Patriot Act Renewed Without Any New Civil Liberties Protections
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So another attack will happen some day. It's a given (and both the Bush and Obama administrations have said as much)
That's where the Patriot Act comes in. Every politician believes it would be the death of their career if they change or reject the existing law only to have that inevitable terrorist attack take place right after. And given how irrationally people act after an attack the politicians are probably right.
So we're stuck with the Patriot Act until politicians become brave or the public stops acting irrationally after an attack. I won't be holding my breath.
Geography alone makes it pretty obvious that you can't stop a determined group from carrying out an attack. So that leaves making nice with those groups so that they don't want to attack us.
Given the fact that there are radical groups at either end of just about any political or religious spectrum you can think of, the idea of appeasing all of them is nuts. The very actions necessary to appease one group could incite another to attack.
This is, of course, putting aside the idea that the motivation behind some violence isn't motivated by our actions at all, but rather by internal politics within extremist groups. There are a lot of folks out there who are awfully fond of power, and one of the easiest ways to garner power is to rally people against a common enemy (who cares if that "enemy" actually instigated anything... that's easy enough to spin)
So, all that to say... We're never going to prevent every terrorist attack, we can only work to minimize the collateral damage. In my opinion, the Patriot Act is just about the biggest example of collateral damage we've seen resulting from terrorist attacks, and I'm saddened to see that Congress chose to do nothing to limit that.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Dear framers, your posterity does NOT deserve the "Blessings of Liberty". Now, respectfully, why don't you roll over cause that is the only revolution that USA and your posterity can muster at this point.
(I know, your opponents and the media can blame you. Just mention something about how you're against gay marriage, or something, and people will forget all about terrorism...)
Bush deserted from the military and used cocaine, and that didn't affect his presidency at all. So there is probably some factor other than voter outrage here.
And anyway, the Patriot Act has very little to do with terrorism. Let's not let idiots run our country.
Or, the courts knock it down as unconstitutional.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
So sometimes the right thing to do is the unpopular thing. But that's not new. While democracy is great at preventing certain abuses of power which clearly hurt the populace at large. Hence, it is also good at preventing violent uprising. So while it comes up with good solutions to some problems, the democratic process we have doesn't come up with the right solution to every problem, terrorism being a good example. This notion is much older than JFK, of course. One purpose of the Bill of Rights was explicitly anti-democratic: put in a general way, it prohibits the majority from oppressing inherent rights of minorities.
In theory, it is the role of the courts to strike down such laws as unconstitutional. In practice, this doesn't seem to happen very quickly, Japanese internment serving as one historical comparison [2]. But the sky has not fallen, former transgressions were greater, and like them, this too, shall pass.
What is novel about the current political climate in the US, as far as I can tell, is the extent of the influence money has in politics, and the magnitude of such money being spent. The best chronicle of this I've read is "So Much Damned Money" [3]. This is a problem worth fretting over.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiles_in_Courage
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
The internment of these German-Americans almost certainly saved American lives by denying the German American Bund Party (Nazi Sympathizers) from being able to engage in espionage and sabotage.
Furthermore, I have a problem calling them internment camps considering how completely different they were from the kind of internment camps the Nazi's ran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_American_internment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_internment
Actually, Israel has mostly prevented them. They still get rockets shot at them (which they probably could stop if they didn't have any ethical constraints), but suicide bombings have mostly stopped, and not for lack of attempts.
I wonder when the small government conservatives will leave the Republican party and when the anti-war, pro civil liberties liberals will leave the Democratic party?
I think Barack Obama did a masterful job of pacifying the anti-war left by annoying his intention to withdraw from Iraq after a certain period of time. I don't know that it will actually happen but it was a pretty smart move to get it off of people's minds for the most part.
We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition. I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this.
It is not in the interest of the ruling elite for this fact to become apparent. They control education and media, and have mastered the art of dividing society along various (ultimately facile and irrelevant) fault lines.
(Do you remember when Blue and Red state meme suddenly appeared out of nowhere like a cheap ready-made knockoff hanging in every one of our various media outlets? Is it a surprise that every time the country finally starts focusing on a substantial issue some completely random troll topic is pushed on queue; is the biggest problem facing USA the decision to allow gay marriage or to rescue this sinking ship of a state?)
"We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition."
You take that sentence and run it by a random sampling of 18 year olds in America. A certain proportion may be able to parse it; a subset of that may actually understand what is said; an even smaller subset would be able to reason about the proposition. Am I being completely pessimistic for thinking that the percentage that can even understand that as English is in single digit percentile?
How so many people in the comments thought that it was the actual Facebook login page, as it was (temporarily) Google's #1 hit for "Facebook login?" Well, have a look at their english. The grammar, the underlying argument structure, the confused-awkward lololols, the lot of it.
That's the majority of people in the US. Most adults stopped during or after high school. Remember high school? Remember the attitudes of students going through history & government courses? That's where they stopped, that was their final set of saved data on the matter.
And worse, they're still much better off -- even intellectually -- than many times their numbers across the planet: sustenance farmers, laborers, tribespeople, etc. (I'm speaking as someone born on the same land that my family spent centuries sustenance farming). A good portion of the human population's still living in the mode Ghandi called "more like animals than people." (rough quote from memory, sorry).
The current elite clearly think that a systemic leveling across the board (aka domesticating the people identified by Ghandi) and homogenization is the only way to address the inherent contingent (your context) and intrinsic (your genetics) differences between humans.
My experience (obviously a tiny sample) is that the distribution is not smooth and quite lumpy, actually. I am not yet convinced that people generally prefer to be misinformed and deceived, and live lives of animals as opposed to a beings primarily distinguishing themselves by their possession of minds.
I do remember High School and do remember the history and government teachers (History: leftist progressive; Government: (presumed) future Bush voter). I remember (as memorable "learning" events) the woven tie of the history teacher and his half-hearted efforts to inject a bit of reality into the official version, and, the episode where the government teacher discussed "Deep Throat"[] with a flirting jock in class. No, I did not live in the ghettos among the disadvantaged and downwardly mobile; this is somewhere in a suburb around Washington DC -- the "Empire's capital" what a joke -- circa early 80s. in a county that likes to boast of the exceptional concentration of the highly educated amongst its residents. (Boggles the mind.)
[edit: The movie not the source. In any event, the film in question was actually "The opening of Misty Beethoven" ...]
Ha! I grew up in Springfield, VA, mid-late 90s for high school.
TARP probably saved us from a Great Depression, and IIRC the bailouts are in the black except for the segments bailing out the government mortgage banks and the car companies. FTR, the protests against Volcker's anti-inflation measures in the 70s were bigger, with farmers eventually blockading the Fed headquarters with their tractors. The protestors were wrong then, too.
Not quite: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/10-ways-say-no-banks-have-n...
The thing is, TARP hasn't led to any reforms in the financial sector. It simply shoveled taxpayer money at private corporations with very few strings attached, which propped up the banks long enough to say "hey, thanks, we would have been fine anyway, really, now piss off".
I think we'd be a lot better off without TARP. Your smug "the protestors were wrong" is unjustified.
Nobody knows what would have happened for the current crisis, but history suggests attitudes like yours are not a good idea. The last thing we need right now is a nation of Hoovers.
I suggest that you re-read your history. Hoover was a progressive and was ramping up deficit spending and production controls. FDR ran against those policies but did a 180 when he got into office and basically just did more of the same.
That war on production is what made the great depression great. It didn't really end until WWII made it untenable - you can't have an empty arsenal of democracy.
Oh really? How did forcing "loans" on Wells Fargo and other banks that didn't need money save us from anything?
Note that as the money is repaid, it's being spent on pork under the "hey look, we didn't expect that" theory.
> the bailouts are in the black except for the segments bailing out the government mortgage banks
The payments to Goldman via AIG?
Note that Fannie and Freddie are continuing to lose money in a desperate attempt to delay additional housing market loses until after the election.
Part of the force in economics is psychology. If enough people think the dollar will crash then it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know if you were paying attention when, after Congress first rejected TARP, the stock market shot down severely again. There are many people out there that believe the dollar will crash - something Ron Paul has warned for a long time, long before our current economic crisis (a big reason for his sudden popularity). Many people still believe it's not a question of if but when. The scary thing is just how much everything flipped upside down, and Dr. Paul went from "kook" to genius, while at the same time Warren Buffet tells us he also noticed the shift, while attending a birthday party of well-to-do friends, where many started asking if their money-market investments were safe: "When people who drive Rolls-Royces are worrying about their piggy banks, you know you've got a problem" - Warren Buffet (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126056572135687829.html)
The stock market isn't the economy. Its moves now are somewhat independent of "life on the street". (That was even more true during the great depression.)
> There are many people out there that believe the dollar will crash
The dollar has weak for almost 10 years. It didn't and hasn't moved much.
Do you really think that Buffet has a "sense of the people"?
> General Motors needed to be rescued
No. General Motors needed to go into bankruptcy and have all of its contracts broken.
> and there are millions out of work, yet these items have little association with Bear Sterns, AIG, Wall St. etc., the financial institutions where the damage shook the pillars of our economy which rests upon the financial system and the dollar.
You're babbling.
> The point being things are connected
Yes, but that doesn't tell us that TARP was a good idea.
> The dollar is no longer backed by anything but promises
That's nothing new and TARP did nothing to change it.
> It's true the dollar has been fairly consistent for about a decade, and that's because our standing in the world has remained so - people still die to get in. However, a truer measure of faith in the dollar is the price of gold 10 years ago vs. today - $280 vs. $1080 respectively.
The price of the dollar relative to other currencies tells us the relationship between the US and other countries. The price of gold is a combination of absolute value and general skepticism.
Note that TARP didn't address any of that.
You do remember TARP. You're trying to argue that it was necessary. Yet, you've only mentioned generalities that are independent of TARP.
I guess you weren't alive in 2003 for the Guiness world record largest protest in human history against the Iraq war, including 400,000 in New York, 200,000 in SF, etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003_anti-war_prot...
EDIT: took out the London and Rome references
Is that outside the US? I don't recognize these cities.
Great choice of words. I love how it applies equally well to the USA and China. I agree, of course, and think it applies to most modern democracies, in whom I have zero faith.
1) Renew the current law. No real upside for any legislator, but no significant downside.
2) Reject the current law. Very little upside: the doves, paranoids, libertarians, and tea party activists who might actually care about this options are insignificant minorities within the electorate. Significant downside: it opens a legislator up to all sorts of "<insert incumbent name here> is making it easier for terrorists" attack ads regardless of the actual merits of the argument.
3) Amend the current law. An effort which would have needed to start a while ago. With enough bi-partisan support this could have limited the downside risk and enabled supporters to make the sort of "we are being smart about protecting ourselves form terrorists while protecting liberties" arguments that would have electoral upside, but given the current legislative climate it would have been a hard task to get the early defectors form the status quo which would have provided a bit of momentum.
If you haven't noticed, the Republicans and their mainsteram media lapdogs are going to attack the Democrats as being "weak on national security" and "weak on terrorism" no matter what they do.
If they want not to be attacked at all, they should just stay completely out of politics.
Of course, they should pick their battles, and fight the ones that are really important. It's obvious from their inaction on and even outright support of the PATRIOT Act, that civil liberties just aren't that important to them, no matter what their rhetoric might be.
The same has been true regarding their "opposition" to torture, to the Iraq war, to Bush's Supreme Court nominees, their support of the "public option" for health care, etc. The Democrats have shown very little spine on these matters, when it comes time to walk their talk. And the public is noticing. That's why Congress has such a low approval rating, and why the shine is wearing-off Obama.
Their spinelessness and willingness to be the Bush-lite party could cost them dearly in the mid-terms and 2012. They're just lucky the Republican party is tearing itself apart with their "tea party" splintering and fighting over who are the "real conservatives".
It isn't just that it isn't important, many of them actively oppose it.
Joe Biden's opinion on the patriot act: "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up [the patriot act] was my bill..."
The republicans could pick up some disaffected democrats as single issue voters on hot-button topics. But the social conservative agenda that the republicans are married to is fairly distasteful to people who regularly vote democrat - even if the parties are 95% identical in practice.
Of course they were going to get attacked on that point. What matters is if there is a public perception about a candidate or party that the attacks can use as leverage to rise above the level of standard electioneering and actually influence a voter.
The Democrats have shown very little spine on these matters, when it comes time to walk their talk. And the public is noticing. That's why Congress has such a low approval rating, and why the shine is wearing-off Obama.
You have obviously confused these people with some idealized version of the world that you imagine might have existed -- they were elected and get to do what they want to or are able to do, not what you want them to do. They are all doing pretty much what they campaigned on and what would be expected of them given the circumstances.
You must be joking. Did Obama withdraw all combat troops from Iraq? Did he close Guantanamo? Where are all those "green jobs" he promised? Funding nuclear power plants doesn't exactly qualify. What exactly has he done that was promised during the campaign? From what I can see he's backpedaled or even completely flip-flopped on what he promised.
But it's not just about Obama. The Democrats have been heaping on the rhetoric to seem like an opposition party during the whole Bush term, but when it came time to actually vote against his policies they virtually always caved (with social-security being the only notable exception) and voted along with Bush and the Republicans, whether it was on the funding of the Iraq war, or on the PATRIOT Act, on torture, on habeas corpus, on wiretapping, etc.
It's not some "fantasy" that they were against these things. They were, in word. But when it came time to act on their rhetoric they caved.
Now that the Democrats are in power, they have more of a chance to effect change than ever. But what are they choosing to do with that chance? They're choosing to support and extend Bush's policies (by keeping the Iraq war going, by expanding the war in Afghanistan, by fighting to keep innocent people in jail without trial, by continuing to send prisoners to be tortured in other countries, etc..).
This outrageous behavior is not making them any fans, except among the neocons, who have heaped much praise upon Obama's cabinet nominees, and must be very pleased with what they've accomplished.
If they were serious about protecting civil liberties that's just what they'd do. And the Republicans couldn't have stopped them.
Take the health care bill, for instance. It doesn't do anything helpful, just forces everyone to pay for a private insurance policy. Republicans can say they protected business, Democrats can say they reformed health care and everyone now has access, businesspeople stay happy and their money keeps pouring in, normal people are hoodwinked into believing their side did whatever it was they wanted, and this cycle perpetuates.
Counterterrorism is just the manifesting justification of this inevitability.
The debate on privacy -- or more accurately, the debate on the inflection point between real safety vs real privacy -- will be long and hard. It's a complex question that hasn't had an answer settled by any means.
My guess is that it's going to take a lot of work by folks like Wikileaks and the courts to make understood how the power is really being used. Only after a few cycles of (massive-problem -> privacy regulation) are we going to see some rational work in this area.
Sadly this is probably the only way it can happen; there just isn't any real data on what levels of privacy are appropriate with a civilization built on current levels of cyber-interconnection.
*The movie itself is not obscure at all.