Sunday, December 08, 2013

I, For One, Welcome (UPDATE)


Our new plutocrat overlord.

Because unaccountable Libertarian billionaires have always been our greatest bulwarks against secrecy and tyranny...

...provided you don't ask any uppity god damn questions about what goes on behind their closed doors.

From PandoDaily:
...
Even Greenwald supporters like Pando’s David Sirota have admitted that, at best, we don’t know what Omidyar’s approach to reporting on business will be. In our debate on the subject earlier this week, he advocated a “wait and see” approach.
It’s certainly true that, to know how Omidyar would react if a Snowden-esque source arrived with a cache of leaked corporate documents, we’d need a concrete example of that happening.
Fortunately, thanks to Twitter-troll-turned-Greenwald-critic OhTarzie, we now have an answer. Tarzie found the following Tweet from Omidyar, posted back in 2009 after TechCrunch published leaked documents from Twitter.
Omidyar’s position on journalists publishing corporate leaks?
Screen Shot 2013-12-07 at 4.09.41 PM
So there you go. A definitive answer, direct from Glenn Greenwald’s new boss. “TechCrunch and anybody else who pubs stolen info should help catch the thief. Shldnt pub in the 1st place.”
Rest easy, corporate America, your secrets will be perfectly safe with Pierre Omidyar. And if anyone is considering approaching Greenwald or his new boss with leaked corporate documents, don’t be surprised if their first call is to the FBI.
...
Once upon a time, the notion of an unelected billionaire who believed that corporate leakers should be treated like thieves (And held incommunicado?  Tossed into fictional supermax hellholes forever?  Who knows?)  buying access to the stolen blueprints to America's intelligence apparatus to do with whatever he pleases -- and nunya fucking business just what that is -- would have been exactly the kind of witchbag of plutocracy and opaque, unaccountable power against which Mr. Greenwald would turned his considerable fire-hose of invective. 

Funny old world.

The full exchange here...
And right on schedule, Mr. Greenwald lashes out at anyone who asks any inconvenient questions with a variant of "I am rubber.  You are glue..."
The careful reader will note the added hilarity inherent in fact that the inconvenient questions being asked of Mr. Greenwald are exactly the sorts of questions to which Mr. Greenwald himself would loudly be demanding answers if the focus those question were anyone other than Mr. Greenwald.

Funny old world indeed.

15 comments:

Horace Boothroyd III said...

This is what bothered me from the very beginning, about the hysterical ninnies at dailykos.com and their anaphylactic shock upon exposure to the Snowden leaks:

Since when do progressives love corporations and trust them to do the right thing?

NSA spying is bad, but it's hardly the orders of magnitude worse than what Google and Yahoo do in hoovering up personal information that one would infer based on the screeching over the former vice the yawning about the latter.

The government is at least bound by a substantial body of privacy law. I can't help but notice that a great many people are fashionably cynical The Law, but the modern state has four hundred years of experience in balancing the needs of the government with the rights of the citizens, with a great many successes on record, while corporate governance is the Wild West - especially after a generation of anarchocapitalism in ascendence.

If we don't blow our cool and massacre the Democrats in a fit of faux radical purity trolling, I have every confidence that we can make this work and get our privacy mojo back again.


Fritz Strand said...

So, are you sending them your resume?

Mr. Bob said...

@HB3
I don't worry about combat forces from Google or Yahoo battering down my door and dragging me away in the dead of night.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Bob,

I'm sorry, and I hope you're concern trolling or snarking, but comments like that really twerk my goat.

In the past hundred years, we have stopped Big Bad Gubbmint from knocking down the doors of and dragging away Blacks, those in mixed marriages, registered socialists, registered communists, suspected communists, gays and lesbians, and from time to time Jews, and we are working on that for Mexicans now. (And, on the last one, at least the rationale has some standing in immigration law.)

As I laid out for someone earlier, this swamp-fever view of Big Bad Gubbmint has been used to dismantle the government to the point that they are completely incapable of taking over the country in a violent uprising. What are they going to to, nuke the west coast and New York?

The government has been getting weaker and weaker, and corporations have become stronger and stronger. Corporations can sue the US government in international courts over "infringing right to profit".

And why would combat forces come into this? Government has eminent domain ownership, and that can be passed on to a corporation. If a corporation suddenly owns your land and controls your water, phone, and electricity, why would they drag you off?

Emergency Manager laws in Michigan and Ohio already let the Governor give control of townships to corporations as well as people. The first time Boeing or General Motors or DuPont is given control of a town, we will be right back where we were at the end of the Guilded Age. And will the unions stop it? Or government workers? If a corporation from China takes over a town here, do you think they will hesitate to drag off dissidents?

The ones who I'm afraid dragging my partner and I off in the night are not the police, or the DMV attendants, or the few remaining local librarians. The reason I keep a machete by my bed is the superstitious and ignorant christpaths. These are the same christopaths that are given justification by one political party.

Government only becomes "Big Bad Gubbmint" out to steel property and rights when we put conservatives in charge. The solution is not to destroy the government, but to destroy the political power of movement conservatism.

And before anyone says it, none of this shit about "the Democrats don't care about you either!". You know who you are.

I know the Democrats are beholden to corporations. They are, however, largely sane, and not the immediate problem. They play the "good cop, bad cop" routine. They know people will vote for them because the Republicans bring a pack of rabid jackals with them.

That is why we have to put down the jackals first. They are an immediate threat to society, every minority, the educated, and even science and social progress. When the pack of jackals is put down, the Republicans will have very little to fall back on. They will be crippled.

When the bad cop has been thrown out of the room, the good cop has to negotiate in good faith.

Mike.K.

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

I don't worry about combat forces from Google or Yahoo battering down my door and dragging me away in the dead of night.


But they will sell your information to the highest bidder and forward erroneous information that can destroy your credit rating and fuck up your employment.

seriously, which of those vectors are more threatening to you personally? Which are more likely to screw up your life?

Mr. Bob said...

Mike.K.
Are you going to post an angry, and confusing Palinistic response every time I comment?

Anonymous said...

Mr. Bob,

The "Fuck your racist ass" Mr. Bob?

I've responded to you twice. Once when you said "Fuck your racist ass." This is the third time, and you called me "Palinistic". I think a hale and hardy "go fuck yourself" would be in order, but...

Let me simplify:

Conservatives have pulled the teeth out of the government.

The whole "Big Government Socialism Communism Sharia Law!!1!" thing is to make you afraid of the government, so the government can be dismantled more.

We had laissez-faire capitalism before. It was an absolute disaster. People could be killed in machinery, and the blood was mopped up while the rest continued working. (My great-uncle could not smell or taste sugar for years without being sick after he saw someone he knew get pulled into the machine that processed sugar beets. The bigger parts were pulled out. The rest was bleached.)

But laissez-faire made some people very rich.

Government stopped that.

And now government is being dismantled by corporate interests. Because "the government is out to get you".

Mike.K.

Unknown said...

I couldn't resist this one:

http://bceca.tumblr.com/post/69336937619

BREAKING BAD XMAS ornaments!

Mr. Bob said...

Mike.K.
I'm not again'st so called big government. I totally agree with you that hands off capitalism is bullshit.

Not being 100% with the President's
policies does'nt make me a conservative, or a wingnut troll.

The President standing up to the Repugs in the government shutdown was good. Not bombing Syria was/is good. Opening peace talks with Iran is refreshingly good. The government hounding Aaron Swartz to his grave, not so good.

I've been voting for Dems since McGovern. Always will, if for no other reason than Supreme Court noms.

I'm not again'st big government.
I am again'st big brother.

Love always'
Bob

Unknown said...

From the frozen reaches of the rustbelt, Droneglass cheerleads for U.S. imperialist rogue-state chauvinism - (torture, murder, and surveillance by 'his' [sic!] government) against heroic revelations by Snowden, Manning, Assange... via denunciations of Greenwald.

When this is done by paid shills it's despicable. When done by an unpaid chump it's merely pathetic.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Bob,

"I'm not again'st big government.
I am again'st big brother."

That is a good discussion to have, and should be held on the national level.

Personally, I think the government has been too gutted to be a legitimate threat. I think it is much, much more likely that corporations will simply take over distressed towns, and become independent city-states government by international business law. Back in the days of company towns (real company-owned towns, that printed their own money), the working base eventually needed permission to leave the town. Again, why drag you off when the company assumes eminent domain of everything and won't let you leave? It seems to work in China. That is also how the coal industry treats West Virginia, while keeping workers too afraid of Big Bad Gubbmint to get their children treated for pediatric leukemia by Medicaid (or enforce pollution regulations to start with).

I'm not against Big Government. I'm against corporatocracy.

The hale and hardy comment is rescinded.

Though you have a grudge for "Palanistic". ¬̯¬

*ahem!* Mr. Bob... The Founding Fathers set out Free Market Constitutional principles to secure Liberties from ACLU judges and warn the British that they wern't gonna be taking away our Second Amendments, but then somebody sent me the other day Isaiah 49:16, when God carved the Constitution into my hand, in the great history of American judicial ruling enforcing Conservative values and freedom families, to fight against the atheists and lizard people in the War on Christmas.

Why do you hate Christmas, Mr. Bob?

Mike.K. <- officially claims to not be a "person of lizardness"


EDIT: OK, Driftglass, I know you don't control the text Captcha, but, Dear God, it just printed "Trustees" with the STEM S-T LIGATURE! "Truļ¬…ees"!

Why do you hate Christmas, Mr. Glass?

Anonymous said...

And once again, Lumpy the Lounge Lizard takes his mouth off Glenn Greenwald's dick long enough to spew his unique blend of wit and wisdom. Quitty McHalfterm has got nothing on good ol' Lumpy for sheer entertainment value!

steeve said...

Couldn't help but be belatedly amused by the comments in the last link. Several Greenwald supporters, and not one of them showed the slightest awareness of the existence of the article's central point, spelled out clearly over and over again:

The contents of Greenwald's book and movie will be wholly approved by the US government.

Greenwald supporters simply can't read.

Cinesias said...

Steeve:

Greenwald supporters are actually Greenwald worshipers (one p!) who believe that only they can prevent a totalitarian state.

Because they're Pures.

We're unPures, because we notice when people exaggerate and lie, and don't just close our eyes while repeating what our hero and personal savior has trained us to say.

jim said...

It would be academic if Omidyar were %100 hands-off in his administration of any media concern - as its main funder, he need only turn off the money-tap to silence its members overnight ... & surely those members are aware of this & will be unlikely to publish anything that would jeopardize their paid positions in a shrinking industry.

I find it very noteworthy that Sibel Edmonds is one hell of a lot harsher with both Snowden & Greenwald than our host here has ever been. Keep in mind that Edmonds is a REAL whistleblower who, because of her search for the (very ugly & terrifying) truth about the FBI's misconduct regarding foreign intercepts both pre- & post-9/11, lost her job & was subsequently the test case for abuse of the State secrets privilege law that has since been used routinely to squash other whistleblowers.

It boggles my mind that anyone can any longer consider Greenwald either a hero or a dissident when he's now spent much of a year steadfastly sitting on vital information of no small import to his home country - in effect doing the NSA's work for them gratis - with the explicit predicate of monetizing some of it for personal gain, & presumably letting most of the remainder of it drift down the Memory Hole. Anyone who can demonstrate exactly where the heroism or dissent lies in such behaviour is more than welcome to do so.