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By jdb, December 12, 2010

Wikileaks is much ado about nothing, and in the end will harm the very cause that Assange claims to celebrate. The only thing Assange has accomplished with ‘Cablegate’ is to make the governments of the world hold their secrets closer to their chests. Those ‘classified’ documents were available to hundreds of thousands of people, not exactly top level secrets – but Assange wants the publicity for his ideological cause. In doing so, he has only empowered the right wing in his country and ours – people he should recognize as his enemy.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze the man himself too much because all I have to go on is interviews but he seems to me to have the kind of self centered importance and, really, paranoia that can come from viewing the world through the lens of a computer screen, and only a computer screen. Even if his heart is in the right place, if it can be separated out from his rapacious ego, in the end he’s no different than those on the right who can’t see farther than their own nose.  

I am intimately familiar with the hacking subculture from which he sprang and that ethos, while very exciting on the surface, leads nowhere. I’d say he’s a geek first, an anarchist as an afterthought, and I tend to put the whole ‘free the information’ crowd there because, I speak from experience, the tendency with technicians is to think that all problems can be solved with technology, specifically computers, and given that, there is a group of them who think their particular ideology is the technological solution to everything under the sun. That faith in technology has gotten really extreme as global culture abandons it, and certain groups hang on to it even more tightly. They are wrong – in terms of real political reform, you have to address people’s hierarchy of needs, and land and bread come before ‘information’, not the other way around. Ownership of information, like any property, is as much a tool in the hands of reformers as it is in the hands of the elite. Robbing the people of that tool leaves them even more vulnerable to exploitation. And in the very real sense, it doesn’t matter if someone in Congo can look at ‘Mickey Mouse’ on a cell phone when their life is at risk and the damn thing is in English anyway. Politically, Assange and the Pirate Party etc. are just a sideshow, a dead end, a symptom of hoarded wealth and not a solution to the problem it creates.

I really can’t say anything about the date rape thing. Like everyone else I’ll just have to wait and see what the court says. And guessing which if any government has something to do with it would be only a guess. It seems like a government would be more apt to downplay the whole thing than to keep it in the media with a court room drama.

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By jdb, November 11, 2010

Slate has a very good series of articles about income inequality and the fate of the middle class in America:

http://www.slate.com/id/2267157/

I think they are leaving out something very important.

American top marginal tax rate:

Even though that paints an incomplete picture of tax burden, the correlation between the tax rate and the ‘great divergence’ of classes in the US is hard to miss.

Then there is this one – American tax rates since 1960, showing an increase in taxes on the middle class and a drastic decrease in taxes for the wealthy:

Basically, either intentionally or by accident the middle class was engineered out of existence.

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By jdb, October 14, 2010

I’ve said for a while that the Internet tends to isolate us, and our opinions, from other people and their beliefs. I believe it’s in the way the Internet was designed. I think Eli Pariser, president of MoveOn.org, does as well.   

“Instead of connecting us to the world, the Web is connecting us back to ourselves in an invisible feedback loop”

I suppose one could always look for the opposing view, which is rarely offered. Using the system is definitely something that relies on the individual fighting their own instinctual tendency, but I think he skirts the root of the problem which has to do with the nature of search and retrieval systems themselves – the main way we deal with the Internet. We find what we are looking for, and by extension, people who share our views and places that reinforce them. So fighting that tendency is not only fighting human nature, it’s fighting the nature of the network itself.

If the comments are anything to go by, some people are threatened to the point of anger by this article, which seems to criticize their perfect totem.  Another example of the kind of tribal microculture that has become so prevalent in the world.

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By jdb, September 10, 2010

We’ve all heard the grandfather story – at least a thousand times. “My grandfather came here to the USA and worked his butt off, didn’t take a nickel from anyone, I’m tired of paying taxes so people can mooch off my hard work” etc., etc.,

Well, so did everyone’s grandfather. One of the reasons they came here is because a lot of the countries they came from aren’t the kind of places where people have helped each other like this one is. So grandpa never bought a house? With the government subsidized loan? He didn’t go to school with the federally guaranteed loan? Or the GI bill? If your grandfather was like mine and the majority of his generation, he was civic minded and understood that we are all in this together. The ‘handout’ part of welfare is tiny in comparison to the stuff people pay in to or pay back. What people are calling our ‘welfare state’  basically makes it so that kids can eat and have clothes, so they have a small chance at the stuff the middle class takes for granted.

Our grandfathers built that system, and for generations, it elevated people out of poverty. They built the social welfare programs that in turn created the biggest middle class in the history of the world, a great gift for their descendants. Those descendants elected people who told them what they wanted to hear, that they could be spoiled and greedy and there were no consequences, that people were only poor because they deserved it, homeless because they wanted to be, and so the GOP started exploiting people’s selfishness, killing our society – and the middle class, so they could keep our wealth for themselves, destroying lives so they could keep the cost of labor low.

Of course, it’s a free country, a level playing field, right? Well it depends on what one’s vision of ‘freedom’ is. The GOP’s version of freedom includes the freedom to live in a country full of families that made a ‘bad’ choice (like choosing between eating and paying for health care) and therefore future generations will live in poverty. There is a difference between ‘freedom’ in the mind of people who don’t understand why they have what they do (hint: they think it’s because of their ‘hard work’) and real freedom which comes from living in a modern democracy and not some backwards pit where the peasants have been trained to tell themselves they have the ‘freedom to fail’ and if they just love god/Allah/whatever they will inherit the earth.

But we cling to our myths, fed to us on a stick by the rich. Funny, they could be dispelled by looking at a federal or state budget. But they serve a purpose, and that is to make those who are being exploited feel rewarded. These myths are the same nonsense that always falls from the lips of the puritanical bourgeoisie right before they throw away everything they have because they don’t know how they got it in the first place. Anyone who doesn’t make the connection between the federal government and the fact that they get to live in a house that isn’t falling over, they have food that isn’t poison, electricity, roads, and schools, has absolutely no idea what happened in this country in the last century.

Here we are at yeat another crossroads. The post-Bush GOP is the greatest homegrown threat to western civilization since the Nazis. Their vile rhetoric makes the US look more and more like Italy in the 20′s and 30′s every day. If they win their precious power back, it’s over. I mean ALL of it, over. America will transmogrify from a force of good in the world into a brute force of destruction. These stakes are too high to risk letting them return to power.

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By jdb, September 6, 2010

I updated this post, about the structural and policy changes in the government that came about because of the Hart-Rudman Commission. Obama has continued to implement many of the suggestions of the commission above and beyond the major changes that Bush executed.

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By jdb, September 3, 2010

MLK’s ‘Dream’ speech should not be in the public domain, no matter it’s historical significance. One man wrote that speech – Dr. Martin Luther King. There is no real reason for the state (the public) to seize that property. How is it in the public interest, how does it feed the public good? The speech is widely available in it’s original form and copyright protects it’s integrity. If it wasn’t copyrighted, Fox News could rearrange it at will and rewrite history in the minds of half the population. Pampers could make a video about having a dream about a dry butt. Want to see MLK selling Viagra? It would happen. Quickly the speech could lose meaning as it became not a product, but a thousand products. As it is, they would get sued. Which is in the public good.

Ever see a commercial feature a song that you know had meaning to tons of people, real meaning in their memories, and it’s altered and used to sell air fresheners or deodorant? In a lot of cases that’s because it’s owned by a group of people – a corporation. If the ‘public’, the biggest group of all, owns something, it really gets the treatment. It loses all meaning and before long nobody even knows what it is or where it came from. Think about all those old melodies from a hundred years ago that everyone has heard but nobody knows more than a snatch of, the public doesn’t know what it is, and they don’t care. The public domain is a graveyard. Copyright maintains the integrity and definition of works and keeps our cultural landscape from turning into a mess of nothing.

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By jdb, August 19, 2010

“Poll shows more Americans think Obama is a Muslim”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/18/AR2010081806913.html

Why are we even having polls with questions like ‘are Muslims patriotic Americans?’ …it sounds so much like ‘Are Jews really German?’ the GOP’s entire platfrom is race, basically about how different groups of brown poeople aren’t ‘real like us’ in one way or another. I don’t care if all the Democrats had for candidates were dog turds, the GOP has to be kept out of power or America’s gross racism will become institutionalized and atrocities will undoubtedly follow. This is real. We are in trouble.

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By jdb, April 26, 2010

I don’t know if Eisenhower meant this or more importantly in what context it was said, but it sure is cool.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

–Five Star General, 41-year veteran, and POTUS, Dwight D. Eisenhower

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By jdb, February 21, 2010

I find it disturbing that some of the larger local governments in the US started to call their citizens ‘customers’ about ten years ago. It implies the only power we have is purchasing power – which in the final analysis is nothing, no ability to shape the ‘product’ or the context for the ‘product’, only to choose to buy or wait for the alternative, if it ever comes. To choose the less evil option with the most pleasing logo, the jolliest jingle. It implies the constant tendency of capitalism to cater to the lowest common denominator and discards the little tyrannies that protect the rights of the minority, civil rights, personal liberties, copyrights and trademarks for that matter, all of which might be heading for the closeout bin if it’s not too late.

Around the same time that we became ‘customers’ instead of ‘citizens’, when the change winds blew through the federal government, companies became ‘clients’ of federal agencies, according to a few escapees that used to work there. I suppose the customers are to be served and charged, and the clients are to be … obeyed? If we accept the label of ‘customer’ for ourselves and speak in terms of affecting change with ‘the power of the dollar’ we have already lost the most important fight. The fight to be something more than a mark, a target for marketing, a credit rating, a bank balance, an anonymous voice in an opinion poll. Because that is all that a customer can be.

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By jdb, January 23, 2010

We have to admit it, we elected a card-carrying centrist for president. He took the middle ground in political debate during the election and he still does now. In the aftermath of the grueling health care debate, he still sits firmly in the middle between the left and the right. The left wants European style, universal health care, the right wants things as they are. The health care bill that just slid off the table splits the difference. Obama is still at the center of the whole mess, holding what’s left.

We’ve heard the statistics. The countries that have the best health care and healthiest populations have universal health care, where people with the means can buy extra coverage if they want – and in those countries, the extra coverage is more affordable too, because the system is more efficient. Obama knows this, but he’s a pragmatist, so he pushed for a compromise solution. He invited conservatives and Republicans to the table and said ‘make me a bill’ – and The resulting bill on the table, what all the fuss was about, was a big compromise between people who want a government run system and people who want things like they are. It was basically just government regulations for health care and a bunch of money for Medicaid so that dirt poor people (people with no money in the bank and very low incomes) can go to a doctor. It’s a nice middle ground but the entire Republican party opposes it. An entire party opposes it because they have a near religious belief that government is bad, wall street is good, and they want their power back. With that belief, they brought this country to the brink of collapse – again.

The Republicans created the Great Depression with their policies that favored business over the people, but as the Great Depression faded into memory, the American people have slowly been convinced that taxes and government programs are bad, they have been convinced over time that all government is bad and can do nothing for them – that they are not part of the government at all, that government is separate from them and preys upon them. Previous generations understood that this was not the case, but the same forces and philosophy that brought us the Great Depression have managed to chip away at the U.S. Government’s effectiveness and alter the people’s attitude toward government. Even though public health like medicare is proven to be more efficient and effective than paying private insurance, people don’t want government to do it because horrible leaders like Nixon and Bush have screwed up people’s belief in their country.

The people’s belief that they are powerless and that they have no voice in government has served special interests well, that basic disappointment, coupled with the ‘soundbyte’ nature of current political discourse, has allowed misinformation to spread. Repeatedly during the health care debates, much was made about ‘cuts’ in Medicare. Most of the so-called Medicare ‘cuts’ in the bill come from stopping the free subsidies given to insurance companies for running ‘medicare advantage’, which was a way for Republicans to destroy medicare by funneling seniors into crummy HMO’s from private insurers instead.

Much is made of the insuffiencies in our own public health care system, but those problems were created by the very party that is stonewalling reform. For instance, Medicaid long-term care only kicks in when a senior is virtually bankrupt – and medicare stops covering nursing home care long before that. But Republicans have blocked every attempt to raise the resource limit for medicaid to keep pace with inflation, it has hardly changed in forty years. Veterans often criticize the VA and the Republican party points to it as an example of badly run public health, but Republicans have blocked every attempt to keep the VA well funded and take care of our soldiers. Republicans negotiated huge holes in Medicare to protect their friends in the insurance industry. If our public health system has problems, they were created by people that have something to lose if it doesn’t.

Our political system relies on compromise and reason. The Republicans have failed to respond to compromise or reason, and the left is calling for Obama to pull off the kid gloves – and forsake the things that make the constitutional system he is sworn to uphold function. How does a politician who believes in our system respond to people who trample all over that system they claim to cherish? How do you undo forty years of Republican subversion of people’s basic patriotism?