Using the U.S. census as a teachable moment

I received my census form in the mail today. I don't generally think twice about it - I understand why the government needs this information to allocate representation, funding, etc. But the insert caught my eye: the Census Bureau took the time to tell me that I don't need to worry about what they're going to do with my personal information. It is, after all, protected by law. Here's an excerpt from the Census Bureau website:

We depend on your cooperation and trust, and promise to protect the confidentiality of your information. Title 13 of the U.S. Code protects the confidentiality of all your information and violating this law is a crime with severe penalties. In addition, other federal laws, including the Confidential Statistical Efficiency Act and the Privacy Act reinforce these protections.
Obviously the Census Bureau considers these assurances regarding the legal protection of privacy to be crucial to getting honest answers. I'm not surprised - the information could certainly be used to identify likely tax evasion, immigration status, even occupancy codes. It is very sensitive information in its raw, unaggregated form. This isn't my first census form. I've had the opportunity to participate in the previous two censuses. But for me, for the first time, I am not reassured by their claim. After all, I'm pretty sure that warrant-less wiretaps are illegal too. As is torture - isn't it? I believe the evidence is strong that our government has authorized or allowed both activities. Certainly it was necessary to pass legislation giving telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution for participating in wiretaps. I'm no legal expert but to this citizen that means that the wiretaps are acknowledged to be illegal - we just won't do anything about it. So, how can I have any faith that the Census Bureau would live up to it's claims? How can anyone? But it's an opportunity. This is one of those "teachable moments" that a parent, or teacher would apply to an unruly child. What more natural consequence could there be for lawless behavior by the government than to say "You know what? I won't tell you that information because I don't trust you to act in good faith with it." The census, as an opportunity for civil feedback, is a perfect time to teach that lesson. I only wish that it could be recognized as civil feedback instead of the apathy that it would undoubtedly be labeled as.

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Why politicians like to keep “terrorism” vaguely defined

Why don't politicians clearly define the word "terrorism," the alleged principle on which they allegedly based so much national policy? As he does so often on so many topics, Glenn Greenwald hits the mark:

[T]he word that is used most frequently to justify everything from invasions and bombings to torture, indefinite detention, and the sprawling Surveillance State -- Terrorism -- is also the most ill-defined and manipulated word. It has no fixed meaning, and thus applies to virtually anything the user wishes to demonize, while excluding the user's own behavior and other acts one seeks to justify . . . The reason no clear definition of Terrorism is ever settled upon is because it's virtually impossible to embrace a definition without either (a) excluding behavior one wishes to demonize and thus include and/or (b) including behavior (including one's own and those of one's friends) which one desperately wants to exclude.

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Matt Taibbi compares the political parties

In a short Rolling Stone article called "The Way Out for Obama," Matt Taibbi compares the Democrats and the Republicans:

Democrats and Republicans are basically the same on a lot of issues: They both voted for the Iraq War, they both love pork and useless weapons programs, they both lift their skirts for Wall Street. But they have one major stylistic difference: Republicans are unafraid to exercise power, while Democrats try to run government like one of those pansy-ass T-ball leagues, where every kid gets to have a hit, nobody loses, and nobody has to go home with an ouchie or hurt feelings. Well, T-ball is over. If Obama wants to pass any kind of [health care] reform — even one as riddled with industry giveaways as the current measure — he is finally going to have to take a swing in anger. If he doesn't, it may well mark the moment when our government conceded that it can never force any powerful industry to accept any kind of change, no matter how minimal.

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Who is crazy?

The mainstream media is going after anyone who dares to stray from what they consider to be the proper boundaries of discourse. He dares to treat mainstream political discourse "as the political freak show that it is." That's why Alan Grayson, who is one of the few people in Congress who is really working hard to get to the bottom of serious problems, has a big target on his back--he is being labeled as crazy by a mainstream media that doesn't know what to do when someone asks real questions about real issues. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com explores this problem at length, pointing out the other side of the coin, that in Media-World, those who are certifiably insane are being labeled as "sane" as long as they stay within predesignated boundaries. For example:

Just consider who is supported and embraced by those who slap the "crazy" label on the forehead of every perceived dissident. Hillary Clinton -- the ultimate embodiment of Democratic Party Seriousness and Sanity -- supported the invasion of Iraq by warning of scary weapons and Al Qaeda ties that did not exist . . . and she spent her campaign beating her chest and doing things like threatening to "totally obliterate" Iran. While in office, Barack Obama has endorsed putting people in cages with no charges, assassinating American citizens with no due process, eavesdropping on Americans en masse with little oversight, increasing military spending beyond its shockingly inflated levels while searching for ways to cut Medicaid and Social Security, and blocking judicial review of presidential felonies and war crimes on the ground that those criminal acts constitute vital "state secrets" and must be protected. Most Serious, Sane Democrats have supported all of that insanity.
What honest person can argue with Greenwald's list? But he was just getting warmed up. There's a lot more, including this:
Meanwhile, the GOP establishment from top to bottom spent a decade cheering on torture, disappearances, abductions, unprovoked wars, chronic presidential lawbreaking and truly sick McCarthyite witch hunts. Both of the Sane Parties conspired to transfer, with little accountability, massive amounts of public wealth to the very Wall Street firms which virtually destroyed the entire world economy, while standing by and doing very little about tragic levels of joblessness or the future risk of Wall-Street-caused financial crises; kept us waging war for a full decade in multiple countries (while threatening others) even as we near the precipice of bankruptcy, the hallmarks of under-developed nation status and the disappearance of the social safety net; and are so captive to the corporate interests which own the Government that they viciously compete with one another over who can be a more loyal servant to those interests.
Greenwald is not suggesting that those who step out of the mainstream are always correct about everything they say. But he does give credit to Alan Grayson, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul for not buying into most of the rubbish that we are being fed by the media. We live in world painted upside-down by a media that is largely not about traditional Fourth Estate values. Rather than feed us information that will allow a democracy to thrive, the mainstream media, based on its constant miserable failures over the past ten years, is clearly more interested in destroying those who dare to ask questions that might threaten our corporate-military-prison-industrial-Complex.

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How do Wall Street banks make their money?

In the March 4, 2000 episode of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi answers a question on many peoples' minds: To exactly does Wall Street make so much money that it could hand out multi-billions of dollars in bonuses last year and this year? The story of Taibbi detailed article is that the Wall Street banks use at least seven major scams to make their money, and most of them involve taking advantage of American taxpayers. The seven scams can be summarized in one principle: "the answer . . . is basically twofold: they raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients." Taibbi's entire article is available online. If the extremes, the corruption and the opacity of Wall Street have angered you, you'll appreciate Taibbi's facts, as well as his colorful descriptions. The first of the seven major cons described by Taibbi is the "Swoop and Squat," by which Taibbi is referring to the fact that AIG should not have been able to hand over big chunks of cash to a single creditor like Goldman when AIG was about to go belly up. Taibbi correctly refers to this maneuver as a "fraudulent conveyance." That money accounts for $19 billion in cash that Goldman would not have had without the massive intervention by the United States. As Taibbi asks: "To is that $13.4 billion in 2009 profits looking now?" Taibbi cautions that these numbers don't even include the direct bailouts of Goldman Sachs and other big banks. I'll mention one more of the seven major Wall Street cons described by Taibbi: "The Dollar store." Less than a week after the AIG bailout, Goldman and another investment bank, Morgan Stanley applied for and received permission to become bank holding companies, which made them available for increased federal financial support. Why would they do that? You probably won't read this anywhere in your local newspaper, because it's real news.

Institutions that were, in reality, high risk gambling houses were allowed to masquerade as conservative commercial banks. As a result of this new designation, they were given access to a virtually endless stream of "free money" courtesy of unsuspecting taxpayers. The $10 billion that Goldman received under the better-known TARP bailout was chump change in comparison to the smorgasbord of direct and indirect aid it qualified for as a commercial bank.

When Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley received those expedited federal bank charters, they were given permission to go to the Fed to borrow huge amounts of money at 0%. Taibbi points out that without this federal gravy, these banks would've totally collapsed, because they had no other way to raise capital at the time. Consider what the banks did with this taxpayer money, however.

Borrowing at 0% interest, banks like Goldman now have virtually infinite ways to make money. In one of the most common maneuvers, they simply took the money they brought from the government at 0% and went it back to the government by buying treasury bills that pay interest of three or 4%. It was basically a license to print money--no different than attaching an ATM to the side of the Federal Reserve.

Taibbi writes that that "The Dollar Store" goes a long way to explaining the enormous profits of Goldman Sachs last year. The entire article is well worth reading. Taibbi has once again done a terrific job of describing the corrupt ways of Washington and Wall Street.

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