Entries by tag: fraud
Some of you may recall that Time Warner Cable made the boneheaded move a little while back of trying to roll out bandwith caps for users in markets that had no competition from other ISPs. The response was swift, brutal, and definitive, and I’m proud of the role I played in putting the hammer down on that.
Since then, one of the TWC reps on Twitter solicited comment on how to build a decent loyalty program that helps retain customers. Since I know a little bit about that too, I thought I might offer some ideas on how they can fix their PR problem. As both a journalist and a TWC customer, it’s in my interest to help forge a solution that benefits everyone without more idiotic schemes like the aforementioned.
I thought you guys might enjoy reading the letter I sent them, so I’ve provided an edited version of it for you below.
So if you’re an Obama supporter, or Obama himself, things must be looking pretty good right now. You’ve got a solid lead in all national polls, every electoral vote tracker has you at 270 or better, you just scored an endorsement from a top Republican and former Bush official, and you’re breaking records with your fundraising. Sounds like the election’s in the bag, right?
Wrong.
Voter suppression is a very real and very serious concern that we have to face in the weeks before the election. I’m not talking about the myth of ACORN’s voter-registration fraud propagated by the conservative noise machine. I’m talking about real efforts to disenfranchise new voters, to lose or miscount ballots, or to use faulty e-voting machines that are error-prone or can be easily hacked, all to depress turnout and delegitimize any victory of Obama’s as “stolen.”
After the cut I’ll have a bunch of info about what’s happening and what you can do to ensure your vote–and everyone else’s–gets counted fairly.
That, as they say, was one hell of a speech.
He hit every right note, the right way, at the right moment. Perfect. This was the Obama I came to believe in and support.
45 years from now, I want to be able to tell my kids and grandkids that there was a time when people were frightened of electing a black man to the Presidency, that America’s future was clouded by doubt, selfishness, and greed, and that we were in danger of losing everything our forefathers worked so hard to build.
And I want them to laugh their little heads off and tell me how silly I am, because such a thing would be impossible in the brighter future we’ve built.
That’s really what it’s about, you see–even if Obama doesn’t live up to the promise he has engendered, even if he fails to reach his ambitious goals, he will still have succeeded, because he has inspired a movement towards greatness that is truly bigger than one man. The future needs all of us, every one of us, to make it happen.
I seriously wouldn’t want to be John McCain right now. As I said on my Twitter feed, he could make Colin Powell his VP, resurrect Reagan AND Jesus to serve in his cabinet, and he’d still be crushed by the tide of awesome that Obama has inspired. Let’s get out there and make sure it does so.
UPDATE: Here’s the video:
I was deeply amused to read the breathless news coverage of Hammerin’ Hank Paulson’s “ambitious” and “sweeping” plans to restructure the federal financial regulatory structure. It says something about how far the goalposts of this country’s discourse have been moved towards rampant, unchecked, unbridled “law of the jungle” financial pillaging that modest reforms like these are considered a major move.
If these pathetic hot-flashing stenographers that call themselves “reporters” would actually take a closer look at the plan itself–hell, even just the fact sheet–they would see that not only is Paulson’s reform agenda miniscule at best, but that it’s a shell game, a distraction designed to accomplish the long-held mantra of the Bush administration–centralizing federal power and weakening consumer protections at the state level.
The accessing of private passport-based travel data of all three Presidential candidates by contractors working for the State Department has finally galvanized Capitol Hill to address the issue of privacy–something we’ve been begging them to do for years. Ron Wyden sums it up succinctly:
“The Government Accountability Office has been warning about this problem for a decade. And it seems to me in this administration, there’s been pretty much a culture of disregard for privacy, and that’s part of the problem,” he said.
Wyden may have been referring to a 2006 report from the GAO documenting the lack of oversight in sharing Social Security Numbers with contractors working for various federal agencies, including the IRS and the FBI, as well as within the private sector. It is but one of many reports the investigative agency has issued documenting the serious vulnerabilities our government’s mad drive to outsource its functions to the private sector has wrought–but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Following up on my post from a little while back discussing Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell’s desire to police the Internet, the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima confirmed last weekend that the Decider had signed a classified directive authorizing the NSA to more expansively monitor intrusions on federal networks for signs of cyberattacks:
Until now, the government’s efforts to protect itself from cyber-attacks — which run the gamut from hackers to organized crime to foreign governments trying to steal sensitive data — have been piecemeal. Under the new initiative, a task force headed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will coordinate efforts to identify the source of cyber-attacks against government computer systems. As part of that effort, the Department of Homeland Security will work to protect the systems and the Pentagon will devise strategies for counterattacks against the intruders.
As Brian has said recently, the U.S. is absolutely not ready to handle cyberwar on almost any front. I’m all in favor of redirecting tax money towards protecting and strengthening our Internet infrastructure against any one of the millions of crippling threats it can face, rather than expensive, crappy weapons systems that have little measurable effect except fattening defense contractors’ coffers.
But in an expansive profile of Mike McConnell, the New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright touches on the myriad obstacles our intelligence community faces towards handling a real threat, and why they get it wrong so often:
To call the disparate intelligence bureaucracies a community suggests that they share a collegial spirit, but throughout their history these organizations have been brutally competitive, undermining one another and even hoarding vital information. Since the establishment of the C.I.A., in 1947, the fractious intelligence community has botched many of the major tasks assigned to it. Its failures include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the unforeseen collapse of the Soviet Union, the inability to prevent the September 11th attacks, and the catastrophic assessment that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The intelligence culture, like any other corporatized, hierarchical, top-down system, is hobbled by its own evolution. Territorial turf wars, emphasis on CYA over doing the job, antiquated technology and lack of resources to pay for it, and a thick blanket of paranoia and mistrust that suffuses the field at every level not only prevents agencies from being able to do their jobs effectively, but often redirects them into much more malignant and sinister ends–like the NSA’s illegal wiretapping program. From Wright’s article:
The changes to FISA that McConnell proposed were minor, in his view. “Three things we wanted,” he told me, in characteristic bulletin language. “First, we had to have a situation where it doesn’t require us to get a warrant for a foreign person in a foreign country. Second point, we need the coöperation of the private sector. The private sector is being sued for allegedly coöperating with the government.” He was referring to reports that, even before 9/11, many of America’s major telecommunications companies had diverted virtually all records of telephone and e-mail traffic from their routers into N.S.A. data banks, where it could be stored and examined. McConnell wanted liability protection not only for the companies’ future coöperation but for their past actions as well; however, he agreed to take the issue of retroactive immunity off the table if Congress would reconsider the matter after its recess.
Of course, this didn’t happen, and we’re now in a brutal Congressional stalemate between the White House, who wants permanent immunity for the telecoms and expansive new surveillance powers, and the Dems in Congress who refuse to let lawbreaking companies get away with it.
McConnell, as I’ve said before, is a big fan of private-sector cooperation on surveillance matters. He acknowledges in Wright’s article that the massive, bureaucratic intelligence community can’t move or innovate fast enough to perform the kind of vast tracking he wants for the Internet. So, how will he accomplish this?
The battle over telecom immunity isn’t just important for what these companies and their pals in government have done, but for what they will do. No matter how vital the need for a stronger policing of the Internet against cyberterrorism is–and it is vital–that can’t come at the hands of an Administration and its operatives who have repeatedly and willfully disregarded the law and civil rights to achieve their objectives, and rapacious private interests who want to use these technologies as stepping stones to their goal of a much more controlled Internet–with their hands on the dial.
That’s why nothing like this can happen under Bush’s reign without the most stringent accountability and strong oversight. He simply cannot be trusted, and those who work for him and want to enact these goals have to be viewed with extreme skepticism. Otherwise we may find that our innocuous e-mails and blog posts are getting swept up in a vast vacuum of data mining, while real terrorist threats go unnoticed until it’s too late.
(Special thanks to Ars Technica.)
That Bush and his inner circle of neocon zealots lied and cooked the books to get us into a war we never should have fought is not news, of course. But to see the number of lies told and analyzed in such a fashion as Lewis and Reading-Smith have done beggars the imagination–the sheer amount of bullshit spewed by this cabal is astonishing.
Consider: President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).
The study also holds the media culpable for their role in cheerleading the march to war without even the slightest desire to dig deeper into the claims and propaganda:
Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, “independent” validation of the Bush administration’s false statements about Iraq.
Again, this is no surprise. The media knew Bush’s true goals were oil and empire, and did their part to keep the public somnolent and thirsting for blood simultaneously. But I disagree with my friend Joe over at CenterBlue when he says:
This all has bearing on the current presidential election going on, as people try to sling mud at some candidate or other (Hillary, Edwards, etc.) over their having initially voted for the war. Well excuse me, but if I had been subjected to a relentless months-long misinformation campaign emanating from the president himself over the certainty of WMD’s and terrorism in Iraq I probably would have voted the same way. In fact I supported the war to begin with, having been played for a fool just like everyone else. This is why I consider these votes to be non-issues and pin the blame fully and squarely on Bush.
But not all of us fell for that. It’s something that a child could see–why attack Iraq when bin Laden was in Afghanistan?
People chose not to see the truth. They willingly blinded themselves to the obvious in order to remain favorable in the court of public opinion. Clinton and Edwards went along with the herd in order to look tough (and Clinton continues to do so today, even as Edwards has renounced his vote). Everyone who bought into the hype and supported this damnable false war must be held accountable and forced to bear the weight of their failure to question.
But they won’t be, of course. Bush continues to lie to this very day, and while Clinton’s lies about getting a blowjob nearly tore this country apart, Bush, like Rollo Tomasi, is the guy who gets away with it. And we are left with the burden of a costly, brutal, bloody, and useless war that has killed thousands, cost trillions, and turned our country into a pariah on the global stage.
Bush is the one who lied, but we are all responsible for believing the lie and not holding him accountable. Until that day comes, we must all bear the burden of that sin.
Last week the news broke (via a leaked memo found by Broadband Reports) that Time Warner Cable was instituting a “tiered pricing” structure for broadband, where heavy bandwith users would have to pay more, rather than the customary “all you can eat” model of supposedly unlimited usage for a flat price. My article covers the issue in more detail, but the gist is that while tiered pricing structures are better than being kicked off your service for violating invisible bandwith caps, it’s still no substitute for building out new networks with more capacity.
This leads me to the excellent paper authored by Sascha Meinrath on how the concept of net neutrality needs to be incorporated and expanded into a larger vision of Internet freedom.
Meinrath’s paper (available as a free download, and which I found via the indispensable Natasha Chart) studies the landscape of America’s decrepit and costly broadband offerings in exhaustive detail. He hits all the right marks–the $750 million buildout of “dark fiber” connections that go largely unused, the billions in subsidies given to major telecom companies with no discernible return for the taxpayer, and the current efforts of both telecoms, government, and media companies to restrict, choke, and narrow access to information in order to preserve both their business models and their primacy of content providing.
As Meinrath notes:
From the reemergence of telecommunications giant AT&T to current efforts by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to re-open media ownership proceedings, fewer players are gaining massive market share, creating increasingly vertically and horizontally integrated corporations with the potential to dominate entire market sectors (Kushnick, 1999; McChesney, 1999). The current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulatory environment fails to spur technological innovation and has retarded expansion of digital inclusion efforts (Cooper, 2004). Instead, the FCC has fostered a decades-long market environment fraught with pricing and geographical discrimination as well as overpriced, substandard telecommunications services (Slotten, 2000)…
Meinrath’s solution is a ten-point plan that recasts the Internet as a global public utility rather than a private enterprise commodity. I’ll translate his points for the tech-phobic among you:
1. Requires Common Carriage. (Every market player has access to the Internet, from public networks to private companies)
2. Is Open Architecture and Supports Open Source Driver Development. (You can use any hardware you want…)
3. Is Open Protocol and Open Standard. (…and any software you want.)
4. Supports an End-to-End Architecture (i.e., is based upon a “dumb network”). (Prevents governmental and corporate attempts to block or prioritize traffic.)
5. Is Private (e.g., no back doors, deep packet inspection, etc.). (No spying allowed!)
6. Is Application-Neutral. (See #2 and #3.)
7. Is Low-Latency and First-In/First-Out (i.e., requires adequate capacity). (Requires carriers to eschew “artificial scarcity” by using all the cables and connections they buy for at least basic access.)
8. Is Interoperable. (Works effectively across the nation and the world.)
9. Is Business Model Neutral. (Enables both public-sector and private-sector innovation.)
10. Is Run by its Users (i.e., is internationally representative and non-Amerocentric). (Self-explanatory.)
Meinrath’s plan doesn’t have all the answers, but he does a marvelous job of providing context and a larger vision for how we can not only rebuild America’s position as a true technological and social innovator in the realm of the Internet, but how this can be expanded into a truly globe-spanning connective system that’s “neutral, democratic, and efficient.” Highly recommended.
And if you’re so inclined, you can go back and read my principles for America’s Internet future , which addresses a lot of similar points, and a few Meinrath doesn’t. Just sayin’.
The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson has an op-ed in the Washington Post today outlining the nature of the coming recession, and how our economic response is going to have to change if we’re to fix it.
“Wait,” you’re thinking, “is he saying we’re in recession? Surely not! I know it’s a worry, but no one’s actually said it’s official yet.”
Let’s take a look at the facts, then:
Citigroup, America’s largest bank, has been hit with a staggering $10 billion in losses this quarter. Naturally, the company is doing what all companies do as a first response to crisis–cutting thousands of jobs –and is begging foreign investors to pump cash into its reserves to keep it solvent.
Countrywide, America’s largest lender, reported spikes in delinquencies and foreclosures so severe that the company was looking at bankruptcy protection. It was hailed as a relief when Bank of America announced plans to buy the lender, but think about this–how bad is our economic state when our biggest giants in their respective industries are doing so poorly?
And what about the consumer, that bulwark of economic growth through spending? Well, thanks to a combination of collapsing home equity, high gas, energy, and food prices, and nearly insurmountable personal debt, consumers are falling behind on loan payments, credit card debt is on the rise, and retail sales are plummeting from lack of consumer spending.
If this isn’t a recession, it’s damn close, and like the wolf hungrily stalking its prey, will be upon us soon.
Back to Meyerson’s column. He accurately notes that the mazelike structures of current Wall Street investment strategies make it nigh-impossible to accurately oversee these transactions, which has led to so many billions of dollars’ worth of losses. Moreover, he also notes that without some serious infusion of jobs, cash, and direction from the government, this recession may deepen into a depression that will take years to recover from.
“Okay,” you may be asking, “but where can we get the money for such a thing? That’s going to be expensive!”
Well, here’s one simple idea–ending the war in Iraq immediately and bringing our troops home. Imagine what we could do with the influx of capital we’re wasting on a failed venture that has cost thousands of lives and tens of millions of dollars. I live in DC, so I used my own city as the basis for calculation:
Taxpayers in District Of Columbia will pay $2 billion for the cost of the Iraq War through 2007. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:
504,157 People with Health Care OR
3,465,229 Homes with Renewable Electricity OR
33,815 Public Safety Officers OR
33,333 Music and Arts Teachers OR
946,048 Scholarships for University Students OR
174 New Elementary Schools OR
6,801 Affordable Housing Units OR
620,958 Children with Health Care OR
266,133 Head Start Places for Children OR
33,333 Elementary School Teachers OR
29,432 Port Container Inspectors
Any one of these projects provides a golden opportunity for new jobs and economic revitalization for my city, or the even better long-term investment of raising kids with decent educations and the ability to make better lives for themselves. But we’ll never know, because that money went instead to turning a country into a protectorate of our empire just to keep the oil pumps working.
I said not long ago that in order to win, Democrats should run on the economy instead of Iraq , and I still hold to that. But I am rethinking that approach–instead of trying to push Iraq aside in people’s minds, Democrats and progressives should link the two together. Every dollar spent in Iraq, fighting a war started on a lie that has cost us immeasurably, is a dollar not spent on rebuilding our country’s prosperity, peace, and future solvency.
End the war, bring our troops home, and let’s get down to the equally painful business of rebuilding our country’s economic base and transiting us out from a system based on debt, consumption, greed, and graft. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. We don’t have any choice in the matter.
Bankrate.com has an interesting look at the Federal Reserve Board’s survey of Americans’ financial health.
As Lee Eisenberg notes, the idea that a family making $40,000 a year might be doing better than half the households in America would certainly be surprising to some who are scraping by on that amount of money. But the Fed has always been overly generous with its statistics, much like the Commerce Department’s leaving out food and energy prices when measuring the fluctuations in the Consumer Price Index. (I wonder how these stats will look this year, as opposed to 2001.)
It really is about the net worth–the unearned wealth. The wealth that doesn’t come from hard work, innovation, entrepreneurship, and one’s own labor, but from passively shifting piles of paper around in the hands of bean-counters and using ever-more complex financial instruments. The physical tangibles of consumerism, spending, and ensuring that everyone knows you consume conspicuously.
As I’ve said before, for a country that fetishizes and praises hard work, our system is not geared to reward it. It’s specifically designed to favor those who have money, and use that money to generate more money, often at the expense of those who actually create. And unless you’re already on the top tiers of the ramp, you aren’t worth the time of those who enable the wealthy class to stay wealthy.
I know that I don’t feel like I’m wealthy, despite my placement on the income and net worth charts. I live comfortably, however. I may not be able to afford a house yet, but all my bills are paid, I have very little debt, and I want for nothing. For me, that’s enough. I have no interest in trying to get to the top of the wealth parking garage.
Where do you fit on these levels, and do you really feel like that you’re wealthy?
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