In The Public Interest

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

The very thing that Edward Snowden — NSA whistleblower, or traitor, malcontent and narcissist, depending on whom and what you believe — said he didn’t want to happen, did: the press turned its collective head to scan the details of his life, scouring for tweets and Facebook posts and pictures of his way-hot girlfriend, turning away from the vastly more significant Prism program he exposed.

One might conclude that it went after the salacious, looking for the titillating rather than providing the public what it needs. Ah, but it gave us what we want, given our interest in Snowden’s lifestyle and his girlfriend’s skill as a acrobat.

With the sure instincts of carney pitch-men, the press spends little effort in analyzing current problems or taking a stand against governmental excess. If you wonder whose side they’re on, they’re on their own. Let the Internet(s) worry about facts and figures, they’ve got suckers to lure into the tent to see the two-headed calf; in short, tickets to collect. Nothing’s for free, you see. Everything costs the price of admission. I see that PBS, one of our last remaining bastions for unbiased news in this country, has cut back their funding, closing field offices in San Francisco and Denver. A very bad indicator for the fourth estate, which should have little truck with profit, and just grist in the mill of the corporate estate that eats truth for lunch and passes you the bill.

Sure that what we really want is a bewildering array of responses from others about what the crisis du jour means, giving us a heads up about how upset we should be and how we should think about things, the press scrambles to offer a point of view acceptable to the Establishment without seeming complicit. They always back up just short of candid, leaving us to channel our inner sleuth in order to figure out which dots to connect. We’re not too good at that yet, but we’re getting better.

Meanwhile, the tit/tat opinion page offered by MSM isn’t nearly as exciting as the two-fisted, lip-biting conversations offered on cable TV news that don’t have to contain even a shred of truth. Statistics show that four out of every ten Republicans think that the Affordable Care Act has been repealed, as suggested by pundits on their “fair and balanced” news source. Keep the rubes excited, boys, keep them coming back for more!

That’s evidently how we want our news delivered, watered-down and manageable, feeding our bias while neither rattling our cage nor mussing our feathers. It’s scary to break through a wall of delusion and discover unhappy truth, scary to contemplate that all is not as we perceived it. Frightening to realize we have so little control over our lives.

Easier not to look at scary stuff, to choose diversions that soothe our jangled senses. How else to explain, for example, the photo of a dog anus that resembles Jesus and the video clip of a two-faced kitten (which has now, mercifully, died) rating the second and fourth most popular bits on Huffpost today?

This was a week when news was like the little girl with a curl. When it was good, it was very very good; when it was bad, it was horrid. Much of the big news was nut-shelled by Eric and Company in Friday’s premium piece.

Horrid news includes being pushed into a response in Syria due to chemical warfare — the “red line” issue that’s put us in a corner — although our involvement offers no clear prospect of success in either stopping the genocide or discovering which faction to support. There’s no win-win here, but the bottom line is — always has been, always will be — that in a hot fight among factions, the innocent will die. The U.N. reports the death of 93,000 Syrian’s in the last two years.

Obama has erred on the side of caution, but it appears he can no longer stall. Bill Clinton criticized the Prez for not getting involved sooner, as he, himself, did in Kosovo. Seems to me Bill’s got a short memory, but perhaps he’s positioning for a Hillary run. I’ll bet the Rwandans remember everything that was, and wasn’t, done under the Big Dog’s tenure. Getting involved probably isn’t going to please a war-weary public, but we haven’t been asked nor will we be. That’s not how we roll in the U.S.A.

Another chemical plant explosion, this one in Louisiana, has killed one and hospitalized 73. The plant hadn’t had an OSHA inspection for two decades, much like the one that all but flattened a town in Texas recently and hadn’t had inspection since 1985. Low staffing and funding of OSHA have gutted the agency, making on-site inspections rare. A recent 8.2% budget cut, due to sequestration, has whittled their efficacy down even further, despite projections that some 7,000 chemical plants around the nation have reported, according to ThinkProgress, “that a worst-case scenario would impact populations greater than 1,000 people, and 90 plants would impact more than 1 million people.”

Brad Manning’s trial continues but we don’t know much about that. It’s Super-Duper Secret, like all those things he let out of the bag.

Amazingly, we’ve become so accustomed to hearing the bad stuff that when good news arrives, we’re shocked. For example, testing the limits of our “ownership society,” the Supreme Court’s rejection of DNA as private property should have provided us an enormous sigh of relief, considering how much of the public good has been handed over to corporate personhood in the last decade. Those expecting the worst had to pinch themselves, while the labs owning hundred of DNA patents more likely wanted to pinch the Supremes.

Monopoly patents for big companies have been promoted as the only way to ensure medical breakthroughs, bypassing government in order to throw Big Pharma money at the process of scientific discovery. The ensuing profits, of course, are then protected by corporate patent. Instead of serving public interests, these patents have made equal, affordable access to DNA testing prohibitive for patients, some of whom had to wait long (and dangerous) periods to raise money for the process. Angie Jolie spoke to the extreme testing expense when revealing her double mastectomy.

In this case — involving genetics for breast and ovarian cancer victims — the Supremes did not split the customary hairs. Surprisingly, they put patients’ health and scientific research ahead of private corporate profit. In a unanimous decision, and delivered by no less than Clarence Thomas, the Supremes finalized the question of DNA ownership, although, as with any big decision, hundreds of possible new court cases were born in the doing.

Genetic materials have received over 40,000 patents since 1984 (the PERFECT starting date for such a project,) and that’s a lot of Petri dishes on the line. But while all that remains to be sorted out, patients suffering breast and ovarian cancer will no longer be locked in to limited choices, but will have access to any resulting medical innovation and affordable testing. This decision is also expected to cut costs for screening, leading to earlier treatment.

There is seldom a unanimous decision in the Supreme Court of the United States of America, or one that consciously elevates the public interest over corporate. Not just good news, but great news.

Also, the closure of California’s San Onofre Nuclear Plant is a project that’s been dear to my heart for over thirty years. Back in those days, I would often spend weekends with friends at their sweet little home within walking distance of the beach, just down from the plant. Famous as Nixon’s one-time summer White House, their little town was also infamous for its proximity to the problematic reactors.

Once every six weeks, my friends would receive a packet of materials about how to protect themselves from radiation and what they would be expected to do in a disaster. The nuclear facility and most of the little beach towns along that corridor back up to Camp Pendleton and its shooting range, making a bee-line to the East impossible. The prospect of a north/south freeway snarl, should an evacuation be declared, is almost laughable. You could walk out faster.

True, there’s little actual humor in such a possibility, although my friends never seemed disturbed by their proximity to this limping, lethal nuclear plant, considering it part of the price paid for the good life in So Cal. That left me to fret for them, concerned about what was spilling out of the two round, nippled structures we called The Tits, what was mixing in the surf we let our kids splash in. Less was known in those days, of course. I wonder what they’d make of the news coming out of Fukushima, indicating as many as 27 youngsters, of  174,000 tested, with thyroid cancer? Under normal circumstances, that number is one or two per million.

And now, after several years of cracking, leaking and insufficient repairs at the aging facility, Southern California Edison has decided that it’s not economically feasible to continue trying to repair the crippled reactors — which were shut down over 18 months ago after the failure of newly installed steam generators caused a radiation leak — which is really good news for the entire region.

Yes, there will be almost a thousand lay-offs and a dangerous facility to be dismantled, nuclear waste to be dealt with. There will be high energy costs passed along to consumers, and if summer heat returns to the area as predicted, brown-outs, even black-outs. No matter. Decades of reported leaks and cracks, and the unseen dangers they represent, will be behind.

That’s the good news, and a stab in the heart of the short-lived nuclear renaissance that has three new facilities currently under construction, all behind schedule. The bad news? It’s the expense of nuclear energy that seems to have caused its decline. Experts are pointing to natural gas as the cheaper option. Frak on, America!

It would be good if we knew more about these things — NSA spying, Syrian politics, Big Pharma shenanigans, nuclear plant dysfunctions — sooner, don’t you think? It’s in the public interest to get a clear sense of what we aren’t being told, as much as what we are. Enter the whistleblowers and God/dess bless ’em, but there is very little evidence that we have been properly informed about much of anything for decades. Given the challenges in front of us, the number of whistleblowers it would take to get our attention is legion!

We’ll have to rely on common sense. There are some Super-Duper Secret Things — none of them in the public interest — going on in various strata of government that we should always sniff around carefully, given all we’ve learned about power and money these last years. We’ve put a toe in to them all now, I think, although you never know how things will go with secrets.

Manning gave us the heads up on the military industrial-complex; Snowden — Spock-like in his notion that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few — has us examining the NSA; and, a few years back, Wall Street took that fateful tumble, giving us a look at the inner workings that put us in fiscal free fall, with sharp folks like Matt Taibi following the Street’s every move like heat-seeking missiles, all to no avail.

You can tell who is part of the Super Secret Inner Sanctum by their overt disdain for the public, and by the way they deal with their “outing:” too big to fail rhetoric, public outcry demeaned, whistleblowers rebuffed or punished. You can tell who the problems are by the fact that they’re never held accountable.

Those three — NSA, MIC, WS — continue to function as if nothing was dark and dank at their very heart, but the public knows better. Currently, 38 percent of those polled think Edward Snowden has done the country a service, while 35 percent think he’s bad, bad, bad. Twenty-something percent aren’t sure one way or another, but according to pollsters, those who delve deeply into the issue seem to favor Snowden’s pardon. I’d suggest that those with no opinion appear ‘teachable.’

Delving deeply into the issue is the whole damned point, isn’t it? I know, regarding the good news and the bad, the picture of the dog’s butt that looks like Jesus seems preferable to an afternoon studying our very serious problems. The two-headed kitten, bless it, is more interesting than trying to connect dots back to Super-duper Secrets being withheld or honing our ability to pay attention when we see them. But we’re in crunch mode, we need to know what connected dots look like — especially the ones we seem to have missed.

Yesterday, our whistleblower of moment, Edward Snowden, reported that the U.S. has been hacking computers in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland for years now. He reports more than 61,000 NSA global hacking operations. According to Snowden, “We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one.”

Well, isn’t that a pretty picture? Especially since one of our main bitches, brought to the table last week when new Chinese President Xi came to visit, was cyber-security and U.S. allegations that China had hacked into our systems. According to Obama, “It’s important … to distinguish between the deep concerns we have as a government about theft of intellectual property or hacking into systems that might disrupt those systems … versus some of the issues that have been raised around NSA programs.”

Let’s connect the dots all the way around this issue, shall we? Intellectual property is no more important than personal privacy. Both deserve the highest ethical standards that can be brought to bear. Both need to be protected as personal rights and neither can be, so long as they’re a Super-duper Secret. If Obama has hackers and Xi has hackers, and neither are going to divulge their secrets, preferring to play their cards close to the chest, what did they talk about all day? Anybody out there think they didn’t talk turkey about this situation? Pffft! Anybody think WE shouldn’t be doing the same?

Perhaps there are places all across the world that have different expectations from Americans. Perhaps many governments have no interest in serving the public good, no citizens demanding it, but THIS government was conceived to do exactly that. State secrets are one thing, secret government is another. Secrets sat on at government request by newspapers, things not said that impact the credibility of lawmakers. Smoke and mirrors from politicians that no longer seem anything but a joke. We can do better than this.

One last word about good news, as we end on this bad taste in our mouth: the Kansas State Board of Education voted Tuesday to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which is a new science curriculum that treats evolution and climate change as fact. That’s KANSAS we’re talking about, as in “What’s The Matter With …?”

While we’re considering all that’s wrong, all that’s broken, all that needs to be reworked as the big planets play marbles with our social and governmental structures, it’s worth considering that if Kansas can finally make it back from Fantasyland, can embrace common sense and change for the better of its citizens, so can all of America. The public interest will be served as soon as the public is interested, and we’re getting there, one whistleblower at a time.