Month: March 2015

Losing wars that aren’t wars

by digby

I was wondering when somebody was going to write this:

Pardon my cynicism, but the “war on terror” (aka “war on violent extremism”) is reminding me more and more of the disastrous U.S. “war on drugs.” That latter campaign, we now know, has been a costly and counter-productive debacle. The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to interdict drug shipments, eradicate poppy and coca fields in foreign countries, and round up drug dealers and users here at home, with hardly any lasting or meaningful successes. Narcotics producers just relocate to new areas or develop new products, and smugglers find new routes to bring drugs into the United States, leaving the level of drug abuse largely unchanged. After four decades, the main achievement of the war on drugs was giving the “Land of the Free” the world’s largest prison population.

Similarly, the broad U.S. effort to address the threat from al Qaeda and its like-minded successors seems to be lurching from failure to failure. Indeed, the entire U.S. approach to the greater Middle East has been a costly series of missteps, which is why some of us have called for a fundamental rethinking of the whole U.S. approach. The GOP would like to blame the current mess on U.S. President Barack Obama, but U.S. Middle East policy is a bipartisan cock-up going back more than 20 years.

I would suggest it goes back even further to the neoconservatism obsession with rogue states in the 1980s which blinded them to the threats from non-state actors.

The author of the piece, Stephen walt, outlines all the similarities between the two failed “wars” that don’t make sense, but his last one really gets to the problem:

The final reason for recurring failure is the tendency to rely on the same people, no matter what their past track records have been. We’ve seen a revolving door of (unsuccessful) Middle East peace negotiators who then spend their retirements giving advice on how future peace negotiations should be conducted. We’ve got a CIA director who’s been centrally involved in U.S. counterterrorism policy since the early 1990s, and who continues to enjoy the president’s confidence despite a dodgy relationship with the truth and a conspicuous lack of policy success. We’ve got famous generals who were better at self-promotion than at winning wars, yet whose advice on what to do today is still eagerly sought. And of course we’ve got a large community of hawkish pundits offering up the same bellicose advice, with no acknowledgement of how disastrously their past recommendations have fared. The result is that U.S. policy continues to run on the same familiar tracks, and with more or less the same unhappy results.

Just like the war on drugs.

And there’s little reason to believe there’s any prospect of change. If you read James Risen’s new book you’ll know that all the incentives go the other way.

.

Watch This Guy’s Brilliant Anti-fraking Demo

by Spocko

This is the most straight-forward and powerful video I’ve seen in awhile.

It’s from a hearing on shipping fracking wastewater to a well in Sioux County Nebraska.

The lack of slickness helps. The crappy camerawork adds to the authenticity. I’d like my friends at various non-profits and activists to watch this to see what was done right.

• The speaker knew his audience. Not only the commissioners, but the people in the room and in the community. He was not an outsider. He looked like them, dressed like them and talked like them.
• He addressed the concerns of both sides before his demo
• He made a powerful visual case with common items people knew
• He made an emotional appeal and had an intellectual back up.  This is for the people who say they only decide based on “facts,” to rationalize their emotional decision.

So many great things in one short video, and I’m glad that Bold Nebraska used it to get people to sign their petition, Don’t Frak our Water.

After I watched the video, I read some comments at Reddit and in the YouTube section.  I searched Google News to see how the story got picked up by the local and national media.

What was fascinating to me was to see all the methods that the oil and gas companies used to get their way. The local media pointed out a few of the methods before hand.  One paper took to the opinion pages to call out the other methods.  But what I also want to point out is how successful actions like this still get pushed back without some additional media strategic thinking.

The old line, “They are playing chess while we play checkers.” comes to mind. But since my 7 year old nephew destroys me at chess, “The horsie moves in an L Uncle Spocko!” and I haven’t played checkers for 23 years, instead I’ll say,

 “They are writing a long form TV show, while we are writing a weekly episodic drama, with stand alone episodes, with no character or season arcs.”

The take away?  Even a kick ass viral video with popular support can be deflected because of how corporations use the media’s own methods and journalist’s own self identification to dilute powerful actions and videos.

I recently was advising a friend about a damning piece of email from a public official. I implored her to think 3 steps ahead of the announcement before sending it out to the media.

MSM attempt to tell the back story of viral media but often in the process activists are discredited. Companies know this, that is why they have all their very serious experts, lawyers and economists lined up for the press.

The press can say they are telling “both sides” but really they are making sure that the company under attack gets a second or third bite at the messaging apple.

I told my friend the importance of getting the last word in on a story. “Be sure to ask to comment on the response of the official!” I implored her with my human emotion.  Meanwhile my Vulcan background envisioned and prepped for the next scene.

What was also interesting was how Greg Awtry, the publisher of the closest big paper, the Star-Herald, responded. He knows his audience too, instead of attacking the oil and gas corporations for rigging the game or pressuring the governor to pack the Nebraska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission with oil men, he blames government.  Yes, the procedural tricks to keep the hearings off the record, and not subject to popular control are ‘government,’ but it takes some smart lobbyists to get those laws passed in the first place.

But at least he can say he was outraged. This is western Nebraska and the “get government out of my face,” is strong. He can’t acknowledge the role of government in protecting people, even when they are the best bet to stop the corporate destruction of the people’s water supply.

What I’m looking forward to is just how this viral video can be used beyond the first pop, beyond the media’s “on the other hand” stories.

Right now the lobbyists are circling the money wagons to explain to the politicians why they should ignore the public and can’t stop this anyway.

QOTD: Rand Paul

by digby

From avideotaped interview in 2013.

“I don’t think I’ve ever used the word gay rights, because I don’t really believe in rights based on your behavior.” 

As Daily Kos’s Laura Clawson quipped:

Says the man who has all sorts of rights based on his “behavior” of being married to a woman.

What’s the matter with Arizona?

by digby

And I’m not talking about John McCain:

Arizona’s Republican governor has vetoed a controversial bill that would have barred the release of the names of police officers involved in lethal shootings. The bill, which had broad support in the state legislature, was inspired by two incidents in which unarmed suspects were killed by police.[…]

That the bill even reached the governor’s desk reflects a sentiment in Arizona, and perhaps across America, that the real problem with police shootings is the threat posed to the safety and reputations of officers by those angered by such incidents. This threat, Smith argued, became especially clear in Arizona over the last year or so.

“This was the genesis of two cases in Arizona,” Smith told the House committee.

In both cases a police officer in Arizona shot and killed an unarmed person of color under questionable circumstances. And yet, the bill’s passage suggests, the lesson state legislators drew from those killings was that it was the police who needed more protection.

Maybe the police could offer their fellows protection? Like they are supposed to offer all the citizens? As in, it’s their job?

I don’t think police officers should be targets. But then neither should anyone else.

Is there another state in the union that has to depend on its super conservative governor to rein in the ultra-right wing legislature?

.

Karl Rove Jr.


by digby

Read this story about the Karl Rove of Missouri — and Ted Cruz’s campaign consultant. (He’s worked for Huckabee and Perry also.) You may have heard about the suicide of a Missouri politician a month or so ago because of rumors and innuendos. This guy is widely held to be partly responsible:

Will Kraus, a candidate for Missouri secretary of state, is certain.

Jeff Roe is still his guy.

“I plan to continue to use Jeff and Axiom Strategies,” the Lee’s Summit Republican said last week. “They’ve done a great job for me.”

It’s been more than a month since Roe, a well-known and often-feared campaign consultant, helped produce a mocking radio commercial in the Missouri governor’s race. The ad, aired in Kansas City and other markets, suggested state auditor and GOP candidate Tom Schweich was a “bug” and compared him with bumbling TV character Barney Fife.

Days after the spot aired, Schweich took his own life.

Some of Schweich’s friends quickly concluded the ad played a role in the suicide and accused Roe of bullying the candidate. Former U.S. Sen. Jack Danforth urged Republicans to walk away from Roe, a request he repeated last week.

“We should disassociate ourselves from anyone who conducts this sort of campaign,” he said in an email.

But nothing suggests candidates are taking Danforth’s advice, or that Schweich’s death dented Roe’s multimillion-dollar Kansas City-based political enterprise in any significant way.

Roe — who declined to comment for this story — remains the chief campaign strategist for Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who announced his presidential bid last week. Roe’s companies maintain longstanding connections with Republican U.S. Reps. Sam Graves of Missouri and Kevin Yoder of Kansas, as well as more than two dozen other candidates for federal office.
[…]
Some colleagues said Axiom’s client roster remains intact because candidates believe Roe shouldn’t be held responsible for Schweich’s suicide. They said that the anti-Schweich radio ad, while tough, wasn’t unusually aggressive or fundamentally unfair, and that suicide is almost always an act without a clear motive.

At the same time, the 60-second spot was aimed primarily at Schweich’s appearance and personality, not his positions on issues. For weeks Schweich’s allies have said the ad wasn’t meant to convince voters, but rather to rattle the sometimes high-strung state auditor.
[…]
Controversy has defined Roe’s career.

In 2006, he ran TV ads chastising a disabled candidate for working for an adult publication. She actually sold ads for a company that owned that magazine and others.

He connected former Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes with “San Francisco values” during her unsuccessful effort to oust Graves.

He’s hired operatives to track opponents with video cameras, leading some to complain of unnecessary provocation and to file complaints with police. His deep research into his opponents’ personal records is legendary. He’s been accused of orchestrating a lawsuit to gain access to a candidate’s personal papers.

In 2014, a Roe mailer Photoshopped a candidate “in the classic Marlon Brando Godfather pose and likened him to a mobster,” according to The Dallas Morning News.

He was part of a long-running feud with former U.S. Sen. Kit Bond that eventually entangled both men in the controversy over fired U.S. attorneys during the George W. Bush administration.

Candidates have been known to hire Roe just to keep him from working for the other side.

Roe has never apologized for his approach.

“These are not prom-queen elections,” he has said. “Who’s elected, what their values are, all that determines the direction of the nation.”

He’s been paid by the payday loan industry and the Missouri Republican Party. He ran the unsuccessful campaign for the Jackson County health research sales tax.

He’s a real pip.

The article says that he might become a problem for Cruz as Republicans might use him to degrade Cruz’s reputation. I suppose it’s possible in these days of social media rage but these are Republicans we’re talking about, so I have a feeling that no matter how piously they declare they are above such tactics the guy who actually employs them will be more respected by the base.

.

The Matrix refinanced: Changing a human being into revenue
by Tom Sullivan

Jeff Bryant’s alarming post at Salon details some of the financial services sector’s inventive, new schemes for funding education. Wall Street already saw K-12 schools as “the last honeypot,” a steady, recession-proof, government-guaranteed stream of public tax dollars just waiting to be tapped by charter schools. It first had to convince states to increase competition – meaning eliminating teachers and other public employees standing between investors and their money.

One could argue that the right’s small government, low taxes mantra always had as its goal eliminating the “creeping socialism” of government providing education and other public services on a not-for-profit basis. (What, no middle-man markup?) “Starving the beast” was never about the size of government, but about eliminating public-sector competitors and making sure the right people take a percentage of vital services funded at taxpayer expense.

Since the collapse of the housing market, the giant pool of money is looking for other places to invest. So it’s out with the NINA loans and the CDOs and in with the SLABS, CABS, PPPs, and ISAs. Jeff Bryant writes:

It’s not hard to see the allure of SLABS [student loan asset-backed securities]. Student loans seem to be an endless stream of revenue as colleges and universities continue to increase tuition, economic conditions and employment transience feed the unemployed back into continuing education, and political leaders urge everyone to attend college. The income stream is nearly guaranteed to pay off because the loans are next to impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.

A Huffington Post article by Chris Kirkham states, SLABS offer “seemingly unlimited growth potential at virtually zero risk. The burden of college loan repayment falls entirely on students’ backs, shielding corporations from the consequences of default.”

Remember when mortgage-backed securities were a guaranteed, sure thing? There’s much more here: ‘capital appreciation bonds’ (CABs) for financing public schools, “public-private partnerships (P3s) where developers provide capital to build schools they then lease to universities (as happens with K-12 charters). Don’t get me started on P3s.

The ultimate solution in the private edu-debt sphere emerged recently when conservative ex-governor of Indiana, now president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels proposed to the U.S. Congress that, “Instead of taking out a traditional college loan, students would have the option of finding an investor – possibly a Purdue alum – to finance their degree in exchange for a share of their future income.”

If you read that and said out loud, “indentured servitude,” so did I. Daniels’ (and others’) first swing at these Income Share Arrangements (ISAs) whiffed, Bryant explains. But?

But like what so often happens, quirky proposals from conservatives that appear like blips on the outer edge of the crazy radar, actually have a huge think tank machinery behind them. As a report from an Indiana news outlet explains, the financial vehicles Daniels alluded to are what’s known in the biz as Income Share Arrangements (ISAs). The reporter sourced the concept of ISAs to 1955 and University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, the god of right-wing privatization advocates.

Beth Akers, a fellow with centrist think tank Brookings, has argued ISAs should “play a role” in financing student loan debt. She posits that the central problem with higher education is there is “almost no incentive” for students to choose schools and courses of study that pay off down the road in terms of lucrative salaries. A broad market for ISAs could change that by enabling students to “collateralize their financing with future earnings, just as home buyers collateralize their mortgage with the house itself.”

Except here, humans themselves are the collateral. This financial Matrix bypasses all the intermediate messiness of productive capitalism. Why should “job creators” bother with the inefficiency of trading in actual products and services when, by plugging them into a matrix of derivatives, you can change a human being into revenue?

Cue Laurence Fishburne. I didn’t give the Wachowskis enough credit.

Mr Mainstream

by digby

Jeb Bush: “Mike Pence has done the right thing. This is simply allowing people of faith space to be able to express their beliefs.” #RFRA
— Eric Bradner (@ericbradner) March 30, 2015

I’m sure everyone in the beltway is frantically reassuring one another that he can’t possibly mean it. Because he’s a grown-up and a moderate. Deep down. Really.

.

The new servant economy Part XXIV

by digby

Hermit aristocrats:

Katherine van Ekert isn’t a shut-in, exactly, but there are only two things she ever has to run errands for any more: trash bags and saline solution. For those, she must leave her San Francisco apartment and walk two blocks to the drug store, “so woe is my life,” she tells me. (She realizes her dry humor about #firstworldproblems may not translate, and clarifies later: “Honestly, this is all tongue in cheek. We’re not spoiled brats.”) Everything else is done by app. Her husband’s office contracts with Washio. Groceries come from Instacart. “I live on Amazon,” she says, buying everything from curry leaves to a jogging suit for her dog, complete with hoodie.

She’s so partial to these services, in fact, that she’s running one of her own: A veterinarian by trade, she’s a co-founder of VetPronto, which sends an on-call vet to your house. It’s one of a half-dozen on-demand services in the current batch at Y Combinator, the startup factory, including a marijuana delivery app called Meadow (“You laugh, but they’re going to be rich,” she says). She took a look at her current cliens — they skew late 20s to late 30s, and work in high-paying jobs: “The kinds of people who use a lot of on demand services and hang out on Yelp a lot ”

Basically, people a lot like herself. That’s the common wisdom: the apps are created by the urban young for the needs of urban young. The potential of delivery with a swipe of the finger is exciting for van Ekert, who grew up without such services in Sydney and recently arrived in wired San Francisco. “I’m just milking this city for all it’s worth,” she says. “I was talking to my father on Skype the other day. He asked, ‘Don’t you miss a casual stroll to the shop?’ Everything we do now is time-limited, and you do everything with intention. There’s not time to stroll anywhere.”

Suddenly, for people like van Ekert, the end of chores is here. After hours, you’re free from dirty laundry and dishes. (TaskRabbit’s ad rolls by me on a bus: “Buy yourself time — literally.”)

So here’s the big question. What does she, or you, or any of us do with all this time we’re buying? Binge on Netflix shows? Go for a run? Van Ekert’s answer: “It’s more to dedicate more time to working.”

That’s from a fascinating story at Medium about how young rich net nerds are no longer living as part of the wider world and instead are outsourcing all of the chores normal people do. It’s basically high-tech feudalism although some of the people who now employ humans called “Alfreds” to manage their apps for them (for real) did have a few tiny misgivings about whether those servants and the servants they manage might not be paid all that well. (But hey, it’s better than nothing, amirite?)

I will say this: if it’s all about work and nothing but work I think a really good idea for an internet business in the next couple of decades will be something that deals with midlife crisis. It’s going to hit these people like a ton of bricks.

Also too,this:

That’s the other side of this, the gender one. The errands being served up by the on-demand economy — cooking, cleaning, laundry, groceries, runs to the post office — all were all once, and in many places still are, the jobs of stay-at-home mothers. Even now, when women outnumber men in the formal workplace, they continue to bear the brunt of that invisible domestic work, often for many, many hours a week. So women — those who can afford it, at least — have the most to win from passing that load on to somebody else.

So it’s not a surprise that 60 percent of Alfred’s clients are female. One mother I know told me she has no time to cook while wrangling two kids under two, so she uses EAT24. Uber is an easy way to get out of the house with an infant, another told me, saying the driver helped her strap the baby seat into the black sedan.

The invisible work handed off by some women simply becomes visible — oftentimes for other, less wealthy women. Despite the name, 75 percent of “Alfreds” are women.

There’s nothing new about poor women serving rich women. There is something new about those rich women working outside the home. More work for women everywhere!

.

Maybe if she had a union …

by digby

This is a sad reality for low wage workers. As “at will” employees they only have freedom of speech in the abstract:

Shanna Tippen was another hourly worker at the bottom of the nation’s economy, looking forward to a 25 cent bump in the Arkansas minimum wage that would make it easier for her to buy diapers for her grandson. When I wrote about her in the Post last month, she said the minimum wage hike would bring her a bit of financial relief, but it wouldn’t lift her above the poverty line.

She called me the other day to say she didn’t get to enjoy the 25-cent hike for long. After the story came out, she says she was fired from her job for talking to the Post.
[…]
Tippen says she was fired by her boss, hotel manager Herry Patel. Earlier that day, Patel had called the Post to express frustration that he had been quoted giving his opinion about the minimum wage hike. (He objected to it.)

It was soon after, Tippen says, that Patel found her in the lobby and fired her.

“He said I was stupid and dumb for talking to [the Post],” Tippen said. “He cussed me and asked me why you wrote the article. I said, ‘Because he’s a reporter; that’s what he does.’ He said, ‘it was wrong for me to talk to you.'”

She’d worked there for two years and is now unemployed and searching for another job.

This is what liberty means for millions of workers in America. They have the same rights as their employers in the abstract but in order to exercise them they have to be willing to enjoy the “freedom” of starvation.

.

The Village’s dumbest moment of the week

by digby

.