Opinion
When is a coup not a coup?
By Patricia Zengerle and Warren Strobel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Egyptian military's overthrow of elected President Mohamed Mursi left President Barack Obama grappling with a difficult question of diplomacy and language in dealing with the Arab world's most populous nation: was it a coup?
At stake as Obama and his aides wrestle with that question in the coming days is the $1.5 billion in aid the United States sends to Cairo each year - almost all of it for the military - as well as the president's views on how best to promote Arab democracy.
If the United States formally declares Mursi's ouster a coup, U.S. law mandates that most aid for its longtime ally must stop. And that could weaken the Egyptian military, one of the country's most stable institutions with long-standing ties to U.S. authorities.
Further complicating Obama's calculus is the fact that millions of Egyptians rallied in favor of Mursi's departure, and that the military announced a roadmap for return to civilian rule that was blessed by Egypt's Muslim and Christian religious leaders.
But Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood retain backing from a broad swath of Egyptian society, even as he alienated many of his countrymen.
Obama, after meeting top advisors at the White House, said in a statement that he was "deeply concerned" by the army's actions and had directed the relevant U.S. agencies to review the implications for U.S. assistance to Egypt.
But he did not use the word "coup" and stopped well short of advocating for Mursi's reinstatement, suggesting Washington might be willing to accept the military's move as a way to end a political crisis in a nation of 83 million people struggling with severe economic difficulties.
Recent history suggests Obama might take his time on deciding the future of U.S. aid to Egypt, and by extension, Washington's relations with the country.
U.S. law bars "any assistance to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup d'etat or decree."
When Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in June 2009, Washington temporarily suspended aid, but did not cut about $30 million in assistance until more than two months later.
Even then, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not determine as a matter of law that a coup had taken place.
Eric Trager, an expert on Egyptian politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Obama should not label Mursi's ouster a coup, nor cut off U.S. aid.
"The Obama administration should recognize that as undemocratic as a coup is, it was the result of the basic fact that President Mursi had completely lost control of the Egyptian state," Trager said by telephone from Egypt.
"Democracy was not the primary thing at stake in Egypt these last few months," but rather Mursi's mismanagement and fears of collapse of the Egyptian state, he said.
In announcing Mursi had been deposed and the Egyptian constitution suspended, Egypt's army commander promised a quick political transition. The military laid out plans for elections and a constitutional review.
CALLS FOR QUICK TRANSITION
The U.S. chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, warned Egyptian military leaders of consequences if Mursi's overthrow were viewed as a coup.
"At the end of the day it's their country and they will find their way, but there will be consequences if it is badly handled," Dempsey told CNN.
Obama also warned against further violence, indicating that Washington's ultimate decision on aid to Egypt will depend on how Egypt's armed forces handle the transition in coming weeks.
Mursi, in power for a year, was widely blamed for presiding over a steady decline in Egypt's economy and for failing to form a broad-based government that included other groups that had joined in the 2011 revolution that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak.
U.S. lawmakers also welcomed Mursi's departure but called for a quick transition back to democratic rule - with a close look at the aid budget.
Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who heads the Senate subcommittee that oversees foreign aid, on Wednesday promised a review of the $1.3 billion in military aid and $250 million in economic aid sent to Cairo each year.
Washington has cut off aid following military coups several times before. In April 2012, the United States suspended at least $13 million of its $140 million in annual aid to Mali following a coup in the West African nation.
Programs that did not go directly through government ministries were not affected.
Any Obama support for Egypt's new government is unlikely to face opposition from Republicans in Congress, who had been skeptical of Mursi's Islamist government.
"Mursi was an obstacle to the constitutional democracy most Egyptians wanted," said Republican Representative Ed Royce, the chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.
Republicans also voiced strong support for Egypt's military, whose close ties to Washington stretch back to the 1979 Israeli-Egypt peace accords.
"The Egyptian military has long been a key partner of the United States and a stabilizing force in the region, and is perhaps the only trusted national institution in Egypt today," said U.S. Representative Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House.
"Democracy is about more than elections," he said.
(Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton. Editing by Stacey Joyce)
[Members of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of Egypt's President Mohamed Mursi hold his picture as they react after the Egyptian army's statement was read out on state TV, at the Raba El-Adwyia mosque square in Cairo July 3, 2013. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah]
To those who say 'trust the government' on NSA spying: Remember J. Edgar Hoover's FBI?
Those who tell us to trust the US's secret, privatised surveillance schemes should recall the criminality of J Edgar Hoover's FBI
It's a fine thing to see mainstream American media outlets finally sparing some of their attention toward the cyber-industrial complex – that unprecedented conglomeration of state, military and corporate interests that together exercise growing power over the flow of information. It would be even more heartening if so many of the nation's most influential voices, from senator to pundits, were not clearly intent on killing off even this belated scrutiny into the invisible empire that so thoroughly scrutinizes us – at our own expense and to unknown ends.
Summing up the position of those who worry less over secret government powers than they do over the whistleblowers who reveal such things, we have New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who argues that we can trust small cadres of unaccountable spies with broad powers over our communications. We must all wish Friedman luck with this prediction. Other proclamations of his – including that Vladimir Putin would bring transparency and liberal democracy to Russia, and that the Chinese regime would not seek to limit its citizens' free access to the internet – have not aged especially well.
An unkind person might dismiss Friedman as the incompetent harbinger of a dying republic. Being polite, I will merely suggest that Friedman's faith in government is as misplaced as faith in the just and benevolent God that we know not to exist – Friedman having been the winner of several of the world's most-coveted Pulitzer Prizes.
If Friedman is, indeed, too quick to trust the powerful, it's a trait he shares with the just over half of Americans, who tell pollsters they're fine with the NSA programs that were until recently hidden from their view. Why, our countrymen wonder, ought we to be disturbed by our state's desire to know everything that everyone does? Given the possibility that this surveillance could perhaps prevent deaths in the form of terrorist attacks, most Americans are willing to forgo some abstract notion of privacy in favor of the more concrete benefits of security.
Besides, the government to which we're ceding these broad new powers is a democracy, overseen by real, live Americans. And it's hard to imagine American government officials abusing their powers – or at least, it would be, had such officials not already abused similar but more limited powers through repeated campaigns of disinformation, intimidation and airtight crimes directed at the American public over the last five decades. Cointelpro, Operation Mockingbird, Ultra and Chaos are among the now-acknowledged CIA, FBI and NSA programs by which those agencies managed to subvert American democracy with impunity. Supporters of mass surveillance conducted under the very same agencies have yet to address how such abuses can be insured against in the context of powers far greater than anything J Edgar Hoover could command.
Many have never heard of these programs; the sort of people who trust states with secret authority tend not to know what such things have led to in the recent past. Those who do know of such things may perhaps contend that these practices would never be repeated today. But it was just two years ago that the late Michael Hastings revealed that US army officials in Afghanistan were conducting psy-ops against visiting US senators in order to sway them towards continued funding for that unsuccessful war. If military and intelligence officials have so little respect for the civilian leadership, one can guess how they feel about mere civilians.
Not that anyone need merely guess. Discussing the desirability of such "information operations" in his 2001 book, retired USAF Lt Col George Crawford noted that voters tend to view these sorts of programs with suspicion. "Consequently," he concludes, "these efforts must take place away from public eyes."
And so they do. If we want to learn a thing or two about the latest round of such programs – that is, if we are willing to disregard the Thomas Friedmans of this world – we must look not just towards the three letter agencies that have routinely betrayed us in the past, but also to the untold number of private intelligence contracting firms that have sprung up lately in order to betray us in a more efficient and market-oriented manner. Our lieutenant colonel, scourge of "public eyes", is among the many ex-military and intelligence officials who have left public service, or public obfuscation – or whatever we're calling it now – to work in the expanding sphere of private spookery, to which is outsourced information operations by the Pentagon, spy agencies, and even other corporations who need an edge over some enemy (in Crawford's case, the mysterious Archimedes Global).
So, how trustworthy is this privatized segment of the invisible empire? We would know almost nothing of their operations were it not for a chance turn of events that prompted Anonymous-affiliated hackers to seize 70,000 emails from one typical firm back in early 2011. From this more-or-less random sampling of contractor activity, we find a consortium of these firms plotting to intimidate, attack and discredit WikiLeaks and those identified as its key supporters, including the (then Salon, now Guardian) journalist Glenn Greenwald – a potentially illegal conspiracy concocted on behalf of corporate giant Bank of America, which feared exposure by WikiLeaks, and organized under the auspices of the Department of Justice itself.
We find several of the same firms – which collectively referred to themselves as Team Themis – involved in another scheme to deploy sophisticated software-based fake people across social networks in order to infiltrate and mislead. For instance, Themis proposes sending two of these "personas" to pose online as members of an organization opposed to the US Chamber of Commerce, another prospective Themis client, in order to discredit the group from within. Yet another revelation involves a massive cross-platform military program of disinformation and surveillance directed at the Arab world; still another relates how one NSA-inked firm can monitor and attack online infrastructure throughout the world, including western Europe, and will rent these capabilities out to those with a few million dollars to spend on such things.
And Booz Allen Hamilton, which has received some belated scrutiny as the eminently powerful employer of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, was apparently in talks with Themis participant HBGary Federal regarding its own still-secret "project" involving, again, WikiLeaks. These are simply a few of the revelations stemming from a portion of the email correspondence among a handful of major contracting firms – a tiny, serendipitous sampling of what such firms are doing for their government and corporate clients as they compete for contracts.
Hundred of these sorts of companies have come about in the last few years, operating in close partnerships with the state, yet existing beyond the view of Congress, the media and "public eyes". Even in the unlikely instance when their activities come to light, potentially illegal behavior goes unpunished; even calls by congressmen to investigate the sordid Themis conspiracy were ignored by the Department of Justice, which, of course, set the whole thing in motion to begin with through its recommendation.
This, then, is the environment in which public officials and Beltway insiders like Friedman are asking us to trust the intelligence community and its private partner firms with increasing power over information. It's an age in which even the limited rules in place can be broken with impunity by the powerful – even as journalists and activists who cross them are targeted for destruction by state-corporate alliances armed with increasingly sophisticated cyber weapons, propaganda techniques and surveillance authority.
This is the world we accept if we continue to avert our eyes. And it promises to get much worse.
Florida's governor wants you to go to work sick
Florida's Governor Rick Scott is the latest Republican to block any initiatives in his state to enact paid sick leave for workers
As attempts to dehumanize the workplace go, few could be more sadistic than forcing workers to come to work sick, but that's precisely what the Florida legislature and Governor Rick Scott recently did.
This throwback to the Satanic mills era of industrial relations came in response to a successful petition by 50,000 voters in Orange County, Florida, to place on the ballot an initiative to guarantee a certain number of paid sick days to all workers in the county. The state bill nullifies the ballot measure by blocking local governments from enacting any standards on sick leave, voter preferences be damned.
Governor Scott and the state legislature did this at the behest of some of Florida's largest employers, including Disney World, which might otherwise have suffered the inconvenience of employees being able to go to the doctor without losing their jobs. Ostensibly, legislators say it's to maintain "uniform regulatory standards" throughout the state. But Florida legislators have never been particularly devoted to uniformity in other legal matters. This is, after all, a state that allows its counties to ban the sale of alcohol and come up with their own interpretations of the First Amendment by erecting gigantic monuments of the Ten Commandments outside of courthouses.
But when it comes to worker protections, Florida is a stickler for centralized authority, as long as that authority assures no such protections exist. The reason corporations are calling on the state to override local initiatives is precisely due to the popularity of such initiatives among voters, not just in Florida – where polls show 80% of residents support setting sick leave standards, consistent with national surveys, but also in several other states including Wisconsin, where Republican Governor Scott Walker threw out a sick leave law in Milwaukee that passed in a voter referendum by 69%. Prior to Walker's nullification, Milwaukee was one of a growing number of cities – San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Washington DC – and one state, Connecticut, which guarantee some number of earned sick days – typically one hour for every 30 or 40 hours worked. There is often a maximum amount set according to business size, which workers can take in case of personal or family illness without losing pay or their jobs.
New York City will likely join the list soon, with the city council set to overturn Mayor Bloomberg's veto of its paid sick leave law. Thus in Florida and elsewhere, Republican-controlled statehouses have been scrambling to either overturn or preemptively bar such initiatives with copy-and-paste bills drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which for good measure also nullify other protections that, for example, prevent workers from being fired for being gay, another issue many states feel is best left up to employers.
The fact that sick leave protections enjoy increasing public support speaks to their broader health and safety implications for consumers. Workers most often denied sick leave are concentrated in certain service industries, particularly hospitality, retail and food preparation. A survey by the advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United found 64% of food service workers have reported working while sick. One dishwasher interviewed in New York testified:
"I don't have health insurance and I don't get sick days. If I get sick, I take painkillers and continue working. ... Once, I was washing dishes when I cut myself on a piece of broken glass. Because the water was hot, the bleeding just wouldn't stop. It was so busy that day and I didn't want to be sent home without pay so I kept on working."
So far, any job-killing side effects predicted by sick leave opponents have failed to materialize. San Francisco, the first city to enact a sick leave bill, saw both employment and the number of businesses grow in the years following its implementation, while both declined in neighboring counties. And consumers seem to agree that whatever costs may be borne by businesses or passed on to them are outweighed by the benefits of not eating food that has been sneezed and bled upon. Were this not the case, there would be no need for such preemption laws in the first place.
The political football between state and local governments is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon at the federal level. Unlike every other rich country in the world, ours is a nation that prides itself on upholding the traditions of our founders by not offering things like paid vacations or maternal (or paternal) leave. And so workers groups will continue their piecemeal efforts to drag the US, city by city, into the last century, while Republican state lawmakers – the same ones who routinely restrict access to abortion in defiance of federal law, refuse to implement Obamacare and claim the right to draw up their own immigration enforcement schemes – find themselves in the awkward position of intervening against local control in the name of central government.
An old saying about consistency and hobgoblins comes to mind.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
["Stock Photo: Sick Woman.Flu.Woman Caught Cold. Sneezing Into Tissue. Headache. Virus" on Shutterstock]
Paula Deen's racism is no joke
But the celebrity chef is not unique; some Americans still haven't adjusted to the racial realities of the 21st century
Paula Deen wants you to know she's really, really sorry about the "n-word" thing. In a bleary, teary video apology she said: "Inappropriate, hurtful language is totally, totally unacceptable ... please forgive me."
Paula Deen's lawyer wants you to know she's a victim of her culture: she was "born 60 years ago, when the south had schools that were segregated, different bathrooms, different restaurants and Americans rode in different parts of the bus."
The celebrity chef, famous for her high-calorie, near-parody recipes (deep-fried balls of butter) admits to using racist epithets in jokes and perhaps in talking to her husband about the time she was held up, but, come on, that was "a long time ago".
Wait: does 2007 count as "a long time ago"? A former employee of the Deen food empire is suing Deen and her brother Earl "Bubba" Hiers, charging racial and sexual harassment. Lisa T Jackson claims, among other unsavory things, Deen wanted her to design a "plantation style" wedding for Bubba, which would ideally include "a bunch of little niggers" in bow ties to act as servers, like the ones that used to "tap dance around" in "Shirley Temple days".
Jackson, who is white, says Deen laughed and said, "That would be a true Southern wedding, wouldn't it? But we can't do that because the media would be on me about that."
For his part, Bubba Hiers addressed Jackson as "my little Jew girl", supposedly because he was impressed with her bringing the business into profit, subjected his employees to porn in the workplace, called his kitchen workers "coons", and, well, here's an extract from Jackson's complaint:
In Ms Jackson's presence, Bubba Hiers said to his African-American security guard and driver, "don't you wish you could rub all the black off you and be like me?" The security guard responded, "I'm fine the way I am", whereupon Mr Hiers replied, "You just look dirty. I bet you wish you could."
Undelicious as this is, it's not about only a couple of undereducated white people spouting rubbish worthy of an Imperial Wizard on a bender. We're talking about Deen because she has a huge following and because she's on TV – or was, before the Food Network declined to renew her contract – and because she's not unique. This stuff is said every day and not just down here in Dixie. A century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, 50 years on from the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, the assassination of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers, and former Alabama Governor George Wallace's "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door", too many Americans still haven't adjusted to the racial realities of the 21st century. Or even the 20th.
The president of the United States continues to be subject to coded language – he's not really American. Remember Mitt Romney's attempted quip at a 2012 campaign stop in Michigan: "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate." Barack and Michelle Obama still get called "uppity" out loud and in public. Recently, a school board official in Virginia thought it amusing to email colleagues pictures of bare-breasted African women and caption it "Michelle Obama's high school reunion".
The Kappa Alpha Order, a fraternity with chapters at more than 100 colleges nationwide, throws an annual party called "Old South" at which the young men ride around campus on horses with faux swords to collect their dates, who wear Scarlett O'Hara hoopskirts. The boys used to wear Confederate officers' uniforms, but the fraternity recently banned the practice, along with the flying of the Confederate battle flag, citing modern racial sensitivities. Progress!
Yet the country still swoons for moonlight-and-magnolias, the South as a land of gents, belles, white-columned houses, down-home folks, honeyed accents, sweet tea, fried chicken and cakes so tasty you'll want to slap your mama. Paula Deen's South.
The trouble is, that South never existed. Deen and her brother grew up in Albany, Georgia, a famously vicious little burg where the local sheriff famously broke his cane over the head of an African-American lawyer simply because "he is a nigger and I am a white man". Deen was about 15 when Martin Luther King Jr spent several days in the Albany jail and when some black kids jumped the fence and dove into the white-only municipal pool, causing the town to drain it and scrub it, and then sell it rather than integrate it.
Deen doesn't acknowledge any of this. She sticks to the Gone With the Wind-y fantasy that, as she told reporter Kim Severson during as TimesTalks conversation, "Black folks were like our family". She proudly presents her African-American friend, "black as this board", and makes him come up on stage: "Come out here, Hollis: we can't see you standing against that dark board!"
Although her many fans are outraged and threatening boycotts, Deen has lost her TV program, Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer, has dumped her as its spokesmodel and QVC, the home shopping empire, is "reviewing its business relationship" with her. All the banana split brownie pizza in the world can't sweeten Deen's casual racism. Stick a fork in her: she's cooked.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
'Journolist' and the banality of detail
Gawker's Journolist reveal is unlikely to find a liberal conspiracy. In any case, the media must expect its conversations to be public
When the Journolist story broke in 2010, it provided fodder for the always-hungry conservative outrage conspiracy machine. A bunch of journalists! Colluding! Planning coverage! Killing stories!
To that end, conservative publisher/prankster Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 for the full archive. Friday, Gawker revealed at least part of what his money would have bought.
The document dump is only a few weeks' worth of exchanges, but even this slice of the conversation would have given Breitbart a bargain on a character-per-word basis: about $0.25 per keystroke.
Of course, most of those characters are quote-denoting carats, metadata mish-mash and sigfiles. The would-be treasure-trove is, as the Atlantic put it, "repetitive garbage". The Atlantic was referring to the dingbats and to/from headers, but – I mean no offense by this – they might as well be talking about the actual content, and not just of Journolist, but of the conversations most reporters have with each other all the time.
As I've written before, the biggest threat to freedom of the press isn't government snooping but groupthink. Journolist archives have glimmers of debate, but list founder Ezra Klein intended the list to be one of polite discussion. He told list members, as he considered shutting it down, that he came up with the list after a back-and-forth with Time Magazine's Joe Klein about the Iraq war:
"Taking the conversation out of the public made it less defensive, less about winning."
I'm in favor of the compassionate exchange of ideas, I guess? But maybe the Iraq war is not the best example of a topic where we can all "agree to disagree". Indeed, most conversations we've seen from Journolist simply underscore the pervasiveness of conventional wisdom more than they do bias toward a specific ideology. If Journolist had an agenda, it wasn't to advance a particular worldview but to advance the careers of particular journalists.
Indeed, Journolist's only casualty was Dave Weigel's gig at the Washington Post; and then, almost immediately after departing, he founded a new listserv, one dedicated to promoting his writing. Ironically, Weigel's listserv morphed quickly into something Journolist wasn't: a forum in which writers of all political shades and depths talk to each other. Full disclosure: I'm on the list, but I mostly lurk.
People on "Weigolist" quickly began joking about having their comments leaked, but awareness about the fragility of our privacy hasn't dampened the conversation. If anything, it may have helped it along. In the wake of the news about domestic surveillance, it may sounds like heresy, but there are times when knowing you'll be held accountable for your words benefits the public. I'm in favor of personal privacy and institutional transparency. Making conversations among journalists (rather than between them and sources) public is a check on corrosive institutional bias: unlike the government, we don't have any other mechanism of oversight.
If we keep the conversations we have just among ourselves to ourselves, we eliminate true dissent via structure and habit. We sink further into the very notion that all issues can be discussed through the lens of left and right. Call it the Sunday Show Syndrome.
Transparency and erosion of barriers to access into the national conversation (and international one) have done much to complicate that vision. Indeed, that's what the NSA revelations have done. I believe that journalists who cling to a bifurcated political framework will increasingly find themselves adrift. The professional market for one-of-two-sides reporting is still strong. The public appetite for it? Not so much.
Weigel parted ways from the Post because of a not-that-partisan (but kind of mean) joke about Matt Drudge. And that separation has turned out a lot better for Weigel than the Post, which hired him to "give readers a deeper understanding" of the conservative movement.
Mostly unspoken was the notion that it would be a sympathetic understanding; Weigel started his career reporting for libertarian outlets and self-identified as a "rabid conservative" himself early on. After the Post, he landed at Slate, and over the past three years has followed his reporting and critical analysis, rather an ideology. Just in recent months, he's noted that "of course" the IRS has a liberal bias, that Republicans have overhyped the Benghazi "scandal", and written a eulogy to Michael Hastings, in which he emphasized the importance of seeing the world not through a left/right prism but through a powerful/powerless one.
The Journolist scandal blew open Weigel's career beyond a conservative/liberal continuum. That very binary view blinded those who wanted to use the list's existence to prove engineered media bias. They believed the emails they saw, full of self-serious nitpicking and table-drumming thoughtfulness, were the tip of the iceberg. In fact, they turned out to be more a life-raft.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image via Flickr user Dave]
Where immigration policy intersects with government surveillance
During a week notable for dramatic disclosures about the breadth of government surveillance, the Senate started debating the immigration reform bill. The two issues are more related than you’d think. The ACLU writes that the bill “creates the kind of militarized environment along our southern border…
Parents must teach their children about porn and consent
Suzanne Moore: As we teach kids how to cross the road, so parents must now teach them about porn and consent
'How was school?" As every parent knows, this question is usually met by a grunt and "Why haven't you bought the biscuits I like?" Then later on they accuse you of not being interested in what they do all day.
This week was different. My youngest came in outraged. "Today was the most disgusting day ever. Our teacher showed us pornography."
The "porn" in question was a film of a woman giving birth, part of my daughter's sex education. It was, she said, the most revolting thing she had ever seen. "Really?" I asked, because we watch Embarrassing Bodies together. Like many a young girl or indeed sensible woman she had decided not to have a baby unless it was a kitten and certainly not THAT way.
But at 12 she certainly knows what actual porn is. The boys at school have it on their phones. Talk to any primary school teacher and they will tell you this has been an issue for some time.
The latest summit, then, on how to stop this awfulness has been another "damp squib". Its chair Maria Millerpromised she would "throw down the gauntlet to companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter". These companies should do more to block access to porn via parental controls, and block images of child abuse outright. This, like chocolate oranges at tills, used to be one of David Cameron's big issues also. But it wasn't big enough for him to show up at the summit.
So Miller, not surprisingly, did not throw down any gauntlet, a) because she is Maria Miller and – apart from squeaking "as a mother" every so often – appears clueless, and b) because her job is impossible. She is Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and also Minister for Women and Equalities. This is the buy one, get one free cabinet post. And what are "Equalities" when they are at home?
She is concerned about images of child abuse online. Well who isn't? Who defends them? The fact is that an image of child abuse is an image of a rape, a crime that is already illegal. You can't make it more illegal.
The easy access to hardcore porn is indeed problematic. Typing "internet porn summit" into a search engine, I got to "sumi pussy licking sluts". My typing is awful. But porn is ubiquitous and hardcore torture porn is everywhere – and no it's not Fifty Shades of Grey. It's blood, vomit and faeces.
Even the softcore stuff presents us with the "new normal". A nice 14-year-old boy I know told his mum when he was going on his first date (the girl was 13) that he was taking a condom to be sensible "for the anal".
The young feminists who, understandably, say they don't want their viewing censored by the state remain somewhat bamboozled by the happy-hooker mythology that recasts sex work as just another choice but tends to forget the trafficked woman locked up 16 hours a day, and the porn stars who are extremely damaged before they get into the industry and are even more damaged when they come out.
The punters' websites which review prostitutes or porn also promulgate the idea that the women basically love their job and it's just another choice, though one few punters would want their wives making.
As for the state taking on the internet, it's a joke. The free market wants commodities that sell and nothing sells like sex or drugs. So leglislators tinker at the edges, while all forms of sex are sold online.
In such a world, just as we teach our kids how to cross the road, so we have to teach them about porn and about consent. Both of which make the Boden-loving right deeply uncomfortable. They make all of us uncomfortable, to be honest.
Mostly, though, we discuss not kids accessing porn but what images of themselves they put on social media sites. "Did you see what she put on Facebook?" "Why all the 'likes' on Instagram?" "How do you do the privacy settings?" One dithers between paranoia and laxity. What is definite, though, is that the redefinition of what is public and what is private has already happened. What happens online stays online forever. Education, not censorship, is the answer. Children are sexual beings. It's simply that late capitalism is commodifying their sexuality earlier, extending its market. But we are governed by technophobes, who, on one hand, tell us that the state via surveillance must be able to see everything and, on the other, that we must stop our children from seeing what they easily can. Even our state broadcaster the BBC has on its iPlayer a simple tick box to confirm you are over 18.
To admit we can't control what our kids see online is hard. But show me a parent who hasn't used the internet as a babysitter (as we used to use TV) and I will show you a liar.
Those most vulnerable are those who do not know their way round the online environment, not those posting pictures of their toddlers. Google will not protect your child, any more than the government. We have to teach our kids about the worst aspects of the internet and of sex. Both involve consent. In order to do this we have to trust our children. Are we grown up enough to do that?
• Comments on this article will be switched on on Thursday morning.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
["Stock Photo: Happy Mother And Daughter Using Laptop In The Kitchen" on Shutterstock]
Republicans' latest abortion ban is staggeringly stupid
The white male-dominated Republican party is still living in the stone age on social issues. It just goes from bad to worse
It's a truism verging on dogma that history favors steady progress toward equal rights for gays. The last election cycle saw incredible gains for marriage equality and representation for gays and lesbians in government. There is a movement in the Republican party to at least stop fighting the issue, and at least a recognition that they cannot hope to grow the party as long as young voters associate opposition to marriage equality with a general stance of intolerance and bigotry.
Funny how attitudes haven't shifted in the same way when it come to women and, especially, anything to do with sex. Why are debates about reproductive rights mired in Neanderthal attitudes, demonstrably fanciful notions about biology ("legitimate rape"), and pro-life activists stubbornly resistant to even basic attempts at reasonable compromise?
Indeed, many of the most extreme anti-choice measures passed in state legislatures (and, as of this week, potentially the US Congress) stand on weak constitutional grounds; "fetal heartbeat" laws create a whole new standard of fetal viability and legal experts predict costly and ultimately pointless court battles defending them. Many mainstream anti-abortion groups even shy away from supporting these unprecedented decisions: neither National Right to Life, Americans United for Life nor the Roman Catholic Church have campaigned for them. Yet conservatives continue to march out parades of white men to spout aggressively ignorant arguments that alienate even audiences inclined to be sympathetic to their point of view. In the last election cycle, Republicans lost ground with suburban white women, and women in general, and polls suggest that antipathy stemmed almost entirely from the impression that conservatives were coming for their birth control. In 12 swing states in 2012, a plurality of women named abortion as their top electoral priority. Men (especially Republican men) seem befuddled (or in denial) by women's intractability on the issue. Speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference last weekend, American Values president Gary Bauer insisted, "The social issues we believe in are more popular than the Republican economic agenda." At best, they assume arguments about abortion to be a "distraction" from the obvious top priority, the economy. This week, moderate Republican congressman Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania expressed exasperation with the House leadership's decision to bring to the floor a bill a federal ban on abortions 20 weeks after conception:
"I'll be very frank: I discouraged our leadership from bringing this to a vote on the floor … Clearly the economy is on everyone's minds, we're seeing very stagnant job numbers, confidence in the institution of government is eroding and now we're going to have a debate on rape and abortion. The stupidity is simply staggering."
Well, he's not wrong about the stupidity, but his argument explains it: women understand that reproductive rights are an economic issue. Whether you're for or against a woman's right to choose, to discuss it as "social issue" is to buy into talking points that haven't changed since the turn of the last century – and these arguments find traction. Anti-choice gains in limiting access may face uphill legal battles, but that doesn't change the fact that conservatives keep successfully turning back the clock even as the country, on almost every other measure of civil liberty, moves relentless forward. Prolife activists argue, ironically, that it's science that undergirds this retrograde motion: They hold up polls that show an decrease in support for abortion being "legal under any circumstances" and a rise in Americans identifying themselves as "prolife" with the rise of the "ultrasound generation". Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, wrote an open letter to that hypothetical contingent earlier this year:
"You have grown up with ultrasound technology that has opened a window into the womb, allowing us to glimpse preborn babies from the earliest weeks of gestation. You have seen your little brothers and sisters before they were born in these grainy videos and photographs pinned to the fridge."
Belief in the power of those images is so strong that pro-life legislators have rather famously sought to make viewing them mandatory for women seeking an abortion. But if those images are so powerful, how come it's the "transvaginal probe" laws that finally rallied mass awareness, and mass outrage, about just how dangerous to women's rights these laws are?
It may have to do with the word "transvaginal", sure, but I think it parallels the way Americans have to be pushed into a corner when it comes to distasteful outcomes. We have to be faced with the NSA reading our private emails to care about the balance of security and privacy. We have come to believe that marriage equality is bigotry, not mild disapproval, to reject discrimination. And we have to think about a doctor needlessly, and against her will, putting a wand in a woman's vagina to think twice about her right to do what she want with her body in a more general and less literal way. What the polling trumpeted by anti-choicers really suggests is continued broad support for women being able to make private decisions. I don't take lightly the steady, overwhelming majority of Americans who say that abortion of definitely be legal under some circumstances – competing with discomfort with the idea of abortion. This disconnect exists because what we live in not a post-sonogram world but a post-back alley abortion, post-free-condom one. It's the inverse of how we have become acclimated and accepting of gay rights because we now see gay men and women all around us.
Today we have a whole generation a majority of whom has never themselves had a friend get sick from an abortion performed in unsterile environment, never had to had unsafe sex because they simply didn't have access to birth control, and only on TV seen a teenager give up for adoption an unwanted child – and there, the situation is santitized, if not idyllic. As other feminists have argued, the unspeakable horror that came to light in the trial of Philadelphia abortion "doctor" Kermit Gosnell was not an illustration of the horrors inherit in a post-Roe world, but in a pre-Roe one. And it's only because abortion is comparatively safe and legal that we confuse the two. Backed into a corner, confronted with the predictable end-game of anti-choice logic, people resist. Why do we have to get to that point? What will it take to awaken voters to the fact that reproductive health does not obey the rhythms of an election cycle? The whole point of reproductive health is exerting some control of over cycles. It begins with women just being present in the halls of power. No woman takes lightly even the most subtle encroachment into these most private of decisions. And lately, the encroachment has been anything but subtle.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[Angry woman via Shutterstock]
From hope to fear: the broken promise of Barack Obama
For 10 years, Paul Harris has been the Observer's US reporter. He reflects on the President's progress from soaring rhetoric to scandal
It is all too easy to look back on some moments in the past and claim their significance was obvious at the time. That it was clear – even as the event unfolded and you frantically scribbled details down in a notebook – that you were witnessing a historic moment.
Certainly that was the case when Barack Obama gave the keynote address at the 2004 Boston convention that anointed John Kerry as the champion of a Democratic party frantic to defeat George W Bush. Obama – then a state senator from Illinois – delivered one of the finest speeches in modern times. His oratory lit up that dull Boston shindig like 4 July fireworks.
Or at least I remember it that way. The morning after his speech, I trailed Obama through a series of events, seeking an interview. It was too late. He already become a political rock star, viewable only behind a freshly-minted posse of minders.
Change happens quickly in America; it is part of the genius of the nation. Four years after that night, Obama was in the White House, having ridden a wave of hope and optimism that made him a global hero and America's first-ever black president. Four years on again, he would win a second term, defeating Mitt Romney and the Tea Party hordes at his back.
Surely that early promise of Boston had been fulfilled. Everything presaged in that remarkable 2004 speech had come true. I had indeed witnessed history in a glorious moment of its making. Sadly, I now think not.
Over the last two weeks, the world has seen an extraordinary series of revelations about the scale, size and activities of the National Security Agency under Obama's administration. Though he came to power decrying the secret actions of Bush, Obama has embraced and extended many of the same activities. His NSA uses a secret court system to get permission for its shadowy work, hauls out "metadata" on millions' of Americans' phone calls, taps into the biggest and most powerful internet companies of the Information Age – Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Yahoo, Google – to monitor and snoop. Its tools have names like Prism and Boundless Informant, as if their inventors were all too aware that they resembled dystopian science fiction.
Yet Obama has flippantly dismissed the controversy. Resorting to the worst tactics of the Bush years, his message is: "Trust us. We're the good guys." And then Congress is briefed – in secret, of course – about the "dozens" of terrorist plots such industrial-scale espionage has stopped.
No one in that hall in Boston in 2004 could have imagined that the young, eloquent and inspiring politician would have transformed so dramatically less than a decade later. Yet the Age of Obama is not one of hope and change; it is the era of the National Security President. Obama has overseen increasing use of drones, in a targeted killing programme across the globe. No doubt they wipe out legitimate targets. But the drones also murder American citizens – such as Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulraman in 2011 – with no trial amid a legal framework that – again – is kept largely secret. They wipe out wedding parties by accident. Any "military-aged male" in a drone strike zone is called a legitimate target, turning the innocent into the guilty to justify death from above. Then there is Guantánamo Bay, that bleeding sore on the face of American civil liberties. It is a tropical gulag of 166 men – more than half cleared for release but still kept behind bars – who are starving themselves out of desperation. Obama promised to close it down in 2008. He failed. He promised again last month. But nothing has happened. Meanwhile, the regime inside the camp is growing more savage.
Obama has cracked down aggressively on whistleblowers, using the Espionage Act – a hangover from the first world war – more times than all his predecessors combined. He has presided over an explosion of over-classification, as millions of government documents are shuttered away from public eyes. His Department of Justice has collected the phone records of AP journalists and accessed the emails of a Fox News reporter.
It's the stuff of conspiracy theorist fantasies. But these abuses of power are real and are playing out the front pages of America's papers every day. When the IRS searched for conservative groups to target for special treatment, it confirmed the worst fears of every rightwinger in America.
How on earth did we get here from Boston, 2004? Bush – a cipher of a politician whose only belief was in his right to rule – surrounded himself with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton and an army of whispering neocons. Obama does not have that excuse. When his staff meets to mull over the latest names in their killing programme – an event dubbed "Terror Tuesdays" – Obama himself is often present.
Neither is Obama ignorant of the law; he's a constitutional law professor. In turning America into a national security state, the awful truth is that he knows full well what he is doing.
There are three more years of this to come. Involvement in Syria's war looms, and more terrorist attacks like the one that hit the Boston marathon could lurk in the future. Where will Obama take America in that time? Judging him on his past actions, I think it will be no place good.
Due to his race, Obama is often cast in the light of America's civil rights movement and its heroic leader, Martin Luther King. Among King's most famous words are his hopes that his "four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character".
That dream of King's was what many believed Obama would one day fulfill. Perhaps he has, just not in the way anyone thought. In 2013 – amid drones, assassinations, mass spying, secret courts and tapping journalists' phones – it seems that Obama's race matters less and less, while his inner character is shining through for judgment. It is sorely wanting.
The Republican Party is still 'stuck on stupid'
Following two presidential election defeats in 2008 and 2012, the Republican party is still making the same mistakes
Stupid is as stupid does and, apparently, the Republican party didn't get Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's "stupid memo" because it looks dumber by the day. After losing the 2012 presidential election the "GOP establishment" from former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich and every white man in between acknowledged that the party must make "the tent" more welcoming to minorities and women – where the votes increasingly are. So what does the GOP do? It keeps headlining white men behaving badly.
Americans were treated to a double feature of GOP stupidity this week brought to you by the senator from Arizona on 12 June. Republican Senator Jeff Flake had to apologize for his 15-year-old son's unsavory remarks on Twitter. According to Buzzfeed, Tanner Flake tweeted he would find "the faggot" who stole his bike and "beat the crap out of you." Tanner also posted screenshots of his scores from an online game "Fun Run" where he used the handle "n1ggerkiller".
If this isn't enough to make anyone's eyes roll in disgust, Buzzfeed reported that Tanner's Twitter account, which is now locked, revealed his repeated use of the racial slurs in January and February. Tanner made equally offensive comments on YouTube, including "nigger" and "faggot" along with calling Mexicans "scum of the Earth". Strong words for a 15-year-old, who also gleefully reminded everyone his father was a member of Congress, according Buzzfeed.
Issuing an apology, Senator Flake wrote:
"I'm very disappointed in my teenage son's words, and I sincerely apologize for the insensitivity. This language is unacceptable anywhere. Needless to say, I've already spoken with him about this, he has apologized, and I apologize as well."
The burning question is where did Tanner hear this kind of "unacceptable" language? Typically, children repeat things they've heard their parents say or those close to them. The fact that Tanner Flake used these words with impunity across various social media platforms for months suggests he's quite at ease with bigoted thinking. Whether the senator knew about it or not, it's just another example of why blacks and other ethnic minorities don't trust the GOP's words of inclusion.
On the heels of the son-of-Flake hate rant, the good ole boys of the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Bob Goodlatte (a Virginia Republican), thought now is the time to pass an abortion ban bill and alienate more women voters. As Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank aptly noted with sarcasm, not one of the 23 Republican members on the House Judiciary Committee is a woman. They are all white males dedicated to legislating women's health issues. Do you see the irony in this?
The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks and has no exception for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest or when the mother's health is in jeopardy. In all his male wisdom, Representative Trent Franks of Arizona said there was no need to include an exception because "the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low". Interesting, particularly when studies prove otherwise.
The bill has no chance of passing, "even if it clears the House", Milbank wrote, because the Democrat majority in the Senate would almost certainly vote it down. Introducing the bill makes Republicans look stupid, and I say this as a member of the GOP and someone who's against abortion. Now is not the time to try and open up Roe v Wade.
America has a severe jobs and economic problem. Republicans in Congress should be focusing on those issues "not trying to legislate morality", as a good friend told me. I'm against abortion and the horror of how Kermit Gosnell killed live babies in Philadelphia is a tragic reminder that we as a society need to focus on the inhumanity of abortions through churches, charities and parenting that teaches morals and the value of life to young girls and boys.
After two presidential shellackings in 2008 and 2012, the Republican party seems to be stuck on stupid and doing business as usual. It's been three months since the Republican National Committee issued its 100-page autopsy report about what went wrong in 2012 and promised to reach out to more non-white voters.
The country is still waiting for the RNC to actually do something. What's evident is the GOP has the same white guys in charge doing and saying the same stupid things that lost them two presidential elections. The Republican party is rotting, but boys will be boys and that seems to be the way everyone in the establishment likes it.
'Bill Mill' group ALEC trying to skirt open records laws in Wisconsin
Last week, The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed suit against Wisconsin State Senator Leah Vukmir for failing to release documents as required under the state’s public records law. CMD alleges that Sen. Vukmir possesses materials pertaining to her involvement with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the controversial organization of which she is a member. Sen. Vukmir has handed over ALEC-related documents in the past, but recently, reports CMD, the senator’s responses to records requests have “dried-up.”
ALEC may have something to do with that.
A little background for the uninitiated: ALEC calls itself a “nonpartisan” public-private partnership of state legislators and corporations, who gather regularly to produce what they term “model legislation” behind closed doors. The goal is for ALEC member legislators to get versions of those model bills passed in their statehouses.
Wisconsin’s state government has thick-roped ties to ALEC. Nearly one-third of its legislators are ALEC members, and versions of ALEC model bills have wended their way through many a legislative session. (Last week, I wrote about Wisconsin’s curiously high ranking in an ALEC “economic outlook” report.) But the state also has a comprehensive open records law, declaring that “all persons are entitled to the greatest possible information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts of those officers and employees who represent them.”
Sen. Vukmir’s ties to ALEC are particularly well-woven: in 2009, she was named ALEC’s “legislator of the year,” and she currently serves as the treasurer for ALEC’s national board of directors. CMD’s General Counsel Brendan Fischer says that Sen. Vukmir has released ALEC-related records following freedom-of-information requests in the past. But, writes Fischer, “in response to a requestfrom CMD, Sen. Vukmir claimed that she had no meeting agendas, model bills or other documents relating to ALEC’s most recent meeting, held in Oklahoma City May 2-3, which she attended.” It’s a claim CMD finds difficult to believe.
When I called Vukmir’s office, they refused to comment about the lawsuit.
Vukmir’s assertion that she has no pertinent ALEC documents comes at an interesting moment. Lately, the organization has undertaken an effort to stop its documents from falling into outside hands, most notably with an imprint that has begun to grace the bottom of ALEC materials. “Because this is an internal ALEC document,” the disclaimer reads, “ALEC believes it is not subject to disclosure under any state Freedom of Information or Public Records Act.”
What’s more interesting, the new imprint emerges in the midst of an ALEC image revamp. “We really believe in transparency,” ALEC spokesman Bill Meierling told The Huffington Post back in March. “We believe that more eyes on our model policies will create better policies. We are hoping to engage with the public.” Though ALEC now posts all of its model legislation online (“If it is not on our website,” said Mieirling, “it is not our policy”) its full corporate and legislative membership lists still remain hidden from public view.
The suit against Sen. Vukmir isn’t the first time an ALEC legislator has come up against CMD. In October, the center (in conjunction with Common Cause) reached a settlement with five Wisconsin lawmakers who then released their ALEC-related emails. But the recent drama over email correspondence seems to have made ALEC all the more tech- savvy. In what CMD construes as aneffort to skirt state open records laws, ALEC has begun to distribute materials using the internet drop box website Box.com, which allows ALEC members to share materials via hyperlink to ALEC-related content, rather than directly sharing the content itself. Anyone who is sent a link to a Box.com folder must have a password-protected account to access those files – and even then, a file’s “owner” retains the option of removing, altering or setting expiration dates for all files in question.
According to the Wisconsin State Journal, Michael Bowman – ALEC’s senior director of policy and strategic initiatives – said the drop box system was implemented when an attorney advised that those files wouldn’t be subject to public records laws. Bowman also claimed to be under the impression that the organization’s new non-disclosure imprint was legally valid in all 50 states.
But Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Leuders told the Journal he finds such claims absurd. “The logic of our open records law is that if the government has documents in its possession as it goes about doing the government’s business, the public is entitled to obtain those documents,” he said.
The situation is not without irony. CMD’s Brendan Fischer notes that in a statement put forth by a 2002 “ALEC Issue Analysis,” the group states that “Transparency is a bulwark of constitutional republicanism: citizens cannot inform themselves on the issues of government if they cannot see what the government is doing. Thus, transparency serves as an important feedback mechanism by allowing the citizens to monitor and more accurately select their representatives.”
It seems ALEC’s new cellophane image does not come without wrinkles. But if suits like the one Sen. Vukmir is now facing continue to occur, the group may need to reconsider its definition of transparency.
[Image: "Woman Peeking Behind Notebook" via Shutterstock]
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