Greenwald has railed against the abuses of JP Morgan Chase in the past, not so much because of their prominent role in the sub-prime mortgage debacle and other assorted shystery, but because of the special cosy deal they worked out with the Obama Justice Department to get off rather lightly for their horrid abuses. Indeed, former JP Morgan director William Daley became "co-chair Obama's re-election campaign." (See Paul Street's Hollow Resistance for a full-throated take-down of Obama's appeasement years.)
Many people would be surprised to learn that Amazon is one of eBay's principal competitors (according to Forbes magazine, only about 7% of Amazon's total revenues comes from book sales; the rest is from selling other stuff, just like eBay). Maybe Greenwald felt conflicted by this awful potential blip in his bestseller sales and could not bring himself to delve further.
But it was embarrassing, to say the least, for someone who polishes his integrity to such a high sheen, and so passively works with a company like Amazon, which, aside from working with the CIA and JP Morgan, is known to treat workers with contempt; which sniggerly responded to widespread drone fears by suggesting Amazon might deliver books that way; which uses very intrusive algorithms; which employs DRM locks to its e-books so that you unknowingly don't realize that you're leasing the books rather than buying them; and which has alienated writers and the publishing industry with mean anti-trust-like tactics.
Back in March 2014, Counterpunch's Chris Floyd discussed at length eBay owner Pierre Omidyar's role in helping to fund the corrupt but democratically elected Ukrainian government, a success which almost brought the world closer to another catastrophic war. He was assisted in his doings by USAID, the old soft shoe of the CIA. Greenwald was not fazed by this. He's not fazed by Omidyar's cooperation with the NSA, tweeting at one point, "I don't doubt PayPal cooperates with NSA"." PayPal was even one of the companies that participated in a credit blockade of Wikileaks in 2010, that seriously starved them of operational funding.
Until some of his long-time followers expressed alarm, he wasn't fazed that the Intercept website he helped build from scratch was employing Google Analytics and Amazon algorithms, and others, to track and store data on visitors who showed up at Intercept, nor fazed that Intercept's TOS was not exactly visitor friendly. He's unconcerned that his readers who take advantage of the special offer on the Amazon website may, trusting his judgement, divulge personal data to banks (who will run a credit profile) and authorities that risks their becoming persons of interest by virtue of their connection to Greenwald. And he's unconcerned that some readers see his document-hoarding, especially regarding the Snowden cache, as not much better than Dina Raston-Temple's gatekeeping role-play.
Greenwald has resigned from The Intercept now. And there's chatter that he may now take his talents to substack, where he may once again enjoy what he likes to do best, which is to blog. Bloggers don't have editors. He quit Intercept because he couldn't curry their editorial policies, he says. Readers don't yet know the full substance of the breakdown of his relationships there. But there was evident friction between he and James Risen over the DNC Hack / RussiaGate event, with Greenwald cautious about findings released by corrupt American intel figures, like John Brennan and James Clapper, and Risen, well, just hating on Trump, the "he's a murderer."
Greenwald was also upset with The Intercept apparently because they muffed the Reality Winner document procurement process, leaving her vulnerable to easy identification back at her government post. Details are sketchy, so far. (But one has to shake one's head at his outrage here, given how famously lackadaisical he has been with securing classified data in the past. Even Snowden and Laura Poitras have called him on it. Who knows how many security breaches he's suffered from hackers of all ilks as a result of his arguably juvenile truculence?)
In this latest kerfuffle, editors at The Intercept would be right to condemn his prissiness at refusing to be edited, as if he alone had a right to a "director's cut" whenever he wrote, but that does not appear to be the issue. Greenwald is concerned that a recent piece he wrote regarding Hunter and Joe Biden was being "censored" for no other reason that editorial staff support Joe Biden's candidacy in the upcoming election and don't want a powerful voice swaying potentially undecided younger voters to abstain from Lesser Evil voting. If Greenwald's right, he's got a point, and it's an ironical one, since a similar claim was made by the NYT before the 2004 election, when they quashed a devastating piece about the Bush Administration's illegal collection of citizen data in the operation known as Stellar Wind, a quashing Snowden says, in his memoir, inspired him to become a whistleblower.
There are all kinds of ironies and contradictions in the media game. As The Intercept perhaps moves editorially toward "mainstream" policies that, Greenwald says, mirror the very news agencies they were trying to distinguish themselves from, the kind that led to decisions like that NYT quashing, which James Risen has claimed came as the result of a personal favor to Michael Hayden by a NYT editor, he may be on to something. Perhaps, he'll take over where Assange has been forced to leave off. He takes with him the huge, largely still untapped Snowden cache of documents that he could proffer forth for our revelation delectation. Or, he could get lazy and just write another Pulitzer prize-winning book about his adventures at Intercept.
First appeared at substack on November 1, 2020.
(Article changed on November 1, 2020 at 22:27)
(Article changed on November 2, 2020 at 03:53)
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