Undernews Headlines For December 7, 2010

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Establishment really scared
Visa & Mastercard block donations to Wikileaks

Now look at what you can still use your Visa & Mastercard for
Wikileaks news
• Facebook allows Wikileaks to stay
• Alternatives to PayPal
• Latest released cables
• Ron Paul: Focus on the policy, not Wiikileaks
• Twitter blocks trending Wikileaks
• Assange Accuser Worked with US-Funded, CIA-Tied Anti-Castro Group
• Military blocking troops from major news sites
• Search Wikileaks cables
• Government agency warns employees that even looking at Wikileaks documents could be a criminal offense
• Wikileaks back up in Switzerland Netherlands Finland Denmark US & Britain
• Other links

Assange offers his case
Julian Assange, Australian - In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win." . . .

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public. . .

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be "taken out" by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.. . .

Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn't want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

The tax deal
Wall Street Journal - The proposed 2% rollback of individuals' payroll taxes used to fund Social Security is the latest iteration of an idea that's been kicked around for years as a way to supplement incomes and boost economic growth. Under the plan, the Social Security payroll tax on individual wages would be lowered to 4.2% in 2011, from the current 6.2% rate.

A worker earning $70,000 would pocket $1,400 as a result of the tax cut.
Proponents of payroll tax cuts argue that they are effective stimulus because they can be delivered quickly. Also, because they are concentrated on lower and middle-income workers, they are more likely to be pumped into the economy through increased consumer spending. Both of those are reasons a bipartisan task force chaired by former Sen. Pete Domenici (R., N.M.) endorsed a payroll tax holiday last month.

Talking Points Memo - Progressive economists have worried that a payroll tax break along the lines of the one announced tonight could come back to bite Democrats if it undermined the solvency of Social Security. But officials tonight insisted that its cost to the Social Security trust fund will be reimbursed with a credit from general revenue.

Guardian, UK - The outgoing House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is reported to have expressed deep unhappiness at the deal, saying the White House gave in too easily to Republican pressure. Richard Durbin, the second highest ranking Democrat in the Senate, said the agreement to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy was "against my judgment".

Paul Krugman, the Nobel economics prize winner, called on Obama to stand firm against the Republicans' "tax-cut blackmail" which will cost the US treasury $4 trillion in revenue over the next decade and prompt a "major fiscal crisis".

"If Democrats give in to the blackmailers now, they'll just face more demands in the future. As long as Republicans believe that Mr Obama will do anything to avoid short-term pain, they'll have every incentive to keep taking hostages. If the president will endanger America's fiscal future to avoid a tax increase, what will he give to avoid a government shutdown?" Krugman wrote in the New York Times.

But Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said that Obama had little choice but to make a deal.

"The Democrats generally haven't adjusted to the fact that they lost the election badly. That's fundamental and they haven't accepted it. Republicans designated maintaining tax cuts as their top priority," he said.

NPR - Five major progressive groups¬Move On, Democracy for America, True Majority, Credo Action and the Progressive Campaign Change Committee¬are now urging the Senate not to ratify the imminent Obama deal.
Cable leak of the day
"The main activity of the day was eating and drinking - starting from 4 p.m., about eight hours worth, all told - punctuated, when all were laden with food and sodden with drink, with a bout of jet skiing in the Caspian. . . To the uninitiated Westerner, the music sounds like an undifferentiated wall of sound. This was a signal for dancing: one by one, each of the dramatically paunchy men (there were no women present) would enter the arena and exhibit his personal lezginka for the limit of his duration, usually 30 seconds to a minute." More from this diplomatic genre
Notes on the tax deal
Sam Smith - Some things to keep in mind when considering the Obama tax negotiations:

- The Democrats' real defeat - perhaps the worst of the whole Obama administration - was the party's failure to change the filibuster rules when they took over in 2009. This whole story could have been vastly different if Harry Reid hadn't been such a wimp.

- That almost forgotten document, the Constitution, gives the power to write laws and assess taxes to Congress, not the President. The President can obviously help, but the final deal is up to members of Congress. The media and presidents often act as though this is no longer true. A CNN reporter even described Obama's role in the tax negotiations as that of "Commander in Chief." But the game isn't over until it's over.

- When a crime is committed, there are two tasks: the first - and most important - is to help the victim; the second is to catch the perp. Obama has clearly done a lousy job in handling this matter, but anger over that should not endanger things like the extension of unemployment benefits.We can always deal with Obama later.

- The issue is how can Americans be best helped, not how can liberal members of Congress best display their virtue. For example, dumping unemployment benefits in the trash, or even at risk, is not a pretty way of showing off your integrity.

- As Time has calculated, Obama actually came out slightly ahead in this matter - by about $85 billion or a 25% gain on all matters negotiated. This doesn't mean that the whole issue was handled well - it wasn't - but a 25% advantage on a bad deal does soften the blow somewhat.

- Perhaps the most dangerous thing about this whole affair, as Mark Thompson has noted, is that the changes will expire in two years, or just in time to be a matter of major debate in the next presidential campaign. Given how the Democrats have handled matters so far, that's not good news.
The figures behind the fight
Extracted from a good analysis by Michael Scherer of Time:

GOP wins

$75 billion - Cost of extension of tax cuts for the wealthy.

$43 billion - Cost of estate tax change

$118 billion - Total of Obama's giveaway to GOP

Democrat wins

$120 billion - One year cut in payroll taxes

$58 billion - 13 month extention of unemployment benefits

$40 billion - Tax fredits for student and for parents with children, plus a number of business tax breaks.

$206 billion - Total of Obama's side of the deal

$85 billion - Net gain for Obama's side

Overall

$324 billion - Net cost of negotiated items

$787 billion - 2009 Stimulus package
How to reduce a deficit
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Censroship - Technically, reducing a deficit is a straightforward matter: one must either cut expenditures or raise taxes. It is already clear, however, that the deficit-reduction agenda, at least in the US, goes further: it is an attempt to weaken social protections, reduce the progressivity of the tax system, and shrink the role and size of government – all while leaving established interests, like the military-industrial complex, as little affected as possible.

In the US (and some other advanced industrial countries), any deficit-reduction agenda has to be set in the context of what happened over the last decade:

- a massive increase in defense expenditures, fueled by two fruitless wars, but going well beyond that;

- growth in inequality, with the top 1% garnering more than 20% of the country’s income, accompanied by a weakening of the middle class – median US household income has fallen by more than 5% over the past decade, and was in decline even before the recession;

- underinvestment in the public sector, including in infrastructure, evidenced so dramatically by the collapse of New Orleans’ levies; and

• growth in corporate welfare, from bank bailouts to ethanol subsidies to a continuation of agricultural subsidies, even when those subsidies have been ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization.

As a result, it is relatively easy to formulate a deficit-reduction package that boosts efficiency, bolsters growth, and reduces inequality. Five core ingredients are required.

First, spending on high-return public investments should be increased. Even if this widens the deficit in the short run, it will reduce the national debt in the long run. What business wouldn’t jump at investment opportunities yielding returns in excess of 10% if it could borrow capital – as the US government can – for less than 3% interest?

Second, military expenditures must be cut – not just funding for the fruitless wars, but also for the weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist. We’ve continued as if the Cold War never came to an end, spending as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.

Following this is the need to eliminate corporate welfare. Even as America has stripped away its safety net for people, it has strengthened the safety net for firms, evidenced so clearly in the Great Recession with the bailouts of AIG, Goldman Sachs, and other banks. Corporate welfare accounts for nearly one-half of total income in some parts of US agro-business, with billions of dollars in cotton subsidies, for example, going to a few rich farmers – while lowering prices and increasing poverty among competitors in the developing world.

Creating a fairer and more efficient tax system, by eliminating the special treatment of capital gains and dividends, is also needed. Why should those who work for a living be subject to higher tax rates than those who reap their livelihood from speculation (often at the expense of others)?

Finally, with more than 20% of all income going to the top 1%, a slight increase, say 5%, in taxes actually paid would bring in more than $1 trillion over the course of a decade.

A deficit-reduction package crafted along these lines would more than meet even the most ardent deficit hawk’s demands. It would increase efficiency, promote growth, improve the environment, and benefit workers and the middle class.

There’s only one problem: it wouldn’t benefit those at the top, or the corporate and other special interests that have come to dominate America’s policymaking. Its compelling logic is precisely why there is little chance that such a reasonable proposal would ever be adopted.
NPR & PBS public funding threatened
The Wrap - Massive budget shortfalls, vicious in-fighting and a power shift in Washington. Make no mistake, public media is facing the biggest ever threat to its existence. At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and the future of such popular programs as "Nova," "This American Life" and "Sesame Street."

And while public media has long been a favorite target for Republican lawmakers, the mounting federal deficit -- coupled with a series of PR blunders -- mean that threats to slash government aid to non-profit stations are no longer just idle boasting. Should the government turn off the spigot, National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service will likely have enough corporate and donor support to limp along, but jobs will be lost and popular shows will have to be canceled. On a local level, some of the thousands of public television and radio stations will almost certainly have to close up shop.
Meanwhile

A video that every boss should be required to watch
On campus

On campus: spotting your faculty enemies

Watchlist

At the behest of the incoming mayor, Vincent Gray, the DC city council has voted to start cutting welfare benefits. A mostly black and Democratic body has declered that its concern for the poor will only last for five years, after which benefits will be cut.

Thoughts of Barack Obama

"I'm a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes ... And so I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I'm a big supporter of non-censorship." – Barack Obama, November 16, 2009

ENDS

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