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Our Privacy Rights Are Being Stripped, Sold And Stolen

Our Privacy Rights Are Being Stripped, Sold And Stolen

Every company with a credit card, store card, website — or even a clerk who asks for your email and phone number at the checkout counter — is looking to peddle "data" about your buying habits. In many states, you have to hand over your fingerprints to renew your driver's license. Public and private spaces alike are constantly scanned by ever-more-observant surveillance cameras.

When we're asked for our Social Security number, many of us simply shrug our shoulders rather than raising hell. And if we happen to be poor, a footloose kid hanging on a street corner or a motorist guilty of "driving while black," for example, we're liable to be locked up and lost in a vast criminal "justice" system that considers itself not responsible for any rights, especially privacy rights.

Invasion of our privacy has become a way of life, so that when you stand up and demand to be left alone, you're likely to be pegged as a quaint holdover from days gone by, a whiner or, more likely, someone with something to hide — maybe even a terrorist! We're living in a culture in which individual rights have been sold and subjugated, all for database marketing and to keep the lid on the unruly masses.

This is an issue that has fallen off the political radar. Last I looked, the only people in Washington overly concerned with privacy were the corporate check writers and their pet politicians, eager to cover the tracks of their own financial quid pro quos.

In the brave new culture built around the marketplace, both corporate and government sectors have deemed private and personal information to be just another commodity.

In 1999, Congress passed the "financial modernization" bill, which was written with the help of banking industry lobbyists and allowed banks to collect and sell what they know about you without so much as a courtesy call to ask your permission. The only "protection" is that if a bank wants to share information from a credit report or loan application, it first must send you a notice with the chance to say no, a so-called opt-out provision.

But why is the burden on us to opt out of an agreement that lets someone else sell something that rightfully belongs to us? Before such an agreement can even be considered, they should be required to get our permission in advance — to ask us to "opt in," and to take it as "no" if they don't hear from us. Last year, Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) introduced the Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act, which would do just that. It would create a much-needed national consumer privacy standard. But such bills have been introduced before, and they have all been killed by members of Congress who have taken millions from interests that profit from the sale of your private information. The current bill has only 21 co-sponsors, all of whom are Democrats, and seems likely to die in committee.

While the finance guys are padding their fortunes by telling each other what we buy, where we buy it and on whose credit, there's another booming trade going on in the identity market.

Driven by dreams of a citizen databank available to government at every level, public officials are falling over each other trying to keep tabs on us. For example, the International Association of Chiefs of Police wants DNA samples from anyone who is arrested for any reason (as opposed to tried and convicted), and others want to take DNA samples from all newborns.

Filing our DNA in a government databank is about the ultimate in unreasonable search and seizure. DNA tracking is not just an assault on the principles embodied in our Constitution; it has very real, and frightening implications: Employers could deny you a job because your genes include a tendency toward certain diseases or health defects, and insurers might use DNA-derived information to impose limits on your health care coverage.

Not to be outdone, governments are not just compiling these databases to keep tabs on us unruly ones; they're selling the data alongside the corporate vendors. One estimate is that federal, state and local governments are making tens of millions a year selling public records to junk mailers and other businesses.

Ah, for the simpler days of 1984, when George Orwell imagined that all this high-tech snooping and file gathering would be used to spot and snuff out society's troublemakers and dissenters before they threatened the system.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America's ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

Let’s Cut Child Poverty In Half -- By Making Tax Credit Permanent

Let’s Cut Child Poverty In Half -- By Making Tax Credit Permanent

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Child poverty has been a pervasive issue in the United States as nearly 11 million children are considered poor. That's one in seven children. Rising costs of living — from basic necessities, like rent and groceries, to transportation and childcare — coupled with stagnating wages are putting more children and their families below the poverty line.

COVID-19 has made it worse as families deal with record levels of unemployment. When schools transitioned fully to remote learning, many parents were forced to choose between employment and taking care of their children. The economic impacts of the pandemic can have long-term consequences, including an increase in food and housing insecurity and worse health and education outcomes.

Growing up, my family struggled to make ends meet, and we moved around a lot as my parents looked for work. I was fortunate to be able to go to college where I worked hard and was able to start my career. Now more than ever, I feel that working hard isn't enough to guarantee success. There are too many institutional barriers that keep children in a generational cycle of poverty.

There is no reason why the wealthiest country in the world should be home to 11 million children living in poverty. Most other developed countries offer a child benefit that gives families money to help cover the basic necessities of raising children.

In the United States, we have the Child Tax Credit, but it is much more narrow than the benefit in other countries. Until recently, it didn't serve the people who needed it most, leaving behind one-third of all children who live in families that didn't make enough money to qualify for the full benefit.

That's why Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and I introduced the American Family Act, which would give families up to $300 per month per child and make sure all low- and middle-income families can access the full credit.

A one-year version of our proposal was included in the American Rescue Plan. That's because the New Democrat Coalition, a group of 94 forward-thinking Democrats that I lead in the House, endorsed the American Family Act and pushed for its inclusion as a way to rebuild the middle class. The federal government is expected to start issuing these monthly checks to families in July, to help pay for groceries, rent, and other regular bills.

This is only the beginning of this effort. We cannot lift children out of poverty for just one year. Parents need consistency and predictability knowing this support will be here for the long term as they raise their families. Some might contend this will cost too much or will be too hard to achieve. I say how can we afford not to? Childhood poverty costs the nation upwards of $1 trillion a year. Permanent expansion of the benefit is supported broadly by Democrats, including the New Democrats and Progressives. Giving children a fair chance at success is a position that shouldn't be partisan. The permanent enhanced credit is estimated to save eight dollars for every dollar it costs. This means better health and education outcomes for children and more stability and predictability for parents.

President Joe Biden has said he supports making the expanded benefit permanent. This could be a historic opportunity to cut childhood poverty by 55 percent and we cannot afford not to act.

Suzan DelBene, the representative for Washington's First Congressional District, serves as chair of the New Democrat Coalition and vice chair of the House Ways and Means Committee.

2 Washington State Congress Members Lecture Tech Giants On Gender Equality

2 Washington State Congress Members Lecture Tech Giants On Gender Equality

By Kyung M. Song, The Seattle Times

WASHINGTON — Congress is hardly a bastion of diversity. The Senate is 93 percent white. The Republicans in the House don’t have a single African-American or Asian-American member. And men in both chambers outnumber women 4 to 1.

So what were Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) doing at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C., last week?

Telling Microsoft and other tech titans to build up their ranks of women.

Cantwell and DelBene, were the lone lawmakers to appear at the five-day event, Microsoft’s annual global fest for networking. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) was invited, but canceled at the last minute because of a conflict with scheduled congressional votes.

At a Women in Tech panel, Cantwell noted that a record 20 of the 100 U.S. senators are women. That’s the same as their share among software developers and tech executives. The lack of female perspective, Cantwell said, is a serious shortage in an economy where women make 85 percent of the spending decisions.

Cantwell drew a sharp contrast between the sexes — at least in politics.

“We have a saying in the Senate: When the TV cameras are on, there are two kinds of senators. There are those who immediately check their hair and makeup … and then there are the women.

“I think women are more interested in getting things done than claiming credit,” said Cantwell, who before running for the Senate was senior vice president at RealNetworks, the Seattle-based Internet audio-streaming pioneer.

Cantwell said women’s increased presence in the Capitol was responsible for key legislation, including boosting funding to the National Institutes of Health for research on women’s health issues and the 2013 passage of the Violence Against Women Act to toughen penalties for domestic batterers.

Yet, Cantwell said, women are often underestimated.

She talked of last year’s budget agreement negotiated between Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). The deal helped set the overall 2014 spending levels, a dispute that earlier had triggered last October’s 16-day federal government shutdown.

For that achievement, Ryan was “lauded on TV as maybe the next presidential candidate,” Cantwell said at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

But when it came to the 5-foot Murray, “the only thing they talked about was her stature, which just shows you that we don’t always get all the credit.”

“I think it is very important for women to stand up and take credit,” she said.

DelBene, a former Microsoft executive whose husband, Kurt DelBene, retired last year as head of Microsoft’s Office division, spoke briefly at an earlier reception at the conference.

Aaron Schmidt, DelBene’s chief of staff, said she discussed the importance of diversity to innovation. Assembling people of different skills and background, DelBene said, will fuel creativity as computing migrates away from desktop PCs to tablets, smartphones, and new devices.

If Cantwell and DelBene’s message needs to be heard anywhere, it might well be in Silicon Valley and other tech corridors. The industry, dominated by mostly young men, has come under fire for both the dearth of women and for sometimes overtly misogynistic culture.

Only a quarter of computer and math jobs in the country are held by women, according to 2013 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Women account for 24.4 percent of Microsoft’s U.S. employees. At Google, 17 percent of technical workers worldwide are female.

The imbalance partly reflects that women are less likely to pursue studies in relevant fields. In 2012, for example, women earned only 18 percent of the 48,000 bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer sciences by American colleges.

The share of women who earned master’s degrees in computer sciences was higher, nearly 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation. But about half of those were awarded to foreign students, not U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

AFP Photo / Markku Ruottinen

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