WHAT IS IT YOU DO?

A while ago, I suggested that a good exercise or project for high school students was to identify those individuals in their communities who held power. I went on to suggest a method to do this and an initial inquiry into where these individuals worked and lived. I cautioned that students not be too aggressive in finding this information and that they should depend on publicly available sources. The main idea of this second phase of the project was to look into how much these powerful people actually mix with other segments of the community, especially with those who are lacking in advantages – the poorer segment of the local population. In this posting, I want to suggest a further step in this inquiry: devising questions that could be used in interviewing the powerful.

Again, this methodology is suggested by an old study: Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers by Floyd Hunter.¹ The next apparent step in Hunter's study was to formulate questions that would be part of a survey to be administered to the forty identified powerful members of the community he called Regional City. Hunter's account of the interviews does not contain the questionnaire, but from the type of information the study reveals, I have devised a set of questions – at least initial questions – that seem to have been asked of these people. I will list these questions in no particular order, but I will advise any teacher who wants to pursue this type of assignment that the overall aims are to see how the individuals saw their good fortune, how their success reflects a system that provides equal opportunity, how the individuals are using their good fortune to promote equal opportunities for other members of the community, what kinds of experiences – particularly reflecting their own efforts – seem to aid one in becoming powerful, and how conscious the powerful are of how dependent they are on communal resources to advance their careers.

Of course, the tone of the interview should be complimentary of these individuals' positions and accomplishments. It should avoid in any way reflecting jealousy, rancor, an accusatory tone, or negativity. I would suggest the general approach can be to communicate a purpose for the interview; that is, to share with students those qualities useful in attaining success – students would benefit from such insights. This positive demeanor need not be devious or untruthful. In the process of obtaining and reporting this information, one can report, as context, the true conditions that lead to advancement and an honest account of how likely it is for any particular, hard working person to eventually meet this type of success. I believe that educating young people as to these matters is a very responsible thing to do. It is responsible in terms of students' personal interests and in terms of educating students as to the true level of equality that exists in their community.

Naturally, what I am proposing is just a suggestion, but I want to emphasize that these questions are listed here only to spur in teachers or a class of students ideas that can serve as a starting point. Students should be totally free to take them and change them in any way they might feel would be suitable given the aims the teacher offers to guide their efforts. Here is the list:

• With what business are you employed?
• What is your role in that business? Generally describe your duties.
• With what other businesses are you or your business linked or associated?
• With what associations – such as professional or communal – are you or your business engaged?
• What are your roles in those associations?
• How would you describe your role or activities in advancing community interests?
• How many jobs does your business provide?
• How would you describe these jobs – in terms of actual duties, skills, pay, and the like?
• How would you describe your role concerning civic affairs?
• How would you describe your rise within your business – in terms of time, experiences, level of effort and difficulty, and the like?
• What previous jobs did you hold before coming to the present business or employer you presently have?
• Do you have any family members employed by your business – now and before you took on the top position of leadership?
• How does your business, your industry, your community, the nation promote leadership?
• Are these methods of promoting leadership effective? If yes, how? If not, in what ways are these methods deficient?
• Given a position of leadership, as the one you hold, what are the moral responsibilities of a person holding such a position to the welfare of a community? Please expand.
• To prepare for a position such as the one you hold, what type of educational experiences are essential? Which are, if not essential, useful? Which are, if not essential or useful, a waste of time?
• Given all the factors that affect you and your business, what is right with your community, with the region where your business is located, with the nation, with the world?
• Given all the factors that affect you and your business, what is wrong with your community, with the region where your business is located, with the nation, with the world?
• If you were asked to account for your success, what percentage would you say was due to your effort (hard work) and what percentage was due to good fortune? Please explain.

In regard to these kinds of questions, I will share with you, in some future posting, what Hunter found out about the leaders he studied. While his study is now dated, it would be interesting to compare what business and other community leaders say today with what their counterparts reported over a half century ago. Also, it would be interesting for the students, before administering the survey, to answer the questions as they believe an ideal powerful person should answer them. They can then compare their version of the ideal with the reality that exists in their community.

1Hunter, F. (1953). Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

PRIVATE EYES ARE LOOKING

What value does privacy have for us? Given the recent uproar over the revelations regarding the methods used by the National Security Agency (NSA) in gathering information on the communication activities of Americans, one can assume quite a bit. The idea of government having access to our phone calls, emails, other social media use, and the like makes us very uneasy. We know that the history of totalitarian regimes and their reliance on gathering such information lend to our imaginations of government overcoming our liberties – and rightly so. After all, the founding generation had such concerns, one, from our experiences under British rule and, two, from concerns that a newly formed central government could exert such power over our recently gained freedoms. So concerned were they that the political process produced and ratified the Fourth Amendment. That bit of constitutional law protects against government unreasonably searching and seizing our things, including our papers and other information without a warrant. My purpose here is not to review or comment on this NSA scandal, but to suggest that if all this is troubling, we might want to give some very serious attention to what the private sector is able to acquire in terms of our personal information.

I want to review some of these capacities – relying on Amitai Etzioni's account¹ – of how private corporate entities, often in conjunction with government and sometimes not, have magnified the ability to gather a great deal of information about us. Never mind that the Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (1994) requires that telecommunication businesses build in capacities for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to have the ability to perform wiretaps. Private corporations, for their own uses, have developed and expanded their abilities to gather information on us. Seemingly, their purposes are limited to marketing aims, but the potential is chilling. Someone is keeping track of what you buy on the Internet, whom and how often you email, what you watch on cable, where and when you go about town or wherever else, your net worth, your real estate holdings, social security numbers, where you live and where you've lived, phone numbers, fax numbers, neighbors' names, and on and on. A lot of this information is in the public domain, but some is not, and these businesses that make it their business to know about you are using more and more sophisticated technologies to do their work. Here is Etzioni's summary of these efforts:

In short, corporations do almost everything that the federal government has been banned from doing under various laws … . [O]ne must note, first of all, that the violation of privacy by private agents often has the same effects as identical violations committed by government agents. Thus, when gay people who seek to keep their sexual orientation private are “outed” by the media, or banks call in loans of those they find out have cancer, or employers refuse to hire people because they find out about their political or religious views, privacy is violated in a manner about as consequential as if the same violations had been carried out by a government agency.²

All of these potential abuses – chilling just in terms of their possible eventuality – could dampen our liberty in very real ways. And before you think that all of this is limited to private entities, remember that all of this information is available to government.

It's not as if we haven't had presidents who formed lists of enemies and attempted to circumvent constitutional safeguards in order to discredit and intimidate opponents of their policy aims. Oh! I know a plot for a political thriller: devotees of Richard Nixon gather DNA from some old hairbrush of the former president and clone a slew of humans with this DNA so they can grow up to be the former president's genetic copies. Eventually, one is bound to become a future president and accomplish what Nixon tried to do. The only thing is, in the future this Nixon will have much more advanced technology and a stored bank of information that private corporations have already accumulated. We can call the thriller, Boys from Silicon Valley.³ Oh, that's right; the plot has already been used.

Let me share two businesses Etzioni identifies as particular firms that are doing quite a bit of gathering and have contracts with government agencies in which they share a cache of information. There is Choicepoint – 35 government contracts including with the Justice Department – and SeisInt – gathering criminal records, SSNs, bankruptcy information, property ownership, family names, credit, and other information.

Of course, such activities are an affront to the natural rights view of government. In terms of this construct's concern over private businesses gathering such information, this construct is not so clear. After all, what these businesses do, as long as laws are not broken, might not be really interfering with others' rights. If you come to the conclusion that such gathering is what someone wants to do, then others can be free to protect that information from being detected. Don't use social media, don't write emails, don't watch cable TV, don't go on the Internet, don't make a call on your phone, don't own a cell phone, don't live a modern life. A federalist concern transcends this view. The mere fact that if a person's individual ability to freely and in a non-threatened way participate in the political process is limited in any way, then federalist thinking is concerned with such a development. Such an eventuality diminishes the ability of people to be federated with each other. And this concern can be what a civics class can use to address this whole area of invading a person's privacy.

1Etzioni, A. (2013). The bankruptcy of liberalism and conservatism. Political Science Quarterly, 128 (1), pp. 39-65.

2Ibid., p. 50.

3For the sake of the younger readers of this blog, Boys from Brazil (1978) is a film starring Gregory Peck and Lawrence Olivier. The plot idea in the text is borrowed from this film.