Today I am throwing out the newspaper I was saving from the day after Obama was elected and all the electronic newspaper front pages from around the world I was saving from that day are being deleted from my hard drive. I've lost all pride.
I am utterly disgusted with this administration. Any good he has done is wiped out by being far worse than Bush with the domestic spying and whistleblower prosecutions.
How are we any better than China - because we at least eventually find out? Because people don't get disappeared off the street?
You remember that feeling of incredible relief when we saw Bush finally being flown away in the helicopter on his last day? Well that feeling is going to be deja vu in a couple years.
I just hope the next president doesn't try to do a one-up like Obama did to Bush. Obama's library/museum is going to be even more hypocritical than Bush's.
Please don't make this about one party or one president. It's not. This kind of behavior goes way, way beyond partisan politics, and to reduce it to that is to abdicate pretty much all of your agency or ability to do anything about it, not least because partisan politics is more about apportioning blame for problems than it is finding solutions to them.
Getting all, "Thanks, Obama!" over what the NSA was up to long before he was elected — if not before Bush was elected — is giving the people who actually did this, and are still doing it, a complete pass.
A campaign promise Obama made was to revisit the PATRIOT Act and when it came up for renewal to implement better oversight for NSL's and sneak-and-peak warrants.
The Patriot Act was reauthorized in 2009 without a single modification, despite there being a bi-partizan bill on the floor of congress that looked to implement many more checks and balances, as Obama wanted.
Here is what candidate Obama said in opposition to the FISA extension bill in 2008:
> "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty."
Guess what he did when he became President ..
He also said he would kill warrantless surveillance, but by extending the FISA Act. they changed the warrantless period from 48 hours to a week, at the same time banning states from requesting information and plugging a lot of other loopholes that legal challenges to FISA and warrantless wiretaps could have used in courts.
Obama did a complete 180 on civil liberties (there were other issues as well - Gitmo, habeas corpus for enemy combatants, the coke/crack sentencing disparity, assassinating US citizens with drones etc.) and for some reason seems to enjoy the tough on crime/tough on terrorism stance.
I will continue to say: the President has no power. He is a figurehead to placate the citizenry, he takes his marching orders from higher powers (I don't claim to know who that might be).
Call me a conspiracy theorist all you want, but look at the reality.
The president has the power to use his veto when needed. That he may be pressured not to do so or not is irrelevant. On a personal basis, Obama is clearly taking part in all this and is an accomplice.
>The president has the power to use his veto when needed. That he may be pressured not to do so or not is irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant at all. It's a real pragmatic issue. The president (all of them, I mean) has advisors, pressuring him to do this or that. He has lobbies going for some things. He can be blackmailed or exposed for some peripheral BS (think of Clinton). He has pressure from his party. He might be complicit and make a quick buck (thing of Halliburton and such). In the end, if he's too difficult to work with, he might even be shot (some presidents have. Was it all the work of "madmen"?).
The fact is: the president is the president only after he is elected. And to get to that point, he is vetoed himself so much by the party, lobbyists etc, he has to pass so many "loyalty" tests, he is screened so well in order to get campaign funds and support, that nothing really unpredictable can come out of him against the whole system.
Despite the BS "profile" articles, it's not like any random guy gets elected president. Even if he is a "Chicago community organiser", the above process makes sure he is the RIGHT "Chicago community organiser" -- a tame one, that will satisfy all requirements, and wont affect much change.
Great, so he's an accomplice. I don't think very many people actually dispute that. I certainly don't.
So fucking what?
What does identifying him as an accomplice to the surveillance actually do? Does it make the surveillance somehow magically stop? Does it delete all the data the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other TLAs have about you from their databases? Or does it just serve to stoke your righteous indignation over getting fooled by yet another politician?
When can we stop bickering over whose goddamned fault it is and start, you know, fixing it?
You seem to be doing all of the bickering. Whenever anyone says that they're disappointed and/or angry at Obama for this, you respond by accusing people of being ignorant or lazy.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that not many Obama voters are disappointed in Bush for this, because they didn't think highly of Bush, and never voted for him. In fact, their landslide for Obama seemed primarily a response to policies just like this from his predecessor. Now, they see those confirmed escalated, rather than ended or even slowed. That's a threat to the entire idea of American democracy.
So when are you going to stop bickering about who's fault it's not, and start fixing it?
He's not saying it's taboo to name drop. He's saying don't be so naive to play in the hands of a system designed to deflect from taking real action to fix the erosion of civil liberties.
A supermajority vote in Congress nullifies the veto; I'm not sure if any President has ever vetoed a bill following supermajority passage.
As a practical matter, I don't think Obama can take on the Patriot act until after the war in Afghanistan is brought to a close and the AUMF terminated.
You know, it would be nice to have a President that would veto in the face of a supermajority vote when disagreeing with the law. Especially after publicly disagreeing with it.
The reason being is that if the President disagrees with the law and Congress overrides his veto, then the President can state he has nothing to do with the potential negative outcome of the law. If Obama didn't like these laws then he should have manned up and told Congress to own their decision for themselves.
I also seriously doubt the Patriot Act will ever go away without some form of major effort because too many people find it useful for their needs regardless of whether that need has anything to do with terrorism.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It's a simple fact that the President is the single most powerful individual in the nation. But given that fact, there are still thousands of power relationships that he has to deal with, so he can't just dictate things. Think of the example of a stock-holder with 5% of the stock -- doesn't sound like a lot, but he has the microphone, and the next most powerful person in the room has less than .05% of the stock.
Not to mention the President has substantial executive order powers, that are often very hard to overrule. If the President went to bat for privacy, openly and regularly explained to the US public why, and used his executive order powers to implement changes - well, let the Congress try to overrule that. Obama can then issue 500 executive orders the next morning, slicing the issue into countless separate pieces, let Congress choke on trying to overrule it all, and if they want to stop him at that point, then they can impeach him - and at least Obama would stand on principle, and he'd be the only President impeached for doing the right thing.
Obama could stop all of this. He does not want to.
I agree that he probably doesn't want to. That Obama is somehow progressive was a fantasy people clung to because of the trauma of Bush, but Obama didn't even campaign on a progressive platform - at best he fit in the centre, but on many things he is right wing even by the standards of pre 9/11 US politics at least (by European standards he's still far right, as pretty much every US president, - many of his policies would be hard to defend even for most European conservative parties)
He just looked like a progressive choice against the backdrop of Bush and Cheney and McCain tied to the horror of possibly having Palin represent the lunatic fringe.
BUT, even if he did want to, if he tried to stand firm, everything else would grind to a halt. He'd burn all political capital he's got.
...he is right wing even by the standards of pre 9/11 US politics at least...
You are misremembering. Before 9/11, domestic spying and the warfare state was primarily part of the left wing platform. Bush was elected on a platform of "humble foreign policy" (as compared to Clinton/Gore's interventionism) and Republicans generally opposed domestic spying.
Only a few years before 9/11, it was paranoid gun toting right wing conspiracy theorists who defended crypto and turing machines, opposed the first patriot act (pushed by Biden and Clinton), and generally opposed the government.
(They dropped this opposition the minute Bush was elected, of course...)
Back in the 90's there was a movement in congress to lock down all computers iPhone style - i.e., ordinary users should not have access to Turing machines. The Clipper Chip was one of the early attempts at this.
The goal was to prevent piracy, encryption, child pornography, violent video games, and all the other bad things that the internet was enabling.
I too would sort of prefer that the President function as a benign dictator but Congress can exert much more fine-grained control over the Executive than the Executive can over legislative excess - Clinton actually got Congress to give him a line-item veto but the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional only 2 years later.
Exactly why I voted for him and now feel disappointed. I had the terribly stupid hope that he would bring about real change in his second term given he wouldn't have as much backlash to worry in regards to being reelected.
Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition?
The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong".
'Obama holds America hostage.'
I typed the above as a tongue-in-cheek response to your argument, but then I did a search on it out of curiosity and got >35k results. I sympathize with your point, but as of last summer about 1 in 6 Americans still thinks Obama is a Muslim. Historically, Presidents back into issues rather than planting their feet on them, because political capital is not unlimited.
Last time Obama reauthorized the Patriot act (passed by a veto-proof supermajority, incidentally - 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House), Republicans complained about the fact that he used an autopen to sign it remotely:
>Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition?
I like how you said "opposition" rather than "public opposition" because it's what makes the statement true. Fox News will spend all day and all night discussing how Obama is probably a Muslim from Kenya and then "let you draw your own conclusions" regardless of what Obama actually does. That's going to happen whether he does the right thing or not, so why should it stop him from doing the right thing?
I'm really not sure what you're even trying to argue here. It sounds a lot like an argument that because someone somewhere can be found loudly disagreeing with us that we ought to give up. People disagreeing with you is part of democracy. You fight for what you think is right in the court of public opinion and at some point we have an election -- and if the people we elect don't do what we want we get to try it again in the next round, and threaten them with the boot in the meantime. That's what we're doing right now. We're expressing our grievances in public and kicking up our own shitstorm so that more like-minded people will express their views to elected officials and otherwise try to make change.
I'm not talking about Fox News, I'm talking about opposition from within Congress and from the general public. Look outside your bubble; there are a lot of people that heartily approve of Guantanamo and would like to go farther down that route. Congress has persistently declined to allocate funds for housing any Guantanmo prisoners on the mainland, and the way the government operates, Obama can't just appropriate the money from some other part of the budget.
>Look outside your bubble; there are a lot of people that heartily approve of Guantanamo and would like to go farther down that route
There are a lot of people who think that ocean levels aren't rising or who deny evolution. Are we supposed to let the lie win just because a nontrivial number of people have been misled?
And the people in Congress know perfectly well what they're doing. It's not a coincidence that the set of Congressmen who most ardently refuse to close Guantanamo are the same Congressmen who take significant campaign contributions from defense contractors.
And yet people keep voting for them, which is the real problem. You think they're wrong, as do I, but ultimately that's a subjective opinion of ours. You can't show that the decision to follow a security posture you dislike is objectively flawed. This is why I think the long game is strengthening constitutional protections through amendment.
>You can't show that the decision to follow a security posture you dislike is objectively flawed.
To some extent you can. Cost benefit analysis, statistics and evidence point against the effectiveness and scale of our existing security posture. Obviously people can ignore all of those things if they please (cue Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"), but at some point you have to find a way to cause the people who are wrong to cease being wrong so that they stop fighting and start helping.
>This is why I think the long game is strengthening constitutional protections through amendment.
That's fine. But I'm sure you know how difficult it is, and how long it takes, to amend the constitution. We can surely approach the problem from other angles in the meantime.
If, no matter who we "elect", we get the same policies, then I do think it's productive to highlight this via comparing and contrasting the parties/representatives.
This shows very strong common threads running through two parties which are presented to us as drastically different. That, in turn, exposes the fact that there is another "power" that completely supercedes our democratic process and the very notion that we actually have a representative form of government.
Now, what we do with that information is another story. Talk raises awareness, but it's not enough to just talk about it. There needs to be a viable third party and protests aimed solely and specifically at reform such as removing the money from politics, term limits, closing the revolving door between industry and government, etc.
Does that somehow make Obama more culpable for the surveillance state?
Or does it just make him a liar?
Look, my point is this: as long as we waste our time bickering over whose fucking fault this mess is, no-one is doing a damned thing to fix it. I'd rather people spend their time and energy on the latter. If you think finger-pointing is a better use of yours, more power to you, and have fun with that.
> Does that somehow make Obama more culpable for the surveillance state?
Actually, yes. Because back when people were angry enough about the issue, they focused all that anger on Bush. Then comes Obama and all that energy gets transformed into support for him because people honestly believed that he was different, that he was against ever-expanding warfare abroad and ever-shrinking civil liberties at home. And when he won in 2008, the people of this country, who were outraged at everything Bush had done, got their satisfaction.
There was vast public sentiment against this kind of thing. Obama subverted it and destroyed it.
He was actually given the Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush - 100% subversion. I think it's not unfair to say that he's harmed American democracy more than Bush could have, by legitimizing every harmful thing Bush did.
I think it shows that his ethics are perfectly consistent — with those of the standard-issue American politician: promise whatever will get you elected.
The anger people are feeling comes from their having been duped, yet again, by yet another of these creatures.
The fact that he talked such a good game, was given such a golden opportunity to talk that game, and inspired so much hope — going so far as to make the word a centerpiece of his campaign — just made it that much worse when those hopes were dashed, even flouted, so completely.
Welcome to American politics. You can hate the player, or you can hate the game.
Well the first step to fixing it is to throw Obama out of office (that starts with finger pointing). That would be the single most powerful statement that the US public could make. We will tear down any leader or administration who acts this way.
In most cases, revolution was dynamite that blew up the old regime, and had little bearing on creating a desirable society and regime to take its place. In most of Europe this happened through centuries of political reform.
We like to romanticize the few revolutions that had positive outcomes (America), but also downplay the utterly disastrous consequences of others (France).
We also like to ignore that today's terrorists are often what we used to call revolutionaries. (Was 9/11 was not Act 1 in a revolution in US governance?)
My point is that violence exists, and revolutions happen. But they exist to destroy, not to create. Annoying, compromising, good old politics haVe to clean up the mess and replace it with something better. That's rare.
This isn't really true. Bush certainly campaigned as being opposed to the excesses of Clinton/Gore. Among other things, Bush chose Ashcroft as his AG to demonstrate his support for civil liberties.
(In spite of his contemporary reputation, Ashcroft was proponent of civil liberties. He ruled that Stellar Wind was illegal (leading to Bush firing him), fought in the senate for encryption and turing machines, opposed racial profiling and protecting 2nd amendment rights.)
I don't know what this comment is replying to. The parent seemed to blame Bush, Obama, and hypothetical future administrations.
The desperation to completely absolve Obama based on claims of his office's powerlessness, Congress, or Bush is bizarre. It's also Greenwald's primary political critique, (not) coincidentally.
Obama has been involved with this from the first day of his presidency until today, it's in his branch, he fought for immunity for telcos and reauthorized PATRIOT. If he had absolutely no ability to effect it, we should just stop having elections.
Earlier this year I was talking to a European friend presently living in China, who is pretty passionate about human rights issues, privacy policies, freedom, and so on. He said he wouldn't ever set on American soil, because he couldn't be arsed going through the mess of immigration policies and aggressive surveillance and all that. I remember I there and then called him up on it: that's not so, China is way more of a police state than America. I remember he replied something to the effect of "The difference is, the Chinese people pretty much know about it -- it's an open secret, and they're fine with it, they've accepted it -- Americans aren't even aware what's happening to them". That was that, but I thought still America is better: unlike in China where if you have any hopes of making it big as a company you pretty much need to play buddy-buddy with the government and accept that the gov't will exercise some control where it suits them. Turns out I'm wrong here too, seeing as Verizon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox play buddy-buddy with the gov't here as well.
This raises an interesting question: to make it big as a company, and not yield to whatever gov't requests ask of you, is it possible to for a company to survive here in America?
In May 2006, USA Today reported that millions of telephone calling records had been handed over to the United States National Security Agency by AT&T Corp., Verizon, and BellSouth since September 11, 2001. This data has been used to create a database of all international and domestic calls. Qwest was allegedly the lone holdout, despite threats from the NSA that their refusal to cooperate may jeopardize future government contracts,[10] a decision which has earned them praise from those who oppose the NSA program.[11]
...
Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, convicted of insider trading in April 2007, alleged in appeal documents that the NSA requested that Qwest participate in its wiretapping program _more than six months before September 11, 2001_. Nacchio recalls the meeting as occurring on February 27, 2001. Nacchio further claims that the NSA cancelled a lucrative contract with Qwest as a result of Qwest's refusal to participate in the wiretapping program
I've gotta say, although it sounds conspiratorial to question the validity of the allegations, recent events do make one think if there's more to the story of the charges and how they were brought about.
I also won't bother visiting the US anymore. Last time it was in 2009 and it was unpleasant enough, with absurd interviews before and after setting foot on US soil. Not happening again if I can help it.
I used to live in a (now ex-)communist country, where state authorities blatantly breaching citizens' privacy and spying on their every activity was pretty much usual.
You're in great error thinking this has something -- anything -- to do with a president in particular, or with a few people at the top of the decision-making chain. It doesn't. My own country changed two dictators (and a handful of "democratic" regimes afterwards) without this matter being solved.
It's a combination of two things:
* A large block that supports such decisions and even actively pushes for them. The elected President will only be there to implement them for two terms at most, but the people supporting them have no cap on their term. Since two presidents from two different parties (it doesn't help that they're basically the only two parties you have...) did similar shit, it's only safe to assume that either both parties have such groups, or that the groups who are supporting them aren't affiliated to any party in particular.
* Woeful lack of alternatives from your voters and, quite possibly, misinformed voting (although the second is something I can only intuitively state, as I don't live in the US). The people who deal in power are greedy; if they had any reason to believe this kind of stuff would have their asses bust out of office, they'd stop doing it. However, my own experience tells me what they feel is that this kind of crap actually ensures their continuous tenure in their offices.
Also, while we would all wish everyone realized how dangerous this is, the sad truth is most people don't care, or don't realize the atrocity of it. We are a minority; a handful of well-educated people who can think for themselves and who can fully grasp the intrusiveness of such surveillance. Most people simply don't realize enough to care that "the State" (whatever the hell that is) knows who they were calling and when -- after all, who in the world has time to sift through all those pages of phone calls, eh?
I have a conspiracy theory that the Republicans fielded such sure-losers as McCain and Romney specifically so that these continuations of policies would legitimized through the lens of bipartisanship.
As I said above, I don't live in the US, so I can't claim to have a reasonable grip on the important discussion themes (I am slightly more informed on the actual problems on the agendas, but those play little part in the election game), but my two cents on this issue is that, after Bush's term, anyone fielded by the Republicans would have been a sure-loser. It also didn't help that, in a country whose social inequity wounds are opening again, the Republican fielded an annoying dick like Romney.
On the other hand, I can't suspect people like Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin of being smart enough (or of not being blinded by their sheer arrogance) of being able to dodge a puppet role. In fact, if I were an evil overlord and had to choose a set of figureheads to deploy as autonomous, but ultimately manipulable characters for my puppetmaster role, I'd choose people like them.
It's scary that folks also seem to vote for people like them, though.
Give it two or three presidencies, and it could very well be an actual thing that happens here. You don't have to disappear a lot of people, just enough to get the word out. Putin doesn't have to kill a lot of people with polonium-210, just one or two public cases does the trick.
The future looks obvious: don't fight the state, don't disagree with the state, or else. It's a fascism model, very similar to what Russia currently has (how ironic is that end result?!?). We have the widening rich / poor issue and oligarch class to go with it (which is very common under highly industrialized fascist nations).
The very core of his entire agenda has been to expand the scope, size, and power of the government in all directions. I'm glad this particular issue finally got your attention.
I'm not giving Bush a pass here, either. He tarnished the name of the Republican Party -- the party of Abolition, Civil Rights, Reagan, freedom, etc. -- and grew government with the best of them.
Maybe the behavior of these last two administrations will wake the people from their stupor and cause them to realize that the God-given liberties described by our Constitution have been under assault for quite some time.
the party of Abolition, Civil Rights, Reagan, freedom, etc.
Reagan? You mean the President that secretly sold weapons to a "terrorist" state to buy weapons for another U.S.-sponsored terrorist group, knowing full well it was an impeachable offense? The one that raised payroll taxes on the middle class to pay for tax cuts for the rich and tanked wages? The guy that deregulated banks and cause the savings and loan crisis? The President that generated huge budget deficits (3x Carter's) to fund Reaganomics? The one that claimed credit for destroying the "Evil Empire" when most analysts were saying the USSR had been in decline since the 1970's.
That Reagan? He's definitely a credit to the Republican Party.
He tarnished the name of the Republican Party -- the party of Abolition, Civil Rights, Reagan, freedom, etc.
I never cease to be amazed at the uncritical association of Ronald Reagan with freedom. Take a good look at the graph below, especially the labels on the axes.
I don't want to get into a political derail because a) I see the larger point you're attempting to make and b) Reagan was extremely effective in advancing US itnerests and thus pretty successful in that aspect of his job, but in my view he treated freedom very much as a transferable commodity rather than a universal grant.
Almost none of that growth comes from changes to federal law. It's almost entirely state and local laws. During the 1980s it was the War on Drugs, but during the 90s it was three-strikes and zero tolerance laws.
The best work on "the carceral state" being done right now is by a UPenn professor, Marie Gottschalk. Check out her books.
Looking back at the Petagon Papers I found this quote:
"[t]he security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." - Judge Judge Murray Gurfein declining to issue such an injunction against the publishing of the Pentagon Papers.
Pretend for a second that your advisers give you two options. Secretly sign bills to allow the gathering of data regarding US citizens from indirect sources, or allow a terrorist attack to happy under your watch as Commander-in-Chief.
You don't have all of the information. The big picture regarding cyber-security and national security in general is very complicated, please lets work together to come to a logical solution rather than blame one political party or candidate.
Policies are never perfect, especially when you involve a technology as new and complicated (technically and ethically) as the internet.
Most people are fully aware of the ability of the US government to spy on all communications. How can you expect the NSA, which has the mission of protect the US security systems and provide foreign intelligence, to have limits on it's information sources?
Is the real concern whether or not the FBI and other agencies have full access to the data the NSA collects? Patriot act might have allowed them to have more access.
The worst part is we had no real choice, at all. In Bush's case, at least he could say, “I'm the tough-on-terrror candidate. In the tradeoff between security and liberty, I favor security.” That's how he was positioned. By electing him, it was understood at some level that this is what we as a country were choosing.
Obama took the other side of this argument. A vote for him was a vote for favoring the liberty side of that tradeoff. His actions in office are a clear demonstration that we can't translate our widely held preferences into implementation through the mechanism of our election system.
How are we any betteer than china? Because there is a huge fucking difference between monitoring information flowing over networks and censoring it or using it to supress political opposition? What ridiculous hyperbole.
> Because there is a huge fucking difference between monitoring information flowing over networks and censoring it or using it to supress political opposition?
Monitoring information is arguably a light form of suppression, isn't it? When someone is being monitored they get worried, they're more conscious about their actions. It has a chilling effect. I don't think finding parallels between the two is an exercise of ridiculous hyperbole.
I am utterly disgusted with this administration. Any good he has done is wiped out by being far worse than Bush with the domestic spying and whistleblower prosecutions.
How are we any better than China - because we at least eventually find out? Because people don't get disappeared off the street?
You remember that feeling of incredible relief when we saw Bush finally being flown away in the helicopter on his last day? Well that feeling is going to be deja vu in a couple years.
I just hope the next president doesn't try to do a one-up like Obama did to Bush. Obama's library/museum is going to be even more hypocritical than Bush's.