South Koreans walk past a TV screen showing a news report about The Interview at Seoul railway station. Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP
A South Korean activist is planning to launch balloons carrying DVDs of Sony’s movie The Interview over North Korea as the propaganda war over the controversial film continues.
The comedy depicting an assassination attempt on the North Korea president Kim Jong-un is at the centre of tension between North Korea and the US, with Washington blaming Pyongyang for crippling hacking attacks on Sony. Pyongyang denies the allegations and has vowed to retaliate.
Park Sang-hak said he will start dropping 100,000 DVDs and USBs of the movie by balloon in North Korea as early as late January. Park, a North Korean defector, said he was partnering with the US-based non-profit Human Rights Foundation, which is financing the making of the DVDs and USB memory sticks of the movie with Korean subtitles.
Park said foundation officials plan to visit South Korea around 20 January to hand over the DVDs and USBs, and that he and the officials will then try to float the first batch of the balloons if weather conditions allow.
“North Korea’s absolute leadership will crumble if the idolisation of leader Kim breaks down,” Park told Associated Press.
If successful, he stunt will enrage North Korea, which expressed anger over the movie. In October, the country opened fire at giant balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets floated across the border by South Korean activists, trigging an exchange of gunfire with South Korean troops.
But it is not clear how effective the plan will be, as only a small number of ordinary North Korean citizens are believed to own computers or DVD players. Many North Koreans would not probably risk watching the movie as they know they would get into trouble if caught. Owning a computer requires permission from the government and costs as much as three months’ salary for the average worker, according to South Korean analysts.
Not everyone supports sending balloons into the North, with liberals and border town residents in South Korea urging the activists to stop. North Korea has long demanded that South Korea stop the activists, but Seoul refuses, citing freedom of speech.
Park said the ballooning would be done clandestinely, with the pace picking up in March when he expects the wind direction to become more favourable.
Calls to the Human Rights Foundation on Wednesday were not immediately answered. The foundation says on its website that it works with North Korean defectors to use hydrogen balloons to send material across the border, as well as smuggling items through China and broadcasting radio transmissions to reach those who own illegal short wave radios.
Chances are that at some point in your career, you’ve taken an idea from someone else. I want to know why.
There’s a clue in a story about one of the great bands of our time.
All good things come to an end, and by 1970, the beloved Beatles had decided to go their separate ways.
Within a year, George Harrison reached No. 1 with a solo song, “My Sweet Lord.” But his sweet time at the top was short-lived. Within a month, a lawsuit was filed. Harrison’s song had original lyrics, but shared a melody and harmony with the 1963 hit song by the Chiffons, “He’s So Fine.”
Was the Beatles’ lead guitarist guilty of plagiarism?
Judge Richard Owen, who happened to be a music aficionado, ruled that Harrison was guilty. But he said Harrison’s theft wasn’t intentional; it was accidental and subconscious.
Eventually, Harrison conceded that Owen was right. “I wasn’t consciously aware of the similarity between ‘He’s So Fine’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’,” Harrison wrote in his autobiography. “Why didn’t I realize?”
The psychologist Dan Gilbert calls this kleptomnesia: generating an idea that you believe is novel, but in fact was created by someone else. It’s accidental plagiarism, and it’s all too common in creative work.
In a classic demonstration, psychologists Alan Brown and Dana Murphy invited people to brainstorm in groups of four. They took turns generating lists of sports, musical instruments, clothes, or four-legged animals. Each participant generated four ideas from each category. Next, the participants were asked to write down the four ideas that they personally generated for each category.
Alarmingly, a full 75% of participants unintentionally plagiarized, claiming they generated an idea that was in fact offered by another member of their group. And later, the participants wrote down four new ideas for each category. The majority wrote down at least one idea that had already been generated by another group member—usually the group member who’d generated ideas immediately before them.
Were they not paying attention? If so, then surely they’d have been just as likely to plagiarize from their own ideas. But that didn’t happen. While 71% of participants took credit for an idea that a group member had generated, only 8% generated one of their own previous ideas.
Kleptomnesia happens due to a pragmatic, but peculiar, feature of how human memory is wired. When we encode information, we tend to pay more attention to the content than the source. Once we accept a piece of information as true, we no longer need to worry about where we acquired it.
It’s especially difficult to remember the source of information when we’re busy, distracted, or working on a complex task. (Sound familiar in today’s workplace?) And the more our attention is divided, the less we notice who’s responsible for the ideas that get raised. This explains why people are most likely to take credit for ideas generated immediately before their own. When it’s almost their turn, they’re maximally busy trying to come up with a good idea, so they never really pay attention to the source of the ideas that come right before their own.
To combat kleptomnesia, psychologists recommend reducing distractions and cutting down on multitasking. It can also be useful to minimize exposure to similar work. For example, comedy writer George Meyer avoided watching Seinfeld while writing for The Simpsons (16 seasons!). “I was afraid I might subconsciously borrow a joke,” Meyer told me.
Had George Harrison taken these steps, he might have avoided a serious financial loss and heartbreak. At minimum, when generating ideas, it could be wise to identify a few existing ideas that are similar, scrutinize the overlap, and give credit where it’s due. Otherwise, in Harrison’s words, “We all tend to break each other’s hearts, taking and not giving back.”
In everyday life, the most important corrective action may involve training ourselves to focus not only on what was said, but also who said it. As the psychologists Neil Macrae, Galen Bodenhausen, and Guglielmo Calvini put it, “May the source be with you.”
I think every “good red-blooded American” (whatever that is) has pretty much the same reaction to being threatened by the little boy with the egg head – Fuh-Kim!” but before we over-react to statements like the one below, we might want to take the second picture.
My initial reaction was to think that they are really not in any position to demand anything. Then I began to think about it. This might be all about positioning right now, but A new analysis of North Korea’s nuclear program by a group of top U.S. experts, led by David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, estimates that North Korea could have enough material for 79 nuclear weapons by 2020.
I believe that one of the major reasons the cold war ended was not a diplomatic one, as much as we had a president in Regan that not only had an itchy finger on the “red button” but his dementia was being fairly well accepted and it was almost universally understood that he was just crazy enough to push the damn thing out of spite.
Kim Jong-un is just pissed off enough about being short, ugly, and oblong that he might just feel the same way. What does HE have to loose? Then there are the neighbors. With Russia, one of our strongest allies (just ask Putin as he moves more troops across his other boarders on “peace keeping” exercises) on the North East, and China (the worlds largest economy having recently overtaken the US) on the other, he is not alone.
Crowd Mentality: When you have people alone, one on one, they are generally cordial. When you get a bunch of “like minded” people together their collective influence is usually more powerful than the sum of the parts. This is called synergy. It could also be called trouble for US – literally.It is good timing for this little group to be considering all the years of being treated like the third world countries they were, to think that circumstances have changed enough to turn the tables.
Its not about the movie: We know damn well that the cyber hackers that hit Sony had a bit of help from China. Most in North Korea dont have access to reliable electricity, let alone a sophisticated hacking station. The demands that we never show a comedy even in bootleg form or post it on the internet, or let HBO get hold of it, or look at the trailers….are so ridiculous it makes me wonder if they are just an excuse to do some more saber rattling.
They have two more years of a lame-duck president who has allowed the military to get to a point that we are unable to launch any kind of attack that would remotely rival desert storm.
Would this be a good time to “re-negotiate” the term “the most powerful nation in the world.”
It started with boats, but over the centuries, it is practiced everywhere… we establish cultural rights of way, a hierarchy of precedence about who gets to go first. We need a default because we can’t always have a discussion about who goes next in the moment.
Motorboats, for example, are generally expected to veer out of the way of a sailboat (instead of the other way around). This makes sense, of course, because they have more options and can recover more easily.
That’s one way to prioritize who gets to go first: the small over the big, the one who needs it over the one would could handle the interruption. It’s annoying for the motorboat, but vital for the sailboat.
Lately, we seem to be making some new decisions about right of way that change this perspective. That cars ought to have right of way over pedestrians and bicycles. That huge corporations have right of way over individuals. That the authorities have the right of way over the presumed innocent, and that the marketer’s infinite need-for-attention has right of way over quiet and privacy.
What would happen if the default was that roads are for pedestrians and bicycles unless otherwise stated, and what would happen if pleasing corporations was seen as an exception in the priorities of those that regulate them?
[There’s no right answer in issues of societal right of way, there is nothing but compromises and judgment calls. At either extreme, everything breaks down, and so the question is: where do you want us to be? Where do you draw the line? Is it up to us?]
It’s possible to argue that roads are more efficient when bikes don’t clog them up, and that our illusion of security increases when the default is to know everything about everyone. Most of all, that corporations are more profitable when they don’t have to worry about the people who don’t fit their model.
It doesn’t seem like much of a cost to ask individuals to get out of the way, until, all at once, we realize just how expensive it was to totally prioritize power and efficiency over humanity and justice.
The Supreme Court case King v. Burwell will determine whether the IRS overstepped in saying (Obamacare) subsidies are available for health insurance bought through the federal exchange.If the administration loses the case, more than half the states will lose an estimated $65 million in subsidies and an estimated 4 million people will probably lose their health insurance coverage.
How should Congress respond?
Yuval Levin and James Capretta have an editorial in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal with a suggested way forward. Because I was critical of a previous reform plan of theirs, let me say how much I really like the current version.
Under the plan, every state would have the option to opt out of Obamacare and establish a different kind of health reform. In particular:
There would be no federal mandates – either for individuals or for employers.
People could buy insurance inside an exchange or outside of it, with the states choosing their own regulations.
Everyone in the individual market would get a fixed sum tax credit for the purchase of health insurance. The credit would increase by age, but would not vary by income.
People who have continuous insurance coverage could not be discriminated against because of pre-existing conditions, but this protection is lost for those who try to game the system by remaining uninsured while they are healthy and buying insurance only after they get sick.
People on Medicaid would be free to leave the program, claim the subsidy and buy private insurance instead.
The repeal of the mandates is huge. All of the anti-job parts of ObamaCare go away once you abolish the employer mandate. And with the abolition of the individual mandate, we can ensure President Obama’s promise: if you like your health insurance you can keep it.
Letting the states regulate insurance markets may seem inadvisable, given all the mandated benefits the states have piled on commercial insurers in the past. But Obamacare didn’t get rid of any of these. As Austin Frakt has pointed out, Obamacare doesn’t mandate a nationwide benefits package. There are fifty different packages – each one reflecting the mandates in the state where it is offered.
Obamacare then piles on with additional cost-increasing mandates – such as the requirement that questionable preventive procedures be offered without any out-of-pocket payment. Under Obamacare, healthy women are entitled to mammograms free of charge, but a woman with symptoms (who really needs a mammogram) can be forced to pay the full cost. With the Levin/Capretta plan, the states would be free to avoid such nonsense.
The third item is also huge. Because Obamacare conditions its subsidies on income, it raises the marginal tax rate for middle income families by six percentage points and in some cases far more. At 400 percent of poverty, a family can lose more than $10,000 in subsidies if it earns one additional dollar. At other “cliff” points, families can be subjected to thousands of dollars of additional exposure (higher deductibles and copayments) as a result of earning one more dollar. All these perversions vanish if everyone gets the same subsidy regardless of income.
And there is more. If the subsidy doesn’t vary by income, all kinds of technical problems with healthcare.gov would vanish in a heartbeat. If every one of the same age gets the same subsidy, the exchange doesn’t have to check with the IRS to verify income. And next April 15th, there won’t be a plethora of additional taxes and refunds because almost everyone wrongly predicted his income for the previous year. (See “Can Obamacare be Fixed?”)
Sony dropped plans to release “The Interview.”CreditDavid Goldman/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — American officials have concluded that North Korea was “centrally involved” in the hacking of Sony Pictures computers, even as the studio canceled the release of a far-fetched comedy about the assassination of the North’s leader that is believed to have led to the cyberattack.
Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism attack. Sony capitulated after the hackers threatened additional attacks, perhaps on theaters themselves, if the movie, “The Interview,” was released.
Officials said it was not clear how the White House would respond. Some within the Obama administration argue that the government of Kim Jong-un must be confronted directly. But that raises questions of what actions the administration could credibly threaten, or how much evidence to make public without revealing details of how it determined North Korea’s culpability, including the possible penetration of the North’s computer networks.
Other administration officials said a direct confrontation with the North would provide North Korea with the kind of dispute it covets. Japan, where Sony is an iconic corporate name, has argued that a public accusation could interfere with delicate diplomatic negotiations for the return of Japanese citizens kidnapped years ago.
The government is “considering a range of options in weighing a potential response,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.
The administration’s sudden urgency came after a new threat was delivered this week to desktop computers at Sony’s offices, warning that if “The Interview” was released on Dec. 25, “the world will be full of fear.”
“Remember the 11th of September 2001,” it said. “We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.”
Hours before Sony canceled the movie, the four largest theater chains in the United States — Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark andCarmike Cinemas — and several smaller chains said they would not show “The Interview” as a result of the threat. The cancellations virtually killed the movie as a theatrical enterprise, at least in the near term, one of the first known instances of a threat from another nation pre-empting the release of a movie.
While intelligence officials have concluded that the cyberattack was both state-sponsored and far more destructive than any seen before on American soil, there are still differences of opinion over whether North Korea was aided by Sony insiders with knowledge of the company’s computer systems, senior administration officials said.
“This is of a different nature than past attacks,” one official said.
An attack that began by wiping out data on corporate computers — something that had been previously seen in South Korea and Saudi Arabia— had turned “into a threat to the safety of Americans,” the official said. But echoing a statement from the Department of Homeland Security, the official said there was no specific information that an attack was likely.
It is not clear how the United States determined that Mr. Kim’s government had played a central role in the Sony attacks. North Korea’s computer network has been notoriously difficult to infiltrate. But the National Security Agency began a major effort four years ago to penetrate the country’s computer operations, including its elite cyberteam, and to establish “implants” in the country’s networks that, like a radar system, would monitor the development of malware transmitted from the country.
It is hardly a foolproof system. Much of North Korea’s hacking is done from China. And while the attack on Sony used some commonly available cybertools, one intelligence official said, “this was of a sophistication that a year ago we would have said was beyond the North’s capabilities.”
It is rare for the United States to publicly accuse countries suspected of involvement in cyberintrusions. The administration never publicly said who attacked White House and State Department computers over the past two months, or JPMorgan Chase’s systems last summer. Russia is suspected in the first two cases, but there is conflicting evidence in the JPMorgan case.
But there is a long forensic trail involving the Sony hacking, several security researchers said. The attackers used readily available commercial tools to wipe data off Sony’s machines. They also borrowed tools and techniques that had been used in at least two previous attacks, one in Saudi Arabia two years ago — widely attributed to Iran — and another last year in South Koreaaimed at banks and media companies.
The Sony attacks were routed from command-and-control centers across the world, including a convention center in Singapore and Thammasat University in Thailand, the researchers said. But one of those servers, in Bolivia, had been used in limited cyberattacks on South Korean targets two years ago. That suggested that the same group or individuals might have been behind the Sony attack.
The Sony malware shares remarkable similarities with that used in attacks on South Korean banks and broadcasters last year. Those intrusions, which also destroyed data belonging to their victims, are believed to have been the work of a cybercriminal gang known as Dark Seoul. Some experts say they cannot rule out the possibility that the Sony attack was the work of a Dark Seoul copycat, the security researchers said.
Security experts were never able to track down those hackers, though United States officials have long said they believed the attacks emanated from Iran, using tools that are now on the black market.
At Sony, investigators are looking into the possibility that the attackers had inside help. Embedded in the malicious code were the names of Sony servers and administrative credentials that allowed the malware to spread across Sony’s network.
“It’s clear that they already had access to Sony’s network before the attack,” said Jaime Blasco, a researcher at AlienVault, a cybersecurity consulting firm.
What is remarkable in this case is that after three weeks of pressure, the attack forced one of Hollywood’s largest studios and Japan’s most famous companies to surrender.
Many attacks have been aimed at stealing credit card data, like the intrusions on the Home Depot and Target networks — and others at disrupting ATMs. An American and Israeli attack known as Olympic Games that targeted Iran’s nuclear program was a rare attack on infrastructure.
Sony has tried to put the best face on the situation, saying it understood that movie theaters had to be worried about the safety of their customers.
But the precedent set Wednesday could be damaging. Other countries or hacking groups could try similar tactics over movies, books or television broadcasts that they find offensive.
The cost of the assault was small: The attackers used readily available tools to steal data and then wipe it off Sony’s machines. Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said the hackers had “created a backdoor to Sony’s systems” that they repeatedly re-entered to send threatening messages to Sony employees.
The North Koreans have half-denied involvement, but have left open the possibility that the attacks were the “righteous deed of supporters and sympathizers.”
But that leaves open the question of what to do about the Sony attack. The North is under some of the heaviest economic sanctions ever applied. A large-scale American cyberattack would require a presidential order, and Mr. Obama has been hesitant to use the country’s cyberarsenal for fear of retaliation.
As Congress raced to complete work last week on spending measures that would fund the military in 2015, barely a word was said about the most important technology program in the whole defense budget. In fact, there are probably plenty of legislators who have never even heard of it. It’s called the Ohio Replacement Program, and there is a real possibility that at some point later in the century, it will make the difference between whether our Republic lives or dies.
I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. The Ohio Replacement Program was conceived to modernize the sea-based part of the nation’s nuclear force — the only part of that force that is certain to survive if Russia, China or some other major nuclear power launches a surprise attack in, say, 2050. The reason why is that the Navy’s ballistic-missile subs patrol silently beneath the surface of the world’s oceans, where enemies cannot find them; the Air Force’s bombers and silo-based missiles, on the other hand, are in known locations that can be easily targeted.
(Disclosure: Several companies likely to build the Ohio Replacement or provide on-board equipment contribute to my think tank; some are consulting clients.)
Collectively, these three types of long-range nuclear systems are called the nuclear “triad,” and the sole purpose for their existence is to convince potential adversaries that any attempt to launch a nuclear attack against America would be suicidal. But what makes that threat credible is not the number of nuclear weapons America has before an attack occurs; it’s how many survive the attack so they can be used to retaliate against an aggressor. That’s what convinces him not to attack in the first place. Strategists used to call this “the delicate balance of terror,” and it is probably the main reason why Russia and America never fought during the Cold War.
However, the Cold War ended a quarter century ago, and many Americans have stopped thinking about the fact that the U.S. and Russia still have thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at each other — despite Moscow’s best efforts to remind us during the Ukraine crisis (Russia’s strategic rocket forces staged their biggest nuclear exercises in years, showing off just how potent their long-range arsenal remains). With only one in five members of Congress having served in the military and nearly half elected in the 2010 election or later, it’s a safe bet that few legislators are conversant with the requirements of effective nuclear deterrence.
Perhaps that explains why the Ohio Replacement Program — so named because it would replace all 14 of the nation’s Ohio-class ballistic-missile subs — was delayed two years by implementation of the Budget Control Act. The delay was a Navy decision, but one made under duress when Congress imposed spending caps with little thought as to the impact on military readiness or modernization. Now a further delay looms because spending caps slowed development of a nuclear reactor that will power the propulsion system of the future subs. That’s a serious problem, because any further delays in developing an Ohio Replacement would result in numbers dipping below the Navy’s stated requirement for ten operational subs.
I should mention that most of the Navy’s subs do not carry nuclear weapons at all. Instead, they are conventionally armed (but nuclear-powered) attack subs that protect the sea lanes, collect intelligence, and perform various other secret missions. The Virginia class of attack subs currently being built at the rate of two per year is the most versatile undersea warship ever designed, and is constantly being improved with new technology. Ballistic-missile subs, on the other hand, aren’t supposed to be versatile. They’re supposed to be as good as possible at doing one thing: hiding beneath the waves until the fateful day when they must launch retaliation against a nuclear aggressor, and then doing so in a tailored and 100% reliable fashion.
Thousands of Americans took to the streets on Saturday in Washington, New York, and several other cities to protest recent grand jury decisions regarding the deaths of black men at the hands of police officers.
Grand jury decisions in Missouri, regarding the death of Michael Brown, and New York, regarding the death of Eric Garner, have unleashed a torrent of demonstrations across the country and hurled long-simmering tensions over racial injustice and police brutality into the national spotlight.
More than 20 people were arrested in Boston on Saturday, as hundreds gathered around the Massachusetts state capitol amid a heavy police presence. Largely peaceful protests took place in Chicago and Oakland.
The demonstrations were dubbed a “day of resistance”, against what protesters believe is rampant police brutality against people of color, especially young black men.
In New York, thousands marched from Washington Square Park uptown, via 6th Avenue, before turning downtown to progress along Broadway and to NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza. Later, after darkness had fallen, protesters attempted to stop traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.
In Washington, throngs of protesters – black, white, young and old – wound their way down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol on a chilly December day. Among them were around 400 protesters who came by bus from Ferguson, the site of Brown’s death in August and sizeable protests since.
Near the Capitol, the veteran civil rights campaigner Reverend Al Sharpton was joined onstage by relatives of men killed by law enforcement officers.
Those represented by family members included Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old shot who was dead by a white police officer in Ferguson in August; Garner, 43, who was killed in July after a police officer on Staten Island placed him in a banned chokehold; Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old shot dead by police in Cleveland in November; Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old shot dead in Brooklyn last month; Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old shot dead by a neighborhood watch leader in 2012 in Florida; and Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times by New York police officers in 1999.
Police officers scuffle with protestors in Boston, where more than 20 arrests were made.Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
“What a sea of people,” said Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden. As she spoke, people in the crowd shouted: “We love you.”
McSpadden continued: “If they don’t see this and make a change, then I don’t know what we got to do. Thank you for having my back.”
Garner’s family wore sweatshirts which bore the words “I can’t breathe”, the final words the 43-year-old father gasped before his death, which have become a slogan of solidarity used by sports stars, among others.
“This is a history making moment,” said Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr. “It’s just so overwhelming to see all who have come to stand with us. Look at the masses black, white, all races, all religions … we need to stand like this at all times.”
In Oakland, the mother of Oscar Grant, a young black man whose fatal encounter with an transit police officer in 2009 inspired the recent film Fruitvale Station, spoke to a crowd gathered outside the Alameda county court house.
“We want officers to be held accountable for their actions… [to] feel that pain just as we have to feel it,” Wanda Johnson said.
The Oakland march was estimated to be 3,500-strong.
In Washington, Sharpton electrified a larger audience, as he has done many times this year at funerals and protests.
“We don’t come to Washington as shooters and chokers,” he shouted. “We come as the shot and the choked, asking you to help deal with the American citizens who can’t breathe in their own communities.
Reverend Al Sharpton and Lesley McSpadden, mother of Ferguson shooting victim Michael Brown, lead the “Justice For All” march in Washington.Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
“This is not a black march or a white march,” he added. “This is an American march.”
Sharpton is urging legislative action that would allow the federal government to intervene in investigations of officer-involved shootings. He warned members of Congress to “beware” because the protesters “are serious”. “When you get a ring-ding on Christmas, it might not be Santa,” he said. “It may be Rev Al coming to your house.”
Among the throng listening intently to the speakers was Tiffany Proctor and her two young sons, Ahmir, 8, and Ahmar, 10. Despite the cold, Proctor told the Guardian she wanted her sons to witness the protest.
“These are my future,” Proctor said, placing her hands on her sons’ shoulders. “And this is their future. The way things are going – it isn’t right.”
“It’s sad that there’s racism,” Ahmar said quietly.
The family had made signs to carry at the protests. Each boy had traced his small hands on his poster and written: “Don’t shoot me.”
Throughout the New York march, demonstrators chanted: “Eric Garner, Michael Brown. Shut it down. Shut it down.”
Protesters march in New York, carrying signs making up the eyes of Eric Garner.Photograph: Zuma/Rex
Protesters leading the way carried signs that combined to display Eric Garner’s eyes. Estimates of the size of the crowd varied widely, between 10,000 and 50,000. Before the protest reached the Brooklyn Bridge police, who did not offer a crowd figure, said no arrests had been made.
Four young boys carrying signs that said “Stop the racist killer cops!” told the Guardian they decided to join the protest after hearing that fellow students in Brooklyn had been arrested during a earlier protest in Times Square.
“We’re hear marching for justice,” Gilead, 13, told the Guardian. Eli, 13, added: “What’s happening is not right.”
WASHINGTON — Less than a month after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) landed a new Senate leadership position, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and President Barack Obama risked a fight with her over government subsidies for risky Wall Street derivatives trading.
They won the near-term policy fight: After a bruising bicameral battle, the House of Representatives narrowly approved an annual spending bill that granted taxpayer support for the risky financial contracts at the heart of the 2008 meltdown.
But the bitter feud left Reid and Obama politically embarrassed, while consolidating a burgeoning populist movement within the Democratic Party that highlighted Warren’s influence in wings of the Capitol far removed from her perch on the Senate Banking Committee. It also forced Obama and a host of Democratic leaders into the crosshairs of a critique Warren typically levels at Republicans: that powerful people in Washington are rigging the system to help Wall Street at the expense of the middle class.
Hours after declaring White House support for the package, Obama was forced to send Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to the Hill to round up votes — a public admission that the president’s party wasn’t taking marching orders from him. By the end of the night, Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, were all whipping members to support the package — a tremendously damaging scenario for Obama’s stature with the Democratic electoral base. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her allies, meanwhile, played the role of underdog, digging in for a Tim Howard-esque performance that emboldened progressives, even in defeat.
“I’m proud that I voted no,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told HuffPost. “The fight was clearly good for morale.”
Democrats were unhappy with several aspects of the funding bill. The legislation cuts Pell Grant funding for low-income college students, legalizes benefit cuts for pensioners who used to work for the government, attempts to curb access to abortion, and defunds the legalization of marijuana in the District of Columbia.
Those are all familiar issues for political junkies. And as with most political issues, you probably could predict how a card-carrying Democrat almost anywhere in the country would feel about them.
But House Democrats didn’t fight on the obvious stuff. They made their stand on a complex Wall Street regulation that most of the Beltway political media had never heard of before Warren started holding press conferences on Tuesday.
And the same week, a host of Senate Democrats voiced their opposition to Obama Treasury nominee Antonio Weiss — a Wall Street merger expert who helped orchestrate the Burger King deal with Canadian restaurant chain Tim Horton’s that would help Burger King duck U.S. taxes. Warren has been campaigning against the Weiss nomination, arguing that elite financiers already exercise too much influence over the administration’s economic policy decisions.
The banking slugfest isn’t a run-of-the-mill policy dispute for Democrats. The central policy struggle within the Democratic Party over the last four years has been about its relationship with Wall Street. President Bill Clinton made nice with the financial industry by slashing capital gains taxes, shattering the Glass-Steagall separation between traditional lending and risky securities trading and, of course, deregulating derivatives. And for years, the party was happy to take Wall Street campaign cash and use it to implement other policy priorities.
The financial crisis of 2008 changed all of that (it also created the tea party and empowered the GOP’s anti-crony capitalist movement). The wreckage the Great Recession inflicted on American families — particularly Democratic constituencies like the young, the poor and people of color — forced many to question the price of their faustian bargain.
Obama’s generally Wall Street-friendly economic team and the necessities of campaign finance politics in the Citizens United era obscured the unrest for a long time. Well into 2014, a common tactic for otherwise hardline progressives was to go easy on big banks. As HuffPost reported this summer in a joint project with The New Republic, even left-wing stalwarts like Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) were routinelypartnering with big banks to roll back parts of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.
Those days appear to be gone. Moore was whipping “no” votes with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) late into Thursday evening in an impromptu war room Waters set up in her own office. Leading members of both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus crammed for space, making calls and counting votes.
“We agreed with the Leader and Rep. Waters,” said Moore spokesman Eric Harris. “We had a very large presence in a very crowded room.”
Both Harris and Ellison cited broad discontent with the bill. But Ellison emphasized that many members might have signed off on GOP cuts to Democratic programs if they were better than what his caucus could expect next year under a Republican-controlled Senate and a broader House GOP majority. But they weren’t willing to subsidize Wall Street in the same package.
“The last election, the problem is that voters believe we’re all in on this cabal together, and nobody’s thinking about their families,” Ellison said. “The minimum wage is winning all over the country at state and municipal levels but Democrats still got shellacked in the midterms. People have separated Dems from the minimum wage. [Members of Congress] won’t let [themselves] be painted in a way that is pro-Wall Street and anti-middle class.”
Warren’s influence over the fight obscures her office’s initial fumbling of the issue. After HuffPost first reported last week that the swaps issue was taking a central role in talks, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) organized a letter to Reid and Boehner objecting to the provision, and Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) signed on. Noticeably absent: Warren, Brown’s Banking Committee colleague.
The swaps provision was still included in the package by Tuesday, and when Warren jumped into the fray, progressive bedlam broke out within the House caucus.
“The two people who led us most clearly were two great women, Maxine Waters and Sen. Elizabeth Warren,” Ellison said. “They had a lot of support.”
Pelosi gave Waters political cover by decrying the White House position on the House floor — she called it Wall Street “blackmail” — but the main whip effort was actually a Waters operation, with help from Warren. Pelosi did not formally demand that her caucus vote against the spending package, opting instead for the softer organizational route of publicly trashing Obama and the bill while allowing her colleagues to vote as they chose.
They almost pulled off an upset, but Waters said the joint efforts of Obama and Dimon peeled off enough of her supporters to pass the bill.
“I think we got hurt when Jamie Dimon and the president started to whip,” Waterstold reporters Thursday night, according to The Hill. “That’s when I think we lost some votes.”
The Drama Queens (and Kings) at your office need to be the center of attention. They’re provocative, emotional and reactive. And they are highly skilled at getting everyone around them worked-up, frazzled and emotional (that’s how they stay at the center of attention).
So you’re going to manage them by doing the opposite (i.e. you’re going to be calm, cool and Factual).
Now, before I can teach you exactly what to say to those Drama Queens/Kings, I need to explain a little more about how to be Factual.
There are basically three lenses through which we see the world: Facts, Interpretations and Reactions. Facts are observable and objective reality (they could be videotaped and measured and transcribed). If you hear a rustling in the bushes outside your window, it’s just a pattern of sound waves that could be recorded. It’s not necessarily a monster coming to eat you or some squirrels running around, it’s just a noise.
But, the human brain doesn’t like to be so dispassionate about that noise; our brains like to “interpret” that factual thing. So an Interpretation is when we take that Fact and give it some extra meaning. If you just watched a horror movie, that rustling in the bushes probably gets interpreted as a scary alien clown coming to eat your brain. If you’re a bird watcher, that rustling could be a red-tailed swallow finch (or whatever).
The final lens is Reaction. This is where we have an emotional response to our Interpretation. If I interpret the noise as a brain-eating clown, my reaction is fear. If it’s a rare bird, I get excited.
So just remember: we observe a Fact, we make an Interpretation about it, and then we have an emotional Reaction.
Now here’s why you need to know all this: Drama Queens/Kings want you to live in the world of Reactions (they love emotions, especially when they’re intense and scary). And they get you worked-up and emotional by distorting your Interpretations. So this means that your solution is going to be focusing on Facts. (And specifically, you’ll be using a tool called Redirection to push them back to Facts).
Here’s an example…
Imagine the Drama Queen/King comes into your office because there was a leak in the roof. So they dramatically say “You know you don’t know what it was like. It was horrible there was a torrent of water and all of a sudden everything was coming through. I thought I was going to die it was unbelievable. We should evacuate the whole building and everybody should know. It should be condemned…”
Now, that’s a lot of Reaction and Interpretation. So we’re going to redirect the conversation an say something like “I hear you feel frightened by this but I need to know what the facts were. Tell me about the facts of what happened.”
They’ll probably resist you and say “Oh it was just awful. I mean you can’t even imagine it was just it was so scary.”
So you repeat yourself and say “Listen, I hear you feel frightened by this, but right now, I need to know what the facts were.” Of course, there is a limit as to how many times you repeat yourself, so you can set a limit like “I’ve only got 5-minutes, so just give me the Facts.”
So your 4 words are very simple: Just the Facts please. If you get sucked into Interpretations and Reactions, you’re sunk. But if you stay with Facts, you’ll find that Drama Queens/Kings start to become a lot less dramatic (because they know they can’t manipulate you).
Mark Murphy is the founder of Leadership IQ, keynote speaker, leadership researcher, and developer of the online “Science of Leadership Academy.” Mark is the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller “Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More.” And his prior book, “Hiring for Attitude,” was chosen as a top business book by CNBC.
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