Week of 09/13/2010

The REAL Stimulus - Employment
– by David Matthews 2

It should come to no big surprise that the economy isn’t faring too well. The so-called “recovery”, as so proclaimed by Wall Street and the White House, is just another house of cards falling back down.

And the so-called “experts” are all scratching their heads and wondering why this is so. After all, we gave over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS to Wall Street to kick start the economy, right?

That’s what President Obama and his people were saying was needed. And as soon as the money was handed out, all of those “experts” proclaimed that the economy was “on the mend” and that we’ve “come back from the brink”.

And they MIGHT have been right… if unemployment wasn’t still a problem.

What? WHAT?

How can this BE? We handed over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS of money that we didn’t even have to Big Corporate! They were supposed to use the money to create new jobs to replace the ones they either destroyed or shipped overseas. What did they expect the money to be used for… to fatten their profit margins?

Well, yes, that is EXACTLY what Big Corporate did with they money. They’re sitting on the money and letting it collect interest as they continue to operate like the October Surprise of 2008 never happened.

Oh, they’ll use the money to create jobs… eventually… but on THEIR timetables, not America’s. After all, they’re hearing from their best buds in the whole world… FoxNews and conservative/neo-conservative talk radio… that Obama is trying to destroy their businesses!

Needless to say, the fifteen million Americans out of work and struggling to make ends meet are on the losing end of the equation. Bankruptcies and foreclosures are still a looming threat, the loss of tax revenue is strangling state and local governments, and as the old saying goes, the beatings will continue until morale improves, which means that we are seemingly locked in an economic DEATH SPIRAL.

In other words, when the “experts” tell President Obama that we’ve “come back from the brink”, they were actually LYING to him. And then when he repeats that mantra to the masses, he comes off looking like just another Pollyanna politician. (Note: I’m actually giving Obama the benefit of doubt here. But breaks are hard to come by around here… much like jobs… so he shouldn’t waste what little trust he has left.)

So now that the news is starting to sink in that the economy WASN’T “fixed”, Obama’s so-called “experts” are now splitting hairs over what happened and what needs to be done next. Some say the “wrong people” were heard. Some say that they were too “timid” with the money, and that they actually needed to give away STILL MORE tax money that we don’t have.

Look, giving out ONE TRILLION DOLLARS for something that doesn’t involve military combat and the removal of an Iraqi leader is pretty much unprecedented. Calling it “tame” or “timid” is like saying the Titanic only took on “a little water”.

Okay, so obviously the glorious “summer of recovery” (that’s their catchphrase, not mine) turned out to be a dud. We got punked by Wall Street… AGAIN! No big surprise.

So… what now?

Well the same “experts” that came up with the idea of giving Big Corporate ONE TRILLION DOLLARS of money that we don’t have decided that we need a NEW stimulus package. And they decided that the best way to stimulate the economy is through… INFRASTRUCTURE!

Huh?

Yes, apparently the same “experts” that falsely believed that big infrastructure projects “saved” the economy the last time around are at it again. They want BILLIONS to be spent on more road and bridge improvements.

Well I suppose that would work… provided that the projects were all built with the bodies of the fifteen million Americans out of work. Oh, and some are estimating that number to get as high as THIRTY-ONE MILLION by the end of the year.

At this point I have to seriously question the wisdom of these so-called “experts” that Obama is relying upon.

First, I object to the “official” definition of “creating jobs”, which according to the White House is now “create a new job or saved a current one”. We spent seven out of the eight years of the previous White House tenure operating under the “disproving a negative” theory when it came to national security. Why are the current “experts” (and I use that term loosely) so fixated on using the SAME dysfunctional logic when it comes to the economy? Technically EVERY job that is currently active is a “saved” job, and that doesn’t help the fifteen million - eventually going up to thirty-one million - that NEED a job.

Well the dirty little secret is that this bastardization of “job creation” is going on so they can justify spending billions on infrastructure projects, since failing to fund these projects could mean more layoffs as state and local governments would not have the money to fund them. So in their distorted mindsets, keeping already-employed highway crews busy with more projects is considered “job creation”.

Of course that same revenue could have been generated through the normal economic cycle if those billions were spent on ACTUAL job creation, where those fifteen-to-thirty-one million Americans would be able to once again contribute to the tax coffers. The only difference is that it would take some time before that could happen.

Second, spending billions on further infrastructure projects does absolutely NOTHING to alleviate the current economic death spiral. The U$$ Titanic is still sinking, and the Obama White House is seemingly fixated on keeping the decks waxed and the brass shined.

What good is re-paving a stretch of road when there won’t be as many vehicles driving on it? Why expand current highways when the traffic capacity is going DOWN instead of up because more and more people are being laid off?

Well that’s the other dirty little secret behind this… because it keeps the union workers employed now instead of having them wait through the normal economic process. Gotta keep your base happy, right?

Unfortunately the matter only gets worse as time progresses. Statistically speaking, the longer a person is unemployed, the more they are considered “unemployable”. When their benefits run out, they disappear from the system altogether. So every time you hear “unemployment claims drop”, that doesn’t mean that people are being EMPLOYED. It means they are removed from the system. They cease to exist! Already ABANDONED by the private sector, they are now ABANDONED by the United States! They are essentially refugees in their own country!

That is unacceptable.

Ideally, any new “stimulus package” would involve IRS Auditors and a Brinks truck showing up at EVERY financial institution that received previous stimulus money and having to PROVE that it was invested on actual JOB CREATION, or else they have to give it back. Unfortunately, the current White House people are just as obsessed with appeasing Wall Street as their predecessors were, so there’s no chance it could ever happen.

But let’s get brutally honest here… ANY kind of meaningful stimulus program from this point out should be focused on three things: Jobs, Jobs, and JOBS!

And here I have the simplest of solutions for job creation that the White House could enact… instead of wasting money on Big Corporate and HOPING they do the right thing - which they have clearly demonstrated they are incapable of doing… they should borrow a page from FDR’s playbook and hire those unemployed people DIRECTLY!

Think about this: the same money that was handed over to Big Corporate on the “promise” of creating jobs could have employed ALL FIFTEEN MILLION unemployed Americans with a job paying $66,000 a year before taxes. (That’s basic math. Get a calculator and figure it out yourself if you don’t believe me!) Fifteen million Americans suddenly employed again, suddenly contributing to the tax system again, suddenly adding to consumer growth. That would have turned the economy around in a matter of MONTHS, not in the DECADES that the so-called “experts” now predict.

So how about taking the people who have been unemployed for at least a year and giving THEM a job? It would give them employment experience, access to employee benefits, and it would take them OFF the state programs while at the same time they would again be contributing to the economy besides for essentials.

And it’s not like there isn’t work that needs to be done! Auditing the Federal Reserve is a nice herculean task to fulfill. Same with evaluating how the previous stimulus programs were spent. Plenty of opportunities there for office workers, administrators, paperwork handlers. There is also currently a glut of office spaces in America - which is a part of the failing economy that the media HASN’T picked up on yet - so there is no shortage of places where an interim “US Jobs” office can be set up to do these thing. That would also stave off the next phase of the real estate crunch.

Oh, wait… that makes too much sense, doesn’t it?

Of course Big Corporate’s friends in the conservative and neo-conservative circles are throwing temper tantrums over public sector jobs already. They certainly don’t want to see the economy recover while Obama and company are in charge, and they would rather have all of that “free money” go into THEIR corporate coffers than invested in someone’s payroll. They currently thrive off our misery, but, make mo mistake, if they were in charge they would just as quickly abandon the rest of the U$$ Titanic and leave us to sink in misery and despair. That’s what they did before Obama was elected, and there is no reason in the world why they wouldn’t be willing to do it again in a heartbeat.

The problem comes down to one of focus. Do Obama and company REALLY want to fix the economy? Do they REALLY want those fifteen-to-thirty-one MILLION Americans back-to-work? Or do they just want the attention to the problem to go away and let those people suffer and die in misery and destitution? As long as the Obama White House is busy listening to their so-called “experts” instead of the people that PUT them in office, they have shown that they have no indication of caring about the sinking ship called our economy.

Week of 09/06/2010

No More 3-D!
– by David Matthews 2

I have a really simple request to make…

Can we PLEASE get rid of this whole “3-D” junk?

I’m serious. It seems like the whole multimedia world is on this “3-D” kick.

Hollywood has really hyped the “3-D” gimmick, especially with computer animated and with the new “Resident Evil” movie. Magazine publishers now want in on the “3-D” scam. Playboy Magazine already did its first “3-D” centerfold, and the Italian version of “Vogue” just did something similar with Victoria’s Secret model Miranda Kerr.

And it’s enough to literally give me a headache.

Okay… first of all “3-D” is NOT something new! In fact it has been around for over fifty years! 3-D was one of many gimmicks used by theater-houses to keep people showing up instead of watching television.

That’s all that it was back then. It was a gimmick. It was right up there with “Smell-O-Vision” and all the myriads of different ways to describe stereo audio. It was an attempt to market the whole experience as another way to “feel like you are there” instead of being stuck in your seat just WATCHING it.

Remember “The Tingler”? It was the name of a movie that employed a gimmick whereby old World War II buzzers were planted in certain seat cushions. Audience members were then warned before the movie began of a disease that would be similar to an electrical shock. At the certain time during the picture, the projector operator would hit the buttons, and random audience members would feel the vibrations and mistake that for the disease.

That took creativity, imagination, skill, and a little bit of investment, not to mention working with the theater owners. Did it work? Well it got the attention of the masses, and that was important. Even the movie posters referred to it as a gimmick, but that didn’t stop the audience from paying their money and wondering if they would get shocked or not.

And that was still far better than today’s fare of over-hyped “3-D” films.

How lame is 3-D? This is how: you still need those stupid glasses!

One red filer, one blue filter, one for each eye. You can even make them yourselves! That’s how simple they are!

Or sometimes the companies will use “special” glasses, but the basic principle is still the same. You add a red line and a blue line, and the close those two lines are, the closer the image is supposed to be.

It’s cheap, it’s cheesy, and it really has no place in the 21^st century theater experience.

Let’s get brutally honest here… we live in an age of incredible technical advancement. We have multi-layered audio, digital-quality pictures, computer-generated special effects that are so realistic you’d believe that Brandon Routh really DID fly in “Superman Returns” instead of using green-screen and wires.

Plus we’re in the age of digital video, where you can create your own theater experience at home. You can get better quality video on your HDTV set and Blu-Ray player, better quality audio with the latest home theater setup, and you can even get the same kind of popcorn and candy from the grocery story. The only thing missing is the soda fountain.

So WHY is Hollywood still wasting time on this “3-D” gimmick?

One word: MONEY.

You pay $9 for a normal movie in the theaters. Cheaper if you go during matinee times. Cheaper still if you were still alive when “3-D” made its original debut.

BUT… if you spend a little extra for the added gimmick, you can bump the ticket price up to $18. Same movie, double the cost, plus you have those cheap glasses which can be recycled over and over again.

What a waste! And I really mean WASTE!

Listen, there was a reason why studios played those gimmick games fifty years ago… they wanted to get their money back on really bad movies they bankrolled. So why waste the money now?

And, worse yet, why waste this on lame gimmick on movies that clearly don’t need it?

Why waste the animation on movies that you know will be box office giants? Why waste it on movies that are already stunning viewers with computer animation?

And let’s think of the sheer stupidity of this gimmick in the typical theater environment. If you’re there in a movie that is popular, then you’re probably NOT going to get a seat where you could fully appreciate the illusion of depth. If you end up with a seat at the front, then the entire peripheral vision will be filled with the movie, and you’ll be at an angle where you’ll be looking UP, not OUT. That neutralizes the whole “illusion” of objects coming “towards” you. You just wasted eighteen dollars.

Do you know what the REAL advance in 3-D animation is? Being able to see the full “3-D” illusion WITHOUT the need of those stupid glasses! If you can’t do that, then stop trying to force-feed the half-century-old gimmick on us just for a lame excuse to double the ticket prices.

And for the rest of the multimedia group… the magazine and comic book publishers… please, just STOP. Showing a fashion or centerfold model should be good enough without the needless gimmick and it actually takes away from the quality of the images where you use it. Ditto for the comic book industry. Reading “Superman Beyond” and trying to figure out how it played into the whole “Final Crisis” story was painful in and of itself. There really was no need to go through it WITH the “3-D” feature. It just caused a strain on the eyes to go with the strain on the intelligence.

The difference between a good gimmick and a cheap one is whether or not it plays into the product. The hidden buzzers in “The Tingler” worked because they tied into the movie. Forcing people to pay double the normal ticked price just for a few seconds of “special” animation added after-the-fact is nothing more than a waste of time and money.

Until the technology exists to give the illusion of depth without the need of external devices like glasses, it is high time that this gimmick be relegated back into the dustbins of history.

Week of 08/30/2010

The Mad Prophet Returns
– by David Matthews 2

The other day I had this idea that I pitched to a friend-of-a-friend who knew someone in Hollywood.

I told him that since Hollywood has been on a kick on recycling and remaking old classics like “Star Trek” and “Friday the 13^th”, that maybe it was time to remake one of the most memorably satirical movies around…

“Network,” I said.

“Huh?” he asked as he scratched his head. “Network what? Is this supposed to be some geek thing?”

I suddenly realized that I was speaking to someone who wasn’t even born when this Oscar-winning 1976 film came out. I cursed myself for being old enough to actually remember it.

“No, no,” I explained, “it was a movie starring Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, and Ned Betty. It was about a fictional TV network.”

He tilted his head a bit as if to suggest that this had piqued his curiosity. “Go on,” he said.

“It starts off with this old-school network news producer having to fire his best friend and long-time news anchor because of low ratings. The anchor then goes on the air and announces that he was being let go and that he would be killing himself on the air on his last broadcast day.”

“Does he do it?” asked the Hollywood guy.

“No,” I replied. “He gets talked out of killing himself, but he then goes off on this rant about how television is crap… well actually that’s not the word he used… and once he does, the ratings start to soar.”

“So the network executives keep him around,” he speculated.

“Yes,” I said. “Especially after he has a nervous breakdown and claims to have had a conversation with God. At one point he even gets the audience to open up their windows and shout that they’re mad as hell and that they weren’t going to take it anymore.”

“I think I’ve heard that line before,” the Hollywood guy said. “So that’s where it came from!”

I nodded. “Right. The anchor’s name was Howard Beale. Anyway, the executives decide to turn the whole news division over to the entertainment branch, and they transform Beale’s news show into this big entertainment program, and they dub him the ‘Mad Prophet of the Airwaves’.”

At that point I saw that the figurative wheels were starting to turn in his head. This could be either good or bad.

I continued with the summary. “The entertainment producer decides to broker a deal with some political extremist group so they could cause havoc and boost the ratings of the new show. They believe that keeping people afraid will help them stay tuned to the network.”

His optimistic look started to fade. I began to worry.

“So what happened to this show?” he asked.

“According to the narrator, it became the most-watched show in television history,” I said. “And Beale went on and on about any kind of subject that piqued his interest before collapsing in front of the cameras, much to the glee of the studio audience. Unfortunately one of his targets turned out to be the network itself, and he began to talk about the network’s new partners in Saudi Arabia. This led to a confrontation with the network president, and he leads Beale to a new sermon about the joys of capitalism. Unfortunately when he starts preaching all about capitalism, his ratings begin to slide, the entertainment producer has the extremist group kill him on the air.”

This was not turning out well. I could see from the look on his face that he didn’t like how it ends.

“But I think we can fix this,” I quickly said. “Maybe in our remake we can give a powerful ending. Maybe we can start with him already as a corporate tool for the advertisers. Maybe instead of him having a nervous breakdown, he can sell the idea of being a ‘Mad Prophet of the Airwaves’ to a cable news channel, and they decide go with it so that they can hide any look into their foreign investors.”

I was losing him. I could see it.

“And…” I started reaching. “Maybe… maybe the big climax would be the media trying to make him go away and instead he uses the extremist group to organize a huge rally… and we see him in Washington and…”

“No.”

He gestured with his hand for me to turn around and look at the wall behind me.

There on the flat-screen TV was a live broadcast from a certain foreign-owned cable news channel, one sometimes accused of mixing news and “entertainment”. One of their biggest media personalities, a man known for his outlandish and “prophet-like” rhetoric, was speaking in front of a huge rally in Washington DC, and the common message amongst the followers was that they were “mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore”.

Obviously my idea for a remake of “Network” never got the green light. Because let’s get brutally honest here… it’s a little hard to come up with a remake of that classic movie that would be better than the one that Glenn Beck and FoxNews are delivering in the real world.

Week of 08/23/2010

The Wall Street Job
– by David Matthews 2

If you have never seen TNT’s original cable series “Leverage” before, you really need to.

The series stars Academy-Award winner Timothy Hutton as a former insurance investigator who brings together some of the best criminals in the world and has them doing good deeds. Each of the people he brings in are the best in their particular specialty, from hacking to safecracking to grifting to strong-arming, and they each realize that they can do a whole lot of good by scamming the rich and powerful and bringing them to justice over the poor and powerless.

We need some folks like that in the real world.

Correction: we need A LOT of folks like that in the real world.

Correction again: we need a whole LEGION of folks like that in the real world.

One of the key reasons why this show is so successful is that it actually plays TWO con jobs with every episode. The one that you know about… and the one that comes out of left field.

The first con job is the one designed for the rich and powerful bad guy. They’re going to see to it that justice is served, but they don’t seem to have everything under control. It’s almost a comedy of errors. Nothing seems to work right, luck isn’t on their side, or maybe the bad guy is just too good or too skilled or just too powerful…

And then right at the very end is when they spring the SECOND con job… the one played on the AUDIENCE. Because we the audience only sees PART of the con… the set-up, the part that the bad guy is supposed to figure out. But we don’t realize until the very end that it was all part of the overall con job to lower the bad guy’s defenses and make him or her believe that they have won when really they’ve lost everything. It’s only after the trap has been sprung that we see the rest of the story and we see that the crew had been in control of everything from day one.

It’s the same magic from the “Oceans Eleven” movie, although it never really was carried over into the sequels. You only tell part of the story, you make people believe that the favored cons failed when in fact they were playing with the audience and the bad guys all this time. And then you show what the audience didn’t get to see before, the bad guy gets caught, the good guys win, everyone gets a good laugh, roll the credits.

Unfortunately, such kind-hearted grifters and thieves don’t exist in the real world. And we desperately need them now more than ever.

Instead we are given ringside seats to the biggest ongoing con game in recent history. Bigger than “Pig-in-a-Poke”, bigger than “Nigerian Prince”, or the “Fiddle Game”, or even “Three Card Monty”.

No, we’re talking “THE WALL STREET JOB”!

This is the ultimate in confidence tricks, requiring several different cons all running at different times to produce the overall result. But make no mistake; no matter how many plans are spinning like plates on poles, the overall plan ALWAYS manages to deliver!

We start with a little misdirection… a short-cut if you will; much like the “get rich quick” schemes, only this is directed at governments large and small. They spin this fantasy of a utopian community with luxury homes, gourmet shops, joyful businesses, top-notch medical centers, and more than enough tax revenue to fund every pet program and be the envy of the country. The politicians wouldn’t have to worry about re-elections because their campaign coffers would be fat with generous donations and the masses wouldn’t be complaining about potholes and failing services.

It’s a beautiful fantasy, isn’t it? And the politicians can have it too. All they have to do is just focus all of their attention on the smallest portion of their constituency… the ones with all of the money. It seems almost second nature to politicians, but we’re talking about them having to put on a whole dog-and-pony show where they claim to represent EVERYONE and yet have to abandon MOST of the people just so they can concentrate their time and attention to the people up top.

For lack of a better term, we’ll just refer to these people as “Wall Street”, and the rest of the constituency as “Main Street”.

To further sell this scheme, “Wall Street” has to rely on other people to come in as experts. We’re talking advisors, consultants, and think-tank organizations. These experts spin the belief that “Wall Street’s” gain is really “Main Street’s” gain, as “Wall Street” would automatically “share the wealth” with “Main Street”. All the politicians have to do is worry about “Wall Street” and keep them happy and “Wall Street” will in turn make “Main Street” happy. And the best way to keep “Wall Street” happy is to give them whatever they want; no questions asked.

Of course the experts are really a part of “Wall Street”, but they come off as being “impartial observers” so well that nobody suspects it.

So when “Wall Street” says that regulations hurt their productivity, the experts will sell the idea that fewer regulations and lax oversight will result in faster production and greater profits. And greater profits are good, right? Because it means that “Wall Street” will “share the wealth” with “Main Street” and everyone would be happy.

Okay, so a bunch of “Main Street” businesses are bought up by “Wall Street”, but that’s supposed to be a good thing according to the experts. It means better resources for those businesses. It means more profit for “Wall Street” because it then supposedly turns into good times for “Main Street” in general.

And when “Wall Street” says they need to “optimize” their resources by removing redundancy and shutting down local banks and stores and “streamline” processes by sending jobs to third world nations, nobody notices it, because the politicians are only looking at the profit margins and seeing those go up.

And when “Wall Street” is finally pressured to hire more people they will tell the politicians “Yeah, we’ll hire more people. In fact we’ll hire a thousand new employees. Oh, by the way, thank you for those 1000 work visas you gave us earlier so we don’t have to worry about hiring all of those local people we laid off before. Now we can bring in a whole new crowd of people from other countries that will appreciate the substandard wages we will pay them, and then get rid of them by ending their visas when they start to complain.”

Now the beauty of “The Wall Street Job” is that even if certain elements happen to fail, the overall plan doesn’t, because as long as the attention is focused on “Wall Street’s” profits, everything else can go to hell and nobody will care. Workplace morale, abysmal production quality, declining real wages, poor turnovers… it doesn’t matter as long as profit margins continue to rise. Bad managers may destroy a business from the inside-out, but they also get cushy contracts that give them hundreds of millions in severance, plus they are free to go find another business to do the same thing to.

This part of the con really went to the next level in 2008, when the politicians were convinced that they should spend BILLIONS on bailouts to give to “Wall Street”. “Wall Street” promises that the money would then be spent on “Main Street”, but they don’t really say how or when. The money is put in their coffers, their profit margins soar, and the politicians think that the problem is thereby solved… only “Main Street” doesn’t really see any new jobs. When asked about the money, “Wall Street” conveniently says that the market is just too “unstable” right now to invest the money in, even though they were GIVEN the money to specifically prevent the market from being “unstable”!

And through it all… nobody in “Main Street” or the political world are seeing what is really going on.

Let’s get brutally honest here… we are being CONNED!

We have been led to believe that the success of “Wall Street” is equal to the success of “Main Street” when the two are completely different entities! “Wall Street” is about one thing and one thing only: IMMEDIATE PROFIT. They don’t care HOW they make it, they don’t care who they have to step on to make it, and they don’t care if they have to break laws or rules or even whole communities to get it.

You look at all of the notorious business enterprises, the darlings of “Wall Street”, and you see one common element: their obsessive fixation on short-term immediate PROFIT. They just need to get their “numbers”, and that is all that matters to them. Everything else and everyone else can go to hell. Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, they were all fixated on PROFIT. They didn’t care about long-term survival. They just needed to make their numbers TODAY and worry about tomorrow when it comes about.

“Main Street” is about permanence. It is about the LONG-TERM. When “Main Street” welcomes a new business into the community, they don’t think that the business will only be around for six months or even a year. They’re looking at a business and seeing LONG-TERM. They expect every business that comes in to have jobs that are LONG-TERM. People cannot engage in things such as getting a home mortgage or buying a new car or planning for a vacation or redecorating or remodeling if they do not have a sense of LONG-TERM stability to back it up! They will not get a twenty-year mortgage if they don’t know if they will still have a job six months down the road.

In the first season of “Leverage”, the newly-reformed grifters and thieves were shocked to discover that they had a central building to go to, and individual offices, and email accounts. They were so used to just focusing on the next immediate short-term scheme that they didn’t realize that their new venture would be so… permanent.

And that, above everything else, spells out the difference between “Wall Street” and “Main Street”. “Main Street” sees “Wall Street” as a long-term partner. “Wall Street” considers “Main Street” to be just another mark, just another victim to scam. We need to start recognizing this difference and act accordingly, or else we will not have a “Main Street” left to call our own.

Week of 08/16/2010

WikiLeaks versus “No Snitching”
– by David Matthews 2

There comes a point in a story about evil where someone’s conscience gets the better of them and they have to tell SOMEONE of the great evil going on. The great conspiracy, the great catastrophe, the great master scheme or plan being carried out…

In the movie “JFK”, based on the accounts of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner), the “grand conspiracy” is introduced by the ramblings of David Ferrie (played by Joe Pesci). His long-winded and panic-laden description set the stage for the information that Garrison and his team would assemble and Garrison himself would narrate in the failed trial of Clay Shaw, one of the supposed members of this conspiracy.

Real-life stories are also filled with people who come forward with their knowledge of a grand conspiracy that was just too burdensome to keep silent about. FBI agent W. Mark Felt came forward to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the White House involvement in the Watergate Scandal, which eventually forced President Richard Nixon to resign to avoid impeachment. Linda Tripp exposed the scandal surrounding President Bill Clinton and an intern, which led to his impeachment for lying under oath. Frank Serpico exposed corruption among his fellow New York police officers. Peter Rost discovered accounting irregularities surrounding the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

We call these people heroes.

Or… at least we TELL ourselves that they should be called heroes.

But quite often we don’t think of them as heroes. We brand them as troublemakers, miscreants, saboteurs, and even traitors. We damn them for doing the right thing, for speaking out and showing the bad things that need to be fixed. We don’t say “thank you” for exposing the evils, we condemn them for DARING to upset that precious status quo that we are so fixated on.

That is one of our larger double-standards in society. We WANT people to stand up and speak out and expose the truth, but then we get upset when they do. Don’t speak up, don’t tattle, don’t make waves, and don’t say anything. Just sit down, shut up, and let life go on.

That brings us to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks is a website that started in 2006 to serve as the central warehouse for documents and submissions of various activities involving nations, groups, and businesses. A place where people could expose the evils of the world without the fear of reciprocity.

From the get-go, they knew that they would be causing trouble. They pissed off several nations, big corporations, exposed dissent among the scientific community about climate change, and even posted email reportedly from Sarah Palin’s hacked account.

But now they’re focusing on the War in Afghanistan. And now the chickenhawks in the conservative and neo-conservative community are screaming bloody murder.

WikiLeaks has exposed the darker side of this ongoing war, the civilian casualties, the cases of friendly fire, proof of paid propaganda, and the mention of weaponry that terrorists and the Taliban reportedly “did not possess”. The latter certainly would have been helpful for the servicemen fighting and dying over there trying to stop the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies.

And yet the chickenhawks want WikiLeaks punished. They want the founders locked up for treason and the website shut down for DARING to expose the grittier side of war instead of showing the sanitized “clean” version that they think war should be.

They claim that they don’t want to risk the lives of servicemen, but isn’t underreporting the capabilities of the enemy doing just that? Isn’t holding that information back from the people that need to know such things putting the soldiers that they claim to protect at risk?

As for the incidents of friendly fire and civilian casualties, while some incidents are to be expected, they’re insistence that EVERY incident needs to be covered up doesn’t help the cause. Indeed, they are actually feeding the propaganda of the enemy by keeping such information secret. The enemy certainly knows what’s been going on and they’re willing to use that information as part of their recruitment even if our own government doesn’t want to own up to it.

Let’s get brutally honest here… WikiLeaks is doing EXACTLY what we CLAIM to want in society! We supposedly WANT people to expose evil and wrongdoing. They’re doing just that!

And it’s damned hypocritical for the conservative and neo-conservative chickenhawks to scream bloody murder over WikiLeaks exposing the ugly side of war when they had no problems whatsoever crowing about the “climate change” emails!

But perhaps the biggest bunch of hypocrites in the world right now are those in the media who are quick to question WikiLeaks for exposing the evils of the world. They question whether or not WikiLeaks is truly the “new wave” of journalism.

Well there is a distinct difference in what WikiLeaks is doing and what the mainstream air-fluffed ego-driven media has been doing. The difference is this: WikiLeaks is not exposing evils for the sake of ratings. They’re not chasing people down with cameras simply to show them on the 6pm news. They’re simply putting the information out there, without editorials, without the condescending comments from anchors before moving on to weather and sports.

And maybe that’s why the media is concerned about WikiLeaks… after all, they’re ruining a seemingly good business operation.

Someone in a very old book said that you cannot serve two masters… and the whole issue with WikiLeaks is essentially about having to choose between two such masters. It is about choosing between living up to our own promises of wanting evil exposed, or in keeping the status quo going. It’s either “doing what’s right” or “don’t snitch”. Take your pick, but you can’t have them both, no matter how badly you want them.