Obama's not claiming the treaty is Ratified. That's a very specific Constitutional process which requires a vote in Congress explicitly saying "treaty x is ratified." None of his people ever have. He's claiming we've "Acceded" to the treaty because everything required to enforce was already on the books. That just means all the laws are passed so we're complying, and it's clearly true. The whole point of ACTA is to make everyone else hjave the same BS draconian laws we do, therefore it would be somewhat astounding if we hadn't already acceded. The Ratification argument is a strawman brought up by the Treaty's opponents because the MSM really doesn't give a shit about any of the other numerous issues surrounding ACTA.
Unfortunately it tends to dominate the conversation, thus instead of finding out whether I care about the secrecy of ACTA you've read a page and a half on ratification and international law.
BTW, you clearly haven't thought this through if you think that requiring a ratification vote will reduce Presidential power. The President has unilateral power over who is recognized as a country, and he has the unilateral power to negotiate treaties with countries. He also has the power to not send a proposal to the Senate for a vote. Which means you just gave the President the power to veto any law he wants, simply by recognizing some dumbass as President of the Bir-Tawli triangle, agreeing to enforce said law, and then refusing to send the treaty to the US Senate.
In these threads some guy usually says that the President has to send a treaty to Congress for it to be valid, therefore Obama is abusing his power, usurping Congressional Authority, and raping kittens by not sending ACTA to Congress. This is false, and based on the poster not understanding what's going on.
What's going on is that everything ACTA demands is already part of US Law. Obama can already seize your shit if he thinks it's counterfeit. It's called asset forfeiture, and it's already in the US Code. As is literally everything else in the treaty. When he does so the people judging whether the US is in compliance have to say "Yes, that guy totally had his shit seized because it was counterfeit." Therefore Obama doesn't care whether ACTA is formally ratified and made part of US Law, he already has all the powers he needs.
Thus Wyden has to resort to maneuvers like this if he wants to stop ACTA, and Wyden's maneuver probably won't be very effective at all. Because even if Congress does not vote to ratify the treaty we're still in compliance unless Congress also insists on amending all the copyright rules currently in place.
As a political tactic it has some uses. The biggest is that it establishes there's resistance to the business community's insane copyright/patent demands from some folks with clout, and future ACTAs will be designed to appeal to those other groups. It's unlikely (that ordinary Poles will understand the particular wrinkle of US Law I just explained, so Polish politicians are all answering the question "Why should we ratify ACTA, even the US didn't ratify ACTA?" The potential drawback here is that if Wyden gets his ratification vote he's likely to lose, because this isn't just about copyright. It's also about fake golfclubs, cars, etc. You don't want to be the guy on the side of fake chinese golf clubs/antibiotics/toothpaste/etc. in an election year.
But if you think there is literally any chance of ACTA not applying to your American ass, I have news for you: It already does.
If your skill is building houses, and nobody is buying houses, you are unemployed. Any job you can actually get pays near minimum-wage, because you aren't qualified for anything anyone needs anymore. The same goes for dozens of other, more profesional level, jobs.
American companies are never gonna offer training to a significant number of people. It would be stupid for any company to train any individual employee because he can just quit the day he gets his certificate. Besides American businessmen don't really plan years ahead. They'd probably be well-served is they figured out how many Ruby programmers they needed two years from now, and started paying bright High School grads to go to the local community college and earn an AA in Ruby in exchange for a long-term contract, but they just don't think that way.
They think "Shit, I needed a Ruby guy last Tuesday, I asked for resumes on Wednesday, and I'm getting inundated with resumes from 50-something Java programmers who will demand double the salary I can pay, clearly the government must increase education spending!" And then when they have the opportunity to make the government do something they'll support the hell out of the GOP anti-tax wing, and be really surprised that shit doesn't result in thousands of HS grads getting certified in Ruby.
They don't really have vast power. What they have is unchallenged power.
Ford can't just do things. If they started writing a law specifically to benefit Ford (and screw everyone else) the next day every Democrat would oppose it because the UAW/environmentalists said so, and every non-Michigan Republican would join in because businesses in their district were being screwed.
Hollywood's unions are on their side re: piracy, which means the AFL is on their side, which means all the other unions have solidarity with the Hollywood studios. The business community doesn't care about fair use, because restricting fair use doesn't screw them. Therefore Hollywood gets to be the only people in the room when decisions like SOPA are made, which gives the ability to write the damn treaty.
To an extent the internet and geek activism can stop this. When we are organized we are unstoppable. We are everywhere, and we can influence all those people who jumped on the SOPA bandwagon when it was easy, and then jumped off when we noticed what they were doing.
The problem is convincing geeks to all give money to the same organization, on a consistent basis, even after said groups issues a press release they don't like.
The point is not, and never has been, that the people know the exact perfect Sales Tax rate.
Nobody, including most of the people, think they know that. What the people can judge are results. If Obama delivers that's not prima facie evidence that every single word of his platform is better advice then every single word of McCain's platform, but it does imply that giving him four more years is a safe plan. OTOH if he doesn't deliver it doesn't prove that McCain's ideas were actually better, but it does imply that firing Obama might not be a bad idea.
More cynical Political Scientists support Democracy for a slightly more brutal reason: in a modern economy the alternative is almost certainly literally too horrible to contemplate. How many people could have killed you today simply by not showing up for work? OK, that was hyperbole, but I think we can all agree that the number of groups/classes of people who could seriously inconvenience everyone else is pretty much everyone. It's a lot easier to convince garbage men to not go on strike for higher wages from the city if those garbage men got the opportunity to vote for the guys responsible for the Municipal Budget, and therefore trust those guys when they say "sorry, it ain't in the budget."
There's a huge practical problem with not letting recipients of government largesses vote: Defining government largesse.
For example the number two health care expense is called the "Employer Tax Exclusion." Anything your employer gives you is supposed to be reported as income to the IRS. If your boss lends you a car, the employer pays life insurance premiums, or even lottery tickets above a certain amount. Anything that is except health insurance. We're talking $Hundred Billion range.
The number one housing related expense in the Federal budget is the mortgage tax deduction. It's massive. This is closer to $1 Trillion.
So basically under your system the only people who can vote in 2015 will be more then 400% poverty (below gets subsidies in ObamaCare), rents/owns their house, works for a company that doesn't provide health care, etc.
In Michigan the way the handicapped vote is simple: they bring a friend they trust who verifies their ballot is right. It's technically not a secret ballot, but so far it's worked fine.
As for multiple languages, I think you don't understand the law very well. Russians, Poles, Germans, and French people do not have any legal right to demand ballots in their native tongues. Only Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Alaskan Natives do; and they only get them in jurisdictions where they make up a large portion of the population (10,000 people or 5% of the population, whichever is lower). New York State, for example, has Counties that print ballots in Spanish, Korean and Chinese. I wouldn't be surprised if there're more languages in Arizona, for the simple reason that AZ has a lot of Indian reservations which have populations speaking a Native American language.
The idea is that you can re-analyze the data (ie: people's votes) more rigorously, so you are 100% sure that the guy elected is the guy most people voted for. That can't happen with electronic data because the data is the count, and no recount will change the result. If, for example, the printer screwed up and put candidate a (call him Stalin), on the line the scanners counted for candidate b (call him Hitler), the recount will prove that, and Stalin will be elected instead of Hitler.
If the same thing happens with a non-paper ballot of any kind the recount is worthless because there's no way to find out that the election machine was displaying votes for Stalin and counting them for Hitler.
Internet voting compounds the problem by adding a bunch of totally non-secured terminals, where you could easily install malware that counted every vote as a vote for Hitler.
AllAfrica's the best I've found. It's got more news on more obscure countries then any other source. In fact it's pretty much the only English-language source for news coming out of some of he smaller former French colonies. The Central African Republic, and Congo-Brazzeville don't get a lot of ink.
The BBC is probably second-best. Human interest "trivia" is there, but so is actual reporting, and they're continent-wide.
The flaw with the others isn't that they're bad, it's that they're limited. The Economist has a fairly small Africa section, and it's Africa section (like all it's news) is written from a clear market liberal point of view. Kenyan sites are focused on Kenya, which is great if you're interested in Kenya, but not great if you're interested in figuring out whether the government of the CAR has finally driven the rebels from Birao, whether the rebels ever actually controlled Birao or their announcement they took the town was posturing, etc.
In some ways Fisher is right. Stratfor just doesn't have the resources to equal a real journalistic organization.
OTOH they're not really journalists. Journalists won't tell you certain things because there's only a certain amount of space on the front page and they don;t want to waste it on articles that most people won't read. Thus some chick has a tragic (and mysterious) accident on Spring break and it's story #1, 2 and 3 because pretty women in trouble and mystery means lots of eyeballs.
Stratfor is gonna ignore that crap. It's interesting, or people wouldn't watch it, but it's not intelligence. You subscribe to them because you're genuinely interested in important things, even if they're less 'newsworthy' then unimportant things, and you want clear-headed analyses so you know what's going on. You can get half of this from the BBC, because they think every war is newsworthy, so they will actually post reports onAfrican wars even in the Prince is getting married; but a lot of their stuff is very small-scale. Human interest stories are important, and it's not good to lose sight of the fact that 10,000 refugees mean a lot of human suffering, but i'm interested in figuring out why the refugees are there, and how political conditions would have to change to get them back home. Which means I want to know things like what actual military hardware the combatants are using, is it working, are the tactics of one side markedly superior to the other, is there an obvious political solution, if so why aren't they doing it, etc.
Re:The Atlantic (article) is a joke
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Is Stratfor a "Joke"?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I subscribed during the middle of the Second Congo War. Stratfor was a much better source of info on what was happening then anything else. They weren't giving me rocket science -- it probably wasn't hard for them to figure out that a) the official Congolese Army was worthless, and b) the Rwandans were kicking their asses mostly by coordinating flanking attacks with satellite phones. CNN, the Atlantic, etc. all probably had guys who knew way more then that; but none of them would consistently be posted on their websites because thousands of black people getting shot in a major battle is not very "newsworthy."
The BBC was a little better, because they have a whole section of their website dedicated to Africa, which mans that even if theirs a news-orgy because the President had a blow-job thousands of people getting killed will be posted somewhere. But they don't focus on the nuts and bolts of military operations the way Stratfor does, so the Congo war wasn't always the number one story on their site either.
I never gave them money (I was a student when they were free, and had no job lined up when they started charging) I found them very useful. I was interested in African and Military affairs, and there just aren't a lot of sources that do either one available in English. Most of their stuff was fairly banal, and definitely the easiest info to get -- one of my favorite sections of the site was basically cut and pasted from the Institute of Strategic Studies "Military Balance" series -- but who else could tell you which Somali faction was based on Clan Darod?
Yeah CNN probably has a guy who knows that, but they wouldn't update their website with that info if there was a bigger story. AKA: some pretty white chick disappeared in an unusual (and thus newsworthy) fashion.
Moreover in this case they (and their friends) are clearly exaggerating what they've leaked. The last article Slashdot featured on Stratfor was all about how evil it was that the government was paying Stratfor to spy on an American activist group called the Yes Men. But if you read the emails you realized that they said did prove that, they proved Dow Chemical, a major target of the Yes Men's activism, was paying Stratfor to tell them what the Yes Men's official, and very public, website said.
The confusion was caused directly by Wikileaks page, which made a point of describing Stratfor as an organization paid by (among others) the US Marines.
I wouldn't be surprised if somebody asked them for a paper once, just to see if they sucked; and I'd be;less surprised to find out somebody with an interest in foreign affairs who worked for an officiallish sounding agency signed up for their free newsletter when it free with his official email address, and then paid for it when they started charging with his own credit card. For example an Marine MD who was curious about whether those pointy-headed Stratfor guys think he'll be sent to Iraq. Either way both Wikileaks and Stratfor have an interest in proclaiming those actions prove it's basically an arm of the CIA.
But I've yet to see anyone say precisely what Stratfor did for the government, and how much (or indeed, whether) they were paid.
You got some evidence for that "Government paid them to spy on on American citizens" comment?
Because the only evidence I've seen presented that they spied on American citizens said that they read a protest groups website, and then tell Dow Chemical what it says. Which involves neither spying nor being paid by the government.
Heck some definitions would be nice. I would have thought spying required wiretaps, and tailing people. But apparently all it takes is reading public websites.
The original article, this story, and all the threads based on it are the premise that the work described in this exact set of emails was being done for the government. The quote you bring up says Stratfor does some work for the government, but doesn't say these precise emails were done for the government. That most of the government agencies you mention have nothing to do with this particular set of emails is pretty obvious. Even if you assume the government believes the Yes Men are the new Weatherman, the Marines and Defense Intelligence Agency would not be monitoring them. The DHS would, but the DHS was apparently not receiving these particular emails.
Which means any conclussions you draw about government support for Stratfor based on this particular set of emails is inherently stupid. Note that one of the people I just called stupid is me. My first post on this thread was explaining why only a fool would be surprised that Stratfor was hired to do this work.
Let's leave aside the fact that the article's thesis is self-contradictory (either government is spying too much, or not enough), the simple fact is that the emails linked to have nothing to do with any government. They're work Stratfor did for Union Carbide and Dow Chemical. We know this because if you go to the link the to: addresses do not end in.gov. They are to unioncarbide.com, dow.com, tomm_sprick@yahoo.com, stratfor.com, and some Canadian website.
Stratfor does intelligence for private companies and the government. This means that, while some of their work may have something to do with public policy, most of it doesn't. In this case it's pretty clear what happened:
The CEO of Dow (which owns Union-Carbide), noticed the Yes-Men and said "somebody should keep an eye on them." His buddy/trusted subordinate said "What's the budget? I think I know a company?" And since then Stratfor has been raking in the dough for sitting on their asses browsing the website.
There's no governmental violation of the Yes Men's privacy rights because the government isn't involved. There's no waste of public funds because no public funds are being spent.
This kind of confusion is probably actually what WikiLeaks was looking for. They are too lazy to find actual government waste (and if it was easy to do so the pols in DC would have done it already, and then had a Press Conference crowing about it), so they find an organization that other lazy people will assume is part of the government, and release documents proving it's kind of silly. *poof* millions of people too lazy to click the link will assume Wikileaks has helped them ferret out government corruption.
Most of the posts on this thread have been total BS because nobody bothered to click that link and find out this research was paid for not by Uncle Sam, byut by Dow and it's subsidiary Union Carbide.
I've just realized this whole conversation is based on a total BS assumption.
The Yes Men were not being monitored by the government. They were being monitored by Dow and Union Carbide, aka: the people on the legal hook for killing thousands at Bhopal. This is proving by clicking on the link in the article, and noticing none of the Bhopal mails were sent to a.gov address. They all went to those folks from Dow or Union Carbide, or private email addresses.
So people, especially me, have been talking out their asses. As was the original article.
It's amazing how little people know about intelligence gathering. The Government is not magic. It is an organization. A big and powerful organization, but an organization nonetheless.
They have a bunch of databases of information they can use. Shockingly, few people are willing to put their press releases in a format that this database automatically understands. This means that if the government wants to know what an organization posts on it's public website some poor schmuck has to go to the website, read the information, and copy/paste into the official database.
It shouldn't be surprising that a group like the Yes Men, whose information is in English and written in way that's supposed to be accesible to ordinary Americans, gets looked at by the losers of the intelligence community, Stratfor, and not official agents.
Without seeing the contract I can't say whether this is losing the government money. This is low-level work, which means people in their first jobs, and the Federal pay structure is such that you make a little more then you're worth in the low pay-grades ($30-$35k out of college, even if you're a Liberal Arts Major), and get full benefits, but then get screwed when you get promoted (Obama only makes $400k, CEOs making that typically oversee less then 1% of the Fed $Trillion budget). Depending on Stratfor's negotiating prowess we could be saving thousands, or being screwed.
Dude, if you think there is anything India could do that is so immoral that the French would cut them off google Operation Turquoise. Then realize that it's a lot worse then it sounds on wikipedia, because the French wouldn't intervene to stop the violence in Rwanda until after all the Tutsis resident in Rwanda were dead, and the only remaining violence was the rebels bringing the murderers to justice. The lack of UN mandate didn't stop them from intervening in the CAR, Cote d'Ivoire, or any of their other clients; why would it stop them in the most clear-cut case for foreign intervention since at least 1980?
Then realize that instead of punishing the Prime Minister who did that shit by ostracizing him, they rewarded him with the Presidency. The only thing India could to get cut off from French spares is display disloyalty.
Regardless of that, the simple fact is the Indians have a policy of building as much as possible within India itself so that no foreign supplier can screw them. Partly this means they use planes from all over. But mostly it means they have to have the ability to build as much as possible with India (these are called 'offset agreements'). Which they can't have for the most advanced US tech because we're not that desperate. OTOH, the French are keen to prove they still play with the big boys, which means they have to sell weapons to third world countries; partly for prestige but partly to offset the enormous cost of developing said weapons domestically.
First you didn't read your own source, now you're not reading what I said. I didn't say that cars didn't bring in $34.5 Billion. I said that the Federal Highway Trust Fund was given $34.5 Billion from general revenue from 2008-2010.
2008 required $8 Billion, 2009 a $7 Billion, and 2010 a ridiculous $19.5 Billion. For a single program. And you'll note that I'm not talking about total Federal spending on cars with this. Ethanol, cleanup for the Deepwater Horizon spill, regulating the Keystone XL pipeline, etc. all cost the Federal Government money, are required largely because we're so car-crazy, and are not counted in Highway spending. So if you really want to throw down on how efficiant federal transportation is you;re gonna have to add all that to the $34.5 Billion, plus ongoing massive subsidies to the Highway fund.
Amtrak's entire budget, OTOH is $3.5 Billion. The subsidy it receives is $1.5 Billion. The Feds have never spent $19.5 Billion on mass transit. Ever.
It's from 2004. That's before $34.5 Billion in income tax money was sent to the Federal Highway Trust in 2008-2010. In addition it includes figures from the mid-90s, aka: the last time the gas tax was increased.
As I mentioned before, if the gas tax pays for roads and the truck at the grocery store uses roads it has paid the gas tax. Since the cost of the truck is included in the food I buy if the gas tax pays for roads my income taxes are unnecessary.
My problem isn't necessarily the idea of my taxes being used to pay for roads. My problem is that if I dare bring the idea that maybe my hometown (Detroit), or buses that actually come when they're scheduled; the local GOP gets all huffy about the waste of taxpayer money. But when the taxman comes to take my money to subsidize their roads they get all huffy if I don't pay with a smile.
In my current abode mass transit is actually pretty decent. Cleveland could use a few more train lines, and it would be nice if the bus came every half-hour during busy times (ie: when school has just gotten out and it's flooded with 13-year-olds), but it works pretty good.
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The AC's got it right. They aren't asking for more power to screw with Americans. They've got that.
They're asking for more power to screw with Poles.
Obama's not claiming the treaty is Ratified. That's a very specific Constitutional process which requires a vote in Congress explicitly saying "treaty x is ratified." None of his people ever have. He's claiming we've "Acceded" to the treaty because everything required to enforce was already on the books. That just means all the laws are passed so we're complying, and it's clearly true. The whole point of ACTA is to make everyone else hjave the same BS draconian laws we do, therefore it would be somewhat astounding if we hadn't already acceded. The Ratification argument is a strawman brought up by the Treaty's opponents because the MSM really doesn't give a shit about any of the other numerous issues surrounding ACTA.
Unfortunately it tends to dominate the conversation, thus instead of finding out whether I care about the secrecy of ACTA you've read a page and a half on ratification and international law.
BTW, you clearly haven't thought this through if you think that requiring a ratification vote will reduce Presidential power. The President has unilateral power over who is recognized as a country, and he has the unilateral power to negotiate treaties with countries. He also has the power to not send a proposal to the Senate for a vote. Which means you just gave the President the power to veto any law he wants, simply by recognizing some dumbass as President of the Bir-Tawli triangle, agreeing to enforce said law, and then refusing to send the treaty to the US Senate.
In these threads some guy usually says that the President has to send a treaty to Congress for it to be valid, therefore Obama is abusing his power, usurping Congressional Authority, and raping kittens by not sending ACTA to Congress. This is false, and based on the poster not understanding what's going on.
What's going on is that everything ACTA demands is already part of US Law. Obama can already seize your shit if he thinks it's counterfeit. It's called asset forfeiture, and it's already in the US Code. As is literally everything else in the treaty. When he does so the people judging whether the US is in compliance have to say "Yes, that guy totally had his shit seized because it was counterfeit." Therefore Obama doesn't care whether ACTA is formally ratified and made part of US Law, he already has all the powers he needs.
Thus Wyden has to resort to maneuvers like this if he wants to stop ACTA, and Wyden's maneuver probably won't be very effective at all. Because even if Congress does not vote to ratify the treaty we're still in compliance unless Congress also insists on amending all the copyright rules currently in place.
As a political tactic it has some uses. The biggest is that it establishes there's resistance to the business community's insane copyright/patent demands from some folks with clout, and future ACTAs will be designed to appeal to those other groups. It's unlikely (that ordinary Poles will understand the particular wrinkle of US Law I just explained, so Polish politicians are all answering the question "Why should we ratify ACTA, even the US didn't ratify ACTA?" The potential drawback here is that if Wyden gets his ratification vote he's likely to lose, because this isn't just about copyright. It's also about fake golfclubs, cars, etc. You don't want to be the guy on the side of fake chinese golf clubs/antibiotics/toothpaste/etc. in an election year.
But if you think there is literally any chance of ACTA not applying to your American ass, I have news for you: It already does.
For a lot of people it created a skills mismatch.
If your skill is building houses, and nobody is buying houses, you are unemployed. Any job you can actually get pays near minimum-wage, because you aren't qualified for anything anyone needs anymore. The same goes for dozens of other, more profesional level, jobs.
American companies are never gonna offer training to a significant number of people. It would be stupid for any company to train any individual employee because he can just quit the day he gets his certificate. Besides American businessmen don't really plan years ahead. They'd probably be well-served is they figured out how many Ruby programmers they needed two years from now, and started paying bright High School grads to go to the local community college and earn an AA in Ruby in exchange for a long-term contract, but they just don't think that way.
They think "Shit, I needed a Ruby guy last Tuesday, I asked for resumes on Wednesday, and I'm getting inundated with resumes from 50-something Java programmers who will demand double the salary I can pay, clearly the government must increase education spending!" And then when they have the opportunity to make the government do something they'll support the hell out of the GOP anti-tax wing, and be really surprised that shit doesn't result in thousands of HS grads getting certified in Ruby.
They don't really have vast power. What they have is unchallenged power.
Ford can't just do things. If they started writing a law specifically to benefit Ford (and screw everyone else) the next day every Democrat would oppose it because the UAW/environmentalists said so, and every non-Michigan Republican would join in because businesses in their district were being screwed.
Hollywood's unions are on their side re: piracy, which means the AFL is on their side, which means all the other unions have solidarity with the Hollywood studios. The business community doesn't care about fair use, because restricting fair use doesn't screw them. Therefore Hollywood gets to be the only people in the room when decisions like SOPA are made, which gives the ability to write the damn treaty.
To an extent the internet and geek activism can stop this. When we are organized we are unstoppable. We are everywhere, and we can influence all those people who jumped on the SOPA bandwagon when it was easy, and then jumped off when we noticed what they were doing.
The problem is convincing geeks to all give money to the same organization, on a consistent basis, even after said groups issues a press release they don't like.
The point is not, and never has been, that the people know the exact perfect Sales Tax rate.
Nobody, including most of the people, think they know that. What the people can judge are results. If Obama delivers that's not prima facie evidence that every single word of his platform is better advice then every single word of McCain's platform, but it does imply that giving him four more years is a safe plan. OTOH if he doesn't deliver it doesn't prove that McCain's ideas were actually better, but it does imply that firing Obama might not be a bad idea.
More cynical Political Scientists support Democracy for a slightly more brutal reason: in a modern economy the alternative is almost certainly literally too horrible to contemplate. How many people could have killed you today simply by not showing up for work? OK, that was hyperbole, but I think we can all agree that the number of groups/classes of people who could seriously inconvenience everyone else is pretty much everyone. It's a lot easier to convince garbage men to not go on strike for higher wages from the city if those garbage men got the opportunity to vote for the guys responsible for the Municipal Budget, and therefore trust those guys when they say "sorry, it ain't in the budget."
There's a huge practical problem with not letting recipients of government largesses vote:
Defining government largesse.
For example the number two health care expense is called the "Employer Tax Exclusion." Anything your employer gives you is supposed to be reported as income to the IRS. If your boss lends you a car, the employer pays life insurance premiums, or even lottery tickets above a certain amount. Anything that is except health insurance. We're talking $Hundred Billion range.
The number one housing related expense in the Federal budget is the mortgage tax deduction. It's massive. This is closer to $1 Trillion.
So basically under your system the only people who can vote in 2015 will be more then 400% poverty (below gets subsidies in ObamaCare), rents/owns their house, works for a company that doesn't provide health care, etc.
In Michigan the way the handicapped vote is simple: they bring a friend they trust who verifies their ballot is right. It's technically not a secret ballot, but so far it's worked fine.
As for multiple languages, I think you don't understand the law very well. Russians, Poles, Germans, and French people do not have any legal right to demand ballots in their native tongues. Only Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Alaskan Natives do; and they only get them in jurisdictions where they make up a large portion of the population (10,000 people or 5% of the population, whichever is lower). New York State, for example, has Counties that print ballots in Spanish, Korean and Chinese. I wouldn't be surprised if there're more languages in Arizona, for the simple reason that AZ has a lot of Indian reservations which have populations speaking a Native American language.
You aren't understanding the point of a recount.
The idea is that you can re-analyze the data (ie: people's votes) more rigorously, so you are 100% sure that the guy elected is the guy most people voted for. That can't happen with electronic data because the data is the count, and no recount will change the result. If, for example, the printer screwed up and put candidate a (call him Stalin), on the line the scanners counted for candidate b (call him Hitler), the recount will prove that, and Stalin will be elected instead of Hitler.
If the same thing happens with a non-paper ballot of any kind the recount is worthless because there's no way to find out that the election machine was displaying votes for Stalin and counting them for Hitler.
Internet voting compounds the problem by adding a bunch of totally non-secured terminals, where you could easily install malware that counted every vote as a vote for Hitler.
AllAfrica's the best I've found. It's got more news on more obscure countries then any other source. In fact it's pretty much the only English-language source for news coming out of some of he smaller former French colonies. The Central African Republic, and Congo-Brazzeville don't get a lot of ink.
The BBC is probably second-best. Human interest "trivia" is there, but so is actual reporting, and they're continent-wide.
The flaw with the others isn't that they're bad, it's that they're limited. The Economist has a fairly small Africa section, and it's Africa section (like all it's news) is written from a clear market liberal point of view. Kenyan sites are focused on Kenya, which is great if you're interested in Kenya, but not great if you're interested in figuring out whether the government of the CAR has finally driven the rebels from Birao, whether the rebels ever actually controlled Birao or their announcement they took the town was posturing, etc.
In some ways Fisher is right. Stratfor just doesn't have the resources to equal a real journalistic organization.
OTOH they're not really journalists. Journalists won't tell you certain things because there's only a certain amount of space on the front page and they don;t want to waste it on articles that most people won't read. Thus some chick has a tragic (and mysterious) accident on Spring break and it's story #1, 2 and 3 because pretty women in trouble and mystery means lots of eyeballs.
Stratfor is gonna ignore that crap. It's interesting, or people wouldn't watch it, but it's not intelligence. You subscribe to them because you're genuinely interested in important things, even if they're less 'newsworthy' then unimportant things, and you want clear-headed analyses so you know what's going on. You can get half of this from the BBC, because they think every war is newsworthy, so they will actually post reports onAfrican wars even in the Prince is getting married; but a lot of their stuff is very small-scale. Human interest stories are important, and it's not good to lose sight of the fact that 10,000 refugees mean a lot of human suffering, but i'm interested in figuring out why the refugees are there, and how political conditions would have to change to get them back home. Which means I want to know things like what actual military hardware the combatants are using, is it working, are the tactics of one side markedly superior to the other, is there an obvious political solution, if so why aren't they doing it, etc.
I subscribed during the middle of the Second Congo War. Stratfor was a much better source of info on what was happening then anything else. They weren't giving me rocket science -- it probably wasn't hard for them to figure out that a) the official Congolese Army was worthless, and b) the Rwandans were kicking their asses mostly by coordinating flanking attacks with satellite phones. CNN, the Atlantic, etc. all probably had guys who knew way more then that; but none of them would consistently be posted on their websites because thousands of black people getting shot in a major battle is not very "newsworthy."
The BBC was a little better, because they have a whole section of their website dedicated to Africa, which mans that even if theirs a news-orgy because the President had a blow-job thousands of people getting killed will be posted somewhere. But they don't focus on the nuts and bolts of military operations the way Stratfor does, so the Congo war wasn't always the number one story on their site either.
I never gave them money (I was a student when they were free, and had no job lined up when they started charging) I found them very useful. I was interested in African and Military affairs, and there just aren't a lot of sources that do either one available in English. Most of their stuff was fairly banal, and definitely the easiest info to get -- one of my favorite sections of the site was basically cut and pasted from the Institute of Strategic Studies "Military Balance" series -- but who else could tell you which Somali faction was based on Clan Darod?
Yeah CNN probably has a guy who knows that, but they wouldn't update their website with that info if there was a bigger story. AKA: some pretty white chick disappeared in an unusual (and thus newsworthy) fashion.
But they choose what to leak.
Moreover in this case they (and their friends) are clearly exaggerating what they've leaked. The last article Slashdot featured on Stratfor was all about how evil it was that the government was paying Stratfor to spy on an American activist group called the Yes Men. But if you read the emails you realized that they said did prove that, they proved Dow Chemical, a major target of the Yes Men's activism, was paying Stratfor to tell them what the Yes Men's official, and very public, website said.
The confusion was caused directly by Wikileaks page, which made a point of describing Stratfor as an organization paid by (among others) the US Marines.
I wouldn't be surprised if somebody asked them for a paper once, just to see if they sucked; and I'd be ;less surprised to find out somebody with an interest in foreign affairs who worked for an officiallish sounding agency signed up for their free newsletter when it free with his official email address, and then paid for it when they started charging with his own credit card. For example an Marine MD who was curious about whether those pointy-headed Stratfor guys think he'll be sent to Iraq. Either way both Wikileaks and Stratfor have an interest in proclaiming those actions prove it's basically an arm of the CIA.
But I've yet to see anyone say precisely what Stratfor did for the government, and how much (or indeed, whether) they were paid.
You got some evidence for that "Government paid them to spy on on American citizens" comment?
Because the only evidence I've seen presented that they spied on American citizens said that they read a protest groups website, and then tell Dow Chemical what it says. Which involves neither spying nor being paid by the government.
Heck some definitions would be nice. I would have thought spying required wiretaps, and tailing people. But apparently all it takes is reading public websites.
Reread your quote carefully.
The original article, this story, and all the threads based on it are the premise that the work described in this exact set of emails was being done for the government. The quote you bring up says Stratfor does some work for the government, but doesn't say these precise emails were done for the government. That most of the government agencies you mention have nothing to do with this particular set of emails is pretty obvious. Even if you assume the government believes the Yes Men are the new Weatherman, the Marines and Defense Intelligence Agency would not be monitoring them. The DHS would, but the DHS was apparently not receiving these particular emails.
Which means any conclussions you draw about government support for Stratfor based on this particular set of emails is inherently stupid. Note that one of the people I just called stupid is me. My first post on this thread was explaining why only a fool would be surprised that Stratfor was hired to do this work.
Because this article is silly.
Let's leave aside the fact that the article's thesis is self-contradictory (either government is spying too much, or not enough), the simple fact is that the emails linked to have nothing to do with any government. They're work Stratfor did for Union Carbide and Dow Chemical. We know this because if you go to the link the to: addresses do not end in .gov. They are to unioncarbide.com, dow.com, tomm_sprick@yahoo.com, stratfor.com, and some Canadian website.
Stratfor does intelligence for private companies and the government. This means that, while some of their work may have something to do with public policy, most of it doesn't. In this case it's pretty clear what happened:
The CEO of Dow (which owns Union-Carbide), noticed the Yes-Men and said "somebody should keep an eye on them." His buddy/trusted subordinate said "What's the budget? I think I know a company?" And since then Stratfor has been raking in the dough for sitting on their asses browsing the website.
There's no governmental violation of the Yes Men's privacy rights because the government isn't involved. There's no waste of public funds because no public funds are being spent.
This kind of confusion is probably actually what WikiLeaks was looking for. They are too lazy to find actual government waste (and if it was easy to do so the pols in DC would have done it already, and then had a Press Conference crowing about it), so they find an organization that other lazy people will assume is part of the government, and release documents proving it's kind of silly. *poof* millions of people too lazy to click the link will assume Wikileaks has helped them ferret out government corruption.
Mod this up to five somebody.
Most of the posts on this thread have been total BS because nobody bothered to click that link and find out this research was paid for not by Uncle Sam, byut by Dow and it's subsidiary Union Carbide.
I've just realized this whole conversation is based on a total BS assumption.
The Yes Men were not being monitored by the government. They were being monitored by Dow and Union Carbide, aka: the people on the legal hook for killing thousands at Bhopal. This is proving by clicking on the link in the article, and noticing none of the Bhopal mails were sent to a .gov address. They all went to those folks from Dow or Union Carbide, or private email addresses.
So people, especially me, have been talking out their asses. As was the original article.
Thank you Chuck Chunder, for pointing this out.
It's amazing how little people know about intelligence gathering. The Government is not magic. It is an organization. A big and powerful organization, but an organization nonetheless.
They have a bunch of databases of information they can use. Shockingly, few people are willing to put their press releases in a format that this database automatically understands. This means that if the government wants to know what an organization posts on it's public website some poor schmuck has to go to the website, read the information, and copy/paste into the official database.
It shouldn't be surprising that a group like the Yes Men, whose information is in English and written in way that's supposed to be accesible to ordinary Americans, gets looked at by the losers of the intelligence community, Stratfor, and not official agents.
Without seeing the contract I can't say whether this is losing the government money. This is low-level work, which means people in their first jobs, and the Federal pay structure is such that you make a little more then you're worth in the low pay-grades ($30-$35k out of college, even if you're a Liberal Arts Major), and get full benefits, but then get screwed when you get promoted (Obama only makes $400k, CEOs making that typically oversee less then 1% of the Fed $Trillion budget). Depending on Stratfor's negotiating prowess we could be saving thousands, or being screwed.
Dude, if you think there is anything India could do that is so immoral that the French would cut them off google Operation Turquoise. Then realize that it's a lot worse then it sounds on wikipedia, because the French wouldn't intervene to stop the violence in Rwanda until after all the Tutsis resident in Rwanda were dead, and the only remaining violence was the rebels bringing the murderers to justice. The lack of UN mandate didn't stop them from intervening in the CAR, Cote d'Ivoire, or any of their other clients; why would it stop them in the most clear-cut case for foreign intervention since at least 1980?
Then realize that instead of punishing the Prime Minister who did that shit by ostracizing him, they rewarded him with the Presidency. The only thing India could to get cut off from French spares is display disloyalty.
Regardless of that, the simple fact is the Indians have a policy of building as much as possible within India itself so that no foreign supplier can screw them. Partly this means they use planes from all over. But mostly it means they have to have the ability to build as much as possible with India (these are called 'offset agreements'). Which they can't have for the most advanced US tech because we're not that desperate. OTOH, the French are keen to prove they still play with the big boys, which means they have to sell weapons to third world countries; partly for prestige but partly to offset the enormous cost of developing said weapons domestically.
First you didn't read your own source, now you're not reading what I said. I didn't say that cars didn't bring in $34.5 Billion. I said that the Federal Highway Trust Fund was given $34.5 Billion from general revenue from 2008-2010.
2008 required $8 Billion, 2009 a $7 Billion, and 2010 a ridiculous $19.5 Billion. For a single program. And you'll note that I'm not talking about total Federal spending on cars with this. Ethanol, cleanup for the Deepwater Horizon spill, regulating the Keystone XL pipeline, etc. all cost the Federal Government money, are required largely because we're so car-crazy, and are not counted in Highway spending. So if you really want to throw down on how efficiant federal transportation is you;re gonna have to add all that to the $34.5 Billion, plus ongoing massive subsidies to the Highway fund.
Amtrak's entire budget, OTOH is $3.5 Billion. The subsidy it receives is $1.5 Billion. The Feds have never spent $19.5 Billion on mass transit. Ever.
Dude, did you actually read your own source?
It's from 2004. That's before $34.5 Billion in income tax money was sent to the Federal Highway Trust in 2008-2010. In addition it includes figures from the mid-90s, aka: the last time the gas tax was increased.
As I mentioned before, if the gas tax pays for roads and the truck at the grocery store uses roads it has paid the gas tax. Since the cost of the truck is included in the food I buy if the gas tax pays for roads my income taxes are unnecessary.
My problem isn't necessarily the idea of my taxes being used to pay for roads. My problem is that if I dare bring the idea that maybe my hometown (Detroit), or buses that actually come when they're scheduled; the local GOP gets all huffy about the waste of taxpayer money. But when the taxman comes to take my money to subsidize their roads they get all huffy if I don't pay with a smile.
In my current abode mass transit is actually pretty decent. Cleveland could use a few more train lines, and it would be nice if the bus came every half-hour during busy times (ie: when school has just gotten out and it's flooded with 13-year-olds), but it works pretty good.