Today’s environmental movement is vastly bigger, richer, and better connected than it was in 1970. It’s also vastly less successful. What went wrong?
This is from last month. A great overview of the environmental movement, and how it’s lost its way since Earth Day. Hopefully newer organizations such as 350.org are starting to close the gap. We need it.
What makes the inaction more remarkable is that we have been hearing so much hysteria about the dire consequences of piling up a big burden of public debt on our children and grandchildren. But all that is being bequeathed is financial claims of some people on other people. If the worst comes to the worst, a default will occur. Some people will be unhappy. But life will go on. Bequeathing a planet in climatic chaos is a rather bigger concern. There is nowhere else for people to go and no way to reset the planet’s climate system. If we are to take a prudential view of public finances, we should surely take a prudential view of something irreversible and much costlier.
The F.B.I. and Justice Department cannot credibly declare that they need to restore balance with more warrant power, and at the same time campaign against the need for warrants in the first place, and abuse their subpoena powers. If the argument for preserving a balance between security and privacy compels a stronger wiretap power, it must also means a broader statutory warrant requirement, one that covers most of what we do on the Web and covers most records. Otherwise, the balance argument works against the Justice Department.
An FBI investigation manual updated last year, obtained by the ACLU, says it’s possible to warrantlessly obtain Americans’ e-mail ‘without running afoul’ of the Fourth Amendment.
Read on for more terrifying revelations of how the government considers your privacy to be a hindrance to national security, including this gem:
Last week, FBI former counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente told CNN that, in national security investigations, the bureau can access records of a previously-made telephone call. “All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not,” he said. Clemente added in an appearance the next day that, thanks to the “intelligence community” — a likely reference to the National Security Agency — “there’s a way to look at digital communications in the past.”
A Census Bureau survey also found that Hispanics and Asians continue to turn out at much lower rates than other groups, and that women turn out at higher rates than men.
I know that even with a black man in the Oval Office, things for African Americans have not exactly gotten better over the last four years (in some cases they seem to have gotten worse). But this is still a monumental data point, given this country’s sordid racial history.
Today’s young adults, facing huge challenges and dwindling opportunities, choose the medium chill by necessity — and show us all a better way to live.
This is a very interesting rumination on the “screwed generation” and how the way we live our life is actually the key to changing everything.
The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.
Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.
“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”
Glad to see that worked and wasn’t a huge waste of taxpayer money or anything. Rosenberg’s article goes on to state that the Iranian cash drops were actually MORE transparent than the CIA’s. So there’s that.
A former senior official in the Obama administration told me that after Abdulrahman’s killing, the president was “surprised and upset and wanted an explanation.” The former official, who worked on the targeted killing program, said that according to intelligence and Special Operations officials, the target of the strike was al-Banna, the AQAP propagandist. “We had no idea the kid was there. We were told al-Banna was alone,” the former official told me. Once it became clear that the teenager had been killed, he added, military and intelligence officials asserted, “It was a mistake, a bad mistake.” However, John Brennan, at the time President Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, “suspected that the kid had been killed intentionally and ordered a review. I don’t know what happened with the review.”
Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, would not answer questions about the former official’s assertions, saying that she “can’t address specific operational matters and won’t go into our internal deliberations,” adding: “We cannot discuss the sensitive details of specific operations.” In an e-mail, she pasted a lengthy statement citing the public pronouncements of various US counterterrorism officials, much of which had already become part of the White House’s boilerplate response to any media inquiries regarding the drone strikes.
Brennan, who is now director of the CIA, recently answered an inquiry from the Senate Intelligence Committee on such after-strike reviews. When civilians are killed, Brennan said, “we not only take account of the human tragedy, but we also go back and review our actions.” Analysts “draw on a large body of information—human intelligence, signals intelligence, media reports, and surveillance footage—to help us make an informed determination about whether civilians were in fact killed or injured,” Brennan asserted in his written response. “In those rare instances in which civilians have been killed, after-action reviews have been conducted.” No such review of Abdulrahman’s killing has ever been made public.
Stunning. According to this piece, the entire operation that ended the life of Awlaki’s son was a giant, incompetent “whoops” perpetrated by the intelligence community Obama is always falling all over himself to congratulate. And more disturbing, the teenagers assembled for that barbecue in Yemen seem to have been deliberately targeted. This amazing excerpt (from what looks to be the powerhouse national security book of the year) points to a bureaucratic system of killing that cannot be stopped and is able to assassinate American citizens abroad by fiat. This is not a government Americans should recognize and is in desperate need of reining in by the citizens and our representatives.
Reporters miss a chance to expose Congress’s weak rationale for an ethics rule rollback
I missed this last week. It’s a very important report from CJR’s Chavkin on how Congress quietly gutted key provisions of the STOCK Act by using the oldie but goodie excuse of “national security” concerns.
The tempo of mass killings and bombings IS going to increase. The generation coming up is much more detached from your society. They are much less likely to believe in it, to think it’s fair, to believe they can have a good life, or a purposeful life in it. They are burdened with debt, they know that one slip up can condemn them to a lousy life, they see the good jobs going, going, going and they understand, in their bones, that the society is a corrupt one. Make no mistake, bankers killed far more people than these boys, and they didn’t go to jail. The people running the plant in Texas which blew up and the bureaucrats who made the decision not to shut it down, killed more people than these kids did, and they did it for money. A society which is fundamentally unjust, and which is seen to be fundamentally unjust, is going to have more and more problems like this. The older generations still sort of believed, or still thought they could make it through. The new generations coming up, will less and less believe the myths, less and less believe that if they just play by the rules, they’ll be taken care of. Less and less believe that if they fail, well, the system is basically fair and they had it coming.
So what in fact did change? We now have a “War on Terror” that permeates every public news event and action. The immediate leap to the familiar “Terrorists In Our Midst” narrative is facilitated and amplified by a bovine mainstream media amped up by endless alerts issued by a Department of Homeland Security and two Presidential Administrations about insane foreigners here, there, and everywhere. In other words, what’s changed is the presence of a fear-mongering narrative of the War on Terror, along with the billions in expenditures that are used to justify it, that reframe a centuries old story about crime.
Bill McKibben: Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the “Stonewall” of the Climate Movement? | TomDispatch
Unlike gay rights or similar issues of basic human justice and fairness, climate change comes with a time limit. Go past a certain point, and we may no longer be able to affect the outcome in ways that will prevent long-term global catastrophe. We’re clearly nearing that limit and so the essential cowardice of too many Democrats is becoming an ever more fundamental problem that needs to be faced. We lack the decades needed for their positions to “evolve” along with the polling numbers. What we need, desperately, is for them to pitch in and help lead the transition in public opinion and public policy.
Instead, at best they insist on fiddling around the edges, while the planet prepares to burn. The newly formed Organizing for Action, for instance — an effort to turn Barack Obama’s fundraising list into a kind of quasi-official MoveOn.org — has taken up climate change as one of its goals. Instead of joining with the actual movement around the Keystone pipeline or turning to other central organizing issues, however, it evidently plans to devote more energy to house parties to put solar panels on people’s roofs. That’s great, but there’s no way such a “movement” will profoundly alter the trajectory of climate math, a task that instead requires deep structural reform of exactly the kind that makes the administration and Congressional “moderates” nervous.
Posting this as “text” instead of “link” since tumblr changed how stupid links look on the stupid dashboard.
Ahem. This is a great piece by one of the great climate warriors on the spineless Dems and how to get them to come on board with the climate movement.
AP Photo/Boston Globe, John Tlumacki (via Boston University)
This is a sad time for the nation, but something that deserves deliberation. It’s still early in the scheme of things given that the party responsible has yet to be found, but some basic reflection is warranted.
First, we still have no idea who or what group did this. Yes, it looks like the work of a terrorist organization, or (the media cause celebre these days) the “lone wolf” who wanted to make a big splash killing a bunch of American citizens enjoying one of the few public events worth celebrating these days. News reports are full of speculation, both by “experts” and people within the government, about whether this was the result of domestic or foreign elements. Not that it really matters; a bombing that rips apart people at a public gathering (including murdering an eight-year-old boy) is a horrific act no matter who perpetrated it. Does it really matter at this point whether it was an al-Qaeda cell or some “patriot” type obsessed with the federal government? An act of terror is an act of terror. There will be plenty of time in the next week to get to the bottom of who was responsible. What’s important at this point is to see why a society such as ours (with all the “freedom” and “greatness” and so on) keeps enduring such horrific acts. Why are such events as these, and others such as Newtown and Aurora, happening with such regularity? Could it possibly be because of societal breakdown, because of the endless world-wide warfare with no point, because the elite criminals of the last decade (both on Wall Street and within the government) have not been held accountable while we imprison massive amounts of regular people? Just as it’s irresponsible to place blame before the evidence comes in, it’s not good to assign it to any particular measure of society. But there is no question that ours is a society at its breaking point. These types of things don’t usually happen in healthy societies (Anders Breivik may beg to differ, but the Norwegian government handled that pretty well, all things considered). What is it about ours that causes such horrific crimes? Whether it’s a foreign terrorist organization making a statement about the massive bombing campaigns that are part and parcel of US foreign policy or a domestic terrorist making a statement about the Federal Reserve’s looting of the economy, the fact still remains that this person saw no other recourse than to act out in such a terrifying, destructive way. This could be the result of mental illness, but the fact that such illness was allowed to permeate this individual without any consequence could still point to an overall sick society. It’s a still too early to place blame for this event given that no one has been arrested, but it bears consideration.
The second thing is to watch how the media covers this. What happened in Boston, while a tragedy and sad for everyone involved (and their families), is nothing out of the ordinary for people walking the streets of Baghdad, Kabul, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Beirut, or any of a dozen other places across the world. And yet I haven’t seen much wall-to-wall coverage of the latest car bombing in Afghanistan, have you? This pattern played out similarly in the wake of the Newtown tragedy, which I wrote about at the time. It will be very interesting to see how this tragedy is compared to 9/11 but not to the massive devastation that occurs in other areas of the world on a near-daily basis. This is evidence both of the corporate American mindset in the boardrooms running the show at the media conglomerates as well as the general sense that tragedies are always much worse when they happen to Americans on our soil. Why does the corporate media never center its attention when these type of mass bombing attacks happen in the Middle East or elsewhere?
Again this is not to take away from the very real suffering happening in one of this country’s greatest cities, but to put it in context. It’s still too early, and the grief very palpable, to examine this situation from a societal level too much. But these things should be on everyone’s mind in the days and weeks ahead. What does everyone else think? Is it simply too early for this kind of analysis? Or is this precisely the time, given what we’ve all been through in the last decade? At this point I’m not quite sure, but I have to get my thoughts written down. It seems the only way to deal with these appalling circumstances.
It’s a battle that pits President Barack Obama against whistleblower advocates, against some of the largest federal employee unions, and against a bipartisan contingent in Congress.
The fight, over the rights of thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of federal workers, has even divided Obama’s own administration. The White House — which has repeatedly pledged to be the most transparent in history and to embrace whistleblowers — has sided with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, but agencies charged with protecting whistleblowers and officials who investigate discrimination complaints have loudly dissented.
Even a blind sow, and all that…looks like Conventional Wisdom Hourly has accomplished real journalism on the “War on Whistleblowers.” Josh Gerstein’s piece is worth reading for some good bureaucratic background on the issue.
“Equipping Navy surface ships with lasers could lead to changes in naval tactics, ship design and procurement plans for ship-based weapons, bringing about a technological shift for the Navy — a ‘game changer’ — comparable to the advent of shipboard missiles in the 1950s,” said the assessment, by the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress.
The study found that the new high-energy laser “could provide Navy surface ships with a more cost-effective means of countering certain surface, air and ballistic missile targets.”
Among the limitations, according to the research service, is that lasers are not effective in bad weather because the beam can be disturbed or scattered by water vapor, as well as by smoke, sand and dust. It is also a “line of sight” weapon, meaning that the target has to be visible, so it cannot handle threats over the horizon. And enemies can take countermeasures like coating vessels and drones with reflective surfaces.
Good thing they won’t be using it around water or sand. Oh, right.
Glad to see the military-industrial-complex still worries about the important things like those nasty Iranians and their desire to be sovereign and stuff.
