The New American Oligarchy

Over drinks a few weeks ago, a friend of mine said, “Once you accept that America is an oligarchy, life is easier.” The statement hit me harder than the drinks --a Howard Beale moment of sorts. Over the next few weeks the evidence in favor of my friend’s statement mounted. The Supreme Court opened the door to corporate personhood ruling that closely held corporations can have religious beliefs (Not sure how that works on Judgment Day. Can God send a person to heaven and the Sub-chapter S corporation to which he or she belongs to hell?).

My egalitarian delusions crashed completely when I read that Amazon has won the rights to operate the cloud computing system for the entire U.S. intelligence community. Reminiscent of Mr. Jensen’s sermon, Amazon promises bureaucratic peace through shared data. The turf wars that led to intelligence failures will be morph into a new pax intelligentsia marked by enhanced data sharing and perfectly scalable harmony. Yes, it will be a digital Age of Aquarius where our best and brightest can stop fighting amongst themselves and concentrate on real and imagined terrorists not in government service.

That’s right, the company that wanted to deliver your books via drones now operates the CIA computers. Amazon outbid Microsoft, IBM and others to get rights to build the intellicloud. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, also recently purchased the Washington Post. After all you’re no one in the oligarch set if you don’t have your own media outlet.

Currently, Amazon’s omnivorous algotrithms digest and redigest its ever-growing sales data in hopes of making the company a smarter seller. Fair enough, that’s business. Now those same people will be building the intellicloud. NSA analysts will likely pull up a file on a given terrorist complete with a pop-up window that says, “Analysts who studied this terrorist also looked at weapons of mass destruction and dirty bombs.” Perhaps the program will rank each terrorist according to the number of analyst hits in each category something like “Hassan al-birkabommer ranks #2 out 102,640 jihadists.”

Remember the brouhaha when the Bush Administration attempted to obtain book sale and library data in the wake of 9/11? How hard do you think it will be now? Will there be a firewall between the Amazon cloud and the intellicloud when the same people are working on both? How would we know? Who is watching the oligarchs?

Inside the Papenfuse Echo Chamber

On July 4^th, a line of traffic stopped in the eastbound land of the Harvey Taylor Bridge to watch the fireworks from City Island. They were in for a long wait. As part of its ‘rebranding’ of the city, the Papenfuse administration had expanded the Independence Day festivities to include two other locations, Reservoir Park and Italian Lake. In the process, the City Island fireworks were moved to the 5^th to coincide with a Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra riverfront concert. The problem, of course, was that many people did not get the memo, or in this case, the tweet.

City of Harrisburg Communications Director, Joyce Davis (no relation), explained the city’s publicity campaign in an online forum on PennLive.com. The city sent out a bulk mailing detailing the changes, but many appeared to have arrived after the event. Davis also claimed notices were enclosed in city water bills, but no one has found such a notice yet. Perhaps it will be in next month’s bill. Finally, Davis claimed that she tweeted news about the event to 1,000 or so followers, but sent a minimal number of tweets rather than multiple posts. The tweets directed tweetees to the city’s Facebook pages, the city’s main page and “Stay and Play Harrisburg”.

The Independence Day celebrations traditionally have attracted many from surrounding communities to come into the city. They, clearly, would not have been reached through the city water bill stuffers even if those notices did in fact exist. Inexplicably, many West Shore residents do not rise each day and perform a twitter search for “Harrisburg”, “Stay and Play Harrisburg”, or “City Island Fireworks”. If they are not part of the city’s rabid 1,000 twitter followers, they could have completely missed the great fireworks tweet amid the torrent of 140 character missives that flood the twitosphere. Clearly, these folks should have retroactively followed the directions they received in the direct mail flyer that arrived a week after the event.

Like spawning salmon, many city and suburban residents attend Independence Day fireworks out of instinct to “ooooh” and “aaaah” at the night sky. Perhaps no one can fault the Administration for moving the event to the 5^th to cut costs. Although in fairness, the Thompson Administration always found corporate sponsors to fund the fireworks and this one has not.

Papenfuse’s minions were quick to point out that the election was held in November and they did not take office until January. Clearly, they had other more pressing issues than fireworks. Fair enough, but raising corporate donations was no problem for the Papenfuse campaign when it raised more that $330,000. Perhaps the same effort on behalf of city’s image that many of those donors wish to burnish would be appropriate.