Showing posts with label accountability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label accountability. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

Government is not a Business

[A grayscale image of the White House in a manufacturing setting with pipes and smokestacks.]

Be wary of the statement “Government needs to be run like a business.” It should not. It's meant to sound unobjectionable, but is a radical shift away from anything familiar.

Centralized Control

The Constitution is designed around the notion of decentralizing control. It's inefficient, as people often notice, but that's by design. Inefficiency is protection from tyrants. It makes things happen slowly, allowing time for deliberation. Every time you make something efficient, you enable change to happen faster than government can respond, as is happening now with DOGE.

Tyrants want central control. Be wary of the statement “The President is the CEO of the US.” They want you to think a President is a King, a central voice to tell us everything. That neglects the checks & balances of three co-equal branches of government, intended to distribute control, to have the various branches fighting with one another, to make sure there's lots of consensus before anything happens.

Checks on Power

When a Congressperson salutes POTUS and says “yes, sir, you're in charge,” they breach their oath of office. The whole point of distributed power is distributed thought, which isn't happening.

It's pointless and dangerous, to have all the thought be centralized in one person and then to have everyone just say “yes” because then you just have a zillion photocopies of one person's thought. If that person is even thinking. Democracy at all levels intends many people thinking in different ways and making sure many paths of thought lead to convergent policy. That's how consensus is built.

In Service of All

But even beyond that, government differs from business in another very important way. Business is founded centrally on the notion of profit made by determining who not to serve. It's rarely profitable to serve everyone, so the assumption is that it's fine to leave some unserved. Maybe someone else will serve them. Maybe not.

Business figures out its profitable customer base and just focuses on them. That's not what democratic government promises. Democracy, even beyond all the voting stuff, is about believing each person matters just because they exist, that dignity arises not from wealth but from being alive, that we are all equals. Government must serve each of us in a way that does not prioritize rich over poor.

Oh, You Poor Unheard Rich People!

Money already speaks. It needs no representation in government. There are people, usually rich people, who sometimes say that Big Business needs special attention in government. It does not. Business is not going to be forgotten, no matter what government does, so stop feeling sorry for it. Big Business has the shameless means to be regularly petulant, but in spite of its many pity parties, it is not suffering.

Undo the Citizens United ruling. Corporations are not people. Profit-making entities don't need to be voting. Their stakeholders can already vote in public elections. Businesses need no additional, redundant, amplified freedom of speech, no megaphone.

Business isn't going to suddenly stop happening if we change laws in some way that is unfavorable to particular rich folk. If the people who are in business now don't like it, they can drop out. Others will happily take their place.

Fairly Represented

What needs representation in government are regular people. Government sets the rules that all businesses must follow.

Adam Smith, called the father of economics and/or capitalism, expressed concern about morality in business. He very clearly understood that the optimization engine that is the marketplace will not find morality on its own, that business will tend toward tyranny if not forced to do otherwise. He suggested that if you want morality in business, it must be encoded in law.

It's government's job to make good rules that hold tyranny at bay. Some people and businesses will tell you they'd profit better if there were no rules. In my view, where there are no rules, bullies rule. That's no world to be seeking.

What Privatization Dodges

Nor should government be privatized. An important thing that government offers is accountability and auditability by the public, and redress of injustice. Many pushes for privatization are attempts to get around such scrutiny and accountability.

Business is a dictatorship in structure, where the US government distributes control to avoid dictatorial control. We're lulled by business success to thinking such dictatorships nonthreatening, but you can go home from them at the end of the day, they cannot keep you from leaving, and they can't threaten your family or property, as government dictatorships might.

Employees have a duty to business leaders, who have a fiduciary duty to shareholders, whereas our elected representatives have a duty to the public, those who elected them. Elected leaders must be working for The People, not vice versa.

DOGE Debunked

Business profits by efficiency, where democracy finds strength in inefficiency because it distributes power. Too-concentrated power is historically understood to be a great danger. A DOGE-like effort to focus on efficiency might be defensible in some businesses, where efficiency is the central concern, In government, however, DOGE undermines both the safeguards underlying and the stated goals of the US government.

Government must not be run like a business. Elimination of inefficiency is not an automatic positive. Privatization loses control of and accountability for things that affect citizens' lives. Such suggestions are active dangers to democracy to be discussed with great wariness.

 


Other Posts by Kent Pitman on related topics:

Author's Notes:

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This post was cobbled together from other writings of mine, so if you feel like you've read some or all of this before, you're probably right. But I wanted to put it all in one place.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude-Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Friday, July 5, 2024

Supreme Challenge

[image of crown]

Just days ago, the United States Supreme Court said that Presidents are Kings, that their actions are largely immune to prosecution for things that would be crimes if done by others.

This is an amazing amount of power, as we are on track to learn once Biden finishes wasting this power doing nothing and leaves us with Trump as his successor.

“This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. … Each of us is equal before the law. … No one is above the law, not even the President of the United States. With today’s Supreme Court decision on Presidential immunity, that fundamentally changed. … For all practical purposes, today’s decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a President can do. This is a fundamentally new principle and it’s a dangerous precedent because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the Law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States. The only limits will be self-imposed by the President alone.”

US President Biden
in a July 1, 2024 address

Trump is not just Biden’s adversary, but he is the adversary of free society. He has said so. He has promised to be a dictator on day one, and he means it. He will not waste this newly conjured kingly power doing nothing, but rather undoing what Biden has done for gun safety, gender equality, environment, etc. Alongside all that, he will proceed immediately to do rampant evil, as laid out in detailed published plans that his ultra-conservative allies are calling “Project 2025.”

But Trump does not yet have this superpower—not until we elect him in the fall, if we are foolish enough to do that. And the polls say we are on track to being just that irredeemably foolish.

For a few months, though, such extraordinary power resides in Biden. And what will he do with this power? He rushes to promise us that he will not use it, not even for good, not even to assure that we do not end up with Trump as dictator. Nor to assure that these ridiculous changes by the Court are rolled back.

Note also that We The People are helpless here, glued to our TVs and phones, sifting news and social media for clues about what will happen to us. Give any one of us the power that the Supreme Court gave Biden, and we could do a lot of good, fix a lot of problems, and make the US safer for democracy than Biden is promising to do. We know that because Biden is promising to do nothing with this extraordinary power. That’s a pretty low bar for any one of us to exceed.

Failing to Protect Us

Biden wants to do things in the same old tired way. He wants to use his centrist tools of inaction, treating any real opportunity to make a difference as something not to do. Something too radical. Not his preferred way.

He’d rather labor slowly, expecting consensus with the MAGA crowd when there is none to be had, and he would rather not use the new tool, a tool that Trump and the MAGA-majority Supreme Court are counting on him not to use. They have given him a loaded weapon and are counting on him to deliver it, still loaded, still unused, to his successor, who will not leave it unused, who will in all likelihood use that weapon to assure he does not ever have a successor, that he just stays in power for life.

At the outset of our nation, it was the character of George Washington, our first President, that defined the Presidency. He believed power was limited, not absolute, and that power always resides with The People. Always. Now, over 200 years later, with today’s Supreme Court decision, once again it will depend on the character of the men and women who hold that Presidency that are going to define the limits of the power of the Presidency because the Law will no longer do it. I know I will respect the limits of the Presidential powers that I have for three and a half years. But any President, including Donald Trump, will now be free to ignore the Law. I concur with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent today. … She said, ‘In every use of official power, the President is now a King above the law. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.’ So should the American people dissent. I dissent. ”

US President Biden
in a July 1, 2024 address

We are in danger. Biden sees the danger, but does not see that he is part of the planned delivery mechanism for that danger, and that he is willingly and complacently accepting that role.

It's like Biden sees someone coming at him with a club or a knife in a dark alley and decides to use debate to protect himself even as someone is trying to hand him a pistol. All well and good if he's by himself and can take full personal responsibility for that ridiculous choice, but he is charged here with protecting the Constitution and the nation.

We Need Real Action

Strong language, politely delivered, will not protect us here. An offer of centrist consensus-building with the MAGA right will not protect us either. Oh, sure, he can probably find something to collaborate with MAGA about, but it will amount to mere distraction, one of those inconsequential things that still loses us our democracy even as it adds to his list of accomplishments.

Part of the problem is that Biden thinks that the doing of everyday horse trading is his job. At this point, it is not. He doesn't need more legislative successes. If the successes he has are not impressing anyone, adding more will not fix that. He has a lot of experience as a Senator, but at this point, we need him to stop being some kind of Senator in Chief and just be the Commander in Chief.

He needs now to secure democracy. That is his job. And it cannot be done by compromising with the party that seeks to disassemble democracy. It must be done by actually confronting that party, using any and all tools at hand. He thinks he's doing all he can, and maybe he is doing all he can. But he is not doing all that could be done. Inaction at this point is dangerous.

The tool he's been given, this new superpower, may not be Biden's preferred tool, but it IS adequate to the task. He is just choosing not to use it because he doesn’t like the look of it. That alone is sufficient reason for We The People to want a different leader, both now while that power exists and in the next Presidential term if possible.

Coaxing the Genie back into the Bottle

It’s good that Biden knows this new Presidential immunity poses a danger to democracy, but it’s not enough to just know it. He needs to insist that the Court take back that power now, not taking “no” for an answer.

Inaction is insufficient. Fortunately, given this new superpower, better options are available. I’ll offer a hypothetical, just for conversation, but hopefully it will demonstrate that stronger and more effective action is possible, and that it is neither necessary nor advisable to wait until the election.

After all, the election could go very awry. It is reckless to wait and hope it will not. This new reality entitles him to not just suggest but insist it be dealt with now. He can insist that the Supreme Court create ethics rules, term limits, and accountability.

So here is my hypothetical scenario for discussion:

Biden could explain that, in order to preserve Democracy and hold Monarchy at bay, he is ordering poor old Seal Team Six to hunt down and execute all conservative justices on the Supreme Court so that he can install judges with better sense, but that he has stayed execution of that action—for which he has absolute immunity—by 3 weeks, just in case the Court can move (expeditiously, for once) to find a better way to protect the Constitution and the nation with less bloodshed, for example by vacating their recent extraordinarily ill-advised and outright reckless ruling, removing the power of Presidents to take such actions confident of their immunity.

I like to think that such an approach would end with better accountability for Presidents and no one injured. It might seem an extreme way to get there, but it absolutely pales by comparison to what we should expect if Trump is elected.

Supreme Blind Spot

An action with parameters such as I’ve described would also help SCOTUS see the very real danger they’ve created. Fixing the problem would allow a happier outcome for us all, even SCOTUS themselves. They may not realize it, but they are in danger due to their own ruling in ways that they’re not taking seriously enough. They blithely discuss a President authorizing SEAL Team Six to take out political rivals, yet fail to see that they themselves might be such rivals?

It leaves me questioning not just their lack of neutrality, but their competence. It is short-sighted and dangerous, and poor judgment to the point of recklessness. I expect more of Supreme Court Justices.

Biden Isn't The Leader We Need

This is no time for Biden to sit on his hands. It’s a time for bold actions proportional to the danger, actions suddenly well within the scope of Biden’s new powers, and capable of being done with noble purpose, not that the new Supreme Court ruling requires noble purpose for President acts any more. That's part of the problem.

The Court has given Biden this power, so they must intend him to use it, right? Or maybe they just intended the power for Trump and calculated that Biden was too wimpy to use it.

I'd concur with them on that calculation, by the way. He is too wimpy. He's confirmed that by prematurely promising not to use it. That's a self-inflicted wound. He didn't have to say that, for the same reason that Presidents don't say “we won't strike first with atomic weapons.” It's not that we plan to, but we don't want our adversaries relying on our self-restraint.

I don't think Biden wargamed this. I think he just tied his own hands without thinking. Now, if he uses the power, even to help eliminate it, he'll have people fussing at him.

But so be it. I see it as dereliction of duty if he declines to use it. Letting his successor, probably Trump, be the first to explore this unlimited power is terrifying because it will be too late at that point for the public to react in any meaningful way to defend itself. It was reckless even just to say out loud that he wouldn't use the power.

I get why he wanted to. I get why it's uncomfortable. But right now he is the one we have elected to do the uncomfortable things. Better him than Trump. He, at least, is acting in the nation's best interests, not just his own.

Sadly, I’m pretty confident Biden isn't up to it. I think he'll disappoint us. Not just disappoint us, but outright fail us. He sees its use as lacking decorum, even as somehow he sees no lack of decorum in abrogating his responsibility to protect us and leaving us at material risk of a Trump presidency with unlimited power still in full effect.

He thinks by saying these are the stakes that surely no one will elect Trump. That's a dangerous game and one we're all too likely to lose.

Our Weakened Voting System

A partisan SCOTUS has weakened the Voting Rights Act enormously. States bent on voting rights abuse, bolstered by SCOTUS, have indulged gerrymandering and other actions that injure fair voter participation. Trump has raised baseless questions about election integrity. Republican media has echoed him to the point that Republican voters and lawmakers do, too. Fake electors were conjured using illegal schemes. Some have been brought up on charges or sent to jail, but Republican state lawmakers have worked to make it easier to do the same shady things legally this time around. Trump and GOP are mustering armies of lawyers to challenge elections this time around. Election 2024 will be about procedural tricks and challenges. That's a problem.

Telling us to go vote is just not adequate. Assuring us that we have the final say would be laughable if not so serious.

It will be great to rely on voting once a proper democracy is restored, but right now there is no guarantee of the vote’s outcome, or that the outcome won't be challenged, ultimately winding up in the Supreme Court to be overturned by the same folks that brought us the recent Presidential immunity ruling. They have meddled in elections before, and nothing stops them from doing it again, especially now that they have lost all shame.

Immediate action is needed to put things to right, while Biden has the power. He must use that power. Carefully. But he must use it. The safety of the Constitution and the nation demands it.

I doubt he is up to this most important of tasks. But I'll be happy to be surprised.

A Nation of Laws

Our nation needs to be a nation of laws. For everyone. No exceptions.

We already make exceptions for acts that are necessary. We have laws against murder, but we let people off if it’s self defense. We have laws about copyright violation, but we let people off for fair use. But we have not had laws that expressly said that people could walk free merely for who they are, only laws that insist they are doing things for good motive.

Will that scare some Presidents? It’s never scared them in the past. Or maybe the ones that it did scare didn't run for office. Good for them.

Presidents have always had to fear that breaking laws might get them in trouble and yet the nation has functioned well for two and a half centuries. Let Presidents continue to fear the Law. Let them continue to have to justify deviations.

If a President hesitates to start a war or authorize a covert action or explode a weapon of mass destruction, well, that’s good. Hesitation isn’t bad. I want a President to know that breaking the law cannot be a casual decision. It cannot be just another day on the job. They must be prepared to later justify questionable actions.

Having to account is part of the job. It is what makes us a democracy. The President is accountable to The People, not the other way around. Let Presidents assume that We The People understand these are hard decisions, and that we’ll make exceptions for technical breaches of law that are justly done in the best interest of the nation. But let them sweat a bit. That’s healthy.

By contrast, this newly conjured law, brought into existence out of nowhere Monday by a rogue Court, not Congress, that says Presidents must not be made to sweat, must not be asked to account, is not healthy.

Some have advanced the fairytale notion that voting is how Presidents should be called to account. But it is not a crazy hypothetical to think that a President might try to stay illegally in power. We’ve seen evidence that Trump might do this. He’s said aloud that it’s something he thought about.

And, anyway, there is a lot of damage that can be done in the four years between elections, if we're lucky enough to ever have them again after a President decides he wants to be a dictator. So elections are not an appropriate check. We need better.

Let Presidents sweat. We’ll be safer for it.


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The crown icon is a public domain image that was downloaded from the rawpixel.com site.

Friday, April 21, 2023

Capitalism's Dominion

I've seen a lot of news reports explaining why even though the Dominion law suit was settled out of court, we in the public should still see this as a victory.

I just want to say this is bunk.

The problem here is one of reductionism, by which I mean taking a hard problem that's hard to think about and reducing it to some other proxy problem that appears to represent the original problem so that the problem is easier to think about. This is a common and sometimes defensible practice, but one must always double-check when solutions start to arise in the proxy space that the original problem is being solved.

Just as an example, we hear proposals to address carbon in the atmosphere by taxation. This is because people think that taxation will create economic pressure to spend in ways that will fix the problem. But if you look at how the rich do their taxes, they mostly do not in fact spend in ways taxation is trying to make them. Rather, they invest in accountants who find loopholes, or they invest in regulatory capture to create loopholes. And then they smugly claim they did their part on the original problem, when they didn't.

Too often in recent years, media has gotten to the place where we have serious societal problems for which they have on-hand experts they can call in when something happens. When something happens for the first time, sometimes it's good to call in an expert to hear how they think about it. But finding a way to understand technical detail is not always a substitute for good journalism. If one becomes too practiced at calling up an expert on speed dial, one stops asking the question "What really happened?" and "What does the public need to know?"

Because here's the thing: What the Dominion settlement really exposes is the stranglehold capitalism exerts on society by insisting on reducing civil disputes to money. While clearly Dominion suffered enumerable economic harm, just as clearly the real damage was non-monetary, to our democracy, our society, and civilization. And none of the news outlets are saying that. They're so focused on how we have experts in law that they aren't focused on the question of whether our system of law is serving us at all in this case. It simply is not. It may serve Dominion. They may take home quite a payday. But that is not why this was a big story. And the big media places have lost this point.

We as a society have no standing to sue. We hoped in vain this would proxy for us, yielding results as non-monetary as the damage. Of course that was fantasy. But it explains the crushing sadness many of us feel. Pundits too practiced with procedural expertise keep missing this.

We as a public are sad, but this sadness is not a failure to understand process, so stop trying to tell us what a historic win this is. The public understands acutely that even a historic win is not helping them. This was not a success for society no matter what career policy wonks say. Ordinary folk know.

What we as a society need is a recognition that there is both process due and none to be had. We need to be allowed to express our pain. That pain needs to be acknowledged. If you want to call in experts, call in grief counsellors or experts in how to change government because from where we sit, the problem is that only the rich can change government, and that's why we are in collective pain.

Not only will it be busines as usual for Fox, but they will write off a big piece of their payment as a tax deduction (meaning the public will pay for some of this), and the rest will be passed along as costs to subscribers (which means viewers will pay more). Some will tell us that increased costs to viewers will hurt Fox and that this will ultimately do well. But meanwhile they will go on lying and issuing propaganda in exactly the way they did, and the real, non-monetary damages will continue to mount without recourse.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Using Real Names has Real Consequences

I post under my own name, but I do it with a consciousness of the risk.

I've been on the net (it was the ARPANET then) since 1977. At that time, we actually had user profiles with a place to supply your social security number, and people often complied because there was no reason to suppose it was dangerous. Those were certainly different times. People today are often horrified as they look back at the practices of those days, but everyone's sensibilities were different then. At some point we noticed that there was danger in having such information out in the open, so the data was erased and the ability to attach it was removed. But initially we were more trusting.

I had an unofficial administrative position on one of these machines as member of a group called “user-accounts” that oversaw guest usage of the machine. Guest users were called “tourists.” They were tolerated on the system as long as they didn't interfere with real work, but sometimes we had to disable an existing account or deny an application for an account if we suspected a potential for problems.

Having their accounts turned off didn't always make people happy. The first time I ever found myself quoted by someone on a web page in the early web, it was a remark quoted out of context from my time as a user-accounts member, where I'd once said in email, “[It] would have taken hours to be fair and we're not employed to do that sort of thing.” You can imagine that kind of attitude upsetting this or that person. In fact, in its proper context, the thing to understand is that we already went to extraordinary lengths to be fair to tourists, spending sometimes hours of unpaid time to make sure we didn't do anyone an injustice. But at some point there was just a limit where we had to just guess.

Life in the digital world is not a certainty, and an entire lab of real research at MIT depended on things operating properly. Just one act of devastation by a tourist on our largely unprotected and highly trusting system would have brought down the entire tourist program, and could have jeopardized research funding for the Lab. It was no small matter. So sometimes we just made arbitrary decisions, and tourists sometimes just had to live with them.

It happened one time, however, that someone was so annoyed by something I'd done that in retaliation he ended up performing an act that I'll describe here simply as “having a real world effect.” It really doesn't matter what the act was, and I don't want to give anyone ideas of mean things to do to someone. We'll just say it was more destructive than just sending an annoyed email, and that it involved the use of real world personal information about me in a way that was not proper. It was a sufficiently invasive act that there may well be a law against it now. Maybe there was a law then, too, but I didn't pursue it legally. My point, though, is that it made me conscious of the fact that not everyone “out on the net” was a nice person, and conscious in a personal, tangible way of the fact that sharing information, even information people have been accustomed to sharing since long before computers, isn't always harmless.

My favorite quote on privacy comes from John Gilmore's remarks to the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in San Francisco 1991, which I had the good fortune to attend. He said:

Society tolerates all different kinds of behaviour -- differences in religion, differences in political opinions, races, etc. But if your differences aren't accepted by the government or by other parts of society, you can still be tolerated if they simply don't know that you are different. Even a repressive government or a regressive individual can't persecute you if you look the same as everybody else. And, as George Perry said today, "Diversity is the comparative advantage of American society". I think that's what privacy is really protecting.

And that brings me to the claim that life would somehow be better if people blogged under their real name—if there were no pseudonyms. The underlying claim, not always expressed explicitly, is that eliminating pseudonyms would make people more polite and/or more accountable. I disagree that it would, even if it did, I don't think the cost is worth the value.

First, there is the question of whether you need to know who a speaker is in order to evaluate truth. I don't think you do. Maybe once in a while. Wikipedia is a monument to this because although you can find out who wrote what in there if you dig really hard, most of the truth that is in there is best verifiable by going and testing to cited references, not by going to who wrote it and by testing their character. If who said it mattered, then they might as well throw out the content after about 100 years since all of the people who've contributed will be dead and there will be no one to validate the content.

Second, the claim that having a publicly known name leads to better accountability is bogus. It's maybe okay if what we mean by “accountable” is exposed to personal whims of literally any individual on the net. But then how is that person accountable? In order to make everyone “accountable” for their speech, the claim seems to be that we should expose them to unbounded real world risk. I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem like much of a solution to me.

And while in most cases it may matter that people are accountable for what they say, consider the case where a patriot needs to speak out against an oppressive government. Before we claim that in all cases we want those willing to speak out to suffer the consequences of doing so, let's remember that rules tolerating offensive speech are not there because we like offensive speech, but rather because sometimes, especially in politics, it's subjective what is offensive. And sometimes it's necessary to make people feel uncomfortable in order to promote change. If governments or even just businesses always knew who was speaking, there might be no way to discuss certain things very critical to all of our lives.

I don't know how much of the recent activity in Egypt required some form of anonymity or pseudonymity to accomplish, but it's not a serious stretch of the imagination to think that the events that recently unfolded might not have happened without some degree of protection for those speaking out. Certainly in the case of corporate whistleblowing, anonymity can be critical. When real world corporate or political power hangs in the balance, perturbing the lives of exposed individuals is well-known to be the cheap way to “fix” the “problem.”

Still, even for those cases that do need accountability, all that matters for accountability is that someone (e.g., an OS system administrator) could contact that person. It's just not necessary that every person in the reading audience know how to contact every writer, since it's not the right or responsibility of most people reading along to be imposing judgment or punishment.

There may indeed be some forums that are more pleasant when real names are used, but the price may be that those forums cannot carry the voices of our most vulnerable or our most controversial. It's worth keeping that cost in focus. There is some risk to words, but there is greater risk to people taking up sticks and stones to make their point. I'd rather see words encouraged over sticks and stones, even if the price is tolerating highly controversial speech.

We should be encouraging people to speak and to feel safe about doing so. Sometimes that requires actual anonymity, sometimes just pseudonymity. But certainly it should not mean that “real names” are always best.

If the words of an anonymous soul appear to be causing a problem, more than likely it's an indicator that we need to learn about how to read anonymous writings, not that we need to reform the production of anonymous writings.


Author's Note: Originally published February 12, 2011 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, privacy, accountability, writing, authorship, psuedonyms, pseudonymity, anonymity, anonymous, pseudonymous, safety, hacking