While well-intentioned, the administration’s efforts to advance the cause of “Internet freedom” as a human right should raise some concerns. First, despite the admirable desire to apply the nation’s enduring principles to the rapidly evolving realm of high technology, framing “Internet freedom” as a human right risks weakening the very concept of human rights. Further, by lending its prestige and credibility to the international cause of Internet freedom, the U.S. government may actually make it more likely that tyrannical regimes will crack down on the Internet [...]

A “right” to use it is a claim of entitlement to a particular technology and thus is based on the nature of the technology, not on the nature of the claimant [...]

tying human rights to the state of technology, however powerful, is an intellectual rabbit hole, at the bottom of which human rights are deprived of the very thing that makes them unique — the fact that we possess them because we are human [...]

In making Internet freedom a subject for discussion among governments, the administration is opening up the possibility of compromising between its version of Internet freedom, based on American political values, and versions embraced by other countries, based in some cases on their authoritarian interests [...]

if unabashedly championing freedom and democracy themselves seems too backwards and Bush-like to policymakers today, the “nearly magical qualities” of the Internet from their perspective leave it as “the only ray of light in an otherwise dark intellectual tunnel of democracy promotion." [...]

Translating our rights and values into cyberspace is a noble goal and one that should ultimately be pursued. But the only way such aims might truly be realized is in the context of societies that recognize and foster individual rights.

Just as we paternalistically bar people from selling themselves into slavery, we must paternalistically bar people from privacy-related choices that constrain their freedoms, opportunities, and dignity. Paternalistic interferences with liberty are called for where market failures, psychological realities, and certain other factors impair the capacity of mature adults to protect themselves from significant harms. It’s hard for individuals to bargain about privacy with large business concerns. The complexity and novelty of privacy-compromising technologies makes it extremely difficult for individuals to protect their own privacy. Not only do educated individuals not necessarily understand the ramifications for privacy of the technologies they use, but we as a society don’t have a clear idea of how voluntary disclosures we make today will bear on our future opportunities.

Debt is the perversion of a promise, a promise that has been perverted through mathematics and violence. I’m not saying mathematics is bad, but the combination of mathematics and violence is extremely bad. A debt is a promise to give a certain sum of money, in a certain amount of time, under certain conditions. It is a contract that is ultimately enforceable through the threat of force [...]

I’m surprised that people are not more outraged by this direct assault on every fabric of their lives. It’s an assault on the very idea of community, and an assault on the commitments that we make to each other through the medium of government. Why is it that a promise made by a politician to the people that elected them—to provide free education for instance—has a less moral standing than the promise that politician has made to a banker? It seems insane. But it’s simply assumed nowadays [...]

in the ancient world, it was not repaying debts that was sacred, but one’s ability to forgive or especially, cancel debts...ultimately a debt is a promise, a human arrangement, and freedom is our ability to make commitments to each other but also, to voluntarily rearrange those commitments when circumstances change. Similarly, if democracy is to mean anything, it can only means the collective power to readjust the commitments we have to one another [...]

Periods of bullion money tend to be periods where you have empires, chattel slavery, and large standing armies. That was true of the classical world. You don’t have the same types of professional armies in the Middle Ages, you don’t have the same sort of gold and silver system, and you don’t have the same mass abuse of slavery. Around the time of discovery in the new world you have bullion money coming back, gold and silver comes back, slavery comes back and we see huge standing armies. Capitalism is obviously new, you wouldn’t describe the ancient world as capitalist, but at the same time capitalism is built on top of something that is not historically unprecedented, and the link between military and money systems remains the dirty secret of capitalism.

The fact that there was any debate over whether to call in experts on such a matter should tell you something about the integrity of Congress. It’d be one thing if legitimate technical questions directed at the bill’s supporters weren’t met with either silence or veiled accusations that the other side was sympathetic to piracy. Yet here we are with a group of elected officials openly supporting a bill they can’t explain, and having the temerity to suggest there’s no need to “bring in the nerds” to suss out what’s actually on it.

regulating institutions of advanced economies are assumed to be efficient; policy-making in developing countries is experimental, "more almost a business mindset, in a way" [...]

the willingness to constrain and for the people to accept constraints is an advantage as we enter into an era in which we don't have unlimited natural resources...[policy makers in developing economies] impose constraints we would view as infringements on the territories we have traditionally viewed as free choice [...]

in the US, 27 million tradable jobs (value creating, ie: manufacturing, farming, raw materials, education, tech svcs.) have been swallowed up by non-tradable jobs (value transference, ie: construction, retail, health care, legal, restaurants) as enabled by over-consumption

part V re: Germans under Schroeder circa 2000 found themselves with a productivity problem, and they were hurt more than helped by the global economy. They focused on unions, job creation and wise outsourcing in order to address inequity of income distribution (though they did not have inequity of income distribution to the extent US does now). Schroeder lost the next election, but his leadership seems to have increased Germany's resilience.

Study after study has shown that In early childhood, the arts have been linked to school-readiness, improved cognitive and motor ability. Learning should also not be confined to formal, academic environments, but should continue through adulthood...

@36 re: assessment

[live blog: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/30/nea-interagency-research-taskforce_n_1120168.html ]

...most disasters are not random acts of fate. They are man made. Terrible events (such as earthquakes and floods) and ineffective systems (such as those crippled by corruption) devolve into disasters because of bad decisions we make [...]

our mechanisms for disaster response and recovery, however innovative, donʼt address the root causes of modern-day tragedies. They donʼt address the poor decisions and the structural flaws that led to their occurrence, meaning that tragedies are bound to repeat themselves[...]

This reckoning can create opportunities. In my own experience, I’ve seen how the field of design is uniquely suited to seize these opportunities and address the systemic flaws that underlie disasters [...]

Though the design process is skilled at creating new services and systems, I think its true value is in its philosophy. By putting first those that had been left behind, and are thus most vulnerable in times of crises, design can enable structural change.

If this concept of “political disobedience” is accurate and resonates, then Occupy Wall Street will continue to resist making a handful of policy demands because it would have little effect on the constant regulations that redistribute wealth to the top. The movement will also continue to resist Cold War ideologies from Friedrich Hayek to Maoism — as well as their pale imitations and sequels, from the Chicago School 2.0 to Alain Badiou and Zizek’s attempt to shoehorn all political resistance into a “communist hypothesis.”

On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.

In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.

four forces doing everything they can to eliminate freedom on the net:

1. governments concerned about loss of control
2. content owners
3. data miners
4. network operators

...via platforms that control, influence and limit our behaviors.

"When you have lived your entire life sharing everything, it may not have occurred to you that human personality used to be created internally, that the struggle of the soul to understand itself and its place in the universe is an internal struggle, not to be decided by an advertiser and not to be adjusted by an intermediary...we need anonymity."

*Anne Marie Slaughter (@SlaughterAM) on "DIY Foreign Policy": http://livestre.am/Oozk (and part 2!)

"...division was the starting point of foreign policy in The Cold War...[Now] we start with connection...non-state actors...and social actors, all of whom can be connected to each other in ever-changing ways with ever-evolving identities...[Christakis, Gladwell]...what all of us can do to engage in addressing global problems - which is the business of foreign policy: map, connect and create. [...Alaa abd el Fattah on Egypt: 'The internet was a platform where we could connect social groups so we could build critical mass without having to liberate an entire institution'...] We can, in every domain, build local, go global and change the world."

*Ben Rattray (@Brattray) from change.org on "Big Problems, Small Solutions": http://livestre.am/Onf1

"...Even if all you care about is national legislation, the most effective means to achieve that end, in many cases, is not to pursue it directly, it's to win locally, all across the country, engaging people through personal narratives and building a movement much broader in scope and deeper in commitment than what currently exists, and in the process creating an environment within which national change is possible."

The point is that Google doesn’t have to dominate any of these industries to be successful, provided that they dominate content monetization. They merely have to make these industries more competitive, lowering the barriers to consuming a lot of content online.

The broader lesson is that monopolies will provide public goods in complementary industries, meaning that they are not as economically harmful as a static analysis would suggest.

The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a "one size fit all" approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.

This is not, however, what this issue of The American Interest means by plutocracy. We mean not just rule by the rich, but rule by and for the rich. We mean, in other words, a state of affairs in which the rich influence government in such a way as to protect and expand their own wealth and influence, often at the expense of others. As the introductory essay to this issue shows, this influence may be exercised in four basic ways: lobbying to shift regulatory costs and other burdens away from corporations and onto the public at large; lobbying to affect the tax code so that the wealthy pay less; lobbying to allow the fullest possible use of corporate money in political campaigns; and, above all, lobbying to enable lobbying to go on with the fewest restrictions. Of these, the second has perhaps the deepest historical legacy.

Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics, one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites. The most dysfunctional societies in the developing world are those whose elites succeed either in legally exempting themselves from taxation, or in taking advantage of lax enforcement to evade them, thereby shifting the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society [...]

Why has a significant increase in income inequality in recent decades failed to generate political pressure from the left for redistributional redress, as similar trends did in earlier times? Instead, insofar as there is any populism bubbling from below in America today it comes from the Right, and its target is not just the “undeserving rich”—Wall Street “flip-it” shysters and their ilk—but, even more so, government policies intended to protect Americans from their predations. How do we explain this? [...]

But as it turned out, Obama was not riding a tide of left-wing populism. While the Democratic majorities in Congress succeeded in moving this ambitious legislative agenda forward, the results fell far short of expectations. The stimulus package did not produce stunning economic successes. The healthcare bill did not include a public option, and failed to address the real sources of cost inflation. Above all, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform bill did not change the perverse incentives that led to the crisis in the first place. Indeed, while Wall Street brought considerable opprobrium on itself, it was arguably the sector of the U.S. economy that suffered the least in the long run. Bank earnings were restored after a couple of quarters. And though the banks now face tougher regulation, Congress failed to do anything about the fact that investment banks are still too large and too interconnected to fail, and will surely be bailed out again when they get in trouble. Indeed, the U.S. financial sector is now concentrated in fewer hands than it was before the crisis [...]

here is the evidence for an American plutocracy of a narrow and discrete but hardly harmless sort. Wall Street seduced the economics profession not through overt corruption, but by aligning the incentives of economists with its own. It was very easy for academic economists to move from universities to central banks to hedge funds—a tightly knit world in which everyone shared the same views about the self-regulating and beneficial effects of open capital markets. The alliance was enormously profitable for everyone: The academics got big consulting fees, and Wall Street got legitimacy. And it has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis.

Another set of ideas was of even more direct help to the wealthy: Reaganomics. Supply-side economics provided a principled justification for the rich paying lower taxes on the grounds that entrepreneurial incentives unleashed by lower marginal tax rates would not merely trickle but pour down both via public finance and through the creation of employment. This argument was likely true at the near 90 percent marginal rates that prevailed after World War II, but those rates were reduced in several waves beginning in the 1960s. Clinton’s tax increases of the early 1990s brought rates up only slightly, and didn’t have the growth-killing effects widely predicted by Republicans—just the opposite, they preceded one of the great economic expansions of recent memory. The benefits of the Bush-era cuts flowed overwhelmingly to the wealthy, and yet were promoted on the grounds that lower rates would redound to everyone’s benefit. This is still a gospel that many people continue to believe, including, oddly enough, all too many of those left behind.

While some of the movement's self-described liberals undoubtedly have good intentions, the strategy is effectively the same as any conservative effort to hobble the public sector: defund government so that it is less effective and then use that ineffectiveness to argue for further privatisation.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/11

calculating the amount of the historical federal subsidy of the Internet “depends on how one parses government spending—it’s fairly modest in terms of direct cash outlays. But once one takes into account rights of way access that were donated and the whole research agenda (through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, etc.), it’s pretty substantial. And if you include the costs of the wireless subsidies, tax breaks (e.g., no sales taxes on online purchases), etc., it’s well into the hundreds of billions range.”4 For context, Meinrath’s estimate puts the federal investment in the Internet at least ten times greater than the cost of the Manhattan Project [...]

The early Internet was not only noncommercial, it was also anti-commercial. Prior to the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation Network, the forerunner to the Internet, explicitly limited the network to noncommercial uses. If anyone dared to sell something online, that person would likely be “flamed,” meaning that other outraged Internet users would clog the individual’s email inbox with contemptuous messages demanding that the sales pitch be removed. This internal policing by Internet users was based on the assumption that commercialism and an honest, democratic public sphere did not mix. Corporate media were the problem, and the Internet was the solution. Good Internet citizens needed to be on the level; they should not hustle for profit by any means necessary [...]

In the realm of the Internet, a state-corporate alliance has developed that is matched perhaps only in finance and militarism. It makes a mockery of traditional economics, with its emphasis on an independent private sector responding to a competitive market. It also makes a mockery of the traditional liberal notion that capitalist democracy works because economic power and political power are in two distinct sets of hands, and that these interests have strong conflicts that protect the public from tyranny. Examples of how large communication corporations and the national security state work hand-in-hand are beginning to proliferate. The one that was exposed—and is singularly terrifying—concerned how, for much of the past decade, AT&T illegally and secretly monitored the communications of its customers on behalf of the National Security Agency.27 The more recent stories of how Amazon and PayPal/eBay cooperated with the government in the WikiLeaks affair may not be in the same league, but they point to the demise of the separation of public and private interests at the heart of liberal democratic theory [...]

The future increasingly looks like one where the wireless Internet world will come to equal or exceed the traditional wireline broadband sector, and this will be a proprietary system that does not practice “network neutrality” or have the openness long associated with the Internet. We should expect more great mergers among and between the largest media, telecommunication, computer, and Internet corporations, along the lines of Comcast-NBC.

As the authors of a 2011 report by the New America Foundation put it, we are entering a world of digital feudalism, where a handful of colossal corporate mega-giants rule private empires. Advertising will be given every opportunity to exploit the system, and any meaningful notion of privacy will have to be sacrificed. “For once the fate of a network—its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation—is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them,” one of the earliest champions of the democratic Internet recently observed, “that network loses its power to effect change.” It is a world that would have been considered impossible not too long ago, but it is the destination at which one inevitably arrives, if capitalism is behind the steering wheel.

the seeming inevitability of Orszag-like migrations points to a potentially fatal tension within the progressive strand of liberal thought. Progressives laudably seek to oppose injustice by deploying government power as a countervailing force against the imagined opressive and exploitative tendencies of market institutions. Yet it seems that time and again market institutions find ways to use the government's regulatory and insurer-of-last-resort functions as countervailing forces against their competitors and, in the end, against the very public these functions were meant to protect.

We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism. So it's no surprise that progressives would rather worry over trivialities such as campaign finance reform than dwell on the paradoxes of political power.

America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth. Figuring out why so many of our intellectuals and experts are so poorly equipped to play a constructive role — and figuring out how to develop the leadership we currently lack — may be the most important single thing Americans need to work on right now [...]

the biggest roadblock today is that so many of America’s best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history to do their real job and help society transition to the next level. Instead of opportunities they see threats; instead of hope they see danger; instead of the possibility of progress they see the unraveling of everything beautiful and true [...]

America today has many technical intellectuals – people like doctors, engineers, and others who are able to carry out complex tasks – and we are extraordinarily rich in specialist intellectuals who have a deep knowledge of a particular subject. Our educational and professional systems are set up to train and support the large numbers of people needed to fill these roles. We are much less effective at teaching and supporting people who are able to master the essentials of many complex subjects, integrate the insights from this kind of study into a coherent social or political vision, and communicate what they have learned to a broad general lay audience. The more complex a society and the more rapidly it is changing, the more need it has for multi-disciplinary, synthesizing intellectuals who are focused on communicating serious ideas to a large audience. Otherwise, a gap grows between the technical and specialist intellectuals and the values and ideas of society at large [...]

For Assange in 2006, then, the public benefit of leaked information is not the first-order good of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (free information is its own reward), nor is it the second-order good of the muckrakers* (free information will lead the people to demand change). What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims. In his words, “We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment.”

Revelations about the past will continue to bloody the Internet’s pathways. At the same time governments will stuff data back into Pandora’s box, while individuals find new electronic routes for data to reach the public. Assange and his crusaders may be good. Perhaps they are bad. But they have taken everyone’s urge to tell a story to a new and almost wholly unfamiliar level.

All they know is that we're crusaders. All they know is that we're imperialists. All they know is that we want their oil. They don't know otherwise. And I'll tell you, a lot of the people I spoke with in Afghanistan had never heard of the Twin Towers and most of them couldn't recognize a picture of George Bush [...]

the Arabs all think it's happening and they think it's for religious purposes for the most part. Again, most of them are so uneducated and they have such little access to media, what they do get is a very bad story, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be afraid as they are. You know, they just don't have the luck that we do of open information.' [...]

This TV show that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there's nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.

"Look," she says now, "the process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer."

The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians’ misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence.

Most of the technologies that are now 25 years old or more will be around; almost all of the younger ones “providing efficiencies” will be gone, either supplanted by competing ones or progressively replaced by the more robust archaic ones. So the car, the plane, the bicycle, the voice-only telephone, the espresso machine and, luckily, the wall-to-wall bookshelf will still be with us.

In education, as in so many other aspects of society, money is being used to squeeze out democracy.

Waiting for Superman and its surrounding campaign reflect an influential trend that has proven adept at dominating education policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations. This bipartisan alliance unites 20th Century conservatives closely aligned with the Republican Party who made the bulk of their money before the dawn of the digital era, and 21st Century billionaires more loosely aligned with the Democratic Party who generally made their fortunes through digitally based technology. (These two groups can loosely be described as analog conservatives and digital billionaires.)

Despite their differences, both groups embrace market-based reforms, entrepreneurial initiatives, deregulation and data-driven/test-based accountability as the pillars of educational change. Under the banner of challenging bureaucracy and promoting innovation, both groups chafe at public oversight and collective bargaining agreements. Above all, both rely on money to get their way.

We are entering the Anthropocene, a new geological era in which our activities are threatening the Earth´s capacity to regulate itself.

@8:00 ...our old paradigm of analyzing and pushing and predicting parameters into the future aiming at minimalizing environmental impacts is of the past. Now we have to ask ourselves: which are the large environmental processes that we have to be stewards of to keep ourselves safe in the Holocene and could we even...identify the...points where we may expect non-linear change and could we even define a planetary boundary...within which we have a safe operating system for humanity...we can only find NINE boundaries [including climate, ozone depletion, ocean acidification]

@12:00 ...the drama is that 200 countries have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction. But it changes fundamentally our government and management paradigm, from the current linear, command-and-control thinking, looking at efficiencies and optimization, towards a much more flexible and adaptive approach where we recognize that redundancy in social and environmental systems is key to be able to deal with the turbulent era of global change

[persistence to withstand shocks, transformation from crisis to innovation, adaptation]

@13:00 examples of new approach: Latin American farmers, Australian Great Barrier Reef, Swedish wetlands

@15:45 Elinor Ostrom's work clearly shows that we can govern the commons if we invest in trust, local action-based partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations

[see Umair's write-up after Ostrom's Nobel:
http://pinboard.in/u:Taryn/b:ddef9f501c1d
-and-
Lewis Hyde (author: The Gift) on The Commons:
http://pinboard.in/u:Taryn/b:a60ab6dde9d3 ]

@17:20 ...incremental change is not an option. We are facing the largest transformative development since industrialization. In fact, what we have to do over the next 40 years is much more dramatic...than what we did when we moved into the situation we're in today.

1. call everything an experiment
2. when you're given the go-ahead from authorities, go fast
3. build up a user base
4. when you achieve your objective, don't be afraid to be nice
5. keep asking, keep re-phrasing the question
6. when you get the microphone, make your point clearly
7. get standing
8. try to get the bureaucrats to threaten you
9. look for over-reaching
10. don't be afraid to fail

Cass’s work points out that parties who disagree on basic things — such as a would-be polity that wants to produce a constitution for the first time — risk coming away empty handed if they insist on their own views. But they don’t want to compromise, either. So what they do is strategically punt: they come up with texts that are intentionally vague, leaving it for another day to figure out what they mean in practice, so they can move on with a joint endeavor of some kind. There are lots of vague statements of that sort in the proposal, some of which are drawn from another likely-intentionally vague set of FCC principles about the Net. So, for example, under the proposal, carriers can’t engage in undue discrimination. They can do reasonable network management. There’s to be transparency, but not neutrality, for wireless at this time. These definitions would have to be much more fleshed out to understand what the agreement means, and lawyers use terms like these so that the parties’ different ideas of “undue,” “reasonable,” and “now” can be parked in peace under the same roof [...]

The proposal is aimed for Congress to adopt in part to clarify the FCC’s ability to regulate here, and it can be divided into two types of suggestions: one about the ground rules (limited by the vague language sampled above) to be observed by ISPs, and one that’s meta, i.e. about who should make and enforce whatever rules there are to be [...]

At the very least, it’s clear that the substantive ideas represented in the Google/Verizon proposal are important enough not to simply be left to these two players. Both freely admit as much — they call the framework simply a starting point, soliciting others’ views, and acknowledging that it’s ultimately up to bodies like the U.S. Congress to decide what the rules will be and how they’ll be refined and enforced. But their opening bid is to ask Congress to lay down a few rules and then butt out — leaving the FCC to play a limited role in enforcement, and making the bar for adjustment one where Congress would have to revisit the issue, such as for wireless, if trouble is seen there.

the system of state capitalism is breaking down, threatening the entire planet, its institutions and species. When this collapse can no longer be contained and a global monetary crisis ensues, world society will have the choice of creating an economic system that follows the universal laws of biophysics and commons preservation — or accepting a new version of 18th-20th century mechanistic economics, obliging humanity to continue living off the common capital of the planet under corporate feudalism and über-militaristic regimes. Our decision will likely come down to this: global commons or global autarchy. As an economist, I donʼt pretend to speak for the conscience of humanity; but as a human being, my heart tells me that we shall see the beginnings of a commons economy in our lifetimes.

Bloggers carry so much influence that many senators have a young press aide dedicated to the care and feeding of online media. News about, by, and for a tiny kingdom of political obsessives dominates the attention of senators and staff, while stories that might affect their constituents go unreported because their home-state papers can no longer afford to have bureaus in Washington. Dodd, who came to the Senate in 1981 and will leave next January, told me, “I used to have eleven Connecticut newspaper reporters who covered me on a daily basis. I don’t have one today, and haven’t had one in a number of years. Instead, D.C. publications only see me through the prism of conflict.” Lamar Alexander described the effect as “this instant radicalizing of positions to the left and the right.” [...]

On July 21st, President Obama signed the completed bill. The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.

[ see also: Todd Purdum's "Washington, We Have a Problem"
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?printable=true&currentPage=all ]

I didn't like the management culture. I still wanted to be a person who worked with his hands, and everybody there, except in the research area, was aspiring to get into management [...]

There was a very close linkage between people who were doing technical work and people who were trading or doing sales [at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s]. There weren't a lot of barriers to dealing with different people. It was a place that valued you if you had a skill, no matter what it was [...]

Most of the models that had been developed in the financial world for treating the risk of bonds or the risk of options or valuing options were all essentially diffusion models, related to diffusion of heat in classical physics [...]

To build a model of options — there are a lot of little things that can go wrong. If there is a gap between the person who understands the model and the person who does the implementation, then a lot of little things can go wrong which you have an incredibly hard time rooting out because the person who understands the theory can't implement it and the person who understands the implementation can't understand what might be wrong when you get some mistake [...]

The difference between being an economist and being a physicist is that most economists have never really seen a successful model. So they don't know what constitutes a good model and a bad model. They either denigrate models too much or they respect them too much and think they are much better than they are.

Physicists, going back to what I said earlier, know the difference between a really accurate theory and between a more or less pragmatic model and they understand where to make approximations and what not to take too seriously. It's that sort of understanding of how much theory is useful, but not too much, is one of the skills that physicists bring. The second is really a hands-on approach to doing things yourself [...]

There isn't going to be an elegant solution to any of this. That's the way of human affairs, and in terms of leadership, perhaps the best we can hope for is that occasional, miraculous, moment when people who are in a position to make a difference cease to behave mechanically — to take some recent examples, Mandela and de Klerk, perhaps Gorbachev — and who, rather than fulfilling their preprogrammed destiny, break the cycle of karma.

[The Nixon Administration's] cheap food policy worked almost too well: crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even. This led to a deep depression in the farm belt in the 1980s followed by a brutal wave of consolidation. Most importantly, the price of food came down, or at least the price of the kinds of foods that could be made from corn and soy: processed foods and sweetened beverages and feedlot meat. (Prices for fresh produce have increased since the 1980s.) Washington had succeeded in eliminating food as a political issue—an objective dear to most governments at least since the time of the French Revolution [...]

Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids [...]

What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself.

how can the government change the framework of choices that particular people are faced with so that their own small errors in risk perception don’t expose the whole of society [...] taking human idiosyncrasies into account, might revive an old technocratic hope: that society could be understood so perfectly that it might be improved. The elaboration of behavioral economics, which seeks to uncover the ways in which people are predictably irrational, “is the most exciting intellectual development of my lifetime" [...] OIRA's administrators require that federal agencies express the costs and benefits of their proposed rules (lives saved, swampland preserved) in dollars. Moral principles, filtered through this cost-benefit analysis, find their way into confounding little boxes. A human life, the E.P.A. figured in a 2001 rule about arsenic and drinking water, was worth $6.1 million. (If an environmental regulation would save one life but cost $4 million, it ought to be put into effect; if it cost $8 million to save that life, the regulation would be scuttled.) Each I.Q. point a child lost because of exposure to lead was worth $8,346 over the course of a lifetime. A lost workday was worth $83. Many of these estimates used data from surveys — taken at malls, among other places — that asked passers-by how much more they would need to be paid to take on a job that carried, for instance, a 1-in-10,000 risk of death. Richard Posner, who has the most magnificent and chilly mind in this realm, used similar projections to price the benefit of preventing the extinction of the human race at $600 trillion.

Sunstein, steeped in the literature of behavioral economics, suggests that this abstract, utilitarian method might be humanized and reconciled with the world in which people actually live.

[interesting handling of climate crisis economics in the 2nd half]

If your market doesn’t work to set reasonable prices, then you need to acknowledge that and start thinking like serious regulators; you’re going to have to get a lot deeper into cost-of-service regulation than you ever imagined.

And setting rates is more than making consumers happy; you also have to allow premiums that keep the insurers from withholding service or withdrawing completely. Welcome to cost-of-service regulation of essential public services.

If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in “friends-of-friends” (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people’s abstractions allow them to share more. When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.

The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.” [...]

What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away. It pains me how many people are living like ostriches. If we don’t look, it doesn’t exist, right?? This isn’t good for society. Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outting people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury.

[ Calacanis' rant:
http://calacanis.com/2010/05/12/the-big-game-zuckerberg-and-overplaying-your-hand/ |

R Stross, NYTimes:

The company’s desire now to help out “the world” — an aim that wasn’t mentioned on its “About” page two years ago — has led it to inflict an unending succession of privacy policy changes on its members.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/business/16digi.html |

danah on Facebook as a utility that needs to be regulated:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-regulated.html ]

The other 21st-century wrinkle: technological systems are often too complex, their functioning not fully understood even by the people who build and run them. In the case of oil, it’s a drilling rig measuring nearly five miles from top to bottom, reaching into crushing, cold depths where bizarre chemical reactions are the norm. The equipment is just part of a complex hierarchical system – with responsibility dispersed between different locations and companies. Facebook is constantly growing and changing. And you, of course, don’t know how your privacy settings are supposed to work. Neither does Facebook – and they like it that way!

The thing is, we don’t know where all this is going. The federal government cannot be relied upon to oversee any of this. Its reach is too short, its capabilities diminished by long stretches of anti-government stewardship and outpaced by the challenges it faces. Oil drilling is geographically remote and done by international corporations with powerful lobbying arms. Social networking is, for government agencies, a new frontier and one that doesn’t seem, on the face of it, like a good target for traditional forms of consumer regulation.

Ed Begley on lawns, Diane Ravitch on tests, Donna Brazile on pundits, James K Galbraith on CBO, Mike Tidwell on carbon offsets

[must read Rushkoff's and Lanier's responses in Reality Club responses:

Rushkoff:

It's not that the Net doesn't allow for the creation of the required charismatic leader. It's such a leader is no longer necessary. The ground rules have changed with the landscape.

Lanier:

It seems apparent, alas, that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have not improved American democracy, and yet we expect these tools to promote democracy elsewhere.]

The questions being asked in this conversation are for the most part coming from thinkers who are not situated in traditional academic disciplines and whose authority is not derived from institutional affiliations. This is a crowd of maverick intellectuals. In addition to Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky, participants in the ongoing Edge discussion include David Gelernter, George Dyson, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Yochai Benkler, Douglas Rushkoff, and Charles Leadbeater. Only Gelernter (Yale), Benkler (Harvard), Shirky (NYU), hold academic positions.

Perhaps one reason there are so few thinkers from the psychology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy departments of our major universities contributing to this conversation is that communications theory has long been deemed to be a low-prestige discipline among academics. The best people are likely to be found outside academia.

Morozov: huge intellectual void with the regards to the Internet's impact on global politics

[...]

Yes, it was a very vibrant, online campaign, but I didn't see it extending into real world coordination all that much.

Complete DNA sequencing of every case of cancer, Solar cells, A light-weight vest for soldiers and police officers, Educational software, Intelligent prosthetics, Biological systems that can turn sunlight into carbon-neutral fuel, “exascale” supercomputer capable of a million trillion calculations per second , Automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation between the major languages

the truth of it is that many cops will interpret an assertion of your constitutional rights, however politely delivered, as a rude challenge. They are supported in that view by four decades of "law and order" talk that classifies constitutional rights as mere instrumentalities of crime, not as the rules by which we have chosen to live.

Shame on us if we put up with that.

innovative forms of online cooperation could result in more efficient and responsive for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies by the year 2020

For the past 20 years, Diane Ravitch, a highly regarded historian who served in the Department of Education during the George H.W. Bush administration, has been among the keenest advocates of this approach. "I too had fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures," she says, and "drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix." Mea maxima culpa: The Death and Life of the Great American School System is a complete turnaround, a point-by-point repudiation of this market-driven strategy.

[more book reviews:
http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=1193680 |

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/books/review/Wolfe-t.html |

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/13/how-save-schools/ |

interview with Diane Rehm in which Ravitch talks about schools' role in the community and democracy, NCLB fraud as put forward by Arne Duncan:
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-03-11/diane-ravitch-death-and-life-great-american-school-system ]

As it turns out, though, I am wrong. Entirely wrong. Granted, he is not big on self-revelation. But he is neither difficult nor mean. McSweeney's is in the Mission district of the city: it's like Camden only with wider roads and more second-hand bookshops. When I arrive, I'm led past the desks of half-a-dozen bright young things and into his office, which is small and gloomy and womb-like. Time to break the ice. You hate doing interviews, don't you? I ask, sitting down (there is no desk; he works on an old sofa). "No, not at all," he says. There is a look of mild amazement on his face as he tells me this and it's not disingenuous; as he will explain later, he feels a certain sense of distance from his old self. Perhaps he prefers not to remember exactly how he used to be [...] "We try not to be hit and run. We give micro-loans and I have no problem helping people out financially. Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that. I guess I'm very practical. My mom taught me that. That's why I get along with Zeitoun so well, and with Valentino. They build things. They make things happen." [...] "Yes, there can be a little bit of an unhelpful whirlpool of cleverness that eats its own tail and, having spent a little time in that, it wasn't always the best company to keep and it wasn't the people I was used to." [...] "Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down.

Summary: Despite increasing interest in issues of open government and governmental transparency, the values of “openness” and “transparency” have been undertheorized. This workshop will bring together academics, government, advocates and tinkerers to examine a few critical issues in open and transparent government. How can we better conceptualize openness and transparency for government? Are there specific design and architectural needs and requirements placed upon systems by openness and transparency? How can openness and transparency best be sustained? How should we change the provision and access of primary legal materials? Finally, how do we best coordinate the supply of open government projects with the demand from tinkerers?

On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress. But the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it [...] Given the magnitude of the challenges we're facing, we need people around the world to pool their knowledge and creativity to help rebuild the global economy, protect our environment, defeat violent extremism, and build a future in which every human being can realize their God-given potential.

Improved outreach to state and local governments will take place; Any remaining barriers to government 2.0 at the federal level will be removed through the legislative process; Open source is open for business in D.C. and at all levels of government;

who creates the industries of the 21st century, which system of government is best at encouraging innovation, and which citizens have the drive to tackle hard problems and turn them into great opportunities [...] How does government become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate? How do you design a system in which all of the outcomes aren't specified beforehand, but instead evolve through interactions between government and its citizens, as a service provider enabling its user community?

The directive, sent to the head of every federal department and agency today, instructs the agencies to take specific actions to open their operations to the public. The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration are at the heart of this directive. Transparency promotes accountability. Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise to government initiatives. Collaboration improves the effectiveness of government by encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the federal government, across levels of government, and between the government and private institutions.

Recovery.gov only does half of what a lot of people believe it to do. Recovery.gov's job is to allow the Recovery board and taxpayers watch what's going on with the 787 Billion Dollars being spent. There's no data-collection going on at Recovery.gov. That all goes on at Recovery.gov's less pretty step-sister: FederalReporting.gov

FederalReporting.gov is also managed by the Recovery board, and is used by recipients of federal funds to report the data back to the government. In essence, FederalReporting.gov is the source of the data Recovery.gov eventually displays. So if you're looking at Recovery.gov going "how the heck did all this bad data get in here in the first place

Law.Gov is an outgrowth of 3 years of work we've done at Public.Resource.Org along with our numerous colleagues in the open law movement across the country. There have been a series of piecemeal successes which have demonstrated that there is a demand and a need for more legal information to be more broadly available. I'm hopeful now that a truly national movement may have coalesced and that there is at least a chance we can bring this across the finish line and create a new function inside of government, the publication of America's operating system on an open source platform.

billions spent on this, billions spent on that

The clock is ticking. In one year, unless the Albany crowd pulls off some miracle, which we doubt will happen, it will be up to the voters to get them out, all of them.

There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption. Projects such as the one that the health care bill would launch--building a massive database of doctors who got money from private interests; or projects such as the ones (these are the really sexy innovations for the movement) to make it trivially easy to track every possible source of influence on a member of Congress, mapped against every single vote that the member has made. These projects assume that they are seeking an obvious good. No doubt they will have a profound effect. But will the effect of these projects--at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations--really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they righteously envisage?[...]not all data satisfies the simple requirement that they be information that consumers can use, presented in a way they can use it. "More information," as Fung and his colleagues put it, "does not always produce markets that are more efficient." Instead, "responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response."[...]The public is too smart to waste its time focusing on matters that are not important for it to understand. The ignorance here is rational, not pathological. It is what we would hope everyone would do, if everyone were rational about how best to deploy their time. Yet even if rational, this ignorance produces predictable and huge misunderstandings. A mature response to these inevitable misunderstandings are policies that strive not to exacerbate them.

"With an XML edition, independent organizations can reorganize the Register’s contents in ways that are more meaningful to you and address your personal interests; track issues that are likely to affect your community or your profession; and even engage in real-time public discussions about its contents with others across the country and around the world."

[follow link to Brendan Nyhan's] These numbers also suggest a pretty significant secular trend toward everybody hating Congress all of the time. Minority parties can make politics a pretty miserable sphere. Nothing gets done. Media coverage is thick with outrage and scandal and trivialities. Voters begin to loathe the system, and that hurts whoever is in power at the moment.

The point is that when you have capitalism, capitalism encourages you to think of ways to make money or to make more money. And the judges never could have gotten the kickbacks had the county not privatized the juvenile hall. But because there's been this big push in the past twenty or thirty years to privatize government services, take it out of our hands, put it in the hands of people whose only concern is their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders or to their own pockets, it has messed everything up.

With the US Senate bogged down in the fight over reforming health care, American leaders have said that the senators might not move on climate legislation until 2010, well after the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. That drew a sharp response from John Bruton, head of the European Union delegation: "The United States is just one of the 190 countries coming to this conference," Bruton said, "but the United States emits 25% of all the greenhouse gases that the conference is trying to reduce. I submit that asking an international conference to sit around looking out the window for months, while one chamber of the legislature of one country deals with its other business, is simply not a realistic political position"...Europe has proposed far-reaching reforms designed to impose new rules on executive pay and bonuses, requiring that banks link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance...

Talking at the US State Department this summer, Hans Rosling uses his fascinating data-bubble software to burst myths about the developing world. Look for new analysis on China and the post-bailout world, mixed with classic data shows.

On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.

The question of why so many of the wealthy world’s previous efforts to do just that - the ambitious international initiatives, both public and private, the trillions of dollars in aid - have not had more of an effect has triggered vehement debate among politicians, activists, and scholars alike. What’s so radical about Romer’s proposal, what makes the politics unique, is that it’s not based on aid at all but a sort of frank, pragmatic paternalism. In charter cities, developing nations would be outsourcing their government to rich ones.

Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation...economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems.

Weary of shelters, the couple pitched a pup tent in Roger Williams Park, close to a plaque bearing words Williams had used to describe this place he founded: “A Shelter for Persons in Distress.” But someone complained, so Mr. Freitas set off again in search of shelter. The March winds blew.

Down South Main Street he went, past the majestic court building and the upscale seafood restaurant, over a guardrail to a gravelly plot beneath a ramp that once guided cars toward Cape Cod. Foul-smelling and partially hidden, a place of birds and rodents, it was perfect.

synopsis

In this system, elected leaders carry responsibility, but not authority, for far-reaching policies about public revenues and resources. That's not governance -- it's reactive management of a deeply flawed status quo.

Government to Citizen, Citizen to Government, Citizen to Citizen, Government to Goverment

The toppling of Democratic control unfolded in swift and dramatic fashion shortly after 3 p.m. as senators gathered in the lofty oaken chamber for what seemed like small-bore legislative action on an uneventful afternoon.

[a lot of bandying about of the terms]
We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American

[This is an excellent film, a must-see. Sadly, Vimeo sucks.]
[Torrent here: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4896283/Us_Now_(2009)/]

A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet

Our American culture embraces a host of microcultures—local traditions and ways of seeing the world that spring from some particular history and make different groups express our common Americanism in their own distinctive accents.

We should not let ideology blind us to the reality that direct government control of a central industry can work to everyone's benefit, especially if government itself is part of the problem, as it was with the railroads and still is for the automakers.

read comments

How can Congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government? Instead of viewing the public as a customer for services, I believe that we should empower citizens to become our partners in shaping the future of our nation.

It was interesting to see this bit of climate news juxtaposed against the fall financial crisis. The two crises have a lot in common. In both cases we have a systemic problem that can be forestalled only through immediate and very expensive government action, paid for by a public that has to take the diagnosis on faith (since even the domain experts do not understand the problem). The solution has to cross national boundaries, with the most advanced economies paying a disproportionate share of the price. And in the best case, the solution will give a negative result (lack of a depression, absence of catastrophic climate change) where it may be impossible to prove that the adopted policy was better than doing nothing.

http://change-congress.org/ al gore @ 37:00 - "democracy crisis" Q&A 42:00

Zero. That's how many Republican votes the stimulus bill received in the House. Zero. Not one. Not Mike Castle of Delaware, whose constituents gave 62 percent of their votes to Obama. Not Anh Cao of Louisiana, whose district when 74 percent for Obama. Not Illinois' Steven Kirk, whose district went 61 percent for Obama. Zero. A popular new president elected amidst an economic crisis was not able to attract one crossover vote on his first major priority. In the more moderate Senate, Obama is expected to attract three Republican votes. They will have cost him hundreds of billions in concessions, and they will have cost America hundreds of thousands of jobs.