Roldo Bartimole writes:

Cleveland needs a brutal political shake-up. Soon.

The mayoral election this year will be a joke. Mayor It-Is-What-It-Is vs. What’s-His-Name. Yawn.

So here’s one way of shaking the system but it will take the voters and a ballot issue to do it.

But no time like the present to start.

My suggestion: Make the position of Council President an elected post. City-wide. In other words one has to run before all voters to be Council President.

That would take the position out of the hands of weak Council members and chicken-shit politics. And their sickening games. It would be up to the voters.

We wouldn’t have, for example, Martin Sweeney as Council boss. He couldn’t run city-wide and win. At least that’s my thought. He’s trying to keep his job by gerrymandered ridiculous ward boundaries, contrived simply Continue Reading »

While my mother taught me the basics of chess, I learned much of what I first knew about the finer points of the game from reading Bobby Fishers monthly column in Boy’s Life.

Robert Reich writes:

Congress began its summer recess last week and won’t reconvene until after Labor Day. You’d be forgiven for not noticing a difference. With just 15 bills signed into law so far this year, the 113th Congress is on pace to be the most unproductive since at least the 1940s.

But just because the legislature has ceased to function doesn’t mean our government has. Political decision making has moved to peripheral public entities, where power is exercised less transparently and accountability to voters is less direct. What we’re losing in the process isn’t government — it’s democracy.

Robert Reich first uploaded this video in June 2011. The message hasn’t gotten any better.

Matt Taibbi writes:

What is interesting is what my friend Thacker noticed yesterday. Not only did the DOJ revise the original press release on the web, they also revised the transcript of Holder’s remarks from the infamous October 9th, 2012 press conference from last year. The only thing is, unlike the press release, there was nothing on the web page containing that transcribed speech indicating that it had been altered. Here’s how the second paragraph of the official DOJ transcript of Holder’s remarks reads now – note some of the numbers:

This national effort – known as the Distressed Homeowner Initiative – ran from October 1st, 2011, to September 30th of this year – and was led by members of the Mortgage Fraud Working Group of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. This landmark Initiative, spearheaded by the FBI, was launched to help streamline and advance investigations and prosecutions against fraudsters who allegedly targeted, and preyed upon, Americans struggling to keep their homes. And it’s been a model of success. Over the past 12 months, it has enabled the Justice Department and its partners to file federal criminal charges against 107 defendants for allegedly victimizing more than 17,185 American homeowners – and inflicting losses in excess of $95 million. On the civil side, as part of this Initiative, Mortgage Fraud Working Group Members have filed federal civil cases against 128 defendants for losses totaling at least $54 million, and involving more than 19,000 victims.

Thanks to the joy of the Wayback Machine, however, we know what Holder actually said that day. His actual remarks read as follows:

This national effort – known as the Distressed Homeowner Initiative – ran from October 1st, 2011, to September 30th of this year – and was led by members of the Mortgage Fraud Working Group of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. This landmark Initiative, spearheaded by the FBI, was launched to help streamline and advance investigations and prosecutions against fraudsters who allegedly targeted, and preyed upon, Americans struggling to keep their homes. And it’s been a model of success. Over the past 12 months, it has enabled the Justice Department and its partners to file 285 federal criminal indictments and informations against 530 defendants for allegedly victimizing more than 73,000 American homeowners – and inflicting losses in excess of $1 billion. On the civil side, as part of this Initiative, we have filed 110 federal civil cases against over 150 defendants for losses totaling at least $37 million, and involving more than 15,000 victims.

As someone who collects old newspapers – and once paid pretty fair money for an old Soviet magazine featuring a photo in which the face of Lev Trotsky had been blotted out – I find this very curious.

Certainly it is news when the Attorney General recites erroneous statistics, but the fact that his Department admitted to such a mistake last week would normally be in his, and its, favor.

But just as clearly, one can’t go back into history and change what someone said, in public, at a news conference. Nonetheless, this is, in fact, what the Department of Justice just did.

Previously…

Spencer Ackerman writes:

A leader of the US congressional insurrection against the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance programs has accused his colleagues of withholding a key document from the House of Representatives before a critical surveillance vote.

Justin Amash, the Michigan Republican whose effort to defund the NSA’s mass phone-records collection exposed deep congressional discomfort with domestic spying, said the House intelligence committee never allowed legislators outside the panel to see a 2011 document that described the surveillance in vague terms.

The document, a classified summary of the bulk phone records collection effort justified under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, was declassified by the Obama administration in late July.

Robert Reich writes:

The last time America was this bitterly divided was in the 1920s, which was the last time income, wealth, and power were this concentrated.

When average people feel the game is rigged, they get angry. And that anger can easily find its way into deep resentments — of the poor, of blacks, of immigrants, of unions, of the well-educated, of government.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Demagogues throughout history have used anger to target scapegoats — thereby dividing and conquering, and distracting people from the real sources of their frustrations.

Make no mistake: The savage inequality America is experiencing today is deeply dangerous.

Mary Elizabeth Williams writes:

It wasn’t that long ago that my life was relatively untouched by grief. I’d had a few losses along the way, but they had been intermittent – punctuation marks of sorrow in a relatively griefless life. Then the deaths started piling up. There was the year all the dads died. The 24-hour period that saw a suicide and a heart attack. The week that took out a huge chunk of our family’s cancer support groups. A deluge of loss.

I never get used to it. But grief is a muscle that the past few years have made stronger. And though I still frequently find myself stunned and stammering for the right words with every fresh death, I’m trying to improve at the art of consolation. So I recently asked my friends for their counsel about what they’ve appreciated most in the worst moments. The main tip? Just be a friend. Just stick around. It’s so simple, and so needed.

What follows is one of the most important pieces of writing that I have ever read…

Tina Vasquez writes:

After a few years of under-the-table gigs, I figured why not give freelance writing a try. After all, I had an English degree that was just collecting dust in my closet. But the why-not’s are very apparent: you get paid by the word, not for your labor. So the endless emails with editors, the hours spent writing a pitch, tracking down sources, the phone interviews, the bus fares for the sit-down interviews, the research–none of that is compensated. Everyone one and their mama pays you late. An invoice is about as useless as the Morton memo.

Then there’s this other thing…

Marc Lefkowitz writes:

Urban highways have a poor track record of improving commute times. In many cases, they “induce demand” for building new roads and move the same population farther away from existing centers. They end up making people more reliant on driving. Over time, the new road fills up with cars and the advantage of saving a few minutes is gone, but the city is stuck with the cost for keeping up the road.

Seizing on this idea of induced demand and alternatives to Opportunity Corridor is the reason Clevelanders for Transportation Equity are organizing. The citizen group opposes a new road and is promoting ideas. They would like to see the money ODOT plans to borrow from the Turnpike used to fund instead a new transit line on one of the many existing roads that link west and east sides. Ideas are bubbling on its Facebook page, such as investing in a bus-rapid transit line on E. 55th Street that would serve the east side and do more for leveraging re-investment as it did in the Euclid Corridor. A west side BRT line on W. 25th/Pearl Road was floated as a way to improve local economies and the environment.

The CTE group claimed a victory in snatching the web address opportunitycorridor.com where it is helping to frame the debate about two opposing world views. Cleveland, with supportive partners like RTA, could do more to build on its investment in BRT and bike lanes. It would support a stronger city, they reason, pointing to cities like Vancouver, BC, which has not added a traffic lane for cars since the 1970s, and has managed to grow its population while lessening the burden of traffic.

When your political campaigns are financed by construction barons, the solution to every problem is a highway.

Via Culturestr/ke…

A favorite line of discussion for me when I’m talking to security hawks is to ask: So, what are you afraid of?

That I recognize that they are often motivated by fear gives them pause and they quickly try to put forth some other rational for why they believe what they believe, but I don’t let go: I keep asking, So, what are you afraid of?

Kate Hanni, an airlines passengers rights advocate said:

They’re trying to scare the pants off the American people that we need these things.When [former head of Homeland Security Michael] Chertoff goes on TV, he is basically promoting his clients and exploiting that fear to make money. Fear is a commodity and they’re selling it. The more they can sell it, the more we buy into it. When American people are afraid, they will accept anything.'”

That was in 2010, and the fear mongering hasn’t slackened.

Glenn Greenwald writes following the appearance of former National Security Administration director Gen. Michael Hayden on Face The Nation yesterday:

Hayden has a clear financial stake in the very NSA debates he’s put on television to adjudicate. And while he’s sometimes identified as a principal of the Chertoff Group, what that means – the conflicts of interest it creates in the very debates in which he’s participating – is almost never mentioned. That’s because one inviolable rule for establishment TV hosts like Bob Schieffer is that US military officials must be treated with the greatest reverence and must never be meaningfully challenged (contrast that with what actual journalist David Halberstam described as the “proudest moment” of his career: when he stood up in press conferences in 1963 in Vietnam to make clear he knew US generals were lying, to the point that the Pentagon demanded that his New York Times editors remove him from covering the war).

That political figures have undisclosed financial stakes in the policy positions they pretend to favor is so common in Washington that it has become normalized, something its mavens barely recognize as noteworthy. The same is true of former national security officials who exploit their credentials, their connections, and – especially – the Fear of Terrorism to generate massive profits for themselves. But that this manipulation is incredibly common in sleazy Washington does not justify having TV-journalists conceal those conflicts when presenting these officials as authorities and experts. When it comes to people like Michael Hayden, the profoundly unhealthy reverence harbored by TV journalists means that they would never dare utter any such facts. We are thus subjected to “journalism” in which those least qualified to opine, and those with the greatest personal interests in the outcome of debates, are presented as objective experts, while viewers remain entirely uninformed about all of this.

Greenwald noted one telling tweet:

@ggreenwald inviting Hayden to comment on regulation of surveillance is like having Bernie Madoff comment on regulation of Wall Street

When the foxes are sitting on both sides of the desk, the chickens need to be really, really scared.

I, for one, am much more afraid of financial interests run amok in Washington than I am of a criminal taking my life in the name of their personal agenda.

That’s what I fear.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Cleveland is disappearing, bit by bit.

It’s like a slow motion hurricane. Or a tornado that takes its time. Slow. Not like a fire that devastates a place quickly. It’s a slow death. Death nevertheless.

In my days with the Plain Dealer back in the late 1960s I was often assigned to do articles on Cleveland’s growing poverty neighborhoods. The pieces were full-page exams labeled “The Changing City.”

Urban renewal – the Renaissance hope of those days – crushed many neighborhoods by causing movement then overcrowding. Cut up houses, apartments. No more giving care. Just taking as much revenue as an owner could. Grab while you can.

The city has changed. It’s often a sad, sad place. You can literally see at points the city shrinking. Falling apart. Dying.

The housing, particularly in Hough, became stressed in the 1960s. Riots were reactions to bad conditions. It was not changing for the better. Just the Continue Reading »

So whatever you have learned, whatever you have heard, you should be careful to not consider it to be the absolute truth. p. 47

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

In the 19th century the race was between makers of arms and makers of armor. In the 20th century the conflict shifted to stealth vs. detection. In the 21st century the war is online between the watchers and the watched.

Can the watched protect themselves from the watchers? Dan Gillmor has a few suggestions:

What are your risks in this era of surveillance, hacking and sloppy software coding? It depends. So what precautions should you be taking? Same answer: it depends.

That’s a pretty unsatisfying bit of advice, isn’t it? Yet it’s a core truth of digital security. You should be concerned, very concerned, but in order to make decisions about your own security measures you should first figure out which threats you’re likely to face.

Over the next several months I’ll be posting a number of pieces here about how you can do a better job of protecting your privacy and staying secure. Understanding what’s at risk – and that not all threats are equally daunting – is a key to how you should respond.

Here’s an example: every summer, thousands of computer hackers and security experts flock to a sweltering Las Vegas. They assemble at two of the most important annual conferences in the field, DEF CON and Black Hat, where they compare notes about their increasingly complex and worrisome fields.

I learned in the ’70s when I was a nascent programmer, that what could be coded can be decoded. How secure your data is inversely related to how badly another entity wants your data.

While I fear that, like Ford Prefect’s update to the entry for Earth in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Universe, the watchers consider me mostly harmless (timemark 6:38), I still dislike the idea that any twit at the NSA is free to cyber-riffle through my undies.