Month: May 2015

A nation of hoarders
by Tom Sullivan

Last night NPR ran a story on how police departments like Seattle’s are archiving masses of data gleaned from cities’ license plate scanners. They’ve only scratched the surface of what might be done with it:

Newell is a PhD student at the University of Washington. He studies surveillance and is experimenting with what people can find out from stored license plate data. The scanners have already proven themselves when it comes to finding stolen cars, but Newell says with a big enough data base of this information, people could do so much more.

“As we mix data between roving systems on these patrol cars and systems mounted on, say red lights, law enforcement could get a much better picture of our individual movements,” he says. “And with enough data, [police can] predict when we might leave our home and when we might be at home, for instance.”

That capability is still “rudimentary,” and the data is mostly in the hands of private companies and contractors, not the government’s. Still, the hair on the back of privacy advocates’ necks is already standing up. But this isn’t another post about government spying and privacy concerns.

NPR reports that law enforcement officials across the country are worried Congress may force them to throw away data they have already collected, as well as restrict how they may collect, store, and use automated license plate recognition (ALPR) data in the future … for purposes they haven’t thought of yet … using technology that hasn’t been invented yet.

That got me thinking. They’re not alone. ALPR is just a smaller version of what the NSA is doing on a grander scale with phone records, etc. The NSA built Bluffdale (the Utah Data Center) so it could hoard — that is the word, isn’t it? — the sum total of “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’” You know, for later. Because who knows? Some odd bit of random pocket litter might prove important someday. To somebody. Somewhere. And heaven forbid we should ever be forced to throw it out.

God help us. That’s not law enforcement. That’s a psychological disorder.

The right thinks Fox is being rude to the right

by digby

So, I read on my twitter feed that right wing talker Mark Levin said today that he’s beginning to think that Fox News is harmful and I thought, “hey, maybe these guys really are wising up.”

Not a chance:

Mark Levin ripped the Fox News ‘commentary’ that immediately followed the announcement today by Rick Santorum to run for president. Levin says candidates deserve a little respect when they announce for president, even if you disagree with them. But apparently that’s not what Santorum was getting from the crew of The Five, who Levin didn’t name but is obviously who he was referring to as Santorum announced in the 5pm hour. Levin pointed out that they essentially mocked Santorum and went on to say that he believes those who did the mocking would have likely done the same to Ronald Reagan when he announced.

Levin suggested that he believes Fox News has become harmful:

“I’m really starting to believe that some of these outlets that we have come to rely on are actually kinda harmful – kinda harmful.”

I actually agree that it’s rude for these guys to mock Santorum. (That’s my job!) He’s a legitimate candidate of the right who actually came in second on the last go. He deserves to be treated by right wingers, at least, with a little bit more respect, especially since their preferred candidates are best known for things like this:

.

Everybody thinks they’re a singing star

by digby

Sorry folks. If I had to hear this, you have to hear it. You’ll never be quite the same:

h/t to Matt Taibbi

Here’s your creeping Sharia

by digby

Via Huffington Post:

When Jennifer Smith’s son brought home a permission slip for a sixth-grade pool party, she was surprised to read a stipulation: “All girls must wear a non-white t-shirt over their swimsuit.”

And you’ll notice the boys aren’t allowed to wear speedos. I sure hope nobody allows their kids to watch the Olympics because they’re going to get an eye full and lord only knows what bad thoughts they might have.

The mother (who wrote the comment there on the permission slip) complained and the school district said it was about not shaming girls who didn’t have nice swimsuits, which was clearly nonsense because they wouldn’t have mandates that they not be white unless they were worried about modesty. (No explanation for the speedo ban.)

They ended up making the t-shirt optional and none of the girls wore them. There were no reports of temptresses and lust-filled schoolboys being unable to control themselves at the pool party.

I suspect this sort of thing is becoming common again in a lot of places. Parents are upset by the sexuality they see in popular culture and want to keep their kids away from it. But this kind of thing goes exactly the wrong way. You can’t repress sexuality you can only teach people to be responsible and decent about it. It always comes out somewhere. Look at the Duggar saga.

Speaking of the Duggar saga:

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, from TLC’s reality series “18 Kids and Counting,” are very serious about modest dressing, such much so that they’re fans of “Wholesomewear swimsuits.”

.

Just blowing off some steam. Again.

by digby

A grotesque image recently made public by a Cook County judge shows two former Chicago police officers holding rifles and posing next to an unidentified black man, who is shown wearing fake deer antlers and sticking his tongue out, as if he had been hunted and killed.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Police Department requested that the racially charged photo, which shows former officers Timothy McDermott and Jerome Finnigan standing over the man, remain sealed in court documents. Judge Thomas Allen, however, denied the request in March, after police Supt. Garry McCarthy moved to fire McDermott. He has since been removed from the force, but appealed his dismissal earlier this year.

Via the Sun-Times:

Believed to have been taken in a West Side police station between 1999 and 2003, the Polaroid photo was given to the city by the feds in 2013 and resulted in McDermott, a clout-heavy cop, being fired last year by the police board in a 5-to-4 vote. The four dissenters said McDermott should only have been suspended. But a majority of the board wrote that “appearing to treat an African-American man not as a human being but as a hunted animal is disgraceful and shocks the conscience.” […]

Federal prosecutors gave the photo to police investigators in 2013 about two years after Finnigan — the notorious other cop in the picture — was sentenced to 12 years in prison for leading a crew of rogue cops in robberies, home invasions and other crimes.

Remind you of anything?

That’s what I immediately thought of. It seems that some people in our allegedly civilized culture like to torture and humiliate people by treating them like animals.  How odd.

The Chicago cops described the decision to take their picture as “spur of the moment.” Nobody knows who the man is. The officers say they released him without arresting him because he had no criminal record. Let’s hope somebody identifies this man and proves that he was still alive after that incident. It’s one very creepy image. Nice of the city (like the federal government with the torture pics) to try to keep it under wraps. For our own good dontcha know. These things tend to inflame the plebes.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that this is yet another anomaly. Bad apples. Very rare.  nothing to worry about.  And the fact that nobody ever turned these guys in is just another coincidence.  It’s not as if the culture requires that “good cops” cover up for “bad cops” or anything.

.

Game on! Unleash the Pride!


by digby

So it looks like Rick Santorum has a new theme song for this cycle.  It’s called “Take back America, unleash our pride.”

Poor Rick. I’m pretty sure that when someone says “unleash our pride” in 2015, they think of this.

And that makes them think of this.

I’m sure these girls are very disappointed:

.

The common sense sound of Bernie Sanders

by digby

Watching the right wing go looney tunes over Bernie Sanders is so much fun I’m beginning to enjoy politics again. They’re so used to having their basic assumptions validated all the time that when somebody takes them on directly they get very agitated. Matt Bruenig at Demos points to one perfect instance:

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said this:

If 99 percent of all the new income goes to the top 1 percent, you could triple it, it wouldn’t matter much to the average middle class person. The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn’t matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty. You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.

Naturally, some media sorts exploded with self-satisfied criticism (I, II, III, among many others). Jim Tankersley’s response at Wonkblog was typical:

The literal implication of that last sentence is that there some kind of a national trade-off between antiperspirant/Air Jordan variety and food for children. This makes sense if you believe that the government should be allocating the resources in the economy — in this case, directing fewer of them to personal hygiene and footwear and more to child nutrition.

It makes less sense if you look at economic history.

Except of course, this is not at all what Sanders is arguing. While I don’t expect the man on the street to necessarily catch Sanders’ drift here, self-styled wonks should see it immediately.

Whenever someone argues that we should distribute the national income more evenly so as to reduce poverty and inequality (as Sanders does), the very first thing someone says in response is that doing so will reduce growth and innovation. Sanders is mocking this argument, saying he’d gladly cut poverty and inequality even if it meant a reduction in superficial product innovation.

If the company that determined there was big money to be made by innovatively telling teen boys that using a certain brand of deodorant would cause attractive women to have sex with them decided not to go through with creating Axe because taxes were too high, Bernie is saying he is OK with that. You might have less brands to choose from on the deodorant aisle, but on the plus side kids will get to eat.

Bernie is not arguing, contrary to what Tankersley suggests, that we spend too much buying deodorant. This should be pretty obvious as he didn’t talk about the quantity of deodorant being consumed, but instead the dizzying (and socially useless) number of products in the deodorant category. The massive prizes our economic system pays out to someone who can capture deodorant market share with slick advertising may indeed incentivize them to innovate new branding strategies, but, Bernie amusingly asks, would cutting that incentive really be so bad?

This is the most substantive argument in the presidential campaign so far, and may be the most substantive argument uttered in electoral politics for a long while.

Contrary to Bruenig, I actually think the man on the street easily gets this. That there something wrong about  spending ridiculous sums on various brands of consumer items which are basically the same while allowing children to go hungry is a common sense observation. I hear people say it all the time. I’ve said it. It’s not that anyone thinks the government should take over the market and ban all competition and innovation, it’s that we think any society that can afford to provide such a vast array of similar consumer goods should also be able to take care of its children. That it doesn’t is shameful.

Good for Bernie Sanders for saying this on the campaign trail. Maybe he’ll even make it socially acceptable for politicians to talk like real people again without having to sound like a conqueror or a cowboy. There are a lot of real people in America who don’t sound that way.

.

QOTD: Scott Walker vaginal probe edition

by digby

Letting the cat out of the bag:

Walker told Loesch that criticism he received about the ultrasound bill was merely an attack from the “gotcha” media, and that he was in fact just trying to provide women with “a cool thing.”

“The thing about that, the media tried to make that sound like that was a crazy idea,” he said. “Most people I talked to, whether they’re pro-life or not, I find people all the time that pull out their iPhone and show me a picture of their grandkids’ ultrasound and how excited they are, so that’s a lovely thing. I think about my sons are 19 and 20, we still have their first ultrasounds. It’s just a cool thing out there.”

“We just knew if we signed that law, if we provided the information that more people if they saw that unborn child would make a decision to protect and keep the life of that unborn child,” he said.

We knew that, of course.  But they don’t usually admit that was the goal. Because sticking a probe into women for the sole purpose of coercing them doesn’t really set well with a lot of them. Some people think that the government mandating such things is particularly distasteful. But Walker isn’t too bright.

Update: Proud to say that California’s having none of this crapola:

The California Assembly voted on Tuesday to enact a law that will require crisis pregnancy centers to stop actively misleading women.

AB 775, also known as the FACT Act, will make it more difficult for CPCs to use traditional tactics (such as straight-up lying) to prevent women from terminating their pregnancies, by requiring centers that do not have medical licenses to disclose that they do not have medical licenses. The law, which was passed by the Assembly in a 49-26 vote, also requires that licensed medical facilities alert clients to all options related to pregnancy, including abortion.

AMONG liberals, it’s almost universally assumed that of the two major parties, it’s the Republicans who have become more extreme over the years. That’s a self-flattering but false narrative.

No, it’s not.

Not a single elected Democrat has called for secession, as Rick Perry did. Not a single elected Democrat defied the Supreme Court to the extent of sending in the National Guard and provoking an insane confrontation with the local police, as Jeb Bush did during Schiavo. Not a single elected Democrat is so anti-reality and anti-science that they believe that if women are “legitimately raped,” they will be protected from pregnancy as Todd Akin did.

Oh, sure there are leftwing extremists. Somewhere. But in the Democratic Party? Holding office or positions of power? Puhleeeze.

Adding: An unspoken assumption in this article is that there is a dichotomy between right and left viewpoints. In US politics today, that is an absurdly false dichotomy. The actual dichotomy is between the crazies (i.e. national Republicans and their rich enablers) and the reality-based rest.

Oh do I ever have my disagreements with Democrats (I’m an Independent), but I never doubt their grip on reality. I cannot say the same about Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Michael Huckabee, and the rest of the clown club. It truly is hard to take seriously someone who doubts evolution, human-based climate change, elementary economic theory, or basic civil rights.<br>

Super-deluxe, Extra-special, Inc.
by Tom Sullivan

Avoiding responsibility is just what the corporate form was designed for, wasn’t it? That’s why corporations will always go to the mat to protect their special rights and privileges as super-citizens. Those include not to facing jail time for repeated criminal behavior. Petty crime? Three strikes and you’re out. Corporate crime? Nobody’s counting. Justice for corporate crime is a different ball game.

“Banks have been on a criminal wilding,” Katrina vanden Heuvel writes, “allegedly laundering money for drug dealers, systematically defrauding homeowners on their mortgages, routinely committing perjury in courts and much more.” Their companies pay fines, yet virtually no one in charge goes to jail. Isn’t that special?

RJ Eskow ticks off a lengthy series of criminal behavior by large banking firms: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS Financial Services. All repeat offenders:

In an expanded version of a survey we first reported on in 2012, an updated study on behalf of law firm Labaton Sucharow found a deep-seated culture of immoral behavior among bankers in the United States and Great Britain. And it found that the situation was getting worse, not better, noting “a marked decline in ethics” since the first study was conducted.

Two-thirds of voters surveyed believe the market is rigged by and for insiders. Eskow writes:

These voters are right – and they’re not alone. William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, spoke in 2013 of “deep-seated cultural and ethical failures” and “the apparent lack of respect for law, regulation and the public trust” in the culture of our biggest banks.

Dudley reached that conclusion in 2013, and the Labaton Sucharow study suggests that banker ethics have gotten worse since then.

Our banking system has a design problem, because its incentives are broken. Financialization is stifling the productive economy. And the systemic threat posed by our biggest banks has made them immune from real punishment.

Except, I would argue that the design problem is not isolated to banks. Corporate capitalism has metastasized. The banks have simply grown so big that their cancers are visible to the naked eye.

In London right now, an interactive play lets audience members have a go at making the choices corporate super-citizens usually get to make:

… In Zoe Svendsen’s play World Factory at the Young Vic, the audience becomes the cast. Sixteen teams sit around factory desks playing out a carefully constructed game that requires you to run a clothing factory in China. How to deal with a troublemaker? How to dupe the buyers from ethical retail brands? What to do about the ever-present problem of clients that do not pay? Because the choices are binary they are rarely palatable. But what shocked me – and has surprised the theatre – is the capacity of perfectly decent, liberal hipsters on London’s south bank to become ruthless capitalists when seated at the boardroom table.

It is not them. It is not just lax regulation or enforcement. It is the system. Paul Mason, economics editor of Channel 4 News, argues that capitalism is “a mode of regulation, not just of production.” That is, it is an organized market system that merely looks spontaneous. Bank CEOs walk free after committing fraud on a global scale “because a company has limited liability status, created by parliament in 1855 after a political struggle.” Because, I argue, we created corporations as privileged, jail-resistant, super-deluxe, extra-special citizens. That is the design problem. Why is it a surprise when they behave like spoiled children?

It is Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment writ large: “What happens when you put good people in an evil place?” Put college students in a mock prison, assign some the role of prisoners and others the (privileged) role of guards, and within days the “guards became abusive and the prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress and anxiety.” What happens when you put ordinary people in a corporate environment – not for days, but for years – privileged with limited liability and with the economic imperatives and incentives of the capitalist model? As Eskow says, “Crooked bankers aren’t born. They’re made.”

Paul Mason writes:

Our fascination with market forces blinds us to the fact that capitalism – as a state of being – is a set of conditions created and maintained by states. Today it is beset by strategic problems: debt-ridden, with sub-par growth and low productivity, it cannot unleash the true potential of the info-tech revolution because it cannot imagine what to do with the millions who would lose their jobs.

Because metastasized corporate capitalism does not care about anyone or anything beyond “expected future profits.” The Great Recession proved that. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is about to prove it again. It is not in need of better regulation or a software patch, but a new operating system.

Marx believed capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. Well about now, corporate capitalism is looking pretty seedy.