The headline might as well be a more Onionesque "After gaining power, politician turns out not to actually hold the strongly principled views he expressed while campaigning".
I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign. A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power.
Generally speaking, the vast majority of power holders agree that aggressive spying is a good idea. This is closely related to their strong preference for maintaining the status quo across the board. We should not be surprised that Obama did not reverse any of Bush's controversial decisions because they were not actually controversial among those with power or with the potential to gain power.
Generally speaking, when an issue is touted as being highly controversial between the major parties, it consists of 98% solid agreement and 2% hyped up disagreement. The disagreement and the "fray" are part of the choreographed propaganda undertaken by powerful interests to create the illusion of dissent.
I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign. A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power.
Usually we at least get to learn about candidates' fundamental views before electing them. A pro-life candidate, for example, isn't suddenly going to change that view after taking office. Even the much-maligned George Bush generally acted in keeping with the fundamental beliefs that he told the country he held prior to his election.
This is what is so disturbing about Obama and his supporters. He told them bald faced lies about his fundamental views, and is fairly unapologetic about it. Even worse, the vast majority of his supporters are OK with that. They have shown politicians that lying to us is fine as long as the lies are delivered with enough polish. That paves the way for even more egregious activities going forward.
>Even the much-maligned George Bush generally acted in keeping with the fundamental beliefs that he told the country he held prior to his election.
Bush promised a humble foreign policy with no nation building. He had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to prevent that."
This statement was made pre-9/11 - an event that changed many things. But even this wasn't a dramatic shift in his views. If anything, Bush's reaction to 9/11 reinforced the image he presented prior to his election. Whether you agreed with his views or not, few would argue that his reaction came entirely out of left field.
By contrast, this NSA/Obama issue proves that we simply don't know the person that is sitting in the White House right now. We only know that he lied through his teeth to get there.
> This statement was made pre-9/11 - an event that changed many things.
Bush surrounded himself with PNAC members before 9/11. All that 9/11 did was give them the opportunity to initiate regime change in Iraq, which they had been calling for ever since PNAC was first formed. Yet he promised "no nation building" while campaigning.
I don't see much difference between Bush and Obama's level of honesty.
Imagine a presidential candidate making promises and saying a lot of things that he believed in about spying and how the agencies involved should work. Then he gets into office and finds out that things are much worse than he could have possibly known before getting into office. Would you prefer he keep to the path he laid out in campaigning or deal with reality as it is, even if it goes against his beliefs? I try to be smarter today than I was yesterday, I hope somebody in such a position of power would do the same.
Note that I have no idea if this is anywhere near true and I don't believe in what Obama and the various agencies have done but I do believe something like this is closer to the truth than some grand scheme by Obama to lie himself into power.
Naivete is an arguable excuse for Obama's statements prior to his first election. But he continued his anti-surveillance rhetoric during his second campaign, and there is simply no explanation for that other than lying.
What's really funny about GWB is he did a negligible amount for the pro-life crowd. He dangled that fish in front of the rabid pro-lifers but did nothing for them except lip service. I don't want to get into an abortion debate. I'm just saying that the pro-lifers hardly get anything from any politician and it's just funny how they vote based on whatever the lip service is. The politicians have an incentive to never settle anything because those single issue voters would just move on to other issues and weaken their power base.
> This is what is so disturbing about Obama and his supporters. He told them bald faced lies about his fundamental views, and is fairly unapologetic about it.
Can you give some examples? Seriously. I can't recall Obama giving a definitive opinion on anything. (e.g. his evolving "views" on gay marriage.)
His detractors keep calling him a leftist, socialist even though he doesn't seem to have a strong (or passionate) opinion on any subject.
Talking about "majority of power holders agree" is so disingenuous. See: http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/05/poll-public-supports-nsa-sp... ("As we’ve written about before, the American public has widely supported the NSA’s activities before and after the scandal. I’m no fan of the secretive spying, but if the government appears to be acting slowly on surveillance reform, it could be because they’re responding to constituents.").
And this is a poll of people. If you polled likely voters, who skew older (i.e. more who lived through the cold war), you'd see even healthier margins in support of the NSA.
Also, it's a bit of historical revisionism to paint Obama as extremely anti-surveillance. Yes, he opposed certain of Bush's programs, but look at the whole picture. He's answer to "what would you have done instead of going into Iraq?" was "I would have hit Afghanistan harder!" He was a candidate who was self-conscious about the perception of Democrats as being "weak on security" and campaigned to avoid that label. And on his second go, he campaigned as "the guy that killed Osama." He's been quite consistent as someone who wants to project a lot of U.S. military power abroad, and in the grand scheme of things the NSA is part and parcel of that.
Most Americans learn about the issue from media stories created by firms owned by powerful interests, so public opinion is not surprising.
If you look back at the early coverage of the Snowden leaks in the NY Times, the story was reported but the paper dutifully prepped a character assassination attack on Snowden himself, while intentionally suppressing the story of James Clapper's perjury and while also avoiding suggesting that Obama owed the public an explanation.
This might or might not be true, but it is also among the oldest arguments in all of propaganda: the will of the people can't be trusted, because it's shaped by malignant elites. Often, it continues on to say that until we can fix that problem, we all need to be governed by this other group of benificent elites.
That's not really the argument I'm making b/c I do ultimately believe it's the public's own responsibility. But nonetheless, short-term framing of issues is influenced by media, and that's often enough to nudge things quite significantly.
Yes. Taking on the government is the wrong fight when they are (at least broadly) representative of public opinion. The fight should be educating people on the dangers of NSA spying, something that I haven't really seen anyone try to do. All commentary comes from the perspective that "NSA = bad" is already a given.
Hmm. How can the public have an opinion about a secret program? If a leaker revealed that the government had a secret underground concentration camp below the Arizona desert would you view that to be the result of dutiful fulfillment of public service?
The public can have an opinion about a secret program when details of it have leaked, as is the case here. But more to the point, if the public don't know how little they know then that's also an area for activism. All of these topics ought to enrage everyone, but they don't because of a lack of awareness. Yet the tech crowd starts the debate assuming everyone is angry.
I have no idea what point you're making with the concentration camp comment.
>Yes, he opposed certain of Bush's programs, but look at the whole picture.
True, since his days as a Senator from Illinois he has positioned himself as "power ready" by adopting power-friendly "moderate" stances on various key issues.
It's not current and it's not a crisis. It's working exactly how it was designed to work. We changed, not them. The Internet disrupted the popular perception of democracy by creating a massive global communication channel that is not under the control of the people in power.
The most common thing I see is my fellow Americans blaming politicians, bankers, school teachers, lobbyists, cops, unions, almost anyone... except themselves. The truth is, the American people are the problem, and they've spent the last few decades doing everything possible to avoid personal responsibility for the shape of the country.
To be fair, the American people are and have been the most heavily propagandized people on Earth. I sympathize with your desire to tell people to step up and take personal responsibility, but the truth is that many people can't even think straight. Look at how many people consistently vote against their own interests, identify with their oppressors, etc.
Your point is well taken. However, propaganda in America is much more insidious than propaganda in North Korea. Don't get me wrong, North Korea is a brutal place and I thank my lucky stars I was born here and not there.
In America, there is always the illusion of a raging debate, which causes people to identify with the views they are presented. In places like North Korea, the propaganda is much more heavy-handed and if you step out of line you are punished much more severely. This causes people to pay lip service to the official views, but not necessarily to believe it in their hearts. In America, stepping out of line is tolerated - to a degree.
EDIT: So perhaps what I should have said originally is not that America is the most heavily propagandized population, but that Americans are the victims of the most sophisticated propaganda machine.
Oh, yes, very much so! For example, you seem quite effortlessly to lay blame on three hundred or so million people, and that's only counting those alive right now, with no consideration for those who've predeceased us, at least some of whom presumably could be expected, in your formulation, to have had a hand in creating the situation you so readily decry.
But laying blame, while satisfying, rarely does anything to solve a problem. In blaming "the American people" for the current state of things, you imply that they, all three hundred million or so, could have acted, and presumably could still act, to improve the situation. What would you have us do? -- all three hundred million of us, of course.
(For the sake of not seeing you wiggle out of the question that easily, assume in your answer that some method, not intolerable to the modern American sense of morality and ethics, exists of usefully coordinating the actions of almost half a billion human beings.)
> What would you have us do? -- all three hundred million of us, of course.
Vote. For for better people. That is the basis of any democracy. You don't blindly follow your leaders, and you don't blame them for their mistakes and carry on as if there's nothing you can do about it, because you can do something about it. You can vote them out, and vote better people in.
The fact that those three hundred million Americans haven't done that, is entirely their own responsibility. It is the responsibility of the American people is that they allow themselves to be lied to. That you allow every single politician to break their promises, and re-elect them anyway. That you keep voting for the same two parties.
And yes, of course the first-past-the-post district system makes it a lot harder to have someone else win the vote. You'll have to mobilize a lot of people. But you have to start voting for different people. People unrelated to the big two parties. People who do politics in a different way. Find them and vote them into office.
A glib answer, to be sure. What do you recommend regarding the unelected civil service bureaucracy which has such a large hand in how the United States are administered? I can't imagine seeing any president take on the State Department, for example, but having seen at least one senator do so, I suspect I know who'd win.
One Senator wields 0.5% (ish) of the authority of a branch of government that State Department officials and staff don't (directly) work for. The President wields 100% of the authority of the branch of government that the State Department officials and staff work for. I think these things are different in both kind and degree.
When you spot someone blaming, try not to assign blame when you reply. It interferes with forward movement in the conversation. Also, everyone makes mistakes every now and again. Shit happens.
I might be more amenable to an argument like this if I saw any possibility of "forward movement", as you describe it, existing in a conversation like this one. I don't, so I'm not; my participation is directed at the goal of amusing myself, nothing more.
Wiggle out of what? I didn't say blame is bad, I said it's fascinating how people lay blame, and specifically what / who they choose to blame (anybody but their own self typically).
I have absolutely no problem taking my share of responsibility as an aware American, for the state of the country (I never said otherwise, you merely incorrectly inferred it). I don't see a very large percentage of people willing to do that these days.
Accepting personal responsibility in a democracy is a critical requirement to then taking action to change the conditions of a nation. So I strongly disagree that laying blame rarely does anything (throwing false blame around at every object you can, however, does nothing)
I say the buck stops with the American people. I'd argue that far more often than not, a country reflects its people. This isn't North Korea, we're not a Communist slave pen.
I believe it's blatantly obvious why America is eroding across nearly every measurement - and has been for decades - and I think it's obvious The People must be the root of it. Politicians come and go, Presidents come and go, Fed chairpersons come and go, corporate leaders come and go, educators come and go. The culture is created by and evolves with the people of a nation. The politicians that get elected are a direct reflection of the culture. The people set the standard for the culture, and that culture is what rules a nation, on its ethics, its beliefs, its standard of 'the good' or fairness, or whatever else you want to refer to.
If the ~250 million adult Americans are not responsible for the state of their country, who exactly would be? The Russians? The Chinese? The British?
Who voted Obama into office? Who voted Bush into office? Who voted Reid into office? Who voted Boehner into office? Who voted Pelosi into office? Who voted all their priors into office? Who allowed that to happen by inaction? And on and on it goes, encompassing the radical majority of Americans, either directly or indirectly by willful inaction. Who else is at fault for the net value of the elected representatives of the last ~50 years, if not the people of America?
How many are standing by, not saying a word, not lifting a finger, even while they disagree with what's happening? How many don't even disagree? My personal observation and opinion say that's a scary number as well.
Who has failed to rise up and protest or take action (voting, informing, etc) against the endless wave of scandals and violations going back decades leading to our current condition as a country? That would be: the extreme majority of Americans.
Who bought into the fear pandering? Who is still buying into it?
Who has bankrupted the country financially by more than happily licking up all the obviously fraudulent political promises? And then going back to the trough to ask for more. What do you think the soon to be $20 trillion in public debt that can never be repaid (or even reduced) went to? To buy votes of course, on both sides of the aisle.
Meanwhile the Republicans blame the Democrats, and the Democrats blame the Republicans, and the majority sit and watch Leno instead of doing something about the politics and shape of the country (both of which they supposedly think are terrible per polls). Inaction, complaining and paralysis rules the majority - all by choice.
Who favored the war response after 9/11? The radical majority of Americans, blatantly.
The security policies since 9/11? Where's the wide spread protesting? Didn't exist, doesn't exist. Where was the large scale outrage over the Patriot Act? Didn't exist.
Who doesn't show a bit of outrage at the droning - murder - of innocent civilians overseas? The radical majority of Americans.
Who is numbing themselves 24/7 in a endless orgy of consumerism - which has been going on increasingly for decades - while the core fundamentals of the economy just keep rotting out from under them (you of course realize the actual unemployment rate isn't 6.7%), as they stay perpetually hooked on cheap consumer financing?
Who's supposedly wildly unhappy with Congress? And what have they done about it the last few elections? Well a quick check on the voter turnout numbers tells you all you need to know: the majority mostly complains and not much else.
It's a culture that can't wait to put itself to sleep so it doesn't have to think (see the hyper self-medicating that Americans are doing for example).
Who is looking the other way as the NSA, FBI, DEA, CIA, TSA, DHS and an endless parade of agencies violate an endless list of laws and Constitutional lines in the sand? Where were the American people as Hoover reigned for decades? Willfully absent in their give-a-shit of course. Well Hoover set the standard for illegal spying on the American people.
Who is not caring one iota about the cause of their health problems, and just keeps on gorging the soda and fast food, not exercising, ballooning in obesity, and whining about health care costs, looking to blame anyone and everyone but themselves for their condition? It's the insurance companies, it's the doctors, it's the hospitals, it's Obamacare, it's the politicians. No, it's the majority of Americans.
Who was happy to borrow an ever increasing amount of easy money for college? Whose fault is that? The politicians? The Fed? Educators? Bankers? Or the people that take out the loans and the system they haven't cared to do anything about? Zero personal responsibility, find someone else to blame for it. It's unfair they forced Joe to sign up for $80,000 in student loans, obviously. Americans are unhappy with education costs? I've got a brilliant idea: take action - 20 years ago - and work on a solution instead of whining about it and putting it off.
The housing bubble? The corporate leaders blame the people that took out the loans, the people that took out the loans blame the greedy corporate leaders, others blame the Fed, or real estate agents, or brokers, or or or. Oh look, turns out it's the fault of the American people mostly as a whole for doing absolutely nothing about their broken system. It's a bankrupt culture of consumerism.
They don't want the budget cut, they don't want entitlements cut, and they don't want to pay higher personal taxes, and or they want someone else to foot the bill, and so on. They want a much higher minimum wage, but they don't want to pay 25% more for the things they buy at McDonalds or Walmart. I believe this general attitude represents the vast majority (not every single person).
This attitude of blame someone else pervades nearly every aspect of American culture. I say: start with taking personal responsibility for your role (however big or small), and then do your best to take actions to correct the problems you see. It's about America becoming an involved democracy.
Many of the "Who" -> "Americans" call / responses I believe. However, it feels like correlation without causation. Yes, statistically, the majority of Americans are self-interested actors who vote as individuals, not as well meaning members of a greater whole. They're people. But so are the voters in most other representative governments. I would instead say that they are just the logical developed state of a nation that extols Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (all very individual goals) while situating them in a place with a very rapid, capitalistic feedback loop that gives carrots for highly self-interested choices, and sticks for choices which benefit the larger social group.
This will be a bit of a stretch, but nations are kind of like equation solvers. You start with ICs (form of government, economic views, population diversity), BCs (neighbours, trade, media), source terms (research, development, legal activism) , ect... and then start moving through time, trying to solve for a converged social state that's stable. Some of that junk just isn't stable and diverges spectacularly. Some are only locally stable, so you get periodic upheaval. And some are stable solutions and converge well. Almost every IC for America is one that favors absolute personal freedom over the welfare of the group. Our government rewards people for thinking locally and voting in their self interest. Our economic model is one which absolutely rewards people on self-interest. The idea model (touted here and elsewhere) is to develop the minimal effort product, market it extensively, build a loyal following, and then go public so that early backers / founders can cash out. At which point...who cares? Next big project and the public can get soaked. Even our population distribution favors it. "The land of bounty and opportunity where anyone with enough determination and drive can be a millionaire!" what kind of folks is that going to attract?
And like I said, it all converges. The media used to balance some of this, but as the iterations have continued, the bankruptcies, the buyouts, and the new investors, they've gotten more infected, to the point where they're now largely just mouthpieces for whatever self-interested individual or group speaks through them.
Are we divergent? Hard to tell. We could be a convergently stable Rome, stagnating as we develop ever more robust home tofu delivery visualizations. With the core of extreme individualism, we could theoretically be explosively divergent. However, I'm hoping for locally stable, so that we can get enough upheaval to kick us over the nearby hill and maybe find a better minima, where we once again aren't risk averse, dare to build big projects that change the world, and possess a government that does more than go into spasmodic seizures every two months.
A system that relies on all of it's constituents being informed and politically active in order to be successful is structurally unsound. This in my opinion is the true problem with our representational democracy. I am wary of blaming people who have difficulty day to day making ends meet for not caring enough about spying, etc.
I'm not sure the founding fathers could have predicted what laid in store for the country or the world.
We have reached the point, I believe, where it is impossible to expect the majority of the population to be knowledgeable in all the various facets of running one of the most powerful countries in the world. Economics. Cultures. Science. These are all words which could be separated into thousands of sub-topics. You're expecting somebody to be "informed" about stem-cells, the likely implications of raising the interest rate by 0.1%, the differences between computer "memory" and "storage", and the differences of bowing to or shaking the hand of another world leader. Plus somehow keeping a full-time job and raising a family.
This is where media is supposed to step up, do the research, and present the facts to the populace. I believe that a few people figured out long ago that if you can control the media, you control the country. It's a big ship and it steers rather slow, but I still think it is true.
Hell, we still live in a world where laws are created based on books written thousands of years ago, where people doubt global warming because "man cannot possibly change what God created" and/or because the bible doesn't mention it.
The problem is the same as it's always been: Us. Asshats worm their way into the system and through fear, money, charisma, or subterfuge they subvert whatever they can modify to suit their own desires. If anything what we need is a system that can prevent this somehow, which is what the founding fathers were attempting to create. The entire western culture (likely others as well), needs to change, and I don't see that happening without something major (think The Day the Earth Stood Still type shit here) happening.
When I was born, on the day of my birth, how much personal responsibility did I have for the state of the USA and the world in general? (None)
When did I start to have the even the most basic understanding of what's really going on in the world?
At what point did I become culpable?
At that point, what power did I have to actually influence anything (given 400+ years of policy, expansion, entrenchment, racism, etc).
I agree to an extent that individuals can and should take some personal responsibility, but that doesn't address systemic effects. And the mere notion that we should take some responsibility doesn't lead to an effective course of action.
Suggesting that we vote (which someone else suggested).. well, that's almost comical given the premise of the thread, which is that you can't trust politicians, no matter how progressive or sincere they might seem.
As much as I do take responsibility (and feel guilty about not doing more), I still haven't figured out how to have any real influence.
I've spent plenty of time complaining about other people and their lack of participation too, and I'm not sure what difference that has made. Merely pointing out the problem (or what I perceive the problem to be) doesn't change anything by itself.
Personal/Individual responsibility is a dirty word. There is no incentive for a representational democracy to create an environment that fosters the development of personal blame. It can only grow and continue if it focuses on social responsibility and blaming the other group. Like 1984's Goldstein.
I'm not so worried about net neutrality. I mean it's easy enough for the average person to eventually understand the importance of all traffic being treated the same.
Copyright extremism (and 'protecting' children - Firewall of Cameron) is what we should be worried about. Our rulers have chosen copyright as their 'Trojan horse' of choice [1] for regaining the arbitrary censorship powers that they once enjoyed. Sadly, most people can't come to terms with the importance of copyright reform in the digital age. They fail to understand that copyright has always been used by rulers as means of controlling the rhetoric and preventing 'non-aligned' publishers from reaching large audiences [2].
No. Wrong. It is current and it is a crisis when campaign finance is essentially unlimited and politicians are more accountable to their financiers than their constituents. American politics were bad and they're getting worse post-Citizens United.
I believe it's high time to repeal the 17th Amendment and return a fair bit of power to the states. This would ease the democracy crisis and decentralize some of the power from D.C.
Yeah, the power structure in DC has gotten way too comfortable for the people living there. Look at how unaffected the DC housing market was by the crisis over the last 6 years.
The people in Washington aren't going to relinquish any of their power, though. An Article V convention of the states is about the only hope.
I agree about a constitutional convention ... trouble is, that sword cuts both ways. It's a great opportunity for those you agree with to get major changes through ... but it's a great opportunity for those you disagree with.
No, just the current crisis in a subset of electoral systems. A voting system such as Range Voting[0] would go a long way towards solving these problems, predominant among them being the issue of spoilers.
Any campaign will be a marketing effort in any context. The crisis is that the marketing effort is the only data point that most of the voting population considers prior to the vote. Without an informed population there is no incentive for honest campaigns.
You can turn that argument around just as easily; without honest campaigns, there is no incentive for an informed population, because there is no meaningful chance for popular support to elevate a candidate running an honest campaign to the same heights attained by those to whom all weapons are friends.
Politicians are public figures by definition. There is plenty of information out there to make informed decisions with or without the existence of honest campaigns.
The only reason there is "no meaningful chance for popular support" of an honest candidate is because the voting population doesn't reward it; and perhaps more importantly, the voting population doesn't punish dishonesty.
> There is plenty of information out there to make informed decisions
It's funny you should say that, given the number of people who thought they were making informed decisions to support Obama, especially in 2008, and who have since found so many reasons to feel so deeply betrayed.
Short of mind-reading, I'm not sure how you imagine it possible for citizens, almost all of whom have lives to lead which do not revolve around the ambitions of the current crop of politicians, to inform themselves in as accurate and precise a fashion as you seem to consider trivial; for almost everyone, it comes down to a choice among competing sets of analysts, all of whom arrogate unto themselves the mantle of reliable authority, and all of whom have not only equal reason to lie in support of their own desiderata, but equal lack of compunction to dissuade them from such mendacity. (That's why they call corruption corruption; like any rot, it spreads.)
As for "punish[ing] dishonesty", I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on precisely what benefit there is in choosing one pack of liars over another. Given the track record of American politicians, and especially of American presidential candidates, favoring one in particular seems less likely to succeed at "punish[ing] dishonesty" than to act as a strong selective pressure in favor of the most skillful and least scrupulous liars available -- something I'd argue was not just perceptible but obvious in modern American politics, except that I think the presidency has been the province of liars since at least as far back as Andrew Jackson.
Does it really have to be that cynical? Don't you think it is entirely possible pre-2008 Obama's opinions were formed with the same information as the rest of us and post-2008 Obama received more information (national security briefings) that completely blew away his belief system? I don't agree with much of what the Obama administration has done regarding domestic and international surveillance but I always feel like we should give ALL Presidents a little slack when it comes to these things because they have two burdens that the rest of us do not. Information and the responsibility to act on that information.
Good point. I used to be more sympathetic to that line of reasoning. It's tightly coupled to the argument for the existence of state secrets... granting the state the power not to act in a fully transparent manner.
How might any institution act if it wanted to earn the credibility to behave in a way that was non-transparent to its constituents?
A firm might pay out consistent dividends or go public and comply with the additional regulatory requirements. A government might declassify information as quickly as possible to prove that information was classified judiciously (once the classified status was no longer needed).
In the US, there is still lots of classified information that is decades old. Clearly the government feels no need to earn its credibility when it comes to what information may be classified and for what purpose (or for how long). For a long time this was fine b/c the public had no good reason not to trust.
Things like WikiLeaks and Snowden's leaks have given us insight into the kinds of things that are classified. The most damning in my opinion were the WikiLeaks revelations that information was classified during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that effectively filters out bad news from the information available to reporters. This is not judicious use of secrecy, it's using secrecy to achieve a propaganda motive.
Snowden's leaks reveal more than just the existence of a secret program, they reveal that the program was deliberately extralegal and far-reaching in a way that normal legal and law enforcement processes would never have allowed to happen.
It comes down to the question of whether we value (at a basic level) the rule of law, or if we prefer to be ruled by a trusted council of elders that makes secret decisions on our behalf without any kind of transparency or accountability.
I agree with your points, I'd personally prefer full transparency over anything else but that is something that needs to be hashed out by the legislative branch, which conveniently gets very little blame. If any of us have an issue with the way government surveillance is performed we shouldn't be looking at the President, we should be looking at Congress since they control the budget and can pass laws to limit actions they find are in legal grey lines.
The first time I saw that live on C-SPAN my heart actually sank. It was huge wasted opportunity for the people, through their direct donations to a candidate, to make things better. In that moment the President-Elect proved one of two things: he had no idea what was going on, or he willfully misrepresented the notion of reform through the election. A third possibility is even more frightening, something or someone changed his position for him.
But more than that, the President-Elect laughed it off as a joke, as if asking a question about the state of intelligence reform was the same thing as asking the contents of the PDB, as if the plebs simple weren't entitled to a straight answer on something affecting the function of 'their' government. And this wasn't a nobody asking, it was Candy Crawley (I believe, the transcript did not state that but her first name was given as Candy.)
We elected an former Constitutional scholar as President, and he appointed a Civil Rights division lawyer as Attorney General, and they have seriously damaged both the Constitution (whose spirit remains the saving grace of this nation) and Civil Rights and Liberties.
It's a combination of hubris and intentional ignorance on the part of OP and others like him.
It's really fascinating to see otherwise intelligent people completely unable to challenge their own beliefs about the nature of the world.
Is Obama simply reacting to new information he has been made privy to since becoming the president? Is it possible that there are genuine threats to America that are not made public? Is it possible there are realities of foreign affairs that we may not understand?
No, the world is just as I conceive it and Obama is a liar prone to malfeasance.
Accepting otherwise would challenge the safe bubble of the reality I have constructed. One where everyone fundamentally shares my value system and I have the necessary information and skills of deduction to construct an accurate conception of reality.
I wonder if it's something particular to technically skilled people. They have a knack for figuring out things that most people in society don't care for or don't have the aptitude for so they assume that that applies to all things, even things outside of their sphere of experience or aptitude.
Your comment reads like some kind of passage from scripture, offering humble ignorance of reality and blindly placing trust in some entity to take care of your best interest.
In the real world, it's clear that institutions become corrupt. Enron is one example. So is GroupOn. So is the NSA.
I suppose you think we should not let our faith be shaken by the revelation that corruption has been found in some NSA programs. The Catholic church has made a similar argument about why its members should still continue to support the institution even though it was found that it systematically placed priests accused of child abuse in other parishes.
We have new information, and so it's perfectly reasonable to reconsider our previous worldview. Sure we can just accept the institutional response at face value, but if we hope to reform the system we ought to be critical and expect actual change to occur.
You haven't actually considered that the system is reasonable as it is. Which is the hubris that I'm talking about.
I don't blindly trust institutions. But I also don't blindly distrust institutions when the system they perpetuate has merit.
Life is quite good in America if you're in the middle class as compared to the standards of living in the past and around the world.
I'm careful with my judgements as I understand that I don't fully understand all of the realities and circumstances and interests at play. I can only look at the result, which from my perspective is quite good relative to what I know about the world today and in the past.
Are there serious problems in society? Yes.
I went through a stage of cynicism when I was in middle school through high school so I can appreciate your perspective.
Speaking of blinders, this sentence illustrates the pair you are evidently wearing:
> I can only look at the result, which from my perspective is quite good relative to what I know about the world today and in the past.
You are judging the state of the entire system by the level of personal comfort you experience and your heavily biased view of history.
It sounds to me like you are judging America's actions to be morally superior simply because America enjoys a high standard of living. I'd argue that a high standard of living out to result in a high moral standard for our institutions and officials.
You know the 'middle class' is people making 250K+ right?
In most countries the middle class are doing fine and live well.
It appears that high school and middle school have done their job of building trust in US institutions. Yes, it's completely alright that Mr. Obama went from constitutional scholar to repeatedly lying to the public about the scope of surveillance in the country.
Remember the debate he wanted to have about surveillance but just forgot about having for 5 years? How about the rinse wash repeat of Grenwald says you're doing X, we're not doing X, here's your documents proving your doing X.
Ends justify the means right? Middle class is doing well, ghetto don't matter! Just wave a flag and say you're free!
Wikipedia says: "Depending on the class model used, the middle class constitutes anywhere from 25% to 66% of households."
Fewer than 5% of Americans make more than 250k/yr. So either that is not the cut-off for middle class, or a huge percentage of the former middle class is now lower class.
It's the middle class, not middle income quintile. It would seem to be pretty ridiculous to me that more than 5-10% of America were doctors, lawyers, etc.
Perhaps in the US it's the middle class includes the working class but in my estimation middle class means you still derive most of your income from working but you own a decent portion of the means of production.
If the middle class means households making 100K then I would estimate that a couple working as tech support and a caregiver are middle class rather than working class.
To me it works like this:
You derive your income from capital: Upper class
You work and own a decent portion (5%+ unless public) of your employer: middle class
You work: working class.
eg. My mom was a phone operator, my dad was a mechanic, they're working class despite making more than $100K inflation adjusted.
"It's the middle class, not middle income quintile."
I made no claim to the contrary. But if we are looking at income figures to try and guess class, 1) we're going to be doing a poor job if we're missing at least 4/5 of middle class people, 2) we're going to be talking about something other than what everyone else means when they say middle class, or 3) the situation has changed and it's a recent development that so few people are middle class and the models haven't caught up. If 3, we've either seen tremendous immigration/reproduction in the lower classes (somewhat possible in the small, but a five-fold increase would mean the earlier figures were pre-1900, which is unlikely) or we've seen a lot of people leave the middle class in a downward direction - which doesn't say good things regardless of how well the remaining middle class is doing. If 2, we might be able to have a meaningful discussion but it's likely a different one than most people in the discussion thought we were having. If 1, we should pick better numbers or simply refuse to include income in driving our estimates.
I think it's an intentional political doublespeak that people who are making a median wage think they are middle class.
Thus policies for the 'middle class' are policies they identify with despite those policies not actually being particularly well suited to their economic situation.
IIRC I believe 90% of Americans think they are middle class, even from a quintile perspective this is probably skewed.
The more reasonable "100k+" number that others have cited is still all in the top 20%, so while there may broadly be some inappropriate conflation of "middle class" and "most people" or "median income", that's not most of what's going on here.
A good test of this hypothesis is this: if Hillary Clinton runs for President, what would be her take (support or oppose)?
Unlike Obama the Senator, as Secretary of State she would have served on the National Security Council and would have been privy to much of the same intelligence info. Therefore, if she's still opposed on surveillance issues vs. Obama, that would be a very telling sign.
Well, to be sure, the job always seems to turn their hair white.
On the other hand, I'm easily cynical enough to wonder whether a modern president's staff hairdresser is expected to have an unusual degree of skill with dyes and bleaches.
> I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign.
The evidence during his time in office and the battles he has chosen to fight from the White House suggests that the view he expressed during the campaign about the critical importance of health care reform toward a more universal system is, in fact, one that he holds in office.
On a less policy and more meta-political level there are, I would say, quite a few indications that his frequently expressed view that people who want change must "be the change [they] want" and not rely on getting some figure in office and then expecting change to magically happen on its own is also a belief he holds honestly in office.
> I would say, quite a few indications that his frequently expressed view that people who want change must "be the change [they] want" and not rely on getting some figure in office and then expecting change to magically happen on its own is also a belief he holds honestly in office.
A view he also expressed during a memorial I attended for the Washington Navy Yard shootings, in regards to gun control for those with mental illnesses. Sadly I think he's right.
"I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign."
His nomination of the original author of the Patriot Act[1] to be his running mate was my confirmation that we were no longer one choice away from a dictatorship. Geitner & Gates' retention was just salt in the wound.
Come on now. He's still a Democrat, with Democratic views, hardly pursuing the agendas the Republicans were pursuing before (for example, trying to get rid of social security; do you remember all the Bush town halls on that?). He's not going to suddenly oppose abortion.
First and foremost on his platform was bringing back bipartisanship in Washington. And he sure tried his damndest to do that, trying time and time again to compromise with Republicans, trying to get them on board, trying to meet them halfway. That was him keeping that promise, and it's one I think he fundamentally believes in. He's always trying to build a consensus, not trying to be a firebrand. If others chose to ignore that repeated refrain in his campaigning, then too bad.
He also expended nearly all his initial political capital on health care, as promised. And reformed health care. Please let's not forget this, as it's skewered the Democrats more than once in the last 50 years.
> We should not be surprised that Obama did not reverse any of Bush's controversial decisions because they were not actually controversial among those with power or with the potential to gain power.
We are not surprised out of the blue; we are deeply disappointed, as he clearly won elections based on promises he pretty much knew he cannot keep.
Similarly this would be like getting into relationship based on trust and someone shows you their big house, their boat, their company, claim they can have children and care about animals, while within a time, it turns out that person is a neutered scumbag that runs a horse-kill house and that house and boat was his friend. And then he tells you "what do you expected honey, I wanted to be with you, this is normal that I lied otherwise I wouldn't win your affections".
Sure, plenty of us could do that; its just a matter of choosing one or another side of life: good or bad. If Obama knew he cannot change anything and continue anyways, he's just a scumbag like any other scam artist.
And you throw-in the even more Onionesque: "A review of candidates speeches reveals the apparent 'strong principles' were actually a clever packaging of euphemisms, glittering generalities, rainbow-ruses and Barnum-statements"
I think Obama probably holds those small number of positions he unambiguously stated as a Candidate. He like doesn't hold doesn't hold the positions that he seemed to articulate but didn't really, unambiguously assert. Which is of the things people thought he said.
OK: once he got in office, it turned out that watching everyone seemed like a good idea.
But here's the thing: it's unconstitutional. It's illegal.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".
Meaning: 1) You can't read my email without a warrant and 2) you need specific suspicions of me to get one.
Any interpretation that says the grocery list in my pocket is covered by the fourth amendment, but every electronic communication I make is NOT covered, is insane. "Houses, papers and effects" was the writer's way of saying "everything I can think of belonging to that person." Email and phone metadata and GPS location weren't imagined, but can you seriously say they would have been excluded?
So: balancing security with privacy is a hard thing. It is. But pooping on the constitution isn't a solution.
You want to surveil everything? Say so openly, explain your case, and try to repeal the fourth amendment. We're America: we decide by voting.
Secretly discarding the highest laws of the land is tyrannical, whatever the justification.
This has been debunked to death. The issue isn't "houses, papers, and effects" not encompassing e-mail, but the "belonging to that person" aspect. Phone metadata doesn't "belong" to you. It belongs to your phone company. They generated it, they store it--you never even see it. It's also quite questionable how much of say your Facebook data "belongs" to you. Or your GPS location data. It's about you, but much or all of it is generated by some company and stored by that company, and you are often even not aware of it nor do you have access to it. You have little to no recourse if they lose it, destroy it, or misuse it. You can't even make them let you see it.
Indeed, I strongly agree with your use of the word "belong" because I think the use of "houses" and "persons" purposefully puts the 4th amendment on a strong property rights foundation.[1] But viewing the 4th amendment through the lens of property rights (i.e. "everything I can think of belonging to that person") makes most of what the NSA is doing quite legal! Things that are about you do not necessarily belong to you. If I write down every time my neighbor enters and leaves his house, that's mine, not his. Is Facebook tracks what you click on and your cellular company tracks your GPS location or your phone company tracks who you call, that's their data, not yours.
[1] The prevailing Supreme Court view of the 4th amendment is broader than this property rights view, but still embraces third party doctrine which makes much of what the NSA is doing legal. And certain Justices seem partial to the property rights formulation.
Intelligence agencies automatically gathering and storing all data generated by mankind is very different from manual surveillance of an individual's house. I find these types of comparisons rather misleading. The changing nature of technogoly and the increasing tendency for highly personal data to be generated and then vacuumed up by the NSA & friends strongly implies, to me at least, that, in order to protect the sanctity of the individual's personhood as well as democracy itself, this data needs to withheld/protected from powerful institutions. Especially those that can kill you/lock you in jail. Even if the data isn't "owned" by the indiviudal in the traditional sense.
1) Even if you are correct about eg, metadata, they are also snooping your internet requests, emails, etc, simply because they pass through infrastructure not belonging to you.
Do you think the Founders would have said "if you send a message via Pony Express, you authorize the government to read it"?
2) "If I write down every time my neighbor enters and leaves his house, that's mine, not his." True, but one person writing down what one other person does is hardly scalable or powerful. Computers recording everything everybody does creates much larger potential for analysis and abuse. We don't know what the Founders would have said about this, but I oppose it on the grounds that the risks for tyranny are enormous.
A subpoena requesting documents relevant to an investigation is presumed reasonable under the 4th amendment. Generally, the government can compel you to turn over information relevant to an investigation of someone else. The subpoena power is very broad and also very old (predating the 4th amendment).
If the government hacked into Facebook's servers and took the data, that would be a violation of Facebook's 4th amendment rights, but it still wouldn't be a violation of yours.
Since the Supreme Court doesn't give advisory opinions, agencies always have to make educated guesses about whether the Supreme Court would find some course of action legal. E.g. The Supreme Court did not find the healthcare mandate legal until after attempts to implement it were challenged. In this case the NSA can very reasonably expect that the Supreme Court wold find metadata collection legal as a straightforward application of Smith v. Maryland.
Everything that's wrong with the current intelligence approach in a sentence: "And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration."
This completely vindicates Snowden's point about the current system being one of policy instead of law, and of enabling turnkey tyranny.
I think it's a symptom of corruption of the system's built-in checks and balances. The executive branch is much more powerful now than it used to be, and is the only branch that is composed entirely of a single party. The only politically homogenous branch is now far-and-away the most powerful.
From the article: "Mr. Obama was acutely aware of the risks of being seen as handcuffing the security agencies. 'Whatever reforms he makes, you can be sure if there’s another incident — and the odds are there will be in our history — there’ll be someone on CNN within seconds saying if the president hadn’t hamstrung the intelligence community, this wouldn’t have happened,' Mr. Axelrod said."
If theres ever a time to do the right thing, it's in the President's second term: it's all downhill, what the pundits say doesn't matter to re-electability, since there is none (unless you plan on going to another office later on...)
If the President wants to accomplish anything in his second term -- which is the point of holding the office -- than he still needs to maintain popular support. The public can't (generally) vote him out of office any more, but they can vote out his allies in the House or local/state government.
Unless the President is just hoping to shut everything down. Almost by definition he can do that without cooperation.
Famously, John Quincy Adams served in the House for nine terms (17 years) after his single term as president, where he spent most of his time fighting to abolish slavery.
Andrew Johnson won election to the Senate shortly before his death, in 1875. This was after several attempts to win political office in his post-Presidency years had failed.
“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser.
This strikes me as backwards. Seems that a president with a steely spine would be strong enough to maintain the rights of citizens in the face of such challenges.
I wonder if the real answer is to simply reject that workflow. I can't imagine functioning in an environment where I'm being daily bombarded with information about dozens or hundreds of potential "threats" which never become anything.
What if the president simply told his advisors that he would take a weekly instead of daily briefing on these issues?
What I'd really like to know is what process does the President-elect endure that turns him into an alien lizard from hell?
I mean, seriously .. its like black and white with Obama. Pre-Presidentiality, Obama was real. After-President'ness, he's become some obscure caricature of all other Presidents who came before him..
So is there some sort of secret Presidential chamber that all the past Presidents get to donate their DNA to, which gets injected into The New Guy, to make him into some sort of transformed hybrid clone, or something? I seriously wonder sometimes, if the enemies of the USA haven't realized that the real backdoor to infiltrating America and bringing it to its knees is in the Presidential Training Program that goes on with newly elected victims. It sure seems like the President of the USA gets a new skin, anyway .. I've only been watching for the last 4 Presidents or so ..
Anyone that manages to get to be in the race for the presidents is so irredeemably corrupt they shouldn't be running.
It's like top CEO of financial firms. You don't get to the top by being a nice guy. You get it by being the biggest shark.
PS. I'm reminded of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzaccio
In which a young idealistic person wants to end tyranny of his cousin. To achieve that he decides to gets close to the tyrannt, working inside, helping him and engaging in debaucheries. Eventually he becomes more and more like his cousin. Finally he decides to end his cousins life not because he thinks that it is the right thing to do, or because he believe that it will bring change (he considers the entire city irredeemably corrupt) but because he wants to atone for his sins.
He deposes his cousin and then goes around Florence, announcing to the noble men that he has killed the tyrant and that people are now free to rebel. People just ignore him.
I think this depicts life of pretty much politician, except they don't have the balls to commit their original intent, they just wallow in power and do what's worst for everyone.
> What I'd really like to know is what process does the President-elect endure that turns him into an alien lizard from hell?
I'm going to go with it's the /r/politics and HN echo chamber.
The President's approval ratings are at all time lows right now and it has nothing to do with the NSA (which the majority of the USA is just fine with right now btw), it is due to the rollout of the ACA. I'm sure once things related to the ACA smooth over and keep improving between now and his end of term his ratings will slowly be climbing back up, barring anything major going on in the world.
Just because every other post in /r/politics is about how terrible everyone that works for the government is, and every NSA post (way too often here now unfortunately) on HN is evil, does not mean the majority of the USA thinks that way. Actually it is quite the opposite.
> What I'd really like to know is what process does the President-elect endure that turns him into an alien lizard from hell?
A Truman-era bureaucrat coined the phrase, "where you stand depends on where you sit."
When Obama was outside the executive branch and had only a year of Senate experience before embarking upon his presidential campaign, he had a very different set of interests and responsibilities. As a junior, back-benching senator with no Washington DC experience, Obama had very few capabilities or political capital. People who are weak decry the power of the strong and seek to limit it.
When Obama became president and was given responsibility not just for Illinois, but for the United States and its allies, he assumed a very different set of responsibilities, interests, and capabilities. Obama entered office with a tremendous amount of political capital and the full panoply of executive branch powers at his disposal. The powerful do not generally seek to limit their own power or to accept limits placed upon them.
This happens to every candidate-turned-president, but with some it's more extreme than others. Some presidents enter office with executive branch experience, e.g. Bush Sr. or Eisenhower. Some enter with tremendous political capital and experience with DC politics, like LBJ a.k.a. the "master of the Senate." The transformation is not so great with these presidents.
Some enter with almost no political experience whatsoever, like Obama. The subsequent transformation is much more jarring, because the change in their power is much starker.
> I mean, seriously .. its like black and white with Obama. Pre-Presidentiality, Obama was real. After-President'ness, he's become some obscure caricature of all other Presidents who came before him..
On the contrary, pre-presidential Obama was fake. He was in campaign mode from his entrance on the national scene in 2004 through 2008. You cannot honestly believe that the campaign image of a politician is the "real" version of that person.
Presidential Obama is the real Obama. Abraham Lincoln said, "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." This is who Obama is. There's a reason why presidents seem to feature greater continuity than change, and part of that reason is that the responsibilities of the office don't change according to the president, rather the president must change in order to perform the responsibilities of the office. Many wildly different personalities can occupy the office, but the office structures and constrains those personalities.
Idealists often have a consequence-free vision of what presidents ought to do (a "deontological" ethic). But politics does not work that way. Max Weber contrasted the (deontological) "ethic of ultimate ends" with the "ethic of responsibility" in his essay "Politics as a Vocation," which I urge you to read. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/ethos/Weber-vocation.pdf
Responsibility is a different ethical standard than what individuals on their own would be held to. And what an individual ought to do is very often different from what someone responsible for the lives of others ought to do. And the actions a responsible political figure ought to undertake are often morally repugnant to the private individual. But it is a mistake to judge the leader by the standards one would use to judge a private citizen. Weber says as much:
> "It follows that as far as a person's actions are concerned, it is not true that nothing but good comes from good and nothing but evil from evil, but rather quite frequently the opposite is the case. Anyone who does not realize this is in fact a mere child in political matters."
> If you object to the political methods recommended because they seem to you morally detestable, if you refuse to embark upon them because they are, to use Ritter’s word, “erschreckend,” too frightening, Machiavelli has no answer, no argument. In that case you are perfectly entitled to lead a morally good life, be a private citizen (or a monk), seek some corner of your own. But, in that event, you must not make yourself responsible for the lives of others or expect good fortune; in a material sense you must expect to be ignored or destroyed.
> To be a physician is to be a professional, ready to burn, to cauterize, to amputate; if that is what the disease requires, then to stop halfway because of personal qualms, or some rule unrelated to your art and its technique, is a sign of muddle and weakness, and will always give you the worst of both worlds. And there are at least two worlds: each of them has much, indeed everything, to be said for it; but they are two and not one. One must learn to choose between them and, having chosen, not look back.
> There is more than one world, and more than one set of virtues: confusion between them is disastrous. One of the chief illusions caused by ignoring this is the Platonic-Hebraic-Christian view that virtuous rulers create virtuous men. This, according to Machiavelli, is not true. Generosity is a virtue, but not in princes. A generous prince will ruin the citizens by taxing them too heavily, a mean prince (and Machiavelli does not say that meanness is a good quality in private men) will save the purses of the citizens and so add to public welfare. A kind ruler—and kindness is a virtue—may let intriguers and stronger characters dominate him, and so cause chaos and corruption.
Sigh, I guess this is nothing new. Obama's the ultimate (in my mind) say one thing, do another. At least with Bush we knew he was just a bad guy that didn't give a shit for anything other that war, greedy buddies, and a good walk on the ranch.
With Obama, yah, he came in as the 'outsider' (typical of all candidates I suppose) with all these things he would 'Change' (Shepard Fairey anyone?). But alas, it's been one disappointment after another. Net neutrality, spying, real universal healthcare, not going after politicians of the Bush area that blatantly broke all kinds of laws, etc. All a sham.
It's playing out like a sci-fi story where anyone can be an enemy of the state, just choose your own adventure: leaker, no fly list, dissident, downloader, photographer/videographer; the list goes on and one.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised as this isn't really a democracy anymore. Every law, decision pretty much has to have some 'but what about business/economy?' question. Excessive lobbying makes sure these decisions/rules will never change short of revolution. The fact that corporations are 'people' and that they have no donation limits anymore, pretty much ends what the founding fathers fought for - we the people.
The message of the 21st century america: get rich. Get above the law and above the fold of the 99%. Go where the rules don't apply to you. Go where you make the rules for everyone else.
The vast majority of people took Bush at his word for a long time, especially on matters of war. The recognition of the deceit in the mainstream came long after.
“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser. “There are people out there every day who are plotting. The notion that we would put down a tool that would protect people here in America is hard to fathom.”
That's the whole problem. The NSA spying is being sold as if it stops terrorist attacks. It does not. They have not cited a single incidence.
The NSA existing in a state that doesn't stop terrorist attacks is the status quo (it's the same as them not existing at all). It doesn't need proving.
If they want to spy on everyone in the world all the time and their reasoning is that it makes Americans safer, then the burden of proof is very much on them.
My heart sunk when Obama won the election the first time; not because I wanted McCain to win, or that I had any actual hope that one of the third-parties could win; but because everyone was so happy.
I was in Burlington, VT; about as liberal a town as you will find in the USA; and there was a strong anti-war movement. That anti-war movement bought Obama's promises hook-line-and-sinker and the same people that were out holding signs and going to rallies were canvasing for Obama. There was a march through the streets when the counting was done; people cheered as if we were finally turning a new leaf.
I hope, so deeply, that people will have learned their lesson; that, if some politician you have never heard of suddenly starts getting a ton of press and magically enters your consciousness; he is being tapped by big players to do so. Obama, more than any other public figure in the last twenty years is proof positive that there does indeed exist a shadowy cartel that are fucking with us for power.
If you believe Obama started out pure-at-heart and was 'corrupted' after becoming president; you are naive beyond all comprehension. Remember early, early when Obama was asked about marijuana? One of the easiest, most obvious blatantly fucked up policies our government carries out.. something that every single non-political marginally liberal person is absolutely crystal clear on should be legal for adults: he laughs derisively like it's a terrible idea.
Why? What is it about Obama being so full of hope and change and feel-goody liberalness that makes him laugh at marijuana? Talk to 50 non politician democrats and you will find 49 think it's obvious to legalize marijuana. But talk to 50 politician democrats, and you will find maybe half of them. The higher up you go, the less likely they are to be pro legalization. Why? Because their interests aren't yours.
If you think that there will be ever be a 'main stream' candidate that will represent your interests over the 'shadowy cartel' of government interest and lobbyists, you are sorely mistaken; and we all pay the price.
In the shortest term, voting third party makes little to no difference for structural reasons. That's not necessarily an immediate condemnation of the policy, though - a pattern of people voting third party could eventually flip things if only enough people sign on... However, once third parties start getting some clout, what stops the Powers That Be from co-opting them just as effectively as they have co-opted the major parties? How do you see this actually fixing things?
What's interesting is that the article suggests that Obama himself did not know extent of the NSA's activities. ("At the same time, aides said Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden... just how far the surveillance had gone.")
If that's true, it seems to indicate that Obama is not an overseer at all.
Have our worst fears been confirmed? Is the NSA an unstoppable organization that reports to nobody except itself?
The military industrial complex has been running the United States since WW2. It's best to take Eisenhower's speech as the acknowledgement of that. It was a sitting President issuing a dire warning of what can only be described as a coup to a free Republic.
The political power, the money, the might, the lobbying, the military budget slush fund, the endless scandals, the wars. It's pretty clear the military-industrial combination has done the most to shape the last five or six decades of America's existence.
This is a good point. We have this fetished ideal of the POTUS as this mastermind, but I imagine a great deal of things are purposely hidden from him or hidden via apathy/politicking/corruption and "lets not involve the president on this," kind of thing.
I'm also curious what would happen if we had a president who was strictly anti-intelligence and anti-military. I imagine that's a quick way towards impeachment or getting deposed. There are way too many powerful people and way too much money in intel/military to just reform it. Can you imagine moving to a military budget on par with Russia? Ever?
If anything, we're a military power first and a democracy last. The fact that we can casually lie about war justifications, end the lives of 130,000 civilians, get into almost 1T in debt for it, and have it considered uncontroversial by American citizens and politicians speaks a lot about our values and our system.
No kidding. This is either a lie "Golly, I had no idea, I am shocked! Until this news story blows over.", or a scary truth. If a contractor for the NSA was able to find more shocking abuses of liberty than the Commander in Chief knew of, it would seem what little oversight there is, is completely ineffective.
Both look bad for NSA and Obama, both should compel us to demand more transparency.
P.S. Some would say Snowden should have gone the sanctioned whistleblower route to bring this to the attention of the proper parties such as Pres. Obama. Personally I am not optimistic that that would have been effective. I believe Snowden has claimed trying to start conversations with superiors, and NSA claims he never did such a thing.
>Mr. Obama was told before his inauguration of a supposed plot by Somali extremists to attack the ceremony[...]. Although the report proved unfounded, it reinforced to Mr. Obama the need to detect threats before they materialized. “The whole Somali threat injected their team into the realities of national security in a tangible and complicated way”[...]
So a non-existent threat was what made Obama decide that the surveillance state was necessary. Great decisionmaking here.
“He has more information than he did then. And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration,” said the former Obama aide
Okay, so given the trend of these powers is to increase, and he's not going to be in power after 2016, does he trust the next guy with even more powers, or the guy after that with even more than that?
When civil liberties advocates visited to press him to do more to reverse Mr. Bush’s policies, Mr. Obama pushed back. “He reminded me that he had a different role to play, that he was commander in chief and that he needed to protect the American people,”
The role of President isn't to follow through on the platform you were elected on?
There is an interesting case of regulatory capture nobody seems to be discussing. From the article:
`"But they said his views have been shaped to a striking degree by the reality of waking up every day in the White House responsible for heading off the myriad threats he finds in his daily intelligence briefings.
`“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser. “There are people out there every day who are plotting....'
and then:
`Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden...[we all know what]'
Every morning the president gets a propaganda dose from the very people he needs to reign in. OF COURSE they are going to tell him the sky is falling in and that they are the only ones holding it back. And since it's exciting and secret there is no cross check or balance.
He should be seizing the example of Snowdon's releases to realize that the books are being cooked. Instead he's been completely taken in by the briefing books. It's really no different from Joe Barton being taken in by BP.
Back in the Reagan era Alan Kay told me about his very short time as a white house advisor. Reagan's briefing book wasn't even a book, it was a three minute video. I'm sure it REALLY played up the Soviet threat, yet the security apparatus was as astonished as anyone else when the USSR collapsed.
By the way if your getting most of your updates on this subject from HN, you're most likely out of the loop. Since a lot of the insightful content doesn't make it. IIRC there's even a penalty on this subject on HN.
It is not probably a good idea surround yourself with the people you need to control.
Obama spends most of his time going to eat-dinner with the same rich people that benefit from printing money. The rest of the time it is with the praetorian guard that "protects" him.
Anybody believes he is going to make the same people he surrounds most of the time furious? The same people that put him in charge?
This people are the eyes and ears of the "king of the world". He is living in a bubble.
The mere hand-wringing that current leaders are doing over this is so disturbing to me because of where I see it taking the country. It's not hard to imagine, say, Carl Rove or his ilk giving someone at the NSA a wink and a nod that they'll be taken care of if their candidate wins office. The NSA leaks or hands off information that tilts the election their way. Given that collection of all of this data is A-OK, no step in this process is blatantly illegal anymore. If I were Ron Wyden, this is what I'd be saying. "Do you want your representatives picked by the NSA? Because that's the logical path we're going down."
The ability read/listen to all electronic communication without warrants gives the NSA too much power for this not to happen.
Mr. Obama hasn't changed more than would be expected over several years and, while I can't speak with certainty, I would be very surprised to find out that he was lying about his views during the presidential campaign (I don't know about his promises).
He has more information than he did then. And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration.
Even postulating some revolutionary secret information seems to me to be unnecessary.
Obama has always trusted himself. Most people do. What's changed is that the president is now someone who is trusted by Obama. Everything that's happened up to this point falls nicely out of those circumstances.
If this thinking, that "we will do anything to prevent another terrorist attack, including give up our liberties", is acceptable, then why isn't giving up guns acceptable to prevent the next school massacre?
> At the same time, aides said Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, just how far the surveillance had gone.
If this is meant to be taken at face value, and it's at least plausible given how the US government seems to operate, how can Obama not follow it up with at least a strong commitment to making the American security apparatus more clear and transparent?
Probably because unlike crypto, this is one of those areas where "security through obscurity" really is an aid. That has always been the tension between intelligence agencies and public oversight, it's not like NSA originated the problem.
His administration's descent on this issue has been disappointing. I mean how is the quote any different than something that would have come out of the previous administration?
“There are people out there every day who are plotting. The notion that we would put down a tool that would protect people here in America is hard to fathom.”
What is it, do you think, that causes former critics of spying to become 'overseers'? The Presidency is limited to two terms, so it's not like it's being used to weild power. Are there honest intentions related to safety, or is it all about money/lobbying?
The Federal government is a byzantine web of regulation, conflicting rules, agendas and actions.
Big programs have tentacles so intertwined into things, it's difficult/impossible to unwind and even figure out what they are doing. Think of it from the President's perspective -- getting someone whom he trusts in a position to actually know anything about the programs probably takes a year.
Say you have someone on top whom you trust and the President says "dismantle X program". The bureaucracy is awesome and effective at slowing things down. Keeping up the pressure to do something that the bureaucrats don't want requires alot of energy. And with something like Intelligence, attacking the people running those programs means that they won't be motivated to make the President look good.
So from the President's perspective, you have to invest massive energy, take body blows when things don't go well and distract yourself from whatever it is that you ran for office for. It's a high cost, and the benefits are minimal -- nobody is going to carve your head into the side of a mountain for shutting down some Top Secret program that nobody knew about anyway.
> Mr. Obama was a sponsor of a bill in 2005 to raise the standard required for federal agents using ... national security letters ... He joined other Democrats fighting the renewal of the Patriot Act until it was amended to address civil liberties concerns, then voted for its extension in 2006 after a compromise, breaking with Mr. Wyden who voted no.
> “The rhetoric was probably sharper than his votes.” By summer 2008, with the Democratic nomination secured and the White House now a real possibility, Mr. Obama voted for legislation essentially ratifying Mr. Bush’s surveillance programs.
Perhaps it's about supporting the people who have to collect and analyze Intel in the face of withering public criticism. The rank and file are skilled and intelligent and can find work elsewhere. If the President doesn't defend the value of their work then many will bail. He may still be a vocal critic behind the scenes.
When you are the head of (one branch of) the government and you know that people will blame you foremost for any attacks or intelligence failures, I think almost anyone would tend to see these types of powers and programs differently than when they were merely one of 100 senators.
Mr. Obama was angry at the revelations, privately excoriating Mr. Snowden as a self-important narcissist who had not thought through the consequences of his actions.
The big lie is that surveillance has to do with nation security. It doesn't. You build a surveillance system to suppress political descent not stop terrorist attacks. Business has big plans and they don't want some republic to vote and screw things up for them. They have world to conquer. Follow the money.
What is honestly the point of even concerning ones self with politics anymore? There has been nobody I've talked to in real life that has their head in the game completely, who knows what they are talking about, myself included.
Nothing is going to change, it's a big boys club, debating it, writing about it, all fruitless.
Roughly 125 million people voted in the last presidential election. Had I been among them, I'd therefore have had roughly 1/125,000,000 of a say in who gained the office. Perhaps, to a homeopath, such a marvelous dilution of political power might leave something meaningful in its wake. Not being a homeopath myself, I find it somewhat less than compelling.
I fail to see how resignation in the face of inevitable powerlessness can be anything other than healthy. "How our society governs itself" is a subject over which very few people have, or might gain, any sort of influence; not being one of those people, and having neither desire nor reasonable prospect of joining their ranks, the profligate expenditure of mental and physical effort, to say nothing of precious and irreplaceable time, to pursue the meaningless self-appellation of "good citizenship", strikes me as falling well within the realm of foolishness.
Local politics, depending on where one happens to live, may well present a more worthwhile prospect. In my own case, and being that I live in Baltimore -- a city whose corruption is almost as famous as it is nigh-boundless -- I see little more reason to involve myself on the local level than on the national. Those of a temperament for politics, and who find themselves living in places where local politics are other than an Augean stable of gerrymandering and nest-feathering, might be well advised to involve themselves.
Roughly 125 million people voted in the last presidential election. Had I been among them, I'd therefore have had roughly 1/125,000,000 of a say in who gained the office.
Naturally, that isn't true at all. The President gets all the attention but they can't do much without the House of Representatives and the Senate's approval. Your vote for representatives in those houses is worth a lot more than 1/125,000,000.
If you wanted to have a greater effect, you could get involved. Help campaign for the candidate you favour, effectively multiplying your vote by however many people you convince of your case. Or if you really wanted to make a difference you could run for office yourself.
But yeah, local politics is messy and difficult. It's a lot easier to say you're above it and not do anything.
The population of my congressional district, as of 2010, was about six hundred and sixty thousand. I grant this is three orders of magnitude smaller than the voting population of the United States as a whole; I don't grant that 1/660,000 of a say, in who represents my district in the House, is worth much more, in practical terms, than 1/125,000,000.
The population of my state is about six million. I'm not seeing much value in 1/6,000,000 of a say in who represents my state in the Senate, either.
"Get involved!" you say, as though it were that simple. I've known people who were, and my observation has been that what might start as a hobby soon enough grows to absorb their entire lives, while providing no obvious benefit either to their own well-being, or in the cause to which they so completely give themselves. Having also known people who fell foul of heroin, I'd have to say that, while a political habit isn't quite as damaging overall, the difference is a lot narrower than one might expect, and the similarity certainly doesn't militate in favor of either.
Contrast your viewpoint with those of a very politically powerful group: the baby boomers. The U.S. is more or less exactly what you would expect taking a composite of that group's viewpoints: liberal with Social Security benefits, tough on crime, projecting a tough foreign policy abroad, etc. It always amazes me that there is so little light that can be seen between my mom's political viewpoints and the status quo. And why is that the case? Because she votes.
And if you're the younger, more liberal type that commonly frequents HN, then frankly you're an ideological minority and it's pointless for you to vote. And really, it is by design that we don't let ideological minorities have their way.
In saying this, you seem to express the opinion that I've missed something crucial. Would you like to explain what that is?
If anything, I should think that having seen the express popular will set at naught, by the actions of a few professional gerrymanderers, would add even more point to my analysis.
You could take the outcome as indication that the popular will is always thwarted -- I'm not here to convince you otherwise, and your wording indicates you are up on the soapbox (Augean stables, really?). There's no outer bound to cynicism.
My interpretation is that a thousand votes in Florida would have swung the election, so Florida voters and abstainers were quite powerful indeed.
Often it's hard to tell for sure which election will be like that. The California ballot propositions (where I live) are an excellent example.
I'm not terribly much in favor of mob rule in the first place, but even if I were, it wouldn't further enamor me to see events like the result of the 2000 election. Yes, a relative few voters in Florida found themselves, by accident of history, in possession of political power far outstripping what their numbers would suggest, but given that no one can either plan for or expect such historical accidents, how can they possibly benefit anyone who desires either political power or predictable government? (If predictability isn't considered a cardinal virtue of government, I'm not sure why it isn't.)
And, yes, Augean stables, really. Call it soapboxing if you like, but I'm hardly the only one to express a similar opinion of Baltimore city politics.
Do you truly believe that you as an individual can make any difference at all? And do you truly believe that it is in fact the society that governs itself?
No, I don't believe in anything, not religion, ethics, or morality, just survival. It's an entirely fruitless endeavor. Where do I begin? Organize a friendly protest somewhere?
I think everything is just a tool, and those who see through them and utilize these tools to their advantage move up the ladder.
There's just no way to do it from the bottom. All these protests, all this (sl)activism, it doesn't do anything.
You either need to dedicate your life to politics and get into the club and start working from the inside, and pray some holy fucking deity that there are others like you, or nothing will change.
Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.
There isn't enough time in the day to concern yourself with shit that matters. Nobody wants to come home after working 8 hours with a two hour commute to dip their head into politics, just to even begin to know what's happening.
Where do you go? The mainstream media? Where do you inform yourself?
The reality is people just want to go home, flick the TV on, spend some time with the kids, and maybe if they're lucky, devote a few extra hours to a hobby every week. This scenario occurs in the poor, it occurs in the rich.
It takes a very very special type of person to run a country. You need people who are basically insane. Who have no problem getting up every day and just doing that one thing they do, all day, every day. That isn't 99% of the population. If the top tier of our government is run by similar people at the bottom, we're screwed.
> Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.
I always find this sentiment (or various forms of "wiping the slate clean") to be quite amusing. It is historically more likely for a society to be less free after violent revolution than the opposite. Radicals who believe in a cause strongly enough to engage in revolution also tend to be ideologues who, once in power, want to remake society in the mold of their own viewpoint.
The historically successful revolutions have been conservative ones. For example, the Glorious Revolution in which Parliament asserted its supremacy over the King of England. In another example, modern democratic Spain arose with the restoration of the monarchy!
Wiping the slate clean also means repeating the same mistakes. Actually I strongly prefer pragmatic and strong ideology free, realpolitik playing USA than the current state where the US is ... entangled in some mix of ideology and interest that ensure that anything will be done half assed.
World War I and II were settled over some whiskey and a game of poker right?
It's difficult to objectively say whether violent revolt works, because every single revolt has been in a very different context then the next.
The amount of people, artillery, the strength of the opposition, the cause, the location, the current government, the time.
You can't say whether a violent revolt is the way to go or whether it's not the way to go. It's not a black and white issue at all.
If my brothers and sisters see that giving up their lives for our country is a necessity, then I will dedicate my life and fight along side them.
It hasn't gotten bad yet, the moment it starts to really affect your day to day life, people will do something. Right now, to most people, if their instragrams and facebooks work they don't care.
> World War I and II were settled over some whiskey and a game of poker right?
It's interesting that you mention that, because at the meta level World War I and II were Germany's attempt to violently overthrow the status quo in Europe (which had long tried to maintain Germany as a divided non-power). The revolution failed and the status quo won.
> It's difficult to objectively say whether violent revolt works, because every single revolt has been in a very different context then the next.
Sure, but you can see patterns. From France to China to Russia to Afghanistan, etc, etc, violent internal revolutions are more likely to result in oppression than freedom.
> Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.
Nor I, and God be thanked for it! The trouble with "severe violent revolt" is that it includes no guarantee that the people on the wrong end of the "severe violence" are the same ones whom you think should be. Indeed, there's not even a guarantee that the people on the wrong end of the "severe violence" won't include you. Escalation of commitment can be ugly enough as it applies to individuals and small groups; do you really want to see its effect on the national scale?
That said, you're not quite right to say "it doesn't do anything". Political activism, as it is currently conceived and undertaken in the United States, serves a useful social purpose as an in-group/out-group marker, and I gather that, given sufficient youth and sex appeal, it can be an excellent means of finding pleasant and willing bedmates. Either by itself would suffice as a reason for the young and energetic to involve themselves in what goes by the name of activism; both together make such involvement nigh irresistible.
If you want long-term results, the bottom is the place to do it from. Popular culture and social taboos are pretty much the only way to influence a power structure that's not interested in being influenced.
In 2014, there simply isn't any way a lawmaker or bureaucrat could start a program aimed at punching babies (for example). Legal or not, sensible or not, it would never pass because that's not something you do. Likewise: If people really valued liberty and there was social pressure to support it, there would never be mass spying even if in theory it were legal—because no one would propose it, no one would support it, and no one would associate with anyone who did.
"She [Thatcher] had no hobbies, no hinterland, and no close friends with 'an old shoe' quality of comfortable familiarity. Recharging her batteries was a practice she had never heard of."
How do you think that movements to legalize marijuana or the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage work? These were bottom-up political movements.
I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign. A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power.
Generally speaking, the vast majority of power holders agree that aggressive spying is a good idea. This is closely related to their strong preference for maintaining the status quo across the board. We should not be surprised that Obama did not reverse any of Bush's controversial decisions because they were not actually controversial among those with power or with the potential to gain power.
Generally speaking, when an issue is touted as being highly controversial between the major parties, it consists of 98% solid agreement and 2% hyped up disagreement. The disagreement and the "fray" are part of the choreographed propaganda undertaken by powerful interests to create the illusion of dissent.