Tag Archives: Internet censorship

How to Create a DIY Sticker Campaign

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This is a simple how-to guide for creating a surprisingly effective sticker campaign on a limited budget. Before commencing, one might first ask “why a sticker campaign?”

A sticker of the right image in the right place is in essence a form of guerrilla marketing. While not as permanent as a graffiti stencil, it can still get a message across without damaging whatever objects or surfaces they happen to be placed on. Well-designed stickers can be viewed as a physical meme, which in internet culture has come to mean a combination of (usually humorous) images and words which transmit ideas. As social media monopolies continue to assert their power to censor any ideas which they, their corporate sponsors and government partners might disagree with, we need to be more creative about how to spread memes through society in a multitude of ways which can bypass censorship, contradict the mainstream consensus and have positive impacts.

As a user of mass transit, I began noticing small stickers on buses and bus stops along the routes I take featuring images mocking certain multinational corporations known to harm the community. The more I thought about the method and motives behind them, the more attractive the concept became. It’s a relatively low risk and low investment action that can have great results if even just a few with the right mindset see them and are nudged towards critical thoughts and actions. For example, I was moved to attempt to recreate the stickers, strategically place them in public spaces, and also share the method of producing them with the hope that others will do the same.

The first step is to choose an image. The meme content of your sticker is limited only by your imagination and the issues you wish to address.

Regardless of message, make sure it grabs attention and is still legible even if the sticker is small. I found that upping the contrast and converting images to black and white usually makes them more effective (and saves on color toner).

Next, acquire a box of Avery 5160 address stickers (or something similar) which can be purchased for a few bucks at thrift shops or found at most corporate workplaces.

Using Microsoft Word, click on “Tools” dropdown menu, then “Labels” and set it for “Avery standard, 5160” (or whatever type of label one happens to use).

Drag and drop image onto the Word label template so it looks something like this:

Print and trim with a paper cutter so all white portions are removed and each image is separated. This size of label and image creates 60 individual stickers per page. Granted, they’re pretty small so should ideally be placed in areas in which people come in close proximity to them such as on buses, bus stops, elevators, bathrooms, eye-level store shelves, etc. Smaller sizes have the advantage of making them easier to place more discretely however.

With bundles of strips of stickers in your pockets, have fun doing something admittedly immature but with the potential to support intelligent and worthy causes 🙂

The conspiracy to censor the Internet

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By Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

Source: WSWS.org

The political representatives of the American ruling class are engaged in a conspiracy to suppress free speech. Under the guise of combating “trolls” and “fake news” supposedly controlled by Russia, the most basic constitutional rights enumerated in the First Amendment are under direct attack.

The leading political force in this campaign is the Democratic Party, working in collaboration with sections of the Republican Party, the mass media and the military-intelligence establishment.

The Trump administration is threatening nuclear war against North Korea, escalating the assault on health care, demanding new tax cuts for the rich, waging war on immigrant workers, and eviscerating corporate and environmental regulations. This reactionary agenda is not, however, the focus of the Democratic Party. It is concentrating instead on increasingly hysterical claims that Russia is “sowing divisions” within the United States.

In the media, one report follows another, each more ludicrous than the last. The claim that Russia shifted the US election by means of $100,000 in advertisements on Facebook and Twitter has been followed by breathless reports of the Putin government’s manipulation of other forms of communication.

An “exclusive” report from CNN last week proclaimed that one organization, “Don’t Shoot Us,” which it alleges without substantiation is connected to Russia, sought to “exploit racial tensions and sow discord” on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and even Pokémon Go, a reality game played on cell phones.

Another report from CNN on Monday asserted that a Russian “troll factory” was involved in posting comments critical of Hillary Clinton as “part of President Vladimir Putin’s campaign to influence the 2016 election.” All of the negative commentary in news media and other publications directed at Clinton, it implied, were the product of Russian agents or people duped by Russian agents.

As during the period of Cold War McCarthyism, the absurdity of the charges goes unchallenged. They are picked up and repeated by other media outlets and by politicians to demonstrate just how far-reaching the actions of the nefarious “foreign enemy” really are.

While one aim has been to continue and escalate an anti-Russia foreign policy, the more basic purpose is emerging ever more clearly: to criminalize political dissent within the United States.

The most direct expression to date of this conspiracy against free speech was given by the anticommunist ideologue Anne Applebaum in a column published Monday in the Washington Post, “If Russia can create fake ‘Black Lives Matter’ accounts, who will next?”

Her answer: the American people. “I can imagine multiple groups, many of them proudly American, who might well want to manipulate a range of fake accounts during a riot or disaster to increase anxiety or fear,” she writes. She warns that “political groups—on the left, the right, you name it—will quickly figure out” how to use social media to spread “disinformation” and “demoralization.”

Applebaum rails against all those who seek to hide their identity online. “There is a better case than ever against anonymity, at least against anonymity in the public forums of social media and comment sections,” she writes. She continues: “The right to free speech is something that is granted to humans, not bits of computer code.” Her target, however, is not “bots” operating “fake accounts,” but anyone who seeks, fearing state repression or unjust punishment by his or her employer, to make an anonymous statement online. And that is only the opening shot in a drive to silence political dissent.

Applebaum is closely connected to the highest echelons of the capitalist state. She is a member of key foreign policy think tanks and sits on the board of directors of the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy. Married to the former foreign minister of Poland, she is a ferocious war hawk. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea, she authored a column in the Washington Post in which she called for “total war” against nuclear-armed Russia. She embodies the connection between militarism and political repression.

The implications of Applebaum’s arguments are made clear in an extraordinary article published on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times, “As US Confronts Internet’s Disruptions, China Feels Vindicated,” which takes a favorable view of China’s aggressive censorship of the Internet and implies that the United States is moving toward just such a regime.

“For years, the United States and others saw” China’s “heavy-handed censorship as a sign of political vulnerability and a barrier to China’s economic development,” the Times writes. “But as countries in the West discuss potential Internet restrictions and wring their hands over fake news, hacking and foreign meddling, some in China see a powerful affirmation of the country’s vision for the internet.”

The article goes on to assert that while “few would argue that China’s Internet control serves as a model for democratic societies… At the same time, China anticipated many of the questions now flummoxing governments from the United States to Germany to Indonesia.”

Glaringly absent from the Times article, Applebaum’s commentary and all of the endless demands for a crackdown on social media is any reference to democratic rights, free speech or the First Amendment.

The First Amendment, which asserts that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech,” is the broadest amendment in the US Constitution. Contrary to Applebaum, there is no caveat exempting anonymous speech from Constitutional protection. It is a historical fact that leaders of the American Revolution and drafters of the Constitution wrote articles under pseudonyms to avoid repression by the British authorities.

The Constitution does not give the government or powerful corporations the right to proclaim what is “fake” and what is not, what is a “conspiracy theory” and what is “authoritative.” The same arguments now being employed to crack down on social media could just as well have been used to suppress books and mass circulation newspapers that emerged with the development of the printing press.

The drive toward Internet censorship in the United States is already far advanced. Since Google announced plans to bury “alternative viewpoints” in search results earlier this year, leading left-wing sites have seen their search traffic plunge by more than 50 percent. The World Socialist Web Site’s search traffic from Google has fallen by 75 percent.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have introduced similar measures. The campaign being whipped up over Russian online activity will be used to justify even more far-reaching measures.

This is taking place as universities implement policies to give police the authority to vet campus events. There are ongoing efforts to abolish “net neutrality” so as to give giant corporations the ability to regulate Internet traffic. The intelligence agencies have demanded the ability to circumvent encryption after having been exposed for illegally monitoring the phone communications and Internet activity of the entire population.

In one “democratic” country after another governments are turning to police-state forms of rule, from France, with its permanent state of emergency, to Germany, which last month shut down a subsidiary of the left-wing political site Indymedia, to Spain, with its violent crackdown on the separatist referendum in Catalonia and arrest of separatist leaders.

The destruction of democratic rights is the political response of the corporate and financial aristocracy to the growth of working class discontent bound up with record levels of social inequality. It is intimately linked to preparations for a major escalation of imperialist violence around the world. The greatest concern of the ruling elite is the emergence of an independent movement of the working class, and the state is taking actions to prevent it.

Grooming Students for A Lifetime of Surveillance

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The same technologists who protest against the NSA’s metadata collection programs are the ones profiting the most from the widespread surveillance of students.

By Jessy Irwin

Source: Model View Culture

Since 2011, billions of dollars of venture capital investment have poured into public education through private, for-profit technologies that promise to revolutionize education. Designed for the “21st century” classroom, these tools promise to remedy the many, many societal ills facing public education with artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, and other technological advancements.

They are also being used to track and record every move students make in the classroom, grooming students for a lifetime of surveillance and turning education into one of the most data-intensive industries on the face of the earth. The NSA has nothing on the monitoring tools that education technologists have developed in to “personalize” and “adapt” learning for students in public school districts across the United States.

(Mega)data Collection + Analysis

“Adaptive”, “personalized” learning platforms are one of the most heavily-funded verticals in education technology. By breaking down learning into a series of tasks, and further distilling those tasks down to a series of clicks that can be measured and analyzed, companies like Knewton (which has raised $105 million in venture capital), or the recently shuttered inBloom (which raised over $100 million from the Gates Foundation) gather immense amounts of information about students into a lengthy profile containing personal information, socioeconomic status and other data that is mined for patterns and insights to improve performance. For students, these clickstreams and data trails begin when they are 5 years old, barely able to read much less type in usernames and passwords required to access their online learning portals.

Data collection and number crunching aren’t the only technologies being explored to revolutionize education– technology billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates funded a $1.1 million project to fit middle-school students with biometric sensors to monitor their response and engagement levels during lessons, and advocated a $5 billion program to install video cameras in every classroom to record teachers for evaluation.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a law put in place in 1974 to protect student academic records, does nothing to protect student data when it is in the hands of education technology companies. Instead, FERPA threatens to take federal funding away from schools who are found to have breached student privacy while it fails to mandate bare minimum security standards for the storage and transmission of student data. In fact, a recent revision of FERPA increased the power that companies have to collect and mine student data.  Though lawmakers and privacy advocates are regularly outraged at the immense volume of student data freely floating through the web, the repeated failure to create legislation that protects student data from being used for profit is astounding.

One thing is clear: those who have the power to protect student privacy will not do so as long as they can continue to subsidize the cost of public education with student data.

Internet Censorship in Schools

In most educational institutions, the vast majority of IT operations are focused on monitoring, filtering and blocking web traffic instead of building secure networks that safeguard student records and sensitive behavioral data. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the widespread adoption of web filtering software tools in K-12 schools. Usage of these technologies is required for compliance with programs like E-Rate, which grant federal money to schools to fund internet access for their students.

To be eligible for funding from the E-Rate program, schools are required to comply with federal regulations that ban access to websites displaying pornography, graphic material, or any other that could otherwise be judged as immoral, improper or lewd. More often than not, this subjective criteria is determined by the opinions and belief systems of school administrators under political pressure to deny students access to content on controversial issues about topics like evolution, birth control and sex education. These decisions disproportionately affect young girls and LGBTQ students by denying them access to sites that provide important information about their rights, their developing bodies, their sexuality and their access to contraceptives. In the case of Securly, the first filtering tool designed for schools, the controls set by IT and administration for web access can extend far beyond the walls of the school and determine what content students can access while using school- issued machines from their home internet connections.

Despite the many positive contributions of the internet in the distribution and dissemination of knowledge across the planet, students are regularly denied access to valuable information that could positively impact their learning… all to safeguard a small percentage of federal budget money granted to their schools. The implications of this are particularly severe for low-income students who do not have access to the Internet at home; without the ability to freely access the web on their own terms, their digital literacy skills lag behind those of their affluent peers. Though teachers request better and broader internet access for students in their classrooms, administrator-imposed blocks and filters on school internet leave most students woefully unprepared to navigate the realities of the web. When students do find a way around the tools used to limit their access to the outside world (this happened with a group of students who were given iPads in the Los Angeles United School district last year), they’re labelled as “hackers” or miscreants, and disciplined for using Tor, a tool popular among students for anonymous web browsing and circumventing blacklists that ban websites from school networks.

Social Media Surveillance

Schools are adopting many other surveillance technologies with unprecedented reach into the private communications and lives of students and their families. In Lower Merion, PA, a suburb outside of Philadelphia, educators engaged remote administration tools on students’ laptops to regularly spy on their activities while at home. In a case that made its way into federal courts, one student was punished by administrators who mistook candy pictured through his laptop’s camera for drugs. While the full extent of the spying was never exposed, parents and students have expressed concern about educators having the ability to watch young girls undress in the privacy of their homes, unaware that they were being watched through their school-issued computers.

In 2013, the Glendale Unified School District in Glendale, CA took a move straight from the NSA surveillance handbook by seeking out a $40,000 contract with Geo Listening, a social media monitoring company that charges schools to eavesdrop on student social media chatter. While the company claims to only access posts that are public in the school districts they work with, and says it works closely with school districts to tailor their monitoring programs to prevent cyberbullying, suicide and active shooter incidents, it is very easy— too easy, in fact— to use such technologies to identify and target students who have been labeled deviant or delinquent within their communities, or who are otherwise outspoken and critical of their teachers and schools.

Schools are also demanding access to students’ social media communications in ways that severely harm their constitutionally protected rights to free speech. In Minnewaska, MN, a female student who complained about a hall monitor’s behavior in a Facebook post was questioned and given in-school suspension. Later, when a parent reported the student for “sexting” over Facebook with a classmate, she was removed from class again as a group of educators and a police officer armed with a taser demanded that the student hand over her password. They then read private communications that took place outside of school through her Facebook account. After being pulled from class multiple times, suspended from school, and barred from attending a school field trip (the same punishment was not doled out to the male student involved in the messaging), the ACLU stepped in to defend the student’s right to privacy and free speech in communications outside of school property. Though the ruling in the case upheld students’ protection under the 1st and 4th amendments, school districts around the country continue to demand access to students’ social media accounts and threaten to mark students’ academic records to make it difficult to get into a desired university or to seek other avenues for continued education.

Physical Surveillance

In addition to the online monitoring taking place in schools, there are many surveillance mechanisms in place to enforce physical security in public schools. Since the shootings that took place at Virginia Tech in 2007, and again after those that took place in Sandy Hook, CT in 2012, technology companies have launched myriad tools designed to minimize the potential loss of life in the next active shooting incident at a school. Some of these technologies include:

By preying on the absolute worst fears of administrators and parents across the country, technology companies are earning millions of dollars selling security “solutions” that do not accurately address the threat model these tools claim to dispel. School districts that purchase these systems further perpetuate the farce of security theater and infringe on students’ rights to privacy and individual freedom.

A Lifetime of Surveillance

When we develop and use educational technologies that monitor a student’s every moment in school and online, we groom that student for a lifetime of surveillance from the NSA, from data brokers, from advertisers, marketers, and even CCTV cameras. By watching every move that students make while learning, we model to students that we do not trust them– that ultimately, their every move will be under scrutiny from others. When students recognize that they are being watched, they begin to act differently– and from that very moment they begin to cede one small bit of freedom at a time.

Though the education technology revolution continually promises a silver bullet that will be a great democratizing force for all of society’s ills, it categorically disregards the patriarchal power structures and biases that both legitimate and perpetuate discrimination against minorities and marginalized groups. Despite it being well within the scope of educational technology tools to track, identify and expose biases towards groups of students, technologists avoid implementing small changes that monitor educator performance and correct for unconscious biases that negatively affect student learning. Because the surveillance taking place in schools is typically based on qualitative criteria like morality, appropriateness and good behavior, these technologies extend current practices and prejudices that perpetuate injustices against marginalized groups.

There are few to no safeguards built into the online and offline monitoring systems to protect students from the abuse of these tools. Young female students who are active on social media can be unfairly targeted, slut-shamed and disciplined for suggestive language that takes place outside of school, while their male counterparts are not held equally accountable for participating in sexually charged online conversations. Youth of color, a group that is disproportionately stereotyped as angry, aggressive, and unpredictable by educators, can easily be monitored, disciplined, and entered into the juvenile justice system for any outburst that could vaguely be misinterpreted as a threat to a homogeneous caucasian school culture. Any student grappling with issues of abuse, depression, disability, gender identity or sexuality could easily be discovered by online surveillance tools, stigmatized and outed to their teachers, parents and wider community.

Education technologists also continue to widen the digital divide between affluent and economically oppressed. Despite an industry-wide insistence that technology is not being developed to replace educators in the classroom, many poor school districts faced with massive budget cuts are implementing experimental blended learning programs reliant on “adaptive” and “personalized” software as a way to mitigate the effect of large class sizes on student learning. This means that students who attend costly private schools or live within rich school districts that can afford to employ more educators and maintain smaller class sizes receive much more personalized instruction from their teachers. Instead of receiving much-needed interaction and personalized learning directly from educators, poor students living in disadvantaged communities receive instruction from educational software that collects their data (which is likely to be sold), and have less individual instruction time from teachers than their affluent counterparts.

By developing technologies that collect, track, record, analyze every move a student makes both online and off, technologists and investors and educators are ensuring that today’s students will have less privacy than any other generation that came before them, threatening to make privacy and anonymity unattainable for future generations. Though the surveillance mechanisms at play in education technologies affect the privacy of millions of students who pass through the education system each year, this system is a profound, persistent threat to the privacy and individual liberty of LGBTQ students, low-income students, and students of color who have already been so severely failed by the status quo.

Ironically, the same technologists and investors who protest against the NSA’s metadata collection programs are the ones profiting the most from the widespread surveillance of students across the country, by building educational tools with the same function.

Upper 1 Percent Plan Total Control of Internet News

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By Wayne Madsen

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

With the impending demise of World Wide Web “net neutrality,” which has afforded equal access for website operators to the Internet, the one percent of billionaire investors are busy positioning themselves to take over total control of news reporting on the Internet.

In the latest move by billionaires to monopolize the Internet, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and billionaire Nick Berggruen announced the creation of World Post, a news and views website that will be officially launched at the World Economic Forum conclave of one percenters in Davos, Switzerland.

Among the announced contributors to World Post are Microsoft owner Bill Gates, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The move by Huffington and Berggruen follows the creation of the “investigative” news website First Look, Inc. by PayPal’s billionaire founder Pierre Omidyar. First Look plans to distribute the remaining cache of National Security Agency (NSA) documents originally leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald.

Another billionaire who has joined the rush to seize part of the Internet is hedge fund tycoon George Soros. Soros has backed two media operations, Pro Publica, which promised to disclose many Snowden documents but has not followed through, and Project Syndicate, which paves the Internet with editorials backing all of Soros’s global initiatives.

Greenwald and his associates have published only one percent of the estimated 50,000 documents downloaded by Snowden from classified NSA databases. In a recent interview by Israel’s Channel Ten, Greenwald made it very clear that he would release more documents concerning NSA surveillance of Israeli leaders based on what the Obama administration does with regard to convicted and jailed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. There are increasing calls for Pollard’s release from prison and permission for him to move to Israel.

Greenwald stated to Israeli television that the slow pace of document release would continue and that he agreed with Israel on the issue of Pollard: “I think you are absolutely right to contrast the Jonathan Pollard case with revelations of American spying on their closest allies within the Israeli government, because it does underlie, underscore exactly the hypocrisy that lies at the center of so much of what the U.S. government does.”

Pollard is serving a life sentence in the Butner, North Carolina, federal penitentiary for disclosing a cache of documents that resulted in a number of U.S. intelligence assets in the Middle East being compromised to Mossad. The Mossad approached the U.S. assets and offered them a deal: cooperate with Mossad or risk being outed to their governments as CIA assets. In either case, the assets faced a certain death sentence: disclosure of work for Israel or the United States would have been met with the same fate of execution as spies.

A number of American journalists are now coming out in support of clemency for Pollard to placate Israel over the NSA spying reports leaked by Greenwald. First Look’s initial operating budget is $250 million. Along with Greenwald, journalists such as The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill; Dan Froomkin, formerly with The Washington Post; and Entertainment Weekly.com’s Bill Gannon jumped ship to sign on to First Look. The hiring of an entertainment editor who once worked for Lucas Films, the producer of Star Wars movies, raised eyebrows among those who believed Greenwald and Omidyar intended First Look to be a no-nonsense news operation. It now seems certain that First Look will be no different than Disney Corporation’s running of ABC News.

There have been some outrageous examples of corporate parents spiking stories by their news divisions in order to avoid bad publicity. In 2006, ABC News was pressured by Disney and its then-CEO Michael Eisner to kill an investigation of pedophiles being employed by Disney World in Orlando. The end of net neutrality will stymie and possibly eliminate investigative reporting on the Internet as we now know it.

The formation of the two newest media companies follows Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of The Washington Post. It is believed that Bezos will begin to streamline the newspaper with more focus on Internet distribution than the print run.

Under President Obama, the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission have done little to advance the cause of net neutrality. In fact, the regulatory agencies have gone the other way in order to facilitate the creation of a multi-tiered Internet that will permit high bandwidth access in a “pay to play” scheme. In other words, only billionaires like Omidyar, Berggruen, Bezos, and others will have access to the top tier of the Internet to distribute varnished “news” reports.

Those media organizations without deep pockets will be relegated to the slower tiers of the Internet, sharing limited bandwidth with pornography, quack medicine, and get-rich-quick scam operators.

Rupert Murdoch’s British Sky Broadcasting and Virgin Media, formerly owned by Sir Richard Branson, have been at the forefront of establishing a “two-speed Internet.”

It is painfully clear that the top one percent are feverishly engaged in an orgy of carving up the Internet after the collapse of net neutrality for the benefit of corporatism and oligarchic control over news dissemination.

It is noteworthy that Obama’ old friend from Columbia and Harvard and his first FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, has just joined a new firm after offering only lukewarm support for net neutrality. Genachowski now works for the eternally dubious Carlyle Group.

There is little wonder why one of World Post’s first contributors will be Google’s Schmidt, the frequent habitué of the Davos and Bilderberg secret conclaves of financial and political vipers who run the world. The journalists who have joined the frenzy to climb into the one percenters’ Internet top tier deserve nothing but condemnation from their peers.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report.

Nick Margerrison on Revolutionary Self-Help

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Last week Nick Margerrison posted a follow-up to his inspiring essay, The Global Awakening published last year on Disinfo.com. In Improve Yourself First, he reminds us of the importance of inner development as a means to avoid violent revolutions which replace one form of tyranny with another. He also makes the connection between today’s internet-based self-improvement movement and how printed culture facilitated the age of enlightenment. In his words: “the most important revolutionary aspect of the printed page: it allowed people to learn how to improve themselves and change the way they thought. This is the driving force behind any meaningful long term social change ever experienced in any society“. For these reasons, authoritarians love censorship, controlling what people think and controlling how to think.

Based on trends he has observed, he writes “the entire notion of a hierarchical dictatorship is coming apart” in part because “leaders lead by controlling information and the communications revolution makes this impossible.” Furthermore, “victory in the oncoming ‘war on information’ is beyond their power, no matter how hard they try, just like the ‘war on drugs’. The Western World’s massive financial difficulties limit their ambitions for now but make no mistake, the internet is causing them to lose their grip on reality.”

As an antidote, he encourages the practice of questioning ideas requiring others to follow orders and suggestions (even his own). In other words, thinking critically and independently, which an uncensored internet facilitates. The true path for a revolution in Margerrison’s view begins with self improvement and learning “not what to think but how to think…The biggest most important changes that you can make to your world are the ones you can make right now to yourself and the way you think.” In his long-term view, the more people who take up the challenge of self improvement, the less unlikely the wider changes needed in society will be. By making such personal efforts in myriad ways, “we might well all move in different directions but the definition of the word “revolution” will move away from something which involves violence and brings long term suffering.”

Building Bridges: Top 10 Issues That 99% Can Agree On

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On a recent episode of PBS Newshour, Jeffrey Brown hosted a roundtable discussion exploring the dangers of polarized politics for American Governance. The guests were Eric Liu, Steven Hayward and Beverly Gage. Most of the discussion was an analysis of the recent government shutdown from a typical left vs. right perspective, but I thought their view of reactions of average citizens was interesting:

JEFFREY BROWN: And so, Eric Liu, let me ask you, because I know you’re very — you’re trying to engage people in the act of citizenship. What do you see the effect of all of this? Are they more engaged? Are they just more disgusted and turned off?

ERIC LIU: Well, I don’t think those are mutually exclusive. There is disgust.

(LAUGHTER)

ERIC LIU: But, because of the disgust, there’s actually more engagement.

And that’s true on both the left and the right. Look, I think the reality is, when Steven was speaking a moment ago about the kind of encroachment of ever-growing and ever-larger government, we can have reasonable debates in this country about what the proper size and scope of government ought to be, but we ought to regard those debates not as “on/off, yes/no, my way or we shut the whole thing down” kind of debates.

…so people from both left and right watching these last two weeks are ready for something different.

They’re ready to actually hear each other and see one another and not the caricatures of one another, and try to figure out, well, where is it that we can manage to agree on the role of government, and where we can’t agree, how can we recognize that to be a citizen isn’t just a single-shot sudden death game. It’s infinite repeat play, and you’re going to win some, and I’m going to win some.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, let me ask Steven Hayward to respond to this.

Do you see the result of this as people ready to work together or more divisions that ever more polarizes?

STEVEN HAYWARD: Well, I think there’s two things to think about here.

One is, is we have divided government once again. The voters, God bless them, have a lot of cognitive dissonance. Right? In the last week, what you saw is people say, I don’t like Obamacare, but I don’t want the government shut down. I don’t want it to be a matter of a budget fight the way it’s become. And that’s why Republicans lost this proximate battle.

But if you look at some of the poll numbers right now, I think they ought to be very worrying for everybody, but I think more worrying ultimately for liberals, for this reason. You have seen record high numbers of people who now say — I think 65 percent in one poll — that government is a threat to their rights.

You have seen a long-term trend going back really to the 1960s of the number of people saying they have confidence that the federal government will do the right thing down in 15 percent, 20 percent, when it used to be in the ’50s up around 60 to 70 percent. And to the extent that if you’re liberal and that you believe in political solutions to our social problems or government engagement with our problems, you want the public to have confidence in the federal government’s capacities.

And so it seems to me that, as much as this might have been a train wreck for Republicans, the long-term effect of this might not necessarily play out that way.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Beverly, when you look back at political — what could be called political crises of the past, what does it — what happens in terms of public response to those?

BEVERLY GAGE: Well, I think to some degree, Steven’s quite right, in that I would kind of like to subscribe to Eric’s view that we’re going to have a much more serious conversation, a much more bipartisan conversation.

But I think it’s equally possible that you’re actually going to see people throw their hands up and say, oh, it’s all such a mess. I don’t really want to make sense of it. I don’t want to deal with it. And, in that way, it sort of serves an anti-government message, and in some ways, even serves sort of the Tea Party message in ways that maybe were intended and maybe weren’t.

But I think there’s also a danger for the Republican Party in all of this, which is to say that these divisions that we’re seeing right now within the Republican Party between moderates and Tea Party conservatives and also between a sort of establishment business class, which is very, very alarmed about what’s happening, and this more right-wing part of the party, that actually may in fact spell destruction for the Republican Party.

Those are divisions that have been there for a long time. They have often been papered over. But when you’re on the brink of financial catastrophe in the way that we were, we may not see them be papered over, and we may in fact see some sort of political realignment coming out of this.

You can read the complete transcript here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec13/governing_10-17.html

All three guests made good points, though the views of conservatives and liberals are typically generalized in such discussions and I think issues of most concern to citizens on a grassroots level are often not the ones being debated enough in Washington D.C. There definitely needs to be more political discussion between left and right not just within government but among the general public. Increased communication and education is the best defense against “divide and conquer” tactics but of course this is easier said than done because politics has become a taboo subject for many, mainly due to fear of getting into heated arguments. But perhaps this fear is unwarranted because there’s many issues that the left and right can agree on (though motives and priorities may differ). These are just some of the more topical examples:

  1. End the Wars – As demonstrated by widespread negative reaction to war threats against Syria, people are perhaps becoming more aware of political trickery thus becoming harder to persuade. Also, as living standards drop for more people, the connection between costly foreign policy and the nation’s declining economy and infrastructure has never been more obvious.
  2. Stop the Surveillance State – Privacy is a universal human need. Mass spying on citizens is illegal and unethical whether online or through drones and informants.
  3. End Unjust Trade Agreements – Agreements such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) hurt working people and endangers health and safety, the environment, and national sovereignty.
  4. End the Fed – We’ve endured 100 years of a “Federal” Reserve run by private bankers and all we have to show for it is a debt of tens of trillions of dollars. It will never be paid off as long as we continue to use interest-bearing federal reserve notes as currency.
  5. Create Affordable Health Care – It can be argued that Obamacare is an incremental improvement but everyone knows it’s not enough and is far more beneficial for greedy insurance companies than the poor.
  6. End the Drug War – We can all agree the Drug War is a colossal failure (when it comes to the stated purpose of reducing drug addiction). It has only increased incarceration rates while enriching the prison-industrial complex and drug cartels. We need to adopt policies that have proven to be effective such as legalization, decriminalization and harm-reduction.
  7. Stop GMOs – GMOs are unnecessary, physically and economically harmful to farmers, may have potentially catastrophic effects on the ecosystem, and only serves to increase profits for companies like Monsanto.
  8. End Obscene Economic Inequality – Complete economic equality might not be possible, but when economic inequality reaches absurd and unsustainable levels as they have today, obviously something needs to change.
  9. Protect Internet Freedom – Legislation such as the NDAA, SOPA and PIPA indicate that government and corporations are threatened by the internet. Attacks against internet freedom are attacks against freedom of speech, freedom of information and cognitive liberty.
  10. Ignore Corporate News – Another point of agreement between right and left is the corporate news media’s increasing irrelevancy and bias. Today it is not so much a liberal or conservative bias as it is a neoliberal and neoconservative bias.