Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Edward Snowden is no whistleblower and should “come back and face the music”.
Taking care to stay on the right side of government to preserve his access to the mighty, Fareed Zakaria, said on his Sunday “GPS” television program that Edward Snowden “is no hero” because “he has tried by every method possible to escape any judgment or punishment for his actions”. He cited Gandhi and Nehru, who had been imprisoned, and Daniel Ellsberg who “did not hop on a plane to Hong Kong or Moscow”, who instead “stood trial and faced the possibility of more than a hundred years in prison”. On the program and in his Time magazine column, he then went on to say how “shocked” Americans are “by the revelation that the U.S. government is collecting massive quantities of their digital signatures – billions of phone calls and e-mails and Internet searches”.
It is an ambiguity which Zakaria shares with others who effectively thank Snowden for bringing us the truth of government spying on our lives all these years behind our backs, but who then curiously conclude that to become a hero he must spend the rest of his life in prison.
When Snowden contemplated what he would do after releasing documents to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, he had before him the record of the Obama administration, which has conducted “unprecedented” surveillance of journalists and has prosecuted more federal employees under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined. Previously used only three times by all presidents since its enactment in 1917, Obama has wielded it six times and Snowden now makes it seven.
If it were possible in today’s climate to “face the music” in the expectation of a trial where Snowden’s criminality of releasing classified documents would be fairly weighed against the criminality of the NSA going well beyond the letter and intent of the laws in violation of the Constitution, then Snowden seems to be the sort who would very likely want to challenge the system on home turf.
But the home country has changed, and Snowden is fully aware. Daniel Ellsberg was acquitted. He had turned over to The New York Times in 1971 thousands of pages of documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers which said the Vietnam War could not be won, contrary to the lies of the Johnson administration. Given the Obama administration’s vengeful pursuit of whistleblowers and journalists, it is unimaginable that Snowden would have any chance of acquittal. Symptomatic of our much changed view of government, there is even open speculation that if Snowden manages to reach a South American country that has offered asylum, Obama might have him assassinated, as he did with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen living in Yemen.
If that seems exaggerated, just ask Ellsberg. “I see Edward Snowden as someone who has chosen, at best, exile from the country he loves — with a serious risk of his assassination by agents of his government or life in prison (in solitary confinement) — to awaken us to the danger of our loss of democracy to a total-surveillance state,” Ellsberg said. Snowden did not follow Ellsberg’s path because he saw what was happening to others who dared report on the malefactions of this government.
Snowden saw the treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, imprisoned in its most brutal form, solitary confinement, for a year, a total of two years by the military before he was finally brought to trial. And now the judge in the trial has declined to dismiss the most serious charge that Manning “aided the enemy” merely by making documents public and available to “the enemy” without any proof of just how an enemy was aided and which enemy. How does that differ from any information reported by any journalist in the media?
Snowden was certainly aware of how the government treated Thomas Drake. A former employee of the NSA, Drake told a reporter from the Baltimore Sun of the government’s intention to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to an outside vendor to develop data mining software instead of using an internal product that cost far less and was less invasive of privacy. Even this was classified. For this attempt to save taxpayers’ money, Drake was looking at 35 years in prison. The case was so weak that the government settled for a face-saving misdemeanor charge but Drake had been fired, had lost his pension and was ruined financially by legal costs.
Snowden certainly knows that John Kiriakou sits in jail for accidentally revealing to a reporter the names of two still-active CIA agents whom he thought had left the service. No consideration was given to Kiriakou, a former CIA agent himself, who had risked his life in the service of his country (unlike this president, might we point out?). Kiriakou, in the midst of a bloody shootout in Pakistan, stormed a house, captured a badly wounded man, and sent a cell phone photo of his ear to identify his captive as Abu Zubaydah, a prize catch in the early moments of war against al Qaeda in 2002. So why the vengeful treatment of a man who we routinely think of as a hero? Because those two agents had been involved in waterboarding interrogations, and the Obama administration sees fit to keep the lid on Bush administration violations of international law and what have for the U.S. have become the quaint Geneva Conventions. The Obama Justice Department has never prosecuted anyone for waterboarding prisoners, yet it sent Kiriakou to prison for 30 months for exposing witnesses to a reporter. “In truth, this is my punishment for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program and for telling the public that torture was official US government policy”, he said in a letter just recently sent from prison.
Snowden also sees what the Obama administration is doing to thwart his applications for asylum in other countries. The U.S. pressured three European countries to block the airspace of the flight home of a sovereign country’s head of state, Evo Morales of Bolivia, followed by Vice President Joe Biden’s calling the leaders of other South American countries to dissuade them of offering asylum. “There is not a country in the hemisphere whose government does not understand” that helping Mr. Snowden “would put relations in a very bad place for a long time to come”, a senior State Department official was quoted as saying by The New York Times. Snowden must be asking why he should sacrifice himself to his country when it has used these bullying tactics against him, jettisoned its own constitutional safeguards and cast aside international laws that it now finds inconvenient.
There’s a theory that Americans are savvy enough about government that they vote for a legislature in opposition to the president, a kind of populist check and balance scheme to make sure that no one side runs away with the country. And so we have a Democratic president; a Democratic majority in the Senate, hemmed in by the strange filibuster rule that now requires 60% to pass anything; and a Republican-controlled House that sees to it that nothing that the president wants goes forward.
They haven’t heard about that theory in North Carolina. Republicans took control of both houses of the legislature in 2010 for the first time in a hundred years. Gerrymandering had seen to it that Democrats have been corralled into few enough districts not to matter, so voters finally achieved one-party rule when they swept Republican Pat McCrory into the governorship in the 2012 election.
self-sufficiency
In short order this triumvirate set about cutting maximum unemployment benefits from an average of about $300 a week by a third, and shortening eligibility from 26 weeks to as few as 12, expected to affect some 170,000 people by year-end. What makes that all the more extraordinary is that reducing benefits makes the state ineligible for $700 million in federal aid in a state with the fifth highest unemployment rate in the nation, hovering around 9%. The effect of the cuts is to have the unemployed themselves return the $2.5 billion the state owes to Washington for past unemployment borrowings, and only because the state wants to retire the debt three years sooner.
Now in its 14th week, a Moral Monday crowd of 5,000 emerged in Asheville, at the western corner of the state opposite from the state capital in Raleigh. North Carolina is also one of the states that has refused to expand Medicaid, turning away the Obamacare program that would have paid for 100% of the expansion in the early years and 90% thereafter.
As for the state’s wealthier residents, Republicans in the legislature want to cut their income taxes and raise sales taxes, already nearly 7% on most items. North Carolinians even pay a 2% tax on food.
dumbing down
The jobs problem will worsen with the state’s plan to spend less on schools than it spent in 2007, regardless of a growing population. Services to disabled children are being cut back and 10,000 pre-kindergarten slots are slated for elimination, despite a growing realization among educators and social scientists that a low learning environment in those earliest years results in a cognitive gap that is never overcome in later years. Extra pay for teachers with masters degrees will be cut and limits on class size will be eliminated.
aborting abortions
The state assembly has passed an anti-abortion law that would call for doctors to be on hand for all abortion drug doses and require clinics to match the same standards as surgical centers, either of which would have the desired effect of forcing clinics to close shop. The state senate passed its own bill, rushed through in 24 hours under the cover of the July 4th holiday. It was tacked on as an amendment to an unrelated bill regulating motorcycles and banning Sharia Law.
Governor McCrory made a campaign pledge that he would not sign any law that curbs access to abortions. But he was lying. He just signed the bill. To make protesters outside the governor’s manse forget their anger, he came out of the gate with a plate of cookies.
let executions proceed
The state has repealed its Racial Justice Act, the first in the country passed only four years ago, and now being emulated elsewhere. It gave death row inmates an opening to lessen their sentences if racial discrimination — typically the disproportionate removal of blacks from the jury panel by prosecutors during voir dire — could be proved.
The state is on the verge of ending public funding of judicial elections, which every candidate for the state’s supreme court and court of appeals opted for in last year’s elections. That will leave judicial candidates to rely in the future on contributions of attorneys and special interest groups looking for favorable future rulings.
ballot box barriers
No sooner had the U.S. Supreme Court hobbled the Voting Rights Act that for certain counties in North Carolina required prior approval by the Justice Department of any changes to voting laws, than the legislature moved to change the laws for the full state. To vote will require a document with a photo (“of a white man”, said one wag), but state IDs issued to those receiving financial assistance will not be accepted, a high percentage of them being African-American, nor will student IDs qualify, they being a liberal-leaning bloc at election time. In a move that hopes to deter students from voting at all, the plan is to end a family’s tax deduction for their dependents if student sons or daughters vote at college instead of at home.
The bill trims early voting by a week, ends same-day registration, ends straight-party voting, increases contribution limits, allows secret money to influence elections, and bans voting on Sundays, an after-church tradition for blacks.
The legislature has passed a number of bills that take from cities control of their own facilities, examples being Asheville’s water systems, its airport, and Charlotte’s airport as well. David Swindell, who teaches public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, says “these changes amount to an unprecedented attack on the state’s cities, which happen to be home to many of the state’s Democrats”. Governor McCrory was mayor of Charlotte before moving to the governorship, but has turned his back on his no longer needed power base.
There’s even a proposal to declare a state religion (and you can guess which one) in violation of the Constitution’s establishment clause.
The state is making a “powerful comeback” says McCrory. All these “tough decisions” are “problem-solving”, a phrase he uses three times in a short letter to the critical New York Times that addressed none of the above issues. “Already companies have announced plans to create more than 9,300 jobs in the state and invest more than $1.1 billion in facilities“, renewed prosperity that begs the question of why the need to slash the quality of life so drastically?
The changes have spawned a new institution in North Carolina: “Moral Mondays”, the weekly demonstrations of growing crowds in the capital, Raleigh, that have been assembling for months and are spreading to other cities. As of this writing, 925 citizens have been arrested. The movement and the state’s heavy-handed majoritarian upheaval have attracted media attention nationwide.
Given how the Obama administration has prosecuted other whistleblowers, Edward Snowden could not possibly receive a fair trial had he remained in the United States, says the adjacent article.
That’s a failure of foresight, is what David Pozen, a Columbia Law School professor and former State Department lawyer effectively says in an article in Lawfare titled “What Happens When We Actually Catch Edward Snowden?”
First, he points out that a trial might be as “unpleasant” for his captors as it would be for Snowden. It would shine a bright light on the totalitarian tendencies of a secret government that spies on all its people. In court we would hear the prosecution repeatedly make motions to suppress citing “national security” to stifle any further revelations, exposing more publicly than ever just how deep in the shadows our government operates.
Snowden would probably attract top flight lawyers. Eager to take the case pro bono whether for celebrity or probity, they would likely charge that the NSA had far exceeded anything permitted by the laws it claims justify its actions and that it has violated the civil rights protections of the Constitution. The government might find itself more in the dock than Mr. Snowden.
“Journalists would camp out inside”, Pozen says. And we would add that television and print media around the world — all those countries that the U.S. spies on — would fill its hours and pages with daily coverage. In the wake of gavel to gavel coverage of the Zimmerman trial, there would be public outrage over cover-up if the court was pressured by the government to disallow televised proceedings.
In a trial of someone who has exposed government wrongdoing, American hypocrisy would be on flagrant display to a world of countries long subjected to U.S. lectures about their treatment of dissidents. The author points out that the U.S. would undermine its “soft power” against human rights violations by other regimes, who would thereafter point the finger back at us for how we treat our own.
A recent Quinnipiac poll has 56% favoring Snowden’s actions versus 34% saying he is a traitor. Our bet is that the percentage will rise over time in favor of Snowden. And that, the author neglects to add, would produce daily crowds of demonstrators outside the courtroom waving placards for television transmission to the world. “A rogue leaker who comes to be seen by a large number of Americans as a persecuted truth-teller is a serious problem” for the nation’s intelligence gathering policies, says Pozen.
Then there is the question of the jury. Prof. Pozen offers this possibility:
“Even if the judge instructs the jury to set aside its views on the rightness or wrongness of Snowden’s acts, there is no guarantee it will. Jurors might be tempted to acquit Snowden, not because they believe he is factually innocent but because they believe he was morally justified.”
Workers at fast food chains have been rebelling against their low wages. There have been demonstrations and one-day strikes in seven cities against McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell and Domino’s Pizza, with employees typically demanding that wages rise to $15 an hour. The movement is growing and has attracted financial support from unions, even though organizing the nation’s four million fast food workers is not an expressed plan.
In Washington, D.C., Wal-Mart threatened to cancel building six stores when this July the city council passed a “living wage”measure that would require the giant chain to pay wages of $12.50 an hour.
Wal-Mart Wins Again: Sept 11: The D.C. mayor vetoed the bill that would have required Wal-Mart to pay $12.50 an hour calling it a “job-killer”.
Workers are reminded constantly of the huge pay increases awarded the heads of their companies, but have seen no upward movement in their own paychecks for years.
Their plight is now made worse by the growing practice of fast food and other retail businesses putting payroll on plastic cards to save money on printing checks. The research firm Aite Group says that in 2012, dozens of major companies filled 4.6 million payroll cards with $34 billion in 2012 and expects those counts to double by 2017. In order to get their money, workers must pay fees at ATM machines for every withdrawal — as much as $2.25 for out-of-network withdrawals — plus per-purchase fees and $7-$8 penalties if the card is not used actively. Workers unwillingly bear these costs, reducing wages further.
The minimum wage is not a living wage. It comes to $15,080 a year (less if no pay for holidays, sick days, or vacations). Somehow, less than $1,300 a month is supposed to pay for rent, food and clothing for children, light, heat, getting to work — and let’s hope no one gets sick.
McDonalds came in for ridicule for a tutorial on its website titled “Practical Money Skills” that educates its employees how to budget and save money. First step, get a second job. The chain admits that a family can’t live on its wages, even following its budget that assumes monthly expenses of only $600 for rent, $20 for health insurance, and $0 for heat.
disinterested
Congress last passed a bill increasing the minimum wage in 2006, which added increases gradually from 2007 to 2009 leading to today’s $7.25 an hour. As with all past increases, there was no provision to adjust annually for inflation, and the rate continues well below the $10.51 an hour that was the minimum, adjusted for inflation, long ago in 1968. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have broken with the federal government by setting their own minima above $7.25, but the increases are mostly slight, and the highest is $9.19 in Washington State.
And then there’s the minimum wage for workers otherwise paid with tips. Congress has ignored that for 22 years since 1991 when it set the minimum at $2.13 an hour, a period during which Congress gave itself raises 13 times.
President Obama wants to raise the minimum to $9.80 an hour, which, says the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research organization, would lift pay for more than 28 million Americans. There is a bill in Congress, the “Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013,” sponsored by Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.50 per hour, and with automatic increases indexed to inflation thereafter. It has the backing of 104 economists (whom we exempt from our sub-head fatwa) who signed this petition supporting a $10.50 an hour minimum wage.
But until legislators act, they leave on the books a minimum that for a single mother with two kids is $4,000 below what is considered the poverty level. Nevertheless, whenever the issue is raised in Congress, a chorus of business lobbyists descend on the Hill with money and dire predictions of calamitous job losses. They rely on numerous surveys of economists who are avid adherents of Newton’s 3rd law of motion in their chalkboard belief that for every rise in one vector there must be an equal and opposite decline in another. Economists therefore reflexively theorize that a minimum wage’s mere existence, all the worse when there’s an increase in same, must inexorably increase unemployment.
But those are just surveys of opinion, and economists’ opinions tend to align with the dogma of their profession. What count are actual studies.
David Neumark of the University of California and William Wascher, a Federal Reserve Governor, are solidly in the camp that says minimum wage increases cause job loss. They are steadfastly critical that a minimum wage exists at all and their study presents evidence showing that a higher wage will cost some low-skilled workers their jobs while helping those who keep them.
Other studies, especially those done in recent years that have taken different approaches, find minimal effects. Economists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst compared employment levels in contiguous areas with different minimum-wage levels for the 16 years between 1990 and 2006 and concluded in a 2010 paper there are “strong earnings effects and no employment effects of minimum wage increases”, as reported here.
What these studies seem to leave out is that not only have the fast food and big box stores brought down wages at smaller competitors forced to compete, but their own workers are disproportionately reliant on safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid. Taxpayers thus subsidize these chains so they can pay those low wages.
standoff
There are no end of studies arriving at opposite conclusions and it could be argued that they pretty much cancel each other out. The standard counterclaim of opponents of a minimum wage increase — that it causes job losses — seems too pat. How does a businesses continue to operate by shedding workers rather than increasing pay if those employees are needed to keep the business humming? The more plausible claim is that a business may need to raise its prices to keep those employees. But even in major retail chains with a significant labor component, wage increases can be absorbed without major price hikes just they have in the past, witness those restaurant and retail chains having grown bigger than ever.
This group of economists calculates that McDonalds would only need to raise the price of a Big Mac by five cents — a 1% increase — if the minimum wage were raised to $10.50 an hour. A study from UC-Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education calculated that if Wal-Mart raised its average wage from $8.81 to $12.00 an hour, and passed on the cost to consumers, their average shopper would pay only $12.49 extra a year.
Moreover, as with rising tides lifting all boats, a universal minimum wage rise would affect all businesses, such that price increases by one would be matched by others, putting no one at competitive disadvantage.
Economists are equally at odds over what effect minimum wage increases have on the general economy. Those in favor of an increase have the intuitive advantage — minimum earners spend every cent of their paychecks, and economists who as a breed believe every action has a reaction cannot argue that extra money flowing into the economy will have no effect. It might even create jobs. Yet Neumark and Wascher are highly dismissive of that notion.
a cycle of impoverishment
But all the arid studies seem to lose sight of the true subject matter: the lives of humans. Those advocating that the minimum wage be held at today’s $7.25 an hour (or eliminated altogether) would condemn millions to stagnant poverty. Does it make good sense to save the jobs of “some low-skilled workers” at the price of holding everyone else to an unlivable wage? Is it morally defensible that the rest of society should go on enjoying low prices that depend on keeping the low stratum of society at the poverty level? There’s the irony that those who believe the minimum wage should be kept at a minimum tend to be those who decry the expanded ranks relying on food stamps, not wanting to connect cause and effect.
Henry Ford famously believed that he should pay his workers enough for them to buy a Ford, whereas, as Harold Meyerson noted in The American Prospect, those who suppress the minimum wage make sure that workers can afford only Wal-Mart. Stephen Moore, from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, calls Wal-Mart the greatest anti-poverty program ever, lauding the ever-downward cycle of a massive company that pays poverty-level wages so as to provide cheap prices for other poverty-level earners.
Today we have the opposite of Ford in Charles Koch who, in an interview with the Wichita Eagle, said he wants to eliminate the minimum wage altogether because it creates a culture of dependency and keeps people with limited capital from starting their own business.
breaking the mold
In defiance of those major American companies that believe they must pay as little as possible for labor are some other big outfits that have found the opposite. Store chains such as Costco Wholesale, Trader Joe’s and QuikTrip, highlighted in this article, pay an average annual wage in the vicinity of $40,000 to their personnel. In fact QuikTrip, a convenience store chain with 645 outlets in 11 states, pays exactly that plus benefits to entry-level employees.
Costco, which Bloomberg/BusinessWeek called the happiest company in the world in a recent cover story, has spurned Wall Street’s repeated urgings that it cut wages so that the money will be given instead to stockholders. CEO Craig Jelinek says, “I think people need to make a living wage with health benefits. It also puts more money back into the economy and creates a healthier country”. The average Costco employee earned around $45,000 in 2011, according to Fortune magazine, while Wal-Mart’s equivalent, Sam’s Club, pays its sales associates an average of $17,486 per year.
These companies find that paying people a living wage pays off. Costly turnover plunges, and worker diligence increases because they value their jobs more.
Meanwhile, Congress drags its feet. Once and for all, this nation, its minimum wage less than all developed countries with such a law, needs a base living wage; not just an arbitrary number like the $9.00 or $9.80 an hour proposed; a rate arrived at over a few years to allow businesses to adjust, tied to cost indexes thereafter; a wage beneath which no corporation may pay, finally putting an end to the exploitation of an underclass now kept in perpetual penury.
In the U.K.’s The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras revealed as no one had before the extent to which the government spies on the communications of everyone in the U.S. But rather than pursue whether the intelligence agency was trampling the civil rights of the people, or questioning whether Americans at least have every right to know what is done with the data collected about them, the attention immediately shifted to the motives of Snowden and the reporters, and away from whether NSA had violated the Constitution.
It is impossible to reconcile NSA’s nationwide grab of everyone’s data with the laws that it claims support its actions. Yet our most senior legislators sided reflexively with NSA. House Speaker John Boehner called Snowden
“a traitor”. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid equivocated. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “I think it’s an act of treason”. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Snowden should “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”, claiming that “each of these programs is authorized by law, overseen by Congress and the courts, and subject to ongoing and rigorous oversight”, all of which would be disputed or debunked in the days that followed.
President Obama assured us that “every member of Congress has been briefed on this program” and that “Congress is continually briefed on how these [data collection programs] are conducted”. That was patently false. Very few Congress members knew of NSA’s activities, and the committees charged with overseeing the intelligence agencies seemed to have lost control of that assignment. Government figures such as Feinstein seemed to be surprised that the public thinks it should have any say in such matters, that Washington should be left to do as it thinks best.
deflecting attention
Immediately after The Guardian’s first release, Greenwald, with years of experience challenging government secrecy, foresaw that government would attack the messenger:
Ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst’s office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message. That attempt will undoubtedly be made here.
Which is exactly what happened. And the press, for the most part, fell right in step with the government position.
the press eat their own
Journalism is competitive, so instead of celebrating one of their own, the media set about backbiting. Greenwald had just reported the biggest leak of government secrets in history, yet he said that the major concern of The New York Times, New York Daily News and Buzzfeed was some personal matter from ten years prior about which they all e-mailed Greenwald on the same day, the only conceivable purpose being to find a way to discredit him or impugn his character.
With facts in short supply, the press speculated. In a June 24 article, The New York Times wrote
“Two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies, said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.”
The New Yorker quickly followed, citing the Times, saying that Snowden’s usefulness was drained along with his laptops which was “Why China Let Snowden Go”. Other publications, blogs, etc., picked up the story, with little concern that it was based on two unidentified sources who “believed” rather than knew.
On “Meet the Press”, NBC’s Chuck Todd showed no interest in whether NSA’s surveillance is illegal, but demanded to know “how much was [Greenwald] involved in the plot” to expose the NSA? On CNBC, the Times business reporter and commentator, Andrew Ross Sorkin, said “I would arrest him [Snowden], and now I would almost arrest Glenn Greenwald”.
So here were these ostensible journalists choosing to ignore the “big story” they had missed and instead attacking, and even advocating the arrest of, a fellow journalist, or as Greenwald tweeted Sorkin, “Maybe worth discussing the dark irony that someone who works for the NYT (you) is suggesting that journalists be arrested”. Sorkin apologized the next day.
In an attempt to make Greenwald and Poitras partners in a conspiracy, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal tried to turn the question of who paid Hong Kong expenses into aiding and abetting “this well-planned theft” of secrets — secrets that were already stolen before Hong Kong. The dishonest title of the article was “Who Helped Snowden Steal State Secrets?” The answer is no one. Only Snowden was inside NSA. An op-ed writer is not a reporter for the paper, you might point out, but what does it say about the editors who allowed this into the Journal.
Walter Pincus, co-winner of a Pulitzer, no less, at The Washington Postwrote a piece that that had so many faults — pointed out by Greenwald in a scathing reply — that the Post had to run three paragraphs of corrections — and place them unusually above the article to warn readers. Pincus’s objective was to create a broader conspiracy, asking “Did Assange and WikiLeaks personnel help or direct Snowden to those journalists?” Even though Pincus’s beat is national security, he seems to think Greenwald so obscure that Snowden couldn’t possibly have known of him. Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer who quit that practice a few years ago in order to do investigative reporting on surveillance and national security, first for Salon and now The Guardian, is closely followed by those concerned for what the government is secretly doing, certainly known to Snowden and his obvious first choice to approach. But Pincus wanted to wrap his rival journalist in an Assange/Wikileaks conspiracy.
Tom Friedman is fearful that another 9/11 would lead “to the end of the open society as we know it”, which is why he “reluctantly, very reluctantly” (two days after The Guardian” story broke) accepted NSA’a spying as worthwhile. His is a puzzling formulation that says we should sacrifice our civil liberties so as to preserve our civil liberties. Ben Franklin has different advice for Friedman: “They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”.
But it was David Gregory of NBC who topped them all, asking Greenwald in an interview, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime”? Greenwald skewered Gregory in reply (see video). Here was a television personality, who calls himself a journalist perhaps because he once asked a daring question or two back when he sat in the White House stenographer pool, accusing a true journalist of committing the crime of journalism. As Frank Rich, a columnist with New York Magazine, wrote, “Name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he’s covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he’s conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin, or Chuck Schumer”.
access
So we have seen a vivid demonstration of how the press, in order not to lose access to government figures, access that they need to write their stories, learn that they cannot bite those who feed them and gradually become co-opted and even chummy (Bush threw a party for Gregory’s 30th birthday on the campaign plane, e.g.) with those they write about. It is an occupational hazard that can lead to abandonment of the impartiality demanded of good journalism and a diminished enthusiasm to go against those hard-won contacts looking for wrongdoing. Greenwald has over his years of reporting shown no sign of cozying up to the Washington establishment.
semantically squeamish
There was a whole other layer of media timidity in choosing nouns for the principals.
The snooty Times, in possibly a jealous pique at never having been considered by Greenwald for publication of the leaks, at first called him a “blogger”. Greenwald recounts his reasons for bypassing the Times with the story that Bill Keller, then Times executive editor, said in an interview that, unlike Wikileaks, which published whatever it chose, he had gone to the Obama administration ahead of time with the Wikileaks outpourings to ask, in Greenwald’s words, “these are the things we think we ought to publish, do you think we should…and if the U.S. government said ‘you shouldn’t publish this’ or ‘you shouldn’t publish that’, Keller proudly said the Times withheld the material”. Moreover, the Times had held off for a year, at the Bush administration’s request, the 2005 publication of James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s explosive discovery that Bush had authorized wiretapping of all international phone traffic without a warrant.
As for Snowden, there was great hand-wringing over whether to call him a leaker or a whistle-blower. Some said he wasn’t a whistle-blower because he didn’t go through the “proper channels” prescribed by the Whistleblower Protection Act, which would have sent him to the NSA’s inspector general, from which he might never emerge, or to that same Congress that called him a “traitor” and thinks he “should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law”.
Tom Friedman, says he doesn’t “believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower”.
Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, notes, “No one internally, as far as I know, has suggested we use the term ‘whistleblower.’ I prefer ‘source’ or ‘leaker.’”
The Associated Press issued a memo telling reporters to call Snowden a “leaker” rather than a “whistleblower.” In a policy guideline the AP explained, “A whistle-blower is a person who exposes wrongdoing. It’s not a person who simply asserts that what he has uncovered is illegal or immoral”. This is automatic acceptance that NSA’s extravagant “interpretation” of the laws that goes beyond what its congressional authors intended is not illegal.
A whistle-blower, of course, is someone who reports what he or she believes to be wrongdoing, but what we see in the diffident media is a willingness to let the government redefine the word.
The Obama administration finds it essential that all call Snowden a leaker and not a whistle-blower. Otherwise they will have to explain away a contradiction. During his 2008 campaign, Obama set forth an ethics agenda found here, which says under “Protect Whistleblowers”:
“Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government, is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism… should be encouraged rather than stifled…. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government”.
Obama promised change and he certainly changed that pledge: His administration has revoked Snowden’s passport without any due process, bullied three countries to block the airspace of the Bolivian head of state’s flight home, charged whistle-blower Snowden under the Espionage Act, and decided that the international right of asylum no longer applies.
At a time when the United States has slipped to second tier status in so many categories, a time when the nation desperately needs a better-educated workforce, why are we making it as difficult and costly as possible for students to get a college education?
A number of factors, not least of which is the rise of tuition charges by our irresponsible colleges, have created the crushing burden of debt borne by those who wanted a college education. Exacerbating the problem is a whopping 6.8% interest rate on Stafford loans imposed by Congress. That rate may have been defensible at the time, but the wise solons didn’t think to build in flexibility to reflect fluctuations in the market place, so in the new era of 0% interest rates, students and grads are stuck with comparatively usurious interest charges.
Congress’ solution was to cut the rate in half — to 3.4% — for two years running, and kick the can down the road. Once again, we’ve caught up with the can. The year has expired, and Congress went off for a their two week 4th of July vacation, allowing the rate to revert to 6.8% on July 1 for 7.4 million university students. Counting graduates and borrowers from other sources — commercial and government — the debt load has passed $1.1 trillion, the fastest growing of all debt sectors.
many approaches. no agreement
The Republican-controlled House has passed a bill, 221 to 198 on party lines, that Democrats say would raise the cost of loans. The House bill would reset the rate annually to match the future interest rate of the 10-year Treasury note, plus 2.5%. The CBO projects that would come to 5% next year and 7.7% ten years hence. The bill caps the rate at 8.5%.
The President wants certainty. He prefers a fixed rate at the time the student takes down the loan, with a maximum of 10% interest should inflation break out.
The Democrat-controlled Senate wanted to kick the can two years further down the road, simply extending the 3.4% rate again. But close to the deadline, a bipartisan group of five — three Republicans, a Democrat and an Independent — came up with a compromise solution that would peg the rate to the 10-year Treasury note, plus 1.85%. That rate on the Friday before this was written was 2.52%. With the surcharge added, that would make today’s cost of student loans 4.37%. But Democrats and Majority Leader Harry Reid shot that down, and job not done, Congress went off for yet another vacation — their 4th of July lasts a full week. It helps explain why, in the most recent Rasmussen poll, Congress’ approval ratings have dropped to 6%.
Democrats balked because they want a cap — a maximum interest rate to protect student borrowers should inflation run the table. But the real question is, why does the government think of students as a profit center. This op-ed by Lamar Alexander (R-Tn), Tom Coburn (R-Ok) and Richard Burr (R-NC) says that the rate reduction to 3.4% “cost taxpayers nearly $6 billion”, as if it is students’ job to prop up a government that, says the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), will make a profit on student loans of $51 billion this year. That’s more than the profits of ExxonMobil, or of Apple, or the combined profits of the four largest banks. Why are students charged even 3.4% when those banks can borrow from the government at less than 1% and interest rates in general are near the vanishing point?
In the interest of the nation’s future, which needs an educated public, the government should set student loan rates as close as possible to what it costs the government to borrow that money, so that a college loan is no longer a crippling burden. This is social policy; it is not meant to be the government-owned business it has evidently become.
Rookie Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma) had that in mind when she put forth her first bill. It would charge students the same rate as the banks can borrow from the Federal Reserve, currently .75%. It attracted 385,000 signatures from various Internet petitions, but it was another kick of the can that would obtain for only a year, to provide “a window for Congress to find a fair, long term solution”.
So students are caught in Congressional gridlock, this time over seemingly minor differences. Their trillion-plus debt exceeds car loans, credit card debt, and every category other than mortgage loans as the chart shows. This has produced a significant drag on both the economy and the society. Graduates cannot afford to start a family, buy a car, buy a house, even move out from their parents’ home. If they ever do make it to family status, they are likely still to be paying off their government loan when they face paying for their children’s education. Just ask a family with the last name Obama. They say they just finished paying off their student loans nine years ago.
Speaking of corporations, at a time when students desperately need money to start paying off those loans, firms have hugely expanded the practice of paying nothing to summer and post-grad interns, exploiting their need to show some experience on their résumés. Those with wealthier parents have the advantage of being able to take intern assignments, an imbalance that broadens the social gap between themselves and the less privileged. A federal district court judge in Manhattan just ruled that unpaid internships are a violation of the minimum wage law.
the colleges
Student debt is so high because of the venality of our colleges. One faction says the government is to blame for that and should get out of the loan business altogether. The argument is that by the government handing out loans indiscriminately, colleges have found they can raise tuition charges stratospherically. Evan Feinberg of Generation Opportunity, which inveighs against the generations that created the economic problems that the young will inherit, makes the point saying, if the government gave everyone $100 to buy an iPhone, Apple would raise the price because they’d know everyone has $100 to pay for an iPhone. As the ultimate beneficiaries of the loan proceeds, colleges have spent lavishly on amenities, built football stadiums, lured superstar faculty (who often teach hardly at all), and joined what has been called an “arms race” for higher rankings in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Caught in this vortex of tuition extortion, but needing a college education for a job, 94% of students are forced to borrow, Department of Education statistics say. In 1993, half that — 45% of students — borrowed toward earning a bachelor’s degree.
the students
And then there is the student contribution to the problem, with so many believing they have enough intelligence for college yet contradicting themselves by brainlessly signing up for loans with no knowledge of how they will pay for them, and then embarking on a curriculum that confers few employable skills, only to find themselves, once out in the world, under mountainous debt that a lower level paycheck cannot surmount. Currently, nearly 40 million people owe an average of $26,000 after graduation, with every year’s interest on the unpaid portion greatly increasing the ultimate obligation. No surprise that average default rate is 11.7% and rising.
But the average masks the much greater problem of for-profit colleges. Wall Street has rushed to invest in them, infatuated by their steep course charges and their hard sell tactics which have led to 57% of their graduates owing more than $30,000, versus 25% of the graduates of non-profit private colleges owing that much. That partly explains why their loan payment default rate runs to 23% — double the average and half of all defaults. The other explanation is that employers don’t think much of the for-profit schools. and do not recognize the certificates of most of the 2,000 “schools” that entrepreneurs have rushed to create.
The worst cases are the dropouts. At the for-profit colleges, few complete to take a degree. The all too easily government money is wasted for its lack of qualifying criteria. Only 9% of students who sign up for Phoenix, for example, the one that spends heavily to advertise its alleged success stories on television, stay to earn a degree. The dropouts come away with nothing but their debt, little means of repaying it, and may someday discover that, because this is taxpayer money, not even bankruptcy gets rid of it.
