Tag: Punting the Pundits

Here’s one solution to the league’s fumbling of race and free speech: replace incognito on-field secrets with a giant hot mic

Lately, I’ve been following an NFL rules-change proposal to dock a team 15 yards – the league’s harshest yardage penalty – should officials hear its player use the word “nigger” or other racial slurs. This proposal, like so many attempts to curb “hate speech”, comes from a place of genuine concern and legitimate grievance. It originates with the Fritz Pollard Alliance, named for the league’s first black coach, and John Wooten, who heads the group, has argued passionately for it as a way to peel back some of the more gruesome attitudes that characterize the modern industrial-sports complex.

But backlash against the idea has been swift, fiery and disproportionate. ESPN devoted an hour-long special to the issue. It’s spawned countless op-eds and been weighed in on by pretty much every player or sportswriter with a Twitter account and an opinion. Those responses run a spectrum from compassionate doubtfulness and raised-eyebrow irony (the league will consider punishing “nigger” but not “Redskins”?) to angry dismissal. Media critic, cornerback and Super Bowl champion Richard Sherman turned the intent of the rule on its head, reasonably concluding that actual enforcement of the rule would penalize black players and itself be “almost racist”.

Holly Baxter: It’s time to kick the high-protein diet habit – before it kills you

Veggies, tuck into your hummus with glee – it’s now almost impossible to deny that eating too much meat, dairy and eggs is unhealthy

According to the latest study into protein consumption, it turns out that this theory may well have something to it. The National Health and Nutrition Survey has been collating data on 6,381 people across the US, and found that diets rich in animal protein (as opposed to protein routinely taken from plant sources) could be as harmful to health as other vices such as smoking. Those under the age of 65 who regularly consume a lot of meat, eggs and dairy are four times more likely to die of cancer or diabetes – although it’s worth noting that, if you make it to 66, beginning to eat a high-protein diet for your remaining years is a better shout than sticking with the steamed kale. [..]

Ultimately, it makes no difference whether you did it for the love of fluffy lambs in spring or deep-seated narcissism combined with a fierce survival instinct: the fact is you should probably eat less meat. You may well have to face a couple of awkward questions over a bowl of hummus, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear. And so, for the love of the NHS, please consign your well-thumbed paleo book to the dustbin. Because it turns out that you may be taking its simpering promises to make you thinner literally at your own peril.

Leslie Savan: MSNBC and Its Discontents

Lately, MSNBC seems to be waking up every few mornings to find a celebrity rattlesnake in its boot. First, Bill Maher said MSNBC was obsessed with Chris Christie and that Bridgegate had become its Benghazi. Then Alec Baldwin took to the cover of New York magazine to denounce his former network for running “the same shit all day long.” “The only difference” between shows, Baldwin wrote, “was who was actually pulling off whatever act they had come up with.”

MSNBC killed Baldwin’s Friday night talk show after only five weeks when the actor made a homophobic remark, which he contends in New York wasn’t homophobic at all. He also calls Rachel Maddow, whom he suspects was behind his ouster, a “phony.” But such Hollywood hairballs, coming on the heels of a series of apologies, anchor defenestrations and schedule rejiggering, could make a casual viewer wonder, Could there be buried in Baldwin’s bruised ego a critique of the network worth listening to? And is Maher right that MSNBC is in danger of becoming the Fox News of the left?

With at least one house of Congress almost certain to be under the control of intransigent Republicans through the rest of his presidency, there is little prospect for any major legislative action over the next three years. However, President Obama has said that he intends to use his presidential power to do what he can to improve the economy and lay the groundwork for future change.

While there are limits as to what Obama can based on executive authority alone, there are many areas where he can have an impact. He already identified one area in his State of the Union Address, when he announced that new federal contracts would require that workers be paid a higher minimum wage. This sort of action can be carried much further.

Eugene Robinson: Before Crimea There Was Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada and So On

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Closing the D.C. Reality Gap

To understand the country’s frustration with politics, we shouldn’t focus primarily on “gridlock” and “polarization.” The larger problem is a disconnect between what the nation’s capital is talking about and what most citizens are worried about.

The issues discussed at kitchen tables and over back fences relate to getting and keeping good jobs, better educating our children, improving living standards (or, these days, keeping them from falling), and holding families together. The issues that fixate Washington are abstractions such as tax reform, deficit reduction, and whether small government is better than big government. Call the distance between the two sets of priorities the Reality Gap.

Mike Konczal: Mike Konczal

We already have one, it’s a major success, and we can use the post office to expand it rapidly

Trying to get basic banking services to cash Social Security and disability checks was a persistent source of anxiety for Patricia Geary, A 65-year-old Philadelphia resident. She receives her payments in paper form, but since she didn’t have a checking account, she had trouble figuring out how to convert them into usable form.

“It was so stressful,” she told me. “It put me in such a fragile and depressive state that I had to seek out professional help at times.”

Commercial banks have too many hidden fees and minimum balances that are too high to help her. The check-cashing places she relied on require large fees for her to get cash and even more fees to convert some of that cash into money orders to pay bills. Keeping her money entirely in cash made it hard to budget well and left her vulnerable to theft.

Luckily, a public option became available. Geary received a Direct Express debit card that loads her government pension and disability payments. The card has low fees and none of her old financial hassles. “It was so much more flexible and allowed me to be much better at budgeting,” she said. “It’s like I have a bank in my pocket.”

Jared Bernstein: Rep. Ryan’s New Poverty Report: A Fat Thumb on the Evidentiary Scale

Paul Ryan and the majority Republican staff of the House Budget Committee are out with a big document that purports to provide a balanced evaluation of the full spate of federal anti-poverty programs. It’s a detailed, serious look at the issue but is beset with misleading evidence and conclusions. While much of the commentary suggests that federal antipoverty efforts have failed and are fraught by wasteful duplication, the evidence — some of which is in here and much of which is conspicuously missing) — belies that facile claim.

Of course we could improve the efficiency of many of these programs. But a close look at their totality shows considerable and even lasting anti-poverty effectiveness.

There’s also something that I found fundamentally odd about the report. In 200 pages of detailed and carefully researched analysis (excepting omissions, as you’ll see), it’s all windup, no delivery. Rep. Ryan never suggests what he wants to do differently in terms of antipoverty policy. Is this a mystery serial where we have to wait for the next installment (i.e., the House budget)? I think I know why he left out the punch line as I’ll reveal below (I too can create a wonky mystery!).

International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a “breach of international law.” Secretary of State John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is “in direct, overt violation of international law.”

Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader has done more to undermine international law than Barack Obama. He treats it with rhetorical adulation and behavioral contempt, helping to further normalize a might-makes-right approach to global affairs that is the antithesis of international law.

Leo W. Gerard: Rights Only for the Right People

All those rights Americans cherish, those fundamental human and political freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution, Republicans contend those aren’t really inalienable rights or anything solid or permanent like that.

See, according to the GOP, some Americans are sub-citizens who don’t deserve rights equal to those enjoyed by, well, the right-wing. Republicans think they’re right, and anyone who disagrees doesn’t deserve rights.

Republicans managed to highlight that perverse plank in their political platform over the past several weeks as they proposed – and sometimes actually passed – legislation limiting the fundamental rights of specific groups of American citizens. That includes gay Americans, African-Americans, and Americans who are members of labor unions. Right-wingers sought to seize from these Americans their rights to vote, protest and live free from discrimination.

Joe Glenton: Rape and sexual assaults in the military need more than ‘kangaroo court’ justice

Informal and unaccountable ‘in-house’ procedures mean hundreds of allegations go unquestioned

The foreign secretary, William Hague, has called for an end to the use of sexual violence in war as part of the fine and timely crusade he has taken up alongside movie star Angelina Jolie. An inquest into the death of corporal Anne-Marie Ellement, a military policewoman who killed herself in 2011 after claiming she was raped by army colleagues, has fixed a spotlight on the issue of sexual violence within the British military. Today the coroner found Ellement killed herself in part due to bullying in the army and the effects of alleged rape. It has also emerged that of 200 allegations of rape and sexual assault between 2011 and 2013 in the military, there have only been 27 convictions.

To begin to understand the British military on any level it is best to start with a round of myth busting. Let us dispense with the idea that the British military is in a meaningful sense a slightly quaint but essentially harmonious family. Healthy families do not regularly inflict acts of sexual violence upon each other, and in the British forces rapes and sexual assaults seem to have become something of a banality. No comparable professional group in the UK appears to rival the military for rates of colleague-on-colleague sexual violence. I would argue this stems from a poisonous mix of unchallenged sexism, unaccountable power and an archaic military justice system.

Dan Gillmor: Snowden made cyber-geek nightmares true. Can ‘private’ be normal again?

The NSA leaks created everyday interest in products built to protect. At a security pow-wow turned sour, that’s a good thing

In the nearly nine months since the Edward Snowden revelations began on this website, some of the most jaw-dropping surveillance news has involved a company called RSA, which for years has been one of the top computer security firms in the world. Boiled down, RSA is alleged to have weakened a core element of a widely used encryption product at the behest of the National Security Agency, receiving $10 million in the process of providing a “back door” for government snooping. [..]

It’s too early to tell whether this incompetence – or betrayal, take your pick – will hit RSA and its $51bn parent company, EMC, where it should: on the bottom line. And despite a boycott by some scheduled speakers here, the RSA conference was well-attended. As one security expert who’s expressed contempt for the company’s behavior told me, it’s still his best chance to catch up, face-to-face, with other top people in this still burgeoning field.

House Speaker John Boehner says raising the minimum wage is “bad policy” because it will cause job losses.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says a minimum wage increase would be a job killer. Republicans and the Chamber also say unions are job killers, workplace safety regulations are job killers, environmental regulations are job killers, and the Affordable Care Act is a job killer. The California Chamber of Commerce even publishes an annual list of “job killers,” including almost any measures that lift wages or protect workers and the environment.

Most of this is bunk. [..]

For one thing, a higher minimum wage doesn’t necessarily increase business costs. It draws more job applicants into the labor market, giving employers more choice of whom to hire. As a result, employers often get more reliable workers who remain longer — thereby saving employers at least as much money as they spend on higher wages.

Josh Levy and Hannah Sassaman: Remember When We Toppled SOPA/PIPA in Just 24 Hours? How the People Can Still Win on Net Neutrality

When it comes to limiting digital rights, big companies are in cahoots with governments like never before. But the belief that everyone deserves safe, affordable, and private access to the Internet is taking off.

2014 is already shaping up as a defining year for digital rights. A federal court just killed Net Neutrality. The U.S. government is spying on millions of individuals as well as organizations, companies, and governments, provoking an outcry from both newer organizers and communities that have long labored under government and corporate surveillance. Congress is poised to rubber-stamp a trade agreement that could threaten Internet freedom worldwide. And we’re still mourning the loss of the inspirational Aaron Swartz, who fought for free and universal access to information.

The idea that the Internet is a space where all voices have the same right to be heard is common sense to millions. The principle that we should be free to access information online-and in private-without the interference of companies or governments resonates across the political spectrum.

David Sirota: How the Rich Became Dependent on Government Welfare

Remember when President Obama was lambasted for saying “you didn’t build that”? Turns out he was right, at least when it comes to lots of stuff built by the world’s wealthiest corporations. That’s the takeaway from this week’s new study of 25,000 major taxpayer subsidy deals over the last two decades.

Entitled “Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent,” the report from the taxpayer watchdog group Good Jobs First shows that the world’s largest companies aren’t models of self-sufficiency and unbridled capitalism. To the contrary, they’re propped up by billions of dollars in welfare payments from state and local governments.

Such subsidies might be a bit more defensible if they were being doled out in a way that promoted upstart entrepreneurialism. But as the study also shows, a full “three-quarters of all the economic development dollars awarded and disclosed by state and local governments have gone to just 965 large corporations”-not to the small businesses and startups that politicians so often pretend to care about.

Jeff Biggers: Should Sierra Club Endorse Coal Rush/Fracking Gov. Quinn-Or Call Out Environmental Disaster?

Is it enough for Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and state treasurer candidate Mike Frerichs to hustle today to purge their campaigns of tainted coal industry contributions from a growing mine safety regulator scandal, or should citizens groups and environmentalists hold the Democratic candidates accountable for their full-throttle push behind the state’s unprecedented coal mining rush and spiraling fracking debacle?

Questions abound in Illinois, where coal mining production and its toxic slurry fallout has skyrocketed by a mind-boggling 70 percent during the Quinn administration, as Gov. Quinn also touts a controversial and widely denounced fracking regulation law, opening the floodgates for oil and natural gas drilling in the state’s beloved Shawnee forest region.

Earlier this week, in fact, despite a public promise by Quinn’s deputy chief of staff that no fracking permits would be issued without strengthened fracking rules, Quinn apparently intervened to push through a second horizontal drilling permit for Denver-based Strata-X Energy.

If you take the king’s shilling, says the old saying, then you do the king’s bidding. So what happens when you take 100 million of them?

Here’s one possible answer: You negotiate trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the new pact that the administration is currently trying to ram through Congress.  A recent report confirms that some of the officials crafting this latest agreement were paid handsomely by the Wall Street institutions who stand to benefit from them.

As the United States Trade Representative, Michael Froman has primary responsibility for the TPP. A new investigation from Republic Report reveals that Froman received more than $4 million in payouts from his then-employer Citigroup as he was leaving to join the Obama administration.

Robert L. Borosage: Tax Reform: Republicans Abandon Their Own Baby

Remember the Republican promises about comprehensive tax reform? A flatter, simple tax code. Lower rates, paid for by closing loopholes. Well, never mind. [..]

Well, now we know. When Dave Camp, Republican Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, unveiled comprehensive tax reform three years in the making, Republicans ran for the exits. Senate leader Mitch McConnell announced, “I have no hope for that happening this year.” House Speaker John Boehner did his imitation of a 5-year-old, muttering “blah, blah, blah” when asked on about the details of the Camp reform, saying that this was only the “beginning of a conversation, a discussion draft.” That’s the Republican position: Comprehensive tax reform, flatter, simpler lower taxes, centerpiece of the Republican growth agenda — ah, forgeddaboutit.

Karen Breenberg: The Five Commandments of Barack Obama

In January 2009, Barack Obama entered the Oval Office projecting idealism and proud to be the constitutional law professor devoted to turning democratic principles into action.  In his first weeks in office, in a series of executive orders and public statements, the new president broadcast for all to hear the five commandments by which life in his new world of national security would be lived.

Thou shalt not torture.

Thou shalt not keep Guantanamo open.

Thou shalt not keep secrets unnecessarily.

Thou shalt not wage war without limits.

Thou shalt not live above the law.

Five years later, the question is: How have he and his administration lived up to these self-proclaimed commandments?

Let’s consider them one by one:[..]

Five years later, Obama’s commandants need a rewrite.  Here’s what they should now look like and, barring surprises in the next three years, these, as written, will both be the virtual law of the land and constitute the Obama legacy.

Thou shalt not torture (but thou shalt leave the door open to the future use of torture).

Thou shalt detain forever.

Thou shalt live by limitless secrecy.

Thou shalt wage war everywhere and forever.

Thou shalt not punish those who have done bad things in the name of the national security state.

Robert Johnson: The Political Underbelly of the Pensions Crisis: What Broke the System, and How Do We Fix It?

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, policymakers and reporters have spoken of a growing crisis in public pensions. Many state and local governments are struggling to meet their obligations to retirees, and the easiest explanation is that government workers are overpaid and their pensions are unaffordable. But the evidence suggests that the pensions crisis is both less pervasive and more complex than that. Beyond the economic crisis, which put enormous pressure on state and municipal budgets, a range of factors including poor decision-making and the influence of big money interests has led to the underfunding of some state and city public pensions. With a clearer understanding of the problem, we can begin to take steps to solve it and keep our promises to public workers. [..]

The pensions crisis has far-reaching implications for the future of the U.S. economy: the state and local government sector is about 14 percent of the American workforce. Failure to uphold the promises we’ve made to current workers and retirees would create a brain drain in the public sector, drive down private-sector wages, exacerbate inequality, and lead to more economic volatility. The good news appears to be that there are a large number of pension plans that are solvent thanks to prudent management. The real problem rests with the governments of a few states that have historically failed to provision adequately for their pension obligations and are increasingly turning to riskier investment assets. These problems can be solved, but it will require substantial reform and swift and collective action.

The nation has been treated to a sneak preview of President Obama’s 2015 budget, scheduled to be released next Tuesday. As we asked in Part 1 of this two-part budget update, that’s an occasion for reflecting on the nature of a White House budget. Is it a negotiating document? A vision statement? A “political treatise”? [..]

We’ve been given no indication that the president or his advisers understand what a grave mistake it was to embrace the deficit-cutting rhetoric of the right, to appoint austerians to lead a Presidential Deficit Commission, or of extending the austerity framework even to programs like Social Security (which does not contribute to the federal deficit).

Instead we’re being told that the president’s plan spending increases (more about those in a moment) are “fully paid for,” a phrase which suggests that austerity’s ghost still lingers.

Eugene Robinson: GOP Crocodile Tears Over Jobs

At the risk of repeating myself, the federal minimum wage is far too low and needs to be raised. Republicans who claim to be worried about lost jobs can dry their crocodile tears, because a few simple measures would get all those jobs back-and lots more.

It has been amusing to watch GOP grandees try to paint themselves as champions of the working stiff. This new appreciation for the struggles of low-wage earners was prompted by a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which estimates that raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, as President Obama proposes, would result in the loss of 500,000 jobs. [..]

Maybe we should all take a deep breath and look at the big picture. The purpose of raising the minimum wage is to give those at the bottom of the pay scale something that more closely approximates a living wage. It strikes me as obscene for conservatives to prattle on about the “dignity of work” when workers can toil long and hard in full-time jobs and yet their families can still be poor and in need of government assistance.

Sarah Anderson: Without any Grassroots, This Austerity Group Withered

The American people know a fake when they see it.

The austerity mania that plagued our political system for four years is finally subsiding. The latest sign is President Barack Obama’s decision to nix the Social Security cuts he had previously included in his budget proposal.

This was a body blow to the most powerful pro-austerity force in Washington – the Fix the Debt campaign. Starting in 2012, this fake grassroots – or “astroturf” – organization had deployed more than 100 CEOs to try to persuade the nation that our economic survival depended on expanding tax breaks for big corporations and slashing earned benefit programs.

Fix the Debt once boasted a budget of $40 million. Today, it’s shedding staff and going into hibernation, having failed to win any of their top priorities.

Sam Pizzigati: The Mess on Our ‘Information Superhighway’

Why should moving data around be any different from moving people? No private party ought to be getting rich off a basic public trust.

Back in the early 1990s, the infancy of the Internet Age, our hippest policy wonks orated endlessly about the emerging “information superhighway.”

But that mouthful of a moniker would soon fall out of fashion. Anyone today who talks “information superhighway” comes across as hopelessly uncool. The irony here? If we still talked about the Internet as a “superhighway,” maybe we wouldn’t find ourselves in the online mess that [now envelops v] us.

Americans currently pay much more for Internet than just about everybody else in the developed world. Other countries have established [fast, cheap Internet access v] as a given of modern life. In the United States, we surf the Net at Model-T speeds – and tens of millions of Americans still have no broadband access at all.

This pitiful situation may soon get worse. Two corporate giants that share significant responsibility for our current digital state of affairs, Comcast and Time Warner, are now seeking regulatory approval for a $45 billion merger that would leave Comcast controlling the bulk of the nation’s broadband access.

Ukraine is in a mess. And the first steps must be taken not by politicians but by the people, who must honour life and prevent more violence

In Russia, the Sochi Olympics are over, the metaphoric fairy dust has settled, and the rapidly developing events in Ukraine are at the top of the news agenda. If you stick to watching state television, the picture being painted is a grim one. For the majority of TV commentators following the deadly violence on the streets and the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine is in free fall. Russian viewers are being warned that dangerous radicalism is spreading practically on their doorstep. [..]

The important thing, right now, is to honour human life – and prevent further violence. And while nothing is certain, I know the possibility is there. I’m a Russian-speaking native of Kiev, with both ethnic Russian and ethnic Ukrainian relatives who certainly manage to not kill each other at the dinner table, not to mention Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking friends and acquaintances from different parts of the country who somehow manage to get along.

Lauren Carasik: The US Should Respect Venezuela’s Democracy

Simplistic end-of-Chavismo narrative callously dismisses Venezuela’s progress

Venezuela is facing a protracted political crisis. Images depicting its streets tell the tale: Student unrest coalesced into massive demonstrations around the country, triggering a violent crackdown on opposition leaders and protesters. The ensuing violence and destructive confrontations over the last several weeks have left at least 13 people dead and scores wounded, with casualties on both sides. Tensions remain high.

Headlines in the United States broadcast unchallenged narratives of widespread discontent with mounting economic woes and denounce the ensuing repression by an unpopular and discredited administration barely clinging to power. But the reality in Venezuela is far more complicated and nuanced than what the media and the U.S. government spin suggests. [..]

Venezuela, to be sure, is not a utopia. Like many of its Latin American neighbors, including close allies of the U.S., it must confront crime, impunity and corruption. The country’s economic troubles are causing real hardship and palpable anxiety, though they are inseparable from the global recession. Despite these challenges, Venezuela has registered tremendous gains in elevating millions of people out of grinding poverty and democratizing a postcolonial country – developments that predictably alienate the country’s elites. However imperfect, reducing Venezuela to a failed socialist experiment run by a repressive autocrat who should be overthrown is a callous dismissal of its laudable progress.

Ana Marie Cox: Who’s the true ‘top conservative on Twitter’ – and does it matter for 2016?

The GOP struggles with the social media generation, but a few are starting to figure it out, especially Governor Chris Christie

It’s no secret that the GOP has been playing catch-up to the massive social media machine built by Obama campaign for years. (The Romney campaign’s deficiencies in that regard were well-documented.) As the Republican party grapples with the large-scale demographic shifts ahead, we thought it might be revealing to see how the 2016 GOP frontrunners have approached the more granular social media. Social media interactions, after all, are much more like old-fashioned politicking than they are like “messaging”: too much polish works against you, humor is at a premium, and the real skill isn’t convincing people so much as working the crowd. So it makes sense to us to ask who’s winning the Twitter Primary.

There’s more to social media than Twitter, of course. But as the political class grows more and more desperate for metrics to measure a race that hasn’t even begun, it makes sense to turn to Twitter: that’s where the journalists hang out, so that’s where a candidate’s image will or won’t get the extra spit shine that only comes with being very good at this very new form retail politics.

Jill Filipovic: Kansas’ anti-gay bill: another attempt to force warped Christianity on others

Conservatives keep trying to use America’s religious freedom as a way to limit everyone else’s rights

Last week, the Kansas House of Representatives passed a bill (pdf) that would have broadly legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians. Luckily, after national outrage, the bill was halted. But the fight isn’t over: the bill’s reliance on religious freedom to justify discrimination is a sign of right-wing efforts to come.

The Kansas bill didn’t become law because the forces behind it are losing. That’s cold comfort to gay Kansans who were just issued a very clear “you are not welcome here” message from their elected officials. The Republican party, whose members have yanked the welcome mat out from under the feet of too many groups, should perhaps consider whether a strategy of alienation is a winning one. After all, are there many strong supporters of this law in Kansas who weren’t already voting Republican? On the flip side, younger voters overwhelmingly support gay rights. And so do gay people – increasingly, so do their families and friends. A plan of aggressively antagonizing LGBT people is not a winning one.

Forget about the Machiavellian drama that plays out in the hit series The House of Cards, if you really want to be educated (or frightened) about what goes on in the nation’s capital, just let everything you read in Mike Lofgren’s essay sink in. [..]

The ideological gridlock that grips Congress might make you angry. But as Lofgren points in his professorial manner, what should really get your blood pumping are the strings being pulled by the real decision makers: the executives on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and in the military-intelligence industrial complex surrounding the Beltway.

The really creepy part is that a lot of this corruption (the revolving doors, lobbying activities and campaign contributions, for instance) is legal. Mull that over: We’ve passed laws allowing the “Deep State” to not only exist, but also to flourish.

Henry Giroux on Resisting the Neoliberal Revolution

The notion of the “Deep State” as outlined by Mike Lofgren may be useful in pointing to a new configuration of power in the US in which corporate sovereignty replaces political sovereignty, but it is not enough to simply expose the hidden institutions and structures of power.

What we have in the US today is fundamentally a new mode of politics, one wedded to a notion of “power unaccompanied by accountability of any kind,” and this poses a deep and dire threat to democracy itself, because such power is difficult to understand, analyze and counter.

I would suggest that what needs to be addressed is some sense of how this unique authoritarian conjuncture of power and politics came into place. More specifically, there is no mention by Lofgren of the collapse of the social state that began in the 1970s with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, a far more dangerous form of market fundamentalism than we had seen in the first Gilded Age. Nor is there a sustained analysis of what is new about this ideology.

Heidi Boghosian on Mass Surveillance

Mike Lofgren’s exceptional essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State,” delivers the roadmap that bewildered Americans need to navigate the past year’s glut of news about mass surveillance. The term “Deep State” aptly conveys how the private security industry has melded with government. It is soldered by plutocracy, perpetual war, reduction of industrial capacity, US exceptionalism and political malfunction. Lofgren is a credible and welcome interpreter of how these factors combine to exert control over us. [..]

Understanding the Deep State as laid forth by Lofgren is a necessary first step in questioning the power system. Mobilizing resistance, with creativity and persistence, comes next.

Having stolen local democracy, corporate planners now trip over themselves to create the grid for a new

Hundreds of low-wage surveyors scour the depopulated streets of Detroit, mapping the extent of “blight” that has consumed the city. The three-person teams of the Blight Removal Task Force are financed by private corporations and foundations whose mission is the “orderly” destruction of the nation’s largest Black metropolis, to clear the way for a “new” city – one in which marginalized people like the surveyors themselves will be relegated to the shadows. The resulting data-base will allow real estate moguls like Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert, the task force sugar daddy, to create an urban grid that maximizes land values and forms the basis of future city planning. The corporate schemes that flow from the survey, beginning with recommendations to be released in late March, will dictate the types of people that the city will accommodate, and their “place” – if any – in the new urban configuration. Other corporate-financed demolition planners, under the so-called Detroit Blight Authority, have already begun clearing land for private exploitation.

There is no question that Detroit’s state-imposed bankruptcy has dramatically quickened the pace of the land rush. However, private capital has always positioned itself on the ground floor of urban planning in the United States, where cities are first configured by profiteers and then occupied by those populations that can manage to fit themselves into the capitalist-contoured framework. The phenomenal, stunning – and wholly unplanned – explosion of Black urban pluralities and majorities in the Sixties and Seventies occurred when capital followed white populations in flight from the cities. Capital later reasserted itself, paving the way for gentrification with its “renaissance” projects in cities across the nation, thoroughly suborning the newly established Black political (misleadership) class to the task of African American removal.

Matthew Shears: Snowden and The Politics of Internet Governance

The Snowden revelations about the mass surveillance programmes of the NSA and the complicity of other Western security agencies have generated a lot of talk about the supposed lack of trust in the Internet, current Internet governance mechanisms, and the multistakeholder governance model. These revelations have been crucial to fueling the surveillance reform effort (see CDT’s NSA surveillance reform work here). However, most commentary linking surveillance and global Internet governance conflates two important issues in inaccurate – and politically motivated – ways, driving long-standing and potentially damaging agendas related to the management of the Internet. [..]

Governments are using the Internet to undermine our fundamental rights and threaten, as the UN Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue has suggested, the foundations of democratic society. Our response should not be to increase government control over the management of the Internet. Instead, we should reaffirm the need for open, inclusive, participatory Internet governance processes (nationally and internationally) and resist unilateral or multilateral decision-making on Internet-related policy issues.

Ralph Nader: The Cruel and Shameless Ideology of Corporatism

Like ravenous beasts of prey attacking a weakened antelope, the forces of subsidized capital and their mercenaries sunk their fangs into the United Auto Workers (UAW) and its organizing drive at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The UAW narrowly lost – 712 to 626 – and the baying pack of plutocrats exalted, as if they had just saved western civilization in the anti-union, lower-wage South.

The days preceding the vote were a corporatist frenzy with corporatist predators bellowing ‘the sky is falling.’ VW, which sensibly stayed neutral, but privately supported the UAW’s efforts and its collateral “works councils” (an arrangement that had stabilized and made their unionized, higher-paid workers in Germany more productive), must have wondered on what planet they had landed.