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Gary Edwards

Columbine Survivor Pens Bold Open Letter to Obama Rejecting Gun Control: 'Whose Side Ar... - 0 views

www.theblaze.com/...-control-whose-side-are-you-on

Gun-Control second-amendment Evan-Todd

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Feb 13
     
    Amazing letter from Columbine survivor, Evan Todd, to Obama, explaining why Obama's gun control proposals are non sense. Evan Todd's open letter to Obama, below. - Mr. President, As a student who was shot and wounded during the Columbine massacre, I have a few thoughts on the current gun debate. In regards to your gun control initiatives: Universal Background Checks First, a universal background check will have many devastating effects. It will arguably have the opposite impact of what you propose. If adopted, criminals will know that they can not pass a background check legally, so they will resort to other avenues. With the conditions being set by this initiative, it will create a large black market for weapons and will support more criminal activity and funnel additional money into the hands of thugs, criminals, and people who will do harm to American citizens. Second, universal background checks will create a huge bureaucracy that will cost an enormous amount of tax payers dollars and will straddle us with more debt. We cannot afford it now, let alone create another function of government that will have a huge monthly bill attached to it. Third, is a universal background check system possible without universal gun registration? If so, please define it for us. Universal registration can easily be used for universal confiscation. I am not at all implying that you, sir, would try such a measure, but we do need to think about our actions through the lens of time. It is not impossible to think that a tyrant, to the likes of Mao, Castro, Che, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and others, could possibly rise to power in America. It could be five, ten, twenty, or one hundred years from now - but future generations have the natural right to protect themselves from tyrannical government just as much as we currently do. It is safe to assume that this liberty that our forefathers secured has been a thorn in the side of would-be tyrants ever since the Second Amendmen
Paul Merrell

Steven Salaita settles lawsuit with Univ. of Illinois | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...-settles-lawsuit-univ-illinois

war & peace Israel Palestine Salatia litigation settlement BDS

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Steven Salaita will not be reinstated under the terms of an out of court settlement with the University of Illinois. The deal will pay Salaita $875,000 – about ten times the annual salary he would have received as a tenured professor in the American Indian Studies program at the university’s flagship Urbana-Champaign campus. “This settlement is a vindication for me, but more importantly, it is a victory for academic freedom and the First Amendment,” Salaita said in a release from his legal counsel, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the law firm Loevy & Loevy. The settlement brings an end to Salaita’s breach of contract lawsuit against university trustees and administrators over his August 2014 firing because of his tweets excoriating Israel’s attack on Gaza. Salaita had sought reinstatement as well as financial damages.
  • The university statement said Salaita would receive a lump sum of $600,000, while the remaining amount would cover his legal fees.
  • Salaita’s case became a cause celebre for academic freedom, highlighting the role of pro-Israel donors in pressuring university administrators. Thousands of academics pledged to boycott the university until he was reinstated. The Salaita affair devastated and demoralized the university’s celebrated American Indian Studies program, leading to the departure of several faculty. His firing also earned the University of Illinois a formal censure from the American Association of University Professors for violating academic freedom, a rare rebuke and severe blow to its reputation.
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  • Salaita had scored successes in the early phases of his federal lawsuit. In August, US District Judge Harry Leinenweber backed Salaita’s contention that he had a binding contract with the university. Yet there was never a guarantee that even if he won at trial that the court would order his reinstatement. In September, the judge found that university officials had destroyed emails that may have contained key evidence Salaita needed to prove his case. This came after sensational revelations that top officials, including then Chancellor Phyllis Wise, had been using private email accounts to discuss the case and evade disclosure laws. Wise and another official, Provost Ilesanmi Adesida, resigned in disgrace, adding to the disarray at the frequently scandal-plagued state university.
  • In August, Salaita took up a year-long post as Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut.
Paul Merrell

UK Cryptographers Call For Publication of Deliberately Weakened Protocols, Products | T... - 0 views

threatpost.com/...102301

surveillance state NSA GCHQ cryptography surveillance-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • A group of cryptographers in the UK has published a letter that calls on authorities in that country and the United States to conduct an investigation to determine which security products, protocols and standards have been deliberately weakened by the countries’ intelligence services. The letter, signed by a number of researchers from the University of Bristol and other universities, said that the NSA and British GCHQ “have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve.” The appeal comes a couple of weeks after leaked documents from the NSA and its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, showed that the two agencies have been collaborating on projects that give them the ability to subvert encryption protocols and also have been working with unnamed security vendors to insert backdoors into hardware and software products. Security experts have been debating in recent weeks which products, standards and protocols may have been deliberately weakened, but so far no information has been forthcoming.
  • “By weakening cryptographic standards, in as yet undisclosed ways, and by inserting weaknesses into products which we all rely on to secure critical infrastructure, we believe that the agencies have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve. We find it shocking that agencies of both the US and UK governments now stand accused of undermining the systems which protect us. By weakening all our security so that they can listen in to the communications of our enemies, they also weaken our security against our potential enemies,” the letter says.
  • Published on Monday, the letter is signed by cryptographers from the University of Bristol, University of London, University of Birmingham, University of Luxembourg, University of Southampton, University of Surrey, University of Kent, Newcastle University and University College London. In it, the researchers call on the relevant authorities to publicly name the products and standards that have been weakened in order to inform users which systems they should avoid. “We call on the relevant parties to reveal what systems have been weakened so that they can be repaired, and to create a proper system of oversight with well-defined public rules that clearly forbid weakening the security of civilian systems and infrastructures. The statutory Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons needs to investigate this issue as a matter of urgency. In the modern information age we all need to have complete trust in the basic infrastructure that we all use,” the letter says.
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  • In the weeks since the documents detailing the NSA’s cryptographic capabilities emerged, further details about exactly which protocols the agency can attack successfully and which standards it may have influenced have been scarce. NIST, the U.S. agency that develops technical standards for cryptography, among other things, as denied accusations that the NSA was able to weaken some of the NIST standards. However, at the same time, NIST officials have issued a recommendation that people no longer use one of the encryption standards it previously published.
Paul Merrell

Ontario Announces North America's First Test Of Universal Basic Income - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...227191

economy basic-income ontario

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • The province of Ontario will start its pilot project testing universal basic income in three Canadian cities this summer, premier Kathleen Wynne announced on Monday. About 4,000 residents of Hamilton, Thunder Bay, and Lindsay will be randomly selected to take part in the three-year program. One group will start receiving funds this summer—as much as $12,570 annually for individuals—while the other will be part of the control group, and not receive any money. Researchers will track the program’s impact on the economy, public health, education, and housing.
  • “It’s not an extravagant sum by any means,” Wynne said. “But our goal is clear. We want to find out whether a basic income makes a positive difference in people’s lives. Whether this new approach gives them the ability to begin to achieve their potential.” Participants will be screened to ensure that they are between 18 and 64 years old and living on a low income. “This is a new world with new challenges,” Wynne said. “From technology to [President Donald] Trump, it is a time of greater uncertainty and change.” Universal basic income, a form of social security that provides unconditional financial support from the government to all residents of a country or region, has recently gained traction as a solution to poverty, homelessness, and low quality of life. Similar pilot programs are on the way around the world, from Finland to Kenya. According to the Globe and Mail, a separate basic income plan for First Nations communities will be introduced later this year.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Apr 17
     
    Society begins to come to grips with the fact that, due largely to automation, we have more adults than jobs.
Paul Merrell

Richard Branson: A.I. will make universal basic income necessary - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...al-basic-income-necessary.html

AI employment basic-income Musk Zuckerberg Branson Gates

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Billionaire serial entrepreneur Richard Branson says cash handouts will eventually be required to keep people from becoming homeless in the US. "I think with the coming on of AI and other things there is certainly a danger of income inequality," Branson tells CNN's Christine Romans in a piece published Thursday. The inequality will be caused by "the amount of jobs [artificial intelligence] is going to take away and so on," Branson says. "There is no question" technology will eliminate jobs, he says. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates echoed this sentiment recently. "AI is just the latest in technologies that allow us to produce a lot more goods and services with less labor," says Gates, speaking with "Hamilton" composer Lin-Manuel Miranda and his wife, Melinda, at Hunter College in New York City earlier in February. "AI will bring us immense new productivity."
  • So new jobs will have to be created, says Branson. But also, a "basic minimum earnings," or a universal basic income, should be instituted "so that there is nobody that is having to sleep on the street," Branson tells CNN. "One hundred percent, I think that is really important." Universal basic income is a cash handout, distributed irrespective of employment status.
  • Billionaire SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk told CNBC in 2016 that he expects cash handouts will be necessary too. "There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation," says Musk to CNBC. "Yeah, I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen." Additionally, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg promoted the idea of universal basic income during his commencement speech to Harvard in May. "Now it's our time to define a new social contract for our generation. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things," says Zuckerberg.
Gary Edwards

Startup turns carbon dioxide into fuels - 0 views

phys.org/...rtup-carbon-dioxide-fuels.html

syngas synfuels energy Clean-Energy carbon dioxide

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The research has received funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFSOR), the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy (DOE). The collaboration between Liquid Light and the University was supported by the DOE Small Business Innovation Research program and the AFOSR Small Business Technology Transfer program. Princeton's agreement with Liquid Light allowed the company to continue to collaborate with Bocarsly and his research team. Before long, new discoveries were emerging. "They started noticing interesting chemistry that we wouldn't have predicted," said Bocarsly.
  • The Princeton scientists did some additional studies, and made a surprising discovery: They could turn CO2, which contains only one carbon, into a compound with a carbon-carbon bond, which vastly increases the possibilities for creating commercial applications. This was radical because although the reaction is certainly possible, it is highly unlikely to happen because so many other competing reactions are occurring. "Everyone who electrochemically reduces CO2 today makes compounds with only one carbon," said Bocarsly. "Nobody makes things with carbon-carbon bonds." He paused. "But we can." "That was a very 'wow' moment," recalled Cole, "because we thought that our process could only make methanol. But now we were finding that we could make a variety of products, and that is what makes this technology commercially interesting." She said Liquid Light scientists can now make more than 20 different products from CO2.
  • One of the chemicals Liquid Light can make is isopropanol, commonly known as rubbing alcohol and an important industrial chemical. Another is butanol, which could be commercially important as a fuel. Liquid Light's technology offers the potential to make these chemicals at lower cost than today's methods, which involve starting with fossil fuels such as petroleum and natural gas.
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  • Why does pyridinium work so well as a catalyst for the reaction? Based on its structure, the ring-shaped molecule is an unlikely catalyst for this reaction because it shuttles just one electron at a time. But to convert CO2 to methanol requires six electrons, and to make higher-carbon molecules takes even more electrons. Bocarsly and his team — in collaboration with Steven Bernasek, professor of chemistry — are doing studies to understand the steps in the chemical reaction, and they are making rapid progress. "There are clearly some intermediate products formed during the reaction that do not sit around for a long time and are not there in very high concentrations," said Bocarsly.
  • The Princeton team also is studying the factors that determine which products can be made from CO2. The researchers have found that very subtle changes in the electrode surface can lead to production of different chemicals. For example, CO2 plus a pyridinium catalyst and a platinum electrode make methanol. However, the same catalyst and a different electrode give a different product. The team published its findings on how the reaction is affected by catalyst concentration, temperature and pressure in the journal ChemSusChem last year.
  • Citing government statistics that the United States generates about 5.5 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, Teamey said it will not be hard to obtain the starting materials for this new industry. However, the CO2 needs to be relatively pure, a requirement that rules out gasoline tailpipes and coal-fired power plants. Instead, said Teamey, the CO2 could come from manufacturing facilities, such as fertilizer manufacturers and cement plants, which according to Teamey emit some 100 million tons of high-purity CO2 each year.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Feb 14
     
    "Today, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a hot topic. Scientists around the globe are searching for ways to store, dispose of, or prevent the formation of the greenhouse gas, which is a major driver of global climate change. Liquid Light hopes to take this concept one step further and harness waste CO2 as a source of carbon to make industrial chemicals and fuels. The technology behind the process is simple: Take CO2 and mix it in a water-filled chamber with an electrode and a catalyst. The ensuing chemical reaction converts CO2 into a new molecule, methanol, which can be used as a fuel, an industrial solvent or a starting material for the manufacture of other chemicals. Liquid Light's founders include Bocarsly and his former graduate student Emily Cole, who earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009. Cole helped revive efforts in Bocarsly's lab to study the conversion of CO2 into usable fuels, which led to the launch of Liquid Light and an ongoing collaboration that Bocarsly said has been extremely positive for his research team at the University. "We've made some discoveries that wouldn't have been made in a university setting, and this has really accelerated the research," Bocarsly said. "It is a very productive relationship." Back in the 1990s, a former Ph.D. student of Bocarsly's named Chao Lin conducted some of the earliest experiments on turning CO2 into methanol. He used palladium metal as the electrode and pyridinium, an inexpensive ring-shaped molecule, as the catalyst. By plugging the electrode into an electrical outlet, he could drive an electrochemical reaction that converted CO2 into methanol. As Bocarsly recalled, Lin was quite excited about his success. However, said Bocarsly, "We published that finding in 1994 and there was approximately zero interest in it." The work languished until 2005 when Cole, then a new graduate student, told Bocarsly she wanted to work on a clean-energy project. She took up the challenge of reproducing Lin's results, but this time
Paul Merrell

SANTIAGO, Chile: Chilean accused of murder, torture taught 13 years for Pentagon | Nati... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...accused-of-murder-torture.html

war & peace National-Defense-Univ human rights Chile Colombia Operation-Condor

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A member of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s brutal secret police who’s been accused of murder taught for more than a decade at the Pentagon’s premier university, despite repeated complaints by his colleagues about his past. Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in criminal court in Santiago with being the mastermind in the execution-style slayings of seven people in 1973, according to court documents. McClatchy also interviewed an accuser who identified Garcia Covarrubias as the person who sexually tortured him.Despite knowing of the allegations, State and Defense department officials allowed Garcia Covarrubias to retain his visa and continue working at a school affiliated with the National Defense University until last year .Human rights groups also question the school’s selection of a second professor, Colombia’s former top military commander.
  • Some Latin America experts said the hirings by the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies reflected a continuing inclination by the U.S government to overlook human rights violations in Latin America, especially in countries where it funded efforts to quash leftists. But those experts were especially troubled by Garcia Covarrubias’ long tenure at one of the nation’s most renowned defense institutions. “His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror,” said Chris Simmons, a former Defense Intelligence Agency and Army intelligence officer from 1982 to 2010 who specializes in Latin America. “If he is in fact guilty of what he is accused of, he is a terrorist. Then who are we to tell other countries how they should be fighting terrorism?” To his supporters, Garcia Covarrubias is a brilliant thinker with a Ph.D. and purveyor of leadership skills. To his alleged victims, he’s a sadistic torturer with a penchant for horsewhips and perversity.
  • A 2008 Chilean military document reviewed by McClatchy identified Garcia Covarrubias as a member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the feared spy agency known by its acronym DINA.“DINA was simply the most sinister agency in Latin America,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive, which secured the release of U.S. government classified documents underscoring the complicit relationship between the U.S. and Pinochet. “Anyone associated with that agency should never have been allowed into this country, let alone given this job.”Officials with the Pentagon, the State Department and the school refused to comment. Garcia Covarrubias is now back in Chile, ordered by an investigative judge in January 2014 to remain in the country while an inquiry continues into his alleged role in the deaths of seven people in Temuco weeks after the U.S.-backed Pinochet coup on Sept. 11, 1973. His case is one of 108 involving tortured, disappeared or murdered supporters of the deposed elected president, Salvador Allende. More than 3,000 people died at the hands of the regime, and in 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell offered regrets for U.S. involvement in the coup, calling it “not a part of American history that we're proud of.”
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  • The center’s officials who hired and renewed Garcia Covarrubias’ contracts say he was a highly qualified professor and minimize the allegations against him. “We made inquiries with people in the region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about Jaime,” said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. “He was vetted by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn’t have anything either or he wouldn’t have been hired.”McClatchy, however, located one of his alleged victims, who described being brutalized by him. “They submitted us to torture, twice a day. We were submerged in feces,” Herman Carrasco, who’s now a real estate agent, told McClatchy in Chile. “They stuck rifle barrels in our anuses.”According to Carrasco, the torture unfolded in October and November 1973 – lorded over by the horsewhip-wielding Garcia Covarrubias – and included electric shock administered to eyelids, genitals and other sensitive areas of the body.“He was the person who tortured us, with his face shown,” said Carrasco, who added that he’d known Garcia Covarrubias from social events before the coup. “He forced us into sexual acts, which shows that besides ferocious cruelty there was a level of psychopathic behavior.”
  • Despite very graphic torture accusations against Garcia Covarrubias, U.S. officials are rallying behind him.
  • As the center supported Garcia Covarrubias, it pushed out Andersen in retaliation, the former communications chief said.Last September, Andersen filed a complaint with the Pentagon’s inspector general, with the support of then-Sen. Carl Levin. D-Mich. An inspector general spokeswoman declined to comment. “It’s shameful that at a time the U.S. prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent,” Andersen said. The details uncovered about Garcia Covarrubias have prompted demands from several members of Congress for a Pentagon accounting of how he was hired and retained his job.“The American people deserve to know that adequate vetting of such individuals would be routine,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., author of the “ Leahy Law,” which restricts U.S. assistance to foreign security forces that violate human rights.
  • While most of the concerns focused on Garcia Covarrubias, the center also took heat in 2006 for hiring Colombian Gen. Carlos Ospina Ovalle. As army commander, he turned the tables in a decades-old guerrilla war while simultaneously crushing drug cartels. Ospina Ovalle left the center last year and took a post at another National Defense University school.He was hired at the request of the Colombian government and was popular with U.S. military leaders, recalls Downie, the center’s director at the time. “The Colombians wanted, for his own safety, to get him out of Colombia,” said Downie. “This is a guy we certainly wanted to have as a professor.”Human rights groups, however, criticized the general’s hiring and continued employment at the National Defense University. They point to his earlier command in Antioquia province, where right-wing paramilitaries ran roughshod and were linked to the military.“Antioquia in the late 1990s . . . is less than one degree of separation from working with the paramilitaries,” said Adam Isacson, a senior associate specializing in military matters for the Washington Office on Latin America. “If he has not, it’s some miracle that he managed to be the one clean officer.”“Having officers like that, the implicit message is that human rights takes a backseat,” said Isacson.
Paul Merrell

The U.S. Government And The Sinaloa Cartel - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/-and-the-sinaloa-cartel-2014-1

Mexico DEA Holder Fast&Furious war on drugs™ gun-running

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • An investigation by El Universal found that between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels. Sinaloa, led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, supplies 80% of the drugs entering the Chicago area and has a presence in cities across the U.S.
  • There have long been allegations that Guzman, considered to be "the world’s most powerful drug trafficker," coordinates with American authorities. But the El Universal investigation is the first to publish court documents that include corroborating testimony from a DEA agent and a Justice Department official. The written statements were made to the U.S. District Court in Chicago in relation to the arrest of Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the son of Sinaloa leader Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada and allegedly the Sinaloa cartel’s "logistics coordinator."
  • El Universal, citing court documents, reports that DEA agents met with high-level Sinaloa officials more than 50 times since 2000.
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  • "The DEA agents met with members of the cartel in Mexico to obtain information about their rivals and simultaneously built a network of informants who sign drug cooperation agreements, subject to results, to enable them to obtain future benefits, including cancellation of charges in the U.S.," reports El Universal, which also interviewed more than one hundred active and retired police officers as well as prisoners and experts. Zambada-Niebla's lawyer claimed to the court that in the late 1990s, Castro struck a deal with U.S. agents in which Sinaloa would provide information about rival drug trafficking organizations while the U.S. would dismiss its case against the Sinaloa lawyer and refrain from interfering with Sinaloa drug trafficking activities or actively prosecuting Sinaloa leadership. "The agents stated that this arrangement had been approved by high-ranking officials and federal prosecutors," Zambada-Niebla lawyer wrote.
  • After being extradited to Chicago in February 2010, Zambada-Niebla argued that he was also "immune from arrest or prosecution" because he actively provided information to U.S. federal agents. Zambada-Niebla also alleged that Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the cartel in exchange for information used to take down its rivals. (If true, that re-raises the issue regarding what Attorney General Eric Holder knew about the gun-running arrangements.)
  • El Universal reported that the coordination between the U.S. and Sinaloa, as well as other cartels, peaked between 2006 and 2012, which is when drug traffickers consolidated their grip on Mexico. The paper concluded by saying that it is unclear whether the arrangements continue. The DEA and other U.S. agencies declined to comment to El Universal.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Jan 14
     
    Another chapter in the long-running history of U.S. government participation in drug-smuggling and gun-running. This one breathes new life into the notorious Fast & Furious scandal.
Paul Merrell

WA State Bill Proposes Criminalizing Help to NSA, Turning Off Resources to Yakima Facil... - 0 views

blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/...f-resources-to-yakima-facility

surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The state level campaign to turn off power and electricity to the NSA got a big boost Wednesday. In a bipartisan effort, Washington became first state with a physical NSA location to consider the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, designed to make life extremely difficult for the massive spy agency. Rep. David Taylor (R-Moxee) and Rep Rep. Luis Moscoso (D- Mountlake Terrace) introduced HB2272 late Tuesday night. Based on model language drafted by the OffNow coalition, it would make it the policy of Washington “to refuse material support, participation, or assistance to any federal agency which claims the power, or with any federal law, rule, regulation, or order which purports to authorize, the collection of electronic data or metadata of any person pursuant to any action not based on a warrant.” Practically speaking, the bill prohibits state and local agencies from providing any material support to the NSA within their jurisdiction. This includes barring government-owned utilities from providing water and electricity. It makes information gathered without a warrant by the NSA and shared with law enforcement inadmissible in state court. It blocks public universities from serving as NSA research facilities or recruiting grounds. And it disincentivizes corporations attempting to fill needs not met in the absence of state cooperation.
  • The state level campaign to turn off power and electricity to the NSA got a big boost Wednesday. In a bipartisan effort, Washington became first state with a physical NSA location to consider the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, designed to make life extremely difficult for the massive spy agency. Rep. David Taylor (R-Moxee) and Rep Rep. Luis Moscoso (D- Mountlake Terrace) introduced HB2272 late Tuesday night. Based on model language drafted by the OffNow coalition, it would make it the policy of Washington “to refuse material support, participation, or assistance to any federal agency which claims the power, or with any federal law, rule, regulation, or order which purports to authorize, the collection of electronic data or metadata of any person pursuant to any action not based on a warrant.” Practically speaking, the bill prohibits state and local agencies from providing any material support to the NSA within their jurisdiction. This includes barring government-owned utilities from providing water and electricity. It makes information gathered without a warrant by the NSA and shared with law enforcement inadmissible in state court. It blocks public universities from serving as NSA research facilities or recruiting grounds. And it disincentivizes corporations attempting to fill needs not met in the absence of state cooperation.
  • Lawmakers in Oklahoma, California and Indiana have already introduced similar legislation, and a senator in Arizona has committed to running it there, but Washington counts as the first state with an actual NSA facility within its borders to consider the Fourth Amendment Protection Act. The NSA operates a listening center on the Army’s Yakima Training Center (YTC). The NSA facility is in Taylor’s district, and he said he cannot sit idly by while a secretive facility in his own backyard violate the rights of people everywhere. “We’re running the bill to provide protection against the ever increasing surveillance into the daily lives of our citizens,” he said. “Our Founding Fathers established a series of checks and balances in the Constitution. Given the federal government’s utter failure to address the people’s concerns, it’s up to the states to stand for our citizens’ constitutional rights.”
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  • According to documents made public by the US Military, as of 2008, a company called PacifiCorp serves as the primary supplier of electric power, and Cascade Natural Gas Corporation supplies natural gas to YTC. The Kittitas Public Utility District, a function of the state of Washington, provides electric power for the MPRC and the Doris site, but no documentation has yet proven that it also provides electricity used directly by the NSA facility on site. And while YTC does provide a bulk of its own water, documents also show that some of it gets there by first passing through upstream dams owned and operated by the State. The Army report states, “YTC lies within three WAUs whose boundaries coincide with WRIAs, as defined by the State of Washington natural resource agencies.” WAU’s are Washington State Water Administration Units. WRIAs are Washington State Water Resource Inventory Areas A Washington company also has a strong link to the NSA. Cray Inc. builds supercomputers for the agency.
  • If the bill passes, it would set in motion actions to stop any state support of the Yakima center as long as it remains in the state, and could make Cray ineligible for any contracts with the state or its political subdivisions. Three public universities in Washington join 166 schools nationwide partnering with the NSA. Taylor’s bill would address these schools’ status as NSA “Centers of Academic Excellence,” and would bar any new partnerships with other state colleges or universities. Tenth Amendment Center national communications director Mike Maharrey says the bills prohibition against using unconstitutionally gathered data in state court would probably have the most immediate impact. In fact, lawmakers in Kansas and Missouri will consider bills simply addressing this kind of data sharing.
  • “We know the NSA shares data with state and local law enforcement. We know from a Reuters report that most of this shared data has absolutely nothing to do with national security issues. This bill would make that information inadmissible in state court,” he said. “This data sharing shoves a dagger into the heart of the Fourth Amendment. This bill would stop that from happening. This is a no-brainer. Every state should do it.” Maharrey said he expects at least three more states to introduce the act within the next few weeks. “This idea is catching fire,” he said. “And why wouldn’t it? We have an out of control agency spying on virtually everybody in the world. We have a president and a Congress that appears poised to maybe put a band aid on it. Americans are realizing if we are going to slow down the NSA, we are going to have to take a different approach. This is it.”
Paul Merrell

Americans Show "Enormous Increase In Support" Of Universal Basic Income | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...support-universal-basic-income

basic-income polls stats

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • As automation and AI destroy millions of middle-income jobs, permanently forcing (primarily male) workers from the workforce, Americans are beginning to reconsider their attitudes toward a radical policy tool that's popular among some segments of the left: Universal Basic Income. According to CNBC, a recent poll conducted by Northeastern University and Gallup found that 48% of Americans support the measure. In an association that's hardly a coincidence, the poll also showed that three-quarters of Americans believe machines will take away more jobs than they'll generate...
  • Unsurprisingly 65% of Democrats want to see a universal basic income and 54% of people between the ages of 18 and 35 do. In comparison, just 28% of Republicans support UBI.
Paul Merrell

Update: BRICS Announces New University for the South | News | teleSUR English - 0 views

www.telesurtv.net/...r-the-South-20150709-0009.html

surveillance state BRICS information-security universities

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Thursday the BRICS group of nations will create their own university. “Member states of the bloc have agreed to coordinate their efforts in (the area of) information security, including on the Internet. There will be a network of community universities to bolster scientific and technological exchange between member states,” Putin said. The announcement was made during the bloc's summit in Ufa, Russia.
Paul Merrell

Are US Academics Who Cite WikiLeaks Blackballed? - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...212806

Wikileaks censorship academic

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Speaking to Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine in July 2015, Assange suggested that institutions within the international relations discipline have failed to understand the intersection between current geopolitical and technological developments. Specifically, Assange charged that the US journal International Studies Quarterly (ISQ), published by the prestigious International Studies Association (ISA), would not accept manuscripts based on WikiLeaks’ material. Professor of international politics Daniel W. Drezner hit back on July 30 in The Washington Post, arguing that there were other explanations for why the journal was not publishing WikiLeaks’ material. However, he did concede that it is possible that the “structural forces” opposing WikiLeaks were so powerful that a scholar would eschew WikiLeaks’ publications for “fear of being blackballed”. For the thousands of undergraduate to PhD students, fellows and academic researchers facing a precarious employment market, self-censorship for fear of freezing one’s career is not unlikely. One publicised incident from November 2010 concerning the office of career services at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), which according to The New York Times “grooms future diplomats”, provides the perfect illustration. That year the office sent an email to students warning them against commenting on or posting WikiLeaks’ documents on social media because “engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government”. The warning came to the office through a SIPA alumnus working at the State Department.
  • Years later, the tone of the warning continued to reverberate through the halls of one of the most reputable universities in the world. In documenting human rights abuses in June 2013 a Columbia University graduate class produced the anonymous academic paper “WikiLeaks and Iraq Body Count: the sum of parts may not add up to the whole — a comparison of two tallies of Iraqi civilian deaths”. The acknowledgements section of their report refers to the 2010 warning email and states that in light of that email it would be “unwise and perhaps unethical to acknowledge all the participating students by name”. Others participating in a peer-review process have cited additional factors curtailing their use of comprehensive and illuminating WikiLeaks publications. Former US presidential candidate for the Green Party Cynthia McKinney, for example, says that she was forced to scrub her PhD dissertation from any reference of WikiLeaks material. However Drezner, who is an ISA member and on the ISQ’s web advisory board, claims that WikiLeaks’ published diplomatic cables “are not nearly as significant as Assange believes” and that the “academic universe is indifferent to WikiLeaks”. A surprising claim, given that international human rights courts have not been indifferent to evidence derived from WikiLeaks’ published cables, including cables that show the insidious ways in which European officials attempt to conceal CIA torture in secret prisons.
  • To help address the gap in scholarly analysis of the more than 2 million US diplomatic cables and State Department records published by WikiLeaks since 2010, WikiLeaks has produced a new book, The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire, published September 7, 2015. The book brings together journalists, researchers and experts on international law and foreign policy to examine the current cables and records. The documents are extensive. They expose US efforts —  across Bush and Obama administrations — to use bribes and threats to keep the US protected from facing war crimes allegations, conveying the fading effervescence of concepts such as “international justice” or “rule of law” in the face of a superpower that clearly believes that “might makes right”. Analysts review the efforts US diplomats take to maintain ties with dictators. They examine the meaning of human rights in the context of a global “War on Terror”. Like the cables they seek to illuminate, the 18 chapters of the book touch upon most major regions of the world. Experts on US foreign policy such as Robert Naiman, Stephen Zunes and Gareth Porter examine cables that reveal US meddling in Syria, US acceptance of Israeli violations of international law, and how the US dealt with the International Atomic Energy Agency in relation to Iranian nuclear development. The book offers a user guide written by WikiLeaks’ investigations editor Sarah Harrison on how to research WikiLeaks’ cables including meta data and content.
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  • Writing in the book’s introduction, Assange proposes that the diplomatic cables provide “the vivisection of a living empire, showing what substance flowed from which state organ and when”. Assange notes in his introduction that academic disciplines outside international relations, and where career aspirations do not go hand in hand with patronage by government institutions, have voluminous coverage of the cables. But the ISA does not accept submissions citing WikiLeaks’ material. Although ISA executive director Mark Boyer denies that the association has a formal policy against publishing WikiLeaks’ material, he says that journal editors have discussed the implications of publishing material that is legally prohibited by the US government. According to Gabriel J. Michael, author of the Yale Law School paper Who’s Afraid of WikiLeaks? Missed Opportunities in Political Science Research, the ISQ has adopted a “provisional policy” against handling manuscripts that make use of leaked documents if such use could be interpreted as mishandling “classified” material. According to an ISQ editor quoted in Michael’s paper, this policy prohibits direct quotations as well as data mining, and was developed in consultation with legal counsel. Stating that editors are currently “in an untenable position”. According to the editor, ISQ’s policy will remain in place pending broader action from the ISA, which publishes several other disciplinary journals. The ISA and ISQ concerns about handling material that the US government forbids —  which include WikiLeaks’ cables —  amount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The cables go into the heart of an empire, and reflect on matters that affect everyone.
  • Without WikiLeaks, the public would still be in the dark about the Trans-Pacific Partnership “agreement” currently being negotiated. The treaty aims to rewrite the global rules on intellectual property rights and would create spheres of trade which would be protected from judicial oversight. Such agreements have the potential to change the fabric of how states operate, and the leaked cables shed light on how states negotiate significant treaties, aiming to keep citizenship participation in politics out. Where academia bans the use of important leaked documents the public loses out.
Paul Merrell

Dr Alan Sabrosky- Mossad Did 9-11 | Centurean2\'s Weblog - 0 views

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war & peace 9-11 Mossad Israel

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • “What we need to stand up and say is not only did they attack the USS Liberty, they did 9/11. They did it. I have had long conversations over the past two weeks with contacts at the Army War College, at it’s headquarters, Marine Corps and I made it absolutely clear in both cases that it is 100 percent certain that 9/11 was a Mossad operation. Period.” - Dr. Alan Sabrosky, March 14, 2010 – listen to podcast
  • Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is a writer and consultant specializing in national and international security affairs. In December 1988, he received the Superior Civilian Service Award after more than five years of service at the U.S. Army War College as Director of Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, and holder of the General of the Army Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research. He is listed in WHO’S WHO IN THE EAST (23rd ed.). A Marine Corps Vietnam veteran and a 1986 graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Dr. Sabrosky’s teaching and research appointments have included the United States Military Academy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Middlebury College and Catholic University; while in government service, he held concurrent adjunct professorships at Georgetown University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Gary Edwards

Tyranny? What Tyranny? - The Patriot Post - 0 views

patriotpost.us/18095

Tea-Party-Patriots Patriot-Post Socialism

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 May 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 May 13
     
    Like most concerned citizens, my inbox is overflowing with Tea Party - Libertarian - Conservative news and articles.  Lots of shrill tones and emotional angst, and there is no doubt in my mind that the socialists are trying to push this country into open rebellion and civil war.  It's the only way they get to totally discard the Constitution and Bill of Rights.   Sanity for me has become the study of our history, and the long hard march toward freedom and individual liberty our forefathers made.  The Patriot Post is one of the few publications I've found that can consistently link the socialist civil war and globalist events of the day to the cultural and historical legacy of that great march towards individual liberty and freedom.  This most recent article hit me between the eyes.  Maybe someday I'll understand why this kind of discussion shakes me to the core.  For now though, I hope you'll give it some consideration.  And like me try to stay calm in the midst of Benghazigate, Fast and Furious, ObamaCare and the incredible avalanche of daily assaults on our Constitution and the individual liberties that great document was designed to protect and defend. excerpt: "From the days of Woodrow Wilson to those of Barack Obama, and encompassing all the "progressives" in between, taxpayer-funded academic institutions have been the breeding ground for generations of socialists. For most leftists, the crucial years that cemented their worldview were the ones they spent in our nation's colleges and universities. Given that some substantial number of the adoring, bright-eyed beneficiaries of Obama's rhetoric have no concept of Essential Liberty and its antithesis, tyranny, let me take apart the selected excerpt of Obama's oration and provide those graduates with an introductory lesson in Liberty. After all, most of the class of 2013 will have plenty of time to contemplate this lesson, as more than half of college and university graduates entering the "Obamanomic
Paul Merrell

EXCLUSIVE: Snowden reveals more US cyberspying details | South China Morning Post - 0 views

www.scmp.com/...s-cyberspying-details-revealed

surveillance state NSA China Hong Kong Pacnet

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • US spies are hacking into Chinese mobile phone companies to steal text messages and attacking the servers at Tsinghua University, Edward Snowden has told the Sunday Morning Post. The latest explosive revelations about US National Security Agency cybersnooping in Hong Kong and on the mainland are based on further scrutiny and clarification of information Snowden provided on June 12. The former technician for the US Central Intelligence Agency and contractor for the National Security Agency provided documents revealing attacks on computers over a four-year period.
  • The documents listed operational details of specific attacks on computers, including internet protocol (IP) addresses, dates of attacks and whether a computer was still being monitored remotely. The Sunday Morning Post can now reveal Snowden's claims that the NSA is: Extensive hacking of major telecommunication companies in China to access text messages   Sustained attacks on network backbones at Tsinghua University, China’s premier seat of learning   Hacking of computers at the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet, which owns one of the most extensive fibre optic submarine cable networks in the region
  • Pacnet, which recently signed major deals with the mainland's top mobile phone companies, owns more than 46,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cables. The cables connect its regional data centres across the Asia-Pacific region, including Hong Kong, the mainland, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. It also has offices in the US. Snowden claims that data from Chinese mobile phone companies has been compromised, with millions of private text messages mined by the NSA. Cybersecurity experts on the mainland have long feared mobile phone companies had fallen victim to back-door attacks because they were forced to go overseas to buy core technology for their networks. In recent years, those security concerns became more vocal and as a result domestic network equipment suppliers such as Huawai, Datang and ZTE started to close the technology gap, enabling the phone companies to reduce their reliance on foreign suppliers.
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  • As for the attacks at Tsinghua University, the leaked information points to the NSA hacking into the institute's servers as recently as January. Tsinghua is widely regarded as China's top education and research institute and carries out extensive work on next-generation web technologies. It is home to one of the mainland's six major network backbones, the China Education and Research Network.
Paul Merrell

Pepe Escobar - The real November surprise -- Puppet Masters -- Sott.net - 0 views

www.sott.net/...bar-The-real-November-surprise

Auction 2016 Powers-that-Be Hillary Trump

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • "As bad as it is the folks above the President make the decisions. They may have decided on Trump. These things do not happen by accident." Thus spoke a high-level US business mover and shaker with secure transit in rarified Masters of the Universe-related circles, amidst the utter political chaos provoked by head of the FBI James Comey's latest bombshell. It's virtually established by now that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Comey not to release his letter to Congress. But Comey did it anyway. If he had not, and a scandal would - inevitably - spring up after the US presidential election, Lynch would be perfectly positioned to deny she knew anything, and Comey would be on the firing line. Lynch is a certified Clinton machine asset. In 1999 then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney's office. She left in 2002, taking the private practice revolving door. She was back to the Brooklyn office in 2010, urged by Obama. Five years later she became the 83rd US Attorney General, replacing the dodgy Eric Holder. A plausible case has been made that Comey took his fateful decision based on a serious internal revolt at the FBI - led by key people he trusts — as well as being egged-on by his wife. Yet one of the key questions that refuse to go away is why the FBI waited until 11 days before the US presidential election to supposedly "find" an email trove on certified sexting pervert Anthony Weiner's laptop.
  •      "As bad as it is the folks above the President make the decisions. They may have decided on Trump. These things do not happen by accident." Thus spoke a high-level US business mover and shaker with secure transit in rarified Masters of the Universe-related circles, amidst the utter political chaos provoked by head of the FBI James Comey's latest bombshell. It's virtually established by now that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Comey not to release his letter to Congress. But Comey did it anyway. If he had not, and a scandal would - inevitably - spring up after the US presidential election, Lynch would be perfectly positioned to deny she knew anything, and Comey would be on the firing line. Lynch is a certified Clinton machine asset. In 1999 then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney's office. She left in 2002, taking the private practice revolving door. She was back to the Brooklyn office in 2010, urged by Obama. Five years later she became the 83rd US Attorney General, replacing the dodgy Eric Holder. A plausible case has been made that Comey took his fateful decision based on a serious internal revolt at the FBI - led by key people he trusts — as well as being egged-on by his wife. Yet one of the key questions that refuse to go away is why the FBI waited until 11 days before the US presidential election to supposedly "find" an email trove on certified sexting pervert Anthony Weiner's laptop.
  • The business source, although unsympathetic to the Clinton machine, especially in foreign policy, is a realpolitik practitioner, not a conspiracy theorist. He is adamant that, "the FBI reversal could not have happened without orders above the President. If the Masters [of the Universe] have changed their mind, then they will destroy Hillary." He adds, "they can make a deal with Donald just like anyone else; Donald wins; the Masters win; the people think that their voice has been heard. And then there will be some sort of (controlled) change." What's paramount in the whole soap opera is that faith in the US political system — as corrupt as it may be — must endure. That mirrors the faith in the US dollar; if confidence in the US dollar fails, the US as a hegemonic financial power is no more. The source is equally adamant that, "it is almost unprecedented to see a cover-up as extensive as Hillary's. A secret meeting between Bill Clinton and the Attorney General; the FBI ignoring all evidence and initially clearing Hillary to near rebellion of the whole of the FBI, attested to by Rudolf Giuliani whose reputation as a federal prosecutor is unquestioned; the Clinton "pay for play" foundation. The Masters are troubled that this is getting out of hand." The record shows that "the Masters do not usually have to go to such lengths to protect their own. They did manage to save Bill Clinton from the Monica Lewinsky perjury and keep him in the presidency. The Masters were not attacked in this case. They even got away with the 1987 cash settlement crash and the theft surrounding the Lehman debacle. In all these cases there were no overarching challenges to their control, as we see now open to the public by Trump. They antagonized and insulted the wrong man."
Paul Merrell

US looks at ways to prevent spying on its spying - 0 views

bigstory.ap.org/...king-prevent-spying-its-spying

surveillance state NSA call-metadata dispersed-call-metadata research

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • (AP) — The U.S. government is looking at ways to prevent anyone from spying on its own surveillance of Americans' phone records. As the Obama administration considers shifting the collection of those records from the National Security Agency to requiring that they be stored at phone companies or elsewhere, it's quietly funding research to prevent phone company employees or eavesdroppers from seeing whom the U.S. is spying on, The Associated Press has learned. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the government's possession. The project is among several ideas that would allow the government to discontinue storing Americans' phone records, but still search them as needed.
  • Under the research, U.S. data mining would be shielded by secret coding that could conceal identifying details from outsiders and even the owners of the targeted databases, according to public documents obtained by The Associated Press and AP interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government officials.
  • Internal documents describing the Security and Privacy Assurance Research project do not cite the NSA or its phone surveillance program. But if the project were to prove successful, its encrypted search technology could pave the way for the government to shift storage of the records from NSA computers to either phone companies or a third-party organization. A DNI spokesman, Michael Birmingham, confirmed that the research was relevant to the NSA's phone records program. He cited "interest throughout the intelligence community" but cautioned that it may be some time before the technology is used. The intelligence director's office is by law exempt from disclosing detailed budget figures, so it's unclear how much money the government has spent on the SPAR project, which is overseen by the DNI's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity office. Birmingham said the research is aimed for use in a "situation where a large sensitive data set is held by one party which another seeks to query, preserving privacy and enforcing access policies."
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  • A Columbia University computer sciences expert who heads one of the DNI-funded teams, Steven M. Bellovin, estimates the government could start conducting encrypted searches within the next year or two. "If the NSA wanted to deploy something like this it would take one to two years to get the hardware and software in place to start collecting data this way either from phone companies or whatever other entity they decide on," said Bellovin, who is also a former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission.
  • An encrypted search system would permit the NSA to shift storage of phone records to either phone providers or a third party, and conduct secure searches remotely through their databases. The coding could shield both the extracted metadata and identities of those conducting the searches, Bellovin said. The government could use encrypted searches to ensure its analysts were not leaking information or abusing anyone's privacy during their data searches. And the technique could also be used by the NSA to securely search out and retrieve Internet metadata, such as emails and other electronic records. Some computer science experts are less sanguine about the prospects for encrypted search techniques. Searches could bog down because of the encryption computations needed, said Daniel Weitzner, principal research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and former deputy U.S. chief technology officer for the Obama administration. "There's no silver bullet that guarantees the intelligence community will only have access to the records they're supposed to have access to," Weitzner said. "We also need oversight of the actual use of the data."
  • The encrypted search techniques could make it more difficult for hackers to access the phone records and could prevent phone companies from knowing which records the government was searching. "It would remove one of the big objections to having the phone companies hold the data," Bellovin said. Similar research is underway by researchers at University of California at Irvine; a group from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas at Austin; another group from MIT, Yale and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and a fourth from Stealth Software Technologies, a Los Angeles-based technology company.
Paul Merrell

Americans on Wrong Side of Income Gap Run Out of Means to Cope - 0 views

www.moneynews.com/...544365

financial-collapse income inequality statistics Obama Boehner

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • “We’ve exhausted our coping mechanisms,” said Alan Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and former chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “They weren’t sustainable.” The result has been a downsizing of expectations. By almost two to one — 64 percent to 33 percent — Americans say the U.S. no longer offers everyone an equal chance to get ahead, according to the latest Bloomberg National Poll. The lack of faith is especially pronounced among those making less than $50,000 a year, with close to three-quarters in the Dec. 6-9 survey saying the economy is unfair.
  • The diminished expectations have implications for the economy. Workers are clinging to their jobs as prospects fade for higher-paying employment. Households are socking away more money and charging less on credit cards. And young adults are living with their parents longer rather than venturing out on their own. In the meantime, record-high stock prices are enriching wealthier Americans, exacerbating polarization and bringing income inequality to the political forefront. Even independent government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve have been dragged into the debate.
  • “The basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed,” Obama said in a Dec. 4 speech in Washington. “This is the defining challenge of our time: Making sure our economy works for every working American.” Democratic lawmakers also intend to press next year for a higher minimum wage to tackle the yawning gap between rich and poor, Durbin said. Republicans aren’t ceding the issue. “The American dream is certainly more in doubt than in decades,” House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said in response to Obama’s speech. “But after more than five years in office, the president has no one to blame but himself.”
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  • Income inequality has been rising more or less steadily since the mid-1970s. The Gini coefficient, a broad-based measure of inequality, stood at a record high last year, according to Census Bureau data dating back 46 years.
  • Women who became unemployed during the recession and its aftermath have been slower to find new positions. Among women losing jobs they’d held for at least three years between January 2009 and the end of 2011, 50 percent were re-employed by the start of 2012, while the share for men was 61 percent, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released in February. Households turned to stepped-up borrowing to help make ends meet, until that avenue was shut off by the collapse of house prices. About 10.8 million homeowners still owed more money on their mortgages than their properties were worth in the third quarter, according to Seattle-based Zillow Inc. The fallout has made many Americans less inclined to take risks. The quits rate — the proportion of Americans in the workforce who voluntarily left their jobs — stood at 1.7 percent in October. While that’s up from 1.5 percent a year earlier, it’s below the 2.2 percent average for 2006, the year house prices started falling, government data show.
  • “The middle has really collapsed,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a former chief economist at the Labor Department in Washington. Even those with college degrees are having trouble keeping up, he said. While they earn more than those with less schooling, they’ve seen no real wage growth in recent years. The median income of men 25 years of age and older with a bachelor’s degree was $56,656 last year, 10 percent less than in 2007 after taking account of inflation, according to Census data.
  • It’s the richest of the rich who are reaping the most benefit as an increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated world puts a premium on those perceived to have the highest skills — a phenomenon dubbed “winner take all” by Cornell University Professor Robert Frank. Government policies also play a role. The Treasury Department, for instance, taxes capital gains racked up by the wealthy on the sale of shares, bonds and other assets at about half the rate of ordinary income. The top 1 percent captured 95 percent of the gains in incomes in the first three years of the recovery, based on analysis of tax returns by Saez. Those less well-off, meanwhile, are running out of ways to cope. The percentage of working-age women who are in the labor force steadily climbed from a post-World War II low of 32 percent to a peak of 60.3 percent in April 2000, fueling a jump in dual-income households and helping Americans deal with slow wage growth for a while. Since the recession ended, the workforce participation rate for women has been in decline, echoing a longer-running trend among men. November data showed 57 percent of women in the labor force and 69.4 percent of men.
  • The disparity has widened since the recovery began in mid-2009. The richest 10 percent of Americans earned a larger share of income last year than at any time since 1917, according to Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. Those in the top one-tenth of income distribution made at least $146,000 in 2012, almost 12 times what those in the bottom tenth made, Census Bureau data show. Economists have posited a variety of explanations for the growing differences in incomes. Manufacturing companies moved once high-paying jobs abroad, to China and elsewhere. Technological advances led to the loss of clerical and office work, especially relating to routine tasks. The decline of unions — 11.3 percent of workers were represented in 2012 compared with 20.1 percent in 1983 — has advantaged bosses at the expense of their employees.
  • Millennials — adults aged 18 to 32 — are still slow to set out on their own more than four years after the recession ended, according to an Oct. 18 report by the Pew Research Center in Washington. Just over one in three head their own households, close to a 38-year low set in 2010. Obama has proposed a raft of policies to attack the widening wage gap — from simplifying the tax code and increasing exports to enhancing worker training and boosting pre-kindergarten education. Yet in a divided Washington he hasn’t made much progress pushing them through. The president’s renewed focus on income inequality has more to do with politics than policy, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a self-described center- right institute in Washington.
  • “It’s great politics to demagogue income distribution and complain about the rich getting ahead and the poor falling behind,” said Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director. “The substance of what he’s actually done doesn’t match the enormity of the problem as he’s portrayed it.”
  • The wage-gap debate has reverberated to other parts of Washington, as the SEC published a rule Sept. 18 that would compel public companies to reveal pay ratios between chief executives and their employees. While businesses have decried the requirement as overreach, some investors welcome the data as a way to help assess a company’s health.
  • Across companies in the S&P 500, the average multiple of CEO compensation to that of rank-and-file workers is 204, up 20 percent since 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg in April. The Fed also has been caught up in the debate over growing income disparities. Lawmakers from both parties have questioned whether its bond-buying policy, called quantitative easing, has benefited the rich at the expense of those less well-off by boosting prices of stocks and other assets.
  • The S&P 500 stock index has risen 29 percent in 2013. The richest third of U.S. households account for 89 percent of all equities ownership, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
  • Janet Yellen, nominated to take over as Fed chairman next year, defended the central bank’s actions at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Nov. 14. “The policies we’ve undertaken have been meant to generate a robust recovery,” Yellen told the committee. The growing calls for action to reduce income inequality have translated into a national push for a higher minimum wage. Fast-food workers in 100 cities took to the streets Dec. 5 to demand a $15 hourly salary.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Jan 14
     
    Monetary policy of, by, and for banksters continues in the U.S. One irony is that banksters press for transition to an all digital currency so that savers can be penalized, a blatant "trickle-up"economic policy, whilst also pressing for more bank bailouts, wielding the thoroughly-discredited "trickle down" economic theory. But "trickle down" theory, in the context of bank bailouts, has not successfully trickled down and the only beneficiaries have been the few Americans who can still invest in the stock market, paying the highest dividends to the wealthiest among us. Has their ever been a time when the stock market's behavior has been so divorced from the well-being of the middle and lower economic classes? I doubt there has been at least in the last 50 years. Where would we be if the bank bail-out trillions had instead been mailed as checks to the middle and lower economic classes? "Trickle up" works and that is what built the American economy to its peak in inflation-adjusted dollars -- an affluent middle class. But do not expect leadership from Washington, D.C. in correcting income inquequality; only political rhetoric and a fight over extension of unemployment benefits, now lapsed. "According to the World Bank, the GINI coefficient "measures the extent to which the distribution of income or consumption expenditure among individuals households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution." Therefore it is used as an indication of income inequality within countries. ... In the late 2000s, Chile had the highest GINI coefficient, after taxes and transfers, among OECD member countries. The United States, Turkey and Mexico came right before it. At the other end of the scale, Slovenia, Denmark and Norway led the ranking with the lowest levels of income inequality." http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/11944-wealth-distribution-income-inequality.html#ixzz2pGpv4xGZ Higher minimum wages? How about instead abolishing the Feder
Paul Merrell

Transcript: Comey Says Authors of Encryption Letter Are Uninformed or Not Fair-Minded |... - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...-letter-uninformed-fair-minded

surveillance state FBI Comey encryption backdoors

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 May 15 - No Cached
  • Earlier today, FBI Director James Comey implied that a broad coalition of technology companies, trade associations, civil society groups, and security experts were either uninformed or were not “fair-minded” in a letter they sent to the President yesterday urging him to reject any legislative proposals that would undermine the adoption of strong encryption by US companies. The letter was signed by dozens of organizations and companies in the latest part of the debate over whether the government should be given built-in access to encrypted data (see, for example, here, here, here, and here for previous iterations). The comments were made at the Third Annual Cybersecurity Law Institute held at Georgetown University Law Center. The transcript of his encryption-related discussion is below (emphasis added).
  • Increasingly, communications at rest sitting on a device or in motion are encrypted. The device is encrypted or the communication is encrypted and therefore unavailable to us even with a court order. So I make a showing of probable cause to a judge in a criminal case or in an intelligence case to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that the content of a particular defense or a particular communication stream should be collected to our statutory authority, and the judge approves, increasingly we are finding ourselves unable to read what we find or we’re unable to open a device. And that is a serious concern. I am actually — I think encryption is a good thing. I think there are tremendous societal benefits to encryption. That’s one of the reasons the FBI tells people not only lock your cars, but you should encrypt things that are important to you to make it harder for thieves to take them.
  • A group of tech companies and some prominent folks wrote a letter to the President yesterday that I frankly found depressing. Because their letter contains no acknowledgment that there are societal costs to universal encryption. Look, I recognize the challenges facing our tech companies. Competitive challenges, regulatory challenges overseas, all kinds of challenges. I recognize the benefits of encryption, but I think fair-minded people also have to recognize the costs associated with that. And I read this letter and I think, “Either these folks don’t see what I see or they’re not fair-minded.” And either one of those things is depressing to me. So I’ve just got to continue to have the conversation. I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think a democracy should drift to a place where suddenly law enforcement people say, “Well, actually we — the Fourth Amendment is an awesome thing, but we actually can’t access any information.”
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  • But we have a collision going on in this country that’s getting closer and closer to an actual head-on, which is our important interest in privacy — which I am passionate about — and our important interest in public safety. The logic of universal encryption is inexorable that our authority under the Fourth Amendment — an amendment that I think is critical to ordered liberty — with the right predication and the right oversight to obtain information is going to become increasingly irrelevant. As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is that all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, therefore all of our lives — I know there are no criminals here, but including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies — will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning. I think we need to have a conversation about it. Again, how do we strike the right balance? Privacy matters tremendously. Public safety, I think, matters tremendously to everybody. I think fair-minded people have to recognize that there are tremendous benefits to a society from encryption. There are tremendous costs to a society from universal strong encryption. And how do we think about that?
  • We’ve got to have a conversation long before the logic of strong encryption takes us to that place. And smart people, reasonable people will disagree mightily. Technical people will say it’s too hard. My reaction to that is: Really? Too hard? Too hard for the people we have in this country to figure something out? I’m not that pessimistic. I think we ought to have a conversation.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 May 15
     
    Considering that I'm over 10 times as likely to die from a police shoooting as I am from a terrorist attack, how about we begin this conversation, Mr. Comey, by you providing formal notice to everyone who's had the telephone metadata gathered or searched all dates on which such gatherings and searches were conducted so citizens can file suit for violation of their privacy rights? Note that the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held last week that the FBI exceeded statutory authority in gathering and searching that information. Because the gathering and searching was not authorized, that would bring the gathering and searching under the protections of the Privacy Act, including the FBI duty to account for the disclosures  and to pay at least the statutory minimum $1,500 in damges per incident.  Then I would like to have an itemization of all of the commercial software and hardware products that your agency and or your buddies at NSA built backdoors into.  Then your resignation for millions of violations of the Privacy Act would be deeply appreciated. Please feel free to delegate the above mentioned tasks to your successor. 
Paul Merrell

John Kerry, Hollywood Studio Chiefs Meet to Talk ISIS | Variety - 0 views

variety.com/...-studio-chiefs-isis-1201707652

war & peace propaganda Kerry Hollywood

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Secretary of State John Kerry met with the heads of major studios on Tuesday to talk about how to counter the ISIS narrative. “Great convo w/ studio execs in LA. Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative,” Kerry tweeted, along with a photo of his meeting with Jeff Shell, chairman of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group; MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd; Warner Bros. Entertainment CEO Kevin Tsujihara; DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg; 20th Century Fox Chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos; 20th Century Fox Co-Chair Stacey Snider; Sean Bailey, president of Walt Disney Motion Picture Production; Universal Pictures Chairman Donna Langley; Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Motion Picture Group; Universal Pictures President Jimmy Horowitz; Amblin Partners CEO Michael Wright; and NBCUniversal Vice Chairman Ron Meyer.
  • Daesh is an acronym for the Arabic phrase “al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil Iraq wa al-Sham,” another term for ISIS. The terrorist group reportedly hates the term, but western leaders have been using it instead of Islamic State. The meeting was held at Universal Studios, and lasted about 90 minutes. One attendee who was there said that the executives also exchanged ideas and observations about studio worldwide marketing of movies and TV shows, a way of showing how narrative storytelling can cross cultures. The attendee described part of the gathering as a “brainstorming session,” including how to involve storytellers in regions afflicted or threatened by ISIS, as a way to counter the narratives promulgated by the terrorist organization. “Let’s figure out how to involve people who are there,” the attendee said.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 16
     
    For any who hadn't noticed before, Hollywood is into dispensing U.S.government propaganda, into it up to their necks.
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