Sensible Liberals – Page 6

What, Me Worry?

Published on May 27, 2007

How much further is the authoritarianism of New Labour going to be allowed to go before it’s put a stop to, and who is going to do it?

We hear this morning that now they propose to allow police to stop and question anybody, anywhere, anytime, about anything at all, with no probable cause and no need for any crime having been committed – and those who refuse are to be charged with obstruction of the police.

And now Whitehall even wants to put litter=droppers on the DNA database.
Are they crazy? Yes. Crazy like a bunch of technofascists. It’s not just the sweeping powers being given to police that we need to worry about, either:

Civil liberties groups are warning that the details of every Briton could soon be on the national DNA database, raising fresh concerns of a ‘surveillance society’. Controversial plans being studied by the government would see the DNA of people convicted of even the most minor, non-imprisonable offences, such as dropping litter, entered on the national database.

That rather puts the lie to those New Labour supporters insisting that all is for the best in the best of all possiible worlds – people like well-padded journo and ‘cultural critic’ Mark Lawson, whose asinine assertion in the Guardian on Friday that datamining is nothing to worry about, really, is one of the reasons we’re in this mess.

A commenter put it better than I ever could:

Markson
May 25, 2007 8:08 AM

Wow, the writer is exceptionally naive, especially in a world that has witnessed what the Bush administration has done with data mining. No one is paranoid to fear that governments may use Google’s vast search database to turn it on its citizens, just as Bush used AT&T to spy on Americans (w/o warrants mind you) and the Chinese government has used Yahoo to arrest a dissident.

This Pollyanna belief that because there are laws against such behavior in democracies that mortals won’t break those laws or the public will rise up is foolishly dangerous. There is no greater example of that folly than the United States where Bush has succeeded on destroying constitutionally protected rights in an unprecedented fashion and the public is apathetic (either being ignorant of the scale or believing that it’s scope is limited and accurate).

Exactly.

Mark Lawson and media figures like him are overprivileged, overfed over-insulated tossers who need to get out of North London or Bow or wherever the latest middle-aged trendoid meedja hangout is now and then. Lawson’s horribly representative of a technologically and politically illiterate cadre of journalists who were in bed with Tony (and now with Gordon) and who just flat out don’t see what’s happening. By minimising the threat Lawson and his ilk are actually enabling it.

When government authoritarianism is combined with ID cards and a DNA database and supplemented by commercial datamining, any remaining civil liberties, any claim to being private individuals that we have, is gone. Forever.

The information may be all about us, but it isn’t ours any more: even our thoughts are regularly monitored and sold.

What’s not sold is seized: in the UK the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allows the government to seize and sweep broad swathes of information about us from companies and data providers, basically on spec (and it’s about to get worse). In the US the Patriot Act and National Security Letters serve the same purpose.

The wall between commercial and governmental data mining is now so flimsy all it will take is a enough hot air from a determined politician to blow it down completely.

Now they want our DNA too.

Soon we will all cease to be private individuals and become the property of the state, with no aspect of our lives left unmonitored, unsurveilled or uncontrolled, not even our genes. By 2010 every UK ‘citizen’ is to have a biometric ID card, the information on which is to be collated with what’s already held by government.

Liberty claims that, per head of population, the UK has five times as many people on the DNA database as any other country. The government estimates that even if the database is not expanded to include the details of minor offenders, some 4.5 million people will still be on it by 2010.

The expansion of the database is prompting fears that people from ethnic minorities are being stigmatised. According to research by the Liberal Democrats, under the existing system within three years the details of more than half of all black men will be on the DNA database

Almost 40% of the male black population, many of them children, have their DNA on criminal file, despite their having never been charged or convicted of any crime.

Oh, and just in case you though this apparent discrimination was accidental, the biometric ID cards are being brought in for foreigners first.
Guess who’ll be constantly asked to produce their ‘foreigners’ ID papers? You can bet that they sure as hell won’t be white and they won’t be foreign either.

Not content with seizing our DNA, the New Labour government’s latest wheeze is that children – even in the womb – are to be identified by social services departments as being ‘at risk of future criminal behaviour’.No only that, they’re proposing that not just hard data but gossip and speculation about us should be shared amongst government departments:

UK Proposes Department of Precrime

It seems the Blair government’s attacks on civil liberties will continue even during the PM’s farewell tour. The Times today has printed a leaked plan from the Home Office violent crime unit which if true is almost beyond belief.

The proposal is to force frontline public sector workers to report people they merely think might one day commit a violent offence. This speculation will then be collated by a national agency and shared amongst a range of bodies such as local authorites and the police.

The proposal includes terms like “sufficiently concerned” which sound good. However if staff have a statutory duty to make such reports then they will obviously cover themselves by reporting more rather than less. Remember that we’re not just talking about specially trained personnel. We’re talking about anyone in the public services who comes into contact with us.

If this monstrous scheme goes ahead it will in effect create a national database of gossip, hearsay and uninformed speculation – some of which will undoubtedly be malicious. Once on the database you’ll probably never get off. An unfounded accusation could follow you for the rest of your life.

And of course data, like that from Sure Start and other arms-length, semi-privatised or outsourced agencies, goes right into the ‘caring services’ pool.

It’s called the multi-agency approach, but it’s authoritarianism by stealth. Cemtral government is leeching off public service workers’ best efforts to help people. The people on the ground may have the best will in the world, but when a government is hell-bent on social control and has the means to do it, good people get crushed.

But it’s going to take principled people in the public services like that to fight this: only if the public and civil service unions refuse to play ball with New Labour, refuse to go along with and to implement these mad dictatorial schemes, do we have any chance of escaping a future that’s very scary indeed.

If civil servants decide to use their power they could bring the country to a standstill – and they could easily put a spoke in any scheme the government thinks up to oppress the populace, because after all they’re the ones who have to implement it.

But Will thay? How likely is that to happen? I don’t know. I wish I did.

“Whither Progressive Blogging?”

Published on May 14, 2007

This seems to be the main theme of the blogospheric zeitgeist this morning and as I just spent best part of an hour composing this response to Donna’s comment on the ‘e-democracy’ conference, I thought screw it, it’s a post.

So here’s some further thoughts on the ongoing metamorphosis of the liberal blogosphere into the fundraising arm of the Democratic party, and on the ensuing exclusion of other voices:

Every time I read one of the big blogs self-congratulatorily patting themselves on the back I think Hah! we put you there, bigshot. Back along before the war, when the election was being stolen and real antiwar activist overseas were looking for a bit of sense in the ocean of bullshit that was coming from official US media sources, we found a few lone voices, like Atrios and Kos, speaking out.

Understandably they were feted abroad as being the last remaining sensible Americans and we all flocked to read and encourage them; the left supports those who speak out against injustice. As disquiet over the war spread – fed by the constant stream of information from antiwar bloggers and activists around the world – those US blogs, because of the input of their commenters – many of them activists and acdemics abroad – began to get a name for themselves for having good information and analysis.

In encouraging antiwar sentiment in the US we created a monster: the blogging kool kidz. They now think it’s all their own work and don’t acknowledge either the support of those thousands of small bloggers worldwide who supported, publicised and linked to them. or the later leg-up they’ve been given by influential lfriends in the Democratic party structures and media.

That latter kind of co-option is the way the establishment works to neutralise potential threats, and the bigger bloggers, enamoured of their own importance, either don’t see or refuse to see it. They think they made themselves popular and influential. Nope, we made them popular to to begin with, but as soon as big media saw that the nexus of intelligence clustering around these blogs could be a threat they moved quickly to absorb the bloggers themselves into the existing power structures.

It’s happened in quite a subtle way; by having shifted from their initial antiwar focus to concentrate on the shortcomings of the mainstream media the big bloggers have in actuality become a necessary adjunct to it. Big blogs are shoring up the very media/military/political structures they claim to be railing against.

It’s fascinating how by being suckered by party politics into arguing on the rightwing media’ ground they’ve already accepted the right’s framing of current political issuess as cultural and insular rather than fundamental and global. So the kool kidz’re becoming part of the problem, not the solution, liberal blogging as another branch of showbiz.

I’m sure the big bloggers would disagree vehemently – after all, aren’t they the good guys? But meaning well is not sufficient, meaning well is not revolutionary, meaning well is accommodationist and reformist. Take the Huffpo or Kos – these big blogs, while superficially enabling democracy and challenging The Man, are enabling a sham democracy that challenges little.

That kind of ‘liberal’ blogging changes nothing fundamental, it just makes shit more palatable by allowing people room to bitch about it. Max Sawicky gets to the core of it:

4. People power rests in the ability to mobilize people and resources around some common, substantive agenda by turning them out for meetings and demonstrations (local and national), boycotting, petitioning elected officials, shutting down workplaces, and mounting campaigns to contest the seats of incumbents. It’s more than surfing the web, donating money and voting. It happens that the latter activities serve the needs of website commerce, and the prior ones do not. Everybody has to make a living, but it is not necessary to base a universal political philosophy on how you make a living.

While I’m not one to deride political space, god knows we need more free political space – this kind of blogging has turned the potential for real actvism into little more than a celebrity-based money-raising machine Its now all about the elections, all about the media and superficialities, all about tweaking the political process to their preferred party’s advantage.

Meanwhile the substantive issues – bigotry, greed, poverty, ignorance and now climate change – are undermining society from within and continue unchallenged. Max Sawicky again:

Anti-intellectual preemption of the rubric of progressivism by the not-very-progressive obscures genuinely critical ideas about life under capitalism.

Well, quite. No-one, least of all the blogger writing on his bosses’s time, with a mortgage and a car and quite a nice life really, really wants to overturn the current political system; it’s the way things are that got them where they are, why would they really want to change it, other than to get rid of a few annoying assholes?

No, they just want it to be more Democrat-friendly so they and their peers can get better jobs and everything will be nice and comfy again. The aim is to make the system work their way, not overturn it.

The trouble is, the planet is on the edge of such momentous climatic, economic and political change in the coming decade that the insular little world of beltway media and frontline liberal blogging will be forced to accept there are other worlds than theirs. When New York is flooded or there’s a million-strong river of refugees headed to DC from Florida, the rickety political structures they’re so desperately trying to shore up will inevitably give way. What then?

For all their vaunted sophistication and internationalism I’m not really sure that many big liberal bloggers even realise there’s is another world out there at all except in theory. Even Iraq seems to be comprehended as a semi-fictional place off in some tv-land somewhere, and it only pops into existence when they choose to look at it. As for the other worlds within the domestic borders, they don’t get any air time at all so they exist even less. (And who wants to be reminded of the fate that awaits should one’s standard of living slip?)

No doubt all this (if anyone reads it) will dismissed as the sad bleatings of a lower-tier, also-ran blogger. Let me just say for the record that I’ve never blogged for any other reason that when things are wrong, someone should say so. I’m not pursuing a career, we don’t do ads, this is not a money-making exercise. In any case I’ll be dead in a few years so I have no compunction about speaking my mind now. What have I got to lose?

My feeling about blogging is that it’s a combination of record and samizdat. If an injustice exists, it should be put on the record somewhere, even if it’s only on a lower-tier also-ran blog. It would still please me no end if only one person read this blog – that’s one other person who knows, and who’ll tell someone else who’ll tell someone else. And there are millions more out there all over the world who feel just like me. THAT is the real strength of blogging.

It’s all about getting it on the record and making unheard voices heard. For the first time in history anybody has the chance to talk to anybody in the world in real time: that’s a dangerous thing to those in government and in power so we’d better make the most of it while we still can.

Hmmm: tendentious, argumentative and verbose, a classic Palau post, if I say so myself. Maybe a little short on the needless offensiveness, but hey, we all have off days.

US Democrats: Venal, Stupid… Or Both?

Published on May 13, 2007

At Working Assets, David Sirota points to secret negotiations on trade between the Democratic party and Bushco, that prove the Dems are either utterly dim or totally compromised, one of the two:

DEAL MAKES SURE TO PREVENT UNIONS FROM HAVING SAME RIGHTS AS CORPORATIONS: Reuters reports that the deal includes “a provision that would only allow national governments” – not unions – “to file a labor complaint under the pact,” meaning Democrats complicit in the deal are effectively proposing that America rely on the Bush administration to make sure workers and the environment are protected. This provision in the deal creates a clear double standard that prioritizes corporate rights over worker rights. Specifically, the provision stands in contrast to provisions already in America’s current trade pacts that allow domestic and foreign corporations to file complaints against sovereign governments (including U.S. local, state and federal governments) when those governments pass environmental/consumer protection laws. These complaints have resulted in U.S. taxpayers alone being forced to pay roughly $1.8 billion in “damages” in international courts because of its own laws.

Actually the provisions don’t contrast at all; I expect the Democrats are perfectly aware that Bushco has declared that the US can’t be sued by anyone at all and so they’ree just accepting the status quo. Democrat multimillionaire corporatists no more want workers’ rights than the Republicans do.

Chimpy declared his government immune from prosecution in 2006:

Citing an “unpublished opinion of the [Attorney General’s] Office of Legal Counsel,” the Secretary of Labor’s Administrative Review Board has ruled federal employees may no longer pursue whistleblower claims under the Clean Water Act. The opinion invoked the ancient doctrine of sovereign immunity which is based on the old English legal maxim that “The King Can Do No Wrong.” It is an absolute defense to any legal action unless the “sovereign” consents to be sued.

The opinion and the ruling reverse nearly two decades of precedent.

Or maybe the Democrats didn’t know about that ( which makes them thick), but think it just fine and dandy either way that corporate might makes right.

REUTERS – BIG BUSINESS OVERJOYED: Reuters reports that most of the corporate lobbying community in Washington, D.C. is praising the deal.

DLC APPLAUDS DEAL AS FIRST STEP TO GIVING BUSH FAST TRACK: The Democratic Leadership Council – the corporate-funded group that has long supported NAFTA and other similar pacts – issued a statement praising the deal, and saying it is “good news” that the agreement is a step towards Democrats passing President Bush’s request for reauthorization of “fast track” trade authority.

SENATE DEM POLICY COMMITTEE PASSES OUT K STREET PRESS RELEASES: The U.S. Senate Democratic Policy Committee blasted out a triumphant email alert to Capitol Hill staff touting press releases praising the secret Democratic-Bush trade deal from the National Association of Manufacturers, the Financial Services Forum, Microsoft and the Emergency Committee on Trade – the corporate front group pushing this deal.

Either way, the workers lose. Meet the new bosses …

The Vanguard of the Online Revolution – Parlour Pinks and MCWAs

Published on May 13, 20079 Comments

Ooh, an online democracy conference! This looks new and shiny and exciting and empowering, doesn’t it? Boing Boing announces:

Personal Democracy Forum, NYC, May 18
This year’s Personal Democracy Forum in NYC on May 18 looks like an incredible show, with speakers like Esther Dyson, Craig “craigslist” Newmark, Eric Schmidt, Larry Lessig, Arianna Huffington and many others, discussing the theme, “The Flattening of Politics.”

Technology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. Personal Democracy Forum is a hub for the exciting conversation underway between political professionals, technologists, and anyone else invigorated by the remarkable potential of technology to engage citizens in the democratic process.

New and exciting for the same old leech-like white faces making money off it, you mean. and by ‘exciting conversation’ they mean over cocktails between those already heavy with money, influence and power.

Arianna, Esther, Craig – same old boomer faces, same old boomer politics, Democrats for ever rah rah rah, sis boom bah, must protect our nice comfortable way of life from scary fundies and scarier anticapitalists. This conference is just another Middlle Class White American (I’d’ve said Middle Class White Assholes, personally, but then I’m uncivil) share-the-profits-circle-jerk.

For ‘democratisation’ of the internets and blogging read: circle the wagons, the natives’re getting uppity.

Here’s an alternative view on the topic from Donna at The Silence of Our Friends. :

What is imperative for everyone to know, is that the majority of middle class white American people are untrustworthy and unreliable. (A handful of these people have discovered this, and those are the ones who tend to be trustworthy and reliable.) The reason for this is that they are completely self-centered. So you ask, “But Donna, isn’t everyone self-centered?” Yes, but it is the extent I am talking about. MCWAs’ are oblivious to everyone else around them and throughout the world. Only their problems, their issues, their concerns matter. Everyone else is just a “special interest”. In the blogging world, the major liberal/progressive/Democratic blogs are close to useless for informing or being informed by anyone but MCWAs. The only time people of color; poor people, including whites; those with disabilities; foreigners; labor, especially blue collar; just about anyone who isn’t a MCWA is mentioned with any concern on their blogs is when that person can be used for their agenda, not because the concern is real. Sometimes appearances is the only agenda, because when they can make themselves appear like they care, they all get to sit around and feel all warm and fuzzy and enlightened.

I gave up on the male-centered liberal mainstream blogs long ago. I thought that maybe since the women had to deal with the oppression of sexism and misogyny that I’d have more in common with them and have a place to work through our issues together. Wrong. Because they are privileged, but blind to it, they only see their issues. Since they are middle class white Americans, usually able bodied, usually heterosexual, usually white collar workers, etc they pay lip service to issues related to poverty, people of color in the US, anything about another country, anything about disability, most GLBT issues (but since some middle class white women are lesbians, this gets a little more interest), or anything having to do with blue collar workers, low level white collar, or part time/temp workers.

No, the big issues on their blogs revolve around preserving only what they already have and getting more for themselves, they really could care less if you are out in the cold looking in. Oh sure, sometimes they talk about poverty, or women in India, or immigrants in America; but look at the framing. Almost every topic leads back to how it affects them, it’s not really about the people they are using. If they don’t center it on the middle class white woman, someone (usually several) will do it in the comments. Even on our blogs, we have white people show up wanting us to reassure them that they are good people. That is tiring for those with little to keep propping up those with much. Figure out another way to work on your self esteem, like maybe doing something to make a difference, instead of whining that you don’t mean to be racist. I much prefer the ones I usually get, if they ask anything, instead of asking me to tell them that they are good people, they ask, Am I doing something wrong? What should I be doing? But I have seen this on other POC blogs and expect it as I continue blogging.

They are untrustworthy and unreliable and we should stop looking to them for any sort of help. It won’t be there. But you know something, in this country they are a minority, just like they are in the rest of the world. So whose issues are “special interests”? We the POC, the poor of all colors, the labor movement, the disabled, people from all over the world, all of us who are oppressed and truly care for each other need to come together and help each other. We don’t need them, they will soon be needing us. We will remember the ones who were by our sides and we will remember the ones who turned their backs or used us. So you middle class white feminists might want to jump on the bandwagon right about now, show some real concern for women who aren’t just like you. I’ll be happy to help you with your problems, but not at the expense of my problems, we will work TOGETHER. It’s not good enough to work on you keeping your privileges at my expense.

Well quite: that’s exactly what this conference is about, the haves keeping their privileges by forming cartels to take control of the technology so that only their voices, and voices of which they approve, are heard.

The attendees as this conference may call themselves the Democratic opposition or the netroots, or whatever they like – but at heart they don’t want to challenge the political status quo at all. They want to use technology to their own political and personal benefit, notto extend democracy to the unwashed toiling masses, who, after all, are too stupid to know what it is they want and who need an Arianna or an Esther Dyson or a John Aravosis to tell them.

No doubt the delegates (though they’re not delegates as such – no-one delegated them, they chose themselves) will feel all smug and ‘vanguard of the revolution’-ish as they network away and contemplate their new exciting roles in the sexy, exciting world of online democracy, but this is not an event for the average blogger or grassroots political activist. Look at how much it costs to go, for a start:

Registration for the Main PdF Conference includes:

Full access to the Main PDF Conference, May 18, 2007
Continental breakfast
Lunch
Networking post conference cocktail hour

Order
at $295.00 each
Price: $295.00 Processing: $0.00 Total: $295.00

Ooh, cocktails, the high life we’re living! Add on to the conference fee however much it costs to travel and rent a room in NYC and there’s not going to be much change from a thousand dollars, at a minimum. And isn’t it cute how they have the Unconference too, for the smelly poor people to maybe lap up some crumbs from the rich attendees tables while being kept away from the real powerbrokers. Isn’t that kind? Noblesse oblige.

God these people make me angry. Democratisation my ass – the MCWAs are doing what they always do, co-opting a movement built by others to their own benefit, while the real voices of the grassroots are effectively silenced. It’s not just the usual suspects either but those who were thought to be sympatico: I’ve noticed recently that the group of blogs that cluster around Atrios and Kos, all the names on the infamous email list, are pulling up ladders, erasing links, purging blogrolls and closing the drawbridges. The reformists are forming cartels and they don’t include us.

And they wonder why we hold them in contempt.