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• Wednesday, October 3, 2007 10:52 AM

  Putting money where mouth is

  This is what I wrote to my friends:

  Hi everyone

  We are like parents who gave birth to a son and brought him up with great care and love and a superb education only to find that at the age of 15 he has become an uncontrollable monster. In the first place we need to diagnose what is wrong with him. Is it a psychological problem? Is it a physical problem? What is it that has caused this person, with all the advantages of his upbringing and with all the promise that that entails, to morph into a monster seemingly impervious to our cries of alarm and pain? This is what the American political system has become. All the carefully constructed checks and balances, all the brilliant minds that argued and gave birth to a constitution and political system that was understandably admired by all the world has become a grotesque and overfed mutant that has caused the deaths of 1 million Iraqis since 2003 and wants to do the same to Iran, has a congress that has in the last few years, in a bipartisan way, thrown out the 800 year old right of habeus corpus and embraced the most hideous forms of torture. This is not just an anomaly resulting from the presidency of GW. This is a system in which politicians with real integrity and moral principles(such as Kucinich) can never raise enough corporate donations to get near power. What can we do? Well first of all we need to diagnose what is wrong and then do what we can to treat the problems we find. It doesn't take too much to realize that one of the most broken parts of the system is the gathering and dissemination of news. Luckily, the internet has enabled (until Democrats fold on net neutrality) a form of news gathering and dissemination that recaptures the original dynamism and honesty of the very first pamphleteers: blogging. Glenn Greenwald is a superb example of a blogger. (He now writes for Salon). I value what he writes (almost daily) more than the combined output of the rest of the mainstream media. It suddenly strikes me that when it comes to news, no amount of quantity can compete with a single voice that speaks with dependable honesty and morality.

  Glenn asks for donations twice a year. He explains it all here . Give what you can and try to pass this on to like minded friends.

  Thanks

  Ken

  —crossmankl Read crossmankl's other letters
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