Month: March 2014

Headline ‘O the Day

by digby

Drones will cause an upheaval of society like we haven’t seen in 700 years

That’s quite a statement isn’t it? The article to which it refers explains a lot about why some people are instinctively concerned about the rise of drones and see them as not just another weapon. They are something very different and could revolutionize the way we organize society:

The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying attention. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of war. Or to put it another way: the end of the Age of the Gun.

You may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the Age of the Gun because it’s been centuries since that age began. But imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun.

That day was the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity. For centuries after that fateful day, gun-toting infantry ruled the battlefield. Military success depended more and more on being able to motivate large groups of (gun-wielding) humans, instead of on winning the loyalty of the highly trained warrior-noblemen. But sometime in the near future, the autonomous, weaponized drone may replace the human infantryman as the dominant battlefield technology. And as always, that shift in military technology will cause huge social upheaval.
[…]
Note that what we call drones right now are actually just remote-control weapons, operated by humans. But that may change. The United States Army is considering replacing thousands of soldiers with true autonomous robots. The proposal is for the robots to be used in supply roles only, but that will obviously change in the long term. Sometime in the next couple of decades, drones will be given the tools to take on human opponents all by themselves.

Meanwhile, technological advances and cost drops in robotics continue apace. It is not hard to imagine swarms of agile, heavily armed quadrotor drones flushing human gunmen out of buildings and jungles, while hardened bunkers are busted with smart munitions from cheap high-altitude robot blimps. (See this video if your imagination needs assistance.)

The day that robot armies become more cost-effective than human infantry is the day when People Power becomes obsolete. With robot armies, the few will be able to do whatever they want to the many. And unlike the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, robot-enforced tyranny will be robust to shifts in popular opinion. The rabble may think whatever they please, but the Robot Lords will have the guns.

Forever.

Where this scenario really gets scary is when it combines with economic inequality. Although few people have been focusing on robot armies, many people have been asking what happens if robots put most of us out of a job. The final, last-ditch response to that contingency is income redistribution – if our future is to get paid to sit on a beach, so be it.

But with robot armies, that’s just not going to work. To pay the poor, you have to tax the rich, and the Robot Lords are unlikely to stand for that. Just imagine Tom Perkins with an army of cheap autonomous drones. Or Greg Gopman. We’re all worried about the day that the 1% no longer need the 99%–but what’s really scary is when they don’t fear the 99% either.

I don’t know if any of this plausible from a technological viewpoint, but it does sound at least possible from a human, sociological standpoint. Let’s assume that there are a number of global “stresses” on the horizon, the most important of which is climate change and the inevitable large scale migration that naturally ensues. In a time of limited resources, growing population and vast wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer, is it really so outlandish to think that something like this might come to pass? (And I would also guess that it won’t be — at first,anyway — just the mega-wealthy — the regular people in certain places with more resources will be likely to enable their government to “protect” them as well.)

Was it the gun that empowered the individual?  I don’t know about that.  But it certainly seems plausible to me that the autonomous drone can disempower them.  There is something truly different about drone weapons. It’s the distance, the lack of personal danger, the sheer coldness of it. (Even B-52 bombers could get shot down or malfunction the crew could be killed or captured.) I don’t know if this dystopian scenario is realistic in any way. But there’s something about it that does make the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up.  Mostly because if it is possible,  I cannot imagine any way of stopping it.

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Enemies of the Internet

by digby

The government that prides itself on its constitution and guarantee of civil rights must be doubly proud today:

The U.S. government is an enemy of the Internet, according to an annual list released by Reporters Without Borders.

The press freedom group chided the Obama administration for its surveillance activities through the National Security Agency (NSA), which it claimed have “undermined confidence in the Internet and its own standards of security.”

“U.S. surveillance practices and decryption activities are a direct threat to investigative journalists, especially those who work with sensitive sources for whom confidentiality is paramount and who are already under pressure,” the organization said.

The U.S. had never before been included on Reporters Without Borders’ “Enemies of the Internet” list. Other countries listed as enemies include Russia, Iran, Syria and North Korea, as well as the United Kingdom, which was criticized for its Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Along with the NSA, the GCHQ was implicated in many of the programs unveiled in leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“The Internet was a collective resource that the NSA and GCHQ turned into a weapon in the service of special interests, in the process flouting freedom of information, freedom of expression and the right to privacy,” Reporters Without Borders said.

According to documents released by Snowden, the NSA actively worked to weaken encryption standards, have private software firms reduce their tools’ security and capture information about the users of major Web companies like Google and Facebook.

Disclosures about the controversial surveillance programs have caused a stir around the world and upset advocates of freedom online.

This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called President Obama to denounce personally the breadth of the surveillance programs. In a post on his website, he said that the government’s activities are posing a “threat” to the Internet.

At the same time, the NSA was denying reports that it had posed as Facebook in order to infect targeted computers with malware.

The internet shouldn’t feel singled out anymore. We now know they have the capability of collecting  recordings of 100% of the phone calls to and from certain countries so they can go back and listen to them later. But that is no cause for alarm at all. What could possibly go wrong with that? True, this one of the reasons they are building the massive storage facility in Utah  (all those recording and metadata take up a lot of space!) but that doesn’t mean we should be concerned.

Clearly, we need all of this to fight Islamic terrorism. (How could they have ever caught this dangerous terrorist madman without it? Oh never mind. They did catch him without it.) But I’m sure there are lots more terrorists out there making phone calls and writing emails and the government needs to have a recording of every single bit of communication in the world just in case. To keep us safe.

And if they happen to overhear some other stuff well, that’s the price you pay for freedom.

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You talkin’ to me???

by digby

Americans do not have the right to make fun of a policeman’s driving. Or, at least, this cop didn’t think so:

A Philadelphia police officer has been suspended and criminally charged after he allegedly yanked a war veteran off a Center City corner, handcuffed him and drove him around in his SUV, irked that the man and his friends had criticized his driving.

The 16-minute saga started when Officer Kevin Corcoran, 33, a nine-year veteran of the force, was patrolling in his SUV near 13th and Lombard streets at about 2 a.m. last March 31, according to the District Attorney’s Office. A pedestrian, part of a group of people on the sidewalk nearby, yelled to Corcoran that he’d made an illegal turn, prompting the officer to get out of his car and yell at them, according to the D.A.’s Office.

As onlookers began recording the incident on their cell phones, Corcoran allegedly slapped a device out of Roderick King’s hands and confronted him, saying: “Don’t f***ing touch me.” The officer allegedly kept walking toward King, “who was backing up with his hands out in front of him making no contact with the officer,” the statement from the D.A.’s Office said.

Corcoran then pushed King, grabbed him by the chest, threw him against the side of the SUV, handcuffed him, hurled him into the back of the car and then sped away with him, the D.A.’s Office said. The whole incident was caught on tape. King was not the person who criticized Corcoran’s driving.

Corcoran drove King somewhere off Broad Street, telling him he was under arrest for public intoxication, the D.A.’s Office said. But Corcoran “did not prepare any of the required police paperwork for a public intoxication arrest, had no evidence that the victim was intoxicated, and was in fact driving in the opposite direction of the 17th police district where Corcoran was assigned,” the D.A.’s Office said.

King then told Corcoran that he was an Iraq War veteran and had never been arrested before. That prompted Corcoran to stop at 13th and Rodman Streets, uncuff King and release him without charges.

Gosh, I wonder what would have happened if someone hadn’t been recording this incident?

I wouldn’t bring this up normally since examples of overzealous policing are so commonplace, even including physical violence and torture. But this illustrates something very specific about our policing and what’s going haywire with it. This “respect” nonsense, that seems to spring from the military and/or gang culture is now normal. I get that cops need to have authority in order to function safely in emergencies and times of danger. But this is about being “dissed”, an entirely different proposition and one that has no place in a free society.

I think that most cops would shrug at someone making fun of their driving — some might even roll their eyes or laugh. But there exists a non-negligible number who have adopted this authoritarian attitude that demands that citizens bow down to them. That’s not right. Luckily the law seems to have been following in this case — thanks to documentation — and this officer has been sanctioned. But I don’t know how many departments would do that. There’s way too much macho, military swagger in our police departments.

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The professional haters 2016 reunion tour

by digby

Media Matters has helpfully compiled a list of 1990s right wing Clinton haters for all you kids so you'[ll know who you’re dealing with when they start turning up in the media once the 2016 campaign kicks in. It’s already started on Fox, but I fully expect to see some of these people appearing elsewhere as well:

Fox News hosted the “professional dirty trickster” who founded an anti-Hillary Clinton group with the acronym “C.U.N.T.” The day before, it was the attorney who pushed fabricated anti-Clinton stories in the 90s. Last month, it was the woman who has suggested the Clintons may have had her husband killed.

Fox has never had particularly high standards for who they put on air, and it appears there’s no source too incredible for Fox to host as long as they are willing to smear the Clintons. And that list is long.

As Joe Conason and Gene Lyons detailed in their book The Hunting of the President, in the 1990s, an array of conservative operatives, right-wing journalists, and opportunists sought to drive the Clintons from the White House. Their backgrounds were often shady, their methods deceitful, and their claims fraudulent.

So who might be the next guest for a network with no standards and an urge to stop a potential Hillary Clinton presidential run? Some of these figures have gone on to extensive careers in the conservative media, while others haven’t been in the public eye for decades.

But all have literally unbelievable stories to tell.

Read on for the whole list. I was getting nervous they had left off Toensing and diGenova but I see they sved them for last.

I would also expect the gaggle of blond “former prosecutors” to be back as well. (They were the precursors to the FOX anchor archetype.)They are always good TV.

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Objectively Pro-Putin

by digby

It figures that in a time when gangs of various political and cultural persuasions take to social media and demand that putative allies conform to their rules of discourse or risk being stalked or banished, it would only be a matter of time before this group dynamic made its way to foreign policy. I’m surprised it took so long.

Check this out, from TPM:

The clock strikes 13: The longer @ggreenwald and Snowden remain silent on events in Ukraine, the more I suspect their previous motives.
— tom ricks (@tomricks1) March 17, 2014

In a post published Monday on his blog, Ricks once again seemed to insinuate that Greenwald and Snowden are in cahoots with the Russians.

“Bottom line: I am no longer going soft on Greenwald and Snowden,” he wrote. “In fact, rather the opposite, I am beginning to believe the worst about them. If they acting on moral beliefs, now would be the time for both of them to speak out against Putin. It could have a great impact, I think.”

Whatever you do, don’t think about the uncomfortable parallels with some not so distant historical events in American political life in which it was demanded that people publicly denounce Russian leaders or risk being named as sympathizers. It was not exactly our finest hour. (Also too, best not to think about the Soviet Show Trials, which also demanded denunciations — not that it mattered, they were executed anyway, which is what usually happens.)

Ricks claims that Greenwald and Snowden are “profiting” from Russia (how that’s happening is rather obscure) and therefore, if they fail to loudly denounce events in the Ukraine, they are objectively Pro-Putin. Greenwald refuses to bow to his demands because well … bowing to such a demand is unethical in itself (and useless.) Anyone who requires you to denounce someone else to prove that you are not a sympathizer is playing an authoritarian power game and giving them the “denunciation” they demand will never fully satisfy.
We have a long history of witch hunts both real and metaphorical in this country. One of the defining characteristics is this requirement that one prove one’s loyalty to the group. You may recall that the way they used to do it was to strap the accused witch to a chair and throw him or her into the water. If the accused floated to the top and lived he or she was obviously guilty. If he or she sank to the bottom and drowned, she was not. I think we can all see the problem with that.

Ricks is free to think what he wants about Greenwald and Snowden’s political beliefs and if he has some evidence that they have signed on to Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine agenda, as a top journalist I’m sure he can figure out a way to prove it. Otherwise this is just another example of a certain strain of creepy social coercion that rears its head in our culture from time to time and should be resisted by anyone who believes that administering loyalty oaths and demanding intellectual conformity, whether it comes  from a church, the government or one’s social group, is antithetical to a free society. One would think that journalists would be at the top of that list of resistors, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few years it’s that there are no greater enforcers of elite membership rules than political journalists.

Of course, there are Americans who openly applaud Putin’s actions in Ukraine for their own ends, but strangely I haven’t seen much push back:

“We obviously see other things driving the news cycle,” a top industry executive said. “Ukraine keeps the focus off the evil 1 percent, so I guess we have Putin to thank for that.”

Well, he has been a good friend to oligarchs.

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The fallout from Grand Bargaining

by digby

While the entire Democratic establishment is wringing its hands and blaming Obamacare for Alex Sink’s loss in Florida last week, this article points to a different issue:

With everyone trying to draw some national lesson from last week’s special election in Florida ahead of the November midterms, add this to the mix: Liberals think Democrats shot themselves in the foot on Social Security, an issue that played a central role in the district.

Democrats used a familiar playbook, accusing Republican David Jolly of wanting to privatize the program. House Majority PAC, an outside group that supports Democratic candidates, dropped almost $750,000 on an ad warning that Jolly “lobbied for a special interest that wanted to privatize Social Security,” and that he “still says privatization should be on the table.”

Democrat Alex Sink herself called Social Security “an American promise” and said that unlike her opponent, she would “fight to protect the integrity” of the program. It’s a message the party hoped would resonate in a district that has one of the nation’s highest concentrations of voters over the age 65.

But Jolly had an easy comeback: He denied wanting to privatize Social Security, and fired back by noting that Sink voiced some support for the Simpson-Bowles debt-reduction plan, which included cuts to Social Security.

The National Republican Congressional Committee hit Sink from the left on this, saying she “supports a plan that raises the retirement age for Social Security recipients, raises Social Security taxes, and cuts Medicare.” Katie Prill, a spokesperson for the Republican group, added: “Sending Alex Sink to Washington guarantees that seniors right here in Pinellas County are in jeopardy of losing the Social Security and Medicare benefits that they have earned and deserve.”

Liberal writers cried hypocrisy, but it didn’t matter: Sink lost.

For the Left, it’s evidence that Democrats need to take a firm line on the entitlement program — or even support expanding it — at a time when some in the party, and especially the White House, have offered concessions.

It couldn’t hurt to try. Obviously, Democrats get no political benefit from trying to cut these programs, (unless you count Villagers extolling them for being “grown-ups” which should get them at least a hundred votes in Virginia.) Why they persist in thinking this was good politics is beyond me.

Senator Jeff Merkley came out for Social Security expansion this week and Senator Mark Begich had signed on earlier so we should have a decent experiment in a blue state and a red state on this issue. I have no idea if it will be decisive, but in an off-year election that traditionally tilts heavily to older voters I think it’s fair to say that denying the Republicans the ability to slap you in the face with a stated desire to cut Social Security (and a plan to actually improve it!) is a smart idea.

Politico has a different take on the election results in Florida. Surprise: she lost because Democrats are too mean to the wealthy:

“Fresh off a bruising loss in Florida, the Democratic playbook for the midterms appears in need of a major rewrite – and the pro-business wing of the party is ready to draw up new plans. President Barack Obama in his budget once again floated a plan to raise taxes on Wall Street, but no one took it seriously. … In two-dozen interviews, the denizens of Wall Street and wealthy precincts around the nation said they are still plenty worried about the shift in tone toward top earners and the popularity of class-based appeals. On the right, the rise of populists including Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz still makes wealthy donors eyeing 2016 uncomfortable. But wealthy Republicans – who were having a collective meltdown just two months ago – also say they see signs that the political zeitgeist may be shifting back their way and hope the trend continues.”

I’ll bet they do.

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Bill Gates wants governments to beg corporations scraps

by David Atkins

It’s important to understand that in the halls of international power, this is the conversation that’s actually happening:

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates isn’t going to sugarcoat things: The increasing power of automation technology is going to put a lot of people out of work. Business Insider reports that Gates gave a talk at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, DC this week and said that both governments and businesses need to start preparing for a future where lots of people will be put out of work by software and robots.

“Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses… it’s progressing,” Gates said. “Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set… 20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model.”

As for what governments should do to prevent social unrest in the wake of mass unemployment, the Microsoft cofounder said that they should basically get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans over algorithms. This means perhaps eliminating payroll and corporate income taxes while also not raising the minimum wage so that businesses will feel comfortable employing people at dirt-cheap wages instead of outsourcing their jobs to an iPad.

That mass unemployment is coming soon isn’t the wild fancy of futurists. It’s real.

There are only two ways to deal with that. One is the Gates way. It’s the way that most world leaders are quietly putting into place, not only because of corruption, but because they they feel they must. It’s the international race to the bottom, in which the capital mobility of the jet set crowd trumps and overwhelms the power of sovereign states.

The other way is completely opposite–a hard turn toward social democracy, universal basic incomes, universal jobs programs, and international treaties that limit the power of mobile global capital while giving power back to real people and severing the assumed link between doing a billionaire’s bidding and human dignity.

There isn’t a middle ground. Either billionaires and the Tea Partiers win, or the progressives do. There’s no third way.

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Shamrock Shake

by digby

It didn’t last long but it was a good jolt:

I know it’s kind of funny to watch them dive under the desk, but they’re under a bunch of lights that could come crashing down on their heads and kill them …

On the other hand, here are a couple of cool customers during the Loma Prieta quake back in 1989:

The Northridge quake was a real shaker. I literally knocked me out of bed and knocked over everything in my house:

The aftershocks days later were a lot bigger than the one we had today.

My cat didn’t even wake up during this morning’s quake. But my heart pounded a little. When they first start you don’t know how it’s going to go. And anyone who lives at the beach as I do, thinks about that Tsunami …

Scary stuff.

Justifiable homicide

by digby

This is ridiculous:

Florida has executed 84 people since the Supreme Court announced the modern death penalty regime in 1976. Zero of them are white people sentenced to death for killing an African American. Indeed, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, “no white person has ever been executed for killing an African American” in the state of Florida.

Nor is Florida particularly unusual in the racial impact of its death penalty. In Alabama, 6 percent of murders involve black defendants and white victims, but 60 percent of black death row inmates were convicted of murdering a white person. In Louisiana, a death sentence is 97 percent more likely in murder cases where the victim is white.

Nationwide, only 20 white people have been executed since 1976 for killing a black person. By contrast, 269 black defendants were executed for killing someone who is white.

This system is so arbitrary that to execute anyone makes a mockery of the idea of equal protection and justice. Clearly nobody should be executed.

And in case anyone thinks that white people don’t kill black people in Florida, well, we only have to look at a couple of fellows named George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn to know otherwise. Or this, for that matter:

On October 23, 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers announced that they had signed Jackie Robinson, assigning him to their International League team, the Montreal Royals. Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager, believing he “knew” Florida, thought his team could train there, ruffling as few feathers as possible. Robinson and his wife were instructed by Rickey not to try to stay at any Sanford hotels. He and his wife did not eat out at any restaurants not deemed “Negro restaurants.” He did not even dress in the same locker room as his teammates.

As soon as the citizenry became aware of Robinson’s presence, the mayor of Sanford was confronted by a “large group of white residents” who “demanded that Robinson…be run out of town.”

On March 5, 1946, the Royals were informed that they would not be permitted to take the field as an integrated group. Rickey was concerned for Robinson’s life and sent him to stay in Daytona Beach. His daughter, Sharon Robinson, remembered being told, “The Robinsons were run out of Sanford, Florida, with threats of violence.”

Also too, the Rosewood massacre, along with countless other examples of white on black violence in Florida.

Let’s just say that Florida has a long history of racial violence. And it’s more than willing to execute people. It’s just unusually forgiving of white people who kill black people.

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“It’s an international race to the bottom”

by David Atkins

Thomas Frank has an interesting little interview with legendary S&L loan regulator Bill Black in Salon:

It is even more infuriating to realize that the correct answers to the test have been available to Professor Obama all along. Back in September of 2008, when the financial crisis was gathering speed, I was writing a column for the Wall Street Journal; in my efforts to comprehend the disaster, I learned that the nation’s foremost authority on the type of fraud that had wrecked the economy was a former S&L regulator named Bill Black. I went on to ask Bill Black’s opinion probably dozens of times; as the years passed and the crisis deepened, Bill Black went on to be quoted by just about everyone and to become probably the most famous former S&L regulator in the world. His doctrine of “control fraud” is today familiar to anyone trying to understand what went wrong in 2008.

Another group that sought out my friend Bill Black during the crisis year was the Obama campaign. For them he narrated a twelve-minute campaign video, describing at length the involvement of Republican candidate John McCain in the Keating Five scandal, and faulting McCain for choosing a zealous deregulator as his chief economic adviser—“he’s picked the worst possible source of advice.” (You can watch the video here.)

When Obama won the presidency, I assumed that Bill Black would soon be moving to Washington to usher prominent bankers through their perp walks. That’s what opportunity and meritocracy meant, after all. You bring in the guy who understands the problem.

Of course it never happened. His phone never rang. There was no ladder of opportunity for him or anyone like him, precisely because they represented accountability. And Barack Obama, champion of meritocracy, went on instead to pick the second-worst-possible source of advice.

When I ask Bill Black now what these last few years tell us about fairness and meritocracy, he refers me to Gresham’s law. “If you gain a competitive advantage by cheating,” he says, “then you won’t get a meritocracy, you’ll get a system where cheaters prosper and bad ethics drive good ethics out of the market.” Is that what kept him out of Washington, I ask? Yes, in part. It’s “the international race to the bottom, which the administration has largely adopted. ‘We can’t crack down [on the banks, the administration thinks,] they’ll all move to the City of London. We need to have the JOBS bill,’ a godsend to fraudsters, ‘because too many IPOs are being done in China instead of the United States.’ ”

“People like me were moved out long ago,” Black concludes. To a government “trying to signal continuity and friendliness to the banks,” his presence would have been, he supposes, more than a little discordant.

This is a crucial point to understand. But in fairness the Obama Administration isn’t the only one to think this way. No less a progressive thinker than Thomas Piketty agrees, which is why he advocates nothing less than global wealth taxes in order to prevent capital mobility.

Every country out there is terrified that if they crack down on their own banksters, the vulture finance parasites will punish that by moving the capital out of their neck of the globe. There may be some truth to that.

The nations of the world need to realize that it’s better to work together than apart, and that every government worldwide is threatened by the same group of jet setting plutocrats holding all of us hostage. Placing international regulations on global capital and making pariah states out of those who harbor plutocratic money will ultimately be absolutely necessary as the human race progresses.

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