Pam Brown's Blog l emission - control. net

Fighting to Restore American Democracy

The potential for an American form of fascism to develop due to corporate infiltration of our political process via the Congress is growing day-by-day.  The Supreme ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, allowing unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns, dealt a serious blow to the principles campaign finance reform supporters have been pushing for years.  Have we crossed the line?  Is there anyway to return democracy to the hands of the People? 

 

Lawrence Lessig, the renown media and legal scholar, has written an article for this week's The Nation entitled How to Get Our Democracy Back, and with it has launched a movement toward the one option the People are left with:  a constitutional convention.  In his thinking Congress is too corrupt to pass an amendment neutralizing the Supreme court ruling.  But, if two-thirds of states apply for a constitutional convention, democracy would at least have some hope of dodging the bullet of corporate control.

I encourage you to read the article, then sign the petition.

How to Get Our Democracy Back

Change Congress Petition

fixcongressfirst.org

Senator Franken Rips Into Comcast CEO Brian Roberts

Josh Silver of Free Press:  "Not everyone is swallowing the snake oil Comcast is peddling to grease its takeover of NBC. None shone brighter yesterday than Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who aggressively interrogated Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker -- all but accusing them of lying to his face."

Senator Franken Rips Into Comcast CEO Brian Roberts

I would also add to Senator Franken's comments that not only did they falsely assert that FCC rules prevent a conflict of interest between content and carriage, but also that Comcast is in the process of appealing previous net neutrality rulings against them by asserting that the FCC has no jurisdiction.  So, they are simultaneously saying that the FCC rules prevent a conflict, while claiming that the FCC has no jurisdiction.

Let’s Not Pivot to Jobs

There’s been a lot of talk over the past couple of weeks - the weeks after the loss of the Democratic “super majority” and with it the likelihood of any meaningful health insurance reform - that Obama’s best political move now is to “pivot” to jobs.  Why so-called progressives would encourage him to do this is beyond me.  In fact, to me it sounds like a Republican wet dream - first, the failure of health insurance reform, and then the failure to bring back jobs, a recipe for a disastrous presidency for sure. 

Liberal economists (especially Paul Krugman) have felt that the stimulus package wasn’t big enough to promote job growth, even if it was big enough to slow job loss.  But perhaps, even a bigger stimulus really couldn’t have promoted job growth in the same way that strategy may have worked in past economies.  In this meltdown whole industries collapsed, leaving millions of workers not just unemployed, but without an employable skill set.  Many disenfranchised workers are mid career, stuck with years of specific industry experience that’s now leaves them both overqualified and under-qualified at the same time.  Many others are entry level, living at home, working in internships and McJobs, unable to obtain career-building work in the first place. 

Economists tend to focus on data, and sometimes fail to fully appreciate the real world, day-to-day, lived experience beyond the numbers.  What jobs would have been created by a bigger stimulus?  I have a friend who worked in the publishing industry; I don’t think her job would have been saved.  The whole industry is disappearing before our very eyes.  She considers herself having “taken early retirement.”  I have many friends who are self-employed.  At what point is there so little business that you go from self-employed to unemployed?  And what’s the lived difference between the two categories, if you have no other skills to trade on anyway?  And eventually almost everyone who can’t find an actual job, gets tired of saying that they’re unemployed, and becomes self-employed.  That’s exactly what my friend who works in publishing did.  This middle ground between unemployed and employed skews the numbers, rendering them an inaccurate measure of what’s happening on the ground.  So much of the job loss has been due to industry transformation that I suspect that middle class jobs would not have been very impacted by more stimulus, even if the numbers camouflage that lived experience.  And this is what Obama promised he was going to turn around - we work harder, we get paid less, we’re tired, fatigued, exhausted and broke.

The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever

In The Growing Underclass:  Jobs Gone Forever, nytimes.com Economics Editor, Catherine Rampell, points out that a major obstacle for job growth is that jobs in certain industries have completely disappeared.  In addition, because of the housing market decline, many job seekers will find it impossible to move for better work.  While I agree that those factors are significant, it concerns me that technological change is rarely mentioned as a critical factor in labor market analysis.  Further many of the reader comments pointed the finger at illegal immigration.  Several readers even commented that the problem is foreign competition - more "efficient" factories abroad.  Perhaps they're not aware of many of the things Naomi Klein discusses in No Logo - the corporate tax holidays and cruelly exploitative conditions of the workers.  Another comment was from a reader in Berlin, who thought it was crazy that the American government wouldn't take on the retraining of its citizens.  All in all, my feeling is that until we really begin to incorporate the issues related to changing technology and resultant changes to our political economy into our dialogue, we will not be able to find solutions that address the true underlying problems.  In other words, we'll just be chasing our tails.

I posted the following comment to the Economix Blog:

"This is likely to be an extremely unpopular comment, but I feel it needs to be said.  Either we turn our backs on the unfortunate who have permanently lost their livelihoods and develop something in the neighborhood of 40% poverty rates (like many of the countries that have instituted similar neoliberal economic policies - see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine) or we will have no choice but to develop social programs that may need to include "basic income" or similar ideas (to increase consumption). The global trend is toward reduction of work opportunities, as productivity has increased exponentially due to changing technology. From an historical perspective, each time human beings have undergone a major technological revolution, a new political economy has formed. (Consider the printing press and capitalism...) It concerns me that technological change as a critical factor in labor markets is not being discussed in the media. It seems to me that many of the ideas as to how to impact unemployment rest on incorrect assumptions that weigh past performance too heavily in a fundamentally changed economy."

Progressives Need a Narrative that Resonates

Let’s face it - January was an unimaginably rough start to the New Year for progressives.  First, the painful and surprising loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat to a crass, pickup truck driving teabagger, who tried to sell his daughters on national TV, and who promised the country to derail health insurance reform.  Then, the announcement of the big, unfathomably huge, gargantuan Wall Street bonuses totaling almost the exact amount that taxpayers had forked over in the bailout, ultimately culminating in a 100 million dollar payday for Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankenfein, and the need for anti-nausea drugs for the rest of the country.  With the administration’s most important social policy change unlikely to result in anything meaningful, and the financial crisis turning into a coup for banks, burning rage for the people, and a public relations nightmare for the beleaguered administration the week before the State of the Union speech, things didn’t seem like they could get any worse.  And then - whammo – seemingly out of nowhere, the Supreme Court rules that corporations can make unlimited campaign contributions, expediting the retreat of democracy to an insidious and uniquely American form of corporate fascism.  On the year anniversary of the election of the first black president, and just after our national reflection on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., there’s every reason for progressives to ask, “why, oh why?” 

 

Some answer that it was a failure of the democrats to support Martha Coakley that led to the humiliating loss of the key seat.  Others blame her for an untimely holiday vacation.  Others say she was simply a bad candidate, and mean that she didn’t come across well enough on television.  Some argue that we should have let the banks fail.  Others that they had a gun to their head and a bomb strapped to their back, and we had no choice but to hand over the dough.  Still others feel that allowing corporations carte blanche contributions won’t change much at all – either the people will still prevail, or it’s merely the breakdown of an illusion anyway. 

 

But while all of these points speak at some level to the issues at hand, they also all fail to address the big picture:  the progressive narrative of interdependence, a “level playing field” and social welfare is failing to strike a chord, while the conservative narrative of freedom, individuality and the invisible hand sounds in tune with what many in the country believe on a gut level.  I would argue that the impact of changing media technology on these classic American narratives is the strongest and most difficult force to reckon, blowing back very rational progressive solutions to problems that will determine the future success of this country.

Corporate Branding and The White House

In her recent article on AlterNet entitled How Corporate Branding Took Over the White House, Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, revisits branding, examining how the phenomenon has changed and developed over the 10 years since publication of the bestselling book.  In the context of Barack Obama it seems self-evident that he and his team are branding virtuosos.  And, as is the case with virtually all brands, when Klein looks behind the brand, she sees little substance.  To have substance, she feels that social movements will need to be "the real thing" - yes, like the Coke ad. 

But, the question is why are social movements having such difficulty forming in the midst of corporate corruption, the influence of lobbyists, and a populous that clearly wants change?  Absent from Klein's work is an accounting for the change to social dynamics and political economy that revolutionary technological change has precipitated.  I recently revised my essay, The Failure of Culture Jamming: Resistance in a Post-social World - it addresses why some of the dynamics needed to form a social movement may have changed, and where to look for change in the future.  Unfortunately, there are still no clear answers...

Download The Failure of Culture Jamming - Pamela Brown

My Response to: "Compared to Other Rich Countries, U.S. Had Big Job Losses"

I tried to change my NYTimes moniker to "radical thinker" but somehow it reverted back to "pambrown15" - oops!  Since everyone knows who wrote the comment already, I figured I'd post it here as well...

Here's the article:

Compared to Other Rich Countries, U.S. Had Big Job Losses

Here's my comment:

It's really not surprising that this post comes via a professor at U of Chicago, the home of Milton Friedman, and the intellectual foundation of the neoliberal thinking that has caused the loss of the middle class in America, and in every country where markets have been deregulated throughout the world.

I have a feeling that most human beings would favor income without expending the energy of labor. And there are many Americans doing just this right now via investing in the stock market, where you make money not from work, but from money. Unfortunately, for most of us, we lack the money to exploit capital in this way, and are left with the crumbs.

Biggest Net Neutrality boosters question FCC proposal

From The Washington Post: 

"The strength or weakness of a proposed Internet rule, known as net neutrality, could rest in the interpretation of just one word: "reasonable."

The way that word is defined can tilt fortunes in the Web economy and set the course for how consumers use the Web today and in the future, proponets of the policy say.

Now, a group of law professors and public interest groups are telling the Federal Communications Commission that its proposed rules don't sufficiently define what that word means for Internet service providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon as they management traffic on their networks. In a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski sent this morning, the legal scholars -- all long-time proponents of net neutrality -- are asking the agency to clear up ambiguity on "reasonable network management" practices in a draft of rules."

Biggest Net Neutrality boosters question FCC proposal

AT&T Says Google Voice Violates Net Neutrality Principles

From The New York Times:

"AT&T is playing a “gotcha” with Google. The big phone company filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission Friday saying the Google Voice calling system violates the commission’s network neutrality principles.

At issue is Google’s decision not to connect Google Voice customers to certain conference calling and other lines because of what it says are excessive access charges by the providers of those lines. AT&T, which is required to connect its telephones to all lines, says Google is discriminating against certain uses of its network, a no-no in the network neutrality world."

AT&T Says Google Voice Violates Net Neutrality Principles 

FCC Defends Internet Regulation Authority

From Broadcasting & Cable:

"The FCC this week told a D.C. federal appeals court that it had the authority to take action against Comcast for "covertly interfering" with BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic in violation of Internet openness principles, and doing so in an adjudicatory proceeding rather than a rulemaking.

That argument was made in a brief to the court on the same day FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced he proposed codifying and expanding those principles.
 
The commission also more broadly asserted its authority to regulate the Internet. "Congress created the FCC for cases such as this one," it told the court. "Congress gave the agency broad and adaptable jurisdiction so that it can keep pace with rapidly evolving communications technologies. The Internet is such a technology."

Comcast pulled the plug on the practice, but also challenged the legal basis and authority for the FCC to conclude that it was using unreasonable network management techniques and was not giving customers sufficient notice about how it was managing its network."

FCC Defends Internet Regulation Authority