bill:politics

Beautiful, heartaching, swinging country version by the Burns Sisters of Little Steven’s I am a Patriot provides the soundtrack for a video view of last summer’s Cindy Sheehan-led peace protests in Crawford, Texas. The song is so appropriate and never more so than when Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are giving speeches claiming that people like me, who disagree with their tactics and policies, are either traitors or providing sustenance to the terrorists. As if their oh so precious Bible were not the only document they possess written down by man but whispered by their Almighty!

(Tech note: I initially attempted to embed the video in this post for your convenience but despite trying a couple of WordPress plugins couldn’t make it work; the fault is mine, I’m sure, and not the plugin authors’.)

From the Interesting People mail list, the recent London bomb scare has almost certainly got the real Al Qaeda laughing so hard they’ve wet themselves. Twice. As Perry E. Metzger, a computer security expert whose gone back to school to study chemistry, analyzes the liquid bomb plot and concludes by saying:

“At some point, we’re going to have to accept that there is a difference between real security and Potemkin security (or Security Theater as Bruce Schneier likes to call it), and a difference between realistic threats and uninteresting threats. I’m happy that the police caught these folks even if their plot seems very sketchy, but could we please have some sense of proportion?”

Frankly, more or less the same thoughts (without the extensive chemical explanation) had occured to me as I watched TV clips of people tossing good stuff in the trash bins because the security regime went more than a bit bonkers. All the politicians and NeoCon pundits screaming about how this would have been a tragedy beyond imagining just set off too many buttons for me. Of course, more people are dying every couple of weeks in places like Darfur (from intertribal violence) and South Asia (from floods and earthquakes and train derailments) than would have if this plot was real and succeeded but they aren’t American or British. So who gives a fuck, right?

[via Semiologic]

John Robb had a post today on the latest developments in the police v. PCC battle in Sao Paulo and reminded me I was saving up some material to blog on Brazil, to follow up this post from a couple of weeks ago.

A good friend of mine, born in Massachusetts but fluent in Portuguese and married to a lovely Brazilian woman, said to me the other day: “Brazil is like a big carcass being ripped apart by hyeanas.” The PCC problem in Sao Paulo is just one part of it, and probably the lesser.

The bigger problem, as discussed in my previous entry, is the completely lawless destruction of the Amazon. Not to go all ecowarrier but for the near future this will probably have a larger global impact and is being driven by a simpler motivation, greed. The government won’t step in effectively because the necessary individuals are corrupted and external intervention is a non-starter due to Brazilian nationalism.

To a degree, the PCC and Amazonian issues are driven by the same underlying cause: Brazil is a country with a tiny, ultra-wealthy ruling elite, who think nothing of jetting to Miami for a hairdo and dinner, and a huge improverished peasant class, millions of whom live in cardboard and newspaper shantytowns called invasions with no water or sewage
treatment and minimal electricity provided by illegal taps.

Two of the commonly cited examples of economic success are widespread use of ethanol and exported beef; even proud Brazilians will brag on them at parties. Both, however, are actually causing much more harm than good. To provide grazing for the always increasing cattle herds and farm land to grow the corn and grain to feed them and produce the ethanol, more and more land is required.

Where is the land coming from? Criminals and corrupt politicians! Even Lula da Silva, the left winger elected President in 2002 on promises to reform the system and dig the country out from under the thumb of the IMF and World Bank, has found it impossible to put a dent in the system. Da Silva’s re-election this October, considered a lock weeks ago, is now under severe pressure from a renegade senator even further to the left who split off from the ruling party because it failed to deliver on the 2002 platform.

Guns are as, or perhaps even more, freely available in Brazil as in the United States. Over the last 20 years groups of armed men have simply shown up in the Amazon and the nation’s countryside, chopped down as many of the beautiful old growth hard wood trees as they could carry off and set fire to the rest to clear the land for ranchers or farmers. Politicians and police are paid to do nothing and the ones who refuse the payola are killed or transferred to ineffectual postings.

The people who lived on the land head for Sao Paulo, Rio and the other big cities where nothing but more misery awaits them. The hovels, which can spring up over night, grow into the huge tracts known as favelas. Brazil’s most brilliant futebol players, Ronaldinho and Robinho being the latest global superstars in a line going back to Pele, often emerge from these ghettos but other than the dozens who escape via sports each year few residents have little such hope.

Except, of course, through crime. My friend says that middle class Brazilians travel between home and work, shopping or school in constant fear of carjackings, kidnappings or worse, windows closed, doors locked and guards opening electric gates at the last possible moment and for the shortest time span so no one can sneak inside.

The recent actions of the First Command of the Capital (PCC) gang, the focus of Robb’s attention, is an early indicator that the largest country in South America may soon become the next failed state in our hemisphere, joining Columbia and Peru, but with horrifically more serious consequences than increased drug trafficking.

Federation is sponsoring a major rally this Sunday, July 23, at 5:00 at the Circle of Palms, the Plaza on Market St. between the Fairmont Hotel and the San Jose Museum of Art.

If you live further north, a similar rally will be held that day in San Francisco at noon at the Justin Herman Plaza at the foot of Embarcadero and Market St.

Show the world that we Stand With Israel during these terrible days! Please remember to wear blue and white. Feel free to make your own signs but please no signs or graphics offensive to any racial, ethnic or religious group including but not limited to Arabs, Islam, or Palestinians.

If you can’t attend or want to take care of this ahead of time, you can donate to the Israel Crisis Fund online. Only $350 can take an Israeli child out of bomb shelter and bring him or her to a summer camp in a safer place (photos).

So tonight the Big Guy and I hauled over to SAP Labs’ very nicely appointed offices for this month’s Future Salon meeting, Security Future Salon, featuring Global Guerillas author John Robb. For most of the audience (40-50 people, clearly more than expected), people who don’t subscribe to Robb’s RSS feeds, this was probably a big, unpleasant revelation.

Having paid attention to his writings on 4GW and the limitations of the national security model, this wasn’t particularly new material for me. No less unpleasant. I wish he’d have spent more time on showing how terrorist lessons learned in Iraq are being exported to Nigeria (which he did at least touch on), Pakistan, Somalia, Chechnya and Colombia but hopefully he’ll blog this stuff in more detail soon.

For someone with his military ties I was pleased to see him explicitly criticize Bush, Rumsfeld and the Administration’s work on pretty much all levels.

Push to Tighten Lobbying Rules Loses Strength says a report in today’s New York Times. According to Florida Republican Adam Putnam, who sits on the controlling House Rules Committee, the only reason we might have seen meaningful new restrictions was perception of vulnerability at the polls. “I think this entire Congress is schizophrenic on this right now,” he said. Putnam is one of the principles drafting lobbying legislation, so when he says schizophrenic that probably translates to “phew, we dodged the bullet this time.”

Because really, why would politicians pass a law so definitively against their own interest unless not doing so posed an even greater threat? Consider how many of the Republicans signed the 1994 Contract With America, which included term limits to end the practice of members serving in Washington for decades, and yet are still holding office–this is just an example, though, since the inaction on lobbying is attributable to Democrats as well.

The linked article claims that new legislation on lobbying has lost its window of opportunity due to the recent uproar over Dubai Ports World’s bid to acquire a half dozen American ports. Frankly, this is a much better explanation of the uproar than I’ve seen before: good ol’ distraction! Really, the ports were already owned by a British company and many other American ports have been owned by foreign companies for some time.

DPW may be based in a country where two of the September 11 terrorists were born, have loose financial controls that allowed Al Qaeda money to flow through its banks, and been the base of operations for Pakistani nuclear renegade AQ Khan. Those are the three primary arguments used by politicians for blocking the deal. If America really felt so strongly, then how come we aren’t blocking the much larger and more numerous investments from Saudi Arabian companies?

No, I think the reason is obvious for anyone who looks. Feeding the ports deal fire is terrific cover for letting much more important–but politically undesirable–work go undone.

Later: My new friend Dan Shafer touches on some very similar concerns from a different angle, the possibility that in 2008 a woman will be elected President because both major party candidates will be women.

When Bill Lind says “Beware the ides of March” it’s time to find a deep hole. And the whole mishegas over the Danish editorial cartoons isn’t making me feel any less quesy either. [via JRobb]

For the second week I, Cringely covers the NSA wiretapping issue with the help of an anonymous ex-insider to suggest that the most likely scenario is that the agency is tracking the connections between phone numbers, a sort of six degrees game on known terrorist phones, to decide which lines should be specifically targeted for legal taps.

The whole analysis seems logical until you bring one fact to the table that Cringely skips: these guys almost certainly change cell phones like you and I change underwear. So rather than, say, weekly calls from Al Qaeda #14 to #22 there’s probably no more than two or three interesting calls before the phone is abandoned. Even worse, these cretins could use two other strategies to render pen/traps monitoring useless: randomly make one or two calls from the legitimate phone of a non-member or turn the cell phones over to non-members after short period of use.

Cringely often gets off into wild blue speculation or assertions that read logicially but are so far from reality that they might as well be fantasy. This column and last week’s, though, are a different form of weird techno-cover for bad politics.

Brit blogger Lenin’s Tomb steps up to the Official Secrets Act and hacks a goober: Foreign Office Tries to Censor Craig Murray on Torture. The former UK Ambassader to Uzbekistan is pissed that his so-called liberal colleagues in the ruling party are willing to throw civility, decency and legality to the wind and accept information gathered by allies (American agents?) through torture. In this electronic age I sit here and guffaw at the idea that Blair and Co. believe that they can keep material out of public view by simply ordering it so. [via KMacleod]