With an increasingly small fraction of wealthy Americans buying and selling elections, power has never been more unequal in Washington, says Lawrence Lessig in a new TED Talk. And the problem goes way beyond the 1 percent.    

Everybody seems to agree that there’s too much money in politics. According to a Demos poll during the last election cycle, more than 80 percent of Americans agree that “corporate political spending drowns out voices of average Americans,” and more than half would support a ban on all corporate donations. What’s more, opposition to laws like the Citizens United decision is equally strong among those on the left and the right. 

But knowing that the system is rigged is different than understanding exactly what’s behind it. With Super PACs and “independent expenditures” veiled from public knowledge by Citizens United and other laws, how do we know what’s really going on?

For activist and academic Lawrence Lessig, it all comes down to the Lesters. That is, the 144,000 or so Americans that are rigging the game for the rest of us—roughly the same small number of Americans who are named Lester. These are the guys making big donations to Super PACs and hiring high-powered lobbies. They’re also the guys members of Congress are trying very hard to impress—as Lessig adds, federal politicians spend somewhere between 30 and 70 percent of their time just trying to raise even more money from the Lesters.

But wait, it gets worse. The Lesters may have more political influence than most of us can fathom, but they’re no match for the real movers and shakers. The ones who are really in charge are the .000042 percent—that’s exactly 132 Americans—who made 60 percent of Super PAC contributions in 2012. I’m gonna let that sink in a little…  

But don’t worry, there is hope. There are plenty of proposals for fairer elections already on the table, and no shortage of public support. The key, says Lessig, is to remember that the barriers to real change are not insurmountable—just political.

To learn more, check out his TED Talk below: 

Image by Kevin Dooley, licensed under Creative Commons.   

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about what would happen if we reach the fiscal cliff (or slope or obstacle course) later this year. Unless Congress acts before January 2, the argument goes, large-scale automatic cuts in government spending will likely trigger a new recession, whether or not Obama is reelected. A handful of programs like Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP, are exempt from cuts, though Medicare will take a hit. Some of the bigger cuts will be in defense, farm subsidies, and student loan assistance. If all this happens, says the CBO, look for unemployment to rise above 9 percent, and the economy to plunge into deep recession next year.   

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How would sequestration affect state budgets? Check out this infographic from the Pew Research Center to find out. States are where some of the worst pain will be, says Pew’s Jake Grovum, especially in education. Oddly, while big-ticket safety net programs like Social Security and Medicaid are off-limits at the federal level, automatic cuts will slash state services like WIC, and some may cease to exist. Special education will see a $1 billion cut nationwide.

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So why aren’t we more worried? Because it’s probably not gonna happen, says Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum. At least not all once. Whether or not Congress can ultimately reach a deal, the problem won’t come to a head in January. This is a “fiscal slope,” not a cliff, Drum says, and big changes like these take a lot of time. Congresspeople are great at procrastinating, but thankfully, they probably have until sometime in spring to avert disaster.

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Economist Dean Baker agrees. “Contrary to the image conveyed by the metaphor, pretty much nothing happens on January 1, 2013 if there is no budget deal in place,” he writes in Beat the Press. In fact, concern over impending (but completely avoidable) doom makes the deep cuts Republicans are pushing that much more palatable. Waiting until the Bush tax cuts expire (also January 1) would put the Democrats in a far better negotiating position, says Baker, and would not lead to immediate recession.

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And sequestration is by no means the only economic disaster we need to avert this year, says Josh Bivens and Andrew Fieldhouse at the Economic Policy Institute. A handful of big stimulus measures are also set to expire at the end of 2012, and that loss would be even greater than a sequestered budget. On January 1, emergency unemployment benefits, along with tax credits for students, parents, and low and middle income workers (all powerful fiscal multipliers) are set to expire. If Congress averts sequestration but lets these programs go, about 1.6 million Americans would lose their jobs by 2014. What we’re dealing with, says Bivens and Fieldhouse, is not so much a fiscal cliff as a series of potential—but not inevitable—pitfalls. Hence, the “fiscal obstacle course” metaphor.

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And whether or not sequestration actually kicks in, there’s a more immediate reason to be concerned about the automatic cuts, says Policy Shop’s Katherine Stone. With sectors like defense on the chopping block, private contractors are already planning to make cuts of their own. Lockheed Martin has floated the idea of laying off more than 100,000 workers by the January deadline, and other contractors are not far behind. If that happens, the companies are required by law to issue notices to their workers 60 days in advance—and that just happens to be November 2, the Friday before the election.

That hundreds of thousands of workers could get a pink slip four days before we go to the polls could be a disaster for the Democrats, says Stone, and they know it. Already, leading Dems have urged companies not to issue lay off notices on November 2, and the Office of Management and Budget has even offered to pay employers’ legal fees, should they be penalized for doing so (arguing that sequestration still may not happen). Not long after, Republicans including John McCain and Lindsey Graham fired back that the government had no right to condone violating the law, and threatened legal action against recalcitrant firms. “All this is ironic given that sequestration was a bipartisan compromise,” says Stone. Whether or not the lay-off notices turn into an October, or November, Surprise, we’ll have to wait and see.

Image by Powerruns, licensed under Creative Commons.   

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich -- after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards -- but also a little pathetic. A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Mr. Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had “generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!) Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them—and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That—have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with. Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp. That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot. Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

He’s proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.” His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was speaking were “Hitler Youth.”

Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech theoretical physicist who has never published on climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady stream of web assaults on scientists he calls “fringe kibitzers who want to become universal dictators” who should “be thinking how to undo your inexcusable behavior so that you will spend as little time in prison as possible.” On the crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik’s ideas, it was hard to justify gunning down all those children—still, it did demonstrate that “right-wing people... may even be more efficient while killing—and the probable reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.”

If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on you—because it’s worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before the U.S. Congress.

Morano, one of the most skilled political operatives of the age—he “broke the story” that became the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry—plays rough: he regularly publishes the email addresses of those he pillories, for instance, so his readers can pile on the abuse. But he plays smart, too. He’s a favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he and his colleagues have used those platforms to make it anathema for any Republican politician to publicly express a belief in the reality of climate change.

Take Newt Gingrich, for instance. Only four years ago he was willing to sit on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi and film a commercial for a campaign headed by Al Gore. In it he explained that he agreed with the California Congresswoman and then-Speaker of the House that the time had come for action on climate. This fall, hounded by Morano, he was forced to recant again and again. His dalliance with the truth about carbon dioxide hurt him more among the Republican faithful than any other single “failing.” Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts actually took some action on global warming, has now been reduced to claiming that scientists may tell us “in 50 years” if we have anything to fear.

In other words, a small cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took control of the Republican Party on the issue. This, in turn, has meant control of Congress, and since the president can’t sign a treaty by himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international progress on global warming. Put another way, the various right wing billionaires and energy companies who have bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money’s worth many times over.

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side. There aren’t many senators who rise with the passion or frequency of James Inhofe but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what’s really happening on our embattled planet.

It’s a striking barometer of intimidation that Barack Obama, who has a clear enough understanding of climate change and its dangers, has barely mentioned the subject for four years. He did show a little leg to his liberal base in Rolling Stoneearlier this spring by hinting that climate change could become a campaign issue. Last week, however, he passed on his best chance to make good on that promise when he gave a long speech on energy at an Iowa wind turbine factory without even mentioning global warming. Because the GOP has been so unreasonable, the president clearly feels he can take the environmental vote by staying silent, which means the odds that he’ll do anything dramatic in the next four years grow steadily smaller.

On the brighter side, not everyone has been intimidated. In fact, a spirited counter-movement has arisen in recent years. The very same weekend that Heartland tried to put the Unabomber’s face on global warming, 350.org conducted thousands of rallies around the globe to show who climate change really affects. In a year of mobilization, we also managed to block—at least temporarily—the Keystone pipeline that would have brought the dirtiest of dirty energy, tar-sands oil, from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf Coast. In the meantime, our Canadian allies are fighting hard to block a similar pipeline that would bring those tar sands to the Pacific for export.

Similarly, in just the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands have signed on to demand an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And new polling data already show more Americans worried about our changing climate, because they’ve noticed the freakish weather of the last few years and drawn the obvious conclusion.

But damn, it’s a hard fight, up against a ton of money and a ton of inertia. Eventually, climate denial will “lose,” because physics and chemistry are not intimidated even by Lord Monckton. But timing is everything—if he and his ilk, a crew of certified planet wreckers, delay action past the point where it can do much good, they’ll be able to claim one of the epic victories in political history—one that will last for geological epochs.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. 

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook. 

Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben

Image by Ansgar Walk, licensed under Creative Commons.  

In July 2010, Pew Research Center released a report on the online habits of Millennials. The experts involved in the study, who were mostly academics and leaders at companies like Google and Microsoft, concluded that social networking will only grow in importance despite privacy concerns. In particular, many argued that sites like Facebook had created new social norms around which the barriers between “public” and “private” information were being recast. The study echoed a controversial statement by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg made earlier in 2010—that, among young people, privacy is no longer a “social norm.”  

That argument may be a little harder to make today. In addition to debates over Facebook privacy settings, over the past several weeks, controversies have erupted in a number of states over employers and schools asking for Facebook passwords from applicants, employees, and students. And while everyone seems to agree that those employers are overstepping their bounds, actually doing something about it is tougher than you might think.

For one thing, legislation is woefully outdated, says the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC. The closest thing to a law protecting online privacy is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was passed in 1986—a good 10 years before widespread Internet use, not to mention smartphones and other new media. So most of the law’s provisions apply only to landline phones and physically stored data, rather than the smartphones, social media, and “cloud” storage that have become such a large part of 21^st century life. For something like email, the rules are complex and cumbersome, reflecting an early understanding of the technology, says the Center for Democracy and Technology. If you happen to store your email on a home computer, it is fully protected and requires a warrant to be searched. But if you use a cloud computing service (say, Gmail), anything you store online can be accessed without a warrant. That includes webmail, photo sharing sites like Flickr, spreadsheets and documents on Google Docs—basically, much of what now makes up many people’s personal and professional lives.

The rules for social networking sites are even more complicated. While law enforcement generally needs a search warrant to access a suspect’s social network account, they can do so without the knowledge of the suspect, reports GOOD. Facebook actually seems to be alone on this policy, as Twitter and Google have their own rules about notifying their users of law enforcement action. In fact, Twitter had to fight for its notification rule against a federal court ruling in Virginia. And, according to EPIC, at the same time, the Department of Homeland Security has an ongoing program of setting up fictitious user accounts on Facebook and Twitter to follow suspects’ posts (also without their knowledge). 

Whether or not the DHS program is legal or constitutional is not all that clear. Without more relevant legislation, no one really knows where to draw the line—high courts being no exception. In 2010, the Supreme Court heard two cases on email privacy, and both times, they chose not to address constitutional privacy issues, reports the National Legal Research Group. Wrote Anthony Kennedy in the first case’s majority opinion: “The judiciary risks error by elaborating too fully on the Fourth Amendment implications of emerging technology before its role in society has become clear.” The implication apparently being that until innovation stops and lets us take a breather, we should be careful about fleshing anything out too much.  

To be fair, Congress has (half-heartedly) taken up some of these issues. Late last month, Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter proposed an amendment to the FCC Process Reform Act called “Mind Your Own Business on Passwords,” says The Atlantic. While the amendment—which was almost immediately voted down—did not address government snooping, it would have prohibited employers from asking for workers’ passwords on sites like Facebook. The strange reality is that, because of the vote and Facebook’s own reaction to the controversy, the social networking site now has stronger privacy rules than the U.S. government—at least when it comes to password protection.        

That fact should be pretty alarming. But if we go back to Zuckerburg’s “social norm” argument, it does make some sense. Because technology moves so quickly, and because it has such a big influence over our lives, it’s easy to simply accept new customs and rules without seriously thinking about their impact. The Facebook password cases are unique because they don’t involve government agencies or third parties breaking and entering to access private data. Rather, they involve users willingly giving up their privacy when pressured by people in positions of power.

The real danger here is that social media are still very new, so if a practice like that became more accepted, it could be difficult to undo. Laws and court rulings can be repealed or overturned, but social norms can be much more permanent. Challenging them might mean rethinking our place in the brave new interconnected world. 

Sources: Pew Research Center, The Guardian, Electronic Privacy Information Center,Center for Democracy and Technology, GOOD, National Legal Research Group, The Atlantic, Tech Crunch.  

Image by rpongsaj, licensed under Creative Commons.   

Under the Democratic-led Congress, action against climate change went essentially nowhere. Under the coming Republican-led Congress, it appears to be headed backward.

Republican Illinois Representative John Shimkus, who according to the New York Times Green blog stands a dark-horse chance of chairing the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has gone so far as to suggest that climate change won’t destroy the planet because God promised Noah it wouldn’t. His 2009 comments, recounted here by London’s Daily Mail, sent a shockwave of amazement through the progressive and environmental blogospheres:

Speaking before a House Energy Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing in March, 2009, Shimkus quoted Chapter 8, Verse 22 of the Book of Genesis.

He said: “As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.”

The Illinois Republican continued: “I believe that is the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it is going to be for his creation.

“The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”

Speaking to Politico after his comments went viral, Shimkus stood behind them, clarifying that while he believes climate change is occurring, he thinks it’s folly to spend taxpayer dollars trying to stop “changes that have been occurring forever.”

See Shimkus’ 2009 remarks on the Bible and climate change in this video:

UPDATE 11/19/2010: At least one brave Republican in Congress concedes that global warming is real and should be aggressively addressed. There’s a problem, though: He’s just been voted out of office.

Sources: New York Times Green, Daily Mail, Politico  

The country’s recent financial crisis has left Americans panicked and angry. My prevailing thought whenever I hear the ever-climbing tab of the bailout—after a colorful expletive or two, of course—is always “Where is that money going to come from? And where is it going?”

The likely answer to the first question is unfortunate: the taxpayers, of course. The Republicans, who hate taxes and government regulation, have ensured an unprecedented magnitude of each by woefully mismanaging the country’s economy.

The answer to the second question is trickier. And it may remain vague, as Kagro X points out at Daily Kos. For the Bush administration, oversight and transparency are like kryptonite, and the president has become notorious for, as Kagro X puts it, “threatening to use his veto crayon to force Congress to pass bills exactly as he wants them, accepting no changes.”

Bush only has four months left in office, but Kagro X is worried the president will still find a way to misappropriate $700 billion. “When you're talking about a guy who 'lost' $9 billion in cash in Iraq, you kind of have to wonder whether he's even going to use the money for its intended purposes.”

That we are bailing out private institutions with public funds is deplorable enough. But Kagro X believes the situation will only be worsened if we hand over the money while Bush is still in office.

If there were any justice in the world, the price for the bailout would be Bush and Cheney's resignation. No, it won't happen, but it should. Instead, almost no matter what approach is ultimately adopted, we'll be throwing (at least) $700 billion into the hole with nothing but crossed fingers to guide us through. The best oversight regimen in the world doesn't help you with people who don't think they have to answer subpoenas.

There is hope: “Thankfully, Congressional Democrats (and some Republicans, too) have for the most part balked at the notion that the bailout should come in the form of a blank check.” Let’s hope that Congress refuses the president this sort of absolute economic power during these final dark days of his presidency.

Image by Tracy O, licensed by Creative Commons.