Democratic establishment unmasked: prime defenders of NSA bulk spying
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
However, the title was a bit of linkbait. The real point is that no, it's not true that the parties in Washington do not agree on anything. The hardcore partisans all are very happy to work with each other to secure and increase the security state. For that reason, for pointing out the traditional wisdom is wrong in this area and that the problem here is not political but systemic, it was worth a vote.
I called my Representative, a Republican, to support the Amash amendment. Like a jackass, he didn't do it. I imagine Repbulican leadership did a lot of leaning on members to vote the amendment down. Looking at the Democrats (the other major US political party), I imagine Democratic leadership did a lot of leaning on members to vote the amendment down. While the consitutional system seems broken in the US - the state is conducting blanket surveillance and then deciding later what to review -- the political system, whereby parties gain and maintain power, seems to be working very well.
The good news is that the wheels almost came off the wagon: the amendment was almost passed. That means next time we'll all need just to lobby twice as hard to get our rep's attention. The other good news is that members of both parties came out to support the amendment, which means that the issue of the security state cuts both ways. Both parties could easily flip on this given enough pressure. It's just our job to make sure the pressure is there (while acknowledging that there is a vital need for national security and SIGINT)
And Sensenbrenner, a principal author of the Patriot Act, is outraged by the secret interpretation being used to justify these programs:
http://sensenbrenner.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Docu...
The key problem is that there is no system of checks and balances, no matter what your personal congress-critter might say. Terms that are interpreted one way when the law is created get interpreted another way in secret. Going after certain people becomes checking up on everybody. Checking up on everybody becomes store-now, search-later. The government's natural oversight and regulatory authority over commercial businesses is being used as leverage to collect data on the population against our will. It's just out of control.
I'm concerned that a Constitutional Amendment is really what it's going to take to put this genie back in the bottle. Sure, you stop NSA, but does that stop the FBI from picking up the keys? Stop any of a dozen other agencies from creating similar systems? I'm optimistic about this particular fight, but the overall war is looking like whack-a-mole out there to me.
Lots of HN readers are in SF.
If you want to make a difference on the NSA spying, find a credible candidate to run in the primary against her and put a little money behind it.
[1]: Smith faced five challengers in the 2012 general election on November 6, 2012: Candace Duval (Dem), John-Henry Liberty (Lib), Fidel Castillo (Grn), Bill Stout (Grn), and Carlos Pena (Ind).[14] He won the race with 63% of the vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Represe...
http://www.ksat.com/news/politics/Joaquin-Castro-Lamar-Smith...
Also the challenge to Smith was obviously not well organized. You don't have to be Karl Rove to understand that flinging five candidates against Lamar Smith isn't a great tactic for anyone but Lamar Smith.
Primary from the left have a chance in SF. You don't have to win to have an impact. You just need to make it credible.
The other thing that works is, if you are a big donor in the past, then don't write that check this year. Money gets their attention.
Being more paranoid than less I have a inkling that this system is being installed and police is being armed because it is known that if economy collapses, these will be instruments to quell dissent and literally destroy (imprison and/or execute) opposition - of those who might well lead the revolution.
Economy is doing good, but the external debt is mindboggling those who are in the place of power might know what we don't.
Think that case with the German who said on Facebook that they should visit the new NSA center in Germany, and the police visited him before he got a chance to do it. That's what we're really talking about here. If you think that developing such capabilities to stop protests is a little too paranoid for you to digest, do you really think they wouldn't do this if there was another massive protest against the banks, with the excuse that they're protecting the nation against an economic crash or whatever? The last time around, they arrested people for trying to close their bank accounts, and they weren't even that many. Let's just say that if this was an Intrade bet, I would be in favor of it happening.
The architects are liberal ex-hippies who just do not understand that they are building the framework for totalitarianism. I think there are a lot of us who just like playing with toys and do not evaluate the ethical ramifications of their actions.
Money seems to have that effect.
The internet is not just tech - it is almost a worldview. Governments don't deal well with satire, irony and cynicism.
Has it maybe occurred to you that e.g. Pelosi and Hoyer, whose lives were defined by the Cold War, have maybe a different view on life than the HN readership, who were mostly children when the Soviet Union collapsed?
The folks looking to increase their power at the expense of the citizenry are relentless. They spend their nights and weekends thinking up new ways to be more dominant. As citizens, we can't expect to combat their never-ending efforts with luke-warm responses or apologetics for our favorite political leaders.
When it comes to privacy/liberty/freedom, the only reasonable response to government incursion is a strong and unequivocal one.
Also, before we go there, yes I am aware they also did a lot of other horrible things, but we're talking about the NSA and their activities as related to the fourth amendment right now.
EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK
It does appear as though it was shut down the moment it came under scrutiny before a proper debate could be had about the legality of it.
Then I'd expect they appreciate the view that any government that perpetrates pervasive surveillance upon the populace at large with no notification & no recourse is the embodiment of Evil Communism™ and the antithesis of core American values, totally violating the US Constitution.
And yet, things turned out fine. The Soviet Union was defeated, America survived, and our biggest problem today, from their point of view, is not civil liberties but an ailing economy.
I can totally see how someone like Pelosi might think along the following lines:
1) The world is scary and the CIA/NSA serve an important purpose in protecting national security;
2) By and large government officials are trustworthy, and won't abuse their power (remember, she's a Democrat);
3) The NSA has shown colorable attempts to stay within the bounds of the Constitution (only collecting metadata, or only targeting non-US persons).
You may not agree with any of these points, but I think it's ridiculous to say that only bribery could make you agree with these points.
I didn't.
In other words, there is nobody telling them it's wrong and to stop. That's all outside their universe.
If the idea that maybe we don't need all this militarism and surveillance does make it through the layers of filters protecting Congressmen from reality, there is a general attitude that people saying these things are naive hippies, and that the fearless Congressmen are the 'grown ups' who can make the 'tough decisions' to spend trillions of dollars on defense and violate the odd civil liberty to 'keep America safe'.
It's not just that they can't hear the critics, it's that when they do hear the critics they feel smugly superior to them.
The reality is that the people seem to want this. That is the reality Congress works from.
If the argument was wrong when used 7-8 years ago in a somewhat different context, it's not automatically also wrong in today's context.
Peter King and Michelle Bachmann might be bozos, but on the rare occasions where they agree with you it doesn't mean you are also a bozo by some sort of associative property. This seems like the most illogical of smears, to say that because person A and B have the same opinion on a single topic they are similar in all natures (reminding me of the billboards touting the fact that the Unabomber believed in global warming).
It's also worth pointing out that the warrantless wiretapping program of 2001-2005 and the current wiretapping authorized under 2008 FISA aren't really the same issue as what the Amash amendment yesterday would have defunded (the collection of phone metadata under section 215 of the Patriot Act). Greenwald is somewhat mixing the issues and reducing this to an issue of just "should the NSA be able to surveil Americans?".
And this isn't a new phenomenon. The Democrats moved hard to the right with Clinton, and have ever since become a solidly center-right party with a social-liberal streak. As a practical matter, that was the only thing that could win elections with a voting population that was solidly center-right.
Democrats are moderate conservatives, not liberals. There are no liberal parties - and certainly no left-wing parties - anywhere in the American mainstream.
Can you elaborate on some policies that a truly liberal party would promote (that we don't see in the US)? Numerous countries in Europe have what are often defined as highly liberal parties by American standards. What do they do, what policies do they champion, that the liberal wing of the Democrat Party in the US doesn't? And so on.
(and by liberal here, I'm speaking of what's considered a modern left wing party by European standards (or "socialist" in some circles); versus classic liberalism that would have defined the near laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century)
"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
Today, the intellectual mainstream of the movement has shifted to neoclassical economic justifications: the value of environmental services provided by e.g. wetlands and mountain ranges, the potential economic costs of climate change, market failures resulting from the externalities of pollution. The progressivism and idealism is gone, replaced with detailed analysis of how pro-environment policies fit into our existing economic and value structure.
Well yeah, because like most political movements they're subverted as vehicles for power and the original motivation for their existence is just a loose excuse to gain more power. The result ends up being enormous amounts of money going in to feed thousands of regulations and government employees that really only pay lip service to the original intent of the movement or organization.
It's the reason why my default position with any government proposal is: scale it back, refactor what you already have, make due with less money, less laws, and less bureaucrats.
Ah yes, the environmental movement is just an excuse to increase government power, not to protect innocent people from vicious, ruthless, remorseless businessmen who have no compunction about dumping dangerous waste into lakes that people drink out of and swim in, as long as doing so saves them a buck.
It's not about the environmentalists who care and actually make the world a better place by stopping toxic dumping. It's the people who come along later and take over positions of power who torment ordinary citizens for filling a ditch on their own property, claiming that the ditch was "wetlands". It's the California coastal douchebags who aren't protecting jack shit on the coast but won't let you replace LITERALLY rotten boards in your own house because of a morass of idiotic rules, regulations, and and endless stream of power-happy "environmentalists".
A truly progressive liberal party would promote (in no particular order):
* Universal single payer health care. This is a no-brainer for anyone more interested in broad outcomes than ideology, narrow interests and grandstanding: universal health care is by all measures vastly cheaper, fairer and more effective than the monumental fustercluck that is American health care.
The American health care debate is instructive insofar as it reveals the fault lines of American power: the only reason there's a debate at all is that some sectors of American business want public health care (mainly manufacturing companies with established workforces) and others don't.
It also illustrates the power of the Overton Window. When the Democrats proposed universal health care in the 1990s, the Republicans countered with a more market-based approach. By the time the Democrats approached the issue again under Obama, it was already more market-based than the Republican counter-offer had been, but the Republicans just continued to shift their demands to the right faster than the Democrats could accommodate them.
The result is an abomination of a policy that leaves everyone disappointed and/or outraged.
* A legislative framework that protects worker rights, including workplace safety, overtime, vacation, maternity/parental leave and the right to unionize. America's record is deplorable on all these measures.
* A constitutional and legislative framework that protects human rights in the broad sense developed over the 20th century, including the so-called rights revolutions against discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and so on.
The US has led some important victories on this, driven mostly by the robustness of its Bill of Rights, but that Bill is also hobbled by an essentially 18th century, classical liberal view of rights. As a result, so-called "strict constructionists" have a legal wedge they can use to undermine the rights frameworks built on implicit legal extensions of the Bill of Rights' measures.
The Constitutions of some other countries (e.g. Canada, where I live) have moved forward to a more inclusive understanding of rights that embeds the 20th century rights extensions into the text instead of pasting them on with legal duct tape.
* Real gun control. Further to the essentially 18th century character of the Bill of Rights is the idea running through it that the only thing that stops governments from tyranny is the threat of revolution. America's own political history, coupled with the reality of dozens of other industrialized liberal democracies, demonstrates that governmental accountability flows not from the barrel of a musket but from robust democratic institutions and traditions, broad civic engagement, civil disobedience and so on.
* Real intellectual property reform: in particular copyrights and patents, which are profoundly dysfunctional.
* Real military policy reform. The US single-handedly spends about half of the entire planet's military budget. That's a staggering missed opportunity to spend that money on the development of social and economic justice.
* Progressive taxation. It's odious that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, and it has allowed for a society in which the wealthiest 1 percent controls 35% of the wealth, the wealthiest 5 percent controls 62% of the wealth, the wealthiest 15 percent controls 74% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% control just 0.2% of the wealth.
Progressive taxation would ameliorate that, and far from killing the economy would actually make it much stronger by moving money from people who have more than they need to people who don't have enough. The US is currently so far to the left of the peak of the Laffer Curve that real top marginal tax rates can go up significantly before any nonsense about reverse trickle-down will ever kick in.
* Real campaign finance reform. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision was a travesty of liberal democracy. American governments, parties and elections are fundamentally and thoroughly corrupt (in the Lawrence Lessig sense) and that financial corruption makes every other policy on this list more or less impossible to achieve.
I do think the flocking of these republicans to the NSA's (and by association Obama's) defense indicates the source of a bad smell. You're right, even a broken clock is right twice a day and having the conservatives who once opposed you rush to your defense doesn't automatically mean you've changed all your opinions. On the other hand it does strike me as a good enough reason to be suspicious.
His point is that the popular consensus that Washington is gridlocked by partisan warfare is a myth. In reality, the Democrats and Republicans aren't at war with each other, they agree on quite a lot. The real fight is between establishment politicians and insurgent, more principled members of each party.
He uses Bachmann and King as examples of supposedly "extreme" partisans who, according to popular legend, hate Obama on some deep, emotional level and would never support him no matter what he did. Yet yesterday we saw the two of them speak out in favor of the administration and its unchecked power.
At the same time, we saw Pelsoi and company, who are painted in the popular press as hardcore liberals (and perhaps even attempts to cultivate such a perception) siding with not only Bachmann and King, but also with the general outlook on the world held by Cheney and his gang.
All of this goes to support Greenwald's thesis (given at the beginning and the end, so I'm not sure how you missed it) that the real warfare in Washington is between establishment authoritarians, and those who have become weary (and wary) of the unchecked national security state, not between Republicans and Democrats as is frequently portrayed in the media.
This is actually a thesis that Greenwald has been hammering on for many years, in case you haven't read much of his stuff until recently.
"The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians. " -George Orwell
Fascists would also be appropriate.
That's the only likely future for mankind.
Orwell (1944): "the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'"
The fascist state was very much totalitarian, and the relationship with corporations wasn't conspirational, they were co-opted into the state for the benefit of the state's goals. Individuals were enabled and allowed to attain wealth through this scheme, but that doesn't mean they ran the show, at all.
The corporate state is very much totalitarian, and the relationship with politicians isn't conspirational, they are co-opted into the "holistic system of systems" for the benefit of corporate goals. Individuals are enabled and allowed to attain wealth and fame through this scheme, and are allowed to choose drape colors, but that doesn't mean they run the show, at all.
Edit: Terms like "Totalitarian", "Fascist" and "Communism" have real, historical backgrounds. When they are casually applied where they don't belong, they derail the discussion (much like "Nazism", hence Godwin's Law) and prevent a real debate about real issues.
How about we start small, and read the posts we're replying to, hmm?
"Totalitarian", "Fascist" and "Communism" have real, historical backgrounds.
Yes, and? Where did I mention any of these? Books may be too heavy to me, but I can parse single sentences from Wikipedia, such as this one from the page about totalitarianism:
The term 'an authoritarian regime' denotes a state in which the single power holder - an individual 'dictator', a committee or a junta or an otherwise small group of political elite - monopolizes political power. However, a totalitarian regime attempts to control virtually all aspects of the social life including economy, education, art, science, private life and morals of citizens
You see, the difference is basically that you put down slave uprisings, but don't care what color their underpants are, or wether they like you, or what they think - only in so far as that affects performance. Not sure where "making people wear flair", nodding to buzzwords or Japan fit in there, but at any rate totalitarianism, in comparison with simply controling the jugulars and assholes of golden gooses, is a silly and ineffective thing. It even sucks as strawman.
The US has the highest prison population per capita on the planet. It is most assuredly well on the road to totalitarianism.
No, even in that case, they still have no less potential for democracy than the government chartering them.
Sure, it is currently impeded by factors of the world it's embedded in, but in spirit it's still tyranny. Just recall how capitalism started out, and how much struggle it took to inject even the most rudimentary sanity and dignity into it. People got killed over that stuff. Now we have the constant backlash, always smiling with eyes that don't partake; just like some people want to see women back in the kitchen, others would love to have free reign back over the people who work for them. And goddamnit, if that isn't gobbled right up by some.
You can bicker about the words "pure" and/or "tyranny" all you want, but the point would be the same if he had said "have a strict top-down flow of authority", and then what? Same point, "requiring" a whole new set of responses.
The distinction between "pure" tyranny of corporations and the less-pure tyranny (because it was tempered by potential democracy) in government was the whole of the Chomsky quote, so its not "bickering" to point out that the tyranny of corporations cannot be any more "pure" than that of the sponsoring government.
> but the point would be the same if he had said "have a strict top-down flow of authority"
Corporations do not inherently have a strict top-down flow of authority. Labor cooperatives are still (generally)corporations. Governments control the structures that are possible for corporations, which can neither be formed nor continue to exist but through acts of government; if, in any particular system, strict top-down flow of authority is essential in a corporation it is because a government has chosen to make it so. Corporations have no less "potential" for democracy than governments do.
"To say that there is a major sea change underway - not just in terms of surveillance policy but broader issues of secrecy, trust in national security institutions, and civil liberties - is to state the obvious. But perhaps the most significant and enduring change will be the erosion of the trite, tired prism of partisan simplicity through which American politics has been understood over the last decade. What one sees in this debate is not Democrat v. Republican or left v. right. One sees authoritarianism v. individualism, fealty to The National Security State v. a belief in the need to constrain and check it, insider Washington loyalty v. outsider independence.
That's why the only defenders of the NSA at this point are the decaying establishment leadership of both political parties whose allegiance is to the sprawling permanent power faction in Washington and the private industry that owns and controls it. They're aligned against long-time liberals, the new breed of small government conservatives, the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, many of their own members, and increasingly the American people, who have grown tired of, and immune to, the relentless fear-mongering."
That would change the tone of the debate overnight.
Remember how pissy the mainstream journalist got over the DOJ monitoring its phone lines.
It's easy to justify spying when it is on those terrorists. Not so easy when the lens is pointed at you.
I just don't know if truth and politics are compatible. We may need a solution outside of politics.