Should we ditch the idea of privacy?
The ubiquity of digital gadgets and sensors, the pervasiveness of networks and the benefits of sharing very personal information through social media have led some to argue that privacy as a social norm is changing and becoming an outmoded concept. In this three-part series Don Tapscott questions this view, arguing that we each need a personal privacy strategy.
Since I co-authored a book on privacy and the Internet 15 years ago I’ve been writing about how to manage the various threats to the security and control of our personal information. But today I find myself in a completely unexpected discussion. A growing number of people argue that the notion of having a private life in which we carefully restrict what information we share with others may not be a good idea. Instead, sharing our intimate, personal information with others would benefit us individually and as a society.
This is not a fringe movement. The proponents of this view are some of the smartest and most influential thinkers and practitioners of the digital revolution.
Jeff Jarvis, in his thoughtful book Public Parts, makes the case for sharing, and he practices what he preaches. We learn about everything from details of his personal income to his prostate surgery and malfunctioning penis. He argues that because privacy has its advocates, so should “publicness.” “I’m a public man” says Jarvis. “My life is an open book.” And he provides elaborate evidence on why this has benefited him, and says that if everyone followed his lead, the world would be a better place. He concludes that while releasing information should be a personal choice, privacy regulation should be avoided.
Facebook is the leading social-media site that promotes information sharing, and part of the company’s mission is to “make the world more open.” In his book The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick explains that Facebook founders believe that “more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing things.” Some at Facebook refer to this as “radical transparency” – a term initially used to talk about institutions that is now being adapted to individuals. In other words, everyone should have just one identity, whether at their workplace or in their personal life.
Stanford University professor Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com, says that “the notion of privacy began with the creation of cities, and it’s pretty much ended with Facebook.” He says “our social norms are changing.”
Other thought leaders like Tim O’Reilly (he coined the term “Web 2.0″) or Steward Brand (author of the Whole Earth Catalog) defend an individual’s right to privacy. But they argue that the benefits of sharing personal information are becoming so beneficial to each of us and so widespread that we need to shift the discussion from what to share, to how to ensure the information we share is used appropriately. Says Brand: “I’d be totally happy if my personal DNA mapping was published.”
from MediaFile:
Instagram’s Facebook filter
The startup had millions of users, but, from the beginning, just one customer.
The predominant way of interpreting Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram, in light of the social-networking giant's forthcoming IPO, is that Mark Zuckerberg had to pick up the photo-sharing app to boost his company’s mobile engagement. That would allow him to guard the mobile flank against incursions from Google, Twitter, and whatever other social-media tools might next arise.
That may be true – and it may even be the way Zuck thought about the deal when he swallowed hard and ponied up the purchase price. But that way of analyzing Facebook’s pickup, and the pickup of dozens of other startups, not just by Facebook but by Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and others, is probably not telling the whole story. Here’s a different theory, one that better describes the tech world that we, the users of the Internet, now inhabit: Instagram may have had millions of us as its users, but it was really built for just one customer: Facebook.
Silicon Valley, for too long, has confused the issue of what it means to be a user of a website, service or app, and what it means to be a customer of the app. Intuitively, you’d think they would be one and the same: The person using the app is the person consuming the app. But increasingly, apps are being made to grab the attention of the hegemonic companies in tech. Whatever it takes to get bought.
Sure, startup CEOs are careful to refer to their user bases as just that – users – but even when money changes hands, those users are cattle to be herded toward a cell on a venture capitalist’s spreadsheet, to help the VC decide whether to fund another pivot, engineering acquisition, rack of servers, whatever. Users are just another dart, basically, that startups have to hurl at the bull's-eye and ensure success.
A colleague of mine tells a story: You can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a farmer, and you can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a corporation to be used by its employees. Tractors whose users are also the customers come equipped with every convenience, from a satellite radio to Wi-Fi to all the cupholders a farmer could dream of. They drive well, and their controls are intuitive, because that’s what the average tractor driver wants, and what the tractor competition provides. Tractors bought by companies, for earthmoving, rock breaking and the like, come equipped with nothing but a hard seat and a prayer. Employees – mere users – don’t get any say on the amenities, or lack thereof.
Should ExxonMobil be broken up?
This book review was originally published in the American Prospect, and is republished here with permission.
Even granting that testifying to congressional committees is not on the list of an oil CEO’s favorite things to do, when ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, known to his employees as “Iron Ass,” arrived at the Dirksen Senate Office building one morning in November 2005, he was in an especially reticent mood. Among other things, the Senate Energy Committee wanted to know about the corporation’s role in formulating policy with Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Raymond – who was chummy with Cheney and seven weeks away from his retirement, after 12 spectacularly profitable years at the helm first of Exxon and then Exxon-Mobil – did not think the committee needed to know. Thus when New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg asked Raymond whether he or any ExxonMobil executives participated in a 2001 meeting with Cheney, Raymond responded with a single syllable: “No.”
The truth of that statement was something only a lawyer or a comedian could love, but it was consistent with how the company prefers to be seen: independent, apolitical, above the muck of any particular political fight. Yet as Steve Coll documents in his groundbreaking investigation, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, sometimes even the aloof need a little assistance. Just days before the hearing, the company had found itself frustrated with the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which seemed to be stalling on giving ExxonMobil its slice of a hugely valuable 50-billion-barrel oil field. The State Department did not seem to be pressing ExxonMobil’s case as hard as Raymond wanted, so he called Cheney and asked, according to Coll’s paraphrase, “What in the hell is with this country?” Cheney called the UAE government himself, and ExxonMobil got what it wanted.
Coll gained a unique perspective on the history of ExxonMobil’s power from his two-plus decades covering business and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Middle East politics, and national security – early on for The Washington Post, in recent years for The New Yorker, and most notably in Ghost Wars, his book on Afghanistan and the CIA. He approaches the company almost as if reporting on the State Department, finding a sprawling global network led by insular executives often unaware of what is being carried out in their name. At the heart lies a contradiction best illustrated by Raymond’s duplicity. The corporation long ago decided it was best to flex its immense muscle as discreetly as possible, because almost all publicity – whether it’s news of gas prices, climate change, or congressional fights over industry subsidies – is bad.
Indeed, ExxonMobil may have reached the point of being more powerful and entangled than any government. The company’s leaders look at an untapped oil or gas field as a relationship that might last a half-century or more; during that time, politicians and policies will come and go even in settled democracies. Its perspective is so geological, so Olympian, that it has been willing to anger sitting American governments – as in 1997, when Raymond, a Republican, challenged the Democratic administration’s policy with a speech in Beijing urging China’s communist rulers not to sign the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement. At the same time, because so much oil and natural gas is locked up in places with unstable regimes or unsavory leaders – from Equatorial Guinea to Indonesia to Russia – ExxonMobil often finds itself with more power to affect the local society than the best-intentioned State Department functionaries. In a nail-biting chapter on a showdown between the World Bank and the besieged government of Chad, Coll writes that “Exxon-Mobil had made its own choice clear: It was more interested in the survival of Chad’s oil production than it was in the World Bank’s experiment in nation building.”
Private Empire jumps around the globe to illustrate such conflicts, drawing on an impressive array of lawsuits, State Department cables, Freedom of Information Act documents, and interviews with 400 or so subjects, from former executives to tribal leaders who have sued the company. The image that emerges is of some kind of metabolically challenged creature unable to eat enough to sustain its weight. Because its production is so vast, the company is constantly depleting its existing energy supply. It is therefore under intense pressure to appear to book new reserves, to a degree that has encouraged some fudging on the math: For many years, the company would report actual figures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, then issue a press release announcing a bigger amount – a gambit that was technically illegal, though the company doesn’t seem to have ever paid a price (nor is it clear if anyone who matters was fooled).
The company’s culture is almost as strange as the places its engineers now have to go to find oil and gas. Exxon was so shaken by the fallout from the Valdez spill that it adopted safety procedures that sound like the handbook of a paranoid cult. Employees had to back their cars into garage parking spaces, minimizing difficulty if they needed to leave in a hurry. Executives were prohibited from pursuing dangerous behavior even outside the workplace and urged to confess publicly “near misses” they had, from shaky ladders to stones flying out of lawnmowers. Yet all these rituals didn’t keep 24,000 gallons of gas from leaking into the ground in Maryland in 2006, in an area where residents relied on well water, or any of the other countless mishaps that have occurred as part of ExxonMobil’s sprawling operations.
Morgan Stanley’s Facebook curse
As Morgan Stanley’s retail force is learning, it’s hard being the anointed one. To most of the world, Morgan Stanley got the plum job of lead manager for the most important public stock offering since Google in 2004. But among the retail sales force at the firm, the Facebook Blessing might as well be known as the Facebook Curse.
The refrain from Morgan Stanley’s rank and file: The IPO of the decade is a lose-lose proposition. That’s because retail investors as well as smaller institutions are likely to be disappointed with their Facebook allotment. Institutional players know how things roll, but for the retail brokerage force, the situation is particularly vexing. Many clients assume that because it is a lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley brokers are on the inside track. That’s true, but means less on a popular IPO like Facebook’s. Financial advisers in the lead group, which also includes Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, do have an edge over the 30 other investment banks tasked with distributing shares. But it’s not much of an advantage. Global demand for the $11 billion in shares appears to be much bigger than the deal itself. Institutional salespeople at Morgan Stanley are already warning clients that they expect the deal to be 20 times oversubscribed, one source explained to me.
It’s always been the case that only a thin sliver of retail investors would be able to get hot IPO shares. They were typically high-net-worth clients who reliably invest in every single IPO that would come their way – hot or not. Shakier deals, of course, were always available to retail clients. In its heyday, Lehman Brothers brokers used to say that some of the mediocre IPOs they pushed were from the “institutional waste basket.”
Over time, retail investors have been even less likely to win any meaningful amounts of shares in hot IPOs. That’s in part because fewer companies are going public. Meanwhile, institutional investors have grown bigger and bigger – which means that they need a bigger slice of a new issue if it is to have any impact on portfolio performance. The most recent super-hot, social-media IPO, LinkedIn, went to a remarkably few number of institutions, my sources tell me.
These facts don’t do much for morale at Morgan Stanley, which announced earlier this year that advisers who have produced less than $500,000 per year in gross commissions would not get any shares in IPOs – that is, they don’t get to share in the syndicate for Facebook. That was just before Facebook announced its plans to go public. Talk about timing. Morgan Stanley’s joint venture with Smith Barney has not been the smoothest; adviser count has dropped 5 percent in the past year; this year alone, the firm lost at least 87 advisers who managed about $7.2 billion in assets. The Facebook deal is adding oil to that simmering fire. One broker at another wirehouse told me disaffected Morgan Stanley clients have announced that they will move their accounts to him if they don’t get any Facebook shares.
Meanwhile, another Morgan Stanley broker complained to me that even marginal clients are trying to ingratiate themselves with him in the mistaken belief that they can get a piece of the Facebook IPO from him. The joke’s on them. He doesn’t expect to get any shares. Even big producers who are confident that they can get some shares are bracing for flak because they are unlikely to get enough to satisfy client demand. Some are hoping that the firm will bend some rules by factoring in client account sizes, not just broker gross commissions, as a basis for handing out the prizes. This would widen distribution to large clients whose brokers aren’t usually part of the syndicate group.
Halting the Corvair made America safer
This is a response to an excerpt from Paul Ingrassia’s Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars, published this month by Simon & Schuster.
The causal stretch by Paul Ingrassia over three decades and millions of intervening human events leads him to conclude that “decades after its demise, in the election of 2000, the Corvair’s legacy improbably helped to put George W. Bush in the White House.”
Egads! – as the British say. His otherworldly trek through American history reminds me of Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect,” in which the trail of a tornado is traced all the way back to the flapping of a butterfly’s wings thousands of miles distant. It is one thing to lament the deadly, dancing design of the Corvair until the 1965 model, when the stabilizing, dual-link suspension system was finally installed; it is quite another to burden this automotive offspring of GM’s Ed Cole with the lawless, corporatist, war-starting, anti-democratic Bush regime selected by five Supreme Court justices-turned-Republican politicians in their 5-4 dictate of Bush v. Gore.
The Corvair was an attractive but lethal car. The government-sponsored taskforce, under President Richard Nixon, shaped by a former GM man, could not whitewash the Corvair’s role in the avoidable deaths and injuries of so many unsuspecting motorists. The novel Corvair, with its air-cooled rear engine was widely disliked by auto dealers, but for the wrong reasons. As the famous John DeLorean (former GM vice-president and author of On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors) related, inside the company it was common knowledge that on certain turns the Corvair became unstable. This loss of control even led to the deaths of some children of GM executives. GM also designed the leading edge of the steering mechanism just two inches from the surface of the front tire, thereby exposing the driver to the rearward displacement of the steering column, especially in a left-front collision. Moreover, as GM admitted in a belated public recall, Corvairs emitted a risky amount of odorless carbon monoxide from their heater exchange system during cold weather.
The tragic saga of the Corvair and its victims did, as Ingrassia points out, produce consequences, but only as part of broader revelations regarding the industry suppression of long-known safety devices now taken for granted by car owners.
Today people expect air bags, seat belts, padded dash panels, head-restraints, better brakes, steady vehicle handling and overall crash protection. Auto companies now boast about their vehicles’ safety in their advertisements. Consumers expect their cars to be recalled and fixed when there is a defect attributed to the manufacturer.
Federal auto and highway safety regulation, still too intermittent in my view, has worked to save over a million American lives while helping to diminish or prevent many more injuries. Hundreds of billions of dollars in medical and disability expenditures have been saved as well. To his credit, after warning that the first federal motor vehicle regulations could shut down the industry in 1966, Henry Ford II recognized a few years later that federal standards made cars safer, more fuel-efficient and cleaner.
“the lawless, corporatist, war-starting, anti-democratic Bush regime”
Mr Nader, I’ve been watching and listening to you since I was a little kid in the 60′s. I thought you were a nut then, and at 57 my opinion hasn’t changed, but I will say, America would be poorer without you. You are indeed a man of purpose who against great opposition has always stayed true to the vision in your head.
The gay-rights cause Obama can actually do something about
On Wednesday, President Obama declared his evolution complete. In an interview with ABC News he said: “At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
Gay-rights groups rejoiced; conservative groups scolded. But what the president thinks about gay marriage is, ultimately, symbolic. There is a different issue on which Obama could achieve real, tangible results for gays and lesbians, and gain electoral advantage over Mitt Romney: employment discrimination.
Obama has already done everything he can on gay marriage. His administration has declared the federal law banning gay marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), to be discriminatory and declined to defend it in court. He has extended spousal benefits to the domestic partners of federal employees. Marriage laws, on the other hand, are written at the state level. Even a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman, which Romney supports and Obama already opposed, is not actually signed by the president.
Meanwhile, it is still legal in 29 states to discriminate against gays and lesbians in hiring and firing employees, and in an additional five it is legal to discriminate against transgender people. There has been a Democratic bill floating around Congress called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would extend the federal protections of the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Thus far Obama has said he supports the legislation, but has not called much attention to it.
Instead he’s spoken out on gay marriage, which may come with some political costs in November. It is preposterous to assert, as many political pundits do, that black voters will be receptive to attacks on Obama over gay marriage. Polling shows blacks have become roughly equal to whites in their acceptance of gay marriage. Obama enjoys high approval ratings among black voters, and they agree with him more than with Romney on every other issue. They are also accustomed to voting for more socially liberal politicians, just as wealthy pro-choice Republicans have accepted that they must vote for anti-abortion-rights candidates.
But perhaps it could hurt Obama at the margins among certain key demographics that lean against gay marriage, such as working-class white voters in the Midwest or Mexican-Americans in the Southwest. Meanwhile Democrats in socially conservative states who face a tough re-election fight, such as Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), are surely seething at the attack ad Obama just handed their opponents.
President Obama’a support for same sex marriage is a National AIDS Disaster & a Disgrace.
(I’ve been a solid Atheist, Democrat & Liberal all of my 67 years, but this is just too much)
There is no such thing as a ” Monogamous Gay Marriage “.
All statistics done in the last 20 years by AIDS prevention organizations & Medical Associations reveal the the majority of gay men have experienced over 100 sexual relationships, without condoms, whether ‘same-sex married’ or not. These are the facts & you can kick them around & shuffle them all you want, they are what they are.
As these statistics prove there is no ‘ LOVE ‘ in gay marriage, instead it is a sexual obsession with dangerous consequences, AIDS.
To hell with economic issues Mr. Obama, because with the proliferation of gross homosexuality our society is going no where except hell.
Republicans could join Obama on same-sex marriage
In finally evolving to support marriage equality, President Obama has not only placed himself firmly on the right side of history with respect to an issue of fundamental rights and justice but he has also thrown down the gauntlet for Republicans, especially his presumed challenger, Mitt Romney.
In his comments to ABC News, the president said his attitude toward gay marriage has been shaped over time by voters and members of his own staff “who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together” – who are clearly in love. In other words, the president let the human reality around him shape his personal views and will now lead accordingly – a stark contrast, say, with Mitt Romney, who seems to have little grasp of the struggles and experiences of actual voters and instead rotates his political viewpoints as often as he rotates the cars on his vehicle elevator. In President Obama’s “evolution,” America saw a leader who is not afraid to be wrong and not afraid to change his mind. It’s refreshing.
And now it’s the Republicans’ turn. As Fox News anchor Shepard Smith suggested in reporting the president’s shift, Republicans are “on the wrong side of history.” Indeed. But they have plenty of time to make amends. Republicans should be ashamed enough that theirs is the party that stood in the way of interracial marriage and civil rights. Is that really a legacy the GOP wants to continue into the 21st century? It seems to me the GOP has a choice between courting the open-minded next generation of voters, or continuing to be marred by scandals in which anti-gay Republican after anti-gay Republican is embarrassingly outed and shamed. Apparently this is a tough choice for the GOP, which would rather keep implicitly firing up bigotry than stand firm for equality.
In our exceptionally and often disgustingly hyper-partisan political environment, it can be difficult to remember that political decisions affect real people – and that the politicians who make those decisions are people, too. People can make mistakes. People can change. The same goes for presidents. I believe the president genuinely did evolve on this issue. Sure, it’s easy to be cynical that the same Obama who has been conflict-averse since day one of his administration was merely letting his opinion on gay marriage sail with the winds of political pressure. As the New York Times editorialized, the president “dampening the enthusiasm of allies without gaining the support of equality’s opponents [is] not an unfamiliar place for this president to be, unfortunately.” Unfortunate but accurate. But he deserves our praise now for coming out on the right side of marriage equality and having the decency to call his shift a shift rather than maneuver like Romney, who plainly flip-flops on issues like gay marriage for political gain while trying to feign consistency. Not only should the gay community (including gay Republicans) be thoroughly fed up with being political pawns, but voters in general should be fed up with politicians who refuse to do what’s right and merely, cautiously do what they think is popular.
The great leaders in history were not the ones who did what was popular, but those who did what was difficult – yet ultimately right. In standing up for marriage equality, President Obama showed that he has the capacity to be that kind of leader. Here’s hoping Republicans will follow his lead.
PHOTO: President Barack Obama gestures during the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS) 18th annual gala dinner in Washington, May 8, 2012. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
Homosexual has the same right that straigt people, the main thing is that thy want reconnoissance from the society, they do not want as Obama say the right to marry they want be accepted as a acceptable behavior
How the Corvair’s rise and fall changed America forever
This is an excerpt from Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars, published this month by Simon & Schuster.
However it unfolds, this year’s U.S. presidential election is unlikely to be as close as the one America experienced in 2000. That election was decided, after months of contention and suspense, by disputed ballots and a razor-thin result in Florida.
The historic events, however, were set in motion 40 years earlier by a badly flawed automobile, the Chevrolet Corvair. In the mid-1960s the Corvair made Ralph Nader famous. It also made lawyers ubiquitous, thereby making lawsuits one of the great growth industries of the late 20th Century. And decades after its demise, in the election of 2000, the Corvair’s legacy improbably helped to put George W. Bush in the White House. The car’s story is one of genius, hubris, irony and tragedy, not to mention unforeseen long-term effects on American life and thought.
The Corvair debuted as a 1960 model as one of the first American “compact cars.” (The term was coined by American Motors Chairman George Romney, later Michigan’s governor and father of current presidential candidate Mitt Romney.) The car was “the most profoundly revolutionary car … ever offered by a major manufacturer,” wrote Sports Car Illustrated when the Corvair was launched. It was the brainchild of a brilliant and uber-confident General Motors engineer, Edward N. Cole.
(View a slideshow of the fifteen cars that changed America here or click on the photo above)
Cole grew up in a small Michigan town, where he learned to tune old automobiles fast enough to outrun any other cars in the county. He attended the General Motors Institute in Flint, Mich., alternating study with internships at GM. After graduation he helped GM’s Cadillac division win a big Army tank contract by boosting the performance and reliability of the tank’s engine.
I bought a 1965 Corvair new for about $1,700 while in college. It had a heater and a radio. I drove that car like a “bat out of hell” and it handled superbly. To this day I still think it was one of the best cars I have ever owned. It was not perfect, but had a great future had it not been for Ralph N. He may have been correct about the earlier models, I do not know, but GM buckled under pressure and dropped the car. I lalso bought a Pontiac Fiero many years later (another GM rear engine car). This was another great rear engine car that GM dropped. My only complaint about the Fiero was stiff steering. The Fiero did not have rack & pinion and steering was a little stiff… which seemed odd for a rear engine car.
Bottom line: GM seems to have compromised on some fundamental engineering and shot itself in the foot on both of these rear engine cars. It seems short sighted to me and maybe that is why GM ultimately failed. I hope they have learned something and I hope to see another rear engine car from the new GM.
The real reason Romney is struggling with women voters
Back in February, things started to look dire for the Romney campaign’s ability to attract female voters. Every day brought another story about Republican attacks on reproductive rights: attacks on insurance coverage for contraception, transvaginal probes, all-male panels called in Congress to discuss contraception, attacks on Planned Parenthood’s funding, and the candidate himself increasingly afraid to say a positive word about contraception when asked directly in the debates. A gender gap opened up between the candidates in the polls, with Obama outpacing Romney with women by 19 points. The Romney campaign responded by trying to change the subject, to jobs and the economy. But if Romney wants to close the gender gap, he should rethink that strategy. After all, the polling data suggests that his stance on economic issues – specifically the size of the safety net and amount of economic support the government provides to citizens – is what’s really hurting him with female voters.
The real war between the sexes may not be over feminism or sex so much as whether or not our tax dollars should go to social spending. Research conducted by Pew in October 2011 showed women support a strong, activist government in much larger numbers than men. On the question of whether the government should offer more services, women said yes by 9 more percentage points than men. The gender gap on social spending remained when pollsters asked about specific interest groups. Women wanted more spending on the elderly than did men by 11 percentage points, more spending on children by 10 percentage points and more spending on the poor by 9 percentage points.
Female voters respond much more strongly than male voters to government providing pragmatic solutions and real-world support for ordinary citizens, which helps explain why women flock to Obama and to the Democrats in general. In fact, with college-educated white voters, the gender differences are nothing short of astounding. In this group, female voters prefer Obama 60 to 40, and male voters prefer Romney 57 to 39.
As the lingering downturn puts economic issues front and center in the election, a ballooning gender gap was entirely predictable. Voters cite healthcare and economic issues as their top concerns, and with all the discussion of the student loan crisis of late, that will likely become part of the larger concerns about jobs and the economy. Knowing this, Romney wants to keep talking about these issues.
Support for healthcare reform remains low, at 43 percent, but as the public learns more about what the Affordable Health Care Act provides, the polling numbers have been creeping up a bit. With female voters, the uptick has been swift, with 47 percent of female voters supporting the new law in late March, 10 percentage points up from November. Student loan debt is another issue where women lean more to the left than men. In a recent Daily Kos/SEIU poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, more women than men – by 6 percentage points – supported legislation to keep student loan rates low, a policy that, because of congressional Republicans’ protest, voters strongly associate with Democrats, not Republicans.
Not that reproductive health issues don’t matter to female voters, but women voters have a more expansive view of what meaningful contraception policy looks like. They don’t just want the government to protect the legal right to use contraception; they also want it to enact policies that make sure birth control is affordable for all women, regardless of income. Fifty-five percent of women cite government contraception policy as an important issue for them, compared with 35 percent of men, according to Gallup. By requiring insurance companies to cover contraception and by protecting Planned Parenthood’s funding, the Obama administration appealed to female voters’ preference for a government that offers services as well as ensures reproductive rights.
I’ve never seen such an angry, dismissive and insulting set of posts as those here. What’s up with this? The article is just a straightforward description of gender preferences and yet it draws a furious assault of misogynous comment. Whether you believe in conservative, moderate, or liberal social policy (or pragmatic which can be either) you can’t help but be taken aback by the overt hostility towards women expressed in some of these posts.
Pledging ourselves out of democracy
If anyone were to suggest that members of the House and Senate should abandon their own judgment and instead follow a strict dogma laid down by an outside body, we would be appalled. And if it were proposed that the president should be little more than a rubber stamp to sign any and all legislation presented to him by Congress, we would throw up our hands in horror.
Under the Constitution, members of Congress are representatives of all their constituents, and they are expected to weigh the value of legislation, discuss it, then vote according to their conscience. It is, after all, the House of Representatives, not the Supreme Soviet or the Chinese National People’s Congress. The Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, didn’t intend congressmen to be mere delegates or toe a line drawn by others.
Since 1978, however, when California passed Proposition 13 to reduce property taxes, this essential element of our democracy has been compromised by those who have tied the hands of lawmakers by having them sign solemn and binding “pledges.” By far the most successful is the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” promoted by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), in which congressional candidates agree in advance of election to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates” and “oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.” It was Ronald Reagan who in 1986 urged Grover Norquist, president of the ATR, to administer a no-tax-increases pledge, though as president he went on to raise taxes 11 times.
According to ATR, 238 representatives and 41 senators have made the pledge, though some now regret signing it. Of GOP congressmen, 95 percent have promised not to raise taxes in any circumstances. It is this unanimity among Republicans that has led to the end of give-and-take across the aisle in Washington and brought government to a grinding halt.
Other pledges that bind lawmakers include promises to oppose abortions, to ban pornography, to prevent women from fighting in the armed forces, to outlaw Sharia law, to deny gay marriages, to cut and cap public spending, to pass a constitutional amendment demanding a balanced federal budget, to remain faithful to their spouses (good luck with that), and to support “robust childbearing and reproduction” (whatever that is).
Those who dare renege on the pledge not to raise taxes can expect to be targeted by ATR, or, as Norquist so charmingly puts it, for the group to “educate the voters that they raise taxes” and “encourage them to go into another line of work, like shoplifting or bank robbing, where they have to do their own stealing.” One of those on ATR’s hit list is the Republican senator from Indiana for 35 years, Dick Lugar, hardly a liberal, who, having refused to sign the pledge, is currently defending himself from a primary challenge by a Norquist-approved alternative.
So far, so sinister. But Norquist has another adjustment to the Constitution in mind. He wants the majority in Congress to become the main driver of government. “We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go,” he told the 2012 conservative CPAC conference. “We just need a president to sign this stuff … Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.” His vision of American democracy is something like the British Parliament, with the prime minister backed by a majority in the Commons deciding and the monarch obediently providing.
Great op/ed Mr. Wapshott. And the truth is that it goes much further than just these pledges. The pledges are just one of many tactics being used to take over the country by the right. They are also trying to take away bargaining rights from labor unions and making it harder to for them to raise money from their members; many Republican state legislatures have passed photo id laws to reduce the number of voters that traditionally vote Democratic (if this wasn’t their primary goal, each state that passed such a law would have included in the law a simple and cost-free way for voters to obtain photo id cards. This wasn’t done in any state, because that would be defeating the purpose of the bill.); the conservative Supreme Court has ruled that money = free speech and that corporations are people. (If money = free speech than speech is no longer free, no?) The Citizens United ruling makes it easy for wealthy special interests to buy our government. And then there’s the Republicans’ organized resistance to oppose anything and everything related to Obama or the Democrats, regardless of a proposal’s merits. They won’t confirms Obama’s political and judicial appointments. The Senate filibusters everything the Democrats propose. The level of civility has fallen into the gutter, where the President of the United States is called a liar during the State of the Union and instead of being censured, the Republican Congressman is rewarded by huge campaign donations. Mediocre, has-been rocker Ted Nugent makes an implied threat on the President’s life; the numbers of rightwing militias have burgeoned like we’ve never seen before. It goes on and on and on.
And I haven’t even mentioned one of our biggest problems, the “news” media whose interests are monetary and therefore 1. must avoid offending people, so everything has to be made to appear even even when it’s not, and 2. the media, particularly radio and television, makes enormous profits from political campaigning and, therefore, we can’t expect a serious questioning of our current means of funding political campaign–and we need to.
It’s ugly and I think it’s going to get a heck of a lot worse before it gets any better. The right appears willing to sink the ship if they can’t get everything they want. They almost forced our nation into defaulting on our debt obligations and that would have been an unmitigated disaster. It’s not like things have mellowed out since then.
Kudos to Pseudo Turtle and steve778936 for your excellent comments.
As long as the sharing of personal information is not mandated I have no problem with it. There is a downside to unbridled openness. There are some who will use that data to exploit and even harm. Information is not just an asset, in the wrong hands it is a weapon. One should consider the risk before diving into the social media frenzy.