Month: June 2013

Very Serious Person Alert: Mike Grunwald

by David Atkins

TIME Magazine senior correspondent Mike Grunwald tweets:

If Glenn Beck AND Michael Moore think the NSA leaker is a hero…he’s probably the awful person I assumed he was.
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) June 11, 2013

There’s so much asininity here it’s hard to unpack it all. Grunwald assumed that Snowden was an awful person? Why would he do that? Based on a careful assessment of what, exactly? Very little, it seems, by his own admission.

Moreover, how does agreement on opposite sides of the political spectrum guarantee wrong policy? I thought the Very Serious People craved bipartisanship? Or is that the wrong kind of bipartisanship? Is it only bipartisanship if John McCain and Joe Lieberman agree, but not if Glenn Beck and Michael Moore do?

Grunwald’s stance here is everything that is wrong with journalism. Love or hate Glenn Greenwald, he’s doing what journalists are supposed to do: afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted, get a story, and expose what he sees as wrongdoing.

What did Michael Grunwald do on this story, besides lazily parrot whatever conventional wisdom makes the status quo happy? What public interest does he serve? Under what auspice, precisely, does he get to claim the mantle of “journalism” or determine what makes good public policy on this issue?

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Ari Melber says “count me out”

by digby

… of acquiescing to the Surveillance State.

You should watch the whole thing. You’ll see SE Cupp struggle mightily to come up with a way to support these leaks in order to condemn the Obama administration while still being a good gun toting national security Republican, followed by a lukewarm water guest who assures us all that this is a gray area and that we cannot possibly make any judgments about anything, blah, blah, blah. I guess that’s a pretty fair example of the contours of the way the debate is unfolding.

Glad to be in Melber’s court on this one.

Five are dead after a gunman rampaged through Santa Monica, CA, on Friday, ending at the local community college. The Santa Monica shooting marks the tenth mass shooting on a school campus in California since 1976. 

The suspect, 23-year-old John Zawahri, was known as an angry young man with a “fascination with guns” that worried family friends. Zawahri was born in Lebanon but has lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years. In a press conference on Sunday, police said the troubled young man had planned out the attack and likely hoped to kill hundreds. The spree lasted 10 minutes, ending when police shot and killed Zawahri on the scene. 

Zawahri allegedly killed his father and brother and burned down their house before heading toward Santa Monica College, armed with a ballistic vest, an AR-15 assault rifle and a duffel bag filled with an estimated 1,300 rounds of ammunition, magazines, and a .44 revolver. He shot and wounded a woman driving by his house, then carjacked another woman. On the way, he shot at pedestrians and a city bus, injuring 3 people. 

Once he arrived at the community college, Zawahri gunned down a groundskeeper, 68-year-old Navarro Franco, killing him immediately, and his 26-year-old daughter, Marcela, who died in the hospital on Sunday. Witnesses say students scattered, jumping out windows and running for their lives. He then shot an unidentified woman in her 50s outside the library, went inside and fired 70 rounds at students who had been studying for exams. Police ultimately shot and killed him in the library. 

Zawahri had a run-in with the law in 2006, but police could not give more details as he was a juvenile at the time. A law enforcement source told CNN that Zawahri had been hospitalized for mental issues after talking about wanting to hurt someone. 

It is not clear where Zawahri got a hold of his AR-15 — the same weapon used in the Aurora theater shooting and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre last year. Technically, certain AR-15 rifles are prohibited in California, but critics have said the law is rendered essentially toothless by loopholes and legal challenges. In May, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a new law to give law enforcement more funding to crack down on illegal assault weapons owned by convicted criminals and people with serious mental illnesses.

I’m sure the gun nuts are relieved that we’re back to nobody caring about this stuff again.  It’s just an act of nature, nothing to be done.

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A majority of Americans believe govt spying on them is the least of their problems

by digby

Or at least I’m guessing that’s what they think when they give answers like this to poll questions:

A large majority of Americans say the federal government should focus on investigating possible terrorist threats even if personal privacy is compromised, and most support the blanket tracking of telephone records in an effort to uncover terrorist activity, according to a new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll.

Fully 45 percent of all Americans say the government should be able to go further than it is now asserting: that it should be able to monitor everyone’s online activity if this would prevent future terrorist attacks. A slender majority, 52 percent, say no such broad-based monitoring should occur. Overall, 56 percent of all Americans see the NSA’s accessing telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders as “acceptable;” 41 percent call the practice ‘unacceptable.’

On the other hand, consider this:

Only one-third of adult Americans can correctly identify the Bill of Rights and fewer than 1 in 10 know it was adopted to protect them against abuses by the Federal Government, a poll made public today says.

The poll last summer of 507 people, commissioned by the American Bar Association, coincided with the 200th anniversary of the Dec. 15, 1791, ratification of the Bill of Rights.

Ratified four years after the Constitution was adopted, the Bill of Rights fulfilled a political promise made to assure states’ acceptance of the Constitution. Many distrusted the fledgling nation’s centralized Government, and wanted the Constitution to include a declaration of rights and governmental limits.

The bar association’s survey offered multiple choices. Thirty-three percent correctly identified the Bill of Rights as the Constitution’s first 10 amendments; 28 percent said it was a preamble to the Constitution; 22 percent said it is any rights bill passed by Congress; 7 percent chose “a message of rebellion from the Founding Fathers to the British monarchy.” Ten percent said they did not know.

Ok, that’s old. It’s from 20 years ago. Here’s a more recent finding. We must have improved our knowledge since 1991, right?

42 percent of American adults incorrectly chose one of America’s Founding documents as the source of Karl Marx’s exposition of Communism, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Of these incorrect answers, the most commonly chosen was the Bill of Rights.

Other noteworthy findings from the poll include the following:

60 percent of American adults did not correctly identify the principle that our
government’s powers are derived from the people as an attribute that makes America
unique.

55 percent of American adults did not recognize that “education” is not a First
Amendment right.

Nearly 1 in 10 American adults do not realize that the right to petition our government
is a freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment.

Only 20 percent of American adults correctly selected the Tenth Amendment as the
Amendment that reserves powers to the states and the people.

You’ve got to love that Marx dictum being in the Bill of Rights. Maybe we should sneak it in there since nobody knows what’s in it anyway …

I don’t bring this up to prove that Americans’ opinion about NSA surveillance is invalid. It isn’t. They want to be safe from terrorism and they don’t feel they’ve been personally affected by this surveillance so it makes sense. But I do think it’s fair to assume that they may not understand the principles under which some of us are objecting to this.

Most people short-hand politics as a team sport, which you can see in these numbers from today’s poll:

According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans are O.K. with the National Security Agency’s surveillance program—i.e. secret tracking of phone records. Fifty-six percent think it’s “acceptable” while 41 percent think it’s “not acceptable.” That’s a slight change from seven years ago, when 51 percent said it was acceptable and 47 percent said it was not.

Those general numbers mask a large partisan shift. In 2006, when George W. Bush was president, just 37 percent of Democrats said the N.S.A. surveillance program was acceptable, while 61 percent said it was not. Now those numbers are 64 percent and 34 percent respectively.

Republicans appear to be fair-weather fans as well. In 2006, 75 percent said the program was acceptable, and 23 percent said it was not. Now 52 percent find it acceptable, and 47 percent unacceptable.

People trust their guy and not the other guy. I disagree with this but I understand it. People are busy.

I think the one thing we might want to ensure people know is that these government agencies exist outside “our guy” and “their guy.” Presidents come and go but the NSA is forever.

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The future crimes of WalMart

by David Atkins

It’s a point that’s been made before, but a new report is shining a light on just how much WalMart is ripping off the country by forcing its employees onto the public dole while it rakes in massive profits:

Walmart’s wages and benefits are so low that many of its employees are forced to turn to the government for aid, costing taxpayers between $900,000 and $1.75 million per store, according to a report released last week by congressional Democrats…

The report cites a confluence of trends that have forced more workers to rely on safety-net programs: the depressed bargaining power of labor in a still struggling economy; a 97 year low in union enrollment; and the fact that the middle-wage jobs lost during the recession have been replaced by low-wage jobs. The problem of minimum-wage work isn’t confined to Walmart. But as the country’s largest low-wage employer, with about 1.4 million employees in the US—roughly 10 percent of the American retail workforce—Walmart’s policies are a driving force in keeping wages low. The company also happens to elegantly epitomize the divide between the top and bottom in America: the collective wealth of the six Waltons equals the combined wealth of 48.8 million families on the other end of the economic spectrum. The average Walmart worker making $8.81 per hour would have to work for 7 million years to acquire the Walton family’s current wealth.

It’s not a crime for WalMart to do this. Not yet. But then, making children work in factories for 16 hours a day used to legal, too. When activists tried to put a stop to it, they were called communists and enemies of the free market.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. But rest assured, one day most of what WalMart and similar companies do will be illegal. One day companies will be forced to cover the external costs they have grown used to shoving onto the taxpayer, and one day there will be legislated direct scaling between profits, productivity and wages. The longer we wait to make so, the more subject we will be to the scorn of future generations.

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For the “what’s the big deal” crowd, a friendly reminder

by digby

I applaud civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald who draw our attention to it. But it is important to keep it in perspective. Far too many people get their notions of what our government is all about from Hollywood; the paranoid thriller is a wonderful form of entertainment, but it’s a fantasy. The idea that our government is some sort of conspiracy, that it’s a somehow foreign body intent on robbing us of our freedoms, is corrosive and dangerous to our democracy. This remains, and always will be, an extremely libertarian country; it’s encoded in our DNA. We now face a constant, low-level terrorist threat that needs to be monitored. A great many lives are potentially at stake…and our national security is more important than any marginal–indeed, mythical–rights that we may have conceded in the Patriot Act legislation. In the end, the slippery slope, all or nothing, arguments advanced by extreme civil libertarians bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the slippery slope, all or nothing, arguments advanced by the National Rifle Association. — Joe Klein

For those who are too young to have experienced it (or are too old to have a good memory of it like Joe Klein there) this story from journalist and author John Judis about his experiences as a young American dissident should tell people exactly why they should be skeptical of government surveillance power.

It’s not just a Hollywood fantasy:

As my FBI file, which I later obtained, attested, my movements were being monitored even when I didn’t know it. (Most of it is, unfortunately, blacked out.) In organizing demonstrations, I encountered people who turned out to be government agents. I was pulled over by the police with guns drawn for no apparent reason. And I also received inquiries about my tax returns from the IRS even though I was living on about $3000 a year during much of this period. These inquiries, which to this day may or may not have had something to do with my politics, certainly make me sympathetic to the rightwing groups who were barraged by inquiries from the IRS—whether or not these inquiries were directed by higher-ups in the administration.

There were, obviously, people who were subject to far greater harassment than I was, and who played a much greater role in the new left. But that’s what makes my case interesting. I can pretty safely say that there was no good reason to put me under surveillance. After the Watergate scandal, Congress finally recognized that the FBI and CIA had widely overstepped their Constitutional bounds. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was supposed to limit agency surveillance to people whom the agency suspected, on sufficient grounds to convince a judge, were actually agents of a foreign power. The government agencies weren’t supposed to fool with anybody else. But 35 years later, we learn a government agency has been empowered to monitor all of us all the time. That indiscriminate power, like the power that the CIA and FBI held after World War II, can be directed against domestic dissent.

And that is why this is a fundamental threat to our freedom.

This happened in our lifetimes, Judis’ and mine. It’s not some abstract slippery slope scenario — it’s very real. If you think it cannot happen to you, think again. Judis was a young intellectual who called himself a socialist. And perhaps some of you do too. Maybe you think of yourself as an environmental activist or an anti-corporate populist. You just don’t know when the government could decide that this is a threat and use all that information they’ve got stored in their vast data bank to make a case. If your “enviro-terrorism” or “anarchism” can be shown by six degrees of separation between you and someone else they’ve flagged in their data bank, they will have all the “probable cause” they need to pursue you with everything they have.

These were, by the way, activities that took place under both Democratic and Republican administrations by agencies that operated pretty much with impunity. This isn’t a partisan issue and it isn’t just a matter of executive power. So it’s important to keep in mind that is also an issue of building a vast top secret surveillance bureaucracy (which apparently, includes a vast number of outside contractor bureaucracies as well) that endlessly seeks to expand its power and exists through elected governments of both parties. These things can easily get out of hand …

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QOTD: Michael Hayden


by digby

The former NSA and CIA Director:

“Let me get this right: I got a religious fanatic in the cave in the Hindu Kush, yet this is a front-page, above-the-fold story and he already knew this?” he asked rhetorically. “That does not make sense. It will teach guys to be far more cautious in the future.”

It must be a helluva wifi connection.

Or the Guardian has a helluva home delivery system.

Anyone remember this?

WASHINGTON – Despite having no Internet access in his hideout, Osama bin Laden was a prolific email writer who built a painstaking system that kept him one step ahead of the U.S. government’s best eavesdroppers.

His methods, described in new detail to The Associated Press by a counterterrorism official and a second person briefed on the U.S. investigation, served him well for years and frustrated Western efforts to trace him through cyberspace. The arrangement allowed bin Laden to stay in touch worldwide without leaving any digital fingerprints behind.

The people spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive intelligence analysis.

Bin Laden’s system was built on discipline and trust. But it also left behind an extensive archive of email exchanges for the U.S. to scour. The trove of electronic records pulled out of his compound after he was killed last week is revealing thousands of messages and potentially hundreds of email addresses, the AP has learned.

Time Magazine:

How did bin Laden do it? Super computer? Satellites? Ray gun?

Well, no. It turns out bin Laden, Super Villain, typed up his messages and saved them on a thumb drive. His courier took the thumb drive to an Internet cafe and emailed the messages.

Spencer Ackerman asked at the time:

Wasn’t the NSA watching Pakistani internet cafes or monitoring suspicious IP addresses? Was no U.S. operative ready to send out a virus?

Apparently they were so busy collecting data from American citizens they just didn’t have time to monitor internet cafe computers in Pakistan.  After all this agency is also monitoring narcotics trafficking around the world, sees part of its mission as offering “unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world,”  and worries publicly about leaks putting “American companies at risk internationally for simply complying with our laws.” It’s got a lot on its plate.

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Fix the Debt’s campaign keeps on chugging

by digby

The shrieking cries of the fiscal hawks may be somewhat muted with the news that the deficit is shrinking, austerity is a bust and that they’ve achieved their fondest wish of poor people suffering due to sequestration while national security contractors get rich from taxpayer dollars.

But they haven’t yet gotten their hands on the holy grail and until that happens, they will still be using their billions to git ‘er done:

The Social Security compromise: Ideologically unpopular, fiscally sound thehill.com/blogs/congress…. Do it yourself crfb.org/socialsecurity…— Fix the Debt (@FixtheDebt) June 9, 2013

Don’t Let Them Fool You, We Still Have Debt Problems brookin.gs/2Esg via @brookingsinst. Still far from solved crfb.org/document/repor…
— Fix the Debt (@FixtheDebt) June 9, 2013

RT @nyseeuronext: .@honeywell’s David Cote urges the #business & CEO community to get involved in @fixthedebt: bit.ly/12j21fc #NYSE
— Fix the Debt (@FixtheDebt) June 9, 2013

MT @jamespoliti: @fixthedebt fights back, debt still on upward path, tax code a mess, entitlements unsustainable on.ft.com/11nB9nX
— Fix the Debt (@FixtheDebt) June 8, 2013

College president says national debt, unemployment of recent grads are linked news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.a…. Listen youtu.be/MoJABckG9nM
— Fix the Debt (@FixtheDebt) June 7, 2013

(The “college president” is Mitch Daniels, Bush’s former economic advisor…)

And then there’s this blatant incitement to generational warfare:

They’re going to keep at this until a fair number of younger people see this point of view as conventional wisdom. I wish there was someone out there on the youth side that was pushing back. It could take a toll over time.

On the other hand, over time young people will get older and will experience first hand just how vital these programs are to their parents and, eventually, themselves, so maybe it’s ok for Peterson and co. to spend their money on this. Real life tends to focus the mind in ways a propaganda campaign never will.

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Why shouldn’t corporations have a worker on the board of directors?


by digby

Today’s the day:

I had the privilege of speaking with Cathy Youngblood at length not long ago and she is  a very impressive person. I suspect that if every corporate board in America had someone like her on its board, we’d see some real improvement of their management and relationship with their employees.  They do it in Europe.  Why not here?

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Do you care that the NSA is on the front lines of the drug war?


by digby

Yesterday I posted a little tid-bit about the NSA proposing some years back to “re-think the 4th Amendment” in a once secret (now de-classified) document.  I was reading it over again this morning and happened upon this little tid-bit:

So, for all those who worry about ham-stringing the government in its noble quest to protect us from the boogeyman, where exactly does this fit into the matrix of concerns? Are we all ok with the NSA doing secret surveillance of Americans’ activities with a mandate to “stem the flow of narcotics into our country”?

Remember, this document was written long before any alleged terrorist plots featuring Mexican drug lords existed. This was about drug interdiction, period. That’s not to say that in recent years the DEA and the National Security apparatus haven’t pretty much merged under the umbrella of “narco-terrorism”. But the NSA has been involved in the drug war for a very long time.

Is everyone comfortable with that, knowing what we know about how much information they’re collecting?

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