Monthly Archives: June 2013

Dissidents

June 17, 2013 – 10:58 am

No Sift next week. The next articles will be posted on July 1.

At the hands of the press,
and in the eyes of the Government,
I fell from grace.
I too became a dissident.

— Thomas Dolby, “Dissidents” (lyrics, audio)

This week everybody was talking about Edward Snowden

And that misses the point. If you’re talking about Snowden — whether he’s a hero or a traitor, why he did it, what should happen to him, etc. — then you’re not talking about the NSA, what it’s doing, and what should be done to corral it.

The NSA loves that.

So no matter how many bright shiny objects the establishment press tries to distract you with — look! his girl friend is a pole dancer! — keep your eye on the ball. The issue that matters is the NSA, not Snowden. I flesh those ideas out, and cover what else we learned about the NSA this week, in Edward Snowden Is Not the Issue.

You know who does do a good job of laying out the issues? Juice Rap News.

and Syria

The Obama administration has become convinced that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons against the rebels. And governments can’t be allowed to do that, so we have to do something. But that doesn’t mean we know what to do, or how not to get sucked into another long war with nothing to win.

The British newspaper The Independent reports that Iran is sending 4,000 members of its Revolutionary Guard to help Assad. It frames Obama’s move to arm the rebels as the U.S. taking sides in the region-wide sectarian struggle between Sunni and Shia.

Foreign Policy explains why the Pentagon has been dragging its feet on intervention.

With some notable exceptions, top brass believe arming Syrian rebels, creating a no-fly zone and intervening in other ways militarily, amounts to a risky approach with enormous costs that won’t likely give the Syrian opposition the lift it needs.

And at that point do we say, “Oh well, at least we tried.”? Or do we have to go in deeper to justify what we’ve done already?

and Turkey

Turkish protestors make Les Miserables their own. I wish that didn’t fill me with foreboding.

I can’t say I really understand what the Turkish protests are about, but this article helps.

and DNA patents

Maybe my cynicism level has gotten too high. I was sure that a few of the corporatist justices on the Supreme Court would figure out a way to justify granting patents on naturally-occurring human DNA; I wouldn’t have been totally shocked if that view had won a 5-4 majority. Eventually, I figured, some mega-corp will patent lungs and charge the rest of us royalties for breathing.

Didn’t happen.

Instead, Thursday the Court unanimously decided that “separating [a] gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention” and is therefore not patentable. The decision specifically applied to Myriad Genetics’ claim of a patent on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes implicated in breast cancer. Because of those patents, Myriad had a monopoly on testing for those genes and was able to charge high prices. (Angelina Jolie launched those tests into the headlines a few weeks ago by having her apparently healthy breasts removed after seeing her results.)

But I wrote about Apocalyptic Optimism

It’s easy to be an optimist if you think the right people are in power and have things more-or-less in hand. But Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do? and David Graeber’s The Democracy Project are upbeat books by people who think our current system is falling apart.

and how to make the NSA’s job harder

I try out some simple anonymizing tools in Herd Immunity Against Online Spying.

and these things also caught my eye

The usual Brewer/Obama relationship.

In one of the year’s most fascinating political surprises, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (famous for the anti-immigrant “papers please” law S. B. 1070) succeeded in pushing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion through the legislature. Brewer had begun carrying out her threat to veto every bill until Medicaid expansion passed.

300,000 Arizonans will now get health insurance. The Medicaid expansion is important because it rationalizes healthcare for the working poor. Currently, many of them wait until health problems get out of hand, then go to the emergency room, generating huge bills they can’t pay. Some of those costs are absorbed by the hospitals (who make it up by overcharging the rest of us), and some costs eventually are borne by cities and states. Since the cost of Medicaid expansion is largely borne by the federal government, Arizona saves money by agreeing to it.

Nate Silver says the odds of a second Massachusetts Senate upset are slim.

Undoubtedly some everyday sexual harassment — pinching, grabbing, leering, etc. — is done with conscious malice. But I suspect most harassers have just never tried to imagine what being on the receiving side is really like. So they think: “It’s a game”, “women expect it”, “it’s no big deal”, “they should be flattered”, and so on. Well, for those guys, there’s this video:

Parody news sites are getting harder to spot. They’re more subtle than they used to be, and the level of craziness in real news keeps going up. So newslo.com fools quite a few people with stories like Texas Board of Education Revises Textbooks: Slaves were “Unpaid Interns”.

Every news-satire site should adopt Newslo’s help feature: the Show Facts button at the bottom of each story. Clicking it highlights the parts of the story that are true.

After another Republican man says something stupid about rape, Ta-Nehisi Coates comments on the value of diversity:

If you are not around people who will look at you like you are crazy when you make stupid claims about other people’s experiences, then you tend to keep saying stupid things about other people’s experiences.

Diversity in positions of power isn’t just a kumbaya thing or a way to buy off politically important minorities. If you’re about to embarrass yourself, your party, or your country by saying something stupid about (or doing something stupid to) people you don’t understand, a diverse leadership group has ways of shutting that whole thing down.

Ah, the perverse state government of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin. While the legislature has been in the process of passing one of those war-on-women forced-ultrasound laws, the amount of dissent tolerated in the galleries has been shrinking. Thursday they hit a new low: Women who protested by putting duct tape over their mouths were removed from the gallery. Somebody want to explain to me again how conservatism is all about freedom?

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Edward Snowden Is Not the Issue

June 17, 2013 – 10:31 am

Focusing Snowden distracts us from the NSA. The NSA loves that.

Whether Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor* makes for great talking-head debates. Why did he do it? Will he get away with it? What’s he going to do next?

Let me ask a better question: Why do you care? You’re not going to invite Snowden over for dinner or offer him a job, so why do you need to know whether he’s a good person or not? On the other hand, if you’re planning to keep living in the United States, or in any country under the influence of the United States, how the NSA might be spying on you is important. That’s where your attention should be.

I know, I know. Making Snowden the issue lets journalists interview Snowden’s attractive girlfriend (an ABC News article — with picture, naturally — describes her as “an acrobatic pole performer“), her father, and even some woman who lives next door to his mother. (He “seemed like a nice young man”.)

Pole dancer!

Great stuff for ratings, but completely beside the point — what the logicians call an ad hominem fallacy. It’s also standard operating procedure when anybody blows the whistle on wrong-doing in high places: First make the whistleblower the issue, and then assassinate his or her character.

Leaving pole dancers out of it for a few minutes, let’s review the important questions:

Are the programs Snowden described real? Yes. So far the government is not denying the authenticity of the documents Snowden has leaked. Much of it they have verified.

Are they as invasive as the Guardian article made them sound? Unclear. As the techies look at the leaked PRISM documents, many are concluding that one key slide was misinterpreted. It doesn’t really mean that the NSA has a pipe into the central servers at Google and Facebook, from which it can grab whatever it wants at will. There seems to be more process involved than that.

On the other hand, AP reports:

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

CNET reports the NSA admitting in a congressional briefing that their analysts can listen to phone calls on their own authority, just as Snowden said he could. But other sources are saying that also is based on a misunderstanding. Julian Sanchez does a good job of sorting out what we know and don’t know.

Legally speaking, the analysts don’t have carte blanche. In other words, this isn’t “warrantless wiretapping” so much as “general warrant wiretapping.” They can’t just tap any old call or read any old e-mail they strikes them as “suspicious.” They’ve got to be flagging content for interception because they believe it’s covered by a particular §702 authorization, and observe whatever “targeting procedures” the FISA Court has established for the relevant authorization.

On the third hand, it’s not clear who is enforcing those rules or whether the analysts ever break them.

Are they legal? It depends on what the meaning of is is.  If you mean: “Can the government point to laws and procedures that they are following?”, then the answer seems to be yes. But if the question is whether those laws and procedures fulfill the Fourth Amendment‘s guarantee of “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”, I would say no.

Are the safeguards protecting the privacy of innocent people working? We don’t yet have an egregious example of them not working. But if it makes you feel safe that a secret court has to approve these programs, you should read what retired Judge Nancy Gertner says:

As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced.

The judges appointed to this court aren’t representative of the judiciary as a whole, and chosen precisely because they are sympathetic to government power.

it’s not boat rockers. … To suggest that there is meaningful review it seems to me is an illusion.

Congressional oversight also looks more impressive on paper than it seems to be in practice. WaPo reporter Bruce Gellman said on Face the Nation:

Aside from the members of the intelligence committees, there is something near zero members of Congress who have a member of their staff who is cleared to know anything about this.

He described a “locked room” where Congressmen can go to read unbelievably complicated documents for themselves, “and the number of members who do that is zero.”

What’s the effect on democracy if those safeguards fail? The country would effectively be ruled by the people who know everybody else’s secrets. How many congressmen could vote against them? What president could shut them down?

Do these programs really catch terrorists? I’m impressed that Al Franken says they do. But I’m not impressed that we have to take other people’s word for it. It’s like the torture debate: The government can say it works, but if we’re not cleared to look at the evidence, then why should we believe them?

And none of these claims assess how much domestic terrorist recruitment is aided by Americans’ sense that they are subjects of a government beyond their control or understanding.

Why do they have to be secret? Senator Tester denies that Snowden’s leaks harmed national security. And it’s hard to imagine a terrorist cell that wouldn’t already be thinking about people tapping its phones and reading its email.

Some details need to be secret — plans for the H-bomb, dates for the D-Day invasion, and so on. But the government’s interpretations of the laws should never be secret. The American people are owed a map of the rights they have lost, and at every wall that keeps them from knowing more, we are owed an explanation of why we can’t know more. We haven’t gotten that yet.

*Notice what a hero/traitor dichotomy assumes. If what the government is doing is evil, then Snowden could be both a hero and a traitor.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Herd Immunity Against Online Spying

June 17, 2013 – 8:45 am

Can people like us make the NSA’s job harder?

Unlike Senator Lindsey Graham, I’m not “glad” the NSA is hoovering my data into a big database that they pledge (cross their hearts and hope to die) not to access without court authorization and Congressional oversight.

Last time I checked I wasn’t conspiring with terrorists, and off the top of my head I can’t think of any big secrets I’m hiding, but the whole thing just makes me uneasy, given what has happened in the past. The meaning of “terrorist” sometimes gets stretched from jihadist mass murderers to, say, environmentalists who sabotage bulldozers or maybe even Martin Luther King. And while I don’t know how seriously to take Steven Rambam’s claim that it’s “routine” for authorities to log all the cell phones at demonstrations like Occupy Wall Street, I can’t call it unbelievable either.

So, as I said last week, I’m inclined to monkey-wrench a little, and to encourage others to do the same.

The problem is, I’m not a hacker. I’m pretty good at finding things with Google, and I can usually follow step-by-step instructions as long as nothing (and I mean nothing) has changed since the author wrote them, but configuring software isn’t fun for me. I don’t think of it as an artistic outlet. Mostly, I just want stuff to work so I can get on with whatever I sat down to do.

In short, it’s very unlikely that anything I do as an individual is going to give the NSA much of a headache. But there are lots and lots of people at my middling level of sophistication. Are there simple things we could do collectively to make government surveillance more difficult?

That’s what I started playing with this week. Starting with some suggestions from Timothy Lee’s Five Ways to Stop the NSA From Spying On You, I tried out some simple anonymizing tools. I ignored the ones that depend convincing my friends to learn encryption, and focused on things I can do on my own.

I’d like to see more people use these and similar tools for a very simple reason: herd immunity. If only one person is trying to hide his information from the government, that by itself makes him look suspicious. But if lots and lots of people are doing it, then the people with nothing to hide provide cover for any Martin Luther Kings that the government tries to spy on.

Saying the same thing more technically: Data mining like the NSA is doing has a false-positive problem. It might identify a revolutionary (as this clever Paul Revere example illustrates), but it might also pick out a thousand other people who have nothing to do with whatever the government is investigating. So if we all start acting more suspiciously, maybe we can increase the false positives to the point that the whole program becomes useless.

TOR. TOR stands for The Onion Router. (No connection to the satire-news site The Onion. I think the image is supposed to represent something that has layers within layers and can’t be peeled.) Wikipedia says: “Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide volunteer network consisting of thousands of relays to conceal a user’s location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.”

The Tor browser is free, and easy to install and use. It works with the Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems. You can download it here.

The first thing I noticed using Tor is that it’s a little sluggish. It’s not agonizingly slow, but if you’re used to web pages popping up instantly, you’ll notice a lag — just long enough to make you realize that your data is zipping and zapping all over the world. (Like Louis CK says about cell phones: “It’s going to space. Can you give it a second?”)

Second — and this is so obvious in retrospect that I feel stupid mentioning it — remaining anonymous is the exact opposite of identifying yourself. So Facebook keeps asking me security questions, because (even though I’m on my home desktop machine) I don’t appear to be anyplace I usually log in from. And I can never guess what country’s home page CNN is going to serve up.

So whether I’m hiding anything from the NSA or not, I’m pretty sure I’m keeping Google confused.

Finally, some stuff is inherently insecure, so Tor either recommends you not install it or just won’t work with it. For example, using Flash with Tor kind of defeats the purpose. So I’ve been using Tor in combination with another browser. When I want to log in to something or watch a video, I’ll jump over to FireFox.

If you start using Tor regularly — or you just like the idea of it — you might want to contribute to the Tor Project.

TorMail. If you worry about Google or Yahoo turning your mail over to the NSA — email that sits on a server gets none of the constitutional protection of snail mail or phone calls — then TorMail is your answer.

It’s web-based email, just like you’re used to. But the system is designed in an admirably paranoid way. Your traffic goes through the Tor network, so you can only access it with the Tor browser. (People claim you can use the Thunderbird email client as a front end, but I wasn’t able to make that work. And you still need to be connected to the Tor network.) Mail servers that send and receive from the Tor network are pure relays that don’t have any mail sitting on them. So there’s nothing to seize and nobody to serve a warrant to.

LPS. This is the coolest thing I played with, and I was surprised how easily it worked for me. Lightweight Portable Security is something the Air Force wrote to allow their people to do secure work on insecure machines. Here’s the idea: LPS is a very small operating system that you put on a CD or a thumbdrive. Insert that disk into anybody’s machine and tell it to reboot. (You don’t even need their password, because you’re not using their operating system or opening their files.)

LPS takes about 3-5 minutes to load, and then you have a minimal Linux-based desktop with a FireFox browser. After you connect to the local network (maybe you’ll need a password there), you’re free to roam the internet. I checked my mail, edited files on my Google drive, and posted to Facebook. And when I shut down and took my disk, no trace of me remained on the machine I’d been using, because I’d never touched its file system. Likewise, my files didn’t pick up any of the viruses or spyware that might have been on the host machine.

I think the Air Force wants its LPS users to immediately log on to some super-secure Department of Defense network. I can’t do that, so my next project is to add a Tor browser to LPS. That should make me both invisible to the machine I’m using and anonymous to the web sites I visit. (OK, maybe I am starting to enjoy this a little.)

If you’ve been trying out anything the rest of us should know about, mention it in the comments.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (4)

Apocalyptic Optimism

June 17, 2013 – 8:08 am

It’s the end of the world as we know it*, but Gar Alperovitz and David Graeber feel fine.

Lately Robert Jensen has been importing religious terms into journalism. Borrowing from the seminal theologian Walter Brueggermann, Jensen defines three stances from which a journalist can report:

  • royal, relaying the vision of the Powers That Be
  • prophetic, calling the Powers That Be to repent and reform, as the prophets confronted the kings in the Old Testament
  • apocalyptic, announcing that the status quo is beyond reform and calling on the people to think in dramatically new ways

It’s easy for a royalist to be optimistic, because the system is basically sound and a few policy tweaks — a tax cut, a jobs bill, a new general with an improved strategy — will fix whatever temporary problems we might be having. A prophet may rail against current trends, but prophetic warnings rest on the optimistic subtext that we still have time to change our ways. If we just end the war or restore the Constitution or throw the crooks out, we’ll be back on track.

“I was planning to rebuild anyway.”

But the rarest kind of optimism is apocalyptic. The apocalyptic reporter sees that the cavalry won’t arrive in time or isn’t coming at all or will just make the destruction more complete. To be an apocalyptic optimist, you need to see the new seeds already sprouting in the shadow of the doomed sequoia.

In his new book What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz recognizes all the signs that the American-system-as-we-know-it can’t survive.

  • Even after crashing the world economy in 2008, the big banks are still too powerful to regulate, and the private-profit/public-risk dynamic still dominates. So given time, they’ll crash the economy again.
  • Greenhouse gases keep accumulating in the atmosphere, but even now that we’re seeing the results in droughts, heat waves, and violent storms, we still can’t raise the will to do anything about it.
  • Inequality keeps growing, regardless of which party holds power. For decades, all the apparent growth in the economy has been captured by the rich. The  average person’s standard of living is not improving at all, even as valuable intangibles (like job security) are being lost.
  • Our health-care system gets ever more expensive, and yet we get worse results than the other wealthy countries.
  • The unlimited corporate money pouring into political campaigns has captured both parties. The Democrats may be slightly less receptive to the corporate agenda, but they can’t stand against it either.

And while he by no means rejects traditional political organizing and movement-building, Alperovitz doesn’t think politics will solve the problem. Historically, progressive change in America happened in two big bursts — the New Deal and the Great Society — and both depended on external circumstances that aren’t likely to recur. The New Deal needed not just the desperation of the Depression, but a conservative president (Hoover) to blame for it. If things had shaken out differently, all that despair could have energized the Right, as in Germany. (Imagine the nativist backlash if the immigrant-backed Catholic liberal Al Smith had won in 1928 and been in the White House when the bottom fell out in 1929.) The Great Society couldn’t have happened without the confidence and generosity that resulted from two decades of widely-shared growth; and that couldn’t have happened if World War II hadn’t wrecked all our industrial competitors.

So yes, political reform movements can make a difference, but only in the presence of circumstances we can’t count on. And that’s pretty much what we’ve been seeing: We had three consecutive wave elections: Democratic in 2006 and 2008, and Republican  in 2010. But how much actual change did they bring?

And if we somehow managed the political will to, say, break up the too-big-to-fail banks, wouldn’t they just merge back together as soon as our attention shifted? Isn’t that what the old AT&T phone monopoly did?

Looking at things that way should make a person pessimistic, right? Not exactly. Alperovitz’s introductory chapter ends like this:

as a historian and political economist, it is obvious to me that difficult historical times do not always or even commonly persist forever. In my judgment “we shall overcome” is not simply a slogan but in fact the likely, though not inevitable, outcome of the long struggle ahead.

It is possible, quite simply, that we may lay the groundwork for a truly American form of community-sustaining and wealth-democratizing transformative change—and thereby also the reconstitution of genuine democracy, step by step, from the ground up.

The key phrase here is “long struggle”. We can’t just be socially conscious and politically active for a few months, elect President Wonderful, and then go back to sleep. We tried that; it didn’t work.

Alperovitz’s long struggle isn’t purely political. It’s more than just a series of marches and demonstrations that you attend before returning to your old life. The struggle he envisions involves creating institutions that democratize wealth: co-ops, credit unions, employee-owned businesses, and so on. Alperovitz envisions replacing the flighty government/capitalist partnerships of today with more stable alliances joining local governments with fixed local institutions (like hospitals and universities) and the worker-and-consumer-owned businesses that could service and supply them.

The seeds of that revolution are all around us. (I suggested painless ways you can start participating two weeks ago.) And Alperovitz believes they may sprout first and best in the places where the old system has failed most completely — rust belt wastelands like Detroit or Cleveland. (He cites Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives, which are modeled on the successful Mondragon Cooperatives of the Basque region of Spain.) His logic is perverse but compelling: As long as capitalists can threaten to move the factory to China, they have the community over a barrel. But after the factory is gone, why listen to capitalists any more?

Alperovitz foresees a snowballing process as each new democratizing institution changes the consciousness of the people who participate and enlarges the constituency for democratically managed solutions. Before long, the resources that communities waste enticing corporations to locate there will instead become available to invest in the community solving its own problems.

David Graeber’s new book The Democracy Project, presents a somewhat different brand of apocalyptic optimism. (His last book, which I also reviewed, was a marvelous work of economic anthropology called Debt: the first 5,000 years.)

Graeber is one of the architects of Occupy Wall Street, and is at least partly responsible for coining the term “the 99%”. That makes him a leading voice in what The New Yorker has dubbed “the anarchist revival“, and puts him in something of a delicate situation: In order to promote anarchism, he has to shut down the media’s attempt to anoint him as the movement’s leader. Graeber is a “horizontal” activist who believes in groups finding consensus, not a “vertical” activist who wants to tell folks what to do. If you think people should either lead, follow, or get out of the way, Graeber is not for you.

The essence of Graeber’s worldview is a question: How would groups co-operate if they knew from the beginning that they couldn’t force dissenters to go along with what the group decides? That makes him more radical than a Libertarian, because Libertarians believe in a police-enforced property system.

Like Alperovitz, Graeber sees the approaching end of the current system, which he believes is based ever-more-nakedly on extracting value by force, under the pretense of increasingly empty rituals like elections and loans and trade agreements. Today’s young people, for example, face a choice between accepting unstable careers at minimum wage or borrowing heavily to get an education, then working as unpaid interns before beginning to earn money to pay off their debts. How different is that from feudalism or slavery?

But he also is optimistic that new ways are sprouting in the shadow of the old. The establishment view of Occupy is that it failed because it didn’t produce a set of demands that could become the platform of a political party. But to Graeber that outcome would have been failure. (In Jensen/Brueggermann terms, it would recast OWS as prophetic rather than apocalyptic.) To make that case, The Democracy Project not only retells the history of Occupy from the inside, it retells the history of American democracy and of revolutionary movements in general.

And the punch line is: The really successful revolutions don’t seize power, they change our common sense about what power is and what it can do. The French and Russian revolutions failed to the extent that they became new governments; Robespierre and Stalin represent the defeat of the revolutionary ideals, not their victory. But both revolutions succeeded as “planetwide transformations of political common sense”. The French Revolution ended monarchy as a viable option for forming new governments, and the Russian Revolution drew a line in the sand that capitalists didn’t dare cross. The New Deal and the social democracy of postwar Europe never would have happened happen without the Russian Revolution.

Similarly, Graeber points to another so-called “failure” — the antiwar movement of the Johnson/Nixon years. Arguably, it didn’t shorten the Vietnam War. But American governments have avoided high-casualty wars for the four decades since. (Put together, the Iraq and Afghan Wars have produced about 1/10th the number of combat deaths as each of the Vietnam and Korean Wars.) That attempt to avoid casualties led to increased “collateral damage” as we bombed from a distance rather than aimed down a barrel. That stiffened local resistance and

pretty much guarantee[d] that the United States couldn’t achieve its military objectives. And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this. It didn’t matter. They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.

So as Occupy morphs into the future, its goal should not be to launch a new party or seize control of an old one. It should be trying to change political common sense. Graeber closes his book by suggesting places where a change in common sense could make a significant difference. Most have to do with the nature of work, the virtue of working long hours, the value of helping people rather than producing more stuff, and bureaucracy as a problem in both the public and private sectors — a problem that could be avoided if groups organized in ways that didn’t require forcing dissenters to co-operate.

Graeber does not minimize or wish away the signs of global catastrophe, but Occupy has made him hopeful because

the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.

* I’ve never thought about R.E.M. and the Tarot in the same sitting before, so I never noticed: Isn’t that the Fool’s dog in the End of the World video?

By weeklysift | Posted in The Sifted Bookshelf | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

The Monday Morning Teaser

June 17, 2013 – 7:15 am

An afternoon appointment is going to force me to get the Sift out promptly today; the first two articles will go out as fast as I can proof-read them.

And then tomorrow I head to Louisville for the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, which will keep me too busy to put out a Sift next Monday.

Today’s first article will have the unlikely title “Apocalyptic Optimism”. Two recent books have something interesting in common: Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do? and David Graeber’s The Democracy Project are upbeat books based on the premise that America-as-we-know-it is falling apart. I’m classifying them as “apocalyptic” using the royalist/prophetic/apocalyptic framework that journalist Robert Jensen borrowed from theologian Walter Brueggermann. What makes them upbeat? Well, as Graeber says in his last paragraph, “The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die.”

The second article “Herd Immunity Against Online Spying” is more of a how-to. The recent revelations about the NSA have re-awakened my interest in ways to be more anonymous online. I’ll ignore things that require you to become a hacker or convince your friends to use encryption, and focus instead on changes you can make simply on your own: the Tor browser, Tormail, and a neat little program the Air Force uses called Lightweight Portable Security. Maybe you have nothing to hide, but the more people who use these kinds of tools, the harder the NSA’s job gets.

Third, I’ll summarize a bunch of what we learned about the NSA this week and warn you not to get distracted by the hero-or-traitor debate in “Edward Snowden Is Not the Issue”.

The weekly summary is called “Dissidents” after a Thomas Dolby song. Syria, Turkey, DNA patents, the unlikely Brewer-Obama alliance, and why taping your mouth shut is more speech than Wisconsin can tolerate.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (4)

Plugging In

June 10, 2013 – 1:36 pm

How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.

— George Orwell, 1984

They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.

— Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower

This week everybody was talking about the surveillance state

In a series of revelations made through The Guardian and The Washington Post, whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed how the NSA collects information on everyone, even people who have no connection to terrorism and have not done anything to raise suspicion.

In PRISM and Privacy, I collect links to the key articles and discuss how to think about them. (My conclusions are more radical than you probably expect.) But whether you click through to that or not, you should watch this 12-minute interview Glen Greenwald did with Snowden in Hong Kong on Thursday.

and Republican reform

Last Monday, the College Republicans told their party how it needs to change if it’s going to appeal to young voters. They wrote an insightful report, but I doubt the GOP will be able to follow their advice. I put the details in a separate article, Smart Kids.

and you also might be interested in …

Tennessee is one of several Republican-dominated states that are refusing federal money to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. Their substitute program can only be explained by The Daily Show.

Another front on which corporate personhood has been advancing for decades: Corporations claim First Amendment rights in situations that don’t look anything like free-speech cases.

Isn’t it interesting that — at the precise moment in our history when inequality is skyrocketing, when corporate profits are rising and wages shrinking — we have a corporate-funded movement that blames the failures of our inner-city public schools on lazy teachers and their unions?

I learned journalism on my high school newspaper. That makes me a dinosaur, because high-school papers are going extinct.

Speaking of high school, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a fabulous article explaining why he was such a bad student. When he speaks to students now

I try to get them to think of education not as something that pleases their teachers, but as a ticket out into a world so grand and stunning that it defies their imagination. My belief is that, if I can get them to understand the “why?” of education, then the effort and hard work and long study hours will come after.

Coates is largely self-educated in adulthood. The problem wasn’t that he was lazy or stupid.

I recall sitting in my seventh-grade French class repeating over and over “Il fait froid. Il fait chaud.” Why was I learning French? Who did I know that spoke French? Where is France? Do they even really talk like this? Well, yeah, they kinda do. I figured that out at 37. And now I find myself clutching flashcards, repeating “Il fait froid. Il fait chaud.”

He believes poor black kids in inner-city schools want to be rappers or athletes (and work pretty hard at it sometimes) because that’s the only kind of wonder they get to see. If they understood education as a way to open up more wonder, they might work pretty hard at that too.

Remember the guy at CPAC from the White Students Union? The guy who wondered why Frederick Douglass would need to forgive his owner for “giving him shelter and food”?

What if you were his fiction-writing professor, like Ben Warner? Warner’s article in Salon is a meditation on the ambiguities of remaining in human relationship with people despite their politics, despite your inability to influence them.

Finally, it doesn’t get any cooler than …

a treehouse made of mirrors.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

PRISM and Privacy

June 10, 2013 – 1:03 pm

This week’s big story was the series of revelations about government spying on ordinary Americans. I don’t see the Weekly Sift as a breaking-news blog, but before we can get around to reflecting on how upset we should be and what we should do about it, let’s establish what happened.

Verizon metadata. It started Wednesday, with Glenn Greenwald’s scoop that Verizon turns its caller records over to the NSA every day. The report was based on a copy of an order from the secret FISA court that oversees the government’s secret snooping. The order, in turn, is based on an expansive interpretation of a provision of the Patriot Act.

Leaks during the Bush administration revealed that call records were being swept up into a massive government database, but

Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

Three related New Yorker articles are worth reading: a Seymour Hersh article about what the NSA was doing in 2006, Jane Mayer explaining just how much about the content of a phone call can be deduced from metadata, and (laughing to keep your sanity) Andy Borowitz’s satirical “Letter to Verizon Customers” in which the company explains that

While the harvesting and surveillance of your domestic phone calls were not a part of your original Verizon service contract, the National Security Agency is providing this service entirely free of charge.

Probably there’s nothing special about Verizon; that’s just the court order we happen to have.

PRISM. Thursday, The Guardian and The Washington Post published a leaked slide presentation on the top-secret PRISM program, in which “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats” are collected directly from the servers of major U.S. service providers like Google, Facebook, and Apple. As the then-anonymous leaker claimed, “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”

Edward Snowden. This weekend, I was explaining to my wife that I didn’t understand why the leaker was staying anonymous, since the NSA was going to figure it out anyway. He might as well orchestrate the announcement himself, rather than be introduced to the world while doing a perp walk.

It turns out he was having similar thoughts. Saturday Edward Snowden was revealed as the whistleblower. Currently hiding out in Hong Kong, Snowden gave this interview to Glenn Greenwald.

Defending surveillance. A variety of sources jumped to the defense of the newly-exposed programs. President Obama emphasized that the programs “do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the e-mails of US citizens and US residents.” And there is oversight to prevent abuse:

Your duly elected representatives have consistently been informed. … This program, by the way, is fully overseen not just by Congress, but by the FISA court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs. … We have established a process and a procedure that the American people should feel comfortable about.

Obama’s bottom-line justification of the spying programs is: “They help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Republican Saxby Chambliss — the ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee — released a joint statement:

The intelligence community has successfully used FISA authorities to identify terrorists and those with whom they communicate, and this intelligence has helped protect the nation. The threat from terrorism remains very real and these lawful intelligence activities must continue, with the careful oversight of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

Opposition in Congress comes from an unusual right/left alliance: liberals like Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, as well as conservatives like Rand Paul.

Four levels of privacy loss. Now we’re getting into the how-should-I-think-about-this part. When I think about “loss of privacy”, I might be talking about four different things:

  1. The modern world collects a lot of information about me. We don’t usually think about it, but just about everything we do leaves a record somewhere. When I walk past a security camera, make a phone call, buy something with a credit card, or go through the E-Z-Pass toll gate, something gets recorded. Most of that security video is never watched by anybody, but it could be, and that by itself might intimidate me out of doing something perfectly legal and harmless, like dancing to the Muzak when I’m by myself in an elevator.
  2. My information could be gathered together into a database, even if no one is targeting me. It’s one thing to imagine a rogue security guard in my building getting obsessed with me (or with my daughter, if I had one) and scanning security tapes. It’s another thing entirely to worry about somebody with access to security cameras everywhere, as well as cell-phone tracking data, credit-card data, TSA body scans, and so on. Again, I’m not important enough for anybody to bother, but the mere possibility is worrisome.
  3. I might be investigated by the government. Think about J. Edgar Hoover tapping Martin Luther King’s phone. Just exercising your constitutional rights in a totally legal way — organizing the next Occupy Wall Street, say — could put you under the government’s microscope. Suddenly, every illegal or embarrassing thing you’ve ever done (no matter how trivial) might come to light and be used to tear you down.
  4. Someday the government might routinely keep track of everyone. So far this is science fiction, because you’d need to hire half the country to watch the other half. But as artificial intelligence improves and processing power grows, the idea of a system that processes all that gathered information and draws conclusions about everybody becomes less and less far-fetched

Now we’re in a position to think about the things we learned this week about government surveillance. It’s tempting to be mad at the government for our level-1 loss of privacy, but that’s just life in the modern world. You need to put that aside.

The Level-2 issues. This week’s revelations indisputably showed level-2 loss of privacy. Information that already existed in separate places is being pulled together into big government databases.

Anybody who watches prime-time TV cop shows shouldn’t be terribly surprised that information can be pulled together about specific people for some good reason. Castle and Beckett are constantly studying suspects’ financial records, looking for specific cars on traffic cams, getting businesses to turn over security-cam videotapes, and so on. The Boston Marathon bombing investigation was like CSI: Real World. We expected investigators to have video of everything and records of everything. If we were disappointed, it was that the FBI couldn’t assemble and process that information to zero in on the bombers faster.

The public is mostly OK with this — supports it, even — as long as the information is handled properly: The government has a good reason to assemble the information; investigators use it to accomplish that legitimate purpose; and after the purpose is fulfilled, they dispose of the information they don’t need. We assume that Castle and Beckett stop tracking a suspect’s financials after his alibi checks out, and that after the case closes, they do their best to forget what they’ve learned. It would creep us out to see them compiling private information just to satisfy their curiosity.

So the idea that the government might be collecting everybody’s phone and/or internet records and storing them forever — that’s a problem.

Level 3 issues. The government’s defense amounts to: Level 2 doesn’t matter as long as we have good procedures in place to protect Level 3. In other words, compiling the database shouldn’t bother you; the real violation of privacy doesn’t happen until somebody accesses the database.

I’m not persuaded, mostly because the safeguards are as invisible to me as the programs were until Wednesday. Courts that have to publish their opinions sometimes make outrageous rulings, and we can respond by pressuring Congress to change the law or starting a movement to amend the Constitution. But if a secret court makes an outrageous ruling, none of that happens, because we don’t hear about it.

Likewise, police sometimes exceed their authority, as they often did during the Occupy protests. When the excess takes the form of pepper spray or a baton to the head, it might show up on YouTube or result in a lawsuit. But when the excess is the misuse of a database, you might never know. Even if you suffer tangible effects, you probably won’t be sure what happened.

One of the things Snowden emphasized in his Greenwald interview was that policy safeguards aren’t much to stand on, particularly if the details of the policy are secret. If you’re a loyal Democrat, you might imagine that President Obama is honestly doing his best to keep the databases from being abused; if you’re  a Republican, you might have similarly trusted President Bush. Good for them if they really did prevent abuse, but the long-term threat is still there.

We have had untrustworthy presidents in the past and we will undoubtedly have another one someday. Or we’ll have an emergency that makes everybody temporarily forget all those namby-pamby notions of privacy. Policies can change in a blink, or people can just stop enforcing them. And if they’re secret policies, no one will know.

Snowden calls this “turnkey tyranny”.

What can be done? This is the hardest kind of thing to fix through the democratic process. First, because a lot of Americans, maybe a majority, would buy the idea that the threat of terrorism justifies ditching some abstract ideals about privacy. (My hunch is that this is an issue where you can get wildly different poll results by re-phrasing the question.)

Even if a majority is solidly against this, it might survive — just as 70% support levels haven’t produced a universal background check law. On the one hand you have the threat of abuses that can probably be kept secret; on the other the threat of a terrorist attack that will dominate the news for weeks. Politicians may decide not to take the chance.

Even if we can elect people we believe oppose such programs … well, we thought Obama did too.

So I’m about to say something significantly more radical than you’re used to reading on this blog: I don’t see this changing without direct action, and probably not without monkey-wrenching. Somehow — and I’m open to suggestions about how — ordinary people have to make this kind of surveillance not work, and frustrate and embarrass the people who try to implement it.

Should it come to that? Yeah, I think it should. I know the spies think they’re keeping us safe from terrorism, and God knows I don’t support terrorism. But long-term, I believe the surveillance state itself is a bigger threat than what it claims to be protecting us from.

To get yourself thinking in the right direction, I recommend a 2008 young-adult novel by Boing-Boing editor Cory Doctorow: Little Brother (as compared to Big Brother). Turns out you can download it for free. I found it a compelling read, and it does for cyber-privacy what Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang did for the environment a generation ago.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Smart Kids

June 10, 2013 – 10:22 am

College Republicans are giving better advice than their elders will be able to follow.

Ever since Mitt Romney’s defeat — the second consecutive presidential election that the Republicans have lost by large margins (4.9 million votes in 2012 and 9.6 million in 2008), and fifth loss of the popular vote in six elections (Bush lost the popular vote by half a million in 2000, but won in the Electoral College) — diagnosing the Republicans’ problems and prescribing a cure has become something of a cottage industry.

The demographic outline of the problem is clear and ought to scare anybody who dreams of painting the map red in 2016 or 2020 or ever again.

  • Hispanics are the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the country, and Republicans have been losing them badly: John McCain could muster only 31% of the Hispanic vote in 2008, and Romney couldn’t even hold that; he got 27%. If current trends hold, the Houston Chronicle says Texas will be a swing state by 2024. It’s hard to see how any Republican can win nationally without a base in Texas.
  • Young people have voted overwhelming for Obama: 60% in 2012 and 66% in 2008, both times with higher-than-normal turnout. That should trouble the GOP for two reasons: A voter’s first few elections can establish a lifelong political identity or party brand loyalty. Plus, every year more new voters turn 18 and more old voters die. In short, large margins in the youth vote could presage Democratic electoral domination for decades to come.

So far, Hispanic outreach isn’t going well: Last month the RNC’s Director of Hispanic Outreach for Florida announced he was becoming a Democrat, citing “the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today”. Ouch.

As if they were trying to prove his point, Thursday House Republicans (with no Democratic support) voted to defund President Obama’s “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” program. Since that’s the moratorium on deporting undocumented students pending passage of the DREAM Act, the upshot is that Republicans — including Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and VP-nominee Paul Ryan — voted to resume deporting the undocumented Hispanics who have the most public sympathy. Since the Senate and the President will never go along with this, it’s hard to interpret it as anything other than gratuitously giving the finger to the Hispanic community.

But what about the youth vote?

Monday, the College Republican National Committee put out its report on the party’s youth problem. The CRNC did something unusual in conservative circles: It talked to the people it was reporting on, gathered facts, and wrote them up clearly. That’s what has been conspicuously missing from the Hispanic effort. Lots of Republicans have decided that the party needs more brown-faced candidates or an immigration bill, but few have asked real live Hispanics what they’re looking for and then thought about how Republicans can provide it.

Social media. The report has three main pieces: media, policy, and branding. The media section says stuff that ought to be obvious to anyone with an ear to the ground, but apparently has not been obvious to Republican campaigns:

  • Young people are more influenced by social media and less influenced by traditional media, particularly TV commercials. When your Facebook friends start sharing the 47% or legitimate rape videos and adding their own caustic comments, no amount of paid advertising is going to counter that.
  • Social media isn’t just another way to broadcast your message to passive viewers, like TV and radio. CRNC says: “Success on Facebook and Twitter comes from getting people to share, not just consume, your message.” So why would they share your message? “When people share content online, they are making a statement about themselves. They will therefore be more likely to share things that make them appear entertaining or intelligent to their friends.”

You know who doesn’t get that? Mitch McConnell. Lately Mitch’s tweets have been showing up on my Twitter feed, because he’s paying Twitter to broadcast them. It’s like he broke into my living room while I’m trying to talk to my friends, shouted something unrelated to our conversation, and left. Similarly, Mitch bought himself a “viral” video on YouTube — apparently by paying a service to run up the numbers. But there’s nothing entertaining or intelligent about McConnell’s tweets or videos that would cause one of your friends — even a conservative friend — to want to share one with you.

But hey, Mitch is “with it”. He has a social media strategy — just like Bob Dole had a web site in 1996.

Policy. The big message here is that Republicans need a message. Hating Obama and blocking everything he tries to do is not a message.

CRNC did focus groups with young Obama voters that they considered “persuadable” for some reason, like “aspiring entrepreneurs” or people “having economic troubles”. They discovered that even voters who were not thrilled with Obama’s first-term performance nonetheless gave him credit for trying. By contrast

Young voters simply felt the GOP had nothing to offer, and therefore said they trusted the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party on every issue tested.

On healthcare, for example, the CRNC survey found considerable skepticism about Obamacare. But even if the implementation goes badly

it will be important for Republicans to outline a vision for how they would build a better system that does contain costs and improve quality. For the moment, the advantage that Obama has on the issue is largely due to the fact that he attempted a reform plan at all.

Same-sex marriage played an interesting role: Few young voters identified it as the most important issue facing the country, but nonetheless it was a deal-breaker for many. Conversely, the report noted that young voters were trending slightly more conservative on abortion. However, the most extreme Santorumish anti-abortion positions are still unpopular.

The young voters largely didn’t respond to traditional Republican buzzwords like “big government”. They are more interested in whether government is solving problems than how big it is.

the focus must be on the outcomes rather than on treating “big government” itself as the enemy.

Neither party appreciates the full importance of the student debt issue for young people, and Republicans frequently wind up on the wrong side of it.

This is one of many issues where young people view Republicans as the party of people who are already rich. To win young voters, it will need to be seen as the party that will help them get rich.

a message and narrative that focuses on economic growth and opportunity cannot exist without substance behind it. … Economic growth and opportunity policies cannot just be about tax cuts and spending cuts.

To win young voters, this agenda must include a range of policies, and they must also be about removing barriers to getting a good education, removing barriers to entrepreneurship, and addressing the challenges of our nation’s health care and immigration systems.

The report mentioned the difficulty the Party has had getting young people to connect their positive feelings about “small business” with keeping taxes low on people who make over $250K a year — many of whom are small businesspeople of some sort.

The vastly different polling numbers for taxes on small businesses versus taxes on “the wealthy” underscores the fact that the connection between the two is rarely made

This is a place where even the College Republicans are drinking the ideological Kool-Aid: The rosy glow that surrounds the phrase “small businessman” goes away when you say “wealthy small businessman”. The small businessman we root for is the one struggling to make a new shop or restaurant turn a profit at all, not the one in the top tax bracket.

One point in the report struck me as particularly insightful: Republicans tend to be people who have established themselves. For example, married homeowners with kids trend strongly towards the GOP, while single apartment-dwellers and 20-somethings living in their parents’ basements don’t. That means the GOP has a vested interest in helping young people get established. If high student debt and a lack of good entry-level jobs keeps responsible young adults from getting married, buying houses, and choosing to have children, how are they going to become Republicans?

Branding. This part of the report drew the most coverage, because it has the most eye-popping quote:

the young “winnable” Obama voters were asked to say what words came to mind when they heard “Republican Party.” The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.

The most interesting information in this section, though, is what words young adults want to identify with — which presumably are the words they most want their party identity to evoke: intelligent was the #1 answer, closely followed by caring and hard-working.

Here’s the problem: Ideology is a lazy way to look at the world. The public dislikes ideologues because they don’t react intelligently to new information, and they care more about ideology than about people — which is why they keep making those insensitive remarks about rape victims. So if you want to be seen as intelligent, caring, and hard-working, you can’t be an ideologue.

That’s why I don’t think the CRNC report is going to have much influence on the over-40 leadership of the GOP. The Party’s current base values its ideology above all. The codeword for this is principles. Any discussion of reform inside the GOP quickly comes around to: “We can’t abandon our principles.”

Intelligent, caring, and hard-working means being willing to make the effort to investigate the details of an issue, to recognize how the strict application of your principles is hurting innocent people, and to come up with clever compromises that achieve most of what you want while doing as little damage as possible.

That’s not the kind of people the GOP’s aging base want to be.

Does it matter? As a Democrat, I have a hard time getting too upset about the possibility that the Republican Party might drive itself into the ground. But my better angels remind me that the country needs two good parties. The sheer craziness of the deport-the-Dreamers Republicans makes the Democratic Party less responsive.

Look at this week’s other main issue: the surveillance state. I have a Democratic senator who faces re-election in 2014 (Jean Shaheen). I can write to her about my concerns, but can I seriously threaten to vote for her opponent if she doesn’t do what I want? Not really. Voting Republican means voting for global warming and back-alley abortions and creationism in the public schools and gays in the closet and new wars and more tax cuts for the rich — and they won’t rein in the surveillance state either. It’s not an option.

So even though my tribal desire to win pulls the other way, I’ll be rooting for the young Republicans to restore some sanity. Go work hard at being smart and caring, young Republicans. Your country needs you.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (5)

The Monday Morning Teaser

June 10, 2013 – 7:46 am

This week there’s no avoiding the surveillance issue and the revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. There are three parts to this story: First, just getting the facts straight. Then, how do we think about this? And then, what can we do? I’ll take my first shot at those questions in “PRISM and Privacy”. (Short version: I’m normally a use-the-ordinary-political-process guy, but this issue might call for monkey-wrenching if we can figure out how.)

Another newsy story is the report the College Republicans put out last Monday about how the GOP can appeal to voters born since 1980 — because eventually all voters will have been born since 1980. I’m not a big fan of the College Republicans, but the insight-to-propaganda ratio in this report is pretty high. (I doubt, though, that they will be able to influence their headstrong elders. And I can’t decide whether I think that’s good or bad.) I’ll summarize in an article called “Smart Kids”.

Those two topical stories have crowded out an article I promised last week: a review of Gar Alperovitz’s new book What They Must We Do? That will have to wait until next week, and I’ll probably also be ready to comment on David Graeber’s The Democracy Project by then.

In the short-notes part of the weekly summary, some articles worth staring into space about. Notably, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls what a bad high school student he was and tries to imagine a message that would have moved him, and college professor Ben Warner writes about the complex emotions that arose when one of his students emerged as a notorious white supremacist — there’s no hope for converting the intolerant without exposing them to human kindness, but sometimes that feels wrong too.

The College Republican article will appear in the next hour or so, and I hope to have the PRISM article posted by noon (EDT).

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (1)

Submission

June 3, 2013 – 1:40 pm

I’ll start with you, Erick. What makes you dominant and me submissive?

— Megyn Kelly, to fellow Fox News pundit Erick Erickson

This week everybody was talking about “breadwinner Moms”

A Pew study about … well, it’s hard to say exactly what it’s about, as I outline in Category Error — the problem with that “breadwinner mom” study  … anyway, it set off a hilariously neanderthal discussion by this all-male panel on Fox Business Channel.

which prompted this on-air butt-kicking by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly.

Fox’s Greta Van Susteren wasn’t directly stereotyped (because her bio doesn’t mention any children), but she wasn’t buying it either:

Have these men lost their minds? (and these are my colleagues??!! oh brother… maybe I need to have a little chat with them) (next thing they will have a segment to discuss eliminating women’s right to vote?)

But rather than poke fun at Fox-pundit ignorance, I’d rather ask one of my favorite questions: Why are we having this discussion?

I think it’s because Pew threw together groups of people whose combination produces a big eye-catching number and a scary graph, but who really don’t belong together. Pew then gave its new category a catchy-but-inaccurate name that contributed to the term becoming a stereotype.

The media then had an ignorant, stereotype-driven discussion because what else could it do? Pundits who paid attention to the full diversity of the category and restricted themselves to true statements — they had nothing interesting to say.

and “court packing”

The D. C. Court of Appeals is the second-most-important American court after the Supreme Court. It had a conservative majority until President Obama finally got a nominee Sri Srinivasan confirmed last month. Now it’s 4-4. But there are three other vacancies, and rumor has it that the administration is planning to submit three nominations at once — a strategy Jonathan Chait calls “obstruct this“. If Senate Republicans try to block all three, that would make a clear case for the Senate to end the filibuster on presidential nominations once and for all.

Hilariously, Senator Grassley referred to this possibility as “packing the court” a phrase that points back to an FDR proposal to change the Constitution. Somehow, a president using his constitutional power to nominate candidates to fill vacancies is equivalent to a constitutional amendment.

The longer version of the Republican argument is that the D.C. Appeals Court’s workload doesn’t justify full staffing. But the Constitution provides a proper way to address that concern: Congress establishes all courts inferior to the Supreme Court and can change their size if it so chooses. But of course, you need a majority to do something like that, and Republicans don’t have one. This is one more example of their anti-democracy, rule-from-the-minority tactics.

Dylan Matthews provides everything you need to know about the situation.

and saving the world by making lots of money

Dylan Matthews’ Join Wall Street, Save the World started a lot of discussion. The article describes the earn-to-give path, where young people aim for high-paying careers, with the goal of living simply and giving a lot of money to organizations that save lives.

I’ve got a whole range of short reactions:

  • I’m not going to criticize anybody who is making a serious attempt to save the world.
  • The argument about whether this path is better or worse than choosing a career that helps people directly is misguided. People should do what they’re good at and what makes sense to them. Anything else invites frustration and burnout.
  • A related path is the one I’m on: Make money to fund yourself doing something you think needs doing. My two main talents are in mathematics and writing. I saved a lot of the money I made as a mathematician so I could retire early and try to raise the public consciousness through writing.
  • Praiseworthy as it is, charity is no substitute for social justice. Charity mitigates the injustice of the system, but doesn’t change the system. Tolstoy’s What Then Must We Do? begins with his attempt to use his income as a Russian aristocrat to help the poor of one Moscow neighborhood. But his failures convince him that the underlying structure of the Russian economy is too corrupt for this to work. Our situation is different, but the challenge he raises deserves attention.
  • If you’re going to join the corporate power structure to do good, you need to be careful that you don’t do more evil in your job than your money can undo. If you make your money writing climate-denial propaganda, I don’t care who you give it to.
  • Earn-to-give is a tough path to follow, because of the constant temptation to spend the money on yourself. I’m curious what the young people in the article will do if they have kids; it’s very hard to say no to the put-my-kid-on-the-path-to-Harvard temptation, which can eat as much money as you can throw at it.
  • If you’re going to pull this off, you’ll need a high degree of self-awareness and a well-tuned bullshit detector, because you’re always one rationalization away from screwing it all up.

But I wrote about how to route your money around corporations

Not perfectly, of course. The economy is so dominated by corporations that you really can’t avoid them if you’re going to lead anything like a normal life. But probably you can avoid them a lot better than you do. I list my suggestions in Starve the Corporate Beast.

and you also might be interested in …

Modern Success interviewed Noam Chomsky. Some noteworthy observations:

  • He identified himself as an anarchist, and then defined anarchism like this: “It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them.  … And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.”
  • He differentiates anarchism from libertarianism: “what’s called libertarian in the United States … permits a very high level of authority and domination but in the hands of private power: so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it likes.  The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society.”
  • “commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets.  We should recognize that.  If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices.  You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose?  No it’s not.  It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices.  And these same institutions run political campaigns.  It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.”

We got a wake-up call about genetically modified organisms (a.k.a. Frankenfood) when

the United States government disclosed this week that a strain of genetically engineered wheat that was never approved for sale was found growing in an Oregon field.

The wheat itself is probably no big deal in public-health terms. (Monsanto engineered it to resist its Roundup herbicide, and we’re already growing and consuming vast amounts of Roundup-ready corn and soybeans. So most likely it’s either harmless or the harm has already been done.)

The disturbing aspect of this story is that Monsanto says it stopped testing this wheat strain in 2004. So how did it wind up in an open field? Where else is it growing? And if that seed escaped the laboratory and got into the wild, what else could escape?

This event raises a worry that even Monsanto, the U.S. government, and other GMOs-are-harmless believers have to take seriously: If laboratory strains can’t be controlled, U.S. grain exports in general could become suspect.

Congratulations!

The headline says that a majority oppose Obamacare. But if you look deeper, an even bigger majority wants at least Obamacare.

Two Oregon bakeries assert that their Christian values won’t let them make wedding cakes for same-sex couples, and that it violates their religious freedom to make them serve that part of the public. But a local news organization had its reporters call in to order cakes for other kinds of celebrations — for divorces, out-of-wedlock births, and so on. Strangely, Christian values didn’t come into play.

Pro Publica puts some context around the IRS scandal.

Joe Muto was a liberal mole inside Fox News.

Bye-bye, Michele Bachman. Humorists of all kinds will miss you.

A convicted felon contradicts the NRA: Illegal guns are not really that easy to get.

Peter Rollins, author of the new book The Idolatry of God, shares his unusual take on Christianity.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (2)