Month: November 2013

Everybody’s spying

by digby

Apparently, just because they can. The good news about this is that somebody thinks this might even be wrong:

Three senior Ikea executives in France were put under investigation on Wednesday over allegations they spied on disgruntled customers and former staff.

The head of Ikea France is among those accused of employing a firm of private detectives to snoop on individual employees, particularly union activists, job applicants and even unhappy customers, and of fraudulently obtaining personal information from police files.

A judge decided there was enough evidence to formally mis en examen (the equivalent of being charged) Stefan Vanoverbeke, the chief executive of Ikea France, his predecessor Jean-Louis Baillo and chief financial officer Dariusz Rychert, who were arrested on Monday and held for questioning.

Under French law, the men had to be formally put under investigation within 24 hours or freed.

Since January, a total of 10 people have been arrested and put under investigation for “fraudulent use of personal information”, including four police officers and Ikea’s former head of security.

The case is hugely damaging to the reputation of the flagship Swedish company famed for its family-friendly but infuriatingly difficult to assemble flat-pack furniture.

The accused are said to have requested a range of personal data, including criminal records and confidential details about the targets’ dealings with the police or courts, even as witnesses or victims. Scores of people were alleged to have been snooped on, including a union official.

I know collusion between industry and government authorities could never happen here in the US because we are exceptional. Still, it’s interesting.

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The President decides he’s a Democrat after all

by David Atkins

I know this is inside baseball that many readers may not care about, but one of the more troubling aspects of the Obama presidency has been the failure to convert the Obama campaign apparatus into an effective mobilization tool for Democratic candidates down ballot. President Obama in 2008 ran one of the most innovative and successful field campaigns in American history, and the data derived from that campaign was every field organizer’s dream. However, after winning office the Obama team did not give its data to the Democratic Party. Instead, it kept that treasure chest to itself, and converted Obama for President into the group Obama for America (the same thing happened in the 2012 cycle, after which OFA became “Organizing for Action.”)

The ostensible reason for doing this is that the President received a great deal of independent and cross-party support, and many people in the Obama for America infrastructure were not registered Democrats. In a Democratic Party controlled environment, those individuals would have to switch party registration or be removed.

The end result has been a weird amalgam at the state and local levels, where the Democratic Party infrastructure runs parallel to an Obama for America parallel party of sorts that mostly aligns with Democratic interests but doesn’t conduct significant operations to assist in elections, and essentially only activates to make calls to voters and legislators asking them to “support the President’s agenda” even if it’s not entirely clear at any given point what that agenda is. In my own efforts to bring my county Democrats and the local OFA together, I participated in some of those phonebanks as a gesture of good will. But it was very clear that the data and resources of OFA could have been put to much better–and more progressive–use by the actual Democratic infrastructure.

To say nothing of the fact that once a Presidential candidate secures the nomination, that person becomes de facto the leader of the Democratic Party. Running one’s own parallel pseudo-Democratic organization to the Party doesn’t do much for Party cohesion, or for a trusting relationship between the President and his Congressional allies. And indeed, one of the weaknesses of the Obama presidency has been a lack of communication and coordination with Democrats in Congress.

What it all points to is something that has been a common thread of the Obama presidency at a policy level as well: a genuine distrust of and distaste for partisanship and political parties in general. The creation and evolution of Obama for America was another symptom of the President’s desire to transcend “the politics of division” and become a post-partisan charismatic figure. I leave it to the reader to judge how well that worked.

At any rate, the President has finally decided to allow the DNC to have access to most its data–but, singularly, not the most important part, which is the President’s email list.

President Obama’s campaign will transfer voter data, turnout models, and information about supporters who volunteered on behalf of the president to the Democratic National Committee, in a move Democrats say will boost the party’s efforts ahead of the midterm elections.

The decision to turn over the data to the DNC comes despite initial discussions about creating an external corporation to house the Obama campaign data.

Those deliberations had sparked concern that the committee may have been prevented from full access to the modeling and data systems widely credited with helping propel the president to two consecutive victories.

“It’s a big get for us,” said a DNC official. “This is a treasure trove of information we’ll be able to utilize.”

The official said that early discussions “may not have enabled the DNC” to use some of the campaign’s information, but that the agreement was “a good-case scenario for us.”

The DNC believes that the volunteer data, in particular, will help Democratic candidates looking to rally support in off-year elections. Voter profiles that indicate how and when individuals voted in the past can also help campaigns target solid Democratic voters who might not otherwise turn out in a non-presidential year.

“The single most informed predictor of people’s voting habits is their previous election data, so when you have their voting history and that information, it’s incredibly powerful,” the official said.

Not included in the turnover — first reported by Politico — is the Obama campaign’s email list, considered by some campaign strategists as the crown jewel of the Obama data effort.

There was concern that if the email list was gifted to the committee, outside political groups — and specifically Organizing for Action (OFA), the nonprofit policy organization born from the president’s reelection effort — would be legally unable to access it.

The DNC and other campaign committees — including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — will be able to access the email list under the new agreement but will not take ownership.

The DNC official also said the committee may be using the email list increasingly for its own fundraising efforts.

That could help to calm tensions between OFA and the DNC, which has complained that the unprecedented creation of a political advocacy group to support the president outside of the party was hurting fundraising efforts.

Again, folks who don’t do field work on campaigns won’t realize quite how troublesome all of this is. But it’s a big deal. Seamlessly transferring voter contact lists for controlled use by Democratic candidates all the way up and down the ballot should be a given. The reticence and delays are just another way in which Democratic and progressive efforts have been hampered by a President who never did get very comfortable with being a partisan Democrat.

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Funny, funny stuff

by digby

Who at Microsoft is like, “People are going to love this!”? pic.twitter.com/RqWwcOWSvQ
— Aaron Levie (@levie) November 20, 2013

Hey, if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about …

Big Sugar, big people

by digby

Mother Jones on the amazing PR victory by Big Sugar:

ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in “the forging of public opinion.” The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John “JW” Tatem Jr. and Jack O’Connell Jr., the Sugar Association’s president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they’d just pulled off.

Their winning campaign, crafted with the help of the prestigious public relations firm Carl Byoir & Associates, had been prompted by a poll showing that consumers had come to see sugar as fattening, and that most doctors suspected it might exacerbate, if not cause, heart disease and diabetes. With an initial annual budget of nearly $800,000 ($3.4 million today) collected from the makers of Dixie Crystals, Domino, C&H, Great Western, and other sugar brands, the association recruited a stable of medical and nutritional professionals to allay the public’s fears, brought snack and beverage companies into the fold, and bankrolled scientific papers that contributed to a “highly supportive” FDA ruling, which, the Silver Anvil application boasted, made it “unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in coming years.”

And it hasn’t been. In fact, it turned the American public into a bunch of sugar addicts with a whole bunch of associated illnesses:

Research on the suspected links between sugar and chronic disease largely ground to a halt by the late 1980s, and scientists came to view such pursuits as a career dead end. The industry’s PR campaign corresponded roughly with a significant rise in Americans’ consumption of “caloric sweeteners,” including table sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This increase was accompanied, in turn, by a surge in the chronic diseases increasingly linked to sugar. Since 1970, obesity rates in the United States have more than doubled, while the incidence of diabetes has more than tripled.

Check it out:

I don’t really want to enter the food wars, although I have become convinced about the dangers of too much sugar. However, this information about how an industry managed to dry up funding for the scientific community and radically change public opinion is a very useful illustration of what money and this strategy is capable of.

Now, it must be said that it’s probably not terribly hard to convince people that what they already desire is perfectly healthy. But still, there was a time when it was a matter of common sense that over-doing sugar wasn’t good for you. Today, it’s barely on the radar. Indeed, most people don’t think of this overconsumption of sugar as being unhealthy at all. It’s more than just an amazing example of an industry pushing back on regulation. They went way beyond that and have managed to get it introduced into thousands of foods and in the process changed people’s tastes so they crave ever more of it. It’s a brilliant victory for the sugar and corn producers.  People, not so much.

*And I’m not advocating banning sugar, Sarah Palin. But science is science and when you look at those charts it’s obvious that we need to do some serious research into whether that growth in certain diseases really is caused by this growth in sugar consumption. Maybe it isn’t. But we need to know. In the meantime, people should at least be aware that they are basically eating the equivalent of glazed donuts even when they’re not eating dessert.

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QOTD: Bob Woodward

by digby

To Larry King:

“I wish [Snowden] had come to me instead of others, particularly The Guardian,” Woodward told King in an interview that airs Thursday on Hulu. “I would have said to him ‘let’s not reveal who you are. Let’s make you a protected source and give me time with this data and let’s sort it out and present it in a coherent way.'”

I’m going to guess it had something to do with this, from Howard Kurtz’ essay about the coverage of the lead up to the Iraq War at the Washington Post:

Bob Woodward told me that “we did our job, but we didn’t do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder.” There was a “groupthink” among intelligence officials, he said, and “I think I was part of the groupthink.”

No kidding.

He might have also been aware that while Woodward is perfectly willing to publish classified information, he limits it to a very special kind — the kind the government wants you to see:

Did the Bush administration “authorize” the leak of classified information to Bob Woodward? And did those leaks damage national security?

The vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) made exactly that charge tonight in a letter to John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence. What prompted Rockefeller to write Negroponte was a recent op-ed in the New York Times by CIA director Porter Goss complaining that leaks of classified information were the fault of “misguided whistleblowers.”

Rockefeller charged in his letter that the most “damaging revelations of intelligence sources and methods are generated primarily by Executive Branch officials pushing a particular policy, and not by the rank-and-file employees of intelligence agencies.”

Later in the same letter, Rockefeller said: “Given the Administration’s continuing abuse of intelligence information for political purposes, its criticism of leaks is extraordinarily hypocritical. Preventing damage to intelligence sources and methods from media leaks will not be possible until the highest level of the Administration cease to disclose classified information on a selective basis for political purposes.”

Exhibit A for Rockefeller: Woodward’s book “Bush at War”.

Here is what Rockefeller had to say:

In his 2002 book Bush at War, Bob Woodward described almost unfettered access to classified material of the most sensitive nature. According to his account, he was provided information related to sources and methods, extremely sensitive covert actions, and foreign intelligence liaison relationships. If it no wonder, as Director Goss wrote, “because of the number of recent news reports discussing our relationships with other intelligence services, some of these partners have even informed the C.I.A. that they are reconsidering their participation of some of our most important antiterrorism ventures.”

I wrote both former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet and Acting DCI John McLaughlin seeking to determine what steps were being taken to address the appalling disclosures contained in Bush at War. The only response I received was to indicate that the leaks had been authorized by the Administration. The CIA has still not responded to a follow-up letter I sent a year and half ago on September 1, 2004, trying to pin down which officials were authorized to meet with Mr. Woodward and by whom, and what intelligence information was conveyed during these authorized exchanges.

Were leaks of classified information “authorized” to Woodward? Rockefeller’s letter says exactly that. And among other things, it is well known and has been reported long ago that one of Woodward’s sources for both of his books about the Bush presidency was then-VicePresidential chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who is portrayed in quite a flattering manner in both.

He does have a reputation for protecting his sources — but then his sources are all very high level government officials who are leaking to him to advance an agenda. It’s unsurprising that someone in Snowden’s position might not think Bob Woodward (or one of the dozens of other journalists who specialize in publishing “authorized leaks”) would be the best person to approach.

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Hating on the homeless

by digby

What a horrible person:

Much like Batkid, Hawaii has found its own superhero. Except that instead of protecting the powerless from harm, he roams the streets with a sledgehammer and looks for homeless people in order to literally smash their possessions.
Remarkably, this vigilante isn’t just some random Hawaiian, but five-term State Rep. Tom Brower (D).

Noting that he’s “disgusted” with homeless people, Brower told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about his own personal brand of “justice”: “If I see shopping carts that I can’t identify, I will destroy them so they can’t be pushed on the streets.” Brower has waged this campaign for two weeks, estimating that he’s smashed about 30 shopping carts in the process.

“I want to do something practical that will really clean up the streets,” he explained to Hawaii News Now as he showed off his property destruction skills while sporting an Armani Exchange hat…

After coverage of Brower’s actions went national, the Democrat agreed to stop destroying homeless people’s possessions. “I’m not trying to attack the homeless. I’m trying to attack the issue of cleanliness, but some people interpreted as an attack on the homeless,” Brower explained to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Still, Brower remained defiantly unrepentant.

“The point that I was trying to make has been made. Now that the issue of shopping carts is on our minds, the question is are we going to move forward and try to solve it or just let it become status quo.”

I can’t believe this person wasn’t arrested. He destroyed private property and left it lying there and threw people’s personal possessions on to the street. It’s a funny way to “attack the issue of cleanliness” unless he was saying he thinks streets littered with destroyed shopping carts and homeless people’s personal property is somehow “clean.”

What an ass.

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Which mandatory savings?

by digby

So, it looks as though the Murray Ryan budget talks might come up with something that isn’t completely terrible, at least by our current standard of terrible budget deals. But the devil is in the details, as usual. They’re seriously considering a “smaller deal” that includes a slight lifting of the budget caps. But from what I can tell, the additional spending will only apply to defense. Or something.

The Senate GOP leadership has been holding out for keeping the budget caps as is, but they’ll come along:

“What [McConnell] wanted to tell us was the vast majority, all but one of his senators, support keeping the budget caps; and so I wanted to say we can’t do that if we keep doing what we’re doing to the military,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) told POLITICO. “He can’t put pressure on us; we can’t put pressure on him. … It would be so nice to get this place back to where it functions.”

By “functions” McKeon means giving the military every last thing it wants, no questions asked. Still, the fact that they’re even thinking about changing the budget caps is probably a good sign.

It is is worrying, however, that the following is considered something Democrats could, in theory, agree to:

… the Budget committees’ leaders could presumably cut a deal that would resolve the concerns of McConnell, defense hawks and Democrats if they could agree to replace the sequestration cuts with spending reductions from other mandatory programs. That would effectively raise federal discretionary spending above $967 billion and give Democrats the opportunity to spare domestic programs hurt by sequestration. But it would also keep in place the same net level of savings.

A McConnell spokesman said Tuesday that, “While he’s not open to tax hikes, Sen. McConnell has said publicly that he’s open to swapping real mandatory savings for the sequester — as long as the top line stays the same or better.”

But where those cuts would come from has long been the major sticking point. Murray has made clear she won’t agree to any structural changes to Medicare or Social Security, particularly without significant revenue increases. Democratic aides said Murray has not given up the push for higher taxes or a deal in the range of the $1.058 trillion spending target. But Murray has not drawn any lines in the sand, given the high stakes for even a smaller deal.

Senior GOP aides, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive private negotiations, say that a budget deal with Ryan is the best option for all parties.

Yes, the Democrats continue to say they won’t swap future cuts to “mandatory programs” (aka “entitlements” — aka, vital safety net programs)unless they get some revenue. The question now is which mandatory programs and whether this sort of thing would be adequate to fulfill that pledge:

Ryan has developed several different frameworks that replace the sequester for different lengths of time. While the outlines of the agreement are certainly far from solid, they could include some mandatory savings, along with revenue — but no new taxes. Revenue raisers being discussed include increased Transportation Security Administration fees and money generated from wireless spectrum sales, according to sources in both parties.

That was discussed in the context of a “small deal” so it’s possible they’ve come up with some “mandatory savings” that isn’t a benefit cut to vital safety net programs. Let’s hope so because:

Senior GOP aides, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive private negotiations, say that a budget deal with Ryan is the best option for all parties.

While Congress could still shoot down any deal between Murray and Ryan, senior House GOP aides argued that an accord with Ryan’s stamp of approval could sail through the House. The Appropriations Committee is eager for a shot at regular order; hawks would be happy to replace defense cuts; and leadership wants to clear its plate of budget fights for a while.

Keep in mind what sequestration was always designed for according to Gene Sperling:

The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand bargain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start. It was an accepted part of the understanding — from the start. Really. It was assumed by the Rs on the Supercommittee that came right after: it was assumed in the November-December 2012 negotiations. There may have been big disagreements over rates and ratios — but that it was supposed to be replaced by entitlements and revenues of some form is not controversial. (Indeed, the discretionary savings amount from the Boehner-Obama negotiations were locked in in BCA: the sequester was just designed to force all back to table on entitlements and revenues.)

These current negotiations may not get the deficit reduction numbers of 1.2 trillion they were aiming for with the president’s budget. But then they don’t need to do they? The deficit numbers are looking much more positive right now anyway. At this point, if sequestration can get the defense hawks to demand the restoration of their gravy train in exchange for some kind of cuts to mandatory spending paired with some Ryan approved temporary “revenue-not-taxes” it will have achieved its purpose — which is that spending will remain at austerity levels as far as the eye can see, the 1% will still be drowning in money, the defense sector will be as gluttonous and bloated as ever and the people will have lost.

Oh, and if you ask how they can possibly get liberals to sign on to such a thing? Well, it’s the usual blackmail:

As an extra bargaining chip, Republicans would consider including an extension of extended unemployment benefits, which expire on Dec. 28

Yep, the Christmas unemployment extension miracle.

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But by all means, let’s cut food stamps and Social Security benefits

by digby

Hey a few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there pretty soon you’re talking about real money:

The Defense Department’s 2012 budget totaled $565.8 billion, more than the annual defense budgets of the 10 next largest military spenders combined, including Russia and China. How much of that money is spent as intended is impossible to determine.

In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.

Even if the Pentagon accounting was perfect in every way it would still be an epic misappropriation of funds to spend this much money on the defense sector. To do it while literally taking food out of people’s mouths and declaring them to be too “dependent” on government is morally repulsive.

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The political perils of the security state

by digby

In this week of commemoration of the 50 year anniversary of the Kennedy Assasination, Politico magazine has published a fascinating bit of historical gossip that’s just plain fun to read, featuring the recollections of Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s BFF who was drummed out of Washington on corruption charges back in the day:

Exactly 50 years ago this fall, in the face of a widening official investigation into his private business dealings and vivid social life—an inquiry that threatened to engulf the Kennedy White House in a sex scandal and destroy Baker’s political patron, Vice President Lyndon Johnson—Baker drank four martinis at lunch and impulsively resigned his post. He had been as close as a son to Johnson, privy to the vice president’s deepest secrets. On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination short-circuited the Baker investigation, and spared Johnson career-ending ignominy.

Still, prosecutors eventually caught up with Baker, if not his patron, and he ended up serving 18 months in prison on federal tax evasion charges. In 1978, he co-wrote Wheeling and Dealing, a rollicking memoir with Larry L. King, best known as the author of the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

But Baker in recent years quietly recorded an even more unvarnished account of his anything-goes-era in Washington, which Politico Magazine now publishes for the first time. His recollections—of an age when senators drank all day, indulged in sexual dalliances with secretaries and constituents, accepted thousands of dollars in bribes and still managed to pass the most important legislation of the 20th century—were collected by Donald Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office in interviews with Baker in 2009 and 2010. The resulting 230-page manuscript was so ribald and riveting, so salacious and sensational, that the Historical Office refrained from its usual practice of posting such interviews online.

I doubt that any sentient person can believe that powerful men have changed so fundamentally that none of this could ever happen again (if nothing else, yesterday’s congressional cocaine bust proves otherwise)so I think it’s important to consider this one little detail:

“Any time I had a rich guy in town, my secretary called her to see if she could go out. She told me that of all the people she had met … the nicest one was Congressman Jerry Ford. [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover could not find out the happenings when the Warren Commission was investigating the killer of President Kennedy. … J. Edgar Hoover could not find out what they were doing. So, he had this tape where Jerry Ford was having oral sex with Ellen Rometsch. You know, his wife had a serious drug problem back then. … Hoover blackmailed … Ford to tell him what they were doing. That’s the reason I don’t like him. It’s just a misuse of authority.”

The fact that Ford funneled information to Hoover about the Warren Commission is established fact. People have always wondered why he would do that.

The reason I bring this up is not to talk about politicians getting blow jobs, although that’s always fun. It’s because this story about the foibles of powerful people in Washington points up the fact that all this information “collection” can serve a very useful purpose for people inside the secret government if they choose to use it such ways. It’s been done before and it can be done again. I don’t care about the inner lives of politicians or their sexual proclivities. But no humans can live like humans under a microscope and I think it’s quite clear that politicians are human. The ability to spy on people in powerful positions and use that information to manipulate the government has always been a problem. This “metadata collection” puts that danger on steroids.

The big question I have is why the politicians who so vociferously support these programs do so. It might be that they do it on principle. It might not be.

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Taser in handcuffs

by digby

It happens every day:

A mother in Pennsylvania is threatening to sue after officers shocked her 14-year-old son in the face with a Taser while he was handcuffed.

Mother Marissa Sargeant showed WCAU graphic photos of what the boy’s face looked like after he was arrested with an older relative for retail theft at a local Walmart.

“What he did was wrong,” she admitted. “He was coerced by a 19-year-old. He does know better.”

According to Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler, Tullytown officers fired a Taser and hit the boy in the face when he escaped from their police cruiser and began to flee. The district attorney asserted that the 14-year-old was not able to stop his face from hitting the pavement because he was handcuffed, causing the bruising seen in the photos.

Heckler said that the officers were forced to use the Taser on the child because they were “fearing for his safety,” WCAU reported.

Yes, it’s always for their own good.

The kid was in handcuffs. When you shoot someone who is in handcuffs full of electricity they cannot break their fall when they go down screaming in pain. And they always go down screaming in pain. I’ve seen dozens of videos that show people falling right on their faces with reports of broken teeth and bones.

This, however, looks excessive even under those circumstances. So, it appears they not only tasered him, they beat him too. You have to wonder if that happened while he was in handcuffs as well.

The alleged crime he committed that supposedly justified all this was shoplifting. This kid needs to learn that if you want to get away with stealing you need to be a white guy in a suit who steals millions. They never get tasered.

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