War had come to an end, but famine came in its place.  There were three men who each stole a sack of corn from different owners, but they were all caught.

The first owner brought his thief to the judge, and the maidens said everywhere that he had done right.

The second owner took the corn away from his thief and let him go in peace.  The maidens said he has done well.

The third owner went to the thief’s house, and when he saw what misery was there, he went and brought a waggon-load of necessaries to relieve their distress.  Frya’s maidens came around him and wrote his deed in the eternal book, and wiped out all his sins.  This was reported to the Eeremoeder, and she had it made known over the whole country.

==From a 13th century manuscript quoted by Making Light.

Political scientist Tom Ferguson tells the story.

In the mid-1980s, a group of insurgent Republicans broke with the long established norms governing how the U.S. House of Representatives transacted business.  Led by Newt Gingrich, it derided older Republican House leaders as timid, unimaginative, and too inclined to compromise with Democrats.  Self-styled “revolutionaries” launched vigorous public attacks on Democrats as they trumpeted their own agenda of deregulation, budget cuts, lower taxes, and a baker’s dozen of social issues, from abortion to opposition to all forms of gun control.

Result?  The House boiled over.  Statistical measures of Congressional behavior show that party line votes jumped sharply.

Gingrich and his allies were painfully aware that transforming the GOP’s gains at the presidential level into a true “critical realignment” of the political system as a whole required breaking the Democratic lock on Congress.  So they shattered all records for Congressional fundraising in their drive to get control of the House.  Their success in this and their parallel campaign to rally major parts of the media to their standard are what polarized the system.  The GOP insurgents emphasized fundraising, not just through the usual publicly reported vehicles like the national party committees, but also GOPAC, a political action committee that Gingrich had controlled since 1986, which operated mostly in secret.

In 1992, in the midst of a recession, the Republicans lost the White House. But their dreams of a sweeping political realignment did not die.  In fact, by clearing centrist Republicans out of their perches in the White House, the loss probably helped Gingrich and his allies.

Completely undaunted, Gingrich, Republican National Chair Haley Barbour, and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Phil Gramm orchestrated a vast national campaign to recapture Congress for the Republicans in the 1994 elections.  With the economy stuck in a “jobless recovery” and Democratic fundraising sputtering, the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress.

The tidal wave of political money they conjured allowed Gingrich, Gramm, Barbour and Co., to brush aside older, less combative center-right Republican leaders and persist in their efforts to roll back the New Deal and remake American society in the image of free market fundamentalism.  Once in power, the Republicans institutionalized sweeping rules changes in the House and the Republican caucus that vastly increased the leadership’s influence over House legislation.  They also implemented a formal “pay to play” system that had both inside and outside components.

On the outside, DeLay and other GOP leaders, including Grover Norquist, who headed Americans for Tax Reform, mounted a vast campaign (the so-called “K Street Project”) to defund the Democrats directly by pressuring businesses to cut off donations and avoid retaining Democrats as lobbyists. Inside the House, Gingrich made fundraising for the party a requirement for choice committee assignments. Senate Republicans, led by Phil Gramm and other apostles of deregulation, emulated the House.

And so, alas, did the Democrats.

Click on Standstill Nation as the New Abnormal for Tom Ferguson’s full article for the Roosevelt Institute.

Click on Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years by Republicans (And Quickly Imitated by Democrats) for more on Gingrich’s legacy on the Naked Capitalism web log.

Click on Newt Gingrich and Our Dysfunctional Congress for an article on Gingrich’s legacy by Lou Dubose of The Washington Spectator.

Click on Newt Gingrich Is a Saul Alinsky Republican for an analysis of Newt Gingrich’s political tactics from the Washington Examiner.

Click on Language: a Key Mechanism of Control for Newt Gingrich’s 1996 GOPAC Memo on political rhetoric.

Throughout his political career, Barack Obama has been lucky in his political opponents.  When he first ran for Illinois State Senate in 1996, his only opponent in the Democratic primary was Alice Palmer, his predecessor, who only decided at the last minute to run for re-election.  Obama was able to show that two-thirds of the signatures on her nominating petitions were invalid, and so he ran unopposed.  In his district, nomination in a Democratic primary was tantamount to election.

In 2004, when Barack Obama first ran for the U.S. Senate, the two strongest potential candidates, incumbent Republican Peter Fitzgerald and predecessor Democrat Carol Moseley Brown, decided not to run.  The Republican front-runner, Jack Ryan, a Goldman Sachs partner who retired to become a parochial school teacher in inner-city Chicago, was embarrassed when the Chicago Tribune sued successfully to have his sealed divorce papers made public.  The papers revealed that his wife, the actress Jeri Ryan, accused him of pressuring her to go to sex clubs in New York, New Orleans and Paris. Ryan withdrew from the race, and Obama’s opponent was the eccentric Alan Keyes, whom he defeated overwhelmingly.

In 2008, with Barack Obama ran for President, he faced a formidable Democratic primary opponent in Hillary Clinton.  But in the general election, Republican candidate John McCain proved surprisingly inept, and then chose the even more inept Sarah Palin as his running mate.   Given the unpopularity of the George W. Bush administration, it is unlikely any Republican could have one.

Now, in 2010, the likely Republican candidate is either Newt Gingrich, a symbol of political sleaze and corruption, or Mitt Romney, a symbol of corporate wealth and economic privilege.   President Obama’s opponents, and not his record, are his best hope for re-election.

Nate Silver thinks there is a possibility that the Republican nominating convention will choose a candidate other than the ones who’ve signed up for the marathon primary race.   I don’t think that is likely, but it would be a way to nominate a better candidate—that is, one better qualified to be President of the United States.

Click on Some Signs G.O.P. Establishment’s Backing of Romney is Tenuous for Nate Silver’s reasoning in his FiveThirtyEight web log and column.

Click to enlarge

I’m highly critical of President Obama’s record.  But in fairness, I ought to acknowledge the President’s achievements.   These achievements are real, even though some of them have to be qualified with an asterisk (*).

• President Obama’s economic stimulus program has apparently helped the economic recovery along.  (*The current economic recovery has been weaker than most post-World War Two recoveries, and it will take a long time to get back to pre-recession conditions, which were none too good to begin with.  Nevertheless, the Obama stimulus program was enacted over Republican resistance to doing anything at all, so the President deserves some credit.)
• President Obama stuck to his promised timetable for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq. (*Non-combat troops and armed U.S. contractors remain in Iraq, and the Obama administration probably would have kept combat troops in Iraq if the Iraqi government had agreed to give them extraterritorial privilege.  Nevertheless, the President did what he promised to do, and he deserves credit.)
• The new Defense Department budget calls for a reduction in force and a slowdown in growth in military spending, a necessary step to bring overall federal spending under control.  (*Spending will remain above pre-9/11 levels, and spending will increase on Special Forces and unmanned weapons, thereby increasing the President’s power to wage secret wars.  Nevertheless, this is a politically difficult action.)
• The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit to uphold the right of private citizens to make video recordings of police in the performance of their duties.  As Radley Balko wrote on The Agitator, this is a big deal.  Video evidence is usually the only evidence of police abuse of power except the unsupported word of the victim.  Now, the initiative for this may have come more from Attorney-General Eric Holder than from the President himself, but Obama still deserves credit.  No asterisk here.

Click on Pentagon budget set to shrink next year for the Washington Post’s report on President Obama’s proposed military budget.

Click on DOJ Urges Federal Court to Protect the Right to Record Police for background on this lawsuit.

The Obama administration also deserves credit for the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy toward gays in the military, and for compiling and distributing objective data to physicians on the effectiveness of different forms of medical treatment.  None of this, however, outweighs President Obama’s record on war, civil liberties and pandering to Wall Street.

Click on President Obama and his liberal critics for my case against President Obama.

The chart at the top of this post shows that the decline in U.S. jobs has stopped since President Obama took office.  On the other hand, the recovery in jobs is not enough to regain what has been lost and keep up with population growth.   And the charts below show that the current economic recovery has been weaker than average in all respects except exports and corporate profits.

Double click to enlarge

In the normal course of events, recessions are followed by recoveries.  I’m not smart enough to say how much the current recovery, or its strength or weakness, is due to the President and Congress, and how much is due to the swings of the economic cycle.   I think the best way to stimulate the economy is for the government to invest in things that the country needs anyway, such as repair and replacement of the nation’s deteriorating physical infrastructure, scientific and technical research and maintenance of governmental services on the state and local levels.   President Obama deserves some credit for attempting to do this to a modest extent, against the opposition of Republicans in Congress.

Note:  I originally began this post which I realized couldn’t possibly be correct.  So I deleted it, and combined with post with a post with more correct (or at least more plausible) information.

Click on Regulations Protect Us for an explanation (sort of) of this sign on Radley Balko’s The Agitator web log.

Human beings are amazing.

Hat tip to Stellar Interesting.

I’m not sure that the casual Internet user fully appreciates the true Internet “golden age” we are experiencing right now.  I mean consider it – we can access information, from any country, about any subject, at any time – with a few strokes of the keyboard.  If that’s not monumental to you, then you don’t fully appreciate the greatest thing to happen to mankind, perhaps ever.  It’s true and completely free, almost instant, multi-source, discussed – knowledge.

Perhaps never has a population been so connected and so empowered.  We no longer have to accept what the media or our own government tells us.  We have instant access to blogs and websites coming from multiple perspectives (even the perspective of the “enemy”) that can paint almost a crystal clear picture of the world that we live in.  You can be more culturally knowledgeable in an evening in your living room than most of mankind was in their entire lives.  This is true power.

Revolutions can be formed, fueled, and organized in moments.  Underfunded and disperse – ideas have power like never before.  All because of this network we have created that spans the earth.  Yet, we think that shopping on Amazon.com or checking our email is the real gift the Internet has provided us.  Don’t let your apathy fool you into believing the Internet and its users aren’t more important than that.  The information we have at our fingertips, no matter how we use it, is power – and Governments all over the world know it.

It’s about control.  How long do you really think this modern day wild west is going to last?  Do you honestly believe that no one is going to try to control the most powerful invention ever created?  How long do you really think you will be able to freely access websites that promote anti-government or even terroristic ideas?  How long do you think sites that offer free music and movie downloads will be able to run?  What about those sites that appose the Government or suggest that we overthrow it?  Will those last?  It won’t be long before the Government says it should be controlled – all to “protect Americans” from things like terrorism and child pornography.

via BlogTruth.

Although the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Internet Privacy Act are now on hold, John C. Dvorak, a columnist in PC Magazine, thinks it is only a matter of time before the United States government imposes the same controls over the Internet that the Chinese and Iranian governments have.

Instead of the free global Internet as we know it, John Dvorak says, the world will come to be divided into regulated national Internets.

In the future, all sites will be subject to immediate takedown orders. You can count on it.  You can just see this trend moving forward with very little resistance.  Nobody, especially in the U.S., wants to face the political implications of any of this.  We just trust our officials to an extreme.  …

Watch over the next few years as the idea of a national Internet evolves from a tool used to suppress opposition to a good idea whose time has come.  Yes, this will be sold as a great new idea.

It will be the way we can protect ourselves from alien sites that recruit homegrown terrorists and bomb makers.  It will stop offshore piracy web sites from ruining our movie and record industry.  It will block international child pornography rings from making [in]roads into our nation.  It will keep al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan from easily communicating with terrorist cells in the U.S., probably preventing another 9/11.  It’s a clear winner.

It will also have other benefits.  It will protect the nation from spying Chinese eyes.  It might prevent the cyber war that everyone is fretting about.  If it is a closed system, then any attack has to take place from within and that’s easier to catch.  I’m telling you, I can explain for days why this is a great idea.  I’m almost convincing myself.

I can assure you that it will take very little effort to convince Congress and the public that a national Internet in the U.S. is brilliant.  Then, see what happens next. Complete government control.  You won’t like it, but it will be too late.

via PCMag.com.

Based on the intensity of the U.S. government’s responses to various uses and abuses of the Internet, the real concern is less terrorism or child pornography or even intellectual property than to put a stop to organizations such as WikiLeaks, which threaten government power by undermining the power of secrecy.  The U.S. government and its allies have succeeded in effectively shutting down WikiLeaks, which is now putting all its efforts into fund-raising to overcome the government-organized financial blockade.  Obviously they want to prevent WikiLeaks from being revived or imitated.

Sometimes I hope to live long enough to be proved wrong about things like this.  Other times I’m glad I probably won’t live long enough to be proved right.

Click on WikiLeaks for updates on that organization’s status.

Click on Why SOPA Is Dangerous for a computer programmer’s analysis of the Stop Internet Piracy Act.

]]> http://philebersole.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/the-golden-age-of-the-internet/feed/ 0 philebersole caution censorship-h http://philebersole.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/on-the-internet-nobody-knows/ http://philebersole.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/on-the-internet-nobody-knows/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:26:12 +0000 philebersole http://philebersole.wordpress.com/?p=20371 ]]>

This is the second anniversary of this web log.  I owe it to my friend David Damico, who pointed how that web hosting services such as WordPress are free, and that no technical knowledge is needed to start a web log.  If I had realized that before, I would have started a web log years ago.

The father of the today’s food stamp program was George McGovern, a liberal Democratic Senator from South Dakota who is remembered for running for President in 1972 in opposition to the Vietnam War, and being defeated in a landslide by Richard M. Nixon.  He and Senator Robert Dole, a conservative Republican Senator from Kansas, co-sponsored the Food Stamp Act of 1977, which establishes the food stamp program in its present form.

An experimental food stamp program existed during the Great Depression, and a food stamp program was revived during the Great Society era.  First the government gave away surplus food, such as cheese.  Then there was a program for poor people to buy their own food, using government stamps that could be bought for less than the face value.  The problem with that was that some Americans were too poor to afford food stamps.  Even with food stamps, malnutrition and even starvation existed in the United States.  This was addressed  by Senator McGovern’s and Dole’s bill, which gave the food stamps to any eligible family.   This is an achievement to be proud of.

I remember back in the 1990s when Newt Gingrich talked about “McGovernite” morality.  He and McGovern, make an interesting contrast.  George McGovern served his country bravely in wartime, married and was faithful to his college sweetheart, never took drugs and was respected even by his political opponents.  Newt Gingrich avoided military service, cheated on at least two of his three wives and was despised even by his political allies.  But Gingrich had the audacity to set himself up as an arbiter of morality, and there were people who took him seriously.

Click on Newt Gingrich’s Dodgy Attack on Food Stamps for comment from Business Week.