Your Worst Nightmare; Conservative Success (Reminding conservatives that Georgie Bush did exactly what Republicans have been dreaming about for years... observe the wreckage.)
BILL MOYERS: What is your explanation for why the bankers who created this mess are still calling the shots?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that, especially after what's just happened at G.M., that's... it's scandalous.
BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, รข€˜contracts, sacred.' But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.
BILL MOYERS: The cover up?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Sure. The cover up.
BILL MOYERS: That's a serious charge.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Of course.
BILL MOYERS: Who's covering up?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.
These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator.
And (same link) the interview with Goodman and Greenwald:
BILL MOYERS: Glenn, what stories are you covering that you think are being ignored by mainstream press?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, let's start with the fact that there is a very widespread perception, one that's growing with more and more revelations, by the day. That what the United States did over the last eight years, in terms of how we detained people, how we interrogated people, how we tortured people and kidnapped them, and shipped them off to black sites, where they were completely disappeared is something that is not only disgraceful, and a fundamental violation of what we claim our political values to be but are crimes. Very serious war crimes. If you look at political discussions that take place on most major television no shows, about that. What you'll find is this implied consensus that Americans don't want their political leaders spending time on investigations and looking to the past. And that's absolutely false. It's a case where public opinion is distorted. Polls show that large numbers of Americans, even 50 percent believe that there should be investigations into whether or not crimes were committed. Because if we don't investigate when our political leaders break the law, it means that there's no rule of law. Look at our policy toward Israel, and this continuous blind support for whatever the Israeli government does. Something that's about to get even more harmful to our interests now that there's a very right wing extremist party with racist factions within the government in Israel. Polls show that if you ask Americans do you think the U.S. Government should be on the side of Israel, on the side of the Palestinians, or should be even-handed? Seventy percent, seven out of ten, will say that the government should be even-handed in that conflict. And yet, that is an opinion that is virtually never heard. Debates about our policy toward Israel is something that is essentially frozen out. You can go across those issues, and find the same dynamic.
BILL MOYERS: I sometimes sense some frustration in both of your voices. And I know that I.F. Stone was often frustrated. I mean, no one dug deeper into government documents than he did. And he saw the difference between the official view of reality, and the reality on the ground. And yet, for all of his exposure of these lies and deceptions and horrors, the Vietnam War raged on another ten years. Do you ever feel futile over the results of what you do?
GLENN GREENWALD: Personally, I actually don't. And, you know, I do think there is a difference. I think that the advent of technology the internet, in particular. And also the collapse of trust that so many Americans have now placed in the political and media institutions, as Amy was saying earlier. Largely, though not exclusively, as a result of how transparent the lies were over Iraq. Have really caused so many more citizens than ever before to question the kind of establishment instruments that have been used for so long to propagandize the citizenry. And to seek out alternative sources of truth. You know, change of this type is always extremely incremental. And it can be kind of imperceptible and very frustratingly slow. But I think it clearly is happening. And the more profound and transparent are the failures of the institutions. The more the citizenry will be open to alternative ways of thinking. The greater the crises are, I think, the more people will seek out opinions that may even five, ten years ago have been entirely excluded. And so, I think when you combine those events with the potency of technology, the advent of bloggers, and alternative media, like what Amy is doing, and the growth of it. I actually feel rather optimistic that the work that we do is paying off.
Thank god for Bill Moyers and real journalism. (Just for fun and the enjoyment of delicious memories, look at how he dealt with 0'Reilly's attack dog):
Glenn Greenwald: My guest today is Scott Horton, who has written the cover story, the cover article for the current edition of Harper's, that explores various approaches for investigating and prosecuting Bush officials for crimes that have been committed over the last eight years. The article is entitled Justice After Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration.
[snip]
I want to ask about the more general point that you make: that although it's the case that in the past that presidents have broken specific laws, what has happened under the Bush administration is different in kind, not just degree, because what they've really done is assaulted the law itself. That's the argument that you've made. What did you mean by that?
SH: When we look at all these things in tandem, we see that there's a collective attitude that applies across the board, which is, they don't care about criminal law limitations on the power of the president. They believe the president has the right to ride roughshod over them. And in fact, just as a good example: if you look at Barton Gellman's book the Angler [Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency] -- excellent book -- he talks about the formation of the terrorist surveillance policy and its implementation. And he had David Addington, with the authority of Vice President Cheney, telling individuals who are putting in their proposals, to make their proposals completely disregarding the law, including the criminal law restrictions. And indeed, they specifically solicited proposals disregarding the law, and they implemented them disregarding the law -- knowing that they didn't have legitimate legal arguments to avoid the restriction, that they could just do it by force and dint of power and authority.
And they could only do that by getting high-level policy makers and people down the line to accept their position of being above the law. So they did that. They were basically governing via being at war with the law, and that's something that has not happened before. The closest case we had previously was the Nixon administration, but what I think what happened there is bland compared to what happened under George W. Bush.
GG: Yeah, I think it's a point that's often overlooked. We don't have isolated serial cases of law-breaking; it's really an ideology of lawlessness -- a principle that was adopted that the president in general has the right to act outside the law -- that distinguishes it from even the worst law-breakers that have occupied the White House and government agencies.
When I read things like this, my teeth curl with the thought of the Bush cabal escaping unscathed from their eight years of terror. We must have public exposure of their crimes and an accounting. To quote Glenn Greenwald, Scott Horton:
argues that it is imperative to investigate, expose, and prosecute the Bush administration's war crimes, particularly its torture of detainees. Scott sets forth a detailed proposal for how this should be pursued, beginning with the creation of a Truth Commission to expose what was done and to generate public support for further proceedings, followed by prosecution.
A public egging while in the stocks would be a therapeutic start...
The Pentagon has posted to its website the roughly 8,000 pages and audio tapes it was forced to provide to the New York Times regarding its "military analyst" program. Anyone who reads through them, as I've now done, can only be left with one conclusion (other than being extremely impressed with David Barstow's work in putting together this story): if this wasn't an example of an illegal, systematic "domestic propaganda campaign" by the Pentagon, then nothing is.
This should be exploding all over the front pages, but it's not. Glenn Greenwald continues:
Despite this, the truly extraordinary blackout by the major television and cable news networks -- which were complicit in this program -- continues. Howard Kurtz of CNN and The Washington Post previously called this blackout "pathetic", and yesterday, The Politico published a relatively impressive article further documenting the "deafening silence" from the networks at the center of this story. As the article noted:
While bloggers have kept the story simmering, Democratic congressional leaders also are speaking out, calling for investigations that could provoke the networks to finally cover the Times story — and, in effect, themselves.
Beyond the networks' keeping this scandal completely concealed from their viewers, The Politico story noted that only two network executives -- CNN's President Jim Walton and ABC's President David Westin (.pdf) -- even bothered to respond to the letters sent by Rep. Rosa DeLauro to all networks demanding answers with regard to their complicity in this program. When responding, the two executives -- exactly as Brian Williams was when he was finally forced by blog-inspired commenters to respond (on his blog, but not on NBC) -- were casually dismissive of the entire matter, insisting that they had done nothing wrong (other than CNN's acknowledgment that they failed to detect a conflict of interest with regard to a single military analyst they had used).
Now if this had been ... say ... Bill Clinton who had done this, they'd work in the death of Vince Foster, illicit sex, cigars, AND Monica Lewinsky into the relentless 24/7 news cycle. The frothing and blather would never cease.
By they, I mean the Right Wing Smear Machine... the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. They aren't even trying to hide it any more, are they?
Because it truly is all show and no substance. Glenn Greenwald:
It was 24 hours of unadulterated, amazingly coordinated war propaganda that could not have been any further removed from the truth.
He is discussing the talkshow blitz of Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon:
It is difficult to remember a media spectacle to match yesterday's grand pageant where Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon were paraded across virtually every network and cable news show and radio program and heralded as "war opponents" and "Bush critics" who nonetheless returned from Iraq and were forced by The Truth to admit that we are Winning. For sheer deceit and propaganda, it is difficult to remember something quite this audacious and transparently false.
As was demonstrated yesterday, O'Hanlon and Pollack were among the most voracious cheerleaders for Bush's invasion and, as the war began to collapse, among its most deceitful defenders. But it goes so far beyond that.
Even through this year, they have remained loyal Bush supporters. They were not only advocates of the war, but cheerleaders for the Surge. They were, and continue to be, on the fringe of pro-war sentiment in this country. And yet all day yesterday, this country's media loudly hailed them as being exactly the opposite of what they really are.
