When Britain’s GCHQ and the American NSA, they wanted to intercept video so they could use facial recognition software to identify enemies of the state. Turns out they might need genital recognition software as well. Here’s my cartoon for ANewDomain.net.
Grandiosity comes standard when you’re a third-generation 1%er like venture capitalist Tim Draper. Among other things, the dorky 55-year-old claims to have invented viral marketing. (Whatever.) He founded a non-accredited “Draper University of Heroes” for aspiring entrepreneurs, based in part on Hogwarts. He’s a right-wing Republican who voted for Obama.
Draper’s latest foray into the political arena is a ballot initiative that, if he garners the required 807,000 signatures, will ask voters this November to do for the Golden State what the 1990s did to Yugoslavia — split California into six states. (This is his second dance. Voters rejected his mandatory school vouchers proposition in 2000. )
“California as it is is ungovernable,” Draper says. “It is more and more difficult for Sacramento to keep up with the social issues from the various regions of California. With six Californias, people will be closer to their state governments, and states can get a refresh.”
Actually, the result wouldn’t be six Californias. It would be six pieces of what used to be California:
San Diego + Orange County = “South California”
L.A. + Santa Barbara = “West California”
Bakersfield + Fresno + Stockton = “Central California”
San Francisco + San Jose = “Silicon Valley”
Sacramento = “North California”
Eureka + Redding metro = the awesome, totally not broke, new state of “Jefferson”
Is Draper’s measure a good idea? I don’t know. What I do know is that the arguments Draper makes in favor of balkanization make zero sense. Whatever the merits of his splitsville scheme, it’s scary to endorse anything ginned up by such a messy mind.
Consider these excerpts from Draper’s recent interview with Time. They make fellow right-wing multimillionaire Donald Trump look levelheaded in comparison:
We now spend the most and get the least. We spend among the most for education and we’re 46th in education. We spend among the most for prisons, and we are among the highest recidivism rates … So the status quo is failing. And there have been some very good people running California, governing California. So it must be systemic. At best, the system seems to be on a spiral down. At worst it’s a monopoly, and in a monopoly, they can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service they want. In a competitive environment, people get good service and they pay fair prices.
If California’s current woes are “systemic” — i.e., the result of California’s current size — why didn’t the same system “spiral down” during the state’s postwar boom years?
Draper says the state is a “monopoly” that “can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service they want.” To the extent that that’s true — just like businesses, governments are subject to constituent/customer pressure — it’s true of all governments. It’s not like drivers in West California will pay lower fees for their drivers licenses by picking them up in South California — or that South California would have any incentive to offer lower fees, i.e., compete.
You know how everything looks like a nail when you’re a hammer? When you’re a VC, everything looks like a business. But states aren’t businesses and people aren’t just consumers.
We don’t have to look far for examples of states whose capitals are closer to their citizen. New England is already divvied up into tiny states. “Our government will be more in touch with our individual constituents” if California breaks into smaller parts, says Draper. If he’s right, the New England states should be a shining beacon of governance. But they’re not. They’re just average.
There’s just no evidence that efficient or responsive service is related to a state’s size. History, resources and luck are the real determinants.
By most standards, Vermont and Massachusetts offer better services to their citizens than Maine or New Hampshire (not to mention livelier job markets). But they’re not “competing” against each other. Why don’t we see an exodus of former Mainers to Vermont? People who stay in Maine stay there because they like it. They grew up there. Their families are there. They dig the lobster rolls. Whatever. They’re not going to move to Massachusetts just to get Romneycare.
The strongest argument for Six Californias is that we are not well-represented. The people down south are very concerned with things like immigration law and the people way up north are frustrated by taxation without representation. And the people in coastal California are frustrated because of water rights. And the people in Silicon Valley are frustrated because the government doesn’t keep up with technology. And in Los Angeles, their issues revolve around copyright law.
Copyright law. Yep, that’s what all Angelenos care about. Who could ever forget the Intellectual Property Riots of 1992? Brother against brother, PC vs. Mac, VHS vs. Beta. Brrrrr.
Seriously, though, doesn’t Draper know that the federal government, not the state, has jurisdiction over border control? Tech regulations, the Internet — that’s the feds too. And copyright.
If the “strongest argument” in favor of breaking up California is to address issues that states don’t control…well, don’t make me say it.
Draper adds: “I’ve noticed that the people most adamant about creating their own state or being a part of their own state are the poorest regions, and in the current system, they are not happy, because it is not working for them. So if they had their own state, I believe all of those states would become wealthier.”
By Draper’s reasoning, Mississippi and Alabama — the nation’s poorest states — should split apart too. They’d all become wealthier, right?
As long as logicians like Tim Draper walk the earth, political cartoonists will never be out of work.
Whenever a president is deposed, we always go through the same rigmarole: he goes on the lam and issues statements that say that he is still the legitimately elected leader.
And in many cases that’s true. But how often do they ever get to really come back? I was thinking about that this morning. The answer is: not often.
One exception that I could think of was Pres. Charles de Gaulle, who briefly fled during the May 1968 uprising in France. He returned to power after the military and police crushed the students and labor unions in street battles.
There is also Pres. Aristide of Haiti, overthrown not once but twice. After the first time, the Clinton administration invaded Haiti in order to return him to power. A few years later, the Bush administration backed a coup that overthrew him and forced him to fly to the Central African Republic. But at least that first time under Clinton, he counts as a legitimately elected president who was returned to power, albeit via foreign military intervention.
Can you think of other examples of restorations?
Mainstream news outlets in the United States, whose politics are closely aligned with those of the U.S. government, frequently criticize mainstream media outlets in Russia, whose politics are closely aligned to those of the Russian government. Current example: recent events in Ukraine.
“Russian officials have been doing everything they can to make it clear that they don’t recognize the legitimacy of this current parliament or its right to form an interim government,” NPR’s Corey Flintoff reported February 26th. “The impression that ordinary Russians would get from [their] news coverage is really that the Ukrainian Revolution is very much a thing to be feared.”
Flintoff made fun of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who called the overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych “essentially the result of an armed mutiny.” Russian Interior Minister Sergey Lavrov said it was “an attempt at a coup d’état and to seize power by force.”
Yet American media insist on the R-word: revolution.
Here we go again.
In U.S. and Western media, both the Tahrir Square “people power” demonstrations that removed Hosni Mubarak and the military coup that imprisoned the democratically elected Mohammed Morsi are called Egyptian “revolutions.” So is the Benghazi-based insurgency that toppled Libya’s Col. Moammar Gaddafi. If the civil war in Syria leads to the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad — even if, like Gaddafi, he gets blown up by a U.S. drone or a NATO fighter jet — they’ll call that a revolution too.
But those weren’t/aren’t revolutions. A revolution is “a forcible overthrow of a government or social order in favor of a new system.”
A new system. Those are the key words.
Even if it occurs as the result of dramatic street violence, a change in leaders doesn’t mean there has been a revolution. If the system doesn’t change much, a revolution has not taken place.
Egypt’s Tahrir Square was dramatic, an important event. But it wasn’t a revolution. This became evident last year, when General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi arrested and jailed President Morsi. If the 2011 Tahrir uprising against Mubarak had been a revolution, Sisi — a high-ranking officer who served most of his career under Mubarak — would not have been in the military at all, much less a figure powerful enough to stage a coup.
In a real revolution, the old system — all of its most important components — are replaced. Military leaders aren’t merely shuffled around or replaced; the army’s core mission and organizational structure are radically altered. It isn’t enough to rejigger boardrooms and change CEOs; the class structure itself — which defines every other role in society — is changed. (In China, for example, landlords went from a privileged class to impoverished pariahs after 1949.) Reforms don’t make a revolution. In a revolution, everything old gets trashed. Society starts from scratch.
The bar for whether a political change qualifies as a full-fledged revolution is extremely high.
And yeah, the definition matters. It matters a lot. Because revolution — capital-R, blood-in-the-streets, head-on-a-stick Revolution is by far the biggest threat to our system of corporate capitalism and the ruling classes who have been stealing almost every cent of the fortune we the people create with our hard work. If our business overlords convince us that revolution is something short of actually changing the system — in other words, getting rid of them — then they’re safe no matter what. Even if we protest, even if we turn violent, we will never truly emancipate ourselves.
Maybe they’ll pay higher taxes. For a little while. Until they bribe their way back out of them.
Until we destroy the 1%, stripping them of their money, power and social status, we will be their slaves. And that will never happen if we forget what revolution is.
Bearing in mind what revolution means, Ukraine comes nowhere close.
Consider this quote from Nicolai Petro, a politics professor at the University of Rhode Island, on Amy Goodman’s radio show:
“Yes, [Ukraine] is pretty much a classical coup, because under the current constitution the president may be—may resign or be impeached, but only after the case is reviewed by the Constitutional Court and then voted by a three-fourth majority of the Parliament. And then, either case, either the prime minister or the speaker of the Parliament must become the president. Instead, that’s not what happened at all. There was an extraordinary session of Parliament, after—it was held after most members were told there would be no session and many had left town. And then, under the chairmanship of the radical party, Svoboda, this rump Parliament declared that the president had self-removed himself from the presidency.”
Note the trappings of “legitimacy”: Constitutional Court, Parliament, preexisting political parties, laws created under the old regime.
Under a revolution, old institutions would be abolished. Anyone who had anything to do with them would be discredited, and possibly in danger of being executed. Parties, if there were any, would be new (unless they’d been operating clandestinely), with revolutionary politics and brand-new organizational structures. You certainly wouldn’t see old establishment figures like the recently released former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko (a leader of the “Orange Revolution” of 2004, which also wasn’t a revolution), seriously discussed as a potential new ruler.
Many Ukrainians know what revolution is — and they want one. “We need new people who can say no to the oligarchs, not just the old faces,” a 25-year-old economist told The New York Times. “The problem is that the old forces are trying to come back to take their old chairs,” said a shipping broker who waved a sign outside parliament that read: “Revolution, Not a Court Coup!”
U.S. reporters quote the would-be revolutionaries, but they can’t understand their meaning. After all, their country’s founding “revolution,” the American Revolution, was nothing of the sort. The elites became even more powerful. Slavery continued. Women still couldn’t vote. The poor and middle class didn’t gain power.
Just another coup.
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We all complain about the sorry state of the media these days. That includes lame political analysis and insipid cartoons that not only don’t make you think, they didn’t make the cartoonist who drew them think.
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The expanded paperback 2nd edition of Silk Road to Ruin: Why Central Asia is the Next Middle East comes out April 1, 2014. It is now available for pre-order from Amazon. The new edition updates the politics and current events sections to the present. In addition, there is a bonus chapter about my expedition to Lake Sarez in Tajikistan — Central Asia’s “Sword of Damocles,” which could cause an epic flood that could kill millions of people at any time.
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Each week I do a cartoon for The Los Angeles Times, along with a blog entry. I submit two rough sketches to the editors. This week, here’s the idea that was rejected. The one they accepted, about a proposal to split California into six states, runs tomorrow.
NSA blames ACLU and us for having to keep outer phone data even longer than 5 years. My NewDomain essay: http://ow.ly/3hywlS
“Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it.. . . And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it,” a U.S. intelligence official said about former NSA director Keith Alexander.
The problem with knowing everything is that you can’t make sense of it all. What’s important? What isn’t? “What they are doing is making themselves dysfunctional by taking all this data,” says a key NSA programmer.
“When your working process every morning starts with poking around a haystack of seven billion innocent lives, you’re going to miss things,” adds NSA leaker Edward Snowden. “We’re blinding people with data we don’t need.”
The same thing is happening to Los Angeles’ probation department. Ankle monitors attached to the bodies of criminals on probation are setting off so many alerts that besieged deputies are losing track of their charges.
The Times’ Paige St. John reports:
The nation’s largest probation department strapped GPS ankle monitors on the highest-risk…convicts, expecting the satellite receivers to keep tabs on where they spent their days and nights, and therefore keep the public safe.
Instead, agents are drowning in a flood of meaningless data, masking alarms that could signal real danger.
County probation officers are inundated with alerts, and at times received as many as 1,000 a day. Most of the warnings mean little: a blocked signal or low battery.
The messages are routinely ignored and at times have been deleted because there were so many, officers say.
Dang.
As the satellite cable ad goes, mistakes are made — but the downside is far more serious than getting body-slammed by a lowland gorilla. “In Colorado last year,” St. John writes, “officers dismissed days of tampering and dead battery alerts from a parolee’s GPS monitor. The man had slipped out of the device strapped to his ankle and killed a pizza delivery man and the state’s corrections chief, authorities said.”
Alerts, legit and false, wind up in a probation officer’s email inbox. Some deputies were greeted by 1000 alerts a day. “If the probation officer receives thousands of emails for every probationer in the county, he will delete them all without reading any,” a deputy said anonymously.
Which may make you wonder how much taxpayers are shelling out for a service whose net worth appears to lie between useless and counterproductive. I did.
The answer is $245,000 for six months.
It might not be as dystopian-cool, but maybe it’s time to go back to the old-fashioned analogue approach.
