Ten things Americans don’t understand

This article of 10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America was written back in 2012, but it is still highly relevant. Here are the headings: 1. Few People Are Impressed By Us 2. Few People Hate Us 3. We Know Nothing About The Rest Of The World 4. We Are Poor At Expressing Gratitude And Affection 5. The Quality of Life For The Average American Is Not That Great 6. The Rest Of The World Is Not A Slum-Ridden Shithole Compared To Us 7. We’re Paranoid 8. We’re Status-Obsessed And Seek Attention 9. We Are Very Unhealthy 10. We Mistake Comfort For Happiness

Continue ReadingTen things Americans don’t understand

Edward Snowden wins Sam Adams award

From WikiLeaks:

This week Edward Snowden received the Integrity Award from the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. These videos from the award ceremony are the first of Mr Snowden after being granted asylum in Russia. The videos show Mr Snowden as he was given the award by Ray McGovern (ex-CIA) who said "Sam Adams Associates are proud to honor Mr. Snowden’s decision to heed his conscience and give priority to the Common Good over concerns about his own personal future. We are confident that others with similar moral fiber will follow his example in illuminating dark corners and exposing crimes that put our civil rights as free citizens in jeopardy.... Just as Private Manning and Julian Assange exposed criminality with documentary evidence, Mr. Snowden’s beacon of light has pierced a thick cloud of deception. And, again like them, he has been denied some of the freedoms that whistleblowers have every right to enjoy." Also present at the ceremony was WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison who took Mr Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow and obtained his asylum. The previous award winners, all United States Government whistleblowers, Thomas Drake (NSA), Jesselyn Raddack (DoJ) and Coleen Rowley (FBI), were also in attendance. These videos were filmed on the October 9 and are released for the first time today.

Continue ReadingEdward Snowden wins Sam Adams award

Anti-democratic Scalia

At Democracy Now, Amy Goodman discussed McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, which has been referred to as "the next Citizens United."

Republican leaders and wealthy GOP donor Shaun McCutcheon wants the Supreme Court to throw out aggregate limits on individual contributions in a single two-year cycle, saying they violate free speech. "If these advocate limitations go down, 500 people will control American democracy. It would be 'government for the 500 people,' not for anybody else — and that’s the risk," says Burt Neuborne, law professor and founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. . . "AMY GOODMAN: During the oral arguments, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, quote, "By having these limits you are promoting democratic participation, then the little people will count some, and you won’t have the super-affluent as the speakers that will control the elections." Justice Antonin Scalia responded somewhat sarcastically by saying, quote, "I assume that a law that only—only prohibits the speech of 2 percent of the country is okay." That was Scalia. BURT NEUBORNE: And that’s the—that’s the gulf that divides the court on these cases. Justice Ginsburg thinks that we should use campaign finance reform to advance equality, so that everybody has a roughly equal political influence. Scalia says, "Look, if you’re rich, you’re entitled to have as much influence as you can buy." And that’s now been the collision, and the Scalia side has won five-to-four consistently in recent years."

Continue ReadingAnti-democratic Scalia

I have nothing to hide

Film Maker Laura Poitras responds as follows to those who say (in reaction to revelations regarding the surveillance state) "I have nothing to hide":

If someone says, “I have nothing to hide,” does that mean they want a camera in their bedroom? Or that they want their computer to be a two-way camera, feeding information into a government office? Do they want a switch that can be flipped so that your phone becomes a microphone streaming your personal conversations to the government? Most people who make the argument “I have nothing to hide” don’t fully understand the technical capabilities that the government has. They are vast. All these devices that we carry around with us can, at the flip of a switch, be turned against us. Our most intimate moments, our beings, ourselves... It can become an Orwellian nightmare where all these tools that we surround ourselves with can beam our whole life to people sitting in some secret government facility. It’s not that the government is necessarily interested, it’s that there’s nothing to stop them, legally or technologically. And a person would never know when it’s happening. They won’t tell you because it’s all a secret. I have a Gmail account, and I assume that everything is being handed over, probably in real time, to the government, and I think I should have a right to know that that’s happening. There are no technical constraints to this becoming a full surveillance state. And we hardly have any oversight, and any laws that exist are all happening in secret.

Continue ReadingI have nothing to hide

Tea Party Logic

I agree with this Salon article that it is counterproductive to write off the Tea Party as irrational. It is much more productive to work harder to understand the Tea Party's thought process. Here's an excerpt:

While each of the Newest Right’s proposals and policies might be defended by libertarians or conservatives on other grounds, the package as a whole—from privatizing Social Security and Medicare to disenfranchising likely Democratic voters to opposing voting rights and citizenship for illegal immigrants to chopping federal programs into 50 state programs that can be controlled by right-wing state legislatures—represents a coherent and rational strategy for maximizing the relative power of provincial white elites at a time when their numbers are in decline and history has turned against them. They are not ignoramuses, any more than Jacksonian, Confederate and Dixiecrat elites were idiots. They know what they want and they have a plan to get it—which may be more than can be said for their opponents.
In Jonathan Haidt's most recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, he makes a compelling argument that all of our become blinded when we get caught upon in tribal politics. His suggestion is that we need to work hard to unplug from the moral matrix in order to better understand the "other." It's a tall order in these times of great hostility and crisis, but I believe that Haidt is correct, that it is the only way out of this mess.

Continue ReadingTea Party Logic