When The Need to Know Corrupts the Right to Privacy

The mainstream media continues to get yanked around by the Trump vigilantes.  They have spent the past few weeks pouring through John Podesta's emails, searching for... what?  The comments they are coming up with are notably unspectacular, ideas about Hillary's campaign, reactions to Bernie and then Trump, the kind of stuff that emails are made of.  Free association, ideas, frustrations, and, yes, things that are not said in public.

The media is doing this because they are afraid if they don't they will be accused of favoring Hillary.  And why is that?  They don't have Donald Trump's staff emails to create an actual balance.  What it has done, though, is persuaded the media to distract us from the real issues, again.  As Jon Stewart would say... "SQUIRREL!!"

When did WikiLeaks evolve from being the hero that exposed government lies and deceptions to the tool of the Russian government?  When did they go from vetting submissions for relevance to dumping?  And what on earth is the motivation?

We have forgotten -- SQUIRREL!! -- the hypothesis that Trump has failed to disprove by refusing to divulge his tax records.  What are his ties to the Russian government?  This is the greedy megalomaniac who bought Chinese steel for his buildings to save money.  To what depths would he stoop to gain some advantage by dealing with the Russians?

Glenn Greenwald, who was responsible for releasing the Edward Snowden files, and Naomi Klein, environmentalist and critic of corporate globalization, got together for a truly important discussion of what these email dumps mean to our understanding of privacy.  Some justify the Hillary dumps because she is a powerful person, which begs the question of where that line is drawn.  Who is so powerful that they should lose their right to privacy?

And does that mean that anyone with the resources, from the Russian government to the Kochs, have the right to hack and expose the emails of anyone who they see as sufficiently influential?  Klein points out that her activism has put her in the line of fire, under surveillance by powerful oil industry groups.

If we have the right to eavesdrop on an email conversation, don't we have the right to tap a phone or bug a conference room?  Both have been done, but both are illegal.  With email hacks there is no legal protection; hence, the abandon with which news outlets have gone at the Podesta dumps.

To be fair, this raises the question of other third party releases of information, from the infamous 49 percent quote by Mitt Romney in 2012 to the appalling video of Trump on the Access Hollywood bus.  Would it be fair if someone in the audience during one of Hillary's Wall Street speeches came forward, but not if the same information was released in an email?

I think so.  I think we have had this technology for far too long without commensurate protections.  We need the same strong protections for our communications online as we have (despite attempts at erosion by government surveillance) for our telephone communication.  As we assume we have in our homes.

The failure of government to make our internet secure has a lot to do with government attempts to breach our privacy since 9/11.  Privacy groups have long held that by not allowing private citizens strong encryption, they have made it easier for us all to be hacked by our enemies.  In other words, if our government can get in, others can get in.  It not only makes private citizens more vulnerable, it makes essential government structures more vulnerable, from the Pentagon to our electrical grid.

It has got to start somewhere, folks.  We need to tune in to the importance of the internet privacy issue, and there is no better time to start than now, with Wikileaks gone awry.  We need to have some firm moral and ethical guidelines for where right to privacy ends and right to know begins.

What on Earth Is This TPP?

I have C-Span as my default TV station, so that whenever I turn the TV on, there it is.  That doesn't mean I watch it; in fact, as the republicans have gained more power in Congress, my tolerance for listening to the bullshit has diminished.  Today, for example, when I turned on the tube, there was John Boehner, whining that all the House Democrats are opposing their own president on this bill, and President Obama ought to get his team in line.

I like coming in in the middle.  I play a little guessing game with myself, to see how long it takes to figure out what is going on.  Usually, though, when I turn it on, there is one lone House member going on about something, and without looking, I try to guess whether it's a republican or a Democrat.  I'm pretty good at it, too.  I can do it in about three seconds.  You don't have to know what they are talking about, because they use the same words for everything.  This could probably be a good drinking game.

Anyway, there was that idiot Boehner today, going on about how the President needed to reign in his party.  All of a sudden he was doing kumbaya with President Obama.  I had an idea what it was all about, but other than signing online petitions, I hadn't been all that involved.  But we really should be.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership -- known now as TPP because who has time to say Trans-Pacific Partnership? -- is a trade deal.  If you liked the way NAFTA worked, you will love TPP.  We were told back then the same things we are being told now.  This will be a job creator by increasing exports and will just be super for the economy.  Except what happened with NAFTA was that it allowed businesses in the USA to move to Mexico where labor is cheaper.

Here's another really weird outcome, which I read about in an important book about climate change by Naomi Klein:  This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (a book that the New York Times reviewer said was, "a book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable.")

Because of current trade agreements between Canada and foreign governments, Ontario was forced to repeal parts of its 2009 Green Energy and Economy Act, which had in fact created jobs and improved the environment.  The European Union and Japan took Ontario to the World Trade Organization because the Act favored the local economy.  Ontario lost more than the court case.

This makes as much sense for our country as selling roads and parking meters to foreign governments and private corporations to make a quick buck so you don't have to tax the wealthy.  Being too much a part of this new global environment these days means becoming even more vulnerable to the forces of capitalist greed.  It means giving up a community's right to determine it's own fate, sometimes giving up important economic ground, losing the ability to make its own decisions about safety and the environment.

This is not a trade agreement between countries; this is a trade agreement that will be controlled by the big corporations that are sinking millions into our elections so that people like John Boehner can push for trade advantages for the powerful.

This may be good business for John Boehner, but I am heartened that the Democrats are pretty much opposed.  Just as did Bill Clinton, President Obama is being lured into a compromise that will make our economy weaker in order to be beef up his world leader creds.  But just as with the Keystone Pipeline, Obama needs to honestly look at how this agreement could tie the hands of local communities, states, and the federal government in critical environmental and security issues.

Meanwhile, get out a six-pack and try your hand at guessing what's going on on C-Span.

Privatizing the U.S.

When I hear our president speak about helping business do its work, I get chills.  When he refers to "small business" incentives, I wonder if he is talking about a mom-and-pop, or about a subsidiary of Blackwater – I mean Xe.

If you haven't read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, run to your library, that is, if you still have a library, and check it out.  It's approaching Halloween season, and there is no better time for this scary read.

We have been lured and duped by the wealthy and powerful into hating the government for its incompetence and waste.  If we stopped to think at all about this, we would see just how absurd are both the premise and the argument.

The great waste and inefficiency of our federal government is due, not to federal workers and federal programs, but to the private industries, their lawyers and lobbyists, with which our government's representatives shares its bed.  And its dollars.

The secret to the success of the raping of this country is in scaring people too busy, undereducated, gullible and apathetic to understand that they are being duped.

They say things like, "It is regulation that is killing business", "Raising minimum wage will strangle the free market", "People need to be free of unions so that they can earn a living."

Absurdities.

But people who will never make a living wage without union or government intervention scream about those unionized workers who do, rage at the waste caused by the regulators (that try to keep the mercury out of our food and pharmaceuticals from killing us), and worry themselves about the minimum wage worker who is preventing them from getting that raise.

Nonsense.

But it works.  On MSNBC, during the recent republican debate, I saw an ad, featuring a young, handsome, quite sane looking and sounding individual talking calmly about illegal aliens, and ending in the punchline that we need to do something to stop LEGAL immigrants NOW.

And during that republican debate on MSNBC for gods' sake, where were the ads with the progressive messages?

I know: our side doesn't have the money and the incentive to fight as hard and as long.

So read The Shock Doctrine.  At least be educated as to the extent of this fight.  It didn't start with Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, and people like Barack Obama, in the name of compromise, are furthering the cause of disaster capitalism every time they speak of government aiding business rather than helping people.  And we need to understand it in order to stop it.