.

There was a long feminist attack on the Hollywood sex symbol as a sex object, a commodified thing, passive to the male gaze, and it's such a crock! "Butterfield 8" really shows it. There's that incredible moment in the bar where she's wearing a svelte black dress and she and Laurence Harvey are fighting. He grabs her by the arm, and she grinds her stiletto heel into his elegant shoe. It's male vs. female -- a ferocious equal match. He's strong, but she's strong too! That scene shows the power and intensity of heterosexuality, with all its tensions and conflicts. It also shows how terrible current Hollywood filmmaking is -- how false and manufactured sex has become. There's no real eroticism anymore. "Butterfield 8" sizzles with eroticism, because of the psychological distance and animal attraction between male and female. The businessmen in that film are all in their uniforms, their black suits. They're like a horde of identical and characterless myrmidons or clones. They have wealth, they have power, but they're nothing compared to her! The film truly captures the complexities and struggles of sexuality -- all of which have been lost in our period of easy gender-bending. Everything's become so bland and boring now.

The era of the great movie queens is certainly over. Sharon Stone did have her solar moment in "Basic Instinct." Not just in the famous interrogation scene in the police station but everywhere in that film, she was commanding sex and commanding the camera. It was a spectacular performance -- and then the movie kind of self-destructs. But I had a brief moment of hope there -- I thought, is Hollywood sex finally coming back? But no, they never could come up with anything that good for Sharon Stone again, and the moment faded.

Is there really no one else who has made that sort of splash? I'm having a hard time coming up with one. Angelina Jolie, perhaps?

For me, Jolie's greatest performance was in "Gia," where she played the bisexual fashion model Gia Carangi, who died of AIDS. Jolie is amazing in that. She had the sensuality and animal energy of Ava Gardner, which virtually no one has been able to duplicate. But after she got huge around the world, Jolie decided to become the big humanitarian. Elizabeth Taylor did that, but it was later in her career. So suddenly Angelina Jolie thinks she's a U.N. ambassador for all human misery in the world. Everything turns high concept, and soon she's collecting a multiracial menagerie of children. The result is a total flattening out of her artistic image. In a way, she suffers from the problem of being a star in the age of paparazzi, where you're much more hounded than even Elizabeth Taylor ever was. Marilyn Monroe was certainly harassed by the press and hated it, but not like today, where there's hardly a place on earth to have your own thoughts. So Angelina Jolie became defensive and covert, and now there's something too calculated and manipulative about her public persona, so she's less interesting than she was. Of course, there are no great roles being written for her. She gets action adventure scripts, like Lara Croft, where a contemporary woman has to show she's tough and can duke it out with the guys. But I'm not sure Jolie would have been able to handle some of the roles Elizabeth Taylor did so well like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." There's a relaxation at the heart of Elizabeth Taylor's acting style -- and also in Elizabeth Taylor the woman-- whereas you always feel a wariness or tension in Jolie.

We're in a period now where everything has to be taut -- in mind and body. And part of it is that we're in the post-studio era. Elizabeth Taylor was a creation of the old Hollywood studio system -- she was one of the last great studio products. And in the studio, you were very protected as you grew up. It was a family environment, which some people -- like Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis -- found claustrophobic. But it was very nurturing for someone like Elizabeth Taylor. Angelina Jolie, however, had a kind of hard, unsettled, up-and-down life. She's tough, she's a survivor, she's a little bit cynical. But you never feel cynicism in Elizabeth Taylor -- never! She does it when she has to play it, as in "Virginia Woolf," but it isn't her. There was never an ounce of cynicism in her. To all reports, she was a warm and maternal woman.

And that's another thing -- all these stars today, accumulating children with an army of nannies. Despite all her children, no one would ever call Angelina Jolie maternal. But Elizabeth Taylor's maternal quality is central to her heterosexual power. Elizabeth Taylor could control men. She liked men. And men liked her. There was a chemistry between her and men, coming from her own maternal instincts. I've been writing about this for years, and it was partly inspired by watching Taylor operate on-screen and off. The happy and successful heterosexual woman feels tender and maternal toward men -- but this has been completely lost in our feminist era. Now women tell men, you have to be my companion and be just like a woman; be my best friend, and listen to me chatter. In other words, women don't really like men anymore -- they want men to be like women. But Elizabeth Taylor liked men, and men loved to be around her because they sensed that.

But she was no pushover! She gave as good as she got. There were those famous knock-down, drag-out fights with Burton, and she loved it. No man ever ruled her. Not for a second. But at the same time her men weren't henpecked. She liked strong men. That was one reason she dropped Eddie Fisher. Evidently, according to Carrie Fisher in her one-woman show, he was quite renowned in the sack, and Taylor went for that. But then she realized he was no Mike Todd or Richard Burton, and he got the boot.

We've spent almost 30 minutes talking about a very small part of her career, but she's been such a public figure, decades later, in very different ways.

Right! On the way to the library this morning, I was listening to New York's WABC on the car radio, and they were saying how all the interns think that Elizabeth Taylor was just Michael Jackson's friend or "that crazy old lady in a wheelchair." For many people who are older, however, our lives were permeated by her for decades. She affected us on the deepest emotional level.

It's interesting what a profound rapport she always had with gay men, beginning with Montgomery Clift. She was a great friend and counselor to him early on, when he was struggling with his homosexuality. Then when he had that terrible car crash that deformed his face, I've read that she ran down the road to his aid and saved his life by pulling his tongue out of his throat. It was a bloody scene -- he was choking to death. She always had a gift for intimate communication with both gay and straight men.

Is there anyone we're missing, though? Is there no one else who captures, as you've called it, her raw, lush sensuality?

I would say there's no one else in Hollywood. However, there are a number of examples in the European tradition -- authentically sexual and maternal stars like Sophia Loren, who has the same combination of qualities. Loren's tenderness toward men is so obvious. At the same time, she's very strong -- a working-class Italian woman who survived the war. And then you have the French actresses, like Jeanne Moreau, whose overt sexuality is fabulous. But Moreau has a kind of decadent quality that Elizabeth Taylor never had. Moreau's eroticism was tinged with a sophisticated world weariness -- something a bit haggard: "I've seen it all. What can you show me?" The French actresses can also project such a delicate femininity. Catherine Deneuve, for example, shows such genuine emotion and sensitivity, but she's always cool. She's an observer, a little detached. I adore Deneuve, but she's not like Elizabeth Taylor, who is volcanic. Taylor is all gusto and fire.

She lived life to its fullest. There hasn't been anyone quite like her. I mean, we've had some high-energy, bawdy, over-the-top actresses like Stockard Channing and Bette Midler, and they're very endearing, but there's always something slightly ironic about them.

They're in on the joke.

They're campy. But Taylor was so instinctive and intuitive, so in the moment. It was pretty remarkable that someone with such a strong personality could also be such a good actress. Usually, actors who can project themselves into so many different types of roles tend to have a kind of fluid, unfixed identity in real life. But Elizabeth Taylor's personality was rock solid. At the same time, she was always ready to throw on costumes from any era and look magnificent. She was a real trouper, a pro. By the way, do you notice how we're calling her an "actress"? The minute Hollywood actresses decided to become "actors," they lost their sexuality. It's time to junk that pretentious term.

You famously collected 599 photos of Elizabeth Taylor when you were a teenager. Which one should we use to illustrate this interview?

The canonical shot of Elizabeth Taylor sewn into that white slip in "Butterfield 8" is one of the major art images of my entire life! She is Babylonian pagan woman -- the goddess Ishtar, the anti-Mary!

That photo heralds the dawning sexual revolution, among other things. But the leading feminists totally rejected the Hollywood sex symbols from the start. Raquel Welch was still complaining about that when I interviewed her for Tatler in 1994. Gloria Steinem wouldn't even let Raquel speak at an abortion rights rally in the 1970s. Puritanical fools! But thanks to Madonna, the pro-sex, pro-pop wing of feminism rose with a vengeance in the 1990s and swept the prudes into the dust bin of history.

Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her most recent book is "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems."

Debtors Are Still Being locked up in the United States

Welcome to Debtors' Prison, 2011 Edition

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

Some lawmakers, judges and regulators are trying to rein in the U.S. debt-collection industry's use of arrest warrants to recoup money owed by borrowers who are behind on credit-card payments, auto loans and other bills.

More than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can't or won't pay to be jailed. Judges have signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties with a total population of 13.6 million people, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal of filings in those counties. Nationwide figures aren't known because many courts don't keep track of warrants by alleged offense. In interviews, 20 judges across the nation said the number of borrowers threatened with arrest in their courtrooms has surged since the financial crisis began.

The backlash is a reaction to sloppy, incomplete or even false documentation that can result in borrowers having no idea before being locked up that they were sued to collect an outstanding debt. The debt-collection industry says such errors are extremely rare, adding that warrants usually are sought only after all other efforts to persuade borrowers to pay have failed.

View Full Image

Andrew Spear for The Wall Street Journal

PAY UP, OR LOCKED UP: Jeffrey Stearns, of Indiana, spent two nights in jail over a $4,024.88 debt.

Earlier this month, Washington state's House of Representatives passed by a 98-0 vote a bill that would require companies to provide proof a borrower has been notified about lawsuits against them before a judge could issue an arrest warrant. All 42 Republicans voted for the legislation, which is expected to pass the state's Senate and be signed into law by the governor. A trade group representing debt collectors supports the bill and says the changes are needed because some companies are abusing Washington's existing law by improperly arresting borrowers.

In Florida, training this week for dozens of new judges and sitting judges who are moving to courts with the power to lock up borrowers includes a session about potential abuses of debt-related warrants. "Before we take away a person's freedom, we want to ensure that there are procedural safeguards," said Peter Evans, a Palm Beach County, Fla., state-court judge who proposed the session.

Some judges elsewhere are issuing fewer debt-related arrest warrants because law-enforcement officials complained those cases gobble up resources needed to pursue violent offenders.

Illinois regulators are investigating the use of warrants by debt collectors and other financial firms doing business in that state. In September, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation issued an order seeking to revoke the license of Easy Money Express Inc. The Paducah, Ky., payday lender won arrest warrants against at least four customers. One spent five days in a Carbondale, Ill., jail last March after failing to pay a $275 debt, court filings show. The lender "exploited the court system to obtain the arrest and incarceration of its customers," said Sue Hofer, a spokeswoman for the agency. The company declined to comment but is fighting the state's proposed ban.

At the national level, the Federal Trade Commission began scrutinizing in July the use of arrest warrants in debt-collection lawsuits. An FTC spokesman declined to comment on whether the inquiry has led to formal investigations by the agency, which oversees the debt-collection industry and enforces a U.S. law that restricts how borrowers can be pursued for debts.

Arrest warrants generally can be issued if a borrower defies a court order to repay a debt or doesn't show up in court. Retailers, credit-card issuers, landlords and debt collectors are the most frequent seekers of such orders, according to court filings and interviews with judges and lawyers.

Encore Capital Group Inc., the largest publicly traded debt-buying firm by revenue, last year began requiring law firms handling its cases to follow a "code of conduct" that includes this sentence: "Under no circumstances should a firm cause a consumer to be taken into custody involuntarily."

J. Brandon Black, Encore's president and chief executive, said the San Diego company decided to stop threatening borrowers with jail because the practice made Encore look bad. The company filed 425,000 lawsuits against borrowers last year, up 27% from 334,000 in 2009.

Last year, officials in McIntosh County, Okla., south of Tulsa, issued about 1,500 debt-related arrest warrants, up from about 800 a year before the crisis, according to a court clerk. More than 950 borrowers got similar warrants in Salt Lake City courts last year. Maricopa County, Ariz., officials issued 260 debt-related warrants in 2010.

Few orders result in jail time. For example, in Piatt County, Ill., just five borrowers were arrested last year out of the 13 hit with debt-related arrest warrants. The sheriff said he puts a higher priority on tracking down people accused of violent crimes.

"I wish I could do it more," said Piatt County Circuit Judge Chris Freese, who has heard hundreds of debt-collection cases. "It's often the only remedy to get people into court and paying their debts."

In one of those cases, Emmie Nichols, 26 years old, was arrested in June at her mother's house after lawyers for Capital One Financial Corp. won an arrest warrant against her for skipping a court hearing about $1,159.87 she owed on a credit card from the company. The $500 bond that freed Ms. Nichols from the county jail was turned over to Capital One as a partial payment of the debt, court filings show. A Capital One spokeswoman declined to comment on Ms. Nichols. Some judges are worried that the jump in debt-related arrest warrants is creating a modern-day version of debtors' prison. The practice ended in 1833 after decades of controversy, since borrowers owing as little as 60 cents could be held indefinitely in squalid jails until they paid off their debt.

Earlier this year, Vanderburgh County, Ind., Superior Court Judge Robert Pigman asked Indiana's highest court to review the legality of debt-related warrants after law-enforcement officials complained they can't quickly access arrest orders for dangerous criminals because their computer system is clogged with debt cases. The Indiana Supreme Court hasn't responded to the request.

In September 2009, Jeffrey Stearns, a concrete-company owner, answered a knock at the door from a Hancock County, Ind., deputy sheriff. The deputy was holding a warrant to arrest Mr. Stearns for not paying $4,024.88 owed to a unit of American International Group Inc. on a loan for his pickup truck.

After being handcuffed in front of his four children, Mr. Stearns, 29 years old, spent two nights in jail, where he said he was strip-searched and sprayed for lice. Court records show he was released after agreeing to pay $1,500 to the loan company. "I didn't even know I was being sued," he said, though he doesn't dispute owing the money. "It's the scariest thing that ever happened to me."

Mr. Stearns said he never got the summons or two orders to show up before a judge that a deputy sheriff said in court filings were delivered to him. Hancock County Sheriff Mark Shepherd couldn't be reached for comment. Mark Herr, an AIG spokesman, declined to comment on Mr. Stearns but said the lending unit was sold in November.

Kieth Oberman on Our Role in Libya

Here's another observation on the No Fly Zone. It's getting more and more complicated all the time. Have a look.


Keith's Five Second Rule.

The Death of the Liberal Class

eath of the Liberal Class

Posted on March 23, 2011 by rocketpoetry| Leave a comment

by Robin Lindley, Contributing Writer

Another story largely missed or ignored by the mainstream media: On Thurs., Dec. 16, 2010, police arrested 131 antiwar activists outside the White House at a nonviolent demonstration led by Veterans for Peace to protest the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Among those arrested were Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges.

Hedges saw the snowy White House protest as an act of hope.

“The normal mechanisms by which democratic participation are rendered possible in this country have been closed shut, and if we don’t do this, we die,” he said.

“This is what’s left of hope in this country.”

In his most recent book, “Death of the Liberal Class,” Hedges argues that the traditional channels for democratic participation, the five pillars of the liberal class; the press, universities, unions, liberal churches and the Democratic Party, have become corrupted and permitted the rise of a terrifying corporate-national security state that has dismantled protections for ordinary Americans.

Hedges also wrote the bestsellers “American Fascists” and “Empire of Illusion,” and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” He was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 as part of a team covering global terror. Hedges now is a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lannan Literary Fellow. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.

Hedges recently talked about his recent arrest and new book by telephone from the East Coast.

Robin Lindley: I heard a brief mention of your December arrest with 130 other antiwar protesters on NPR, but otherwise it seems the mainstream media didn’t even note the demonstration.

Chris Hedges: There’s been a constriction in the kinds of things covered and those who still do journalism are very circumspect about what and how they report. They are very deferential to corporate and state structures of power. And that means that events like [the demonstration] don’t get published.

R.L.: The mainstream media seems to ignore war, disease and poverty, while you focus on these difficult issues. Can you comment on the coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

C.H.: It’s not covered anymore, in the same way that poor people and a dispossessed working class have all become invisible. We are preoccupied with tawdry, running soap operas whether it’s John Edwards’ love child or Michael Jackson — I can’t even keep up with it. We’re distracted by the celluloid shadows on Plato’s cave while what’s left of our democratic state is dismantled and destroyed.

R.L.: You’re outspoken on portrayal of the poor and underclass in the media, as on “The Jerry Springer Show.”

C.H.: Yes, they’re figures of ridicule in the commercial media. The media propagates a message that corporations want, and there’s a belittling and mocking of the poor and celebration of wealth. A kind of cutthroat, rapacious capitalism is celebrated on reality television shows where you betray and manipulate and push aside your competitors for fleeting fame and money. These are sick values, but they’re disseminated through corporate media in almost every program you watch.

R.L.: Your new book is an obituary not just for the liberal class but also for democracy.

C.H.: Of course. You can’t have a functioning democracy if liberal institutions have atrophied and died. This was something Dostoevsky understood: the breakdown of the liberal class propelled you into moral nihilism, which is what “Notes from the Underground” is about. He’s right, and this is the book of our time: The defeated dreamer who went to all of the Obama rallies and chanted “Yes We Can,” and was betrayed, and became cynical, and went underground, and realized only fools and idiots assumed power in this environment, and washed his hands of it all. Then you’re trapped, and that’s precisely what’s happening.

R.L.: What is the role of the liberal class in a democracy?

C.H.: Liberal institutions, when they function, provide a safety valve. They offer a mechanism within the formal structure of power by which the injustices and grievances of working and middle class members can be redressed. We saw this with the New Deal. The New Deal was not a product necessarily of Roosevelt but of very militant labor activity (such as) sit down strikes and Bonus marchers.

Now these institutions have calcified to such an extent that the suffering visited on our dispossessed working class, much of it created by self-identified liberals such as Clinton, has nowhere to go but outside the formal channels of power. That’s what we’re seeing with movements like the Tea Party and militias that assault not only government as the enemy but attack the liberal class with some justification, because those self-identified liberals — people like Obama and Clinton — have betrayed core liberal values. The anger is not misplaced (because of) the hypocrisy of the liberal class.

R.L.: You single out supposed liberals who supported the Iraq war.

C.H.: The liberal class played its traditional function in the buildup to the war in that it argued the war was a necessary evil and defined themselves as reluctant hawks. That’s traditionally why the power elite tolerates the liberal class. They give a moral veneer to activities that, in this case, were clearly criminal. People like Michael Ignatieff, George Packer, David Remnick of The New Yorker, even figures like Frank Rich, all supported the war with a kind of anguish that gave the war a moral patina that it didn’t have. That’s what liberals traditionally do.

R.L.: You wrote after the 2010 election that you see the Tea Party as a proto-fascist movement. Many view the Tea Party as buffoons, and you’ve mentioned that in Yugoslavia, Milosevic and his ilk were seen as buffoons before the war there in the 1990s, and in Weimar Germany before 1933, Hitler and his Nazis were seen as buffoons until Hitler’s sudden and unlikely rise to power.

C.H.: When a liberal class no longer functions, when normal mechanisms for change are shut down, then you vomit up figures like Slobodan Milosevic or Hitler. Tea Party figures provide an emotional consistency but their political agenda is utterly irrational. They want to dismantle government and yet don’t want to touch the military, the part of the government that consumes more than 50 percent of discretionary spending.

They have a great deal of rage, which is legitimate because they have been betrayed by establishment figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And that rage is also effectively used by the demagogues to target weak scapegoats, which always happens, so they demonize Muslims [and] undocumented workers [and] funnel that rage away from Wall Street and the criminal class that manage our financial institutions.

Although we live in a period of relative stability that will change if we don’t radically alter our economic and political policies, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which we’re borrowing from the Chinese at the absurd rate of $2 billion per day to fund. If that doesn’t change, we’re playing with an implosion of our currency, and if that happens and we enter a period of instability or crisis, we’re no more immune from the effects of breakdown than were the Yugoslavs or the Germans or the Russians or anyone else. And then it becomes very frightening.

These buffoonish figures like Glenn Beck and others who are laughed off by the establishment find a following among people who feel quite correctly that they have been betrayed by the traditional institutions of power.

R.L.: Like journalist Jeremy Scahill, you also see growing privatization of traditional government functions as part of a corporate class takeover.

C.H.: Yes, they’ve hollowed the state out from the inside, and now they’re gunning for social security. They’re parasitic. A corporation like Halliburton is a classic example. It is a creature of taxpayer money and its stock has quadrupled since the start of the war in Iraq, and yet most of its subsidiaries are set up in Dubai so they don’t have to pay taxes. Corporations are supranational: they’re quite happy to destroy the state as they’ve destroyed our manufacturing sector, to leech off the state in terms of sucking taxpayer money out of it. Goldman Sachs and Citibank and Wall Street investors have done (this), then refused to invest that money back into the country. That’s what has happened: a reconfiguring of American capitalism into a very frightening feudalism.

R.L.: In “Death of the Liberal Class,” you date a takeover by corporate power and a state of perpetual war to the era of Woodrow Wilson and World War I.

C.H.: That’s the seminal moment when the massive reconfiguration of American society begins. The first system of modern mass propaganda was created during World War I under the Committee for Public Information headed by George Creel. It employed the understanding of mass psychology pioneered by Trotter, Le Bon and Freud that grasped that people are manipulated more effectively by appeals to emotion rather than fact or reason.

The Committee for Public Information had a news division that churned out pro-war stories, a speakers’ bureau and graphic artists [that] saturated the culture. It was very closely studied by Goebbels (Hitler’s propaganda minister). It seduced most of the country, including a lot of the leading socialist intellectuals. Randolph Bourne and Jane Addams wrote quite movingly on how effective that propaganda was, and how few people were able to resist. Those who did resist were silenced with a cruder form of state control under the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

Once the war was over, the effective psychological manipulation continued, so the dreaded Hun was instantly replaced with the dreaded Red. The Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to deport Emma Goldman and others. The climate of fear, the search for the internal enemy, the constant witch hunts for the communist sympathizers never left American society.

Dwight MacDonald writes that World War I “was the rock on which progressive movements broke.”

So we saw a dismantling of populist radical movements, and an internal purging within traditional liberal institutions. It was the radical movements that kept the liberals honest.

Those radical movements, certainly after the witch hunts of the 1950s, were destroyed, and the liberal institutions pushed out thousands of people — teachers, social workers, professors, journalists — who weren’t affiliated with the Communist party but had a moral autonomy that was unacceptable. With the rise of neo-liberalism, under Clinton in particular, these liberal institutions didn’t fight back or withered as effective counterweights to power.

R.L.: You mentioned the press as a dying liberal institution. Why did you leave The New York Times?

C.H.: Because I was very outspoken against the Iraq War, and that became a public issue after I gave a commencement address at Rockford College that was picked up by Fox and all the trash cable shows. The Times responded by giving me a formal written reprimand saying that I could no longer speak about the war in Iraq. I had a choice: I could muzzle myself in service of my career, which I was unwilling to do, and (so) I left the paper.

R.L.: What are your political beliefs?

C.H.: I believe in heavy taxation, heavy regulation. Without heavy government interference in a capitalist society, it descends into a mafia political system and a mafia economic system, which is pretty much what’s happened. I’m a European socialist, not a Marxist. And I’m not an anti-capitalist. I’m anti-corporate capitalism, and if you don’t set up huge barriers to protect against corporate capitalism, it becomes predatory and will destroy your country.

R.L.: You foresee not only the end of democracy but the environmental ruin of civilization as we know it.

C.H.: Of course. The commodification of human beings, which is what corporations do, is matched by a commodification of the natural world. Nothing has an intrinsic value; everything is exploited for money or profit until exhaustion or collapse, and that’s why the environmental crisis is intimately twinned with the economic crisis.

R.L.: Your prognosis for American democracy is bleak, but you find hope in the stories of figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Nader, journalists Sydney Schanberg and I.F. Stone, historian Howard Zinn, and [Catholic social activist] Dorothy Day.

C.H.: Hope comes from physical actions: resistance or rebellion. It’s not going to come from placing our faith in bankrupt liberal institutions. All those people you mentioned are essentially American radicals who understood that. We don’t have a progressive wing of the Democratic Party that has any power or influence. Labor unions are spent. Liberal churches are irrelevant. Universities and the press have been corporatized.

So it’s incumbent upon those of us who care about protecting what’s left of civil society to recognize that hope comes in physical acts of resistance. If we’re not willing to do that, hope is extinguished.

Glenn Greenwald: How the US Government Strikes Fear in Its Own Citizens and People Around the World

In a recent speech, Glenn Greenwald discussed how the government and media treatment of WikiLeaks reveals a total lack of respect for the law and government transparency.

March 21, 2011 |

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[Editor's note: The following is a transcript of a speech that Constitutional lawyer and Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald delivered for the Lannan Foundation on March 8. The speech was transcribed by the blog Contumacious.]

I've been speaking more at events like this and at various college campuses and the like over the last year. And one of the things that typically happens before the event, is that there's a lot of time and mental energy spent on figuring out what the topic of the speech is going to be, and what the title is going to be. The speaker and the sponsors of the event go back and forth over what will be an interesting topic, what's timely, what will be interesting to people. And then the title gets worked on and changed and edited. I have several speeches planned over the course of the next month, and there are all different topics and titles that were all worked out as part of this arduous process. What I found is that, as much time and energy that's spent on that process, it actually ends up being completely irrelevant, because I find that no matter what the topic is, I keep speaking about the same set of issues, no matter what the title is.

The reason why that happens is not because I have some monomaniacal obsession with a handful of issues I can't pull myself away from no matter what the topic is. That may be true, but that's not actually the reason. The reason is because political controversies and political issues never take place in isolation. They're always part of some broader framework, that drives political outcomes, and that determines how political power is exercised. And so it doesn't really matter which specific topic, or which specific controversy of the day you want to discuss, the reality is, you can't really meaningfully discuss any of them without examining all the forces that shape political culture, and that shape how political outcomes are determined. So, in order to talk about any issue, you end up speaking about these same, broad themes, that are shaping, and I think plaguing, the political discourse in the United States.

This is something that I first realized when I started writing about politics in late 2005. One of the very first topics on which I focused was the scandal about the Bush administration eavesdropping on American citizens without the warrants required by law. This was first exposed by the NYT in December of 2005, so it happened around six weeks after I began writing about politics. I had this very naïve idea that this was going to be very straightforward and simple political controversy. The reason I thought that in my naiveté, was because what the Bush administration got caught doing [eavesdropping on Americans without warrants from the FISA court] is as clear as could possibly be a felony under American law. You can actually look at the criminal law that existed since 1978, when FISA was enacted. It says that doing exactly what the Bush administration got caught doing, is a felony in the U.S., just like robbing a bank, or extortion or murder, and that it's punishable by a prison term of five years or a $10,000 fine for each offense.

The report that the NYT published was that there were at least hundreds and probably thousands of instances where American citizens were eavesdropped on illegally and in violation of the law. So, I thought that this was going to be a fairly straightforward controversy, because I had this idea that if you get caught committing a felony, and the NYT writes and reports on that and everybody's talking about that, that that's actually going to be a really bad thing for the person who got caught doing that. I know it was really naïve. I'm actually embarrassed to admit that I thought that, but that really is was I thought at the time. I also thought that basically everybody would be in agreement that that was a really bad thing to do....that thing that the law said for 30 years was a felony and punishable by a prison term and a large fine. And, as it turned out (and I realized this fairly quickly) none of that actually happened. It wasn't a really bad thing for the people who got caught committing that felony.

And, not only did everyone not agree that that was a bad thing, very few people actually agreed that that was a very bad thing. So, what I thought I was going to be able to do was to take this issue and write very legalistically about it, and demonstrate that what the Bush administration had done was a crime, that it was a felony under the statute and that the legal defenses for it that they had raised were frivolous and baseless and that would be the end of the story. Crime committed, investigation commenced, punishment ensues. So what immediately happened, when I realized that none of that was really going on, of course then the question became why. Why was my expectation about what would happen so radically different than what in fact happened?

So, then I needed to delve into that dynamic, that I began by referencing that determines political outcomes. I had to examine the fact that we have a political faction inside the U.S. [the American Right] that is drowning in concepts of nationalism, and exceptionalism, in tribalism that leads them to believe that whatever they and their leaders do is justifiable inherently because they do it, and in a complete lack of principle...this is the same faction that impeached a democratically elected president not more than 10 years earlier on the grounds that the rule of law is paramount and we can't allow our presidents to break the law. And, yet, here they were defending it.

And then I watched Democratic politicians, one after the next, go on talk shows to talk about this scandal, and they were all petrified of saying what the reality was, which was that what the Bush administration got caught doing was a crime and it was illegal. They were all afraid to say that. What they were really eager for was for the scandal to go away, for them not to have to talk about it any longer. And so that made me write about the cravenness of the Democratic Party, and the extent to which they are replicas of Republicans when it comes to national security issues, and the complete bipartisan consensus, where all of these kinds of issues are concerned, especially in the post 9-11 world.

And then I started realizing that there were journalists who were shaping the political discourse who were not only saying that they were fine with the fact that the Bush administration had broken the law, but were attacking the very few Democrats who actually stood up and said "I think it's problematic when the president does things that the Congress says is a criminal offense."

The journalist class, almost unanimously, was saying that the Democrats ought to avoid this for political reasons, and that on substantive grounds, Bush did the right thing because he had to protect us. Then I had to start writing about the media's allegiance to political power and their belief in the omnipotence of the national security state, and its ability to act without restraints.

And then it turned out that it wasn't just the government who was eavesdropping, but they were doing so in collaboration with the largest telecoms, the entire telecom industry, in essence, which was turning over all the phone records and emails of their customers secretly to the government, even though laws were in place specifically prohibiting private telecoms from handing over any information to the government without warrants because in the past, when the Church committee discovered the decades of abuses they found that AT&T had been turning over records to the government, that Western Union was turning over all telegraphs.

And so, Congress said not only the government is barred from eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, but private telecoms--it shall be against the law for them to turn over data without warrants as well. Of course, they did exactly that. That led to my having to write about the consortium between government and corporate power and how the surveillance state and the national security state have essentially become merged; and that the real power lies with the private sector because so many of these government functions have been nationalized.

Then, of course, the entire "scandal" ended by all of the perpetrators being completely protected. The Bush Administration was given an immunity shield by the Obama administration from any investigations to determine whether crimes were committed. And the private telecom industry was given retroactive immunity by the Democratic-led Congress in 2008 supported by Barack Obama.

In fact, the only person to suffer any legal repercussions from that NSA scandal was someone named Thomas Tam, who was the mid-level Justice Department whistleblower who found out that this was taking place and was horrified by it and called Eric Lichtblau at the NYT and exposed that it had happened. The person who was the only one to suffer repercussions was the person who exposed the criminality. The criminals were fully immunized.

So that led to my having to write about how the rule of law had been subverted. And, so, I realized that what I thought the scandal was about, what I thought the issue was about,...you know, nice abstract clinical little discussions about whether the law had been violated, and whether Article II theories were really viable, were actually relatively irrelevant. You could have that discussion, but it didn't make much of a difference. What made the real difference were these broader themes.

So, although the topic tonight is ostensibly Wikileaks and the controversies surrounding Wikileaks, if you look at what has happened in the Wikileaks scandal, it involves every one of the ingredients that I just described. That's why I can give a speech on the erosion of civil liberties in the U.S. (which I'm going to do in a few days). Tonight I'm talking about Wikileaks, but what I'm always going to end up talking about are the fundamentals of how political power in the U.S. is exercised and the way in which just outcomes are subverted because of these dynamics.

One of the reasons why I find Wikileaks to be such a fascinating and critical topic is because I think it sheds unprecedented light on how these processes work and how they have come to develop and evolve in the U.S. I also think there's so much at stake in the war that has arisen over Wikileaks and Internet freedom, and the ability to breach the secrecy regime behind which the government operates. For that reason, too, it's such a critical topic.

There are a lot of different ways to talk about Wikileaks, and Wikileaks is a complex topic. But, one of the things I want to do is just to sort of walk through, a little bit, the chronology of my involvement in Wikileaks and to talk about some of the realizations that I've had that may have been somewhat known to me, but have really been cast into a very bright light as a result of what's happened in the controversy surrounding Wikileaks.

The first time that I ever wrote about Wikileaks , or ever really thought about WL was in January of 2010, a little bit more than a year ago, now. And this is a time when almost nobody had heard of Wikileaks , before they disclosed the first newsmaking leak, which was the video of the Apache helicopter shooting unarmed citizens and journalists in Baghdad. But, what had prompted me to pay attention to it and to write about it was that the Pentagon had prepared a report in 2008, a classified report, about Wikileaks that ironically though unsurprisingly was leaked to Wikileaks, which Wikileaks then published.

What this report said, it talked about how the Pentagon considered Wikileaks to be an enemy of the state; a grave threat to U.S. national security. It discussed a variety of ways to destroy Wikileaks: by fabricating documents to submit to them, in the hopes that they would publish forged documents, which would then destroy their credibility, like what happened with Dan Rather and CBS news and the Bush AWOL story; it talked about breaching the confidentiality between them and their sources so that their sources would get exposed and people would no longer feel confident in leaking to them.

I didn't have a really good sense for what Wikileaks had been doing, or what it was, but I figured that if there's any group being targeted that way by the Pentagon, that's a group that merits a lot more examination and probably some admiration.

So I started looking into Wikileaks and what they were doing, and at the time, although they hadn't made much news in the U.S., they had actually exposed a great deal of wrongdoing around the world. They had disclosed documents showing the involvement of government leaders in death squads in Kenya; they had shown the involvement of the Icelandic government in the financial collapse that destroyed that country's financial security; there was an Internet bill being discussed in Australia to shut down Web sites that were supposedly promoting child pornography, yet secretly on the list of targeted Web sites were a bunch of political sites that had been critical of the Australian government; they had exposed corporate toxic waste dumping in West Africa; the involvement, or the negligence of local officials in Berlin with regard to a trampling at a nightclub that killed 23 people. So they had been quite active in a whole variety of different ways in exposing wrongdoing.

The one document they had exposed involving the U.S. was a manual at Guantanamo for how prisoners ought to be treated. This manual was nothing very enlightening. We already knew that severe systematic abuse and torture were taking place at that site. But, the mere fact that Wikileaks had shown that they were able to start shedding light on some of the world's most powerful factions, and exposing serious corruption, and had touched a little bit on America's detention regime, with this one document, was enough for the Pentagon to take them very seriously.

So, I wrote at that time about that report, and I had talked about all the potential for good that I thought Wikileaks could do. I had encouraged, in the context of my writing about it (and I also interviewed Julian Assange at the time), I encouraged my readers to donate money to the group because there were indications that they were somewhat impeded in some of the disclosures they wanted to do because of the lack of resources. I said this would be a great organization to donate your money to. They need it. They look as though they could really achieve a lot of good.

And after I wrote that, I received a lot of comments from people via email, from people in person telling me at my attended events, from people in my comment section, American citizens who said the following: "I understand and agree with the idea that Wikileaks has a lot of potential to do good, but I'm actually afraid of donating money, because I'm afraid that I'm going to end up on some kind of a list somewhere; or that eventually I will be charged with aiding and abetting, or giving material support to a terrorist group."

This was not one or two people who tended toward the pole of paranoia saying these things. These were very rational people, and there were a lot of them. Some long-term readers whom I knew to be quite sober in their thinking. The fear that they were expressing was somewhat pervasive. That, to me, was extraordinarily striking: that these were American citizens who were afraid to donate money to a group whose political aims they supported; who had never been charged with, let alone convicted of any crime who felt like they were going to end up on some kind of government list, or possibly be charged with aiding and abetting or giving material support to terrorism.

Although I didn't find those fears to be completely justifiable, in the sense that I thought those things would happen, I told people that I thought they ought to set those fears aside and donate money anyway, the fact that those fears existed; that that kind of climate of intimidation has been created in the U.S. when it comes to the most basic rights of association and free speech, which are the rights which are implicated by donating money to a political organization that you support; that that climate of fear and intimidation had been so great that people were self censoring and relinquishing their own rights was something that perhaps in the abstract I had known about in the past, but really illustrated to me just how pervasive that had become.

Over the course of the next several months, because I was writing about Wikileaks more and more, especially as they began releasing the newsmaking videos and documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and I began engaging in debates on behalf of Wikileaks and arguing with those who were claiming they were a force for evil and should be punished and prosecuted, I got to know the people who were involved in Wikileaks, either currently or in the past. Especially among the people who had once worked with Wikileaks, but then stopped, there was a common theme that they all sounded when you spoke to them about why they stopped working with Wikileaks , including some who had been very high up in the organization hierarchy and who were well resourced, and people who are citizens of European countries.

What they said, almost to a person about why they stopped being involved in Wikileaks, and what a lot of people who still work with Wikileaks will tell you about why they are contemplating no longer working with Wikileaks is they will say: "I am extremely supportive of the organization's aims and mission, I am proud to have been a part of the things they have done thus far, but I have a paralyzing fear that one day, my government is going to knock on my door and not charge me with a crime (that I can confront and am willing to deal with), but they're going to knock on my door and tell me they are extraditing me to the U.S."

In other words, the great fear of almost every person now or previously involved in Wikileaks is that they're going to end up in the custody of the American justice system, because of the black hole of due-process-free punishment that they've seen created and that is sustained for foreign nationals accused of crimes against U.S. national security, because of the way in which people are disappeared without recourse to courts or any political protest.

It's amazing that we have spent decades, probably since the end of WWII, lavishing praise on ourselves as the model of justice for the entire world, the leaders of the free world, lecturing everybody else about what their system of justice ought to be, and yet the fear that so many people around the world have, is that they will end up in the grip of American justice. That to me was extraordinarily telling, as well.

Then, over the course of the next couple of months, when the controversy over Wikileaks was really escalated by the release of the diplomatic cables, I began doing a lot of public media debates over whether Wikileaks was a force for good or a force for evil, or whatever media morality narrative was, and how that was framed. I appeared on countless shows and television networks. The reason I was so ubiquitous doing that isn't because CNN and MSNBC producers suddenly decided that they really liked me. It was because there were so few people to chose from who were actually defending Wikileaks, because the unanimity in the media was essentially that they were demonic and ought to be punished.

So, in order to have a debate where one person was arguing on behalf of Wikileaks and one was arguing against it (it was very easy to find someone who was against it you could more or less pick a journalist or a political figure out of a hat and that would be accomplished), what was harder was to find people who were willing to defend it. There were some but not many. So, I did a lot of these show, a lot more than I like to do, and is probably healthy for me to do. One of the things that I found, that was sort of striking was, I was usually on the show, the format of the show would be: there would be some journalist or a person who is on TV, an actor on TV playing the role of a journalist along with some kind of government official, some like Washington functionary.

So, I was on CNN and I debated Jessica Yellin, who's the CNN anchor, along with Fran Townsend, George Bush's former national security advisor; and I did an NPR show once with Jamie Rubin, who was Madeline Albright's deputy, and John Burns, the NYT reporter. That was usually the format. I did MSNBC with Jonathan Tapper who's a journalist who writes for the Washington Post editorial page, and Susan Molinari, a former Republican congresswoman.

Literally, in every single case, the person who was designated as the journalist, and the person who was there to represent America's political class, thought and argued identically. I mean they were completely indistinguishable in terms of how they thought about Wikileaks. They were all in agreement that what Wikileaks was doing was awful; that our government had to put a stop to it. The only concern that they had was that the government wasn't more careful in safeguarding secrets.

So, you had people who were claiming to be journalists who were on television outraged that they were learning what the government was doing and furious at the government for not taking better steps to hide those things from them. And you had these debates that would take place and I would be listening to them and I literally couldn't tell the journalist and the political official apart. And the reason that was so striking to me was because, if you think about it, if you put yourself in the mindset of what a journalist is supposed to be, not what an American journalist is, what an American journalist is supposed to be, what they're supposed to be interested in, is exposing the secrets of the powerful, especially when the actions which are being undertaken in secret, are corrupt or illegal or deceitful.

What Wikileaks is doing is exactly that. It is shedding unprecedented light on what the world's most powerful corporate and government factions are doing. Any journalist who ever had an inkling of the journalistic spirit, at one point in their life before that all got suffocated, you would think they would look at what Wikileaks was doing and reflexively celebrate it. Or at the very least, see the good in it. Yes, that what they are doing is what we are supposed to be doing, which is bringing to the citizens of the world the secrets that governments and corporations are trying to keep to conceal their improper actions. And yet there is almost none of that.

I mean, it made sense to me that people in the political class were furious at Wikileaks because people in the political class inherently see their own prerogatives as being worth preserving, and they want to be able to operate in secret and think that they ought to be. But, the fact that journalists were not only on board with that, but were really leading the way was really remarkable to me as I did these interviews because there wasn't even really a pretense of separation between how journalists think and how political functionaries think. I found that pretty striking as well.

A few other aspects to the Wikileaks controversy that I think are commonalities in how our political discourse functions: One of the things you had was almost a full and complete bipartisan consensus that Wikileaks was satanic. I don't think there has been a single democratic or republican politician of any national notoriety (other than I think Ron Paul and a couple of very liberal members of the house) who were willing to say that maybe Wikileaks isn't all evil in a very cautious way. Other than that, you basically had a complete consensus as always happens when it comes to national security controversies. Almost nobody was willing to defend Wikileaks.

Then what you had was a faction on the American Right, and some Democrats as well, who very casually, almost like you would advocate a change in the capital gains tax, or some added safeguards for environmental protection, would go on television and start calling for Julian Assange's death; like I think we need to send drone attacks, I think we need to treat him the way that Al Qaeda is treated. And maybe I was being a little unfair to Democrats and the debate between Republicans and Democrats were having at this time was should we kill Julian Assange or just throw him in prison for the rest of his life, even though he hasn't actually committed any discernable crime? But the ease and the casualness with which our political culture entails calling for people's death, you know we ought to kill this person even without any due process we ought to use drones, we ought to treat him the way we treat Al Qaeda, and the like I think is also reflective of how our political culture functions.

Couple other things that happened that I think are quite common which Wikileaks sheds light on: One of the things that started happening was that you have members of Congress of both parties writing laws, now to vest the government with greater power to prosecute people for espionage, and for other serious felony offenses for leaking classified information. So this is very typical when a new demon arises and here we have Julian Assange and Wikileaks the villain of the month, immediately the government starts thinking about how they can opportunistically manipulate the hatred, the two-minute hate sessions that arise out of this new villain to develop and seize more power for itself. And you very much see that.

And the last point that happens that is, I think, quite significant ... was the complete manipulation of law to advance the interest of the powerful. One of the things that I found to be striking about what's happened with Wikileaks is, there's this group, Anonymous is what they call themselves, and they're essentially a group of mostly adolescent hackers who have quite advanced computer skills for doing things like shutting down Web sites or slowing them down.

What they decided they were going to do was they were going to take a position in defense of Wikileaks. They said that they were going to target for cyber attacks and other kinds of cyber warfare any companies that in response to the government's pressure terminated their services with Wikileaks. There were a whole variety of companies that obediently complied with the government's request to cut off all services of Wikileaks: Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, Amazon, all of these companies made it impossible for Wikileaks to stay online or for them to conduct financial transactions to receive donations.

Anonymous began to target these Web sites. And the attacks were fairly primitive. They slowed those sites down for a few hours. Not very much damage. And yet, the Justice Department treated them like this Pearl Harbor on the Internet. Eric Holder said "We are going to devote unlimited resources to getting to the bottom of Anonymous and who they are." Turned out to be a couple of 16-year-olds in the Netherlands and Belgium doing the clichéd operating-from-their-mother's-basement type thing, but the fact that they had targeted corporate power on behalf of Wikileaks, an enemy of the U.S. government, meant that the full force of the law was unleashed in order to punish them.

But, a couple of weeks before those Anonymous attacks, there was a far more sophisticated, and a far more serious and dangerous cyber attack that was launched at Wikileaks, that basically resulted in their being removed from the entire network of Web sites for the U.S., the entire website that hosts all Internet Web sites for the U.S. could no longer sustain those attacks that were being launched in a way that would safeguard their other customers. So they removed Wikileaks from the Internet. That was when they had to search around and ultimately find a different URL. Now that attack was really worthy of serious investigation because the complexity of the attack was really unlike anything that had really been seen before in terms of being right out in the open.

And yet, so far, for some really strange reason, even though that attack was every bit as illegal as the attacks that Anonymous had launched that merited such scrutiny and investigation from the Justice Department, Eric Holder, the Obama administration has never once vowed to get to the bottom of who might be responsible for the attacks that knocked Wikileaks offline, even though they're much more dangerous.

And so, what this really reflects is that the law becomes a weapon for the U.S. government for corporate power to use, to punish those who stand up to it the way Anonymous did in a very mild and modest way. And yet, at the same time, the law shields those who are in power or who are operating on behalf of those in power of to advance their interests as illustrated by the fact that whoever was responsible for the attack on Wikileaks, whether a government organization or a corporate entity, or some combination of both, broke serious laws, committed serious cyber felonies, and, yet, will never be investigated, let alone prosecuted by the Justice Department.

And it's all of these ingredients that I've just described that Wikileaks revealed, and that has shaped the outcome and driven the Wikileaks controversy are the same things I would talk about no matter what political controversy you asked me to talk about, whether it be civil liberties erosions; or what's happening in Wisconsin, or anything else. And that's why I say that the title, the topic, the individual episode that you chose to focus on, is valuable only as a window into how our political culture, how political factions all function.

The last point I want to make is why I think that Wikileaks is such a vital topic, not just in terms of the light that it shines on our political process, but in terms of what's at stake.

I actually do believe that the battle over Wikileaks will easily be one of the most politically consequential conflicts of our generation, if not THE most politically consequential. I think that we're just at the very incipient stages of this conflict, and that how it plays out is still very much still to be determined. I think what's at stake is whether or not the secrecy regime that is the linchpin for how the American government functions, will continue to be invulnerable and impenetrable or whether it will start to be meaningfully breached. And I also think that Internet freedom, the ability to use the Internet for what has always been its ultimate promise, which is to have citizens band together in a way that no longer needs large corporate and institutional resources, to subvert and undermine the most powerful factions to provide a counterweight to them, whether that Internet freedom will be preserved.

And this is why I think that: we have in general, when you talk about politics and you look at political discussions, what typically is focused on are these internecine day-to-day conflicts that are partisan in nature. What are Republicans and Democrats bickering about? What reason today are the left and the right at one another's throat? What is it that's dividing the citizenry and making the citizenry divisive and unable to band together to defend their common interest? These are the kinds of controversies that fill cable news shows; that occupy pundits and political chatterers, and all of that.

By and large, all of that is completely inconsequential. In fact, I shouldn't say that. It actually is consequential. It has a purpose. The purpose is to distract all of us from what really matters in terms of how the government functions. What matters in terms of how the government functions has very little to do with whether Democrats or Republicans win the last election, or the next election. And it has very little to do with who sits in the White House, what individual occupies the Oval Office. I don't mean to suggest those things are irrelevant, they're not, they matter in marginal and sometimes more ways.

But what they don't have anything to do with is the permanent power faction that runs the U.S. and runs the governments with which the U.S. is allied, this consortium of government and corporate power that I talked about earlier. What's really interesting is, it used to be case that if you stood up in front of an audience and said that what really is running the government of the U.S. is not the political parties that win elections, but this secret consortium of government and corporate power, a lot of people would look at you like you were some sort of fringe paranoid maniac, it would be a self-marginalizing act to talk about that. But I don't actually think that's the case very much longer, and that's because a lot of mainstream sources have confronted those realities, because it's impossible to turn away from them.

I mean you could of course go back to the famous 1956 farewell speech of Dwight Eisenhower, who is hardly a fringe figure. He was a four-star, a five-star general, and a two-term elected Republican president and he warned about exactly that. He called it the military industrial complex, of course. But he described how the merger of government and corporate power in the national security state context was threatening to subvert democracy because it would become vastly more powerful and unaccountable than anything that was actually still responsive to democratic forces. And yet, it's odd that something that someone like Dwight Eisenhower warned about became for a long time taboo to talk about. I think in the post-9/11 world, this merger has become so overt, so conspicuous, so pervasive that it's impossible to hide it any longer.

So earlier this year, or the end of last year, the Washington Post had a three-part series that got very little attention because it covered this topic too well. People just didn't know quite how to process it, especially people who go on television and talk about the news of the day. It was called "Top Secret America." It was written by Dana Priest, who's one of the widely hailed and highly decorated establishment reporters, along with William Arkin. What it describes is exactly what I just described, which is a vast apparatus of corporate and government power that is so unaccountable and so secret and so sprawling and so powerful that not even the people ostensibly running it know what it is composed of or what it does or what it entails. This is the faction that is truly exerting power in the U.S. when it comes to most of the significant policies.

So, people become confused, and frustrated and angry and confounded and disheartened when they elect a Democratic president like Barack Obama who ran on a platform of change and delivered so little of it; and who continues to extend and bolster the very policies against which he railed while he was running.

There are lots of reasons why that is, and part of it is because politicians are inherently unprincipled, and get into office and want to preserve their own power. They think that the power that other people exercise which was a threat, in their hands is not only something that could be trusted but could be used as a force for good. All of those reasons are true. But, what is really true is that this powerful faction that exists, this enormous consortium of government and corporate power is at least as powerful and probably much more so, than any single politician, even the "most powerful man on earth" or whatever we call the president these days. So, even if he wanted to change these things, and I think he doesn't, even if he wanted to, he probably couldn't.

What this faction relies upon more than anything else to preserve their power and to carry out the actions they undertake, is this wall of secrecy, this regime of secrecy. It is that secrecy that enables them to operate in the dark and therefore operate without any constraints, moral, ethical, legal, or any other kind. This is not a new concept. If you look at what political theorists have always talked about for centuries, if you look at what the Founders talked about, the gravest threat to democracy and to a healthy government is excessive secrecy, because people are human beings, and human nature is such that if you operate in the dark, you will start to abuse your power.

That's why, central to the whole design of our country, was that there would be these institutions that would prevent that from happening. They would be adversarial to political power. You would have the Congress that would investigate and exert oversight. We would have the media, the glorious Fourth Estate that would serve as a bulwark against abuse. We would have the courts that would ultimately hold people accountable under the constraints of law at least, if nothing else worked. And each of these institutions have utterly failed, especially, though not only, especially in the post-9-11 world to bring about any meaningful transparency to what the national security and the surveillance state is doing. They operate fully without accountability, without constraint and with total compunction to do what they want.

So, Wikileaks, is one of the very, very, very few entities that has proven itself capable of breaching that wall of secrecy. That is why it is one of the very few entities that has finally put some degree of meaningful fear in the heart of this national security state. For that reason and that reason alone is all I need. That is why I think a defense of Wikileaks has become so vital and so crucial and such an obligation on the part of anybody who believes that this regime of secrecy is so harmful.

Now if you look at the instances of serious government abuse over the past decade, and even longer, what you'll find is that the lynchpin, the enabler for all of them is secrecy. So, if you look at the Bush administration's creation of a worldwide torture regime, or its spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law, or Dick Cheney meeting with energy executives early on to formulate the nation's energy policies to benefit only that group, or how the government excluded any dissenting intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war to make the case as though it was somehow airtight, or even going back to Vietnam, when the government knew the war they were waging was unwinnable, even as they were assuring the American public they were making progress and then Daniel Ellsberg released the secret documents showing that.

It's always secrecy that enables this level of abuse. It's the same thing in all of the animal kingdom. Cockroaches at night scamper around in the kitchen and the minute you turn on the light, they run and hide. That is what transparency and light does to people.

One of the things about it is you can have whistleblowers, and we have had whistleblowers without Wikileaks, but there are a couple of features about Wikileaks that make it so unique and such a threat. One of the unique features is that it provides full anonymity. It doesn't even know the identity of the people who are leaking to it, unlike say, the NYT, which always knows the identity of their sources and thus could be compelled at some point to disclose it to the government. And they have been compelled to do so. Wikileaks does not know the identity of who it is who's leaking to them, and unless somebody goes around and boasts that they are the leaker it's virtually impossible for the government, no matter how much force they bring to bear, to discover the identity.

More importantly, Wikileaks is a stateless organization. Unlike the NYT or the Washington Post or the Guardian or Der Spiegel, or El Pais or any of the other newspapers around the world, Wikileaks does not physically exist in any state, and therefore can't be subject to the laws of that state.

It can't, therefore, be dragged into court and compelled to disclose information about their sources, even if they had it. But, what's more important still about this statelessness is that unlike American newspapers, which will acknowledge as Bill Keller, the executive editor of the NYT recently did, in an article he wrote about Wikileaks, they will acknowledge that even though they try to be objective, their allegiance is a patriotic and nationalistic one. They are loyal to the U.S. government, and their editorial judgments are shaped by what advances or undermines American interests.

They therefore don't disclose things many times on the ground that disclosure will harm American policy, even though that policy is improper. So, the NYT learned that the Bush administration was spying without warrants and they sat on that story for a year because Bush told them to, until Bush was safely reelected. Or, the Washington Post learned that the CIA was maintaining a network of CIA black sites throughout Eastern Europe, a violation of every precept of international law on American treaties. Although they finally wrote about it, they concealed the specific nations where those black sites were located because the CIA told them that if they disclosed the nations it would prevent them from continuing to operate those prisons. So they withheld the information that enabled that illegal policy to continue.

Wikileaks doesn't do that. They have no allegiance to the U.S. government. Their allegiance is to transparency and disclosure. So, sources know that if they disclose something to the NYT, it's very likely that the NYT will conceal it, or will edit snippets of it and release only those in order to protect the interests and policies of the U.S. government. Wikileaks will not have that allegiance. They have a true journalistic purpose which is to bring transparency to the world.

And then, finally what you see is the reform potential with Wikileaks. The amount of information which has been released over the past year is extraordinary. And although journalists have talked about how there's "nothing new in these documents" was the claim made for a while to dismiss its importance. On one hand Wikileaks is a great threat to national security and compromising all that was good in the world. On the other hand nothing they were disclosing was remotely new and it was all everything we already knew. That conflict never got reconciled. It didn't need to.

But, the reality is that the documents Wikileaks has disclosed has not only made huge headlines in the U.S., but in almost every country around the world. What's really interesting is that Bill Keller, the aforementioned NYT executive editor, although a hardcore critic of Wikileaks, in that article said, that some of the documents released by Wikileaks, allegedly disclosed to Wikileaks by Bradley Manning, exposed just how corrupt and opulent the royal family in Tunisia was, and that that helped fuel and accelerate the uprising in Tunisia, which was of course the catalyst for the rest of the uprisings in the Middle East.

So, if you look at the chat logs that have been disclosed, where Bradley Manning supposedly confessed that he was the source of these documents, what he says about why he did that was that he believed that only Wikileaks would provide the level of disclosure needed to bring about the kind of transparency that would make people, not just in the U.S., but in the world, realize the level and magnitude of corruption of the people in power. And that this could not help but trigger very serious uprisings and reforms: exactly what is happening is exactly what he said he hoped to achieve through this leak.

I have one more point that I just want to make, that I think underscores this whole controversy. And that is, as I said earlier, that I saw the Wikileaks controversy as a war over the regime of secrecy and whether it would be preserved or subverted and over Internet freedom as well. The people who are most threatened by Wikileaks are well aware of the fact that you can not stop the technology that Wikileaks has developed. Even if you did send a drone to kill Julian Assange and everybody else associated with Wikileaks, the template already exists. It's not all that difficult to replicate Wikileaks' system for anonymity and for disclosure.

In fact, there are other entities already popping up that will simply substitute for Wikileaks and replace what they're doing. The Pentagon knows that. The national security state knows that. They know that they can't create secrecy practices that will protect them against these kinds of disclosures, as well. So, their strategy is to escalate the climate of intimidation and deterrence, so that would-be whistleblowers in the future think twice and a third time and a fourth time when they discover illegal and deceitful actions about exposing it to the world.

So you see, in response to Wikileaks, and a variety of other whistleblowers, the Obama administration waging what is clearly the most unprecedented aggressive war to prosecute whistleblowers, people who exposed waste and corruption and lawbreaking in the Bush era, have been prosecuted with extraordinary aggression by the Obama DoJ, even though Obama, when he ran for president, hailed whistleblowers as patriotic and courageous, and said that whistleblowing needs to be fostered and protected, he's currently heading a war, the likes of which we have never seen, to put people who whistleblow, who expose the wrongdoing of the powerful, into prison, and to expose who they are and detect them.

On top of that, you have a war being waged on Wikileaks. The Justice department is obsessed with the idea of prosecuting Wikileaks, even though they have done nothing that newspapers everyday also don't do, which is expose government secrets that they receive from their source. And they've done things like subpoena the Twitter accounts of anyone associated with Wikileaks including a sitting member of the Icelandic Parliament who was once associated with Wikileaks, causing a little mini diplomatic crises, at least as much of a crisis as can be caused with Iceland.

You see as well what has happened to Bradley Manning ... what they want essentially to do, is to take that climate of fear that I began by talking about, that made so many people who read what I wrote petrified of donating money to Wikileaks, even though they have the absolute legal and constitutional right to do so. They want to take this climate of fear and drastically expand it. This is what the Bush torture and detention regime were about.

Everybody knows that if you torture people you don't get good information. It was never about that. Disappearing people and putting them into orange jumpsuits, and into legal black holes and waterboarding them and freezing them and killing detainees was about signaling to the rest of world that you can not challenge or stand up to American power, because if you do, we will respond without constraints, and there is nothing anybody can or will do about it. It was about creating a climate of repression and fear to deter any would-be dissenters or challengers to American power. And that is what this war on whistleblowing and this war on Wikileaks is about as well.

They don't want, more than anything, for anybody to get the idea that they can start doing what Wikileaks is doing, to start exposing those in power who engage in wrongdoing. That is their biggest fear, because they know that if that mechanism exists, they can no longer continue to do the things that they are doing.

So, this war on Wikileaks, this war on whistleblowers, is about forever ending really the one avenue that we've had over the past decade for learning about what our government and their corporate partners do, which is the process of whistleblowing. If they succeed, that regime of secrecy will become much more intensified. That deterrent will endure for a long time. But if Wikileaks is successfully defended, if these efforts are warded off, then one of the most promising means of bringing accountability and transparency that we've seen in a very long time, will be preserved. And that's why I talk about Wikileaks so much, why I write about it so much and why I think it's so important.

Glenn Greenwald is a Constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at Unclaimed Territory. His forthcoming book, How Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok will be released by Working Assets Publishing next month.