Happy Valentine's day NSA

Glen Greenwald and a number of other reporters I've respected for a long time have just opened up a new website which talks about national security issues that ought to concern all of us. I feel really insecure knowing my government is spying on me, and that some of the spies are sociopaths or fanatics who might misuse information or even invent information. I grew up near Fort Meade, and admired the NSA since I first read about it's origins with the Bletchley park folks fighting the Nazis. I have no personal trouble with spying on foreign countries. It helps prevent nasty surprises. But I do have a problem with the security state, which I've followed back to 1914 and the passing of the Espionage act and the rise of the Army War College, VanDeman and his bunch all the way through the rise of J. Edgar Hoover to the present. So I used to love Fort Meade. The Place wasn't always such a secret. I used to be able to drive through it, visit military friends who lived or worked there. But now it is completely different. It's been turned into a Soviet Style Secret city, and I can't even get close enough anymore to try to remember what it looked like before it was turned into a Frankenstein Monster. Here's a picture from Greenwalds' site of what the NSA looks like now. I'm surprised the person who took it didn't get shot down.

It's turned into a bureaucratic Frankenstein's Monster. American Bureaucracy is a frightening thing of Catch 22's, privateers and profiteering. Not sure how dangerous they are to our external enemies, but they sure are dangerous to our survival as a Democratic Republic. I'm Glad Froomkin, Greenwald and the others are creating a private effort, but that also means they are being divorced from the major media, which is culpable too.

I keep telling them to investigate the Fusion Centers and FBI links, but they seem focused on the NSA. Oh well. It's worth following them here:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept

Anyway Happy Valentines day, and I hope you aren't keeping any secrets. Please send a valentine to whoever is reading your websites or email too.

Happy Valentine's day NSA

Brazen Graft

I'm a pragmatist and so my pragmatist side often is willing to compromise with my ecologist side, or my "good government" side in the interest of people around the country having food on the table. But there is a distinction between getting things done and progress and graft. And our politicians dance near that line all the time, but the Republicans lately have been erasing it. Think Progress alarmistically reports: (http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/11/3277571/republican-party-state-public-lands-drilling/)

"[It] calls upon the federal government to honor to all willing western states the same statehood promise to transfer title to the public lands that it honored with all states east of Colorado; and …calls upon all national and state leaders and representatives to exert their utmost power and influence to urge the imminent transfer of public lands to all willing western states for the benefit of these western states and for the nation as a whole."

But of course there is a reason the Federal Government controls these lands, and there is a reason we don't want them transferred to states: We really don't want private persons getting permanent ownership of their mineral resources, or grabbing property that shouldn't belong to them. At least with a lease the general public retains some control. But once they are transferred to private alloidal ownership they become the rule of already powerful and greedy land and extraction barons. And there is a tradition of "leases", in this country, managing to become personal property that dates back to when the Dutch leased Manhattan. But at least that can be fought in court. The claim that such sales would be for the benefit of the nation as a whole are of course typical bait and switch "trickle down" promises. If this happened it would be just graft and usurpation as private landlords would pay Government employed lawyers to hand over property that belongs to us the taxpayers for pennies on the dollar. Graft "is the personal gain or advantage earned by an individual at the expense of others as a result of the exploitation of the singular status of, or an influential relationship with, another who has a position of public trust or confidence. The advantage or gain is accrued without any exchange of legitimate compensatory services."[http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/graft

A lot of extraction in this country is accompanied by brazen graft. Graft is so common that the legal dictionary calls the word "colloquial" though it has some pretty definite meaning going way back.

Regulating Personal Business by legalizing private behavior example legalizing Marijuana

I've got doubts about the safety or health benefits about marijuana. I don't smoke it, mostly because it is illegal, but partly because I remember when i tried it it was very harsh on my already delicate lungs. Legalizing it wouldn't change those doubts for me. And it being illegal hasn't stopped the vast plurality of acquaintances of mine from smoking it. Just me because I'm hyper chicken about such things. That risk from inhaling smoke seems to me to be the same risk as from smoking cigarettes. So if it ever does get legalized I doubt I'll smoke it anyway. But all that is beside the point. It almost got legalized in the early 80's, but a PR campaign, and some evidence from Egypt, convinced people it should remain illegal. Since then the evidence shows that it's not harmless. But if one made a scale look of it's harm relative to other drugs and products the chart might look like this.

Substance	Severity (1-10)
Arsenic	10
Lead	10
Cigarettes	9
Alcohol	8
Opiates	8
Marijuana	7

The right way to regulate cigarettes is by keeping them legal but restricting access. The same has been found for alcohol. Prohibition sends use underground and actually enhances popularity. Restricting sales to drug stores, liquor stores and similar outlets keeps them where law enforcement can watch them, and lets the government recover some of the health costs of their use. It seems to me that marijuana should be legal, sold in a restricted manner requiring ID, and use in public, while driving, or at work restricted. This works (more or less) for alcohol and cigarettes. I suspect it would work for Marijuana.

And it is insane to prohibit growing hemp.

People should have the right to do their private business without fear, and I suspect that includes the right to drink or get high. That changes when people's rights infringe on others as in common spaces like work, which is a privately governed commons.

Why the right was able to put the country in such deep Kimchee

Someone was asking me about why the Right has been so successful and what we can do to put things right, and that reminded me of some comments I'd heard on the Thom Hartman show. So tonight I'm listening to a "Democracy Now Interview" and they are talking about Caesar Chavez and his mentor, whose mentor had been "Saul Alinsky." So I had my laptop going and I googled "Saul Alinsky" and what do I find, pretty much the Right took their instruction from Saul Alinsky and other leftists. Of course they ignored the chapter about analyzing whether the "end justifies the means" but Glen Beck and other Righties organized the Tea Party as the culmination of organizing based on (and aimed at) the efforts of Union Activists like Ceasar Chavez who'd been trying to do something to help workers. Glen Beck has a book that is a homage to Saul Alinsky; http://www.bestofbeck.com/wp/activism/saul-alinskys-12-rules-for-radicals, so they demonize Saul Alinsky and then take pages out of his book. Essentially the modus operandi of the right is to hijack any strategies or rhetoric they can focus group test to work for them.

So the leaders of the far right read Saul Alinsky, love his ideas, and then try to warn folks to not actually read him in his own words because he's "Evil, but brilliant." John Hawkins quotes his ideas and how to "use [them] against "liberals" He's not the first but here's the list he uses:

http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2012/04/13/12_ways_to_use_saul_alinskys_rules_for_radicals_against_liberals, only he makes it 13 rules and kind of ignores Alinsky's own words to make him a straw devil:

Always remember the first rule of power tactics:

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people.

…The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

…the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

…the fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

…the sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

…the seventh rule is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

…the eighth rule: Keep the pressure on.

…the ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

…The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.

…The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

…The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. — Rules for Radicals

He doesn't mention Alinsky's commandment to consider ends versus means, and he doesn't note that the Tea Party considers his book a bible. Wikipedia reports:

"Adam Brandon, a spokesman for the conservative non-profit organization FreedomWorks, one of several groups involved in organizing Tea Party protests, says the group gives Alinsky's Rules for Radicals to its top leadership members. A shortened guide called Rules for Patriots is distributed to its entire network. In a January 2012 story that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, citing the organization's tactic of sending activists to town-hall meetings, Brandon explained, "his [Alinsky's] tactics when it comes to grass-roots organizing are incredibly effective." Former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey also gives copies of Alinsky's book Rules for Radicals to Tea Party leaders."

The Tea Party is really the culmination of a movement that goes way back, but got it's formation in the "Right to Life Movement." Those members read Saul Alinsky. They run for office to offices from Dog Catcher to Party jobs. And they follow Saul Alinsky's advice. When the Republicans organized the Tea Party they were focused on Economic issues. They were using social issues like abortion as a means to get "simple people" to vote against their economic interests. The Right to life Activists were then recruited (With lots of money from a few billionaires) to fight against Barack Obama when he was elected by forming the Tea Party.. So the Tea Party is essentially an anti-Left, anti-Labor, anti-women's rights brand of radicalism. Unfortunately they get their energy from racism, fighting women's rights, and other social issues -- and that irritates their funders whose real concern is effing workers. So when John calls Alinsky "evil" he's really engaging in projectionism.

So to fight the Tea Party and the right's appropriation of Alinsky. The best thing we can do is to read him and adopt his strategies.

Further Reading:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679721134/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=2477290328&ref=pd_sl_7oa4nfkg5z_b

The Horror that lies ahead

She said:

It is already the dark ages my friend.

Just because no one has connected the dots,

Doesn't mean we aren't at the end.

I said:

I believe that our POV influences outcomes so I won't go that far.

Hope may be faint but it makes a guiding star.

It's not the dark ages until someone kills me or I fail completely and pass away.

As long as there is one light in the darkness the dark can be kept at bay.

She said:

and that's how it's done Christopher....

making sure people don't believe the canary in the mine

I said:

I didn't say the canary wasn't dead.

Just that the entrance is up ahead.

And the people I'm leading are my responsibility.

We have to get to the entrance,

so we can be free.

She said:

do you think the peasants knew the horror they would face

when the Roman empire collapsed until the hoards burned their town...

or the priests started burning their midwives

I said:

Some of the peasants in ancient Rome,

saw the horror that lay ahead,

as they marched far from home.

While they were fighting far away,

Hannibal was burning their farms,

and carrying their wives away.

They fought Romes wars,

and came home slaves, broken and alone.

While the men who had sent them away.

Danced and drank in far Pompeii.

And who was worse? Hannibal or their own leaders?

What gained the corrupt senators and tribunes, when Vesuvius entombed them in their homes?

What lesson did they learn when their laziness collapsed the world?

They learned nothing! They brought in lions and circuses instead!

And when the corruption made them sick and their slaves turned to another God,

They became the bishops and convened an authoritarian synod.

They burned their own libraries, and poisoned their own great teachers.

Because it was easier to control the masses if they controlled the preachers!

They learned nothing, and they never will.

And when men invaded, some from far away.

They blamed the "barbarians" and blamed their own peasants.

And they married the barbarians, and played the noble game.

Living in dark and cold castles, and hunting peasants for fun.

Until they realized, if they didn't start learning science.

They would be conquered, by men from the Desert far away.

And sadly:

Power and privilege are like wood alcohol, a blinding swill.

It is on us people around them, to learn the lessons of history.

And stand up and teach them, and enforce the lessons of democracy.

For tyranny and dysfunction, are our greatest teachers.

If we but learn to listen with our inner ear,

and analyze the lessons of all the smoke and tears.

Our Officers earn themselves a "black spot" -- piracy in Business Government

I've been making the case that our inequality problems are political and not purely economic. If we had a system of owner operators then they'd be self governing, but our system is built on banks that rule the money supply, and businesses with partial or complete monopolies over resources or branded products. This system is designed to siphon money off to those who govern wealth, which becomes synonymous with those who own capital.

Paul Krugman weighs into the inequality debate. with his latest editorial in the New York Times:

"A few days ago, The Times published a report on a society that is being undermined by extreme inequality. This society claims to reward the best and brightest regardless of family background. In practice, however, the children of the wealthy benefit from opportunities and connections unavailable to children of the middle and working classes. And it was clear from the article that the gap between the society’s meritocratic ideology and its increasingly oligarchic reality is having a deeply demoralizing effect." ["http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/opinion/krugman-rich-mans-recovery.html?_r=0"]

And of course these gaps reflect political power as well a economic power -- and are destructive!

The report illustrated in a nutshell why extreme inequality is destructive, why claims ring hollow that inequality of outcomes doesn’t matter as long as there is equality of opportunity. If the rich are so much richer than the rest that they live in a different social and material universe, that fact in itself makes nonsense of any notion of equal opportunity.

But of course the "equality of opportunity" is false advertising too. Later in the article he notes:

The data in question have been compiled for the past decade by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who use I.R.S. numbers to estimate the concentration of income in America’s upper strata. According to their estimates, top income shares took a hit during the Great Recession, as things like capital gains and Wall Street bonuses temporarily dried up. But the rich have come roaring back, to such an extent that 95 percent of the gains from economic recovery since 2009 have gone to the famous 1 percent. In fact, more than 60 percent of the gains went to the top 0.1 percent, people with annual incomes of more than $1.9 million.

And this follows on a report that showed that the improvement in GDP over the last 30 years has pretty much all gone to the same people.

Basically, while the great majority of Americans are still living in a depressed economy, the rich have recovered just about all their losses and are powering ahead.

So we have a depression for most people but opportunity for the wealthy.

"An aside: These numbers should (but probably won’t) finally kill claims that rising inequality is all about the highly educated doing better than those with less training. Only a small fraction of college graduates make it into the charmed circle of the 1 percent. Meanwhile, many, even most, highly educated young people are having a very rough time. They have their degrees, often acquired at the cost of heavy debts, but many remain unemployed or underemployed, while many more find that they are employed in jobs that make no use of their expensive educations. The college graduate serving lattes at Starbucks is a cliché, but he reflects a very real situation."

I certainly found that to be the case. One of the smartest men I've known struggled while getting two college degrees and struggled in blue collar work until he finally landed the kind of work equal to his education and became a curator of a small museum.

What’s driving these huge income gains at the top? There’s intense debate on that point, with some economists still claiming that incredibly high incomes reflect comparably incredible contributions to the economy. I guess I’d note that a large proportion of those superhigh incomes come from the financial industry, which is, as you may remember, the industry that taxpayers had to bail out after its looming collapse threatened to take down the whole economy.

Krugman doesn't attack this but my Mathematically Perfected Money friends and folks talking about how capital goods are displacing workers (automation) have an explanation. If a person can only sell his labor at less than it is worth and must borrow to survive then all he can expect to net is a net transfer of his labor earnings to his employers and eventual replacement with automation that also belongs to those same masters. Capitalism is entering an automated stage where it no longer needs us. We are becoming 'superfluous'.

In any case, however, whatever is causing the growing concentration of income at the top, the effect of that concentration is to undermine all the values that define America. Year by year, we’re diverging from our ideals. Inherited privilege is crowding out equality of opportunity; the power of money is crowding out effective democracy.

Money can buy offices, and if not it can buy the officers.

So what can be done? For the moment, the kind of transformation that took place under the New Deal — a transformation that created a middle-class society, not just through government programs, but by greatly increasing workers’ bargaining power — seems politically out of reach. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on smaller steps, initiatives that do at least a bit to level the playing field.

What we are needing is not just income redistribution but a redistribution of common properties that have been usurped. The days when the super rich own oil deposits, own the assets that process the oil, and then make money from the refined product, need to end. The oil in the ground belongs to the commons and the companies need to pay for the privilege of taking out of the ground and compensate those harmed by the removal. Same with Coal and other minerals. We need to put the profits from oil in a National Sovereign fund not the pockets of fat cats.

Take, for example, the proposal by Bill de Blasio, who finished in first place in Tuesday’s Democratic primary and is the probable next mayor of New York, to provide universal prekindergarten education, paid for with a small tax surcharge on those with incomes over $500,000. The usual suspects are, of course, screaming and talking about their hurt feelings; they’ve been doing a lot of that these past few years, even while making out like bandits. But surely this is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing: Taxing the ever-richer rich, at least a bit, to expand opportunity for the children of the less fortunate.

All that is nice, but pinning hopes on education only addresses the openings where education is a premium entry card. But it won't end favoritism, nepotism, or the simple advantages of connections and access do to education and class. We need to enable blue collar people to have a stake in this country and people to own their tools and have a share in business capital.

Some pundits are already suggesting that Mr. de Blasio’s unexpected rise is the leading edge of a new economic populism that will shake up our whole political system. That seems premature, but I hope they’re right. For extreme inequality is still on the rise — and it’s poisoning our society.

Either it will be populism or it will be unrest. Either we'll have a system that is fair to everyone or it will degenerate into some Terminator/Robocop/Caprica future. It's not a new issue. Ellen Brown in the group "Global Research" (which I may or may not agree with otherwise) notes;

"The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913 in response to a wave of bank crises, which had hit on average every six years over a period of 80 years. The resulting economic depressions triggered a populist movement for monetary reform in the 1890s."

Ellen Brown then notes: "Mary Ellen Lease, an early populist leader, said in a fiery speech that could have been written today:"

"Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. . . . Money rules . . . .Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. . . ."

Krugman is pointing to a problem he is probably too afraid to take on too directly for fear of retaliation. But the solution is simple:

"We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out."

A "well regulated capitalism can only provide that if there is judicial, legislative and executive direction in the direction of actual justice and equity. But Ellen notes that the Federal Reserve Act was a bait and switch. Instead of holding the giant monopolies and banks accountable it ratified their governance of banking.

"That was what they wanted, but the Federal Reserve Act that they got was not what the populists had fought for, or what their leader William Jennings Bryan thought he was approving when he voted for it in 1913."

And Ellen then notes: "In the stirring speech that won him the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896, Bryan insisted":

"[We] believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. . . . Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson . . . and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business."

And you hear the same arguments echoed down to the same time, with, as Ellen notes, he answers "with this famous outcry against the restrictive gold standard":"

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Nothing has changed except the orders of magnitude of the wealth, and the internationalization of the issue. The privateering of banks in using paper money, and even more perniciously electronic money, to make loans and acquire people's homes, work, tools, and labor at a pittance is a tool with a power greater than a pirate ship's broadside.

Merely getting rid of the reserve won't fix this. But turning the Fed into the agency it should be and sovereign money issued by purchasing assets rather than loaning money would help. http://www.globalresearch.ca/one-hundred-years-is-enough-time-to-make-the-federal-reserve-a-public-utility/5362475

Further Reading:

http://www.wealthandwant.com/HG/what_the_railroad_will_bring_us.html

http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/11444/jerry-peloquin-disappearing-jobs-and-the-ownership-solution

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/education/harvard-business-students-see-class-as-divisive-an-issue-as-gender.html

"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/opinion/krugman-rich-mans-recovery.html?_r=0"

"http://www.globalresearch.ca/one-hundred-years-is-enough-time-to-make-the-federal-reserve-a-public-utility/5362475"

http://perfecteconomy.com/

Can we prevent a Hunger Games future?

I finally went to see "The Hunger Games" part II. My problem in watching it is that I can't help but think this is where our future is headed as a country unless we improve our government and make it more constitutional in spirit as opposed to lip service, and more democratic and locally run. The movie shows the evils of too much centralization and an all powerful bureaucratic police state. At the same time, this episode was a bit more hopeful as it showed the people starting to push back against the lies and deceptions of a media-propaganda based police state. Top down government has inherent evils, and without bottom up structures like representation in the legislature and judiciary, it eventually evolves into something really ugly as is depicted in the books and the movie. If we want a better world we'd best prevent the de-evolution of our country into pure plutocracy. We are already half way there. I've seen the Hollywood types already building games that resemble the Hunger games. And as we see what is happening in Detroit and other cities, it's not implausible. Just under our current system it's likely to be 50 central cities with hunger games going on rather than one nationwide one; maybe with a championship each year with 100 contestants...