Month: July 2013

The Confederates push forward to re-enact as much of Jim Crow as possible

by David Atkins

Ah, the laboratory of the states, Old Confederacy edition:

State officials across the South are aggressively moving ahead with new laws requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls after the Supreme Court decision striking down a portion of the Voting Rights Act.

The Republicans who control state legislatures throughout the region say such laws are needed to prevent voter fraud. But such fraud is extremely rare, and Democrats are concerned that the proposed changes will make it harder for many poor voters and members of minorities — who tend to vote Democratic — to cast their ballots in states that once discriminated against black voters with poll taxes and literacy tests.

The Supreme Court ruling last month freed a number of states with a history of discrimination, mostly in the South, of the requirement to get advance federal permission in order to make changes to their election laws.

Within hours, Texas officials said that they would begin enforcing a strict photo identification requirement for voters, which had been blocked by a federal court on the ground that it would disproportionately affect black and Hispanic voters. In Mississippi and Alabama, which had passed their own voter identification laws but had not received federal approval for them, state officials said that they were moving to begin enforcing the laws.

The next flash point over voting laws will most likely be in North Carolina, where several voting bills had languished there this year as the Republicans who control the Legislature awaited the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had covered many counties in the state. After the ruling, some Republican lawmakers said that they would move as soon as next week to pass a bill requiring voters to present photo identification at the polls. And some Republicans there are considering cutting back on the number of early voting days in the state, which were especially popular among Democrats and black voters during the 2012 presidential election.

On and around July 4th, I like to celebrate the destruction of the Old Confederacy as much as the founding of the nation. I take great schadenfreude over the pain of Southern nationalists on Yankee Independence Day. And I’ll continue to do so as long as the scoundrels continue to kick against pricks of justice, attempting to reclaim and preserve the glories of their unearned privilege. The Lost Cause still lives, no doubt. But it will be a glorious day when a hundred million feet of all ages and races finally stomp its last bitter embers into the Southern sands, its vile spirit forever to be extinguished and driven from the land.

Demographic winter is coming for them, and not soon enough.

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Spying vs leaking

by digby

Spencer Ackerman has a good piece in the Guardian about this cavalier accusation  among some of our leaders, both in government and in the political press, that Edward Snowden has been actively aiding “the enemy.” He specifically discusses something that I’ve been wondering about as well — what’s the difference between a whistleblower and a spy? (Or if you prefer, a leaker and a spy.)

According to US legislators and journalists, the surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden actively aided America’s enemies. They are just missing one essential element for the meme to take flight: evidence.

An op-ed by Representative Mike Pompeo (Republican, Kansas) proclaiming Snowden, who provided disclosed widespread surveillance on phone records and internet communications by the National Security Agency, “not a whistleblower” is indicative of the emerging narrative. Writing in the Wichita Eagle on 30 June Pompeo, a member of the House intelligence committee, wrote that Snowden “has provided intelligence to America’s adversaries”.

Pompeo correctly notes in his op-ed that “facts are important”. Yet when asked for the evidence justifying the claim that Snowden gave intelligence to American adversaries, his spokesman, JP Freire, cited Snowden’s leak of NSA documents. Those documents, however, were provided to the Guardian and the Washington Post, not al-Qaeda or North Korea.

It’s true that information published in the press can be read by anyone, including people who mean America harm. But to conflate that with actively handing information to foreign adversaries is to foreclose on the crucial distinction between a whistleblower and a spy, and makes journalists the handmaidens of enemies of the state.

Yet powerful legislators are eager to make that conflation about Snowden.

The Twitter account of Representative Mike Rogers (Republican, Michigan), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, on 18 June placed Snowden and accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning in the same company as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, two infamous CIA and FBI double-agents. (The tweet appears to have been deleted.)

When I asked about the conflation, Rogers’ Twitter account responded: “All 4 gave critical national security information to our enemies. Each did it in different ways but the result was the same.”

Never to be outdone, Peter King, a New York Republican and former chair of the House homeland security committee, proclaimed Snowden a “defector” on 10 June. Days later, Snowden left Hong Kong to seek asylum in an undetermined country – a curious move for a defector to make.

Once elected and appointed leaders casually conflate leaking and espionage, it is a matter of time before journalists take the cue. For insight into the “fear and isolation that NSA leaker Edward Snowden is living through”, CNN turned to Christopher Boyce – who sold US secrets to the USSR before becoming a bank robber.

That’s just daft. Spies secretly give or sell information to an enemy, they explicitly don’t make the information public. After all, if the point is to help a foreign power, they would hope the US government would not know they had done it. Spilling the information all over the world defeats that purpose.

Anyway, Ackerman’s piece discusses all this in some depth and it’s well worth a read. He concludes with this:

By all means, consider Snowden a hero, a traitor or a complex individual with a mixture of motives and interests. Lots of opinions about Snowden are valid. He is a necessarily polarizing figure. The information he revealed speaks to some of the most basic questions about the boundaries between the citizen and the state, as well as persistent and real anxieties about terrorism.

What isn’t valid is the blithe assertion, absent evidence, that the former NSA contractor actively collaborated with America’s enemies. Snowden made classified information about widespread surveillance available to the American public. That’s a curious definition of an enemy for US legislators to adopt.

Well, not so strange when you think about it.

Update: Just one random thought here. Ackerman says this speaks to “persistent and real anxieties about terrorism” which I think is right. But how does that track with the accusation that he’s a defector or a spy for “Communist China and Russia?” The last I heard, the terrorist threat comes from small groups of religious fanatics that cross all national boundaries. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Russia, at least, is battling the same enemy at least to the extent that pair of losers up in Boston are part of the Global Terrorist Threat.

I find it quite revealing that some people have so easily slipped into a Cold War framework on this thing. I thought the only ones who still saw the world in those terms were the unreconstructed neocons. Maybe everyone just needs to stop binge watching old episodes of Mad Men for a while. It isn’t 1964 anymore.

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Chart ‘o the week: recessions of my life

by digby

Via Ritholtz:

David Brooks is a racist creep

by David Atkins

It’s amazing that in July of 2013, the New York Times would allow these words to appear on its public editorial column, courtesy one David Brooks:

Islamists might be determined enough to run effective opposition movements and committed enough to provide street-level social services. But they lack the mental equipment to govern.

Mental equipment? Now, most people would agree that Islamists lack the temperament to govern, and that their ideology is incompatible with constitutional liberalism. But then, Islamism is simply another form of conservative religious rule, one that Republicans hope to practice in the United States in their own way. David Brooks may want to take a look in the mirror. It’s a known fact that constitutional liberalism is at odds with democracy in a society of religious bigots. That’s why the national guard had to be sent in to desegregate the schools in the Old Confederacy.

But beyond that, did Brooks really mean “mental equipment”? As in, their brains don’t have the capacity for democracy? Is Brooks a phrenologist? Perhaps it was just an unfortunate turn of phrase his editor failed to catch.

Oh. No it wasn’t.

In reality, the U.S. has no ability to influence political events in Egypt in any important way. The only real leverage point is at the level of ideas. Right now, as Walter Russell Mead of Bard College put it, there are large populations across the Middle East who feel intense rage and comprehensive dissatisfaction with the status quo but who have no practical idea how to make things better. The modern thinkers who might be able to tell them have been put in jail or forced into exile. The most important thing outsiders can do is promote those people and defend those people, decade after decade.

It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.

In her tremendous book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes of how neoliberal villains destroy nation-states’ ability to protect themselves from the predations of multinational corporations and open markets, “liberalizing” their economies while rapidly impoverishing societies, shrinking middle classes and generally immiserating their people.

When the great experiment in shocking nations into radical free-market economics erupts in failure, conservatives fall back on the argument that something in the minds and cultures of the people whose markets have been freed even as their persons have been impoverished, somehow lack the mental and cultural components required for freedom. That was the argument made when the plutocrats ensured Russia’s transition into kleptocracy rather than social democracy. It was also the argument made by conservatives about Iraqis after the bombing of their country and the imposition of radical economic Objectivism on their people.

David Brooks is a racist. Brooks sees a middle east ravaged by oil imperialism from without and conservative religion from within, and declares its inhabitants mentally unfit for democracy by virtue of his singularly ineffable expertise on the subject.

If David Brooks and his ideological kin were ever allowed to fully take control of this nation, he might find us, too, mentally unfit for democracy. Fear, religious conservatism, jingoism, Objectivism and economic imperialism tend to be anathema to democracy wherever they go.

Update: So I’m just now seeing this, also by Brooks. “A Nation of Mutts.” The man really is a racist creep bar none.

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by digby

This by Jane Mayer about the Koch Brothers:

The investigative study tracks the political influence wielded by the billionaire Koch brothers, who have harnessed part of the fortune generated by their company, Koch Industries, the second largest private corporation in the country, to further their conservative libertarian activism. Charles Lewis, the Executive Editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop explained that the I.R.W., a non-profit news organization attached to American University, spent two years focussing on Koch Industries because, “There is no other corporation in the U.S. today, in my view, that is as unabashedly, bare-knuckle aggressive across the board about its own self-interest, in the political process, in the nonprofit-policy-advocacy realm, even increasingly in academia and the broader public marketplace of ideas.” Formerly head of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, Lewis has focussed for years on the way money affects American politics. “The Kochs’ influence, without a doubt, is growing,” he believes. A spokeswoman for the Kochs declined to comment. 

In its multi-part report, “The Koch Club,” written by Lewis, Eric Holmberg, Alexia Campbell, and Lydia Beyoud, the Workshop found that between 2007 and 2011 the Kochs donated $41.2 million to ninety tax-exempt organizations promoting the ultra-libertarian policies that the brothers favor—policies that are often highly advantageous to their corporate interests. In addition, during this same period they gave $30.5 million to two hundred and twenty-one colleges and universities, often to fund academic programs advocating their worldview. Among the positions embraced by the Kochs are fewer government regulations on business, lower taxes, and skepticism about the causes and impact of climate change. 

Climate-change policy directly affects Koch Industries’s bottom line. Koch Industries, according to Environmental Protection Agency statistics cited in the study, is a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions, the kind of pollution that most scientists believe causes global warming. In 2011, according to the E.P.A.’s greenhouse-gas-reporting database, the company, which has oil refineries in three states, emitted over twenty-four million tons of carbon dioxide, as much as is typically emitted by five million cars.

Starting in 2008, a year after the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate greenhouse gasses as a form of pollution, accelerating possible Congressional action on climate change, the Koch-funded nonprofit group, Americans for Prosperity, devised the “No Climate Tax” pledge. It has been, according to the study, a component of a remarkably successful campaign to prevent lawmakers from addressing climate change. Two successive efforts to control greenhouse-gas emissions by implementing cap-and-trade energy bills died in the Senate, the latter of which was specifically targeted by A.F.P.’s pledge. By now, four hundred and eleven current office holders nationwide have signed the pledge. Signatories include the entire Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, a third of the members of the House of Representatives as a whole, and a quarter of U.S. senators[…] 

The study recounts that the Kochs have influenced the congressional climate-change debate in other ways, too, which include funding an array of nonprofit groups whose experts have testified in Congress questioning the cause, the severity, and the necessity of, acting on climate change. Since 2007, “Senior staff at more than a dozen Koch-funded nonprofit groups have made frequent trips to testify on Capitol Hill in favor of deregulation,” of the environment and energy sector, the study says.

There are many reasons to be a little bit freaked out by the right at the moment. They’ve obviously gone nuts and are willing to obstruct even the most basic government necessities
in pursuit of the nihilistic agenda.

But this is something else. These people are extremely powerful and extremely wealthy and they are using all that power and money to implement an agenda that will kill the human species. Probably important to figure out a way to stop them.

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So lots of people do care about civil liberties

by digby

I have to say that this surprises me.  And I guess it’s because the reaction of a majority of the Village media has largely been so negative and so hostile (along with a lot of liberals I erroneously assumed would be opposed to the secret surveillance of American citizens.)

From the commentary I’ve been reading, I thought for sure that a majority of the country strongly believed that the revelation was the wrong thing to do. Just goes to show, once again, that the Villagers do not accurately reflect majority American values.

I certainly don’t blame anyone for being unsure about the rightness and wrongness of this or whether or not it should be prosecuted. It’s a complicated topic.  I’m just happily surprised to see that most Americans are not reflexively opposed to these revelations in the way I’ve observed so many of the cognoscenti over the past few weeks. It at least shows a respect for our American traditions of a free press and the Bill of Rights that I’m afraid many of our leaders have either lost — or never had.

There’s hope for us yet.

However:

Another HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted just after Snowden revealed his identity publicly found that 38 percent said Snowden did the right thing and only 35 percent said he did the wrong thing.

Much of the drop in support for Snowden’s actions since the earlier poll appears to have taken place among Republicans, who were divided, 37 percent to 37 percent, on whether Snowden did the right thing in the previous poll, but in the latest poll said by a 44 percent to 29 percent margin that he did the wrong thing.

In the new poll, Democrats said that Snowden did the wrong thing by a 46 percent to 26 percent margin, while independents said that he did the right thing by a 40 percent to 28 percent margin. Neither of those margins were significantly changed from the previous poll.

Republicans are no longer seeing this as an Obama scandal since the Noise Machine isn’t treating it that way. They are free, therefore, to retreat to their usual more authoritarian stance. Unsurprisingly, it’s Democrats who remain in their partisan corner.

Update:  This piece by Teacherken at Daily Kos is well worth reading. He begins by highlighting this sentence from Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post:

I don’t believe government officials when they say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs do not invade our privacy. The record suggests that you shouldn’t believe them, either.

That’s 100% correct. And love Snowden or hate him, we would not know what we know about that today if it were not for these revelations.

Please read on. It even features key scenes from Three Days of the Condor!

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Who needs Posse Comitatus?

by digby

Radley Balko has written a must-read for anyone who cares about civil liberties Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

Here,  the ABA Journal features a lengthy excerpt about our long and illustrious history in this regard. The following charts accompany the piece.

None of that will come as a surprise to anyone who read Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland.For every step forward there is a backlash, something that liberals often ignore in the ecstasy of their victory dances. The “law and order” backlash that came as a result of the civil rights revolution of the 60s never totally abated and one of the places where it’s really taken hold is in our police apparatus at every level of government. 9/11 simply put the program on steroids.

The ABA Journal, wrote this as an editors note:

In a remarkable speech at the National Defense University in May, President Barack Obama signaled an end to the war on terrorism; maybe not an end, it turns out, but a winding down of the costly deployments, the wholesale use of drone warfare, and even the very rhetoric of war.

Prompted by the odious attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., in 2001, he said, we took the battle, for better or worse, to Afghanistan and to Iraq and, surreptitiously, to Pakistan to punish those deemed responsible. We moved on the home front, as well; perhaps too quickly, some would argue—“hardening targets, tightening transportation security, giving law enforcement new tools to prevent terror,” as the president described the domestic defense agenda.

Some of this hardening and tightening was obvious. Surveillance cameras became as ubiquitous as concrete barriers. Office buildings tightened security. Passengers were screened for weapons before boarding planes. But in local law enforcement some of the “new tools” made available to even the smallest police departments helped accelerate changes in policing, changes that some say altered the way police departments behave.

Today, police departments—or some of their key enforcement operations—appear to be on a war footing. Many dress in commando black, instead of the traditional blue. They own military-grade weapons, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and Humvees. Their training is military. Their approach is military. They are in a war against crime and violence and terror that they argue never ends. Just ask those at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15.

In his new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, journalist Radley Balko points out that this militarization of police departments had taken hold several decades before 9/11. He argues, in the following excerpt, that a few appropriate applications of those tactics and weaponry have obscured their routine use each day, against U.S. citizens accused of ordinary crimes, in ways that would have been repugnant to the nation’s founders. “To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance,” the president noted in his recent speech. “For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power—or risk abusing it.”

Whether or not you agree with him, it is an issue that Balko has been chronicling for years at the local and national levels. And in this particular moment of national introspection about the efficacy of traditional warfare against the threat of determined terrorists, Balko poses the question about its efficacy against common crime.

That piece says they are in a war against “crime and violence” but that’s obscurely abstract. It’s a war against people — also known as citizens of the United States. And as with our foreign adventures, much of it, in my opinion, is driven by a zeal to deploy new technology.

I’ve been following this story for some time and always quote Balko’s work liberally. His insights on this are required reading for anyone who’s concerned about this issue of creeping authoritarianism.

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QOTD: Wall Street Journal editorial board

by digby

You have to give them credit for consistency:

Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.

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Makes me proud to be an American

by digby

All over the world today there were protests against NSA spying. Here are a few pics from the Utah and NYC events:

We ain’t dead yet …

You can read more about it at this link.

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Faces of the founders

by digby

Looking very human …

This bust was created from life mask of Thomas Jefferson, who died this day 1826, 50th anniv of Declaration he wrote: pic.twitter.com/EMUUwNGs46
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) July 4, 2013

And this bust from life mask of old John Adams, who also died today 1826, saying in error that Jefferson still lived: pic.twitter.com/roZgGzMIME
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) July 4, 2013