Our Institutions

have become the enemy.

Ran across this post by Andrew Sullivan that stopped me cold this morning:

In an unprecedented move, the University of Akron is requiring that new employees should be willing to give their DNA to administrators. One adjunct faculty member has already quit over the issue.

WTF?

From CBS News:

The new policy, which says a "DNA sample for purpose of a federal criminal background check" may be collected, took the campus by surprise after it was announced last week. An adjunct faculty member has resigned in protest and is contemplating a lawsuit, and the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors says that genetic testing violates a collective bargaining agreement.

"At any number of levels, it's alarming," says Stephen Aby, a professor of bibliography who is the past president of Akron's AAUP chapter. "It's awfully broad. It gives them the discretion to do fingerprinting or DNA testing as they see fit."

Adopting the policy, which the university's board of trustees did in time for the fall semester, appears to violate a federal law that takes effect on November 21 called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, better known as GINA. It also could conflict with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

"GINA clearly prohibits the collection of a DNA sample from employees or prospective employees by the University of Akron," says Susannah Baruch, an attorney and consultant for Johns Hopkins University's Genetics and Public Policy Center. "One of the primary targets for GINA was employers collecting genetic information from employers and using it to make decisions about hiring and firing and promotions. It's that kind of discrimination that GINA was designed to prohibit."

Read the article -- it's pretty good.

And the University of Akron adds itself to the list of institutions that are grossly overreaching what's permissible. It's a list headed, of course, by our government(s), which have always tried to encroach on our privacy and show no signs of stopping anytime soon. Aside from the newly entrenched and very broad executive powers openly flaunted by Bush II and how carefully nurtured by Obama, think about those surveillance cameras on street corners, which the British have taken the lead in and now find completely useless -- they don't deter crime, and at the very best they might -- might -- enable the police to figure out who did it. (We have them in Chicago, too. Total waste of money, but then, that's what our city does best.)

And then you get some repellent asshole like Glenn Beck in on the action. Here's his take on net neutrality, courtesy of Phil Kerpen, another corporate shill:

In a segment featuring Kerpen last night, Beck warned his audience that the Obama administration “just might be trying to take over the media.” “This is a big week, isn’t it, for freedom of speech?” Beck asked Kerpen, who said that it was because “the FCC on Thursday is going to decide what the future of the Internet looks like”:

KERPEN: It is a very big week because the FCC on Thursday is going to decide what the future of the Internet looks like, if it looks much like the past 10 years where you have private competition and pretty much people can do what they want on the Internet or whether we have a much, much heavier government hand. And they’re going to take the first step on that Thursday.

BECK: OK. I want to start just real quick – Net neutrality, because it happens on Thursday. This is that everybody should have free Internet, right?

KERPEN: Well, essentially. You know, they dress it up the way they dress up a lot of their things. They turn it upside-down by saying that evil corporations, phone and cable corporations are going to block what we can do block or we can say.

First, get a load of Beck's understanding of "net neutrality." Free Internet? I wish. Try "free access," Glenn. And Kerpen is a bald-faced liar -- as the article points out, "evil" corporations have already tried to do that:

In fact, in 2007 it was revealed that Comcast had disrupted peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on its network, leading to an FCC investigation. There was also an incident where “Verizon Wireless denied Naral Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group, access when the group asked to the carrier to allow Verizon customers to sign up for text-messaging alerts.”

Both of which actions were and still are flatly illegal. What Beck and Kerpen are after is a teabagger rebellion in favor of the telecoms, so that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon get to decide what you can watch online.

(Glenn Beck, in case you were wondering, turns my stomach. Literally.)

Can we talk about defense spending? Get this:

House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July.

Don't expect major shake-ups from the House ethics committee. Ain't gonna happen unless someone outside the club makes a huge stink.

It's not just defense contractors. A few choice senators -- Blanche Lincoln, Max Baucus, and Ben Nelson among them -- have raked in millions from the insurance lobby. With this context, is it any wonder that the insurance industry is controlling the development of health-care reform?

And it's everything -- even our cell phone services cost more and work worse than anyone else's. From Barbara O'Brien:

Last August the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) came out with a survey showing that Americans pay way more for cell phone service than just about anyone else. To which Cactus at Angry Bear responded, sarcastically, that this means the U.S. must have the best cell phone service in the world.

I’m just now catching up to this, but I think Cactus could have taken the analogy further.

In the early 1980s, most European countries decided to adopt a uniform GSM system for cell phone service, so that any cell phone would work anywhere in those countries on the same network. Today this GSM system is the most popular standard for cell phones in the world, used by 80 percent of the world’s cell phone users in at least 100 countries.

And then there is the U.S. Our Congress didn’t want to adopt standards — that would be government regulation, you know, which is bad — so it let the free market come up with our standards. So we have a tangled mess of private and incompatible digital networks, and cell phones that don’t work anywhere but here, if then.

This is probably one reason I haven't been posting much lately (aside from the aftermath of the Virus Formerly Known As "Flu"). I look at the news, and it's all one story: our government, our corporations, our representatives are all screwing us over -- and the appalling part is, they're not being consciously evil. This is just business as usual.

I got a clue for you: yes, Western civilization is going down the tubes, most likely, but it ain't me and mine doing it. It's General Electric and Boeing.