Lee Fang

How Obama’s Chief Negotiators on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty Received Huge Bonuses from Mega Banks

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Anyone that has spent any time whatsoever looking into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade treaty, understands that it is a oligarch crony capitalists’ wet dream. Being negotiated entirely in secret, the treaty is designed to institutionalize corporate rule, giving companies the ability to sue governments and prevent them from exerting regulatory control over their own societies.

Bill Moyers has described the treaty as “Death for Democracy,” and now, unsurprisingly, we find out that several of the main negotiators for the TPP have received huge payments from taxpayer bailed out “Too Big to Jail” banks.

From the Republic Report:

Officials tapped by the Obama administration to lead the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations have received multimillion dollar bonuses from CitiGroup and Bank of America, financial disclosures obtained by Republic Report show.

Stefan Selig, a Bank of America investment banker nominated to become the Under Secretary for International Trade at the Department of Commerce, received more than $9 million in bonus pay as he was nominated to join the administration in November. The bonus pay came in addition to the $5.1 million in incentive pay awarded to Selig last year.

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So Who Really Pays Television Pundits?

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It is the job of the Fourth Estate to act as a check and a restraint on the others, to illumine the dark corners of Ministries, to debunk the bureaucrat, to throw often unwelcome light on the measures and motives of our rulers. ‘News’, as Hearst once remarked, ‘is something which somebody wants suppressed: all the rest is advertising’. That job is an essential one and it is bound to be unpopular; indeed, in a democracy, it may be argued that the more unpopular the newspapers are with the politicians the better they are performing their most vital task.

– Brian R. Roberts from a October 29, 1955 article in the London periodical “Time & Tide”

I’ve used the above quote before, and it is one that many others have paraphrased in various ways over the past century. The key point is that news is supposed to be delivered by people who do not have direct financial conflicts of interests that will cause their news or opinions to be biased based on receiving a fat paycheck from an outside entity. If such conflicts exist, they should at the very least be disclosed. It’s hilarious that so many pundits call Glenn Greenwald an “activist” and not a “journalist,” when it is clear he is delivering information based on a genuine passion for civil liberties. Many of these same people that accuse Glenn of “activism” are paid shills for public relations (PR) firms that represent large corporate clients and special interests. Even worse, it is almost never admitted on air. I’d much rather a person report the news biased with a genuine passion for a cause than based on a bias that revolves around his or her bank account size.

I’ve been waiting for someone to put together a more comprehensive article on this topic, because while many people recognize that television news is nothing more than tabloid garbage or statist/corporate propaganda, most people don’t understand the inner workings of it all. One of the primary reasons television news is so bad is because the so-called “experts” or pundits are actually quite often highly paid spokespeople for special interests, something which is disgracefully almost never disclosed by the anchors.

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More Proof Emerges that “Meet the Press” is Pure Propaganda

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This brief article by Lee Fang in The Nation is extremely valuable.  While I wrote a lengthy piece on the outlandish hypocrisy laden in government lapdog David Gregory’s criticism of Glenn Greenwald, Mr. Fang exposes another manner in which the corporatist-state media fools the public. They do so by having guests on with vested financial interests making false proclamations, while all the while failing to disclose who they really are and who pays their bills.  We learn that:

On Meet the Press yesterday, shortly after host host David Gregory stunned many by suggesting that The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald should face prosecution, a roundtable of pundits discussed the unfolding Edward Snowden story. Mike Murphy, one of the Meet the Press pundits, mocked Snowden’s attempt to seek asylum, calling him a “so-called whistleblower,” and charging that “it’s never been easier in human history to be a whistleblower” through official means.

There are problems here with both the messenger and the message.

First, the message. In fact, the Obama administration has one of the worst records of any president’s in terms of prosecuting leaks and whistleblowers. Moreover, Snowden had virtually no legal protections as a member of an intelligence agency contractor (Booz Allen Hamilton).

But Murphy himself has a stake in this debate that arguably ought to have been disclosed. Though Murphy was introduced only as a “Republican strategist,” he is also the founding partner of Navigators Global, a lobbying firm that represents one of the NSA’s largest contractors. Disclosures show that Navigators Global represents Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) on issues before Congress.

Recall I covered CSC and others in my recent article:  Meet the Contractors: America’s “Digital Blackwater”

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