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Dear Media: Stop Using the Phrase "Clean Coal" |
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Tuesday, 23 December 2014 12:23 |
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Biggers writes: "You’d think the filing of a class action lawsuit last month by the families of the 78 coal miners killed in the 1968 Farmington, West Virginia, mine explosion — a disaster that led to the establishment of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act — would serve as a painful reminder that coal isn’t clean."
 There's nothing clean about "clean" coal. (photo: David Goldman/AP)
Dear Media: Stop Using the Phrase "Clean Coal"
By Jeff Biggers, Al Jazeera America
23 December 14
 ou’d think the filing of a class action lawsuit last month by the families of the 78 coal miners killed in the 1968 Farmington, West Virginia, mine explosion — a disaster that led to the establishment of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act — would serve as a painful reminder that coal isn’t clean.
But familiar headlines about “clean coal” endeavors — the coal industry’s still experimental carbon capture and storage operations — continue to roll off the newswires.
An article published in the online trade magazine Environment and Energy Publishing on Nov. 24, for instance, bore the headline “Newest Ill. clean coal project searches for a way to sell its energy.” Bloomberg blasted this headline only days before: “EU risks blackouts without clean-coal inducement.” Earlier this month, an article in The Hill ran the lede “The clean coal industry is asking Hillary Clinton to be the ‘voice of reason’ for coal if she makes a run for the White House.”
“Clean coal” is an industry marketing term. Failing to enclose it in quotes, which the AP Stylebook does not require, and instead presenting it as a demonstrable fact is inaccurate and lazy — and offensive. It also makes a mockery of the miners and journalists who employ the term.
Coal is dirty, costly and deadly. It’s time all media venues stop using the phrase “clean coal” as though it were truthful reporting — because by touting the PR-speak of energy companies, the media are enabling a deadly and outlaw industry.
Debunking a popular mantra
Spend a day in a miner’s boots and you’d recognize that there is nothing clean or safe about coal. While coal mining accidents are on the decline, black lung disease still kills three coal miners daily.
And despite improvements, coal mining accidents continue below and above ground, in an industry that routinely flouts workplace safety rules. Strip mining blasts unleash toxic discharges to streams and watersheds as well as deadly air pollution that has been linked to lung cancer.
Further into the mining cycle, toxic coal-slurry impoundments that contain chemically washed coal prior to transportation have led to the contamination of nearby watersheds, the poisoning of nearby residents and even disastrous accidents.
In a shift from underground operations, radical strip-mining in the form of mountaintop removal has wiped out more than 1 million acres of hardwood forests in Appalachia and jammed nearly 2,000 miles of streams and waterways with toxic coal waste. Coal mining regions from Arizona to Alaska are rocked daily by explosive detonations; besieged residents face accidents; deadly fly rock, silica and coal dust showers; and contaminated streams and wells. Communities have been depopulated and erased from the map; Lindyville and Twilight, West Virginia, like my own Eagle Creek community in southern Illinois, have joined the ranks of once vibrant American communities turned into bombed-out ghost towns.
These realities have not in the least dampened the popularizing of the “clean coal” mantra — over and over — throughout the past century.
Since the 1890s, as the coal-fired electricity boom began to light up U.S. cities, newspapers have run ads for smoke-free “clean coal” in Chicago and around southern Illinois.
A half-century later, coal boosters raved about new processes to wash and screen coal, hailing their results as a refined “clean coal.”
In 1950 schoolchildren in Illinois put on coal-industry-funded plays, such as “Old King Coal Reigns Here,” telling audiences that their furnaces could now burn “clean coal.”
In the 1970s numerous “clean coal” institutes attempted to greenwash the troubling sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain. That decade, Illinois’ then-Gov. Dan Walker launched a campaign dubbing “clean coal” the “energy alternative” during the OPEC oil crisis.
As the debate has shifted in recent years to the reality of climate change and coal’s indubitable role as a leading contributor of carbon dioxide emissions, the “clean coal” campaign has been refashioned as a miracle cure to capture and store carbon emissions.
But even the “clean coal” reference to carbon capture and storage experiments is incorrect. Whether or not CO2 emissions can ever be captured and buried safely in the ground, such commercially untested plants would necessitate an estimated 20 to 40 percent increase in coal production to carry out the additional operating procedures. That effectively makes “clean coal” plants even deadlier.
This long, tortuous marketing ploy needs to come to an end. That will happen only when the media, including the AP Stylebook editors, take the first step to hold the “clean coal” label accountable and call the industry what it truly is: lethal.
Next steps
There is some precedent for this. Earlier this year, the London-based Advertising Standards Authority ruled that Peabody Energy’s “clean coal” ads were misleading and unsubstantiated and failed to take into account the overall damage — from black lung disease to deadly air pollution to the contamination of watersheds — incurred by mining operations.
It’s time for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission to follow suit; enforce their standards, which require advertising claims to be truthful and substantiated; and stop allowing “clean coal” ads to engage in deception through omission. It’s time, too, for media outlets to cease the naive repetition of a marketing phrase in the face of a mountain of evidence that proves it patently untrue.
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FOCUS | Of Anger and Bigotry |
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Tuesday, 23 December 2014 11:15 |
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Bronner writes: "With the publicity surrounding the police shootings of yet another two unarmed African-Americans, Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the refusal to bring the responsible police officers to trial, and the demonstrations and rioting that have recently rocked the United States, there is a pressing need for a more robust discussion of bigotry and racism in order to place these events in context."
'Black Lives Matter.' (photo: PA)
Of Anger and Bigotry
By Stephen Eric Bronner, Reader Supported News
23 December 14
 ith the publicity surrounding the police shootings of yet another two unarmed African-Americans, Eric Gardner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the refusal to bring the responsible police officers to trial, and the demonstrations and rioting that have recently rocked the United States, there is a pressing need for a more robust discussion of bigotry and racism in order to place these events in context. These shootings are part of a pattern: From one to three supposedly “justifiable homicides” by police take place every day, overwhelmingly targeting people of color. Longstanding tensions exist between the police and those ghettos and neighborhoods in which minorities predominate. But the opportunity to begin such a discussion is inhibited by the adaptation of the bigot to a new society in which his prejudices are camouflaged as he turns them into reality. Uncritical defenders of the police are always quick to note that race plays no part in these events that have so infuriated particularly the black community. That is also part of a pattern and part of the prevailing culture.
Soon after Barack Obama’s electoral victory in 2008, conservatives began depicting the event as a triumph of cosmopolitan and secular intellectuals, people of color, liberal pieties, and “socialist” hopes. Grassroots organizing accompanied an agenda of legislative sabotage led by the Republican congressional hierarchy. Media demagogues stoked the flames of resentment. President Obama was mockingly called “The One” and excoriated as an Arab, an imam, even the Antichrist. Posters identified him with Hitler, placed his head on the body of a chimpanzee, implied that he was a crack addict, portrayed him with a bone through his nose, and showed the White House lawn lined with rows of watermelons. Six years later, the fury has hardly subsided: Thousands of young people check on racist websites like Stormfront every month, anti-Semitism is again becoming fashionable, Islamophobia is rampant, and conservative politicians are suing President Obama in the courts for his supposed abuse of power while their more radical supporters are labeling him a traitor. The refusal to engage the question of racial prejudice by even mainstream conservatives in explaining the ongoing humiliation and brutality directed against people of color in the United States should be seen in this light.
Most conservative advocates of “law and order” and those in the right-wing Tea Party don’t see themselves as bigots. They long to reinstate the “real” America perhaps best depicted in old television shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. This completely imaginary America was orderly and prosperous. Women were happily in the kitchen; gays were in the closet; and blacks knew their place. But this world (inexplicably!) came under attack from just these (ungrateful!) groups, thereby creating resentment – especially among white males on the political right. They feel persecuted and wish to roll back time. Their counterattack is based on advocating policies that would hinder same-sex marriage, champion the insertion of “Christian” values into public life, deny funds for women’s health and abortion clinics, cut government policies targeting the inner cities, protect a new prison network inhabited largely by people of color, eliminate limits on campaign spending, and increase voting restrictions that would effectively disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged citizens. The new privatized “prison-industrial complex” is part of this political agenda.
Old-fashioned prejudice obviously still exists. But the bigot is adapting to a new world. The bigot now employs camouflage in translating his prejudices into reality. To forestall criticism, he now makes use of supposedly “color-blind” economic and anti-crime policies, liberal notions of tolerance, individualism, the entrepreneurial spirit, local government, historical traditions, patriotism, and fears of nonexistent voter fraud to maintain the integrity of the electoral process. The bigot today is often unaware either that he has prejudices or that he is indulging them.
Unfortunately, popular understandings of the bigot remain anchored in an earlier time. His critics tend to highlight the personal rather than the political, crude language and sensational acts rather than mundane legislation and complicated policy decisions. Many are unwilling to admit that bigotry has entered the mainstream. It is more comforting to associate bigotry with certain attitudes supposedly on the fringes of public life. Words wound, but the truth is that policies wound even more. Everyday citizens grow incensed when some commentator lets slip a racist or politically incorrect phrase. But they are far more tolerant when faced with policies that blatantly disadvantage or attack the bigot’s traditional targets, whose inferiority is still identified with fixed and immutable traits: gays, immigrants, people of color, and women.
Reactionary movements and conservative parties have provided a congenial home for true believers, provincial chauvinists, and elitists of an aristocratic or populist bent. Not exclusively: Liberals and socialists – though usually with a guilty conscience – have also occasionally endorsed imperialism, nationalism, racism, and the politics of bigotry. But while the connection between right-wing politics and bigotry does not hold true in every instance, it is true most of the time. It is certainly true today. Ideologues of the Tea Party provide legitimacy and refuge for advocates of intolerance while the GOP provides legitimacy and refuge for the Tea Party.
Not every bigot is a conservative and not every conservative is a bigot. Yet they converge in supporting an agenda that explicitly aims to constrict intellectual debate, social pluralism, economic equality, and democratic participation. Either the bigot or the conservative can insist that his efforts to shrink the welfare state are motivated solely by a concern with maximizing individual responsibility; either can claim that his opposition to gay rights is simply a defense of traditional values; and either can argue that increasing the barriers to voting is required to guarantee fair elections. Whatever they subjectively believe, however, their agenda objectively disadvantages gays, immigrants, women, and people of color.
Reasonable people can disagree about this or that policy as it applies to any of these groups. Any policy, progressive or not, can be criticized in good faith. But ethical suspicions arise when an entire agenda is directed against the ensemble of what President Reagan derisively termed “special interests.” No conservative political organization today has majority support from women, the gay community, or people of color. There must be a reason. It cannot simply be that the conservative “message” has not been heard; that members of these groups are overwhelmingly parasitical and awaiting their overly generous government “handouts”; or that so-called special interests are incapable of appreciating what is in their interest. A more plausible explanation, I think, is that those who are still targets of prejudice and discrimination have little reason to trust conservatism’s political advocates.
Is the conservative a bigot? It depends. Is the particular conservative intent upon defending traditions simply because they exist, supporting community values even if they are discriminatory; and treating political participation as a privilege rather than a right? Critics of the bigot should begin placing a bit less emphasis on what he says or feels than what he actually does. That conservative can always rationalize his actions – platitudes come cheap. But then perhaps, one day, he will find himself looking in the mirror and (who knows?) the bigot might just be staring back.
Stephen Eric Bronner is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. His most recent book is The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists (Yale University Press). He is also director of global relations and on the executive committee of the UNESCO Chair in Genocide Prevention for its Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights
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How to Fix Poverty: Write Every Family a Basic Income Check |
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Tuesday, 23 December 2014 07:39 |
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Isaacson writes: "In the United States - as in all of the world's wealthier nations - ending poverty is not a matter of resources. Many economists, including Timothy Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin (and former director of the Institute for Research on Poverty) have argued that every developed nation has the financial wherewithal to eradicate poverty."
Belva Weiner waits to take away a cart of food from the Care and Share Food Bank to distribute the food to her church's food pantry in Colorado. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
How to Fix Poverty: Write Every Family a Basic Income Check
By Betsy Isaacson, Newsweek
23 December 14
 n the United States—as in all of the world’s wealthier nations—ending poverty is not a matter of resources. Many economists, including Timothy Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin (and former director of the Institute for Research on Poverty) have argued that every developed nation has the financial wherewithal to eradicate poverty. In large part this is because post-industrial productivity has reached the point where to suggest a deficit in resources is laughably disingenuous. And despite the occasional political grandstanding against welfare, there is no policy, ideology or political party that is on the books as pro-starvation, pro-homelessness, pro-death or anti-dignity.
Yet, poverty continues to exist. In the U.S., for example, almost 15 percent of citizens (and almost 20 percent of children) live in poverty. Of those, slightly under 2 percent live on less than $2 per person per day.
The main problem is logistical. The current U.S. welfare systems take in trillions of dollars and provide fairly little utility on a dollar-for-dollar basis. There’s unhappiness on both sides of the political aisle—conservatives harrumph about “welfare queens” and liberals complain about the expensive drug testing required to collect welfare checks, for example. Welfare as it exists today is fragmented to the point of making effective oversight impossible, mired in red tape and inconsistent between cities, states and the federal government. And because of that, in the richest nation in the world, people starve.
But there may be a solution. Some might see it as radical, but advocates, both libertarian and liberal, are suggesting straight up cash: a guaranteed subsidy to everyone. "We've got to a technological level now where no one needs to work the traditional 40-hour week," says Barbara Jacobson, chair of Unconditional Basic Income–Europe, an alliance of European citizens and organizations that advocate for such subsidies. But while productivity per hour across developing nations has increased dramatically since the 1970s, “this has not meant a rise in wages, or a fall in hours without a pay cut,” says Jacobson. And on top of that, she adds, there is a significant amount of “crucial work, generally caring work, which isn't paid for, but without which society would collapse.” The people doing this type of work—parenting and elder care, for example—often end up broke; if you are a single parent, it’s often not feasible to hold a traditional, wage-paying job while also taking care of three kids and your mother who has Alzheimer’s.
A simple cash subsidy—$15,000 per year (which is about what the average retiree gets annually from Social Security) for every household, say—would give the poor and middle class a financial floor on which they could live, take care of their loved ones and maybe, says Jacobson, "think about what really needs doing, what they would like to do, what they have trained to do, as opposed to simply what someone might hire them to do."
It makes financial sense for the cash-strapped U.S. government. In 2012, the federal government spent $786 billion on Social Security and $94 billion on unemployment. Additionally, federal and state governments together spent $1 trillion on welfare of the food stamp variety. Adding those costs together, that's $1.88 trillion. This number shows no signs of falling—in fact, the number of people seeking social services each year is increasing, as is the rate of homelessness, and as the baby boomer generation ages, more and more will need the support of Social Security.
In switching over to a universal basic income, the books will not only stay balanced—they might even move into the black. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 115,227,000 households in the U.S. Split $1.88 trillion among all these households and each one gets $16,315.62. In other words, if you turned the welfare system into a $15,000 basic income payment, you’d end up saving over $150 billion (or $1,315.62 per American household).
The basic proposal can be tweaked, of course, so that the system makes a bit more sense. Households making over $100,000 per year probably get by just fine on their own. Cut them out of the equation, and you would end up with a $20,000 basic income check for the remaining households, while still netting the government some nice savings.
Despite the pleasingly round back-of-the-napkin math, replacing food stamps and other artifacts of America’s welfare system with no-strings-attached cash isn’t that easy. There’s the small matter, for example, of stitching together all of the patchwork social program providers—federal, state and local governments—and getting them to agree to all put in to one kitty. It’s also controversial. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a columnist for The Week, worries that if we gave everyone basic incomes to cover their necessities, it might encourage a mass exodus from the workforce as people no longer “need” to work to survive. And the fear that some kind of basic income might tank the economy by allowing “freeloaders” is hardly a new apprehension: Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, which proposed a modest basic income of $1,600 per family (plus $800 in food stamps) was opposed by conservatives in 1970 because it lacked work requirements; once those were added, the left, fearing the requirements were too onerous, opposed the bill. Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan never passed.
But analysis of pilot programs in which basic income was provided to communities in the U.S. and Canada suggest that it plays out differently than opponents suggest. In those programs, the overall reduction in working hours among those given basic income was extremely low. And the only participants who stopped working fit neatly into one of two distinct demographics: new mothers, and teenagers who had previously been working while attending high school—neither of which are representative of the broader population
Matt Zwolinski, founder of Bleeding Heart Libertarians, thinks basic income would be no worse than the current welfare state, which often stops providing benefits when recipients become employed. “As a result,” he says, “poor families often find that working more (or having a second adult work) simply doesn’t pay.” Zwolinski believes libertarians and small-government conservatives should be fighting to replace welfare with a basic income guarantee, which would shrink the government and promote personal independence—two tenets of their political beliefs.
Other opponents of a basic income argue we should expand the current welfare system, which provides necessary services to those in need. “We already provide, for example, universal elementary and secondary education because that is something we feel everybody should have," says Barbara Bergmann, an economist and trustee of Economists for Peace and Security, a New York–based nongovernmental organization. According to Bergmann, food, shelter, college education and child care should also be provided by the government. "If the government were going to spend large amounts of money, there are better things to spend it on than universal cash."
But Michael Howard, coordinator of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, believes that in the age of automation, basic income or something like it could become a necessity. “We may find ourselves going into the future with fewer jobs for everybody,” he says. “So as a society, we need to think about partially decoupling income from employment.”
Despite tentative bipartisan support for basic income in the U.S, the concept has gained greatest traction outside America. Switzerland has become the first country to hold a referendum on basic income at a national level; in 2015, the Swiss Parliament will vote on whether to extend a basic income of 2,500 Swiss francs (about $2,600) per month to every Swiss resident. In India, meanwhile, after the success of a 20-village pilot program in Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India, the federal government of India announced in 2013 it was moving to replace 29 aid programs with direct cash transfers.
But even in the U.S, basic income has a forebear. In Alaska, the state’s oil revenues are divided equally between every resident. The checks written at the end of the year usually amount to somewhere around $1,000 per person, hardly enough for a household to live on, but the subsidy does seem to positively affect Alaskans: economist Scott Goldsmith calculated that this is the equivalent to adding an entire new industry, or 10,000 new jobs, to the Alaskan economy. The model boasts nearly a 90 percent approval rating and a slew of fierce political advocates, including those, like Alaska’s former Republican Governor Wally Hickel, who see it as a blueprint for a new, superior economic policy. “From common ownership of our land and our resources, has emerged a new model for modern society,” he said in 2009. “We call ourselves the Owner State. And what we own is the commons. We believe our model surpasses both capitalism and socialism.”
December 15, 2014: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Swiss Parliament will be voting on a basic income of 2,500 Swiss francs per year. They will actually be voting on a basic income of 2,500 Swiss francs per month. It also stated that Wally Hickel spoke about the "Owner State" in 2012. He actually made the statement in 2009.
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Sony's Apocalypse Is Now |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Monday, 22 December 2014 16:41 |
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Rich writes: "Yesterday, Sony Pictures canceled the release of the Seth Rogen–James Franco comedy The Interview after hackers linked to North Korea threatened terrorism against theaters that showed the film."
Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy film "The Interview" depicted the assassination of Kim Jong-Un. (photo: Ed Araquel/CTMG)
ALSO SEE: FBI's Evidence That North Korea Hacked Sony 'Tenuous', Expert Says
Sony's Apocalypse Is Now
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
22 December 14
 very week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the devastating Sony hack and our new age of cyber warfare.
Yesterday, Sony Pictures canceled the release of the Seth Rogen–James Franco comedy The Interview after hackers linked to North Korea threatened terrorism against theaters that showed the film. What do you make of Sony's decision? Was it prudent, or does it set a dangerous precedent for future controversial works of art?
I think everyone knows the precedent is ominous. As Fred Kaplan asked rhetorically at Slate, “Will hackers now threaten to raid and expose the computer files of other studios, publishers, art museums, and record companies if their executives don’t cancel some other movie, book, exhibition, or album?” The short answer is yes. We are witnessing, in Alan Dershowitz’s phrase, the “Pearl Harbor of the First Amendment.” But this story is far bigger than the threat to the First Amendment. And the vituperation being aimed at Sony for canceling the film’s release — coming from both the left and the right — is a sideshow that misses a bigger point. Before Sony capitulated, every major movie theater chain in the country had pulled out of showing The Interview. The Wall Street Journal reported that the nation’s largest cable company, Comcast, would have refused to show the film — and no doubt would have been joined in this veto by all the other cable and satellite providers if Sony had considered such a distribution alternative. So if Sony canceled a film that couldn’t be shown anyway, was that a cancellation or just a certification of reality? If Sony is a coward, they all are.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that Sony had not canceled The Interview and, hypothetically, that one big theater chain — say, AMC — had agreed to exhibit it. Does anyone doubt that Sony’s rival studios (like the Comcast-owned Universal) would have exerted pressure to get The Interview yanked anyway? They wouldn’t want their own big Christmas releases to risk losing a single terrorized customer fearful of entering a multiplex where The Interview was on a neighboring screen. In that context, look at the Mitt Romney tweet that caused such a stir overnight:
Wonderful sentiment, but would Comcast or any other American internet provider be brave enough to host a free online streaming of The Interview? Would the Comcast-owned NBC broadcast it, or would Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network? Let’s see if Mitt has the leadership abilities to broker that deal. The Motion Picture Association of America couldn’t even come together to draft a statement supporting Sony until two weeks after news of the hack broke.
But as I said, this story is bigger than the First Amendment. In the aftermath of breaches spanning from the NSA to JPMorgan Chase to Home Depot, it confirms that hackers may be able to bring any corporation — or government agency — to its knees for any reason whatsoever. And what are we to do about it exactly? Obama Administration intelligence officials now say that North Korea was “centrally involved” in the hacking. We have yet to see the proof, and, as Wired has observed in a skeptical analysis of North Korea’s alleged role, a cybercrime of this magnitude and ingenuity may be “difficult if not impossible” to attribute to any single source. But even if the administration can make an air-tight case, does America respond with a counter-attack at North Korea and risk further retribution? Is an American government that has seen computer breaches at the White House and State Department even capable of a failsafe retaliation? This is why I think people will one day look back at today’s newspapers and laugh that the long-overdue American détente with our Cold War nemesis Cuba received banner headlines while the cyberwar of our current century was relegated to below the fold.
The Sony hack, of course, has caused more casualties than The Interview. There have been leaked social security numbers, leaked screeners, and, most salaciously, leaked emails from producers, directors, and executives behaving badly. You've seen showbiz from many angles in you career. Did any of what you read surprise you?
I am shocked to learn that there has been dissent within Sony about the quality of Adam Sandler movies. And to discover that even in liberal Hollywood, women do not get equal pay for equal work. As for the Amy Pascal–Scott Rudin thread about what movies President Obama might like, I was less startled by its content than by Pascal’s decision to apologize to Al Sharpton for it. Who elected this guy the Zelig of racial conflict in America?
But the real damage in the hack is not the gossip and the bitchiness. And it’s not merely the theft of intellectual property like screenplays and full cuts of movies, and the looting of personal information that could lead to identity theft and other crimes against the legions of non-boldface names who have been victimized. There are other subplots involving all sorts of people and corporations that have little or nothing to do with Sony or show business. And we don’t remotely know the whole of it yet. The hackers claim that the stolen Sony cache amounts to 100 terabytes — ten times the estimated storage space needed to digitalize the entire Library of Congress. And those who want to sift through it, whether journalists or bloggers or amateur sleuths, can and will continue doing so no matter what critics have to say about it. On Monday, for instance, the Times published an opinion piece by Aaron Sorkin lashing out at the press for trading in the Sony material, and the lawyer David Boies, in a news story in the business section, warned that Sony would go after any news organization that did so. But on the front page of the paper that very same day, the Times bucked both Sorkin and Boies to run a story on The Interview drawn in part from “hacked emails published by other media.” Yesterday, another Times article, about Google lobbying, also drew on Sony emails — these provided by “an industry executive.” Given that so many other players beyond Hollywood have figured in the emails thus far — from Google to NYU to the Times itself — it’s safe to assume that the digging will continue, with more unexpected revelations yet to drip out bit by bit. It’s a Chinese — or perhaps North Korean — water torture of untold American companies and institutions.
Last year, after the Edward Snowden leaks, you wrote that "though Americans were being told in no uncertain terms that their government was spying on them, it quickly became evident that, for all the tumult in the media-political Establishment, many just didn’t give a damn." Certainly the Sony hack has led to a lot of embarrassed executives and irate staffers. Did you underestimate Americans’ desire for privacy — at least when their private matters are made public?
My point, which I think still holds, is that Americans talk a good game about wanting their privacy protected but in reality we are almost sheeplike (and I include myself in that we) in the docility with which we turn over personal information to Amazon, Google, Uber, Facebook — you name it — in pursuit of convenience, shopping, entertainment, and facile social engagement. All the information we give up can be hacked and too frequently is. One might imagine that the Sony apocalypse is making many Americans think twice about their voluntary exhibitionism. But I think we are unlikely to change our habits so much as hope, as Sony did, that surely there must be some nerd in IT somewhere who is protecting us from harm.
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ast week, Rolling Stone shared 
