Sunday, October 26, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Having jotted down one or two of these on the road, I figured on doing a Sunday links column, followed by a Monday music column, just like normal times. Didn't work out that way, but thanks to the magic of back-dating my tardiness will eventually be forgotten.

  • Alex Henderson: Rise of the American police state: 9 disgraceful events that paved the way: Let's just list 'em:

    1. Ronald Reagan Escalates the War on Drugs
    2. Rodney King Beating of 1991
    3. 9/11 Terrorist Attacks
    4. Waterboarding and Torture at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base
    5. Growth and Expansion of Asset Forfeiture Laws
    6. National Defense Authorization Act and Erosion of Habeas Corpus
    7. Department of Homeland Security Promoting Militarization of Local Police Departments
    8. Growth of the Prison/Industrial Complex
    9. NYPD Assault on Occupy Wall Street

    Note that nothing facilitates the creation of a police state like war -- even pretend-wars like the one on drugs, but see how the pace picks up with 2001?

  • Paul Krugman: The Invisible Moderate: A more accurate assessment of Obama than the one Krugman put forth in his Rolling Stone puff piece:

    I actually agree with a lot of what David Brooks says today. But -- you know there has to be a "but" -- so does a guy named Barack Obama. Which brings me to one of the enduringly weird aspects of our current pundit discourse: constant calls for a moderate, sensible path that supposedly lies between the extremes of the two parties, but is in fact exactly what Obama has been proposing. [ . . . ]

    Well, the Obama administration would love to spend more on infrastructure; the problem is that a major spending bill has no chance of passing the House. And that's not a problem of "both parties" -- it's the GOP blocking it. Exactly how many Republicans would be willing to engage in deficit spending to expand bus networks? (Remember, these are the people who consider making rental bicycles available an example of "totalitarian" rule.) [ . . . ]

    It's an amazing thing: Obama is essentially what we used to call a liberal Republican, who faces implacable opposition from a very hard right. But Obama's moderation is hidden in plain sight, apparently invisible to the commentariat.

    Actually, when I think of Obama as a "liberal Republican" I flash back to an earlier Illinois senator, Charles Percy, who was better on foreign policy and no worse on economics or civil rights than Obama. But Obama doesn't have the luxury of being a liberal Republican, or for that matter a centrist Democrat. Today's Republicans allow no such luxury, nor do today's problems. As far back as 1998, Jim Hightower warned: "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos." Today there's just more roadkill.

    By the way, Krugman's too kind to Brooks, whom he quotes as saying, "the government should reduce its generosity to people who are not working but increase its support for people who are. That means reducing health benefits for the affluent elderly . . ." You may wonder why the party of the rich proposes adding means tests to Medicare. It's because they don't want anyone to think they have a right to medical care.

  • Seth McElwee: Why Turning Out the Vote Makes a Huge Difference in Four Charts: The charts show that non-voters are consistently more liberal than voters, which reinforces the by-now-conventional view that Democrats win when then can get the vote out, while the key for Republican gains is voter suppression. This doesn't go into the question of why non-voters don't vote, even though voting is one of the few ways they have to advance their own interests. Clearly one reason is that the economic costs of voting (which include things like the time it takes to vote) are high enough to suppress turnout. Another likely reason is widespread cynicism about politicians -- especially about Democrats, who appeal for public support on election day but more often than not spend the rest of their time triangulating between interest group lobbies, raising money that they often see as more valuable in securing reëlection than any work they do to benefit their constituents.

    When voter turnout is discussed in public it is often treated as a civic obligation, rather than a means to advance individual interests. Republican candidates often denounce low-income voters for voting for the party that best advances their class interests (while at the same time supporting massive tax cuts for their rich constituents). Yet when Benjamin Page interview the rich he finds that they, "acknowledged a focus on fairly narrow economic self-interest" when discussing their engagement in the political process. In this way, the recent Lil' Jon video, "Turnout For What," while tacky, has reframed the voting as a means to forward political interests, rather than as a civic obligation. Since some 41 percent of non-voters claim that their vote wouldn't matter, this message is important. It's also important to remove barriers to voting. Research by Jame Avery and Mark Peffley finds, "states with restrictive voter registration laws are much more likely to be biased toward upper-class turnout." In contrast, states that have adopted same-day registration and vigorously enforced the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) have lower levels of class bias in their electorate. Research also suggests that unions are an important mechanism for low and middle income voters to engage with the political process. Attempts to disempower than should also be viewed through the lens of voter suppression.

    Indeed, Republican opposition to unions seems to have more to do with reducing their political effectiveness than as a favor to the rich. Since their blip in 2010, when Obama voters took a nap, Republicans have seized the opportunity to do as much as they could to suppress voting (as well as to distort it through the infusion of extraordinary sums of money). I expect this to produce some kind of backlash -- the message for those who bother to pay attention is that your vote must be worth something, otherwise why would they be so eager to take it away? -- but thus far the clearest message is how shameless Republicans have become about their desire to exclude a really large segment of the American people. For more on voter suppression efforts, see Jeffrey Toobin: Freedom Summer, 2015 (and from 2012, Jane Mayer: The Voter-Fraud Myth).

  • Paul Woodward: Terrorism exists in the eye of the beholder: I was in Arkansas Tuesday [October 22], when a soldier on duty at a "war memorial" in Ottawa [Canada] was shot by a lone gunman, presumably the person shot and killed later that day in Canada's Parliament building. The TV was tuned into CNN, where they spent the entire day blabbing on and on based on scant information and fervid imagination. The shooter was later identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau.

    In 2012 there were seven murders in Ottawa (population close to a million), 2013 nine murders, and so far in 2014 there have been five (including yesterday's).

    The overwhelming majority of the crazy men running round shooting innocent people are on this side of the border. What makes them dangerous is much less the ideas in their heads than the ease with which they can lay their hands on a gun.

    It's often hard to be clear about what should be described as terrorism. What's much easier to discern is hysteria.

    By the way, Zehaf-Bibeau's gun was evidently a Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle, a design that dates back to 1894 and is limited to eight rounds, which have to be individually loaded -- a very inefficient choice for a "shooting rampage."

    Then on Friday [October 24], a high school student in suburban Seattle went on his own shooting rampage, killing two and injuring three more before shooting himself. I missed CNN's wall-to-wall coverage (assuming that's what they did), but it's safe to guess that the talking heads spent much less time speculating on the shooter's ties to ISIS. For one thing, shooting each other is just something Americans do.

  • I don't have time to dig through Israel's recent garbage, but if you do here are some typical links from Mondoweiss:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Tom Engelhardt: Entering the Intelligence Labyrinth: An introduction, or precis, of Engelhardt's new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (paperback, Haymarket Books). It bears repeating that the US annually spends $68 billion on 17 major "intelligence" agencies -- sorry for the quotes but it's hard to think of them without choking on that word -- that do, well, what exactly? Sorry, that's a secret, but thanks to the occasional leak or boast we do know a wee bit:

    You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for . . . well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you've created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of "spycraft" gains its own name: LOVEINT.

    You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees, creating the sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into the "backdoors" of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user accounts. You create new outfits within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of events and regularly rubberstamp them -- and whose judgments and substantial body of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about.

    You have put extraordinary effort into ensuring that information about your world and the millions of documents you produce doesn't make it into our world. You even have the legal ability to gag American organizations and citizens who might speak out on subjects that would displease you (and they can't say that their mouths have been shut). You undoubtedly spy on Congress. You hack into congressional computer systems. And if whistleblowers inside your world try to tell the American public anything unauthorized about what you're doing, you prosecute them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a foreign power (which, in a sense, they are, since you treat the American people as if they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck their lives and -- should one escape your grasp -- you hunt him implacably to the ends of the Earth.

    As for your top officials, when their moment is past, the revolving door is theirs to spin through into a lucrative mirror life in the intelligence-corporate complex. [ . . . ]

    Keep in mind that the twenty-first-century version of intelligence began amid a catastrophic failure: much crucial information about the 9/11 hijackers and hijackings was ignored or simply lost in the labyrinth. That failure, of course, led to one of the great intelligence expansions, or even explosions, in history. (And mind you, no figure in authority in the national security world was axed, demoted, or penalized in any way for 9/11 and a number of them were later given awards and promoted.) However they may fail, when it comes to their budgets, their power, their reach, their secrecy, their careers, and their staying power, they have succeeded impressively.

    Speaking of secrets, also see: Nick Turse: Uncovering the Military's Secret Military (back from 2011, more relevant than ever):

    In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once "special" for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.

    That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even while many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows. Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from Admiral Olson: "I am convinced that the forces . . . are the most culturally attuned partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive, agile, innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers, problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer."

    I suspect that the main target of that propaganda campaign is the president, to drive home the point that "special forces" are a no-risk, high-return, small scale option for any problem that can be solved simply (with a bullet, that is).

  • Rory Fanning: Why Do We Keep Thanking the Troops?: I can't be the only person who finds the constant adulation given to the "troops" of the US military downright disgusting, but it sure is hard to find anyone saying so in print. America has always cultivated hypocrisy, and those in my generation suffered through more than usual dose. We noted the beginnings of a cult of the troops in the Vietnam War, where failure on the battlefield was ever-more-generously decorated with medals, but memory was too close to WWII to get carried away: WWII was an intense, all-encompassing collective effort; with so few uninvolved it would have seemed silly to declare everyone a hero (although as memory dimmed that eventually happened with the "greatest generation" hype). The obvious excuse for putting troops on a pedestal today is that so few people sign up (and many of them are tricked into thinking it's some sort of jobs program). Still, this idolatry obscures one of the fundamental political questions of our time: do the sacrifices of US troops do any good for the vast majority of Americans who are otherwise uninvolved? The answer, I'm certain, is no. If all the US had done after 9/11/2001 was to put out a few Interpol warrants, I doubt that even the tiny number of "terrorist attacks" we've seen since would have happened. Had we practiced policies in the Middle East favoring democracy and basic human rights for all but eschewing intervention and arms sales we probably would have missed out on 9/11 (and both Gulf Wars). Sure, the troops had no real say in the decision to squander their lives in a vain attempt to buttress the Neocon ego, but I'm not so sure they shouldn't shoulder some of the blame. Back in the Vietnam War days there was a popular saying: "suppose they gave a war and nobody came." We were under no illusion that most of those who "came" for the war then were compelled to do so. I can understand, and even sympathize, how one might succumb to the force of the state -- I did, after all, feel that force -- but for me that made those who resisted, either by going to jail or avoiding that fate, were the era's real heroes; nothing one could do in battle came close. Since the draft ended, the choice to deny the war machine its bodies is less fraught, and indeed most people choose that path. So today's troops range from malevolent to the merely misinformed, but they all help to enable a set of policies that ultimately do massive harm to the nation and its people. And often, of course, they do great harm to themselves, adding to the public costs of war. (Aside from the dead and maimed, Fanning mentions that "there is a veteran suicide every 80 minutes in this country," nor does the PTSD stop there.) Of course, there are more nuances to the whole phenomenon, but at root is a common misconception that those who "served" did something to protect the rest of us, something that we all should be grateful for. That simply did not happen. That they sacrificed for something we should regret and be embarrassed by, well, that's more to the point. Only once we recognize that can we get past the charades, and that will be better for all of us.

  • David Bromwich: American Exceptionalism and Its Discontents: Speaking of hypocrisies, here's the hoary mother lode, the notion that we're so special the world wouldn't know what to do without our enlightened guidance. Needless to say, the tone has changed over time. Once America was unique in declaring that "all men are created equal"; today our self-esteem is the very celebration of inequality.

  • David Gerald Finchman: The hidden documents that reveal the true borders of Israel and Palestine: In 1947 David Ben Gurion begged the UN to vote in favor of partition borders for Palestine which would give 55% of the mandate to a majority-Jewish nation that represented only 35% of the total population, and 45% to an almost exclusively Arabic-speaking nation. In 1948 Israel's Declaration of Independence proclaimed a Jewish State but said nothing about borders. This unwillingness to define borders has kept Israel in a state of war ever since, with Israel grabbing another 23% of the Mandate's territory during the 1947-49 war, and the remaining 22% in 1967 (plus chunks of Egypt and Syria). This piece looks into the decision-making process from UN-borders to no-borders. A longer version is available here.

  • Karen Greenberg: Will the US Go to "War" Against Ebola? It's telling that Obama's initial response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was to send in the US military. That made some sense inasmuch as AFRICOM has money to burn and some expertise in logistics, but it also imposes a rigid worldview and introduces a dangerous level of intimidation. The one thing Ebola does have in common with Terrorism is an exaggerated level of hysteria, but that seems of a piece with the media's highly orchestrated kneejerk reactions. I'm reminded of the anthrax scare of 2001, which would have soon gone freaking insane had the perpetrator not had the good sense to stop. Greenberg points out many ways Ebola differs from the Terrorism model.

  • Louis Menand: Crooner in Rights Spat: A useful review of copyright matters:

    Baldwin joins Saint-Amour, the law professors Lawrence Lessig, Jeanne Fromer, and Robert Spoo, and the copyright lawyer William Patry in believing that, Internet or no Internet, the present level of copyright protection is excessive. By the time most works fall into the public domain, they have lost virtually all their use value. If the public domain is filled with items like hundred-year-old images of the back of Rod Stewart's head, the public good will suffer. The commons will become your great-grandparents' attic.

    As it is, few creations outlive their creators. Of the 187,280 books published between 1927 and 1946, only 2.3 per cent were still in print in 2002. But, since there is no "use it or lose it" provision in copyright law, they are all still under copyright today. Patry, in his recent book, "How to Fix Copyright," notes that ninety-five per cent of Motown recordings are no longer available. Nevertheless, you can't cover or imitate or even sample them without paying a licensing fee -- despite the fact that your work is not competing in the marketplace with the original, since the original is no longer for sale.

  • Katha Pollitt: How Pro-Choicers Can Take Back the Moral High Ground: An excerpt from Pollitt's new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

    A man's home is his castle, but a woman's body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it's belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband -- in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldn't her body belong to a fertilized egg as well? And if that egg has a right to live and grow in her body, why shouldn't she be held legally responsible for its fate and be forced to have a cesarean if her doctor thinks it's best, or be charged with a crime if she uses illegal drugs and delivers a stillborn or sick baby? Incidents like these have been happening all over the country for some time now. Denying women the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for their conduct during pregnancy -- and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014, a law was proposed in the Kansas Legislature that would require doctors to report every miscarriage, no matter how early in the pregnancy. You would almost think the people who have always opposed women's independence and full participation in society were still at it. They can't push women all the way back, but they can use women's bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.

  • Peter Van Buren: Seven Bad Endings to the New War in the Middle East: I know what you're saying: "only seven?" Van Buren doesn't get to the political effects of continuing the War on Terrorism -- of continuing to fund the surveillance state, of the increasing militarization of police departments, of the circumvention of the justice system, of how public funds are being drained as remote and preventable problems are prioritized over real and immediate ones by a political establishment deeply in hock to the security phantom.

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