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In a 2011
profile about California’s ongoing fiscal mess, Vanity
Fair interviewed San Jose’s then-Mayor Chuck Reed, a
progressive Democrat who has for years been warning about coming
cuts in public services if the state’s pension systems don’t get
benefit levels under control. Reed did the math and the picture
wasn’t pretty. “By 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million
people, the 10th-largest city in the United States, would be
serviced by 1,600 public workers,” according to the piece. “The
problem was going to grow worse until, as he put it, ‘you get to
one.’ A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with
a focus on paying pensions.” But while San Jose and other cities
will never literally reach a single employee who sits in the room
mailing out pension checks, the trajectory is headed in that
troubling direction. Now, writes Steven Greenhut, even the
California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s
largest pension fund and one of the state’s most adamant opponents
of pension reform, released a report in November that
bolster’s Reed’s case.

View this article.

We live in an time of two-way
surveillance. On one hand, governments and other powerful
institutions can track us more closely than ever before. On the
other hand, ordinary civilians can
pull out a cell phone and start recording if they see a cop or
some other official doing something abusive, irresponsible, or just
embarrassing.

We all know that. But there was a time when hardly anyone saw
such a future coming. Four
decades ago, it was widely assumed that new surveillance
technologies would serve only the state and the corporate world.
The idea that ordinary people might point a lens back at the
powerful didn’t really take hold until a witness with a
camcorder recorded
the beating of Rodney King in 1991.

Yet that wasn’t the first time a man with a camera was at the
right place to tape some cops who’d gotten out of control. If you
were attentive enough, you could see the outlines of the new era
taking shape even before King came along. Two years
earlier, for example, in Cerritos, California,

a bridal shower at the home of the Dole family, natives
of Samoa, apparently attained a level of festivity that provoked
the interest of the sheriff’s department. In all, according to
accounts in the Los Angeles Times, about 100 officers from
three law enforcement agencies showed up for the event, bringing
with them a helicopter whose noise and blinding searchlights
reportedly added to the confusion.

The police said that they were pelted with rocks and beer bottles.
Neighbors and party guests said the cops initiated the violence in
which 34 persons were arrested and an undetermined number
injured.

A cam-equipped neighbor decided to unobtrusively tape what he could
of the scene. He got shots of an officer beating people on the
ground who, it appeared, were already restrained. Dismissing the
images on the tape, the sheriff said, “It would be unusual to use a
baton if they were handcuffed.”

Unusual or not, local newscasts gave their viewers a picture of the
law in action somewhat different from the one the police would
prefer to project.

The story ultimately ended with what the Los Angeles
Times called
“the largest civil rights damage award against police in California
history.” Here’s a news report that includes some of the neighbor’s
footage, starting about 48 seconds in:

The Dole family didn’t come first either. A year before police
attacked their home, two men carrying cameras—Clayton Patterson and
Paul Garrin—happened to be on the scene during the
Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988, when squatters and cops
clashed over control of a park in Manhattan. When officers started
clubbing bystanders and otherwise trampling people’s rights, there
was videotape to back up the victims’ complaints. In one meta
moment, Patterson got footage of the police smashing Garrin into
the wall.

There may well be even earlier examples. But it’s the events in
Cerritos and in Tompkins Square Park that were cited in a prescient
piece Peter Karman wrote for the leftist paper In
These Times. (That’s where that passage I quoted about the
Dole party came from.) The article was titled “Little Brother Is
Watching Too”—in those days, that headline wasn’t
a cliché yet—and it appeared in 1989, long before the world had
heard the name Rodney King.

Citing a variety of examples—not just camcorders but radar
detectors and the tools used by hackers—Karman argued that the
surveillance state was being turned upside down. He also noted the
central role that market forces were playing in this
transformation, though he phrased this in a way calibrated to
appeal to In These Times‘ socialist audience: “owing to
the treasonous nature of modern capitalism,” he wrote, “the same
corporations selling the tools of social control to Big Brother
were happily adding to their profits by selling their antidotes to
little brother.”

Later in the article, he extended the point:

The videocams with which Patterson and the Cerritos
resident caught the police at their worst first began to bloom
years ago in parking lots, lobbies, workplaces and,
surreptitiously, in the ceilings of those blank motel rooms to
which undercover cops bring the subjects of stings. Banks of
monitors showing bare corridors and newscasts of time-signed scenes
of politicians stuffing money into briefcases became commonplaces
of our visual landscape. We also knew, of course, that we were
being watched on the job—but knew, too, that we would probably bore
our surveyors to death before giving their tape machines anything
to pop their heads about.

Commercially speaking, there were only so many hallways, washrooms
and cops that could be mounted with videos. Real profit lay in
putting a videocam to the eyeball of every tourist, nostalgist or
artist—in short, just about everyone. Once that happened, the
technological tables again turned on Big Brother.

Today millions of Americans carry pocket-sized devices that can
not just record the police but can transmit their footage to the
world. In the future, those tools will be even smaller and more
ubiquitous. (If Google Glass–style
technologies catch on with the wider public, Karman’s line about
“putting a videocam to the eyeball” may prove even more prophetic
than it looks now.) And just about everyone understands this. What
was a counterintuitive thesis in 1989 is now the conventional
wisdom. It’s reached the point where some anti-authoritarians have
had to start issuing
reminders that these technologies can still be used by powerful
people too.

But there was a time when most people didn’t realize that anyone
but the powerful could deploy this tech. Kudos to Karman
for seeing so early that the future would be more complicated than
that.

(For some of Patterson’s footage from the Tompkins Square
Riot, go here.
For some of Garrin’s footage, go here. For past
editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

Remy helps the
Stand with Hillary super PAC come up with a new music
video.

“Stand with Hillary: Part 2 (Arkansas Badonkadonk)” is the
latest from Reason TV. Watch above or click the link below for full
lyrics, downloadable versions, and more.

View this article.

In sworn congressional testimony on
Tuesday, MIT economist and Obamacare architect
repeatedly refused to immediately provide details of the contracts,
payments, and work he’d produced as a health law consultant to
multiple states and the federal government. Reports suggest that
Gruber has received millions of dollars for his work over the
years.

Gruber did not submit the standard disclosure form before his
testimony. (Gruber said that he had been advised by his lawyer that
the alternative disclosure he submitted was in compliance with
committee requirements.) He said that he had received nearly
$400,000 for his work modeling the effects of Obamacare for the
federal government, a number that has been widely reported, but
when asked for additional information, he repeatedly
told members of the House Oversight Committee that they could
take it up with his lawyer. He was warned that if he continued to
respond that way, the work would be subpoenaed. 

As of this morning, Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa
(R-Ca.) has followed through with a formal request for the
documents. According to a press release, the
request covers… 

1. All documents and communications to or from any federal,
state, or local government employee, including, but not limited to,
any document or communication referring or relating to the
Affordable Care Act or federal and state health care exchanges.

2. All documents and communications referring or relating to
funding, for research or otherwise, from any federal, state, or
local government agency, including, but not limited to, any
contract(s) with a federal, state, or local government agency.

3. All documents and communications referring or relating to
work product produced to any federal, state, or local government
agency, for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the results
of any and all economic models or simulations.

One thing to be on the lookout for when this comes through:
Gruber’s estimate of how many people would lose their existing
insurance under Obamacare.

Gruber admitted during questioning that his econometric model,
created for use by the administration and congressional staff
drafting the law, estimated that some Americans would not be able
to keep their existing health plans, but he wouldn’t say how many.
Shouldn’t that mean that Gruber knew that administration’s repeated
promises that those who like their health plans could keep their
plans under the law weren’t true?

Gruber was asked about the promise, and tried to dodge the
question by saying that he was not a political adviser. But
eventually he explained how he understood the president’s promise.
“I interpreted the administration’s comments as saying that for the
vast majority of Americans the law would not affect the productive
health insurance arrangements that they have,” he said. “I did not
see a problem with the administration’s statement.”

Of course he didn’t. Gruber is, after all, someone who
argued that “lack of transparency” was key to passing the
health law. Gruber wanted the law to pass, and so despite knowing
that the administration’s statement was inaccurate, he did not see
it as a problem. 

Debra Jean Milke has been fighting for
decades a capital conviction in Arizona for allegedly arranging the
murder of her 4-year-old son in 1989. The conviction was based
almost entirely on the testimony of Phoenix Det. Armando Saldate,
who claimed she confessed in an interview. The interview was not
recorded, and she insisted she did not confess.

Saldate also had lengthy history of misconduct and lying under
oath that had been concealed from the defense. His behavior had
resulted in judges tossing out confessions or indictments in four
previous cases. Milke’s conviction was tossed out a year ago by the
U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit. Maricopa County Attorney Bill
Montgomery attempted to get Milke retried. On Thursday the Arizona
Court of Appeals
ordered the charges dismissed with prejudice, citing “egregious
prosecutorial misconduct.” Montgomery said he will appeal this
ruling to the state’s Supreme Court.

The 2013 dismissal, written by 9th Circuit Chief Judge Alex
Kozinksi, actually spent several pages documenting all the
misconduct claims against Saldate, including “taking liberties”
with a woman he had pulled over for a faulty taillight and then
lying to investigators about it. He was suspended for five days for
that incident. You can read the
court’s ruling here (pdf). Saldate subsequently invoked his
Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself in order to not
testify in Milke’s case. Two other men (one Milke’s former
roommate) have been convicted and are on death row.

Hat tip to Ken White of Popehat, who also posted about the case
last year here
and uploaded the court decision.