It occurs to me that a side benefit of the evidence-less allegations of Donald Trump’s Russian dealings (not that he hasn’t had Russian dealings) is building the opposition to pardoning Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. It is very interesting how quickly a bunch of Democrats embraced Edward J. Eptstein’s new book as an axe to sharpen for this battle. That is the Wall Street Journal and Breitbart neo-conservative author of several analyses of the JFK assassination.
Glenn Greenwald, another controversial figure for lots of Democrats because of his criticism of President Obama, has a take on Nicholas Lemann’s review of Epstein’s book that contains many verifiable facts, unlike a lot of what is passing for reporting on the intelligence community and on Russia’s cyberwarfare capabilities and actions.
Even if one wants to argue that Snowden bears some moral responsibility for exposure of this program by virtue of having made these documents available to news outlets, it is undeniably true – to reverse Lemann’s formulation – that Snowden didn’t decide what stayed secret. The press did. As the ACLU’s Wizner simply put it about Lemann’s review: “the last lines are just false.”
(One great irony highlights this dynamic: in September, Perlroth – after exploiting Snowden’s leaks for her own benefit – argued that her own source should not be pardoned on the ground that he leaked documents “that had nothing to do with privacy violations.” But it was she, Nicole Perlroth – not Snowden – who decided to expose, on the front page of the NYT, the NSA’s spying activities on Huawei.)
If you live long enough, do you see EVERYTHING twice.
Gee, too bad they didn’t think to blame the market crash on the Roooskies. We might have forgiven all those “pardons” given to the financiers.
Yep. Once as tragedy, once as farce.
Although the Republican victory in 1946 triggered it, the Truman administration pandered to the mood by sacrificing significant numbers of public servants who were not Soviet agents but merely lefties or accused of being lefties. The same Red Scare was used to purge many labor unions and reduce labor power through Taft-Hartley. And then you had the Republican McCarthy doubling down because the Republicans had not painted Democrats red enough, ending with his failed attempt at Roy Cohn’s hands to delegitimize the military and even Eisenhower (the birth of the John Birch Society). Many careers were ruined forever; some, for only a decade and came back in the civil rights era and anti-war movements. There is a lot of profound social an personal tragedy there, some of which was documented in films of the 1970s and 1980s–no doubt (along with It’s a Wonderful Life) why Hollywood is the bete noir of the right wing that seeks absolute destruction of the left wing. The global tragedy was that what was an extension of the values of liberty, equality, and brotherhood of the Enlightenment revolutions ended up as militarized authoritarian state capitalism in every instance. But one that bought domestic consent through provision of universal infrastructure and extracted the capital for rapid economic development in a system other than privatized plantation capitalism or laissez-faire race to the bottom, which fought any infrastructure other than what commerce and the wealthy wanted. The supposed alternative proved in the end false.
And once as farce. Picking up on your market crash comment, do we know which Russian banks or oligarchs were counterparties to US too-big-to-fail banks? Which ones did, for example, Jamie Dimon meet with? How much did Russian interests get out of the US bank bailout and TARP actions? That would be farce.
The evangelicals most enamored of the first US Trump (a term of office like Caesar) are full of “God-anointed” and “the peacemaker’s time is at hand” millennialism; others are longing for the Crusades of exactly 1000 years ago; that is farce, but it could become tragedy.
The Democrats are trying their mightiest to whip up a Red Scare with a Russian Orthodox nationalist authoritarian oligarchy, starting with the boycott of the So Chi Winter Olympics in 2014 and moving to sanctions against Russia. The arguments have been contradictory, international support has been missing, and Kerry has soldiered on with essential a mixed message diplomatic effort with Russia’s Lavrov. Thankfully, so far what could have been tragedy has been farce. Thankfully, Kerry has been willing to be the scapegoat for that farce. One senses that the whole maneuver was to buy deep state political support for Clinton, which now seems too clever by half as Comey seems to have put party before country before opponent’s party. That is farce.
The use of the Espionage Act of 1918 to sentence whistleblowers who were pointing out abuses of the Constitution domestically by the intelligence community is tragedy for Chelsea Manning and John Sinclair above all. Using Edward J. Epstein as evidence that Edward Snowden is a “communist Russian” agent is pathetic; merely accusing him of being a Russian agent is farce. He has the same value to the nationalist Russians of the Putin regime that Paul Robeson had to the Soviets of Stalin’s regime — propaganda about the hypocrisy of US hectoring on liberty and human rights. Jim Crow in Robeson’s case and total surveillance of a sort that Stalin would envy in Snowden’s case. This is farce that could become generalized tragedy in Trump’s hands.
The left’s hangup on destroying Clinton while ignoring Trump and their fear that Clintonism will rise from the grave is tragedy that we all will live. The failure of those on the left to recognize that it is popular resistance to authoritarianism that is the only thing that will limit Trump is going to allow the DNC-generated “Resistance(tm)” to come off as farce and another round of cynicism.
Rev. William Barber has been leading protests at Sen. Thom Tillis’s house asking him to vote against the confirmation of Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as US Attorney General. He should be getting widespread support from North Carolina Democrats and independents. The fact that so far it’s business as usual with elected Democrats and that they are posturing resistance from a “Tickle me Donald” position is farce. Why aren’t there protests at the home of every Republican Senator in the country?
My sense is that are far more jail cells available than there were in the rural South of the 1960s. Tragedy and farce at the same time. Law and order, my ass.
Agree except for the inclusion of “It’s a Wonderful Life” for exposing the ‘red scare.’ It didn’t flop when it was released because it exposed anything. It flopped because it was a saccharin take on how ‘little people’ defeated banksters before the New Deal but set a decade after New Deal legislation had made that ‘little people’ response obsolete.
It didn’t expose the Red Scare, it drew criticism from the folks pushing the Red Scare. They didn’t like the hostile portrayal of good entrepreneurial Mr. Potter. And then there were those Frank Capra hung out with. (From Wikipedia, “Frank Capra”)
The Wikipedia entry for It’s a Wonderful Life has this:
The turn in It’s a Wonderful Life’s fortunes seemed to follow Watergate and especially the death of J. Edgar Hoover. It was then that it became a Christmas ritual to fill media airtime during the holidays. Almost 40 years later, it is still with us, a messenger of some distant American values.
Actually, something was wrong with the copyright and TV stations didn’t have to pay to broadcast it. I think the copyright was later fixed, whether by change in copyright law or legal appeal I don’t know. IIRC, someone forgot to file papers renewing the copyright.
That is hilarious. Potter forgot his copyright renewal.
Suspect you’re correct. A Christmas theme and cheap to air turned it into a “classic.”
I personally dislike the movie because of it’s odd time-warp. Potter, as depicted in the movie, was a stereotypical fat-cat bankster that would have been familiar to people in the late 1920s and early 1930s. And the “good” small community banker probably existed to some extent back then as well. Properly “middle-class” with the AA housekeeper.
But the period of the major portion of the story was post WWII. People knew that bank-runs were in the past and that in the past, the little people couldn’t come together and save “their bank” against the machinations of the Potters. Plus, the loan term for mortgages were only five to twelve years and required a large down payment. Any hiccup and they lost their houses.
So, while HUAC etal. objected to a bankster looking like a bankster and little people collectively saving their good bank and banker (hints of communism), the story didn’t rang false to people in ’46 who were experiencing social democracy. It may also have been too early for entertainment schmaltz. Fifteen years or so later that historical time gap had been erased for viewers. They knew that there had been banksters like Potter, bank-runs, and bank failures and that people had lost their houses, but for them there was no time demarcation from say 1930 to post WWII.
Also interesting to note that it gained popularity just as the attacks on the New Deal began emerging. Creating the meme that banking regulations are unnecessary to defeat the Potters. Might be where Reagan got his anti-government notions from.
Cooperative savings and loan companies were a product of the New Deal. And at least in South Carolina, all savings and loans were owned by their depositors just like today’s credit unions. They had fixed rates. Savings at the end of the 1960s was 3% and loans were 6%. They struggled with the inflation of the 1970s and were killed by deregulation, privatization, looting, and the collapse of the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s. It was relatable in 1946; it was nostalgic in 1986. It is a desperate act of Christmas hope these days. It works because the Potter-type banks still existed in competition with savings and loans until branch banking laws allowed consolidation of banks in greater combines.
No. By 1946 when the movie was released, there weren’t “Potter-type banks.” Nor would there have been a family S&L for the Jimmy Stewart character to begin running when he was a young man. They didn’t exist before passage of the Federal Home Loan Bank Act July 1932 (under Hoover). The major overhaul of the commercial banks was done under FDR.
Depositor ownership of S&Ls was probably used as a means to more quickly organize them at a time when there wasn’t much capital available to invest in them and therefore, they needed depositors for them to operate and being depositor owners added a confidence component. It was the creation of FSLIC in ’34 that was likely the bigger boost as for practical purposes for depositors, the ownership didn’t mean much. Secured savings with a higher return than banks could offer is what made them attractive.
What came of S&Ls (and banking in general) in the decades after 1946 is irrelevant to my point as to how this movie played to audiences when it was released. It was out of sync with their reality and time frame. It would be like a movie released in 1980 and set in the US during the Carter Administration with the story revolving around a polio epidemic and the lead character was a fifteen year old in an iron lung machine.
I think the majority of the viewers would not have notice anachronism. It’s common in historical films.
Savings and loans were aimed at financing mortgages by getting money that had disappeared into tin cans and under mattresses and other places for storing cash back into circulation.
It came out in the middle of an emerging post-war housing crisis, and there were still new savings and loans forming to soak up the savings that people had accumulated but could not spend during the War (as it was then referred to).
The Potter-Bailey conflicting interests were just re-emerging and would continue until the savings-and-loans were finally destroyed through deregulation and privatization.
It took a while to roll out all of the savings and loans after the enabling federal and state legislation. It took a while for them to be consolidated into something attractive to be privatized.
By the way, I’m noticing a similar consolidation going on in credit unions today. I think its only a matter of time before the legislation allows credit union boards to privatize ownership and for that ownership to make the same bad mistakes that allowed them to get rich while their institutions failed.
Same in Illinois.
To an extent, Snowden did decide what became public by deciding what to copy and leave the building with.
All these protestations of “privacy” and editorial judgement are angels dancing on pins. Many, many people want the whole archive released, then let everyone make up their own mind.
Anyway, details as to code named programs are just nerd pornography ( and I include myself in that description). We all knew that they watched, acted on occasion, had relationships with the various telcos. Nothing new there. The real thing to take away is that.
-TLA access to all means of communication within the US and most of the industrial world available for monitoring and analysis. Relationship trees reaching down 3,4,5 levels. That is the phone metadata issue.
-NSA now has the capability to store ALL of the Internet and communications over it. And will keep it for decades. If encrypted, they will keep it and then decrypt when technical abilities appear, as it did with the Verona Intercepts. (Bamford). Of course said content will be key word searched and flagged for further examination. Just think, comments here are stored in Utah for future use. And cute nyms do Not hide identity.
-the notion of hiding within the massive torrent of data that passes over the Net, is wrong. Snowden shows that they can (metaphorically) pinpoint a droplet of water and retrieve it as it passes out of a firehose.
Everything else is details. The shock that they may be using those tools within the US is naïve after the “Patriot” Act.
Ridge
We did not know that any of this was going on. It was easy to dismiss anonymous leaks to the media by their anonymity.
It is difficult to dismiss the actual electronic document copy details as anything other than solid evidence of widespread surveillance.
We did not know about the Five Eyes agreement (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and it’s use to evade guarantees of warrant in those countries by swapping data about another country’s nationals for information about your own citizens.
Most American have been and still are naive about how far from Constitutional operation we now are with respect to critical amendments in the Bill of Rights (now become the bill of government-granted privileges easily and arbitrarily withdrawn). That was part of the problem Snowden aimed to fix. He knew that “existing channels” were bullshit. He did what he could. That turns out to be bullshit too. Political asylum still is contingent of political usefulness to the host country. The Snowden case shows how far-ranging US power extends even into China and Russia, the US’s two major competitors. How many days did he stay in an airport lounge at the Moscow airport before the Russians granted him entry? And the US attempted to intercept a airliner supposed to be carrying him to where? Was it Cuba?
Dealing with what Trump has in store is the least of the problems (and that is a huge one) that we now have to deal with.
While the notion of hiding within the massive torrent of data is wrong, the idea that one can collect everything and investigating after the fact or predicting with big data correlation is also wrong and costs us $10 billion a year to boot.
When I said “we knew”, I may have meant the communities I have hung out in.
The history of US communication surveillance is long and convoluted. Most of the time it was directed to people or items Leaving the US, but there have always been informal agreements with Western Union and ATT for looking at internal comm when needed. Even the US mail was opened and monitored. Now they just scan and copy the outside of every piece passing through the system. All to build up relationship trees.
The rise of the Internet and the tools and services it provides are grossly misunderstood by a vast majority of people. The assumption that a text, email, online search…etc… is in any way or form “private” is incorrect. The Internet is a huge Party Line, with any number of actors listening in. There is no real expectation of privacy. Only point to point protection is a valid means to secure ones communications. Snowden may have shown those facts in bright letters to a startled public, but he didn’t write the text.
So with the Patriot Act, all rigid limitations were stripped. Things like National Security Letters did away with any formal presentations before judges and secretly opened up all aspects of a US resident or citizen’s life for examination. One (of several) of Obama’s mistakes wasn’t an independent review of actions under that law and reforms.
What I’m worried about is with the “War on Terror”, technology used overseas against targets in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places have been funded and filtered down to the local police departments as well as other civilian authorities. The same things that target a cell phone in the Border Territories for an air to ground missile are used today by the local cops for minor infractions; scooping up hundreds of other cell phone signals and their content in the process. Every wonder why the cops or Feds circle a city in a plane for hours at a time. Just like they circle areas in Iraq?
https:/www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous/spies-in-the-skies?utm_term=.jcaRMNK3y#.qdVxmAwZ5
https:
http://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/dec/02/virginia-state-police-release-cellphone-surveilla
n
One more encroachment. Securing one’s privacy is still possible, but you have to 1) want it and 2) be willing to go the extra mile in effort. its the constant balance of security vs convenience.
R
I heard on radio news today that Facebook is concerned about “fake news” and is going to censor members’ posts. They already do, but with a computer algorithm. Now they are going to employ an army of “Winston Smith’s”. Why anyone is on Facebook is beyond me.
I thought we had libel laws and a law against making false statements . Silly me.
And who died and left Facebook King?
That apparently no longer applies to news. Thus Alex Jones’s InfoWars, FoxNews, and increasingly the entire Wall Street media.