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.

But first, the release:

DETROIT — On  June 26, at 2pm, a group of U.S. military veterans will hang a large banner on the abandoned Eddystone Hotel, on Sproat St., between Cass and Park, to protest and reveal the effect of war spending on American cities.

Members of Veterans For Peace (VFP), attending the U.S. Social Forum, a gathering of over 8,000 activists from across the U.S., created and erected the 10 x 15-foot sign that reads, “HOW IS THE WAR ECONOMY WORKING FOR YOU?”  Detroit has an unemployment rate of 15 percent and 10,000 abandoned homes on the mayor’s demolition list.  

That’s bad enough, but what really got my attention were the following statistics:

Taxpayers in Detroit have sent a total of nearly two billion dollars to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The city’s 2011 general fund budget of 1.3 billion dollars contains an estimated deficit of 300 million dollars, even after years of cutbacks in services once assumed to be part of urban life.  The budget for Detroit schools has a deficit in the same range.

“Detroit, like so many of our cities, is in crisis,” said Mike Ferner, National President of VFP.  “This crisis is no different than a five-alarm fire and we should respond the same way.   Instead, we watch America’s cities literally crumble while we pour thousands of lives and trillions of dollars into wars abroad.”

John Amidon, President of VFP Chapter 10, added, “It’s absolutely criminal that the people who built the U.S. auto industry have to watch their city collapse around them while they send $2,000,000,000 to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  This is indeed the purest form of madness and it’s coming to a city near you.”  

The release concluded with a fairly innovative plan for future action:

VFP, with over 100 chapters, is beginning a campaign to work with local government officials to place war counters on city halls stating the amount of money each community has sent to the wars….

Ok, so how much coverage did this protest get — or the relevant and moving accompanying statistics? Answer: None at all. Nothing. Nada. That, in short, is the state of journalism today:  keeping the war far from the home front.

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

Mr. Dudley denied that BP, the British oil company, had cut corners in drilling the original well. He shrugged off a report Sunday in The New York Times that said that as far back as last June BP engineers expressed concern that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under pressure.

“The casing designs that are used in the Gulf of Mexico, we’ve used those in other places,” he said. “I think those are statements that an investigation needs to go through and look at. Cutting corners is not the way I describe how we do our business.”

Right on its face, several questions (and answers) present themselves:

• (1) Did BP’s managing director, Robert Dudley, as the Times summarizes, “den[y] that BP..had cut corners”? Actually not. What he said was that “cutting corners is not the way I describe how we do business.” That might sound like splitting hairs, but with liability like BP faces, splitting hairs is about everything. He didn’t actually deny that the company had cut corners. He simply said that he doesn’t describe that as a company policy. But then, what company actually announces that it cuts corners? So, what he said was technically true, while meaning nothing.
• (2) Did Dudley directly dispute the claim, paraphrased by the Times, that “as far back as last June BP engineers expressed concern that the metal casing….might collapse under pressure?” Nope. He simply noted that the company had used the same casing designs elsewhere. But that in no way disputes that the engineers registered their doubts — about using that casing in that particular location at that depth.

The very nature of his statements is misleading. And that needs to be pointed out, explicitly, to the public.

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.

Under the decidedly benign headline “Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us,” we learn that Sunstein, a close friend of President Obama, runs the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA),  a little-known White House office  that reviews the big regulations coming out of federal agencies.

We learn that

The office that Sunstein occupies is a kind of cockpit for the modern administrative state.

We learn that Sunstein

is certainly the most productive and probably the most influential liberal legal scholar of his generation….

In what is certainly an interesting if somewhat vague article, we quickly also learn that

Sunstein wants to use OIRA to make regulations more supple, not less robust. Government regulations can operate at the level of philosophy, elaborating how you weigh the interest of the individual against that of society….

What does this mean? We have to wait 35 paragraphs, to the end of the article, to learn how this might manifest itself if he could do what he wanted:

Sunstein had, during his academic career, a penchant for publishing trial balloons — they were a necessary part of his inquiry, a perpetual what if? Now, with their author a government official, some of these conjectures seem more worrisome. Sunstein has, for example, written often about the corrosive effects of rumors and falsehoods on democratic discourse (it is the subject of one of the two books that were published while he was waiting to be confirmed last year), and in a 2008 paper, he proposed that government agents “cognitively infiltrate” chat rooms and message boards to try to debunk conspiracy theories before they spread. The paper was narrowly concerned with terrorism, but to some, these were dark musings. The liberal essayist Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, called the proposal ”spine-chilling.”

Yet, the article provides a cop-out.

…Many innovative ideas — among them, some of the corrections proposed by behavioral economics — are still hypotheses. Like Sunstein, their brilliance comes with speculation, and it comes with whimsy. 

I.e., don’t worry, Sunstein was just playing around with his dark idea of government agents going undercover to shape political discourse. But was he?

The paper then quotes Sunstein seemingly dismissing the whole thing:

“There’s a big difference between the role of an academic and the role of someone in government,” Sunstein told me when we spoke at the Au Bon Pain near the White House…..”When I was an academic, I’d sometimes get a little feeling of excitement when I had an idea that was, I hoped, fresh,” he said. “And whether anyone should act on that idea is a very different question.”  

The reader will be forgiven for not realizing that the interview at Au Bon Pain took place in the fall of 2009 — that is, before Sunstein’s controversial paper came to light. So why did the Times give the impression that it had contacted him and gotten a reaction to the tempest? We never do learn whether he really intends to follow through on his bizarre proposal.

But consider this seemingly unrelated comment from his wife, found some 20 paragraphs earlier in the article, in which she relates a story about an early date with Sunstein:

…she asked him if he ever fantasized about doing anything else. “I expected him to say he dreamed of playing for the Red Sox,” she told me. “His eyes got real big and he said: ‘Ooh! OIRA!’ ”

“And I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ “

Good question. Why would a guy want so badly to head up such an obscure agency unless he saw an opportunity to advance his ideas? What other motive would he have had?

The real meat here seems to be buried, and was likely missed by most people. Who reads an article blandly called “Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us?” And, really, does he want to “nudge” us? Or does he want to give us a good hard shove? It would seem that having a person with such neo-Nixonian views in an important position and exerting influence on the president of the United States might warrant some additional inquiry.

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!

…warning that our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health….it’s an extraordinary document. It calls on America to rethink the way we confront cancer, including much more rigorous regulation of chemicals…..The report blames weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary. “Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”

Kristof makes a case for the urgency of action by noting the establishment credentials of this panel:

 The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies….It’s striking that this report emerges not from the fringe but from the mission control of mainstream scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel. Established in 1971, this is a group of three distinguished experts who review America’s cancer program and report directly to the president….

But why have we — and columnists upon whom we depend for our analysis, waited until the mainstream finally confirmed the warnings of the “fringe”? 

Why wait until establishment bodies finally do their thing?

Studies of BPA have raised alarm bells for decades, and the evidence is still complex and open to debate. That’s life: In the real world, regulatory decisions usually must be made with ambiguous and conflicting data. The panel’s point is that we should be prudent in such situations, rather than recklessly approving chemicals of uncertain effect.

Indeed, Kristof seems to agree that we ought to heed early warnings. And these, invariably, don’t arrive via the mainstream press. It’s pretty late in the game. A good reason for more aggressive journalistic work on the most pressing problems. And that’s probably going to come from the newest outfits, the ones that boldly err on the side of caution — not in the interests of corporations, but on the side of the public.

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?

Well — duh.

Yet check this out: Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has alleged exactly that, in a deposition supporting a detainee’s lawsuit. The story of Wilkerson’s assertions was published on April 9 in….a British publication, the Times of London. And then they simply fizzled.

As the article noted:

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration…

…He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”….

WhoWhatWhy’s research librarian, Dave MacHenry, could find no examples of major American media covering this story.