Dear Commons Community,

Chrystia Freelan, author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, has an essay in the New York Times Sunday Review, commenting on a rising tide of populism as threatening the power of the plutocrats.  She starts:

“the puzzle of America today: the plutocrats have never been richer, and their economic power continues to grow, but the populists, the wilder the better, are taking over. The rise of the political extremes is most evident, of course, in the domination of the Republican Party by the Tea Party and in the astonishing ability of this small group to shut down the American government. But the centrists are losing out in more genteel political battles on the left, too — that is the story of Bill de Blasio’s dark-horse surge to the mayoralty in New York, and of the Democratic president’s inability to push through his choice to run the Federal Reserve, Lawrence H. Summers.”

The essay contains a number of insightful comments including:

“The Koch brothers, who have found a way to blend their business interests and personal ideological convictions with the sponsorship of a highly effective political network, are easy to latch on to partly because this self-dealing fits so perfectly with our imagined idea of a nefarious plutocracy and partly because they have had such an impact. But the Kochs are the exception rather than the rule, and even in their case the grass roots they nurtured now follow their script imperfectly…

Most plutocrats are translating their vast economic power into political influence in two principle ways. The first is political lobbying strictly focused on the defense or expansion of their economic interests. This is very specific work, with each company or, at most, narrowly defined industry group advocating its self-interest: the hedge fund industry protecting the carried-interest tax loophole from which it benefits, or agribusiness pushing for continued subsidies. Often, these are fights for lower taxes and less regulation, but they are motivated by the bottom line, not by strictly political ideals, and they benefit very specific business people and companies, not the business community as a whole…

The second way today’s plutocrats flex their political muscle is more novel. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, a pair of business writers, have called this approach “philanthrocapitalism” — activist engagement with public policy and social problems. This isn’t the traditional charity of supporting hospitals and museums, uncontroversial good causes in which sitting on the board can offer the additional perk of status in the social elite. Philanthrocapitalism is a more self-consciously innovative and entrepreneurial effort to tackle the world’s most urgent social problems; philanthrocapitalists deploy not merely the fortunes they accumulated, but also the skills, energy and ambition they used to amass those fortunes in the first place.”

Her conclusion:

“Plutocratic politics have much to recommend them. They are pure, smart and focused. But at a time when society as a whole is riven by an ever widening economic chasm, policy delivered from on high can get you only so far. Voters on both the right and the left are suspicious of whether the plutocrats and the technocrats they employ understand their real needs, and whether they truly have their best interests at heart. That rift means we should all brace ourselves for more extremist politics and a more rancorous political debate.”

In New York City tomorrow, Bill de Blasio will likely be elected mayor and we may have a ringside seat at least for the next four years.  Bring it on!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an editorial (see full text below) today supporting the efforts of a number of states to enact legislation to protect the privacy of individuals.  Specifically it comments:

“Legislatures across the country have enacted laws to regulate the kinds of information that companies and law enforcement agencies can collect about individuals and how it can be done.

Businesses ranging from social networking services to little-known data brokers collect all kinds of information about consumers, often without their knowledge or permission. The data includes basic details like what websites people visit, what they purchase online and in retail stores and whom they interact with. The information is most commonly used to help businesses deliver targeted ads, but it can also be amassed into detailed profiles for purchase by anybody, including potential employers.”

However, there is no mention about the national databases on school records that are being developed with the help of the US Department of Education and state education departments..  Information on special education needs, grades, test scores, attendance,  and a host of other highly personal data items are now finding their way into national databases controlled and built by the likes of the Gates Foundation and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. These databases can follow the children for the rest of their lives and are not needed other than to feed the desires of some policymakers to track children in school and beyond.  The New York Times should be up in arms against this egregious invasion into the lives of children.

Tony

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November 2, 2013

States Take on Privacy

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Tired of waiting for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation, state lawmakers are taking matters into their own hands, and not a moment too soon. Legislatures across the country have enacted laws to regulate the kinds of information that companies and law enforcement agencies can collect about individuals and how it can be done.

Businesses ranging from social networking services to little-known data brokers collect all kinds of information about consumers, often without their knowledge or permission. The data includes basic details like what websites people visit, what they purchase online and in retail stores and whom they interact with. The information is most commonly used to help businesses deliver targeted ads, but it can also be amassed into detailed profiles for purchase by anybody, including potential employers.

In Washington, lobbyists from technology, marketing and related industries have effectively put the brakes on privacy protection legislation. Lawmakers have done nothing to advance a consumer privacy bill of rights that President Obama proposed in 2012, which would have allowed consumers to restrict the data collected and required businesses to give individuals access to files about them. And despite the Federal Trade Commission’s support for a “do-not track” option on Internet browsers that could prevent advertisers from monitoring consumers online, it has not been implemented.

This is why more than 10 states have passed more than two dozen state privacy laws just this year, as reported in The Times by Somini Sengupta. Texas passed a bill that would force police to get a warrant to look at emails — a similar federal bill was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in April but has not come to a vote in the Senate. California made it illegal to publish the nude pictures of someone online without his or her consent. Other states have restricted the use of drones for surveillance.

Industry officials complain that these state efforts are creating a patchwork of rules that will be hard for companies to satisfy, in part because it’s not easy to tailor websites to comply with state-specific rules that might even contradict one another in some cases.

Some of the laws might be hard to carry out, but if that turns out to be the case, the technology and advertising industries have only themselves to blame. By stalling legislation in Congress, they have essentially invited state lawmakers to take up the cause of consumers, who are increasingly worried about privacy. The response of businesses to this trend has been to increase lobbying in state capitols to kill or water down privacy bills.

If these industries are actually interested in uniform rules for the entire country, here is a suggestion: Stop obstructing legislation in Washington, and sit down with lawmakers and consumer advocates to come up with effective federal laws.

Dear Commons Community,

For the past two weeks, the media has been relentless with their stories of the problems with the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare website. Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services,  took most of the heat and apologized to the nation for the botched launch  in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

“In these early weeks, access to health care has been a miserably frustrating experience,” the former Kansas governor said.

The cover of The New Yorker captures well the frustration that the Obama administration has experienced with trying to explain and resolve the computer glitches that have plagued the program’s main website.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Rob Jenkins, an associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College, takes a shot at Bill Gates in a column for  The Chronicle of Higher Education,  Jenkins position is that Bill Gates essentially sees higher education mission as serving corporate America.  To quote:

“I don’t begrudge the man [Gates] his vision, nor does it bother me that he uses his millions to advance it. That’s his right, and I don’t doubt that he believes he’s doing good.

I just think he’s wrong. I think much of what he assumes would be good for higher education would actually be bad for higher education—and, more specifically, for community-college students. And I believe that faculty members, along with responsible administrators and legislators, have a duty to stand up and say, “No, that’s not going to work. It’s not a good idea.”

The essential problem with Gates’s vision is that, at heart, it’s corporatist. I understand that “corporatism,” for historians and political scientists, refers to a specific economic theory, and I apologize for co-opting the term. I’m using it here in much the same way one might use “statist” to describe a person who believes in the primacy of the state. A corporatist, in that sense, is one for whom social institutions—particularly education—exist to serve corporations.”

Jenkins also sees Gates as advancing a two-tiered system of higher education that relegates the masses of students to online, MOOC-like courses while the elite have the benefit of a classical, private education where teachers and students interact in small classes and not in large, electronic lecture halls.

“…what Gates and other like-minded individuals are attempting to recreate for colleges and universities at the national level: a system in which the majority of students—those at community colleges and smaller regional institutions—are stuck in large auditoriums watching talking heads on giant screens, while a much smaller group of elite students gets to attend “real” universities where they receive personalized instruction in small groups. Such a system would certainly work well for corporations, as it would create both a large “trained work force” and an elite managerial class.

I’m not a Marxist. I don’t have a problem with corporations that operate legally and responsibly. I understand that corporations can act as economic engines and do a great deal of good for society. But as a community-college faculty member, I don’t believe their priorities should necessarily be my priorities, any more than I believe that the primary purpose of a college education is to train students for particular jobs.”

Jenkins states well his position.  In addition, I would say that Gates is also a monopolist who tries to control everything involved with his business including the market.  He has taken this approach to his Foundation where he not only seeks to fund projects but also to influence education policy at all levels.  He has no qualms about using his Foundation’s resources to lobby policymakers, to manipulate the media, and to position his people in departments of education to get his way.  There is indeed a problem with Bill Gates’ vision for higher education as well as with the means by which he seeks to achieve it.

Tony