A Treatise on Power - Part II

As promised in A Treatise on Power: Part I: The Relationship between the Powered and the Powerless, here is a continuation of my exploration of power dynamics.

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A Treatise on Power:
II. The Weakness of Force

Although naked force – the ultimate strength of the powered – physically has the ability to quell any resistance from the powerless, it is not all-powerful. Firstly, the increased energy required by the powered to suppress the contumacious ultimately limits its strength. This is because the more the powerless perceive they are on the receiving end of injustice, the greater the degree of this injustice and the greater the abruptness of the injustice (in contrast to a steadily building injustice), the greater the likelihood that the powerless will rebel (by whatever means available to them, no matter how desperate).

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s treatment of this phenomenon is refreshing:

Power viewed as illegitimate is inherently weaker because its application requires a higher input of force to achieve the desired result. Loss of soft power thus reduces hard power.

In effect, soft power (diplomacy) is positively correlated to hard power (physical strength), and mathematically speaking, the amount of soft power granted by the powerless determines the absolute maxima of hard power usable by the powered. Strategically, this has various implications. The most obvious is that the powerless' view of legitimacy in the actions of the powered hold agency over the powered's total strength. Another implication of this is that if the powerless were to view the authority of the powered as illegitimate during a time of imperial overextension and fatigue – historically, a situation all imperial powers have eventually found themselves in – there is an increased probability that the powerless could topple the powered.

Coming back to the point, If we look again at the antonymic ideas of the abruptness of injustice and the steady building of injustice we will find another weakness of force. First, the allegory of the boiling frog will be helpful: a frog can be boiled alive if placed in a pot of water that is heated slowly rather than thrown into a pot of boiling water. This, as the case goes, is because the frog of the first scenario will not react to gradual change while the frog of the second is forced to react due to the abruptness and severity of the change experienced. Relating this to our project we can see that man reacts to change in similar fashion.

Remember that Hitler and the Nazi party carried out its atrocities in slow incremental stages. First on April 1st of 1933 a boycott of Jewish owned shops, then in late September comes the prohibition of non-Aryans employed by the government, the so-called ‘Nuremberg Race Laws’ came in 1935, the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in 1938 and so on until Germany ultimately hiked to the summit of Hitler’s ‘final solution.’ Remember also that while Dachau opened in March of 1933, at that early stage the concentration camp had the pretense of rounding up ‘communists’ and other ‘dissenters’ in response to the Reichstag fire. And even after more than 30,000 Jewish men were taken to that and other concentration camps after the Kristallnacht, nearly all were released within three months upon condition that they leave Germany.

The point here is that neither on Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January of 1933, nor his co-option of power as the ‘Führer ‘ in August of 1934 were followed by an explicit public address to the Jews of Germany explaining to them exactly what was in store. If this was the case, the water clearly would have been perceived as in a boiling-state, and the resistance of Jews in Germany (and elsewhere) would have been practically inevitable. This is the difference between abrupt injustice and a steady building of injustice.

Some may view the aforementioned more as a ‘condition’ of power rather than a weakness of force in the strict sense. To see the weakness of force in this case more clearly we will start by employing the recollections of Derrick Jensen: "The Jews who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising had a higher rate of survival than those who went along." It is here that we can begin to see the essence of what limits force - the difference between those who rebelled and those who went along was their feeling of hope, which is susceptible to change upon the receipt of new information. Employing Jensen’s definition of hope, a longing for a future condition over which one has no agency, it is apparent that those Jews that rebelled understood the true face of Nazism (due to personal knowledge of previous deportations and rumors of death camps - pointing to the reality of their situation) and that their trust of hope within Hitler’s Germany would lead to their death, while those who failed to rebel held out an eventual-optimistic view of their regime, their situation – that there in fact was no way to gain agency over their own future… that their fate was not that of inescapable danger… that their future condition would, overall, turn out okay.

The understanding by the powered that there exists the potential of a Warsaw ghetto uprising and its domino effects (e.g. the Bialystok and Minsk ghetto uprisings, the Treblinka and Sobibor killing center uprisings) are what alter the action of force, what prohibits Hitler from adopting a policy of abrupt injustice (both for the potential of uprising and for the potential of unwanted premature attention of other actors), what fundamentally is the weakness of force.

A careful looking through history will undoubtedly reveal a plenty of accounts where this weakness of force alters the actions of the powered. For instance, the conquest of North America is pregnant with example. What, underneath it all, is the point of a ‘treaty’ between colonizer and native inhabitant outside of an obfuscation device akin to the German's linguistic device of ‘showers’ as opposed to ‘death vaults’? Some may say ‘legal right’ but to that I respond: the same ‘legal right’ afforded to blacks subjected to the kangaroo courts of the Jim Crow era? I will concede that the fact is there is the possibility for the descendants of a nearly exterminated people to use these ‘treaties’ in a legal setting to gain some bastardized semblance of ‘justice’ hundreds of years after the fact, but to the originators, to the drafters of those treaties, there was no such intention.

The true intention was to feign recompense, regroup (logistically, militarily, politically) and abate the possibility of the Warsaw ghetto uprising effect. In the same vein as our unrealized Hitler communiqué to the Jewish people of Germany, if Thomas Jefferson sent runners and translators to the far West announcing to all Native American tribes both his unsqueamishness with breaking ‘treaties’ (as in his use of the Army to forcibly expel Natives from Georgia), and his plans of forced cultural, religious and economic assimilation, the young European nation potentially would have had a unified Native front to contend with. And, due to his projects more savage nature, in the case of Andrew Jackson the potentiality of a unified Native front certainly would have been greater.

Turning our sights to the Caribbean of the late 18th century, the story of Saint Domingue – ultimately to become Haiti – is also an account of the weakness of force. The trigger for uprising and eventual self-liberation of the Haitian slaves was new information from the Republic of France regarding the revolutions there and the Déclaration des Droits de L’homme. The highway of the ocean was alive with ships at that time and when this information reached the minds of Toussaint L'Ouverture and others, their Jensenian hope was transformed into a new entity – an active will. Instead of making due with a longed-for future which one has no agency over, the time had come to actively grasp personal destiny with their own hands – regardless of the consequences.

It is plain that the story of the Haitian revolution also involves the fear of the Warsaw ghetto uprising effect, but for us it is the extent of this fear that is of importance. As the former plantation owners of Saint Domingue fled from their former forced labor camps, other colonies made a concerted effort to disallow their entry in the fear that the simple recanting of their 'misfortune' would reveal the fact that black slaves had successfully revolted, took control of their affairs and repelled the greatest white armies of the day – a set of facts that would almost certainly lead to the spread of the 'contagion of liberté'.

Finally, the weakness of force is finely encapsulated, of all places, in the master/slave driven world of BDSM. In BDSM one partner known as the Submissive relinquishes control, through their own volition, to the dominant partner(s) known as the dom, or Master. During a typical session of 'play,' the dom(s) will have their way with the sub(s) through sexual acts, acts of humiliation, inflicting pain via whipping, flogging, etc. or any combination of the above. As words like 'no' or 'stop', or general cries could potentially not mean what they typically would mean in a normal situation, before the play begins, a 'safe word' is established (say, 'spinach') and the use of it by the sub will mean the end of the 'play session'. What is interesting about BDSM is that while the Submissive individual is typically viewed as powerless while the Master is viewed as in total control, it is in fact the sub who holds ultimate power: the power to end the play session. This is essentially what we saw in The Relationship between the Powered and the Powerless; this is an element of the weakness of force.

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A Critique of Profit: and other economic issues

Bailouts, corporate greed and American towns that have veritably outlived their usefulness have been at the forefront of current news. But, profit and motive, important variables in these three phenomena, have received much less attention. Who controls profit and why? Why are we shackled to a paradigm unquestionably dedicated to continuous commodity production and what are the effects of this framework?

At its core, it is the logic of unfettered capitalism that has led to the existence of corporations and their charter to blindly chase methods of externalization: that is, the externalization of cost in the pursuit of ever-increasing profits. By definition, this can lead to short-term decision-making (i.e. thinking and acting solely for the business cycle) and can materialize in numerous forms. We see it when companies dump the toxic byproducts of local production in our rivers (or export them to the backyard of another country), put off ‘costly’ factory upgrades that would otherwise reduce environmental damage, devise accounting tricks to hide financial misdeeds, or procure cheaper workforces in less regulated markets (thereby contributing to the detriment of local communities, the exploitation of foreign workers and the debasing of those worker’s environments).

But, when all these short-term decisions accumulate and crisis percolates, the harm is never evenly distributed and the response never managed with any sense of distributed damage control, or economic fairness. Instead, these situations tend to emulate a scene played out on the Titanic, where inhabitants of the lower decks are locked into their position, left to drown with the flawed ship while the ‘higher class’ can use its money, power and influence to ameliorate their situation.

Honing our sights on cheap workforce procurement¹, one of the favorite externalization methods of the day, it is easy to see the extent of the method’s destructive power and to spot the fallacies in the arguments protecting the practice. Firstly, when workers outside of a home economy² are attached to the economy of a certain country, an umbilical cord is created between the two. In this situation the nourishment that would have benefited the proverbial main street of the home country are rerouted to an outside entity. Citizens find themselves out of work due to this labor exportation and in many cases end up with new jobs that pay less. It is almost needless to say that the situation is far worse if one is part of a community nearly exclusively employed by the said industry. And in these cases it is clear that communities, not nameless individuals are the final victims of cheap workforce procurement.

Yet, the proponents of what is dubbed ‘free trade’ seem to miss these obvious points. Instead they state that without the free flow of the market (i.e. including foreign labor procurement at the expense of local communities and national cohesion), prices of goods will increase. And in the same breath these proponents admit that wages are higher before these jobs are exported (precisely the reason why the jobs are being exported in the first place). But, if wages are higher, goods cost more and communities are not destroyed when labor exportation is not practiced, while wages are lower (if one can even find a job), goods cost less and communities are ruined when labor exportation is practiced wouldn’t we want to embrace the first scenario?

Unfortunately, the second scenario is the one in which the United States finds itself today. Because of America’s ideological uneasiness with 'protectionism', Rome, New York is no longer the Copper City, Detroit, Michigan no longer a thriving auto-town, Wilmington, Ohio no longer a city living on international package shipments and the list goes on.

Yet, despite the fact that the destruction of these communities were caused by the relentless logic of externalization by auto companies and others, when the time comes, the resuscitation efforts enacted go straight to the players who engendered the situation. And to add insult to injury, the funds given never seem to have provisions either aimed at quelling the community disruption or assuring the prevention of reoccurrence. In short, there are no ‘strings attached’.

Although there are many ways of fixing this issue such as ‘attaching strings’ to the delivery of the resuscitating funds or directing the revival efforts at the representatives of the home economy (the workers), these methods do not plug the gap in the floor that we originally fell through. They attempt to gently fix a systemic problem without truly addressing the system that inherently created it. By going down the route of ‘throwing money at the problem’ we may temporarily climb out of our predicament, but there is nothing to stop us from falling back into it in the future.

So what could be done? Let us take a look at some solutions that break with our current paradigm of concentrated capital and endless growth - first, by setting our sights at our concepts of profit ownership.



In the traditional model of business, an individual or group in the ‘real economy’ begins a venture with raw materials, laborers and machinery. These ingredients react to form a new compound – a commodity. The commodity is then sold on the open market for an agreed price and funds are received. Now this gross income can be used to pay for the raw materials, labor and machinery (including upkeep costs) used in the creation of the said commodity and what is left over is the much awaited profit³. At this point the principals of the business can begin the cycle anew. Traditionally, arguments surrounding this system were based on the fact that the workers had no say in the system, were no better than the machinery (or the raw materials) and could in effect be paid as little as it took for them to return to their job. But, although these observations are valid, our predicament forces us to focus on another issue. The fact of the matter is that the decision to begin the cycle anew is just that, a decision. And this decision is not dependent on the say so of the workers, who, at the bottom of the ladder, have the most to lose. They are virtually held hostage by the system⁴. If the principal(s) do not renew the cycle, the workers are left out in the dark to fend for themselves and variants of this theme have played itself out all over the country.

If the workers are so vulnerable, how should this profit be handled? It is at this point, when this question is earnestly asked, that the possibilities open up. Living wages could be realized with this profit, community and social safety networks could be funded, or a mechanism where workers were given more control of the use of the profit could be initiated. The bottom line is that a more equitable balance must be achieved: it is not the case that the principals should reap no reward for their endeavor, but it is also not the case that the people who make the endeavor possible should be marginalized and merely compensated at a rate that flirts with bare subsistence.

Beside the question of profit control is the question of motive. Why is the practice of continually creating commodities of all stripes so essential to the economic system that in and of itself has been created to reinforce this practice? By the talk of traditional economists one quickly comes away with the feeling that ‘growth’ is vital, that without endless growth at multiple percentage points per year, the universe will cease to exist. Here the words of Albert Bartlett should disruptively take center stage, crashing the hedonistic party of unrelenting ‘growth’: The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
Simply put, when a system steadily grows at a fixed percentage and the new, larger system grows at that same fixed rate, we are in the classic realm of exponential growth. And, at a reliable rate, this system will continually double in size. For example, at seven percent growth per year, the system in question will double its size roughly every 10 years.

But what does this mean for standard economics? Behind the growth numbers is the real economy and behind the real economy are real, physical, tangible resources. Resources that are transmuted into the commodities sold by the polluting factories, eventually breaking, tearing or malfunctioning according to their planned obsolescence and finally ending their life-cycle in a dump. This is what grows exponentially and doubles at a reliable rate when the standard model functions as planned. But, our societies and environment can’t function in this manner forever.

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¹ Which in effect includes two phenomenon a) companies who export their labor forces to reduce cost and b) companies who find themselves unable to compete as a result of other firms flooding the market with cheap goods, enabled by their decision to outsource their own labor.

² By home economy we mean those who broadly reap the benefits of economic activity as opposed to the upper echelons of the economic order - or simply, 'main street' as the parroting media outlets like to put it.

³ Depending on whether the payment system is based on credit or pre-payment come of these costs of venture can be incurred either before or after commodity production and sale.

⁴ It could be said that the strength of the grip on the workers by the mechanism is positively correlated to the amount of options the worker has. With this in mind, a town with no other industry inhabited by people who have no real chance of looking for work outside of town (due to lack of capital, contacts, education, etc.) could be said to be held totally hostage.

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A Philosophy of Food

On Friday, February 6th, I was part of a panel speaking about food to a group of high school students (freshmen and sophomores at The Academy in Brooklyn). The panel consisted of numerous people from different camps of food philosophy (a freegan, a vegan, numerous vegetarians, an adherent of Kosher eating, a rasta and a local food eater) and each of us had a chance to explain our philosophy of food and answer student questions. What follows is an adaptation of my presentation:

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Occasionally I get the question “why are you a vegetarian?”

Well, there are three answers: Ethical, Environmental and Health reasons. Before I describe the details of these three reasons, I want to point out an interesting relationship between them. Note that the first two, the ethical and environmental, are purely altruistic reasons where concern is directed to the outside, while the last reason – health – is purely selfish. Despite the opposite nature of these reasons, they coexist and surprisingly, they intersect.

First, the Ethical:
I remember watching a movie called ‘Faces of Death’ when I was a teenager. The theme in the one we watched was ‘where our food comes from’ and in it there were a number of slaughterhouses filmed juxtaposed with footage of people eating KFC, McDonalds and other fast food. It was rather disturbing, bringing up questions of reification – or abstraction - where people didn’t even fully understand what their food really was… What is a chicken, a cow, or a pig or turkey? What experience do we have with these creatures beyond purchasing their flesh at a local supermarket? But it was another film, Baraka, which drove the nail down. In this beautifully filmed work, the early life of baby chicks was briefly depicted. While being carted about on a conveyer belt, workers grabbed chicks one by one pressing their head against a hot iron in order to burn their beak off their face – presumably to protect them from harming themselves and others. I always felt that these and other examples of our dominion over nonhuman animals made a few judgments ethically apparent that. The first is that at the very least, living things deserve the chance to guide their own destinies. Secondly, there is such a thing as slavery and exploitation for non-human animals and finally, just because we can do something, does not mean we must.

The Environmental:
It has become a matter of empirical fact that the way we eat (three huge meals a day, each usually consisting of meat portions - and by ‘we’ I mean us Americans and others around the world) has lead to a gross misappropriation of resources and is extremely harmful to our environment – that is, our only plane of existence. Now I want to remind you, that years ago, when we were all hunter-gatherers, the only way we could eat a meal consisting of meat was to go out and kill game ourselves which almost exclusively meant people didn’t eat meat three times a day on a regular basis. It is worth noting that this much meat intake is new to the species and may not be what our digestion system evolved to handle.

Getting back to the point, allow me to quickly paint a picture for you. If you go to the mid-west – Indiana, Iowa, Illinois – you’ll see corn and a lot of it. In many parts of those and other states it will look like a never-ending field of it. Now in order to grow all this corn you need a lot of fertilizer, pesticides and water. Forgetting about the pesticides for a moment, all the water washes the fertilizer away , sending it into streams and rivers which eventually flow into the ocean. When this fertilizer, or nutrient-rich water gets to the oceans nature takes heed. Remember, nature never passes up an opportunity… Algae feed on these nutrients and proliferate rapidly, thereby sucking all the oxygen out of the surrounding area. As a result, any fish, crab or sea life that swim in these areas die of asphyxiation – they suffocate. These areas, called Dead Zones, have been found all over the world and are all due to modern agriculture.

Now, finally Health:
Remember I talked about all that corn being grown? Since there is so much of this stuff we need to find something to do with it, so we make some high-fructose corn syrup here, feed some to the cows there… But, the thing is, cow’s can’t digest corn all too well because they didn’t evolve eating corn… they evolved stomachs that digest grass very well. So the cows get sick, and need to be pumped full of anti-biotics. The result is the poor sap that eats the beef at the top of the food chain gets a little more than ketchup and mustard with his burger.

So I’ll finish up on two things. The real message here isn’t about what you eat; it’s about thinking things through. Where did what you are come from? How does what you chose to eat affect the environment? How will the thing you just ate affect your health? Will you be able to get through your day refreshed? Will you be in a metabolic state where you can optimally navigate your world?

And finally, eating is special. When we eat we are in fact acknowledging our mortality and in a sense, performing a veritable meditation on our own life and death. That is when we eat we take the life of the food we ingest (as plants are alive and so are the resources obtained from the flesh of animals).

When we realize this, we see that dead food loses something (i.e. frozen food with its punctured cellular walls loses flavor, processed food loses its vitamins and nutrients) and that our choices in food are representative of a death elsewhere – either the localized death of a once living plant or animal, or the metadeath of an ecosystem. Regardless of the magnitude, the burden ultimately falls on our choices… on us.

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Left/Right Handed, Curly/Straight Hair, Homosexual/Heterosexual Orientation

One of the central tenets of contemporary religious and conservative opposition to homosexuality is the belief that homosexual behavior is unnatural. But, within the past decade, a number of scientific studies have unequivocally hinted that this is not the case. And, in addition to these findings, there are significant dogmatic and ideological reasons why these two groups should relinquish their discriminatory positions.

Brain Similarity

Through a recent study out of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, an interesting fact has been determined regarding sexuality and the brain: orientation-opposites (that is straight male-lesbian female or gay male-straight female) have brain similarity. Firstly, it has been understood that the size of the right hemisphere of the male brain is slightly larger than the left hemisphere where this is not the case in the female brain. In light of this data, researchers Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström of the Institutes's Department of Clinical Neuroscience have discovered that this is not the case with all males and females. Precisely, the brain of a homosexual male has the same proportion as a straight female's (symmetrical) and a homosexual female's brain has the same proportion as a straight male's (larger right hemisphere). Additionally, through positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging scans (MRI) these researchers showed that connectivity of the amygdala region of the brain (important in emotional learning) was also orientation-opposite symmetric.

This similarity naturally leads to our next analysis – desire.

Desire

If the brain's of orientation-opposites are roughly symmetrical, what meta-features do they share (i.e. character traits)? A number of studies conducted point to desire as being one of those shared features. One such study, by the same team from the Karolinska Institute, showed that sexual attraction can be triggered in men and women by ”pheromone-like” odors. The results of this study showed that odors correlated with males attracted gay men and odors correlated with females attracted lesbian women. Although a few issues with the test merit prudent interpretation (inability to distinguish between cause and effect in regards to orientation, pheromones not being completely proven and the “pheromone-like” AND and EST levels were highly concentrated), when taken in conjunction with another test out of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, the naturalism picture becomes begins to solidify. Unlike the Karolinska Institute, the Monell test used naturally occurring odors from men and women of both orientations and found that pleasure and displeasure of odors fell uniformly down lines of orientation.

Genetics and The Environment

In terms of a genetic basis for sexuality, two studies come to mind. The first, was conducted by Dr. Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist at McMaster University. First, working with colleagues at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Witelson studied the brains of healthy, right-handed, 18 to 35-year-old heterosexual and homosexual men using structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Through this work Witelson, et al. discovered that there are a disproportionate amount of left handed homosexuals compared to the greater population at large. After viewing this data through the lens of a previous research she had conducted (which proved that left handed individuals have a larger band of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain), Wittelson decided to employ another MRI test whose aim was to determine whether right-handed homosexuals also shared this larger portion of the brain. When all was said and done, her research showed that this was the case. And because the size of this specific portion of the brain is largely inherited, Witelson’s findings ultimately reinforce the view that sexual orientation has a genetic basis.

The second study is a twins study conducted at Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences and reported in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. This study focused on a group of 3,862 identical and fraternal twins between the ages of 20 and 47 and found that 35 percent of homosexual men's nature could be specifically attributed to genetics and that in terms of lesbian females that number was 18 percent

What does this all mean?

Some may say that if sexuality is truly due to genetic factors, the work out of Queen Mary's School should have shown 100 percent of the identical twins having the same orientation. Firstly, this is is not at all the case. Genetic factors do not rule out biological factors and as other studies have shown, sexuality may also be decided in the womb. Secondly, and of the greatest import, who cares? Why should naturalism be the test case for treating another human being decently – especially when their actions are of no consequence to others?

With that out of the way, lets us now take a deeper look into the religious and ideological outlooks that have been the traditional purveyors of intolerance against these groups. In terms of religion, I will focus my attention on the Judaeo-Christian variety.

What ever happened to 'do unto others'? Or to 'we are all god's children' and 'equal in the eyes of the lord'? But then again, “the good book”also says that in addition to homosexuality, cursing your parents, committing adultery, using the services of or being a medium, and working on the sabbath are all offenses punishable by death (Leviticus 20). The fact is that there are a number of outlandish claims and contradictions in the Bible and as a result the way to treat others can not be left to its contents (insert professional ethics and philosophy perhaps?).

In terms of conservatism, one must look no further than its central philosophy to find guidance on how to regard heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. That is, the philosophy of small government, and the freedom from intrusion into one's affairs. But if this central tenet is true, why work so hard against the union of two consenting adults, against the ability of adults to work in the profession of their choosing, to disallow individuals from the privilege of raising the young? Why fight so hard to intrude into another's life?

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Ensuring Representation

With the election less than two weeks away, many are wondering who will secure the presidency of the United States, but few are discussing how this seat may be procured. Past elections have shown us that a combination of tricks can be utilized to assure one’s ascendancy, yet these easily strung-together facts are rarely aggregated. What follows is a list of five prominent tricks and proposals to sanctify voting in America.

The Problems

Purging:
Just in case we forgot, voter purges played a large role in the 2000 presidential election. Back then, Choice Point (via Database Technologies) effectively purged nearly 60,000 voters from the Florida voting list. They did this by taking lists of Florida Voters (acquired through Texas) and removing names that had extremely weak links to those of known felons. We should recall that ‘extremely weak links,’ means if a felon had the name “Darnel Thomas,” nearly everyone on the list with the first name “Darnel” would be removed. In addition, anyone with the name “Thomas Darnel” would also be stricken. The result was when eligible voters arrived at their polling place, they were told they were not on the voting list – ineligible to vote. In the end, the alleged margin for George W. Bush in Florida was 537 votes and this time around purging is being utilized with increased vigor.

Intimidation:
Out of all of the disenfranchisement tactics, intimidation is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Whether physical or psychological, they can nullify significant numbers of eligible voters. In the past, voters have received phone calls by persons masquerading as election officials espousing disinformation and have been intimidated by police under the rubric of “ongoing investigations.” And this election is no different. Areas have already been visited by fictitious flyers disseminating tales designed to scare people away from the polls. And a target="new"showdown over what attire is acceptable within the polling place currently being waged in Pennsylvania could open the door to looser interpretations of local election regulations.

No ID:
Now lets move on to a few new things. For one, in a number of states it is now law that voters provide identification in order to vote (oftentimes this is still applicable regarding absentee ballots, in which case a photocopy must be included in the envelope). On the face of it, this may seem prudent (although we should ask ourselves why this has suddenly become such a huge concern), but, believe it or not, there actually are people in our country who do not have a driver’s license. For example, 78% of black men ages 18-24 do not have a valid drivers license and it is estimated that 10% of all eligible voters do not have one as well (in light of US census data, that could be about 115,000 voters).

Technological Vulnerability:
Electronic voting machines rank high up in terms of the most effective way to hijack an election. Firstly, their source code is “proprietary”. How this is acceptable in a democratic society is mind-boggling. It is legitimate for a company providing voting machines to be worried that a “competitor” might lift their code, but if this happened the thief in question should simply have legal action taken against them. The most important thing is for voting machine code to be transparent and preferably handed over to the open source community for peer revision. Additionally, voting machines have no paper trail which essentially grants the last link on the vote-tallying chain veritable vote-changing impunity.

Inadequate Resources:
Lastly, if you don’t want a certain subgroup to vote, simply don’t give them enough resources. The most visible incarnation of this tactic was in Ohio in 2004 where a long line of voters spilled outside of the voting precinct leaving citizens in the pouring rain for multiple hours. As precinct-level statistics reveal the number of voters that typically come out to vote, who they vote for and how long it takes them to cast a ballot with a voting machine, it is simple math to figure out how many machines should be in service – or conversely, how many machines a community should be short changed. Data shows that this resource issue frequently occurs in poor Latino and Black areas where voters overwhelmingly cast democratic ballots.


Solutions

Although the extent of voter disenfranchisement can quickly become dizzying, there are solutions. To start, all purges made to voting lists should be made public (via local newspapers, public television, government websites, etc.) and there should be an effort made to contact the purged individual (by phone, postal mail, email, etc.). This would give the voter an opportunity to challenge the purge and would introduce transparency to the purging system.

To combat intimidation, a rigorous fact-providing campaign should be conducted by the federal government. This campaign should target all voters and be available via government website(s), local newspapers, radio, television and postal mail. Unfortunately, this would be difficult as voting rules change from place to place, but this should be changed as well. We don't live in Afghanistan and don't need local tribal warlords or precinct-level voting czars controlling the rules governing our elections. As such, our elections should be based off a national standard. All citizens should be able to vote, regardless of sex, race, religion, socio-economic status or if one was formerly incarcerated.

These proposals may shake the way some citizens perceive voting, but that is precisely what we need – a tremendous shake. For example, in order to ensure the greatest ease for citizens, presidential elections should be a national holiday. Additionally, it makes no sense for us to think the voting and counting process should be all said and done within twenty-four hours. Instead we should expect the process to be finished within something closer to seven to ten days (and only if there are no enormous problems). This extended time-frame would allow all votes to be counted, including absentee ballots coming from citizens abroad. And, this would provide enough time to follow up on allegations of fraud, conduct recounts and possibly provide citizens a re-vote within areas that were proven to suffer severe disenfranchisement.

In terms of providing adequate resources, Ohio's Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has the right idea; there should be enough paper ballots available to service at least 25% of the anticipated number of voters for an election. This way the burden of equipment failures can be offset, and voters who do not wish to use electronic voting systems may do so with no questions asked.

Finally, because of the sheer amount of citizens who do not have a driver’s license or other form of government identification, other forms of ID should be accepted at the polling place (which would also call for a uniform standard). This could be a social security card or recent bill with the voters address. If that isn't acceptable, voters without the funds or time to time available to acquire ID, could have identification cards made on location – if Hugo Chavez can accomplish this, I believe our country should muster the will to do so as well.

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Cloud Computing, Freedom and the ISP

Recently, GNU founder Richard Stallman warned that Cloud Computing is a trap that users and industry should avoid. Believing that the new technology is simply industry’s way of monopolizing software and user data, Stallman advised that users should keep services and information in their own domain rather than relinquishing control to outside parties. Because of this, Stallman has received some flak from people in and around the IT world, but it seems that these detractors may not fully understand his charge or the fundamental issue.

For instance, some commentators seem to be misunderstanding what the word ‘freedom’ actually means. Richard Giles, the CEO of Recommendation Ventures, is a prime example. He seems to believe that freedom is solely determined by itinerancy and ease of use.

I can’t agree with [Richard Stallman’s] blanket statement ... For example, the article picked on Gmail. I can move my data in and out of Gmail freely, and with my own domain I can move my email to another service whenever I want. That sounds fairly free to me.
...
In fact cloud computing has the potential to make our data even more “free.” For instance, rather than store multiple copies of my data on local machines, as Stallman suggests, I can store my data in the “cloud” and take it with me on multiple devices.
...
There are a few people in the old-guard that have exhausted their used-by-date I guess.

Ignoring the Ad Hominem Abusive at the end of Giles’ comment, it is true that an increased ability to travel is positively correlated to freedom, but that is not the only criterion for measuring freedom. Freedom is also determined by one’s susceptibility to ‘queries ‘ - the lower the amount of queries, the higher one's freedom. For example, if a woman were to deposit a letter in her bank’s safety deposit box and that letter was subsequently read by authorities of the bank, we could say that her freedom had been diminished. Similarly, if a man were to leave home and was stopped a dozen times by authorities on route to work, we could say that the man in question has a lower degree of freedom as compared to neighbors who are never interrupted during their commutes.

These examples have a direct relation not only to the question of Gmail and other web based applications (Richard Stallman’s charge), but to the question of Cloud Computing and Internet architecture in general (the fundamental question). Although we are told our data is safe in the hands of Gmail (similar to our fictional woman depositing her letter at the bank) and we hope that all our electronic transmissions will not be intercepted on their way to their final destination (similar to our fictional man trying to get to work), this may not be the case.

Firstly, who is to say our data is safe in the hands of any web based application provider? Once our data is deposited in their servers, we have no idea whether they are acting decorously or maliciously. Data could be stolen, sold, or manhandled by the government. And in addition to trusting the sanctity of our stored data, we have no authority to upgrade, downgrade or modify the application we are using.

Secondly, who is to say our data transmissions will be safe in a cloud computing architecture or are currently safe in today’s traditional internet architecture? Although Stallman’s charge is against the diminished freedom of users in future Cloud Computing architectures, the bottom line is that the Achilles heel of computing security and freedom from queries ultimately rests in the ISP – regardless of the Internet’s architecture. This should be painfully obvious in light of Mark Klien’s revelations, and the “Retroactive Immunity” of the telecommunication industry.

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A Treatise on Power - Part I

I have recently been looking into power relationships and have put together a multiple-part treatise on the subject. What follows is part one and will be accompanied by other installments in the near future.

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A Treatise on Power:

I. The Relationship between the Powered and the Powerless

What is the relationship between individuals and entities that hold power and those who do not? Colloquial understanding of this relationship says that the powered simply hold agency over the powerless, either through violence or some other form of coercion. On the other hand, progressive intellectualism believes that the relationship is partially a construct, where abstract concepts such as 'ownership' and 'control' are granted to the powerful by the powerless. Although both of these views are in their own way correct, the details behind this relationship deserve exploration. In what follows, I will attempt to construct a clearer view of this relationship, which I call the Synergism of Power.

With the Synergism of Power I use the term synergism not in the sense of mutual benefit, but in the sense of mutual connectedness. Take for example wealth production. In situations where the powered gain their wealth via the acquisition of material goods directly from the powerless (in terms of land possession and/or physical work), a ‘conveyor belt’ is formed. As with progressive intellectualism, the core of this aspect of power synergism is the idea that power is ostensibly granted to the powered by the powerless. That is to say, while the powered benefit from inflows on the conveyor belt, the powerless can effectively abate the agency of the controlling group by either suspending input of work or forming a resistance to occupation.

To be sure, the degree of this enervation is determined by the type of relationship between the powered and the powerless (or class of power synergism). For instance, as the free labor of African slaves had the affect of greatly aggrandizing the United States (both structurally and economically), an absolute revolution by the slaves (as in Haiti in 1804) would have had a catastrophic affect on this aggrandizement. Taking a look at a different class of power synergism, the input by Palestinian citizens to the Israeli economic system is by no means comparable to the free labor conveyor belt created by the African slaves of America. This is so because a total withdrawal from the Israeli economy by the Palestinian workforce would not cause catastrophic harm (although their active resistance to occupation has other impacts).

The bottom line is that the expansive gamut of situations between the powered and the powerless have an equally disparate set of power relationships. Without falling into a historicist dilemma, teasing out repetitions in the structures of past power synergisms could wield solid links between the push and pull of the powered and the powerless. In terms of a sociological law, this link may not immediately yield precise, quantifiable variables, but in the least, could provide useful comparisons.

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