I was distressed to learn that all four of my favorite senators are co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act, or PIPA. This is a terrible bill that does more to threaten the technical and philosophical foundations of the internet than it does to actually protect intellectual property. Please, encourage your own representatives to oppose or withdraw support for this legislation.
Dear Dear Al, Amy, Michael, and Sherrod,
I am writing you, my four favorite senators because I hope I can get your attention. You are all four co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act and I believe you are making a grave mistake. I hope you take the time to read this letter personally, and reconsider your co-sponsorship.
You all know that I am a life-long Democrat. Amy and Al know that I have been an active DFL organizer in Minnesota and campaigned hard for their election here in SD64. Though I’ve never lived in Colorado, I’ve known Michael since we could count our age on our hands and campaigned for Sherrod long before he became a senator. I am more proud than I can say of all of you, and your presence in the US Senate gives me hope for our country.
However, Protect IP is fatally flawed. I have worked with technology for over 30 years, I’ve built tools on the web since 1993. While we all tend to imagine that the code supporting the internet is deep and robust, let me tell you, it looks a lot like the code that holds together our country, vast and contradictory. Protect IP assumes that some simple tweaks can solve the problem of piracy: that is a lie. Piracy will stay with us, what Protect IP will actually break is the foundation of the internet.
Al, you wrote to me that “We must protect American jobs from piracy, which has become rampant on the Internet. We don’t tolerate shoplifters in stores and we should not tolerate them online.” I agree that piracy and shoplifting are bad. But I ask you all to consider consequences. When someone shoplifts from a store, do we shut down the store? Do we require that all stores prevent all theft? What would our society look like if we did? Visualize this for a moment. Metal detectors or full body scanners at every entrance? Customers always treated as potential thieves? Stores that have “sponsored” shoplifting cut off from their bank accounts? It is hard for those who are not technologists to imagine what Protect IP looks like to those who would have to implement it, but it is a lot like a world where shoplifting is treated with such disproportional harshness.
Yes, we have to protect jobs. But consider how many jobs depend on the internet as a whole. Consider how many jobs are created by the open network that is easily accessible to all inventors and investors. Consider the chilling effect of Protect IP on legitimate commerce and expression. Consider the ease with which it will be abused.
I understand the entertainment industry is important, and their concerns about piracy are well founded; but Protect IP is a terrible abuse of government power and a vast overreaction to the problem. You are being hoodwinked by an industry that will do well enough without this “protection.” You are sponsoring an internet that will at best encourage the development of tools to facilitate repression around the world and at worst be the germ of an American repression we will all live to regret.
I am so proud to have you all in the Senate. But I can’t tell you how sad I am that all four of you are co-sponsors of this dreadful bill. This one is a show-stopper for me, if you can’t see past the lobbying of the entertainment industry to the truth of what Protect IP does, then I am afraid I will have to question the role of my party in the protection of freedoms that are so much more vital than intellectual property.
Please, reconsider your co-sponsorhip of this bill. Please do everything you can to make sure it does not actually see the light of day. See that it gets tied up in committee, or suffers some other face-saving demise. Please, make sure Protect IP is never actually the law of this land.
As the financial crisis of 2008 hit us squarely in the gut, I was telling Mary that it would be interesting to see how the Fed would get interest rates below zero. They swung rates to zero so quickly that it was clear if interest rates had to go below zero they would have to invent some new excuse. It would be odd to hear on the new that interest rates had gone “negative,” but I was looking forward to something like that.
Let me say a word about negative numbers: they don’t exist. Or, more correctly, they are a fiction we invent to help us do math, but in the real world, they don’t exist. If you see a negative number in the real world, it simply means zero was put in the wrong place. Is the temperature –20 degrees? That just because we put zero in the wrong place on the F scale.
Today I finally realized how the Fed did it. Watch this piece by John Stewart…
How did the Fed create negative interest rates? Through the secret beyond-TARP program they loaned banks 7 trillion dollars at –3% interest! To create a negative interest rate you have to pay someone to take your money, right? That’s just what they did! By giving banks $7,000,000,000,000 at 0.01% interest, and then borrowing that same money back from banks at 3% interest, the effectively gave money away to the banks: that 3% is the negative interest rate. It is the payment for taking our money.
I’d have to do more digging and math than I have time for right now, but I think we now see how the Fed was able to get the lending rate below zero. I am not so upset about that, but I am incredibly upset that they did this in secrecy. Why not let the public know this was going on? Why not let congress know how big a hole we were in? No wonder this depression is taking so long to crawl out of, it was (is?) nearly a black hole!
We woke up this morning to this question from Nate:
what does the down grade from AAA to AA+ mean? How will it affect us? just wondering
nate
How can I resist a question like this from my 13-year-old? I’m glad he’s thinking about the issue. Here’s how I responded. What would you say?
It’s kind of like a movie review. The rating is a review by Standard & Poors of America’s likelihood that we’ll repay the credit other people give us. Before we were three stars (the best), now we are 2.5 stars (pretty good). I think the impact will be not very large because I think most investors have their own sense of the USA and our credit worthiness. We are in the news all the time, and the news has been scary weird of late. Anybody with have a brain-cell should be worried about our future ability to pay back debt, so they’ve already gotten a bit jittery about buying that debt from us. In other words, I don’t think the movie review matters as much when everyone has seen the movie for themselves.
That said, the fact that smart investors will get jittery about our debt is a problem. It means we won’t be able to borrow as much, and since our lifestyle in the USA has been built on that borrowing, it means that tough times lie ahead. That, however, is not news. Where else can we get the money we need if we can’t borrow it? I think we have to face the fact that our taxes are too low and we each need to help pay for the services our government provides, or cut those services. Services we can cut should begin with the military. Taxes we should raise begin with those on the wealthy.
The state of Minnesota was just mugged. There were no negotiations, there was no compromise. Our legislative Republican majority did not make a single new proposal during two weeks of government shutdown. Our Democratic Governor Mark Dayton, on the other hand, came out with idea after idea seeking compromise and only got obstinate “no way” responses from the other side. To me this began to feel like a real crime, like a mugging. The criminals had no intent to compromise and no interest in their victim. Our only choices were to hand over what they wanted or get shot. As we all know, the sane thing to do when you are being mugged is to hand over the goods and hope the criminals don’t kill you. Today Governor Dayton handed over the goods, we’ll see how severe the damage is over the coming year.
While I am disappointed that the Governor had to eventually accede to the awful proposal the Republicans made before the shutdown began, I also don’t think there was much choice left. He gave in to a plan that even former Republican Governor Arnie Carlson says “represents some of the very worst” financial planning he’s ever seen. It is a plan that extends the financial gimmicks Minnesota has been playing to absurd levels, stealing even more money from already strapped schools by delaying state payments to school districts and giving away future tobacco payments in order to raise the revenue required to scrape together a budget. In order to keep a few more dollars in millionaire pockets, the tea party “conservatives” have left Minnesota in even worse fiscal health than ever. This is a disastrous budget that will keep Minnesota on its downward trend for years to come.
Still, the Governor did get a few concessions. Some terrible social policy language was stripped from the Republican proposal, a 15% state workforce cut was avoided, and a $500M bonding bill will accompany the budget outside the usual odd/even year cycle for this sort of thing in Minnesota. Dayton is not up for reelection until 2014, he’ll get at least one more chance to push for a budget that turns Minnesota around.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are busy claiming victory for a plan that will expose them for the hypocrites and liars they are. They claim to value fiscal responsibility and demand a budget of smoke and mirrors. They claim to value every voice, yet refuse to negotiate with the Governor in good faith while their state is in crisis around them. Today they got exactly what they wanted, and our job as Democrats will be to remind them that this was a Republican plan from beginning to end, forced on the state at virtual gunpoint.
Every single Minnesota House and Senate seat is up for election again in 2012, thanks to redistricting brought on by the recent census. This plan credited to the Republican right should give us the foundation we need to take back the Minnesota legislature in 2012 and give Dayton some partners he can work with.
I hope the story of the killing of Osama bin Laden proves to be simple and straightforward, but I am worried about a couple loose ends. There seems to be a contradiction between what the President and his aides were saying about the circumstances of bin Laden’s death, and we in an unseemly hurry to rid ourselves of his body.
In his announcement the President said: “After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” The key word to my ear is “after.” This indicates that bin Laden was not killed in the chaos of the firefight, but at some more deliberate moment following. A statement like this would have been very carefully crafted, and yet it is at odds with a New York Times story this morning.
When American operatives converged on the house on Sunday, Bin Laden “resisted the assault force” and was killed in the middle of an intense gun battle, a senior administration official said, but details were still sketchy early Monday morning.
I have not seen any reports nailing down the actual time of the assault on bin Laden’s compound, but sources seem to indicate it was on Sunday. The news of the success of the mission broke in the US media on Sunday night. Given time zone differences, this would indicate that the attack probably occurred within the first twelve hours or so of Sunday in Pakistan. It has been reported that American forces buried bin Laden at sea, again, from the New York Times:
Muslim tradition requires burial within 24 hours, but by doing it at sea, American authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his followers.
I hope that is accurate, but I can’t help having a very bad feeling about this combination of circumstances. We are told there are DNA samples to prove that we killed the right man, and I frankly don’t have much doubt about that. But are there photographs to document our treatment of him while he was in our hands, dead or alive? Unfortunately we can no longer assume the US took the high road, and if we did anything to be ashamed of during these critical hours of justice being served, you can be sure we will see it exposed slowly and painfully over the coming months and years.
This morning I woke to the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US special forces in Pakistan. I believe that bin Laden reaped what he had sown. I will not mourn his death or worry overmuch about the means by which he was brought down. But on first blush I am, again, worried about the soul of America. The first hint I had of the event was the sound of cheering crowds I heard on the radio. I thought the wedding story was carrying on for far too long. Instead, when Mary showed me the front page of our local paper, with its image of the impromptu celebration in front of the White House, my heart skipped a beat. We are dancing on a grave. How proud can I be about that?
While I accept that the means used to bring bin Laden down were necessary, I also realize that they should be distasteful to a powerful democracy. This was a covert operation, a dark attack that ended in an assassination. We did what we had to do, we did what bin Laden made us do. We have become something we should be at least a bit wary of. To think that this closes the book on 9/11 is very shortsighted. Dancing, cheering, and celebrating this transformation hardly seems worthy of who we were before 9/11, but it may be a fair indication of who we have become since. That leaves me feeling all kinds of sadness for our country today.
I believe school is an intensely social experience. Raising my kids in a respectful multicultural environment is what East Metro Integration District has been about. Kids can be friends with anyone, they talk with each other, they share and know one another. Their comfort with each other will make the world a better place as they take their place in it. EMID is also an environment where smaller scale makes it possible to develop practices that could transform education, if only we had the fortitude to listen to the lessons. Unfortunately, some of the most transformative practices, such as multiage looping classrooms, have already been sacrificed on the alter of state standards and testing. Even our year-round calendar, which teachers and parents know prevents the summer “backslide” and keeps kids engaged all year long in learning, is under stress because it actually puts our kids at a disadvantage when they participate in statewide standardized tests (administered during a calendar window rather than a student-contact-days window).
Focussing solely on the achievement gap misses much of what happens in a school. EMID serves not only the kids in our schools, but educates the educators in 10 districts. Integration funds carve out an important space for innovation, for testing new ideas while giving kids the confidence and space to know one another and each others cultures.
But while this bill renames integration to innovation, it will significantly harm EMIDs ability to do this vital work. I sit on our site council, I attend our board meeting, I know how dependent we are on the foresight and understanding of this committee. We need your support, I hope we get it.
We are told over and over that the political spectrum in this country runs from right to left, from red to blue, from conservative to liberal. What if that is wrong? I believe there is another dimension to our politics that has always been there, but has grown to become the prominent axis on which our politics swivels since the Reagan era. I believe the real spectrum of our politics runs from anti-government to pro-government, from a sense that we are each on our own to a sense that we are at our best when we work together. If we look at the tragedy of this past weekend’s assassination attempt on a congressperson through this lens, the motivations and inspirations of the shooter become easier to understand.
There is nothing terribly new about noticing a pro/anti-government axis to our politics. But there are times when different axes are more or less prominent, and I think the last thirty years have seen the ascendence of this axis. For me it now overshadows the right/left axis. We are so used to the right/left axis, though, that we often mistake it for the pro/anti-government axis. But these are not the same things, they are, in fact, orthogonal. Where you stand on the right/left axis does not necessarily predict where you stand on the pro/anti-government axis.
During the 1960’s there was a clear thread of anti-government rhetoric and action on the left, though the predominant axis was still left/right as evidenced by our recollections of that time as peace&love vs. war&hate. By the time the 1980’s came around, Reagan claimed the anti-government banner arguing that government had grown “too big.”
The push for deregulation and free trade, which have been championed by right and left alike, are demonstrations of a lack of faith in government. Government has to get out of the way. It can’t be trusted. It must let us find our own way, a way toward individual wealth and happiness. The 2000’s brought us a presidential reign that actively dismantled government: made it incapable of even basic services like disaster recovery, made it unable to rule on the basis of law and instead resorted to torture and secret rendition, left us unable to keep the food supply safe and systematically removed science and research from government planning.
The fundamental change that Obama has delivered is a true faith in the capacity of government to be functional. For the first time since the 1980’s he is turning the tide of public opinion toward the belief that government can help us solve problems. While I believe the health care bill we got is far from ideal, I am amazed that we could get any health care bill at all in such rabidly anti-government times. It is a testament to this administration’s skills that inch by inch they are pushing back on a political axis few of us even recognize.
I think part of the reason it is hard to recognize President Obama as a liberal or a conservative is that he is not very far out on either end of that particular spectrum. But if you look at the pro/anti-government spectrum, Obama’s rhetoric and policies jump out into clear relief. He is a president who truly believes government can function and serve us all, he believes that we can do together all the things we can’t do alone.
Today I watched John Stewart grappling with the question of why the rhetoric of the “right” is so much harsher today than it was during the Bush presidency, even though many Bush policies, like No Child Left Behind, were arguably as big an intrusion of government as anything that Obama is doing. He could not get Tim Pawlenty to even see the issue he was trying to frame, I think perhaps because he was still referring to a right/left axis that is more or less irrelevant to the dynamic of politics today. No Child Left Behind is actually an anti-government policy. Remember, it only addresses public schools, it insists that public schools devote themselves to passing tests to justify their existence, and I would argue that it actually sets them up to fail as real centers for education in the process. NCLB has disempowered local governments and only focusses on punishments for non-performance rather than solutions for struggling schools. Over and over again, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush policies evidenced a distrust of government and an abdication of its role to the private sector or market forces.
The rhetoric has heated up during the last two years because the anti-government forces have recognized their first concerted opponent in President Obama. Not only is he pro-government, but he is effective and even got new laws in place against their concerted opposition. The “tea party” is not a “right wing” movement, it is an anti-government movement. It opposes Obama not because he is a “left wing” politician, but because he believes, and might convince others, that government can serve the people.
With the pro/anti-government axis clearly in mind, many contradictions or oddities of the current political climate become more comprehensible. Why is health care worth stopping? Not because it can’t work, but because it might work. In fact, obstruction becomes constructive, because by not funding portions of the health care bill or tying legislatures in knots government will appear more broken, which serves the anti-government forces. In fact, what appear to be incredibly irresponsible or incomprehensible strategies even to some conservatives, like tea-party opposition to raising the federal debt ceiling, actually make perfect strategic sense if your goal is to break government and make sure that people believe it can’t be effective. Similarly, dogged opposition to taxes, even at times of great deficits, ensures that government will not have the funds to be effective.
Who does this serve? I believe that an anti-government ideology serves organizations and individuals who have transcended national government boundaries. These are mega-corporations and the ultra-rich. Their interest is no longer the national interest. In order to continue amassing wealth they require that governments not interfere with their cross-border functioning. And they have acquired enough of that wealth that they can now effectively control governments, even our own, much of the time.
But an explicitly anti-government stance would not be very attractive to voters, and for now voters still matter. So these forces also have an interest in hiding the new axis of politics behind the old right/left rhetoric. Today they have inflamed the right, nearly bringing government to a halt amidst incredibly abusive accusations. Their interest is not actually in a healthy governing conservative movement, which is why many considerate conservatives are finding themselves increasing uncomfortable in this rabid “right” wing, the anti-government interest is in making sure our institutions remain dysfunctional.
Looking at the events of this weekend through this lens makes it clear, or at least as clear as we can be at such an early stage of investigation, that the shooter in Arizona was way out on the anti-government fringe. Some of his writings sound oddly leftist, but all of them are clearly anti-government. The FOX News rhetoric of the day may not have matched him on the left/right spectrum, but it sure is a great match for his place on the pro/anti-government spectrum. Again, the President aligned himself on the polar opposite of this position, pleading with us to build a “more perfect union” and a government worthy of the respect of an idealistic young student-council member who lost her life while catching her first glimpses of our democracy. His was a call to believe that government can be better, that government can work.
Understanding the real currents of the political landscape can help us build alliances and find common ground. America has maintained a two-party system for a spectacularly long time, but that’s not because there have only been two ends to a single spectrum. The axis of our politics have shifted before and the party’s have chosen sides and swiveled around to meet new challenges. What party would Abraham Lincoln belong to today? It would be very hard to say. I believe it is critical that we understand the real political battle of our time is not between right and left, but between pro-government and anti-government. What side are you on? Where do you want your party to be? What will you demand of your elected officials? Think about this, and if you agree, begin talking with others on the right and the left about how we can build a better world together, with effective government, appropriate regulation, and faith in one another.
We hear complaints about how our government is not entrepreneurial enough, not agile enough; and yet we burden government with the kind of fetters we would not begin to consider for real business. We don’t trust our government to get the job done. This week I was reminded of this distrust in a discussion of “data practices” sponsored by MNCOGI.
I am proud that Minnesota’s data practices act assumes the public has access to public data and forces lawmakers to enact specific exemptions to this presumption as law. This makes it a little more difficult for the government to keep secrets. The presentation by Don Gemberling helped us understand our rights and the government’s responsibilities. For example, you have a right to inspect public government data at reasonable times and places at no cost. The government has a corresponding responsibility to make government data easily accessible and convenient to use. Sound good, right?
But then, one of the panelists at the session, State Senator Warren Limmer, complained that after a three minute wait at a county office he was charged $22 for an aerial photograph of a property he was handling in his real estate business. $22 was way more this “piece of paper” should have cost, he contended. When I pointed out that that cost might easily be justified by the systems required to store and provide quick access to such photos, others in the audience responded that the government must be keeping this data around for its own purposes, we should not be charged for just getting copies for our purposes. And yet, I wonder, as we suck funding out of local government and insist on lower taxes toward state government, how can we at the same time expect services like this with little to no fee? Is $22 really so unreasonable? Isn’t a copy in three minutes flat as service to be commended, not ridiculed?
Another public official on the panel, Rep. Mary Liz Holberg, floated a plan for a state commission to handle the tide of exemption requests that hit legislators with regard to data practices. She complained that these requests boil down to a late-night legislative bartering session where lobbyists are in control because part-time legislators just don’t have the time to become experts in data practices, privacy, and government transparency. A commission could operate year-round, hear requests at reasonable hours, and process recommendations for legislators, and perhaps even make interim findings in certain cases. How would such a commission be funded, asked one participant? Holberg simply said, “well, it would have to be a priority.”
Holberg and Limmer are both part of the new Republican majority in the Minnesota legislature. Here they were both demanding increased government service and responsiveness, but you can bet they won’t be arguing for increased funding to support such initiatives. Why won’t we agree to pay for the services we demand?
Meanwhile, I left the panel with real concerns about the fundamental mission of the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act. While I appreciate the ideal of transparency in government, I also recognize that government has to attract real people to its service and the threat of exposure of every action is chilling to government service. Two of four candidates for the recent University of Minnesota presidency pulled out of the process because they did not consent to the very public interviews that would have been required. State workers who supplement meager state technology offerings with personal equipment (like laptops or phones) then find that equipment could be confiscated as part of public information discovery. Government has to avoid the use of cloud services like Gmail or Flickr because public access rules may not be enforceable. How do we make compliance with requirements for public access to government data something other than a weight that drowns efficient administration?
I don’t have any magic bullet. I am simply very concerned that we are, with the best of intentions, destroying the viability of government to serve the common good. As government becomes less efficient, we complain more about the poor service, and we cut back on funding. It is a vicious cycle that leads nowhere but chaos and corruption. Who is left to roam free in the remains of government dysfunction? Private enterprise. With none of the same restrictions and subject to almost none of the same regulation, private enterprise slowly absorbs formerly public function. Then we are truly left in the dark.
We need to stand up for the good that we can do together, as a public. We must trust our government a little more and private corporations a bit less. I’m not sure how we get there, but if we don’t, we give away our state and our country.
My family is middle class, well below the $250k earner limit. I am disappointed that the President is considering anything other than letting the Bush tax cuts simply expire.
Just let them go, even if it raises my taxes.
We should not get bullied by the Republicans and Tea Party into extending this Bush era disaster. If the Democrats can’t pass the President’s compromise then they should do nothing. Let the these cuts expire. That’s why there was an expiration date on them in the first place.
Please, Democrats, stand up for government. We can do together all the things we can’t do alone. But we can only do these things if we properly fund government. Bush and the Republicans have been doing everything they could to destroy our government. Don’t let them win. Fight for the funding a government of, by, and for the people deserves!
