Amid the constant fracas of daily political life, it is often hard to see the big picture of power in America (and, for that matter, the world.) In researching my book, Family of Secrets, I came to a fresh appreciation of this big picture, assembling a vast amount of new evidence of the extent to which the visible democratic process has historically been covertly shaped by powerful interests, and how this shaping has gone largely unnoticed and unremarked-upon, right to the present.

My work has been praised by some and attacked by others, but since its publication, new evidence keeps emerging, in bits and pieces, that the public, its elected representatives (and often even presidents too) are being constantly manipulated to support outcomes favorable to wealthy elites.

The latest comes in the New York Times. In an article headlined “Records Show Doubts on ‘64 Vietnam Crisis,” Elisabeth Bumiller reports on newly released documents that confirm this. 

In an echo of the debates over the discredited intelligence that helped make the case for the war in Iraq, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday released more than 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts that show senators of the time sharply questioning whether they had been deceived by the White House and the Pentagon over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

…”If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress, has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the world, the consequences are very great,” Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, the father of the future vice president, said in March 1968 in a closed session of the Foreign Relations Committee.

…President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the [Tonkin Gulf] attacks to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but historians in recent years have concluded that the Aug. 4 attack never happened….

[T]he transcripts show the outrage the senators were expressing behind closed doors. “In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them,” Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, said in an executive session in February 1968.

…At another point, the committee’s chairman, Senator William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, raised concerns that if the senators did not take a stand on the war, “We are just a useless appendix on the governmental structure.”

….In the end, however, the senators did not further pursue their doubts. As Mr. Church said in one session that was focused on the staff report into the episode, if the committee came up with proof that an attack never occurred, “we have a case that will discredit the military in the United States, and discredit and quite possibly destroy the president.”

He added that unless the committee had the evidence to substantiate the charges, “The big forces in this country that have most of the influence and run most of the newspapers and are oriented toward the presidency will lose no opportunity to thoroughly discredit this committee.”

Now, having read this, consider what happens when one tries to show how this is an ongoing problem - that those “big forces” Senator Church warned against have been doing much more than creating a false justification for a huge escalation in Vietnam. When I showed the pervasive role of these interests in shaping the American presidency, over decades,  people began coming after me. A Los Angeles Times reporter angrily accused me of “paranoia,” and an outside reviewer selected by the Washington Post tried to minimize my work by suggesting that I was “overreaching.” Overreaching?  I’d like to know what Albert Gore Sr., William Fulbright and Frank Church would say if they were alive today, about the long-term evidence of constant falsification of events-including, of course the case for invading Iraq, but also the scores of other false stories I lay out for the first time in the book.

Also, consider what the New York Times does not say in this article, and cannot quite bring itself to talk about: That when the military and the president mislead the people, they don’t do it always just on their own. They, too, have other masters to serve. What goes unsaid is about the basic nature of power in  America-and ultimately, it leads not to government, with all its strengths and weaknesses, but to the “private sector,” where those “big forces” Frank Church cited can be found. That’s where we need to be looking, but so rarely do.

By Russ Baker on July 15, 2010

In a remarkable display of finger-pointing, oil company executives went after BP today, claiming that if they had been running the Deepwater Horizon rig, no accident would have been possible. But as several congressmen pointed out, all the companies’ safety procedures are absurdly inadequate. Which raises the question: how well do we, as a society, police risks? And, more to the point of this site, how well does journalism monitor potentially catastrophic projects of all kinds? Not well. We’re generally much better at reporting disasters after they happen.

As reported by the New York Times:

The chief executives of the world’s largest oil companies faced a Congressional panel of inquisitors on Tuesday and tried to cast the BP spill as a rare event that their companies were not likely to repeat….Rex W. Tillerson, chairman of Exxon Mobil, testified that if companies follow proper well design, drilling, maintenance and training procedures accidents like Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 “should not occur,” implying that BP had failed to do so…….John S. Watson, chief executive of Chevron, also pointed an implicit finger at BP, saying that every Chevron employee and contractor has the authority to stop work immediately if they see anything unsafe…..

 

Well, yes. Sure. But…

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House committee, focused on the spill response plans of the five companies. They were prepared by an outside contractor and are virtually identical, Mr. Waxman said. Each of the plans addresses a worst-case spill. BP’s plan says it can handle a spill of 250,000 barrels a day; Chevron and Shell say they can handle 200,000 barrels a day. The current estimate for the BP spill is about 30,000 barrels a day, and it is clear that the company’s plan was not adequate to deal with it. Mr. Waxman said it is clear that the plans are “just paper exercises.”

“BP failed miserably when confronted with a real leak,” Mr. Waxman said, “and Exxon Mobil and the other companies would do no better.”

That’s not just rhetoric, according to Energy subcommittee chairman Ed Markey:

“In preparation for this hearing, the committee reviewed the oil spill safety response plans for all of the companies here today. What we found was that these five companies have response plans that are virtually identical. The plans cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words. We found that all of these companies, not just BP, made the exact same assurances.”

Like BP, Mr. Markey said, three other companies include references to protecting walruses, which have not called the Gulf of Mexico home for three million years.

“Two other plans are such dead ringers for BP’s that they list a phone number for the same long-dead expert,” he said.

Wow. Now let’s talk about nuclear power……Or, better, turn to the Beatles for insight:

I am here as you are here as you are me
and we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun
see how they fly
I’m crying

Sitting on a cornflake
Waiting for the van to come
Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man you’ve been a naughty boy
you let your face grow long

I am the eggman
they are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo goo g’ joob

By Russ Baker on June 16, 2010

Just read breaking news that the Texas Rangers baseball team — the entity that put George W. Bush on the path to the presidency – has filed for bankruptcy.

According to Bloomberg News:

The Texas Rangers, the Major League Baseball team controlled by billionaire Thomas Hicks, filed for bankruptcy after the planned sale of the team fell through. The Arlington, Texas-based company listed assets and debt of between $100 million and $500 million in Chapter 11 documents filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fort Worth. Alex Rodriguez was listed as the Rangers’ top unsecured creditor.

Actually, the team was long bankrupt — morally bankrupt. As I describe in Chapter 13 of my investigative book, Family of Secrets, the back story of George Bush’s involvement with the team, and its antics in making money at the public’s expense, is part of the larger tale of the corruption of America itself.

Baseball is touted as the great game for the masses, but it is a business, about connections, making money, getting other people to pay for it. And it is about obtaining public goodwill. Bush used his very small personal investment in the firm, and a hyped-up title of Managing Partner, to create the momentum that led shortly to his being elected governor of Texas and then president of the United States. He also rewarded Hicks, who made Bush rich through purchase of Bush’s shares, by putting Hicks in charge of the vast investment funds of the University of Texas.

Here’s the deal: Bush assembled a group of people to take over the team. He made a much smaller investment than the others (who had every incentive to placate the son of the vice president of the United States), and was given a disproportionate amount of stock, which he sold for a great deal to a fellow who wanted a favor, and thereby was able to take a huge amount out the back end. The “value” of the team was largely based on real estate paid for by the local populace in local tax levies, and through the “eminent domain” seizure of land against people’s wishes, contrary to his stated political views against such takings. The people who paid for enriching him thusly were other investors, taxpayers, and, ultimately, the team itself. Now it’s bankrupt.

If we’d looked more carefully, when Bush was running for president, at how he made his money on the team, and how the larger ownership group made its money on public subsidies, we would have been forewarned about a presidential administration that would stop at nothing to enable their own circle to raid the public cookie jar.

Too late, you might say. But it never hurts, at times like this, to go back and study what exactly happened — to the Rangers, to the Texas public, and to America. We might learn something useful for the future.

By Russ Baker on May 24, 2010

I’m constantly struck by ways in which the privileged and the powerful manage to define the terms of discussion. Things like “welfare reform” and “compassionate conservatism.” Hard to be against those things, unless one knows something about what the nasty business they really involve.

Thus, I was intrigued by a recent essay from Martin Lobel, tax attorney extraordinaire and friend of WhoWhatWhy.  In this short but compelling piece, Lobel turns the traditional terminology related to taxes and spending on its head by describing giveaways to wealthy corporate interests, rather brilliantly, as unnecessary  ”tax cut expenditures.”

If we are serious about cutting the deficit, we need to cut tax expenditures too.

Tax expenditures are government spending programs that deliver subsidies through tax exemptions, deductions, credits, exclusions, deferrals, preferential rates, and so on for selected beneficiaries, for example, the oil industry.¹ Tax expenditures cost the government more than $1 trillion in fiscal 2011,² which is almost as much as our projected deficit. If Congress eliminated all tax expenditures, it would cut corporate and individual income tax rates by greater than 20 percent and still generate 20 percent more revenue.³

Lobel goes on to note journalism’s role (or, more precisely, lack of) in this:

Despite the importance of tax expenditures, they are hidden, so there is little or no discussion of them in the mainstream media. Lobbyists and Congress use tax expenditures as an easy way to subsidize a favored few at the expense of the ordinary taxpayer. Once tax expenditures are enacted, they are not subject to annual appropriations analysis of whether they are justified, and there is no limit on the amount of the expenditure.⁴ Best of all from a public relations standpoint, when commentators question those tax expenditures, proponents of the expenditures scream that eliminating them amounts to a “bad” tax increase….

It will not be easy to cut tax expenditures because those who benefit from them will fight to keep them by calling the cuts tax increases, evoking a Pavlovian response from the public, who often don’t understand what the real implications are….

Well, that’s what we’re here for. WhoWhatWhy looks forward to taking on tax expenditures. Tell the public — then let it decide what it wants to do. That’s, that’s….that’s….democracy!

By Russ Baker on May 17, 2010

An article about financial reform legislation seems too little, too late — and points out the need for better journalism in this area.
 
Headlined “Senate Financial Bill Misguided, Some Academics Say,” this New York Times article of May 3 was buried on Page A16 of the paper edition, and easily missable on the website.
 
Note the warning in the first sentence:

As Democrats close in on their goal of overhauling the nation’s financial regulations, several prominent experts say that the legislation does not even address the right problems, leaving the financial system vulnerable to another major crisis. [itals added for emphasis]

Some point to specific issues left largely untouched, like the instability of capital markets that provide money for lenders, or the government’s role in the housing market, including the future of the housing finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Others simply argue that it is premature to pass sweeping legislation while so much about the crisis remains unclear and so many inquiries are in progress.

“Until we understand what the causes were, we may be implementing ineffective and even counterproductive reforms,” said Andrew W. Lo, a finance professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I understand the need for action. I understand the need for something to be done. But what I expect from political leaders is for them to demonstrate leadership in telling the public that we need to proceed about this in a much more deliberate and rational and thoughtful way.” … “It is unfortunate if we end up repeating history,” [Yale] Professor [Gary] Gorton said. “It’s basically tragic that we can’t understand the importance of this issue.”

 A big part of the criticism is that the legislation largely addresses specific causes of the financial crisis, rather than systemic structures that may spawn new trouble spots if not fixed. Much more, these critics say, needs to be done, and done right.

…  [As University of Pennsylvania] Professor [David] Skeel [says]: “[W]e know from history that as soon as this legislative moment passes, the ball is going to shift back into Wall Street’s court. As soon as the crisis passes, what inevitably happens is that the people that are paying the most attention are the banks.”

The ball is not just in Wall Street’s court. It is also in journalism’s. If the biggest and best-funded media outfits can’t find a way to monitor the legislative process early and consistently and get warnings and useful information out in a timely fashion to actually have an impact, what’s the point?

By Russ Baker on May 4, 2010