Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, in his infinite wisdom, is reportedly opposing the nomination of Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren to the new head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Besides literally inventing the idea of the CFPB, she is also the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, which oversees TARP, and presides over hearings where she routinely embarrasses Geithner with her aggressive and probing questions.  She is the “individual who has demonstrated more wisdom, prescience and integrity on economic issues than almost anyone in Washington,” says Glenn Greenwald.

So why does Geithner oppose her nomination?

Warren’s persistent oversight is part of the reason for Geithner’s opposition, according to the source.

So he’s opposing her nomination to the agency in charge of overseeing consumer protections because she is too good at oversight. And people wonder why the economy is not back on track yet.

BRADY: “…one of the reasons unemployment benefits have struggled in Congress is not because people don’t want to help folks who are trying to find a job–they do– they just don’t want to add to the debt, which is one of the reasons consumers are holding on to their cash…“

Really? People are not spending their money because they are worried about a number so unimportant to their daily lives that it’s almost imaginary? I know some people say that Texas is like a different country, but who the fuck does this guy know that goes into the local Texas electronics store and says to the salesman, “You know I really want this HD TV, and I could afford it, but the federal deficit is really high these days, sooo…I better pass.”

And its worth pointing out that Brady voted for the bank bailout, the Bush tax cuts, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also known to the rest of society as THE MAIN SOURCES OF OUR DEFICIT:

But Brady’s words are just a slight variation on what comes out of the mouth of every other disingenuous Republican these days. They know that almost all respected economists on the left and right say unemployment benefits are one of the simplest ways to stimulate an economy when its in recession. They know non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the Office they cite with favor every time any other budget issue is mentioned, says the same thing. But that means nothing to them. They go on television and call 10% of the people in this country “hobos,”  regardless of how many applications they send out per day. In fact, despite dubbing themselves “fiscal conservatives,” the Republican Party has literally NEVER cared about the deficit. Consider the evidence from the past three decades:

1) There have been two presidents who were members of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, and they both presided over massive increases in both present and projected deficits.

2) The major deficit reduction packages of the modern era, in 1990 and 1993, were both uniformly opposed by the conservative movement.

3) When the deficit was temporarily eliminated in the late-1990s, the mainstream conservative view was that this showed that the deficit was too low and needed to be increased via large tax cuts.

4) Senator Mitch McConnell says it’s a uniform view in his caucus that tax cuts needn’t be offset by other changes in spending.

5) The deficit reduction commission is having trouble because they think conservative politicians won’t vote for any form of tax increase.

So why do Republicans vote against unemployment benefits then? Because they know it’ll hurt the economy. The worse the economy is in November, the more seats they’ll pick up in Congress.

And when the economy is in shambles in January of next year thanks to Republicans literally refusing to participate in governance for two years, do you think they’ll finally start voting for unemployment benefits again?

Considering they have no principles whatsoever, you can bank on it.

I’ll be posting an article later detailing how this is just one of many borderline illegal investment tactics used by Goldman and other banks, and why this case  is probably just the beginning of more legal trouble for the investment giant.

Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.   And to Google, students’ Google Books search results are a thing of beauty.  After all, Google can then target individuals based on their taste in books and as a result, stand to make more money.  But we students might fail to see the beauty when our right to privacy is not protected.

This is partially because the Google Privacy Policy allows Google to have more access to your search and purchase records than libraries are currently given.    Forty-eight states have laws that protect public library reading records so that we can freely browse and read books without fear of being monitored.

Since the Amended Settlement to the Google Books lawsuit creates a situation whereby Google has more sweeping access to our book searches and purchases than do libraries, and since Google Books has the potential make many brick and mortar library services obsolete, the Google Privacy Policy should really matter to us.  The Amended Settlement sets up an infrastructure whereby Google will place access terminals containing millions of scanned books in public libraries.  But its privacy policy does not include any provisions to continue to protect reader privacy.

Not only does Google fail to erect privacy rules consistent with current laws, but it certainly is not consistent with the overarching privacy policy of the American Library Association, which has been a long-time defender of patron privacy in the face of government surveillance.

Part of the reason Google is deficient in this regard—while libraries are not—is because The American Library Association includes patron privacy as part of its core mission and libraries do not stand to benefit directly from tracking user search and purchases as Google does.

Google can track a reader’s past and present online actions and locations through a mystery combination of cookies, IP addresses, referrer logs, and distinguishing characteristics of a reader’s hardware and software.

This is not just peripheral tracking.  These tools help Google figure out what books we are looking for (even if we don’t purchase them), what pages we spend time on, how much time we spend on each page, and allows Google to aggregate and store this information for indefinite periods of time.  Bookstores and libraries certainly don’t have this kind of access to how we retrieve our research and book results.

The glaring silence in the Google’s policy regarding any limits on these tracking capabilities is coupled with a quick catch-all statement that reads like a benign proposition that has anything but neutral consequences for reader privacy.  The ominous phrase contained in the Google Privacy Policy is as follows: “We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third-parties”).

The policy lets Google combine the information it learns from Google Book Search with information it has retrieved about users from its other products like DoubleClick, which is an advertising device that places cookie-traced advertising on millions of websites.  

So not only can Google mix and match the information it gathers about us, but there is also no time limitation on how long Google can retain this information.  As past cases have shown, even if records are redacted, individual identities can be singled out.

One particular such case cited in the Privacy Authors and Publishers Objection really exemplifies the subtlety that gets to the core of what is most dangerous here.   In 2006, Thelma Arnold was known as Internet is user No. 4417749 to AOL, just a number out of 20 million Web search queries collected by the ISP.  She was assigned this number to protect her anonymity, but her precise searches were soon cross-linked and circulated across the Internet for all to see.  She conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month using such searches queries as “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything.”

By putting together all these searches, identifying the searcher by name was not a difficult task.  AOL ultimately removed the searches, but it could not remove the damage of having Ms. Arnold’s “whole personal life” publicly revealed through her search records.  And Ms. Arnold is not alone in revealing a great deal about the inner workings of our minds and hearts via our searches.  Millions of others in Google, AOL, and other ISPS possess can reveal our most personal worries, concerns and curiosities.

Ms. Arnold was shocked that her personal life was so exposed, and granted, we as students are fully aware of the potential for Google to track our searches on its search database.  But, at the same time, it is not so obvious to us that we are signing up for this invasive privacy policy that when we engage in the same activity we would otherwise do privately in a bookstore or libraries.  Somehow when we enter searches in Google search, we have become accustomed, albeit perhaps still annoyed, by the ever proliferating advertisements brought to us by AdWords and AdSense.  The privacy policies that have been engrained in library culture and state laws for so long now bolster our desire to have our book browsing, purchasing, and reading details more fiercely protected.

It is true that our “whole personal life” can be deduced from our Internet activity.  Similarly, if one had access to our every search query combined with the books we choose to read, they would pretty much have us figured out.  This potential for exposure leads a hard-working student to wonder about the ramifications of Google’s access to our reading trail on Google Books.

Take the example of a student researching a controversial topic for a school paper on sexuality and the law.  He or she needs access to full texts of sexually explicit books.  Google’s tracking capabilities are especially relevant this, and many other students, who need to search for topics that might appear to be controversial to a third-party but are really integral components to academic research.  By compiling extensive data on readers’ reading habits, Google Book Search will be a hotbed of information for governmental entities and private litigants who will want to utilize this sensitive reader information.  If one such private litigant ends up being a scorned spouse, reading habits of books that might be perceived to be controversial could be used against that person in a divorce proceeding or other litigation.

Sure, we don’t have to use Google Books if we are so concerned with its conflict of interests between making books available for all and its unavoidable pursuit of profits.  But, just because we can get the same content elsewhere, does not mean we are not being denied our First Amendment rights in the process.

Not only are our privacy rights in danger, but as a result of fear of being monitored, there is a possibility that we as young readers will be motivated to stop reading as much or alter our reading choices.  Also, many of us, through our education and personal experiences, will be published authors eventually, and this chilling effect can have secondary effects down the line when choosing what sorts of things to write about.  The chilling effect, discussed by many, is something we should be worried about.  We students, as vital contributors to our society, need to be equipped with as much and diverse knowledge as exists.  If fear causes us to tap into and harness fewer resources, the quality of public discourse is sure to decline.

One potential solution for all of this would be to require Google Book Search to conform to the same privacy standards that currently exist in libraries and perhaps include more tailored mechanisms to deal with the pervasive online tracking capabilities that exist on the Internet.

——–

*Much of the information contained here is based on the Privacy Authors and Publishers Objection to the Google Book Amended Settlement Agreement.

Many regulators say that violations are widespread, but that it is unusually hard to mount a major enforcement effort because interns are often afraid to file complaints. Many fear they will become known as troublemakers in their chosen field, endangering their chances with a potential future employer. 

In response to this article, The Atlantic decided to retroactively pay their interns, and many more companies may soon follow suit.

But while many undergraduate and graduate students complain about their unpaid internships, are they actually necessary for both student experience and the companies they work for? Or are those complaints valid and is this common practice an institutionalized form of indentured servitude?

Deva and I debate:

THEN we found out the “Church” of Scientology has been systematically beating its members as well, though not sexually thankfully.

An End-Of-Days Christian Militia group got arrested in Michigan for trying to spark a war with the federal government. On a side note, these terrorists are still being called a “militia group” by every mainstream news source despite being busted by the FBI Terrorism task force. If only they were Muslim.

Oh, and Muslims fanatics blew up a couple subway trains in Russia, killing scores of people.

Flying slightly under the radar, a rebel group in the Congo aptly named the Lord’s Resistance Army has been going around murdering 100s of civilians in the last week.

Anything non-violence related? Let’s see…

The Texas school board voted Thomas Jefferson out of our children’s history books because he didn’t sufficiently love  Jesus, and Barack Obama was called an “Anti-Semite” by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s brother-in-law just because he wants to uphold international law.

Praise the Lord!

It might strike you as strange that over all the sado-masochism, extreme sexual abuse, racism, anti-Semitism, emotional dysfunctionality, murder and other criminal activity present in this film, I found a much more subtle takeaway.But there is a reason I focused on a leather bound journal. 

The impetus for the whole plot was the disappeared Harriet’ personal diary, containng the inner workings of the mind of a smart, beautiful and observant young lady.  In it were the clues that the down and out journalist Blomkvist and the unconventional (to say the least) hacker, Lisbeth Salander, used to try to track down Harriett who had disappeared from her wealthy famil’ys ilsand years ago.

Lisbeth and Blomkvist, at the behest of Harriett’s elderly uncle, used the highest forms of technology and hacking to decipher Harriet’s written word. Harriett’s cryptic references to Sara, Mari, Magda, BJ (which were actually symbols of murdered young women) scrolled on the pages of her journal inspired Lisbeth to reveal herself via her own cryptic email to Blomkvist after hacking into his computer.  From there the two became a team.

Today no one writes for themselves anymore. No one really writes in journals or private blogs purely for introspective reasons. We all (including myself obviously) feel the need to blast our views for all to see. For some reason, amidst all the graphic sexual abuse and intense scenes, THIS is what I took away from the film, so much so that I took my phone out and began texting myself so that I would remember to post it here. Of course some old dude sitting two seats down did not hesitate to scream that the light from my cell phone was bothering him.

At any rate, I wonder if anyone even keeps a personal journal anymore these days. Maybe we should, instead of being strictly Internet exhibitionists touting our knowledge and views. Maybe our insights would grow richer if we kept them to ourselves first.

If not for Harriett’s journal, the fascinating intricacies of the film would not have played out the way they did, and I think I’m going to start writing in a journal too.  It could prove valuable, especially in coping with life’s stressors and losses.  Good old fashioned catharcism through private writing.  Who knows, it might work.

Here’s a video of Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) giving an impassioned speech on the House floor, literally screaming at the top of his lungs about the mainstream press not covering the House debate on Afghanistan, as he glared at a near empty press room.

We’re talking about Eric Massa 24/7 on TV! And we’re talking about war and peace, $3 billion dollars, 1000 lives, and no press?…The press of the United States is not covering the most significant issue of national importance, the laying of lives down…for the service of our country! It’s despicable—the national press core right now.

Does Politico lead with this story? No, of course not. It’s not even on the front page, its buried in their Click section, where, as Politico co-founder Jim Vandehei puts it, Politico run “a lot of entertainment and personality items”. In other words, their gossip section.

Meanwhile, a gossipy Massa story about his borderline homosexual experiences leads the front page for the third straight day.

Then, just yesterday I also opened a letter from the Census Bureau just to inform me I would get another letter soon with the actual Census form and I should fill it out. At the time I thought, how stupid is it to send out 100 million warning letters about something you’re going to see in a week anyways? But apparently there is logic behind that massive waste of paper as well:

We have extensive research that shows additional mailings alerting households to the arrival of the census form increase response rates by about 6 to 12 percentage points. The savings from that increase more than pay for these mailings. It costs about $85 million to print and mail the advance letter and reminder postcard.  The potential increase in response rates demonstrated by our research could result in a savings of more than $500 million….