I was following up on exsimo2’s Daily Kos diary on the pressure tactics the RIAA has been using against the soccer mom who fought back, and I realized there are some horrifying implications for privacy. This destruction of privacy has the power to reach out and touch YOU and YOUR FAMILY, since the strategy involved can be used by any large organization with a raft of lawyers and a PR team. This strategy hinges on the fact that it’s too expensive for regular people to defend themselves, and the press and the court system have been actively helping corporations succeed in this mode of attack.

First, read these two articles about how the RIAA told the press about a new lawsuits against the Defendant’s children before they even served the papers: press manipulation and gathering private info. The Press Manipulation article explains why the RIAA would go through the trouble and expense of filing a fake lawsuit for PR purposes:

Is the supposed court document the RIAA leaked to the media no more than blatant flim-flam - a way to once again manipulate mainstream reporters to act as Big Four threat bearers to intimidate defendants before they’ve been anywhere near a court?

And does it also mean that, having served its purpose to publicly harrass and humiliate the defendants in the on- and offline print and electronic media, it need never be submitted to a court?

The article, however, does not cover the Privacy loophole. And I want to make sure that every individual with an interest in preserving the U.S. as a country built on civil rights understands the danger here.

When someone files a lawsuit, the name of the person sued becomes part of the public record. That means that the press , which may have previously been respecting someone’s wish to remain anonymous, is now free to publish the names of anyone involved. The lawsuit can be filed for any bogus reason, and the victim will be followed around forever by Googleable headlines that say something like, “Jane Smith Sued For Heinous Act.”

Let me repeat: the victim of this PR strategy hasn’t necessarily done anything illegal. They may have just been making anonymous complaints about customer service in Internet forums. There is nothing stopping an organization from filing a lawsuit against you or your family, and it may be worth the money for them to do it if they think you’re a thorn in their side and they calculate that you don’t have the resources to defend yourself. Hey, if they make the accusation heinous enough, no pro bono lawyer or political representative will help you because they don’t want to be caught up in bad press. They may even actively help the company if the accusation relates to one of their hot button issues, and they know soapboxing will get the media’s attention.

There have now been successful precedents - companies KNOW this tactic will work if they strike quickly.

You may wonder how the company gets a person’s name if they’ve acted anonymously. Well, the Hewlett-Packard situation has shown the lengths corporate investigators are willing to go. However, if you file a complaint with a federal agency about a company, they might give your name to the company as part of their investigation process. Or the company just might pick a name from a list of malcontents and guess.

Companies can file a lawsuit against any person for any reason. YOU can be NAMED and SMEARED all over the press and the Internet just because the accusation itself makes a good story. And if the victim can’t afford an attorney, they might actually end up going through months of court process, at their own expense, because Judges apparently don’t yet get the fact the court system is being used this way.  

The thing people have to realize is that this tactic isn’t limited to the RIAA. The RIAA may have even taken their cue from other corporations who have successfully used the lawsuit-as-PR-tactic to discredit whistleblowers.

This privacy loophole must be closed and soon, because it’s a form of domestic terrorism wielded by corporations and a major stepping stone toward a fascist state.

On Daily Kos, Snoopydog’s post about his life as a page brought back some weird flashbacks of how early the class struggle begins - and how chibi-elitism can be fetishized by all the adults around.

I’m not sure when I first heard of congressional pages. I lived in a dismally backward rural area, so it was probably later than most. What I do remember is that in early high school, I associated pages with debutantes. It was something that classy people did, and therefore I wanted to do it, too. For some sad reason I didn’t make the jump from “rich people get to do this” to “patronage position”: I thought I would apply, and that my grades, test scores, and perhaps an essay question would be reviewed by some committee.

My hopes were raised when the daughter of the posh family in town actually became a summer page. Before the likelihood of becoming a page was about as likely as a prince on a white horse trotting up to the porch of my house. Suddenly being a page was something real people actually did.

If I respected the laws of reality, I would have applied to be a page, all my hopes and dreams would have been crushed, and I would have accepted my fate as a Dollar Store check-out girl. However, I found a way to beat the system. Through a weird, twisty, outright outre series of events I got a save-the-po’-folk scholarship to a D.C. prep school for a year, and they placed their students as congressional interns (yep - like Monica Lewinski was a White House intern). So while my hometown’s prissy prom queen was a page for a summer, I was an intern actually doing staff work for a year. It was a “world turned upside down” moment, and it’s an experience I’ve treasured for many years.  

There’s a few things I’d like to underscore here. First, pages aren’t the only kiddies running around Capitol hill.  They’ve achieved a symbolic status, probably precisely because they are beneficiaries of patronage. They’re not just working in the center of political power, they are scions of wealth and/or privilege. Before Monica, did anyone  ever speculate on the sex life of scantily dressed congressional interns? Youth and beauty isn’t enough - pages represent flirtation (pun absolutely intended) with power.  It’s naughty, it’s dangerous, and it possibly has a skull-and-bones-esque sort of elite cultishness.

And who wants to bet the slobbering voyeuristic public is solely interested in the seduction and/or sexploits of pages? Go into the XXX section of any shady video store two months from now, and I’ll be there will be titles like “Pages Gone Wild”.

While I was an intern, I didn’t see anything untoward going on (though it’s possible I just wasn’t anyone’s type). It might be worth casting the net a little wider to all the Congress-kiddies. I have a feeling, though, that the public is just interested in the pages - for the exact same reason  our wayward elected officials are. There’s a romance about being a page, and they’re easy to fetishize.

After reading the WaPo article on the YouTube Whistleblower, I hope this statement from the Project on Government Oversight gets the widest dissemination possible:

The formal systems that whistle-blowers are expected to use have failed. That’s why you’re seeing people be creative like this…This is a tremendous way for someone brave enough to do it to say something directly and not have to go through a filter.

In my humble opinion, “filter” is not a strong enough word: perhaps “impregnable barricade” would be more accurate.

More after the jump. Previous Agonist story here.

If anyone hasn’t seen it, the whistleblower video is here.  He lays out his case very well, and he will probably be luckier than most whistleblowers in getting a hearing.

This is a Homeland Security whistleblower who is addressing problems with coastguard ships. Here’s a summary of the issues from Slashdot:

1) Not enough security cameras (big blind spots)
2) Bad (unshielded) communications cables
3) Equipment won’t survive the extreme temperatures
4) No one cares, billions of dollars and national security at risk.

(The video especially points out how the unshielded communications cables leads to all sorts of eavesdropping.)

As many have pointed out, whistleblowers ruin their career when they speak out, and this has consequences for their friends and family. Corporations are increasingly resorting to preemptory retaliation on people who just have the potential to become whistleblowers (i.e. by raising a complaint) - just so they will be able to call the whistleblower “disgruntled” and distract the public from corporate misconduct.

Our current civic infrastructure is unfortunately tilting toward enabling corporations to hide the evidence. Employees have every incentive to look the other way - to leave security flaws in place, to leave safety problems for post-disaster investigation, to let fraudsters confiscate the retirement savings of thousands of people, and to let the “next poor slob” suffer by abandoning a bad situation instead of addressing it. Subordinate employees are pressured to be bystanders and to enable the worst behavior through lies of omission. Sure there are people willing to be martyrs…but are their enough?

It’s not enough to refrain from abetting the corporate PR machine and refusing to attack the whistleblower. There need to be positive, concrete measures to protect whistleblowers: advocacy and active legal reinforcement, employment assistance, and community support.  

I’ve seen some mockery of the poor guy’s plea for a lawyer at the end of the video. The people who think this is lame probably don’t understand just how difficult it is to get a lawyer in these situations. Moreover, government enforcement agencies are no help at all in arranging for legal protection even when their are whistleblower provisions in place. The whistleblower has probably been looking for many months.

Even if you can’t hook the whistleblower up with a lawyer or a potential employer, the least people can do is to let the guy know you understand and support what he’s doing - that you know how corporations block and tackle, that you know government agencies are ineffective, that you know lawyers are scarce and he will have to bare the burden of mounting legal costs, and that you know the media is plagued by corporate PR and shady “experts” determined to malign the character of whistleblowers. This guy is being besieged by “balanced” media coverage right now, which will eternally question his motives and approach. He would probably welcome the opportunity to address any questions raised by the media coverage, especially if there’s no lawyer involved yet. You can send him a comment via his YouTube profile or his slashdot account, and if I find a better means of contacting him, I’ll put the information here.

Note: I have not mentioned the whistleblower’s name, which is now all over the media, because he’s going to be haunted for the rest of his life about what people will turn up when they Google him. I don’t want to add to his problems, and I hope other people will keep this in mind for their comments here and elsewhere.

There’s something about Bush declaring a smackdown of Hezbollah that reminds me of the Pharoah Ramses II and his truthiness version of the battle of Qadesh. In 1273, Ramses declared victory over the Hittites despite massive Egyptian casualties and the loss of Syria. Lo and behold, as Bush does his hamster dance of hegemony, here comes Hezbollah’s announcement of historic, strategic victory.

It’s exceedingly difficult for the average person to draw rational conclusions about what’s going on between Israel and Lebanon. The pundits have placed almost as much emphasis on the meta-analysis of the media war as the actual, physical, bullet-wound-causing conflict.

In the Israeli corner, we have doctored photos and cries of Hezbollywood.   In the Hezbollah corner, we have Israel’s obsession with getting out the message and Israeli propaganda pamphlets raining from the sky (I saw this on the news last night - sorry, no link).

Israel’s “right to defend itself” is countered by the bodies of civilian martyrs. The reluctance of Lebanon to recast their freedom fighters as terrorists is countered by the tarring of all Islamic countries as tribal throwbacks that condone such hideous practices as honor killing.    

As I watched the news last night, it was clear that the terms of the cease-fire were dictated by Israel. They issued the demands, and they were keeping all the Lebanese prisoners. Was my first thought “Israel won!” No, my first thought was “this will never be over”, because the focus is on defining the winner instead of solving the problems. Anyone who has been watching the news from the Middle East for the last couple of weeks knows that it’s highly unlikely that Hezbollah will allow Israel just to count coup. Egregiously inaccurate spin is just likely to crank up passions-of-no-return on both sides.

It’s time for someone to say it: framing is the same thing as spin - in fact it’s spin on the word spin that helps the people working on your campaign to see their efforts to manipulate the media as somehow more morally righteous than the “smears” and “swiftboating” coming from the other side. Framing is about positive partisanship, the alternative to wishy-washy compromises of civility - but it also enables way too much asshattery.

In the political realm there’s a very thin line between spin and an outright lie. There’s nothing so disheartening to the voting public as an opportunistic lie (except maybe a nest of cronies dedicated to propping up an obvious lie). Standing on a lie is a standing invitation to merciless mockery.

PR spending DOUBLED under the Bush regime. Honestly, there’s a point where all the words and images don’t even have any meaning anymore. I swear every time I turn on the news now, all I hear is “blah, blah, blah…” I’m suffering from spin-exhaustion.

Israel is currently in a conflict with neighboring states. There is a complex history behind this conflict that involves numerous wrongs by all parties. Israel is now making hard decisions about when to attack and when parry: whether these decisions are righteous, necessary, or Machiavellian is not for the American TV audience to decide. The only thing the “media war” can achieve is public pressure for the U.S. to throw its weight around on one side or the other. It seems to me the U.S. shouldn’t be throwing its weight around at all here. This is something that needs to be worked out between the parties involved, and with all the media manipulation at hand, U.S. intervention on behalf of the side with the best “message” is likely to a) make the situation worse by inflaming passions over media misrepresentation, and b) encourage even more manipulation of the media now that the media has proclaimed itself a crucial arena for “warfare”.

If Israel runs roughshod over Lebanon with their superior armed forces, then they may have to deal with strained relations with their other neighbors. Or maybe those neighbors will prefer to make nice with Israel, downplaying Islamic ties in favor of practical statecraft. This is Israel’s call to make. Turning this into a “media war” in the U.S. is just another way to make global affairs all about “us” (and our Media Power) and not “them”.

The strangest thing happened while I was on BART (the San Francisco commuter train) on Friday. The girl standing next to me, who had been complaining loudly about the over-crowded train, spit at the people standing on the platform right before the door closed. Her friends immediately started doing a victory dance, singing “Boo-boo-be-doo - we spit on you!”

The fact that all these kids immediately knew how to celebrate the spitting on random commuters made me wonder if this is part of an evolving subculture. It’s probably not that far a leap from spitting to the pyrotechnic subculture. Random violence seems to be bubbling up from the ground. Yet because it’s happening in a familiar setting, we’re striving for labels other than “terrorism”. Our children aren’t terrorists. They’re just confused by hormones. Only “other people” are terrorists.

The irony was that I was returning from watching a live filming of Link TV’s Mosaic (there are streaming episodes here if anyone is interested). The most moving part was a woman who expained the ambivalence that the Lebonese people have about Hezbollah. To the Lebonese, Hezbollah is not necessarily a terrorist organization. Many see Hezbollah as an organization of “freedom fighters” and Israel as a terrorist state that has killed over a hundred people and levelled whole neighborhoods to do their “Boo-boo-be-doo - we spit on you!” victory dance.

My landlord just got back from Mumbai, where almost 200 people were killed and 700 injured in train bombings on July 11. While the U.S. has been too distracted by Lebanon to give Mumbai a second thought, I wonder whether 7/11 will provoke the same sort of reaction in India that 9/11 did here - with “kill the terrorist” flash games circulating by email in a matter of hours and general patriotic warmongering? Where will the anger of the people turn?

Mumbai trains are famous for their hot, over-crowded conditions - and this again takes me back to the spitting girl on the BART train. While the commuters on the platform probably wouldn’t regard themselves as having anything to do with her problems, I don’t think her actions were irrational. It seems to me that in an era where a lot of things that oppressive forces are systemic or anonymous, it’s hard for people to figure out where to pursue their fight for justice. These kids were angry at everybody. An anonymous stranger symbolizes everyody.

I’m thinking that it’s time to get rid of the word “terrorist”. First it’s far too easy for politicians to label anyone they dislike a “terrorist supporter” (or possibly a “terrorist” for wearing the wrong t-shirt or hugging a tree in a logging zone). Second, too many mental acrobatics have to occur to separate the “terrorists” out there from other sorts of violence from spouse-beating to “pyrotechnic subcultures”. In the end we should be looking for the source of the anger and repeatedly asking ourselves whether we’ve shut down the alternatives to spitting and basement bombs.

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On an entirely unrelated note - a friend of mine just launched a web site called Dabble for organizing and sharing online videos. Could be very useful for people who want to put together “video albums” for their particular cause.

Last month Judith Schwartz sent me a copy of her novel Doublethink. I read very little fiction so the book soon got buried in my inbox. Something about Schwartz’s enthusiasm about how a book could change the political imagination and change the direction of the country stuck with me, though. I put Doublethink in my backpack, carried it around with me all over Berkeley, and I when I finally got a chance to relax in a coffee shop for a bit, I pulled it out.

Honestly, it was hard for me to get through the first few pages because the protagonist, Joe Winston, starts out with a political outlook that’s so different than my own. This was Schwartz’s intention: she draws a detailed, and respectful, portrait of how a neocon true believer sees the world. At the start of the novel, Joe has all the comforts and advantages of a politically-crafted elite, though his family troubles suggest cracks in the facade.

When Joe’s cushy job gets outsourced out from under him and a donation to a charity raises a red flag for Homeland Security, Joe discovers how tenuous his life of privilege really is. All the laws he supported in the name of family values and national security start to turn against him, and he finds himself on the outside of the gated communities that had been shielding him from the brutal world he helped create.

While Joe learns the ropes of this new world, he rediscovers the value of human dignity, and his growth as a human being enables him to heal some of the rifts in his family. However, now that Joe is aware of how the agenda of the elite has distorted the lives of everyone else, he finds the courage to take the necessary political action.

Schwartz’s book covers many issues of current political debate and imagines the dystopian outcome. I haven’t read a book like this since Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and a recommend it heartily for people who want to see what all the threads of the daily news would look like once woven into the tapestry of the future.

Last week the U.S. Senate narrowly missed amending the Constitution to prosecute people who protest the government through the symbolic action of burning the flag. While the over-obvious distraction tactic was an insult to the intelligence of the voting public, it’s even more disturbing that the effort was co-sponsored by CA faux-Democrat Diane “National ID” Feinstein.

I’m blogging about this now because I just read a message on a mailing list that put my sentiments into the perfect words. The author, Jean, has kindly given me permission to quote the whole thing:

Political debates are about ideas; but also about the real lives of real people who could be affected. You forgot about them in your listing of things about which I might care.

An important part about PASSING A LAW is that it implies it will be enforced against some unfortunate soul. Like laws against “drugs” and ‘terror” the law is not against the idea of flag burning. It is against the act of a person who might burn or dishonor a flag. When such a law is passed this expands the power of the state to arrest, imprison or otherwise harm someone. You appear to be hoping that the law is pointless, it will alter nothing. Are you sure? That this law would never ever be used?

I was once a foolish young student who might walk right into some such law. I care for those people who still are, or who might yet be. Why do you risk hurting them?

Politics is above all about individuals, if we choose to help or harm ourselves and each other. My core obejction to both this law and the Bush Administration is the consistent investment in the sheer meanness, from the petty to the great.

On a related note, J.E. Schwartz’s recent novel DoubleThink spells out the dystopian consequences of the police state mindset. While it might seem like a good idea to improve your own life circumstances by disciplining your neighbors, the weapons of the police state will inevitably turn on you and your family.

Over the last few weeks a number of articles on Daily Kos called attention to Garcetti vs. Ceballos, where retaliation for reporting discipline was outrageously restyled as managerial discipline. The issues range from free speech to enabling government corruption to the chill on whistleblowers.

I have nothing to add but gratitude for all who recognized immediately that any decision that give employees reason to be afraid to report fraud, negligence, and incompetence to their superiors will be a savage blow to the public good. I’m only here today to do my citizen’s duty and pass on that on Thursday, June 29th, National Whistleblower Center Chairman Stephen Kohn will be testifying before the House Committee on Government Reform about the ramifications of Garcetti v. Ceballos. Please note this link includes the handy-dandy Capwiz link to write your political representatives and let them know that you resent every move our government makes toward establishing the Orwellian state.

I’m heartened by the title of the The Human Dignity Act - legislation to extend at least some Federal labor law to the U.S. territory of the Marianas. While The Human Dignity Act is a specific response to Tom DeLay and K Street corruption, I think it implicitly affirms that respect for labor is still an American value.

We all need to hear that affirmation in light of BushCo’s ongoing quest to turn the clock back to the good old days of slave labor. While relentlessly exhorting the masses to the Protestant Work Ethic, what the Bush Crony Class really has in mind is the other American history of the quasi-feudal plantation system - where people flocked to the Colonies for the opportunity to become a gentile landowner, relieved manual labor by cheap, docile dependents.

In the U.S., fueling economic expansion has become an end in itself. Human beings are mere fodder for this process. While weasel-eyed Bush cronies proclaim the moral uplift of tough competition, no one really dwells on what happens to the losers in this process. People are just expected to “keep trying” until they are institutionalized either through the prison system or the mental health system. According to these rules, you either do what you have to do to win or you’re subjected to chronic indignity.

It’s time to refocus the shame where it belongs: on the people who are advocating and upholding this system of top predator exploitation and plunder. Government and corporate employers need to go beyond giving lip service to policies that respect and defend labor - they should get serious about enforcing them.

Take this case of sexual harrassment: the managers elected to look the other way and left their vulnerable subordinate to deal with the ranky panky on her own.

Today the Supreme Court did the right thing by reducing the personal risk involved in filing a sexual harassment complaint and, moreover, making it easier to enforce all anti-discrimination law. By upholding Sheila White’s claim of retaliation:

…the justices defined retaliation as any action taken by an employer that would intimidate “a reasonable employee” into backing off from a discrimination complaint.

The next step is for workers to rise up and demand justice wherever this intimidation occurs. This would be a significant step toward asserting the dignity of our labor and finding the common ground to repel the predations of the Crony Class.

The introduction to my edition of The Tale of Genji describes the author Murasaki Shikibu’s father as a “man who was either unable or unwilling to form and preserve the patronage relationships necessary for bureaucratic advancement…”

This struck a sharp chord for me, because I tend to chose to go with the truth of a situation instead of promoting the personal will of those in a position to guarantee my livelihood. I’ve often pondered why I don’t act according to my economic self-interest. It’s not only anti-Darwinian - it seems to go against the U.S. cultural consensus and the consistent advice of all who care about me. Everyone insists “networking” and “relationships with key people” are the main path to employment and political existence, and all who shirk the social game must be inherently self-destructive or just stupid (or, in business-speak, “needs coaching in social skills“).

During the past few weeks the call for government intervention to preserve net neutrality has once more stirred up my thoughts on what creates pressure to seek patronage. Ever since 9/11 I’ve been worried about the problem of trading freedom for safety - particularly the freedom of speech. However, I’m now even more worried that if we go too far in dismantling government, individual freedom will be all but demolished by corporate interests, mafias, and roving street gangs. Individual freedom isn’t the default: it needs to be actively protected.

The freedom of the individual is being betrayed by the civic culture that now dominates the U.S. Jared Bernstein has described how YOYO economics has maximized the freedom of a few well-placed individuals at the expense of the many. On the cultural side, Robert Fuller has been arguing how rankism places relentless pressure on people to turn to patrons, fueling an epic expansion of indignity. I’ve been arguing that the New Puritans are seeking to block the marginalized from putting their opinions on record, invoking risk to potential patronage relationships. Note the underlying problem of all of this is that people are increasingly turning to the patronage system, while resistance to the patronage system leads to ostracization and homelessness.

Not since the days of corvee labor have average individuals been so powerless in society. Everyone feels dependent on a corrupt employment system. But, moreover, the nation of “nobodies” has no recourse when corporate interests infringe on their most basic civil and human rights. This might be because the powerful forces of our society are not answerable to any institution charged with protecting the rights of each and every individual. The media has become a purveyor of corporate messaging, the legal system is impossible for regular people to cope with even though most can’t afford a lawyer to do the coping for them, and the State can run roughshod over the rights of the individual now that our ostensible “representatives” don’t bother to help constituents unless a good photo op or a bribe is involved. Individual financial viability is being eroded by enormous systems of theft, from health care price gouging to corporate litigation herding into mass settlement centers. While “public interest” groups such as the ACLU seem to be protecting individuals, they actually only help people if it serves their policy agenda.

No wonder everyone feels like they are puppets forced to play out someone else’s lie. And frankly, the current Democratic emphasis on “framing” just reinforces this feeling of being squeezed into a mold of unreality. Even blogging only gives a few people a serious megaphone to stand up for their truth, and this just underscores the plight of those without a megaphone. Why should a megaphone be required? Why do we need to tarry for people in the streets (not to mention fake mobs)?

Big government can be costly and oppressive, especially when the checks and balances fail. However, if we throw out government all together, we will quickly find ourselves in a new feudal age where patronage-seeking and constant indignity are the only possible way of life.