Tag Archives: Edward Snowden

Essential Reading for the Sleepwalkers Among Us

Here’s a recommendation for the erstwhile progressive, a trio of books to get you thinking about the current state of affairs in the world and in particular, the United States. This list will scare you if you’re brave enough to read the books and internalize their messages, taking the unflinching look — which is pretty hard to do, I admit, since we’d like to think that the United States is different, it’s the best country, all of that. That’s how I was raised and what I was taught in school – you probably as well.

Those days are over, if they ever really existed. Here are the books, in no special order, along with my notes/impressions.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century – Thomas Piketty

18736925OK, this is a difficult book if you’re not interested in financial arcana. Much of it is very prosaic, and it doesn’t help that it’s written by someone whose first language is not English, but French. That said, there are a few chapters that are riveting.

I felt a lot of the book was restating the same thing over and over. However, I learned a great deal about the history of capitalism as practiced in the West, and found it fascinating to learn about such obscure things as the Cost Of Living in the 19th Century and the history of inflation, etc. He makes a very persuasive case that the return on capital will always outstrip other forms of income and that will always lead to greater inequality, unless governments manage wealth by taxation policy (that’s his main argument).

I look at it this way – there’s an easy way and then there’s a hard way to fight inequality. The easy way is through modified tax laws, which in the US should take us back to the rates existing in the 1950s and 60s, our most prosperous era. The hard way is to go back to 1789, (see Revolution, French) which I don’t think would be a plus for anyone – for the 1%, surely not, but also not for the 99%.

 

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism – Naomi Klein

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The Shock Doctrine should be required reading for anyone participating in a representative democracy, that’s for sure. Highest Recommendation. It’s a lengthy book, and well worth the trouble.

and perhaps the most shocking of all —

No Place To Hide — Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State — Glenn Greenwald

18213403This is Greenwald’s account of the release of the Snowden NSA files to him and filmmaker Laura Poitras over a series of secret communiques and trips to various corners of the world. (The documentary film of this event/process is called CitizenFour and I highly recommend watching that as well – covers the same territory but obviously the book goes into more depth.)

Basically, your government is spying on you. All of your texts, emails, facebook postings, phone calls and any other kind of electronic communication you make is being logged and compiled. This, at present, is the basic idea of the Snowden revelations — that Americans are being spied upon in the name of “national security.” And not just people the government has probably cause to suspect of something, but all of us.

Critics of Snowden et al. will say that it’s only the metadata being tracked – things like phone numbers but not phone conversations, email headers but not the content of an email message. So the takeaway is that we have nothing to fear from that, that it’s not really spying. Tell me, what kind of picture of you would a good analyst have from knowing what phone numbers call you and that you call, and the content of your email headers? I think it would be a pretty good picture. If you have a mobile with GPS (and don’t we all) then they also track wherever you’ve “checked in” etc. So if they’re interested in finding out more, all they have to do is set a few parameters, and it’s like “24” or Jason Bourne right here and right now.

I was shocked that this is the world we live in now, not some sickening vision of an Orwellian future. It’s the United States of America, 2015. Welcome home. Read and know.

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Gay Midlife Musings: Unsung Gay Heroes in our Midst

After reading Glenn Greenwald’s book “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State” I am astounded once again that neither Glenn Greenwald nor Chelsea Manning have been written about in the gay and gay-ish media with the import and perspective they deserve.

Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald

David Miranda and Glenn Greenwald

David Miranda and Glenn Greenwald

Bradley Manning/Chelsea Manning

Bradley Manning/Chelsea Manning

Arguably, these two people–this one gay man and this one trans woman–have been at the moral center of international secrecy and disclosure in the last year or two, yet hardly a peep from those of our institutions (the Gay Centers, the Parade Groups, the political and fundraising groups) when it comes time to lionize and defend our own.

I took a cursory look at who we (the gay community in the U.S.) have honored at galas, parades and whatnot in the last year or so, and I came across people like Jennifer Lopez, Bill Clinton, Anderson Cooper, Norman Lear . . . not to say that these folks are not deserving of awards, I’m sure they are, but there’s only one gay person among those names above and I’m not sure any of them, including Clinton, have done anything near the importance of what Manning (especially) and Greenwald have done.

Basically Chelsea Manning gave up her freedom — what would have otherwise been likely as a nice, normal life by exposing American crimes in Iraq. Greenwald used his profession as a journalist to expose the unbelievably massive and likely unconstitutional spying/surveillance program of the USA’s NSA (though the disclosures of Edward Snowden) greatly putting himself and his partner David Miranda at risk. (As far as I know, Glenn Greenwald still lives in Brazil and will not come to the U.S. because of the possibility/probability of detainment, even though he is an American citizen.)

What they have done, or helped to do, is very much in the tradition of LGBT people throughout history — we’ve often served as shamans, seers, philosophers, as well as teachers, magicians, composers artists and writers. Since we were almost always not part of the mainstream, we took that distance and reflected something back to society at large. I see that Manning and Greenwald are very much in this tradition.

Is the fact that we can’t see and honor this because we’re in the middle of history as it’s happening and don’t have perspective?

Or is it something else, as in, don’t rock the boat, people. They just gave us marriage, after all. A couple of years before that, they gave us the right to be open in the military. Hard fought gains, to be sure.

Don’t rock that boat.

But what Manning did and what Greenwald has played a decisive role in reporting on has an extremely far-reaching impact in the very fiber of our beings as well as the national psyche.

Are we embarrassed because Chelsea’s transgenderism shines a light where we’d rather not have it go? Do we not want to say we support Greenwald because then it pits us as also opposed to the NSA, perhaps the most insidious organization of our government? I’m not quite sure what the reasons are, but these are revolutionary actions by our own. Why aren’t we owning them? Honestly, what’s happened to our in-your-face-culture since the days of ACT UP, and before that, Harvey Milk and Stonewall?

Here is the one story I did see. And this one, I presume from the tone, written by a straight ally.

Link to my previous post on Chelsea Manning.

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