Tag: TMC Politics

May 22 2014

Punting the Pundits

“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

Trevor Timm: The NSA bill got to the House at warp speed. Senators are our only hope

The USA Freedom Act ended up surveillance a non-issue. Congress might have to hold it hostage, just to start over again

In just over two weeks, the bill known as the USA Freedom Act – formerly the best chance to pass meaningful NSA reform in Congress – has gone from strong, to weak, to horrible. So naturally, after months of stalling the once-promising bill, the House of Representatives was rushing to pass a gutted version on Thursday.

When it inevitably passes Thursday afternoon by a wide margin, the NSA’s biggest supporters will surely line up to call this legislation “reform”, so they can go back to their angry constituents and pretend they did something about mass surveillance, while really just leaving the door open for it to continue. But the bill is still a long way from the president’s desk. If the Senate refuses to pass a strengthened version of the USA Freedom Act this summer, reformers should consider what 24 hours ago was unthinkable: abandon the bill and force Section 215 of the Patriot Act to expire once and for all in 2015. Because it’s one thing to pass a weak bill, but it’s entirely another to pass off smoke and mirrors as progress.

Heidi Moore: Credit Suisse’s plea is kabuki theatre. Big US banks are still getting off easy

It’s not difficult to look tough on a Swiss bank. Call me when Eric Holder starts yelling about JP Morgan’s corruption – or says Bank of America isn’t too big to jail

Getting a bank on tax evasion is like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. It’s a punchline that suggests with absolute certainty that bigger crimes are going to go unpunished.

Consider Credit Suisse, a giant international bank that on Tuesday pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy for helping wealthy Americans avoid taxes. It will pay a $2.6bn fine, which is triple the amount of money it had set aside.

To be fair, the public image of the secretive system of Swiss banking, which has been the basis for plot lines in everything from James Bond to the Bourne films, is not too far from the truth: those banks are open only to the absurdly wealthy, and their promise of discretion is essentially their business model. The US government thinks the Swiss banks are helping rich people avoid taxes by fooling the IRS and filling out fake bank statements, and they’re not entirely wrong: one colorful example involves a Credit Suisse banker who passed such fictionalized documents to a client in the middle of an issue of Sports Illustrated.

New York Times Editorial Board: The Senate Foolishly Rushes In

The Senate is unnecessarily rushing to vote on President Obama’s nomination of David Barron for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, even though the public has yet to see documents written by Mr. Barron that have raised legitimate concern among civil liberties advocates on both the left and the right.

Mr. Barron, a Harvard law professor, was a top official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel when he wrote two classified memos justifying the drone strike in Yemen in 2011 that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen accused of being a terrorist. [..]

In other respects, Mr. Barron appears clearly qualified for the job. Some senators will vote for him in spite of (or because of) what is in the memos; some, like Mr. Paul, will vote against him. But what’s the rush in pushing through this vote? A federal judgeship is a lifetime appointment. The American people should be able to decide for themselves whether their elected representatives are making the right decision.

Jane Hamsher: The Price of Whistleblowing: Manning, Greenwald, Assange, Kiriakou and Snowden

We were eating dinner last night around my kitchen table when the news of the dustup between Wikileaks and the Intercept came through the tubes. As I read the details to the people who came here to share food and conversation, everyone’s eyebrows raised.

The eyebrows at a lot of tables probably raised as Wikileaks took the Intercept to task for its latest story, and failing to release the name of one of the countries in which the United States is spying on its citizens. The Intercept maintained they had been shown compelling evidence that led them to redact the name; Wikileaks maintained the citizens of the country have a right to know. [..]

I know that in the past, Assange has had concerns about releasing documents himself without redacting the names of innocent people who could get hurt, and has contacted the Pentagon offering to work with them to redact documents before their release. And I also understand his concerns that the Pentagon is not always acting in good faith when they say people are in danger. They have cried wolf so many times that nobody believes them any more.

But I also don’t think you can assume bad faith on the part of the people at the Intercept. We may learn two days from now, or in 10 years, that there were fierce internal battles over the Snowden documents. Or we may learn that everyone was in general agreement to redact the name of the country.  I have no idea and have had no discussions with anyone at the Intercept about the story, including Glenn Greenwald.

Robert Reich: The Practical Choice: Not American Capitalism or “Welfare State Socialism” but an Economy That’s Working for a Few or Many

For years Americans have assumed that our hard-charging capitalism  is better than the soft-hearted version found in Canada and Europe. American capitalism might be a bit crueler but it generates faster growth and higher living standards overall. Canada’s and Europe’s “welfare-state socialism” is doomed.  

It was a questionable assumption to begin with, relying to some extent on our collective amnesia about the first three decades after World War II, when tax rates on top incomes in the U.S. never fell below 70 percent, a larger portion of our economy was invested in education than before or since, over a third of our private-sector workers were unionized, we came up with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, and built the biggest infrastructure project in history, known as the interstate highway system.

But then came America’s big U-turn, when we deregulated, de-unionized, lowered taxes on the top, ended welfare, and stopped investing as much of the economy in education and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Canada and Europe continued on as before. Soviet communism went bust, and many of us assumed European and Canadian “socialism” would as well.

That’s why recent data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database  is so shocking.

May 21 2014

Punting the Pundits

“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.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

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

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Marcy Wheeler: The NSA reform bill now shuts down a secret database. Will that fix anything?

A detailed look into the future of America’s phone dragnet reveals a world without the nuclear bomb of the Snowden revelations. Unless, of course, the telecoms set it off

A last-minute change to the National Security Agency reform bill making its way through Congress, as reported by the Guardian on Tuesday afternoon, may minimize one of the greatest dangers of the program. Or it may make things far worse!

At issue is the number of completely innocent Americans who will be subjected to the NSA’s scrutiny under the new, reformed phone dragnet, in which the telecoms retain the data but conduct queries for the NSA. Language added to the USA Freedom Act, which is scheduled for a House floor vote on Thursday, may limit how much of the data on those innocent Americans the NSA can actually keep – and for how long.

To understand the risk going forward, of course, it helps to understand how your phone calls get sucked up right now. But going forward, somebody’s going to have to make it very clear whether it will be the telecoms or the NSA removing numbers from the database. Otherwise you’re still going to be spied on for liking the same kind of pizza as a terrorist.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Reining in the Surveillance State

Last week, Tea Party-backed Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) set the progressive world abuzz.

No, not with his usual retrograde positions on abortion, gay marriage or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (he was against it before he was for it)-but rather with an op-ed in The New York Times, demanding that the Obama administration release its legal argument justifying the use of a drone to kill al-Awlaki, a US citizen, without trial. Paul vowed to filibuster the nomination to the US Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit of former Justice Department official David Barron, who helped write memos supporting said argument.

Paul’s strong libertarian principles have always differentiated him from many of his Republican colleagues. It is, therefore, not all that shocking for him to speak out against a president he dislikes on a policy he disdains. Yet his outspokenness has many liberals and leftists asking a legitimate question: Why aren’t there more Democratic voices opposing the surveillance state? Protecting civil liberties should be a critical piece of the progressive platform, but too many establishment Democrats and progressives have been silent on this issue simply because one of their own is in the White House.

Ana Marie Cox: Don’t be fooled: McConnell’s victory in Kentucky is also a Tea Party win

The top Senate Republican beat his conservative primary opponent, but it came at a price for the GOP

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s primary victory on Tuesday night in Kentucky will undoubtedly tempt many a pundit to write the Tea Party’s eulogy. But the Tea Party will achieve in electoral death what it could never achieve in life: lasting control of the GOP agenda.

McConnell won because he’s got a familiar name, a lot of money and the kind of political clout that makes up for occasional lapses from orthodoxy. That might not be enough next time – as a local Kentucky Republican leader told the National Journal last week, the state party is “still McConnell’s Republican Party, but it’s edging toward being Rand Paul]’s Republican Party”. But, it was enough to keep it from being challenger Matt Bevin’s Republican party – especially after his [unforced errors and willingness to prize ideological purity over more pragmatic concerns (like the $2bn in pork McConnell brought home for agreeing to end the government shutdown).

McConnell didn’t win because he became a Tea Party member – he’s so conservative, he didn’t have to. (A vote analysis casts him as one of the top 25 conservative members of the Senate, and Tea Party darling and intrastate rival Paul is at number 19.) Instead, McConnell’s win just shows how easily the GOP grows over its fringes.

Zoë Carpenter: Will GOP Leaders Block Another Immigration Measure?

For months now Republican leaders have said they’re committed to passing immigration reform while making excuses for inaction. This week, the House has a chance to tackle one small part of a reform agenda, in the form of a bill to allow undocumented immigrants to serve in the military and in some cases receive green cards. WIth the window of opportunity for reform closing, the GOP leadership is poised once again to back away from it, in deference to the far right.

The Enlist Act, put forward by California Republican Jeff Denham and co-sponsored by twenty-four Republicans and twenty-six Democrats, should be among the most palatable to Republicans of the individual reforms: It rewards military service and would apply only to those who were brought to the US as children. But hard right groups like Heritage Action have fought the proposal because it would open up a pathway to legal status. Last week a spokesperson for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said he would not allow debate on the measure, dealing what seemed like a terminal blow.

Bryce Covert: In the Real World, the So-Called ‘Boy Crisis’ Disappears

The realization came to me later than it should have: getting a job is not the same as applying to college. After I graduated, I assumed for a long time that the work world operated the same way as the school world. If I wanted a job, I would comb through hundreds upon hundreds of job postings. If there were jobs that sounded interesting and I seemed to have the right qualifications, I would send in a cover letter and resume, then wait for a call to come in for an interview. About 98 percent of the time, a call never came.

Little did I know that by the time a company posts a job listing, in particular a journalism job, it’s often already all but filled and the posting is an HR formality. The people getting the jobs weren’t following the instructions as laid out on the “Work for Us” section of companies’ websites. They were having informal meetings with friends of friends.

School was all about following the directions and reaping the rewards. Getting ahead outside of school, I eventually figured out, meant figuring out rules that weren’t written down.

Michelle Chen: Turkey’s Deadly Mining Disaster Reveals Just How Little Was Done to Prevent It

After days of pulling bodies from the ruptured earth, the death toll of the Turkish mine disaster in Soma has plateaued at 301. With their masked faces frozen in agony, their crumpled photographs clutched in the fists of loved ones, the workers and their struggles have become far more visible in death than they were in life.

The names have been accounted for, but not the catastrophe that befell them. What was originally suspected to be an electrical fire was later described by experts as a massive industrial explosion precipitated by long-term negligence, not a mere technical malfunction.

Whatever the exact cause, the government seems committed to avoiding blame. Defying workers’ accounts of horrific safety conditions, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stoked outrage by coldly citing mining accidents of nineteenth-century England and suggesting that such tragedies were “usual.” The mine operator, Soma Holding, claimed the company was not obligated to provide workers with an emergency shelter, insinuating that workers were personally responsible for failing to escape on their own. (According to Today’s Zaman, Turkey is one of just a few countries without such a shelter requirement.)

May 21 2014

Glenn Greenwald “No PlaceTo Hide”

“No place to hide”

Chris Hayes talks with Glenn Greenwald about his new book and new NSA revelations from his book “No Place to Hide.”


Hating on Glenn Greenwald

Chris Hayes gets journalist Glenn Greenwald to open up about his tendency alienate liberals.

May 20 2014

Punting the Pundits

“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

Trevor Timm: Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA’s dragnet. Why?

If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here’s what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” – in other words, that the ACLU couldn’t prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn’t challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden’s historic whistleblowing to prove it.

Daniel Devir: The resegregation of America’s schools

The Supreme Court ruled 60 years ago this May 17 in Brown v. Board of Education that “segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation,” is unconstitutional.

The ruling abolished the explicitly mandated segregation made infamous in the Deep South. But political reaction and larger structural shifts, such as white suburbanization, quickly overwhelmed tentative progress. Today, segregation – both racial and economic – remains the core organizational feature of American public education. In 1980, the typical black student attended a school where 36 percent of students were white. Today, the average black student attends a school where only 29 percent are. Many black and Latino students attend schools where nearly every other student is nonwhite – including in supposed liberal bastions such as New York and Chicago.

Indeed, New York state’s public schools are the most segregated in the nation, according to a March report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. In New York City, 19 of 32 community school districts are less than 10 percent white. That includes all of the Bronx, two-thirds of Brooklyn and half of Manhattan.

This is no time for an anniversary celebration.

Ladar Levinson: Secrets, lies and Snowden’s email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit

For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don’t have the right to much privacy in the first place

My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company’s network. [..]

The problem here is technological: until any communication has been decrypted and the contents parsed, it is currently impossible for a surveillance device to determine which network connections belong to any given suspect. The government argued that, since the “inspection” of the data was to be carried out by a machine, they were exempt from the normal search-and-seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment.

More importantly for my case, the prosecution also argued that my users had no expectation of privacy, even though the service I provided – encryption – is designed for users’ privacy.

If my experience serves any purpose, it is to illustrate what most already know: courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance under the shroud of secrecy, lest we find ourselves summarily deprived of meaningful due process. If we allow our government to continue operating in secret, it is only a matter of time before you or a loved one find yourself in a position like I did – standing in a secret courtroom, alone, and without any of the meaningful protections that were always supposed to be the people’s defense against an abuse of the state’s power.

Gary Younge: Racism is far more than old white men using the N-word

Why is there outrage only when epithets are caught on tape? Discrimination is in reality carried out by well-mannered people

Let’s hear it for Robert Copeland. The police commissioner of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire (population 6,083) sticks to his principles. Even if those principles are stuck in a previous century and mired in bigotry. In March Jane O’Toole was finishing her dinner at a bistro in town when she heard Copeland, 82, announce loudly that he hated watching television because every time he turned on the TV he kept seeing “that fucking nigger”. The “nigger” in question was the president of the United States. [..]

By the time Copeland’s outburst became a matter of national note a week later, the pattern had been set: old white men with mouths writing cheques their status won’t cash, in currencies that went out of date decades ago. So far so bad. None are worthy of sympathy.

And yet the magnitude of the response to each incident exemplifies how high the bar is now set for challenging racist behaviour and how distorted our understanding has become of what that behaviour constitutes.

Chris Arnade: Transgender Latinas’ stories reveal how much intolerance they still endure

Facing poverty and with no support network, some Latina transwomen turn to the streets to survive

In downtown Manhattan same sex marriages have become beautifully normal. No longer are they celebrated for their rarity, they are simply celebrated as any wedding is: in whatever manner the couple wants.

Go only five or 10 miles away, to the poorer parts of New York City, and things are dramatically different.

In these communities many LGBT people face an abusive environment. Getting married to someone of the same sex is almost unimaginable. Instead, the LGBT community is still fighting a more primary battle – for basic acceptance of their identities, and to convince their families and friends to let them remain a part of their communities.

One of those neighborhoods is Jackson Heights, a mostly Latino working-class community in Queens where I have spent time documenting a portion of the trans community.

Jonathan Freedalnd: Hillary Clinton needs Hollywood: Modern Family proves it

Drama, like satire, can shape politics and alter society. From 24 to Borgen, TV does more than reflect life: it changes it

Hillary Clinton should steer well clear of Nicole Kidman. The latter’s performance in a new movie of the life of Princess Grace, formerly Grace Kelly, has come in for some acid criticism. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw declared Grace “so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk”.

Twisting the knife, he likened it to the dire Diana movie, a film whose arteries were similarly clogged with saccharine. Admittedly, Helen Mirren did a wonderful PR job for the Queen, but often even the most hagiographic screen treatments can end up diminishing rather than dignifying their subjects.

What’s this got to do with the former secretary of state and could-be presidential candidate for 2016? No producer is likely to begin shooting Hillary: the Movie anytime soon – not now, when the final reel of the story is still undecided. And yet, Ms Clinton needs Hollywood’s help.

>/div>

May 20 2014

The USA Freedumb Act

President Barack Obama has said that he wanted to reform how the NSA collects and stores metadata. What he says and what he does, again, are two different things.

The “Consult with Congress” Stage of USA Freedumb

By Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel

Remember how, in the days after President Obama announced his principles for reforming the dragnet, his Senior Administration Official pretended that any efforts to make the scope of the program worse would come from Congress? [..]

Well, it looks like the Administration isn’t so passive after all. They’re working with House leadership to gut the bill.

   TROUBLE FOR USA FREEDOM? – House leadership and Obama administration officials met with committee members Sunday to negotiate changes to key NSA reform legislation, parting late in the evening without reaching a final resolution, said a congressional staffer close to the process. Still, it seems clear that the USA FREEDOM Act, approved by the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees little more than a week ago, will not reach the House floor intact. Some passages have been watered down already, the staffer acknowledged, declining to go into specifics. The bill is set for “possible consideration” this week, according to the schedule circulated by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s office.

   Word of the talks caused some of the bill’s most ardent privacy and civil liberties backers to cry foul and say they could withdraw support. Areas of concern to watchdogs include possible removal of transparency language allowing companies to tell their customers about the broad numbers of lawful intercept requests they receive; and a debate on whether the search terms used by the NSA to search communications records should be narrowly defined in statute.

   “The version we fear could now be negotiated in secret and introduced on the House floor may not move us forward on NSA reform,” said human rights organization Access. “I am gravely disappointed if the House leadership and the administration chose to disrupt the hard-fought compromise that so many of us were pleased to support just two weeks ago,” said Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute.

And while it’s not clear these secret changes would broaden the scope outside of counterterrorism (though I think that’s possible already), it does seem clear the Administration is pushing for these changes because the already weak bill is too strong for them.

Congress is no better.

Advocates fear NSA bill is being gutted

By Kate Tummarello, The Hill

To win the support of NSA defenders, lawmakers abandoned some reform provisions in Sensenbrenner’s original bill. One of the major changes was dropping the appointment of a constitutional advocate to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves the NSA’s spying requests, and substituting it for a panel of experts.

The bill was also stripped of language that would have allowed tech companies to publish more specific information about the number and types of government requests for user data they receive.

During Judiciary consideration, an amendment to allow less specific reporting was added back into the bill, but some worry that provision is in danger now because the administration thinks it’s already reached a deal that allows tech companies to publish more information about the NSA requests.

While pro-reform advocacy groups and members hailed the House bill as a positive first step, many lamented the revisions and said the legislation will be in trouble on the floor if it undergoes further changes.

A Deep Dive into the House’s Version of Narrow NSA Reform: The New USA Freedom Act

By Mark Jaycox, Electronic Freedom Foundation

Here’s how the House version of the USA Freedom Act compares to the Senate’s version, what the new House version of the USA Freedom Act does, and what it sorely lacks.

The Senate’s Version of USA Freedom Act

As we mentioned when the original USA Freedom Act was first introduced, it proposed changes to several NSA activities and limited the bulk collection of all Americans’ calling records. It would fix a key problem with Section 702 (.pdf) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FISAA), bring more transparency to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISA court), and introduce a special advocate to champion civil liberties in the FISA court.

The House’s New Version of the USA Freedom Act:

The new USA Freedom Act concentrates on prohibiting the collection of all Americans’ calling records using Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Other sections of the bill would allow the FISA Court to assign amici, or non-parties who can brief issues before the court; create new government reports about the spying powers; and create new company reports detailing how many accounts and customers are affected by FISA Court orders.

First and foremost, the bill introduces a different conceptual approach to prohibiting mass spying under Section 215. Unlike the Senate version, which tries to stop the mass collection of calling records by mandating that the records sought “pertain to” an agent of a foreign power or their activities-an approach that we’ve worried about because “pertains to” and “relevant” are so similar-the House version mandates that a “specific selection term” (currently defined as uniquely describing a person, entity, or account) be the “basis for the production” of the records. The overall language may be stronger than in the old USA Freedom Act, but “specific selection term” must be further defined as “entity” could be construed expansively. After the order is filed, the government can obtain up to “two hops“-which may be too expansive for many investigations-from the selection term.

The bill also tries to tighten the “minimization procedures” that apply to government collection of records using Section 215 and other spying authorities like national security letters and the FISA Pen Register/Trap and Trace (PR/TT) provision. But the procedures only touch the FBI, not other agencies-like the NSA-that may be obtaining records using Section 215. In addition, the House version uses language we’ve seen in Section 702’s minimization procedures. If you remember, those procedures are horrendous. They allow for the overcollection, overretention, and oversharing of Americans’ communications “mistakenly” collected. The House must draft stronger minimization language to completely ensure improper information about untargeted users is not collected. For instance, simply inserting the word “acquisition” or “collection” would help.

End the NSA’s Mass Spying

Tell Congress: Support the USA FREEDOM Act. Stop the FISA Improvements Act & Other Fake Reforms.

There’s a powerful reform proposal moving through Congress. H.R. 3361, the House’s version of the USA FREEDOM Act, would limit bulk collection of phone records and add transparency to the egregious NSA spying.

If it passes, the USA FREEDOM Act will be the most meaningful reform of government surveillance in decades. While the USA FREEDOM Act doesn’t address every issue with NSA surveillance, it’s a powerful first step.

But certain members of Congress don’t want reform. Representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger have introduced a bill that attempts to make NSA spying worse. And Senator Dianne Feinstein is promoting the FISA Improvements Act, a bill posing as reform that attempts to legalize the worst aspects of NSA surveillance.

We can’t let NSA apologists preserve the status quo. Demand real reform.  Stop mass spying.

May 19 2014

Punting the Pundits

“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

Paul Krugman: Springtime for Bankers

By any normal standard, economic policy since the onset of the financial crisis has been a dismal failure. It’s true that we avoided a full replay of the Great Depression. But employment has taken more than six years to claw its way back to pre-crisis levels – years when we should have been adding millions of jobs just to keep up with a rising population. Long-term unemployment is still almost three times as high as it was in 2007; young people, often burdened by college debt, face a highly uncertain future.

Now Timothy Geithner, who was Treasury secretary for four of those six years, has published a book, “Stress Test,” about his experiences. And basically, he thinks he did a heckuva job.

He’s not unique in his self-approbation. Policy makers in Europe, where employment has barely recovered at all and a number of countries are in fact experiencing Depression-level distress, have even less to boast about. Yet they too are patting themselves on the back.

Charles M. Blow: Poverty Is Not a State of Mind

Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush, the didactic-meets-dynastic duo, spoke last week at a Manhattan Institute gathering, providing a Mayberry-like prescription for combating poverty in this country: all it takes is more friendship and traditional marriage. [..]

My qualm with the statement is the insistence on a “traditional marriage.” Loving families, of any formation, can suffice. While it is true that two adults in a home can provide twice the time, attention and income for a family, those adults needn’t necessarily be in a traditional marriage. Yes, marriage can have a sustaining and fortifying effect on a union and a family, but following that argument, we should be rushing headlong to extend it to all who desire it. In some cases, even parents living apart can offer a nurturing environment for children if they prioritize parenting when it comes to their time and money. Not all parents have to reside together to provide together.

There are many ways to be a loving family and to provide what children need. All forms of marriage are valid and valuable, as well as other ways of constructing a family.

Corey Robin: The Republican War on Workers’ Rights

Midterm elections are like fancy software: Experts love them, end-users couldn’t care less. But if the 2010 elections are any indication, we might not want to doze off as we head into the summer months before November. Midterm elections at the state level can have tremendous consequences, especially for low-wage workers. What you don’t know can hurt you – or them.

In 2010, the Republicans won control of the executive and legislative branches in 11 states (there are now more than 20 such states). Inspired by business groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, they proceeded to rewrite the rules of work, passing legislation designed to enhance the position of employers at the expense of employees.

The University of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer, who wrote an eye-opening report on this topic last October for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, looked at dozens of bills affecting workers. The legislation involved unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, child labor, collective bargaining, sick days, even meal breaks. Despite frequent Republican claims to be defending local customs and individual liberty, Mr. Lafer found a “cookie-cutter” pattern to their legislation. Not only did it consistently favor employers over workers, it also tilted toward big government over local government. And it often abridged the economic rights of individuals.

Ton Engel hardt: Drones, Trains, and China: How America’s Budget Is Fighting the Wrong Battle

Consider this: our advanced robotic creatures, those drone aircraft grimly named Predators and Reapers, are still blowing away human beings from Yemen to Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is now testing out a 14,000-pound drone advanced enough to take off and land on its own on the deck of an aircraft carrier — no human pilot involved. (As it happens, it’s only a “demonstrator” and, at a cost of $1.4 billion, can’t do much else.) While we’re talking about the skies, who could forget that the U.S. military is committed to buying 2,400 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, already dubbed, amid cost overruns of every sort, “the most expensive weapons system in history.” The bill for them: nearly $400 billion or twice what it cost to put a man on the moon. [..]

On the other hand, if we’re talking about purely civilian infrastructure, just consider that, at this very moment, Congress is dilly-dallying while the crucial Highway Trust Fund that keeps American roads and interstates in shape is “heading for a cliff” and projected to go bankrupt in August. This from the country that once turned the car into a poetic symbol of freedom. Meanwhile, the nation’s overall infrastructure, from levees and dams to wastewater and aviation, now regularly gets a grade of D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

As a rising power in the nineteenth century, the U.S. moved toward global status on the basis of an ambitious program of canal building and then of government-sponsored transcontinental railroads. Jump a century and a half and the country that, until recently, was being called the planet’s “sole superpower” has yet to build a single mile of high-speed rail. Not one. Even a prospective line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, which looked like it might be constructed, is now blocked coming and going.

Robert Kuttner: The Road to Euro-Fascism

As Europe’s depression continues six years after the financial collapse of 2007-2008, watch for far-right parties to make big gains in this week’s elections to the EU’s European Parliament. And why not? The establishment parties of Europe’s center-right and center-left have put austerity policies and the interests of banks ahead of a real economic recovery for regular people.

More than 20 years ago, when the European Union created its constitution in the form of the Treaty of Maastricht, the hope was that Europe stood for a social compact that put citizens first. Europe, especially northern Europe, was a model of decent earnings, universal social benefits and regulation that prevented wealth from swamping citizenship.

Today, however, centrist or center-right governments, which either sponsor austerity or approve of it, govern in every major European capital but France, and France is too weak to go its own way. The economic crisis with its high unemployment only stimulates more migration, which puts pressure on local labor markets and pushes the local working class further into the arms of the nationalist far-right.

May 18 2014

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

“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:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Guests on Sunday’s “This Week” are: Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Berin Szoka, the president of Tech Freedom discuss discuss privacy;  TIME‘s Eliza Gray and University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto examine the sexual assault epidemic plaguing America’s college campuses.

Guests at the political roundtable are ABC News contributor Bill Kristol; Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan; Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MI); and former Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

And a special tribute to retiring newswoman Barbara Walters.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: The guests are White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; Dan Dellinger, head of the American Legion; former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg; former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner; and Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ).

The guests on Mr. Schieffer’s panel are: Jackie Calmes of The New York Times; Jerry Seib of The Wall Street Journal; Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation; and CBS News Political Director John Dickerson.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: On this Sunday’s MTP, NBC News’ justice correspondent Pete Williams will interview journalist and author Glenn Greenwald.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are  Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick; Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA); and California Governor Jerry Brown.

Her panel guests are former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, Newt Gingrich and Cook Political Report‘s Amy Walter.

May 17 2014

Punting the Pundits

“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

Emily Bell: Jill Abramson’s ouster shows women that we still must be more than good

Women’s fury over the New York Times editor’s firing stems from what we know: that excellent performances are never enough

On Tuesday afternoon, the executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, left the building with little fanfare. She had, apparently, been stripped of her title by publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr because of what he called, in addressing the staff and anointing her successor, an issue with management.

That successor, Dean Baquet, started the day as Abramson’s deputy and ended it as the first-ever African American to hold the coveted role as top editor of the Gray Lady. But the public celebration of his success was short-lived – because he replaced the first-ever woman to hold that role, and women in media thought they knew why.

The fury of women journalists who identify with Abramson stems from what we know: that excellent performances are not enough. Women must be completely different from the men they replace (or who replace them), apparently – they must adapt to the power they are briefly allowed to hold without transgressing the gender roles they aren’t allowed to escape.

David Sirota: Is Journalism Losing Its Nerve?

When I went into journalism, one of the first things I was told as a freshman is that journalism is different from stenography. It is supposed to be-or at least has been-about using rights granted under the First Amendment to be a check on government and corporate power.

Yet, the hedge in that last sentence is deliberate-and appropriate. That’s because a new survey from the Indiana University suggests things are fast changing in the news industry-and not for the better.

The latest in 42 years worth of surveys of journalists, this one polled more than 1,000 reporters in the latter half of 2013. That timeframe is significant-it was right when revelations about the NSA’s mass surveillance were being published.

You might think such an historic time period in the annals of journalism would only strengthen reporters’ belief in the necessity of responsibly-but fearlessly-publishing information, even if the powers that be do not authorize such publication. Instead, it seems the exact opposite has happened.

Amy Goodman: Wheelering and Dealing at the FCC

Michael Powell is the son of Gen. Colin Powell. The elder Powell knows a thing or two about war. He famously presented the case for invading Iraq to the United Nations, on Feb. 5, 2003, based on faulty evidence of weapons of mass destruction. He calls that speech a painful “blot” on his record. So it is especially surprising when his son threatens “World War III” on the Obama administration.

Michael Powell is the president of the NCTA, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which is the cable industry’s largest lobbying group. He is also the former chairperson of the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. His target: net neutrality. The battleground is in Washington, D.C., inside the FCC’s nondescript headquarters. The largest Internet service providers-companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Verizon-are joining forces to kill net neutrality. Millions of citizens, along with thousands of organizations, companies, artists and investors, are trying to save it.

Eugene Robinson: Clinton Gets the GOP Treatment

Republican panic at the prospect of facing Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race has suddenly reached Godzilla-nearing-Tokyo proportions.

The election is more than two years away, and Clinton hasn’t even decided whether to run. But none of this seems to matter to the GOP strategists and spinmeisters who are launching the whole arsenal at her-smears, innuendo, false charges. Already, they’ve moved beyond distorting her record to simply making stuff up.

As these damp squibs clatter harmlessly to the ground, it’s useful to remember that Clinton has seen it all before. And I mean all. Anyone who thinks she’ll be rattled or intimidated hasn’t been paying attention the past few decades. [..]

If Clinton should get the nomination, her Republican opponent-no matter who it is-would be no pushover. But the possibility of electing the first woman as president would likely stoke the enthusiasm of Democratic voters to the point where the party’s structural advantages-overwhelming support among minorities and women-came into play. Clinton might win big.

Hence all the premature mudslinging, which reeks of desperation. Republicans hear the sound in the distance. They feel it in their bones. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.  

Jane E. Kirtley: Why the US constitution gives you the right to know lethal injection’s secrets

The death penalty has always been subject to public oversight, and for good reason. It’s called the First Amendment

In the panic and fear that followed the 9/11 attacks, the US government went into ultra-secret mode. In the name of protecting national security, prosecutors asked judges to close criminal proceedings involving terrorism, even though they had always been presumed to be open to the public – and the press – under the First Amendment. Many judges complied.

But in 2002, Judge Damon J Keith of the US Court of Appeals in Detroit ruled that secret deportation proceedings in so-called “special interest” cases involving alleged terrorists could not be conducted in secret. The Bush administration argued that open hearings would reveal sensitive intelligence information and compromise national security. The government further contended that these administrative proceedings are not technically part of the judicial system – and so should not be subject to the First Amendment right of access. [..]

Although the high court has not yet ruled explicitly that these rights extend to executions, history and experience support the argument. The death penalty – the ultimate expression of the state’s power over human life and death – has always been subject to public oversight, and for good reason. The government executes prisoners in the name of the public. To have confidence in that process, the public must have as much information as possible about it. We should know how officials treat those who are paying the ultimate penalty. We cannot call ourselves a democracy if we cede this kind of activity to a secretive government in blind faith and without question.

Sadhbh Walshe: Want to curb binge drinking? End the focus on laws and look at culture

The sooner we all start drinking like Italians, the better: despite liberal regulations, the way they drink in moderation reduces serious risk

The summer before I went to university in Dublin, I was in a state of high anxiety – not about the prospect of leaving home or the coming course work so much as my ability to drink alcohol in any quantity. To my young mind, being able to drink a lot was as important a part of college life as being able to write a good paper. So I put in a lot of effort – to drinking – until I was able to knock back pints with the best of my new classmates.

This kind of blind obligation to binge drink is exactly the kind of potentially dangerous boozing that’s led to a surge of new warnings from health experts. According to a report released this week by the World Health Organization (WHO), fully 16% of drinkers worldwide engage in heavy episodic (or binge) drinking – the most harmful form.

WHO is urging governments to take aggressive steps to address the problem by raising taxes on alcohol sales, raising minimum drinking ages, regulating sales and so on. But if regulations alone were enough to reduce binge drinking, then countries with stricter rules would have better drinking habits. Except that isn’t always the case.

May 16 2014

The DOJ Hates the Fourth Amendment

This administration, especially the Department of Justice really hates your Fourth Amendment rights and is doing everything in its power to narrow your right to privacy as much as it can.

DOJ Says Americans Have No 4th Amendment Protections At All When They Communicate With Foreigners

by Make Masnick, Techdirt

We’ve already questioned if it’s really true that the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply to foreigners (the Amendment refers to “people” not “citizens”). But in some new filings by the DOJ, the US government appears to take its “no 4th Amendment protections for foreigners” to absurd new levels. It says, quite clearly, that because foreigners have no 4th Amendment protections it means that any Americans lose their 4th Amendment protections when communicating with foreigners. They’re using a very twisted understanding of the (already troubling) third party doctrine to do this. As you may recall, after lying to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department said that it would start informing defendants if warrantless collection of information under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) was used in the investigation against them.

Last October, it finally started alerting some defendants, leading courts to halt proceedings and re-evaluate. As two of those cases have moved forward, the DOJ is trying to defend those cases, and one way it’s doing so is to flat out say that Americans have no 4th Amendment protections when talking to foreigners.

   The Supreme Court has long held that when one person voluntarily discloses information to another, the first person loses any cognizable interest under the Fourth Amendment in what the second person does with the information. . . . For Fourth Amendment purposes, the same principle applies whether the recipient intentionally makes the information public or stores it in a place subject to a government search. Thus, once a non-U.S. person located outside the United States receives information, the sender loses any cognizable Fourth Amendment rights with respect to that information. That is true even if the sender is a U.S. person protected by the Fourth Amendment, because he assumes the risk that the foreign recipient will give the information to others, leave the information freely accessible to others, or that the U.S. government (or a foreign government) will obtain the information.

This argument is questionable on so many levels. First, it’s already relying on the questionable third party doctrine, but it seems to go much further, by then arguing that merely providing information to a foreign person means that it’s okay for the US government to snoop on it without a warrant.

The official US position on the NSA is still unlimited eavesdropping power

by Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU at The Guardian

One year after Snowden, the government is defending – in not-so-plain sight – the ‘paramount’ power to spy on every call and email between you and your friends abroad

The government’s argument is not simply that the NSA has broad authority to monitor Americans’ international communications. The US government is arguing that the NSA’s authority is unlimited in this respect. If the government is right, nothing in the Constitution bars the NSA from monitoring a phone call between a journalist in New York City and his source in London. For that matter, nothing bars the NSA from monitoring every call and email between Americans in the United States and their non-American friends, relatives, and colleagues overseas.

In the government’s view, there is no need to ask whether the 2008 law violates Americans’ privacy rights, because in this context Americans have no rights to be violated.

Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel points out that former Sen Russ Feingold warned us back in 2008 about the abuses that could occur under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

May 16 2014

The War On Words

Journalist Chris Hedges spoke with RT news host Sophia about the information difference in the news that is reported. Citing the uprising in the Ukraine as an example, he talks about how the US government uses fake facts and dubious evidence to push its propaganda on the public using an ever compliant American media.

The crisis in Ukraine and the steadily dropping temperature in relations between Moscow and Washington made many talk about a new Cold War; and many others are worried it may turn ‘hot’. But there’s another war going on right now: the information war. US Secretary of State Kerry has already attacked RT, calling it “Putin’s propaganda machine.” But Washington itself uses dubious evidence and fake facts. What is the information war? What methods is America using?

There are two sides to every story, then there is the truth.

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