As a result of the failure of both media and government to actually serve the interests of the people is it any wonder that more than three-quarters of the public holds the Congress in contempt?
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans remain down on Congress, with 15% approving and 78% disapproving of the job it is doing. This approval rating is similar to the low levels seen this year, and is five percentage points above the all-time low of 10%, last recorded in August 2012.
The NSA spying scandal shows that America's pursuit of terrorists has turned into a mania. Spying on citizens is as monstrous and unlawful as Guantanamo Bay and drone warfare. The German government's response has been woefully weak.
America is sick. September 11 left it wounded and unsettled — that's been obvious for nearly 12 years — but we are only now finding out just how grave the illness really is. The actions of the NSA exposed more than just the telephone conversations and digital lives of many millions of people. The global spying scandal shows that the US has become manic, that it is behaving pathologically, invasively. Its actions are entirely out of proportion to the danger.
Global Hawk (Block 30), one of the more obvious vampires sucking money out of the defense budget, has been disinterred from its coffin by corporate go-fers in Congress. The story of this high cost, low performance drone makes obvious that filibuster abuse and political dogmatism are not the only problems in Congress. Two really excellent pieces of work explain the gruesome details.
Aram Roston at the Defense News series of publications published on July 15 an excellent summary of the issues. Find the article and some useful side box material at http://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20130715/NEWS04/307150015/The-battle-over-Global-Hawk. Kudos to the editors at Defense News for allowing their corporate-ad-populated publication to release this excellent example of highly independent journalistic professionalism.
Richard Sia and Alexander Cohen at the Center for Public Integrity released on July 16 their own analysis, also truly excellent, that dives deep into the issues, especially the corruption surrounding Congress' action on Global Hawk/Block 30. Find it, also with important side-material and links, at http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/07/16/12969/huge-drone-could-not-be-grounded.
As an aside, I note that the CPI piece briefly cites Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), my representative in Congress last year, who “played a key role in blocking the retirement of Block 30 [Global Hawk].” Bartlett is also quoted in the CPI piece lecturing Members of Congress for putting pork above the national interest. Bartlett somehow forgot to mention that there is a significant Northrop-Grumman facility in his district, just a few miles from my house in Hagerstown, MD. But surely, that had nothing to do with his support for their product. Right.
An embodiment of all that is wrong with institutions like the House Armed Services Committee, where he presided over a major subcommittee, Bartlett was involuntarily retired in the 2012 elections.
Tell me it’s a sick joke: Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, the guy who tops the list of those responsible for sabotaging the world’s economy, is lobbying to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. But no, it makes perfect sense, since Summers has long succeeded spectacularly by failing.
Why should his miserable record in the Clinton and Obama administrations hold him back from future disastrous adventures at our expense? With Ben Bernanke set to step down in January, and Obama still in deep denial over the pain and damage his former top economic adviser Summers brought to tens of millions of Americans, this darling of Wall Street has yet another shot to savage the economy.
Stupid, Sexist, Sleazy — What's Not to Like?
Summers was one of the key players during the Clinton years in creating the mortgage derivative bubble that ended up costing tens of millions of Americans their homes and life savings. This is the genius who, as Clinton’s Treasury secretary, supported the banking lobby’s successful effort to make the sale of unregulated bundles of mortgage securities and the phony insurance swaps that backed them perfectly legal and totally unmonitored. Those are the toxic bundles that the Federal Reserve is still unloading from the banks at a cost of trillions of dollars.
But back on July 30, 1998, when he was deputy Treasury secretary, Summers assured the Senate agriculture committee that the “thriving” derivatives market was the driving force of American prosperity and would be fatally hurt by any government regulation of the sort proposed by Brooksley Born, the stunningly prescient chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Summers opined that “the parties to these kinds of contracts are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies. … ”
Consider the astounding stupidity of that statement and the utter ignorance upon which it was based. One financial CEO after another has testified to not knowing how the derivatives were created and why their worth evaporated. Think of AIG and the other marketers of these products that were saved from disaster only by the injection of government funds not available to foreclosed homeowners whose mortgages were wrapped into those toxic securities.
More secrets, more water? The NSA data center in Bluffdale could require as many as 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate and keep computers cool.
Initial reported estimates suggested the center would use 1,200 gallons per minute, but more recent estimates suggest the usage could be closer to half that amount.
“Our planning is anywhere from 1,000 acre-feet per year to 2,000 acre-feet per year, and that represents – if it was 1,000 acre-feet per year, that would be about 1 percent of our total demand,” said Jordan Valley River Conservancy District assistant general manager and chief engineer Alan Packard.
. . . . . . . .
Reid said Bluffdale otherwise wouldn't have had the resources to improve the land all the way to the south end of the city limits. Instead, the government funded $7 million in infrastructure to the data center, and an additional $5 million in infrastructure back from the site that will allow a third of the water used at the facility to be recycled.
The water would be used at the city park and on some of the city's lawns, Reid said.
Reid said the city was now pursuing other technology business to relocate to the south end of Bluffdale.
“We're looking to try and combine with Salt Lake County to make that a jobs area,” Reid said.
Phi Beta Iota: This is amusing in part because CIA has supposedly been getting a grip on water for the Department of State, and its obvious that NSA does not read CIA reports and does not care about little things like being in the middle of nowhere with vanishing aquifers.
This is the new warfare. It is the obvious next step in asymmetrical conflict. Lower risk for Americans, and probably cheaper. But, I wonder, is it making more enemies than it is eliminating? If I lived in a little village in the Afghan mountains and, in the middle of night, a drone strike blew up one of the houses, killing a neighbor family, I might have some serous attitude about it.
There is a growing anti-American attitude taking root in Europe, one already well-established in the Islamic world, and parts of Asia. The long term consequences of this are not going to be happy. But our foreign policy barely deals with it.
More and more judicial decisions, particularly those of Republican appointed judges, overwhelmingly favor corporations over people. These decisions get almost no coverage in the media, but they have real and far-reaching consequences. Here's an example of what I mean.
If the US government succeeds in criminalising Brown's posting of a hyperlink, the freedom of all internet users is in jeopardy
Kevin M. Gallaher
Guardian, 13 July 2013
When I first noticed Barrett Brown in early 2011, I never thought that two years later I'd be directing Free Barrett Brown. Intrigued by his irreverence, I became familiar with his work, admiring him for his skill as a writer. I spoke to him briefly on IRC (internet relay chat) and occasionally dropped into the same channels he frequented; later I met him in person at a conference in New York City. But it's the US government's behavior in this and other cases – see also, Manning, Hammond, Swartz, Assange, etc – that have made running his legal defense fund a labor of love for me.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The distributed research project Brown founded, Project PM, is important and necessary. Since 9/11, the intelligence and cyber-security contracting industries have exploded in size. I believe, as Barrett does, that the public/private partnership on surveillance constitutes a threat to civil transparency and the health of democratic institutions. Large and very profitable companies like Booz Allen Hamilton obtain most of their revenues from the federal government; yet, the majority of their work is performed in secrecy.
Barrett had the insight to realize early on that the troves of emails that were hacked by Anonymous out of HBGary Federal and Stratfor and subsequently made public had the potential to provide a rare window into the activities of the cyber-intelligence industry. I believe it was this journalistic work of digging into areas that powerful people would rather keep in the dark that made him a target.
Contrary to claims, Brown is not a hacker (he is unabashedly lacking in technical skills). Nor was he a spokesperson for Anonymous (the very idea is ridiculous). He is an iconoclastic writer with a penchant for satire and hyperbole. He became an activist by observing the media's failure to cover the issues or stories that he deemed important. Some of his proudest work was the assistance rendered by Anonymous to citizens in North Africa during the first months of the Arab Spring.
As a result of the failure of both media and government to actually serve the interests of the people is it any wonder that more than three-quarters of the public holds the Congress in contempt?
