Chicken little

From CIO magazine, the alarmist business perspective on California privacy legislation:

Like a large hurricane sweeping in off the Pacific, these laws will wreak havoc on all kinds of business processes, including how websites can collect personal data and the management of databases that store personal information on customers. They will influence how companies share personal data with third parties and restrict their ability to contact consumers via cell phones and faxes.
...
So what can CIOs do? You may not be able to divert this threatening tidal wave, but you can be prepared for it. To reduce your company's vulnerability, educate yourself about the legislation so that you can talk intelligently with your corporate counsel and CEO. And you can insulate yourself from some of the laws altogether by using encryption. Encryption is one solution to California's disclosure laws. Companies are not required to notify customers in the event of a security breach if customer data is encrypted.

Circumventing legal requirements is key, folks.

You can also adhere to best practices discovered by CIOs who have run afoul of some of these laws and learned from the experience. Such practices include communicating with the public on what information you collect, and following that up with clear, honest answers to questions from customers and the media in the event of an information leak.

Definitely haven't seen any evidence in my research of an effort on the part of telecommunications corporations to promote transparency and communicate with the public on information sharing.

The truth is that legislation hasn't gone far enough to hold business accountable in protecting sensitive consumer information.

Mercatus coast to coast

Speaker Nunez' office cordially invites you to the Hotel Del Coronado for a weekend of wining, dining, and deregulation:

The program, “Capital Campus California,” is sponsored by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. (The Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy as named as a co-sponsor, but the program isn’t mentioned on the UC website). Mercatus, which runs similar anti-regulatory sessions for Washington DC chiefs of staff, promises the weekend will provide “an academic perspective on today's pressing policy issues.”

Oil and gas giant Koch Industries gave Mercatus approximately $7 million between 1998 and 2004, according to the Wall Street Journal. ExxonMobil is also a Mercatus donor ($80,000 in 2003 and 2004), and other corporations with an interest in limiting regulatory protections, including General Motors, Pfizer, and even Enron, pre-collapse, are reported supporters.

I got a taste of Mercatus through The Capital Semester Program--they've hired at least 4 Mercatus scholars over the years to inculcate students with their own radical corporatist ideologies. I never did figure out how the Fund was able to convince Georgetown to give university credit for their courses. Perhaps their money had something to do with it.

Media take notice of opposition to CPUC Commissioner Chong

Not that it will make much difference in whether she's confirmed, but it's encouraging to see challenges to anti-regulatory ideology gaining traction in the political discourse.

Battle Brewing Over PUC Nominee

Groups urge nominee defeat
By STEVE LAWRENCE
Associated Press

SACRAMENTO - Consumer groups urged a Senate committee Wednesday to reject Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's appointment of a former telecommunications industry attorney to the California Public Utilities Commission.

The Consumer Federation of California, The Utility Reform Network and other groups said Commissioner Rachelle Chong's views were too close to those of the companies she is supposed to regulate.

''Her track record in the past year shows she will not be with consumers,'' Ignacio Hernandez, legislative director for the Consumer Federation of California, told the Senate Rules Committee. ''She's for free markets, less regulation, less consumer protection.''

***

Chong said she cares ''very much for consumers, particularly ones that are the most helpless.'' But she added that she has philosophical differences with consumer groups about how to deal with competitive markets.

She said her approach was ''trust, but verify. You hope that the market works, but if it doesn't, the PUC steps in.''

vs.

"We have decided to not take a more regulatory approach that was better suited to monopoly days and instead to trust the carriers to do the right thing given the market will demand it." --Chong, 3/30/06

"I believe that decision makers everywhere should step back from old style 'command and control' regulation and instead think 'regulatory light' where markets are competitive." --Chong, 10/26/06

''If the marketplace was practicing as you're arguing (it is), there would not be a need for a... bill of rights,'' Senator Alex Padilla (D-Los Angeles) said. ''These problems would not be happening. The fact is, they are.''

CFC on KPFA

This just in: "invisible hand" swipes Friedman

Economist Milton Friedman dies at 94.

Too bad the Chicago school won't go with him.

Think CATO will demand a Reagan-esque mass for him at the Capitol? Maybe they'll just embalm him and put him under glass all Lenin-style.

In his defense, he did vehemently resist the draft along with the "war on drugs," insisting on decriminalization like a true libertarian. That's not to say he wasn't the epitome of right-wing though.

This conservative's comment on DKos sums up where Friedman and his fellow bootstrappers went so wrong:

...he wasn't a hero of mine because his calculus didn't include right and wrong, social justice or the general welfare of the people.

Friedman (surprisingly) sounding in favor of CSR in "The Corporation":

Can a building have moral opinions? Can a building have social responsibility? If a building can't have social responsibility, what does it mean to say that a corporation can? A corporation is simply an artificial legal structure. But the people who are engaged in it, whether the stockholders, whether the executives in it, whether the employees, they all have moral responsibilities.

RIP, though Chile's poor will be dancing on your grave.

The noise machine and its soldering engine

I was talking politics (surprise surprise) over a bottle of wine last night with some friends in the city, when a girl I’d just met said something that gave some real insight into the despair plaguing the left. She told us she was too overwhelmed and too disgusted by conservative tactics to even join the conversation. “You can’t win,” she said.

It was just so indicative of what’s been going on with the broader movement—we’ve been attacked on all fronts by a pervasive messaging machine, and all we’ve resorted to is (at least what comes off as) reactionary bitching. I think everyone knows what the right is all about--though having lived at their policy nerve center, it could just be that I’ve been conditioned to pick up on their arguments. Still, it's never ceased to amaze me how consistent and easily recognizable right-wing, particularly free market messaging is. And the fact that I unwittingly ended up at Heritage alone proves how effective they are at drawing people in—even though their hosting me had the unintended effect of pushing me further in the opposite direction.

Ironically, the people with the most regressive politics have maintained this facade that they've got the most coherent and visionary ideas--proof that the left’s lagging on positive messaging (hopelessly abstract as that is) that all we've done is either rail against them or throw up our hands in disgust after seeing how far we've gone in the wrong direction. The fringe has had absolute control, and solid Frankian backlash rhetoric to convince everyone they’re the ones who are marginalized. With strategies that rival the Chewbacca defense, and it’s enough to make any lefty's head explode.

But all this is changing—in spite of themselves, in spite of democrat’s shortcomings as an opposition party, and even with all the republican’s catch phrases and law-bending strategery and corporate funding, they’re losing it:

The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968...

Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush...

Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

And polls show some serious disapproval across party lines. Now isn’t the time for silence or infighting. There needs to be focus on helping their self-destruction along.

On the brink of a CAFTA vote

The Senate sends the free trade agreement to the floor with a favorable recommendation amid news that the Department of Labor withheld information on labor rights in the countries signing onto the agreement:

The Associated Press is reporting that the Labor Department kept secret for more than a year government-funded studies that could hinder the passage of CAFTA -- the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The studies had concluded that several of the countries involved in the trade negotiations have poor working conditions and have failed to protect workers' rights. The studies' conclusions contrast with the administration's arguments that Central American countries have made enough progress on such issues to warrant a free-trade deal with the United States. The studies were conducted by an outside contractor -- the International Labor Rights Fund. According to the AP, the Labor Department instructed the contractor to remove the reports from its Web site, ordered it to retrieve paper copies before they became public, banned release of new information from the reports, and even told the contractor it couldn't discuss the studies with outsiders. The Labor Department said such moves were taken because the agency had concluded the contractor had "failed to meet the academic rigor expected."

Stop CAFTA by calling your rep. In California, Lofgren, Eshoo and Davis are on the fence.
Get educated about the impact of trade liberalization.

Freeloader Foundation

Sky Andrecheck from Campus Progress talk about his lunch with the dark side:

Come to think of it, I was surprised that these conservatives would take the food at all. I could still hear the words of Senator DeMint ringing in my ears, telling me that when people are dependent on food stamps and subsidized school lunches, they become helpless. Yet when these wealthy conservatives were offered a free lunch, they seemed to have no problem loading up their plates.

While my economics professor was preaching that "there's no free lunch," I took advantage of as many Heritage luncheons as possible, though I had to scrounge for crumbs after the republicans gorged themselves. Of course this is assuming I still had an appetite for cheap Chinese food or the Subway subs after a heavy dose of right-wing propaganda. I think they might've reserved the orange chicken to the German exchange students...naturally that's the only thing Heritage would think to recycle.