NEWS2U Articles & CommentsCritical Reporting

2012-01-30T07:41:00.000-05:00

A Crisis in Two Narratives

By Raghuram Rajan
NationofChange.org
Jan. 29, 2012

With the world’s industrial democracies in crisis, two competing narratives of its sources – and appropriate remedies – are emerging. The first, better-known diagnosis is that demand has collapsed because of high debt accumulated prior to the crisis. Households (and countries) that were most prone to spend cannot borrow any more. To revive growth, others must be encouraged to spend – governments that can still borrow should run larger deficits, and rock-bottom interest rates should discourage thrifty households from saving.

Under these circumstances, budgetary recklessness is a virtue, at least in the short term. In the medium term, once growth revives, debt can be paid down and the financial sector curbed so that it does not inflict another crisis on the world.

This narrative – the standard Keynesian line, modified for a debt crisis – is the one to which most government officials, central bankers, and Wall Street economists have subscribed, and needs little elaboration. Its virtue is that it gives policymakers something clear to do, with promised returns that match the political cycle. Unfortunately, despite past stimulus, growth is still tepid, and it is increasingly difficult to find sensible new spending that can pay off in the short run.

Attention is therefore shifting to the second narrative, which suggests that the advanced economies’ fundamental capacity to grow by making useful things has been declining for decades, a trend that was masked by debt-fueled spending. More such spending will not return these countries to a sustainable growth path. Instead, they must improve the environment for growth.

The second narrative starts with the 1950’s and 1960’s, an era of rapid growth in the West and Japan. Several factors, including post-war reconstruction, the resurgence of trade after the protectionist 1930’s, the introduction of new technologies in power, transport, and communications across countries, and expansion of educational attainment, underpinned the long boom. But, as Tyler Cowen has argued in his book The Great Stagnation, once these “low-hanging fruit” were plucked, it became much harder to propel growth from the 1970’s onward.

Meanwhile, as Wolfgang Streeck writes persuasively in New Left Review, democratic governments, facing what seemed, in the 1960’s, like an endless vista of innovation and growth, were quick to expand the welfare state. But, when growth faltered, this meant that government spending expanded, even as its resources shrank. For a while, central banks accommodated that spending. The resulting high inflation created widespread discontent, especially because little growth resulted. Faith in Keynesian stimulus diminished, though high inflation did reduce public-debt levels.

Central banks then began to focus on low and stable inflation as their primary objective, and became more independent from their political masters. But deficit spending by governments continued apace, and public debt as a share of GDP in industrial countries climbed steadily from the late 1970’s, this time without inflation to reduce its real value.

Recognizing the need to find new sources of growth, towards the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and then under Ronald Reagan, the United States deregulated industry and the financial sector, as did Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Productivity growth increased substantially in these countries over time, which persuaded Continental Europe to adopt reforms of its own, often pushed by the European Commission.

Yet even this growth was not enough, given previous governments’ generous promises of health care and pensions – promises made even less tenable by rising life expectancy and falling birth rates. Public debt continued to grow. And the incomes of the moderately educated middle class failed to benefit from deregulation-led growth (though it improved their lot as consumers).

The most recent phase of the advanced economies’ frenzied search for growth took different forms. In some countries, most notably the US, a private-sector credit boom created jobs in low-skilled industries like construction, and precipitated a consumption boom as people borrowed against overvalued houses. In other countries, like Greece, as well as under regional administrations in Italy and Spain, a government-led hiring spree created secure jobs for the moderately educated.

In this “fundamental” narrative, the advanced countries’ pre-crisis GDP was unsustainable, bolstered by borrowing and unproductive make-work jobs. More borrowed growth – the Keynesian formula – may create the illusion of normalcy, and may be useful in the immediate aftermath of a deep crisis to calm a panic, but it is no solution to a fundamental growth problem.

If this diagnosis is correct, advanced countries need to focus on reviving innovation and productivity growth over the medium term, and on realigning welfare promises with revenue capacity, while alleviating the pain of the truly destitute in the short run. For example, Southern Europe’s growth potential may consist in deregulating service sectors and reducing employment protection to spur creation of more private-sector jobs for retrenched government workers and unemployed youth.

In the US, the imperative is to improve the match between potential jobs and worker skills. People understand better than the government what they need and are acting accordingly. Many women, for example, are leaving low-paying jobs to acquire skills that will open doors to higher-paying positions. Too little government attention has been focused on such issues, partly because payoffs occur beyond electoral horizons, and partly because the effectiveness of government programs has been mixed. Tax reform, however, can provide spur retraining and maintain incentives to work, even while fixing gaping fiscal holes.

Three powerful forces, one hopes, will help to create more productive jobs in the future: better use of information and communications technology (and new ways to make it pay), lower-cost energy as alternative sources are harnessed, and sharply rising demand in emerging markets for higher-value-added goods.

The advanced countries have a choice. They can act as if all is well, except that their consumers are in a funk, and that “animal spirits” must be revived through stimulus. Or they can treat the crisis as a wake-up call to fix what debt has papered over in the last few decades. For better or worse, the narrative that persuades these countries’ governments and publics will determine their future – and that of the global economy.

Source:
http://www.nationofchange.org/crisis-two-narratives-1327849845
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2012-01-27T21:45:00.000-05:00

Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

By Robert Scheer
Nation of Change
January 27, 2012

I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration?

Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Why hasn’t he pushed for a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which Clinton’s deregulation reversed?

Does the president really believe that the Dodd-Frank slap-on-the-wrist sellout represents “new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like this never happens again”?

Can he name one single too-big-to-fail banking monstrosity that has been reduced in size on his watch instead of encouraged to grow ever larger by Treasury and Fed bailouts and interest-free money?

When Obama declared Tuesday evening “no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas,” wasn’t he aware that Jeffrey Immelt, the man he appointed to head his jobs council, is the most egregious offender?

Immelt, the CEO of GE, heads a company with most of its workers employed in foreign countries, a corporation that makes 82 percent of its profit abroad and has paid no U.S. taxes in the past three years.

It was also a bit bizarre for Obama to celebrate Steve Jobs as a model entrepreneur when the manufacturing jobs that the late Apple CEO created are in the same China that elsewhere in his speech the president sought to scapegoat for America’s problems.

Apple, in its latest report on the subject, takes pride in attempting to limit the company’s overseas suppliers to a maximum workweek of 60 hours for their horribly exploited employees. Isn’t it weird to be chauvinistically China baiting when that country carries much of our debt?

I’m also getting tired of the exhortations to improve the nation’s schools, certainly a worthy endeavor, but this economic crisis is the result not of high school dropouts as Obama suggested, but rather the corruption of the best and brightest graduates of our elite academies.

As Obama well knows from his own trajectory in the meritocracy, which took him from one of the most privileged schools in otherwise educationally depressed Hawaii to Harvard Law, the folks who concocted the mathematical formulas and wrote the laws justifying fraudulent collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were his overachieving professors and classmates.

If he doesn’t know that, he should check out the record of Lawrence Summers, the man he picked to guide his economic program and who had been rewarded with the presidency of Harvard after having engineered Clinton’s deregulatory deal with Wall Street.

That is the real legacy of the Clinton years, and it is no surprise that GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich has been campaigning on his rightful share of it. The international trade agreements that exported good U.S. jobs, the radical financial deregulation that unleashed Wall Street greed, and the free market zealotry of then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was reappointed by Clinton, were all part of a deal Clinton made with Gingrich, House speaker at that time.

As Gingrich put it in the first Republican debate in South Carolina: “As speaker ... working with President Bill Clinton, we passed a very Reagan-like program, less regulation, lower taxes.”

Even the 15 percent tax break that Mitt Romney exploited for his carryover private equity income was a result of the unholy Clinton-Gingrich alliance. Both principals of that alliance were pimps for the financial industry, and that includes Freddie Mac, the for-profit stock-traded housing agency that Clinton coddled while it stoked the Ponzi scheme in housing and that rewarded the former speaker with $1.6 million to $1.8 million in consulting fees.

There were, finally, some bold words in Obama’s speech about helping beleaguered homeowners, but they ring hollow given this administration’s efforts to broker a sweetheart deal between the leading banks and the state attorneys general that would see the banks fined only a pittance for their responsibility in the mortgage meltdown.

Obama could have had success demanding mortgage relief if he had made that a condition for bailing out the banks. Now the banksters know he’s firing blanks, and they are placing their bets on their more reliable Republican allies to prevent any significant demand for helping homeowners with their underwater mortgages.

Of course, Romney, Obama’s most likely opponent in the general election, will never challenge the Wall Street hold on Washington, since he is the personification of the vulture capitalism that is the true cause of America’s decline.

Obama should shine in comparison with his Republican challenger, but there is little in his State of the Union speech to suggest he will chart a much-needed new course in his second term.

Source:
http://www.nationofchange.org/obama-s-faux-populism-sounds-bill-clinton-1327677410
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2012-01-24T07:44:00.000-05:00

I 911

By Clyde Lewis
Ground Zero
Jan. 21, 2012

For some people 1/19/2012 was just a date with no real earthshaking events to distract them from their daily routine. For others who use the internet it was a date where cyberspace experienced a possible false flag 9/11 type of event.

Megaupload, a massive file sharing site with a reported 50 million daily users, was taken down by federal agents. Four people linked to Megaupload were arrested in New Zealand and an international crackdown led agents to serving at least 20 search warrants across the globe.

Later it was reported that the Collective hacker group Anonymous was responsible for taking down sites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.

Richard Clarke the former counter terrorism Czar told Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig that there would be in the foreseeable future what he called an “I-911” or internet 911 where a major attack would take place online. This event would force Government officials to incorporate an internet “patriot act” limiting freedom of speech and freedom of movement online.

Coincidentally the date of 1/19 inverted is of course 911 which seems a bit convenient considering the large scale attacks that took place. Was this all planned? It seems too bizarre not to be the product of a false flag attack on the internet in order to create a reason to impose draconian laws on the internet.

If we haven’t had our I-911 already we most certainly are seeing various attacks that put the internet at risk and counter intuitive measures that give precedent to a government out of control to enforce more control over the people’s electronic press.

It is human nature to strike when angered, it is also human nature to acts that are peculiar to try and make a point. The effectiveness of such actions are always criticized or praised no matter where your opinions sit on the matter.

However when it comes to the latest series of web black outs and attacks on websites by Anonymous it seems that logic is lacking with ways to go after big government wanting to control the internet. While support efforts to bring down the Stop Online Piracy act and the Protect IP act I can’t help but think that the efforts of censoring for the sake of preventing censorship or attacking government and other sites by an egregore such as Anonymous is sealing the Internet’s fate.

This whole affair was predictable. In fact it was so predictable that one could speculate that the attacks on the Justice Department sites, the RIAA, the MPAA et al were all carried out by the government claiming to be Anonymous. Barret Brown of project PM told the press that it was only 70 minutes after the website Megaupload.com was taken down by the feds that the other sites were hacked and shut down.

It was pointed out the timing of the move to take down Megaupload was arguably bad considering it was done the day after many websites had censored themselves by “blacking out” in protest.

What it indicates and what is missing in the conversation is that Megaupload was taken down without the passing of SOPA or PIPA and the attacks from Anonymous should have been limited because of security firewalls that sites like the Department of Justice should have.

So let us surmise that the Government has tremendous power and the expertise necessary to follow the example of Wikipedia and others to voluntarily shut down and say that it was carried out by a group that literally has no leader and quite frankly has no organization.

As I have said Anonymous is an egregore. It really is not tangible. It’s similar to the idea that anyone can be Santa Claus but there is really only one Santa Claus. Everyone can participate and yet no one knows that they are participating.

Anyone can be anonymous, and yet no one is anonymous. They are only expected to do what they do and when they do it – there is no one that it can be traced to.

We are shown that the shutting down of Megaupload can be done without SOPA or PIPA laws. Can you imagine what they can do with more power and provisions to shut down and eliminate sites that they feel are extremist or otherwise in violation of their new laws?

This goes far beyond piracy and piracy is not the only issue. It is manipulation to test the waters for compliance and plausible deniability when it comes to Internet sabotage.

The issue as I see it is that it seems blatantly obvious to me that these counterintuitive measures, first by Wikipedia, Google and others with their self imposed shut downs or going dark created an opportunity for some organized group to make their move.

Out of the darkness we see a coincidental attack where various other “hacked” sites and shut downs take place and government agents make a symbolic move.

Does this sound contrived? Isn’t this an obvious indication of a false flag attack in order to create an I-911? The whole premise of the protest prior to the attack didn’t make sense—and I was told by my listeners that it was a great idea.

How is it that those who fight against internet censorship and shut downs are the first to use it to prove their point? Were those who stood is solidarity with Wikipedia and other sites duped into being part of an internet psy-op a day before the shot heard round the world in cyberspace would become the I-911?

Think about it – there were several sites that were in solidarity that went dark the night before. They all had links to various sites that were supposed to educate people on SOPA and PIPA. People thinking they were participating in a protest could have clicked a link that would send enough digital attacks to targeted sites causing a chain reaction that could have anonymously brought down FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.

Then in order to create more buzz a story is released saying that the Whitehouse is next. Then Anonymous is blamed. Everyone is responsible and yet no one is responsible. The reality is that if anyone went to a dark site and clicked a link they may have contributed to the attack. Just clicking on a dark site and any of its links created the chain reaction necessary to kill certain sites on the net. I have to admit that on January 18th my personal computer crashed and I had to use a start up disc to reformat the hard drive. This was after I visited Craig’s list.

I was then told that I picked up a virus because something turned off my firewall. I was able to recover my computer. I ran a virus cleaning of my C drive and then went to work. I used my work computer the night of the “Blackout” and picked up another virus when I visited Wikipedia.

I wonder if my computer IP’s were compromised and sent a message to all of the sites that crashed.

Did my computer pick up malware that was used to create a chain reaction DDOS attack?

Do you wonder if yours was also used to cause sites to crash? If it was that easy to bring down sites with a simple protest ploy—we could easily end up destroying the internet for a cause that we might think is right.

What is at stake is the beginning of what can be the “digital civil war.” And in any war the biggest casualty is the truth.

Source:
http://www.groundzeromedia.org/i-911/
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2012-01-23T19:36:00.000-05:00

An open letter to the citizens of the World

By AnonFile
Pastebin.com
Jan 21st, 2012

We stand at a unique time in our history, the rise of the internet and computer technology have contributed to an unparallelled rate of prosperity for the First World.

We have created for ourselves and empire unlike any other, a global network of constant trade and communication, a new age of technological advancement.

We have come a long way from our humble roots in the Industrial Revolution and the days of Manifest Destiny. We are now pioneers on new digital frontiers expanding our domain from the quantum world to the far reaches of space.

And yet, the empire faces a crisis, a global recession, growing poverty, rampant violence, corruption in politics, and threats to personal freedom. As it was before in other times of crisis, the old stories have begun to repeat themselves.

The half truths, this time repeated nightly on cable news and echoed through a series of tubes onto the internet: the empire is strong, change is unwise, business as usual is the answer. In times of uncertainty there are those who seek to add to the confusion, to prey on our insecurities and fears.

Those who would seek to keep us divided for their own gain. The pervasive strategy takes many very convincing forms: Liberals and Conservatives, Christians and Muslims, Black and White, Saved and sinner.

But something unexpected is happening. We have begun telling each other our own stories. Sharing our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our demons. Every second, day in day out, into all hours of the night the gritty details of life on this earth are streaming around the world.

As we see the lives of others played out in our living rooms we are beginning to understand the consequences of our actions and the error of the old ways. We are questioning the old assumptions that we are made to consume not to create, that the world was made for our taking, that wars are inevitable, that poverty is unavoidable.

As we learn more about our global community a fundamental truth has been rediscovered: We are not so different as we may seem. Every human has strengths, weaknesses, and deep emotions. We crave love, love laughter, fear being alone and dream for a better life.

You must create a better life.

You cannot sit on the couch watching television or playing video games, waiting for a revolution. You are the revolution.

Every time you decide not to exercise your rights, every time you refuse to hear another view point, every time you ignore the world around you, every time you spend a dollar at a business that doesn't pay a fair wage you are contributing to the oppression of the human body and the repression of the human mind.

You have a choice, a choice to take the easy path, the familiar path, to walk willingly into your own submission. Or a choice get up, to go outside and talk to your neighbor, to come together in new forums to create lasting, meaningful change for the human race.

This is our challenge:

A peaceful revolution, a revolution of ideas, a revolution of creation. The twenty-first century enlightenment. A global movement to create a new age of tolerance and understanding, empathy and respect. An age of unfettered technological development. An age of sharing ideas and cooperation. An age of artistic and personal expression. We can choose to use new technology for radical positive change or let it be used against us.

We can choose to keep the internet free, keep channels of communication open and dig new tunnels into those places where information is still guarded. Or we can let it all close in around us. As we move in to new digital worlds, we must acknowledge the need for honest information and free expression.

We must fight to keep the internet open as a marketplace of ideas where all are seated as equals. We must defend our freedoms from those who would seek to control us. We must fight for those who do not yet have a voice. Keep telling your story. All must be heard.

-V

Source:
http://pastebin.com/PT8FCDHu
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2012-01-21T19:40:00.001-05:00

You Did It!

It was amazing to see what happened when People stood up and demanded this egregious affront to civil liberties and free speech was challenged. You made the difference!

Internet wins: SOPA and PIPA both shelved
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/internet-wins-sopa-and-pipa-both-shelved.ars

At GOP debate, all four candidates oppose SOPA
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/at-gop-debate-all-four-candidates-oppose-sopa.ars

Reid shelves PROTECT IP Act in response to "recent events"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/reid-shelves-protect-ip-act-in-response-to-recent-events.ars

____________________________________

Created by: Online University

2012-01-18T07:57:00.002-05:00

Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.

The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/

STOP SOPA

http://news2umedia.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html#55969514831571283
http://onecandleinthedark.blogspot.com
http://www.cbsyousuck.com
http://www.justart.net

A rapidly growing community

Opposition to the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) grows with each day. This brief list is just a sampling of businesses. Visit the Center for Democracy and Technology’s list for a more complete look at the individuals, organizations, experts and legislators that know how bad this legislation could be.

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2012-01-07T14:00:00.000-05:00

Bain, Barack and Jobs

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times
Opinion
January 5, 2012
[emphasis added]

America’s recovery from recession has been so slow that it mostly doesn’t seem like a recovery at all, especially on the jobs front. So, in a better world, President Obama would face a challenger offering a serious critique of his job-creation policies, and proposing a serious alternative.

Instead, he’ll almost surely face Mitt Romney.

Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border.

Start with the Obama record. It’s true that 1.9 million fewer Americans have jobs now than when Mr. Obama took office. But the president inherited an economy in free fall, and can’t be held responsible for job losses during his first few months, before any of his own policies had time to take effect.

So how much of that Obama job loss took place in, say, the first half of 2009?

The answer is: more than all of it. The economy lost 3.1 million jobs between January 2009 and June 2009 and has since gained 1.2 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s nothing like Mr. Romney’s portrait of job destruction.

Incidentally, the previous administration’s claims of job growth always started not from Inauguration Day but from August 2003, when Bush-era employment hit its low point. By that standard, Mr. Obama could say that he has created 2.5 million jobs since February 2010.

So Mr. Romney’s claims about the Obama job record aren’t literally false, but they are deeply misleading. Still, the real fun comes when we look at what Mr. Romney says about himself.

Where does that claim of creating 100,000 jobs come from?

Well, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post got an answer from the Romney campaign.

It’s the sum of job gains at three companies that Mr. Romney “helped to start or grow”: Staples, The Sports Authority and Domino’s.

Mr. Kessler immediately pointed out two problems with this tally. It’s “based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain,” and it “does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved.” Either problem, by itself, makes nonsense of the whole claim.

On the point about using current employment, consider Staples, which has more than twice as many stores now as it did back in 1999, when Mr. Romney left Bain.

Can he claim credit for everything good that has happened to the company in the past 12 years? In particular, can he claim credit for the company’s successful shift from focusing on price to focusing on customer service (“That was easy”), which took place long after he had left the business world?

Then there’s the bit about looking only at Bain-connected companies that added jobs, ignoring those that reduced their work forces or went out of business. Hey, if pluses count but minuses don’t, everyone who spends a day playing the slot machines comes out way ahead!

In any case, it makes no sense to look at changes in one company’s work force and say that this measures job creation for America as a whole.

Suppose, for example, that your chain of office-supply stores gains market share at the expense of rivals. You employ more people; your rivals employ fewer. What’s the overall effect on U.S. employment? One thing’s for sure: it’s a lot less than the number of workers your company added.

Better yet, suppose that you expand in part not by beating your competitors, but by buying them. Now their employees are your employees. Have you created jobs?

The point is that Mr. Romney’s claims about being a job creator would be nonsense even if he were being honest about the numbers, which he isn’t.

At this point, some readers may ask whether it isn’t equally wrong to say that Mr. Romney destroyed jobs. Yes, it is.

The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues isn’t that they destroyed jobs, but that they destroyed good jobs.

When the dust settled after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized — or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt — total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case.

But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them.

Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.

And that reality is, of course, what all the blather and misdirection about job-creating businessmen and job-destroying Democrats is meant to obscure.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/opinion/bain-barack-and-jobs.html
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2012-01-03T22:14:00.000-05:00

Richard Stallman Was Right All Along

by Thom Holwerda

OS News

Jan 2, 2012

Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels.

Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

Up until relatively recently, it's been easy to dismiss Richard Stallman as a paranoid fanatic, someone who lost touch with reality long ago. A sort of perpetual computer hippie, the perfect personification of the archetype of the unworldly basement-dwelling computer nerd. His beard, his hair, his outfits - in our visual world, it's simply too easy to dismiss him.

His views have always been extreme. His only computer is a Lemote Yeelong netbook, because it's the only computer which uses only Free software - no firmware blobs, no proprietary BIOS; it's all Free. He also refuses to own a mobile phone, because they're too easy to track; until there's a mobile phone equivalent of the Yeelong, Stallman doesn't want one. Generally, all software should be Free. Or, as the Free Software Foundation puts it:

As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.

I, too, disregarded Stallman as way too extreme. Free software to combat controlling and spying governments? Evil corporations out to take over the world? Software as a tool to monitor private communication channels?

Right. Surely, Free and open source software is important, and I choose it whenever functional equivalence with proprietary solutions is reached, but that Stallman/FSF nonsense is way out there.

But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for 2012, making it possible for American citizens to be detained indefinitely without any form of trial or due process, only because they are terrorist suspects. At the same time, we have SOPA, which, if passed, would enact a system in which websites can be taken off the web, again without any form of trial or due process, while also enabling the monitoring of internet traffic.

Combine this with how the authorities labelled the Occupy movements - namely, as terrorists - and you can see where this is going.

In case all this reminds you of China and similarly totalitarian regimes, you're not alone. Even the Motion Picture Association of America, the MPAA, proudly proclaims that what works for China, Syria, Iran, and others, should work for the US. China's Great Firewall and similar filtering systems are glorified as workable solutions in what is supposed to be the free world.

The crux of the matter here is that unlike the days of yore, where repressive regimes needed elaborate networks of secret police and informants to monitor communication, all they need now is control over the software and hardware we use. Our desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and all manner of devices play a role in virtually all of our communication.

Think you're in the clear when communicating face-to-face? Think again. How did you arrange the meet-up? Over the phone? The web? And what do you have in your pocket or bag, always connected to the network?

This is what Stallman has been warning us about all these years - and most of us, including myself, never really took him seriously.

However, as the world changes, the importance of the ability to check what the code in your devices is doing - by someone else in case you lack the skills - becomes increasingly apparent. If we lose the ability to check what our own computers are doing, we're boned.

That's the very core of the Free Software Foundation's and Stallman's beliefs: that proprietary software takes control away from the user, which can lead to disastrous consequences, especially now that we rely on computers for virtually everything we do.

The fact that Stallman foresaw this almost three decades ago is remarkable, and vindicates his activism. It justifies 30 years of Free Software Foundation.

And, in 2012, we're probably going to need Free and open source software more than ever before. At the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin late last year, Cory Doctorow held a presentation titled "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation". In it, Doctorow warns that the general purpose computer, and more specifically, user control over general purpose computers, is perceived as a threat to the establishment. The copyright wars? Nothing but a prelude to the real war.

"As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won't be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body," Doctorow explains, "So when I get into a car - a computer I put my body into - with my hearing aid - a computer I put inside my body - I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests."

And this is really the gist of it all. With computers taking care of things like hearing, driving, and more, we really can't afford to be locked out of them. We need to be able to peek inside of them and see what they're doing, to ensure we're not being monitored, filtered, or whatever. Only a short while ago I would've declared this as pure paranoia - but with all that's been going on recently, it's no longer paranoia. It's reality.

"Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks," Doctorow warns, "And we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won't be able to fight on without them."

This is why you should support Android (not Google, but Android), even if you prefer the iPhone. This is why you should support Linux, even if you use Windows. This is why you should support Apache, even if you run IIS. There's going to be a point where being Free/open is no longer a fun perk, but a necessity.

And that point is approaching fast.

Source:
http://www.osnews.com/story/25469/Richard_Stallman_Was_Right_All_Along
__________________

2012-01-02T09:25:00.000-05:00

The Book of Jobs

Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz
Vanity Fair
January 2012

It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.

We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. And we thought we knew who the “bad guys” were—the nation’s big banks, which through cynical lending and reckless gambling had brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin. The Bush and Obama administrations justified a bailout on the grounds that only if the banks were handed money without limit—and without conditions—could the economy recover. We did this not because we loved the banks but because (we were told) we couldn’t do without the lending that they made possible.

Many, especially in the financial sector, argued that strong, resolute, and generous action to save not just the banks but the bankers, their shareholders, and their creditors would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis. In the meantime, a short-term stimulus, moderate in size, would suffice to tide the economy over until the banks could be restored to health.

The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover—output is barely greater than it was before the crisis, and the job situation is bleak. The diagnosis of our condition and the prescription that followed from it were incorrect. First, it was wrong to think that the bankers would mend their ways—that they would start to lend, if only they were treated nicely enough. We were told, in effect: “Don’t put conditions on the banks to require them to restructure the mortgages or to behave more honestly in their foreclosures. Don’t force them to use the money to lend. Such conditions will upset our delicate markets.” In the end, bank managers looked out for themselves and did what they are accustomed to doing.

Even when we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. That seeming golden age of 2007 was far from a paradise. Yes, America had many things about which it could be proud. Companies in the information-technology field were at the leading edge of a revolution. But incomes for most working Americans still hadn’t returned to their levels prior to the previous recession. The American standard of living was sustained only by rising debt—debt so large that the U.S. savings rate had dropped to near zero. And “zero” doesn’t really tell the story.

Because the rich have always been able to save a significant percentage of their income, putting them in the positive column, an average rate of close to zero means that everyone else must be in negative numbers. (Here’s the reality: in the years leading up to the recession, according to research done by my Columbia University colleague Bruce Greenwald, the bottom 80 percent of the American population had been spending around 110 percent of its income.)

What made this level of indebtedness possible was the housing bubble, which Alan Greenspan and then Ben Bernanke, chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, helped to engineer through low interest rates and nonregulation—not even using the regulatory tools they had. As we now know, this enabled banks to lend and households to borrow on the basis of assets whose value was determined in part by mass delusion.

The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acting as life support. Without these, unemployment would have been high. It was absurd to think that fixing the banking system could by itself restore the economy to health. Bringing the economy back to “where it was” does nothing to address the underlying problems.

The trauma we’re experiencing right now resembles the trauma we experienced 80 years ago, during the Great Depression, and it has been brought on by an analogous set of circumstances. Then, as now, we faced a breakdown of the banking system. But then, as now, the breakdown of the banking system was in part a consequence of deeper problems.

Even if we correctly respond to the trauma—the failures of the financial sector—it will take a decade or more to achieve full recovery. Under the best of conditions, we will endure a Long Slump. If we respond incorrectly, as we have been, the Long Slump will last even longer, and the parallel with the Depression will take on a tragic new dimension.

Until now, the Depression was the last time in American history that unemployment exceeded 8 percent four years after the onset of recession. And never in the last 60 years has economic output been barely greater, four years after a recession, than it was before the recession started. The percentage of the civilian population at work has fallen by twice as much as in any post-World War II downturn. Not surprisingly, economists have begun to reflect on the similarities and differences between our Long Slump and the Great Depression. Extracting the right lessons is not easy.

Many have argued that the Depression was caused primarily by excessive tightening of the money supply on the part of the Federal Reserve Board. Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the Depression, has stated publicly that this was the lesson he took away, and the reason he opened the monetary spigots. He opened them very wide. Beginning in 2008, the balance sheet of the Fed doubled and then rose to three times its earlier level. Today it is $2.8 trillion. While the Fed, by doing this, may have succeeded in saving the banks, it didn’t succeed in saving the economy.

Reality has not only discredited the Fed but also raised questions about one of the conventional interpretations of the origins of the Depression. The argument has been made that the Fed caused the Depression by tightening money, and if only the Fed back then had increased the money supply—in other words, had done what the Fed has done today—a full-blown Depression would likely have been averted. In economics, it’s difficult to test hypotheses with controlled experiments of the kind the hard sciences can conduct. But the inability of the monetary expansion to counteract this current recession should forever lay to rest the idea that monetary policy was the prime culprit in the 1930s.

The problem today, as it was then, is something else. The problem today is the so-called real economy. It’s a problem rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we’re losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want and the kind we don’t know what to do with. The real economy has been in a state of wrenching transition for decades, and its dislocations have never been squarely faced. A crisis of the real economy lies behind the Long Slump, just as it lay behind the Great Depression.

For the past several years, Bruce Greenwald and I have been engaged in research on an alternative theory of the Depression—and an alternative analysis of what is ailing the economy today. This explanation sees the financial crisis of the 1930s as a consequence not so much of a financial implosion but of the economy’s underlying weakness.

The breakdown of the banking system didn’t culminate until 1933, long after the Depression began and long after unemployment had started to soar. By 1931 unemployment was already around 16 percent, and it reached 23 percent in 1932. Shantytown “Hoovervilles” were springing up everywhere. The underlying cause was a structural change in the real economy: the widespread decline in agricultural prices and incomes, caused by what is ordinarily a “good thing”—greater productivity.

At the beginning of the Depression, more than a fifth of all Americans worked on farms. Between 1929 and 1932, these people saw their incomes cut by somewhere between one-third and two-thirds, compounding problems that farmers had faced for years.

Agriculture had been a victim of its own success. In 1900, it took a large portion of the U.S. population to produce enough food for the country as a whole. Then came a revolution in agriculture that would gain pace throughout the century—better seeds, better fertilizer, better farming practices, along with widespread mechanization. Today, 2 percent of Americans produce more food than we can consume.

What this transition meant, however, is that jobs and livelihoods on the farm were being destroyed. Because of accelerating productivity, output was increasing faster than demand, and prices fell sharply. It was this, more than anything else, that led to rapidly declining incomes. Farmers then (like workers now) borrowed heavily to sustain living standards and production. Because neither the farmers nor their bankers anticipated the steepness of the price declines, a credit crunch quickly ensued. Farmers simply couldn’t pay back what they owed. The financial sector was swept into the vortex of declining farm incomes.

The cities weren’t spared—far from it. As rural incomes fell, farmers had less and less money to buy goods produced in factories. Manufacturers had to lay off workers, which further diminished demand for agricultural produce, driving down prices even more. Before long, this vicious circle affected the entire national economy.

The value of assets (such as homes) often declines when incomes do. Farmers got trapped in their declining sector and in their depressed locales. Diminished income and wealth made migration to the cities more difficult; high urban unemployment made migration less attractive. Throughout the 1930s, in spite of the massive drop in farm income, there was little overall out-migration. Meanwhile, the farmers continued to produce, sometimes working even harder to make up for lower prices. Individually, that made sense; collectively, it didn’t, as any increased output kept forcing prices down.

Given the magnitude of the decline in farm income, it’s no wonder that the New Deal itself could not bring the country out of crisis. The programs were too small, and many were soon abandoned. By 1937, F.D.R., giving way to the deficit hawks, had cut back on stimulus efforts—a disastrous error.

Meanwhile, hard-pressed states and localities were being forced to let employees go, just as they are now. The banking crisis undoubtedly compounded all these problems, and extended and deepened the downturn. But any analysis of financial disruption has to begin with what started off the chain reaction.

The Agriculture Adjustment Act, F.D.R.’s farm program, which was designed to raise prices by cutting back on production, may have eased the situation somewhat, at the margins. But it was not until government spending soared in preparation for global war that America started to emerge from the Depression. It is important to grasp this simple truth: it was government spending—a Keynesian stimulus, not any correction of monetary policy or any revival of the banking system—that brought about recovery.

The long-run prospects for the economy would, of course, have been even better if more of the money had been spent on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure rather than munitions, but even so, the strong public spending more than offset the weaknesses in private spending.

Government spending unintentionally solved the economy’s underlying problem: it completed a necessary structural transformation, moving America, and especially the South, decisively from agriculture to manufacturing. Americans tend to be allergic to terms like “industrial policy,” but that’s what war spending was—a policy that permanently changed the nature of the economy.

Massive job creation in the urban sector—in manufacturing—succeeded in moving people out of farming. The supply of food and the demand for it came into balance again: farm prices started to rise. The new migrants to the cities got training in urban life and factory skills, and after the war the G.I. Bill ensured that returning veterans would be equipped to thrive in a modern industrial society. Meanwhile, the vast pool of labor trapped on farms had all but disappeared. The process had been long and very painful, but the source of economic distress was gone.

The parallels between the story of the origin of the Great Depression and that of our Long Slump are strong. Back then we were moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Today we are moving from manufacturing to a service economy. The decline in manufacturing jobs has been dramatic—from about a third of the workforce 60 years ago to less than a tenth of it today. The pace has quickened markedly during the past decade.

There are two reasons for the decline. One is greater productivity—the same dynamic that revolutionized agriculture and forced a majority of American farmers to look for work elsewhere. The other is globalization, which has sent millions of jobs overseas, to low-wage countries or those that have been investing more in infrastructure or technology. (As Greenwald has pointed out, most of the job loss in the 1990s was related to productivity increases, not to globalization.)

Whatever the specific cause, the inevitable result is precisely the same as it was 80 years ago: a decline in income and jobs. The millions of jobless former factory workers once employed in cities such as Youngstown and Birmingham and Gary and Detroit are the modern-day equivalent of the Depression’s doomed farmers.

The consequences for consumer spending, and for the fundamental health of the economy—not to mention the appalling human cost—are obvious, though we were able to ignore them for a while. For a time, the bubbles in the housing and lending markets concealed the problem by creating artificial demand, which in turn created jobs in the financial sector and in construction and elsewhere.

The bubble even made workers forget that their incomes were declining. They savored the possibility of wealth beyond their dreams, as the value of their houses soared and the value of their pensions, invested in the stock market, seemed to be doing likewise. But the jobs were temporary, fueled on vapor.

Mainstream macro-economists argue that the true bogeyman in a downturn is not falling wages but rigid wages—if only wages were more flexible (that is, lower), downturns would correct themselves! But this wasn’t true during the Depression, and it isn’t true now. On the contrary, lower wages and incomes would simply reduce demand, weakening the economy further.

Of four major service sectors—finance, real estate, health, and education—the first two were bloated before the current crisis set in. The other two, health and education, have traditionally received heavy government support. But government austerity at every level—that is, the slashing of budgets in the face of recession—has hit education especially hard, just as it has decimated the government sector as a whole.

Nearly 700,000 state- and local-government jobs have disappeared during the past four years, mirroring what happened in the Depression. As in 1937, deficit hawks today call for balanced budgets and more and more cutbacks. Instead of pushing forward a structural transition that is inevitable—instead of investing in the right kinds of human capital, technology, and infrastructure, which will eventually pull us where we need to be—the government is holding back. Current strategies can have only one outcome: they will ensure that the Long Slump will be longer and deeper than it ever needed to be.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this brief history. The first is that the economy will not bounce back on its own, at least not in a time frame that matters to ordinary people. Yes, all those foreclosed homes will eventually find someone to live in them, or be torn down. Prices will at some point stabilize and even start to rise. Americans will also adjust to a lower standard of living—not just living within their means but living beneath their means as they struggle to pay off a mountain of debt.

But the damage will be enormous. America’s conception of itself as a land of opportunity is already badly eroded. Unemployed young people are alienated. It will be harder and harder to get some large proportion of them onto a productive track. They will be scarred for life by what is happening today. Drive through the industrial river valleys of the Midwest or the small towns of the Plains or the factory hubs of the South, and you will see a picture of irreversible decay.

Monetary policy is not going to help us out of this mess. Ben Bernanke has, belatedly, admitted as much. The Fed played an important role in creating the current conditions—by encouraging the bubble that led to unsustainable consumption—but there is now little it can do to mitigate the consequences. I can understand that its members may feel some degree of guilt. But anyone who believes that monetary policy is going to resuscitate the economy will be sorely disappointed. That idea is a distraction, and a dangerous one.

What we need to do instead is embark on a massive investment program—as we did, virtually by accident, 80 years ago—that will increase our productivity for years to come, and will also increase employment now. This public investment, and the resultant restoration in G.D.P., increases the returns to private investment. Public investments could be directed at improving the quality of life and real productivity—unlike the private-sector investments in financial innovations, which turned out to be more akin to financial weapons of mass destruction.

Can we actually bring ourselves to do this, in the absence of mobilization for global war? Maybe not. The good news (in a sense) is that the United States has under-invested in infrastructure, technology, and education for decades, so the return on additional investment is high, while the cost of capital is at an unprecedented low.

If we borrow today to finance high-return investments, our debt-to-G.D.P. ratio—the usual measure of debt sustainability—will be markedly improved. If we simultaneously increased taxes—for instance, on the top 1 percent of all households, measured by income—our debt sustainability would be improved even more.

The private sector by itself won’t, and can’t, undertake structural transformation of the magnitude needed—even if the Fed were to keep interest rates at zero for years to come. The only way it will happen is through a government stimulus designed not to preserve the old economy but to focus instead on creating a new one. We have to transition out of manufacturing and into services that people want—into productive activities that increase living standards, not those that increase risk and inequality. To that end, there are many high-return investments we can make.

Education is a crucial one—a highly educated population is a fundamental driver of economic growth. Support is needed for basic research. Government investment in earlier decades—for instance, to develop the Internet and biotechnology—helped fuel economic growth. Without investment in basic research, what will fuel the next spurt of innovation?

Meanwhile, the states could certainly use federal help in closing budget shortfalls. Long-term economic growth at our current rates of resource consumption is impossible, so funding research, skilled technicians, and initiatives for cleaner and more efficient energy production will not only help us out of the recession but also build a robust economy for decades. Finally, our decaying infrastructure, from roads and railroads to levees and power plants, is a prime target for profitable investment.

The second conclusion is this: If we expect to maintain any semblance of “normality,” we must fix the financial system. As noted, the implosion of the financial sector may not have been the underlying cause of our current crisis—but it has made it worse, and it’s an obstacle to long-term recovery.

Small and medium-size companies, especially new ones, are disproportionately the source of job creation in any economy, and they have been especially hard-hit. What’s needed is to get banks out of the dangerous business of speculating and back into the boring business of lending.

But we have not fixed the financial system. Rather, we have poured money into the banks, without restrictions, without conditions, and without a vision of the kind of banking system we want and need. We have, in a phrase, confused ends with means. A banking system is supposed to serve society, not the other way around.

That we should tolerate such a confusion of ends and means says something deeply disturbing about where our economy and our society have been heading. Americans in general are coming to understand what has happened. Protesters around the country, galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, already know.

Source:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/01/stiglitz-depression-201201#
__________________

2011-12-27T14:17:00.000-05:00

Spy Games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down WikiLeaks

By Nate Anderson
Ars Technica
February 14, 2011

When Aaron Barr was finalizing a recent computer security presentation for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, a colleague had a bit of good-natured advice for him: “Scare the shit out of them!”

In retrospect, this may not have been the advice Barr needed. As CEO of the government-focused infosec company HBGary Federal, Barr had to bring in big clients - and quickly - as the startup business hemorrhaged cash. To do so, he had no problem with trying to “scare the sh*t out of them.” When working with a major DC law firm in late 2010 on a potential deal involving social media, for instance, Barr decided that scraping Facebook to stalk a key partner and his family might be a good idea. When he sent his law firm contact a note filled with personal information about the partner, his wife, her family and her photography business, the result was immediate.

“Thanks. I am not sure I will share what you sent last night — he might freak out.”

This rather creepy behavior became common; Barr used it as a sign of his social media prowess. Another target of his investigations went to “a Jewish Church in DC, the Temple Micah.” Someone else “married @ the Inn at Perry Cabin in St. Michaels, MD (non-denominational ceremony).” Barr was even willing to helpfully guesstimate the ages of children in photographs (“they have 2 kids, son and daughter look to be 7 and 4″).

Barr's rundown on his H&W contact

With one potential client, Barr sifted the man’s social media data and then noted that “I am tempted to create a person from his highschool and send him a request, but that might be overstepping it.”

As the money ran out on HBGary Federal, Barr increasingly had no problem “overstepping it.” In November, when a major U.S. bank wanted a strategy for taking down WikiLeaks, Barr immediately drafted a presentation in which he suggested “cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France, putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.”

HBGary's "special ops," from an early slide

Faking documents seemed like a good idea, too, documents which could later be “called out” so as to make WikiLeaks look unreliable.

And Barr wanted to go further, pushing on people like civil liberties Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald — apparently hoping to threaten their livelihoods. “These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals,” he wrote. “Without the support of people like Glenn WikiLeaks would fold.”

When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to look into some of its opponents, Barr teamed with two other security companies and went nuts, proposing that the Chamber create an absurdly expensive “fusion cell” of the kind “developed and utilized by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)” — and costing $2 million a month. And if the fusion cell couldn’t turn up enough opposition research, the security firms would be happy to create honeypot websites to lure the Chamber’s union-loving opponents in order to grab more data from them.

The security companies even began grabbing tweets from liberal activists and mapping the connections between people using advanced link analysis software most often used by the intelligence community. (Some of the Chamber material was unearthed by ThinkProgress and other liberal bloggers, while The Tech Herald and Crowdleaks.org first wrote about the proposed WikiLeaks attacks.)

While waiting to see if his proposals would result in work for HBGary Federal, Barr turned in January to unmask the leadership of the hacker collective Anonymous. This part of the story is well known by now (read our investigative feature): when Barr went public with his findings, Anonymous took down his website, stole his e-mails, deleted the company’s backup data, trashed Barr’s Twitter account and remotely wiped his iPad.

In the days since the attack and the publication of Barr’s e-mails, his partners at other security firms threw him under the bus. “I have directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HB Gary,” said the CEO of Palantir.

Berico Technologies, another private security firm, said that it “does not condone or support any effort that proactively targets American firms, organizations or individuals. We find such actions reprehensible and are deeply committed to partnering with the best companies in our industry that share our core values. Therefore, we have discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal.”

Glenn Greenwald unleashed both barrels of his own, claiming that “what is set forth in these proposal… quite possibly constitutes serious crimes. Manufacturing and submitting fake documents with the intent they be published likely constitutes forgery and fraud. Threatening the careers of journalists and activists in order to force them to be silent is possibly extortion and, depending on the specific means to be used, constitutes other crimes as well. Attacking WikiLeaks’ computer infrastructure in an attempt to compromise their sources undoubtedly violates numerous cyber laws.”

How did Barr, a man with long experience in security and intelligence, come to spend his days as a CEO e-stalking clients and their wives on Facebook? Why did he start performing “reconnaissance” on the largest nuclear power company in the United States? Why did he suggest pressuring corporate critics to shut up, even as he privately insisted that corporations “suck the lifeblood out of humanity”? And why did he launch his ill-fated investigation into Anonymous, one which may well have destroyed his company and damaged his career?

Thanks to his leaked e-mails, the downward spiral is easy enough to retrace. Barr was under tremendous pressure to bring in cash, pressure which began on Nov. 23, 2009.

“A” players attract “A” players

That’s when Barr started the CEO job at HBGary Federal. Its parent company, the security firm HBGary, wanted a separate firm to handle government work and the clearances that went with it, and Barr was brought in from Northrup Grumman to launch the operation.

In an e-mail announcing Barr’s move, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund told his company that “these two are A+ players in the DoD contracting space and are able to ‘walk the halls’ in customer spaces. Some very big players made offers to Ted and Aaron last week, and instead they chose HBGary. This reflects extremely well on our company. ‘A’ players attract ‘A’ players.”

Barr at first loved the job. In December, he sent an e-mail at 1:30am; it was the “3rd night in a row I have woken up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep because my mind is racing. It’s nice to be excited about work, but I need some sleep.”

Barr had a huge list of contacts, but turning those contacts into contracts for government work with a fledgling company proved challenging. Less than a year into the job, HBGary Federal looked like it might go bust.

On Oct. 3, 2010, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund told Aaron that “we should have a pow-wow about the future of HBGary Federal. [HBGary President] Penny and I both agree that it hasn’t really been a success… You guys are basically out of money and none of the work you had planned has come in.”

Aaron agreed. “This has not worked out as any of us have planned to date and we are nearly out of money,” he said.

While he worked on government contracts, Barr drummed up a little business doing social media training for corporations using, in one of his slides, a bit of research into one Steven Paul Jobs.

Steve Jobs is certainly cool with this

The training sessions, following the old “scare the sh*t out of them” approach, showed people just how simple it was to dredge up personal information by correlating data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. At $1,000 per person, the training could pull in tens of thousands of dollars a day, but it was sporadic. More was needed; contracts were needed, preferably multi-year ones.

Social media training bill
The parent company also had issues. A few weeks after the discussions about closing up HBGary Federal, HBGary President Penny Leavy-Hoglund (Greg’s wife), sent an e-mail to her sales team, telling them “to work a quota and to bring in revenue in a timely manner. It’s not ‘optional’ as to when it needs to close, if you haven’t met your number, the closing needs to happen now, not later. You need to live, eat, breath and ensure you meet your number, not kind of hit it, MEET IT… Guys, no one is making their quota.”

She concluded darkly, “I have some serious doubts about some people’s ability to do their job. There will be changes coming shortly and those decisions will be new people’s to make.”

And then, unexpectedly, came the hope of salvation.

“Bond, Q, and Monneypenny”

By October 2010, Barr was under considerable stress. His CEO job was under threat, and the e-mails show that the specter of divorce loomed over his personal life.

On Oct. 19, a note arrived. HBGary Federal might be able to provide part of “a complete intelligence solution to a law firm that approached us.” That law firm was DC-based powerhouse Hunton & Williams, which boasted 1,000 attorneys and terrific contacts. They had a client who wanted to do a little corporate investigative work, and three small security firms thought they might band together to win the deal.

Team Themis

Palantir would provide its expensive link analysis software running on a hosted server, while Berico would “prime the contract supplying the project management, development resources and process/methodology development.” HBGary Federal would come alongside to provide “digital intelligence collection” and “social media exploitation” — Barr’s strengths.

The three companies needed a name for their joint operation. One early suggestion: a “Corporate Threat Analysis Cell.” Eventually, a sexier name was chosen: Team Themis.

Barr went to work immediately, tracking down all the information he could find on the team’s H&W contact. This was the result of few hours’ work:

A bit of what I have on [redacted]. He was hard to find on Facebook as he has taken some precautions to be found. He isn’t even linked with his wife but I found him. I also have a list of his friends and have defined an angle if I was to target him. He has attachment to UVA, a member of multiple associations dealing with IP, e-discovery, and nearly all of this facebook friends are of people from high school. So I would hit him from one of these three angles. I am tempted to create a person from his highschool and send him a request, but that might be overstepping it. I don’t want to embarrass him, so I think I will just talk about it and he can decide for himself if I would have been successful or not.

Team Themis didn’t quite understand what H&W wanted them to do, so Barr’s example was simply a way to show “expertise.” But it soon became clear what this was about: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to know if certain groups attacking them were “astroturf” groups funded by the large unions.

“They further suspect that most of the actions and coordination take place through online means — forums, blogs, message boards, social networking and other parts of the ‘deep web,’” a team member explained later. “But they want to marry those online, ‘cyber’ sources with traditional open source data-tax records, fundraising records, donation records, letters of incorporation, etc. I believe they want to trace all the way from board structure down to the individuals carrying out actions.”

H&W was putting together a proposal for the Chamber, work that Team Themis hoped to win. (It remains unclear how much the Chamber knew about any of this; it claimed later never to have paid a cent either to Team Themis or to H&W in this matter.)

Barr’s plan was to dig up data from background checks, LexisNexis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums and web searches and dump it into Palantir for analysis. Hopefully, the tool could shed light on connections between the various anti-Chamber forces.

An early version of the Team Themis goal

Once that was done, Team Themis staffers could start churning out intelligence reports for the Chamber. The team wrote up a set of “sample reports” filled with action ideas like:

    Create a false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information, and monitor to see if U.S. Chamber Watch acquires it. Afterward, present explicit evidence proving that such transactions never occurred. Also, create a fake insider persona and generate communications with [union-backed Change to Win]. Afterward, release the actual documents at a specified time and explain the activity as a CtW contrived operation.

    If needed, create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second. Such work is complicated, but a well-thought out approach will give way to a variety of strategies that can sufficiently aid the formation of vetting questions U.S. Chamber Watch will likely ask.

Create a humor piece about the leaders of CtW.

The whole team had been infected with some kind of spy movie virus, one which led them to think in terms of military intelligence operations and ham-handed attacks. The attitude could be seen in e-mails which exhorted Team Themis to “make [H&W] think that we are Bond, Q, and Moneypenny all packaged up with a bow.”

Two million a month

But what to charge for this cloak-and-dagger work? Some team members worried that the asking price for an initial deployment was too high for H&W; someone else fired back, “Their client is loaded!” Besides, that money would buy access to Palantir, Berico, and “super sleuth Aaron Barr.”

Barr's investigation in an H&W partner

As the Team Themis proposal went to one of the top H&W lawyers for potential approval, Barr continued his social media dumpster diving. He dug up information on H&W employees, Chamber opponents, even the H&W partner whose approval was needed to move this proposal forward. That last bit of data collection, which Barr sent on to H&W, led to the e-mail about how it might “freak out” the partner.

If the deal came through, Barr told his HBGary colleagues, it might salvage the HBGary Federal business. “This will put us in a healthy position to chart our direction with a healthy war chest,” he wrote.

Indeed it would; Team Themis decided to ask for $2 million per month, for six months, for the first phase of the project, putting $500,000 to $700,000 per month in HBGary Federal’s pocket.

But the three companies disagreed about how to split the pie. In the end, Palantir agreed to take less money, but that decision had to go “way up the chain (as you can imagine),” wrote the Palantir contact for Team Themis. “The short of it is that we got approval from Dr. Karp and the Board to go ahead with the modified 40/30/30 breakdown proposed. These were not fun conversations, but we are committed to this team and we can optimize the cost structure in the long term (let’s demonstrate success and then take over this market :)).”

The leaders at the very top of Palantir were aware of the Team Themis work, though the details of what was being proposed by Barr may well have escaped their notice. Palantir wasn’t kidding around with this contract; if selected by H&W and the Chamber, Palantir planned to staff the project with an experienced intelligence operative, a man who “ran the foreign fighter campaign on the Syrian border in 2005 to stop the flow of suicide bombers into Baghdad and helped to ensure a successful Iraqi election. As a commander, [he] ran the entire intelligence cycle: identified high-level terrorists, planned missions to kill or capture them, led the missions personally, then exploited the intelligence and evidence gathered on target to defeat broader enemy networks.”

(Update: a reader points to additional emails which suggest that the “foreign fighter campaign” operative would not actually be working on the Team Themis project. Instead, Berico and Palantir would list him and another top person as “key personnel,” drawing on their “creds to show our strengths,” but might actually staff the project with others.)

“I don’t think we can make it any further”
But the cash, which “will seem like money falling from the sky for those of us used to working in the govt sector,” was not forthcoming. H&W didn’t make a decision in November. Barr began to worry.

“All things we are chasing continue to get pushed to the right or just hang in limbo,” he wrote. “I don’t think we can make it any further. We are behind in our taxes trying to keep us afloat until a few things came through, but they are not happening fast enough.” He noted that Palantir was asking “way too much money” from H&W.

As the weeks dragged on, Team Themis decided to lower its price. It sent an e-mail to H&W, saying that the three companies were “prepared to offer our services as Team Themis at a significantly lower cost (much closer to the original “Phase I” proposed costs). Does this sound like a more reasonable range in terms of pricing?”

But before H&W made a decision on Chamber of Commerce plan, it had another urgent request for Team Themis: a major U.S. bank had come to H&W seeking help against WikiLeaks (the bank has been widely assumed to be Bank of America, which has long been rumored to be a future WikiLeaks target.)

“We want to sell this team as part of what we are talking about,” said the team’s H&W contact. “I need a favor. I need five to six slides on Wikileaks — who they are, how they operate and how this group may help this bank. Please advise if you can help get me something ASAP. My call is at noon.”

“Attack their weak points”

By 11:30pm on the evening of Dec. 2, Barr had cranked out a PowerPoint presentation. It called for “disinformation,” “cyber attacks,” and a “media campaign” against WikiLeaks.

What could HBGary Federal do?

    Computer Network Attack/Exploitation
    Influence and Deception Operations
    Social Media Collection, Analysis, Exploitation
    Digital Media Forensic Analysis

This attack capability wasn’t mere bluster. HBGary had long publicized to clients its cache of zero-day exploits — attacks for which there is no existing patch. A slide from a year earlier showed that HBGary claimed unpublished zero-day exploits in everything from Flash to Java to Windows 2000.

HBGary's zero-day exploits

Another slide made clear that the company had expertise in “computer network attack,” “custom malware development,” and “persistent software implants.”

In October 2010, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund had tossed out a random idea for Barr, one that did not apparently seem unusual: “I suggest we create a large set of unlicensed windows-7 themes for video games and movies appropriate for middle east & asia. These theme packs would contain back doors.”

Barr’s ideas about WikiLeaks went beyond attacks on their infrastructure. He wrote in a separate document that WikiLeaks was having trouble getting money because its payment sources were being blocked. “Also need to get people to understand that if they support the organization we will come after them,” he wrote. “Transaction records are easily identifiable.”

As an idea that Barr knew was being prepared for a major U.S. bank, the suggestion is chilling. Barr also reiterated the need to “get to the Swedish document submission server” that allowed people to upload leaked documents.

Barr's initial ideas to attack WikiLeaks

At 7:30am the next morning, Barr had another great idea — find some way to make WikiLeaks supporters like Glenn Greenwald feel like their jobs might be at stake for supporting the organization.

“One other thing,” he wrote in his morning message. “I think we need to highlight people like Glenn Greenwald. Glenn was critical in the Amazon to OVH [data center] transition and helped WikiLeaks provide access to information during the transition. It is this level of support we need to attack. These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals. Without the support of people like Glenn WikiLeaks would fold.”

This seems an absurd claim on a number of levels, but it also upped the “creep factor” dramatically. Barr was now suggesting that a major U.S. corporation find ways to lean on a civil liberties lawyer who held a particular view of WikiLeaks, pressuring him into silence on the topic. Barr, the former Navy SIGINT officer who had traveled around the world to defend the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, had no apparent qualms about his idea.

“Discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal”

The fallout rained down quickly enough. In January, with H&W still not signing off on any big-dollar deals, Barr decided to work on a talk for the BSides security conference in San Francisco. He hoped to build on all of the social media work he was doing to identify the main participants in the Anonymous hacker collective — and by doing so to drum up business.

The decision seems to have stemmed from Barr’s work on WikiLeaks. Anonymous defended WikiLeaks on several occasions in 2010, even attacking the websites of Visa and MasterCard when the companies refused to process WikiLeaks donations. But Barr also liked the thrill of chasing a dangerous quarry.

For instance, to make his point about the vulnerabilities of social media, Barr spent some time in 2010 digging into the power company Exelon and its U.S. nuclear plants. “I am going to target the largest nuclear operator in the United States, Exelon, and I am going to do a social media targeted collection, reconnaissance against them,” he wrote.

Once Barr had his social media map of connections, he could attack. As he wrote elsewhere:

Example. If I want to gain access to the Exelon plant up in Pottsdown PA I only have to go as far as LinkedIn to identify Nuclear engineers being employed by Exelon in that location. Jump over to Facebook to start doing link analysis and profiling. Add data from twitter and other social media services. I have enough information to develop a highly targeted exploitation effort.

I can and have gained access to various government and government contractor groups in the social media space using this technique (more detailed but you get the point). Given that people work from home, access home services from work — getting access to the target is just a matter of time and nominal effort.

Knowing about a target’s spouse and college and business and friends makes it relatively easy to engage in a “spear phishing” attack against that person — say, a fake e-mail from an old friend, in which the target eventually reveals useful information.
Ironically, when Anonymous later commandeered Greg Hoglund’s separate security site rootkit.com, it did so through a spear phishing e-mail attack on Hoglund’s site administrator — who promptly turned off the site’s defenses and issued a new password (“Changeme123″) for a user he believed was Hoglund. Minutes later, the site was compromised.

After the Anonymous attacks and the release of Barr’s e-mails, his partners furiously distanced themselves from Barr’s work. Palantir CEO Dr. Alex Karp wrote, “We do not provide — nor do we have any plans to develop — offensive cyber capabilities… The right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy. From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties. Furthermore, personally and on behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters.”

Berico said (PDF) that it “does not condone or support any effort that proactively targets American firms, organizations or individuals. We find such actions reprehensible and are deeply committed to partnering with the best companies in our industry that share our core values. Therefore, we have discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal.”

But both of the Team Themis leads at these companies knew exactly what was being proposed (such knowledge may not have run to the top). They saw Barr’s e-mails, and they used his work. His ideas on attacking WikiLeaks made it almost verbatim into a Palantir slide about “proactive tactics.”

Palantir used Barr's ideas

And Palantir had no problem scraping tweets from union supporters and creating linkages from them.

As for targeting American organizations, it was a Berico analyst who sent out the Team Themis “sample reports,” the documents suggesting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce create false documents and false personae in its effort to “discredit the organization” U.S. Chamber Watch.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce expressed shock when the Team Themis work came to light. “We’re incredulous that anyone would attempt to associate such activities with the Chamber as we’ve seen today from the Center for American Progress,” said Tom Collamore on Feb. 10. “The security firm referenced by ThinkProgress was not hired by the Chamber or by anyone else on the Chamber’s behalf. We have never seen the document in question nor has it ever been discussed with us.”

Indeed, the meeting between H&W and the Chamber on this issue was set to take place today, Feb. 14. On Feb. 11, the Chamber went further, issuing a new statement saying that “it never hired or solicited proposals from HBGary, Palantir or Berico, the security firms being talked about on the web … The leaked e-mails appear to show that HBGary was willing to propose questionable actions in an attempt to drum up business, but the Chamber was not aware of these proposals until HBGary’s e-mails leaked.”

“No money, for any purpose, was paid to any of those three private security firms by the Chamber, or by anyone on behalf of the Chamber, including Hunton & Williams.”

As for Hunton & Williams, they have yet to comment publicly. On Feb. 7, however, the firm celebrated its top ranking in Computerworld’s report on “Best Privacy Advisers.”

Article Source with Graphics and Links:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/02/spy/all/1
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2011-12-09T17:23:00.001-05:00

Listen to the People, Not the Polluters

By Amy Goodman
Nation of Change
Dec. 7, 2011

High above the pavement, overlooking Durban’s famous South Beach and the pounding surf of the Indian Ocean, and just blocks from the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where up to 20,000 people gathered, seven activists fought against the wind to unfurl a banner that read “Listen to the People, Not the Polluters.” It was no simple task. Despite the morning sun and blue sky, the wind was ferocious, and the group hanging the banner wasn’t exactly welcome. They were with Greenpeace, hanging off the roof of the Protea Hotel Edward.

Inside, executives gathered at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), an organization that touts itself as “a CEO-led organization of forward-thinking companies that galvanizes the global business community to create a sustainable future for business, society and the environment.” Down at street level, as the police gathered and scores held signs and banners and sang in solidarity with the climbers, Kumi Naidoo lambasted the WBCSD, labeling it one of Greenpeace’s “Dirty Dozen.”

Naidoo is no stranger to action on the streets of Durban. While he is now the executive director of Greenpeace International, one of the largest and most visible global environmental organizations, in 1980, at the age of 15, he was one of millions of South Africans fighting against the racist apartheid regime. He was thrown out of high school and eventually had to go underground. He emerged in England, living in exile, and went on to become a Rhodes scholar. Naidoo has long struggled for human rights, against poverty and for action to combat climate change.

A colleague and I scrambled up to the roof to film as the seven banner-hanging activists were arrested. South African climber Michael Baillie, one of them, told me: “Our goal here today was to highlight how governments are being unduly influenced by a handful of corporations who are trying to adversely influence the climate negotiations that are happening here in Durban. They are holding the climate hostage.”

Later, at the U.N. conference inside the Alfred Luthuli International Conference Center, named after an early president-general of the African National Congress and the first African to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Naidoo told me about that morning’s action: “We are not opposed to the idea of dialogue with corporations, but clearly corporations are not actually moving as fast as we need them to move and, in fact, are actually holding us back. Therefore, we think that calling them out, naming and shaming them, is critically necessary so that people know why these climate talks here are not actually going as fast as we need them to go.”

The Dirty Dozen in Durban include Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries and BASF, along with industry trade groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the WBCSD and the American Petroleum Institute. Greenpeace highlighted these corporations and corporate umbrella groups for their presence in Durban, and for their actions throughout the global-climate-change negotiating process, in undermining meaningful progress.

The full report, titled “Who’s holding us back? How carbon-intensive industry is preventing effective climate legislation,” details how these corporations not only derail national legislation on climate change across the globe, but are also gaining privileged access to the global negotiations like these crucial United Nations talks in Durban.

Former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressed a rally before the summit, describing climate change as a “huge enemy. … We are saying this is the last chance, please for goodness’ sake take the right decision, this is the only world we have, the only home we have, if it is destroyed, we all sink.” Former Irish President Mary Robinson added, “People are suffering because of the impact of climate change, those who are suffering most are not responsible, so the rich world has to take its responsibility, we have to have a continuation of Kyoto, a track that leads to a fair, ambitious and binding agreement, and we have to do it here in Durban.”

There is a growing consensus here in Durban that the United States is the main impediment to progress at these crucial talks. A consortium of 16 of the major environmental groups in the U.S. wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who directly oversees the U.S. climate negotiations. They pointed out that, while President Barack Obama originally campaigned on a promise to lead in global climate negotiations, “three years later, America risks being viewed not as a global leader on climate change, but as a major obstacle to progress.”

The fossil-fuel industry exerts enormous influence over the U.S. government, and over the U.S. public, with tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and PR campaigns to shape public opinion. Kumi Naidoo, who has been jailed many times for his activism, compared the struggle against apartheid to the fight against climate change: “If people around the world can actually unite—trade unions, social movements, religious leaders, environmental groups and so on, which we saw in the march on Saturday—I pray and hope that we will have a similar kind of miracle to get these climate negotiations to deliver a fair, ambitious and legally binding outcome.”

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

This article was published at NationofChange at:
http://www.nationofchange.org/listen-people-not-polluters-1323268212.
All rights are reserved.
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2011-12-04T18:52:00.001-05:00

66% vs. 41% - The Generation Gap on Foreign Policy and National Security Issues

Pew Research Center
Dec. 4, 2011

Younger generations hold more liberal values than older generations regarding U.S. foreign policy. In particular, they are more likely to favor multilateralism over unilateralism and the use of diplomacy – rather than relying on military strength -- to ensure peace.

Two-thirds of Millennials (66%) say that relying too much on military force to defeat terrorism creates hatred that leads to more terrorism. A slim majority of Gen Xers (55%) agree with this sentiment, but less than half (46%) of Boomers agree and the number of Silents who share this view is 41%. A plurality of Silents (45%) believe that using overwhelming force is the best way to defeat terrorism and 43% of Boomers share that view.

There are similar divisions between Millennials and Silents on other foreign policy and national security issues. More than six-in-ten Millennials (63%) believe that the U.S. should take the interests of allies into account even if it means making compromises in foreign policy. Four-in-ten Silents share that view. Conversely, 44% of Silents believe the U.S. should follow its own interests even when allies strongly disagree; just 29% of Millennials agree.

Two-thirds of Millennials say that the best way to ensure peace is through good diplomacy. In addition, more than six-in-ten (62%) of Millennials say that it is acceptable for an individual to refuse to fight in a war that he or she believes is morally wrong; just over one third of Silents share this view. Read more

Source:
http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=1365
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2011-11-29T19:20:00.003-05:00

Battlefield America: U.S. Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Defense Bill Before Senate

by Democracy Now!
November 29, 2011

The Senate is set to vote this week on a Pentagon spending bill that could usher in a radical expansion of indefinite detention under the U.S. government.

A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect — anywhere in the world — without charge or trial.

The measure would effectively extend the definition of what is considered the military’s "battlefield" to anywhere in the world, even within the United States. Its authors, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, have been campaigning for its passage in a bipartisan effort.

But the White House has issued a veto threat, with backing from top officials including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

“This would be the first time since the McCarthy era that the United States Congress has tried to do this,” says our guest, Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First, which has gathered signatures from 26 retired military leaders urging the Senate to vote against the measure, as well as against a separate provision that would repeal the executive order banning torture.

“In this case, we’ve seen the administration very eagerly hold people without trial for 10-plus years in military detention, so there’s no reason to believe they would not continue to do that here. So we’re talking about indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens, of lawful U.S. residents, as well as of people abroad.”

Source:
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/11/29-0
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2011-11-25T16:21:00.004-05:00

William S. Burroughs’ Great Thanksgiving Prayer

By DJ Pangburn
Death & Taxes
November 24, 2011

Several years ago, whilst in the midst of a William S. Burroughs obsession, I came across audio of Burroughs, in his droning, rhythmic and hilarious voice reading “Thanksgiving Prayer,” in a short film directed by Gus Van Sant.

The audio is set to music that has a vaguely collegiate commencement quality to it.

Below are the text and video.
Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986.

Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin’ lawmen, feelin’ their notches.
For decent church-goin’ women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody’s allowed to mind their own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories—all right let’s see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

Source:
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/162661/william-s-burroughs-great-thanksgiving-prayer/
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2011-11-23T10:57:00.006-05:00

Buy Nothing Day!
Nov 25 / 26

#OCCUPYXMAS

2011-10-31T19:46:00.004-04:00

Ron Paul blasts TSA road checkpoints

by Charlie Spiering
The Washington Examiner
Oct 24, 2011
[Emphasis added]

Ron Paul isn't happy about recent news from Tennessee about the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) new program checking the nation's highways for terrorist threats.

"Disarming the highways and filling them full of jack-booted thugs demanding to see our papers is no way to make them safer. Instead, it is a great way to expand government surveillance powers and tighten the noose around our liberties." Paul said in a statement. (Please Read)

The program is called the "Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response" (VIPR) program and has set up road checkpoints to screen vehicles for illegal substances. The program is also recruiting truck drivers to report suspicious behavior.

For more on the program, watch the video below:

YouTube upload comment:

Perhaps you are so disgusted by the attitude and tactics of the TSA at the nations airports, that you have chosen to cut back on air travel as much as possible, or stop flying completely. Well, Big Sis has news for you! As this page and many others have warned, the TSA is beginning its roll-out onto the streets of America!

The Tennessee Highway patrol began multi-jurisdictional checkpoints on its highways this week, under the auspices of fighting terrorism. Of course, the 'authorities' always use these checkpoints for any purpose they please- setting up a dragnet for drugs, DUIs, and even bureaucratic regulatory violations! Did anyone doubt what Barack Obama had in mind when he said: "We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

Despite running a campaign as a peace candidate, and a civil libertarian, the President has shown himself a real proponent of government force, by using any and all means necessary. With their ubiquitous "See something, Say something" campaign, the Dept. of Homeland Security clearly envisions a civilian spy force- looking for terrorists around every corner- and reporting any other suspicious activity along the way!

Is this the kind of country you want to live in?

New York and DC are likely terrorist targets, and if the people of those cities feel better with massive police state surveillance- so be it. But this is going NATIONWIDE. It is an absurd waste of money and resources, and history shows that law enforcement/intelligence centralization is dangerous!

These video clips may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes only. This constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

Video aired October 18, 2011 - NewsChannel 5 WTVF-TV (CBS - Nashville TN)

Source:
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/ron-paul-blasts-tsa-road-checkpoints

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2011-10-29T11:26:00.002-04:00

How did our the economic system become so messed up?

Digging into the roots of our current economic mess. The Great American Fraud Machine or Why Eliot Spitzer was assassinated.

Elliott Spitzer was doing the right thing on predatory lending and that's why he was politically assassinated with the help of the FBI.

It's one of the most amazing displays of journalistic incompetence and malpractice in recent memory.

The US news media failed to draw the obvious connection between the bizarre federal law enforcement investigation and leak campaign about the private life of New York Governor Spitzer and Spitzer's all out attack on the Bush administration for its collusion with predatory lenders.

The predatory lending industry had a partner in the White House. While the international credit system grinds to a halt because of a superabundance of bad mortgage loans made in the US, the news media failed to cover the details of Spitzer's public charges against the White House.

Read Elliot Spitzers' Washington Post article in 2008 that exposed the scam and sealed his fate.

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime

Who says the US doesn't make anything any more? The US excels in the field of institutional sized financial fraud. One guy was on the road to shutting it down - and he was shut down instead.

Yet when salacious details were leaked about alleged details of Spitzer's private life, they took that information and made it the front page news for days.

From the 9/11 fiasco, the Iraq War, the travesty of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and the shredding of the US Constitution, we can now add a deliberate and reckless undermining of the credit and banking system of the US to the list of Bush administration "accomplishments."

No external enemy, or group of external enemies, could have done as much harm to the nation as this group has in less than eight years.

Hey, do you think it's a coincidence that a Bush was involved the last time the US banking industry fell into a black whole because of White House-facilitated fraud? There's actually a lot of money to be made blowing up banks.

Here's how Bush Sr. and his friends in the Mafia and CIA profited from it the last time:

The Mafia, the CIA and Bush Sr.Roots of the Savings & Loan Scandal
Banking - Bush style

Astute TV political watch dogs know that throughout its second term, the Bush administration actively interfered with states that attempted to enforce their own state lending laws.

Bush & Co. used the Office of the Controller of the Currency to sue states like New York to stop them from going after predatory lenders.Bush Jr. is not the first Bush to get "hands on" involved in shaping the lending industry to his will.

Many know that one of this brothers, Neil, was part of a spectacular Savings & Loan failure in the 1980s. What far fewer people are aware of is how deeply the CIA, organized crime and, George Bush Sr. were involved in the Savings & Loan disaster which caused US taxpayers and estimated trillion dollars plus.

The term of art for these kinds of operations is a "bust out." The scam works as follows: an organized crime group takes over a business, borrows as much as it can in the business' name, fails to pay vendors and then disappears with all the cash.

The Bush family and its associates in organized crime and the CIA have figured out how to run this scam on a multi-hundred billion dollar level using the entire US banking system as its playground.

When you consider that Reagan was probably out of it from Day One of his term and that Bill Clinton is a close associate of George Bush Sr., the Bush crime syndicate has been influencing when not outright running the executive branch continuously since 1980, which, perhaps not so coincidentally, marks the earliest days of the credit bubble the economy is now having serious trouble digesting.

Watch the video series that exposes the Savings and Loan Scandal, the beginnings of our current economic disaster.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Watch More
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=THE+MAFIA%2C+C.I.A.+AND+GEORGE+BUSH+Sr.+from+11%2F92&aq=f
http://www.youtube.com/user/Mindsi2

The entire video archive is available for free download at The Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/details/AV_483_484-THE_MAFIA_THE_CIA_AND_GEORGE_BUSH
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2011-10-23T21:57:00.001-04:00

Anonymous Hackers Take Down 40 Child Porn Websites, Leak Users' Names

By Matt Liebowitz
SecurityNewsDaily
Oct. 20, 2011

Members of the Anonymous hacktivist movement are claiming responsibility for taking down more than 40 secret child-pornography websites and leaking the names of more than 1,500 members of one of the illegal sites.

The Anonymous campaign began Oct. 14, when members of the hacktivist group found a cache of child-pornography websites while browsing a secret website called the Hidden Wiki, a guidebook to hundreds of underground websites invisible to search engines and regular Internet users. The hackers singled out Lolita City, a file-sharing site used by pedophiles, and leaked the names of the site's 1,589 active members to Pastebin on Tuesday (Oct. 18), the Examiner reported.

Member of Anonymous deciding to hack a website whose stance they don't agree with is by no means shocking news. In the past year, Anonymous-affiliated hackers have gone after the New York Stock Exchange, the Westboro Baptist Church, the Recording Industry Association of America and government sites in Malaysia, Egypt, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.

However, in targeting child pornography sites, and in explaining its methods of attack, these Anonymous-affiliated hackers have revealed a deeply disturbing side of the Internet unknown to most people.

The so-called "darknet," from which this "Operation Darknet" hacking campaign takes its name, is any part of the Internet that is hidden from view — not just hard to reach, but deliberately concealed. In this instance, a darknet appears to have grown out of the free TOR routing service, which offers anonymous, encrypted Web browsing to any user.

The TOR-based darknet has reportedly grown into a private, encrypted constellation of websites offering a variety of shady and illegal services, from fake IDs and steroids to email hacking and tip on how to call in police raids as pranks. There's even a hidden site called "The Last Box" that bills itself as an "Assassination Market."

Only computers that have installed TOR browser plug-ins can access the TOR-based darknet, including its guidebook the Hidden Wiki, the security site Infosec Island reported.

In another Pastebin posting, the hackers explained that their campaign against the child pornography sites took root when they found a site listed on the Hidden Wiki called "Hard Candy," which "was dedicated to links to child pornography." The group delved deeper and discovered that nearly all of the pornography sites listed on the Hidden Wiki "shared a digital fingerprint with the shared hosting server at Freedom Hosting."

The Anonymous-affiliated hackers then issued a warning to Freedom Hosting asking it to remove the child pornography links from its server. Freedom Hosting did not comply, so the group, at approximately 11:30 p.m. (CST) on Oct. 14 shutdown Freedom Hosting's server. Freedom Hosting restored service the following day, but it was attacked and taken down again that night.

In its statement, the Anonymous members explained their goals and how they aim to achieve them through repeated pressure and consistent online attacks.

"The owners and operators at Freedom Hosting are openly supporting child pornography and enabling pedophiles to view innocent children, fueling their issues and putting children at risk of abduction, molestation, rape and death," the message said. "For this, Freedom Hosting has been declared #OpDarknet Enemy Number One. By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites, among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date containing more than 100 GB of child pornography. We will continue to not only crash Freedom Hosting's server, but any other server we find to contain, promote, or support child pornography."

The statement added a demand to Freedom Hosting and other Web servers hosting child pornography.

"Remove all child pornography content from your servers. Refuse to provide hosting services to any website dealing with child pornography. This statement is not just aimed at Freedom Hosting, but everyone on the Internet. It does not matter who you are, if we find you to be hosting, promoting, or supporting child pornography, you will become a target."

The trail goes cold in looking for whoever is behind Freedom Hosting. The domain is currently offline; WHOIS domain-name lookups show that the registration for freedom-hosting.com expired on Aug. 7, and the registrar is holding the URL pending renewal.

Pastebin posting
http://pastebin.com/u/opdarknet
http://pastebin.com/GHxGsC8M

Source:
http://www.securitynewsdaily.com/anonymous-hackers-child-porn-sites-1260/
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2011-10-16T18:50:00.000-04:00

Rabbit-Hole Economics

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
October 13, 2011
[emphasis added]

Reading the transcript of Tuesday’s Republican debate on the economy is, for anyone who has actually been following economic events these past few years, like falling down a rabbit hole. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantasy world where nothing looks or behaves the way it does in real life.

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying.

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor.

O.K., I’m exaggerating a bit — but not much. Mr. Frank’s name did come up repeatedly as a villain in the crisis, and not just in the context of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, which Republicans want to repeal.

You have to marvel at his alleged influence given the fact that he’s a Democrat and the vast bulk of the bad loans now afflicting our economy were made while George W. Bush was president and Republicans controlled the House with an iron grip. But he’s their preferred villain all the same.

The demonization of Mr. Frank aside, it’s now obviously orthodoxy on the Republican side that government caused the whole problem. So what you need to know is that this orthodoxy has hardened even as the supposed evidence for government as a major villain in the crisis has been discredited.

The fact is that government rules didn’t force banks to make bad loans, and that government-sponsored lenders, while they behaved badly in many ways, accounted for few of the truly high-risk loans that fueled the housing bubble.

But that’s history.

What do the Republicans want to do now? In particular, what do they want to do about unemployment?

Well, they want to fire Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve — not for doing too little, which is a case one can make, but for doing too much. So they’re obviously not proposing any job-creation action via monetary policy.

Incidentally, during Tuesday’s debate, Mitt Romney named Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw as one of his advisers. How many Republicans know that Mr. Mankiw at least used to advocate — correctly, in my view — deliberate inflation by the Fed to solve our economic woes?

So, no monetary relief.

What else? Well, the Cheshire Cat-like Rick Perry — he seems to be fading out, bit by bit, until only the hair remains — claimed, implausibly, that he could create 1.2 million jobs in the energy sector. Mr. Romney, meanwhile, called for permanent tax cuts — basically, let’s replay the Bush years! And Herman Cain? Oh, never mind.

By the way, has anyone else noticed the disappearance of budget deficits as a major concern for Republicans once they start talking about tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy?

It’s all pretty funny. But it’s also, as I said, terrifying.

The Great Recession should have been a huge wake-up call. Nothing like this was supposed to be possible in the modern world. Everyone, and I mean everyone, should be engaged in serious soul-searching, asking how much of what he or she thought was true actually isn’t.

But the G.O.P. has responded to the crisis not by rethinking its dogma but by adopting an even cruder version of that dogma, becoming a caricature of itself.

During the debate, the hosts played a clip of Ronald Reagan calling for increased revenue; today, no politician hoping to get anywhere in Reagan’s party would dare say such a thing.

It’s a terrible thing when an individual loses his or her grip on reality. But it’s much worse when the same thing happens to a whole political party, one that already has the power to block anything the president proposes — and which may soon control the whole government.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/opinion/rabbit-hole-economics.html
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2011-10-15T07:55:00.000-04:00

The Anti-Capitalist Argument

Echidne of the Snakes
10/13/2011

I keep hearing various right-wing politicians and pundits state that the Wall Street Occupation is anti-capitalist, as if they were saying that it's against mom and apple pie*. Everyone is supposed to frown upon such an awful act of disrespect against capitalism!

Capitalism has somehow clawed itself up on a pedestal, right next to the Christian God in this country, as something we no longer debate at all. It's not a system we can tinker with. It's a religion.

After all, didn't Ronald Reagan gird himself and ride upon a white steed to kill the dragon of communism? Now we are all capitalists!

Except, of course, that the capitalist system does not mean anything of the sort. Capitalism gone haywire is a pretty terrible system, using child-labor in mines or whatever makes the profits highest possible ones. In its extreme form it barely differs from feudalism, except for the marker of what constitutes the upper classes.

I'm a muddy-middle kind of goddess (the middle naturally defined by me!), and I have never been able to fathom why people would want a world of child-labor in mines or a Banana Republic, unless they are so deluded that they believe in their own divine right to belong to the small group of capitalists. And of course a truly unbridled capitalism would kill off most of the would-be-capitalists, too. It's a winner-take-all system.

What's so bad about mixed economies? They do very well in international comparisons. They combine the best aspects of collective and individual systems.

Though I admit that having a Mixed Economy as the label on a pedestal doesn't sound very exciting.
------
*"Mom and apple pie" isn't exactly a neutral myth, either, as I have stated before. But you get the meaning.

Source:
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2011_10_09_archive.html#5151671799158309353
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2011-10-11T22:59:00.000-04:00

Warning to US: Yuan bill to spark trade war

China warned the United States on Monday of a trade war if Congress passes a bill pressuring Beijing to appreciate the yuan. The warning came a day before US lawmakers are set to vote on the bill.

By Wu Jiao and Cui Haipei
China Daily
Oct. 11, 2011

Vice-Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai reiterated Beijing's opposition to the bill and said that it will hamper global economic recovery and further hurt US jobs growth.

"Should the proposed legislation be made into law, the result would be a trade war between China and the US and that would be a lose-lose situation for both sides," Cui said at a news briefing.

The bill is likely to pass with bipartisan support in the Senate, before being sent to the House of Representatives.

The bill would require the US Department of Commerce to estimate what they claim to be currency under-valuations when calculating duties imposed on imports deemed to be State-subsidized.

"(The currency bill) in no way represents the reality of the economic and trade relationship" between the two leading economies, said Cui, who currently heads the China delegation for G20 negotiations.

"Of course it would be detrimental to the development of economic ties and might have an adverse impact on bilateral relations. If this type of situation occurs, it would certainly have negative effects on US economic and job growth," he said. "At the same time, it would hinder global economic recovery."

The legislation, if passed in the Senate, still faces an uncertain future in the House of Representatives.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner has signaled that the legislation will die.

"It's dangerous. You could start a trade war. And a trade war, given the economic uncertainty here and all around the world - it's just very dangerous, and we should not be engaged in this," Boehner said last Thursday.

China's central bank and the ministries of commerce and foreign affairs last week jointly warned that the proposed currency law could lead to a trade war between the two countries.

Some US politicians claim that China holds down the value of its currency to give its exporters an edge. But Beijing says it is committed to gradual reform of the yuan, which has risen 30 percent against the greenback since 2005.

The yuan hit a fresh high against the US dollar late on Monday, up 0.6 percent from 6.3859 on Sept 30 to 6.3486. China's financial markets were closed for National Day holidays last week.

It represents the highest closing level since the country unified the official and market exchange rates at the end of 1993, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trade System.

It is also the biggest daily increase since China loosened the yuan's peg to the dollar on July 21, 2005.

The Wall Street Journal carried an article on Oct 7 which quoted a Boston Consulting Group study, saying that due to rising labor and raw material costs in China, "the jobs that some US politicians want to bring home may already be trickling back to the US".

The study calculates that production that returns to the US from China could add 800,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector, and up to 3 million altogether if service-sector support jobs are included, according to the article.

Wang Haifeng, a senior researcher with the Foreign Economic Research Institute, a think tank for the National Development and Reform Commission, told China Daily that the currency bill may damage the US more than China, because trade friction will reduce imports from China.

"The passage of this bill will surely spark a trade war and US consumers would be the final victims," Wang said. Whether this currency issue will have long-term effects on the Sino-US trade relationship depends on how quick the US economy recovers, he added.

The US imposing sanctions on China would violate international trade rules, said Cao Fengqi, director of the Finance and Securities Research Center at Peking University.

"The US should not blame China for its trade deficit and high unemployment," he said.

"The bill will be unfavorable for Chinese exports. China may also take retaliatory measures, including raising tariffs on imports from the US," Cao said. However, he believed the bill has little chance of passing in the House.

Economist Robert Mundell, winner of the Nobel Prize, said that US legislation to press China to raise the value of the yuan would be a "disaster".

"This is not going to help Americans," Mundell said on Sept 27 in a Bloomberg Television interview. "This is not going to create jobs for Americans. It's just going to create a disaster. This would have a wounding effect on the stability of international relations. There's never been any precedent in economic history where a country, through any legal system, was forced to appreciate its currency relative to another country."

Also at the news briefing, Cui said China will once again raise the issue of US arms sales to Taiwan at a high-level meeting in Beijing on Tuesday.

The meeting will be co-hosted by Cui and US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.

Cui reiterated that US arms sales to Taiwan seriously undermine China's core interests. The US said last month that it would sell $5.85 billion in military hardware to the island.

Reuters and Chen Jia contributed to this story.

Source:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-10/11/content_13865332.htm
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2011-10-10T07:54:00.001-04:00

As Occupy Wall Street began, Chase made biggest donation in history to NYPD

By Xeni Jardin
Boing Boing
Oct 2, 2011

A coincidence, I imagine, but it sure is poetic. In mid-June, just before the Occupy Wall Street movement took shape, JPMorgan Chase donated what the financial organization itself described as "an unprecedented" $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, part of which will be used to expand and fortify surveillance systems.

The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center.

Source: JP Morgan Chase website.

Update: commentors have pointed out that while news of this donation has just been making the rounds this week, the donation was made in mid-June. The first Occupy Wall Street demonstrations happened in mid-September; organizers gathered in the weeks leading up to that point.

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries

Sources:
http://cityarts.info/2011/06/14/new-york%E2%80%99s-finest/
http://boingboing.net/2011/10/02/as-occupy-wall-street-began-chase-makes-biggest-donation-in-history-to-nypd.html
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Related

CCTV and police abuse of power
Investigations into the London Gaza protests last year have called into question how CCTV evidence is being used by police

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/19/gaza-protests-inquiry-police-cctv
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2011-10-08T09:10:00.000-04:00

Against Nostalgia

By Mike Daisey
The New York Times
Opinion
October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs was an enemy of nostalgia. He believed that the future required sacrifice and boldness. He bet on new technologies to fill gaps even when the way was unclear.

He often told the press that he was as proud of the devices Apple killed — in the parlance of Silicon Valley, he was a master of “knifing the baby,” which more squeamish innovators cannot do because they fall in love with their creations — as the ones it released. One of the keys to Apple’s success under his leadership was his ability to see technology with an unsentimental eye and keen scalpel, ready to cut loose whatever might not be essential. This editorial mien was Mr. Jobs’s greatest gift — he created a sense of style in computing because he could edit.

It would be fascinating to know what Mr. Jobs would make of the outpouring of grief flooding the developed world after his death on Wednesday. While it’s certain he’d be flattered, his hawk-eyed nature might assert itself: this is a man who once called an engineer at Google over the weekend because the shade of yellow in the second “O” was not precisely correct. This is a man who responded to e-mails sent by strangers with shocking regularity for the world’s most famous C.E.O. His impatience with fools was legendary, and the amount of hagiography now being ladled onto his life with abandon would undoubtedly set his teeth on edge.

Many of Silicon Valley’s leaders regularly ask themselves “What would Steve do?” in an almost religious fashion when facing challenges, and it is a worthy mental exercise for confronting the fact of his death. I think Mr. Jobs would coldly and clearly assess his life and provide unvarnished criticism of its contents. He’d have no problem acknowledging that he was a genius — as he was gifted with an enormously healthy ego — but he would also state with salty language exactly where he had fallen short, and what might be needed to refine his design with the benefit of hindsight.

Mr. Jobs leaves behind a dominant Apple, fulfilling his original promise to save the company from the brink when he returned in 1997. Because of its enormous strength in both music sales and mobile devices, Apple has more power than at any time in its history, and it is using that power to make the computing experience of its users less free, more locked down and more tightly regulated than ever before. All of Apple’s iDevices — the iPod, iPhone and iPad — use operating systems that deny the user access to their workings. Users cannot install programs themselves; they are downloaded from Apple’s servers, which Apple controls and curates, choosing at its whim what can and can’t be distributed, and where anything can be censored with little or no explanation.

The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

Apple’s rise to power in our time directly paralleled the transformation of global manufacturing. As recently as 10 years ago Apple’s computers were assembled in the United States, but today they are built in southern China under appalling labor conditions. Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after working a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple.

I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.”

Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to “think different,” in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.

It’s a high bar, but Mr. Jobs always believed passionately in brutal honesty, and the truth is rarely kind. With his death, the serious work to do the things he has failed to do will fall to all of us: the rebels, the misfits, the crazy ones who think they can change the world.

Mike Daisey is an author and performer. His latest monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” is scheduled to open at the Public Theater on Tuesday.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/jobs-looked-to-the-future.html?_r=1
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2011-10-03T07:26:00.001-04:00

My Fellow American

Submitted Commentary
Oct. 3, 2010

Muslims are our fellow Americans. They are part of the national fabric that holds our country together. They contribute to America in many ways, and deserve the same respect as any of us. I pledge to spread this message, and affirm our country’s principles of liberty and justice for all.

My Fellow American is an online film and social media project that calls upon concerned Americans to pledge and spread a message that Muslims are our fellow Americans. It asks people of other backgrounds to pledge, and share a real life story about a Muslim friend, neighbor, or colleague that they admire. Using the power of social media, My Fellow American seeks to change the narrative – from Muslims as the other, to Muslims as our fellow Americans.

Most Americans have never met an American Muslim. Many only know Muslims through the way they are portrayed in the media. American Muslims are so often vilified as “the other” that it is possible not to recognize that most were born in the U.S. Or that those who immigrated here came seeking the same freedoms and opportunities that have always attracted people to America.

Muslims are our fellow Americans, who today face threats to their civil rights and even their personal safety because of the fearful and often hateful rhetoric that would not be tolerated were it uttered about any other minority group.

Unity Productions Foundation (UPF)

My Fellow American is a project of Unity Productions Foundation (www.upf.tv), a 501©3 media and education non profit organization. The mission of Unity Productions Foundation (UPF) is to create peace through the media. Founded in 1999, UPF produces documentary films for television and online broadcast and theatrical release, and implements long-term educational campaigns aimed at increasing understanding between people of different faiths and cultures, especially between Muslims and other faiths. We are convinced of the power of media to empower citizens with greater understanding and to nourish pluralism in America.

UPF films have been viewed by an estimated 150 million people worldwide and have won dozens of national and international awards. UPF has partnered with prominent Jewish, Muslim, Christian and interfaith groups to run dialogues nationwide — with more than 80,000 participants in classrooms, community centers, living rooms, government offices and religious congregations.

Year after year, UPF’s films are recognized for excellence:

Best Documentary at the 2007 American Black Film Festival
5 Telly Awards for excellence in educational documentaries
11 TIVA-DC Peer Awards, including Best Documentary
Hamburg World Media Film Festival’s Gold and Silver Awards
4 CINE Golden Eagle Awards
4 Grand Goldies Awards
Newark Black Film Festival’s 2008 Paul Robeson Award
Official Selection of 2 dozen film festivals around the world

Watch the My Fellow American Movie Trailer

About the Film

My Fellow American was produced by Unity Productions Foundation in association with Gardner Films, Inc (www.gardnerfilms.com). It was directed by the Oscar-nominated, multiple Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, Robert Gardner. Unity Productions Foundation has collaborated with Gardner Films on several previous projects, including the PBS documentary, Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain and a documentary based on the Gallup Poll of the Muslim world called Inside Islam: What A Billion Muslims Really Think.

My Fellow American was shot in Baltimore using some of the personnel who worked on the popular television series, The Wire. The voices heard in the film are actual excerpts found on youtube, and were a small sample of such comments from various public figures, including law makers, radio and television personalities, and leading religious leaders.

My Fellow American was made possible by the support of individuals and charitable organizations including the Odyssey Networks, a media organization delivering videos of interfaith news beyond the headlines and inspirational stories of faith in action.

Unity Productions Foundation
http://facebook.com/MyFellowAmericanProject
@usmuslimstories

Commentary Source:
http://myfellowamerican.us/
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2011-10-02T14:16:00.000-04:00

As Obama Goes Abroad Searching for Monsters to Destroy, Ron Paul is Right to Reject Assassinating Americans

The bipartisan disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law stopped when Texas Congressman Ron Paul was asked about the air strike that on Friday killed the two Americans in Yemen.

By John Nichols
Nation of Change
Op Ed
Oct. 1, 2011

President Obama’s authorization of the assassination of an American citizen, New Mexico–born Anwar al-Awlaki—in a drone attack that also killed American citizen Samir Khan, who was raised in New York City and North Carolina—drew high praise from execution-enthusiast Rick Perry, who congratulated Obama by name for “getting another key terrorist.”

But the bipartisan disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law stopped when Texas Congressman Ron Paul was asked about the air strike that on Friday killed the two Americans in Yemen.

The congressman, who is competing with Perry and others for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, has long complained about “war on terror” abuses that he sees as part of “the disintegration of American jurisprudence.”

And he was blunt in rejecting the victory-lap mentality that saw Obama Democrats and Perry Republicans celebrating the killing of American citizens.

“I don’t think that’s a good way to deal with our problems,” Paul said in New Hampshire. “Al-Awlaki was born here; he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. Nobody knows if he killed anybody. We know he might have been associated with the underwear bomber. But if the American people accept this blindly and casually—that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys—I think it’s sad."

Noting that no move was made to assassinate Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was arrested, tried and executed, Paul said: “To start assassinating American citizens without charges, we should think very seriously about this.”

The congressman, who has been an outspoken critic on the expansion of the September 2001 Congressional authorization of a response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to support a perpetual “war on terror,” said, “I voted to authority to go after those individuals responsible for 9/11. Nobody ever suggested that [Awlaki] was a participant in 9/11.”

Paul’s statement, and a slightly less pointed response from another libertarian-leaning presidential contender, reflects a more traditionalist view of the Constitution. As recently as the 1950s, “old-right” Republicans such as Ohio Senator Robert Taft and Nebraska Congressman Howard Buffett (Warren’s father) opposed undeclared wars and military adventures. Their stances extended from founding principles outlined by James Madison, when he warned that “no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

It was a successor to Madison, John Quincy Adams, who warned against searching the globe for targets of assassination and military conquest.

“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” Adams told Congress in 1821. “But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

This story originally appeared in The Nation.

This story originally appeared in The Nation

This story originally appeared in The Nation.

This article was published at NationofChange at:
http://www.nationofchange.org/obama-goes-abroad-searching-monsters-destroy-ron-pauls-right-reject-assassinating-americans-1317534
All rights are reserved.
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2011-09-25T09:42:00.002-04:00

Automated killing
A future for drones

Peter Finn
The Washington Post
Sept. 19, 2011

One afternoon last fall at Fort Benning, Ga., two model-size planes took off, climbed to 800 and 1,000 feet, and began criss-crossing the military base in search of an orange, green and blue tarp.

The automated, unpiloted planes worked on their own, with no human guidance, no hand on any control.

After 20 minutes, one of the aircraft, carrying a computer that processed images from an onboard camera, zeroed in on the tarp and contacted the second plane, which flew nearby and used its own sensors to examine the colorful object. Then one of the aircraft signaled to an unmanned car on the ground so it could take a final, close-up look.

Target confirmed.

This successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. Imagine aerial “Terminators,” minus beefcake and time travel.

The Fort Benning tarp “is a rather simple target, but think of it as a surrogate,” said Charles E. Pippin, a scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, which developed the software to run the demonstration. “You can imagine real-time scenarios where you have 10 of these things up in the air and something is happening on the ground and you don’t have time for a human to say, ‘I need you to do these tasks.’ It needs to happen faster than that.”

The demonstration laid the groundwork for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software. Once a match was made, a drone could launch a missile to kill the target.

Military systems with some degree of autonomy — such as robotic, weaponized sentries — have been deployed in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea and other potential battle areas. Researchers are uncertain how soon machines capable of collaborating and adapting intelligently in battlefield conditions will come online. It could take one or two decades, or longer. The U.S. military is funding numerous research projects on autonomy to develop machines that will perform some dull or dangerous tasks and to maintain its advantage over potential adversaries who are also working on such systems.

The killing of terrorism suspects and insurgents by armed drones, controlled by pilots sitting in bases thousands of miles away in the western United States, has prompted criticism that the technology makes war too antiseptic. Questions also have been raised about the legality of drone strikes when employed in places such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which are not at war with the United States. This debate will only intensify as technological advances enable what experts call lethal autonomy.

The prospect of machines able to perceive, reason and act in unscripted environments presents a challenge to the current understanding of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to use discrimination and proportionality, standards that would demand that machines distinguish among enemy combatants, surrendering troops and civilians.

“The deployment of such systems would reflect a paradigm shift and a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities,” Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said at a conference in Italy this month. “It would also raise a range of fundamental legal, ethical and societal issues, which need to be considered before such systems are developed or deployed.”

Drones flying over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen can already move automatically from point to point, and it is unclear what surveillance or other tasks, if any, they perform while in autonomous mode. Even when directly linked to human operators, these machines are producing so much data that processors are sifting the material to suggest targets, or at least objects of interest. That trend toward greater autonomy will only increase as the U.S. military shifts from one pilot remotely flying a drone to one pilot remotely managing several drones at once.

But humans still make the decision to fire, and in the case of CIA strikes in Pakistan, that call rests with the director of the agency. In future operations, if drones are deployed against a sophisticated enemy, there may be much less time for deliberation and a greater need for machines that can function on their own.

The U.S. military has begun to grapple with the implications of emerging technologies.

“Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions,” according to an Air Force treatise called Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047. “These include the appropriateness of machines having this ability, under what circumstances it should be employed, where responsibility for mistakes lies and what limitations should be placed upon the autonomy of such systems.”

In the future, micro-drones will reconnoiter tunnels and buildings, robotic mules will haul equipment and mobile systems will retrieve the wounded while under fire. Technology will save lives. But the trajectory of military research has led to calls for an arms-control regime to forestall any possibility that autonomous systems could target humans.

In Berlin last year, a group of robotic engineers, philosophers and human rights activists formed the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and said such technologies might tempt policymakers to think war can be less bloody.

Some experts also worry that hostile states or terrorist organizations could hack robotic systems and redirect them. Malfunctions also are a problem: In South Africa in 2007, a semiautonomous cannon fatally shot nine friendly soldiers.

The ICRAC would like to see an international treaty, such as the one banning antipersonnel mines, that would outlaw some autonomous lethal machines. Such an agreement could still allow automated antimissile systems.

“The question is whether systems are capable of discrimination,” said Peter Asaro, a founder of the ICRAC and a professor at the New School in New York who teaches a course on digital war. “The good technology is far off, but technology that doesn’t work well is already out there. The worry is that these systems are going to be pushed out too soon, and they make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes are going to be atrocities.”

Research into autonomy, some of it classified, is racing ahead at universities and research centers in the United States, and that effort is beginning to be replicated in other countries, particularly China.

“Lethal autonomy is inevitable,” said Ronald C. Arkin, the author of “Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots,” a study that was funded by the Army Research Office.

Arkin believes it is possible to build ethical military drones and robots, capable of using deadly force while programmed to adhere to international humanitarian law and the rules of engagement. He said software can be created that would lead machines to return fire with proportionality, minimize collateral damage, recognize surrender, and, in the case of uncertainty, maneuver to reassess or wait for a human assessment.

In other words, rules as understood by humans can be converted into algorithms followed by machines for all kinds of actions on the battlefield.

“How a war-fighting unit may think — we are trying to make our systems behave like that,” said Lora G. Weiss, chief scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Others, however, remain skeptical that humans can be taken out of the loop.

“Autonomy is really the Achilles’ heel of robotics,” said Johann Borenstein, head of the Mobile Robotics Lab at the University of Michigan. “There is a lot of work being done, and still we haven’t gotten to a point where the smallest amount of autonomy is being used in the military field. All robots in the military are remote-controlled. How does that sit with the fact that autonomy has been worked on at universities and companies for well over 20 years?”

Borenstein said human skills will remain critical in battle far into the future.

“The foremost of all skills is common sense,” he said. “Robots don’t have common sense and won’t have common sense in the next 50 years, or however long one might want to guess.”

Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/a-future-for-drones-automated-killing/2011/09/15/gIQAVy9mgK_story.html
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2011-09-17T18:38:00.002-04:00

Five Biggest Right-Wing Lies about Solyndra

By Dave Johnson
Nation of Change
Sept. 17, 2011

Oil-backed conservatives have been absolutely ecstatic over the collapse of American solar-power company Solyndra and the rise of China as the dominant country in green energy, because they think they can turn this into a story that makes President Obama and government look bad. It also gives them a bonus opportunity to attack alternatives to coal and oil.

So is there really a "scandal" behind what happened to Solyndra? Or is this just one more conservative smear, made up from whole cloth and spread around conservative outlets, talk radio and FOX News, hoping the "mainstream media" will be tricked into propelling the propaganda out to the public?

The Smear Machine

When Bill Clinton was president, conservatives developed and refined a "smear machine" technique of making up accusation after accusation after accusation (after accusation after accusation), repeating them endlessly and hysterically in conservative-funded outlets, and working to get major media outlets to pick up and repeat them. Unfortunately they were often successful at driving phony smears into the public arena. Even though the stories were invariably refuted after investigation, by the time each smear was refuted many, many more were circulating. After a while people began to believe "where there's smoke there's fire."

One such story that major outlets repeated involved the supposed "sale" of an Arlington cemetery plot for campaign contributions. When it was proven to be nothing more than a false smear, the repetition in major outlets was justified" because it's just the sort of thing he might have done."

In the 2004 presidential election we saw the process repeated with the "Swift Boat" smear that turned around Sen. John Kerry's lead in the polls. It was entirely a made-up lie, but the mainstream media picked it up and propelled it.

Since President Obama's election, right-wing media outlets have again been engaged in creating a constant stream of negative and destructive "stories" that try to turn the public against the president, Democrats in general and government itself.

We have been told that the President is secretly a Muslim terrorist, was not born in the United States and therefore is an illegitimate president and is a "socialist" out to destroy our way of life. They have claimed he raised taxes when in reality he cut taxes, that he "tripled the deficit" when in reality he cut the deficit from the $1.4 trillion hole Bush left us in, that his stimulus plan "created zero jobs" when in reality it turned around a rapidly-deteriorating economy, that he has dramatically increased spending when in reality he did not—all in an attempt to turn people against him and against the idea that government can be a force for good. (See Three Charts To Email To Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law.) Accusation after accusation has been shot down.

The Top Five Lies

Now they're at it again, this time trying to turn the unfortunate bankruptcy of a solar-power company named Solyndra into an all-out, anti-Obama and anti-government attack. Here is a countdown of the top five lies they are telling about what happened with Solyndra:

5. The biggest investor in Solyndra was an Obama donor.
Conservatives (and now picked up by corporate "mainstream" outlets) make the accusation that there was corruption in the process by which Solyndra received its loan because a major Obama donor named George Kaiser is a major investor in Solyndra. The charge is that Solyndra only received the loan guarantee as a result of campaign contributions by people "connected to" Solyndra. The problem with this is that George Kaiser was not an investor in Solyndra. According to Tulsa World,

In an emailed statement to the Tulsa World, a representative of the George Kaiser Family Foundation said the organization made the investment through Argonaut.
"George Kaiser is not an investor in Solyndra and did not participate in any discussions with the U.S. government regarding the loan," the statement said. "GKFF invests in a globally diversified portfolio across many different asset classes."

The Kaiser Family Foundation is a philanthropic organization, which means Kaiser (or anyone else) could not personally profit from a successful investment by the foundation.

4. Green energy is a bad investment.
Oil-connected conservatives have been trying to kill off investment in green energy for some time. They see opportunity in hyping up a "scandal" over the bankruptcy of Solyndra as a way to attack the idea of developing a green-energy industry in the US.

Just today, Heritage Foundation, which for months has been attacking the idea of creating green jobs, has this today: Solyndra Scandal Ends Green Jobs Myth. (I have several examples of conservative attacks on green manufacturing in the post, The Phony Solyndra Solar Scandal.)

Just in the last year China gave $30 billion financing to 6 solar companies. If the benefits from developing a green energy industry that provides lots of green jobs are a myth then why is China putting so much into this effort?

3. The government lost money "picking winners and losers."
This is a core line of attack by the right. By tricking the public into thinking that the purpose of government's efforts to trigger a green-energy industry was to make money for the government by investing in individual companies, they can make this look bad because one company went into bankruptcy.

But the purpose of our government's involvement in this is to help trigger an ecosystem around which a green-energy industry can grow. When a new technology is promising, it might be risky to investors, but very beneficial to us as a country to pursue it. That way we end up with a chunk of the millions of jobs and trillions of dollars that result. That benefits everyone.

The government does not operate like a venture capitalist, investing in companies with the hope of reaping a profit for itself. Compare the effort to trigger a green-energy industry to government-funded cancer research. Some directions of exploration don’t pan out. But you don’t know that until you fund the tests. This is what happened with Solyndra.

The loan guarantee enabled Solyndra to get private investment, and hire researchers as well as manufacturing and other employees, to build a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in the U.S., to develop a supply chain, to buy equipment and the other components that would make a viable business. This was part of the stimulus and all that money was moved into the economy. And all of those are still in the United States, ready to be part of scaling up a green-energy industry. So where the country is concerned, we didn’t lose at all.

The goal was not to make Solyndra a successful company; the goal was to trigger an ecosystem for the green-energy industry in the U.S. Weren't the things the money was used for good for the country? Even though the company Solyndra didn’t make it, the money created jobs and leaves behind technology, equipment and facilities that other companies will use.

2. The Solyndra loan was rushed or pushed.
This loan originated under the Bush administration—and for good reasons. Following the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Bush administration began efforts to cultivate a U.S.-based green-energy industry. Solyndra offered a promising technology and applied for loan guarantees. Following a review by career professional in the Department of Energy Solyndra was asked to provide more information. A few months later, under the new Obama administration, the same career professionals received the requested information and proceeded to approve the loan.

The Energy department imposed some conditions, and a few months later those conditions were met, and the timeline of meeting the conditions meant it happened under the new administration but was handled by the same career professionals. It was the right thing to do for the country to suggest the loan under the Bush administration, which did nothing wrong.

Approving the loan under the Obama administration also helps the country because that money went toward helping develop that ecosystem that creates companies and jobs. Stories about rushing the approval are meant to make it sound as if it was done to help a major campaign donor who, as point #1 above makes clear, was not the investor. It is the only reason the timing is an issue.

The Number One Lie

And the number 1 lie told by conservatives is:

1. Something bad happened.
The right has been trying to push the idea that something bad has happened involving Solyndra. They are calling it a "scandal." But it is entirely a manufactured scandal, like those from the Clinton era. This is what they do. Nothing bad happened.

The supposed campaign donor/investor is not an investor. The timing of the loan is not suspect, it followed the proper, transparent, accountable procedures. The loan assisted the development of a promising technology. The green-energy industry stands to create millions of jobs and trillions of dollars for the countries that are smart enough now to make the investments that help them grab a chunk of it. The loan was good for the country, even though one company went bankrupt.

But by the time this smear is refuted, five more will have taken its place.

This article was published at NationofChange at:
http://www.nationofchange.org/five-biggest-right-wing-lies-about-solyndra-1316271870.
All rights are reserved.
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2011-09-15T20:22:00.000-04:00

The $2 Billion UBS Incident: 'Rogue Trader' My Ass

by Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone Magazine
Sept. 15, 2011

The news that a "rogue trader" (I hate that term – more on that in a moment) has soaked the Swiss banking giant UBS for $2 billion has rocked the international financial community and threatened to drive a stake through any chance Europe had of averting economic disaster. There is much hand-wringing in the financial press today as the UBS incident has reminded the whole world that all of the banks were almost certainly lying their asses off over the last three years, when they all pledged to pull back from risky prop trading. Here’s how the WSJ put it:

The Swiss banking giant has been struggling to rebuild trust after running up vast losses in the original financial crisis. Under Chief Executive Oswald Grubel, the bank claimed to have put in place new risk management practices, pulled back from proprietary trading and focused on a low-risk client-driven model.

All the troubled banks, remember, made similar promises in the wake of the financial crisis. In fact, some of them used the exact same language. Some will recall Goldman’s executive summary from earlier this year in which the bank pledged to respond to a "challenging period" in its history by making changes.

"We reviewed the governance, standards and practices of certain of our firmwide operating committees," the bank wrote, "to ensure their focus on client service, business standards and practices and reputational risk management."

But the reality is, the brains of investment bankers by nature are not wired for "client-based" thinking. This is the reason why the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept investment banks and commercial banks separate, was originally passed back in 1933: it just defies common sense to have professional gamblers in charge of stewarding commercial bank accounts.

Investment bankers do not see it as their jobs to tend to the dreary business of making sure Ma and Pa Main Street get their $8.03 in savings account interest every month. Nothing about traditional commercial banking – historically, the dullest of businesses, taking customer deposits and making conservative investments with them in search of a percentage point of profit here and there – turns them on.

In fact, investment bankers by nature have huge appetites for risk, and most of them take pride in being able to sleep at night even when their bets are going the wrong way. If you’re not a person who can doze through a two-hour foot massage while your client (which might be your own bank) is losing ten thousand dollars a minute on some exotic trade you’ve cooked up, then you won’t make it on today’s Wall Street.

Nonetheless, thanks to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed in 1998 with the help of Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm and a host of other short-sighted politicians, we now have a situation where trillions in federally-insured commercial bank deposits have been wedded at the end of a shotgun to exactly such career investment bankers from places like Salomon Brothers (now part of Citi), Merrill Lynch (Bank of America), Bear Stearns (Chase), and so on.

These marriages have been a disaster. The influx of i-banking types into the once-boring worlds of commercial bank accounts, home mortgages, and consumer credit has helped turn every part of the financial universe into a casino. That’s why I can’t stand the term "rogue trader," which is always tossed out there when some investment-banker asshole loses a billion dollars betting with someone else’s money.

They’re not "rogue" for the simple reason that making insanely irresponsible decisions with other peoples’ money is exactly the job description of a lot of people on Wall Street. Hell, they don’t call these guys "rogue traders" when they make a billion dollars gambling.

The only thing that differentiates a "rogue" trader like Barings villain Nick Leeson from a Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, John Thain, or someone like AIG’s Joe Cassano, is that those other guys are more senior and their lunatic, catastrophic decisions were authorized (and yes, I know that Cassano wasn’t an investment banker, technically – but he was in financial services).

In the financial press you're called a "rogue trader" if you're some overperspired 28 year-old newbie who bypasses internal audits and quality control to make a disastrous trade that could sink the company. But if you're a well-groomed 60 year-old CEO who uses his authority to ignore quality control and internal audits in order to make disastrous trades that could sink the company, you get a bailout, a bonus, and heroic treatment in an Andrew Ross Sorkin book.

In other words, "rogue traders" are treated like bad accidents and condemned everywhere from the front pages to Ewan McGregor films. But rogue companies are protected at every level of the regulatory structure and continually empowered by dergulatory legislation giving them access to our bank accounts.

There is a movement in the UK for a thing called “ringfencing” that would separate investment bankers from commercial bankers. Some people think this UBS incident will aid that movement, even though UBS can apparently absorb the loss without necessitating a bailout or endangering client accounts.

The U.S. missed its own chance for ringfencing when a proposal for a full repeal of Gramm-Leach-Bliley was routed during the Dodd-Frank negotiations.

That means we’re probably stuck here in the states with companies like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, giant commercial banks in charge of stewarding trillions in client bank accounts and consumer credit accounts who also behave like turbocharged gamblers via their investment banking arms.
Sooner or later, this is going to blow up in our faces, and it won't be one lower-level guy with a $2 billion loss we'll be swallowing. It'll be the CEO of another rogue firm like Lehman Brothers, and it'll cost us trillions, not billions.

Source:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/the-2-billion-ubs-incident-rogue-trader-my-ass-20110915
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2011-09-01T17:50:00.000-04:00

Documents Reveal New Details About DHS Development of Mobile Body Scanners

The mobile backscatter machines cannot be American National Standards Institute “certified people scanners” because of the high level of radiation

Sept 1, 2011

EPIC has obtained more than one hundred fifty pages of documents detailing the Department of Homeland Security’s development of mobile body scanners and other crowd surveillance technology. The documents were obtained as a result of a Freedom Information Act lawsuit brought by EPIC against the federal agency.

According to the documents obtained by EPIC, vehicles equipped with mobile body scanners are designed to scan crowds and pedestrians on the street and can see through bags, clothing, and even other vehicles.

The documents also reveal that the mobile backscatter machines cannot be American National Standards Institute “certified people scanners” because of the high level of radiation output and because subjects would not know they have been scanned.

For more information see EPIC: Whole Body Imaging Technology and EPIC: EPIC v. DHS (Suspension of the Body Scanner Program).

Source:
http://epic.org/2011/08/documents-reveal-new-details-a.html
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2011-08-28T21:07:00.000-04:00

Libya Peace, Politics and Oil

Independent Submission
August 25, 2011

Fighting continues despite the absence of Ghaddafi to an uncertain future while entrepreneurial nations are circling like vultures.

Turkey and Italy have made their intentions known, and China is revising its language. It is clear that the fighters of the National Transitional Council paid no attention whatsoever to the calls to resolve the crisis through dialogue.

Post-Ghaddafi Libya will no doubt see significant changes and a closer look at relationships both economic, political and military as well as potential outcomes of the winners and losers as a result of the conflict.

International Responses

• China: On August 24, Beijing was forced, by the advance of the NTC fighters, to abandon its measured approach to diplomacy and issue a statement - posted on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website - which addressed new tactical realities:

"The Chinese side has closely followed the major changes in Libya's political situation, respects the will of the Libyan people, and hopes Libya will realize a smooth transition of political power. We have consistently attached importance to the significant role of the 'National Transitional Council' in solving Libya's problems, and maintained relations with it. We hope in the future the new regime takes effective measures to consolidate the power of all factions, and to resume normal social order as soon as possible, to help begin political and economic reconstruction, and enable the Libyan people to quickly resume happy and stable lives." WSJ

The Chinese do not formally acknowledge the NTC as the new legal government in Libya, but are being forced by the orchestrated events to reconsider.

If China does recognize the NTC, it will because of the need for Libyan oil to feed the Chinese energy needs, and also to provide jobs for the oil sector - the Chinese are concerned at the prospect of an Arab Spring occurring in China, and Beijing is aware of the unemployment and disaffection driving the revolutions seen across the Middle East.

There has been no acceptance of the emerging events by other nation states:

    •    Algeria:   Opposed the Arab League resolution to back NATO air strikes. Concerned of migration of conflict into Algeria where Algiers continues to struggle against Al Qaida.

    •    Angola: Condemned NATO air strikes and believes that negotiations are the way to resolve differences between Ghaddafi and the NTC.

    •    Bolivia: President Evo Morales called for "an immediate halt to the invasion and armed assault to Libya" and for an international commission to seek a diplomatic solution to the 'civil war'. "You can not defend human rights by violating human rights," Morales said, regarding the authorization of UN intervention and the alleged subsequent bombing of homes and hospitals by the United States, the UK and France.

    •    Cuba: Fidel Castro published on the Cuba Debate website between February 21 and March 3 that: "NATO's plan is to occupy Libya." According to the paper, "Not even the fascist leaders of Germany and Italy were so supremely shameless immediately following the Spanish Civil War unleashed in 1936, an episode that many people have possibly recalled in recent days" and has announced that the U.S. is seeking Libya's oil.

    •    Ecuador: President Rafael Correa compared Libya with the start of the invasion of Iraq. "Remember that it was false reports which led to the United Nation's approval. As in the case of Libya, the only thing the United Nations adopted was the no-fly zone" he said. The president was ironic about the U.S. response to certain Arab countries. "In Saudi Arabia there are no elections, but a hard monarchy. They say that Iran does not respect human rights under Islamic law, but in Saudi Arabia it is three times stronger, we shall see when they bomb Saudi Arabia," he said.

    •    Nicaragua: In February President Daniel Ortega spoke to the Libyan leader to express his solidarity, an adviser to Ortega said his government would consider giving asylum to Ghaddafi if he asked for it, but that it would be difficult to arrange.

    •    Russia: It has criticized NATO for overstepping its mandate and as yet does not recognize the rebels as the sole legitimate representative of Libya.

    •    South Africa: South Africa has not recognized the NTC, and its diplomats continue to advocate a peaceful, negotiated transition, condemning NATO strikes and that South Africa is a possible safe haven for Ghaddafi.

    •    Syria: Bashir al-Assad stated that NATO airstrikes are a violation of Libya's sovereignty (he is concerned that he will be next.)

    •    Uruguay:    President José Mujica said of the NATO airstrikes, "saving lives with bombings are an inexplicable contradiction, the cure is worse than the disease.".

    •    Venezuela: President Hugo Chávez said: "European 'democratic' governments, not all of them, one knows who is who, are virtually demolishing Tripoli with their shelling and the allegedly US democratic government does it, because it feels like doing it. It is an excuse for meddling." On Tuesday, Chavez said "We recognize only one government: the one led by Muammar Ghaddafi." and condemned the roles of NATO and the US government in Libya's conflict. "Without a doubt, we're facing imperial madness," he said.

    •    Zimbabwe: President Robert Mugabe, a close ally of Ghaddafi for many years, and the recipient of much Libyan money, said the West interpreted the UN resolution "in their own hypocritical way" to mean they had a right to bomb Libya. Mugabe said the resolutions was meant to ground Ghaddafi's planes and save civilians not disarm him, and wage a Western-led campaign against his regime, that has instead butchered innocent civilians.

Many nations have condemned NATO's actions; and the traditional international antagonisms between powerful nations highlight unrest over the use of force to resolve internal political issues.

Most Arab countries continue to sit on the fence and have not made any contribution or comment on the actions of the NTC with the exceptions of Qatar and the UAE and will likely to reap the fruits of such commitment.

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2011-08-22T10:19:00.003-04:00

US Park Police Seek to Intimidate Oil Pipeline Protesters

By: Kevin Gosztola
Firedoglake Dissenter
August 21, 2011

A major two-week action involving daily sit-ins at the White House against the granting of a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline began Saturday. Just over seventy people were arrested. The action continues today, as over thirty plan to engage in civil disobedience at the White House again.

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Gus Speth, Lt. Dan Choi, Jane Hamsher and many other fine activists came together at 10:30 am on Saturday morning. They all participated in a rally in Lafayette Park. Following the rally, a carefully orchestrated civil disobedience action took place with more than seventy people lining up in front of the White House.

Two banners were held. One said “Climate Change is Not in Our Interest” and the other said “We Sit-In Against the XL Pipeline.” One long row of people stood along the fence. Two short rows sat on the ground in front of the long row.

It didn’t take long for the police to give the obligatory three warnings to protesters and signal that those still along the fence were under arrest. One by one they were put into police vehicles and taken to the Anacostia Station in DC to be processed. The activists were charged with “failure to obey a lawful order.”

In jail, the activists expected to be processed and out of jail quickly. Tar Sands Action asserts in “multiple phone calls and in person meeting” US Park Police told protest organizers protest participants would be able to pay a $100 fine and be released the same day. But, the US Park Police went back on what they said and made a calculated decision to hold the activists for 48 hours.

The Park Police told Tar Sands Action organizers jail time was given to deter future participants from engaging in civil disobedience.

Tar Sands Action reacted in a press statement, “While the escalated response from the police came as a surprise for organizers behind the protest, they assured the police that the night in jail was not a deterrent for future participants. At a church in Columbia Heights this evening, over 50 more participants from across the country prepared to take part in Sunday morning’s sit-in.”

Not to take away from the activists who have a much more robust history of environmental activism, but it’s worth noting that Dan Choi is once again facing arbitrary punishment for protesting in front of the White House. Choi currently faces federal charges for participating in previous protest actions at the White House. Choi has only been arrested three times but is facing “federal charges.” Numerous people have protest many, many times and have not faced any “federal charges” at all.

An FDL action post put together by Jane Hamsher provides a nice portrait of what typically happens to those who engage in civil disobedience at the White House:

July 27 2011: Luis Guitierrez and ten others arrested for protesting mass undocumented immigrant deportations. “Gutierrez [paid] his $100 fine and was released by the police.”

July 11: 4 people were arrested after 100 people delivered 51 cardboard coffins to the White House to protest the Columbia Free Trade Agreement.

June 25: 12 DC residents arrested for demonstrating on behalf of DC voting rights, bringing the total to 73 since April.

April 19: 41 protesters including DC Mayor Vincent Gray arrested for demonstrating for DC voting rights. All were charged with unlawful assembly and given a $50 fine.

March 19 – Daniel Ellsberg is one of 113 people arrested in front of the White House for protesting the abuse of Bradley Manning by Quantico brig commander.

January 18 2011: Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney was arrested for protesting human rights abuses of the Chinese government

December 17 2010 – 135 arrested for protesting the war.

June 1 2010: Actress Q’orianka Kilcher, who starred as Pocahontas in the 2005 film “The New World,” was arrested for chaining herself to the White House fence to protest the President’s meeting between Alan Garzia Perez. Hazmat teams were called in after her mother poured a black substance over her to simulate oil, which turned out to be paint. She was charged with disorderly conduct and her mother was charged with destruction of government property. They were arraigned in D.C. Superior Court, released and “ordered to stay away from the White House.”

September 2010: James Hansen and 100 others arrested for protesting mountaintop removal.

May 2010 – Luis Guiterrez arrested for protesting to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

March 20 2010: Cindy Sheehan arrested in front of White House.

October 5 2009: Cindy Sheehan and 60 others arrested for protesting against the war in Afghanistan.

November 9 2006: Cindy Sheehan arrested after leading 50 protesters to the White House gates to deliver anti-war petitions.

October 26 2005: Cindy Sheehan and 28 others arrested in a sit-in at the White House.

September 26 2005: 370 people including Cindy Sheehan were arrested for protesting against the war in Iraq. They were “charged with demonstrating without a permit, a misdemeanor that carries a $50 fine and — like a traffic ticket — can be paid by mail or challenged later in court” said Park Police spokesman Sgt. Scott Fear.

This list of recent protests at the White House and the way law enforcement and courts have handled them shows the US Park Police are interested in preventing the Tar Sands Action from building momentum. They are willing to teach participants a lesson in a society where people who are responsible for oil spills rarely, if ever, face punishment for their negligent acts.

Ironically, US Park Police are arbitrarily enforcing provisions of the law because the planned daily sit-ins that are to take place from now until September 2 will conflict with the dedication of a new memorial for Martin Luther King Jr, who was a great believer in the power of civil disobedience to bring about social change and justice. After being arrested for taking nonviolent direct action against segregation by Birmingham’s city government and downtown retailers, King wound up in jail and wrote the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Two lines seem applicable to the bold action being taken by concerned citizens over the next weeks: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

The possible construction of the Keystone XL pipeline is a prime example of something that would be a huge injustice that would threaten justice everywhere. The TransCanada pipeline will wind its way from Alberta to Texas through Nebraska and ruin the livelihoods of farmers while at the same time polluting the Sandhills and the Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska. It would put the Missouri, Yellowstone, Cheyenne and Niobrara Rivers at risk of spills.

TransCanada CEO Hal Kvisle and others can claim the project will “meet or exceed world-class safety and environmental standards.” They can say it will be the “safest pipeline in the US.” But, there is no reason to believe any corporate executive from TransCanada that makes this claim. The company has been responsible for at least twelve oil spills. One spill in North Dakota from their “state-of-the-art” Keystone pipeline resulted in a “six-story geyser” that gushed at least 21,000 gallons of oil into the environment.

Energy companies and their think tanks are selling the government and citizens of the United States a bill of goods. American Petroleum Institute’s Energy Citizens claim the pipeline will bring the US energy security.

They claim it will bring the country national security because the US will be relying on Canada instead of other nations.

They claim it will bring economic growth bringing up to $600 million to the US economy each year.

They claim Canada is environmentally conscious so their energy companies would never develop a pipeline that would destroy the environment.

And, most importantly, they assert over 300,000 US jobs could be created between 2011 and 2015 if the Keystone XL pipeline was given the go ahead today.

The participants in the Tar Sands Action understand on some level that working within the system has failed. As climate activist hero Tim DeChristopher, who is now in jail for making fake bids to block the selling of Utah land for oil and gas drilling, explained in an interview at Netroots Nation 2011 those who “those who write the rules are those who profit from the status quo.” He concluded if people want to move away from a “fossil fuel economy that always leads to a concentration of wealth,” we have to overthrow the current power structure.

What we are talking about is overthrowing our current power structure and that will take some sacrifice on our part. It will take us escalating the tension and the situation so the country has to come down on one side or another. And, really that’s how it’s been with most social movements that have been advocating for significant change. They’ve had to make major sacrifices. They’ve had to escalate the tension and the situation to the point that it couldn’t be avoided. We’re no different from those and we should be willing to make the sacrifices that so many activists in the past have done.

Who knows if the US Park Police are getting cues from anyone within the White House to do whatever they can to stop the daily sit-ins. Those inspired by Tim DeChristopher and the activists—who are taking action and following in his footsteps and the footsteps of many fine US citizens in our nation’s history—should not let the threat of trumped up charges scare them.

Bill McKibben told fellow organizers after his arrest, “The only thing we need in here is more company. We don’t need your sympathy, we need your company.”

Understand, the more people who participate in the action, the harder it will be for the action to be successfully suppressed. The more people who seek to expose the corruption of power—which is seriously considering this project that would cut through the heart of the United States—the more likely citizens are to force the Obama Administration into a position where approving the Keystone XL pipeline is unconscionable.

Source:
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/08/21/us-park-police-seek-to-intimidate-oil-pipeline-protesters/
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2011-08-11T21:04:00.007-04:00

My Fellow American

Submitted Article
Aug. 11, 2010

Muslims are our fellow Americans. They are part of the national fabric that holds our country together. They contribute to America in many ways, and deserve the same respect as any of us. I pledge to spread this message, and affirm our country’s principles of liberty and justice for all.

My Fellow American is an online film and social media project that calls upon concerned Americans to pledge and spread a message that Muslims are our fellow Americans. It asks people of other backgrounds to pledge, and share a real life story about a Muslim friend, neighbor, or colleague that they admire. Using the power of social media, My Fellow American seeks to change the narrative – from Muslims as the other, to Muslims as our fellow Americans.

Most Americans have never met an American Muslim. Many only know Muslims through the way they are portrayed in the media. American Muslims are so often vilified as “the other” that it is possible not to recognize that most were born in the U.S. Or that those who immigrated here came seeking the same freedoms and opportunities that have always attracted people to America.

Muslims are our fellow Americans, who today face threats to their civil rights and even their personal safety because of the fearful and often hateful rhetoric that would not be tolerated were it uttered about any other minority group.

Unity Productions Foundation (UPF)

My Fellow American is a project of Unity Productions Foundation (www.upf.tv), a 501©3 media and education non profit organization. The mission of Unity Productions Foundation (UPF) is to create peace through the media. Founded in 1999, UPF produces documentary films for television and online broadcast and theatrical release, and implements long-term educational campaigns aimed at increasing understanding between people of different faiths and cultures, especially between Muslims and other faiths. We are convinced of the power of media to empower citizens with greater understanding and to nourish pluralism in America.

UPF films have been viewed by an estimated 150 million people worldwide and have won dozens of national and international awards. UPF has partnered with prominent Jewish, Muslim, Christian and interfaith groups to run dialogues nationwide — with more than 80,000 participants in classrooms, community centers, living rooms, government offices and religious congregations.

Year after year, UPF’s films are recognized for excellence:

Best Documentary at the 2007 American Black Film Festival
5 Telly Awards for excellence in educational documentaries
11 TIVA-DC Peer Awards, including Best Documentary
Hamburg World Media Film Festival’s Gold and Silver Awards
4 CINE Golden Eagle Awards
4 Grand Goldies Awards
Newark Black Film Festival’s 2008 Paul Robeson Award
Official Selection of 2 dozen film festivals around the world

Watch the My Fellow American Movie Trailer

About the Film

My Fellow American was produced by Unity Productions Foundation in association with Gardner Films, Inc (www.gardnerfilms.com). It was directed by the Oscar-nominated, multiple Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, Robert Gardner. Unity Productions Foundation has collaborated with Gardner Films on several previous projects, including the PBS documentary, Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain and a documentary based on the Gallup Poll of the Muslim world called Inside Islam: What A Billion Muslims Really Think.

My Fellow American was shot in Baltimore using some of the personnel who worked on the popular television series, The Wire. The voices heard in the film are actual excerpts found on youtube, and were a small sample of such comments from various public figures, including law makers, radio and television personalities, and leading religious leaders.

My Fellow American was made possible by the support of individuals and charitable organizations including the Odyssey Networks, a media organization delivering videos of interfaith news beyond the headlines and inspirational stories of faith in action.

Unity Productions Foundation
facebook.com/MyFellowAmericanProject
@usmuslimstories

Source:
http://myfellowamerican.us/
_________________

2011-08-10T07:52:00.000-04:00

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

Mike Elk and Bob Sloan
The Nation
August 1, 2011

This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.

The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs.

In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”

Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies.

But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.

Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.)

More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.)

ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation [5] last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peak—and at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website.

The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials—yet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program.

This started to change in 1993, when Texas State Representative and ALEC member Ray Allen crafted the Texas Prison Industries Act, which aimed to expand the PIE program. After it passed in Texas, Allen advocated that it be duplicated across the country. In 1995, ALEC’s Prison Industries Act was born.

This Prison Industries Act as printed in ALEC’s 1995 state legislation sourcebook, “provides for the employment of inmate labor in state correctional institutions and in the private manufacturing of certain products under specific conditions.”

These conditions, defined by the PIE program, are supposed to include requirements that “inmates must be paid at the prevailing wage rate” and that the “any room and board deductions…are reasonable and are used to defray the costs of inmate incarceration.” (Some states charge prisoners for room and board, ostensibly to offset the cost of prisons for taxpayers. In Florida, for example, prisoners are paid minimum wage for PIE-certified labor, but 40 percent is taken out of their accounts for this purpose.)

The Prison Industries Act sought to change this, inventing the “private sector prison industry expansion account,” to absorb such deductions, and stipulating that the money should be used to, among other things: “construct work facilities, recruit corporations to participate as private sector industries programs, and pay costs of the authority and department in implementing [these programs].”

Thus, money that was taken from inmate wages to offset the costs of incarceration would increasingly go to expanding prison industries. In 2000, Florida passed a law that mirrored the Prison Industries Act and created the Prison Industries Trust Fund, its own version of the private sector prison industry expansion account, deliberately designed to help expand prison labor for private industries.

The Prison Industries Act was also written to exploit a critical PIE loophole that seemed to suggest that its rules did not apply to prisoner-made goods that were not shipped across state lines. It allowed a third-party company to set up a local address in a state that makes prison goods, buy goods from a prison factory, sell those products locally or surreptitiously ship them across state borders.

It helped that by 1995 oversight of the PIE program had been effectively squashed, transferred from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance to the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA), a private trade organization that happened to be represented by Allen’s lobbying firm, Service House, Inc. In 2003, Allen became the Texas House Chairman of the Corrections Committee and began peddling the Prison Industries Act and other legislation beneficial to CCA and Geo Group, like the Private Correctional Facilities Act.

Soon thereafter he became Chairman of ALEC’s Criminal Justice (now Public Safety and Elections) Task Force. He resigned from the state legislature in 2006 while under investigation for his unethical lobbying practices. He was hired soon after as a lobbyist for Geo Group.

Today’s chair of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task force is state Representative Jerry Madden of Texas, where the Prison Industries Act originated eighteen years ago. According to a 2010 report from NCIA, as of last summer there were "thirty jurisdictions with active [PIE] operations."

These included such states as Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and twelve more. Four more states are now looking to get involved as well; Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania have introduced legislation and New Hampshire is in the process of applying for PIE certification. Today these state’s legislation are based upon an updated version of the Prison Industries Act, which ALEC amended in 2004.

Prison labor has already started to undercut the business of corporations that don’t use it. In Florida, PRIDE has become one of the largest printing corporations in the state, its cheap labor having a significant impact upon smaller local printers. This scenario is playing out in states across the country. In addition to Florida's forty-one prison industries, California alone has sixty. Another 100 or so are scattered throughout other states.

What's more, several states are looking to replace public sector workers with prison labor. In Wisconsin Governor Walker’s recent assault on collective bargaining opened the door to the use of prisoners in public sector jobs in Racine, where inmates are now doing landscaping, painting, and other maintenance work.

According to the Capitol Times, “inmates are not paid for their work, but receive time off their sentences.”

The same is occurring in Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida and Georgia, all states with GOP Assembly majorities and Republican governors. Much of ALEC’s proposed labor legislation, implemented state by state is allowing replacement of public workers with prisoners.

“It’s bad enough that our companies have to compete with exploited and forced labor in China,” says Scott Paul Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a coalition of business and unions. “They shouldn’t have to compete against prison labor here at home. The goal should be for other nations to aspire to the quality of life that Americans enjoy, not to discard our efforts through a downward competitive spiral.”

Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, says prison labor is part of a “confluence of similar interests” among politicians and corporations, long referred to as the “prison industrial complex.” As decades of model legislation reveals, ALEC has been at the center of this confluence.

“This has been ongoing for decades, with prison privatization contributing to the escalation of incarceration rates in the US,” Friedmann says. Just as mass incarceration has burdened American taxpayers in major prison states, so is the use of inmate labor contributing to lost jobs, unemployment and decreased wages among workers—while corporate profits soar.

Source:
http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor
________________

2011-08-07T18:45:00.001-04:00

Creating Evidence Where There Is None

by Paul Craig Roberts
OpEd News
Aug 5, 2011

The New Yorker has published a story planted on Nicholas Schmidle by unidentified sources who claim to be familiar with the alleged operation that murdered Osama bin Laden.

There is no useful information in the story. Its purpose seems simply to explain away or cover up holes in the original story, principally why did the Seals murder an unarmed, unresisting Osama bin Laden whose capture would have resulted in a goldmine of terrorist information and whose show trial would have rescued the government's crumbling 9/11 story?

The gullible Schmidle tells us: ""There was never any question of detaining or capturing him -- it wasn't a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,' the special-operations officer told me." In other words, the SEALs murdered bin Laden because the US government did not want detainees, not because trigger-happy stupid SEALs destroyed a font of terrorist information.

Why did the SEALS dump bin Laden's body in the ocean instead of producing the evidence to a skeptical world? No real explanation, just that SEALS had done the same thing to other victims. Schmidle writes: "All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden's corpse into the sea -- a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth." But before they did so, the US checked with an unidentified Saudi intelligence operative, who allegedly replied, "Your plan sounds like a good one."

I mean, really.

After all of Sy Hersh's New Yorker revelations of US government lies and plots, one can understand the pressure that might have been applied to the New Yorker to publish this fairy tale. But what is extraordinary is that there was a real story that Schmidle and the New Yorker could have investigated.

In the immediate aftermath of bin Laden's alleged murder by the SEALs, Pakistani TV interviewed the next door neighbor to bin Laden's alleged compound. Someone supplied the video with an English translation running at the bottom of the video.

According to the translation, the next door neighbor, Mr. Bashir, said that he watched the entire operation from the roof of his house. There were three helicopters. Only one landed. About a dozen men got out and entered the house. They shortly returned and boarded the helicopter. When the helicopter lifted off it exploded, killing all aboard. Mr.Bashir reports seeing bodies and pieces of bodies all over.

The US government acknowledges that it lost a helicopter, but claims no one was hurt. Obviously, as there were no further landings, if everyone was killed as Mr. Bashir reports, there was no body to be dumped into the ocean.

A real investigation would begin with Mr. Bashir's interview. Was he actually saying what the English translation reported? I have not been able to find the interview with the English translation, but I believe this is the interview that I saw.

Pakistani news reporters went to compound of Bin laden's raid. Eyewitness of the raid tells strange things about the raid that Mainstream media never talked about. According to the eyewitness, all the troops that participated in raid were killed in helicopter explosion and the dead bodies were secretly recovered by Pakistan military and Police. If there were navy seals in that helicopter, they all died in the operation. Americans did not carry a single body back to their base.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np4JiZa9Czs

Surely there is a qualified interpreter who can tell us what Mr. Bashir is saying. If the English translation that I saw is not a hoax, then we are presented with a story totally different from the one the government told us and repeated again through Mr. Schmidle.

If the English translation of Mr. Bashir's interview is correct, one would think that there would be some interest on the part of US news organizations and on the part of the intelligence committees in Congress to question Mr. Bashir and his neighbors, many of whom are also interviewed on Pakistani TV saying that they have lived in Abbottabad all their lives and are absolutely certain that Osama bin Laden was not among them.

Mr. Schmidle goes to lengths to describe the SEALs' weapons, although his story makes it clear that no weapons were needed as bin Laden is described as "unarmed" and undefended. The "startled" bin Laden didn't even hear the helicopters or all the SEALs coming up the stairs. In addition to all his fatal illnesses which most experts believe killed him a decade ago, bin Laden must have been deaf as neighbors report that the sound of the helicopters was "intense."

When Pakistanis on the scene in Abbottabad report a totally different story from the one that reaches us second- and third-hand from unidentified operatives speaking to reporters in the US who have never been to Abbottabad, shouldn't someone qualified look into the story?

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Pres

Source:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Creating-Evidence-Where-Th-by-paul-craig-roberts-110805-618.html
____________________

Pakistan TV Report Contradicts US Claim of Bin Laden's Death

by Paul Craig Roberts
OpEd News
Aug 6, 2011

In my recent article, "Creating Evidence Where There Is None," about the alleged killing of Osama bin Laden by a commando team of US Seals in Abbottabad, Pakistan, I provided a link to a Pakistani National TV interview with Muhammad Bashir, who lives next door to the alleged "compound" of Osama bin Laden. I described the story that Bashir gave of the "attack" and its enormous difference from the one told by the US government.

In Bashair's account, every member of the landing party and anyone brought from the house died when the helicopter exploded on lift-off. I wrote that a qualified person could easily provide a translation of the interview, but that no American print or TV news organization had investigated Bashir's account.
An attorney with a British Master of Laws degree in international law and diplomacy, who was born in Pakistan, provided the translation below. He writes: "I have no problem with being identified as the translator, but would prefer to remain anonymous."

The translator provides these definitions and clarifications:

"Gulley" is generally referred (in Urdu) to a sidewalk or pavement. Also for the space between two houses.
"Kanal" is a traditional unit of land area, so that one kanal equals exactly 605 square yards or 1/8 Acre; this is equivalent to about 505.857 square meters.

Muhammad Bashir refers to himself as "We." This is common respectable language for the self; to use the plural term instead of singular. The English language equivalent would be the "Royal, We."
Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan.

The translator:
I have translated the entire text of the video.

I have tried my best to keep words in a chronological order, but in some cases this is not possible, as in translation words must be replaced in reverse order to make sense! However, I have had to put a few words in brackets to clarify meaning. If you want to ask about any section - please supply time stamp and I will supply a contextual text.

Read Entire Video Transcript here:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Pakistan-TV-Report-Contrad-by-paul-craig-roberts-110806-879.html

Readers can arrive at their own conclusions. It seems clear that under intense pressure and serious threats from the US government, the Pakistani government fell in line with the US government's claim that a commando raid had killed bin Laden and all had returned safely, and that the TV news organization also got the message to get in line.

It is likely that the many witnesses who observed the dead from the helicopter crash have been warned to keep quiet. However, a news organization, should one be so inclined, could certainly interview Bashir and the 200 others who saw the dead bodies. A good reporter, perhaps accompanied by trained psychologists, would be able to tell if people were lying out of fear and encourage some to speak anonymously.

I am confident that no news organization believes that it could confront such an important US national myth in this way. The killing of bin Laden satisfies the emotional need for revenge and justice. In the least, a news organization that challenged the government's story would be cut off from all government sources and be denounced by politicians and a large percentage of the US population as an anti-American terrorist-serving organization.

OBL's death will remain one of those many "truths" that rest on nothing but the government's word.

Source:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Pakistan-TV-Report-Contrad-by-paul-craig-roberts-110806-879.html

____________________

2011-08-07T14:44:00.000-04:00

Secretive Corporate-Legislative Group 'ALEC' Holds Annual Meeting to Rewrite State Laws

Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
Interview
August 5, 2011

Hundreds of state legislators from all 50 states have gathered in New Orleans for the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC.

Critics say the Washington-based organization plays a key role in helping corporations secretly draft model pro-business legislation that has been used by state lawmakers across the country. Unlike many other organizations, ALEC’s membership includes both state lawmakers and corporate executives who gather behind closed doors to discuss and vote on model legislation.

In recent months, ALEC has come under increasing scrutiny for its role in drafting bills to attack workers’ rights, roll back environmental regulations, privatize education, deregulate major industries, and passing voter ID laws.

Nonetheless, this year’s annual ALEC meeting boasts the largest attendance in five years, with nearly 2,000 guests in attendance. We go to New Orleans to speak with Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy.

Last month, her organization released 800 model bills approved by companies and lawmakers at recent ALEC meetings. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:
Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy.

ALEC Exposed
Center for Media and Democracy

AMY GOODMAN: Hundreds of state legislators from all 50 states have gathered in New Orleans, Louisiana, for the 38th annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC. The meeting’s top donor? BP, followed by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company. Critics say the Washington-based group has played a key role in helping corporations secretly draft model pro-business legislation that’s been used by state lawmakers across the country.

Unlike many other organizations, ALEC’s membership includes both state lawmakers and corporate executives. At its meetings, the corporations and politicians gather behind closed doors to discuss and vote on model legislation. Before the bills are publicly introduced in state legislatures, they’re cleansed of any reference to who actually wrote them. However, the chair of ALEC, Noble Ellington, insisted in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross that he works for the tax-paying public. Ellington is a Republican member of the Louisiana State Legislature.

REP. NOBLE ELLINGTON: We represent the public, and we are the ones who decide. So the tax-paying public is represented there at the table, because I’m there.

TERRY GROSS: I understand that, but you’re there at the table with corporations. But at the table—

REP. NOBLE ELLINGTON: Can I interrupt you again?

TERRY GROSS: Yes.

REP. NOBLE ELLINGTON: It’s not just corporations. I’m there, and members of ALEC is the Americans for Tax Reform, the National Taxpayers Union, National Federation of Independent Businesses. Those are people that we represent, as well, and those are people who are members.

TERRY GROSS: But those are—those are all pro-business, anti-tax groups. People not represented at the table include workers, union members, teachers, students—

REP. NOBLE ELLINGTON: No, ma’am. No, ma’am. You are—

TERRY GROSS: —patients, patients who can’t pay medical bills.

REP. NOBLE ELLINGTON: You are completely wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: That was, an exchange between NPR’s Terry Gross and ALEC chairman Noble Ellington.

In recent months, ALEC has come under increasing scrutiny for its role in drafting bills to attack worker rights, roll back environmental regulations, privatize education, deregulate major industries, and pass voter ID laws. Nonetheless, this year’s annual ALEC meeting boasts the largest attendance in five years, with nearly 2,000 people in attendance. The conference features speakers like, oh, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, Wall Street Journal contributor Steve Moore, and the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks.

Now, a new exposé in The Nation magazine called "The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor" details ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the U.S. prison population in the past few decades. According to the article, ALEC pioneered some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today and paved the way for states and corporations to replace unionized workers with prison labor.

We’re joined now by the one of the reporters who wrote the article, Mike Elk, contributing editor to The Nation magazine. We’re also joined by Lisa Graves. She’s in New Orleans right now, where the ALEC conference is taking place. She’s executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Last month, the Center for Media and Democracy released 800 model bills approved by companies and lawmakers at recent ALEC meetings. We invited a member of ALEC to join us, but they denied our request.

Mike Elk, Lisa Graves, welcome to Democracy Now! Lisa, talk about what’s happening right now in New Orleans. Are you getting into this conference? What are you seeing? What are the seminars, these sessions about?

LISA GRAVES: Well, the Center for Media and Democracy was denied access to the convention with one of our cub reporters, and he was required to leave the convention hotel, the Marriott. But we have received reports, from behind closed doors, from those meetings, at which corporations and politicians are voting on model legislation. And one of the reports we received yesterday from insiders is that corporations vetoed model legislation that politicians had voted for. And so, it is in fact the case that politicians and corporations are voting as equals on model legislation through ALEC task forces, and corporations have the right to veto, through this process, legislation that even a majority or—a majority of politicians within those meetings would approve.

Those meetings cover every area of law, including tax, environment, workers’ rights, the rights of Americans killed or injured by corporations, as well as healthcare, pensions—you name it, basically it’s covered. And we’ve even seen coverage from inside about sessions with ALEC, in which they had one session called "Warming Up to Climate Change: How Increased CO2 Can Benefit You."

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to Terry Gross of NPR speaking with the national chair of ALEC, Noble Ellington, the Republican member of the Louisiana State Legislature. Terry Gross asked Ellington why ALEC gives corporations such a big say in drafting legislation. This is an excerpt of their exchange.

TERRY GROSS: Why give corporations such a big say in drafting legislation?

REP. NOBLE ELLINGTON: Well, partly because they are one of the ones who will be affected by it. And you say "a big say," but as I expressed to you earlier, and I think it needs to be made perfectly clear, that they have—they do not have the final say about model legislation. It is done with work with task forces, which is both public and private sector working together. But before it ever becomes model legislation or ALEC policy, it has to go through the public sector board, not the private sector. So only the public sector had the final say as to whether or not something becomes model legislation.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the ALEC chair, Noble Ellington. Lisa Graves, your response?

LISA GRAVES: Well, it’s interesting, because what we saw and what we heard from inside yesterday is that, quite clearly, corporations can veto things before the public board that Noble Ellington sits on have a chance to approve it. So, in essence, if the corporations disagree on proposed legislation at the task force level, it never makes it to the board that Senator Ellington sits on.

The fact is that corporations exert extraordinary influence and control over this process. They can veto legislation through the task forces. They are the bankrollers of ALEC. Over 98 percent of the money that funds ALEC’s operations come from everything except for legislative dues, which are 50 bucks a year. Some legislators are so cheap, they don’t even pay it themselves; they have the taxpayer pay it for them. Meanwhile, corporations can pay $7,500 or $25,000 a year for membership, and then some corporations, like BP, a year after the disaster in the Gulf, is now the headline corporation underwriting this convention. They’re the top corporation listed in the President’s Circle for ALEC’s convention this year.

AMY GOODMAN: Taking place, of course, there in New Orleans. What has the debt deal negotiations and this whole crisis that has happened in Washington meant for this conference and for ALEC? What are they saying about it?

LISA GRAVES: Well, they haven’t—they haven’t mentioned a lot about it directly, at least in the sessions that we’ve heard reports from. However, we do know that Governor Jindal spoke sort of extensively about the power of being stubborn, the importance of being stubborn and the power of that, which I think was a direct reference to the debt negotiations. The fact is that ALEC alums include Congressman John Boehner, who’s the speaker of the House, as well as Congressman Eric Cantor, who’s the Republican leader of the House. ALEC legislation parallels legislation that has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives to cap spending by government, to reduce taxes on the richest of Americans and the richest corporations, and so that agenda is moving both through Congress and through the states, and it’s an agenda whose ideas are made concrete through model legislation that ALEC produces every year. These politicians who sit on the board with Senator Ellington and others, they have approved over 850 pieces of legislation or resolutions, that we’ve made available to the public and have analyzed, and that the public is joining us, along with reporters, in analyzing. And so, we know what this agenda looks like. It looks like the same sort of deal that was pushed through in Congress this week.

AMY GOODMAN: Lisa Graves, the significance of holding this conference in post-Katrina New Orleans? I mean, you’ve talked about BP sponsoring it—of course, the huge BP oil spill. But also, all the teachers fired in New Orleans. It’s known as a Petri dish for policy in this country, and not as many people may be aware—as aware of that.

LISA GRAVES: Well, that’s right. Well, on the one hand, we certainly are happy to see money coming into the New Orleans—the New Orleans economy, even from a convention like ALEC’s, where these corporations and politicians are engaged in this sort of unprecedented joint voting.

The fact is that we had a press conference earlier this week with local school board representatives, including a Republican on the school board, as well as local teachers, who have talked about the failure of policies that basically privatize public education in New Orleans to push money out of the public school system into not-well-regulated charter schools, charter schools that have had severe problems, and how those policies have failed at the ground-floor level here in New Orleans. People who were part of that conference said they wondered where the push was coming for these proposals to just massively change the school system. It turns out these proposals are echoed in ALEC legislation that’s being pushed across the country. It’s a one-size-fits-all, McBill sort of factory within ALEC, and it serves the interests of ALEC corporations, including the ALEC Education Task Force, which is co-chaired by an online school company, a for-profit company.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there anything else you think is critical to understand about this organization that not that many people know about by name, ALEC, but may know about by laws that are passed in their states, with them not knowing where they are coming from?

LISA GRAVES: Well, we think that fellow reporters and citizens can make a lot of use of our website, alecexposed.org. We have lists of politicians. We’ve added over a thousand politicians over the past few weeks since the site was launched. We have profiles and links to profiles on some of the corporations that are the leading players within ALEC, including Koch Industries. And we also are discovering new corporations every day. For example, today, Dick Armey, who is the leader of FreedomWorks, who basically is one of the leaders of the Tea Party effort, is speaking at a luncheon, and that is sponsored by Visa. I say to Visa: "Not priceless." The fact is that what we’re seeing here is an extraordinary influence of corporations on our policy. And we do know—and I would say, with respect to your next segment, we understand from other reporters that ALEC is denying that the Corrections Corporation of America is a member or leader of ALEC, but we have proof that Corrections Corporation of America, which has been involved in pushing this prison privatization agenda, was a member of ALEC as of at least last month.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. "The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor" is our next segment. Lisa Graves, of the Center for Media and Democracy, in New Orleans.

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Source:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/5/secretive_corporate_legislative_group_alec_holds
________________________

2011-08-06T18:07:00.002-04:00

Lying to Ourselves About the Good Old Days

A popular right-wing fantasy-bite now winging virally around the World Wide Web is a snatch of phony nostalgia called “The Green Thing”.

by David Benjamin
CommonDreams.org
August 5, 2011

You could look it up. Everywhere.

This gem came my way via my right-wing friend John, who — like most of my right-wing friends — asserts that he’s not right-wing or even (God forbid) Republican. He insists he’s “independent.” However, John’s “independence” emerges — in practice — as a visceral hostility toward all forms, all levels and all actions of any legally elected government. He’s actually sort of a casual nihilist — which puts him smack-dab in the mainstream of current Republican eschatology.

But never mind. John’s a great guy. If only because he feeds me these wonderful, whacked-out tracts from the paranoid wards of Wingnut World.

The point of “The Green Thing,” a gently nostalgic dig at any sort of communitarian efforts to reduce pollution and protect the earth, is that in some halcyon “good old days” — during which, as far as I can tell, I was alive — environmental protection (“the green thing”) just sort of happened all over the place. It popped up naturally — as the offspring of what Dick Cheney calls “personal virtue.”

I’ve already digressed about John, but I have to wander again, because the lead purveyor of “The Green Thing” is “Miss Cellania” (I know! Isn’t that just adorable?), who’s depicted on her website (http://bit.ly/g6BQOk) as blond, housewifely (child on lap) and 30-ish. Which means I’m roughly twice her age — old enough to actually HAVE the memories for which she’s taking credit but is too young to have ever experienced. [If you check out Miss Cellania's site be sure to read the comments]

For instance, who remembers chamber pots? I do, but I’ll wager that Miss Cellania wouldn’t recognize one if I dipped into it and ladled her up a nice bowl of gazpacho.

The “Green Thing” premise, aimed at “smart aleck young persons” who think they invented environmentalism, is that once, not long ago, we all swept our own doorways, thus rendering the whole word clean and green, with no government interference.

For instance, according to “The Green Thing,” there was a time before escalators, when folks preferred stairs — loved ‘em and ran up ‘em. But now, with escalators everywhere, millions of American kids don’t even know what a stair looks like. No wonder we never see a kid bouncing a spaldeen off a stoop. “Daddy, what’s a stoop?”

Miss Cellania, what’s a spaldeen?

Also, things were so much nicer before appliances. I remember how joyously my grandma, Annie, greeted laundry days (three times a week). She would spend the morning (a song on her lips) in the cellar, scrubbing clothes by hand, running them through a wringer and humping 40 pounds of wet laundry outdoors. She reveled in the caprice of Wisconsin weather — horizontal sleet, 90-degree heat, subzero cold, sparrows crapping on her clean sheets — whoopee. Mother Nature was Annie’s BFF!

By the way, Miss Cellania, how many clothespins can you fit in your mouth?

In the good old days, we also loved hand lawnmowers — none of your sissy motorized jobs. Except… wait! Just a goddamn minute here! Archie, my grandpa, bought his first Sears power mower 60 years ago. Because the patron saint of hand mowers was Sisyphus. Because nobody, until “The Green Thing,” ever had a kind word for hand mowers. Until power mowers, people either didn’t bother keeping a lawn — or they hired a dumb kid, or a really hard-up hobo to cut the grass. The hobo usually died.

Those good old days — whenever they were — were allegedly better because we had “deposit bottles” for soft drinks and such. But then, we — callous consumers — heartlessly forsook that rustic, spontaneous, capitalist recycling regimen.

Except we didn’t. We just did what we were told. In those days, every town had bottling plants. In Tomah, with fewer than 5,000 people, we had two. Neither survived the corporate wisdom of Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Seven-Up, who decided they could make more money by closing all those local bottlers, firing all those local breadwinners, shifting to plastic and centralizing the bottle operation far far away — like in Mexico.

Don’t blame us, Miss Cellania. We didn’t make this choice. Big Business did.

Here’s a good one! The good old days apparently featured people strolling, on foot, to the grocery store and carrying their milk and beer, canned hams and watermelons, and 50-pound bags of Purina Dog Chow home in big brown bags, without need of a car.

Say what? We did what? When?

Back to 1955. Tomah had five slightly-less-than-super markets: The A&P, the Red Owl, Cram’s, Shutter’s and Burnstad’s, all located more or less on the main drag, which put them about six blocks from your average house. The closest corner store to my grandparents was Woodliff’s, over at Cady and Elm. Grandma Annie never once in her life considered the folly of shlepping six blocks over to Woodliff’s, then returning with 20 pounds of groceries in her bony old arms. She either called up Betty Woodliff and gave her an order (later delivered by Betty’s husband Mose), or she waited ‘til Archie got home and sent him, in the Ford, to the store. (He didn’t mind. He loved driving.)

Note to Miss Cellania: Sane Americans have never, ever, walked to the grocery store — for one simple reason. Groceries are heavy. Before the Ford, there were horses; there were buggies. You can see them in John Wayne movies!

Today, although larger, Tomah has two supermarkets. Both are way out on the highway, each surrounded by a 40-acre parking lot. The reason everyone in town now MUST burn two bucks’ worth of BP’s gas just to get a pound of butter at the store has nothing to do with generational sloth or personal virtue. It has to do with Wal-Mart.

We didn’t make this choice. Big Business did.

It has become a cottage industry among America’s reactionaries to lie about matters like health care and birthplaces, debt and taxes, war and heroism, and other such trivia.

But now, in saccharine reminiscences and homespun anecdotes that circulate the right-wing Web, they’re lying about memories — lying about their own lives.

And they’re believing themselves.

David Benjamin is a novelist and journalist. Originally from Madison, Wisconsin and a graduate of Beloit College, he now lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of 'The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked'. His latest book, released in 2010 by Tuttle Publishing, is SUMO: A Thinking Fan's Guide to Japan's National Sport. He blogs at http://benjaminsmess.blogspot.com/ This article was originally posted here:http://benjaminsmess.blogspot.com/2011/08/weekly-screed-553.html

Source:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/05-2
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2011-07-29T20:55:00.000-04:00

F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds

By Charlie Savage
The New York Times
June 12, 2011
[emphasis added]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.

The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.

“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.

Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I. general counsel, said the bureau had fixed the problems with the national security letters and had taken steps to make sure they would not recur. She also said the bureau, which does not need permission to alter its manual so long as the rules fit within broad guidelines issued by the attorney general, had carefully weighed the risks and the benefits of each change.

“Every one of these has been carefully looked at and considered against the backdrop of why do the employees need to be able to do it, what are the possible risks and what are the controls,” she said, portraying the modifications to the rules as “more like fine-tuning than major changes.”

Some of the most notable changes apply to the lowest category of investigations, called an “assessment.” The category, created in December 2008, allows agents to look into people and organizations “proactively” and without firm evidence for suspecting criminal or terrorist activity.

Under current rules, agents must open such an inquiry before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database.

Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search such databases without making a record about their decision.

Mr. German said the change would make it harder to detect and deter inappropriate use of databases for personal purposes. But Ms. Caproni said it was too cumbersome to require agents to open formal inquiries before running quick checks. She also said agents could not put information uncovered from such searches into F.B.I. files unless they later opened an assessment.

The new rules will also relax a restriction on administering lie-detector tests and searching people’s trash.

Under current rules, agents cannot use such techniques until they open a “preliminary investigation,” which — unlike an assessment — requires a factual basis for suspecting someone of wrongdoing. But soon agents will be allowed to use those techniques for one kind of assessment, too: when they are evaluating a target as a potential informant.

Agents have asked for that power in part because they want the ability to use information found in a subject’s trash to put pressure on that person to assist the government in the investigation of others. But Ms. Caproni said information gathered that way could also be useful for other reasons, like determining whether the subject might pose a threat to agents.

The new manual will also remove a limitation on the use of surveillance squads, which are trained to surreptitiously follow targets. Under current rules, the squads can be used only once during an assessment, but the new rules will allow agents to use them repeatedly. Ms. Caproni said restrictions on the duration of physical surveillance would still apply, and argued that because of limited resources, supervisors would use the squads only rarely during such a low-level investigation.

The revisions also clarify what constitutes “undisclosed participation” in an organization by an F.B.I. agent or informant, which is subject to special rules — most of which have not been made public. The new manual says an agent or an informant may surreptitiously attend up to five meetings of a group before those rules would apply — unless the goal is to join the group, in which case the rules apply immediately.

At least one change would tighten, rather than relax, the rules. Currently, a special agent in charge of a field office can delegate the authority to approve sending an informant to a religious service. The new manual will require such officials to handle those decisions personally.

In addition, the manual clarifies a description of what qualifies as a “sensitive investigative matter” — investigations, at any level, that require greater oversight from supervisors because they involve public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars.

The new rules make clear, for example, that if the person with such a role is a victim or a witness rather than a target of an investigation, extra supervision is not necessary. Also excluded from extra supervision will be investigations of low- and midlevel officials for activities unrelated to their position — like drug cases as opposed to corruption, for example.

The manual clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs. And it will limit academic protections only to scholars who work for institutions based in the United States.

Since the release of the 2008 manual, the assessment category has drawn scrutiny because it sets a low bar to examine a person or a group. The F.B.I. has opened thousands of such low-level investigations each month, and a vast majority has not generated information that justified opening more intensive investigations.

Ms. Caproni said the new manual would adjust the definition of assessments to make clear that they must be based on leads. But she rejected arguments that the F.B.I. should focus only on investigations that begin with a firm reason for suspecting wrongdoing.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/us/13fbi.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=print
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2011-07-24T09:33:00.002-04:00

U.S. Blocks Oversight of Its Mercenary Army in Iraq

Exclusive Report
By Spencer Ackerman
Wired
July 22, 2011

By January 2012, the State Department will do something it’s never done before: command a mercenary army the size of a heavy combat brigade. That’s the plan to provide security for its diplomats in Iraq once the U.S. military withdraws. And no one outside State knows anything more, as the department has gone to war with its independent government watchdog to keep its plan a secret.

Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), is essentially in the dark about one of the most complex and dangerous endeavors the State Department has ever undertaken, one with huge implications for the future of the United States in Iraq. “Our audit of the program is making no progress,” Bowen tells Danger Room.

For months, Bowen’s team has tried to get basic information out of the State Department about how it will command its assembled army of about 5,500 private security contractors. How many State contracting officials will oversee how many hired guns? What are the rules of engagement for the guards? What’s the system for reporting a security danger, and for directing the guards’ response?

And for months, the State Department’s management chief, former Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, has given Bowen a clear response: That’s not your jurisdiction. You just deal with reconstruction, not security. Never mind that Bowen has audited over $1.2 billion worth of security contracts over seven years.

“Apparently, Ambassador Kennedy doesn’t want us doing the oversight that we believe is necessary and properly within our jurisdiction,” Bowen says. “That hard truth is holding up work on important programs and contracts at a critical moment in the Iraq transition.”

This isn’t an idle concern or a typical bureaucratic tussle. The State Department has hired private security for its diplomats in war zones for the better part of a decade. Poor control of them caused one of the biggest debacles of the Iraq war: the September 2007 shooting incident in Nisour Square, where Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians. Now roughly double those guards from the forces on duty now, and you’ll understand the scope of what State is planning once the U.S. military withdraws from Iraq at the end of this year.

“They have no experience running a private army,” says Ramzy Mardini, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who just returned from a weeks-long trip to Iraq. “I don’t think the State Department even has a good sense of what it’s taking on. The U.S. military is concerned about it as well.”

So far, the Department has awarded three security contracts for Iraq worth nearly $2.9 billion over five years. Bowen can’t even say for sure how much the department actually intends to spend on mercs in total. State won’t let it see those totals.

About as much information as the department has disclosed about its incipient private army comes from a little-noticed Senate hearing in February. There, the top U.S. military and civilian officials in Iraq said that they’d station the hired guard force at Basra, Irbil, Mosul and Kirkuk, with the majority — over 3,000 — protecting the mega-embassy in Baghdad. They’ll ferry diplomats around in armored convoys and a State-run helicopter fleet, the first in the department’s history.

But there are signs of even deeper confusion as State prepares to take the lead in Iraq. An internal State Department audit from June faulted top officials for “a lack of senior level participation” (.pdf) in an “unprecedented” transition to civilian control. The result is that “several key decisions remain unresolved, some plans cannot be finalized, and progress in a number of areas is slipping,” the audit concluded. It raises the prospect that the U.S. military will leave Iraq the same way it entered it — without any planning worthy of the name.

Bowen has minimal visibility into State’s planning process. His teams of auditors are in Iraq, reviewing reconstruction contracts for waste, fraud and abuse, as they have since the early days of the war. They just can’t see anything about the guard force. As far as Bowen is concerned, even though there’s been a nearly 90 percent drop in violence since the surge, State’s hired army still acts like Iraq is a killing field, with death squads and insurgents around every corner.

“Have the standards for convoy travel changed at all from the worst moments of Iraq civil war? The answer’s no,” Bowen says.

Diplomats are allowed an hour for meetings outside secured U.S. fortresses. Then it’s time to hit the road, in armored cars full of men armed to the teeth and wearing black sunglasses.

The State Department says it’s learned its lessons from Nisour Square and now places stricter rules on contractors, like putting cameras in contractor vehicles and revising “mission firearms policies,” as Kennedy told a congressional panel last month. (.pdf) It’s an issue Kennedy’s well-versed in handling: He ran the department’s internal investigation into Nisour Square in 2007.

Now, according to Bowen, he’s shielding State’s plans from scrutiny.

State wouldn’t comment for this story, saying it would be “inappropriate” to discuss an internal matter concerning Bowen. A department official who wouldn’t speak on the record merely said that it provides him with “extensive materials in response to their audit requests for documents and information falling within its statutory responsibilities.”

But Congress is showing signs of restiveness over State’s stonewalling. A bill that the House Foreign Affairs Committee crafted this week includes a provision specifically instructing State to let Bowen’s office to do its job: “SIGIR should audit military, security, and economic assistance to Iraq during the term of SIGIR’s existence,” the language reads, inserted at the behest of the panel’s chairwoman, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

But it’ll take months for that bill to pass. Until then, Bowen is shut out of State’s ad hoc foray into generalship.

“From my conversations with State Department people,” Mardini says, “they really don’t have a sense of how difficult this is going to be.” And it doesn’t look like they want to know.

Source:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/iraq-merc-army/
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2011-07-09T20:38:00.002-04:00

The Latest Attempt By The Obama Administration To Punish Whistleblowers

The Thomas-Drake Affair part II

Earlier this year, we noted Daniel Ellsberg's comments about how very few people realized that President Obama -- a man who ran on a platform of transparency and who has repeatedly said he supports whistleblowing efforts -- has been the most aggressive President ever in trying to punish whistleblowers.

He pointed out that President Obama has brought more indictments for leaking info than all other presidents combined.

And it's resulted in absolutely ridiculous prosecutions like the Thomas Drake affair, which finally collapsed after it became clear that the feds were merely being vindictive against Drake for his whistleblowing activities, rather than finding any actual case of espionage.

Now we have the sequel to the Drake situation, with much higher stakes in some ways. Conor Friedersdorf has a story at The Atlantic, about the administration's efforts to put reporter James Risen in jail. The full story is a worth a read, but it's pretty ridiculous. Risen is famous for exposing the Bush administrations warrantless wiretapping regime, as well as a few other clearly illegal programs. He so infuriated the Bush administration that Dick Cheney wanted to put him in jail... but realized there was no legitimate way to do so.

Along comes President Barack Obama. Part of Obama's campaign was actually built off of the information that Risen exposed:

You'd think that President Obama would take a different view. After all, he might not be in the White House today if the Bush Administration would've succeeded in keeping all its secrets: the torture, the detainee deaths, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the spying on Americans, the faulty pre-war intelligence in Iraq, and all the rest. One would expect Obama of all people to see the value in Risen's reporting - the real ways in which he has helped to preserve civil liberties, American freedom, and accountability in government - and to weigh that against the national security implications of reporting in 2006 on a bungled CIA effort that happened way back in the year 2000.

You'd think. Instead, we get the opposite.

The Obama administration has come down even harder on Risen than the Bush administration did, and is now threatening him with jail for not exposing his sources for some of his stories. This showdown may come soon, as a judge has indicated that she may require Risen to give up his sources.

As Glenn Greenwald has noted, this whole thing seems to be a part of the "climate of fear" that was certainly present among the previous administration, but which has ratcheted up dramatically with the current administration. The key "fear" element is to make it known to both insiders who leak and reporters who publish those stories, that they could face jail time, even as the administration claims that it's encouraging whistleblowing.

Ellsberg speculated that President Obama's reason for being so much more aggressive on these issues was one of embarrassment . That is, the President recognizes that the federal government is doing all sorts of questionable stuff -- the type of stuff he actively campaigned against -- and is embarrassed by it.

But since he (for whatever reason) is unable to put a stop to it, he's trying to do the next best thing: which is threaten and or punish anyone who might reveal what's being done.

I'm not sure I buy that theory, but either way the situation is clearly troubling, and completely counter to the image that Obama has tried to portray of openness and transparency, and a willingness to respond directly to critics rather than punish them.

If you're concerned about freedom of speech and freedom of the press, this story should concern you. If you believe in the importance of whistleblowers to keep governments accountable when they do things like break the clear letter and intent of the law, this story should concern you.

Tragically, however, it's not getting very much attention at all.

Read the Thomas Drake Affair Part 1
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110523/11515214400/travesty-thomas-drake-being-charged-with-espionage-making-mainstream-news.shtml

Source:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110702/00451614941/latest-attempt-obama-administration-to-punish-whistleblowers.shtml
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2011-07-01T21:12:00.001-04:00

Are Cameras the New Guns?
The move to stop recording of police misconduct.

by Wendy McElroy
The Freeman
May 31, 2011

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states (Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland), it is now illegal to record an on-duty police officer even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.

The legal justification for arresting the “shooter” rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where “no expectation of privacy exists” (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.

Massachusetts attorney June Jensen represented Simon Glik who was arrested for such a recording. She explained, “[T]he statute has been misconstrued by Boston police. You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want.” Legal scholar and professor Jonathan Turley agrees, “The police are basing this claim on a ridiculous reading of the two-party consent surveillance law — requiring all parties to consent to being taped. I have written in the area of surveillance law and can say that this is utter nonsense.”

The courts, however, disagree. A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler’s license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.

In 2001, when Michael Hyde was arrested for criminally violating the state’s electronic surveillance law — aka recording a police encounter — the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld his conviction 4-2. In dissent, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall stated, “Citizens have a particularly important role to play when the official conduct at issue is that of the police. Their role cannot be performed if citizens must fear criminal reprisals….” (Note: In some states it is the audio alone that makes the recording illegal.)

The selection of “shooters” targeted for prosecution do, indeed, suggest a pattern of either reprisal or an attempt to intimidate.

Glik captured a police action on his cellphone to document what he considered to be excessive force. He was not only arrested, his phone was also seized.

On his website Drew wrote, “Myself and three other artists who documented my actions tried for two months to get the police to arrest me for selling art downtown so we could test the Chicago peddlers license law. The police hesitated for two months because they knew it would mean a federal court case. With this felony charge they are trying to avoid this test and ruin me financially and stain my credibility.”

Hyde used his recording to file a harassment complaint against the police. After doing so, he was criminally charged.

In short, recordings that are flattering to the police — an officer kissing a baby or rescuing a dog — will almost certainly not result in prosecution even if they are done without all-party consent. The only people who seem prone to prosecution are those who embarrass or confront the police, or who somehow challenge the law. If true, then the prosecutions are a form of social control to discourage criticism of the police or simple dissent.

A recent arrest in Maryland is both typical and disturbing.

On March 5, 24-year-old Anthony John Graber III’s motorcycle was pulled over for speeding. He is currently facing criminal charges for a video he recorded on his helmet-mounted camera during the traffic stop.

The case is disturbing because:

1) Graber was not arrested immediately. Ten days after the encounter, he posted some of he material to YouTube, and it embarrassed Trooper J. D. Uhler. The trooper, who was in plainclothes and an unmarked car, jumped out waving a gun and screaming. Only later did Uhler identify himself as a police officer. When the YouTube video was discovered the police got a warrant against Graber, searched his parents’ house (where he presumably lives), seized equipment, and charged him with a violation of wiretapping law.

2) Baltimore criminal defense attorney Steven D. Silverman said he had never heard of the Maryland wiretap law being used in this manner. In other words, Maryland has joined the expanding trend of criminalizing the act of recording police abuse. Silverman surmises, “It’s more [about] ‘contempt of cop’ than the violation of the wiretapping law.”

3) Police spokesman Gregory M. Shipley is defending the pursuit of charges against Graber, denying that it is “some capricious retribution” and citing as justification the particularly egregious nature of Graber’s traffic offenses. Oddly, however, the offenses were not so egregious as to cause his arrest before the video appeared.

Almost without exception, police officials have staunchly supported the arresting officers. This argues strongly against the idea that some rogue officers are overreacting or that a few cops have something to hide. “Arrest those who record the police” appears to be official policy, and it’s backed by the courts.

Carlos Miller at the Photography Is Not A Crime website offers an explanation: “For the second time in less than a month, a police officer was convicted from evidence obtained from a videotape. The first officer to be convicted was New York City Police Officer Patrick Pogan, who would never have stood trial had it not been for a video posted on Youtube showing him body slamming a bicyclist before charging him with assault on an officer. The second officer to be convicted was Ottawa Hills (Ohio) Police Officer Thomas White, who shot a motorcyclist in the back after a traffic stop, permanently paralyzing the 24-year-old man.”

When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop.

Happily, even as the practice of arresting “shooters” expands, there are signs of effective backlash. At least one Pennsylvania jurisdiction has reaffirmed the right to video in public places. As part of a settlement with ACLU attorneys who represented an arrested “shooter,” the police in Spring City and East Vincent Township adopted a written policy allowing the recording of on-duty policemen.

As journalist Radley Balko declares, “State legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials.”

(“When policemen break the law, then there is no more law; just a fight for survival.” - ThePoet)

Source:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/are-cameras-the-new-guns/
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2011-07-01T16:21:00.001-04:00

Time to Close the Security Theater

by Art Carden
Forbes
Jun. 30, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

You’ve probably heard about what columnist Gene Healy calls “the TSA’s latest ritual humiliation of an innocent traveler.” Just for the record, I don’t rest any easier knowing that the TSA is keeping me safe from wheelchair-bound 95-year old leukemia patients who might be hiding bombs in their adult diapers. Naturally, people are calling for reform. Keith Olbermann, for example, called for TSA administrator John Pistole to be fired.

Some of the fury over this continues to miss the point, though. The problem isn’t that the TSA is harassing the wrong people. The problem is that the TSA is harassing anyone. The TSA is encroaching on fundamental liberties and providing no discernable benefit. I’ve written before that the TSA should be abolished. The latest outrage is just more evidence in the case against a government administration we would be better off without.

The Transportation Security Administration does not provide transportation security. It provides what security expert Bruce Schneier calls “security theater.”

The effect of the all the trimmings and trappings at airport security is to give travelers the impression that the government is going about Very Serious Business. The net effect, though, is perhaps a trivial increase in safety achieved at massive costs in terms of time, treasure, and lives: it is well known that driving is more dangerous than flying.

By making flying less convenient, we encourage people to drive more. Substitution away from flying and toward driving costs lives, on net.

Naturally, the TSA responds to incidents like these by saying that the agents are highly trained and that they have followed proper procedure.

This indicates a signal failing for the agency: if “doing it by the book” involves touching people in ways that would be considered sexual assault in virtually any other context or telling a 90-year old breast cancer survivor to remove her bra lest it contain explosives (as happened to a friend’s grandmother), then the book needs to be shredded and rewritten.

Better yet, it needs to be replaced with a competitive market for air travel in which the airports, the airways, and the airliners are in private hands.

Some might object that private firms will have incentives to cut corners on safety. It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out. It is important to remember too that just because competitive markets might not provide the best of all conceivable worlds doesn’t mean that government intervention can.

I’m coming to believe that one of the most dangerous phrases in the English language is “well, it could happen.” Yes, it could. But so could…well, anything. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it is worth worrying about. Every day, we face much greater risks than terrorism without anxiety because the probability is so small. People have claimed that terrorism represents an “existential” threat to the United States.

National security expert John Mueller puts it this way:

“Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.”

This hardly suggests an existential threat, let alone a threat that justifies harassing leukemia patients and breast cancer survivors at airport security. Unfortunately, we’re going to have these problems for as long as we have a TSA. No amount of “reform” will fix it–unless, of course, that “reform” is abolition.

Source:
http://blogs.forbes.com/artcarden/2011/06/30/time-to-close-the-security-theater/
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2011-06-20T19:34:00.000-04:00

Turkey: The Mideast's Real Revolution

by Eric Margolis
Smirking Chimp
June 19, 2011

The revolutions and uprising that have been sweeping across the Mideast are widely believed to have begun in Tunisia. In fact, the first seeds of revolution were planted in 2002 in Turkey, as its Justice and Development Party began the long, arduous battle against disguised military dictatorship.

To understand how important last week's Turkish elections were, step back for a moment to 1960 when I was in high school in Switzerland.

A Turkish classmate named Turgut told me, tears in his eyes, "The generals hanged my daddy!" His father had been a cabinet minister.

The 510,000-man Turkish armed forces, NATO's second biggest after the US, have mounted four military coups since 1950. Turkey's current constitution was written by the military after its 1980 coup.

Ever since the era of national hero turned strongman, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has been run by its powerful military behind a thin facade of squabbling politicians. In the process, it suffered widescale political violence, Kurdish secessionism, rigged elections, and endless financial crises.

Americans always liked to point to pre-2002 as the ideal Muslim state. "Why can't those Arabs be more like the sensible Turks?" was a refrain often heard in Washington. Its proponents chose to ignore, or simply failed to see, that Turkey was an iron-fisted military dictatorship.

Turkey began to change in 2002 when the new Justice and Development Party (AKP) won an electoral victory. The shift from the traditional left and rightist Kemalist parties was due to a major demographic shift. Rural and middle class Turks began moving into the cities, diluting the political and economic power of the minority secular elite: the military, big business, media, academia, and judiciary.

Turkey's tame Muslim religious establishment was kept under tight security control. Under Ataturk and his successors, Islam, the bedrock of Turkish culture and ethos, was savagely attacked, nearly destroyed and brought under state control - just as the Russian Orthodox Church was during Stalin's era.

What Turks called "the deep government" - hard rightists, security organizations, gangsters, the rich elite, and rabid nationalists -wielded power and crushed dissenters.

AK called for Islamic political principles: welfare for the poor and old, fighting corruption, responsive, ethical political leaders, good relations with neighbors. Turkey's right and its military allies screamed that their nation was about to fall to Iranian-style Islamists, or torn apart by Kurdish rebels.

In fact, AK's decade of rule has given Turkey its longest period of human rights, stunning economic growth, financial stability, and democratic government.

Under AK, Turkey has moved closer to the European Union's legal norms than, for example, new members Bulgaria and Rumania. But France and Germany's conservatives insist Turkey will never be accepted in the EU. Europe - particularly its farmers - don't want 75 million mostly Muslim Turks.

Largely unseen by outsiders, AK has relentlessly pushed Turkey's reactionary military back to its barracks. This long struggle culminated in attempts by the military, known as the Ergenekon affaire, to again overthrow the civilian government.

The plot was broken: numbers of high-raking officers were arrested and put on trial. So were journalists and media figures involved in the plot - probably too many. Investigators are examining questionable arms deals between Turkey's military and Israel.

Ergenekon broke the power of Turkey's generals, who were closely allied to the US military establishment and Israel's Likud party. In fact, the Pentagon often had more influence over Turkey than its civilian leaders. Until AK, the US nurtured bitter Turkish hostility to Iran, Syria, Hezbullah, Hamas, and, at times, Iraq, and an artificial friendship with Israel.

Today, all has changed. Turkey's popular prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, backed by a majority of voters, has turned Turkey into the Mideast's role model for successful democracy, and unleashed the latent economic power of this nation of 75 million.

Turkey's capable foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, engineered a "zero problems" policy that vastly improved Turkey's relations with all its formerly hostile neighbors, excepting Armenia and Greek-Cyprus. Turkey's foreign policy now reflects Turkish rather than US and Israeli interests.

"Zero problems" opened the Mideast's doors to Turkish business, restoring Turkey to the former dominant regional leadership it held before World War I.

Turkey's popular support for the Palestinians led to a bitter clash with Israel. As a result, Turkey has become the target of fierce attacks by the US Congress and media for no longer favoring Israeli interests. The Wall Street Journal, the North American mouthpiece of Israel's hard right, has led the attacks against Turkey.

Claims by the right that Erdogn is turning Turkey into an Islamic dictatorship are false. The stable, democratic, productive Turkey he is building is a boon for all concerned. Istanbul used to be the Paris of the Muslim world. It's returning to that role again.

Erdogan's third electoral victory fell short of allowing him to rewrite the obsolete constitution without consensus from other parties, but it means years more democratic and economic progress for this vitally important nation that will play a key role in stabilizing and building a new, modern Mideast.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2011

Author Eric Margolis is a columnist for the Toronto Sun. His web site is foreigncorrespondent.com

Source:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-margolis/36850/turkey-the-mideasts-real-revolution
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2011-06-18T11:05:00.003-04:00

Endgame Strategy
Why the revolution must start in America

by Chris Hedges
Adbusters Culturejammer
June 16, 2011

Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy.

The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking.

Dozens of members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the one imploding in our faces – is ignored.

The deadly convergence of environmental and economic catastrophe is not coincidental. Corporations turn everything, from human beings to the natural world, into commodities they ruthlessly exploit until exhaustion or death. The race of doom is now between environmental collapse and global economic collapse. Which will get us first? Or will they get us at the same time?

Carbon emissions continue to soar upward, polar ice sheets continue to melt at an alarming rate, hundreds of species are vanishing, fish stocks are being dramatically depleted, droughts and floods are destroying cropland and human habitat across the globe, water sources are being poisoned, and the great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. As temperatures continue to rise huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable.

The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species. And accompanying the assault on the ecosystem that sustains human life is the cruelty and stupidity of unchecked corporate capitalism that is creating a global economy of masters and serfs and a world where millions will be unable to survive.

We continue to talk about personalities – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama or Stephen Harper – although the heads of state and elected officials have become largely irrelevant. Corporate lobbyists write the bills. Lobbyists get them passed. Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists employ you when you get out of office.

Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations. The share of national income of the top 0.1 percent of Americans since 1974 has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 percent. One in six American workers may be without a job. Some 40 million Americans may live in poverty, with tens of millions more living in a category called “near poverty.” Six million people may be forced from their homes in the United States because of foreclosures and bank repossessions.

But while the masses suffer, Goldman Sachs, one of the financial firms most responsible for the evaporation of $17 trillion in wages, savings and wealth of small investors and shareholders in the United States, is giddily handing out $17.5 billion in compensation to its managers, including $12.6 million to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.

The massive redistribution of wealth happened because lawmakers and public officials were, in essence, hired to permit it to happen.

It was not a conspiracy. The process was transparent. It did not require the formation of a new political party or movement. It was the result of inertia by our political and intellectual class, which in the face of expanding corporate power found it personally profitable to facilitate it or look the other way. The armies of lobbyists, who write the legislation, bankroll political campaigns and disseminate propaganda, have been able to short-circuit the electorate.

Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.

“By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that it can make their interests a priority,” Sheldon Wolin writes, “the Democratic Party pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system.” The Democrats and the Liberals are always able to offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate collectivism.

It is not that the public in the United States does not want a good healthcare system, programs that provide employment, quality public education or an end to Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury. Most polls suggest Americans do. But it has become impossible for most citizens in these corporate states to find out what is happening in the centers of power. Television news celebrities dutifully present two opposing sides to every issue, although each side is usually lying. The viewer can believe whatever he or she wants to believe.

Nothing is actually elucidated or explained. The sound bites by Republicans or Democrats, the Liberals or the Conservatives, are accepted at face value. And once the television lights are turned off, the politicians go back to the business of serving business.

Human history, rather than being a chronicle of freedom and democracy, is characterized by ruthless domination. Our elites have done what all elites do. They have found sophisticated mechanisms to thwart popular aspirations, disenfranchise the working and increasingly the middle class, keep us passive and make us serve their interests. The brief democratic opening in our society in the early 20th century, made possible by radical movements, unions and a vigorous press, has again been shut tight. We were mesmerized by political charades, cheap consumerism, spectacle and magical thinking as we were ruthlessly stripped of power.

Adequate food, clean water and basic security are now beyond the reach of half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel.

When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Somalia and Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them widespread malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of five percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food.

As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest.

Food riots and political protests will be frequent, as will malnutrition and starvation. Desperate people employ desperate measures to survive. And the elites will use the surveillance and security state to attempt to crush all forms of popular dissent.

The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the wider society, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power as the crisis mounts.

The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear to turn the population into passive accomplices. And as long as we remain afraid, or believe that the formal mechanisms of power can actually bring us real reform, nothing will change.

It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie.

It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has become concentrated in a few hands.

It does not matter that the middle class – the beating heart of any democracy – is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished.

It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric or Bank of America to avoid paying any taxes.

It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem for profit. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent are banished as heretics.

The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.

Many of us are seduced by childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but toward disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of nonrenewable resources and its hedonistic levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd.

The game is over. We lost.

The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more.

They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all implodes. Do not expect them to take care of us when it starts to unravel. We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves.

It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former international correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.

Source:
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/96/chris-hedges-revolution-in-america.html
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2011-06-15T07:32:00.000-04:00

F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
The New York Times
June 12, 2011

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.

The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.

“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.

Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I. general counsel, said the bureau had fixed the problems with the national security letters and had taken steps to make sure they would not recur. She also said the bureau, which does not need permission to alter its manual so long as the rules fit within broad guidelines issued by the attorney general, had carefully weighed the risks and the benefits of each change.

“Every one of these has been carefully looked at and considered against the backdrop of why do the employees need to be able to do it, what are the possible risks and what are the controls,” she said, portraying the modifications to the rules as “more like fine-tuning than major changes.”

Some of the most notable changes apply to the lowest category of investigations, called an “assessment.” The category, created in December 2008, allows agents to look into people and organizations “proactively” and without firm evidence for suspecting criminal or terrorist activity.

Under current rules, agents must open such an inquiry before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database. Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search such databases without making a record about their decision.

Mr. German said the change would make it harder to detect and deter inappropriate use of databases for personal purposes. But Ms. Caproni said it was too cumbersome to require agents to open formal inquiries before running quick checks. She also said agents could not put information uncovered from such searches into F.B.I. files unless they later opened an assessment.

The new rules will also relax a restriction on administering lie-detector tests and searching people’s trash. Under current rules, agents cannot use such techniques until they open a “preliminary investigation,” which — unlike an assessment — requires a factual basis for suspecting someone of wrongdoing. But soon agents will be allowed to use those techniques for one kind of assessment, too: when they are evaluating a target as a potential informant.

Agents have asked for that power in part because they want the ability to use information found in a subject’s trash to put pressure on that person to assist the government in the investigation of others. But Ms. Caproni said information gathered that way could also be useful for other reasons, like determining whether the subject might pose a threat to agents.

The new manual will also remove a limitation on the use of surveillance squads, which are trained to surreptitiously follow targets. Under current rules, the squads can be used only once during an assessment, but the new rules will allow agents to use them repeatedly. Ms. Caproni said restrictions on the duration of physical surveillance would still apply, and argued that because of limited resources, supervisors would use the squads only rarely during such a low-level investigation.

The revisions also clarify what constitutes “undisclosed participation” in an organization by an F.B.I. agent or informant, which is subject to special rules — most of which have not been made public. The new manual says an agent or an informant may surreptitiously attend up to five meetings of a group before those rules would apply — unless the goal is to join the group, in which case the rules apply immediately.

At least one change would tighten, rather than relax, the rules. Currently, a special agent in charge of a field office can delegate the authority to approve sending an informant to a religious service. The new manual will require such officials to handle those decisions personally.

In addition, the manual clarifies a description of what qualifies as a “sensitive investigative matter” — investigations, at any level, that require greater oversight from supervisors because they involve public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars.

The new rules make clear, for example, that if the person with such a role is a victim or a witness rather than a target of an investigation, extra supervision is not necessary. Also excluded from extra supervision will be investigations of low- and midlevel officials for activities unrelated to their position — like drug cases as opposed to corruption, for example.

The manual clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs. And it will limit academic protections only to scholars who work for institutions based in the United States.

Since the release of the 2008 manual, the assessment category has drawn scrutiny because it sets a low bar to examine a person or a group. The F.B.I. has opened thousands of such low-level investigations each month, and a vast majority has not generated information that justified opening more intensive investigations.

Ms. Caproni said the new manual would adjust the definition of assessments to make clear that they must be based on leads. But she rejected arguments that the F.B.I. should focus only on investigations that begin with a firm reason for suspecting wrongdoing.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/us/13fbi.html
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2011-06-11T12:51:00.000-04:00

In India and Israel, the burden of protest falls on the victims of injustice

The moment of truth is approaching for Obama and his like who preach the high morality of non-violence to the powerless.

by Pankaj Mishra
The Guardian
June 6, 2011

At a dark moment in postcolonial history, when many US-backed despots seemed indestructible, the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose centenary falls this year, wrote: "We shall witness [the day] when the enormous mountains of tyranny blow away like cotton".

That miraculous day promised by the poet finally came in Egypt and Tunisia this spring. We have since witnessed many of the world's acknowledged legislators scrambling to get on the right side of history.

Addressing – yet again – the "Muslim world" last month, Barack Obama hailed "the moral force of non-violence", through which "the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades".

But Obama failed to acknowledge to his highly politicised audience the fact that the United States enabled, and often required, the "relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity". And he gave no sign that he would respect the moral authority of non-violent mass movements ranged against America's closest allies, India and Israel.

Let's not forget: before the Arab spring of 2011, there was the Kashmiri summer of 2010. Provoked by the killing of a teenage boy in June last year, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris took to the streets to protest against India's brutal military occupation of the Muslim-majority valley. Summer is the usual "season for a face-off in Kashmir", as the Indian filmmaker Sanjay Kak writes in Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir, a lively anthology of young Kashmiri writers, activists, rappers and graphic artists. There is little doubt that Kashmiris, emboldened by the Arab spring, will again stage massive demonstrations in their towns and villages.

The chances of a third intifada in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel are just as high, as Binyamin Netanyahu devises ever greater hurdles to self-determination for his Arab subjects. In the next few months we will see more clearly than before how India and Israel – billed respectively as the world's largest, and the Middle East's only, democracy – respond to unarmed mass movements.

Certainly, they have shown no sign of fresh thinking, even as the victims of their occupations grow more inventive. India's security establishment fell back last summer on reflexes conditioned by two decades of fighting a militant insurgency during which more than 70,000 people, mostly civilians, have died; 8,000 have "disappeared", often into mass graves; and innumerable others have been subjected to "systematic torture", according to a rare public outburst by the Red Cross.

Last summer soldiers fired at demonstrators, killing 112 civilians, mostly teenagers (Kashmir has many of its own Hamza al-Khatibs). The government imposed round-the-clock curfews (one village was locked in for six weeks) and banned text messaging on mobile phones, while police spies infiltrated Facebook groups in an attempt to hunt down demo organisers.

Faced with non-violent Palestinian protesters, who correctly deduce that their methods have a better chance of influencing world opinion than Hamas's suicide bombers, Israel hasn't varied its repertoire of repression much. For years now the West Bank village of Bil'in has campaigned against the Israeli government's appropriation of its lands. Israel responded by jailing its leader, Abdallah Abu Rahmah, often called the Palestinian Gandhi, for 15 months – "solely", according to Amnesty International "for the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression and assembly".

Encouraged by Egyptians and Tunisians, masses of unarmed Palestinians marched last month to the borders of Israel to mark the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in Mandate Palestine. Israeli soldiers met them with live gunfire, killing more than a dozen and wounding scores of others.

Of course, occupations damage the occupier no less than the occupied. Revanchist nationalism has corroded democratic and secular institutions in both India and Israel, which, not surprisingly, have developed a strong military relationship in the recent decade. Hindu nationalists feel an elective affinity with Israel for its apparently uncompromising attitude to Muslim minorities. In 1993 the then Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, reportedly advised the Hindu nationalist leader LK Advani to alter the demographic composition of the mutinous Kashmir valley by settling Hindus there. Advani, later India's deputy prime minister, fondly quoted from Netanyahu's book on terrorism, given to him by the author. Israeli counter-insurgency experts now regularly visit Kashmir.

India and Israel, both products of botched imperial partitions, were the Bush government's two most avid international boosters of the catastrophic "war on terror", fluently deploying the ideological templates of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – democracy versus terrorism, liberalism versus fundamentalism – to justify their own occupations.

Aggressively jingoistic media helped hardliners in both countries to demonise their political adversaries as terrorists or terrorist sympathisers. Meanwhile, liberal opinion grew almost inaudible. Writing recently in the New York Review of Books, the Israeli scholar and activist David Shulman lamented: "Israeli academic intellectuals as a group have failed to mount a sustained and politically effective protest against the occupation." This is also true of the Indian intelligentsia.

So the burden of non-violent protest in India and Israel has fallen almost entirely on the victims of the occupation. Indeed, many liberal commentators try to condone their passivity by deploring the absence of non-violent protests in Kashmir and Palestine (never mind the fact that the first intifadas in both places in the late 1980s turned violent only after being savagely suppressed).

The moment of truth is fast approaching for those powerful men who preach the high morality of non-violence to the powerless. Only an American veto seems likely to prevent the member states of the UN from declaring a new Palestinian state in September. But Palestinians may rise up against their colonial overlords well before this expected rejection. And, as the political philosopher Michael Walzer points out, Israel would then confront "something radically new. How can it resist masses of men and women, children too, just walking across the ceasefire lines?"

The tactics of young tech-savvy Kashmiris have already confused and bewildered the Indian government, whose recent actions – censoring the Economist, forcing spying rights out of BlackBerry and Google – evoke the last-minute desperation of the Arab world's mukhabarat (secret police) states. The mass movement in Kashmir, which has emerged after two decades of a futile militant insurgency and has no compromising links to Pakistan, poses, as the Kashmiri journalist Parvaiz Bukhari writes in Until My Freedom Has Come, an unprecedented "moral challenge to New Delhi's military domination over the region".

The stage is set, then, for a summer of protests, of unarmed masses rising up to express, in Obama's words, "a longing for freedom that has built up for years". They may well meet with live bullets rather than offers of negotiation and compromise. It will be fascinating to see if Obama makes good his claim last month that the United States "opposes violence and repression" and "welcomes change that advances self-determination".

Certainly, as the corpses of the Palestinian and Kashmiri Hamza al-Khatibs pile up, there will be the usual flurry of intellectual rationalisations – the bogey of Islamic terror will again be invoked. And we will witness how the "enormous mountains of tyranny" in the world's greatest democracies do not blow away like cotton.

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/06/india-israel-obama-non-violence
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2011-06-08T00:05:00.000-04:00

Secret Wars Of CIA Cost U.S. Taxpayers Billions Of Dollars

by Sherwood Ross
Smirking Chimp
June 6, 2011

It's been estimated the Iraq war, besides making that country pretty much unlivable, will flush $3 trillion in U.S. taxpayer dollars down the Pentagon drain. Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz, who made that cost estimate, wrote with co-author Linda Bilmes in The Washington Post March 9, 2008, "The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. Economy...you can't spend $3 trillion -- yes, $3 trillion -- on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home."

The Stiglitz study is well known and is a factor in making many Americans want to get out of Iraq. (A CNN poll this January found two-thirds opposed the war.) But other costly wars have been waged by the White House, Pentagon, and CIA that have been kept largely secret. Their costs ran into the billions of dollars and not only cheated uninformed taxpayers but lacerated innocent nations, turning their populations against us, and ruined for American business countries that should have been harmonious trading partners.

Take El Salvador. President John Kennedy in the early Sixties worked to help El Salvador's military set up ORDEN, a rural paramilitary network, and ANSESAL, an intelligence agency, that were the forerunners of the dreaded Death Squads. Between 1980 and 1992, the U.S. literally waged a war to help the government suppress El Salvador's poverty-struck people. The CIA created right-wing Death Squads to murder labor leaders who fought on behalf of the poor for decent wages. By the time those killer bands had finished their slaughter, 75,000 civilians lay dead and "the U.S. Treasury depleted by six billion dollars," according to journalist William Blum's "Rogue State" from Common Courage Press.

"Officially, the U.S. Military presence in El Salvador was limited to an advisory capacity. In actuality, military and CIA personnel played a more active role on a continuous basis," Blum writes. "About 20 Americans were killed or wounded in helicopter and plane crashes while flying reconnaissance or other missions over combat areas, and considerable evidence surfaced of a U.S. role in the ground fighting as well."

That the CIA was involved up to its ears in the blood-bath is more than a hollow assertion. The man known as the "father" of El Salvador's notorious Death Squads, General Jose Alberto Medrano, told The Progressive magazine at the time that his killer outfits were established with the support of the CIA. What's more, Covert Action magazine reported that in 1963 the Pentagon's Green Beret Col. Arthur Simons of Panama sent 10 Army Special Forces men to help Medrano set up the first paramilitary Death Squad. These Green Berets carried out political assassinations in coordination with Salvadoran military, that magazine said.

Besides Green Berets, The Progressive identified both the State Department and the Agency for International Development(AID) as participating in the concerted effort to suppress dissent. As far as Medrano was concerned, anyone who took the side of employees against corporate owners was a Communist. "You discover the communist by the way he talks," Gen. Medrano said. "Generally, he speaks against Yankee imperialism, he speaks against the oligarchy, he speaks against military men. We can spot them easily."

Medrano added, "In this revolutionary war, the enemy comes from our people. They don't have the rights of Geneva. They are traitors to the country. What can the troops do? When they find them, they kill them." (So much for free speech and human rights.)

One of the "enemies" was Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero who urged soldiers to stop killing on grounds they were "not obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God" -- a comment that is as relevant today as the hour it was uttered. The very next day while saying mass in a cancer hospital chapel, Romero was shot dead. According to Craig Pyes, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, the Salvadoran National Guard also set up safe houses "where they tortured and then murdered those they considered 'subversives.' Their idea was to cleanse the country of hundreds of thousands of people."

President Reagan not only funded the savage El Salvador government, he used that nation, as well as Guatemala and Honduras, as springboards to attack Nicaragua. James Carroll, in his award-winning "House of War"(Houghton Mifflin), said Reagan "increased what had been relatively modest support to three of the most repressive regimes in the world, just as their police-state methods reached new levels of savagery, all in the name of staving off the Marxists."

Just why the U.S. Developed Death Squads in El Salvador may have something to do with profit-hungry US corporations operating Central America. As Carroll sees it, "More than two thirds of the region's people had been made desperately poor over three generations by an American-sponsored, single-crop, agri-business economy that had made a mere 5 percent of the population fabulously wealthy."

"The Latin oligarchs were not owners, exactly," Carroll explains, "but in effect agents of such American companies as United Fruit and Domino Sugar, and multinational corporations like Gulf & Western. Dictators had been installed in these countries to protect this U.S. dominance."

The slaughter in El Salvador, in which the CIA played a primary role, expresses the duality of U.S. foreign policy -- where the White House espouses freedom and self-determination for all peoples while the reality, kept from the knowledge of the American public, is a policy of oppression to serve the interests of misguided U.S. corporate officials exploiting foreign labor. Should it be a surprise that after years of busting labor unions from El Salvador to Iraq, US politicians are attempting to do the same Stateside? Is it surprising that after denying millions of people the world over their fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the U.S. Congress has extended the Patriot Act and President Obama has assumed kingly powers, including the right to arrest anyone and throw away the key?

In this stunning disintegration of American democracy, the CIA is regularly found siding with the worst corporate interests -- big oil companies such as BP that want government to punish those who expect them to agree to a fair profit; agricultural giants that want cheap labor to maximize short-term profits; and so forth.

Such firms are afraid of both free enterprise and fair enterprise, and have turned the face of the nation towards unbridled corporate fascism. Like the Ku Klux Klan of old, the CIA is the new illegal, "invisible empire," one that works harmoniously with its one-time employee, President Obama, to serve the needs of the Empire.

The Republic is dead.

Source:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/sherwood-ross/36607/secret-wars-of-cia-cost-u-s-taxpayers-billions-of-dollars
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2011-05-15T10:56:00.000-04:00

The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party

By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist

August 28, 2010

Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed.

As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center.

But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html
______________________

2011-05-08T11:55:00.000-04:00

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today

By Mike Whitney
SmirkingChimp
May 6, 2011

The greatest threat to Libyan sovereignty and independence is the United States of America. Nothing else comes close.

Gaddafi hasn't been targeted because he's a tyrant, but because he sits on an ocean of petroleum. That's what this is all about, right? If Libya's main source of wealth was car parts or coconuts, there never would have been a war.

The notion that a leader does not have the right to put down an armed rebellion against the state is too absurd to dispute. If we apply the same standard to the demonstrations in Wisconsin, then the teachers and other union members would be entirely justified in grabbing their hunting rifles and handguns and storming the capital in Madison. Can you see how stupid this is? And yet this is pretext that's being used to wage war on Libya.

"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government." That was true when Martin Luther King uttered those words more than 40 years ago, and it's true today. Just ask anyone who lives in Baghdad.

Sure, no one wants to talk about Iraq anymore. It's more fun to watch while some dissolute sitcom star, like Charlie Sheen, has an emotional breakdown on national TV. Or listen to the endless blabbering of some clownish real estate mogul as he claws a path to the 2012 elections. But Iraq is still front-and-center on every Arabs mind. And, it should be. It's the prime example of US foreign policy at work.

Don't worry, I won't bore you with all the stats about the 1 million killed, the 4 million displaced, the lack of electricity, clean water, hospitals, schools etc., etc., etc. You've heard it all before. But there is one clip from an article in the New York Times that I will share with you because it perfectly summarizes how life has changed for many Iraqis since the invasion. The article is titled "City Upon a Hill of Scraps: Surviving on Scavenging in Iraq". Here's an excerpt:

"At the bottom of the economy here, life revolves around that humblest of commodities, garbage.....

On a recent morning, Hamad Tarish dropped down a bag of cans and scrap metal, showing off blackened hands that rarely touched running water. For Mr. Tarish, 22, garbage is his capital. Every night around 3 a.m. he leaves his home to scavenge in a neighborhood to the south before the sanitation trucks come, hustling to avoid the police and to compete with other collectors.

In front of a stretch of makeshift cinder-block houses he threw his haul onto a scale. Seventeen pounds of aluminum cans, worth $6. A hunk of scrap metal and a pound of wire from which he had burned the rubber insulation, each good for $2. In all, $10 to buy food for himself, his wife and their two children.

For Mr. Tarish, who said he usually earned about $4 a day, it was a good harvest. Tomorrow might not be as good, he said. You could never tell. His eyes were bloodshot, his limbs hung heavy with exhaustion.

“A kilogram of meat is $15,” he said. “It’s impossible. I don’t buy sugar for tea.”

As Iraq’s economy languishes, Mr. Tarish has found his livelihood in an underground economy that sustains and organizes whole neighborhoods. Around him were his fellow foot soldiers in this new marketplace — the nocturnal scavengers, the middlemen who bought the scrap for cents on the pound, the dirty horse-drawn carts bringing in more debris from more remote parts of the city. And around these were piles and piles of garbage, sorted by type and swarmed over by flies.

“People here are living on garbage and animals,” said Ali Hasun, 27, a middleman, gesturing around him at a horizon of improvised houses pressed one against another as far as the eye could see — a midsize city subsisting on refuge....

Mr. Hasun and Mr. Tarish live in a vast slum named Naser City, or Victory City, one of dozens of squatter settlements that have sprung up around Baghdad since the American invasion of 2003. Naser City, one of the largest, grew exponentially through the waves of sectarian violence that displaced people from other areas, and more recently because unemployment has forced others to leave their homes. With Baghdad experiencing a housing shortage, the squats — where land is free but illegal, and housing is whatever a family can erect — are in a construction boom.

Residents of Naser City believe that as many as 500,000 people live here, but that is just guesswork. The governor of Baghdad estimates that 600,000 people live in 42 squatter encampments around the city — roughly the population of Boston. But in a country without a census, where few government agencies venture into the squats, this, too, is more belief than fact.

“Those people need to pick up garbage because there are no chances to work,” said the governor, Salah Abdul-Razzaq.

Because the communities were not legal, he said, the province did not provide services like education, medical care, security, electricity, sewage and clean water. “The neighborhoods become places for criminals, thieves, terrorists, kidnappers. But we can’t move them out because there are no alternatives.”......("City Upon a Hill of Scraps: Surviving on Scavenging in Iraq", John Leland, New York Times)

This is what US "liberation" looks like up-close-and-personal, a half a million people foraging through garbage dumps to feed their kids and stay alive. Isn't that worth thinking about the next time Obama beats the war drum and tries to rally the masses to action?

The United States will never atone for what it did to Iraq. There's no making up for the lives that were lost or ruined. There's no making up for the blood that was spilled.

Here's a poem by the insightful Iraqi author, Layla Anwar, who asks Americans to consider what's been done in their names and to take a fresh look at the death and destruction we've left behind. The poem is called "Flying Kites":

“Come and see our overflowing morgues and find our little ones for us...
You may find them in this corner or the other, a little hand poking out, pointing out at you...
Come and search for them in the rubble of your "surgical" air raids, you may find a little leg or a little head...pleading for your attention.
Come and see them amassed in the garbage dumps, scavenging morsels of food...
Half of them are under-nourished or dying from disease. Cholera, dysentery, infections of all sorts....
Come and see, come....” (“Flying Kites” Layla Anwar)

Source:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/mike-whitney/36009/the-greatest-purveyor-of-violence-in-the-world-today
_____________________

2011-05-04T08:20:00.000-04:00

Osama bin Laden's last hours come into focus as White House revises its story

While US officials amend narrative of raid, Abbottabad residents describe Bin Laden’s ‘mansion’ and the brothers who built it.

by: Declan Walsh
The Guardian
May 4, 2011

By the time Pakistani soldiers lifted the cordon around Osama bin Laden’s house in the garrison town of Abbottabad, triggering a media stampede, the most obvious traces of its infamous resident had been effaced.

The American soldiers who had swept in aboard four helicopters on Sunday night had scoured the three-storey building, taking away computer hard disks and a trove of documents – as well as Bin Laden’s bloodied body, which was later buried at sea.The following day, Pakistani intelligence – angered at not having been informed of the raid, and embarrassed that it took place under their noses – made a second sweep.

Tractors carted away furniture and other belongings. But it was impossible to erase every trace of the drama that ended the manhunt.Beyond the gates, children in flip-flops and salwar kameez fished chunks of blackened helicopter debris from the surrounding fields, flung there after a US helicopter that failed to take off was blown up by its own soldiers.One boy produced a jagged, soot-encrusted chunk of metal, perhaps part of an exhaust, from a drain. “This is silver!” declared 12-year-old Yasser. A nervous looking intelligence official, loitering nearby, grabbed the child by the hand and led him away. Fascination with the raid was not confined to Abbottabad. In Washington, fresh details were being revealed by the White House, some which contradicted the earlier version of the demise of the world’s most wanted man.

In the hours after Bin Laden’s death, US officials briefed that he had put up a fight and shot at the Seal 6 team that stormed the second and third floors of his hideout. Other details suggested he used one of his wives as a human shield.

The White House confirmed that neither was true. Bin Laden was unarmed, was shot in the head and chest, and his wife had been wounded in the leg while rushing towards the special forces before he was killed.

The administration was considering whether to release the photos of the Saudi fugitive’s body to counter claims in the region that he had not been killed at all. “There are sensitivities about the appropriateness,” said spokesman Jay Carney. “It is fair to say it is a gruesome photograph.”

CIA director Leon Panetta told NBC that the government had been talking about the best way to release the photograph. “I don’t think there was any question that ultimately a photograph would be presented to the public,” he said.

Another shifting narrative concerned the property itself. Up close, Bin Laden’s house, a tall, unlovely piece of architecture, towering over the policemen guarding the gate, was not quite the million dollar mansion described by officials. The walls were high, certainly, but not unusually so for north-western Pakistan, where privacy is jealously guarded. The paint was peeling, there was no air conditioning.

But it was the only house in the neighbourhood with barbed wire and surveillance cameras. And it towered over its only neighbour, a small, ramshackle dwelling made of rough bricks with plastic sheeting for windows. The people inside were scared and apprehensive.

Zain Muhammad, an elderly man perched on a rope bed on the porch, said Pakistani soldiers had come in the night and taken away his son, Shamraiz. He produced a photo of a smiling man with a moustache in his early 40s. “I’ve no idea where he is. The soldiers won’t allow us to leave, not even to fetch water.” The family did harbour some suspicions about the house 10 feet away, however – and in particular the pair of secretive, security-conscious brothers who owned it.

“They told us they had to protect themselves because they had enemies back in their home village. They had to screen off the house to protect their women. A lot of us thought they were smugglers,” said Abid Khan. Stranger still, the two men had two cows and some goats, but had no discernible source of income.

The house, it turned out, had been on the radar of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for more than eight years. Construction started around 2001. Two years later, when it was still unfinished, ISI agents raided it in search of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a senior Bin Laden lieutenant, but left empty-handed, an ISI official said.

Around 2005, Bin Laden moved in, according to US officials – perhaps around the time of the devastating Kashmir earthquake that killed 73,000 people in October of that year. As the wounded flooded into Abbottabad’s military hospital a mile away – so many that doctors set up a tent on the main lawn – the Saudi fugitive and his clan were settling into this house down the road.

There had been great speculation about his whereabouts. Across the border in Afghanistan, US soldiers distributed matchboxes with Bin Laden’s picture and details of a $25m bounty.

In Pakistan, the US embassy paid for expensive television ads appealing for information. “Who can stop these terrorists? Only you!” implored a voice as images of Bin Laden and 13 henchmen flashed across the screen.

The then president, Pervez Musharraf, insisted the Americans were wrong. His security forces had “broken the vertical and horizontal command and communication links of al-Qaida” in Pakistan, he boasted. “There are a lot of people who say that Osama bin Laden is here in Pakistan,” he said. “Please come and show us where.”

In Abbottabad, the two Pashtun brothers had finally completed their house, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy where Musharraf himself had been trained.

One of them was Bin Laden’s courier, the man trusted to take his messages to the outside world. CIA officials subsequently learned his nom de guerre from an al-Qaida militant picked up in Iraq: Sheikh Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. US officials described him a Pakistani brought up in Kuwait.

To the locals, however, he was simply a Pashtun businessman with an identity card issued in Charsadda, north of Peshawar. He and his brother seemed to be known by several names: Arshad and Tariq Khan, but also Rasheed, Ahmed and Nadeem. The gas bill was in the name of the elder brother, Arshad Khan, presumed to be the “courier” sought by the Americans. Oddly, the house had four separate gas connections.

They kept largely to themselves, coming and going in a small white Suzuki van and a red jeep. But they joined in with the everyday rituals of life, condoling the bereaved, celebrating weddings and births. It may have been a necessary part of the cover story; to have done otherwise might have aroused greater suspicion.

“They weren’t chatty,” said Rasheed, a 32-year-old local shopkeeper, lounging behind his counter who said he sold the brothers salty biscuits and chewy toffees when they arrived with their seven children. He refused to believe they had any links to Kuwait. “We absolutely believed they were Pashtuns,” he said.

But the young trader did notice one strange thing. Seven years earlier he had worked on the house as a labourer when it was being built, and had wondered why the brothers insisted that the walls should be 3ft thick.

In the end, the two brothers were Bin Laden’s downfall. The CIA learned of Arshad Khan’s identity four years ago, and after a two-year search traced him to the Abbottabad area.

Then, last August, a Pakistani working for the CIA spotted one of the brothers as he drove his Suzuki van from Peshawar, leading them to the house. In February, the CIA became convinced Bin Laden was inside, leading to last Sunday’s raid.

The two brothers were killed in the opening moments of the assault, according to the CIA, along with Bin Laden and one of his sons, thought to be Khalid.

Many details, however, remain blurred. US officials amended their initial version to reveal that a woman who was killed during the raid on the compound was not Bin Laden’s wife.

It is also not clear how Bin Laden, who was cornered in a third-floor room now marked by a shattered windowpane, resisted as the US soldiers barged into his room.

President Barack Obama insists the Navy Seals would have detained him if they could, but it is hard to imagine US officials would have relished either a trial or the spectacle of the al-Qaida leader being held in Guantánamo Bay.

Bin Laden’s erstwhile neighbours, now in the gaze of the world’s media, congregated outside his house. Some seemed angry, others bemused. One bearded man scolded his friends for speaking to the foreign press; others seemed to relish the attention, presenting themselves for detailed interviews about their brushes with the neighbour they never knew. A few displayed pro-Osama bravado. “I would have opened fire on the Americans myself if I had to defend him!” declared one man.

Others worried about more material problems. “It’s going to destroy property prices in this area,” muttered one. And there was a surreal moment when an Osama lookalike – a man with a thin face, a large white turban and a full, scraggly beard – turned up at the front gate, triggering laughs and a flutter of camera shutters.

But there was no sign of life from a nearby property, about 50 metres from Bin Laden’s back wall, with a high perimeter wall and two watchtowers. Neighbours said it had been built three years ago by a man whose family has long owned property in the area. The nameplate read: Major Amir Aziz. Locals said he was a serving Pakistan army officer. Despite repeated rings on the doorbell, he refused to answer.

It is unclear what will happen now to the house that Osama built. It has become an embarrassment for Pakistan, a reminder of the fact that the world’s most famous fugitive managed to live in suburban comfort, apparently undetected, for up to six years.

Some fear it could become a shrine of sorts for al-Qaida supporters, and so it may be destroyed. But failing that, it may simply be rented out again. It is, after all, an attractive property – spacious, well located, and fully fitted with advanced security features. In fact it’s just the sort of house that is favoured by security-conscious US diplomats elsewhere in Pakistan. Perhaps they might consider taking it.

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/03/osama-bin-laden-death-raid
_______________

2011-05-02T00:14:00.000-04:00

The Boogie Man is Dead, Long Live the Boogie Man

The Power of Nightmares: Baby It's Cold Outside

Should we be worried about the threat from organized terrorism or is it simply a phantom menace being used to stop society from falling apart? In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.

The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares. In a new series, the Power of Nightmares explores how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organized terrorist network is an illusion.

It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media. At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world.

These two groups have changed the world but not in the way either intended. Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful. Together they created today's nightmare vision of an organized terror network.
A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.

The rise of the politics of fear begins in 1949 with two men whose radical ideas would inspire the attack of 9/11 and influence the neo-conservative movement that dominates Washington. Both these men believed that modern liberal freedoms were eroding the bonds that held society together.

The two movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay. But in an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neo-conservatives turned to fear in order to pursue their vision.

They would create a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see. The Islamists were faced by the refusal of the masses to follow their dream and began to turn to terror to force the people to "see the truth"'.

Watch Part 1:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm

The Phantom Victory

The Power of Nightmares continues its assessment of whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. Part two, the Phantom Victory looks at how two groups, radical Islamists and neo-conservatives with seemingly opposing ideologies came together to defeat a common enemy.

On 25 December 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. Moscow was able to install a friendly government in a neighbouring country but at a price. The invasion gave a common cause to an extraordinary alliance of radical Islamists in Afghanistan and around the world and to the neo-conservatives in the US.

It was a key battleground of the Cold War. Washington provided money and arms including even Stinger missiles capable of shooting down Soviet helicopters. But it was Islamic Mujahideen fighters who would fire them. Among the many foreigners drawn to Afghanistan was a young, wealthy Saudi called Osama Bin Laden.

Long before 9/11, he would have been seen by neo-conservatives in Washington as one of their foot soldiers, helping fight America's cause. After nearly 10 years of fighting, Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan. Both the neo-conservatives and the Islamists believed that it is they who defeated the "evil empire" and now had the power to transform the world.

But both failed in their revolutions. In response, the neo-conservatives invented a new fantasy enemy, Bill Clinton, focusing on the scandal surrounding him and Monica Lewinsky. Meanwhile, the Islamists descend into a desperate cycle of violence and terror to try to persuade the people to follow them.

Out of all this comes the seeds of the strange world of fantasy, deception, violence and fear in which we now live.

Watch Part 2:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1038.htm

The Shadows In The Cave

The Power of Nightmares assesses whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it.

In the wake of the shock and panic created by the devastating attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September, 2001, the neo-conservatives reconstructed the radical Islamists in the image of their last evil enemy, the Soviet Union - a sinister web of terror run from the centre by Osama Bin Laden in his lair in Afghanistan.

There are dangerous and fanatical individuals and groups around the world who have been inspired by extreme Islamist ideas, and who will use the techniques of mass terror - the attacks on America and Madrid make this only too clear. But the nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organisation waiting to strike our societies is an illusion.

Wherever one looks for this al-Qaeda organisation, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the "sleeper cells" in America, the British and Americans are chasing a phantom enemy. But the reason that no-one questions the illusion is because this nightmare enemy gives so many groups new power and influence in a cynical age - and not just politicians.

Those with the darkest imaginations have now become the most powerful.

Watch Part 3:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1040.htm
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2011-04-24T11:38:00.003-04:00

Make-believe civil war

BrasscheckTV.com

I've been waiting for someone to point out the obvious about Libya:

There is no battle between "rebel forces" and the Libyan military.

NATO bombs a Libyan position, the Libyan military evacuates - temporarily - and then a rag tag bunch of poseurs flood in, get their pictures taken pretending to be soldiers by a bunch of idiot journalists and/or CIA media people and then run off when the Libyan military comes back.

John McCain told reporters today that meeting these guys was "one of the most inspiring moments of his life" which re-enforces the idea that the 2008 presidential "election" was a choice between Clown-Liar #1 and Clown-Liar #2.

I guess the plan is to "help" the "rebels" one small step at a time until we're in there up to our elbows.

The last guy to have a major hard on for Libya was a former corporal with a funny mustache named Adolf. I guess there's not that many variations when it comes to trying to take over the world.

Looking for oil is risky and expensive, so it requires huge capital and technical expertise. Lybian national oil companies have neither and so rely on the American and European oil companies to finance the oil extraction and export.

Most of the money they earn is spent elsewhere and their sphere of activity remains confined within the Lybian borders.

So despite expulsions, revolution and nationalisation, the renewal of Lybian oil ties to major oil companies is inevitable, with or without Gaddafi.

So what we see now is that it is more cost effective for the major oil companies to back rebel forces in Lybia and the Ivory Coast causing social and political unrest and eventually a regime change than it is to fund increasingly expensive and risky explorations in developed countries where environmental issues may block oil development.

With the corporations funding rebel uprisings in resource rich countries and the media going along with it and framing the unrest as a desire for a democratic form of government, add one or more international military powers (US, NATO, etc.) to oversee and justify the military involvement, and you have a situation like Lybia and very shortly the Ivory Coast providing a cheaper alternative for the exploitation and profit for oil than traditional explortation expenditures.

Do You Get It?
______________________

More truth than fiction?

This clip came from the movie "Wag the Dog" but it is more truth than fiction.

For all practical purposes, there are no Libyan rebels. As much as a whack job as Gaddafi is (and he is), for an Arab dictator he treats his people pretty well and they mostly tolerate him.

So where are the rebels coming from?

The news media/CIA.

Some undeniable evidence:

1. LOOK at the pictures

What do you see?

Two or three guys standing around with AKs cheering...a guy sitting in a pick up truck with a large caliber machine gun attached...a close cropped picture of a guy sitting it what might be a tank...shaky footage that at the end of the day shows nothing.

And that's it.

I defy you to show me even one image that you couldn't manufacture in 5 minutes flat in your own home town. Just wrap a scarf around your head and grab a hunting rifle. Instant rebel.

2. The UTTERLY bogus "social media" war

Ya gotta love social media. If it's on Twitter or YouTube then it has to be true, right?

No.

Also consider this: YouTube has been turned off in Libya...yet the "rebels" are able to post massive quantities of shaky video footage (which shows nothing) up without trouble.

You ever been out in the field with people firing at and bombing you? Do you think you'd have the time to find an Internet connection, override the YouTube block and upload video. Maybe, but probably not.

Manufactured rebels to justify invasion to take the oil- and take out someone who would not support US-Israel attacking Iran.

_______________________

2011-04-12T07:18:00.001-04:00

And Now, For The Kill

By David Michael Green
Smirking Chimp
April 11, 2011

One of the more interesting developments in American history is something that actually didn't happen. But if one wants to gain some appreciation of the degree to which our public sphere has deteriorated over time, it's worth remembering this non-event.

When Dwight Eisenhower came to the presidency in 1953, it was the first time in an entire generation that a Republican had held the office. Prior to that time, the GOP had led the country into unparalleled economic destruction, refused to do anything about the nightmare they'd created, lost five presidential elections running, and sat on the sidelines while Democratic presidents guided the US through a few slightly consequential events like the Great Depression, World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.

The American Constitutional system - with its potential for divided power - isn't so big on the notion of responsible government (as one finds in parliamentary systems), where authority, and thus responsibility for outcomes is clearly assigned to a given actor or political party. Nevertheless, we got pretty close to it in 1953, with the exhaustion of Democratic governance, the repudiation of Harry Truman, and the Republican Spring led by the grey, seemingly-above-politics new president, General Eisenhower.

What's important here is what could have happened, but didn't. The character of American government had changed radically - the most in the country's history - during the two decades since Herbert Hoover had been in office. It was now much bigger in size, it did a lot more things than it used to do, and the federal government had usurped responsibility for policy domains formerly primarily in the hands of the states. Most importantly, the ethos underscoring the relationship between the American people and their government had completely changed. In the past, that relationship had been one characterized chiefly by libertarianism, on the one hand, and oligarchical corruption on the other. With the New Deal, the government was for the first time in the business of serving the public interest and providing Americans a much-needed social safety net. In short, the American welfare state was born.

These changes had been completely contrary to the politics of the Republican Party, and especially to the politics of the plutocrats in American society (for whom the GOP had long prior become an interest-serving vehicle). They saw Roosevelt as a "traitor to his class", and they hated him so much they couldn't even spit out his name. They actually referred to him as "that man".

All of this is relevant and significant because the GOP had a choice to make in 1953. With their hands on the levers of power for the first time in a long time, they could have undone the New Deal. Some in the party wanted to do so. But by that time both Ike and the bulk of his party had left behind the Neanderthal tendencies of the pre-FDR days and had moved to the center-right. Eisenhower famously discussed his position - and that of others in the GOP - in a 1954 letter to his brother: "Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Ah, how very quaint such sentiments now seem in retrospect. Weren't those just the days, back when even Republicans sorta had a heart with a detectable pulse? Now we live in a very different place. It is a place of destruction and despair. An abattoir where the little people go - all 99 percent of the country, let alone the fully dispensable "human resources" found outside our borders - to be sacrificed on the altar of unparalleled greed.

But that's just the beginning of the story. We'd be in bad enough shape if it were only Republicans out to destroy us. Then there's the "Democrats", including the "socialist" leader of the party, Barack Obama. If we're remotely honest about it, we'd have to acknowledge that today's Obama, the former anti-war community organizer, is to the ideological right of yesterday's Dwight Eisenhower, former five-star general, leader of the Normandy invasion, commander of NATO and head of the Republican Party. As today's worst elements of the Republican Party (that is, almost all of them) seek to do exactly the things that Eisenhower called "stupid", there is Obama, facilitating their efforts.

There are the Democrats, continually adding to the pile of tax giveaways for the rich, and therefore adding to the pile of debt which is now being used as a cudgel to force cuts on essential government services, programs despised by the oligarchy since the beginning. There are the Democrats, continually adding to the pile of stupid Middle Eastern wars being fought using resources so scarce that medical care must now be cut for the poor and elderly. There are the Democrats going even further than Republicans in smashing civil liberties and shredding the Bill of Rights. There are the Democrats, as absolutely unwilling as Republicans to remotely face the very real planetary peril of global warming. There are the Democrats, continuing to promulgate the failed Bush education policy of No Child Left Behind.

There are the Democrats, turning yet again to corporate 'solutions' to health care, which enrich parasitical insurance companies but do nothing for sick people other than to deny them care. There are the Democrats (led by a black man, no less!), joining the chorus of Jesus Freak freaks in denying civil rights to gays.

I think the conservative Eisenhower would sooner have become a German storm trooper than a modern Democrat, let alone a Republican - and on far too many days I'm not sure I can see the difference.

I got a letter this week from my good friend, Barack. I call him by his first name because his note was addressed to "David" and signed "Barack". I guess we're old pals, though in my dotage I seem to have neglected to notice that the most powerful and prominent man on Earth somehow became my personal bud-bud. It was a letter to announce that he was launching his 2012 campaign for reelection. He seemed to be laboring under the misconception that I give a shit. He also seemed to think I hadn't heard.

In fact, the media reported that Barack launched his campaign by announcing it over Twitter, that network of abbreviated bursts of inanity which is ground zero for our national epidemic of narcissism. I think that is totally appropriate that he would make such a momentous announcement in that fashion. Not, mind you, because he's a cutting-edge sort of fellow, mobilizing the new social media technology for political purposes. But, rather, because that particular outlet of that medium speaks so perfectly to the impossible lightness of being that is our President Tweet.

Anyhow, Barack wrote to tell me that he wants to do a big old grass roots campaign again next year, one that doesn't start with "expensive TV ads", but with me - "with people organizing block-by-block, talking to neighbors, co-workers, and friends". Now those would be some brief goddam conversations, I can tell you. "Hey neighbor, let's do some organizing for Obama, 'cause he capitulates so gracefully!"

"Hey co-worker, would you like to pay more taxes so that rich people can contribute even less than they already do? Let's give Barack another term!" I don't think so.

Then he let me in on a little Team Obama secret that, "In the coming days, supporters like you will begin forging a new organization that we'll build together in cities and towns across the country. And I'll need you to help shape our plan as we create a campaign that's farther reaching, more focused, and more innovative than anything we've built before. We'll start by doing something unprecedented: coordinating millions of one-on-one conversations between supporters across every single state, reconnecting old friends, inspiring new ones to join the cause, and readying ourselves for next year's fight."

Wow! That's awfully flattering. The President of the United States - ol' Potus himself - wants my help in shaping his plan to create a people-driven, grassroots campaign for "the cause" of giving him a second term. If only I didn't have other plans for, gosh, well, the entirety of every waking minute in 2012. Looks like, for some reason, that project he has in mind is going to be a big job, too. He goes on to tell me that, "We've always known that lasting change wouldn't come quickly or easily. [Oddly, I don't remember this campaign slogan from 2008.] It never does. But as my administration and folks across the country fight to protect the progress we've made - and make more - we also need to begin mobilizing for 2012, long before the time comes for me to begin campaigning in earnest."

There's that word "fight" again. Ol' Barack, he's a real fighter, eh?! At least now that there's an election where something that he wants is at stake. I noticed that he didn't really seem to fight for anything during his first two years in office, least of all for anything progressive. Even his health care legislation, which is only partially progressive on a good day, didn't seem to inspire any spunk from the president. Did you ever get the feeling that he wanted it real bad? Do you remember him ever pushing the public to rally hard behind this national necessity, making the urgent case for how it would make the country better off, in the same way that, say, Reagan or Bush pushed hard for their beloved tax cuts, or their wars based on lies? Do you even remember Obama standing up to the insane lies told about him and his legislation, the death panels and government rationing and socialism cant, and so on? For that matter, do you remember Obama ever even defining what shape his own signature bill had to take? Single payer? Public option? Money for stethoscopes?

Predictably, a president who stood for nothing during a period of multiple crises got routed in the midterm election. Even still, did it seem to you like he cared very much about that? I'm starting to develop a new theory about Obama. In 2008 I thought he might be a progressive. Then I thought he was such a wimp that it was just easier for him to capitulate at every turn, rather than to fight for progressive values. Now I think he's truly regressive in his politics, and is purposefully altering his operating environment to allow him to pursue those policies while still remaining the nominee of a party that's supposed to be devoted to the people's interests. "Golly", he can say to stupid Democratic voters, "I really wanted to be progressive on [Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, health care, education, gay marriage, the budget, the economy, the environment, civil liberties, whatever] but those mean right-wingers won't let me. And now there's even more of them than there used to be! What can I do but give in even more?" It's a perfect formula for anyone with those priorities. Regressivism begets more regressivism, under cover of the long shadow of a genuinely liberal Democratic Party, thirty years dead.

Meanwhile, the current condition of the United States is fantastical, the stuff of legend, the kind of absurdity that no one would find credible enough to buy were it presented as a work of fiction. We have genuine crises, but we ignore them. Instead we squabble about non-issues, while the ship of state rapidly sinks. And who is squabbling? The far left versus the far right? The reds against the blacks? We should be so lucky. No, it's this faction of political whores carrying water for the oligarchy versus that almost identical faction of political whores carrying water for the oligarchy. Meanwhile, the only seemingly assured ticket to electoral success in our political system on any given day is to have enacted failed policy ideas the day before. And, most bizarre of all, no one will seek to reward the depredations of the political class more rapidly than those who are its victims.

Wonderland would seem to Alice quite the paragon of rationality by comparison.

The current budget brouhaha is only the most recent and obvious example of this political pathology par excellence. Think about it. Here's the real version of what has happened: A decade ago, the United States had the greatest budget surplus ever recorded in human history. Then the regressives came to power. They quickly slashed tax revenues, especially from the rich, borrowing like crack addicts in order to pay for their profligacy. They meanwhile spent gigantic sums on wars based on lies, on hugely increased military spending apart from the wars, on a new Medicare benefit which they insisted on setting up in a way that massively benefitted insurance and pharmaceutical corporations rather than the federal treasury, and on general pork barrel spending, thus driving the national debt up dramatically further, and creating the world's greatest ever deficits. Let me repeat, it was the GOP who did this. Now these very same people are falsely claiming an electoral mandate to slash spending, screaming that borrowing is an urgent problem which must be addressed at all costs. At the same time, they continue each year to further slash revenues coming in to the government, massively exacerbating the very problem they claim to desperately want to solve.

Their solution is to cut spending on essentials for poor people and the middle class. They have completely taken any form of tax restoration off the table. They won't dream of reducing military expenditures, which are bloated to an absurd degree. They cannot contemplate allowing the government to buy way cheaper drugs from Canada, or negotiating a bulk price discount for those drugs, let alone rescinding their (socialist) prescription drug benefit plan. They would never accept a reduction in the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on corporate welfare each year for agricultural or sugar or oil or other industries.

Instead, they're right back at us again, with more of exactly the same formula.

Wisconsin's Paul Ryan continues his (only in ueber-Wonderland) multi-year run as a media darling, some sort of budgetary guru, some sort of brave truth-teller. He this week released a ten-year plan that is, in fact, astonishing for how cowardly and dishonest it is. It slashes almost every form of domestic spending imaginable, dramatically cuts Medicare for seniors, and turns control of Medicaid over to the fifty states, each of whom can of course then do whatever they want with it. Most amazing of all, while this entire draconian meat-axe of a budget proposal is predicated on the urgent necessity of slashing deficits, Ryan's plan would gut revenues to the government by lopping almost 30 percent off of top individual and corporate tax rates, taking the top rate down from 35 percent to 25 percent. No wonder, then, that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has calculated that Ryan's plan would actually increase deficits, the direct opposite of the very rationale that supposedly justifies its existence.

Perhaps most ludicrous of all is the context in which this all arrives, along with the latest budget deal slashing $38 billion in federal spending on domestic programs. The two most urgent problems facing the United States today are global warming and a crappy economy for workers that is probably never going away. But the stuff we argue about has nothing to do with the former, and only exacerbates the latter (because cutting spending will kill the demand in the economy which is precisely what is needed now to stimulate a recovery). We, as a society, could not possibly be more irrelevant to ourselves. And that's the good news. If only it was just irrelevance.

None of this is random, however. This has been a three decade long process to produce that which our unparalleled greedy rich have craved the most, namely, a return to the good old days when they had everything and the rest of us had nothing. They have been indignant at the very notion of the slight bit of economic egalitarianism America managed to maintain for a couple of generations. They sat on their hands, gnashing their teeth, from the 1930s through the 1970s, because they had to, but now they've come back with a vengeance.

Exporting jobs, slashing government programs, moving tax burdens, bankrupting the government, breaking unions, coopting Democrats, creating bogus news media, dumbing down education, fabricating scary bogeymen, stealing elections. It's all there, man.

Remember when Nixon and Kissinger decided to kill socialism (not to mention lots of people) in Chile by "making the economy scream"?

Welcome to Chile Norte, amigo.

As Scott Walker and Paul Ryan and the rest apply the finishing touches, the job is today almost complete.

And now, for the kill.
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About author David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg at regressiveantidote dot net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

Source:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/david-michael-green/35468/and-now-for-the-kill
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2011-04-02T22:22:00.000-04:00

The Fate of The Top 1% Is Bound Up With How The Other 99% Live

By Susie Madrak
Crooks and Liars
April 2, 2011

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that America's top economists are running around with their hair on fire? (Or whatever passes for it with economists.) Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz in Vanity Fair sounds the alarm about growing economic inequality in America. I wonder if anyone in a position to do something about it is listening?

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far.

Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain.

The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining.

Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important.

America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe.

The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling.

With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.

In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.

As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.

Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now!

Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Sounds like a bit of an implied threat there, Joe! Of course, predicting something is often confused with a recommendation...

Sources:
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/joseph-stiglitz-fate-top-1-bound-how-
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2011-03-15T21:30:00.000-04:00

The Idiocy and Hubris of Engineers

Will GE Get Whacked for the Catastrophic Failure of its Nuke Plants in Fukushima?

by Dave Lindorff
ThisCantBeHappening
March 14, 2011
[emphasis added]

GE, the company that boasts that it “brings good things to life,” was the designer of the nuclear plants that are blowing up like hot popcorn kernels at the Fukushima Dai-ichi generating plant north of Tokyo that was hit by the double-whammy of an 9.1 earthquake and a huge tsunami.

The company may escape tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in liability from this continuing disaster, which could still result in a catastrophic total meltdown of one or more of the reactors (as of this writing three of the reactors are reported to have suffered explosions and partial meltdowns, and all could potentially become more serious total meltdowns with a rupture of the reactor container), thanks to Japanese law, which makes the operator--in this case Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) liable. But if it were found that it was design flaws by GE that caused the problem, presumably TEPCO or the Japanese government could pursue GE for damages.

In fact, the design of these facilities--a design which, it should be noted, was also used in 23 nuclear plants operating in the US in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont--appear to have included serious flaws, from a safety perspective.

The drawings of the plants in question, called Mark I Reactors, provide no way for venting hydrogen gas from the containment buildings, despite the fact that one of the first things that happens in the event of a cooling failure is the massive production of hydrogen gas by the exposed fuel rods in the core. This is why three of the nuclear generator buildings at Fukushima Dai-ichi have exploded with tremendous force blasting off the roof and walls of the structures, and damaging control equipment needed to control the reactors.

One would have thought that design engineers at GE would have thought about that fact, and provided venting systems for any hydrogen gas being vented in an emergency into the building. But no. They didn’t.

There is a worse problem though.

Probably in an effort to keep the problem of nuclear waste hidden from the public, these plants feature huge pools of water up in the higher level of the containment building above the reactors, which hold the spent fuel rods from the reactor. These rods are still “hot” but besides the uranium fuel pellets, they also contain the highly radioactive and potentially biologically active decay products of the fission process--particularly radioactive Cesium 137, Iodine 131 and Strontium 90. (Some of GE's plants in the US feature this same design. The two GE Peach Bottom reactors near me, for example, each have two spent fuel tanks sitting above their reactors.)

As Robert Alvarez, a former nuclear energy adviser to President Bill Clinton, has written, if these waste containers, euphemistically called “ponds,” were to be damaged in an explosion and lose their cooling and radiation-shielding water, they could burst into flame from the resulting burning of the highly flammable zirconium cladding of the fuel rods, blasting perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster. (And that’s if just one reactor blows!)

Each pool, Alvarez says, generally contains five to ten times as much nuclear material as the reactors themselves. Alvarez cites a 1997 Nuclear Regulatory Commission study that predicted that a waste pool fire could render a 188-square-mile area “uninhabitable” and do $59 billion worth of damage (but that was 13 years ago).

Another nuclear scientist agrees with Alvarez, quoted in an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

"There should be much more attention paid to the spent-fuel pools," says Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the anti-nuclear power Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "If there's a complete loss of containment [and thus the water inside], it can catch fire. There's a huge amount of radioactivity inside – far more than is inside the reactors. The damaged reactors are less likely to spread the same vast amounts of radiation that Chernobyl did, but a spent-fuel pool fire could very well produce damage similar to or even greater than Chernobyl."

But it gets worse. According to news reports, the Reactor 3 unit was using fueled MOX fuel rods-- a mix of which includes, in addition to uranium, a significant amount of plutonium--a far more dangerous element both chemically as a toxin, and in terms of its radioactivity.

You have to ask, what kind of numbskull would put a waste “pond” for spent fuel right above the reactor of a nuclear plant, thus insuring that in the event of a meltdown, not only would the core of the reactor blow up into the environment, but also all of the spent fuel from prior years?

All that "Six Sigma" quality culture stuff tauted at GE and they came up with this?

I don’t know. I heard about those waste “pools” in the past, and always assumed they were somewhere on the plant grounds away from the reactor itself, but now it turns out they put the damned things right in the line of fire of any meltdown. Boy, that’s just brilliant!

It’s as if you put the oil tank or propane tank for your furnace right above the burner in your basement, so that if there was some problem with the furnace it would ignite the tank, or as if you put the gas tank of your car right above the engine, so that if you had an engine fire, it would explode the gas tank!

This may explain why people in India are reportedly rethinking GE’s bid for a big piece of the country’s proposed market for $150 billion in new nuclear power plants in that country, and why it may not be so easy for GE and other nuclear plant builders to escape liability for their products in the future.

Back in November, President Obama was in India pushing that country’s government to pass legislation exempting GE from liability for nuclear “accidents.” That idea is probably not going to go very far now.

Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and CEO of GE and a big friend of Obama’s (he was named to an unpaid post as “jobs czar” by the president earlier this year, despite the company’s long record of exporting US jobs to places like China and India), says it’s “too soon” to assess the impact on the company’s nuclear business prospects of the nuclear “accidents” in northern Japan.

He’s certainly right about that (though investors aren’t waiting: the stock was down 3.5% today alone by noon, following the second hydrogen gas explosion). At this point only two of the buildings housing the six troubled reactors has blown up, and TEPCO has only lost control of the cooling systems in three of the six, and also, so far, only three have suffered partial meltdowns. Things could get a lot worse if one or more goes into full meltdown, or if one or more of those waste “ponds” blows up.

GE may end up having to change its motto to: “GE brings death to things.”

Source:
http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/509
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