Robert Reich writes:

Four decades ago, the typical household’s income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as these laws took hold, most Americans’ incomes have flattened. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now be almost $92,000 instead of $50,000.

Obviously, wealthy Republicans would rather other members of their coalition not know any of this — including, especially, their role in making it happen. Their nightmare is small-business owners and struggling whites joining with the poor and the rest of the middle class to wrest economic power away. So they’ve created a convenient scapegoat in America’s minority underclass, along with a government that supposedly taxes hardworking whites to support them.

Time after time I have pondered why so many Americans consistently vote against their own self interests; why they elect politicians who serve a tiny numerical minority. Perhaps Reich is correct, but I want to think there is more at work here. Detractors want to cling to the “they must be idiots” meme, but that tack seems too easy to me.

I now live in a community where I am a minority, where Republicans are the norm. I need to get out, to listen and to understand.

Change doesn’t happen until we grasp precisely what we wish to change.

So, how do we fix the inequality…?

That can be the only conclusion following the latest release of classified information flowing from Edward Snowden. When we spy on our allies (remember Jonathan Pollard) we can expect nothing but blowback of the worst kind because of the actions of the Bush-Obama Security Scheme.

From The Guardian:

US intelligence services are spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, according to the latest top secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

One document lists 38 embassies and missions, describing them as “targets”. It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electronic communications gear to taps into cables to the collection of transmissions with specialised antennae.

Along with traditional ideological adversaries and sensitive Middle Eastern countries, the list of targets includes the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as a number of other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey. The list in the September 2010 document does not mention the UK, Germany or other western European states.

One of the bugging methods mentioned is codenamed Dropmire, which, according to a 2007 document, is “implanted on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy, DC” – an apparent reference to a bug placed in a commercially available encrypted fax machine used at the mission. The NSA documents note the machine is used to send cables back to foreign affairs ministries in European capitals.

The documents suggest the aim of the bugging exercise against the EU embassy in central Washington is to gather inside knowledge of policy disagreements on global issues and other rifts between member states.

I would not want to be Secretary of State John Kerry right now, and I have to wonder if fear of just such a leak might have prompted his predecessor to get out while the getting was good.

Jennifer Stisa Garrick and Christopher Jon Sprigman write:

…Congressional watchdogs — with a few exceptions, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky — have accepted the White House’s claims of legality. The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, have called the surveillance legal. So have liberal-leaning commentators like Hendrik Hertzberg and David Ignatius.

This view is wrong — and not only, or even mainly, because of the privacy issues raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics. The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.

Edward Snowden is the hero here and deserves the Nobel Peace Prize much more than the 2009 recipient.

For a brief moment in journalism school, I bought into the fairy tale that a good journalist is an objective journalist. Fortunately I came to my senses.

Matt Taibbi makes the case that all journalism is advocacy journalism

He writes:

All journalism is advocacy journalism. No matter how it’s presented, every report by every reporter advances someone’s point of view. The advocacy can be hidden, as it is in the monotone narration of a news anchor for a big network like CBS or NBC (where the biases of advertisers and corporate backers like GE are disguised in a thousand subtle ways), or it can be out in the open, as it proudly is with Greenwald, or graspingly with Sorkin, or institutionally with a company like Fox.

But to pretend there’s such a thing as journalism without advocacy is just silly; nobody in this business really takes that concept seriously. “Objectivity” is a fairy tale invented purely for the consumption of the credulous public, sort of like the Santa Claus myth. Obviously, journalists can strive to be balanced and objective, but that’s all it is, striving.

I disagree with Taibbi only in that I think he too narrowly defines the target. Certainly, claims of objectivity do serve to sooth the credulous public, but the stratagem runs much deeper. The public is a secondary target. The primary target is journalism itself. The myth is perpetuated by those who wish to blunt the pen of journalists and make them, to paraphrase Malcolm X, house journalists.

Taibbi nails the concept when he writes: As a journalist, when you start speaking about political power in the first person plural, it’s pretty much glue-factory time.

The discussion at Rolling Stone is lively…

Irin Carmon at Salon writes:

In a secretly recorded video (embedded at the bottom of this story), a young woman named Kate, 19, tells a counselor at Cleveland’s Womankind “maternal and prenatal care” center, “Usually we use condoms, but yesterday we didn’t.” She’s taken a pregnancy test, but is told it is probably too soon. Then Kate asks, “Like, I know there’s a pill you can take to not get pregnant. And I don’t know if you have to go to the doctor?”

After some confusion, the counselor replies inaccurately, “It sounds like the morning after pill. If you have intercourse and then take this pill and it causes a period to come on or something, or bleeding. It’s like having kind of an abortion.” She adds, “That could harm you. It really could harm you … You could hemorrhage from anything like that.”

“Kate” is Katie Stack, a 24-year-old pro-choice activist and patients’ advocate at an Ohio abortion clinic, though she gave the counselor a different last name. Stack is also a founder of the Crisis Project, which films undercover video at crisis pregnancy centers like Cleveland’s Womankind and records the often medically suspect advice given there. And Womankind is one of thousands of clinics across the country that seek to dissuade women from having abortions. Unlike many of those centers, which gauzily gloss over whether they’re actually clinics, it actually offers prenatal care from medical professionals, but that doesn’t mean it dispenses accurate information.

Whether the counselor was misinformed or intentionally misleading, her advice on emergency contraception was false.

[Update @ 0826: can anyone tell what that is over Obama’s right shoulder?]

Read the comments at The Guardian to begin to understand how much we’ve lost…

Welcome to Room 101, Mr. Snowden…

In Zen Buddhism there is the concept of the Dharma Gate: something that has the potential to awaken us to a deeper truth about our life.

This morning I passed through such a gate while reading near the end of Jan Chozen Bay’s Mindful Eating. I’ve read several books on the subject in recent years including Susan Albers’s Eating Mindfully and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Savor to name just two. Both are good works, but I found myself shifting over to blah-blah-blah mode in larges swaths of pages because I wasn’t learning anything new.

I had such moments in Bay’s book as well, but near the end, on page 146 (of 155 pages) I found a gate when I read:

The suffering that the Buddha talked about [in the First Noble Truth: to live as a human being is to experience suffering], however, is an experience that is often much more subtle than outright pain. it is a feeling of dissatisfaction, a persistent feeling that things are not as they should be. It is an unpleasant or irritating feeling, one that impels us to move, to do something, to distract ourselves, to eat something, to drink something, to binge, to vomit, to make the feeling of dis-ease go away.

Moving away and creating distractions are not long-term solutions to this feeling that something is not right. It is a feeling based in truth. It must be attended to. Eating, drinking, using drugs or alcohol, courting danger, courting a new lover—these are all over-the-counter remedies for temporary relief of this fundamental dis-ease, the intuition that things are not as they could or even should be. The true source of this dissatisfaction is spiritual, and thus the only true cure for it is also spiritual.

[I must note here that my concept of spiritual does not involve any aspect of metaphysics or the supernatural. For me, spirituality is merely my emotional understanding of my personal reality, of how I see the world. JH]

Now you need to look at the question, Am I willing to be empty? from the spiritual point of view. First of all, you are empty, whether you like it or not, Every atom in your body is composed of emptiness (more than 99 percent) inhabited by tiny bits of whizzing energy (less than 1 percent). In addition to your very real physical emptiness, you are empty in another way. You are empty of independent existence. You could not exist without all other beings also existing. Sometimes we become overwhelmed by the multitudes of others and might wish that everything else in the world would disappear, but if that happened, we too would disappear. Fundamentally we are made up of our interactions with all other beings. We are each like a soap bubble in the middle of a huge mass of soap bubbles. We are made up of nothing but emptiness and our intersections and interactions with all other beings. And so are they.

To be willing to be empty is to align with a fundamental truth of our being.

In teaching meditation, I talk with my students about Monkey Mind, that incessant chattering we create because the mind does not like to be quiet. I have never before made the connection to my physical self, that there is a body analog to Monkey Mind equally averse to quiet or emptiness.

Around the turn of the millennium I had a brief conversation with a German physicist visiting Cleveland. One of the topics we touched upon was Internet privacy. He was not at all concerned and told me that “the shear volume of information ensures privacy. No one could possibly sift through it all.”

That is not true in 2013.

John Naughton writes:

The result is that what looked like science fiction 20 years ago is now a mundane reality. Back then, we assumed that the scale and pace of growth of the internet would put it beyond the reach of even the most intrusive surveillance. Nobody or nothing could drink from such a firehose – or so we thought. We forgot about Moore’s Law. We didn’t realise, for example, that one day GCHQ would have the technological capacity not just to drink from the firehose, but to store the results for more leisurely inspection – to build what is, in effect, an iPlayer for the net: making the missable unmissable, if you like.

What individuals, or rooms of individuals, could not accomplish, computing power now does with ease. Nothing we do, or say, or text across electronic media is private or beyond government scrutiny.

Nothing.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

In what conceivable sense are Snowden’s actions “espionage”? He could have – but chose not – sold the information he had to a foreign intelligence service for vast sums of money, or covertly passed it to one of America’s enemies, or worked at the direction of a foreign government. That is espionage. He did none of those things.

What he did instead was give up his life of career stability and economic prosperity, living with his long-time girlfriend in Hawaii, in order to inform his fellow citizens (both in America and around the world) of what the US government and its allies are doing to them and their privacy. He did that by very carefully selecting which documents he thought should be disclosed and concealed, then gave them to a newspaper with a team of editors and journalists and repeatedly insisted that journalistic judgments be exercised about which of those documents should be published in the public interest and which should be withheld.

That’s what every single whistleblower and source for investigative journalism, in every case, does – by definition. In what conceivable sense does that merit felony charges under the Espionage Act?

Here’s how I see present events. The Bush-Obama Security Scheme knows that, because of our First Amendment, a direct attack upon our free press will fail. The One Percent (remember them?) have chosen instead to expand their decades-long political strategy of starving the beast, to include all media that they can not buy outright and corporatize, and cut off not tax funds but information sources not under the direction of the One Percent.

Edward Snowden is simply the latest example of this blatant, and anti-democratic strategy.

In 1971, I was fascinated by Daniel Ellsberg’s bravery and subsequent fight. More importantly, I was awed by the manner that both the Washington Post and the New York Times stood their ground and prevailed against then President Richard Nixon. That the man who ought to go down in history for his vision will instead be most remembered for out tricking Tricky Dicky, is tragic. No amount of speeches on global warming will help; Nixon, after all gave us the Environmental Protection Agency.

I fear for my country and I know not how to protect her.

In the school/student crush of the last two months I missed Matt Taibbi’s Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever. In the feature article Taibbi writes:

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it’s no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

Nero was a piker when it comes to fiddlin’ (actually, he would have played the lyre) as the world burns. I suspect that President Barack Hussein Obama, all the members of our Congress and our judiciary are fiddlin’ with something else. If bankers are too big to jail, perhaps exchanges like this little bit of emailery might convince Americans to jail a few politicians for malpractice, or at a minimum, begin to toss the bums out next year.

Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland:

SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?…
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth
SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?…
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u
SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo.?.?. thatd be awesome

Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it’s hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.

How. Do. We. Lock. These. People. Up?

Glenn Greenwald writes:

The US government has charged Edward Snowden with three felonies, including two under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute enacted to criminalize dissent against World War I. My priority at the moment is working on our next set of stories, so I just want to briefly note a few points about this.

Prior to Barack Obama’s inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That’s because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?

9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11…

Fuck a bunch of 9/11, I want my country back…

Matt Taibbi writes:

I don’t often get angered by the things press spokespeople say. Most of these people have difficult jobs and are often forced to be the public faces of policies they had nothing to do with creating.

But in this case, S&P just a few weeks before had sworn before a judge that its reassurances about objectivity, integrity and independence were not legally binding, vague, and so generalized as to be essentially meaningless.

Yet when I contacted this company, they sent me exactly, and I mean exactly, the same reassurances about objectivity, integrity, and independence that they themselves had laughed at as “mere puffery,” “vague,” and “so generalized that a reasonable investor would not depend” on them.

Then they went on to deride the plaintiffs in their lawsuit for not being smart enough to do their own research and make their own assessments about the meaning of an S&P rating, and the value of its reassurances of independence and integrity. Yet us reporters are apparently still expected to take such assurances at face value, which if my math is correct means that in their eyes, we must be even dumber than the investors in the products they rate. What a bunch of assholes!

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In his full article for Rolling Stone Taibbi writes:

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction. If you can imagine a post-9/11 scenario where there were no metal detectors at airports and people could walk on carrying chain saws and meat cleavers, you get a rough idea of what was done to reform the ratings process.

Gawd forbid we impede the further acquisition of wealth by those who have done far more damage to our United States of America than bin Laden ever dreamed of.

Steve Wozniak tells CNN:

I actually feel a little guilty about that – but not totally. We created the computers to free the people up, give them instant communication anywhere in the world; any thought you had, you could share freely. That it was going to overcome a lot of the government restrictions.

We didn’t realize that in the digital world there were a lot of ways to use the digital technology to control us, to snoop on us, to make things possible that weren’t. In the old days of mailing letters, you licked it, and when you got an envelope that was still sealed, nobody had seen it; you had private communication. Now they say, because it’s email, it cannot be private; anyone can listen.

Yes, Richard Nixon was in the Whitehouse when Daniel Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers in 1971, but we forget that the papers, officially titled United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, focused primarily on the executive branch malpractice of presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

As I walked into the library yesterday I passed a large pickup with, among many others, an Impeach Obama bumper sticker. I almost stopped to tap on the window to tell the Tea Party supporter inside that at last we both agreed on a political action.

The Bush-Obama Security Scheme may finally make both ends meet.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;

Retain and make use of “inadvertently acquired” domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

Preserve “foreign intelligence information” contained within attorney-client communications;

Access the content of communications gathered from “U.S. based machine[s]” or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans’ call or email information without warrants.

Meanwhile, my own personal acronym: BOSS (Bush-Obama Security Scheme) rolls on.

I switched, have you…?