How to Uncover Secrets

Giant institutions often violate their own rules and our laws, and hurt, or even kill people in the process. They use powerful offices or connections to them, unlimited money, and threats of retaliation to keep us ignorant of their illegal actions. Individuals who get in their way are bought off or crushed.

There are big secrets in America, which we ought to know about, for our own good. Some Americans say they are worried by a “deep state”. But these are the same people who defend Joseph McCarthy and the national witch hunt against people they didn’t like. The same people who disdain today’s FBI, but said nothing when the FBI illegally attacked citizens in the 1960s. The same people who reject the work of those, like Robert Mueller, who now professionally investigate America’s most important secrets. These people propagate stories about big secrets without evidence and assail those who try to reveal and understand them. Their “deep state” stories are vacuous.

The most relentless, most objective, most principled, and most experienced investigator of America’s secrets is our free press. McCarthy’s unmasking was accomplished by Murrey Marder of the Washington Post, whose daily articles recorded his every action for four years. Marder’s reporting brought about the Army-McCarthy hearings, the first Congressional hearings to be televised live nationally.

Newspaper reporting brought us the most significant revelations about our government’s secrets. The Pentagon Papers published by the Washington Post revealed the truth about the Vietnam War. The Watergate stories by Woodward and Bernstein brought down a dishonest President.

Newspaper reporting uncovers the hidden mechanisms which make some people’s lives more difficult. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s 1989 series “The Color of Money” documented the systematic racial discrimination in housing using redlining. Last year, the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting included the exposé of violence and neglect in Florida mental hospitals; a series by Michael J. Berens and Patricia Callahan of the Chicago Tribune documenting official neglect and abuse leading to 42 deaths at Illinois group homes for developmentally disabled adults; and Steve Reilly’s investigation for USA Today Network in Tysons Corner, VA, of 9,000 teachers across the nation who should have been flagged for past disciplinary offenses, but were not. The list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize gives us dozens of examples of how important American newspapers are to our understanding of what goes on around us that we can’t see.

Journalists have used their skills and resources to uncover historical secrets, such as 24-year-old Sara Ganim of the Harrisburg Patriot-News, who disclosed the child molestation allegations against Jerry Sandusky months before other news organizations.

The resistance of secret-keepers can be powerful. The film “Spotlight” shows how difficult it was for the Boston Globe to put together scattered and hidden evidence into the story about widespread child abuse by Catholic priests. The documentary “Fear and Favor in the Newsroom” shows how media owners and board members try to censor stories revealing corporate wrong-doing.

But we need to know stories about the perverse sexual history of Roy Moore, who was running for Senate in Alabama; about Harvey Weinstein’s decades of abusing women in the film industry; and about the large number of children who are killed or injured by guns.

           

“Reporting the news means telling citizens what they would not otherwise know.”

Getting news from newspapers is slower and less exciting than the bombardment of “breaking news” on TV, but more accurate, more objective, and more useful. Commercial TV stations have far fewer news reporters than local newspapers do. Nearly all stories on local news stations reported on accidents, crimes, and scheduled or staged events.

Social media and smart phones have not killed newspapers, but print journalism has been in decline for a long time. The number of newspaper editorial employees has fallen from more than 60,000 in 1992 to around 40,000 in 2009. The number of newspaper staff reporters covering the state capitols full time dropped 30% from 2003 to 2009.

Newspapers are capitalist enterprises run by the richest Americans. But conservatives hate them. Why? Because they are the most dangerous foes of secret-keepers, and today’s conservatives are desperately trying to hide their biggest secret – they are protecting an incompetent, dishonest and dangerous leader.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, June 26, 2018

My Fellow Americans!

I have little in common with millions of you. We like different drinks, root for different teams, watch different shows and vote differently. 325 million Americans, and our lives and choices almost never touch.

But we do one important thing together: we vote every two years for people to govern us from Washington. They make laws, conduct foreign negotiations and foreign wars, and enforce policies that affect all of us together, theoretically equally. So at this moment, I care about what all of you do.

I care about your votes, because I want the air I breathe and the water I drink to be safe. That seems like our most basic right. We know that we can’t just trust big corporations to put our health in front of their profits, so we need government to insure that they don’t dump dangerous chemicals into our environment. But the Environmental Protection Agency has now decided to ignore health hazards caused by the presence of the most toxic chemicals in the air, ground or water. For example, when the EPA analyzes the risks of the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene, all it will test are hazards for those who directly handle it. The fact that that chemical occurs in drinking water in 44 states, because of unsafe disposal, will not be evaluated. This EPA decision is a direct result of the national vote in 2016.

I care about your votes, because I want our politicians to be good human beings, thoughtful, knowledgeable, honest people. Some of the candidates on the ballot in November will be nothing like that. Across the country, candidates with despicable views or despicable behavior have been getting hundreds of thousands of votes. In Alabama, Roy Moore, who refused to enforce our laws and had to be removed twice from the Alabama Supreme Court, and who is a despicable person besides, nearly won a US Senate seat. Twenty thousand people in Illinois’ 3^rd Congressional District voted in the primary for Arthur Jones, a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier. Don Blankenship of West Virginia went to jail, because 29 men died in an explosion in one of his company’s mines in 2010, but he got 20% of primary votes. We don’t have to vote for the worst human beings.

I care about your votes, because I depend on professional media to inform me about the world, the same media that many politicians say represents “fake news”. Voting for them means moving our national politics even further away from facts to propaganda. While trust in the mass media has fallen somewhat over the past 20 years, some voters have basically given up entirely on the nation’s most professional sources of news: less than 14% of Republicans have a “fair amount” of trust in the mass media. How else can we decide who is the best candidate?

I care about your votes, because only government can solve some of our most pressing problems: widespread poverty, pollution, continuing discrimination against minorities and women. But government can’t solve our problems if Americans don’t vote for good candidates. If we are just left to individual action, if we have no counterweight to the self-interested decisions of giant corporations or of the richest, most powerful people, our communities will suffer.

But today less than one-third of Americans believe that government officials are credible. Among the 28 countries surveyed by Edelman for its Trust Barometer, the college-educated “informed public” in the US ranks last in trust of our institutions. Just one year ago, the US was among the international leaders in trust for our institutions, with 68% expressing trust; now it’s only 45%. Trust in our institutions dropped from 2017 to 2018 more than in any other country. Only we, the voters, can do something to reverse this trend. Only we can find and vote for trustworthy people who will create a trustworthy government.

It’s more complicated than just avoiding Nazis. We must seek out people who demonstrate compassion for all Americans, who exemplify honesty in their personal and public lives, who seek solutions to conflicts rather than fomenting them.

How do ordinary Americans change the direction of America? The Southern Baptist Convention just showed how: they elected a young pastor as president, who urged his brethren to repent their “failure to honor women and racial minorities”. The SBC is breaking its partisan support of the Republican Party. They will change our politics, because they were willing to change their minds.

My fellow Americans, it’s up to us. We can’t magically make our country healthy again in November, but we can reverse disastrous recent trends. We can make America great again, not by being an ugly neighbor, not by trashing other nations, not by just looking out for ourselves, but by electing great Americans and encouraging them to represent the best in us.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, June 19, 2018

Obama Spied on My Campaign!

“Obama Spied on My Campaign! Tried to Throw Election to Hillary!”

What a perfect story to excite all Republicans who are thinking about an election in five months. A Watergate for their side.

Trump pushes that story in capital letters. Three weeks ago, he announced, “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!” Not just one spy, but a whole Criminal Deep State: “Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!”

But it never happened.

The story revolves around a professor who was an FBI informant, had served in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, and campaigned for George H.W. Bush. The real story depends on information we don’t know, locked up in official SECRET folders, so we can’t figure out what actually happened.

But Trump is the only one telling his treasonous story. Republicans who saw the folders say it’s baloney.

Trey Gowdy is chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, so he was one of the nine who witnessed the FBI presentation about the incident. He told Fox News, “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.”

Paul Ryan attended as Majority Leader:  “I think Chairman Gowdy’s initial assessment is accurate.”

Richard Burr, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was there, too: “I have no disagreement with the description Trey Gowdy gave.”

FOX News rejected Trump’s accusation. Host Shepard Smith spoke for the network: “The president calls it Spygate. Fox News can confirm it is not. Fox News knows of no evidence to support the president’s claim.” A Trump favorite on FOX, Andrew Napolitano, said Trump’s “outrageous accusation” was “baseless”.

If there was a shred of truth to Trump’s story of Democratic skullduggery, Republicans and their media allies would broadcast it from here to November.

Trump made no mistake. He has never stopped saying that our government is a Criminal Deep State.

He spent years asserting that Obama was an illegitimate President. He said the government knew in advance about the September 11 attacks, and hinted that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been murdered. He said over and over again during his campaign that our elections were rigged. He tweeted three weeks before the election: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD”.

The story did not change after he won: at a rally a month later in Pensacola, he said four times that our system was rigged: “We have a sick system from the inside.”

After he lost the popular vote by the largest margin ever by an Electoral College winner, he made up “millions of people who voted illegally”. He was more specific in January 2017: 3 to 5 million illegal immigrants. He created a highly partisan Commision on Election Integrity” to show how flawed our voting is, which accomplished only one thing, to show there had been no fraud to find.

Trump has made American government his biggest target. Now he has a new story to show he was always right.

The majority of Americans reject Trump’s accusations about a dysfunctional and dishonest government, 56% to 33%. Supporters of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump and his campaign beat critics, 48%-44%. But Trump doesn’t care about facts or need a majority. He makes up stories for his avid supporters, that is, most Republican voters.

Trump has used the reservoir of distrust which exists in every democracy, and nurtured it, amplified it in service to himself. At a rally in Nashville two weeks ago, he asked the crowd to raise their hands if they were secretly FBI informants.

He took the next logical step on May 29: “The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls.”

Nobody but Trump benefits from invented stories about how our democracy is a sham.

But so many conservatives are willing to believe the wildest lies about everything. 81% of Republicans labeled Mueller’s investigation not legitimate, a “witch hunt”. Two-thirds of Republicans accept Trump’s story about “Spygate”.

The believers say they are the best Americans: “we Trump supporters, which the left wing media calls The Deplorables, pay the bills that makes this country run. We are the backbone of the military, the bedrock of the economy, and we utterly reject the CNN, MSNBC, AKA extreme left partisan propaganda.”

No matter what happens in November, more people, urged on by Trump, will suspect the results.

When he finally leaves office, that may be his only significant accomplishment – to have convinced many Americans that our political system is corrupt.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, June 12, 2018