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Responsible parties

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There’s one situation that we’re all painfully aware of, in which a top official of the U.S. government oversaw a war that began in a flurry of now-disproven charges and then degenerated into disastrous and worsening chaos. During the course of this war incidents of shameful torture were perpetrated by the U.S. military and those hired by the U.S. military. Yet this official did not take responsibility and step down; indeed, when his boss cleaned house and fired a passel of his peers, the official was specifically asked to stay in place.

Then there’s this other situation, in which the top official of the U.N. oversaw a program that may well have been be marred by significant amounts of corruption. There’s even a charge of petty corruption on the part of the official’s son. An investigation led by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, an unimpeachable “wise man,” has yet to weigh in with a verdict. But voices from within the same administration and party that have accepted no responsibility or consequences for their botched war and their torture victims are the first in line to call for the U.N. official to take reponsibility and step down.

Secretary Rumsfeld, meet Secretary Annan. You two gentlemen have a certain amount in common these days. Isn’t it amazing, though, how differently the Republican powers-that-be view your two cases?

I swear my jaw dropped on Friday evening as I listened to the fulminations (on the PBS News Hour) of Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, who has publicly called for Kofi Annan’s resignation. Let’s look at Coleman’s argument in detail:

“Mr. Annan was at the helm of the U.N. He must, therefore, be held accountable for the U.N.’s utter failure to detect or stop Saddam’s abuses. It’s in his interests and it’s in the interest of the U.N. to step down, and I say this without pointing the finger of accusation against the secretary-general. Clearly he knows that people who were under him, people that he put in place allowed this massive fraud and abuse to occur…. There’s no dispute that Saddam Hussein perpetrated a massive fraud on the Oil-for-Food Program, stole billions of dollars, used it to fund terrorism, rearm himself and to bribe high-ranking individuals connected to member states and Kofi Annan was the guy at the center. He was the boss at that point in time…. In any other organization in the country or in the world, a CIA [I assume this is a transcription error for “CEO”] who oversaw, who was in control when a multibillion dollar fraud took place under his nose and under people that he appointed to oversee the program would step down…. He should step back, get somebody fresh in there, then we can have the transparency and credibility we need to get to the bottom of this…. My criticism is that he was at the helm. We do not have evidence today that ties him and so this shouldn’t be about him.”

OK, Coleman’s point one: Annan was in charge when some really bad stuff went down, and though no “evidence” “ties him” directly to that bad stuff, we call for him to resign — “without pointing the finger of accusation against him” — because it’s the right thing to do.

This, of course, is precisely what Democrats and Americans everywhere who were disgusted by Abu Ghraib demanded of Secretary Rumsfeld. In fact, the secretary of defense’s responsibility at the top of a disciplined military chain of command was if anything much clearer than that held by the leader of a loose international organization that serves many masters.

Back to Coleman: “And I don’t believe there’s any way for us to credibly investigate all of this if the guy who was in charge of the organization, who had appointed Benon Sevan is the guy who’s going to receive these reports and have responsibility for ferreting out the fraud…. And if we’re going to get to the bottom of it — if he doesn’t have credibility — how do you have the guy who was in charge at the time of the fraud be responsible for ferreting it out?”

OK, Coleman’s second point: We can’t count on Volcker to report the truth because the Volcker investigation will deliver its conclusions to Annan himself. Well, let’s see, who did the investigators of Abu Ghraib deliver their reports to, again? I don’t recall an independent counsel being given years of time, massive budgets and free rein to pursue the matter.

Former Sen. Tim Wirth of the U.N. Foundation, set up by the News Hour as Coleman’s foil, invoked the Abu Ghraib comparison himself, but I’m afraid he fumbled it. Here’s what he said: “I think to suggest that because Kofi Annan was the secretary general at the time and because there was a problem that’s being looked at independently that he should go is a little bit like saying that Don Rumsfeld ought to leave because of the Abu Ghraib scandal or because of what went on with Halliburton or so on. I mean, that’s sort of an absurd jump to make.”

Well, no, the point is, it’s not an absurd jump. In any other administration Rumsfeld would have been out on his tuches ages ago. And if he didn’t have the integrity to tender his own resignation, any president with a a soul and a conscience would have fired him and his whole cadre of incompetent lieutenants as the first step in cleaning house after Abu Ghraib and trying to set the war against the al-Qaida terrorists back on track from the disastrous Iraq detour. (Well, a president with a big soul and conscience would have resigned himself, but that’s probably asking too much of any politician.)

We’re still waiting for the full record on Kofi Annan and the oil-for-food program. A reasonable person could argue that Annan ought to quit simply for being the man in charge at the time the program went awry. But you can’t make that argument with a straight face unless you accept that the same logic condemns Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and probably George W. Bush himself.

In my book — pardon me, I should say “according to my moral values” — corruption is bad, but torturing people and launching unnecessary wars under false pretenses is worse. (Of course, there’s a theory that the Republicans are just getting Annan back for his criticisms of the Iraq war. But they’re above that. Er, right?)

Coleman closes with this: “Why are we arguing over Kofi Annan? Why doesn’t he step back, bring someone in there who is not tainted by the allegations, the concerns, the fraud that took place…?”

Indeed. With a little tweak you could inscribe his words over the Pentagon doors: “Why are we arguing over Donald Rumsfeld? Why doesn’t he step back, bring someone in there who is not tainted by the torture, the lies, the intelligence failures that took place…?”

Random links

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In this winter of Democratic discontent, here are some good reads that have been percolating through my brainpan:

## George Lakoff’s name is well-known in the blogosphere, and his theories about framing and context are not exactly news, but his piece on “How to Respond to Conservatives” deserves even more attention than it has already received. Here’s a taste:

  You should be able to recognize the basic frames that conservatives use, and you should prepare frames to shift to… Example: Your opponent says, We should get rid of taxes. People know how to spend their money better than the government. Reframe: “The government has made very wise investments with taxpayer money. Our interstate highway system, for example. You couldn’t build a highway with your tax refund. The government built them. Or the Internet, paid for by taxpayer investment. You could not make your own Internet. Most of our scientific advances have been made through funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health — great government investments of taxpayer money. No matter how wisely you spent your own money, you’d never get those scientific and medical breakthroughs. And how far would you get hiring your own army with your tax refund?”

## Over at Personal Democracy, Dean campaign veteran Zephyr Teachout outlines how little of the Internet’s potential the Kerry campaign really harnessed and lays out the still-unfulfilled but still-huge potential for Net-based collective action.

  For all the money-raising, perhaps the most powerful use of the Internet was by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which framed much of the debate for a third of the last critical months. Of all the speedy, turn-on-a-dime fundraising efforts, this one was the most potent, if also the most pungent. But basically, in the political evolution of the Internet, we have barely touched the surface of its potential to shift the locus of real political power. Never before in history have we had a tool that enables–with so little work–local groups to act in coordination with other local groups elsewhere. Never before in history have we had a tool that at its core holds the solution to the most difficult collective action problems in democracy. And almost no one used it.

##These November 3rd Theses, suggesting that Democrats need to figure out how to “communicate with the core needs of the American people,” make for bracing and provocative reading. Memo to organizers (who seem to include Adam Werbach and others): Tell us who you are, and publish your manifesto in text form (what’s there is a big old graphic file and PDF) so people can actually quote from it.

## Micah Sifry surveys The Rise of Open-Source Politics in The Nation. Most interesting to me here is the perspective on the political pros’ fear that they, like so many other middlemen, will be squeezed out by the rise of new Net-based approaches to political organizing:

  “Anybody who does politics the old way will fight doing things the new way because it’s harder to get paid for it,” says Mark Walsh, CEO of Progress Media, the parent of Air America and a veteran of such companies as VerticalNet and America Online. “Look at every other industry and how the Internet has altered it. Take E-Trade and the selling of stocks. Or Orbitz and the travel industry. In every case, the Internet enables getting rid of the middlemen.” For about a year, starting in late 2001, Walsh was McAuliffe’s chief technology officer, earning $1 a year to help the Democratic Party upgrade its tech systems. “Terry did want to do the right thing,” Walsh says, “but I found the same buzz saw — legacy behavior and consultants who are compensated highly for non-cyber-centric behavior. TV, telemarketing, direct mail — that’s where the margins are.”

Mike Pence profiles me for Kuro5hin

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Mike Pence, who used to run a Salon blog here and now maintains Digital Grotto and contributes to Kuro5hin, interviewed me a while back. He has now posted the writeup: more than you probably ever wanted to know about my teenage exploits as a mimeographer and other matters, but also thoughts on Salon’s saga and the future of digital media.

IBM PC: RIP

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IBM is putting its PC business on the block, according to the front page of today’s New York Times.

I can still remember getting my hands on an early model IBM PC in the offices of the American Lawyer magazine in 1982 or so. A chunky gray box, it ran a version of Basic just similar enough to the one I’d learned as a teenager that I could write programs for it to process survey results. It used perhaps the world’s worst text editor, a hilariously clumsy thing called EDLIN. (Hey, it’s still there buried in the lizard brain of the Windows 2000 system I currently use —just open a command-line box and see for yourself! But only on a file that you can mangle without fear.)

There were many things about that computer that, like EDLIN, made no sense. But it had enough going for it that you could make it do useful things. And that helped me pay my bills at a time when freelance writing was not doing the trick.

The history of those early PC days is well known: IBM let Microsoft control the operating system and gave away the store. IBM’s choice of an open architecture allowed it to swamp Apple in the marketplace but let Compaq, Dell and other lower-cost vendors steal the hardware business out from under it.

Most of the choices that led IBM to this point today were made in those early-’80s years. But it’s still too bad to see IBM give up.

I’ve relied on IBM laptops for most of the last decade. The company’s hardware standards remain high: The lightweight “X” series, with the integrated pointer (I far prefer this to the more common trackpad) and a great keyboard, is still the best portable machine out there, in my opinion. (Before you Mac fanatics weigh in: Yes, I know, Macs are great, OSX is mostly wonderful, but Apple’s laptop hardware has had its share of trouble through the years.)

Across many years and several models, I’ve relied on IBM Thinkpads to keep my data safe, and I have never lost an ounce of my work to hard drive failure or other hardware problems. I know the manufacturing of these products long ago moved overseas, but it still seemed to make a difference that IBM had a tradition of people maintaining some quality standards. They did, after all, have a reputation to maintain. Let’s hope whoever buys the business thinks the same way.

Unhand that blogger!

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One of the first things you learn as an editor is that your concept of “fair use” tends to be very different from the concept held by lawyers representing owners of intellectual property — and that weirdly different rules apply in different realms. (Song lyrics, for instance, are policed far more furiously than, say, lines of dialogue from a movie.)

In the latest instance of something that any news organization would consider “fair use” arousing the ire of corporate attorneys, veteran blogger Jason Kottke, who’d long followed the saga of Jeopardy wiz Ken Jennings, has drawn the wrath of lawyers from Sony. Kottke had posted an audio clip of Jennings’ loss, then took it down after he heard from the lawyers, and replaced it with a transcript. The lawyers were still not happy — although they don’t seem to have gone after the Washington Post for publishing something quite similar. Maybe the thinking is, Kottke isn’t a “journalist,” he’s “just” a blogger. If so, then we’re in for a bumpy ride, because the old line between journalists and non-journalists is now written in invisible ink, the border’s unguarded, and hordes are streaming across.

Bloggers like Jeff Jarvis, Britt Blaser and others are starting to call for a kind of legal aid society for bloggers. Fine — but I’m confused: a decade ago, an organization was founded to help protect individual rights in cyberspace. It even has a project called Chilling Effects specifically dedicated for this sort of problem. Wouldn’t that be a good place to begin? Kottke — call the EFF! Or even better: EFF, call Kottke! I don’t know exactly how this sort of situation fits into the EFF’s current mandates, but at the very least it’s a good starting point. And surely if there is an effort to build an organizational structure to handle this sort of thing in the future it makes sense to try to do so under the EFF umbrella rather than starting from scratch.

Bonus link: Eugene Volokh’s op-ed on balancing journalist’s rights and the public’s right to know in a world where everyone’s a journalist.

The great Social Security swindle

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“You’re thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house . . .(to one of the men) . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can.”

Christmas season is “It’s a Wonderful Life” season, and anyone who has seen that movie — which ought to be pretty much everyone by now — will remember Jimmy Stewart’s plain-spoken explanation of banking, delivered to angry customers who have begun a run on the bank where he works.

Today it’s the Bush administration that’s started a run on the institution of Social Security. And so far no one in Washington has had the gumption or the forthrightness to get up, like Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, and tell the American people what’s really going on.

The Democrats have long been accused of overstating the case in defense of the Social Security system and “scaring seniors” by warning them that the evil Republicans are going to cut their benefits. Seniors may not, in fact, be in too much trouble — but people in their mid-’40s like me, and anyone younger, have every reason to fear.

What am I so worked up about? This piece in yesterday’s New York Times, headlined “Bush’s Social Security Plan Is Said to Require Vast Borrowing.” Richard W. Stevenson’s article is a highly problematic example of pseudo-objective “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism — but even through the haze of official mendacity, the message is clear.

For months — years, if you go back to the 2000 election cycle — serious economists have been saying that there is no way to pay for President Bush’s scheme to privatize part of the Social Security system without running up huge deficits. At this point in Bush history, of course, the huge deficits have arrived even without “reforming” Social Security. So the Bush line now appears to be: Hey, “vast borrowing” hasn’t hurt us yet; what’s a few huge deficits more?

As the economist Herbert Stein famously said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Let’s recap some of the history here: The Social Security time-bomb — a side-effect of the Baby Boom demographic bulge passing through the employment lifecycle — was evident a generation ago, certainly by the waning years of the Reagan administration. Bipartisan efforts — including the first President Bush’s acceptance of a tax increase, despite his famous “Read my lips” promise — set the nation’s finances on course again. By the late ’90s we began racking up significant budget surpluses.

These surpluses were supposed to be set aside to keep Social Security solvent for us and our children. That was the famous “lock box” that Al Gore was unfairly derided for talking about. This money wasn’t “ours,” as George Bush fatuously and insidiously told the nation in 2000, justifying his call for tax cuts. It was cash that had been raised to solve a long-term problem.

Bush and his team broke open the lock-box and handed the cash out, mostly to the wealthiest tier of Americans, and began running up deficits like there was no tomorrow. Now they want us to buy into a fraudulent scheme to hand chunks of the nation’s obligations to future retirees into 401k-like private investment accounts. But since the money today’s workers now pay in Social Security taxes actually pays today’s retirees, any cash diverted to such investment accounts will have to be made up somehow.

Bush’s answer? Charge it!

In theory, the economists who like this privatization scheme see it as a way to boost the nation’s total savings, which is a good thing for the economy and should increase long-term growth, ultimately helping put the federal budget back on track. But, er, if the feds are borrowing the money for the citizens to save, then there’s no real increase in total savings, and no long-term benefit — as Stevenson’s article lays out. All we get are bigger and bigger deficits as far as the eye can see, with the looming possibility that, sooner or later, our lenders will grow tired of the game, and we’ll face a catastrophic drop in the dollar, a skyrocketing inflation rate, and the prospect, at worst, of a Weimar-like fiscal collapse.

Meanwhile, what are we taking this huge risk for? For the sake of letting individual investors take a modest portion of their retirement money and put it into mutual funds? Of course, we’ve recently had a national refresher course in how the mutual fund industry works; even without crooked kickbacks and such, the service fees eat up a significant chunk of the ostensible advantage you get from investing long-term in stocks over more conservative choices. And those financial advisers who love to tout the long-term advantage of stock investments are rarely willing to come clean on the risk to retirees: Growing older is not a choice, and if you’re unlucky enough to need to retire during a market downswing, you will not find much consolation in knowing that your portfolio would have averaged out a winner if you’d only had another decade or two.

In the long term, stocks may be better; but as a famous economist once said, in the long term, we’re all dead, too. The long term is always iffy. That’s why the best retirement safety nets are built out of safer materials than stock-market investments — and why Social Security should be kept out of the hands of the brokers.

Consider this other piece from yesterday’s Times, in which Mary Williams Walsh explains a little-known paradox of the pension world: It seems that, despite the woes so many pension funds now face, a handful of them have managed to prosper by choosing conservative, safe long-term investments. Meanwhile, the pension funds that are in trouble are those that chose riskier stock-market portfolios. Imagine that! This, of course, is precisely the course that Bush wants to put Social Security on. In a better world, Walsh’s piece would have been put on the Times front page right next to Stevenson’s, as a cautionary counterpoint to the president’s folly.

Everyone in Washington knows we need to fix Social Security. But the Bush approach, while it could win support in the short term in a Republican-dominated Congress, is a long-term disaster. The worst scenario here is one that no one in the administration would ever admit to, but if you listen in on the loony right fringes (who are closer than ever now to the levers of power) you’ll hear it: The idea is that if we undermine Social Security enough today, when the fiscal train-wreck hits tomorrow the government won’t have any choice but to scrap the retirement system entirely — fulfilling, finally, the dreams of its original die-hard Republican opponents, who saw FDR’s pledge to America’s working families as an evil efflorescence of socialism.

The Bush economists are ready to begin the dismantling. Wall Street is teeming with brokers slavering to get the commissions on this vast new influx of accounts. And, just when we can no longer count on Social Security to cushion our retirements, the borrowing the Bush plan demands will spark inflation or undermine the dollar or both, devaluing whatever savings we may have been counting on to augment those Social Security checks.

Maybe seniors — and the rest of us — should be scared.

Random links

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A little of my recent reading:

## A wonderful piece about SpaceWar, the ur-computer game, by Stewart Brand from Rolling Stone, 1972. (Yes, 1972.) Also about: that thing we would someday call the computer revolution. [Courtesy Metafilter.]

## Inspiring interview with Howard Rheingold from Business Week. I first met Howard around the time his “Virtual Communities” book came out, and he was starting a column at the S.F. Examiner, where I then worked. I interviewed him for the Examiner (you can read it here) back then, and what I said about him still, I think, applies: “His blend of enthusiasm tempered with inquisitive caution distinguishes him from both starry-eyed techno-hucksters and atavistic technophobes.” Here’s what’s on his mind today:

 

We had markets, then we had capitalism, and socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism. There’s been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.

But I think we’re seeing hints, with all of these examples, that the technology of the Internet, reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices — these are all like those technologies…that made capitalism possible. These may make some new economic system possible.

Take that, Francis Fukuyama!

## Having linked to Brand and Rheingold I must now complete the Whole Earth trifecta with a general bow in the direction of Kevin Kelly and his wonderful Cool Tools site, and in particular to the great compendium of documentaries, or “True Films,” that he and his contributors have compiled.

## Here’s a fun illustration of how hard it is to keep your brain’s parallel-processing working right when the verbal and visual cues are contradicting one another. Then click on the site’s comments button for an illustration of what it looks like when people’s brains aren’t working at all. [link courtesy Sam Ruby]

Long Winters tale

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My musical find of the last few months, and an album whose melancholy vitality has helped me through the post-election letdown: The Long Winters‘ “When I Pretend to Fall.”

I can’t even remember how I got pointed in this band’s direction. The music at first sounds like fairly typical alt/indie fare (the album opener, “Blue Diamonds,” reminiscent of Spoon), but a couple of listens and John Roderick’s songs start to burrow into your psyche. It’s all good, but there are three gems: “Cinnamon,” whose warm luster — that’s REM’s Pete Buck on mandolin — swaddles the singer’s grief (“I clung to the stretcher, I drew them a heart”); “It’ll Be a Breeze,” a simple acoustic love song that cuts to the core, like a Dashboard Confessional ditty that’s been through something harrowing; and “New Girl,” a rollicking 1-5-4 rocker with mischievous lyrics (“Twice you burned your life’s work / Once to start a new life / And once just to start a fire”) and a bridge of escalating taunts.

Go ahead, there’s free MP3s here, though sadly not of any of those songs.

If all that weren’t enough, check out the cover’s 1970s typography and gnarly rainbow-as-Gordian-knot graphic.

Blogging can be hazardous to your paycheck

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I took some heat from the attendees at Supernova earlier this year for my skepticism about the whole bloggers-in-corporate-America thing. Yes, there are examples, mostly in the tech industry, of smart, energetic bloggers (and blogging execs) who have brought a human face to their companies, and who serve as corporate ambassadors to the blogosphere. Grand — it’s a smart move for both the individual bloggers and the companies. Someday, you might even see this model spread. But beyond the confines of an industry like software — in which many of the individual workers are highly skilled, highly paid, mobile and relatively confident of their own re-employability — it will happen a lot more slowly than the rhetoric at blogging conferences these days suggests.

Outside of the tech industry, and a few pockets here and there like law and medicine and library science, blogging remains an inscrutable anomaly, less likely to be seen by an employer as a PR plus than as an HR nightmare. Corporate America is still, outside of a few islands of enlightenment (and pragmatism in the face of a chaotic world), all about control — controlling the message, controlling costs, controlling the employee’s life to the extent that the company is able. (It’s the same spirit our “CEO President” is bringing to his current reorg.)

Here are two recent examples illustrating my point, from opposite ends of the power hierarchy. Mark Cuban — the wealthy dot-com mogul who now blogs and owns his own basketball team — is about as independent and autonomous as bloggers come. If anyone can blog without fear of reprisal from his industry, it’s someone like him, right? But here he is, getting fined for a blog posting. This is the appalling, outrageous post that raised the NBA’s ire. I’m a total sports ignoramus, but as far as I can tell, Cuban wasn’t supposed to raise a public complaint about his league’s idiotic decision to hold its opening day on Election Day because — well, why, exactly? Is it just, like, unsportsmanlike? Did Cuban violate the league’s omerta? In any case, so much for transparency, conversations and all the other blogosphere values.

But Cuban’s punishment is pretty trivial compared with the plight of sometime Delta flight attendant Ellen Simonetti, who got fired for posting pictures on her blog that only the Taliban could find offensive. Now, Simonetti’s case has gotten a lot of attention, and it’s certainly possible she’ll be able to turn her ex-employer’s stupidity to her advantage. But losing your job is no fun, and whatever the outcome of her saga, her company threw down a gauntlet to all her former colleagues: Blog at your own risk — we’re watching your every step.

So it’s not just newspaper workers who are being told their employment precludes them from having the right to keep an online journal. It’s people in all walks of life. And it’s not just the people at the bottom of the pyramid who meet resistance. There’s a deep and strong unwillingness in the business world to give up habits of secrecy and control. Maybe it’s just inertia. But I don’t see these walls toppling easily, or without a big fight.

Phone a gauche

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So at long last we have upgraded our home phone system to a multiple-handset cordless thingie (5.8 gigahertz so it doesn’t interfere with the Wifi), and so far I’m generally pleased. Except for one annoyance.

But let me start at the beginning. I’m left-handed, so the button arrangement on my Motorola cell phone has always been a problem: the green “on” button that you have to hit to answer a call is on the right side of the phone, where a right-handed person’s thumb naturally falls; but my thumb just wants to push the red “hangup” button instead. I had to train myself when I first started using this phone to override my natural tendency — or, really, the interface design’s nudge — to hit that button and hang up on the call I was trying to answer.

Ah well — I got over it. Only now, I’m dealing with the nifty cell-phone-like handset of my new cordless phone, and, what do you know, it places its “hangup” button over on the right side of the handset — at the very spot I have forcibly trained my uncooperative left-handed thumb to hit to pick up the phone. (The “pick up the call” button is in the middle of the phone.)

All my life as a left-hander I’ve been willing to adapt. But we sinister types deserve a little consistency from the world!