Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Monday, November 24.

*Charles M. Blow: Bigger Than Immigration (“For conservatives, this debate is really about the fear of seeing traditional power slip away.”)

*With immigration action, Obama calls his opponents’ bluff

*High court tests free speech limits on Facebook

*Uncertainty Upends Lives as Ferguson Waits for Grand Jury

*Giuliani: ‘White Police Officers Won’t Be There’ If Blacks ‘Weren’t Killing Each Other’ (Uh huh.)

*Op-Ed: Good News on Energy

*Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels (Attention Dominion Power!)

*Iran Nuke Deal: A Matter of War or Peace

*4 Things You Should Know About The Democrat Who Has Just Kicked Off The 2016 Elections (“1. Webb is not a dove.”)

*Our view: Democrats should listen to Webb (On economic fairness issues, absolutely.)

*Roper: Fracking will not make us free

*Hundreds protest at UVa; student says memorial to victims vandalized

*Mark Warner barely won his election, but he has a spring in his step

*Virginia’s gas tax headed up over Internet impasse (” Virginia’s gas tax will almost certainly increase Jan. 1, ratcheting up about 45 percent because of last year’s landmark transportation funding deal and a congressional unwillingness to crack down on Internet sales tax collections.”)

*UVa protest against sexual violence swells on Rugby Road

*Are there really two Arlingtons? And will only the richer one survive?

*East Coast storm likely ahead of Thanksgiving travel

*Near-record warmth for D.C. today, but snow could arrive Wednesday

I just finished reading the fascinating new book More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook by Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer. The Wall Street Journal describes the book as the efforts of “four idealists frustrated with Facebook’s control over our personal data…to create an alternative,” and why they didn’t ultimately succeed. Other than being a fascinating story, with drama and even tragedy (specifically, the suicide of brilliant, charismatic co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy), the book covers important issues facing all of us in the age of social media, the “cloud,” etc.: privacy, the digital “Panopticon,” the profit motive vs. creating something socially beneficial, how promising technologies do or don’t end up getting funding to move forward, implications for society, even human identity itself. I make absolutely no pretensions to being an expert on any of this, just someone interested in the subject. So, I asked my friend Yosem Companys — who teaches high-technology entrepreneurship at Stanford University, runs social media for Stanford’s Program on Liberation Technology, and previously worked as consiglieri and CEO of Diaspora (with a crucial role to play in “More Awesome than Money”) – whether he would be willing to answer a few questions. He graciously agreed. Here’s the interview, edited for conciseness and clarity. Note: I’ve decided, due to the interview’s length (16 questions and answers), to break it up into four parts. The first four questions and answers are available here, the second part (questions #5-#8) is here, and the third part (#9-#12) is here. Now, here are questions #13-#16.

Question #13: Do you agree or disagree with the Salon article which suggests that social-networking sites like Facebook are reinventing human identity?

Yosem Companys: I found the premise of that article laughable, because Facebook has not reinvented anything in terms of human identity. Human behavior remains the same. All that has changed is that design values are nudging and shaping behavior in a different direction; that is, in the direction that Facebook’s engineers want. (Notice I did not even mention Mark Zuckerberg because, at this point in time, he is quite detached from design decisions, though the imprint left by his early software remains.) But the history of corporations shows that the dominant ones do not remain dominant forever (if I remember correctly, something like 90% of the largest US corporations from the 1890s don’t even exist today), and the very fact that a company like Facebook requires that you express your identity in one particular way creates an opportunity for a startup to disrupt it simply by allowing you to express yourself in a different way. Facebook then has the choice of incorporating the functionality (which is what happened when Facebook copied Diaspora’s gender field), buying the startup and allowing it to continue to offer the functionality independently, or killing the startup altogether and leaving the space open for yet another one to challenge  it later.

The bigger problem I see is that we are unlikely to see challenges to Facebook’s identity model unless we start training programmers differently by making them more aware of the power they hold to influence user behavior and by encouraging them to do so in ways that improve the lives of users. In other words, programmers need to be taught to listen to users, to be sensitive to their needs, and to design more of the things that users want in the ways that they want. If we did so, we would probably design sites with privacy and security in mind from the very beginning, something that does not happen now because the focus is on cost and practicality rather than on user needs.

Question #14: What does the Diaspora experience tell us, if anything, about people’s need to make a profit vs. the desire to create something socially beneficial.

Yosem Companys: I liked the Salon piece you sent me on this, as it is trying to grapple with many of these issues. For me, the key issue here is legal. I’m not sure how you could ever do better than the for-profit model for innovation if your goal is to make a technology widely adopted. For-profit firms are able to raise huge sums of money because they have the potential of making huge sums of money. And the way you fuel adoption is via marketing and advertising, as well as through further investments into enhancing the firm’s technical and organizational capabilities, all of which require huge sums of money. That fact that Ello and Diaspora grew big, quickly, after just a simple mention in the tech press and the New York Times, respectively, while other firms that experts agree had better technologies did not do so, is a testament to the power of marketing and advertising in technology commercialization.  

Remember: Building a startup is not so much about a superior technology but about execution — about building human systems. A conventional technology with great execution at building human systems will always trump a revolutionary one with poor execution.

Question #15 : Why not set up a non-profit like Mozilla and Wikipedia?

Yosem Companys: I don’t know all the legal details of how Mozilla and Wikipedia are set up, as there are a number of ways that non-profit organizations can set up for-profit arms. But, generally speaking, non-profits, due to their limited ability to raise investment funds and their provision of having to donate all their money to charity at the end of the year, are ineffective growth vehicles. And they are much more subject to regulatory oversight, which can be onerous, particularly when they have federal tax-exempt status,  something that is difficult and time-consuming to secure. Other than that, non-profits and for-profits are almost identical in that they are controlled by their founders and owners, respectively, and their boards.

Question #16: What, if any, are the downsides of the for-profit model?

Yosem Companys: One downside of both the for-profit and non-profit model, of course, is that founders and shareholders, as owners of these firms, disproportionately benefit over workers, fueling inequality. And stock options are a poor solution because of the small amount of profit sharing these mechanisms provide to employees. One solution could be the use of employee- or user-owned cooperatives, something that has not really been tried much in Silicon Valley. In such a model, you could still have a for-profit firm, but you would allow employees and users to own, say, half the firm and sell the other half to investors. Investors would still have an incentive to invest and, because employees often understand their business better than shareholders, employees could then theoretically provide better insights into how the firm should be run effectively and profitably, thereby creating more profit opportunities for shareholders and reducing inequality by allowing employees to keep a larger cut of the profits of the firm.

Another problem is that, as economists have long shown, there are technologies that don’t make a profit and, when such market failures occur, you need the government to get involved. But the American people generally have an aversion to government intervention, and the existence of Silicon Valley has created the false perception that it was solely built by entrepreneurs, when academia and government agencies like the US Department of Defense basically developed the Internet, as the historical record shows. The history of technology, in fact, has demonstrated that the role of government and academia in the development of new technologies has been crucial in many of the world’s most advanced economies. This is shown by the examples of post-WWII Japanese innovation and the industrialization of 19th century Germany, both of which occurred via national industrial policy. The role of Wall Street financiers in the early days (and later venture capitalists, who get most of their money from mutual funds) is also often underestimated. Yet, ironically, many spend all their time criticizing government and bankers, neglecting the important role these actors played – and continue to play – in driving invention and subsequent innovation.

There is an extensive literature that suggests the appropriate role for the US government is at funding invention, whereas the appropriate role for the private sector is at funding innovation (i.e., inventions with a business model). The debate in this literature has focused on the “valley of death,” that is, the transition from invention to innovation, where investors don’t fund innovations because the risk is too high, and where government doesn’t get involved because it doesn’t fund commercial ventures. Thus, the role of the private-public partnership for successful technology commercialization is key. For example, some studies (for an early one, see here) show that government-funded firms subsequently tend to raise more venture capital and perform better because of the signaling effect that it sends to prospective investors that such firms have inventions that have been vetted and certified as more promising than others. One notable example of that is Google, but there are many others.

In short, what makes for a great technology does not always correspond with what makes for a great business, and many of the failures of supposedly hot Silicon Valley startups are a testament to that.

Superb job by Washington Post reporter Laura Vozzella in pulling together her story in today’s paper, “Puckett’s Senate exit undid McAuliffe’s secret plan for Medicaid expansion.” Basically, it’s a blow-by-blow account, with fascinating quotes and details, of how then-Sen. Phil Puckett’s resignation from the Virginia State Senate contributed (or did it?> to killing Gov. McAuliffe’s attempt to expand Medicaid unilaterally. I definitely recommend you read the entire thing, but here are a few highlights that jumped out at me.

*Gov. McAuliffe’s voice mail message to former Sen. Puckett after it became clear that Medicaid expansion was dead: “Hey Phil? Terry McAuliffe. I want you to know we just lost the vote, 20 to 19, in the Senate. Medicaid is done. I hope you sleep easy tonight, buddy.”

*”McAuliffe desperately needed Puckett in the Senate to take the daring step of expanding Medicaid on his own, using budget language the Democratic governor hoped to sneak past Republicans.”

*This incident, and the anger/bitterness it engendered, “are likely to make it more difficult for McAuliffe to work with a GOP-controlled legislature to get anything done during the remainder of his term.”

*New information: “Even as McAuliffe’s aides were spinning Puckett’s resignation as a sign of nasty Republican deal­making, they were working desperately to strike a deal of their own to keep Puckett in the Senate – to protect a secret plan to pass Medicaid expansion without direct legislative approval.”

*Gov. McAuliffe “has given a colorful account of their conversation in recent social settings, according to two people he separately regaled. The tale begins with McAuliffe begging the senator to stay and ends with him wishing aloud that Puckett ‘rot in hell.'”

*Whether this whole scheme to expand Medicaid unilaterally would have worked is highly dubious, regardless, as the Republican-controlled House of Delegates still would have vehemently opposed it. Regardless, after “Bull Elephant blogger Steve Albertson, spott[ed] the language and warn[ed] that it was a loophole McAuliffe might try to exploit,” the last nail was definitely hammered into the coffin.

In the end, of course, the substantive – and tragic – thing about all this is simple: 400,000 Virginians will NOT receive health care coverage due to Republicans’ don’t-bother-us-with-facts, ideological and political opposition. And billions of dollars of our own tax dollars will NOT flow to Virginia’s economy thanks to the right wing. So, yes, Gov. McAuliffe has every right to be angry at “Benedict Puckett” and the Republicans, as do the rest of us. Not sure about “rotting in hell” for anyone, but how about we vote as many of these folks out of office next November? (actually, we can start by electing Kathleen Murphy in a few weeks to fill Barbara Comstock’s vacated House of Delegates seat)

Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Sunday, November 23. Also, the photo of an anti-rape protest at UVA yesterday is by Bob Mical.

*Thomas Frank: Phony spin even Fox News won’t buy (“For decades, the idiot pundit class has pushed Democrats to the right after every loss. It’s not working this time”)

*Ferguson Prepares for Fallout From Michael Brown Grand Jury Decision

*Marion Barry dies at 78; 4-term D.C. mayor was the most powerful local politician of his generation (“Marion Barry Jr., who died early Sunday, was the most powerful local politician of his generation and a symbol of self-governance for urban blacks, even as his life was fraught with the drama of a drug arrest and a jail sentence.”)

*Newspaper ‘Erred’ In Publishing Cartoon Of Immigrants Crashing Thanksgiving (Because racism and xenophobia are SOOOO funny! Ha. Ha. Ha.)

*When The GOP Commissioned A Special Investigation Into Benghazi, This Wasn’t Supposed To Happen (“The latest report, released Friday, does little to back up Republicans’ suspicion of negligence, and it finds no intelligence failure on the part of the CIA.”)

*Most White Evangelicals Attribute Intense National Disasters To The Apocalypse, Not Climate Change

*Jeb Bush’s Reverse Midas Touch (“Bush’s Four Mysterious Companies Share The Same Address And Have Never Done Any Known Business”)

*5th annual ‘Turkeys of the Year’ for foolishness, ineptitude in the D.C. area (In Virginia, of course Bob McDonnell makes the list, as does the pathetic “Washington NFL team.”)

*Opinion/Column: Warner’s moderate approach falling out of favor (It’s not “moderate,” it’s just “both sides”/false equivalence idiocy.)

*Puckett’s exit from Va. Senate undid McAuliffe’s secret plan for Medicaid (“The governor needed him to stay in order to take the daring step of expanding Medicaid on his own.”)

*Schapiro: Warner, Kaine love on the ‘new’ Democrats (“That smooching sound you hear is Mark Warner and Tim Kaine loving on new Virginians – Hispanics and Asians who are rapidly remaking the state.”)

*Senators say time has come to roll back state car tax relief (“Watkins is one of the few legislators openly discussing the possibility of rolling back a portion of the car tax subsidy, which tops a list of almost 80 tax preferences and credits adopted since 1990 that take $2.5 billion out of the general fund budget.”)

*U-Va. fraternities suspended in light of sexual-assault allegations (“The suspension came days after a Rolling Stone account of a 2012 gang rape and will last until Jan. 9.”)

*Protest outside Phi Kappa Psi house leads to four arrests (“Protesters call for change to University sexual assault policies”)

*The Virginia Way, Part 8: Disclosure rules are lax, and reports are hard to find

*Our view: Friendly advice for pipeline opponents (“There’s another angle opponents might try, and some landowners in Nelson County are trying this – going to court to argue that that the state’s laws on eminent domain are unconstitutional.”)

*Danville, neighbors join for regional tourism initiative

*Next challenge for Newport News shipyard: Keeping carrier Kennedy within budget

*Late-Sunday showers and a warm Monday before potential pre-Thanksgiving storm

The Virginia Sierra Club’s 2014 Generaly Assembly Climate & Energy Scorecard is out, and there’s a lot of interesting information in there regarding who’s great, who’s good, and who’s not so good when it comes to protecting Virginia’s environment and promoting clean energy. There were some definite surprises in the rankings, but one thing was sadly NOT a surprise: Republicans were almost uniformly horrible (e.g., all “F”s “D”s and “C”s in the Senate; mostly bad grades in the House, with a few exceptions like Robert Bloxom’s “A+;” Chris Stolle’s “A;” Gordon Helsel’s “B,” Randy Minchew’s “B,” Bobby Orrock’s “B,” Riley Ingram’s “B,” Chris Jones’ “B,” Keith Hodges’ “B,” Michael Webert’s “B,” and Tony Wilt’s “B”). What about the Democrats, all of whom you’d hope would get “A”s on the environment? Here’s a ranking of Virginia Democratic legislators from best to worst.

“A+” grades: Delegates Rosalyn Dance, Alfonso Lopez, Monty Mason, Sam Rasoul and David Toscano.  Thank you to everyone who got a perfect, 100%, “A+” grade from the Sierra Club. You guys rock! 🙂

“A” grades: Senators Creigh Deeds, Adam Ebbin, Barbara Favola, Janet Howell, Mamie Locke, Louise Lucas, Dave Marsden, Donald McEachin, Chap Petersen, Phil Puckett (!!!) and Toddy Puller; Delegates David Bulova, Betsy Carr, Matthew James, Mark Keam, Kaye Kory, Rob Krupicka, Jennifer McClellan, Scott Surovell, Roslyn Tyler and Jeion Ward. Nice job by all these folks too, except for the vote in favor of  SB 459 – which the Sierra Club correctly calls “Dominion’s Accounting Sleight of Hand.” General rule of thumb: if Dominion’s for it, vote against it unless there’s some overriding reason not to. Finally, I’m pleasantly amazed that “coal country “Sen. Phil Puckett got an “A.”

“B” grades: Senators John Edwards and John Miller; Delegates Mamye Bacote, Eileen Filler-Corn, Michael Futrell, Charniele Herring, Patrick Hope, Algie Howell, Delores McQuinn, Ken Plum, Mark Sickles, Marcus Simon and Luke Torian. Pretty good, but they did vote for SB 459 (“Dominion’s Accounting Sleight of Hand”), plus in the cases of Edwards and Miller for SB 25 (establishes a “woefully inadequate to address impacts of [an offshore oil] spill or other accident”).  

“C” grades: Senators George Barker, Lynwood Lewis and Henry Marsh; Delegates Bob Brink, Johnny Joannou and Joe Morrissey. Sorry, but a “C” won’t cut it when it comes to protecting our environment. Nor will voting against net energy metering, or voting FOR the crazy “Teach the Controversy” bill (HB 207), which “was drafted to cloak fossil fuel funded skepticism over climate change as legitimate scientific controversy, and to put creationism on a par with the theory of evolution in science classes in public school.” That latter one is completely inexcusable, can’t even imagine a reason any Democrat would vote for it. WTF?

“D” grades: Senator Kenny Alexander, Chuck Colgan, Dick Saslaw and Jennifer Wexton. I’m not sure what to make of Wexton’s grade, actually wonder if that’s a mistake.  As for Alexander, Colgan and Saslaw, I’d say they need to improve, but Colgan’s retiring and Saslaw’s simply doesn’t “get it” on environmental issues. As for Alexander, I sure hope he gets that grade up significantly in 2015.

“F” grades: No Democrats received an “F,” but a bunch of Republicans did  — Senators Dick Black, Charles Carrico, John “Virginia state leader for ALEC” Cosgrove, Thomas Garrett, Jeff McWaters, Stephen Newman, Mark “Criminalize Miscarriages” Obenshain, Bryce Reeves, Ralph Smith, William Stanley and Frank Wagner; Delegates Les Adams, Richard Bell, Rob Bell, Kathy Byron, Ben Cline, Matthew Farris, Peter “Son of Dominion CEO Tom” Farrell, Todd Gilbert, Steve Landes, Dave LaRock, Richard Morris, Brenda Pogge, Charles Poindexter. These right wingnuts are the dregs of the dregs in the Virginia General Assembly in just about every way, including the environment.  

This piece appeared recently in the Richmond Times Dispatch.

In its opinion in Citizens United, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority pretended it wasn’t true. But every sane person knows otherwise: allowing unlimited money to flow into our election process corrupts our democracy. “One person, one vote” gets replaced by “one dollar, one vote,” which means that the increasing inequalities of wealth in America subvert the democratic idea of equality of political voice among all citizens.

But less obviously, allowing money to buy political power corrupts not only the political system, but the money system as well.

I used to call out the Koch Brothers, for their campaign to misinform the public about climate change, as being not only immoral but also a kind of crazy. What kind of insanity is it, I asked, for billionaires who already have more money than they and their children and their grandchildren could spend in a lifetime, to damage the future for generations to come, and for life on earth generally, just to get still more money for themselves?

I was thinking of money as something that entitles the owner to get economic goods. And for billionaires like the Koch Brothers, the limit to the goodies they might benefit from consuming or owning has long since been passed.

But in a political system like the one being fashioned by things like the Citizens United  decision, money isn’t about acquiring economic goods in the pursuit of happiness. It is about buying the government in the pursuit of power.

The heart of the matter is this: economic expansion can be synergistic, a process in which everyone gains; but power is a zero-sum game, meaning that there’s only so much to go around, and so one person’s gain is necessarily offset by someone else’s loss.

To put it another way: we can all get richer together, but we can’t all get more powerful together.

So letting money buy power removes all barriers to greed, because what looks at first like insatiable greed can really be an insatiable lust for power.

The Koch Brothers’ sacrifice of the future of our planet for their own enrichment no longer looks crazy and despicably immoral. It now looks just despicably immoral.

But it’s not only the Koch Brothers conduct that can be warped by this undemocratic translatability of money into power over the American government.

The American economy worked great, a half century ago, when the CEOs of our corporations earned some 20-40 times as much as the workers on the shop floor. Now they earn 200-400 times as much, and the economy is not working as well.

Inequalities of income and wealth have expanded hugely in recent times. It’s well established that great economic inequality hobbles economic growth.  The flow of money to the rich doesn’t create nearly as much demand for more goods and services as money going to average families, because it is those with less who need to spend more of what they get. Funneling more money to the rich and hollowing out the middle class thus leads to a more sluggish economy.

It used to be that as the productivity of American workers increased, their wages would increase proportionally. But over the past decade and a half workers, have stopped getting their share of the gains of that productivity growth, and all the gains have gone instead into corporate profits.

But that channeling into corporate coffers of all the economic gains has helped keep our economy in the ditch. Corporations have been slow to invest or produce more because they see there’s no demand for such extra production. The demand in our economy is weak – and the lack of aggregate demand is why our recovery has been so slow – because average American families are not getting their fair share of the bounty they help to produce.

So this pursuit of more and more wealth by those individuals and corporations who already have enormous riches is a major impediment to restoring America’s economic health.

But while the present flow of money to the haves from the have-nots makes no economic sense – let alone no sense in terms of our values of fairness for average people and concern about their well-being-it makes more sense the more that money is allowed to buy control over the government of the United States.

Greed and the lust for power have been able to combine forces, thanks to the advance of plutocracy abetted by Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United. They make a deadly combination.

Not only does this deadly mix corrode the democratic values embedded in the political system our founders bequeathed us. But they also corrupt and damage our once-dynamic economy.

Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Saturday, November 22. Also see President Obama’s weekly address, on immigration reform. Key point: if the House had allowed a vote on the bipartisan Senate immigration bill at any time over the past 1 1/2 years, it would have passed and been signed into law. Meanwhile, President Obama is taking action under his lawful executive authority to fix the broken system we have now.

*Republicans challenge Obama’s executive actions, file lawsuit over Obamacare (What a joke.)

*Mr. Obama’s Wise Immigration Plan (“The initiative is a good start, bringing reasons for encouragement, tempered with caution.”)

*President Obama Acted Unilaterally on Immigration and the Right Is Predictably Outraged

*Lack of immigration plan flusters GOP (“Party dithers while Obama pounds message defending action.”)

*Peggy Noonan’s “wisdom”: Build Keystone XL so American boys will become men (“America’s worst pundit wants to build Keystone XL so we can impress the world and build character in wayward youths.” Wow. She gets PAID to write this dreck?)

*Amid Attacks, Obama Urges Action on Immigration

*How much would Jim Webb’s military background help in a White House run?

*Jim Webb sucks on climate change (Worst of all, he basically is silent about the #1 issue facing humanity)

*Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli on immigration lawsuit: ‘Take it slow’ (Laughable Cooch comment du jour: “This shouldn’t be done as a political undertaking” – yeah right!)

*Our view: Tone deaf to “rape school” allegations (“So when the university does hire outside counsel, who does it hire? Someone connected to the same fraternity where it’s alleged an initiation rite is to rape somebody! What did the university know about Filip’s resume and when did it know it?”)

*Controversy swells at UVa as Filip taken off the job and Sullivan heads back to the U.S.

*UVa independent counsel on sexual assaults dropped (This attorney, Mark Filip, should never have taken the job, given his enormous conflict of interest.)

*U-Va. campus addresses sexual-assault allegations in Rolling Stone article

*Hampton U: Discarded poll showed Warner with double-digit lead (Why are these Virginia college polls – Roanoke College, CNU, Hampton U – so awful, when other states have excellent polls done by colleges and universities? Weird.)

*Virginia Politics: Ethics issues likely to be General Assembly focus

*The Virginia Way, Part 7: Networking and career-building in the Capitol (“Sometimes, spending time in the lush green of Capitol Square – or even leaving it – isn’t such a bad deal for Virginia’s part-time legislators.”)

*Gov. McAuliffe, Virginia first lady kick off child hunger effort in state

*Brat: ‘Not one thin dime’ for Obama’s immigration plan (But will he vote to pass the bipartisan Senate immigration bill? Of course not. Just “no” “no” “no” “no”…)

*Hits and misses: Reasons to cheer the Elizabeth (“The contamination of the Elizabeth River through decades of industrial pollution was so terrible, so suffocating, 20 years ago that the waterway and its branches were all but given up for dead.”)

*Double duty: Portsmouth politics sees influx of clergy members

*In Richmond area, immigrants view Obama plans with cautious optimism

*Warm-up begins, but don’t put away heavy sweaters and coats just yet