[NYTr] Fear, Loathing & the Crisis of Confidence

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Alternet - Dec 21, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/71352/

Fear, Loathing & the Crisis of Confidence

By David Sirota

Just a few weeks ago, Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University
released a little-noticed study showing that one-third of Americans now
"believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories" revolving
around government complicity in everything from the 9/11 attacks to the
Kennedy assassination. The same survey last year found that "anger
against the federal government is at record levels."

It would be easy to chalk up these troubling findings to the unending
propaganda of fear. America has been experiencing the searing blast of
politicized terror warnings and breaking news graphics for the better
part of six years now, and populations living under such constant
government and media shock treatment can go a wee bit berserk.

But while many of these conspiracy theories are offensive and factually
unsupported, the underlying paranoia and loathing are not surprising,
and the feelings are not motivated merely by a fear of the next
bogeyman around the corner. The sentiments are symptoms of a deep
crisis of confidence in our public institutions -- a crisis that is a
predictable reaction to a government that now all but admits it breaks
laws, hides information and disregards the public.

We have seen troops sent to war based on manipulated intelligence. We
have discovered phones wiretapped without warrants. Just last week, we
found out the CIA destroyed tapes of potentially illegal torture
sessions. So many scandals now plague the government, it is hard to
remember them all. And they have all happened with almost no
consequences for the perpetrators.

Nonetheless, every era has its sensational scandals, and so it is
probably the mundane that has heated the public's low-grade disgust
into a simmering boil. After all, what we see our government and our
representatives quietly do every day tells us far more than even the
headline-grabbing controversies.

Industries essentially bribe politicians with campaign contributions.
Government employees regularly move into six-figure jobs lobbying for
the industries they once regulated. Presidential candidates of both
parties take time off from their small-town stump speeches about the
middle class to hold big corporate fundraisers in New York penthouses
and D.C. law firms. All of it is legal and treated as ho-hum by the
media.

Then there is the bureaucracy, the faceless monolith whose civil
service protections and multiyear appointment terms were supposed to
prevent it from becoming what it is today: an increasingly important
cog in the corrupt machine.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provides perhaps the most
pristine example of all. In October, the General Accounting Office
(GAO) reported that this faceless alphabet-soup agency tasked with
regulating the media business now regularly leaks secret information to
lobbyists before that information is released to the public. The
behavior undoubtedly feeds into the world of "political intelligence"
-- a burgeoning cottage industry in Washington whereby well-heeled
lobbyists gather inside government information for their corporate
clients.

A federal agency that even mildly cared about trying to serve the
public or follow the law would react to the GAO's damning report by at
least pretending to change. Instead, the FCC dug in.

When lobbyists recently pushed the government to relax ownership
regulations and allow for further media consolidation, FCC chairman
Kevin Martin provided just one week's notice for a required public
hearing on the issue. Officially, the FCC held the hearing to consider
public input about the proposed rule change. But Martin later told
Congress that before the hearing ever happened he was already putting
the finishing touches on his New York Times op-ed formally endorsing
the media consolidation plan. And surprise! This week, the FCC
officially ratified Martin's deregulation scheme, making it the law of
the land.

Like so much of our government's behavior these days, it was kabuki
theater at its most obscene -- an obscure yet powerful agency getting
caught leaking profit-making secrets to lobbyists, and then telling the
public its hearings are all a put-on, taking place well after the
corrupt deals have already been cut.

In Scripps Howard's report on its poll findings, some experts expressed
astonishment at the anger being expressed by the country. But really,
we should be baffled if public opinion were any different. Considering
what's going on, is anyone actually stunned that America is enraged? Is
anyone really confused about why so many believe the government
conspires against the public?


[David Sirota is a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper columnist for
Creators Syndicate. He is the New York Times bestselling author of
Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government
and How We Take It Back (Crown 2006). He is also a senior fellow at the
Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive
States Network. His second book, The Uprising, is due in the Spring of
2008. ]

© 2007 Creators Syndicate