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The neocons’ big Iran lie – Salon.com

10 Feb

It’s crazy-time for the neocons. The war in Iraq was a disaster; the war in Afghanistan still is a disaster. And now they’re after Iran. Don’t they ever learn?

“War is an evil. But sometimes a preventive war can be a lesser evil than a policy of appeasement,” wrote historian Niall Ferguson. “It feels like the eve of some creative destruction.” Illustrating the enormous chasm between clever and smart, the Foreign Policy Initiative’s Jamie Fly and the American Enterprise Institute’s Gary Schmitt suggested that, well, if we’re going to be there anyway, we shouldn’t stop at the nuclear sites, but instead go all the way and destroy the Iranian regime. “If strikes are chosen,” they wrote, “it would be far better to put the regime at risk than to leave it wounded but still nuclear capable and ready to fight another day.” The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephens concurred. “Destroying Iran’s nuclear sites will be a short-lived victory if it isn’t matched to the broader goal of ending the regime,” Stephens wrote. “The ultimate remedy is Iranian regime change,” chimed in Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.

As with the calls for war against raq, what all of these pieces share is a shockingly blithe attitude toward the likely costs of such a war, and a failure to seriously grapple with the consequences.

via The neocons’ big Iran lie – Salon.com.

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Obama’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers – Salon.com

9 Feb

Why are government bureaucrats so eager to operate in secrecy?

Government bureaucrats know that this sort of slow-drip intimidation keeps people in line. It may, in the end, be less about disciplining a troublemaker than offering visible warning to other employees. They are meant to see what’s happening and say, “Not me, not my mortgage, not my family!” — and remain silent. Of course, creative, thoughtful people also see this and simply avoid government service.

In this way, such a system can become a self-fulfilling mechanism in which ever more of the “right kind” of people chose government service, while future “troublemakers” self-select out — a system in which the punishment of leakers becomes the pre-censorship of potential leakers.

Looks like Obama is making Bush/Cheney look like stewards of transparency:

The Obama administration, which arrived in Washington promoting “sunshine” in government, turned out to be committed to silence and the censoring of less-than-positive news about its workings. While it has pursued no prosecutions against CIA torturers, senior leaders responsible for Abu Ghraib or other war crimes, or anyone connected with the illegal surveillance of American citizens, it has gone after whistleblowers and leakers with ever increasing fierceness, both in court and inside the halls of various government agencies.

There is a barely visible but still significant war raging between a government obsessed with secrecy and whistleblowers seeking to expose waste, fraud and wrongdoing. Right now, it is a largely one-sided struggle and the jobs of those of us who are experiencing retaliation are the least of what’s at stake.

via Obama’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers – WikiLeaks – Salon.com.

Is This Really Our Last Line of Defense Against CorpState Republicrats?

8 Feb

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Another 2012 Campaign for Sale – NYTimes.com

8 Feb

On Monday, the president … gave in to the culture of the Citizens United decision that he once denounced as a “threat to our democracy.”

His aides announced that the Obama campaign would begin to assist the “super PAC” that can raise and spend unlimited sums to support the president’s re-election effort. Even White House and cabinet officials are expected to appear at fund-raising events for Priorities USA Action.

Surprise! Surprise!

via Another 2012 Campaign for Sale – NYTimes.com.

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Europe Moves to Protect Online Privacy – NYTimes.com

5 Feb

The Netherlands is considering a bill that would require Internet users to consent to being tracked as they travel from Web site to Web site. And last month, the European Commission unveiled a sweeping new privacy law that would require Web companies to obtain explicit consent before using personal information, inform regulators and users in the event of a data breach and, most radical, empower a citizen of Europe to demand that his or her data be deleted forever.

“Europe has come to the conclusion that none of the companies can be trusted,” said Simon Davies, the director of the London-based nonprofit Privacy International. “The European Commission is responding to public demand. There is a growing mood of despondency about the privacy issue.”

Every European country has a privacy law, as do Canada, Australia and many Latin American countries. The United States remains a holdout: We have separate laws that protect our health records and financial information, and even one that keeps private what movies we rent. But there is no law that spells out the control and use of online data.

via Europe Moves to Protect Online Privacy – NYTimes.com.

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Facebook Is Using You – NYTimes.com

5 Feb

In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States….

Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages.

via Facebook Is Using You – NYTimes.com.

The protectionism boogeyman | Prestowitz

3 Feb

A second, more fundamental question, is why anyone thinks that free trade and globalization are always win-win. In the first place, free trade and globalization are not the same thing. Globalization involves capital flows, direct foreign investment, and technology transfers that are not usually involved in plain old trade transactions. Economic theory holds that free trade is win-win, but only under certain restrictive assumptions such as that all markets are perfectly competitive, that exchange rates are fixed, that there is full utilization of resources, that there are no economies of scale, and that there are no cross border flows of capital, technology, or labor. Obviously, those assumptions hold only in very few instances in modern trade.

Turning to globalization, there is even less of a theoretical basis for arguing that it is always a win-win proposition, and that argument is usually made without making a full accounting of the costs of globalization such as those affecting the environment, dislocation of workers, capital investment losses, and skills learning. The truth is that globalization may or may not be a win-win proposition depending on a wide variety of circumstances.

via The protectionism boogeyman | Prestowitz.

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From Ron Paul, to the Reform Party, to Occupy, to a New America

2 Feb

With your support, I secured a strong top-tier finish in Iowa and an historic 2nd place in New Hampshire. In Iowa, we more than doubled our vote total from 2008. We more than tripled our 2008 total in New Hampshire, and we quadrupled it in South Carolina.

—Ron Paul

People are catching on to Ron Paul’s honest, consistent, principled. and carefully planned program for combating fascism, racism, militarism and imperialism by returning to Constitutionally required and economically necessary LIMITED GOVERNMENT.

But Republicans are not catching on fast enough.

I registered as a Republican just recently, to be able to say I voted for Ron Paul in the Connecticut primary in April, but I can’t find, so far, any House or Senate candidates in this state who want to rein in the Fed and bring all the troops home, support the key Ron Paul fiscal & foreign policy proposals. Too many “military industrial complex” submarines and helicopters made in this state, I guess.

To mobilize that huge majority of Americans, mostly Independents and the 100 million alienated on the sidelines, who want honest politicians and real solutions, we’ll need to revive the Reform Party, test the Americans Elect processes, bring the genuine tax refusers from the ‘tea party’ over to the Occupy Mainstreet movement, and green the grass of the grassroots relentlessly before November 2012.

Let’s get it done this American spring, so we can hear the volume of the loud majority in the streets this summer.

Charlie Keil

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After the Battle Against SOPA—What’s Next? | The Nation

31 Jan

…For the first time ever, the Internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won. And not just in a close fight: the power demonstrated by Internet activists was wildly greater than the power Hollywood lobbyists could muster. They had awoken a giant. They had no clue about just how angry that giant could be.

The real question now, however, is whether this community recognizes the potential it has. Ours is not a Congress that has made just one mistake—almost passing SOPA/PIPA. Ours is a Congress that makes a string of mistakes. Those mistakes all come from a common source: the ability of lobbyists to leverage their power over campaign funds to achieve legislative results that make no public-good sense.

The (Internet) giant has stopped this craziness—here and now. But the challenge is for the giant to recognize the need to stop this craziness generally. We need a system that is not so easily captured by crony capitalists.

via After the Battle Against SOPA—What’s Next? | The Nation.

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United Kingdom Shows That Austerity Does Not Grow the Economy – Economic Intelligence (usnews.com)

31 Jan

The reason the economy is not creating jobs is simply that there is no source of demand to replace the demand created by the housing bubble. With nothing to replace this lost demand, companies see little reason to expand production and hiring.

Government spending is an obvious source of demand. However this spigot has been closed due to concerns over deficits. We have thousands of people in Washington who seem convinced that if the government would just stop spending money and lay off more employees then the private sector would respond with increased output and hiring.

While this might seem implausible on its face (what business hires people because the government has laid off school teachers or firefighters?), we no longer have to speculate about the impact of budget cuts and government layoffs, the United Kingdom is showing us.

via United Kingdom Shows That Austerity Does Not Grow the Economy – Economic Intelligence (usnews.com).

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