Author Archives: ChristiScanlon

What “Going Green” Means in California

by ChristiScanlon Posted on April 8, 2014

What “Going Green” Means in California

So after deciding that if I am going to write articles about things in our lives that have an environmental impact, I would be a level 7 Paladin hypocrite if I didn’t do something to pitch in myself. So next to my trashcan I put a smaller trash can for “recyclables”, and twice a week I drag it out to the city provided bin behind my house and dump it. I began to feel like I was doing my part. Until last night, that is …

I made my normal trip to the bin at the end of my driveway, when I lifted the recycling bin lid I was greeted by what I can only describe as the largest and angriest possum ever to scuttle the planet. A scream exited my body, that I can’t reproduce if I wanted to, that was somewhere in the pitch range between a 6 year-old girl and some species of tree-dwelling rainforest monkey. I’m pretty sure there was a couple of seconds that only the neighborhood dogs could hear. The bag of glass bottles and cans was wind milled and ejected into the alley as I ran back to the house at a speed that belied my age and size.

The next morning in the safety of the morning sun I found myself somewhat shamefully cleaning up my mess from my minor moment of possum weakness. As I collected the shards of bottles scattered across my driveway, I noticed something I never paid attention to. On the bottom of almost every bottle was raised lettering that said “CA CRV 5 cents”. It never occurred to me that the glass bottles that I was throwing away were worth anything, and apparently they are … In California.

The road snacks would have to wait.

earth911

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What “Going Green” Means in California

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How NSA Surveillance Fits Into a Long History of American Global Political Strategy

by ChristiScanlon Posted on January 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line— like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.

For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of US surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.

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How NSA Surveillance Fits Into a Long History of American Global Political Strategy

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