Edward Snowden, knowing the powers of the CIA to get their man, risked everything to alert Americans to what their government was doing to them. To Snowden the truth mattered. Snowden’s example should encourage the rest of us to evaluate the priority we give the truth as we pursue the better world we all want.
High on the list of progressive values should be transparency in government and other institutions that have the capacity to harm humanity. Transparency, it should be noted, promised by Obama and just as readily suborned by him.
As an example, Amy Goodman obviously set out to show that Jeff Bezos, the multibillionaire founder of Amazon, was unfit to own the Washington Post, which he had purchased, because he would turn it into a mouthpiece for his libertarian views. While I think Bezos has more than enough to answer for in his treatment of the small towns where he establishes his Fulfillment centers and his efforts to avoid state sales taxes, I think it is both devious and ultimately dishonest to accuse him of ruining a people-concerned book business as one of Amy’s panelists did.
To do her part in alerting the public to this prospect, Amy assembled a group of commentators to demonstrate how bad Bezos is from their particular perspective.
One of these people was a book publisher who accused Bezos of destroying the book business. He portrayed the book publishing business as peopled by those who loved books and who tempered their desire to profit by said love. He portrayed Bezos as an ex hedge fund manager who brought hard bargaining to this erstwhile book lovers’ business.
The facts of the matter are that the book business was not and is not innocent of hard-driving business decisions. A current case in point: the text books sold to public schools are way overpriced; many are in the $50 to $60 range, some as high as $89. They are lavishly illustrated and printed on heavy clay paper as though they are pricy art books. They are so heavy that they can no longer be carried by hand. Students must now have backpacks for their developing bones to carry. I know one school district librarian who is so outraged by this state of affairs that she intends to use her retirement to fight this practice by book publishers.
While I, as a retired public library administrator, have obviously indulged my own outrage at Amy’s use of a devious book publisher to promote her anti-Bezos campaign, it remains a fact that Amy and her book publisher were willing to distort the truth to promote a progressive campaign against the excessively wealthy. While I agree with much of this effort, I think it should be directed at excessive wealth accumulation rather than just the very wealthy themselves. I note that things are getting so desperate in our understanding of wealth and society that we now have Ralph Nader saying only the super-rich can save us.
Amy’s willingness to sacrifice truth for progressive values makes clear that transparency in public affairs is not a property of any one group. We need to do our part in making transparency an emphasized function of government. Edward Snowden has paid a big personal price because Congressional national security committee members knew what the NSA was doing long before Snowden revealed the truth. Because those committee members refused to execute their legally required duty to inform other members of Congress, Snowden is now an exile from his own country and is wanted for prosecution by those who have played fast and loose with our Constitution and our laws. Snowden is a lesson in citizen democracy, required when a democratic government abandons its democratic duties. He is an example of democracy’s last line of defense—its citizens. The press, whose very business is constitutionally protected to ensure the fully informed citizenry a democracy requires, failed miserably to perform its duties. Snowden has said this failure was his reason for making the NSA documents available to the British newspaper, The Guardian.
If there is an award for recognition of effort to promote and defend democracy commensurate to the Nobel Peace Prize, it should be awarded to Edward Snowden. If there is no such prestigious prize, it should be created to honor Snowden as its first recipient.
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