Obama, the privacy board, and the NSA

According to yesterday’s edition of The Guardian, “The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.”

What is interesting about this is that the White House handpicked the members of the privacy board from the Washington establishment. They couldn’t even stack the deck in their favor on this issue. Of course, the administration immediately issued a response saying that it totally disagreed with the report.

As I’ve noted before, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Unlike the NSA’s supporters in congress, who all have their own agendas, there is no way he doesn’t understand the illegality of warrantless searches. And he also has to be aware that this type of indiscriminate surveillance has been very ineffective. Can he possibly be intellectually convinced that this mass collection of phone data is legal? I find that hard to believe. However, alternative explanations are unsettling. He knows it’s wrong but he’s being pressured to give it his okay. Or he’s being blackmailed.

Could it be possible that the White House chose the members of privacy board knowing what the outcome would be, in order to send a message not to Obama, but to further undermine the NSA? It’s Washington. Anything is possible.

Let me count the ways: A partial list of the illegal, immoral and downright unconstitutional actions of our current U.S. government.

I know I’m only scratching the surface here. Let me know if you have suggestions to add to the list.

1. Indiscriminately collecting communications data on hundreds of millions of Americans who are not suspected of any terrorist or illegal activities.
2. Conducting surveillance and data gathering on friendly foreign leaders.
3. Imprisoning and torturing people in Guantanamo Bay who have not been charged with any crime.
4. Using drones to murder foreign nationals who have not been convicted of any crime.
5. Using drones that regularly kill innocent civilians in foreign countries.
6. Allowing the FBI and local police departments to spy on and infiltrate peaceful, legitimate protest organizations.
7. Allowing the militarization of America’s police departments.
8. Admitting marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol, yet continuing to arrest and imprison people for using marijuana.
9. Continuing to pour billions of dollars into a worldwide drug war that is universally condemned as a failed policy.
10. Continuing the long running policy of supporting foreign leaders who are “friendly” to the U.S. regardless of their human rights records.
11. Continuing to be the largest exporter of weapons to the world.
12. Punishing whistleblowers instead of those criminals who are exposed by the whistleblowers.
13. Not making campaign finance reform a major policy initiative.
14. Not charging any bankers or Wall Street power players with crimes for the 2008 economic meltdown.
15. Trying to push through trade agreements like TPP in secret without sufficient input and discussion from stakeholders.
16. Allowing Israel to have undue influence over policy making both in Congress and the White House.
17. Continuing to spend a disproportionate amount of taxpayer dollars on the military and intelligence operations.
18. Allowing radical Republicans to set the parameters of debate on a number of important topics.
19. Not doing more to reverse or negate the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
20. Continuing to underfund scientific research.

We are living in Gordon Gekko’s America

It’s a quiet Sunday morning. A good time to reflect on things, especially after spending an hour or so immersed in the latest news the Internet has to offer. Although the sun is out in Minnesota, the climate of this country, and the rest of the world, is very dark and gloomy.

I have an interest in conspiracy theories, but that doesn’t mean I subscribe to all of them. One theory that has been growing in popularity, especially since the Da Vinci Code captured the world’s attention, is that there is a cabal of ultra wealthy individuals, some call them the Illuminati, that pull the economic strings of the international financial systems for their own benefit. This is one theory that I think overcomplicates and over romanticizes a far simpler explanation.

What I believe has happened in America to bring us to our current situation is the growth of unfettered, unrestrained, unregulated capitalism. Since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, we’ve had three Republican administrations and two pro-business Democratic presidents. During those 34 years, these corporate-friendly administrations, with the help of congress, have succumbed to the desires of the military/corporate/media complex and weakened, watered-down and done away with the regulations that were created to keep capitalism in check. As a result, Wall Street and the big banks nearly brought the world to a financial Armageddon in 2008, and there is nothing to say that won’t happen again.

At the same time this massive deregulation was taking place, campaign finance laws were also under attack, culminating in the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allowed companies to pour almost unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns. The result is a congress filled with pro-business puppets who obediently do the bidding of their deep-pocketed masters. How bad is it? House Republicans have just nominated a climate change denier to head the Science Committee’s environmental subcommittee.

None of this needed the invisible hand of a secret group of monocled European aristocrats to happen. It just needed a large enough group of wealthy, greedy, near-sighted capitalists willing to spread around greenbacks to get what they wanted. And they have. Perhaps the most prophetic catchphrase to ever come from a movie was Gordon Gekko’s pronouncement in Wall Street that, “Greed is good.” Way too many corporate leaders and spineless politicians took those words to heart, and we’ve ended up with a situation where Scrooge McDuck and a few of his friends now sit on their mountains of money while the rest of us are happy to be able to pay our monthly bills.

I don’t see a conspiracy here. It’s not nearly as romantic as the Illuminati, but I think stone cold greed has brought us to where we are today.

U.S. spies eager to kill the messenger

Today’s Buzzfeed has an article titled, America’s Spies Want Snowden Dead. The article is packed with inflammatory comments like, “I’d love to put a bullet in his head,” from a Pentagon official, and “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him,” from a defense contractor. What’s problematic about the article is that the quotes all come from “Unnamed sources.” On the one hand it makes sense. Spooks can’t be spooks if they hand out business cards. But in today’s world of manipulated media, it raises suspicions about the authenticity of the quotes.

If these sentiments are accurate, however, the article reveals that many people employed by the surveillance state live in an impenetrable bubble of self-importance. Despite the fact that during the past ten years only one or two terrorist plots have been exposed as the result of mass electronic surveillance, they deem Snowden a traitor who has seriously damaged their efforts to stop the bad guys.

The fact is that the NSA has very little to show for its intrusive and costly intelligence gathering operations. Even setting aside the many constitutional issues involved here, there simply hasn’t been much return on the taxpayers’ investment of billions of dollars. Snowden’s revelations have less to do with disrupting America’s spying capabilities and more to do with pulling back the curtain on the ineffective and unconstitutional NSA/CIA programs. 

Obama is making a speech today regarding proposed NSA reforms. Many believe it will be too little too late, and will not sufficiently reign in the intrusive spying tactics already in place. Regardless, if it weren’t for Snowden, we wouldn’t even be having this debate, as we’d still be in the dark about who was listening to our phone calls and reading our texts. If accurate, the ugly quotes about killing Snowden demonstrate an attitude among security officials that lawlessness in the pursuit of one’s objectives is acceptable. Not much of a surprise there.

Israel is trying to drag the U.S. into war with Iran

As the Obama administration is in the midst of delicate nuclear agreement negotiations with Iran, 58 Senators, including 16 Democrats, are co-sponsoring a sanctions bill that would effectively torpedo the current talks and increase the likelihood of war with Iran.

Despite the fact that Americans overwhelmingly oppose another war in the Middle East, these Senators are pushing hard to antagonize the Iranian government. Why? This one fact will provide a key hint. Fifty-five of the 58 Senators who are co-sponsors of this pro-war bill are the largest recipients of money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), totaling $7.3 million (2007-2012). Israel has long made its desire to attack Iran (or have the U.S. do it) public, and their strong lobbying efforts are bearing fruit with this latest sanctions bill.

Obama met with the Democratic Senators supporting the bill at the White House yesterday to try and persuade them to let the current negotiations proceed, but only time will tell us who has more influence in Washington, the President of the United States or the State of Israel.

Anchorman 2: The Legend of Ron Burgundy Ends Here

(Spoiler alert)

I hardly ever write movie reviews, but after seeing Anchorman 2 recently I feel irritated enough to say something. The first Anchorman movie came out in 2004 and with the exception of the Austin Powers series, no film in recent history has resulted in more memes and oft-repeated catchphrases (“I’m kind of a big deal.”) then The Legend of Ron Burgundy. So, fans hoping for a sequel waited patiently almost ten years for the next Anchorman installment. What they got, unfortunately, was a lazy, sloppy, unimaginative retelling of the first Anchorman.

Every funny bit from the original movie is simply rehashed with a few minor alterations and updates. Really? After ten years, the writers (who include Will Ferrell) couldn’t come up with anything even slightly original? Do they have so little respect for fans of the first movie that they thought it would be okay to simply redo the jokes, and everyone would think that was hilarious?

And speaking of Austin Powers, the creators of Anchorman 2 were so lazy that they unabashedly ripped off a bit from one of Myer’s movies. When Burgundy meets the new African American producer, he can’t stop saying “black,” a direct lift from Power’s inability to stop saying “mole.”

Even the core storyline of the movie is off key. Basically, Ron Burgundy is credited with starting the vacuous infotainment trend prevalent in today’s network news. The more original approach, in my opinion, would have been to have Burgundy naively oppose the new trend and to fight quixotically for presenting actual news. This just strikes me as being more in keeping with his dolt-with-a-golden-heart character.

Anchorman 2 would have been a disappointment if they’d rushed it out on the heels of the first movie, but after 10 years, this bastard clone is inexcusable.

American taxpayers keep a Mexican drug cartel in business

An investigative report by the Mexican paper El Universal finds that since at least 2000, the CIA has been working with the Sinaloa drug cartel, allowing them to smuggle billions of dollars worth of drugs into the U.S. in exchange for information on the activities of other drug cartels.

Mmmm. Let me get this straight. Instead of taking down one of Mexico’s largest drug operations, we allow them to conduct business as usual in exchange for information on their competitors. Makes total sense. U.S. taxpayers are spending billions of dollars every year for a war on drugs, but billions of dollars worth of drugs are being allowed into this country in an arrangement that makes the Sinaloa cartel stronger than ever.

Please, make the insanity stop. Our taxes are going to pay for this lunacy. Think of the things the trillions of dollars spent on the drug war over the past 40 years could have gone to – scientific research, strengthening public education, technological advances, much needed repairs to the countries roads and bridges, and much more. Instead it’s been dumped down a black hole that eventually ends up lining the pockets of criminals.

Make some noise. Write to your representatives and tell them to end the war on drugs. The sooner the better.