Who's More Corrupt?

Did you know that the "oil spill" in Arkansas over the weekend was actually tar sands (the stuff to be piped through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline)? Tar sands are probably exempt from the taxes that fund the clean up of such spills, yet this sludge is more toxic and more difficult to clean up than conventional crude.

Some interesting facts: the first, for me, was Oil Change's report, identifying the spill with Canadian tar sands. It wasn't reported that way in the New York Times, which used the euphemism "heavy crude from western Canada," nor on NPR, which simply reported it as a major oil spill until the following day.

Tar sands aren't oil. After much processing (requiring much heat, polluting more than coal), this "bitumen" sludge can be converted into an oil feedstock for further refining, but to call it "heavy crude" conceals what it really is and why a spill is much worse than conventional oil.

Toxicity is one of the reasons for blocking the XL Pipeline, which may be why even supposedly "objective" media outlets misled. Tar sands money has corrupted Canada's politics, and is adding to the endemic, legal corruption here. It may inspire right-wing billionaires, like the Kochs, to purchase media outlets like the LA Times.

Look at the contrast between India and the US: here the courts are influenced by major corporations, especially after Citizens United, and demand outrageous privileges, like patent monopolies indefinitely extended.

India is famous for its petty and not so petty corruption, personally observed when I lived there 33 years ago. Contemporary accounts imply it's as bad now. However, in some ways it might be less corrupt than the US, where corporations get anything they want, like Novartis' minor tweaking of an AIDS drug allowing indefinite monopoly protection. An Indian judge did something our Congress and courts have rarely managed: he stood up to Big Pharma, striking down Novartis' claim that its minor modification justified a new patent (monopoly protection) for the 20 years the Indian patent law permits.

In the US, regulators, courts and Congress bend over backwards to give corporations what they want--like the covert insertion of the "Monsanto protection act" into the Food bill.

The US may have fewer officials and politicians with their hands out, but the powerful use legal corruption. Their bribes are more lucrative: campaign funds, insider info, high paying jobs, and promotions when they recycle back from private to public sectors.

They are in service to our ultimate Roman Senators--the Koch brothers, Murdoch or Lockheed Martin--who know that control of the media is key.

Outside the US, people get freer news: in the US, Congress is writing a law to more strictly control the Internet, our best remaining source for a free flow of information.

Are we already a corporate state, a plutocracy like the later Roman Empire? Hard to tell with the managed information we're fed.

Reporters and Corruption

Everything is for sale, including our supposedly representative government. What I find almost worse is the market of public information--and what, apparently, is not for sale.

Fox News, the most popular (faux) news channel, is despite its slogan "Fair and balanced," an unabashed propaganda mill that actively disseminates half-truths that become, momentarily, lead stories in the rest of the news.

Supposedly, on the other side, is NPR, which Congressional Republicans and candidate Romney both want to cut off from the public teat. NPR may favor Democrats, you see, because it's just as wishy-washy as they are. It's not hard-line for tax cuts for the wealthy, but it takes no position and attempts to present a 'fair and balanced' presentation of the issue.

NPR listeners are better informed than Fox watchers, or those of MSNBC, but none of the above present serious analyses of an issue, like reasonable rates of taxation. Even on NPR, the tendency is to parrot whatever one side said, and then how the other side responded: a he-said-she-said model that requires of the reporter no thought or research.

Will the Watergate break-in, and the investigations that issued from it, be our last really serious and effective investigative journalism?

Fewer and fewer news bureaus have reporters on the ground, either around the nation, or around the world. A worker-police massacre in South Africa is reported on by a journalist in Nairobi, 1780 miles away. If something happens in Minnesota, the reporter may be sent in from Chicago.

And more and more reporters only report: recording what the official, and/or his opponent say, without any reflection like: What the hell is "legitimate rape?" Or, damn, is that how contraception works: "the woman's body" somehow knows how to get rid of it--no abortion needed? Should I report that Congressman Akin don't know nothin'?

Maybe Akin made even the laziest reporters sit up and realize: they can't just report; they've got to base their reporting on facts.

Maybe. If extremists--who seem to be overwhelmingly on the right during this period--keep on attempting to present fiction as fact and fact as fiction, ever more wildly, maybe a more responsible information system will emerge. I hope it will finally allow most people to really know what's going on, and why it affects them.

On the optimistic side: people do help each other, and given a choice, most people will lend a helping hand when needed. Factual and analytic reporting would help people.

On the negative: fear is probably our most powerful emotion, and the one-percent, ably represented by Fox and Limbaugh, are backed by much more money, because our moneyed Roman Senators only want more money, and think in zero-sum terms: if they pay workers more, or protect us more from their pollution (pay their own external costs), they'll get less. Their strategy: keep'em scared and angry.

Will fear and anger work?