Tag: Politics

President Barack Obama is pushing approval of The Trans-Pacific Partnership by the end of the year.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said on Tuesday that world trade ministers may discuss the U.S.-proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on the sidelines of a World Trade Organization meeting that starts on December 3, with a goal of reaching a deal by year-end.

But several outstanding issues remain, he told reporters at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit on the Indonesian island of Bali, citing issues ranging from intellectual property to state-owned enterprises, labor and the environment. The WTO meeting will also be held on Bali.

The three-year-old TPP talks, now involving 12 nations, are aimed at establishing a free-trade bloc that would stretch from Vietnam to Chile to Japan, encompassing 800 million people, about a third of world trade and nearly 40 percent of the global economy.

A major goal of the Obama administration, the TPP would tear down trade barriers in areas such as government procurement and set standards for workers’ rights, environmental protection and intellectual property rights.

In actuality, the TPP has little to do with free trade. In a thirty minute interview with Bill Moyers, investment banking expert Yves Smith who runs the blog naked capitalism and economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research discuss the real agenda of the agreement.

A US-led trade deal is currently being negotiated that could increase the price of prescription drugs, weaken financial regulations and even allow partner countries to challenge American laws. But few know its substance.

The pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is deliberately shrouded in secrecy, a trade deal powerful people, including President Obama, don’t want you to know about. More than 130 members of Congress have asked the White House for greater transparency about the negotiations and were essentially told to go fly a kite. While most of us are in the dark about the contents of the deal, which Obama aims to seal by year end, corporate lobbyists are in the know about what it contains.

How the Trans-Pacific Partnership Would Roll Back the Financial Regulations Needed to Avoid Another Crisis

by Expose the TPP

   The TPP would ban capital controls, an essential policy tool to counter destabilizing flows of speculative money. Even the International Monetary Fund has recently endorsed capital controls as legitimate for mitigating or preventing financial crises.

   The TPP would prohibit taxes on Wall Street speculation. That means that there would be no hope of passing proposals like the Robin Hood Tax, which would impose a tiny tax on Wall Street transactions to tamp down speculation-fueled volatility while generating hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of revenue for social, health, or environmental causes.

   The TPP would empower financial firms to directly attack these government policies in foreign tribunals, and demand taxpayer compensation for policies they claim undermine their expected future profits.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Trade Agreement for Protectionists

By Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research

There are many other areas where we could envision freer trade bringing real gains to the bulk of the population. However this is not what the TPP is about. The TPP is about crafting rules that will favor big business at the expense of the rest of the population in both the United States and in other countries.

For example, we can expect to see limits on the ability of national and sub-national governments to impose environmental restrictions, such requirements that companies engaging in fracking disclose the list of chemicals they use. There may also be limits on the extent to which governments can restrict the sale of genetically modified foods, with rules on labeling. And, the TPP may prevent governments from imposing restraints on financial firms that would prevent the sort of abuses that we saw during the run-up of the housing bubble.

The world has benefited from the opening of trade over the last four decades. But this opening has been selective so that, at least in the United States, most of the gains have gone to those at the top. It is possible to design trade deals that benefit the population as a whole, but not when corporate interests are literally the negotiators at the table. Rather than being about advancing free trade, the TPP is the answer to the question: “how can we make the rich richer?

Another Reason to Hate TPP: It Gives Big Content New Tools to Undermine Sane Digital Rights Policies

by Corynne McSherry and Maira Sutton, Electronic Freedom Foundation

Like the rest of the TPP, we only know what has been leaked. Based on that, it seems the negotiators are poised to give private corporations new tools to undermine national sovereignty and democratic processes. Specifically, TPP would give multinational companies the power to sue countries over laws that that might diminish the value of their company or cut into their expected future profits.

The provision that gives them this power is called “investor-state dispute settlement” (or ISDS for short). The policy was originally intended to ensure that investments in developing countries were not illegally expropriated by “rogue” governments, thereby encouraging foreign investment. But what began as a remedy to a specific problem has since been co-opted to serve very different purposes. Under investor-state, if a regulation gets in the way of a foreign investor’s ability to profit from its investment, the investor can sue a country for monetary damages based on both alleged lost profits and “expected future profits.” There are no monetary limits to the potential award.

Apparently a country’s own courts can’t be trusted to administer this kind of lawsuit, so investor-state also requires the creation of a new court. It would be comprised of three private-sector attorneys who take turns being judge and/or corporate advocate.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Those Depressing Germans

German officials are furious at America, and not just because of the business about Angela Merkel’s cellphone. What has them enraged now is one (long) paragraph in a U.S. Treasury report on foreign economic and currency policies. In that paragraph Treasury argues that Germany’s huge surplus on current account – a broad measure of the trade balance – is harmful, creating “a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as for the world economy.”

The Germans angrily pronounced this argument “incomprehensible.” “There are no imbalances in Germany which require a correction of our growth-friendly economic and fiscal policy,” declared a spokesman for the nation’s finance ministry.

But Treasury was right, and the German reaction was disturbing. For one thing, it was an indicator of the continuing refusal of policy makers in Germany, in Europe more broadly and for that matter around the world to face up to the nature of our economic problems. For another, it demonstrated Germany’s unfortunate tendency to respond to any criticism of its economic policies with cries of victimization.

Dean Baker: Plutocrats vs. Populists: Good Piece Until the End — Answers are Easy

Chrystia Freeland has a good piece in the NYT on the rise of plutocratic politics in the United States and elsewhere and the populist opposition it has provoked. The piece makes many interesting points but then towards the end strangely tells readers:

“Part of the problem is that no one has yet come up with a fully convincing answer to the question of how you harness the power of the technology revolution and globalization without hollowing out middle-class jobs.”

No, this is very far from true. There are very convincing answers to this question, it’s just the plutocrats block them from being put into practice.

Topping the list of course would be aggressive stimulus to bring the economy back to something resembling full employment. This not only would give tens of millions of people more income, it would make many bad jobs into decent jobs.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

Up with Steve Kornacki: Joining Steve on the Sunday morning panel are: Joy Reid, managaing editor at TheGrio.com; Lynn Sweet from the Chicago Sun-Times; Buzzfeed‘s Evan McMorris-Santoro; Perry Bacon of TheGrio.com; Elahe Izadi at National Journal; Michael Wahid Hanna from The Century Foundation; and Rebecca Abou-Chedid with the Truman National Security Project.

Steve also has an interview with Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef, the “Jon Stewart of Egypt” whose show returned only to be blocked again.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Guests on “This Week” are  White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY); and FiveThirtyEight.com editor-in-chief and ABC News special contributor Nate Silver.

Joining the roundtable discussion are: ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd; co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” Van Jones; ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl; and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan.

Also a special interview with actor Rob Lowe discussing his portrayal President John F. Kennedy in the new National Geographic Channel film “Killing Kennedy.”

Note:  “This Week” will air at 2 p.m. ET on WABC in New York this Sunday due to NYC Marathon coverage. And be sure to set your clocks back one hour on Sunday for the end of Daylight Saving Time.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-MI) and the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Dianne Feinstein (D-CA); also former director of the CIA and NSA General (ret.) Michael Hayden.  I don’t expect a very balanced discussion of the NSA from these three.

Sitting with him for a panel discussion are David Sanger of the New York Times; David Ignatius of the Washington Post; plus our own Jan Crawford and John Dickerson.

Also a special interview with Alexandra Zapruder and former LIFE editor Dick Stolley about the 26 second film that tells the story of the Kennedy assassination.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: On this Sunday’s MTP the guests are  former Republican nominee, Mitt Romney; and Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA).

For the roundtable discussion, the guests are Senior Adviser to the president, David Axelrod; Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodard; editor of the Weekly Standard Bill Kristol; and anchor of BBC World News America, Katty Kay.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms/ Crowley’s guests are Michael McCaul (R-TX), Chairman of House Homeland Committee; and Senator Kelly Ayotte(R-NH).

Joining her for a panel discussion are former Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-LA); CNN Crossfire Host Newt Gingrich, former Kathleen Sebelius adviser Neera Tanden; and Obama biographer David Maraniss.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Roger Cohen: A Journalist With a Mission

Glenn Greenwald believes that he faces possible arrest if he returns to the United States but is unbowed.

A young American lawyer comes to Brazil in 2005, falls in love, finds that his gay relationship confers greater legal rights than back home, starts a blog called Unclaimed Territory focusing on illegal warrantless eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, takes a place in the hills of Rio with a bunch of rescue dogs, denounces the cozy compromises of “establishment journalists,” gets hired to write a column by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, is sought out by the N.S.A. whistle-blower Edward J. Snowden, becomes the main chronicler of Snowden’s revelations of global American surveillance, is lionized for work that prompts a far-reaching debate on security and freedom, files repeated thunderbolts from his leafy Brazilian perch, and ends up, in just eight years, as perhaps the most famous journalist of his generation.

These things happen. At least they happen in the empowering digital age, and they happen to Glenn Greenwald. [..]

American society will also benefit from Greenwald’s ongoing revelations about out-of-control surveillance. He has testified before the Brazilian Senate, and should be allowed to testify before the U.S. Senate. He says, “I am definitely going back, I refuse to be exiled for a lie.”

He deserves assurance that he can return to the United States without facing arrest.

Yochai Benkler: Congress should grant Edward Snowden amnesty

The man who sparked the NSA surveillance debate remains in exile. We should thank him for his role and let him come home

Congress has in its power the ability to bring home the man without whom all the abuses, errors, and oversight workarounds would have continued unchecked. Five years ago, when Congress passed the Fisa Amendments Act, the legislature included in that statute a set of provisions that immunized the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program from civil suits by citizens whose rights had been violated and from states that wanted to investigate or sanction these companies. That provision was roundly criticized by civil liberties advocates, but it does provide a legislative model for what Congress could now do to protect Snowden from criminal or civil liability arising from his disclosures.

Critics say that Snowden broke the law and should pay the price; they argue that facing the consequences is what civil disobedience requires; that is what we learned from Martin Luther King, they say. But do they really believe that ultra-segregationist Bull Connor’s arrests in the civil rights era were justified?

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: A War on the Poor

John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, has done some surprising things lately. First, he did an end run around his state’s Legislature – controlled by his own party – to proceed with the federally funded expansion of Medicaid that is an important piece of Obamacare. Then, defending his action, he let loose on his political allies, declaring, “I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That, if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.”

Obviously Mr. Kasich isn’t the first to make this observation. But the fact that it’s coming from a Republican in good standing (although maybe not anymore), indeed someone who used to be known as a conservative firebrand, is telling. Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else – and only willfully blind observers can fail to see that reality.

The big question is why. But, first, let’s talk a bit more about what’s eating the right.

Dean Baker: The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Trade Agreement for Protectionists

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) stands at the top of the Obama administration’s trade agenda. The argument from its supporters is that this agreement is part of the never ending quest for freer trade. The evidence from what we know of this still secret pact is that the TPP has little to do with free trade. It can more accurately be described as a pact designed to increase the wealth and power of crony capitalists.

At this point, with few exceptions formal trade barriers, such as tariffs and quotas, are not very large. If lowering or eliminating the formal barriers that remain were the main agenda of this pact, there would be relatively little interest. Rather, the purpose of the pact is to use an international trade agreement to create a regulatory structure that is much more favorable to corporate interests than they would be able to get through the domestic political process in the United States and in the other countries in the pact.

“We don’t have a domestic spying program.” That was the statement made by President Barack Obama on the “Jay Leno Show” on August 6, 2013 in the aftermath of the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden. We know now that there was no truth in that. We know, through the NSA program called “PRISM,” the NSA had been collecting internet data since 2007, including encrypted communications, from the tech giants, such as Google, Yahoo and Verizon, under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. That’s the one that Obama said he would filibuster, then voted for with the promise of fixing it later.

The latest revelation is the NSA went beyond PRISM’s front door approach and behind the back of Google and Yahooo to infiltrate links to their data centers world wide. This newest document from Edward Snowden’s stash of NSA files exposed a program called MUSCULAR that was jointly operated with the NSA’s British counterpart, GCHQ. As it was reported by  Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani at The Washington Post, through this program they secretly broke into the main communication links that connect Yahoo and Google around the world enabling them to “collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans.

According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records – including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.

The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters . From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and the GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information among the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants. [..]

Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight. NSA documents about the effort refer directly to “full take,” “bulk access” and “high volume” operations on Yahoo and Google networks. Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner.

Outside U.S. territory, statutory restrictions on surveillance seldom apply and the FISC has no jurisdiction. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has acknowledged that Congress conducts little oversight of intelligence-gathering under the presidential authority of Executive Order 12333, which defines the basic powers and responsibilities of the intelligence agencies.

Needless to say the news that the NSA can collect information sent by fibre optic cable between the two tech giants infuriated them:

In a statement, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the company was “outraged” by the latest revelations.

“We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide,” he said.

“We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.”

Yahoo said: “We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.”

It was this slide from the NSA presentation on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” that caused two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing.

Click on image to enlarge.

The tech giants are now calling for real reforms of the NSA. In a letter sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), they called for passage of the USA Freedom Act  a bill sponsored by Democrat senator Patrick Leahy and Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner that would end the bulk collection of data from millions of Americans and set up a privacy advocate to monitor the Fisa court, which oversees the NSA’s US activities.

“Recent disclosures regarding surveillance activity raise important concerns in the United States and abroad. The volume and complexity of the information that has been disclosed in recent months has created significant confusion here and around the world, making it more difficult to identify appropriate policy prescriptions,” the letter states.

“Our companies have consistently made clear that we only respond to legal demands for customer and user information that are targeted and specific.

“Allowing companies to be transparent about the number and nature of requests will help the public better understand the facts about the government’s authority to compel technology companies to disclose user data and how technology companies respond to the targeted legal demands we receive,” they write. [..]

“We urge the administration to work with Congress in addressing these critical reforms that would provide much needed transparency and help rebuild the trust of Internet users around the world,” the letter said.

The lack of credibility that this administration and congress has on this issue is eclipsed only by the enormity of the Grand Canyon. The sham House Intelligence Committee led by chief NSA apologist Rep. Mike Rogers featured inveterate liars NSA boss General Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, along with  Deputy Attorney General James Cole and number 2 guy at NSA Chris Inglis who were tossed easy questions. When push back from Democratic committee members came, Rogers interrupted, incredibly suggesting that they should just shut up if they’re going to say they weren’t informed:

(Rep. Adam) Schiff quite reasonably, appeared to take offense to this, and challenged Rogers, asking for more details as to when and how the Committee was told about spying on foreign leaders. Rogers without actually answering the question kept “warning” other members not to say something about this. Schiff broke in again (with Rogers trying to stop him from talking) to ask if the Committee was directly informed about this or if it was just a giant data dump of information that he would have had to go through carefully to find out who they were spying on. Rogers again refused to answer the question, and again hinted that those who put in the “effort” would have known about this — and then flat out cut off Schiff [..]

So we are now supposed to trust the liars?

 

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Dean Baker: Alan Greenspan owes America an apology

The former Fed chair is promoting his new book. He should admit his role in the housing crisis, not insult our intelligence

Alan Greenspan will go down in history as the person most responsible for the enormous economic damage caused by the housing bubble and the subsequent collapse of the market. The United States is still down almost 9m jobs from its trend path. We are losing close to $1tn a year in potential output, with cumulative losses to date approaching $5tn. [..]

The horror story could have easily been prevented had there been intelligent life at the Federal Reserve Board in the years when the housing bubble was growing to ever more dangerous proportions (2002-2006). But the Fed did nothing to curb the bubble. Arguably, it even acted to foster its growth with Greenspan cheering the development of exotic mortgages and completely ignoring its regulatory responsibilities.

Most people who had this incredible infamy attached to their name would have the decency to find a large rock to hide behind; but not Alan Greenspan. He apparently believes that he has not punished us enough. Greenspan has a new book which he is now hawking on radio and television shows everywhere.

Jeremy Scahill: Will the Global War on Terror Ever End?

Policies initiated under President Bush and continued and expanded under Obama have brought the world to the dawn of a new age, the era of the Dirty War on Terror.

On January 21, 2013, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Just as he had promised when he began his first campaign for president six years earlier, he pledged again to turn the page on history and take U.S. foreign policy in a different direction. “A decade of war is now ending,” Obama declared. “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”  [..]

Yet, as Obama embarked on his second term in office, the United States was once again at odds with the rest of the world on one of the central components of its foreign policy. The drone strike in Yemen the day Obama was sworn in served as a potent symbol of a reality that had been clearly established during his first four years in office: U.S. unilateralism and exceptionalism were not only bipartisan principles in Washington, but a permanent American institution. As large-scale military deployments wound down, the United States had simultaneously escalated its use of drones, cruise missiles, and Special Ops raids in an unprecedented number of countries. The war on terror had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The question all Americans must ask themselves lingers painfully: How does a war like this ever end?

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: JPMorgan settlement is justice, not a shakedown

Is JPMorgan Chase, the imperious mega-bank, a hapless victim of what a Post editorial dubbed “political persecution”? Is it the innocent target of a Justice Department “shakedown,” as the Wall Street Journal‘s editors charged, with Justice “confiscating” JPMorgan’s earnings “for no other reason than because they can and because they want to appease their left-wing populist allies”?

The announcement that JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, personally negotiated the announced $13 billion settlement with the Justice Department has set off howls in the press. The Post suggested that JPMorgan only made the same errors about housing prices that everyone else made. The government was charged with acting in bad faith, holding JPMorgan accountable for misdeeds committed by Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual before Dimon agreed to acquire them at the behest of the government. All in all, we’re supposed to see this deal as a miscarriage of justice.

Give me a break.

Jessica Valente: How to Write About Rape: Rules for Journalists

Feminists spend a lot of time taking journalists and media institutions to task for the way they cover rape-and for good reason. Victim-blaming runs rampant in headlines and news features, sexual assault is often misnamed or mischaracterized, and women’s behavior is treated with more scrutiny than rapists’ crimes. Media makers are smart, interesting people who-like all people-make mistakes. But even well-meaning missteps cause harm.  [..]

The United States does not have a rape problem-it has a rape epidemic. A woman in this country is raped every two minutes, 42 percent of victims are raped before they are 18 years old (pdf). One in three Native women report being raped, as do almost 19 percent of black women. Ninety-seven percent of rapists will never go to jail.

It’s our responsibility as journalists to ensure that we are covering stories of sexual assault with truthfulness, care, and in a way that does not make the country a safer place for rapists. We are not just media makers-we shape the culture as well. So let’s make it a culture that’s safer and more just for girls, women and all survivors of sexual assault.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Chris Hedges: Our Invisible Revolution

“Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”

Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.

The New York Times Editorial Board: The White House on Spying

The White House response on Monday to the expanding disclosures of American spying on foreign leaders, their governments and millions of their citizens was a pathetic mix of unsatisfying assurances about reviews under way, platitudes about the need for security in an insecure age, and the odd defense that the president didn’t know that American spies had tapped the German chancellor’s cellphone for 10 years.

Is it really better for us to think that things have gone so far with the post-9/11 idea that any spying that can be done should be done and that nobody thought to inform President Obama about tapping the phone of one of the most important American allies?  

Who Buys the Spies? The Hidden Corporate Cash Behind America’s Out-of-Control National Surveillance State

by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen

Democratic leaders are full-fledged players in the national surveillance state, right along with Republicans.

Long before President Obama kicked off his 2008 campaign, many Americans took it for granted that George W. Bush’s vast, sprawling national security apparatus needed to be reined in. For Democrats, many independents, and constitutional experts of various persuasions, Vice President Dick Cheney’s notorious doctrine of the “unitary executive” (which holds that the President controls the entire executive branch), was the ultimate statement of the imperial presidency. It was the royal road to easy (or no) warrants for wiretaps, sweeping assertions of the government’s right to classify information secret, and arbitrary presidential power. When Mitt Romney embraced the neoconservatives in the 2012 primaries, supporters of the President often cited the need to avoid a return to the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld National Security State as a compelling reason for favoring his reelection. Reelect President Obama, they argued, or Big Brother might be back.

But that’s not how this movie turned out: The 2012 election proved to be a post-modern thriller, in which the main characters everyone thought they knew abruptly turned into their opposites and the plot thickened just when you thought it was over.[..]

As the storm over surveillance broke, we were completing a statistical analysis of campaign contributions in 2012, using an entirely new dataset that we constructed from the raw material provided by the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenues Service (which compiles contributions from so-called “527”s).  In light of what has transpired, our quantitative analysis of presidential election funding invites closer scrutiny, particularly of the finding that we had already settled upon as perhaps most important:  In sharp contrast to endlessly repeated claims that big business was deeply suspicious of the President, our statistical results show that a large and powerful bloc of  “industries of the future” – telecommunications, high tech, computers, and software – showed essentially equal or higher percentages of support for the President in 2012 than they did for Romney [..]

But the point that our findings document is perhaps most instructive of all. Many of the firms and industries at the heart of this Orwellian creation have strong ties to the Democrats. Bush and Cheney may have invented it, but national Democratic leaders are full-fledged players in this 21st century National Surveillance State and the interest group pressures that now help to sustain its defenders in Washington work just as powerfully on Democrats as on Republicans.

Party Competition and Industrial Structure in the 2012 Elections

Key Findings:

   

• Existing data sources used for studies of campaign finance have a variety of serious flaws.
• As a result, the degree to which major parties’ presidential candidates depend on very large donors has been underestimated and the role small donors play exaggerated.
• The relation between the money split between the parties and the proportion of votes received by their candidates in House and Senate races appears to be quite straightforward.
• Firms and executives in industries strongly affected by proposed regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions heavily backed Mitt Romney. So did much, but not all, of finance.
• President Obama’s support within big business was broader than hitherto recognized. His level of support from firms in telecommunications and software was very strong indeed, sometimes equaling or exceeding Romney’s. Many firms and sectors most involved in the recent controversies over surveillance were among the President’s strongest supporters.
• Republican candidates showed sharply different levels of contributions from small donors; President Obama’s campaign, while heavily dependent on large donors, attracted more support from small donors than did his Republican opponent.
• Big business support for Tea Party candidates for Congress was substantial, but well below levels for more mainstream Republicans. Many of the same sectors that strongly supported Romney also backed Tea Party candidates. Backing for Tea Party candidates by Too Big To Fail banks ran above the average of business as a whole by every measure.

Read “Party Competition and Industrial Structure in the 2012 Elections: Who’s Really Driving the Taxi to the Dark Side?” (pdf), by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen.

Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts and a Senior Fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, Thomas Ferguson discusses the finding of the study with Real New Networks Jaisal Noor.

As Yves Smith at naked capitalism noted this is a good explanation why “Obama started looking more stressed than usual around the time of the Snowden revelations.”