A new kind of bicameral legislature

As another byproduct of the Edward Snowden revelations, it has become clear that the real legislative division in the US is not between the House of Representatives and the Senate but between an Insider Congress and an Outsider Congress.

The defense of the Obama administration to the revelations about widespread NSA surveillance is that they have ‘fully informed’ members of Congress, and since these members are supposed to be representatives of the people, then everything is fine. But as this article from Glenn Greenwald points out, there seems to be two Congresses. There is an inner coterie of people who are in the leadership and who get secret briefings and support the government’s programs and its secrecy, and there are the rest who are stonewalled when they ask for information, and yet are expected to vote on issues without knowing what is going on. [Read more…]

The surveillance data is not being used just for terrorism

It turns out (what a surprise) that the massive collection of data by the NSA is not being used just for detecting terrorist threats.

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. [Read more…]

The Daily Show on the minimum wage battle

Jon Oliver was on fire in this series of three clips dealing with the strikes by fast-food workers who are trying to get the minimum wages raised from the current $7.25 an hour (which works out to about $15,000 per year for a 40 hour week) to a more realistic $15. Of course this is generating huge amounts of protests by the very same people who think that raising taxes on the rich, even the top 1%, would create enormous hardship on the wealthy. I don’t know if it was ever truly the case that minimum wage fast food jobs were exclusively for adolescents to earn some pocket money but it is clearly no longer true. These jobs have become primary ones for adults and they deserve to have a living wage. [Read more…]

More on the Amash-Conyers amendment vote

The close 217-205 vote defeat in the House of Representatives on the amendment by freshman congressman Justin Amash and veteran John Conyers (both from Michigan) to curb the surveillance powers of the NSA clearly has shaken up the establishment. David Kravets finds that there was a significant pattern in how people voted: “It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.” [Read more…]