Tag: obama

Is President Obama Too Googley-Eyed?

Remember when Barack Obama first entered the White House, and he made a deal with the Secret Service to keep his Blackberry?  Admitting to his addiction to the device, the president got the agents to create a secure Blackberry that he could use while in office; and to those of us who were fans of the new president, this seemed folksy and endearing.

Although I still admire and commend this president for many things well outside the editorial scope of this blog, I am admittedly dismayed by the remarkable degree of influence that Google seems to have on his administration.  Chris Castle has reported consistently on the number of former Google executives who now work for Obama, including the nation’s Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith.  And while it is not unreasonable that a 21st century administration should hire people out of one of the world’s leading technology companies, the fact remains that Google does a lot more than make tech; its leaders project a world view that may not be the basis of good policy for the American people.  Certainly, it has not been good policy for America’s creative people.

Yesterday, Dawn Chmeilewski published an article on re/code that includes a chart of lobbyist visits to the White House in which we see that Google lobbyist Johanna Shelton visited administration officials more than twice as often as the next highest representative from Blue Cross/Blue Shield.  “Google’s head of public policy has met with White House officials 128 times over the course of the Obama administration — more visits than the telecom and cable industries combined, according to the nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign for Accountability,” writes Chmeilewski.

Meanwhile, if Obama is not purposely shaping public policy according to Google, he’s coming pretty close to doing so for reasons perhaps only he knows.  I reported a few posts ago that the new Department of Commerce Digital Economy Board includes no representative of any sector other than tech. Obama has backed the FCC AllVid proposal, which even Roku’s founder Anthony Wood describes as a Google handout.  David Dayen reported in The Intercept last week that the Obama administration certainly seems to treat the search giant with kid gloves. This is despite the fact that, “Google has faced questions for years about exercising its market power to squash rivals, infringing on its users’ privacy rights, favoring its own business affiliates in search results, and using patent law to create barriers to competition. Even Republican senators like Orrin Hatch have called out Google for its practices,” Dayen writes.

There is a lot of talk about corporate influence in our political process these days, and with good reason.  In particular, there is a considerable amount of intra-party bickering among democrats, squabbling over how much or how little Wall Street influences Hillary Clinton, or how innoculated Bernie Sanders really is from such things.  Of course, in reality, it isn’t quite that simple.  Most political leaders—with certain notable exceptions—have some sort of vision, an idea about the way society ought to progress, and all political leaders are going to hear from influential people who have access.  But access isn’t just about money. Yes, Google spends an unholy amount of money on lobbyists today, but that’s not the real question.  The real question is the extent to which Obama’s own policy agenda is in synch with Google’s policy agenda; and the more that they are, the greater the concern.

Naturally, I’m acutely concerned about the extent to which President Obama might view copyright policy through his Google Glass (assuming he got one of the remaining devices).  But as I’ve repeated since launching this blog, I believe copyright policy prefaces a much broader question as to how we intend to manage the digital age in general.  In this regard, the fact that the Obama administration is so cozy with Google does not bode well for holding the company accountable for any of its predatory, anti-trust, anti-copyright, and even anti-privacy transgressions.  And this should be a matter of concern to all Americans, not just the 5+ million working in the core copyright industries.

Tangentially, It is worth noting that, despite the tedious repetition in the blogosphere that the motion picture and recording industries exert vast and secretive influence in Washington regarding all things copyright, the chart published on re/code reveals not a single visit to the White House by a representative from the MPAA or RIAA.  No dobut, they’re meeting in an undisclosed bunker plotting to destroy the internet, while Obama’s overt relationships with all these Googlers is just a ruse.  (Seriously, I read this on the internet.)

The Illusion of More Money

Photo by BLaker

On the subject of more not always being all it’s cracked up to be, I think it took about thirty seconds after President Obama won the election for the first pundits to remark, “Six billion dollars, and we’re right back where we started.” I can’t say I’m even a little surprised. By now, the case of Citizens United v. FEC is among the oft-repeated rallying cries against the unmitigated influence of money in politics. But, as I see it, the influence of money might actually be more mitigated than we think for the simple reason that when systems swell beyond a certain size, they have a tendency to collapse under their own weight.

The landmark Citizens United case opened up the valves on soft money, enabling 501c3 corporations in the form of PACs to spend unlimited sums on issues media entirely outside the regulations of the FEC. As long as the communication doesn’t say “vote for” or “vote against” it’s fair game. According to multiple sources, outside spending by PACs on issues messaging to oppose President Obama was roughly three times the amount spent on similar media to oppose Romney. So, why didn’t it work?

When the ruling on Citizens United was first announced, it was hard not to be offended by its implications — that money is speech, that corporations are people, that this would have a dire effect on our political process. I must have had a lot of time on my hands that month because I read the transcripts of the arguments by SCOTUS and have to say that two things came to mind that at least tempered, if not entirely assuaged, my instinctive negative response.

The first is that in fact the free speech aspect of this particular case is not cut and dry; and as a member of the film community, I don’t think I’d be comfortable if the ruling had gone the other way. At issue was a heavily biased documentary about Hilary Clinton that was clearly designed to torpedo her during the primaries leading up to the 2008 race. The FEC argued that it was political advertising and that both the production and proposed means of distribution via Pay Per View ran afoul of campaign finance restrictions. The majority opinion was that ruling against Citizens United would have a chilling effect on speech, and I have to say that it isn’t often I agree with Justice Scalia, but this one of those times. Looking at the particulars of this case, I found it very hard to imagine a documentary film project about a social issue or a political figure, no matter how dilligent the filmmakers might be in their research, that could not theoretically be squelched by the FEC had the precedent ruling gone the other way.

But my second thought on the matter brings us to the the practical question as to whether or not more really adds up to more. Of course money influences elections, but it does not stand to reason that unlimited money will have unlimited influence. And if this first post-Citizens United presidential race is any indication, there’s no denying the possibility that the electorate may be less susceptible to these messages exactly as Justice Scalia predicted they would be when he said about free speech, “The more the merrier. People are smart enough to figure it out.” While the ruling in Citizens United is unappealing in principal, I remain skeptical as to whether it will inexorably affect our politics as many have predicted — or at least that the money will be about campaigns.

One factor to consider is that actual corporate dollars, what I’ll call the sane money, is likely to be bound by a principal more significant than campaign finance regulation, and that’s ROI. When corporations don’t get return on their investments, they tend not to make them a second time; and we may well see the sane money stick to classic lobbying and other forms of influence rather than continue to roll million-dollar dice on campaigns. As I said in an older post, look how cost-effectively the Internet industry stopped a bill in its tracks with its anti-SOPA campaign. Those are the kinds of policy-based initiatives we should be watching, and possibly more closely than campaign finance.

Of course, Citizens United also unleashed a fair bit of crazy money, too by which I am referring to egomaniacal billionaires and niche groups who feel it’s their personal mission to see Americans be more Christian or eat more beets or make gayness illegal or whatever. And then there’s the crazy money of those who just like to wave their influence around Trumpishly, with no clear objective except it seems self-aggrandizement. While these side-show shenanigans are diverting, occasionally entertaining, and always fuel for walls and Tweetdecks, I suspect that if they move the needle at all, it is more often to galvanize their own opposition. It’s not that I think the crazy money has no influence, so much as I have to wonder who needs to spend millions on extreme views when guys like Todd Akin will use the term “legitimate rape” for free?

This article from yesterday’s Roll Call raises the point I’m making, that we need to look beyond the bullet points of the big numbers and the election outcome and focus on where the money goes more subtly when we’re not usually looking.

Narrative

 

Last week, when I logged onto Facebook, two stories were near the top of my feed.  The  first was about the plot of at least four U.S. soldiers who had plans to carry out acts of domestic terrorism, including assassination of President Obama, and who had killed a fellow soldier and his girlfriend in order to stop them from reporting the group’s intentions.  Their sated goal:  “To give America back to the people.”

The second story was a post by a friend, a Vietnam War veteran who writes beautifully about his journey through the world, still grappling with PTSD, still seeking peace.  He was very upset to have stumbled upon a grotesque, right-wing image, a variation on the famous Obama “Hope” poster depicting the president hanged in a noose with the word Hope changed to Rope.

I recognize with some amusement that some readers of my commentary will make the mistaken assumption that I am a right-wing conservative, which only underscores for this mostly liberal Democrat just how incoherent political dialogue has become.  When we speak in memes instead of nuance, and when all issues are associatively lumped together, our narrative becomes useless at best, and the raw ingredients for the ambitions of psychos at worst.

For the first podcast on this site, I had the pleasure of speaking to Christopher Dickey about journalism in the digital age, but Dickey is also an expert on extremism, terrorism, and counter-terrorism, having reported on these issues for thirty years.  In a discussion that didn’t make the cut for the podcast, Dickey described the three elements one always finds in the anarchist, extremist, or terrorist.  Neatly packaged into the acronym TNT, the components are Testosterone, Narrative, and Theater; and it is that middle component, narrative, that compels me to focus on many issues in the way I do.

Narrative, as Dickey defines it in this context is “one of oppression, some wrong that is being righted,” and after all, what politically or humanistically motivated citizen does not possess such a narrative?  Doctors Without Borders are righting a wrong, are they not?  But when that sensibility combines with stupidity (testosterone), and egomania (theater), it becomes a volatile mixture that I believe is actually fueled by even relatively innocuous anti-establishment rancor. For instance, what OWS and the Tea Party inadvertently have in common is a generalized agenda of tearing down institutions without envisioning new institutions in their place.  Our critical narrative has shifted so that bad or failed policies within our institutions are not the enemy, but the institutions themselves are.  And we all feed this narrative from our own political points of view, preaching to our own little choirs in cyberspace.

This excellent article in The Daily Beast suggests that the Fort Stewart F.E.A.R. plot is indicative of “rising domestic terrorism,” and the article explains how a DHS report on right-wing extremist organizations was criticized by conservative pundits (and John Boehner) as “an attempt to smear or criminalize right-wing free speech.”  There it is again — the First Amendment being used as an excuse to apply blunt thinking to a complex issue, to capitulate to the notion that we cannot possibly make a distinction between conservative ideas and violent extremists. And perhaps that’s because the narrative of the two is way too similar. I think it’s fair to say that if the voice of the contemporary right wing sounded like William F. Buckley instead of FOX News, these dumb soldiers would have been less likely to hear their misguided sentiments echoed in the mainstream.  That is not a cause and effect assertion. I don’t propose that FOX News causes these acts of violence any more than Marilyn Manson was responsible for Columbine; but the psychotic hears the coded messages he wants to hear; and there is no question that the conservative plank of “small government” has mutated into a more virulent strain of anti-government (often laced with racism).

But I don’t single out conservatives in dialing up the destructive rhetoric.  While liberals tend toward fewer violent metaphors, I do find parallel fear-mongering among my liberal friends. It’s hard to tell the difference, for instance, between liberals insisting earlier this year that the NDAA gives the feds the right to “assassinate citizens in the streets” and conservatives labeling HR347 an “anti-peaceable assembly bill.”  In these instances, everybody has a motive for writing a narrative of oppression, and that motive is often the aforementioned theater itself.  TV, radio, print, and web pundits need to make theater (and individuals want stuff to post on their walls). So everybody adds a little spectacle to otherwise mundane bits of legislation, and we’re off to the races.

I pick these two examples because the rhetoric from both the right and the left on each bill is completely interchangeable. It really doesn’t matter if it’s Glenn Beck or my liberal friends predicting Storm Troopers in the streets. Both are making theater, and I believe both are in some way feeding the very real paranoia of the next violent extremist.  And that brings me back to my underlying point regarding the lens I apply to the issues discussed here. When the narrative coming from opposing sides on a given subject begins to produce identical rhetoric, it’s probably a good sign that we’ve stopped discussing anything grounded in practical or humanistic reality.