Observations on current events

The So-Called War On Terror:

Wither the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and association?

The Supreme Court's decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project shows where individual rights stand, far outweighed by the National Security State. How many of our lawmakers will flinch, just a bit, when they realize what they're failing to guard against?

Healthcare:

The Commonwealth Fund: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: How the Performance of the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally, 2010 Update
"Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This report—an update to three earlier editions—includes data from seven countries and incorporates patients' and physicians' survey results on care experiences and ratings on dimensions of care. Compared with six other nations—Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. (graphic) Newly enacted health reform legislation in the U.S. will start to address these problems by extending coverage to those without and helping to close gaps in coverage—leading to improved disease management, care coordination, and better outcomes over time..."


The Gulf Oil Disaster:

Jason Linkins: BP Sends PR Professionals To Gulf Coast To Pretend To Be Journalists
"You know, a lot has been said about BP and its contributions to the natural beauty of the Gulf Coast states. But what we haven't heard as much about are BP's contributions to journalism, have we? I mean, we've basically covered the fact that BP's been doing a good job at preventing journalism from happening. But all that's about to change, because BP is sending its own journalists to the region, dispatched abroad from their regular offices, in Hell.
Basically, having grown tired of blocking other reporters from covering the story, BP is going to spend its own money on a bunch of in-house PR professionals who will reliably block themselves from covering the story. It's precisely the sort of genius move you'd expect from the company that's now more despised than Goldman Sachs, the corporate fecal-demons of 2009. The pioneering work of these BP reporters will be collected in an online magazine called 'Planet BP,' which the Wall Street Journal's Benoit Faucon likens to Monty Python's famous song, 'Always Look On The Bright Side of Life,'..."


Technology:

Bill Snyder: Say no to a government 'kill switch' for the Internet
"...a proposed law that would give the government a so-killed kill switch to essentially turn off the public Internet is very, very worrisome, and it raises the specter of some future administration using that power to crack down on its opponents. Imagine if the Iranian government could have shut down the Internet a year ago -- it tried but failed -- when millions were protesting the rigged election and brutal suppression of dissidents..."

The Gulf Oil Disaster:

BP's lies and denials about the rate of oil gushing from the ocean-floor geyser and ineptitude at solving a problem they created is reason enough to revoke their corporate charter.

Naomi Klein: A Hole in the World
"The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism..."


One Nation, Under Domestic Surveillance:

Jeff Stein: DIA to open new counterintelligence records unit
"The Defense Intelligence Agency wants to open a new repository for information about individuals and groups in what appears to be a successor to a controversial counterintelligence program that was disbanded in 2008.
The new Foreign Intelligence and Counterintelligence Operation Records section will be housed in DIA’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, or DCHC, formed after the demise of the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, according to an announcement that appeared Tuesday in the Federal Register..."


Consumers & Technology

The wireless industry has such influence in this country that I cannot imagine such legislation even being considered here...

CBC News: NDP bill aims to unlock cellphones
"Hot on the heels of Apple announcing it will sell unlocked iPhones in Canada, an NDP MP has introduced a resolution that would force cellphone carriers to do the same with all the devices they sell.
Bruce Hyer, the MP for Thunder Bay-Superior North, on Thursday tabled Bill C-560, the cellphone freedom act. The bill proposes three rules: cellphone carriers would be required to notify customers at the point of purchase whether a phone is locked to work only on their network; they would have to remove such a lock free of charge at any point after the conclusion of the customer's service contract; and they would have to remove it if the customer does not enter into a contract within six months of buying the device up front..."

Journalism:

Nieman Journalism Lab: What will Iceland’s new media laws mean for journalists?
"The Icelandic parliament has voted unanimously to create what are intended to be the strongest media freedom laws in the world. And Iceland intends these measures to have international impact, by creating a safe haven for publishers worldwide — and their servers.
The proposal, known as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, requires changes to Icelandic law to strengthen journalistic source protection, freedom of speech, and government transparency..."

Transportation / Energy:

AutoBlog: Officially Official: 2011 BMW 5 Series Touring is too cool for American families
"...Americans, it seems, are so in love with all modes of transportation that are slightly raised up off the ground that we have no appetite for station wagons. Even sporty ones. So says BMW. Instead, we get the rather mutated looking Gran Turismo. Just sayin'. With that out of the way, allow us to introduce you to the 2011 BMW 5 Series Touring, 'Touring' being the preferred BMW nomenclature for station wagon and/or station wagon you can't have..."

Apparently consumers here don't want a BMW 520d, which gets 46 MPG (U.S.).

On Privacy:

Paul Duguid: Privacy Degree Zero
"... In 1999 Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, famously declared, 'You have zero privacy.... Get over it!' During my paranoid winter, Google CEO Eric Schmidt offered a creepier argument in a CNBC interview: 'If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.' These reprimands are self-serving: Sun Microsystems and Google have an interest in persuading us to accept their intrusiveness and portraying resistance as, if not futile, then a matter of our wrongs, not of our rights. And whatever these private companies say about personal privacy, they are vigilant about guarding the corporate variety. I doubt Schmidt would believe that protecting Google's search and ranking strategies from prying eyes is a sign of Google doing something it 'shouldn't be doing in the first place.' Most of us probably would believe, however, that Yahoo shouldn't be selling its users' private information in the first place. But when this came to light, Yahoo effortlessly deflected complaints by denouncing the violation of its trade secrets.
If there's comfort in any of this, it may be that eleven years after McNealy's comment, a statement like Schmidt's can still shock. Privacy is something we haven't gotten over. For that reason, there's comfort too in David Solove's thoughtful examination of the concept of privacy: what it is, why it seems forever under threat and why we continue to fight for it. Solove's approach is primarily a legal one. It is not, though, legalistic. He is determined to avoid the trap of trying to define privacy. This only leads, he argues, to 'disarray.' He makes his point by surveying some of the standard accounts of the principle, starting with the claim of Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 that privacy is the 'right to be let alone.' This definition, he argues, 'fails to provide much guidance about what privacy entails.' More generally, he shows not that definitions are necessarily bad but that they don't facilitate negotiation between privacy and other rights. Our intuitive understanding of the Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, after all, tends to clash with our sense of the First. The right to conceal confronts the right to know and to reveal, and vice versa...
...As we experiment with our identities--something particularly important for teenagers--privacy offers the promise of an escape clause. It allows us to avoid being stigmatized through life for failed experiments, poor choices and poor life chances. The nineteenth-century European novel offered immigration to America as the ultimate escape clause and second chance. Similarly, privacy is a passport that allows for emigration from the dead weight of our past. More significant, as Solove notes in one of the most important passages in the book, such experimentation has not just individual but social consequences, as people resist society's pressures to conform. He quotes an insightful judgment from the Supreme Court of India ruling that 'individuals need a place of sanctuary where they can be free from social control...can drop the mask, desist for a while from projecting to the world the image...that may reflect the values of their peers rather than the realities of their natures.' As the House of Lords report on surveillance explained, 'Privacy and the principle of restraint in the use of surveillance and data' are 'central to individual freedom,'..."


Primary Elections:

FiveThirtyEight.com SC Democratic Primary Getting Weirder By The Hour
"OK, so in the few hours since I published this earlier post on the bizarre South Carolina Senate Democratic primary, things have been developing rapidly, and on a variety of fronts..."


The Mercenary Industrial Complex:

Jeremy Scahill: Is Blackwater's Erik Prince Moving to the United Arab Emirates?
"Sources close to Blackwater and its secretive owner Erik Prince claim that the embattled head of the world's most infamous mercenary firm is planning to move to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Middle Eastern nation, a major hub for the US war industry, has no extradition treaty with the United States. In April, five of Prince's top deputies were hit with a fifteen-count indictment by a federal grand jury on conspiracy, weapons and obstruction of justice charges. Among those indicted were Prince's longtime number-two man, former Blackwater president Gary Jackson, former vice presidents William Matthews and Ana Bundy and Prince's former legal counsel Andrew Howell.
The Blackwater/Erik Prince saga took yet another dramatic turn last week, when Prince abruptly announced that he was putting his company up for sale..."

The Gulf Oil Disaster:

Rolling Stone: The Spill, The Scandal and the President
"The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder..."


Bush's Failed Policy Is Still The Obama Policy?

Raw Story: Think tank: Neocons’ influence remains strong under Obama
"For those who thought the end of the Bush Administration spelled doomsday for the neoconservative movement, think again.
According to a May report (pdf) from the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC think tank, neoconservatives associated with prominent figures like former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and pundit Richard Perle are still broadly active, despite policy failures associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Brookings Institution senior fellow Justin Vaisse, author of Neoconservatism: A Biography of a Movement, argues that because neocons never had the degree of influence that opponents credited them with, and also because of a general unawareness of their history, observers don’t fully understand the trajectory of the neoconservative movement that began long before the Iraq invasion and one continues today.
'Neoconservatism remains, to this day, a distinct and very significant voice of the Washington establishment,' Vaisse insists. In May he published the report Why Neoconservativism Still Matters.
Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, says that the most obvious place the neocons are still influential is in U.S. policy toward Iran, where the Obama administration is 'continuing the Bush administration’s basic approach, albeit with a ‘kinder, gentler’ face,'..."


First, Do No Harm?

Democracy Now! - Experiments in Torture: Medical Group Accuses CIA of Carrying Out Illegal Human Experimentation
"A new report from Physicians for Human Rights accuses the Bush administration of conducting illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on prisoners in CIA custody. The report details how doctors, psychologists and other professionals monitored the effects of sleep deprivation, waterboarding and other so-called 'enhanced interrogation' techniques on more than a dozen prisoners. It charges that CIA doctors and other medical personnel turned the prisoners into research subjects and collected data in order to study and refine those techniques, but did so under the guise of trying to protect the health of the detainees..."

The Gulf Oil Spill Disaster:

ProPublica: Years of Internal BP Probes Warned That Neglect Could Lead to Accidents
"A series of internal investigations over the past decade warned senior BP managers that the company repeatedly disregarded safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident if it did not change its ways.
The confidential inquiries, which have not previously been made public, focused on a rash of problems at BP's Alaska oil-drilling unit that undermined the company’s publicly proclaimed commitment to safe operations. They described instances in which management flouted safety by neglecting aging equipment, pressured or harassed employees not to report problems, and cut short or delayed inspections in order to reduce production costs. Executives were not held accountable for the failures, and some were promoted despite them.
Similar themes about BP operations elsewhere were sounded in interviews with former employees, in lawsuits and little-noticed state inquiries, and in e-mails obtained by ProPublica. Taken together, these documents portray a company that systemically ignored its own safety policies across its North American operations - from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico to California and Texas. Tony Hayward, BP's CEO, has committed himself to reform since taking the top job in 2007. Top BP officials would not comment for this story, but spokesman Tony Odone said that in March an independent expert reported that BP has made 'significant progress' toward meeting goals set in 2007 in response to a deadly Texas refinery explosion. Odone said the notion that BP has ongoing problems addressing worker concerns is 'essentially groundless,'..."

For Sale: The Political Process & Public Policy:

Who, then, stands up for the People?

TPMMuckraker: SHADOW CONGRESS: More Than 170 Former Lawmakers Ply The Corridors Of Power As Lobbyists
"It's not exactly breaking news that Washington is stuffed to the gills with lobbyists. One good government group recently tallied 8 lobbyists for every member of Congress during the health-care reform debate. But what doesn't get as much attention is that, over the last few decades, a vast army of what might be called uber-lobbyists has taken shape in the capital, made up of retiring lawmakers eager to cash in on K Street after a lifetime of making do with public sector salaries.
We've compiled a close-to-comprehensive list of former members of Congress currently working on behalf of private interests in Washington's influence-peddling industry. We count 172 of them -- almost one-third the number of current members of Congress..."


Jim Hightower: Government Impotence and Corporate Rule
"Many news reports about the Gulf oil catastrophe refer to it as a "spill." Wrong. A spill is a minor "oops" — one accidentally spills milks, for example, and from childhood, we're taught the old aphorism: "Don't cry over spilt milk." What's in the Gulf isn't milk and it wasn't spilt. The explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon well was the inevitable result of deliberate decisions made by avaricious corporate executives, laissez faire politicians and obsequious regulators.
As the ruinous gulf oil blowout spreads onto land, over wildlife, across the ocean floor and into people's lives, it raises a fundamental question for all of us Americans: Who the hell's in charge here? What we're witnessing is not merely a human and environmental horror, but also an appalling deterioration in our nation's governance. Just as we saw in Wall Street's devastating economic disaster and in Massey Energy's murderous explosion inside its Upper Big Branch coal mine, the nastiness in the gulf is baring an ugly truth that We the People must finally face: We are living under de facto corporate rule that has rendered our government impotent.
Thirty years of laissez-faire, ideological nonsense (pushed upon us with a vengeance in the past decade) has transformed government into a subsidiary of corporate power. Wall Street, Massey, BP and its partners — all were allowed to become their own 'regulators' and officially encouraged to put their short-term profit interests over the public interest..."


Amanda Hitt: Safe Food, From Soil to Plate
"...Meanwhile, industry regulators, silenced by corporate influence on government, go unheard. Citizen activists, crushed by industry giants, are powerless to confront agribusiness as it pollutes the water and soil. Our system is failing.
It's easy to see why this has happened. Shoppers want cheap, convenient food. The industry is responding to consumer demand, and agribusiness is providing food at historically low prices. Today's consumer savings will come at far greater societal and environmental costs tomorrow.
It's been roughly 100 years since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, an exposé about the nation's meatpacking plants that led to many of our modern food safety reforms. Contrary to popular belief, that groundbreaking work was written to address the plight of the American food worker--not to make our food safer.
When asked about the food safety laws created as a result of his book, Sinclair replied: "I aimed for their hearts. I got their stomachs instead." Either way, Sinclair advocated food integrity.
It's time for Americans to demand the same."

Middle East:

AP: Israel Attacks Palestinian Aid Flotilla
"Israeli naval commandos stormed a flotilla of ships carrying aid and hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists to the blockaded Gaza Strip on Monday, killing at least 10 passengers in a predawn raid that set off worldwide condemnation and a diplomatic crisis.
Israel said its commandos were attacked by knives, clubs and live fire from two pistols wrested from soldiers after they rappelled from a helicopter to board one of the vessels.
Dozens of activists and at least 10 Israeli soldiers were wounded in the bloody confrontation in international waters.
Reaction was swift and harsh, with a massive protest breaking out in Turkey, Israel's longtime Muslim ally, which unofficially supported the mission. Ankara announced it would recall its ambassador and call off military exercises with the Jewish state..."