Here is something that I found while doing some "house" cleaning. Some interesting points here that I didn't want to just delete.............................PEACE......................Scott

Uncommon Denominator

The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org

"I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of thorough and heart-felt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy."
-- Walt Whitman, "Democracy in the New World"

Talking Points: Eyes in the skies II
Wit and Wisdom: The ultimate in gas mileage
Quoted! Dopey and Grumpy
Eye on the Right: Conservative sentimentalism
Featured Article: Che Guevara, capitalist tool
Happenings: Electoral reform news
Endorsements: Anna Eshoo
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a contributor

TALKING POINTS

In the last issue of the Uncommon Denominator, a number of questions were posed about the advent of consumer-friendly surveillance technology, particularly such software as Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth: How will widely available satellite and photographic imagery change our understanding of public space? Can our new image technologies reinvigorate the ancient ideal of the agora, or will they pervert it? Who wins and who loses? To what degree will these technologies help to distribute power more broadly, and to what degree will they concentrate power in fewer hands? The case was made, speculatively, that imaging technology might have the potential to stimulate new forms of environmentalism by helping people to see what is taking place on the face of the earth.

We should look a little more carefully, however, at the dark side of a technology that would seem to erode further the already crumbling boundaries of our personal space. Even before the development of Google Earth, Virtual Earth, and their emergent cousins, libertarians and privacy advocates were sounding the alarm about government and corporate intrusiveness. In Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy (University of Chicago, 2002), Mark Monmonier efficiently summarized the surveillance climate as it then existed:

In the new cartographies of surveillance, the maps one looks at are less important than the spatial data systems that store and integrate facts about where we live and work. Location is a powerful key for relating disparate databanks and unearthing information about possessions, spending habits, and an assortment of behaviors and preferences, real or imagined. What's more, these electronic maps are becoming increasingly detailed and timely, if not more reliable. What gets into the system as well as who can use the data and for what purposes makes privacy in mapping a key concern of anyone who fills out surveys, owns a home, or registers a car or firearm.

The key difference, it should be noted, between what Monmonier has described and what we confront today is that surveillance has become democratized, or at least decentralized. All it takes is a personal computer and an internet connection, and a person can visually zoom in to just about any place on the globe: the Kremlin, a Hawaiian beach, their neighbor's backyard. Although it's still not possible to track individual people in real-time, in coming years the power of this technology to make us all more visible is certain to increase. That's in the nature of technology -- or, more accurately, of the people who design it.

Whether or not we think that there should be laws regulating such technology, we should agree that its potential for harm is real. There are both tangible and intangible negatives to continuing to break down the walls of privacy separating individuals from their fellow human beings -- and it is the intangible ones that are particularly disturbing. Tangibly, surveillance technology opens the door wider for various kinds of financial, professional, and even physical abuse. When there are fewer and fewer places where we can rest free from the eye of a camera; when our actions not only in banks but in parking lots and outdoor cafes can be monitored; when one practically has to go into a closet to pick one's nose -- then we should fear for our safety.

But that's precisely where the intangible, insidious effects of widespread surveillance technology enter in. Perhaps we will cease being jealous of our own privacy and guarding it vigilantly. As these technologies are made friendlier and friendlier, what is at stake is our sense of privacy itself. In other words, it seems possible that what we will lose is actually the fear of our loss of privacy, and that we will be gently reconciled to the idea that there's no space that's truly our own.

It's simply a fact of our day and age that we've grown more and more comfortable with turning over our private information to corporations, in a way that we never would to government -- at least not yet. So the growing access we enjoy to satellite imaging software represents a logical extension of what we have already gotten used to. And the satellites -- brought to us courteous of both our government and our major corporations -- come to seem like just helpful assistants, or guardians watching over us. They have been brought into the American home like a new friend of the family.

One has only to read "What Is a Satellite? (Satellite Technology for Young People)," put out by the Boeing Satellite Development Center, to see how a potentially scary technology is being softened and made nice for public consumption. "A satellite," Boeing explains, "is something that goes around and around a larger something, like the earth or another planet. Some satellites are natural, like the moon, which is a natural satellite of the earth. Other satellites are made by scientists and technologists to go around the earth and do certain jobs." Note especially how the technology is made to seem less threatening by its association with natural satellites. In addition: "Satellites do many things for people. Their most important job is helping people communicate with other people, wherever they are in the world." They are humanity's faithful helpers. And they don't bring us out of contact with each other, but help to strengthen human community.

Certain problems can be addressed through legislation: limiting the maximum resolution of consumer-available satellite imagery; prohibiting the sale or transfer of images; and restricting the coordination of mapping or surveillance technology with the gathering or distribution of personal data. But the deeper threat cannot be legislated away. That threat is to our commitment to the integrity and sanctity of personal space. It can only be addressed by a sustained and passionate defense of the right to privacy and of the places that we hallow with our presence.

After all, there are other troubling technologies on the horizon that will pose new challenges. If you think retail surveillance is a problem, wait until robotics come into their own.

WIT AND WISDOM

"President Bush spoke with the Amish. He didn't want to, but it was the only group he could find that wasn't upset about the high price of gas." -- Jay Leno

QUOTED!

"That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help -- I just don't believe it." -- Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, during a visit to La-La Land, even as Congressional conservatives plan $13 billion in further cuts to Medicaid, poverty assistance, and food stamps: programs that are particularly important to African American families

"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." -- Rep. Richard Baker (R-La.), as quoted in The Wall Street Journal.

Baker later claimed that he was misquoted, and that what hereally meant was that he has long supported improved public housing. The Journal has stood by its reporting.

EYE ON THE RIGHT

On September 2, as he spoke to reporters about the devastation along the Gulf Coast wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, President Bush deflected criticism of the administration's response to the crisis, and then said: "Now we're going [to the region] to offer comfort to the people."

This may or may not have been an offhand comment, or a sincere one, but it hinted at a characteristic impulse of American conservatism: the impulse to sentimentalize in response to pressing civic problems, to practice a politics of the heart rather than of the head. That's not only or always true of conservatives, of course, but there's an interesting history to right-wing sentimentalism that deserves special consideration.

First, there's nothing wrong with feeling sympathy for those who have suffered some calamity or persecution. The Uncommon Denominator is not opposed to people comforting other people. Comfort is good. But that's not quite the point. The problem is not only that sentimentalism -- an emphasis on the emotional side of issues -- can be faked, but that even when genuine it is a poor substitute for effective action, proactively and forethoughtfully undertaken. Moreover, sentimentalism serves to stifle a clear-eyed and hard-headed analysis of what the problems actually are, and works to position that analytical approach as offensively "political," as in "this is not the time to play politics with tragedy." Sentimentalism, or the nostrum of compassion, becomes dangerous insofar as it anaesthetizes or neutralizes the critical and rational faculties. And sentimental feelings, finally, are short-lived. Remember the outpouring of emotion after the Indian Ocean tsunami? Where has that gone? It lasted about two weeks, and then people stopped feeling so bad.

In short, sentimentalism can distract attention from the hard business of taking tangible, practical steps to solving the problems that present themselves. That's one of the major lessons of the Enlightenment, but -- like too many other lessons of the great flowering of Western rationalism -- that lesson seems to be getting lost nowadays.

Political sentimentalism has deep connections to the religious or the fundamentalist mindset. But not always: Witness the efforts of American evangelicals (whether or not one agrees with their approach) to influence policy in Africa, rather than just feeling bad about what is happening there. More generally, however, the connection involves the belief that the ultimate solution to social problems lies in God's hands, and that redemption and social change will flow from a change of the heart. That is the basic Protestant idea: that grace follows faith, and that the highest working of faith is in loving those made in God's image. From this perspective, the feelings in one's heart are a prerequisite to bettering the world -- more so than any particular policy.

The best American example of this mindset may be Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Stowe's millennialist view of the evils of slavery made some room for specific political issues, such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, but mainly it called upon Americans to feel sympathy for slaves -- perhaps, even, to offer them comfort. One passage in particular is worth quoting at length:

There is one thing that every individual can do, -- they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter! Are they in harmony with the sympathies of Christ? or are they swayed and perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy? (original emphasis)

There's the rub: not just the insistence that heart-religion will change the world, but the denigration of politics (the "sophistries of worldly policy") as an appropriate response to political problems.

The fact that Stowe wanted both to upend a racist social institution (in current parlance, a "liberal" position) and to promote the values of domesticity and Christianity (a "conservative" position) points up the complexity of American political sentimentalism. The use of emotional words and images has run across the political spectrum, in many different contexts, from Victorian temperance literature to "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" to Ronald Reagan's eulogy for the astronauts of the shuttle Challenger. To identify a "conservative sentimentalism," then, it is better not to consider the question in terms of specific issues such as worker's rights or abortion, but in terms of the function of emotional language.

In that sense, conservative sentimentalism would seem to serve two main purposes. First, it calls us back to a previous state of society, one presumably better than our own, less corrupt and less complicated. The conservative strain of thought habitually looks to a bygone golden age: the third generation of Puritans to their grandparents, the Southern agrarians to a pre-capitalist economy, the Pat Buchananites to the 1950s. The word is nostalgia, and nostalgia, as Don DeLillo reminds us in White Noise, "is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence."

The second main purpose of conservative sentimentalism, as suggested already, is to enable people to believe that simply by "feeling right" they will be making a difference. It substitutes emotional identification for rational action, and thus tends to divert attention from politics. Crucially, this closely links sentimentalism to calls for "unity," as in "the country must be unified during this time of trial." Let's all feel together, and let's repose our faith in the leader who seems most fully to express our feelings. The troubling potential of such unity -- and increasingly its intended effect -- is to plaster over the real conflicts and inequities that society should confront.

When Bill Clinton said "I feel your pain," as maudlin as that sounds, he had actually thought through the situation carefully, and would back up the sentiment with an understanding of the forces and structures that contributed to causing the pain in the first place. To be an effective leader is to be analytical first and emotive second, to identify the best course of action early and to pursue it resolutely. Unfortunately, many conservatives today seem to regard the analytical mindset as somehow elitist, as something for the liberal intelligentsia, not for the hearty folks of the rest of the country who feel their way to the truth of things. (And here it bears repeating -- and repeating and repeating -- that true elitism has to do with applying power in ways that help the already elite, and that it does not have to do with pastimes or food or any of the other cultural "markers" we hear about.) It may sound funny coming from this source, but whatever happened to the old-fashioned brand of conservatism that prided itself on solving problems and getting things done and not settling for nonsense? Almost something to be nostalgic for.

So where does analysis lead in the case of Hurricane Katrina? Above all, what the storm has revealed, to those who care to exercise their rational faculties, is that we had better learn to start living in concert with nature, not in opposition to it, because nature will always be more powerful than us. It's not good enough to feel sorry for the people of New Orleans, and it's not good enough just to go in now, after the fact, with tens of billions of dollars in aid and expect to make things OK again. That's because the anticipated blowback from a whole range of environmentally foolish policies could make Katrina look like a walk in the park. The time to change our ways is now, and the way to change is to apply our human reason. We should feel bad for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, or any other natural or manmade calamity -- but that's no reason not to be smart about the future.

FEATURED ARTICLE

The following is an excerpt from Alvaro Vargas Llosa's "The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand," which appeared in the July 11, 2005, issue of The New Republic.

"Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer's viewfinder-and into the image that, thirty-eight years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic. Sean O'Hagan claimed in The Observer that there is even a soap powder with the slogan 'Che washes whiter.' ….

"The metamorphosis of Che Guevara into a capitalist brand is not new, but the brand has been enjoying a revival of late-an especially remarkable revival, since it comes years after the political and ideological collapse of all that Guevara represented. This windfall is owed substantially to The Motorcycle Diaries, the film produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles. (It is one of three major motion pictures on Che either made or in the process of being made in the last two years; the other two have been directed by Josh Evans and Steven Soderbergh.) Beautifully shot against landscapes that have clearly eluded the eroding effects of polluting capitalism, the film shows the young man on a voyage of self-discovery as his budding social conscience encounters social and economic exploitation-laying the ground for a New Wave re-invention of the man whom Sartre once called the most complete human being of our era.

Click here to read the whole article.

HAPPENINGS

Election reform report -- The Election Assessment Project, a professional effort to evaluate American electoral procedures and recommend improvements, has issued a preliminary report that draws extensively on Commonweal Institute research and commentary. The Election Assessment Hearing report, which cites CI co-founder Katherine Forrest 27 times, offers an array of findings and recommendations, concluding that "left uncorrected, broken election processes can undermine confidence not just in the election processes - they can undermine confidence in the government processes themselves."

Op-ed published -- The Oakland Tribune published an editorial essay by Commonweal Institute President Leonard Salle on Sept. 22. The essay, titled "Both Parties Must Protect Integrity of Vote," calls attention to persistent problems in the conduct of American elections. It reads, in its entirety:

"Since the 2000 election, those who have been close to voting issues have been intensely concerned about the integrity of the vote. However, there has been scant coverage of this issue in the major media and, perhaps reflecting this, little interest by the broad public. Moreover, few elected officials of either major party are willing to address what is, without a doubt, the major political issue of the day.

During the Florida recounts in 2000, voter disenfranchisement and voting improprieties occurred on a large scale. C-SPAN broadcast the investigation by the NAACP that presented testimony on voting irregularities. These "irregularities" included such things as throwing away ballot boxes, voter intimidation of many sorts and illegal identification requirements.

Shortly after the 2002 election, questions were raised about the reliability of touch-screen voting. Particularly disturbing findings were that top executives of the major suppliers of touch-screen voting equipment were strongly aligned with one political party (Republican), and that there was no way to verify the accuracy of the touch-screen vote. Subsequent investigations by computer scientists have shown that the touch-screen computers could easily be hacked. Indeed, there were strong indications of touch-screen computer fraud in the 2002 election.

Coming up to the 2004 election, there was not only well-documented disenfranchisement of voters, but even stronger indications of lack of trustworthiness of touch-screen voting. It has also been revealed that the results of other voting systems, including paper ballots, could be subject to miscounts through manipulation of the central tabulating equipment used at the county level to tally votes from the precincts. Although this particular problem could be overcome by instituting appropriate procedures, putting these procedures in place nationwide cannot realistically be achieved under the current system, in which individual states and even counties have jurisdiction over voting procedures.

Those who believe there is no way widespread voting fraud could occur in America might well consider the following. There are currently four bills before Congress designed to address one or more well-identified problems that interfere with having honest elections. These bills all have one thing in common: significant support from Democrats but little or no support from Republican members of Congress. The one exception is HR 278, a bill that can be characterized as anti-voting reform. It has only Republican cosponsors.

Why are mostly Democrats supporting voting reform? It's really an issue of self-interest. Republicans have a substantial advantage in leaving things as they are. The flaws in our election system work to their advantage. Unfortunately, history has shown that it is not unusual for political parties (for example, there were questions about Chicago and the JFK election in 1960) to be more interested in winning than in honest elections.

It is ironic that America's leaders talk about the need to create democracies around the world and emphasize how important honest elections are to achieving that goal. The truth is that many of these same leaders don't believe in the democratic principle of honest elections, where every person who chooses to vote can, and every vote will be accurately and honestly counted. As things now stand, unless our representatives in both political parties are willing to do what is needed to ensure the integrity of the vote, we cannot expect to maintain our democracy."