BACK in the days when Republicans were reading polls through rose-colored glasses and imagining a Mitt Romney landslide, one of their most plausible arguments was that many pollsters were simply misreading the likely composition of the electorate. There was no way, this theory ran, that core Democratic constituencies would turn out at the same rates as in 2008, when Obamamania was at its peak. Instead, 2012 was set up to be what the conservative writer Ben Domenech called an “undertow election,” in which reduced turnout among young voters and minorities would drag the incumbent down to defeat.
This expectation turned out to be wrong on two counts. First, Republicans faced an unexpected (though in hindsight, predictable) undertow of their own, as many conservative-leaning, working-class white voters looked at what Mitt Romney had to offer and simply stayed home.
Second, instead of declining as expected after the history-making election of 2008, African-American turnout may have actually risen again in 2012. When the Census Bureau released its turnout analysis last month, it showed blacks voting at higher rates than whites for the first time in the history of the survey.
If you believe Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.’s more overheated liberal critics, last week’s Supreme Court decision invalidating a portion of the Voting Rights Act is designed to make sure African-American turnout never hits these highs again. The ruling will allow a number of (mostly Southern) states to change voting laws without the Justice Department’s pre-approval, which has liberals predicting a wave of Republican-led efforts to “suppress” minority votes — through voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting and other measures.
These predictions probably overstate the ruling’s direct impact on state election rules, which can still be challenged under other provisions of the Voting Rights Act and other state and federal laws. But it is possible that the decision will boost the existing Republican enthusiasm for voter ID laws, and hasten the ongoing, multistate push for their adoption.
If so, though, the Roberts Court may have actually handed the Democratic Party a political gift.
How so? Well, to begin with, voter identification laws do not belong to the same moral or legal universe as Jim Crow. Their public purpose, as a curb to fraud, is potentially legitimate rather than nakedly discriminatory, and their effects are relatively limited. As Roberts’s majority opinion noted, the voter registration gap between whites and blacks in George Wallace’s segregationist Alabama was 50 percentage points. When my colleague Nate Silver looked at studies assessing the impact of voter ID laws, he estimated that they tend to reduce turnout by around 2 percent — and that reduction crosses racial lines, rather than affecting African-Americans exclusively.
A 2 percent dip is still enough to influence a close election. But voter ID laws don’t take effect in a vacuum: as they’re debated, passed and contested in court, they shape voter preferences and influence voter enthusiasm in ways that might well outstrip their direct influence on turnout. They inspire registration drives and education efforts; they help activists fund-raise and organize; they raise the specter of past injustices; they reinforce a narrative that their architects are indifferent or hostile to minorities.
This, I suspect, is part of the story of why African-American turnout didn't fall off as expected between 2008 and 2012. By trying to restrict the franchise on the margins, Republican state legislators handed Democrats a powerful tool for mobilization and persuasion, and motivated voters who might otherwise have lost some of their enthusiasm after the euphoria of “Yes We Can” gave way to the reality of a stagnant, high-unemployment economy.
So a lengthy battle over voting rules and voting rights seems almost precision-designed to help the Obama-era Democratic majority endure once President Obama has left the Oval Office. As Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics has pointed out, for all the talk about how important Hispanics are to the conservative future, the Republican Party could substantially close the gap with Democrats in presidential elections if its post-Obama share of the African-American vote merely climbed back above 10 percent — a feat achieved by Bob Dole and both Bushes. If that share climbed higher still, the Democratic majority would be in danger of collapse.
Such a turn of events wouldn't just be good news for Republicans. It would be good news for black Americans, as it would mean that both parties were competing for their votes.
But for now, our politics is headed in the opposite direction. Liberal demagogy notwithstanding, voter ID laws aren't a way for Republicans to turn the clock back and make sure that it’s always 1965. But they are a good way for Republicans to ensure that African-Americans keep voting like it’s always 2008.
[An article that vaguely reminds me of my earlier days at {previous library where I worked.} I grabbed books from boxes of them marked to be thrown away, held them, and snuck them back on the shelfs. I remember saving our Edgar Rice Burroughs holdings almost in entirety from Tarzan to John Carter of Mars. Whatever I could save of him, was all what we had after that.]
Disclosure: I worked at Urbana Free Library August 2003–January 2004. I was a part-time shelver, book processor, and I also did some secretarial work in the administrative office. The director at that time was Fred Schlipf, and Deb Lissak was the associate director. Both Mr. Schlipf and Ms. Lissak were kind, patient, supportive, and fair to me. Indeed, working for them influenced my decision to become a librarian.
Last week, I was contacted about something extremely disturbing that had recently happened at Urbana Free Library (UFL). A weeding process had taken place that had discarded thousands of nonfiction books in a hasty, arbitrary way — a way that utilizes only one of the UFL’s stated selection criteria.*
Both UFL staff and the public (who were alarmed at the rapidly emptying shelves) spoke out, but the weeding continued until a library board meeting (and Mayor Laurel Prussing) was called. JP Goguen, a university library employee, was at the meeting, recorded it, and sent the recording to me (the board normally does not record meetings). The conversation at this meeting is alarming. Urbana Free Library's director, Deb Lissak, made a unilateral decision to weed books in the print collection by date alone. It seems that the Adult Services staff’s expertise and knowledge of the collection was neither consulted nor welcomed. In fact, Anne Phillips, Director of Adult Services, was not even in the country when the project began and was unaware that it was happening at all.
Timeline of Events (From Goguen's notes)
Week of June 3, 2013. Lissak created an Excel spreadsheet of the nonfiction collection. All titles published before 2003 were highlighted in red for removal. It’s not currently known what percentage of the collection was marked for removal, but it appears to be as high as 50%, and possibly as high as 75%. The full-time staff was instructed to review the spreadsheet and mark books that they wanted to retain. June 8. Twelve new, part-time employees (who’d been hired to do the RFID tagging, but — curiously — were hired two weeks before that project was supposed to take place) were told to put the pulled books in boxes. More than half of the collection was weeded in one day. June 10. The weeded books were shipped off to Better World Books. On that day, Anne Phillips, Head of Adult Services, returned from a "three-week leave to find the collection that she oversees significantly weeded without her knowledge" or approval. Library Board Vice-President Chris Scherer visited the library and called a temporary halt to the weeding. June 11. A meeting of the Library Board was called and took place at 7:30 p.m.
The meeting began with Scherer bluntly asking Lissak the criteria she used for the weeding process:
Lissak: [W]hat I did was I sorted it by [publication] date and highlighted in red everything that was over ten years.
Scherer: Ten years since publication date?
Lissak: Over ten years for publication date.
Scherer: But not use?
Lissak: No.
...
Scherer: [W]e were not given the criteria … at that time. I went back there last night, and … we have given away to Better World Books, thousands of books… [T]he shelves right now, if you go upstairs, are empty. There are hundreds of books gone, thousands of books gone, and yet we have approved this without … board approval.
Lissak’s reasons for the weeding are to free up space and prepare the collection for RFID tag insertion. According to Mary Ellen Farrell, Board of Trustees President, a “conscious effort” was made “to find the most efficient way to get [the library] up to par as far as RFID tagging and … for the most usable [and] efficient things that … our library needs to have here as a core collection, and to identify things that are easily accessed, either from other libraries … or online.”
All lovers of libraries — librarians and patrons alike — know and understand that weeding the collection is a normal (if sometimes regrettable) part of running a library. But in the UFL’s case, "the initial criteria (everything published before 2003) and the time frame (less than one week)" severely limited the time that the librarians needed to review the "tens of thousands of titles that were to be weeded" (Notes, Goguen). As stated earlier, this would seem to go against the UFL’s own weeding policy.* Moreover, while the staff understood that weeding was to take place, their accounts of the weeding guidelines they received conflict with those of Lissak’s, who says that she never told staff that they weren’t allowed to look at the books prior to weeding, though she admits telling them that she “would like them to make the decisions more quickly.”
However, Lissak’s account isn’t what Phillips’ staff told her they understood. At the board meeting, Phillips stated that, according to “three independent statements” from her staff members, “they were told not to go to the shelf or look at the book, or look to see for other editions. They were asked to [weed] as quickly as possible, even at the level of going through a range in 30 minutes of 2,000 titles.” As Goguen stated: that’s less than one second per book.
Phillips: I wasn’t here, and that has been kind of distressing... I went back and looked at some of those spreadsheets … and I … I almost started crying. They went through these things too fast! And it cost them money I think; we can replace things, but the mistake’s made.
[unknown board member to Lissak]: Why would you proceed with the weeding in her absence when you know that she’s not in on the process?
Lissak: Well, obviously it stopped because, because…
[unknown board member]: There was an intervention of a board member.
The reason that Lissak gave for the speed at which this project took place, in other words, the reason why she didn’t wait for Phillips to return from her leave before the weeding began, was her concern for the “dollar value of staff time invested”:
[It] has to do with RFID [tagging]. We have to touch every single piece in the collection and have to tag it… And you don’t want to be doing all that and then find you’re — six months from now — you’re weeding and taking things back out you just went to the trouble of doing this for. So that was what was driving the speed at which it was happening… The timetable needed to move along more quickly.
The tags aren’t here yet; we’re getting our training next Wednesday; to keep those people busy who were hired — and I also need this weeding to happen before we insert — now I’m just on a logistical system that says, I have 154 hours of staff time that will be wasted. I need them to do something productive…
According to Phillips, a staff member asked for a meeting to discuss “the actual criteria to judge” which books would be removed, but that didn’t happen until the board meeting was called, and in the meantime, thousands of books continued to be removed:
Shelvers today are weeding the 700s — the art collection. About 70% of art books from 700–740 are gone. The $300 two-volume Art of Florence is gone; the Pritzker prize winners in architecture are gone; the History of Art by Janson is gone. Deb does not care if they circulate or not. She decided without staff input or support to do this.
On Monday (June 10), the gardening, home repair and remodeling, and foreign language areas went. So we lost lots of international language-English dictionaries as well. The gardening collection was one of the strongest in the state. (Letter. John Dunkelberger, Retired Urbana Free Library Adult Services Librarian)
If you go to the library’s second floor, if you care about these things at all, be prepared. The loss appears to be enormous. And putting aside the cultural loss for a moment, consider the loss of taxpayer money. My guess is that it must be at least in the hundreds of thousands. And it was accomplished in less than a week, while the Director of Adult Services was on leave. All at the hands of a Library Director who, without reservation, said this:
I probably haven’t looked at the collection for thirty years because that’s not my job; somebody else beneath me does that.
In her defense, Lissak did approach the Friends, asking them if they wanted the books to sell at their huge, thrice-yearly book sale. But, according to her, they turned her down, saying that “weeded books don’t sell in their sale because what [UFL] weeds out of the collection is generally not very desirable.” I doubt, however, that even if the Friends had known what was going to happen to the books, they’d not have had the space or ability to take on the thousands of them Lissak wanted to get rid of.
I was not at the meeting and the audio that I received ends after thirty minutes, but from what I understand, it was decided that weeding will not continue until further discussion and communication with the public has taken place. At this writing, the public has not been informed how many books have been removed or will continue to be removed.
No librarian (not even old-fashioned ones like me) operates under the delusion that weeding our collections should never take place. But it should always be done with care, integrity, and a deep knowledge of both the collection and patron need. John Gehner, a former librarian at Urbana Free Library, who was the first to approach me about this, said:
I think the public has no clue that removing/weeding books from the collection (which their taxes pay for) is as big a deal as buying new materials ... that there really are principles at stake (and competing needs sometimes at odds) in creating and maintaining a print collection in 2013.
The board needs to solicit input from all levels of the library for an accurate picture of what's going on.
Sometimes I think that the public has no clue because the public doesn’t care to have a clue. When I learned what happened at UFL, I felt like I’d been gutted along with their collection. I felt lonely. And I wondered if Isaac Asimov was right:
Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself. (I. Asimov: A Memoir, 1994)
But, then I reminded myself that, when this happened, I received not one angry email about it, but four, all of them wanting me to report on this. And as I listened to the transcript, I was heartened by the controlled rage I heard in Chris Scherer's voice. And as I listened to Lissak's “old books” remarks over and over, someone finally spoke up, saying, “You’re using ‘old’ as a pejorative term when sometimes [age] actually makes a book more valuable.” I didn't feel so alone anymore.
There might be hope for us yet.
--- *UPDATE*
Urbana Free Library has published a response. *UPDATE* #2
Good news from Better World Books:
Tracy, just in case you wanted to add this to the Updates at the end of the post, we have gotten in touch with UFL and are working directly with them to resolve the situation. Your detailed write-up helped bring this to our attention so that we could take action, so thank you. *UPDATE #3*
Deb Lissak told WILL Radio today that a "communication errors among staff" led to the problems at UFL. Lissak hopes to restore trust once this issue has been addressed and straightened out.
Read the article here.
~~*~~ *Criteria for weeding:
Physical condition
Frequency of use
Date of publication
Duplication within existing collection
Availability through interlibrary loan
Long-term, historical significance or interest
Cooperative collection agreements or collection strengths
The title of this article was adapted from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are from the June 11 board meeting. Urbana Free Library Staff Board of Trustees ~~*~~ Enormous gratitude to the librarians who helped, advised, and agreed to be quoted in this article. Extra special thanks to JP Goguen for sharing his photographs, notes, transcripts, and audio of the board meeting. This article couldn’t have happened without him.
- See more at: http://smilepolitely.com/culture/do_you_ever_read_any_of_the_books_you_weed/#sthash.Tzc0ofpe.dpuf
Matthew
Ball has a long examination of the economics of Netflix’s original content,
looking at it on a show-by-show level. He starts with the cost of producing
something like Arrested Development, and then works out how many extra
subscribers Netflix would need to attract in order to justify that cost. (Or,
how many extra months existing subscribers would have to keep their
subscriptions for, compared to when they would unsubscribe otherwise.) He
writes:
I’d argue that it is unlikely that Arrested Development will convince
millions of users to stay an extra month in 2014 and 2015. If this is the case,
the show would need to achieve its return in the immediate future. Therefore, if
we don’t see Netflix adding four to five million new subscribers during the
quarter, one of two things are true. One, the show was a poor investment whose
draw was a fraction of those anticipated, or two, the show is instead intended
to convince many of the million subscribers currently churning away each month
to defer their cancellation. This would be telling.
While Wall Street analysts are assessing the success of original content in
terms of new customers, I believe Netflix’s primary goal is on imminent service
cancellations.
Ball lists three reasons why Netflix is making original content. There’s the
way in which that content keeps people subscribing for longer; the way in which
original content will allow Netflix to raise its prices in the future; and then
there’s this:
Hedging against rising content licensing costs, which are up 700% over the
past two years. While per-show licenses will never surpass the cost of original
producing a series, their increases will make ongoing investments in House
of Cards less expensive on a differential basis.
The ever-increasing cost of licensing is a huge issue for Netflix, and it’s
the
reason why its business model is a very tough one: any time that Netflix
builds up a profit margin, the studios will simply raise their prices until that
margin disappears. Netflix had to pay a whopping $1.355 billion in
licensing costs just in the first quarter of this year; that number is only
going to increase, unless Netflix can find some other way of finding content.
Like producing it in-house. At the margin, the more material that Netflix
produces on its own, the less it needs from third parties, and the easier that
Netflix finds it to say no to ridiculous demands.
But what Ball misses, I think, is that Netflix is playing a very, very long
game here — not one measured in months or quarters, and certainly not one where
original content pays for itself within a year. Netflix doesn’t particularly
want or need the content it produces in-house to make a profit on a short-term
basis. Instead, it wants “to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix,” in
the words of its chief content officer Ted Sarandos.
Most importantly, the thing that Netflix aspires to, and which HBO already
has, is an exclusive library of shows. If everything goes according to
plan, then the Netflix of the future will be something people feel that they
have to subscribe to, on the grounds that it’s the only place where
they can find shows A, B, C, and D. That’s what it means to become HBO
— and Netflix is fully cognizant that this is a process which takes many years
and billions of dollars.
If Netflix gets there, then it becomes a license to print money, just as HBO
is today. Shows like Arrested Development and House of Cards may or may not pay
for themselves over the short term — in fact, they almost certainly won’t. But
that doesn’t matter. In the long term, they will become part of a library which
has massive value on two fronts: the shows can be licensed out in jurisdictions
where Netflix doesn’t want to compete, and they will also help make Netflix a
service that can guarantee you a great show that you want to watch, whenever you
want to watch it.
Ball says that “Arrested Development is an established brand that’s intended
to be a one-off event to convince its fanatical (and tech-savvy) followers to
give Netflix’s broader streaming service a try.” That’s true — narrowly. But the
series is much more than that: it’s also a way for Netflix to signal to
all its current and potential subscribers that it is home to
high-quality exclusive content, if and when they ever feel like giving it a try.
In a weird way, Arrested Development is worth more as the number of people who
haven’t seen it goes up.
No one today is likely to subscribe to Netflix just on the grounds that they
think they might like to watch Arrested Development at some point. But when
there are dozens such shows — none of which are available anywhere else — that
begins to add up. At that point, not only does Netflix provide something for
everybody; it also becomes the only place to watch certain shows with
cultural-touchstone status. And presto, the decision is no longer whether
Netflix is worth the subscription price; rather, the question is whether you can
afford not to have it.
There’s no guarantee that Netflix is going to succeed at this strategy: many
have sailed into the treacherous waters of Hollywood video production, and few
have thrived there. And in the first instance the strategy just means that it’s
no longer just the content companies managing to extract enormous rents from
Netflix; it’s the production industry and the talent as well. The old argument
still applies, mutatis mutandis, to the new strategy: as high-quality
original content becomes increasingly important to Netflix, Hollywood will find
ever more ingenious ways of forcing Netflix to pay through the nose for it.
Still, for viewers, this can only be good. The viewing audience doesn’t care
whether Netflix makes money: they just want great shows to be produced. If they
like House of Cards and Arrested Development, they should be very heartened:
there’s going to be a lot more new shows where those ones came from.
[ What fun to share a religious article that is interestingly close to my feelings on the matter, but shouldn't this be entitled "God Revisited" because do you revise God or your opinion of God? So, keep in mind this guy may be only, say, 35% right. :) -mike ]
God, Revised: The Atheists Are Half Right
Rev. Galen Guengerich - Huffington Post
Religion in America is in trouble, and science can help save it. Conventional wisdom suggests otherwise, saying that science is more likely to kill religion than rescue it. I'm convinced that science is the last best hope for religion in the modern world.
The God Wars pit those who believe in a supernatural God that commands and controls from outside the natural order against those who accept rational thought and scientific research as the final word. For centuries, people have tried to arbitrage the difference between these competing worldviews. Today, more and more people are concluding that we ultimately have to choose. In this ongoing battle of Faith v. Reason, reason now appears to be winning: The majority of Americans either have no religious affiliation or, even if affiliated, see a conflict between being a devout religious person and living in the modern world.
This conflict is real, but unnecessary.
Until about 500 years ago, people thought the Earth was at the center of the solar system. But Copernicus looked into the night sky and discovered otherwise. In more recent centuries, scientists have come to another conclusion of similar magnitude: In our universe, the fundamental laws of nature have existed from the very beginning, they apply everywhere, and they do not change.
As humans, we continually revise our answers to cosmic questions, and I believe now is the time to revise the answer to the question of God. This is where science can show the way forward. Rather than ignore it, we need to take everything we know into account in order to discover the God we believe in and decide how we need to live. But like the view of the universe as Earth-centered, I believe the view of God that requires us to suspend disbelief needs left behind.
It won't be easy. The belief in a supernatural God is longstanding and has broad appeal, not to mention evolutionary origins. Our ancient ancestors survived because they understood the world in terms of cause and effect; they understood themselves as agents who could cause things to happen. If they followed cause and agency far enough upstream, they would reach a first cause that stood outside the universe, which they dubbed God.
But people didn't respond to Copernicus by saying that if the earth isn't the center of the solar system, then the solar system doesn't exist. When people ask me whether I believe in God, my answer is yes. But I'm convinced that today's atheists are 100 percent half right. I, too, don't believe in the supernatural God they don't believe in. Traditional religionists are also 100 percent half right. Just because God isn't supernatural doesn't mean that God is a fantasy and religion is a farce.
I did not come to this answer quickly or easily, however. As a former Conservative Mennonite from a long line of Mennonite preachers, I've struggled since my youth with this question, which I work to untangle in my writings, sermons and book "God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age."
Seeking God, finding faith and participating in a religious community is more than a personal exercise. If we fail to adapt, our increasingly empty houses of worship will become a sad symbol of a deeper vacancy in our lives and our culture. We'll each be left increasingly alone with our spiritual hunger and our longing for a place to belong. Self-centered entertainment will increasingly substitute for moral education. Political expediency and religious zealotry will increasingly triumph over a commitment to common good.
In our modern world, we need to understand where we belong -- that deep connection to everything that is present in our world, as well as all that is past and all that is possible. For this reason, a revised understanding of God isn't an optional aspect of life today. I believe it's necessary -- not to explain everything we don't know, but to make meaningful sense of everything we do know.
"Has our collective attention span become so ridiculously short that we’re suddenly shocked by news of the NSA attaining data about Americans as a means of fighting evildoers? Has everyone been asleep for the last 12 years?"
NSA Bombshell Story Falling Apart Under Scrutiny; Key Facts Turning Out to Be Inaccurate
It turns out, the NSA data-mining story isn’t quite the bombshell that everyone said it was. Yes, there continues to be a serious cause for concern when it comes to government spying and overreach with its counter-terrorism efforts. But the reporting fromGlenn Greenwald and theWashington Post has been shoddy and misleading.
We shouldn’t shrug off our weakened privacy as a merely a side effect of the digital age, either. We ought to fight to preserve as much of our personal information as possible. So if there’s any benefit to the NSA news, it’s to serve as a reminder that, yes, the government is serious about attaining information in its war on terrorism and that we should be aware of what’s going on — checking it when it gets out of control.
But with new contravening information emerging since the original stories were posted by Greenwald and the Washington Post, it’s clear that the reporting by each news outlet was filled with possibly agenda-driven speculation and key inaccuracies.
Greenwald told CNN, “It’s well past time that we have a debate about whether that’s the kind of country and world in which we want to live.”
Canonizing bad reporting as a means of inciting a debate is as bad as no debate at all. Attachment to empirical reality must remain a central trait of the left, otherwise the progressive movement is no better than the non-reality based propagandists on the right who will say and do anything to further the conservative agenda. So perhaps some positive changes on domestic spying are eventually achieved, but at what cost? Greenwald, who doesn’t really care about “left and right,” isn’t concerned with anything other than his personal agenda and clearly he’s willing to do whatever it takes in pursuit of those goals. Specifics presently.
It’s a shame because there’s a way to have this debate without selling out to misinformation. Instead, we appear to be careening way off the empirical rails into hysterical, kneejerk acceptance of half-assed information.
Here’s how this story has played out since late Thursday.
1. Both Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post reported that the NSA had attained “direct access” to servers owned by Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Apple and other big tech companies in order to attain private user information via a top secret government operation called PRISM. Initially, this appeared to be a major violation of privacy. The implication is that the government enjoyed unchecked, unrestricted access to metadata about users any time it wanted.
2. Then, naturally, heads exploded throughout the blogs and social media. Left and right alike.
3. While everyone was busily losing their shpadoinkle on Twitter and the blogs, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL and Apple all announced in separate statements that not only were they unaware of any PRISM program, but they also confirmed that there’s no way the government had infiltrated the privately-owned servers maintained by these companies. Furthermore, Google wrote, “Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.” Google also described how it will occasionally and voluntarily hand over user data to the government, but only after it’s been vetted and scrutinized by Google’s legal team.
4. The freakout continued.
5. Furthermore, Glenn Greenwald used the phrase “direct access,” as in unobstructed direct server access, four times in his article, most prominently in his lede, “The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.” Unless the tech companies were collectively lying, Greenwald’s use of “direct access” is inaccurate. And if it’s inaccurate, the most alarming aspect of this NSA story is untrue.
On Twitter, Greenwald defended his reporting by reiterating that the NSA said within the PRISM document that there has been “collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook…” But this could mean that the data was drawn from the servers, vetted and handed over to the NSA per Google’s stated process of legal vetting. And if the data was made available, it’s possible that the tech companies posted it on a server for the NSA analysts to download, just as you might download a file from work or a friend via Dropbox or an FTP server. Regardless, it seems as if Greenwald’s entire story hinges on a semantic interpretation of the PRISM language. And his mistake was to leap from “collection directly from servers” to “direct access.”
6. More exploded heads anyway. Anyone relaying the new information is accused of being an Obamabot.
7. Additionally, the NSA whistleblower who provided the information to the Washington Postwas quoted as saying, “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.” Without direct access to the servers this would be impossible — that is, unless the NSA was intercepting user data in transit. But that’s not what Greenwald and the Washington Postreported: direct server access. This was the bombshell — that the NSA could grab information at will — and, as of this writing, it’s inaccurate.
8. In spite of these new revelations, epidemic-level outrage continued to spread all around. Michael Moore and others applauded the anonymous whistleblower(s) who provided information to Greenwald.
9. By the end of the day Friday, Business Insider reported that the Washington Post hadrevised its article. The article no longer reported that the tech companies “knowingly” cooperated with PRISM. But, more importantly, the phrase “track a person’s movements and contacts over time” in the article’s lede was revised to “track foreign targets.” There’s a huge difference between the two phrases. Public outrage was almost entirely based on the idea that the NSA was spying on everyone who uses those services — broad, unrestricted access to private information (as private as social media and email is). But the revision limits the scope of the operation to international communications.
As of Saturday, Greenwald, unlike the Washington Post, hadn’t corrected or revised his reporting to reflect the new information, and, in fact, Greenwald continued to defend his reporting on Twitter. (It’s worth noting how speculative Greenwald’s article was. The following line was particularly leading: “It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.” There’s no indication whatsoever that the government was gathering information without warrants.)
10. Heads, sadly, continued to explode all over the place in spite of the total de-fanging of both stories.
11. Meanwhile, TechCrunch‘s Josh Constine reported on Saturday, “[T]he NSA did not have direct access or any special instant access to data or servers at the PRISM targets, but instead had to send requests to the companies for the data.”
This is vastly different from what Greenwald reported.
12. Rampant outrage all day Saturday.
13. And ultimately, other than the PRISM Power Point, the NSA’s surveillance story isn’t anything new. Some headline history via ProPublica:
But the Greenwald and Washington Post stories are somehow bombshells, taken at face value. Has our collective attention span become so ridiculously short that we’re suddenly shocked by news of the NSA attaining data about Americans as a means of fighting evildoers? Has everyone been asleep for the last 12 years?
To summarize, yes, the NSA routinely requests information from the tech giants. But the NSA doesn’t have “direct access” to servers nor is it randomly collecting information about you personally. Yet rending of garments and general apoplexy has ruled the day, complete with predictable invective about the president being “worse than Bush” and that anyone who reported on the new information debunking the initial report was and is an Obamabot apologist.
Speaking for myself on that front, I’m not apologizing for anyone. I’m merely noting that Greenwald and the Washington Post reported inaccurate information. I’ve spent a considerable chunk of my writing career eviscerating the post-9/11 surveillance state and its accompanying trespasses against privacy and civil liberties. While I’m encouraged by the president’s vow to begin rolling back the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military force, winding down the endless war and its accompanying endless war powers, I’m also concerned about the continued bartering of privacy for the sake of a little more security — a through-line that began under George W. Bush and continues today.
But this prioritization of security over liberty wasn’t invented by this president. It began as the unforgivable exploitation of fear in the days after 9/11 and became entwined in the American worldview. We’ve sadly become just as accustomed to unnecessary searches and privacy intrusions as the federal government has grown accustomed to going beyond its mandate to smoke out the evildoers.
(Special thanks to both JM Ashby and Charles Johnson from Little Green Footballs, whose coverage on this topic has been tenacious.)
INEQUALITY IS NOW ONE of the biggest political and economic challenges facing the United States. Not that long ago, the gap between rich and poor barely registered on the political Richter scale. Now the growing income divide, an issue that dominated the presidential election debate, has turned into one of the hottest topics of the age.
Postwar American history divides into two halves. For the first three decades, those on middle and low incomes did well out of rising prosperity and inequality fell. In the second half, roughly from the mid–1970s, this process went into reverse. Set on apparent autopilot, the gains from growth were heavily colonized by the superrich, leaving the bulk of the workforce with little better than stagnant incomes.
The return of inequality to levels last seen in the 1920s has had a profound effect on American society, its values, and its economy. The United States led the world in the building of a majority middle class. As early as 1956, the celebrated sociologist, C. Wright Mills, wrote that American society had become “less a pyramid with a flat base than a fat diamond with a bulging middle.”
That bulge has been on a diet. The chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers — Professor Alan Krueger — has shown how the size of the American middle class (households with annual incomes within 50 percent of the midpoint of the income distribution) has been heading backwards from a peak of more than a half in the late 1970s to 40 percent now. The “diamond” has gone. The social shape of America now looks more like a contorted “hourglass” with a pronounced bulge at the top, a long thin stem in the middle, and a fat bulge at the bottom.
One of the most significant effects of America’s hourglass society has been the capping of opportunities and the emergence of downward mobility amongst the middle classes, a process that began well before the recession. Around 100 million Americans — a third of the population — live below or fractionally above the poverty level. A quarter of the American workforce end up in low-paid jobs, the highest rate across rich nations, while the wealthiest 400 Americans have the same combined wealth as the poorest half — over 150 million people.
With a growing percentage of the current generation facing a lower living standard than their parents, more and more US citizens express a “fear of falling,” worried about a further loss of livelihood and their relative income status. The nation is at last waking up to what has been reality for years — the vaunted American Dream (the ability of citizens to go from rags to riches, and one of the country’s most enduring values) is increasingly a myth.
In a poll conducted for The Washington Post before the 2012 presidential election, respondents were asked which was the bigger worry: “unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy” or “over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity.” They chose unfairness by a margin of 52–37 percent. The mostly pro-self-reliant American public are perhaps coming to recognize that their much-heralded virtues of hard work and self-help are no longer an effective means to economic advancement.
The most damaging impact of growing inequality has been on the American — and global — economy. It has been one of the central rules of market economics that inequality is good for growth and stability. The idea was enshrined in the postwar writings of the New Right critics of the model of managed capitalism that emerged after the war. “Inequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses’ well being, not the cause of anybody’s distress” wrote the Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises, one of the leading prophets of the superiority of markets, in 1955.
It was a theory that gained traction during the global economic crisis of the 1970s and with the publication in 1975 of a highly influential book, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, by the late American mainstream economist Arthur Okun. This theory — that you can have either more equal societies or more economically successful ones, but not both — has been used to justify the growth of inequality in the United States, a trend that has since spread to a majority of the rich world. One of the telling by-products of the current economic crisis is that this theory is now being challenged. It is now being increasingly argued that the levels of income concentration in recent times have had a significant negative effect on the economy, bringing slower growth and greater turbulence and contributing to both the 2008 crash and the lack of a sustained recovery.
Perhaps the most significant convert to these ideas is President Obama. A year ago, he remarked, “When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy from top to bottom.” Addressing delegates at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2013, Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, endorsed this view, “I believe that the economics profession and the policy community have downplayed inequality for too long […] [A] more equal distribution of income allows for more economic stability, more sustained economic growth.”
This view goes against the grain of the economic orthodoxy of the last 30 years. As the Chicago economist Robert E. Lucas, Nobel prizewinner and one of the principal architects of the pro-market, self-regulating school that has dominated economic strategy in the Anglo-Saxon world, declared in 2003, “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most poisonous is to focus on questions of distribution.”
A growing body of evidence and opinion now holds that this idea is wrong. In fact, the “distribution question” — how the cake is divided, between wages and profits on the one hand, and between the top and bottom on the other — is critical to economic health. Over the last 30 years, the rich world, led by the United States, has steered a growing share of national output first to profits and ultimately to the top one percent. Across the 34 richest nations in the world, the share going to wages has fallen from over 66 percent in 1990 to less than 62 percent today. The result is a growing detachment of living standards from output. The stagnating incomes of the bulk of Americans, along with the shrinking of the middle, are the mirror image of the rise of the plutocracy and the return of the gilded age.
This decoupling of wages from output creates a critical structural fault that ultimately brings self-destruction. First, a growing pay-output gap sucks consumer lifeblood out of economies. To fill this growing demand gap, levels of personal debt were allowed to explode. In the US, the level of outstanding personal debt rose almost threefold in the decade from 1997 to $14.4 trillion. This helped to fuel a domestic boom from the mid-1990s, but one that was never going to be sustainable.
Secondly, the long wage squeeze and the growing concentration of income at the top led to record corporate surpluses and an explosion of personal fortunes. Instead of being used to create new wealth via an investment and entrepreneurial boom (as predicted by market theorists), these massive cash surpluses were used to finance a wave of speculative financial activity and asset restructuring. The effect was the upward redistribution of existing wealth and the fueling of the bubbles — in property and business — that eventually brought the global economy to its knees. That inequality is also acting as a profound drag on the prospects of recovery.
A central feature of the President’s annual State of the Union address on February 11 was its call to “grow the economy from the middle out,” to “reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth — a rising, thriving middle class.” In his call for more active government to reduce inequality — from a 25 percent hike in the minimum wage to higher taxes on the rich — Obama was adding some meat to his earlier call “to restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share.” Yet, despite a succession of lofty speeches, the best evidence is that since 2008, growth has continued to be very unevenly shared. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have shown that over nine tenths of growth in 2010 was captured by the top one percent. This is in stark contrast to the 1930s, when the big gainers from recovery were most ordinary Americans and the big losers were the superrich.
Obama’s program for change fails to match the radicalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s or that of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty three decades later. Of course, creating a more equal America is hardly a cakewalk. The United States has rarely been more divided on the politics of change. Before Congressman Paul Ryan became Mitt Romney’s controversial running mate, he had blasted Obama’s proposed (and modest) tax measures on the rich as “class warfare.” Other global leaders seem equally disempowered in the face of the might of a global billionaire class determined to preserve its privileges, muscle, and wealth.
But unless Obama can find a way of breaking the firewalls created by the new plutocrats to protect their wealth from economic collapse and political interference, the likelihood is that the American middle class will go on shrinking, the American dream will further erode, and the nation’s economy will continue to stumble from crisis to crisis.
I was not at the meeting and the audio that I received ends after thirty minutes, but from what I understand, it was decided that weeding will not continue until further discussion and communication with the public has taken place. At this writing, the public has not been informed how many books have been removed or will continue to be removed.
INEQUALITY IS NOW ONE of the biggest political and economic challenges facing the United States. Not that long ago, the gap between rich and poor barely registered on the political Richter scale. Now the growing income divide, an issue that dominated the presidential election debate, has turned into one of the hottest topics of the age.