… with assistance from all the telephone and internet companies, such as ISPs, search engines, and social networks. The basic message from Christopher Soghoian is: You have no privacy on the web, especially from the government.
The talk is a bit long and gets a bit technical at times but is fascinating and depressing at the same time.
At the end, he reveals which cell-phone carrier is best for privacy and why. (Spoiler alert: it is T-mobile.)
(Thanks to Jonathan)
Despite Mubarak being a strong ally of the US that has propped him up for three decades with money and weapons, there are no indications that the US government is planning to intervene militarily to support him. That is a good sign. It is annoying to hear the US government tell the people of Egypt what it would like to see happen there but that kind of patronizing interference is the norm these days and is on the scale of things a minor irritation. (You can imagine the outrage if the roles were reversed and the leader of some other country presumed to lecture the American people on what kind of government they should put in place.)
What is interesting to observe is to what extent these mass uprisings will spread to other countries. The president of Yemen, in response to planned protests against his three-decades long rule, has already said that he will not run for re-election in 2013 and will not pass on the leadership to his son. This practice of creating hereditary dictatorships is reprehensible and this move is to be welcomed though it is not clear if it will satisfy the anti-government demonstrators.
Meanwhile Jordan’s king has fired his cabinet in response to protests there.
But these are relatively unimportant countries from the point of view of US strategic interests. The real question is Saudi Arabia. If that long-time, oil-rich ally of the US, the key to its middle eastern strategy, becomes destabilized and its despotic regime of dynastic rulers is threatened, there is a real danger that the US will be tempted to prop it up militarily or support a pro-US military coup.
What is true about elite attitudes to WikiLeaks also applies to religion and censorship. I am pretty confident that many of the elites in society are convinced that there is no god and that religious books like the Bible are fiction. As James Mill said to his son John Stuart Mill, “There is no God, but it’s a family secret.” But they do not share this fact with ordinary people either because they think they cannot handle the truth or they think that religious belief is a good mechanism for social control.
Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate (2002, p. 131) quotes neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol on this firm belief amongst the elites that people should be shielded from the truth. Kristol said in an interview:
“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”
In an interview with Humanist Network News (HNN), Pinker says that Kristol thought that atheism is true but should be kept a secret, reserved for just a few. These people even advocated ‘intelligent design’ as a strategy for keeping the atheistic implications evolution by natural selection at bay, even though they realized that it lacked any evidence in support.
[Read more…]
Mubarak has just finished speaking to the nation and said that he will not run again for president but is not going to leave immediately. He tried to appease the protestors by saying that their genuine concerns had been exploited by criminal elements taking advantage of the situation. He was somewhat self-pitying, talking about how he had suffered to serve the country and had not sought power (Ha!).
The millions-strong crowds seem to have not been satisfied by the speech and the live Al Jazeera stream reports that the crowd heckled him and are now chanting “Leave! Leave!”
Like most people else, I have been observing events in Egypt and also Yemen with some interest, but since I have been traveling with sporadic internet access, I have not been able to follow it as closely as I would have liked.
Not that it makes much difference since I do not have an informed opinion to give. When events are unfolding rapidly and one has a massive uprising, it is hard enough for knowledgeable people within the country itself to know what is going on. Most observers in other countries will likely be clueless unless they have detailed knowledge based on long study of that region. This rules out almost all commentators in the mainstream media whose main focus (as always) is on whether these developments are good/bad for Obama/the US/Israel, as opposed to whether it is good or bad for the people of those countries.
Despite my ignorance about situation there, I must admit that I am glad to see brutal dictators like Mubarak in trouble. The US once again finds itself trying to distance itself from a brutal dictator that it coddled and supported for many years. Mubarak is following in the lines of Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Duvalier in Haiti, Pahlavi in Iran, Pinochet in Chile, Ben Ali in Tunisia, and countless other dictators in Central and South America. It does not help that Mubarak’s newly appointed vice-president Omar Suleiman has colluded with the US in torturing people.
The live stream from Al Jazeera seems to be the best source for news and it is reporting that Mubarak is due to make a statement shortly.
What one hopes for is that whatever government emerges in Egypt is one that seeks democratic rights and the welfare of its people and is not controlled by religious extremists. So far, things look hopeful on that front. The fear mongering about the Muslim Brotherhood, both in terms of its strength and its extremism, seems to be overstated.
(For previous posts about the oligarchy, see here.)
There is much in common between what the tea partiers and progressives seek, as can be seen in this informative joint interview on Fox News with Ralph Nader, a lifelong progressive, and Ron Paul, a tea party favorite.
(For previous posts about the oligarchy, see here.)
If an economic calamity is to be averted in the US, it will require a popular revolt against the power of the oligarchy because the political leadership is not going to do take action against it.
The Democratic Party is unlikely to be the leader of a mass movement for change because its base is far too quick to capitulate to its party leadership. The party’s base seems to be always bewildered as to why their party does not follow through on its promises but as Glenn Greenwald points out, it is absurd for progressives to be puzzled by Obama’s willingness, even eagerness, to capitulate to his seeming political opponents, because it they who are enabling this very behavior. It is worth quoting him at length.
Why, angry progressives seem to be asking, would Obama ignore the views of his so-called “progressive base” while seeking to please those who are his political adversaries?
But it’s perfectly rational for Obama to do exactly that. There’s a fundamental distinction between progressives and groups that wield actual power in Washington: namely, the latter are willing (by definition) to use their resources and energies to punish politicians who do not accommodate their views, while the former unconditionally support the Democratic Party and their leaders no matter what they do. The groups which Obama cares about pleasing — Wall Street, corporate interests, conservative Democrats, the establishment media, independent voters — all have one thing in common: they will support only those politicians who advance their agenda, but will vigorously oppose those who do not. Similarly, the GOP began caring about the Tea Party only once that movement proved it will bring down GOP incumbents even if it means losing a few elections to Democrats.
That is exactly what progressives will never do. They do the opposite; they proudly announce: we’ll probably be angry a lot, and we’ll be over here doing a lot complaining, but don’t worry: no matter what, when you need us to stay in power (or to acquire it), we’re going to be there to give you our full and cheering support. That is the message conveyed over and over again by progressives, no more so than when much of the House Progressive Caucus vowed that they would never, ever support a health care bill that had no robust public option, only to turn around at the end and abandon that vow by dutifully voting for Obama’s public-option-free health care bill. That’s just a microcosm of what happens in the more general sense: progressives constantly object when their values and priorities are trampled upon, only to make clear that they will not only vote for, but work hard on behalf of and give their money to, the Democratic Party when election time comes around.
I’m not arguing here with that decision. Progressives who do this will tell you that this unconditional Party support is necessary and justifiable because no matter how bad Democrats are, the GOP is worse. That’s a different debate. The point here is that — whether justified or not — telling politicians that you will do everything possible to work for their re-election no matter how much they scorn you, ignore your political priorities, and trample on your political values is a guaranteed ticket to irrelevance and impotence. Any self-interested, rational politician — meaning one motivated by a desire to maintain power rather than by ideology or principle — will ignore those who behave this way every time and instead care only about those whose support is conditional. And they’re well-advised to do exactly that.
It is probably the case that a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Democratic base contributed to the Democrats’ defeat in the 2010 midterm election. But what Obama cares about is getting re-elected in 2012, and he knows full well that come March or April of that year — if not earlier — most of the progressives who are now continuously complaining about him will be at the front of the line waving their Obama banners, pulling out their checkbooks and whipping into line anyone who is not similarly supportive. By contrast, corporate institutions and Wall Street tycoons will pour their money into Obama’s defeat if he does not show them the proper level of deference and accommodate their policy demands, but will support him (as they did in 2008) if he pleases them. Resource disparities between those factions are significant, but it’s also due in part to their own choices that Wall Street is empowered, and progressives are irrelevant.
This is why the oligarchy is most successful in its attempts at squeezing the poor and the working and middle classes when Democrats are in power.
It is for this reason that I see the Republican Party’s base in the tea party, for all its manifest faults, as more likely to create the conditions for change than the Democratic Party’s base. The latter is still stuck in a passive mode that puts their faith in a leader. Some of them still see Obama as that savior while others are getting disillusioned and are seeking a new hero. Their desperate need for a noble standard bearer who will fight their battles for them is something that saps their energies. In the words of Galileo (put into his mouth by playwright Bertolt Brecht in his Life of Galileo), “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
At least the Republican base is wary and suspicious of their leadership. At least they realize that political leaders should fear them and that it is up to them to be vocal and active in putting pressure on them. Their growing suspicion that they are being manipulated by their political leadership at least provides some hope for a re-awakening and organizing.
What progressives need to do is develop a common agenda with those who are also disaffected with the power of the oligarchy. This will require a different attitude towards the Tea Party, paleo-conservatives, and libertarians. Rather than wholesale rejection of those groups, we should seek to form alliances on those issues that we can agree upon, and there are surprisingly many.
Next: A possible common agenda
(For previous posts about the oligarchy, see here.)
The main threat to the transglobal oligarchy does not come from those countries that we normally think of as being unstable but from the US, because of the rapacity of the financial sector of the US economy that, like a swarm of locusts, is consuming everything in sight in satiating its greed, leaving the rest of the economy and the country bare. And their enablers are both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Is this spot by a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination the future of political advertising?
(For previous posts about the oligarchy, see here.)
I have repeatedly said that progressives have to be most on the alert when Democrats are in power. It is under Democratic administrations that the oligarchy tries to achieve major goals because the party’s base, ever-vigilant to guard against encroachments when Republicans hold power, falls asleep when their own party is at the helm. We see Obama doing things in the name of national security that would have evoked howls of protest if Bush had done them. We see Obama treating Wall Street with a generosity that would be loudly protested if a Republican did it.
The big prize for the oligarchy is, of course, Social Security. The privatization of Social Security has been a long-cherished dream of Wall Street anxious to get their hands on that trillion-dollar account. In general, Republicans have been thwarted when they tried to do it. George W. Bush tried to privatize it in his second term but was beaten back and gave up on it. The Democratic Party has long been seen as the defenders of Social Security, which is why the oligarchy sees it as a better agent for achieving its goals.