The Big Whorehouse on the Potomac

http://counterpunch.org/roberts07032009.html
As Americans celebrate July 4, they can contemplate that the union of “free and independent states,” like the former British colonial power, has evolved into its final manifestation–a complete whore house.  While Members of Parliament in London charge their expense accounts with every personal expenditure, including the rental of adult xxx-rated films, an American newspaper put the reporting of public policy out to bids until politico.com blew the whistle. In Washington, everything is for sale, including journalistic integrity.  The Washington Post, which abandoned investigative reporting eons ago, decided to boost its sagging revenues by spreading her legs.  The Post’s business division put out a flier offering lobbyists access at the Post’s CEO’s gracious home to “those powerful few” in the Obama administration, Congress, and among the Post’s editors and reporters who decide the nation’s policies, such as health care. The Washington Post’s flyer offered a Wal-Mart low cost of a mere $25,000 for one “salon” to interact with decision makers and $250,000 for eleven interactions. Alas, people with an old fashioned sense of integrity impugned the Washington Post’s new business model, and the Post’s boss, Katharine Weymouth, had to rescind the offer that would have rescued the newspaper by turning it into a “facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters.” I say damn the old fashioned moralists.  America would be much better served if the Washington Post was selling access to lobbyists instead of selling the US government’s PSYOPS operations in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Ukraine, Serbia, Venezeula, Honduras, and everywhere else, for which the paper receives a pittance: the reporter can tell his editor that he has a deep source within the government, hardly an adequate  recompense for wars that cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars at a time when Americans cannot pay the mortgages on their homes. America would be better off if the Washington Post whored for lobbyists than for the US Imperial State, which has failed to adjust its imperial ambitions to its bankruptcy.  As an example of its whoring for US Imperialism, on July 2, the Washington Post reported President Obama’s claim that Russian Prime Minister Putin is a person who lives partly in the past, with “one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.” If Putin has “one foot in the new,” he is ahead of Obama who has both feet in the past.