Did Congress Sell Our Privacy?

Tuesday March 28^th, 2017, you and I were sold out by the United States House of Representatives. They passed legislation rolling back rules set in 2015 by the Federal Communications Commission that prevented internet service providers from selling your personal information. The Senate had already passed their version on March 23^rd.

What this means is your internet service provider can continue to sell your private information. What information are they selling to third parties?

·         Web Browsing History

·         Which apps you use – including frequency, length of time per use, etc.

·         Location information

·         And more that the ISP’s won’t tell us and congress didn’t bother to find out. (Can you believe that?)

The most egregious part of this is the internet service providers don’t have to ask our permission to collect and sell our information. We have to ask them not to!

I wanted to be fare about this issue and find out the reasoning of those who voted for this rule change. I found one reason. The argument goes:

Google, Facebook, YouTube, and others are already collecting and selling your information and congress is just leveling the playing field for internet service providers.

This is a completely dishonest argument. If you are not using Google to search, Google is not collecting your information. When you leave Facebook or YouTube, they are not tracking you and collecting all the data. You can choose to not use a specific application. You can choose to not visit a specific website. What is nearly impossible to do is choose to not use an internet service provider.

If there is only one reason being spouted by the politicians, industry representatives, and pundits and that reason is shown to be false, than what other reason could our representatives and senators have for giant corporations to be allowed to sell our private information without our consent?

Theverge.com has one idea. If you would like to know how much money your Representative or Senator was given by the telecommunications industry (for their election campaigns, of course, nothing more. You believe that, don’t you?), than you can find out here.

There are still many unanswered questions regarding this piece of legislation.

Priority

What process did the Republican leadership use to determine the priority of this legislation? The Senate has so much going on, right now. We are facing the Judge Neil Gorsuch appointment for Supreme Court Justice that is turning into a partisan battle between the parties. In late April they will have to decide whether or not to raise our national debt ceiling again. They are neck deep in the investigations into the Russians influencing our national elections last year. They have the investigation into President Trump’s accusations of the Obama administration illegally surveilling the Trump Presidential Campaign. We still don’t have a Secretary of Agriculture or a Secretary of Labor. Add to all of this, nearly one hundred federal judgeships to fill. And the President also wants them to begin the process for tax reform.

The House Intelligence Committee is also very busy with its Keystone Cops version of the Russian Election Influencing investigation. The entire House of Representatives is busy as well with very important measures to label North Korea a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” (again), and Condemning North Korea for developing multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles and “other purposes.” Don’t forget tax reform.

The point is, in the first one hundred days of a new administration (always a hectic and chaotic time), why was this particular piece of legislation pushed to the front of the line?

Are the internet service providers about to have a mass layoff if they don’t get an infusion of cash? Are they in some sort of financial trouble because the industry’s business model is unprofitable? Are they unable to be profitable unless they are allowed to sell our private information?

In 2016 AT&T’s revenues were up more than 22%. $40.5 billion.

Comcast had a Gross Profit of $51.96 billion in 2015. (2016 figures are not yet available)

Verizon says its total revenue for 2016 was $126 billion! This is down from the year before, but their profits went up!

Time Warner’s total revenue was more than $29 billion dollars. That is up more than $1 billion dollars over 2015's total revenues.

Obviously, the ISP’s are not in financial trouble and are not in need of a “leveled playing field.”

Next, we will look at top receivers of campaign funding from the telecom industry and which committees each of these top “earners” are members of. 

What is the Earth's Intrinsic Value? or Exploit the Entropic Environment

Last week’s article, Bully the Bad Guys, began a four part series on President Trump’s unfolding agenda. If you haven’t already, you might to read it before moving on to this week’s article.

In the Trump administration’s first week they put a gag order on all employees of the EPA and the Department of Agriculture. This order prohibits all employees from communicating with the press or public, including the use of social media. This includes all research scientists. As of February 26, 2017 this order has not been lifted.

President Trump also signed executive orders authorizing the immediate restarting of construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone Pipeline. Both of these pipelines had been reluctantly stopped by President Obama after unrelenting public pressure. President Trump obviously felt none of that pressure.  

The administration nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. What are Mr. Pruitt’s qualifications to run the Environmental Protection Agency? He sued the agency fourteen times in his tenure as Oklahoma’s AG. Thirteen of these fourteen lawsuits were with oil and gas companies as co-parties. These same co-parties also happened to be large scale contributors to his election campaigns. A reported $300,000 in total.

His confirmation was pushed through the senate last week so he could be confirmed before thousands of emails from his time as Oklahoma Attorney General were released. This was done in spite of requests of democrat senators to wait for the emails so a more informed decision could be made. These emails subsequently revealed an extraordinarily close relationship with oil and gas companies. He even copied and pasted an email from Devon Energy onto his own letterhead and sent it as a complaint to the EPA he is now tasked to head.

He was found to again be copying and pasting language from emails from lobby group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers in a complaint he filed with the EPA about ozone limits.

Mr. Pruitt is on public record denying the science that mercury “poses public health hazards.” It should be noted that while he was Attorney General of Oklahoma the number of lakes in the state listed for mercury contamination went from fourteen to forty. His contention during his confirmation hearing that states should be setting and enforcing environmental protection laws also needs to be pointed out.

Is it Mr. Pruitt’s intent that the EPA allow states to deny environmental science and allow their jurisdictions to become continually more toxic?

I am sure we won’t have to wait long to find out.

According to Myron Ebell, who ran the EPA transition for the new administration, the Trump administration is planning a one billion dollar budget cut in the first physical year. The 2017 FY budget is $8.27 billion. Down from $10.3 billion in 2010.

As we watch the dismantling of the EPA and other agencies in the government by this administration, we need to ask ourselves some difficult questions.

1.       Does the earth from which we are formed and sustained, our only home, have any value outside of profits corporations can extract from it?

2.       How important is clean air, clean water, and clean soil to me?

3.       Am I willing to stand by and watch as corporations collude with their political caddies in Washington to take us back to the fifties, sixties, and seventies with burning rivers, toxic smog, poisoned ground water, and subdivisions built on soil so fouled it causes cancer and birth defects in the residents?

4.       At what point do we value the health and vitality of flesh and blood humans, wildlife, and the ecosystem that makes life possible over the profits of soulless and rapacious corporations?

In his inaugural speech at the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Pruitt called for civility. I wonder how long he expects us to remain civil while he ignores and suppresses the environmental science and insists on harming the population of the planet for the profit of his corporate donors.  

President Trump's Unfolding Agenda

We are now one month into the presidency of Donald Trump. He told us on Inauguration Day the time for talk was over and now it was time for action. He has kept that promise. He has signed a minimum of twenty-five executive orders to date. There is at least one more that is being talked about being signed today or tomorrow. It is supposed to replace the one a lower court put a stay on and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that lower court’s ruling.

One month has passed and the President’s agenda is coming into focus. So far, I can see four main parts:

1.       Reward the Rich (gutting already weak regulations designed to prevent another financial collapse like we had in 2008, Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs employee and former George Soros employee, as Secretary of Treasury, and former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State – so much for draining the swamp, eh?)

2.       Punish the Poor (repealing Obamacare, reducing block grants to states for Medicaid, and beginning calls of “From Welfare to Work” and appointing Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education)

3.       Exploit the Environment (gutting EPA regulations, appointing a man to head the EPA who is opposed to its existence, and pushing through the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines over vehement resistance)

4.       Bully the “Bad Guys”

Over the next four weeks I will tackle each of these in reverse order.

One thing before we start. I predicted four weeks ago, part of the new administration’s plan to was to overwhelm the average person by doing so much the work-a-day individual with a job, family, and other obligations couldn’t possibly keep up with it all. This is a tried and proven effective tactic used by many governments, including Clinton, Bush, and Obama. It’s not just for dictators anymore. The administration has proven me correct to this point, but I won’t be patting myself on the back anytime soon. I would have much preferred to be wrong on this point.

Bully the Bad Guys

Candidate Trump made this one crystal clear on the campaign trail. Whether he was advocating torture of prisoners of war, promoting a policy of war crimes such as, “going after the families of terrorists,” or asking military consultants, “why do we have nuclear weapons if we aren’t going to use them?”, he put us and the world on notice:

                It would be “Open Season” on bad guys in a Trump administration.

It was funny right up until the moment Hillary Clinton conceded the election to him. Now, we are getting a more precise definition of what he means by “bad guys.”

Mr. Trump’s definition of bad guys includes all the undesirables a reasonable person might expect. Terrorists, drug cartels, criminal gang syndicates, and violent criminals who are also illegal aliens. A good list, so far. It also appears bad guys include refugees from war torn regions, and any media outlet that doesn’t simply regurgitate his preferred propaganda for the day.

President Trump seems intent on pursuing a scorched earth policy with any dissenters. If you call him on clear fabrications and lies, you suddenly become the liar. He doesn’t have to offer any coherent arguments or facts proving you are the liar. He doesn’t have to present any facts proving he’s telling the truth. He simply calls you dishonest over and over again and lets his supporters do the rest.

Whether beating people at his political rallies who disagree with his proposed policies, cancelling subscriptions, or boycotting specific retailers or news organizations, the President and his supporters intend to silence through intimidation and bullying, both around the world and here at home.

This bullying can be seen in how Mr. Trump cancels meetings with heads of state who have signaled they will not be giving him what he wants, such as the President of Mexico. It can be seen in his hanging up on the Prime Minister of Australia. It can be seen in the aggressive, confrontational style of his policy advisor Stephen Miller. It can be seen in the way he constantly pulls unsuspecting individuals off balance when he shakes their hands. (Rabbit trail: for a good laugh, check out the video of his hand shake with Prime Minister Abe of Japan. The Prime Minister's response speaks volumes about how other world leaders experience President Trump.)

One person who is conspicuously not on the list of Bad Guys is a brutal dictator who murders journalists, assassinates or jails political opponents and heads of state, and is hell bent on expansion of his own empire.

You might want to think carefully, however, before questioning the President on this matter. You might find yourself on that Bad Guy list. 

YOU Are the Republic

We are finally at the end of President Trump’s first week in office. It has been a hectic week to say the least. In his inaugural address, the new president said the time for talk is over and it is now “time for action.” He has been true to his word. It is difficult, not just for the average citizen, but even for the news media to keep up.

Mr. Trump’s first executive order marked the official U.S. withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement. I wrote about that briefly here.

Among the highlights of the other EO’s are reinstating the “Mexico City” abortion rule, implementing much of what he’s promised to do on border security and immigration, providing “relief” from Obamacare regulations, issuing a freeze on all regulations created by agencies of the federal government, implementing a federal hiring freeze, restarting construction of the XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline, expediting environmental reviews of infrastructure projects, creating a new rule requiring any pipelines built in the U.S. to be built with U.S. made steel and other metal products, and ordering a streamlining of the federal manufacturing regulations for U.S. manufacturers.

This adds up to Mr. Trump wanting to get moving quickly on infrastructure projects to get American workers back to work rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure. It won’t solve all of our earning problems, but every little bit helps.

I don’t have time to go through each one of these executive orders, nor do I have any delusions you would sit and read all of it, so I will focus on a couple and give you an overall assessment of where we are and where we are headed.

Pipelines

President Obama wanted these pipelines to be built. He did not cancel them, he delayed them so he didn’t have to deal with the political fallout. Hillary Clinton’s position was “whatever I have to tell you to get elected.” Bernie Sanders stood alone in the presidential candidate field in opposition to these pipelines. They both became a working reality the moment the polls closed on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. If you were against these pipelines, understand, no matter who won in November, you lost this battle the moment Bernie Sanders was mathematically eliminated in the Democratic Primaries. Blame the DNC and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

I’ll say this and move on. ALL pipelines leak. The Native American tribes believe their water supply will be at least tainted if we build the Dakota Access Pipeline. They deserve to be negotiated with as a sovereign nation or, at least, a state in the union. This has not happened. As usual with the U.S., the First Peoples are treated as less than second class citizens. This is how the U.S. government treats all those with less power than itself – and this behavior does not change whether Democrats, Republicans, or Whigs, or Federalists are heading up the government.

Border Security and Immigration

Easily the most impactful thing President Trump has done in his first week is the combination of two executive orders: one to build the wall along the southern border and another on far reaching immigration policies. Among bullet points in the second order are

• ·         Hiring 5,000 additional border patrol agents
• ·         10,000 new immigration officers
• ·         Creation of new detention facilities
• ·         Ending the “Catch and Release” policy and replacing it with “Catch, detain, and deport.”
• ·         Denying federal funds to sanctuary cities and “jurisdictions” (a new word we haven’t seen much of, at first blush, it appears to be a stab at denying entire states federal funds unless they cooperate with the President’s agenda)
• ·         The action also orders the Department of Homeland Security to create and maintain a list of “sanctuary jurisdictions.”
• ·         The office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to create an Office of Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens. (An ominous name, no?) This office will be compiling lists of crimes committed by immigrants. One can only assume these lists will be studied to help officials decide specific countries from which to block, reduce, or only allow super select immigrants. It also says in the order these lists are for the purpose of “better informing the public regarding safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions.” (A thinly veiled threat. This list will very soon be turned into a propaganda tool to disrupt tourism and commercial investment in these “sanctuary jurisdictions.” Why would you visit or expand your business in a place that is so unsafe? The goal is obviously to force compliance by using internal “economic sanctions” against these places.  

I have to point out at this point, had the administrations of the past ten presidents or so simply enforced the immigration laws on the books, we would not be in the position of having to decipher whether this authoritarian president believes his actions are for the good of the nation or if he has more nefarious motives. In short, we did this to ourselves.

Hope

In President Obama’s first ten days he signed nine executive orders. President Trump has signed twelve. This number may actually be thirteen, but it is difficult to get clear information at this point. He was scheduled to sign an EO ordering an investigation into his fictitious voter fraud claims yesterday afternoon, but the signing was postponed.

Bottom line, President Trump is not that far ahead of where President Obama was at this point in his presidency.

Also, one of the first EO’s President Obama signed was the order to close Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba. Eight years later it is still open. The President is not a king. Just because he orders something to happen does not mean it is feasible or doable. The wall may indeed get built. If it does, it will have little effect on illegal immigration. The more stringent steps in the accompanying order will have far more effect. Building the wall will create a few decent paying jobs for a few American workers for a few years. If we decide we don’t like it, we can always take it down once the Trump Presidency is over. Creating a few more temporary jobs?

We’ve had megalomaniac authoritarian presidents before. In the sixties and early seventies we had one who was a Democrat (Johnson) and one who was a Republican (Nixon) consecutively.

And we are still here as a sovereign and a free nation.

The Republic is bigger than one man. It is definitely bigger than this one man, no matter how many times he tries to conflate himself with the nation.

Keep in mind: YOU are the Republic.

President Trump's Combative Inaugural Weekend

I didn’t get a post out yesterday because I couldn’t decide what to focus on. This morning I realized that is exactly what I need to write about.

The reason I had so much trouble deciding what to write about yesterday is because, for three days, we were inundated with lies, half-truths, conflations, misrepresentations, and outright propaganda.

Before I go any further, I want to say:

                ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE

It is a part of governing.

                ALL POLITICIANS LIE

They cannot get elected or even inspire confidence otherwise.

The Bush and Obama administrations both employed the strategy of hiding their lies. I’ll let you decide who did the better job.

President Trump seems to be employing the strategy of the Clinton, Nixon, and Johnson administrations. This strategy is to overwhelm the public with so many lies of varying types it wears the public out. The overwhelm strategy erodes the resistance of everyday people who are working to take care of their families. This erosion happens quickly, like a mudslide in a California rain storm. Soon, the only resistors left are the most radical. Because these folks are so far outside the mainstream of the “Average American” they are easily dismissed and marginalized by the government propaganda machine and their sometimes willing, sometimes unwitting accomplices.  

I will be delighted to be proven wrong on this, but, if the first weekend is any indicator, we are in for an exhausting four to eight years.

**************************

Important Happenings

Besides the U.S. continuing its 220 year streak of peaceful transitions of power, some other significant events happened this weekend.

President Trump’s first executive order was to withdraw the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement. This is exceptionally good news for the American worker. This agreement, while possibly shoring up U.S. influence in Asia, would have our workers degraded by even more competition with fifty cent per hour laborers and three hundred dollar per month knowledge based workers with no protections from our government. U.S. wages have been depressed for far too long by these types of agreements. The only people enriched by these types of agreements are large, multinational corporations.

A record number of people marched in protest on Saturday against President Trump and in favor of women’s rights. This number is nearly equal to the number of popular votes he lost by in the general election. I find that an interesting coincidence.

Finally, the U.S. military carried out drone bombings in Yemen on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as President Trump wasted no time getting to work trying to fulfill his promise to “eradicate extremist Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth.” 

I searched again this morning and could find no U.S. Congressional authorization for the U.S. military to be conducting war in Yemen. Our president, neither Obama nor Trump, have any authorization to be conducting war on Yemeni soil. Still, I see almost no news coverage of this. No outcries from the leaders of either party. No grass roots uprisings. The American people seem content to allow our presidents to illegally use our military to eliminate those they don’t like in other sovereign nations while killing more civilians than combatants - as long as they are “keeping us safe” here at home.

I’ll be back to writing about happier things on Thursday. 

Negative and Positive Liberties

I am currently reading “Escape from Freedom” by Erich Fromm. He published this book in 1941. Which means he wrote it in the years leading up to and the first horrific years of World War II. As you may have already guessed, Dr. Fromm was desperately trying to figure out how the most “civilized” place the planet had ever known (Europe) had lost its collective sanity and decided absolute destruction and the murder of tens of millions was the solution to all their problems. What made the situation even more maddening for him was the necessity of the “II” designation. This was the second time in fewer than fifty years his neighbors had chosen this “solution.”

His conclusions and arguments are compelling. I will be unpacking them more next week because they have a laser focused relevance to our circumstances today.

Fromm believed we modern humans have a habit of celebrating our negative freedoms as individuals and stopping short of their true purpose of existing: the freedom to become. 

An example of this might be free speech. The Constitution of the United States outlines our right to freedom of expression and hampers the ability of the government or other authorities to infringe upon it. We celebrate and defend our right to think, read, write, and speak what we will. Fromm argued the vast majority of the population of free societies stop there. He wanted to encourage us to go past negative liberty of freedom from regulation and embrace the positive freedom of learning how to think rigorously and independently.

He believed our lack of initiative in this area makes us easy prey for advertisers and propagandists alike.

Henry Ford is quoted as saying:

                Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

I find it interesting a man who so prided himself on his ability to think was bamboozled so easily by the anti-Semite propaganda of his day, but, on this quote, I think Erich Fromm would have agreed with him.

Fromm was concerned, as many are today, our inability to think well combined with our vast scientific knowledge brings many to despair. This despair is induced by cynicism and lack of belief in any personal significance, or meaning. This again creates a susceptibility to advertisers and propagandists.

So what was his solution?

Surprisingly, Fromm offered the same treatment as Jung:

                Acknowledge and face your fears of insignificance, separation from the whole of humanity and society, and lack of purpose and feelings of powerlessness. Once you have dealt with these insecurities you will be empowered to embrace your freedom to become.

Of course, being a psychoanalyst, Fromm, as well as Jung, wanted you to go through this process with an analyst to assist you. But, this is expensive and takes years, at best. Psychoanalysis is not an option for the average person in the United States of America. If Dr. Fromm’s solution is the correct one, and I have a hunch it is, the majority of us will have to go it alone. Which brings us right back to the heart of the problem, doesn’t it?

What do you think?

Do you agree with Erich Fromm? Does our lack of critical thinking skills make us susceptible to advertisers and propagandists to use as they will? Do you see signs of this in your community, church, government?

Do you see authoritarianism around the world or in your own country treating the masses as “prey” or a means to their own personal ends?

Tell me in the comments below.    

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