The charitable explanation, which this article seems to imply, is that he suddenly discovers how important these programs are and how much is at stake.
The less charitable explanation, since it's hard to believe he fundamentally agrees deep down with these programs, is that he is just another politicians and the guaranteed political fallout from surveillance and drones was far less than the catastrophic career-ending political fallout from a major terrorist attack (after dismantling surveillance programs). He chose the option that he thought would give him a second term (and then a gold plated public speaking career after the White House).
I would say his gambit paid off. The right would never love him, the left had no one else and in any case they had fallen so deeply in love with the Idea of him.
A more reasonable explanation is that irrespective of what he might /want/ to do, he doesn't actually have sufficient power to do anything about the actions, assuming he's actually being accurately briefed on the matter.
It's probably more a symptom of how absolutely useless and ineffective at doing anything than consuming money to be elected for corporate interests the US congress has become.
I think at this point I might actually be better served by having representatives and senators selected at /random/ from the entire populace.
Don't knock that approach - it's known as Sortition ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition ) and I'm personally convinced that it's a much better way of achieving democracy than any other.
I would like an approach where we randomly select "electors". They are sequestered, listen to the arguments of the candidates, hold several election rounds and finally come out with he elected officials. Like a jury. They would be dismissed after that.
Thanks; glad to know the name for this practice. It'd be a huge improvement over the popularity contest we have now.
In fact, it's probably the ideal way to promote anyone in any setting. I'd make a few small adjustments, however. Rather than random selection, I'd like the pool of candidates to be reviewed by their peers and scored for ability, creativity, fairness, leadership -- whatever skills are appropriate in their realm. Then I'd like to see some sort of weighting applied to the random choice that favors the "best and the brightest" over the bottom dwellers.
And it goes without saying... no campaigning or re-election.
It's easy to fall in love with a political system that's never been tested at the United State's scale. My guess is, if we implemented sortition, a few unsavory things would happen:
(1) The Republican and Democrat parties would just switch their efforts to getting people excluded from the random drawing, much as they currently aim to include or exclude people from voting.
(2) After selections, the losing party would attack the random selection process.
(3) Assuming the selection is allowed to go through without objection, the random person would be under the same duress that elected candidates have to accept bribes and kickbacks.
(4) It's possible that the average citizen would be more prone to reap their rewards during their short term in office, rather than someone who's mindful of their full career.
I'm guessing you're just being flippant out of cynicism against the current system, but I'm a little over that line of thinking.
Two-party systems are the inevitable product of a First-Past-The-Post voting in a democracy[1]. There would be no Democratic and Republican party under a sortition system.
Not quite. rdancer's saying that the options people have to choose amongst/between are a consequence of how their votes are counted. Proportional representation tends toward a larger number of parties; first-past-the-post tends toward two. And "tends toward" can be read as "definitely leads to" in the case of fpp.
Think it through to the logical conclusion: What is a political party? How did it come to be what it is now? What happens when a political party loses popular support?
>My guess is, if we implemented sortition, a few unsavory things would happen:(1) The Republican and Democrat parties would just switch their efforts to getting people excluded from the random drawing, much as they currently aim to include or exclude people from voting.
Well, abolish the parties too then. It's just citizens.
If you pass a law forbidding them to have formal legal presence as an organization, you can. Social cliques are OK, it's the formalizing that makes it worse.
I'd abolish lobbies as official entities if it was up to me too.
They existed as social cliques before they became official entities and were just as problematic at that point. Political parties didn't really become a bipolar construct we have today until ~1791.
I have seen the same thing. I now firmly believe that most people understand that voting for representatives is a sham, but go along with it either for unstated reasons like tribalism and hero worship, or out of a deep seated misanthropy common to both the left and right wing.
Who is "most people"? Almost 2/3 of voters in midterm congressional elections are over 45--are you really considering a representative pool of people in forming your belief?
The majority of voters have the representatives they want (approval rates for peoples' own Congresspeople are extremely high). If you keep in mind the demographics that bother to vote (my 65 year old mom, but not my 30 year old wife and I), they have the government they want too. My mom is super excited about Hilary and would vote for life imprisonment for drug dealing if anyone put it on a referendum.
We're not nihilists. We see a political process that is broken and throws some peanuts our way to keep the paroles happy. But if you're a potential donor like Lockheed Martin you bill the gov't for a flightless bird
The ACA is less than peanuts, since you have to buy the insurance yourself!
A better thing to do is to randomize 2-3% of votes, which takes away the leverage swing voters have, pushing politicians to make bad deals for the final votes they need to edge out their opponent. This way when a candidate has to sew together segments to get a majority, he worries about larger minority groups and leverage of a tiny-minority doesn't overpower the rest. e.g. the NRA
>It's probably more a symptom of how absolutely useless and ineffective
I truly don't believe this.
Any popular uprising that gets large enough, or loud enough, has the capacity to demand change. Sure, the corporate, moneyed interests will push their agenda as hard as possible to try to sway opinion (which isn't always misaligned with the public good, by the way). But at the end of the day politicians will do what they can to save their jobs. Most of them are just ordinary people, after all.
The fact of the matter is, the story of surveillance was sold to us as, "We're protecting you from another 9/11!", and there are many people who really believe that. It might even be true, who knows. Outside of the technorati in SV and urban centers (who, ironically, created the surveillance system), most people really don't give a damn about their digital privacy. Yet. If or when a sensational story happens that involves the "common man" being boned by surveillance, the tide will shift. I'd put money on it.
I don't really think that's possible, because there is no difference between "the people" and..."the not-people"?
Every time there's any discussion about politics or power, there's the inevitable topic of "us" vs "them". It's always insightful to ask people where they draw the line between the categories of people. Is it all politicians? I mean, is there some secret indoctrination, like Scientology, whereby the minute you reach a certain level in your political career, the "real world" is explained to you? How is it that these secrets are kept?
For many Americans it's the "1%ers" who receive the disdain. That is, until they realize that a significant number of themselves are global 1%ers. I have a personal friend who often rails about the "global elite", meanwhile he is a SMB owner with a multi-million dollar net worth who isn't -- how shall I say it -- especially "diligent" when it comes to offering his low-skill employees the best opportunities.
All this is to say that, yes, often times the incentives of the capitalists and the workers are averse to each other. But "the system" maintains the balance, in that one party can't subjugate the other extremely without personal harm. In other words, "the rich" can't take all the money, because that leaves no demand for product, and eventually "the poor" say @#$% it, and start beheading the royals. At least that's what history tells me.
> It's entirely plausible that some things are "kept safe" from the whims of the people.
In fact, that's the reason that the US is a republic, not a democracy - to keep things (somewhat) safe from the whims of the people, and yet to create a system where, if the people want it enough, they'll get it.
And yes, if the people want it enough, they will in fact get it in the US. It's just that the media amplifies screaming. Those who scream are much more often in the minority than the media makes them appear.
(Don't take this as the beginning of a political debate, that's not what I intend. Just at face value...)
I knew what I was getting when I voted for Obama
I've been wondering about people who felt this way. From my perspective, it appears that people in this situation should be very disappointed, because (it appears to me that) many of the promises weren't delivered. In particular, Obama was quite specific in his criticism of GWB for wars without Congressional approval, yet he himself has done this multiple times now. And one of the themes of his candidacy was to be open and transparent, yet promises like "all legislation will be posted for X days online before I'll sign any bill" didn't even survive a week into his presidency. (these are just two obvious examples, not a complete list)
I can understand why you'd be hopeful going into that. But today, seeing how that's all played out, what are your feelings?
The things that mattered to me were, in Obama's favor: taking a stab at reforming our nation's ultra-shitty health care and winding down the two big disastrous middle east wars (Iraq and Afghanistan). Check and check.
What mattered to me, in opposition of the other guy: Mccain joked about bombing Iran and inflicted Palin on us. (There was probably more at the time, but that was 7 years ago!) Romney actually never seemed like a terrible candidate or politician to me, and in another time I don't think we'd have been so bad off under a Romney presidency, but I still think we were better off for voting in Obama
for a second term.
I'm sure there were a lot of campaign promises I wasn't really paying attention to, and that stuff obviously wouldn't matter to me now.
I also think a lot more can be done at the local level, and to a lesser extent, the state level, in terms of dealing with policies that actually matter in our lives.
For all the talk about federal government intrusion in our day-to-day, I think it's probably 99% bullshit.
It means that the candidate who won was wearing a label that said "change". The label may be unrelated to the contents (or the policies) of the candidate - it may well be more marketing artifact than reality.
The whole electoral process is so flawed and corrupt that a politician wanting to save their job has little to do with voting, and thus little to do with popular demand.
>The whole electoral process is so flawed and corrupt
Again, I don't believe it.
It is flawed? Sure. Can it be improved? Most certainly. But you can't point to a few glaring problems (which I agree, there are) and compare to some hypothetical ideal without acknowledging the many things the political system gets right, as evidenced by America being the richest, most powerful nation in world history.
In any democratic system there will be winners and losers. Just by the sheer number of decisions that are made, you're going to end up on the losing end of many. If you're really unlucky, you might be on the losing side of a ton. From that perspective, I'm sure the process looks terrible. But that doesn't mean it's broken or worthless. In the long-run, things do seem to get done. I think history bears that out. Yes, I'm a long-run optimist on the economy and humanity in general.
"...as evidenced by America being the richest, most powerful nation in world history"
That does not follow. First, if you actually allow that America is the 'richest' and 'most powerful nation', it doesn't prove it's somehow the best democracy, or even a good democracy, or even a democracy at all. It doesn't even prove that it's good at capitalism or corporatism, it just doesn't follow. It's like saying god exists, the prove is in his creation.
The 'glaring problems' are utter failures of democracy; the representatives simply don't represent the will or the interest of the people. Of course the will of the people is bent via media, lack of education, religion, anti-intellectualism and American-History-folklore against their own interests.
But note, some of the systemic issues of the electoral process are, just as examples, the FPTP voting system, the ludicrous campaign financing system, pervasive and completely legal corruption that allows gerry mandering.
The 'hypothetical ideals', i.e. actual democracies, exist in other countries.
America is a great place, with many smart people, and many, many interesting and important contributions to science, technology and culture. But it's governance is a plutocracy at best, and proto-fascism at worst (the original meaning of that word, not the one referring to Nazis). But as long as most rara about the best nation on earth, they'll be happily exploited and nothing changes.
> irrespective of what he might /want/ to do, he doesn't actually have sufficient power to do anything, assuming he's actually being accurately briefed on the matter.
He definitely had enough power, but as steve19 points, he could have estimated that such actions would have probably lowered his chances for reelection.
I disagree. In theory he has enough power, but if you look at how the whole system works, you don't get to become a president if you aren't a) owing a lot of people favours, and b) a kind of person that would be disruptive. If you're the uncontrollable type that would pose the risk to the status quo, you won't be allowed to rise high enough to become a president.
Except this is Obama at the peak of his hope and change moment, he'd just been comprehensively elected as an alternative to the Bush years. This was the perfect opportunity to essentially blame even more things on Bush and even cement his position, this was an opportunity to bury the GOP if he had broken this news. Ironically he was in a position to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize if he had taken action against this, Guantanamo and the CIA torture programme.
Obama didn't have infinite political capital. We was dealing with some pretty heavy things in the aftermath of the stock market crash - stuff that was potentially alienating his own base, while also trying to push through his own legacy change (Obamacare). All of this through his peak popularity. If he had tried to squash the wiretapping then, it likely would have overextended him and saw his health care reforms squashed.
I guess maybe this is an unreasonable comment I'm going to make, but:
Yeah, Obama was low on political capital because he shot most of his wad at Obamacare, which didn't get as far as he wanted it, meaning that he loses political capital for losing relative to his goals. In this weak position, the thing to do is rally more political capital from the base... which he never did.
But that's as far as he went. He's hardly been shouting from the rafters about how America should not be a country which tortures, and especially in the light of the Congressional findings re the CIA's activities I'm amazed there haven't been prosecutions.
Honestly McCain, on this particular issue, would have been a better president.
'The CIA "provided inaccurate information to the White House, Congress, the Justice Department, the CIA inspector general, the media and the American public" about the "brutal" interrogation techniques it used on terrorism suspects, a long-held Senate intelligence committee report finds.'
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/12/09/369562383/...
"I was just following orders" didn't cut it at Nuremberg either. The courts should have been allowed to test whether what they were doing was illegal or not, if it was legal then it is "just" a moral stain on the soul of America.
A Nazi comparison? Really? You think people who tortured terrorists because they believed (even if you don't) it would prevent more attacks are in the same reference class as people who tortured and killed innocent people for far less noble reasons?
Yep - during a time of war people are torturing prisoners, sometimes to death. We executed people for that. People who said they thought what they were doing was justified and / or legal.
I'm sorry but the CIA torturers are war criminals, it doesn't matter about the relative aspect of it - there absolutes.
For the sake of a few thousand people, a fraction of those killed in gun violence for instance, the USA sacrificed any claim to moral superiority and probably created many more terrorists than were ever stopped. Home of the brave indeed.
I'm British, in the military and a massive ally of the USA, but on this issue the lack of contrition exhibited is shameful.
That is a very absurd argument, one I have heard several times in liberal circles. President of United States of America is the most powerful man in the world. He doesn't owe anyone anything. We elect him thinking he will do what he promised and the only retribution for him is that he will either be impeached or not get re-elected.
That's it. That is democracy. Unless he had 'an offer he could not refuse', he is guilty of a lot of betrayal (apart from crimes he can commit from a presidential position).
He is not there to do physics, he has been given power to explicitly do what cannot be done without power. Apologetic my ass.
You did not elect Obama. The major news networks, in combination with the major holders of political and economic powers, did - by allowing you to be aware of a few handpicked candidates, and regulating the stories spinned around them.
If they did not want Obama in office, you would not even have seen his name anywhere on screen or in print.
Democracy in its true form has never existed in history as it is not really sustainable for many kinds of reasons, that all lead to disasters (people tend to vote for what is only good for them short-term leading to long-term losses, too many different groups arguing over X and Y and Z leading to stand-stills, etc).
I'm not saying we have it good right now, but it was for a while (last 150 years). But nothing lasts forever and eventually all systems decline and collapse.
Your 3rd and 4th paragraph are a very poor excuse for this undemocratic system. Other countries are doing much better. But attitudes like this won't get you there.
Out of how many candidates were you selecting? 300 million? Or just a few, with long political careers? You don't get to the point of being an actually electable candidate if you could stir up a real mess within the establishment.
The entire political process is a vetting system to weed out the unreliables and the ones who won't play by the rules.
Also, I have an inkling that the system is a sociopath pass filter; at any level of government the candidate who is slightly more immoral has improved chances. After a few iterations we have power lusting vampires in charge (the Cheneys, Clintons, ect.)
Candidates can and almost all do take an unlimited amount of money from private donors to fund their campaigns, likely in exchange for favourable legislation. Obama gathered $1072.6m like this in 2012. Obama owes his donors big time I would say.
See, I get that. He got a lot of money. But still he doesn't owe them anything. What is going to happen to him if he doesn't deliver to people who paid him that much money? Is he going to get assassinated? Is he going to have legal troubles? As a president he has the option to bypass large chunks of constitution, which in fact is the actual problem here. He is literally above the law.
Well, if he starts the custom of not delivering upon his promises to donors, I could image that the next democratic candidate would have a very hard time finding donors. So I guess the pressure from the party would be very big not to go there.
Which means it will be up to the general populace to ensure the small guy wins. And Obama as a person doesn't believe that.
Now that is the real question here. We as people do not think surveillance is bad. We clap for Batman and worry about Jack Bauer. That is the real insight here.
No, the Green Lantern theory is basically that the public believes the President can do anything and everything he wants, and therefore can follow up on all of their campaign promises.
Meh, as the president, he has control over the direction of the executive agencies, of which the surveillance state has several. The "democracy by lawyer" argument that the article suggests is completely hollow, as leadership that way can't undo past mistakes that were made illegally, such as the Bush dragnet / wars.
Random reps wouldn't work because the public is largely uneducated and malleable to propaganda. Maybe opt-in random with a series of civic examinations would work.
Which raises a fascinating question: Why not say so?
This isn't a rhetorical way of saying that there aren't any. I expect that there are valid reasons to be silent in such a position. although I can't think of what they might be. Perhaps the chances of success in six months seems better if he's silent now than if he talks loudly now? But what could that assessment be based on?
I think being willing to do the job increases chances of success a lot. Also some popular support seems to be indication of reasonable person.
But when you go beyond Dunbar number, seeking popularity turns into game. Then it is matter of playing the game well. Which doesn't necessarily correlate with anything else.
Random selection from people who gathered 100 endorsements should get somewhat good results.
> But recently the Senate again took up legislation that would let the phone companies off the hook. It would also expand the government's domestic spying powers.
> Obama supported an amendment that would have stripped telecom immunity from the measure. But after that amendment failed, Obama declined to filibuster the bill. In fact, he voted for it. It passed the Senate, 69-28, on July 9.
I think the simple explanation here is this: Governments rely on information to function. When you get into a position of power and see the breadth and quality of information provided by digital means, you aren't going to be the one to push to turn that off. I'm talking about all data here of course, not just the NSA et. al. - weather, financial, trade data, so on. However, I think this is even closer to the truth when it comes to clandestine sources of data, since those are more often than not tightly coupled with security.
The point being that all of this just makes logical sense given their (essentially impossible) mission of preventing all future terrorist attacks, whether or not you agree with it from an ethical perspective. It makes an argument against the NSA's methods difficult without hard evidence that threats to the country are either overinflated or could not possibly be stopped without surreptitious methods.
> the catastrophic career-ending political fallout from a major terrorist attack
Any rational person would consider preventing a major terrorist attack far more important than keeping their job for four years. People with the opposite motivation do exist, but generally I'd consider them pretty close to evil. Someone like that would probably have had a different 2 terms to Obama, in my opinion.
It's not clear that these surveillance programs actually help stop terrorist attacks, just that if one did happen after Obama stopped them it'd be a career-ending move because it'd be perceived to be his fault.
And if the system selects the non-rational power hungry by design?
Elections are cutthroat, and to become president you have to have won many of them. It could be argued that an evil person has slightly better of odds of getting through. Raise that to the power of the half dozen elections needed to become president and you end up with Cheneys, Hilarys, and the like...
There seems to be a massive flaw in this logic in that it could be used to justify almost anything.
For example, it would be more important for President Obama to forcibly make a large portion of private industry to work on a super laser to defend against alien invasions, because alien invasions would cause more political fallout than not defending against them.
This is the mental problem with forecasting black-swan events, then basing your strategy on the outsized risk of those events. You can end up justifying insane behavior due to an event you have convinced yourself will happen, even if the odds are infinitesimal.
> The less charitable explanation, since it's hard to believe he fundamentally agrees deep down with these programs,
I thought the article was arguing that he in fact did agree with those programs so long as they had a sound legal basis. In criticizing the Bush surveillance programs, people complained that they were (i) bad and (ii) illegal. The article argues that Obama thought that once (ii) was fixed, his work was done.
The NSA is part of the executive branch. Obama controls the executive branch. Reining in NSA powers is effectively giving up some of his own powers, something that people rarely do.
Most people do not walk away from power. George Washington and Cincinnatus were rare exceptions, and not at all the norm.
This is basically how the "whip" system works in British politics.
There is an actual official post in the party called "Chief Whip". [1]
In the original series "The House of Cards" from the BBC in the 1990's [2], Ian Richarson plays the chief whip. Whilst his primary role is officially supposed to be the formal request of party members to attend votes, he is busy collating secret dossiers on the various party member's dubious personal lives that (when required) can be used as leverage against them.
The NSA bulk surveillance programs are this system in automatic overdrive. The enable the powerful (who control these systems) to abuse and corrupt democracy. The only "safeguards" being a secret court, with secret judgements by judges that can also be corrupted.
I'll give the NSA and the US one thing. They appear to give (at least) lip service to the idea of privacy of American citizens. In the case of the UK, the government is desperate to monitor it's own citizens' internet activities first and foremost. What's sad is that the UK public have pretty much passed the point of no return.
In the American version too, that's the protagonist's role - the Majority Whip. In practice, in both the American and British systems, the Whip's actual power springs not from blackmail but from the more prosaic threat to withhold party support for a candidate's reelection.
What makes the British Whips (and party discipline in general) so much more powerful is that in the UK, candidates are almost completely dependent on their party for campaign financing. By contrast, in the US a candidate usually gets campaign donations directly from supporters, so a competitor from the same party supported by the party establishment is less likely to win. This is why, for example, the Tea Party in the US took the form that it did (insurgent candidates competing in primaries against the establishment's choice), whereas in the British system equivalent grassroots insurgencies are all-or-nothing affairs that target the central decision-making bodies and leadership of the party (think Jeremy Corbyn).
This is probably the case, given whistleblower Russ Tice stating that the NSA had a file on Obama during his senatorial campaign and senate career. This was in the early 2000s.
The only question is whether they use this kind of information to get what they want. I'd say they probably do, via the axiom that power corrupts. This also explains why people like Clapper and (now ret.) Gen. Alexander can go into a congressional inquiry, lie to the panel's faces, be caught in the lie at the time or later, and still keep their jobs.
Since the NSA increasingly knows everything about everyone, it is only a question of time until they will be able to blackmail just about anyone. How politicians, who are naturally especially vulnerable in that department, can let this cancer grow unchecked, is beyond me.
Perhaps you've answered your own question. If the NSA knows everything about those that might oppose it, how could compromised politicians possibly hope to succeed in reducing those powers, unless they were willing to become potential martyrs?
John Edgar Hoover did this with the FBI almost 100 years ago. Why would it have stopped? There's no reason for them to have stopped blackmailing folks. In fact there are several buildings bearing his name in DC
> An important meeting with Obama was scheduled to begin in the Situation Room at half past noon on Friday, February 6, 2009. Officials who had been asked to participate gathered around the conference table waiting to brief the new president. He was late
> The officials were there to tell Obama about secret surveillance programs—including the fact that the National Security Agency was collecting Americans’ domestic phone records in bulk.
Funny... that was about 3 years before he denied the Feds were collecting anything. And then corrected himself to admit they were collecting metadata.
This reads like historical fiction. I can't imagine that Charlie Savage attended the meeting. But he says nothing about his source(s). Maybe the book does. Nevertheless, the style strikes me as odd.
After reading the book:
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.
I truly believe that the president (and maybe more so this president) is simply a figure head. Being surrounded by people of strong character he's been unable to be a commander and instead became someone with nice rhetoric.
This lawyerly approach to government had some surprising
consequences for civil libertarians
To those who were unhappy with the overreach of the Bush administration, I would remind them that lawyers gave us the Dred Scott decision. It was an executive order that ended slavery in the United States.
which other elected leader of a western-style country has ended any kind of surveillance?
realpolitik is far more messier than lofty moralism, the US never had a clean slate, ever. just like any other country.
and for the posters bitching about the sham democracy in the US - right, but still people are dying in other countries to achieve just of a fraction of the freedom, safety and liberty present in the USofA.
if elections changed anything they would be banned, right?
which they ARE, in a lot of places on earth.
as long as a president here is limited to two terms the systems works. erdogan, putin, see for other places where this core principle gets violated and what it does to the system.
The less charitable explanation, since it's hard to believe he fundamentally agrees deep down with these programs, is that he is just another politicians and the guaranteed political fallout from surveillance and drones was far less than the catastrophic career-ending political fallout from a major terrorist attack (after dismantling surveillance programs). He chose the option that he thought would give him a second term (and then a gold plated public speaking career after the White House).
I would say his gambit paid off. The right would never love him, the left had no one else and in any case they had fallen so deeply in love with the Idea of him.