Coupla slow blog days

I hate when that happens. Sorry. But sometimes I get busy too although I try to avoid that.

Anyway since the weekend is here, here are a couple of long-ish read articles you might not be too busy to read at you leisure.

Rolling Stone: The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis Matt Taibbi on the corruption at financial ratings agencies.

Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.

In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.

The Baffler: To Galt’s Gulch They Go Thomas Frank on the popular libertarian fantasy of the "capital strike"

Democracy is a problem, all right. Fortunately, entrepreneurs are at work on a solution. And all their innovations point in one direction: withdrawing physically into some libertarian laager—some mountaintop or island or remote state—where free-market principles will be observed with the zealotry they require.

There are, for example, several different plans floating around out there to launch a free-market hideaway named “Galt’s Gulch,” after the fictional place Ayn Rand’s fictional billionaires went to hide during their walkout. One of them is in Chile—made forever safe by that early, bloody act of free-market utopianism—while another, following closer to Rand’s text, is located in Colorado, which its organizers hope to make a center for the “Asset Management” industry.

I've become particularly fascinated with the dovetailing popularity of libertarian entrepreneurial and techno-futurist thinking lately. Here's another piece from a previous Baffler issue by Evgeny Morozov who has been writing about anti-democratic trends in the tech industry for a while now.  This article is mostly about Tim O'Reilly and the history of so-called "open source" software which, I know, sounds boring. But it sprawls widely across a number of social and political trends that should be getting more attention.  This section discusses the growing influence of a technocratic vs truly democratic model of governance.

So what are we to make of O’Reilly’s exhortation that “it’s a trap for outsiders to think that Government 2.0 is a way to use new technology to amplify the voices of citizens to influence those in power”? We might think that the hallmark of successful participatory reforms would be enabling citizens to “influence those in power.” There’s a very explicit depoliticization of participation at work here. O’Reilly wants to redefine participation from something that arises from shared grievances and aims at structural reforms to something that arises from individual frustration with bureaucracies and usually ends with citizens using or building apps to solve their own problems.

As a result, once-lively debates about the content and meaning of specific reforms and institutions are replaced by governments calling on their citizens to help find spelling mistakes in patent applications or use their phones to report potholes. If Participation 1.0 was about the use of public reason to push for political reforms, with groups of concerned citizens coalescing around some vague notion of the shared public good, Participation 2.0 is about atomized individuals finding or contributing the right data to solve some problem without creating any disturbances in the system itself. (These citizens do come together at “hackathons”—to help Silicon Valley liberate government data at no cost—only to return to their bedrooms shortly thereafter.) Following the open source model, citizens are invited to find bugs in the system, not to ask whether the system’s goals are right to begin with. That politics can aspire to something more ambitious than bug-management is not an insight that occurs after politics has been reimagined through the prism of open source software.

On a related note, the annual Aspen Ideas Festival which gathers elite technocrats from around the country to discuss such weighty questions as whether or not universal suffrage is such a great idea and just how can we finally convince everyone to give up Social Security gets underway this week.  Mayor Landrieu is scheduled to speak for the second year in a row.

Finally, via Digby, your technocratic President has also devised a version of Government 2.0.  It's pretty scary.

WASHINGTON — Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.

President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.

Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.

And, yes, it's apparently every bit as weird as it looks.

The program could make it easier for the government to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information to the public, while creating toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations of loyal Americans, according to these current and former officials and experts. Some non-intelligence agencies already are urging employees to watch their co-workers for “indicators” that include stress, divorce and financial problems.

“It was just a matter of time before the Department of Agriculture or the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) started implementing, ‘Hey, let’s get people to snitch on their friends.’ The only thing they haven’t done here is reward it,” said Kel McClanahan, a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law. “I’m waiting for the time when you turn in a friend and you get a $50 reward.”