Mayor Papenfuse Embraces Democracy

In a stunning departure from his past positions, Mayor Eric Papenfuse has professed support for elected politicians controlling public purse strings. Could the little oligarch’s puppet be a closet democrat?

The remark came amidst the mayor’s rant against the Civil War Museum, an entity he views as unfairly benefitting from city largesse. Of the Hershey Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau, he said, "It's just wrong to have millions of dollars in city assets controlled by an unelected group of self-appointed board members with no real connection to Harrisburg.”

That position is radically different than the one Citizen Papenfuse embraced when he advocated for a Midtown Improvement District (MID) to bankroll additional security in Midtown (around his business) after a well-publicized robbery.

The MID would have come into existence had the matter been placed on a ballot sent to all property owners within the District’s proposed borders. Unless 40% of property owners had voted 'no', the District would have been established with the right to levy assessments against area residents. So in the spirit of representative democracy, property owners who failed to vote would have been counted as ‘yes’ votes. The MID would have been run by an unelected board with discretion to spend the funds as they saw fit. The MID effort died on the vine before reaching fruition.

All of that is now in the past though. Since becoming an elected official, Mayor Papenfuse now sees the wisdom of leaving public spending to elected officials. What an epiphany.)

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?