Glenn Greenwald the Traitor

According to pandodaily, a news website hosted on pando.com, Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who Edward Snowden trusted with his entire cache of leaked documents, has formed a $250 million partnership with the billionaire owner of the PayPal corporation. This has caused much controversy because it is suspected that some of the documents in Greenwald's possession show that Paypal complied in the NSA mass data collection program.

Probably the worst part of this is that even Snowden doesn't have the files anymore. Greenwald and his co-worker Laura Poitras are the only two people in possession of the files and they have both entered into this $250 million agreement. This is a clear conflict of interest. These two people have taken the cache of documents that Snowden entrusted to them and have privatized them for their own personal gain. These are probably the most dishonest two reporters I have ever heard about in my entire life. Snowden risked his life to acquire these documents and give them to the public and now all his effort has essentially been thrown into the toilet.

So now these documents are under the control of Omidyar who according to Pando, "invested in a third-world micro-loans company whose savage bullying of debtors resulted in mass suicides." This is not a person we can trust with these documents and clearly Greenwald and Poitras weren't either.

I think the moral of the story here is that anyone can be bought and sold. Nobody can be trusted and Snowden really should have kept a copy of all the data he acquired from the NSA. But I think there's an even bigger lesson to be learned here, one that will probably be ignored. That lesson is that billionaires have too much power in society. I think billionaires are one of the biggest threats to a free and democratic society. Here we have a person with the ability to corrupt any person he or she wants to. This is an enormous amount of power for one individual. How can we have a free society when all it takes is a single billionaire to corrupt a government leader and get what he or she wants. I would argue that we can't.

We have limits on the amount of power people can have within government. Our government is split up into three branches to make sure one doesn't get too powerful. So why do we allow individuals to become so powerful? Money is power and this recent "partnership" is evidence of it. The owner of paypal clearly didn't want certain piece of information about him being leaked so he used his enormous power and influence to prevent it from happening.

While this article about the corruption of greenwald is terrible news for the people, it highlights a different and potentially more important issue in our society: the ever growing influence of the ultra wealthy. This article shows that the only way we can have a truly free and democratic society is to set limits on wealth and power for individuals.